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“It was no such thing,” Akua replied.

He shot her a considering look.

“You reined in your horse before the wall broke,” he noted.

“For the same reason I know it was not an accident,” Akua said. “I caught the scent of demolition charges.”

And she knew the scent well. There had been a time where Special Tribune Robber had delighted in rubbing just enough powder in parts of her tent that the smell would stick and her subconscious mind wouldn’t allow her to untense. If she’d actually needed to sleep as a shade, it would have driven her to a breakdown in a matter of months. The goblin had been an artist in matters of malignance, for all his generally unpleasant demeanour. High Lord Jaheem was impressed, though he should not have been or at least have hidden it better.

“Her Dread Majesty or Wither herself, then,” Jaheem Niri mused. “A heady compliment.”

Akua smiled, more at his reference to the famous line from ‘Maleficent the Great’ – if a woman is to be known by the quality of her enemies, is it not a heady compliment to be at war with all the world? – than the flattery. The High Lord of Okoro was known as a well-read man, fond of theatre and the classics. He’d continued to attend public theatre even after enemies tried to kill him at such performances twice.

“Wither. This isn’t Malicia’s sort of knife.”

High Lady Takisha Muraqib of Kahtan had cut into the conversation with what some might consider rudeness, but though High Lord Jaheem dislike her he let the affront pass without comment. It was not the first time and he was not the first to do so. Takisha’s face had grown hard and her temper foul since the Assassin had slain her husband. She’d been fond of the man, overly so by the standards of proper nobility.

“It seems the more likely of the two,” Akua conceded.

Sappers had done this, or at least people with sapper training. Trying to kill her with a collapsing wall required delicate timing and knowledge of goblin munitions that few who had not been in the Legions possessed.

“You always see goblin hands behind everything,” High Lord Jaheem scorned. “And no wonder why. If you had your way we’d break our armies in the Hungering Sands so your thirdborn can rule Foramen under you.”

“Matron Wither was part of the rebels that seized the city and exterminated the Banu,” High Lord Takisha flatly replied. “Of course she needs to be deposed, it was a mark of Malicia’s decline that it was ever otherwise. And as for rule, well, who has the blood for such a title now save the Muraqib?”

Akua understood well the nature of this conversation and the hundred others like it she had heard over the last two weeks. Malicia’s fall had been considered set in stone – ah, foolishness – even before two High Seats had defected from Catherine’s cause to Akua’s – highly dubious – so instead of scheming to seize the Tower the highest of the highborn were now fighting over another prize. Namely, who was to be Akua’s own Chancellor when she became Dread Empress. It was considered natural and self-evident that a Sahelian of the old blood would end the absurd decree making it high treason to hold or claim such a Name, regardless of Akua never having made such a promise.

So now the vultures showed off their plumage with little displays like this conversation, pecking at each other’s heads so that one might emerge as the natural candidate to be Akua’s treacherous right hand.

“High Lady Wither can wait,” Akua said, tone a tad short. “We came here for a reason.”

She spurred her horse forward, keeping her irritation away from her face. Such politicking did not make her kind better or worse than any other highborn of Calernia. She knew this. It still stuck in her throat that the High Seats would continue these games without batting an eye when a battle had very nearly been lost to the Army of Callow the day before, thousands of levies been mercilessly mowed down. Some of the lords and ladies on the field had been embarrassed by the way their conscripts had broken, but it was not the farmers and traders in shoddy armour that Akua was embarrassed of.

What worth, what pride was there in dying on a field for someone who would not bat an eye at continuing to scheme before your body had finished cooling?

Yesterday’s wounded had been allowed into the city against the Empress’ orders, though not the rest of the private armies, and considering how undermanned the capital’s defences were it had seemed sensible to both Akua and the Black Knight that empty barracks be turned into makeshift hospitals. She’d had to fight tooth and nail with the same nobles who claimed to support her to organize a rotation of mage healers that would see to everyone instead of simply each lord’s own wounded – if even that – and it was only after Marshal Nim shamed the entire nobility of the Wasteland by sending Legion healers first that finally they gave in.

It would have been a public embarrassment otherwise, and once again Akua’s reputation rose with the nobility for having had the ‘foresight to try to spare them such a thing’. She’d bit her lip in frustration until she could feel blood against her tongue. Every time she thought she had finally found the thread she could pull at to undo the knot, she found instead that she was tightening the noose. How long would it take, before she felt the rope around her neck and there was no choice left save the drop? Her fingers closed around the reins at the prospect. They wanted to make her empress. Dread Empress Magnificent, Akua had once fancied she might be called. She’d had plans, dreams. Now it was all within hand’s reach and she felt only fear for what she might have once acclaimed a triumph.

Her ever-present shadow led his horse to her side, leaning close.

“They would burn this entire city and all in it for power over each other,” Kendi whispered. “It is only a matter of time until instead they burn you.”

Akua looked up at the stormy skies, the clouds roiling high above around the Tower. They were never far. The honest words of a man who hated her, who wanted the worst for her, had become oddly soothing. She could count on Kendi Akaze to be exactly what he claimed to be, and that was a startlingly precious thing of late. Their party made good time to the northern districts, where a token force of legionaries kept an eye on the barracks now filled with the wounded and the dying. Akua had already spent hours there this morning, but it was not for the living she had now come. Instead she rode further still to the great plaza where oil-drenched wood rose in great piles.

Above those waited corpses, thousands of them.

High Lord Dakarai Sahel, who along with Abreha Mirembe had already been there, sought her company.

“It was cleverly done, arranging for the bodies to be brought here,” the High Lord of Nok said. “There are not many occasions aside from court where we would all gather, but who could afford to miss this?”

“It might have been for the best if you did, Dakarai,” High Lady Takisha cut in.

Akua’s brow rose ever so slightly. Others would make allowances for grief, but Takisha was being unusually bold today. Interrupting not one but two conversations with peer nobles? Akua herself might find offence in that, not just the High Lady’s rivals. You have something afoot, the sorceress thought. You are willing to risk my irritation now because you believe your boldness will pay off elsewhere soon and my memory of irritation will be transmuted to appreciation in retrospect.

“Takisha,” the High Lord of Nok gently said. “My condolences.”

The other woman’s face slacked with surprise.

“It must be galling, owing your life to Abreha and I,” he continued.

Surprise turned to fury and mentally Akua tallied a strike on Dakarai’s side of the board. It’d been an elegant bit of cruelty, turning implied condolences for her husband’s death to an open slap in the face. Takisha replied with a weaker barb about the Ashuran sack of Nok before beating a retreat, not because she was cowed but because she was having difficulty controlling her anger. Golden eyes turned to the High Lord of Nok, who was smiling pleasantly.

“I have a question, my lord, if you will,” Akua idly said.

“I have sworn to see you climb the Tower, my lady,” Dakarai replied. “I would deny you nothing, much less a question.”

“That is pleasantly to hear,” she smiled. “You will not mind, then, telling me what Catherine planned when she ordered you to betray her.”

He looked at her with convincing surprise.

“Caution is only to be expected,” High Lord Dakarai regretfully said, “but I will convince you of my sincerity in time. I had hoped that saving your cause on the field yesterday would win me some trust, but perhaps that is premature.”

Akua eyed him for a moment, then let out a few rich chuckles.

“My lord of Nok,” she said, “I once saw her order an unconditional surrender of her armies in the middle of a battle just so that she could win in the exact way she wanted. And Abreha’s claim to have found mages that could free her of the Night is patently absurd, given that I am fairly certain to lesser goddesses intervened directly in her raising as undead.”

She patted his arm fondly.

“Of course she sent you,” Akua said. “Mostly likely ordered you to support me as well. So what is it she’s after – opening gates to her armies or switching sides halfway through the battle?”

Seeing she would not be convinced, the High Lord of Nok changed his angle of approach.

“Even if there had been such a scheme,” Dakarai Sahel said, “would I be bound to it when out of her sight?”

He glanced at the pyres and the gathering crowd around them.

“You would rule well, I think,” the High Lord said. “Better than most. And we will need such a tyrant in the years to come. The world is… not what it used to be. It is larger, and much less patient of our foibles.”

Akua considered the older man, still handsome for all his grey hair.

“I had thought, once, to rise from the fields of Liesse an empress of empresses,” she said. “Triumphant come anew, magnificent in my wrath.”

“Nothing is writ until the book is closed,” Dakarai said. “I have spent over half my life failing, Lady Akua. Failing to shake off Thalassina’s yoke, to become more than a second-rater among the Truebloods, to keep the Ashurans from sacking my city.”

He half-smiled.

“But the book is not yet closed,” he said. “The Doom did not bury you. Why give it power it did not earn?”

Because it did bury me, Akua thought. I thought even failing would be a magnificent act, that my pride would shake the Heavens for an hour and it would be enough, but our stories all end when the tyrant dies. On the last defiant, maddened cry of rage. Instead she had been made to live through her folly. To sift through the ashes of a thousand dead, to see the horror of her doom ripple across the world. She’d been made to look soldiers in the eye, to see under the helmets. And now, returned to her cradle, she could not unsee it. Death was an end, for her and them. But she’d walked the hospitals now, the crying and weeping and the pain. Glimpsed the colossal number of lives, of families, she had ruined for… what?

What would the Heavens hear, a million screams or a single vainglorious shout? It’d been empty from the start. All she had left was the enormity of what she had done, and she was drowning in it.

“I give the Doom nothing,” Akua Sahelian quietly replied.

That had been the lesson of the years that followed it. Even if she saved a hundred thousand lives, it would not even the balance. What she had done to Liesse was not something that could be bought off, bargained over with angels as she had once bargained with devils. Akua gave the Doom nothing because there was nothing she could

give. It was not an act that could be redeemed. And in the bleakness of that realization she had come home, for where else could she go, but she hadn’t. Not really. Home was not what she remembered it to be. She had been gone too long, now, forgot the ways of the Wasteland. They were no longer sweet against her tongue.

Now it would be a prison to be Dread Empress. A lifetime of clawing at the walls around her, bloodying her fingers trying to change the nature of stone. Back in the dark, in the cloak, only there would be no way out.

“We will speak again,” she told the High Lord, voice gone hoarse.

She was meant to speak to the assembled nobles and soldiers, to start the pyre personally. It was a good enough excuse to leave. Kendi watched her in silence, eyes smiling. He only kept silent when he knew she had already spoken worse to herself, smelling it out like a bloodhound. Like a petty thief headed for the noose, Akua walked forward. Unthinking, outside herself, as if someone else was moving her body. As if someone else was winning the Tower for her. Already she could be said to have control of all Ater save the Tower and the district around it, the run of the city, and only caution over the Tower’s ancient arsenal had prevented an attempt to seize it by force.

Speaking here today would be the first step of her climb. Her backers were pushing for a formal session of the imperial court, which they wanted to use to force down Malicia and coronate Akua Sahelian as Dread Empress of Praes. All she needed to do was whip these nobles and soldiers into a frenzy, to get them screaming the empress to give answer to her empire. Akua climbed the dais raised for that very purpose, standing tall and hollow, but at her feet there was a scuffle. High Lady Takisha Muraqib’s retinue was pushing aside everyone else, clearing a space for the ruler of Kahtan at Akua’s feet. The Taghreb noble had a hard, blazing look in her eyes as came to stand below the dark-skinned sorceress.

Takisha’s scheme had borne fruit, Akua thought. It was now ready to be revealed.

“My lady Sahelian, I apologize for the disorder but I have news for you that cannot be delayed,” the High Lady called out, voice resounding.

Bespelled so that it could be heard even from the back, Akua noted.

“Speak, then,” she idly ordered.

“As of a half hour ago, my agents seized the weather-controlling artefacts of the Tower in your name,” Takisha said. “Soon the rest of the Tower will follow, and we can-”

Thunder rolled. The clouds around the Tower had turned black and were spreading out, crackling with red lightning. A heartbeat of stillness. A flash of red struck a tall house in the middle of capital, blowing it up in a flash of red flames. The winds began to howl, growing in strength. Hail like black and hardened rocks began to fall in sheets, covering swaths of the city, and in the chaos Akua looked up at the roiling darkness.

“It can be hard, Malicia, can it not?” she murmured. “To tell the difference between a knot and a noose.”

“Answer me,” she Spoke.

A year ago, Malicia would not have needed to make a sound. Her power had weakened, grown shallower. Or perhaps I never grasped how strongly I relied on Rule when Speaking, she thought. Unfortunate as it was that she had not been able to map out the weaknesses of her aspect properly, it was not something that could truly be tested. The young Soninke lord before her choked for a moment, but then his tense shoulders loosened and he began to talk.

“She sneaks out to drink with her foster sister every few days,” he said. “They’ve been doing it for years. The guards let it happen so long as they don’t leave the boundary wards.”

Malicia flicked a glance at Ime, whose ageing face was furrowed in thought.

“We’ll have to burn a sleeper to get to her there,” the spymistress finally said. “Dakarai has been very careful with his camp’s defences since changing sides.”

The empress did not even hesitate. Now was not the time to balk at burning assets.

“Arrange it,” Malicia ordered. “You know whom to implicate.”

“That will be much easier,” Ime snorted. “Even after Abreha’s purges her camp remains a leaking sieve.”

It had made Sepulchral a manageable threat, in those days where the High Lady of Aksum – illegally now, given her state of undeath – had been an empress-claimant. Malicia would not have risked allowing or stretching out a rebellion against if she had not been certain that she could not kill her would-be usurper whenever she desired. Sanaa Mirembe’s failed coup at Kala had been a stinging blow, given that it might have swung the victory there the other way, but her aunt’s culling of the young girl’s supporters when she returned from the grave had not caught all of the empress’ agents.

Even now, only the very highest secrecy in the Aksum camp remained beyond to Malicia’s eyes and ears.

“I’ll see if I can ease your way a tad more,” Malicia smiled, crouching before the bound man.

Her aspect pulse in her, slowly gaining in power as it fully unfolded. It felt like sliding on gloves, though to Alaya’s anger it was a tighter fit than it’d once been. Yet her Rule had not been toppled, and it was enough. The young lord’s mind felt like clay under her ghostly fingers, but she must be careful. Carelessness would just shatter his mind. Instead Malicia shaped her will, her order, and slid it into his mind like the slenderest of needles. Never to be noticed until it was pressed against. When the Dread Empress opened her eyes, which she did not recall closing, she rose from her crouch slightly out of breath.

“He will signal one of the Eyes the moment he’s aware of the girl sneaking out,” Malicia said. “Focus on preparing the assets.”

Ime nodded, looking pleased, but as Connect flickered to life Malicia saw that this was not entirely true. Her spymistress truly was pleased, but it was a small thing compared to her worry.

“You have concerns,” the Dread Empress said.

Ime did not quite manage to smother the surprise out of her eyes.

“I do, though not about this particular plot,” the spymistress said. “May I speak freely?”

Malicia glanced at the young lord, whose eyes were already focused anew. He would need either full turning or a memory scramble before he was released back to the Okoro camp, but either way it was a needless risk to keep speaking in front of him.

“Outside,” the empress said. “Our friend here still needs attending to.”

Ime nodded, the two of them leaving the comfortable cell in the middle levels of the Tower. The spymistress disappeared long enough to pass to her subordinates the necessary orders before returning to Malicia’s side, the two of them briskly heading to one of the sky rooms. Dread Empress Sanguinia had not indulged in the sort of grandiose building projects that many of her contemporaries had, but she had liked to eat her meal with views of Ater splayed out below her. Only two of sky rooms she’d built for that purpose had survived the fall of the Tower after the First Crusade and they were no longer used for that purpose but the very skilled wardwork keeping them protected had remained largely intact.

It was a good place to speak, even if the view was… temporarily indisposed.

Baiting Takisha to make a play for the Cloud Engines had taken longer than Malicia would have liked, but it had turned out exactly as planned. The High Lady of Kahtan had spent most of her hidden pieces in the Tower and badly failed at achieving her objective. Even worse, the empress had ensured that the few survivors who’d managed to flee would report that it was Takisha’s men who had damaged the Engines during the fighting and so unleashed the brutal storm still ravaging Ater and its surroundings. It had been days since the failed coup, and still the gales and lightning struck with wrath. There had been snow, hail, acidic rains and winds so scorching they burned the skin. Hundreds if not thousands had died in Ater, the entire capital grinding down to a halt.

High Lady Takisha was probably the most despised woman in the city at the moment, and that was just the beginning of her troubles. When Malicia had ordered her mages to ensure the Cloud Engines were unleashed under the pretext of some cosmetic damage, she’d ensured that the red lightning would strike a particular target: the tent of the eldest son of High Lord Jaheem Niri, the man’s wife and their two children. None had survived, and so dearest Akua had spent most of the last few days trying to ensure that two of her most prominent supporters did not begin a war of their own. Had she begun to feel the weight, Malicia wondered? Had it begun to sink in that once you had the support of the High Seats, you then had to keep the High Seats happy?

The dark sky with crackling red light was only the beginning of it all, Malicia thought as she looked through the great enchanted windows.

“I feel like some of the plans we’re going forward with are overly risky,” Ime said the moment the door closed and the wards hummed.

“We can handle the High Seats,” Malicia replied, frowning. “That they have all essentially abandoned our cause frees us to act without many of our old restraints.”

It had been difficult to arrange such a wholesale desertion, but it had worked. Alaya had found it hard to bear to send out the Sentinels to brutally put down the riot she’d set up, but the results spoke for themselves: with most of the city turning against her, the High Seats had followed suit. Amends could be made to Ater after this all came to an end, she told herself. If she was to live to see a new moon, she needed Akua Sahelian put forward as Dread Empress at just the right time.

“Our operations to break relations between the High Seats are calculated risks,” Ime stated. “Some of them are riskier than others – Sargon could react like a cornered rat if he figures out our involvement – but I can live with the risks. It’s the other plan I have issues with.”

“Working with the Intercessor,” Malicia said.

“Devils make contracts,” Ime shrugged. “That is the way of things. We make the bargains we must. Yet what you two have been doing is dangerous to your reign.”

“Delaying until the orcs arrive is necessary,” the empress said. “The Bard insists it must be threefold motif and near every scrap of namelore I have found indicates she is not inventing the requirement. We have already thrown the goblins at her and soon the separatists will make contact. We need the Clans to close the loop.”

“I’m not happy about the separatists either, to be frank,” the spymistress said. “There’s always been sentiment in the Green Stretch, but it’s never been this well organized. Too many deserters settled down there, Malicia. They have former officers and fighting men now, not just farmers. If the Black Queen takes does decide to sponsor the Green Stretch seceding, I’m uncomfortable at the idea that it might stick.”

“The sponsorship of a corpse means nothing,” Malicia said. “And we both know Vivienne Dartwick will not go to war over the Green Stretch.”

“The lack of long-term consequences relies on the assumption of our success,” Ime insisted. “Let’s say both you and the Black Queen live. She backs the secession, and it happens in the months after we’ve thoroughly destroyed relations between most High Seats.”

Malicia’s brow creased.

“You worry there is a risk that more secessions could follow, given that my authority will be weak for the first few years following this,” she finally said.

“It’s a possibility we can’t just dismiss,” Ime said.

And she was right, in the sense that the risk existed, but that did not matter. To avoid taking the lesser long-term risk, a larger short-term risk had to be taken instead. And given that in the first instance trouble would be for the Empire and in the second it was Alaya’s life on the line, the choice made itself.

“Lost provinces can be taken back,” Malicia finally said. “Such setback would not be permanent.”

“We still don’t know where the orcs will fall in all this,” Ime quietly said. “They have a Warlord and we know it’s not Troke, so they’re difficult to predict. We are looking at a very volatile situation that could potentially result in permanent losses for the Dread Empire, Your Majesty. All this to follow the nebulous plan of an entity we cannot trust and have no real leverage over. I urge you to reconsider.”

And Malicia did, for a moment, but the reasons why she had made the decision had not changed. The Intercessor was a snake, but she was a snake who wanted Catherine Foundling dead – and the main thrust of that method of killing was to bury the Black Queen in regional disputes so that it would become the shape of her Role. A shape that could then be exploited to kill her in the moments that followed, though Malicia suspected around then would be when the Bard betrayed her. She had prepared accordingly. Until then, the disputes had to be put forward to the Black Queen and that meant following through regardless of the risks.

To hesitate here meant death.

“I understand your concerns,” Malicia said, “but I stand by the decision.”

Ime slowly nodded, face unreadable. The Dread Empress slid her will into Connect, but the aspect only flickered weakly. All she glimpsed was a vague sense of disappointment, with no real idea of the depth of it. Malicia would have to try this again later to be sure her spymistress’ loyalty remained firm.

“So long as you are aware of my concerns,” Ime said, bowing. “I’ll take my leave, Your Majesty. There is much work to do.”

Malicia nodded her goodbye, remaining before the window as the other woman left the room. The storms still raged under her calm gaze, and it would continue to do so until almost two weeks had passed. So her mages had promised. Once the Clans were close enough it would pass and the last dance could begin. Two weeks would be all that Dread Empress Malicia would need to gore the ‘alliance’ behind Akua Sahelian. Already Kahtan and Okoro were at odds, but that was only a start. High Lord Dakarai would turn on Abreha when his favourite daughter – Isoba Mirembe’s wife – was assassinated seemingly at Sanaa Mirembe’s order, as it was certain the High Lady of Aksum would not punish her favoured heir for something she had not done.

Then Sargon Sahelian would catch goblin infiltrators selling the ward schematics of his personal sleeping tent to agents of High Lord Jaheem Niri, burning two bridges at once with the spectre of Wither and Jaheem clasping hands to assassinate him. High Lord Dakarai had already begun to try buying the support of some of Kahtan’s more powerful vassals in his quest to become Chancellor, it would be child’s play to have him caught by some of Takisha’s agents – and it would play on the High Lady’s worst fear, that the grand Taghreb coalition behind her was already falling apart.

Meanwhile of them were going to have incidents with the Legions, which would be much easier to arrange now that Akua had gone ‘against Malicia’s will’ to bring private soldiers into the city and into Legion barracks. The Black Knight was wavering, but soon enough the Legions would be reminded of why they had steered clear of the High Seats for so long. And while everyone bit and everyone bled, Dread Empress Malicia would stoke the hunger with the prize she’d put on the table by making her cause seem finished: the position of Chancellor. It was in the nature of Praesi to begin squabbling over the spoils the moment victory was in sight.

So she’d dragged it into sight.

“It will work,” Alaya whispered to the storm. “Hour by hour I will pull at the knots keeping me bound, you will only know I have won when you feel the noose around your neck.”