A Practical Guide to Evil

Chapter Book 3 65: Elision

“A hero should not confuse striking at Evil and doing Good, lest their Good become the act of striking.”

– Theodore Langman, Wizard of the West

I slumped against the wall, catching my breath, and resisted the urge to deck Robber in the face. He looked like he was enjoying this way too much for it to be healthy. That’d been a close call, inside the room. At this point I was unsure whether Diabolist was actually out to kill me or not – she’d been hinting pretty heavily she wanted me to be the Black to her second-rate Malicia – but just letting me get hammered by those arrays until I was burnt pulp would have been enough to get me captured even if it didn’t get me dead. Dead might be the better outcome of the two, if it came to that. Assuming it even stuck.

“How the fuck did you all get in here?” I panted.

Robber alone, I could have bought. He was tricky that way. But there was a full line skulking around the corridor. Some were wounded, I noted, and not just by blades: there were tell-tale marks of spellfire on some of their gear. They’d been in a scrap before getting here, but I’d assume not even the Special Tribune’s pack of marauders had been audacious enough to assault this horror of a palace. Goblins were a blade best used in the dark or in the enemy’s back. There was a reason they weren’t put in shield walls.

“Special Tribune Robber, ready to report,” the wretch said, sparkling with insolence.

I was going to regret this, I suspected. But at least odds were good I’d be able to sift out a few useful nuggets out of the mixture of lies and blatant exaggerations he would offer.

“Proceed,” I sighed.

That he saluted with the wrong hand before beginning to speak, I thought, was likely emblematic of what was about to follow.

“So,” Robber said, “we were just walking around, staying out of trouble.”

“Were you,” I flatly said.

“I’m a great believer in the sanctity of law and order,” Robber said, putting hand over his chest.

It was, I noticed as a splitting headache dawned, over the wrong side to be covering his heart. Idly I glanced up and chalked up the lack of thunder following that audacious blasphemy as yet another sign the Gods Above were washing their hands clean of this whole mess.

“Then wights started swarming over the arrays we were supposed to blow up, which was all right,” the goblin told me. “But then mages showed up, and the key places got locked up real tight. So then Captain Borer – that’s him right there, a repeat troublemaker I’ve had to report him several times-“

I glanced at the side where he was pointing and found a smaller goblin, with dark green skin tinted even darker over where his eyebrows would be if his kind weren’t hairless. It made it look like he was perpetually frowning. He looked pained, but also reluctant to outright contradict a superior officer.

“We should make trouble, is what Borer said,” the Special Tribune blithely continued. “It’s pathologic with him, I’ve been looking into getting him a mind healer.”

“I imagine they’d take a single look at you and run screaming,” I mused.

“That’s racist, Boss,” Robber informed me, trying to give me what I assumed to be doe eyes but ended up looking like a goblin wearing some poor doe’s skin and batting his eyes through the horrifying flesh mask. “Anyway, as the qualified voice of reason I put my foot down. Was about to look for some important people to help have some falls down the stairs when we ran into Lord Black.”

My eyes sharpened and I leaned forward. This was the first I’d heard of my teacher since we’d parted ways, unless you counted Diabolist boasting she’d captured him.

“He’s not with you anymore?” I pressed.

“No,” Captain Borer said, before I could be strung around some more.

“That’s another gold star of shame for you, Captain,” Robber told him with a leering grin. “I expect you to wear all twenty-three of them on your chest when we return to camp.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I told the poor bastard. “Robber, stop fucking around. I don’t have the time to spare. Where’s Black?”

The goblin turned serious, or at least as much as close as he could ever get.

“He took us to visit an old friend,” he replied. “General Fasili Mirembe. The Carrion Lord figured he wasn’t outside with the vanguard, you see. He had to be in a room somewhere he could command from without risking his very expensive blood.”

“Why target him?” I frowned. “Diabolist is the head of the snake. Fasili getting the axe wouldn’t actually change much.”

“That’s exactly what Borer said,” Robber baldly lied. “Only much less respectful. The Black Knight did that weird smile thing – I see where you get it from now, it was kind of uncomfortable seeing it on another face – and told us that if you want to learn how to bury a villain, the first person to hit up is always their second.”

My fingers clenched.

“He was after something that Fasili would have,” I said.

“Skeleton key,” the goblin said. “There’s only supposed to be one, but you can’t stab your warchief in the back if you can’t get to her.”

“That’s how you got in here,” I deduced. “But your people look like they’ve fought. There was resistance?”

“There was a whole garrison of dead around him,” Robber acknowledged. “We couldn’t handle that much, not even going in quiet. So Lord Black made a distraction.”

I closed my eyes and silently cursed. Fucking Hells, Black. A dangerous gamble at the darkest hour that would allow extremely important information to reach me in my moment of need? That explained why Robber had gotten here exactly when I needed him to – my teacher had effectively twisted Creation’s arm into ensuring as much. At the price, it seemed, of getting overwhelmed by Akua’s minions and taken prisoner. He was playing shatranj with us all and treating himself a piece like any other. I spat to the side and turned my gaze onto Robber.

“If it went down this way, you’ll have gotten more than a key,” I said.

That large a sacrifice would have impact. It would get me an edge of some sort.

“He told me to pass along a message,” the goblin said, and this time there was no humour in his voice. “It went ‘Only one strike. Make it count.’”

And there it was. The way out of the coming trap that Diabolist would have laid for me. I grit my teeth. We would have words about this, if he survived the day.

“How much of your cohort is left?” I asked Robber.

“A bare hundred,” the Special Tribune replied. “Dug-in mages are tricky to handle.”

Considering that meant half his men were gone, that was something of an understatement. I rose to my feet and rolled my shoulder. Those fire arrays had stung, cloak or not.

“All right,” I said. “Here’s what you’re going to do.”

I spoke, and as I did his grin got a whole lot nastier.

I’d been taught that, while assaulting the stronghold of a villain, there were three things to watch out for.

The first was the monster. It wasn’t always a greater devil or a demon, though admittedly that was the traditional Wasteland playbook. Some entity, usually difficult to handle, would be leashed somewhere in the lair to be used as a way to beat down an enemy too powerful for the villain themselves to handle. It was too much to hope that in this case it would be the greater devil we’d shanked before entering Liesse – that’d been a gatekeeper, and while it would have been difficult to handle on my own it wasn’t the kind of brutal counterstroke that someone with Diabolist’s resources would be able to keep around. I had a fight ahead of me, and it wasn’t going to be a pleasant one. My advantage here was that even by villainous standards, Akua was massively arrogant. She wanted me for her attack dog, apparently, so she wouldn’t open the game by sending whatever her monster was after me. She’d want the personal touch, at least until I backed her in a corner and those kinds of considerations went out the window. Considering I’d had to hack my way through both fae courts over the last year to varying degrees, my bet was on something related to Arcadia. I’d even had Masego and Archer send Summer after her neck a few months ago, so it made sense that I’d be made to pay for that one way or another.

The second was the trial, because there was more to killing a villain than just running them through. There was always a cost, a crucible you had to go through to earn that kill. The peasant boy that ended up slaying the dragon didn’t just pick up the magic sword in a rubbish heap, he had to bleed first. What made a hero a hero wasn’t the fancy weapon or the birth right, it was the courage. Or whatever other trite and actually fairly common quality they’d had in them all along. The shade that had once owned the sword would force a test, or the devil guarding the phylactery whisper some sweet temptation. I was of the opinion that lacking that kind of trial was why the Lone Swordsman hadn’t gone out in the blaze of glory, just two stomps to the back of the neck. We’d been opposed, yes. But there’d been little personal about it except for mutual dislike. To me he’d been a means and then a liability. To him I’d been a symbol of everything he wanted to destroy. Behind that, neither of us had thought of the other as more than a stepping stone towards the real fight. Diabolist wasn’t a lit sharper tossed at me by the Hashmallim, though. The higher the both of us rose, the clearer it had become that the story could only end with one of us dead or kneeling. I was partial to dead. That wouldn’t come without a price.

The third was the pivot. Fight between Named were never as simple as who pulled out their aspects first or who was better with spell and sword. While an animated corpse without a single aspect and a shaky mantle, I’d been able to beat a still-fresh Heiress and Lone Swordsman in Liesse because while they went for blood I’d gone for the story. It’d felt like a complicated thing to juggle at the time, but in retrospect it’d been fairly straightforward. Here, now that we’d returned to the very city where I’d once died, there were a dazzling amount of moving parts. Black. Warlock and the Woe. The Empress. And Diabolist herself. That last thread, in my eyes, was what would make or break this day. There was a moment ahead where the weight of Creation’s attention would be on both our shoulders, and when that moment came the one of us who made the choice first was going to be the one who got to walk away. There was a lot of danger to that. Spinning that wheel with William had been one thing because the Lone Swordsman, for all his many flaws, had principles. He had lines he hesitated to cross even for a win, if only a few. Diabolist did not. Her principle, ironically enough, was the same that the Legions had chanted outside her gate. Victory mattered, everything else was dross. If I wanted to win, I had to go into that room ready to cut down something I loved.

She had Black. I did not like the forming shape of this.

My sword was already bared when I found the heart of the palace. The Dukes of Liesse had been kings, once, and their ancestral seat still looked the part. The flight of steps before me had not been built to be lightly ascended. The granite was rough, the steps too tall for more than one at a time to be climbed. What began as a broad procession grew narrow as it rose, leading to tall gates of bronze that now stood sealed. Behind them, I knew, awaited the woman I had come to kill. Sorcery permeated the air here, so thick that every movement felt like I was stirring unseen wisps. So thick I could not tell if there was an array hidden, which meant there was one. The very trap, I thought, that Black had let himself be taken to help me beat.

I took a step forward and split.

Catherine Foundling found herself tired, after a hard bout in the Pit, and slept at the Rat’s Nest. She never stumbled across a man raping a girl, or what came of it.

Catherine Foundling bet on herself in the Pit and lost, without having meant to. Her savings thinned. She never earned enough to go to the College.

Catherine Foundling had watch sergeant’s a hand around her throat, choking the life out of her. The man began to speak, but through his belly emerged a sword that keened.

My boot touched the stone. I was myself, across three lives I had never lived and one I was living. I began the climb in utter silence.

Catherine stood in the crowd when they hung Governor Mazus. It was vindication, sealed by the choked cries of the man that was just another Wasteland leech. But the Rat’s Nest would not pay for her her tuition in Ater, not anymore, so she sought Booker and made a deal. In the months that followed she no longer came on the nights where bruises were what men paid for. She earned gold with a sword in hand, catering to the howls a mob that would settle for nothing less than death. The coin she earned was drenched in blood, but blood was the trade she had chosen and she made her peace with that truth. Catherine did not know blades well, when she began, and her opponents did. She learned, but when she stood among the crowd of cadets awaiting placement in a company she had only one eye and more scars than a girl her age should have.

Coin was what killed the dream, not the schemes of foes she would never meet. Catherine found her savings disappearing like smoke, and Harrion telling her the Rat’s Nest could not longer afford her was the final nail in the coffin. It was a bitter truth, and the bitterness seeped into her bones. The orphanage had taught her enough for a position as a tutor or tradeswoman, but the thought of it had her choking in anger. Impotence cut deepest of all. When Governor Mazus hung she was not in the crowd: her brawl with a guard that had hands prone to wandering had ended with the woman’s neck snapped. Marked for the gaol, barred from the Pit by Booker, she took the offer when it came. Better the Smugglers than the Assassins or the Thieves, she decided.

Catherine did not believe in heroes, but she believed in debts. When two monsters cloaked in black arrived in the alley and struck at her saviour over the cooling corpses of her would-be murderers, she chose her side. They survived only by the skin of their teeth, the Lone Swordsman losing a hand to a moving shadow as a large woman turned into twisted abomination. They fled the alley, the city, the region. It was doomed, she knew. The monsters always won here. But for the first time since she’d been born Catherine Foundling breathed free air, and it was intoxicating. William learned to listen to her, after she opened the throat of the first Eye of the Empire after them. It was in Summerholm that her Name found her. Squire, the Heavens whispered. She knew whose death was needed to become more.

The War College taught Catherine her limits. She was good. Swift with a sword, clever with her mind and with a talent for the unexpected. Tiger Company fostered her skills, seeing in her lieutenant or captain in the making, and for a time she was sergeant under the cold-eyed ogre they called Hune. It was not the already-famous Hellhound that put blood in her mouth. It was Lizard Company, Morok’s brutes shattering her tenth and leaving her broken on the ground. One of the orcs stomped her wrist twice, calling her Wallerspawn, and it never healed properly. She never forgave their kind for that, not the wound but the blind ugly hate she glimpsed in the orc’s eye. Goblins were tribe of their own, regardless of company, and the better Praesi pretended she did not exist. The worst made sport of her, and settling that with teeth on the ground made her as feared as she was alone. She had the talent to make captain, but was never elected by the others. Sergeant was the highest she ever rose at the College.

Catherine could afford the tuition now – and she could ten times over, because she was good with a lie and even better with a knife – but she no longer wanted to go. She’d had a glimpse of the true face of her people, beyond the well-worn stories of the Old Kingdom. Every night she rubbed elbows with murderers and thieves, not one of them Wastelander. What was there to save? Within two years there were only two above her in Liesse who belonged to the Guild of Smugglers, and only one after gold and whispers were traded. She left the title to the other, but the reins were her own. The quotas imposed by the Tower rankled, but she knew better than provoke that beast. It was the rest of the gutter she turned to, the forgotten and the ignored. The Hedge Guild folded first, after their most dangerous mage was found strung up downtown. The King of Thieves stole two shipments from Mercantis as a warning against great ambitions, so when she got her hands on him she melted down his pretty crown and poured it down his throat. The Assassins offered truce. She told them to kneel. Blood followed.

They killed their first Calamity the day before she turned eighteen. The Warlock was a monster, but a monster who loved his son. That was the death of him, and half Summerholm as well. The Penitent’s Blade beheaded the sorcerer among the ashes of his tower and Squire mustered enough kindness to have the Apprentice’s corpse left by his side for the Praesi to bury. They were growing. Thief, Bumbling Conjurer, Hunter and Bard. William found them and bound them, but it was Catherine who made a sword of them all, that wielded it against the Empire. The scent of rebellion was in the air. They ghosted across the land of her birth, followed by a thousand spies, and wherever they went governors and generals died. The Empress sent more. The Black Knight drew them into Liesse and burned the city around them but they were gone, gone through the corpse of an angel and back to haunt him soon enough. Procer sent coin and promises but both were spurned. They had sworn to see Callow free, whatever the cost. One foreign master would not be traded for another, and as the flames burned higher and the graveyards grew full.

She was twenty-three when rebellion came to Callow. Long past the College, Captain Foundling had seen luck good and ill. The Fourteenth Legion, raised in the year after her graduation, had offered better opportunity to rise than the old legions already thick with veterans. But peace, oh peace was her trouble. It took three years to go from lieutenant to captain, and the tribunes above her were all young and hale. Her company was obedient and well-drilled, but loved her little. Most were Praesi, and her reputation in Ater had followed her to the camp. The droplet that tipped over the cup was that the Fourteenth never fought. It was sent to garrison Summerholm as the other Legions fought, dispersing riots and patrolling empty streets as her desperate countrymen died in droves in the south. Vindication, that the Empire could not be fought and beaten. Vindication but no hope. It had been long since Captain Foundling was last kind, not since she’d killed men for gold in the Pit, and so her conscience went untroubled when she slipped poison in her superior officer’s ale. That was the game, in the Wasteland, and if it must be played she would. She would rise whatever the cost, to her or anyone else. After that it was only a matter of patience and skill. Staff Tribune Foundling was twenty-nine, when civil war erupted, and through chaos she rose higher still.

The Guild of Assassins cost her a hand and a permanent limp, before they were broken over her knee. From blood-filled gutters Catherine Foundling fashioned her crown. There was only one throne in the Empire, this she knew, but come night from Harrow to Dormer her will was the writ of law. The Tolltaker they called her now, for there was no sin under Callowan sky she did not get a cut from. A woman with ink-stained hands came one morning and presented her two scrolls. One held a seal, the Tower’s own. The other a list of quotas. It was not a negotiation, and neither of them pretended otherwise. She thought of that, when the heroes came and asked for a way to enter Summerholm unseen. They were going to kill the Black Knight, they promised. She smiled and said she would arrange it. The coin she got from selling their location to the Praesi was spent on a beautiful mansion in Whitestone, where the nobles of Laure still huddled and pretended relevance. After the heroes were all killed, she put it to the torch. Because she could. Because she had no reason not to. To remind the soft-bellied aristocrats living there of what fear tasted like. She watched the flames and wondered when it had all stopped mattering.

My boot scuffed the last step and I stood before the gate. Closed, but kept so by sorcery. It parted without a sound when I pushed and before me the throne room stretched. Tapestries hung from the rafters like columns, each an old triumph of the Empire presented in colourful cloth. The contrast to the bare stone of the floor was stark. Runes shone on the walls and balls of blue flame lit up the darkness bright as day. My gaze moved to the back, where the Diabolist awaited. Languidly sprawled on the old throne of the kings of the south, Akua Sahelian watched me with bright eyes. There was no sign of Black. She wasn’t keeping him here, then.

“Swiftness, Catherine,” she smiled, “has ever been your unmaking. You never learned patience.”

“Break,” I replied coldly.

The throne shattered like a cheap bauble and the wall behind it too. Diabolist fell prone, laughing, and I had no intention of allowing her to cast. Frost formed at the edge of my sword as I shot forward, granite cracking under the force.

“What your Hierophant has wrought, I claim,” Akua said.

The last word reverberated. Aspect, I thought. Then it felt like a hand around my throat, and I screamed. There was a vice around me, and as my Name desperately clawed at it I found myself stumbling while Diabolist rose.

“I told you, didn’t I?” the dark-skinned woman said. “That this ends with you kneeling. What I have claimed, I bind. It is mine.”

I fought it. My knee shook and slowly began to bend, so I wrested my hand from her control and stabbed my blade into the leg. Pain flooded my mind and I embraced it.

“Kneel, Catherine Foundling,” Akua Sahelian ordered. “And rise my Black Knight.”

“Fuck you,” I gasped. “He’s-“

“Dead,” Diabolist said. “He was not the kind of man easily kept prisoner. Why take the risk?”

I buckled, and one knee touched the floor.

Rebellion spread across Callow like a wildfire. Liesse first, but then the south rose up and wherever they went spears were dug out from fields and cellars, ploughshares hammered into swords. Old banners were dusted off, and when the knights of Callow knelt before her the whole kingdom boiled over. It was a bloodletting unlike any Catherine had ever seen. Garrisons swarmed by angry mobs, mages killed with stones and knives and clubs. The Empress gave answer with a hard hand. The day after Summerholm was liberated, Legions surrounded the city and torched it with goblinfire. The rebellion flinched. Assassin dogged them every step, even slit Hunter’s throat, and though she killed him twice with William’s help he always came back. The fought the Praesi near Marchford, a pitched battle, and they would have won had some orc commander not disobeyed her general’s orders and attacked instead of retreated. In the wake of the defeat madness spread. There had gone their last chance to keep any of this contained. It was no longer a war but a hundred smaller ones, and wherever they went they won but they could not be everywhere. The south held, nonetheless, and though the central burned the fight was far from lost.

Then Procer invaded, seizing the Red Flower Vales.

The Praesi had been ready for it, unlike Squire. They retreated to the ashes of Summerholm, destroying everything as they went. Fields salted, villages torched and wells fouled. If they could not have Callow, it would be as much a Wasteland as their home. The banner of the kingdom grew ragged, but still the people rallied to it. Every man and woman who could hold a sword took one up, and though the levies died by the thousands the tide was turned back. The Lone Swordsman hung seven princes and one and the Conjurer, long grown beyond the bumbling, brought down the mountains on the Vales. Shut, for good. The host marched to the ruins of Summerholm, the last foothold of Praes in the kingdom, and there the Black Knight awaited. Three days and three nights the battle went. The Hwaerte ran red with blood. But in the end Catherine Foundling rammed her sword through the back of the Black Knight’s neck and from that death rose Knight as well, decked in white. The monster’s bag of tricks had finally run out but oh, the cost. Callow was not a kingdom, it was a graveyard and an army. The Fields of Streges were taken back, and through those lands Callow reborn marched to reclaim the Blessed Isle. Whispers awaited them there. Dread Empress Malicia was dead, murdered in the Tower.

Dread Empress Magnificent, First of Her Name, awaited them as well. With a host the likes of which had not been seen since the days of Triumphant: demons and fortresses aflight, swarms of devils and every greenskin not buried in Callowan fields.

“Kneel,” Akua Sahelian ordered, crowned in dread.

General Foundling had struck a deal with the devil. The Empress had been losing her grasp for years now, and High Lady Tasia Sahelian might be a viper but she was a viper on the rise. She swore the damning oaths, and over the corpse of every other senior officer in the Fourteenth rose a general. It was on the fields of Callow she fought her part of the war. The nests of rebellion that sprang up all over the Old Kingdom when the Praesi turned their knives on each other were carefully brought into the fold of her legion, promised the settling of old grudges against the same generals that had crushed Callow in the Conquest. Even the knights came to her banner, after High Lady Tasia’s mages broke the right minds and reformed them into something more flexible. One occupying legion after another shattered even as the war became a thing of horror in the Wasteland, and from that destruction General Foundling made herself a force to reckon with. The Knightsbane, drawn and quarried by Liessen chargers. General Sacker given a true red throat instead of one her legion affected. Orim the Grim, a smile carved on his lips as he bled out. Marshal Ranker burned alive, save for the black hand that was her old boast. Wherever she went, legends died.

Nearly every cadet that had gone through the College in her days was dead, either at her hand or that of Sahelian assassins. It was Grem One-Eye and his second, the one they called the Hellhound, that broke her siege of Summerholm and pushed her back in the heartlands of Callow. With but a handful of ragged legions they beat her again at Denier and smashed her one last time near Marchford. It didn’t matter. The High Lords had risen one and all in the backing of a villain for the Tower, ome going by the Name of Heiress. Tasia’s own daughter, it was said. And if One-Eye was fighting General Foundling in Callow, he was not winning the war for Malicia in the Wasteland. Word trickled that Heiress levelled half of Ater winning a duel against the Warlock, that the Black Knight had retreated to the Steppes to raise another army with the Empress. Marshal Grem and the Hellhound retreated to Summerholm and Callow was Catherine’s, finally. The Imperial governors were seized and executed, even those allied to the Sahelians, and General Foundling refused a crown but prepared for the next part of the war. It never came, the embers smothered when a Hellgate was opened in the heart of Summerholm. The last true stronghold of loyalist resistance, wiped out in a single night. Before dawn, precisely a hundred Callowans died for every governor she had killed.

A warning that did not go unheard.

Procer seized the Red Flower Vales, declaring the Tenth Crusade and forming a coalition that spanned half of Calernia. General Foundling began talks with the First Prince, but they ended when a ziggurat of stone large as Laure cast its long shadow over the very city. Dread Empress Magnificent, First of Her Name, had come to reminder her of oaths taken.

“Kneel,” Akua Sahelian ordered, crowned in dread.

The Praesi were at each other’s throats, but what did the Tolltaker care? The quotas would not change no matter who held the Tower. But then, oh wonder of wonders, months passed and the war continued. Then the first two legions were pulled out of Callow to reinforce the Wasteland, and that was just the scent of opportunity wasn’t it? Catherine Foundling had left behind the illusion that there was something remarkable about her people along with her girlhood years, but she was Callowan still. For small slights long prices, and there had been so many slights offered since the Conquest. The Tolltaker mustered her empire of ghosts and crooks, and began a waltz with the many devils claiming the floor. It was a long and bloody night, when every Imperial governor in the old kingdom found death knocking at their door. The nobles, feckless wastes that they were, gathered in hidden rooms and plotted a nation born anew. She had no interest in dead dreams, and so the right whispers fhad Eyes of the Empire rounding them up for treason. They were looking for her as well, of course, and the Legions with them. They found nothing, for her kingdom was not made of castles but of a hundred ugly pacts made in the dark. Those could not be besieged, could not be fought on the field.

There was blood in the water, and so the west stirred. Procer marched into the Vales, filling every nook and cranny with their dead before the Legions could be dislodged. A host of Procerans marched into the central plains, claiming that they had come to put Gaston of Liesse on his rightful throne. So the Tolltaker had him killed, right in the middle of his precious little army. She had never enjoyed anything half so much as watching sixty thousand foreigners milling about, trying to think of justification for their invasion. They spoke of liberating Callow, in the end, and as they tangled with the remaining legions Catherine found her own amusements. The pot of rebellion was already boiling, so she helped it along. Weapons from the Kingdom Below, acquired through Mercantis, reached the hands of mobs. The Assassin came for her but she set the warehouse aflame with stolen goblinfire and whatever the creature had been, it did not crawl out. She learned to live with a hole through the lung, her breath always rasping. One by one the last aristocrats of Callow found knife in the back or poison in the cup, even as knights emerged from the south and fought both Procerans and Praesi for rule of the land.

There was no great plan, no matter what her lieutenants believed. There was only the dance, and every day she lasted against the monsters was yet another victory. The rebel in the Wasteland won, though that part of Creation had come to deserve the name twice over in that making, and after claiming the Tower she moved west with all her strength. Hellgates bloomed across the land and Procer retreated back behind the Vales before calling for a crusade no one else wanted. The knights fought against the tide, valiantly, and equally valiantly they died. In the wreckage of it all Dread Empress Magnificent, First of Her Name, came to Laure. The call came and the Tolltaker went, for someone who cared for nothing had nothing to lose. In the throne room of ancient Fairfax kings, a Praesi stood and looked down at her.

“Kneel,” Akua Sahelian ordered, crowned in dread.

Across three lives I had never lived and one I was living, I knelt. A face as beautiful as it was terrible allowed a smile of triumph to flicker.

Only one strike. Make it count.

I/General Foundling/the Tolltaker/the White Knight rose, and shoved steel through her throat.

My boot touched the stone. I looked up to doors of bronze wide open and began the climb, humming the tune to a song I had never heard.