中文无码第3页影音先锋

Rumour had it he’d argued against his own candidature, though even my friends among the heroes remained tight-lipped. Knowing their kind, trying to refuse the charge had probably swayed a few more in favour of him taking up the sword. Still, important as the decision had been as the days passed it felt like little more than an afterthought. A much greater test was looming just ahead, after all: word had been sent to the Herald, and we were now prepared for the final talks with the envoy of the Kingdom Under. Even the most eminent of swords was a small thing, compared to the conversation that would make or break our attack on Keter.

We took Cordelia’s suggested line, at least superficially. The Barrow Sword would sit in as the representative for Below and the First Prince had reached out to the Kingdom Under through the dwarven gate to find an interlocutor should the talks with the Herald fail. We’d kept it deniable and strictly Proceran so far, talking about the trade the gate being dug up might represent while Cordelia’s envoys sought to get in touch with an isolationist dignitary. It wasn’t that subtle, of course, and wasn’t meant to be – our best shot at getting in touch with such a person was them finding us, not the other way around, so rumours were to our advantage.

And if this blew back on us, then the Grand Alliance could say it’d all been the Principate and that Cordelia Hasenbach would abdicate because of this debacle, because she totally hadn’t been planning on doing that anyway.

We got tentative feelers back from a dwarf whose title was something like ‘home-lord’ in dwarven, but she got frustrated when our envoys got noncommittal and that boded well. Knowing our time was running out, we rushed the meeting a day early. The Herald of the Deeps and Seeker Balasi were once again the whole sum of the Kingdom Under’s delegation, which in retrospect looked a little suspicious. Arrogant as dwarves were, they had to know that sending fewer people than the number of fucking cities you were asking for was a bit much – this was the Herald’s choice, I figured, cutting other people out of the room so word couldn’t get out to his opponents back home.

It boded well for our bargaining position that he couldn’t even be sure of everyone in his delegation.

“You have been given sufficient time to grasp the terms,” Balasi bluntly said. “Have you deliberated your answer?”

They didn’t waste time on courtesies and this time Cordelia didn’t pull out the perfect hostess routine, which I felt was rather more honest a way to do this. Hanno might be inclined to see the best in the Herald, but I had yet to find any reason to.

“A sort of answer, certainly: it has come to our attention that you have not been negotiating in good faith,” Cordelia Hasenbach coldly replied.

I reached for my wakeleaf and began stuffing my pipe, letting the hero and the diplomat have at it. I was here to look imposing and wave my Night stick, not pull strings they were my better at pulling.

“This is an insult,” the Herald calmly said. “Withdraw it and apologize or these negotiations are at an end.”

Mistake, I thought. The green-eyed dwarf wasn’t a diplomat and it showed. Never give that kind of an ultimatum unless you were sure you wouldn’t be called on it or you were willing to go through with the threat. The First Prince matched his gaze, unblinking.

“The door is behind you.”

Balasi rose to his feet.

“Salia will be sunk into the ground for this,” the deed-seeker hissed. “You insult envoys of the King Under-”

“Silence,” I Spoke.

His mouth closed shut and he stared at me as if I’d gone mad.

He might think so, but it had been a tactical choice. It meant the Herald would have to speak for himself at all times and I was looking for something else besides. Still, I cocked my head to the side. That’d resonated more strongly than it should have. It was like I’d thought in Praes, the aspect was so close to emerging it would only need a single halfway solid pivot to solidify. As I considered that I kept my dead eye on the Herald, who under the calm façade was furious. Personally so. But is it him you’re in love with, or is this just a close friendship? I could not tell, I wasn’t good enough at this yet.

There were a lot of revenge stories around the Herald that began by Balasi dying, but that didn’t precisely confirm it either. The death of family or a childhood friend was just as common a catalyst as a lover’s to begin a journey of revenge.

“Now,” Cordelia said, leaning forward, “do you intend to leave?”

I knew her well enough to tell that the glint in her eye was a vicious little twist of satisfaction. Couldn’t blame her, given how these two had tried to use the threat of extinction at the hand of a common foe to extort us out of three cities.

“It appears there has been a misunderstanding,” the Herald evenly said. “We will depart once it has been resolved and you have understood the depth of your mistake.”

“Your intentions were understood,” Hanno said. “You are attempting to create realms on the surface where you can change the ways of your people.”

It was calculated that he would be the one to speak. If it turned out we’d been wrong in our conclusions, then he could take a step back after Cordelia ‘chided’ him and remain silent like Ishaq – who was looking faintly amused as he beheld all this and was not inclined in the slightest to get involved. He was a man who knew his limitations, the Barrow Sword. He was still a few years away from having earned a seat at this sort of table in his own right.

“You assume much, angel-child,” the Herald replied.

“It is a laudable undertaking,” Hanno continued, “but your means are wrong. You cannot build the foundations of a better world by setting the stones on the back of those who live in it.”

The Named dwarf’s face tightened, the first sign of anger obvious enough I was able to catch it.

“You know nothing, White Knight,” the Herald of Deeps said. “Of what is needful or needed. The weight of your ignorance is crushing.”

The air in the room thickened, but I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth.

“None of that, now,” I lazily said. “Else I’m going to start doing it too, and you won’t like where that leads.”

“Threats and insults,” the Herald scorned. “All of you will pay for this insolence.”

He stopped massing power, but only because he rose to his feet as well. He strode out of the room, Balasi following after throwing me a glare I rolled my eye at. They two of them left silence in their wake until the Barrow Sword broke it.

“I take it negotiations with these fine fellows are at an end,” Ishaq said, stroking his beard.

I cast a look at Cordelia, who looked thoughtful, and then Hanno.

“No,” the Sword of Judgment said.

“No,” the First Prince agreed. “They will be back.”

Two bells later, they were proved right.

Dusk was approaching when the two of them returned. They were ushered back into the same room after being made to wait while we gathered up again. This time there were no theatrics: they knew that while they still had a blade at our throat now we had one at theirs. Not the Kingdom Under’s, that was a lost cause, but them specifically. Cordelia’s fondness for cards as a chosen metaphor for diplomacy was proving accurate: we’d played the opponents instead of the cards, and now we were getting results. Interestingly, I noticed that while my command had faded in Basali there was a lingering echo. If I gave the same order, it would come down much more harshly the second time – and my instinct was that three might lead to permanence.

That might prove more than a little useful, if the aspect was meant for what I thought it was.

Hanno took the lead this time, as Cordelia had already pulled the rug out from under them. It was about the soft glove now, not the steel underneath.

“You accused me ignorance,” he said. “Help rid me of it.”

It shouldn’t have worked, I thought. But I knew it would. Because underneath the calm I could see that the Named was just itching to talk. To lay it all out to someone who’d understand, who’d agree. It was the same reason villains gloated, only instead of getting them friends it got them killed.

“The Kingdom Under,” the Herald of the Deeps began, “has grown calcified.”

He spun us a tale, after that. Reading through the lines and navigating an unfortunate number of words in dwarven that I had no idea how to pronounce, it looked like the heartlands of the Kingdom Under had grown into pretty much a caste system. People lived and died in their little bubbles according to tortured rules, only the rungs on the caste ladder were quite literal here: the commons lived crammed in the deepest pits, the respectable in the nicer cities that had been emptied as the expansions continued.

The Herald was from one of the wealthiest families in the great city that was broadly below Orne, a place called Maradar, but he had seen the evils in the way the commons were used because… there he gave a look to Balasi that put to rest any notion it was just friendship between them. Deed-seekers, as I recalled, were dwarves who sought to commit great deeds to their status would be raised in dwarven society. The pieces fit rather neatly together.

“After I became the Herald,” he said, “I attempted reforms. It… did not go well.”

“There was war,” Balasi frankly said. “He was accused of stepping beyond his Burden.”

“So you compromised by heading the Fourteenth Expansion,” Hanno said.

Only that too had failed. While the largely bloodless victory I’d delivered to them over the Firstborn had seen the Herald lauded, it had also made the pioneering safe. His opponents from back home, seeing massive gains to be made at little risk, had immediately begun getting their hands all over the colonies. To get him out of the way they’d tossed him leadership of the Fifteenth Expansion, an unprecedented honour, but those first waves would be mostly soldiers and those had other loyalties. If he wanted to make a haven for the trod upon, then he would need somewhere else to bring them.

So, as we’d surmised, he’d cut a deal with the same people who had been chasing him off after every victory.

“Securing cities for support would have been so resounding a victory we would have been untouchable for at least a century,” the Herald said. “Time to grow, to make alliances.”

“A fair turn given to an ugly act,” Cordelia said, unimpressed.

“You would already have gone beyond us if you did not want to cut a deal,” Balasi replied. “So offer your terms, First Prince.”

“Keter,” she replied.

“A wasteland infested with the dead,” the Herald frowned.

“A great city among once-rich lands,” Hanno replied. “An outpost with roads to the Kingdom Under, a natural capital to the Fifteenth Expansion.”

“Even if all the dead are broken,” Balasi slowly said, “there would be no trade, or humans to work under us.”

“Are you seeking change,” the Sword of Judgment quietly replied, “or just to add a rung below you on the ladder?”

Both dwarves flinched. There was talk back and forth after that, about boundaries of land and trade concessions and the massive sum of gold that they both wanted – I now suspected to make a garden out of Keter, if they were stuck there – but I could tell that it was Hanno’s retort that had done it. Every time it looked like they were getting angry, they felt the bite of the bladelike sentence slide below a rib.

“It is not the bargain I was expected to make,” the Herald told us when the negotiations wound down. “I may not have the support to make it law.”

“I am willing for Procer to take the debt immediately if supplies for the siege of Keter are promised,” Cordelia told him.

“I cannot promise them,” the green-eyed dwarf admitted. “I do not have the authority to move such quantities by my word alone. The land-kings will have their say.”

“But you can help,” Hanno pressed.

“I have struck a bargain with Sve Noc through an envoy before,” the Herald said, glancing at me. “This power none can deny me, so these talks do not worry me. All I can offer for the land-kings is an oath on my staff that I will fight for these terms with all my might.”

So not a sure thing, I thought with a grimace. It wasn’t the agreement we’d wanted, and the Sisters had yet to agree to the terms – which involved them ceding a great deal of territory theoretically theirs – but it was something. And if we tried to go pas them, reach out to their opponents in the Kingdom Under, we ran risks too. The talks might be killed entirely, or the terms grow worse. And even if it worked out just fine, it would take time. What would better terms matter, if they were accepted when we were all dead? No all the decisions we could make carried risks. The real question was which of them was the best risk to take.

My gut said this was the one.

Hanno had gotten to Herald, I’d seen it, and that would work for us. It was a better bet than a complete unknown. I met Cordelia’s eyes and nodded my assent.

“Then speak to the land-kings, Herald,” the First Prince said. “This is the bargain we seek.”

Drinks were brought in, we emptied them and the Herald of the Deeps swore his oath. I saw Creation eddy from the strength of it. It will not be broken without consequence, I thought. That night, as I lay in bed I found that sleep eluded me. The assault on Keter had always been going to be a gamble, a roll of the dice that would lead to either victory or extinction, but it was even more so now. We had enough supplies for the march and a few weeks once we set camp around the Crown of the Dead – a little under two months, barring a disaster, but even two months wouldn’t be enough to crack open Keter.

If the Herald failed, we failed with him.

I was not surprised that I slept little, and fitfully.

It was actually quite hard to take anyone by surprise through the Twilight Ways, at least when you got to the scale of armies. A cavalry contingent of a handful of Named could be slipped in to devastating effect, that was true, but an entire army? Getting it through the gates could take more than a day sometimes, not unlike marching a host through a narrow mountain pass, and it was even worse when you were leading a coalition force – half a dozen languages, people yelling about who was in charge and too many different baggage trains. Having led such a force on the Hainaut front for almost two years, I figured I had my finger on the pulse of the kind of troubles it entailed.

As always, though, the League of Free Cities found a way to surprise me. After a day and a half they had most of the Helikean army through and that was pretty much it. Everyone else had landed small forces, squabbling over who should go through, and apparently Bellerophon’s citizen militia was debating just staying in the Twilight Ways the whole time.

There would, I was informed, be a vote.

Still, by the afternoon of the second day there was no longer any delaying the official ‘arrival’ of the League: people had seen the troops crossing into Creation, word was reaching Salia and there might be a panic if the situation was left unattended. The people of Procer’s capital had gotten much twitchier about armies since the shine off the myth of the Principate’s invincibility had worn off. For that and diplomatic reasons, theatre was made of the whole affair. It suited all parties, since the League cities wanted to salvage their reputation after sitting out most of the war while Procer was in desperate need of good news to trumpet about.

All of the cities picked two hundred of their shiniest soldiers – Bellerophon drew the names by lot instead – and a parade was welcomed into the city to raucous cheers. Cordelia cracked open the foodstuff reserves to throw street banquets and newly minted Empress Basilia sent out crates of salted fish, dried mutton and dates as an elegant gesture of goodwill. If she made sure that the generosity was traced back to her by having her own officers distribute what was technically League stores, well, that was just how those games were played. She’d not gotten her hat by missing opportunities.

The city’s spirits were lifted, the doom just beyond the horizon forgotten for a night, and why wouldn’t the people cheer? Not even the First Crusade had boasted an array of soldiers from so many parts of Calernia: this time all the nations of the continent stood on the right side of horror.

I did not take long for Basilia Katopodis to seek me out after the formalities were done. She came alone, keeping the pretence of a visit between old friends instead of state affairs, but we both knew better. I received her in the same bar I’d received Nestor Ikaroi in when he came on her behalf, standing behind the counter. The Protector of the League had good taste in drinks: she asked for a Wasteland mule, which was a finger of aragh in pale beer. It was an old Legion favourite I remembered from the War College, beloved of students for being a cheaper drunk than either beer or aragh and of innkeepers for being really easy to cut with water without affecting the taste.

“I wondered if Ikaroi was boasting,” Basilia amusedly said as I handed her the mug, “but it seems not.”

“It’s a little nostalgic,” I admitted.

“I wonder if there are any boys in Laure who now boasts of having had their ale poured by a queen,” she mused.

I snorted.

“There’s a few who could boast of getting more than that, if they put the details together,” I told her, wagging my eyebrows suggestively.

She choked on her drink, spraying mist on Cordelia’s nice carpets as she coughed. Ah, the costs of diplomacy. The Empress of Aenia, a realm that covered almost half the territory of the League, was a tall brown-haired woman with a rather plain face and the build of someone who’d spent most of their life on horseback wearing heavy armour. No one would call her pretty, but she was fit and fierce – interesting to the eye the same way a tiger would be. She’d once been believed a man, I’d heard, but I would not have guessed at a glance.

“There are tales about Callowan serving girls,” the Empress admitted, grinning.

“All lies, except for the ones that are true,” I drawled.

She’d not come for idle talk, of course, but I saw worth in keeping the loosely friendly relationship we’d had so far. I had been Basilia’s informal patron during her rise in power, providing support from afar while she fought Malicia’s allies in the League. I’d even tugged at Cordelia’s sleeve once or twice to get her to toss the then-general a bone. We both knew she’d risen far beyond what I had ever intended and that a relation that’d once had a clear superior had grown rather more muddled, but that was not enough to warrant hostility. She was still the closest thing I had to a reliable friend in the League.

I just had to tread more carefully when asking things of her and expect to be asked the odd favour in return.

“That’s always the trouble with tales,” Basilia said. “It can be hard to pick out the true ones, especially when it comes to Named.”

It was my turn to send her an amused glance. There was no need to go fishing when I was ready to just toss her the fish.

“That one’s true,” I said. “I stand as the Warden now. The office will be written into the Accords, with all accordant powers and responsibilities. There is no longer a need for the League to worry about infighting within the Grand Alliance – all our efforts are turned against Keter.”

She let out a low whistle.

“You do keep landing on your feet, don’t you?” Basilia said.

“Coming from you, Empress,” I smiled, “that’s a little rich.”

We traded toothy, savage smiles.

“The message I sent through Ikaroi still stands,” she told me. “The League can’t sign onto the Accords unless we get back the Hierarch.”

“He did not strike me as a man who would sign them if you did get him back,” I frankly replied.

She shrugged.

“Regardless, there’s way around it,” she said. “The cities have already adopted laws that follow along the same lines, so the holdout is you.”

Meaning the office of Warden, which could not be expected to have authority over the Named of the Free Cities when the League had not signed onto the Accords.

“And you have an offer?” I asked.

“What falls under the authority of a Protector of the League is vague,” she told me. “Largely on purpose. So Named could be swept under that aegis, if the bone is gnawed at some.”

I almost smiled at the audacity.

“You want a deal between the office of Warden and the hereditary title of Protector,” I mused. “Your authority over the League’s Named recognized in exchange for enforcing the Accords on them.”

She wanted for her and her descendants to be the natural and legal lieutenants of the Wardens in the Free Cities. More power gathered to her title in exchange for me getting my way past the labyrinth complexities of negotiating any treaty with the League.

“I could stomach that arrangement,” I said, “so long as it’s contingent to the League not having signed onto the Accords yet. Once it does, it will be no different from any other signatory.”

I might not be in a position to take a hard line at the moment – we needed the Free Cities if we were going to take Keter – I had no intention of sundering the Warden’s authority by allowing private Named fiefdoms under the office. Basilia narrowed her eyes at me, recognizing my answer for what it was: a concession that I could accept this temporarily, but that I’d be putting my full weight behind getting the League into the Accords properly the moment we were done with Keter. It wasn’t what she’d wanted to hear, but like me she knew that pushing too far would bite her in the ass.

So, as I had expected, she went after another concession.

“They made for interesting reading, your Accords,” the Empress said. “Particularly the parts about Cardinal and this school you intend to build there.”

I’d originally meant it for Named, but in practice it would likely see only a few of these attending – young and transitional types, before they headed out into the world. The guild I intended to raise there for villains, and perhaps even heroes if Hanno was so inclined, would draw more interest than the halls of learning. But the school itself would draw mages and nobles from all over Calernia, especially if a few Named mages could be talked into teaching. There would be a lot of influence to be traded there, so I cocked the eyebrow over my dead eye at the empress.

“What about it?” I idly asked.

“The League would be late to join that effort, and our divisions may lead others to edge us out,” Basilia evenly said. “A pledge might allay those fears.”

I got what she practically wanted out of her before long: guaranteed seats. For students, but also for teachers. And there was the clever part: those were not to be promised to the League itself, since indeed that would be illegal and infringing on the authority of a Hierarch. They were to belong to the Protectors of the League, so that the Empress and her successors could use them for bribes and influence. Well, she didn’t lack for audacity. I bargained her down to one teacher and ten students, which I suspected was actually what she’d been after from the start, and with that little concession I got the Empress of Aenia in line.

She’d still fight me tooth and nail to keep the League out of the Accords so she could maintain her authority over Named, but this way she wouldn’t actually go to war over the matter. Good luck with that, I thought, smiling prettily at her. The eastern half of the League’s terrified of you gobbling them up and it’s Cordelia fucking Hasenbach I’ll be sending to talk them into signing. She smiled back just as prettily, no doubt already planning half a dozen ways to brutally smash any fingers that dared creep anywhere near her backyard.

“To alliances,” I toasted, raising my cup.

“Long may they last,” Basilia Katopodis replied.

And to the sound of metal against metal, the League of Free Cities entered the war.

The day before Masego was set to arrive in Salia, the people of the capital filled the streets. Rumours had been swirling around the city for days, no small amount of them seeded by Cordelia’s spies, so it was with expectation more than glee that the people gathered. I was not to stand in the crowd but instead in a great raised gallery by the side of the platform where a First Prince would abdicate and another be elected. I’d had forewarning, of course. From the Procerans themselves, but also through the Jacks: the two princesses had gone through every legality they could given the circumstances, and that meant a vote in the Highest Assembly.

There was no way to hide that from Vivienne’s people, who might not be the Eyes or the Circle but were nothing to be underestimated.

It was without an invitation that I went to see Rozala Malanza, but these days my name was invitation enough. The guards, swarming the place like vigilant hornets, let me through and an attendant guided me to a small room up two sets of stairs. There the Princess of Aequitan was having a cup of sweet cider as she looked through a great window at the crowd still gathering below. Louis Rohanon, her husband and secretary who’d abdicated rule of Creusens at the Graveyard, was fussing over her as she allowed his attentions with a fond gaze. I was almost reluctant to clear my throat.

Louis stepped back immediately, looking mildly embarrassed.

“Your Excellency,” he said. “A pleasant surprise.”

“Louis Rohanon,” I said. “Or should that be prince consort?”

He smiled ruefully.

“Simply consort,” the dark-haired man replied. “After consultation with the Rogue Sorcerer, it was decided it would be best for me to be removed from anything princely.”

I hummed in approval. The ‘crown’ he’d surrendered in Iserre had been more than a chunk of metal, it had been the story of his right to rule. It was perhaps not necessary for him to have refused a largely ceremonial title, but the prudence spoke well of him. Rozala was not without taste.

“And to what do we owe the visit, Warden?” the Princess of Aequitan asked.

I flicked a glance at her husband, who took the hint with good grace and made his excuses. As he left the room I took in the sight of Rozala Malanza as she had chosen to dress for her coronation: a warrior-princess. Over a red dress with a yellow stripe down the centre – her heraldry’s colours inverted – she wore a polished breastplate, vambraces on her arms and greaves over soft leather boots. The thick belt at her waist, touched with gold, bore a sheathed sword. The princess’ dark curls had been pulled back, freeing bangs as a loose braid went down her back, and she had been made into the very ideal of an Arlesite princess of war.

It suited her, I thought. It was not without reason I considered Rozala the toughest Proceran general I’d faced: if we’d fought the Camps to the finish instead of making a truce, it would have been an army-shattering hour for both sides.

“Now that my husband was chased off and you’ve looked your fill,” Rozala drily said, “will you deign to speak freely?

I took the time to pick my words carefully.

“Yours is an election come out of the war,” I said, “but Gods willing, it will last long past it.”

“Ah,” the dark-eyed princess smiled. “I had wondered if I would warrant such a visit.”

There wasn’t a lot of joy in that quirk of the lips.

“You have spent much coin and effort keeping Procer from failing,” she said. “So you look for assurances that our gratitude will not be short-lived.”

“You took an oath after the Graveyard,” I said, “when you put that sword in the ground. I don’t believe you the kind of woman to go back on it.”

“But,” Rozala replied.

“We will have business, you and I, when I sit in Cardinal and you in Salia,” I said.

And I did not have the kind of rapport with Rozala Malanza that I did with Cordelia Hasenbach – who, for all that we had faced off for years, had become someone I trusted in our own way. Considering that Procer would be pivotal to the survival of the Accords one way or another, it meant I needed to have a second look at the dark-haired beauty before me: not as Cordelia’s general and rival, but instead as a First Princess in her own right. Rozala narrowed her eyes at me.

“Let me speak plainly, then,” the princess said. “We will never be friends, Catherine Foundling.”

Her jaw clenched.

“I believe you cruel and cavalier with lives as well as deeply conceited,” Rozala Malanza harshly said. “That the Gods have seen fit to reward you for this is the misfortune of our age.”

I did not blink, waiting for her to finish.

“But you keep your word,” the Princess of Aequitan reluctantly added. “And treaties made with you can be trusted. Procer will stand behind the Accords, even if arms must be twisted.”

“I have heard promises before,” I warned, “and they died stillborn on the floor of the Assembly.”

Rozala’s face hardened.

“Procer,” she said, “will not be what it was. It cannot be.”

She rested a hand on her belly.

“I will not bring my daughter into the world I knew as a girl,” Rozala Malanza swore. “The chaos, the petty wars and the knives. Hasenbach had the right of that: there is rot in the Principate and it must be burned out.”

My eye narrowed.

“And what will you do about it?” I asked.

“Open your ears,” Rozala said, “after the crown is set on my brow.”

I left, as she’d tacitly told me to, and an hour later found myself leaning against the gallery railing while the people of Salia shouted themselves hoarse. After the criers and resonance spells had made known Cordelia’s abdication there had been cries of dismay, for though her reign had not been without troubles and riots she was a comfortingly steady hand. They had turned to cheers soon enough, though, when Rozala’s election was announced. She was a popular woman, her victories in the north well known while the black marks on her record were long forgotten.

Cordelia Hasenbach herself set the crown of white gold on her successor’s head, the two of them matching gazes as she did.

When the First Princess of Procer stepped forward afterwards, to the edge of the platform, I felt spells bloom all around us. Scrying mirrors, I realized after catching sight of one of them from the glint of the sun reflected, though where they led I could not be sure. Rozala had a good speaking voice and the promises she gave out were the kind a beleaguered people could cheer at: driving out the dead, restoring order and peace to Procer. After that, though, things took a turn and I found myself leaning forward in interest.

“- and so as we begin our march on Keter I ask: where are the princes and princesses of the south?”

Murmurs, unease.

“Again and again,” Rozala Malanza called out, “we have sown the seeds of our own defeat. Schemes and grasping hands, betrayals and cowardice Shame at every turn.. Even as the Hidden Horror closes his grip on Procer, these parasites hide in their palaces and leave the rest of us to burn.”

A shiver went through the crowd. Like she’d touched a finger to the pulse of the fury just under the surface.

“No longer,” the First Princess said. “I give you this oath now: those who call themselves princes and do not march to save Procer are princes no longer. All their families I attaint, all their holdings I declare forfeit. When the moon turns, all who will not hold a sword to save the Principate will be cast out of it until Last Dusk.”

The city went wild, the clamour of shouts and stamping feet shaking the walls. And now I knew where those scrying mirrors went: the First Princess had, on the day of her coronation, thrown a gauntlet to every crown in Procer.

Pick it up, Rozala Malanza had said, or I will drag you off your thrones by the hair.

“Yeah,” I murmured, smiling down at her from the gallery. “You’ll do.”

Hierophant arrived in Salia early, late on the night of the coronation instead of early in the morning. I offered to delay our departure so he could have a night’s sleep in a proper bed, but he would have none of it.

“It makes no difference to me,” Masego told me. “And time is of the essence, you have been telling me.”

“You just want to get your grubby fingers on the godhead of the Crows as quickly as possible,” I accused.

“That too,” he shamelessly agreed.

He did want to spend a few hours with Indrani before leaving, though, as she wouldn’t be coming with us despite her protests to the contrary. I wanted her keeping an eye on the Barrow Sword, whose seat as representative was still too fresh to be anywhere near secure. I encouraged him to, as much because I loved them both as because I needed some time to get the last of my affairs in order. I sent word that I would be leaving tonight instead of tomorrow to all those who needed to know, then talked Vivienne into a late supper with me. Hakram was out of the city, settling a dispute between two clans out east, so a message would have to do.

After my pack and goodbyes were done, I went to find the third companion that would come north with me. Akua was not far, having been amusing herself over the last few days by turning the flying tower where I’d become the Warden into what she called ‘a proper throne’ in between going into the slums of Salia to offer healing against the diseases that kept sprouting up in the crowded hovels. Some of them could not be wiped out entirely by Light.

“Did you know, darling, that most villains only ever encounter a single godhead in their lives?” she told me. “You are something of an overachiever in that regard.”

“It’s the Crows again, so it doesn’t count as a new one,” I argued.

Though it was novel for her to actually need supplies now – as well as clothes, since she could no longer a shade who could change her wardrobe with a thought – she’d had most of them set aside already. If anything, she had seemed eager to head out to Serolen. When I asked, she turned thoughtful.

“I’ve always felt the business to be unfinished,” Akua said. “It is good to settle all of one’s affairs properly.”

Yeah, I felt it too. It was time to bring to a close the journey that’d begun in the outskirts of the Everdark. We were nearly ready to leave, horses saddled – well, Zombie for me – and our route out of the capital picked out when there was a commotion just out the palace. I looked through the Night, one of my hundred dead eyes, and cocked an eyebrow. Moments later, Cordelia Hasenbach rode in atop one of those sturdy horses the Lycaonese favoured. She had saddlebags and she was dressed to travel.

“Going somewhere?” I idly asked.

“I believe she means to come with us, Catherine,” Masego told me.

He sounded a little surprised I hadn’t caught on to that. Mercifully, Cordelia was not one of the Woe so she did not take the golden opportunity to mock me as one of them would have.

“I thought it best to make my offer for Keter directly to Sve Noc,” the Lycaonese princess said.

She was still Prince of Rhenia and Princess of Hannoven, at least for now. The papers to pass on the crowns to Otto Redcrown and turn him into the sole ruler of the Lycaonese were already ready and signed, I’d been told. They were only waiting so it wouldn’t look like Rozala was stripping her predecessor of the titles.

“That could be done by scrying mirror,” I replied, unimpressed. “The First Princess wants you out of the capital, I take it.”

“We are in agreement that my looking over her shoulder as she begins her reign would benefit neither of us,” Cordelia replied.

“And how does that lead to your riding with us?” I pressed.

“I thought you might be in favour of my presence,” the princess mildly said, “since it will allow you to keep an eye on this.”

Reaching inside her cloak, she presented a baton of sculpted ivory. It was beautifully made, but aside from that there was – no, not quite right. There was something at the heart of it, I thought, dead eye seeing a glimpse of something like Light. I shot her an inquisitive look.

“It is,” Cordelia Hasenbach told me, “the device that triggers the ealamal.”

I smothered a grimace. Yeah, she had me there. I wasn’t letting that out of my sight if I could help it. I’d already figured there must be an artefact serving the purpose but the Jacks had not unearthed anything when they looked into it.

“I don’t suppose I could talk you into breaking that,” I said.

“No,” she pleasantly replied.

“Welcome to our little band, then,” I sighed.

“It is,” Cordelia victoriously smiled, “my great pleasure.”