A Practical Guide to Evil

Chapter Book 7 50: Clouds

The arrival of the last army to join the siege of Keter should have been an uplifting moment, like the beginning of the end for the Crown of the Dead, but instead the coming of the Firstborn had been drowned in the shadow of Neshamah’s counterblow. I landed in the Third Army’s camp to cheers that rang a little hollow and didn’t bother to make a spectacle out of it: posturing would not remove the sight of the sky falling from the minds of my soldiers, and it’d look all the more laughable for trying. I handed off my reins to a stout Vale boy and let myself be guided to the command tent, informed by one of the phalanges that Juniper was already waiting for me.

More than just her, as it turned out. All four of the Army of Callow’s generals were there, as well as the expected old hands – Aisha and Pickler. So was Kilian, to my surprise, but I kept the sentiment off my face. It made sense, given that these days she was the longest serving of our Senior Mages. Our surviving ones, anyway. I took Juniper’s offered arm with a wan smile, clasping it in a legionary’s salute before turning to the others.

General Bagram, the oldest veteran in the room, had visibly aged since I last him. The orc’s fangs had yellowed and his eyes grown sunken, even if his back was still straight. Zola Osei looked better rested, and more confident for her solid performance during the Praesi campaign. She’d not be shy before, but not that assurance was less of a performance. Lady Abigail – of House Tanner, nowadays – still looked like she’d bot out of the tent given a halfway decent excuse, her eyes a little too wide kind of like a panicking horse, but her Third Army’s reputation towered above that of all the others.

The last and freshest addition was an old man with a crooked nose and blue hair, still built like a bull for all that his hair had turned white. General Jeremiah Holt, formerly of the Thirteenth Legion and now instead of the Fifth Army. The First and Second, merged after the heavy losses at Hainaut, would remain that way for the rest of the war. It was better for Vivienne for them to start their own legacy, anyway. She’d get to grant them a cognomen herself and cement the close tie, like I had with the Third. Besides, it would have left a bad taste in the mouth to hand this strange Hune’s old rank.

“Where’s Princess Vivienne?” I asked after the round of greetings.

I’d forgotten how very red Kilian’s hair was, I’d admit. It was still as striking a feature as I’d found it at seventeen, even more so now that she wore it a little longer.

“The White Knight sent for her,” Juniper told me. “There’s been correspondence from the Kingdom Under.”

I sucked in a breath.

“Good news?” I asked.

The tall orc looked at me with irritation.

“If we already knew,” Marshal Juniper growled, “she’d be here, wouldn’t she?”

I grinned, which startled her and so the grin only grew. I patted her arm, to her bafflement.

“Missed you too, Hellhound,” I fondly said.

She cleared her throat.

“Yes, well, we have military business,” Juniper stiffly replied.

She was already getting enough amused looks at her expense that I decided to spare her further teasing. I invited everyone to sit, helping myself to the cup of water that Aisha had poured me. I noted the taste of lemon, which I’d grown to like in Praes, and shot the Taghreb beauty her an appreciative look. I got a wink back. Ah, Aisha. She was still tempting even with Juniper at the table and a fresh reminder of the dangers of sharing a bed with a subordinate squeezed in between Pickler and Zola.

“So,” I said, setting down my cup with a sharp rap. “Fill me in.”

Given that this was a siege, who was to report first was evident enough no order need be given.

“We’ll be finished surrounding Keter by tomorrow evening,” Sapper-General Pickler said. “We started by making gate-fortes in front of the bridges, but we’re planning a full encirclement.”

She paused.

“Both circumvallation and contravallation,” Pickler specified.

I could think of a few reasons why the Grand Alliance would bother to wall up our side of the ‘moat’ that was a chasm miles deep, but one in particular came to mind.

“They’ve been shooting at us, I take it,” I stated.

“Ballistae and sorcery,” Juniper said. “At night especially, though they change the hour to keep us on our toes.”

“And we’re handling the magic?” I asked.

Juniper slid a look Kilian’s way, who brushed back a strand of red hair in a way that brought a faint pang of nostalgia before she cleared her throat and spoke up.

“Our wards are sufficient to handle the swarms,” Senior Mage Kilian informed me, “and ritual attacks have been going sharply in our favour, at least on the defence.”

I breathed in sharply.

“The Praesi made that much of a difference?” I incredulously asked.

“We estimate we might have as many as twice the number of mages as there are within Keter now that we have both the cabals and the Magisterium,” Kilian replied. “It’s still hard to guarantee that we can surpass the enemy in any single place when they concentrate their forces, but alongside Lady Nahiza Seriff we’ve set up proactive defences to get around that.”

I cocked an eyebrow at the vagueness.

“We hit their rituals with ours before they can hit our troops,” Kilian summed up, tone dry.

I swallowed a smile.

“Well done,” I praised, meaning it.

Wouldn’t work forever, since our mages got tired while Neshamah’s didn’t, but while we finished our siege works it was a solid defensive measure. When we went on the offensive, however, we’d have to pull mages off the defence and then things would get nasty. But they’ll get even worse than that if we don’t have cadres of diabolists waiting for the demons we’re sure to get dropped on us.

“Siege preparations?” I asked the table at large.

“Bombardment of the southern and western gates has already begun,” Juniper replied, “but we’re having a hard time getting through the wards in the stone. We’re holding off until we have a way to crack them.”

“I’ll put Akua on it,” I absent-mindedly said.

Masego was better at wards, which was only natural given that his father had been the undisputed master of them in this lifetime, but I’d need him for something else. I needed to know how badly the Twilight Ways had been hit. It should just be a temporary shattering in the Kingdom of the Dead, I thought, but if it wasn’t… I’d planned to imprison the Dead King in the Ways, after forcing on him the poisoned Crown of Autumn. I’d even picked out his keeper, someone I could trust to keep him forever contained. I grit my teeth. The latter part of that scheme was already in doubt, but if even the premise was buried I was in the deeps.

Had he known? Was that why he’d hit the Ways like this, even though he had to know that cornering heroes was putting the wind at their back? I had yet to break the sword I had ripped out of the Intercessor to restore Below’s stories, keeping that blow as a card up my sleeve, but he had to know that when I did that counterstroke would cost him. It smelled of a mistake to me, and we were too late in the game for the King of Death to be making this kind of mistake. Something was up. What’s the angle here, Neshamah? What is it you’re after? I drifted back to the present, noticing that most the table was looking at me expectantly.

I’d probably been asked a question, I realized with faint embarrassment. Not acute enough for me to stop, though.

“Have there been any sorties?” I asked.

“Not since we’ve finished raising the gate forts,” General Jeremiah replied, frowning. “Your Majesty, if you would-”

I raised my hand to silence him.

“Not one?” I insisted.

“No,” General Bagram told me, leaning forward with clear interest. “All the fighting’s been at our backs. The devils are chewing up the dead in the south, but every other skeleton’s headed our way. We’ve been chasing off armies led by Scourges.”

I drummed my fingers against the table.

“The earlier sorties,” I slowly said. “Were any of them led by a Scourge?”

Blinks of surprise. Aisha was the first to answer.

“None,” the Staff Tribune said. “There were other Revenants, but none of that calibre were reported.”

Only Neshamah wouldn’t send out all his best Revenants out in the field, he had to know he needed assets to handle the hero death squads we’d be throwing at him. Meaning he’s keeping them back on purpose, I thought. Trying to prevent our Named from catching one of them and putting them down early? No, he wouldn’t be thinking that way at this point. Trading a single Scourge for ten Named was the kind of bargain he’d take with a smile, because there would be no more Named reinforcements. Every Named he killed was one less story, one less aspect we could use against him. If anything, he should be eager to bleed our numbers dry.

It didn’t make military sense for him to hold back the Scourges, which meant he was moving according to another set of rules. And one I knew that, his intent was not so obscure after all. I rubbed the bridge of my nose.

“This is,” I muttered, “a goddamn mud trap.”

Neshamah had no intention at all of fighting us in a desperate last battle. He was just keeping us here for the two, three months he needed for his armies to finish destroying Procer and raising it. That was the real way Calernia lost, when he devoured the Principate and fielded an amount of undead beyond our capacity to beat. He’d keep throwing expendable armies at our back to prevent us from mounting a proper assault on Keter, but I suspected that if it came down to it he might actually cede his capital. Did he really need the Hellgate and the Serenity behind it, if he already had the rest of Calernia on a silver platter? They were conqueror’s tools, and the conquest was already halfway done.

And beyond even that, a sudden fear assaulted me. We’d bet it all on ending the Dead King here to end his armies, but was he even here? No, I told myself, I was overcorrecting. I could still feel the thick knot of stories coming together in Keter, as if it were just out of my sight, and that couldn’t be anyone else. He wouldn’t have risked it, I decided. Providence would have pointed us at him anyway, and there’s nowhere he has better defences at than Keter. And yet… I pushed back my chair, brusquely getting to my feet. The eyes of the highest-ranking military officers in Callow were all on me, showing varied scales of curiosity and wariness, so I kept my face calm.

I needed to talk with Hanno and soon. I had to be sure. The heroes must have a way to check if the Hidden Horror’s in the city, I thought. Before that, though, we needed to adjust our basic strategy.

“Begin preparing for assaults as soon as tomorrow,” I ordered. “Our timeline has changed.”

Juniper’s eyes met mine.

“Warlord?”

“The Dead King’s trying to run out the hourglass on us, Juniper,” I darkly said. “So let’s remind him why he should know better than to take us so lightly.”

The council Vivienne had gone to was done by the time I got there, but I got lucky. She’d stayed behind to have a drink and a talk with Hanno – Callowan diplomacy at its finest – which allowed me to catch the both of them together. The first thing I noticed when I laid eyes on them was that Vivienne was looking great. A little taller than when I’d last seen her, which smacked of Name given that it was late for her to get a growth spurt, and she’d gained some muscle too. Wearing armour and going around carrying a sword had added tone to her arms. I swept her into a hug before we even greeted each other, and if the way she tightly returned it was any indication she’d missed me too.

“Princess,” I smiled, drawing back.

“Warden,” she smiled back.

Only then did I turn my attention to Hanno, who’d be looking at us with tolerant amusement. He’d not changed much in the time since we’d last seen each other, at least not physically. But the power I could sense him, however tightly constrained, gave away that he’d gotten something back since our talks in Salia.

“You’re Named again,” I said.

“Not yet,” Hanno of Arwad serenely replied, “but I believe it imminent.”

“I’m happy for you,” I told him, a little surprised to find I meant it.

He’d be a lot more useful to me as enforce of the Accords as a hero, of course, but it went further than that. If Hanno had gone through the doubts and all the reproaches I’d crammed down his throat when he tried to become Warden of the West, then he’d end up better off for it. He’d been struggling with hesitation and his own sense of what was just ever since the Seraphim had gone quiet, so if he’d found a measure of peace with his situation I could only be glad.

Besides, with serenity came strength and we’d need heroes of his calibre to take Keter.

Vivienne set aside the abominable brandy they’d been drinking to pour me a cup of wine, further reinforcing that she was the right choice for my successor, and I joined them at the collection of folding tables they’d been using as a single larger one. I raised an eyebrow at the high number of chairs, which Vivi caught.

“We had to give the Free Cities five seats,” she explained, “since the Blood has five as well and giving less would have been an insult.”

“So Procer got five as well,” I said, rolling my eye. “Please tell me you didn’t make a scene for us as well.”

Hanno snorted.

“Two of those seats are empty in your name,” he said. “One for the Warden, the other for the Queen of Callow.”

I sent Vivienne an aggrieved look. She well knew my opinion on having too many people sitting in council – it was an inconvenience at best, trouble at worst. A conference was one thing, but a council needed to actually be able to hear itself talk.

“It does wonder for my leg room,” the Princess told me, entirely unrepentant.

“I always knew the power would go to your head,” I sighed. “I should have seen the signs, just look at the kind of people you’ve been rubbing elbows with.”

Hanno shot me an interested look.

“She plays dice with Indrani,” I told him. “No one of decent repute would ever subject themselves to that.”

“Sidonia once told me she cheats most relentlessly,” he noted.

“Eh,” Vivienne said. “Her sleight of hand could use some work.”

I smiled into my cup, drinking of the wine – some Proceran pale that’d likely get rare in the coming years, given that the undead had not been great for vineyards – and letting the warmth of it soothe my throat. I set it down with a dull thud, the sound getting their attention. They’d both known me long enough to recognize it as a signal for us turning to business.

“Got a question for you,” I told Hanno. “I don’t suppose there’s a heroic Name trick that can be used to confirm the Dead King is in the city?”

He looked surprise, the plain but honest face slowly developing a frown.

“You’re afraid he’s abandoned his capital in favour of Procer,” the dark-skinned hero said.

“It shouldn’t be the case,” I replied. “But we’re not in a place where maybes are something to tolerate.”

He nodded in understanding.

“There is no such trick,” he said. “Providence can sometimes be bent to the purpose, but it is unfortunately unreliable when it comes to the Hidden Horror.”

I grimaced. So much for that.

“However,” Hanno continued, “I have reason to believe he is in Keter as of today. Antigone’s opinion is that the ritual used against the Twilight Ways earlier was directed by his own hand.”

Vivienne stirred.

“One of the Scourges is a mage,” she pointed out.

“Not sure the Tumult could handle a ritual like this,” I noted. “It’s a gestalt soul, not a practitioner capable of this quality of magic.”

“That is still,” she said, “a maybe.”

I grimaced. She wasn’t wrong, I conceded as worried my lip.

“I’ll see if Masego can find out,” I said, reluctant as I was to heap more on his plate. “A godhead, at the very least, shouldn’t be possible to hide.”

Which also meant Neshamah knew we had the Crown of Autumn in our camp, but he couldn’t know what we meant it for. With that matter as settled as it could be in the moment, I pivoted to the greater consideration.

“So,” I said, “I hear we’ve got word from the Kingdom Under.”

Both their faces were grim, a sight that had my stomach clenching.

“Two letters,” Vivienne said. “A personal one from the Herald, carried by Seeker Balasi, and a formal one from the negotiator for the King Under the Mountain.”

She’d phrased the letters as coming from two different people, which had a worrying implication.

“The Herald’s no longer in charge of negotiations,” I stated, and it was not a question.

“He has been replaced,” Hanno said, “by a Lady Sybella. Who informs us that any promises he might have made were done so without the backing of the Kingdom Under.”

“Fuck,” I feelingly said.

I leaned back into the chair, closing my eye and tilting my head back. That wasn’t quite the worst outcome for us, but it wasn’t far either. The amount of soldiers we’d gathered for the siege of Keter was the single largest army – of the living, anyway – in the history of Calernia. Numbers were a little vague given the many moving parts and lack of records in some armies, but we should be somewhere between two hundred and two hundred fifty thousand souls in all. Cordelia had pulled off fucking miracles getting enough supplies to feed an army that size on the march from a crumbling Procer, and gone even further by getting enough to feed us for part of the siege, but it wouldn’t last.

“How long do we have before we’re out?” I asked.

“For water, two months,” Vivienne said. “We’ve already started rationing food, and at this rate we have three to four weeks left.”

“If the Dead King does not hit our supplies,” Hanno reminded me.

We needed the dwarves. We had around two months before Procer was done and Calernia with it, but we wouldn’t even last that long if the Kingdom Under didn’t bring us food. I breathed out, forcing calm, and opened my eye.

“All right,” I said. “Hit me with it. What does Lady Sybella want?”

“The original terms the Herald proposed,” Hanno said. “With the addition of the city of Keter.”

I thinly smiled.

“Does she also want Laure while she’s at it?” I bit out.

“The phrasing of her missive was… strong, Cat,” Vivienne said. “She’s not interested in negotiating terms with us. We take it or leave it.”

My fingers clenched. One of these days, we’d have to get around to teach the Kingdom Under a modicum of humility. They were the great empire of Calernia, but their hegemony had always relied on keeping out of surface affairs and playing nations against each other. Now that they were putting a knife at our common throat to extort us while the Dead King tried to kill us all, they’d outed themselves for the bandits they were. If we survived this fucking war, I expected that diplomatic efforts to squeeze the dwarves out of our affairs would find fertile grounds.

But first we had to survive.

“She has to know at least half of us would rather tell the dwarves to bite it and take our chances with Keter,” I finally said. “And that was before she further upped the price. She’s overplaying her hand. Why?”

“The Herald’s letter shed some light on the matter,” Hanno said, jaw locked tight. “He tells us that the Kingdom Under has learned of the ealamal’s existence.”

I blinked. Yeah, hard to keep that under wraps when it was getting brought here for the siege. What would that change – no, he couldn’t possibly mean that.

“You can’t be serious,” I quietly said. “They actually want us to use it?”

“The mathematics are simple, from where they’re standing,” Vivienne ruefully said. “Either we give them everything they want and they lend a hand, or we blow them off and lose to the dead without them. Then, in our despair…”

“They think we’ll blow ourselves to the Hells and the Dead King with us,” I completed.

“Not so much to the Hells,” Hanno said, “but that is the essence of it. They expect the ealamal to empty large swaths of western Calernia, leaving the lands ripe for the taking.”

Why bother negotiating with the humans, I thought, when they might do you the courtesy of emptying their own lands so you could take them? And since the ealamal was unlikely to reach as far as southern Procer, they could still take the cities they’d asked for by force with the populations intact afterwards. Gods, with the continent so ravaged some might even be grateful for the protection.

“That’s one of the vilest plans I’ve ever heard,” I said. “And I have heard vile plans, Hanno, even speaking a few myself.”

“It is unconscionable,” the dark-skinned man agreed. “The Herald of the Deeps agrees, hence his warning. He also reiterates his promise that he will do all he can.”

I almost rolled my eye at that, refraining only for Hanno’s sake. So far all the Herald had done was try to roll us when we were vulnerable and then fail to be of any use when turning his cloak. I’d spare a speck of gratitude for the warning, but wasn’t putting a lot of hope in the dwarf. He’d done nothing to warrant it and much to do otherwise. The room fell silent and I began drumming my fingers against the table, lost in thought. Eventually, though, I had to speak up.

“I don’t see a way out of this,” I quietly admitted. “Our bet was that the Herald would come through, and it appears we’ve lost it.”

“With the rationing we still have three weeks,” Vivienne said, but we both knew otherwise.

It would hardly be a victory to take Keter within that time, because our armies would likely be fucked anyways: we couldn’t forage in the Kingdom of the Dead, which mean that to eat we’d have to march back. To Procer or Serolen, but both were weeks away. Weeks where hundreds of thousands of soldiers would be expected to march with empty stomach. They’d die, we all knew. They’d die in droves, and darks things would be done as we grew desperate to survive. Even if we won, I realized, even if we got the Dead King, we might still lose. Not because of Gods or sorcery or a story, but because we were too far out in enemy territory without a supply line and our diplomatic efforts had failed.

“The cause is not lost,” Hanno said, unruffled. “Being cornered with everything on the line lends us strength enough to overcome the impossible.”

He paused, brown eyes moving to me.

“And that sword at your hip is not a sword at all, Catherine, unless I’m gravely mistaken.”

People didn’t actually tend to notice the sword at all unless it was pointed out to them, even Named, but then Hanno’s name hadn’t been picked out of a hat when he became the Sword of Judgement. But Vivienne, from the half-hidden startlement on her face, had not noticed it until just now. I unclasped the sheath from my belt, a beautiful wooden piece carved and painted by an artisan of the Ysengral Sigil that displayed the northern constellations on moonless night, and slid out the blade. It didn’t look like much, really. Just a smooth steel arming sword that lacked a crossguard, its edge wickedly sharp to even a casual eye but otherwise unremarkable.

It was only fitting, I supposed, that Below’s stories would take the form of a double-edged blade without a guard. Sometime my Gods had a halfway decent sense of humour

“No,” I agreed, “it’s a little more than that.”

“You can free the stories at any time, then,” Hanno said. “And it might not be as simple as sealing his doom in a single stroke, but…”

“It’ll tip the balance,” I finished.

It’d hurt him. That was the reason behind the strategy I’d begun sniffing out today, after all: Neshamah was afraid of the stories coming back. That was why the only armies fighting the Grand Alliance were coming from outside the city, why they were led by Scourges and why he was hiding behind his walls. It was even why he’d shattered the Twilight Ways only after the Firstborn had crossed: he was religiously avoiding direct confrontation. Because he knew the moment it was him against us, everything on the line, I’d break the sword and the result would not be a finger on the balance so much as a hand around his throat.

We were in deeps, I wouldn’t deny that, but so was he. And that meant we were still in this war.

“Masego called it the Book of Some Things, the other one,” Vivienne said.

“Not my choice,” I defended. “He insisted that since he’d made the artefact he should get to name it.”

“I thought the name rather charming, actually,” Hanno smiled.

Ugh, he would. I shared a look with the other Callowan in the room.

“So what are you calling this one, then?” Vivienne asked.

I raised up the blade, noticing it did not gleam even under candlelight – as if it refused to reflect light entirely – and studied it, then smiled. It’d be a shame not to keep to the naming scheme now that Hierophant had started it, since it was too late to take back anyway.

“I’m rather partial,” I replied, “to the ‘Sword of the Rest’.”