An hour before dawn the camp would begin to stir, but I woke up even before that.
It was almost a mercy. My sleep was rarely anything but fitful – always returning to that night of green flames and red hands – and there were only so many times I could wake up soaked in sweat before I lost taste for turning over and burying my head under a pillow. In the dark before the dawn I found a fire, my still sleepy guards spread out around me, and overcooked a pair of eggs. The bacon rashers were fine, though, and boiling water was transmuted into tea by the twin magics of patience and costly foreign imports. I wolfed down the meal and warmed my hands against the mug, sipping it at it while it was still hot enough to scald my tongue.
My duties had yet to wake up and I wasn’t going to be squeezing into my battle armour any sooner than I needed to, so after I polished off the last of tea I got up so stretch my limbs. A walk around camp would do the trick, and though my guards seemed intent on following I dismissed them. I was now entirely awake, and so I could feel a string of fate pulled taut across the air. Not the battle’s, it was too small for that, but not a small matter either. Best to have a look before someone got around to plucking it, I figured.
My limp was unhurried, as I knew I would not be late. I tread the broad avenues of the Army of Callow’s camp, then the narrower alleys of the Dominion’s all the way into the messy sprawl of Procer’s sea of tents. Past a company of fantassins sleeping in the rough like corpses abandoned on a field, I found a half-broken watchtower – laid low by shoddy workmanship, not the Enemy’s blows – and a silhouette atop stairs. A man’s, leaning against the low shattered wall as if it were a balustrade, and though the cloak was a faded brown I recognized the build well enough. He did not turn as I went up to join him, though he would have heard me coming.
He was, I saw, staring at the dark and distant shape of the Crown of the Dead.
I squeezed myself in at the edge of the wall, leaning my staff against it and my shoulders against the irregular stone. In the gloom before day began to glow, Keter was difficult to make out even to my Night-blessed eyes. It was as some large beast curled up on an island of nothingness, unmoving but far from asleep. No one could look at the Dead King’s capital for long without getting the impression that it was somehow looking back at you.
“How did you find me?” Hanno of Arwad asked.
I glanced his way, having to twist to do so with my flesh and blood eye – the angle was bad. He’d always been a tall a broad sort, Hanno, with a working man’s frame and a working man’s hands. It suited the plain but honest face, which, while not so serene as it had been when he still served Judgement had kept a sense of calm to it. He was not easy to ruffle. Yet this morning, before daylight and other’s eyes caught up to us, he was allowing unease to reach his face.
“I followed a string,” I said. “It’s a thing I do now and then.”
“Mysterious,” he replied, appreciative. “Another ten years of this and you will drive young Named utterly mad.”
“Hey, if I actually make it to old age it’s my goddamn right to mess with the young,” I shrugged. “It’s not like Evil offers a pension or anything. They’re a stingy lot.”
He snorted.
“I cannot tell whether that’s blasphemy or not,” the dark-skinned man admitted.
“I’m getting that a lot these days,” I mused, “which seems unfair, given that I’m the high priestess of an entire religion.”
“One centred,” Hanno said, “largely around theft and murder.”
I cocked an eyebrow.
“And?”
“There’s a saying about birds of a feather that seems appropriate,” he serenely replied, “but I believe you’d never forgive me the pun.”
“You do know me,” I conceded.
I let the silence fall comfortably, settle in a bit. Then I struck with my usual finesse.
“So, glaring at Keter,” I said.
He stirred at my side.
“A roundabout question?”
“If you came here for the view,” I shrugged, “waiting after dawn might have worked better.”
I’d not drag it out of him with a hook and rope, if he did not want to talk, but I suspected that if that were true my feet would not have led me here. I’d been on the other end of this kind of conversation often enough not to mistake reluctance with refusal.
“I never sleep well before battles,” Hanno reminded me.
I didn’t reply. We both knew not sleeping and coming out here weren’t the same thing.
“I find myself irritated,” he finally said.
Huh. Never heard that one out of him before. I cocked my head to the side.
“With?”
“Too many people,” he tiredly said. “Which serves to tell me the troubles does not lie with them.”
“Ah,” I said.
He moved, craning his neck to look at me.
“Ah?” he asked.
“Ah,” I confirmed.
He rolled his eyes at me.
“What you mean, ‘ah’?” he pressed.
“That I’m not surprised,” I said. “You’re close enough to being Named that you can use an aspect and ride providence, but you haven’t claimed one openly. Talking from experience, it’s not a pleasant position to stay in.”
My Name of Squire had died a long death in the throes of Winter, a span of time I’d spent fighting some of the most dangerous heroes on the continent and trifling with lesser gods. I remembered well what it had been like to have the Role without the rest.
“Even a saint with get tetchy,” I elaborated, “if he keeps sitting on a spiked seat for too long.”
“I do not claim sainthood,” Hanno evenly said.
Never stopped anyone from tossing it at your feet, I thought, but true as that was it would be of no help at all.
“Can’t blame you,” I drawled instead. “Laurence was enough to put me off it too.”
He wasn’t quite amused – he remembered the Saint of Swords far more fondly than I did – but the growing tension in his shoulders loosened. Keeping an eye on him, I decided not to prod him any further. He had the look of a man chewing on his own thoughts. If the taste was foul enough he’d spit them back out anyways, yeah? And to think they’d said I would never learn patience.
I’d been patient enough to outlive most the fuckers, so how about that.
“There is a Name there for the taking,” Hanno finally said. “All I would need to do was reach out.”
“But you haven’t,” I observed.
Obvious, but it’d keep him talking.
“I have turned away from it twice now,” he confessed, passing a hand through his close-cropped hair.
My brow rose and I had to repress the urge to let out a low whistle. No wonder he was feeling antsy. He was fighting off his own transition. When he’d become a claimant to Warden of the West he’d ceased being the White Knight, though at least one of his old aspects had lingered. In the wake of renouncing that claim and my rising to fill the Role, what exactly Hanno of Arwad was had remained up in the air. By the sound of it, he’d been struggling with that question just as much as the rest of us.
I didn’t bother to ask what the Name he was shying away from was. I had my suspicions, but in truth it didn’t particularly matter. A Name was just the crystallization of what you were supposed to be, what you were supposed to do. The red, the life of it was in the Role. It was what we struggled with, far more than whether a Champion should be Valiant or Unconquered. So the ‘what’ was an afterthought, really, in face of the question that did matter.
“Why?”
The word had him scowling. It was a rare sight and I almost found myself staring at it: it was, well… human. Not that Hanno had ever been alien in the way that some other Named could become, all cold and power stripped of everything else, but there’d always been something a little aloof about him. The calm, the serenity on his face and in his eyes, it was fitting for a White Knight. Expected almost. But it was something to admire, not to understand, because who could ever really understand certainty that absolute? And now he was scowling, almost childishly. I smiled.
“And what has you so amused?” Hanno challenged.
“When I was a kid,” I said, “I sometimes felt like the world was caught in amber. Maybe not every part, but those that mattered at least. That nothing important ever really changed.”
I traced the edge of the rough stone with my fingers.
“But we did change it,” I said, almost disbelieving. “It didn’t really feel like it was what we were doing at the time, but we did. And now that I know how to look for it…”
All those years of swimming against the tide, of blood and mud and tears, they’d given birth to the first tremors of a new age. Still fragile, uncertain, but the signs were there. In the way that the Dominion was starting to circle around Razin and Aquiline like they were the sun of Levant, in the way that goblins drew on Night and planned to raise halls as far as the Morgentor, in that the empress of my youth was now a chancellor and a girl I’d once thought was now the heiress to my crown. Gods, these days I counted Procer as a halfway steady ally and looked forward to spending time with Cordelia Hasenbach. Somehow, along the way, we’d changed the world without even noticing.
But now that I could see it-
“… it’s everywhere,” Hanno quietly finished, eyes returning to the Crown of the Dead.
Calloused hands pulled closed, as if he was trying to catch something eluding his grasp. He let out a long, shuddering breath.
“Except me,” Hanno of Arwad said. “It’s everywhere except me, Catherine.”
So my instinct had been right.
“You can be the White Knight again,” I said.
“The same Name,” he said, “that I walked away from.”
I hummed.
“Aspects?” I asked, tone gone professional.
A trick that’d always served me well. Sound like you have a right to ask a question and most people will answer before they realize you’re there to buy fish and there’s really no reason you should be told about how much getting their horse shoed cost at Billy King’s smithy. Too much had been the answer. Brother Desmond had been right, the old bastard had been a swindler.
“One stayed,” Hanno said. “Two faded.”
I grimaced. That poor man. For an aspect to stick through a Name being lost and then being reclaimed, it’d have to be so intrinsic to who he was that it was more about Hanno of Arwad than whatever else he ended up being. I didn’t know what Hanno had gone through for Recall of all powers to end up qualifying for that, but I doubted it must have been singularly unpleasant.
“Then it’s not really the same Name, is it?” I pointed out.
“You were the Squire twice,” he said, with the blithe assurance of someone who’d peered at many of my secrets through dead men’s eyes. “Did you think it a different Name simply for having different aspect?”
“I was a different person,” I replied. “It’s why I didn’t get Learn or Struggle. I didn’t feel like I was so out of my depth anymore.”
In the wake of First Liesse, I had been a victor: over Akua, over the High Lords, in some ways even over the Empire. My plan to claw back some sort of local rule over Callow had been a success and I’d been granted lands by Malicia herself. I’d not felt like I was one misstep away from death at all times anymore, and my Name had reflected that confidence.
“But it was the same Name,” Hanno insisted. “Meant for the same purposes. Changing the horses on carriage does not make it a different carriage.”
“There’s an argument to be made that it does,” I drily replied. “Since you never step in the same river twice and all, but I’ll leave that bit of philosophy to the Atalantians. Why are you so keen on a Name always being meant for the same purposes, anyway? Even if it were true, it wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.”
“You have to ask?” he tiredly said. “You are the one who forced me to look that mistake in the eye.”
I blinked at him.
“You’re standing where everyone else started and calling it a journey,” Hanno quoted.
My own words, I realized after a heartbeat. From that night in Salia, when I’d had him at my mercy and savaged him with every hard truth I could find.
“I’d thought that rolled right off you,” I admitted. “Like most of what I said that night.”
“Even if you had been entirely my enemy,” he replied, “I would have thought on the words after. It is a dangerous thing to fear self-examination.”
Sounded a lot like ‘the innocent have nothing to fear’ to me, a sentence generally spoken by people who should not be trusted with even butter knives, but I’d sit on that opinion instead of sharing it. He had a right to his own beliefs, and there were more than a few reasons I’d not ended up dressing in white.
“All right, so you self-examined,” I said, distantly glad Indrani was not there to make a filthy joke of that. “How’d that end up with you here and staring down stone walls?”
“Because I fear that you might not have been wrong,” Hanno said. “It was… I struggled with the decision to act, Catherine. To sunder myself from providence and the Tribunal, however silent, and take matters into my own hands. But I did, and I began to act.”
His jaw clenched.
“And now I am to be the White Knight again?” he said. “To return where I began and sweep away al the doubts I wrestled with, the decisions I made, like fallen trinkets fit only for trash.”
He angrily laughed.
“It was not a journey at all,” Hanno told me. “I just walked in a circle so I could put on the same old cloak. All that grief, all these dangers and struggles and deaths, and what do I have to show for it?”
So that was it, huh. He’d thought he was becoming someone else, that he’d learned something. It must have been a bitter pill to swallow, the Creation itself seemed to think otherwise. At least in his eyes, anyway.
“Two aspects,” I said.
He turned to me, frowning.
“You want to use a Name as measure of who you are, like Creation’s some sort of fair judge?” I challenged. “I can’t agree, but fair enough. You’ll have to follow through, though: Creation judged you different enough from who you used to be that two out of three aspects faded.”
“It’s the same carriage,” Hanno flatly said, echoing his earlier words.
“Maybe,” I said. “But it’s not the same horses pulling it, or the same man riding it – so why does it have to be headed to the same place?”
He looked way. Not convinced, huh. I wasn’t fool enough to be disappointed.
“Perhaps it would be for the best if it did,” he finally said. “For all that I chose to act, I have few gains to show for it. The Gigantes have not come, and the claim I troubled the Grand Alliance to press was a trap.”
I hid my surprise. It was the first time I’d heard he’d reached out to the Titanomachy, though that was actually something I halfway appreciated. Cordelia had gotten some goodies out of dealing with the giants, but however skilled a diplomat she was being Proceran had ensured all paths would turn into dead ends. Both Hanno and the Witch of the Woods were said to have deep ties to the Gigantes, though, and a personal connection might have yielded results where formal talks had not. A shame it hadn’t. Mind, you all of this was babbling nonsense.
“Yeah, you didn’t produce enough results to turn around the literal end times in, like, eight months of trying your hand at it tops,” I drily said. “Just terrible, Hanno. Soon children will begin stoning you in the streets.”
He sent me a long-suffering look.
“Must you?”
“Sure, when you’re being an idiot,” I easily replied. “You tried, Hanno. Maybe you didn’t pull miracles out of thin air – more like not enough of them – but that doesn’t mean you were wrong to act. You made some things better and some things worse.”
I snorted.
“That’s better than I fucking managed to pull off, some years.”
Or Cordelia, for that matter. He mulled on that, silent, and I did not interrupt. Instead I looked to the distance, where on the edge of the horizon light was fast approaching. The gift of the Sisters told me dawn was soon to come.
“The world was never simple,” Hanno murmured. “But I do miss them sometimes, the days when my role in it could be.”
“Enough to go back?” I asked.
He did not answer. I stayed by his side, the two of us keeping in a strangely comfortable silence, until dawn rose to find us.
The silence was deafening.
Almost two hundred thousand soldiers stood around Keter, a fortified camp encircling that island of stone and death surrounded by nothingness, yet I could hear every cough. Empress Basilia had left with the Proceran cavalry, marching to the plains of the Ossuary to fight the battle that would keep our back clear as we stormed Keter. The rest of us – Levant, Callow, Procer and Praes – were mustered for war, for the slaughter about to begin. I sat Zombie’s back in full armour, perched atop a now-empty watchtower, and below me the ranks of the Army of Callow were splayed out. It was not the last two bridges they were readied for, not this time.
Across the lines of legionaries cut massive, segmented steel bridges. Pickler’s creations. Not long enough to reach across the chasm to the top of the rampart, for the amount of steel needed for it would have been prodigious, but long enough for our purposes. There was a glint of light at my side, which bloomed into a circle when I granted it a glance. Masego’s face appeared within.
“We are ready,” Hierophant said. “When does it begin?”
“On the hour,” I said, “though it will be First Princess Rozala that-”
“FORWARD!”
The air shuddered from the force of the call, which would have been fit to burst eardrums near the source. Still, the Proceran mages we’d trained at the Arsenal had done what they needed to: Rozala Malanza’s voice had been heard by every soul in the Grand Alliance army. Not that the order applied to all of them.
“Understood,” Hierophant said, and cut the spell.
My soldiers did not move, standing there as the wind picked up and the ozone scent of magic filled the air. Across the last two bridges, Proceran and Levantine soldiers began their advance on the enemy bastions. Streaks of roiling darkness shot up past the tall walls of Keter, the first wave of the enemy’s rituals – curses so powerful they were sickening even for me to look upon – howling at our advancing forces. Our answer was well-oiled. Our own rituals shot up: the eerie dust-ghosts of binders, great spears of lightning from the Army of Callow and curses just as vile from the Praesi. Magic collided against magic, power spent to no gain but the stalemate we had been aiming for.
“Now,” I murmured. “Now, Artificer.”
Obeying my order without ever having heard it, the Blessed Artificer at least unleashed the wonder she had crafted in Salia and refined over the months since: the Ram. It was impossible for me to miss it. The wooden pillar sheathed in copper caught the morning sun as it was dragged onto the platform we’d raised for it, then aimed at the wall before us. Adanna of Smyrna laid a hand on her creation, and for the first heartbeat nothing happened. Or rather nothing visible. It felt, to my senses, as if the entire world was breathing in.
And in the heartbeat that followed, as Light began to shoot out from the sides in wild spurts, the world breathed out.
She was knocked of her feet, as were the two soldiers helping her, and the Ram shot out like an arrow swatted by some unseen titan’s hand. The Light roiled, screamed, and as a sudden burst of power came from behind the walls of Keter I felt the Hierophan’s name shiver. Wrest killed their defence in the egg as the Ram flew, right at the heart of the wall before us. The same one where a Praesi siege tower had crashed into the stone, weakening the wards holding the rampart together. Spinning and screaming, the Ram hit Keter’s wall like the very wrath of the Heavens. Light flared, blinding and burning as the Ram fought to pierced into the rampart, and I caught sight of spurts of stone flying like drops of water before I was forced to look away.
Just in time, for the explosion that followed was powerful enough its breath sent tents flying behind us.
Shielding my eye with my palm more by habit than need, I risked a look at the rampart and let out a shocked breath.
“Merciless Gods,” I whispered.
The wall had been savaged. Miles of stone had been slagged down to the foundation, the melted remains trickling down the edge of the cliff and into the drop. The streets behind the wall had been ravaged by broken and heated chunks of stone, looking as if a rain of sharpers had been dropped across them, and though I could see soldiers swarming the sheer amount of damage was staggering. Just as we had hoped, the Blessed Artificer had blown us a path open into Keter. One that would not be the enemy’s narrow killing zones on the bridges, nowhere as heavily defended. And they’ll have to keep defending those while we strike here, else we’ll punch through.
A heartbeat later the Dead King collapsed both bridges, but I smiled against the strap of my helmet. We’d been waiting for that: sorcery bloomed, Akua and the Witch keeping the broken bridges aloft and usable. We’d learned from our first defeat. I laughed, unsheathing my sword and raising high, as all around me the Army of Callow cheered loudly enough to echo across the sky. Keter’s impregnable wall, reduced in a moment. My soldiers felt fires in their belly again.
“Begin,” I shouted, and it rippled out.
The melted stone was not yet cooled, but we did not have time to waste. The longer the Dead King got to prepare against our landing, the more brutal securing that beachhead was going to get. Zombie let out a loud cry, wings spreading as I spurred her on to take flight. I glided over the Army of Callow as the First, Third and Fourth brought forward their bridges. They rose up in their air like poles, carefully aimed to the calculations of the sappers overseeing the effort, and then after a push gravity took its toll. They toppled forward, falling all in a row. Not that Keter was to let us land so easily. Magic bloomed ahead, but those I left to Masego. When I guided Zombie into a glide, staff in hand as I called on Night, it was to meet another threat: the great wyrm that was tearing through houses and streets to get to the breach. The great abomination of bone and leathery skin screeched, but I shouted back.
“Crows take you,” I snarled, “and burn.”
Black fire erupted form the tip of my staff, growing from a trickle to a torrent to a burning river as it struck the massive snake construct in the side. Magic whizzed around me, but none came close: all that would have hit suddenly changed trajectory, Hierophant slapping them away with Wrest. I grit my teeth and kept letting the Night flow through me even as my veins cooled and sweat beaded my brow, Zombie’s long wings taking us into a smooth circling glide. I finally killed the working and lowered my staff, just in time to take my mount into a dive as Keter’s first ballistas were brought into position and began firing on me.
I got a look at the wyrm first, though, and grinned fiercely: it wouldn’t going anywhere.
Even with all the power I’d pumped through I’d only incinerated half of the construct, but it was quite beyond moving. It pissed me off a little that it’d still managed to accomplish part of its’ objective – wedge its body between the falling bridges and the ground – but barely a third of our crossings had been blocked with the move.
“Priests will clean up the rest of it,” I told Zombie, leaning against her neck. “Come one, we’re going with the first wave.”
Some brave souls from all three commands in the Army of Callow had begun the daunting work set out before them: crossing the chasm atop the steel bridges. We’d aimed for a wideness of three soldiers to be able to pass through each bridge at a time, for a total of ninety-nine legionaries at a time across all bridges. Much as Juniper would have preferred more, the amount of steel this had taken was already astronomical. Zombie’s took us under the bridges, layering stripes of shadow and light against the cliffs surrounding me on both sides, and after passing the last I guided my mount into taking us up. What I saw as I turned to look at our assault gave me pause.
It was a massacre.
My soldiers had made it halfway through the bridges before enemy fire began to fall on them, but now that it had… Arrows and scorpion bolts shot out in hails, stones from scorpions and streaks of sorcery smashing through shields like they were made of paper. I wasted no time, spurring Zombie back into the fight, and began striking at the enemy – siege engines first, they were hardest to replace. It wasn’t going great.
“Fuck,” I snarled, dropping low to avoid another curse.
Already a full archer’s volley was falling on my position, the impossibly precise coordination between the dead setting up the sequence perfectly. Zombie was already diving but we had to spin to avoid twin ballista bolts – one skidded off the edge of my armour, another took a few feathers off her side – and we were forced to take refuge under the bridges for the second time before flying back up the other side. I’d torched two ballistas and an archer’s nest, but the enemy was using its mages to shield against my Night workings. I guided Zombie back up and flew through a hail of arrows, swatting them aside with a burst of Night, and hammered at a ballista jutting out from some half-broken temple. The black flames washed over the shield, but a heartbeat later Hierophant wrested the defence away and I let out a snarl of triumph.
Without Masego covering me, though, the swarm of curses had me forced to drop below again.
I rose on the opposite side for another pass, but when we tried the same trick I found the that the flames still didn’t go through: the undead mages had layered the shields into two different spells. Fuck. They’d figured out the weakness of the aspect, then. Hierophant could take from more than one source of magic, but that meant splitting focus. On an artefact that was fine, but when there were other wills fighting him? They’d shut down our trick. I had to drop again, a glance telling me that our assault had stalled hallway through the chasm: soldiers were dying too fast to get further.
Another pass, and I went at it differently: I attacked the grounds around the ballista instead, shattering stone with entropy. Mixed results: knocked the ballista down but it wasn’t destroyed, and Masego had to cover me from a mass of enemy magic as Zombie dove. On the next pass, the dead got even more clever on us. They began holding back the release of their rituals, letting them loose when I attacked so that Masego was forced to handle them instead of help me. I almost let out a scream of frustration.
“This is going nowhere,” I breathed out, forcing myself to calm down.
And it had gotten there, by the looks of it: the bridges were almost clear, the last legionaries still on them try to get off.
Not a single man had gotten to the other side, and my soldiers were no longer trying to pass.
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