A Practical Guide to Evil

“And the nature of her alliance with the First Prince?”

Akua Sahelian had found that betrayal was not unlike putting on an old dress. The cut did not quite fit as it would have once did, but there was a certain comfort in the… familiarity of the object. Sargon had been dear enough to grant her use of the family’s finest scrying mirrors – ancient artefacts, tall as a man and twice as broad – so the illusion that she was seated at a table in the same council room as the Dread Empress of Praes was rather convincing. The clarity of the spell allowed for the game to be played as if they were in person, Malicia reading her face as she read Malicia’s. It was rather invigorating to fence this way with a woman of the empress’ calibre.

“Largely a result of common interests,” Akua said. “There is a surprising degree of trust there, but that is not unexpected after Catherine’s restraint during the Peace of Salia.”

Callow had been well positioned to extort Procer when the time had come for bargaining. There was not much the First Prince could have afforded to do but bend, given the imminent collapse of her realm if she did not, but Catherine had instead chosen to court goodwill. Given how important the trust between the two greatest rulers of the Great Alliance had become, and the veiled frustration on Malicia’s face when she spoke of Procer, Akua was inclined to believe it had been the right decision to make.

“There has been some method to her recklessness,” Malicia conceded. “Your opinion, then, on her relationship with Yannu Marave and Itima Ifriqui?”

Oh my, she truly was frustrated. Mentioning those two names – the two heads of the great lines of the Blood that were not Catherine’s informal pupils – was a tacit admission that Malicia was trying to get a peace here in Praes by getting the broader Grand Alliance to twist Callow’s arm into accepting it. No doubt she’d already tried Cordelia Hasenbach and been rebuffed, so she was now looking for other angles of approach. Unfortunately for the empress, the Dominion was dead grounds in this regard.

“She is highly respected, due to her role in the Grey Pilgrim’s resurrection after the Princes’ Graveyard,” Akua said. “I don’t believe she has spoken much with the Lady of Vaccei at all, but she has a solid accord with Lord Yannu.”

Akua decided to keep it up her sleeve that not a single one of the Blood would dare to cross Catherine at the moment. Not while she had the Barrow Sword at her side and they very much wanted to avoid her protection of him extending beyond the confines of the war. If she kept meddling in the politics of Levant that might change, but for now having both fear and respect at her back meant that Malicia would find no purchase with the Levantines. It might be amusing to see her fail in the attempt, however, so Akua offered her empress a pleasant smile instead of potentially useful information.

“Her talent for ingratiating herself to key individuals is proving to be an obstacle,” Malicia deplored.

And perhaps Akua would have agreed, as a girl, when she could only think of strength through the Empire’s conception of it. An outlook that would claim Catherine was ahead because of a superior quality. In this case, Malicia seemed to have decided it was talent for making alliances at the highest rungs of power. To triumph over her the Dread Empress would have to bring her own superior qualities to bear and decisively beat her opponent. Yet the old certitudes no longer rang so true. Praes is so deeply despised out west nowadays that Hasenbach could not agree to a bargain even if it were advantageous, Akua thought. That is not of Catherine’s making.

The Dread Empress had won too many battles, ceasing to question if they needed to be fought at all. Victory was a heady brew, Akua knew better than most, but she was surprised that Malicia would fall prey to such a mistake. The empress had always struck her as being an exquisitely self-controlled woman. Then again, the Carrion Lord was involved. It was always harder to see clearly when the cut was so close to the heart.

Akua knew that too, and learned the lesson roughly enough it still left the edges of her raw.

“The Dead King has forced together strange alliances,” she simply said.

Malicia looked amused, understanding the sentence for the veiled reference that it was.

“How have you found the body?” the empress asked.

Akua closed the fingers of her right hand into a fist, enjoying the sensation of skin on skin. It had been almost overwhelming at first: her time as a shade had blurred the memory of what sensations actually felt like. Returning to the real thing after the pale shadow she’d lived with had needed some adjustment. There was an even greater boon attached, of course. Akua murmured a single word in the mage tongue, opening her hand into a flat palm, and a dot of hellfire bloomed above it.

“More than satisfactory,” she said. “A princely gift, Your Dread Majesty.”

“I reward loyalty, Warlock,” Malicia smiled. “And sometimes even the anticipation of it.”

The Named being spoken aloud earned a small shiver from Akua every time. She was not a claimant for it, not yet, but Creation was recognizing the… possibility. That the potential was there. Neither of them mentioned the spells Malicia’s mages had hidden that would allow the empress to kill her with a word, though they both knew they were somewhere in the flesh. As always, the Dread Empress’ words had two meanings: if loyalty earned reward, then disloyalty earned punishment. The mere anticipation of it would too, as Malicia had subtly warned.

“I’ve no doubt ours will be a close relationship, Your Dread Majesty,” Akua lied.

“Oh, I agree,” Malicia lied back.

The empress deigned to take a sip from her cup, some dark liquor cut with water.

“My decision to place trust in you is why I have decided to assign you to the Black Knight’s command for the coming battle,” Malicia continued. “Your unique insights into the adversary will be of great use, I am sure, but I most look forward to seeing your magic on display once more.”

A transparent enough ploy, but that was on purpose: the empress was asserting control. As the first measure of that control, she wanted Akua to kill enough of the Army of Callow with sorcery that the bridge back to that side would be forever burned. There was not a ruler worth their salt on the continent that did not know Catherine Foundling loved her soldiers just as fiercely as they loved her.

“Of course,” Akua replied, not batting an eye. “In that spirit, I would seek your permission to obtain artefacts from my cousin. The Sahelian arsenal is best put to your service, not left to gather dust.”

“If he is amenable, I don’t see why not,” Malicia smiled.

A lie, Akua decided. The answer had been too smooth, too unthinking. Sargon must have already been given strict instructions about the calibre of what he was allowed to lend her. The empress feared she might be able to slip the leash too early, then. Interesting.

“My thanks,” she said, bowing her head.

“Think nothing of it,” the empress dismissed. “Are you confident, with such aid, of being able to match the Hierophant on the field?”

“It would depend on the amount of magic he first ingests with Devour,” Akua said, feigning reluctance. “I have not seen his upper limit as a thaumatophage. Placing mage circles under my command or moving me to Marshal Nim’s side early so that I might begin preparing rituals would increase my chances.”

She liked Masego. He was a fascinating conversationalist and Akua had something of an inherited fondness for tactless mages. It had been marrying convenience to her own preference to lie about his abilities. With the Tower under the impression that he could simply suck dry entire battalion of mages if they were in sight, he’d be treated as an entity to be avoided instead of a Named that could be fought. And if Malicia’s most sensible answer to this was placing greater power in the hands of another special asset – like an incipient Warlock, just for example – then was it not the best of both worlds? The Dread Empress studied her for a moment, then conceded with the slightest movement of the head.

“I will speak with my Black Knight,” Malicia said, committing to nothing. “Expect to depart soon.”

A moment passed.

“Great gifts bring the expectation of great results, Warlock,” the empress added.

Meaning that should she be granted her request failure to match the Hierophant would have… consequences. Ah, how very old-fashioned of her. Akua found it rather charming.

“That is only natural,” Akua easily replied.

The empress chuckled. It was a languorous sound, and though it had little effect on her Akua could appreciate the artistry as a fellow seductress. Dread Empress Malicia was almost inhumanly beautiful, of course, but in truth that ran rather somewhat contrary to Akua’s tastes. She had spent many years surrounded by the perfect and the splendid, eventually growing tired of the fare. She preferred character nowadays, the interestingly imperfect. The empress was simply too exquisite to qualify. Besides, women were rarely of interest to her. She could count on one hand the number she’d been attracted to. She caught the scent of smoke.

Looking down Akua saw her hand had closed into a fist, smothering the hellflame. She’d not even realized she’d done it. The growing pains of a new body, she told herself.

“I do enjoy conversing with you, Akua,” Malicia lightly said. “They are always interesting, our little talks.”

“I aim to please,” she replied.

The empress smiled and Akua could feel the conversation was now to end. They had reached the end of their business for the day. And it was a whim, to ask, but she did not kill it when it rose. She had wondered from the moment she’d realized that work on the body awaiting her in the depths of the Empyrean Palace would have begun months before she ever set foot in Praes.

“How did you know?” Akua asked.

The Dread Empress of Praes studied her with dark eyes. Not a speck of gold in them. Blood as muddy as the land she’d been born of, running through the veins of the longest-reigning tyrant in the history of Praes.

“That I would turn on them,” she said. “I did not, until the very end. How did you know?”

Dread Empress Malicia’s smile was sad, she thought, and perhaps the sole genuine emotion she had shown this entire conversation.

“You came too late,” the empress said. “Even if some loved you, and I expect they did. You came to them too late, Akua. They were never going to forgive you for what they might have forgiven each other. There was no becoming one of the five.”

Her face went blank, like she was some kind of tipsy debutante. It was still better than the spasm of pain that would have shown on her face otherwise.

“In the end, darling, you were always going to come back,” Malicia gently said. “This is the only home you have.”

Sorcery rippled across the mirror, turning it back to simple polished silver, and Akua was left to wonder whether it had been kindness or an assertion of power to end the spell on that sentence. Perhaps a little of both, she decided. Though the dark-skinned woman knew she could have risen to her feet and distracted herself with movement, with pouring herself a cup of wine from the carafe or biting into a pear – the sheer pleasure of proper taste, after all this time – she did not. Instead she sat there and closed her eyes, thinking while it was all still fresh.

She had just fooled the empress successfully for the first time, after days of being interrogated for every scrap of knowledge on the Army of Callow and the Grand Alliance that she cared to divulge, but it did not feel like much a victory. She would admit it had been enjoyable, sparring with the empress. Sharpening iron with iron, the two of them knowing a single misstep would be enough for the other to pounce. Yet now that it was over, looking at what had been done, it felt… childish. Gaudy. No, neither of those were exactly right. More like she’d been indulging in something particularly-

“Wasteful,” Akua Sahelian murmured.

Scrapping iron for no real purpose save vanity. What had been gained from it all, really? They had circled each other like crocodiles snapping at each other’s tails, a triumph only of showing teeth. If instead they had sat and spoken plainly for even an hour, understood where they differed and where they might concur, would it not have – ah, she thought. And there it was. That old Sahelian greed, whispering again in her ear: she had left the fire for the dark, but she wanted all the pleasures of both. Akua rose to her feet at last, drawing back the chair and gliding past the wine carafe. It was the long window at the back of the room she sought, great panes of glass that could be pushed open to pair a lazy evening breeze with the view. She leaned against the windowsill, enjoying to the touch of the wind on her face, and lost herself looking at the distant silhouettes of Zaman Ango. The ancient maze, the sloping pyramids of mud.

Malicia had been right, she thought. This was home. The warmth of the fire had lulled her into indolence, but she’d snapped out of it at last. She would not forget that moment in the cave, where it had at last sunk in that nothing would make a change. That Akua could turn on her family, on her people, on everything she believed in and had ever loved since she was a child, and still it would not be enough. Because her folly had been the doom of a city, of a hundred thousand souls, and while the Gods knew of forgiveness Catherine Foundling did not. Had that been the revenge, she’d wondered then? Making her… and then ripping away the curtain, leaving her to look a merciless truth in the eye.

Maybe it was. Dartwick had wounded more shallowly when she’d made her rip out the eye instead.

And the worst of it was that, even now, part of her ached to leave. To return. It would not go without comment, her absence, and yet Akua thought she might be able to talk her way out of the worst of it. And she’d still have the evenings spent designing wards with Masego, the drinks and lurid gossip with Indrani. Even those cautious, almost Praesi talks with Adjutant – who wanted to learn all she had to tell of the highborn of the Wasteland while giving back as little as he could for it. And another, of course, the one she’d left behind most of all.

Akua had thought to kill Catherine Foundling, once. To slay her and claim all she had built, perhaps even wearing her face. When she had still been a prisoner of the Mantle of Woe, sent back to the maddening boredom of nothingness in between brief tastes of Creation. Ah, but what interesting tastes they had been. Grandiose plans of war against half the continent, diplomacy with the most powerful people on Calernia. Then even more terrible sights, on the way to Keter. And even as she was dragged from wonder to wonder, there was the once-Squire in the middle of it all. Now a Black Queen, turned into everything Akua had thought she might become.

Fascination had been the doom of many a Sahelian.

“But it doesn’t matter, does it?” Akua said to the wind.

There was no joy to chase at the end of that path. No long-awaited delight, nothing to suffer for. She would not be forgiven, and even a lifetime of saving strangers and helping fools would not see her redeemed in anyone’s eyes. She had been chasing ghosts the entire time. So why stay? Why not come back to the home she had sold for nothing, to the destiny that had been taken from her? Warlock, yes, for that was Malicia’s offer. But why stop there? Sargon wanted her to free him of the soulbox, and so she could use him to free this body from Malicia’s yoke. Beyond the walls of Wolof, Praes was a cauldron about to tip over and in such chaos a clever woman could rise far. If she was to have a foot in the Tower, why not climb all the way to the top?

If none of it mattered, why should Akua Sahelian not get everything she deserved?

A voice she was learning to hate whispered that perhaps she already had. She ignored it. It was the voice of weakness, of the lion gone tame. She could see it in her mind’s eye, the path up the stairs. It began with the Black Knight, Marshal Nim. The key to the Legions, not that Malicia seemed to have grasped that. Her only Black Knight before Nim had the loyalty of the Legions for having reformed them, but the bond ran deeper than that. Black Knights were the champions of the Tower, commander of armies and killers of heroes. There was a Role: Malicia had done more than simply name a new champion when she had recognized the ogre’s claim. Should Marshal Nim prove less than utterly loyal, why, it might just be that the armies of Praes would split between following the old Black Knight and the new.

Did that not simply reek of opportunity? Yes, she decided, it was the beginning of a plan. One that would allow her to sit on the sole throne in all of Praes, before all was said and done.

So why, Akua Sahelian wondered, was she not hearing the song?

Amadeus had always enjoyed looking at the Hungering Sands as night fell.

It was a pleasure to the eye, the way the sky turned to vivid purples and yellows with not a cloud in sight. The way the shadows lengthened among the dunes like slithering snakes. Even the coolness was pleasant, when wearing a cloak. That much had been a necessity, given that it was only feasible to meet the woman he’d come to see under some cover of darkness. He’d not seen her in at least fifteen years, by Amadeus’ reckoning, but neither of them would forget the other. Lady Layan Kaishi had once been Commander Layan of the Third Legion, before she came to rule a prosperous little town at the outskirts of the Hungering Sands.

She’d lost an arm at the siege of Laure, and not in a manner where it might be replaced, but the Legions had not abandoned her. When she’d sought a discharge and returned home to settle accounts with her family, ‘volunteer legionaries on leave’ had accompanied her. Lord Kaisha had fallen down some stairs, as had his young wife – Layan’s own age, he’d heard – whose luck in birthing a son possessing the Gift had first seen Layan given the choice of the Legions or the grave. Some of those legionaries had even returned after their terms were over, stayed on as household guards, and though the holdings of Lady Layan were not large or rich they were known to be orderly. It’d drawn people to her town, as safety always did in troubled times.

Layan had not forgotten whose help it was that’d seen her made a lady: when Amadeus had contacted her, she’d agreed to lend a hand without hesitation. It had not been an onerous favour he asked for, anyway, simply the use of one of her family mages for a scrying ritual. Sometimes the dark-haired man wondered if anyone aside from Eudokia really grasped the sheer number of veterans he’d settled across the breadth of Praes. Most of them were not lords or ladies, of course – a campaign to stack the nobility with his veterans would have caused rebellion – but he’d seen to their livelihoods. Appointments in the local bureaucracies, free land leases in the Green Stretch, cushy posts in city guards or advantageous trade permits.

The Legions of Terror had bled for him across a dozen fields. Amadeus would not let their legionaries tumble into destitution after they left the ranks. And now, in his own time on need, he had found many doors still open to him. It was not the same as when he had been able to call on the Eyes, when Eudokia and Ime had left no stone unturned and council unheard, but he’d learned he still had friends in many places. Not a net of them, but it was better that way. Ime would have been able to infiltrate an organized apparatus, but she could not track entire decades of friendships and loyalties forged through two wars. So long as Amadeus remained quick and careful, so long as he kept moving, the Eyes would stay one step behind. It’d be enough.

In most fights, one step’s worth of distance was all that he needed.

Layan had aged gracefully, hair threaded with silver and skin wrinkled but staying fit in form. She’d come to him out in the sands with her mage, as the odds were good that there was at least one traitor in her keep, but when they met she had hesitated before clasping the arm he offered. Amadeus’s lips quirked in amusement. She had not been the first of his veterans to react this way.

“The beard?” he teased.

“And the grey,” Layan admitted. “Never thought I’d see you with either, sir. No offence.”

“None taken,” he said. “You’d be surprised how many reacted the same.”

She snorted.

“With all due respect, sir, no I wouldn’t,” Layan said.

For all the levity, her eyes had sharpened when he’d mentioned others. She hesitated, then spoke again.

“Is it true?” Layan asked. “That out west you made a claim on the Tower?”

“Rumours fly far and swift, I see,” Amadeus noted.

“Rashan up north was a captain in the Fifth,” Lady Layan said. “His kid and one of mine are married. Lady Salah’s husband, out in Jubar, he’s the brother of the Second’s last quartermaster. We talk, sir. And not just us. There’s a lot who came home after the wars who’re still around. And a lot of us who have kin in the Legions and the Army.”

It still filled Amadeus with a rueful sort of pride, every time he heard the army raised by Istrid’s daughter and his own spoken of as a peer to the Legions he’d given so many years of his life to.

“I spoke words at the Peace of Salia,” Amadeus said. “I stand by them still.”

Layan Kaishi nodded, eyes hooded in the unfolding dark of the evening.

“There’s a lot of us who’ll come, if you call,” she quietly said. “More than you know. Not just veterans and our families.”

She hesitated.

“It can’t go on like this, sir,” Layan said. “This chaos. Ashur burns our coasts and now we play parlour games pretending they’re allies?”

She spat to the side, into the sand.

“Fuck that,” Layan cursed. “And whatever the Hells is happening with Sepulchral up north should have been stamped out years ago, not left to burn for whatever scheme this is. The empress is getting lost in her plots, sir. Doesn’t matter she keeps winning, we’re just tired of the games.”

And in a way, Amadeus thought, those few sentences he’d just heard were the most damning a verdict passed on Alaya’s reign he’d yet to hear. Because when the Tower was losing people like Layan, who was neither rebellious nor ambitious by nature, who most wanted out of a ruler competence and order, something had gone wrong. Were you always like this, Alaya, and I simply never wanted to see it? No, he did not believe that. They had lost perspective, over the years. He as much as she. They’d spent too long sitting on high seats, forgot what the view from the mud was like. Like all empires, like all rulers, they had reached their zenith and begun to decay. Old mistakes were yet in need of mending, and Amadeus of the Green Stretch would not relent until he had laid them all to rest.

That much he owed, to all and to himself.

“I am already a rebel, Layan,” he faintly smiled.

“We can be too, if you want,” his veteran boldly offered. “And there’s enough of us we can get High Lady Takisha behind you if you toss her a few bones. It’s not just us old hands who want an end to the messes. We’ve got support.”

The High Lady of Kahtan would turn on him the very moment she felt she was in a position to claim the Tower for herself, of course. They both knew that without Layan needing to speak the words.

“Another banner raised won’t end this,” Amadeus gently declined. “But beyond your help tonight, there is something that can be done.”

Layan Kaisha was almost seventy. She’d not been in the Legions of Terror for over twenty years. And still, the moment he finished that sentence, she snapped at attention like a cadet fresh off the College rolls. Some things just stay with us, don’t they? he fondly thought. Amadeus understood. He, too, had never quite shaken the stray dog out of his bones. He still found it easier to bite than kneel.

“High Lady Takisha has gathered the nobles of the south to her court,” he said. “Do not let them disperse. Take them north: Ater is where this all comes to a close.”

Layan slowly nodded.

“So long as the Grey Eyries are rebelling and Old Wither’s holed up in Foramen, many will balk at leaving the Sands,” she said.

“The Tribes won’t move,” Amadeus said.

It was not a prediction or a promise. It was a statement of fact. Her eyes widened in surprise.

“Are they- no, best you don’t answer that,” she decided. “They can’t get out of me what I don’t know.”

It was rather heartwarming to see that the safety protocols Ranker had designed were still being kept to. Her contributions to the Reforms had been more discreet than his or Grem’s, but no less crucial for it.

“I’ll spread the word, sir,” Layan said. “We should have enough pull for it.”

And Alaya would want the nobles close, even if she lost the battle taking shape in the depths of the Wasteland. The starker her disarray, the closer she would want them to the Tower: troublesome as they would be in its shadow, it was nothing to the trouble they would make out of her reach. So even if the Eyes learned he had a hand in this, and they would, Alaya would allow it. She would trust in her mastery of the Court to triumph against whatever scheme he might have arranged.

“There’ll be a battle, before it ends,” Amadeus said, offering his arm to clasp.

“Then we’ll meet again, sir,” Layan smiled, taking it. “I still fit in my armour.”

She cast a look around, glossing over the young mage she’d brought as he requested – he had long prepared the ritual, needing only a word to begin – and casting about for another shadow in the gloom.

“I’d heard the Lady was with you,” she said, a question in her tone.

“Ranger’s out and about,” he smiled. “Checking to see if there are any rats.”

“I pity them if there are,” Layan muttered.

With one last glance they parted ways, Amadeus sliding down the side of the hill to speak to the mageling in neat robes awaiting by a simple scrying bowl laid atop a rock.

“I can begin at your pleasure, my lord,” the young man said. “Though the key you gave me is utter nonsense, so it ought to do nothing at all.”

“Then it will do nothing,” Amadeus serenely replied. “The spell, now.”

Though somewhat put out, the young sorcerer duly spoke the incantation and the spell shivered across the air. When the water’s surface rippled the mageling gaped in surprise. Amadeus’ cool stare shook him out of it, making the dismissal clear. He bowed, then ran off after his aunt into the sands. The green-eyed man passed a hand through his hair, which he decided was getting a little too long, and waited for the ripples to cease. It took nearly a quarter hour for it to happen, and only then did a face appear in the water. Deep-set yellow eyes and wrinkled skin that looked like brown-green leather swam into focus.

High Lady Wither of Foramen, formerly Matron of the High Ridge Tribe, looked highly irritated until she realized who it was she was looking at. Then her face went blank, mouth closing shut with a snap.

“Good evening, Wither,” Amadeus smiled, showing only the faintest slice of teeth. “It’s been some time, hasn’t it?”

The old goblin hissed in displeasure through her teeth, almost like a whistle. Obtaining the key to her private scrying bowl had not endeared him to her, evidently.

“Never long enough, Carrion Lord,” she said. “Come to threaten me into changing sides?”

“I usually threaten only people I intend to later kill regardless,” Amadeus noted. “Fear is a poor incentive for alliance. I suppose I could bluster a bit, if it will make you feel better about what is to follow.”

“And what’s that?” Wither mocked, flashing her teeth mockingly.

“I am going to tell you a story,” Amadeus amiably said, “and you will then give me what I politely ask for.”

“You’re getting thick in your old age, Carrion Lord,” Wither said. “My defences are fine enough Ranger didn’t even try for my life when you two passed through Foramen. You have nothing to threaten me with, and any offer you make the Tower will double without batting an eye.”

Ah, Wither. For all that she was the first Matron to truly enter the highest reach of Praesi politics, she’d yet to learn to think beyond the goblin conception of conflict. Amadeus had never attempted to lay a hand on the High Lady of Foramen because what he’d come for had been of much greater value than anything an assassination might bring about. The green-eyed man had promised his old acquaintance a story, however, and so he would tell it.

“After the fall of Summerholm, during the Conquest,” Amadeus said, “it took less than six hours for the first rebel group to form.”

Garrison soldiers and a hedge wizard that’d escaped the Fields of Streges, planning to go to ground until most of the Legions left the city and then strike out at the invasion’s supply lines while the siege of Laure began. It had been a reasoned and practical plan, in Amadeus’ opinion. He’d appreciated the professionalism of it. Unfortunately Wekesa had spared the mage on purpose at the Fields, marking him with a discreet tracking spell, so they’d all been executed after interrogation.

“Three more emerged the following day,” he continued. “Even with Scribe personally overseeing the Eyes in the city, it quickly became clear that the situation was not tenable. Sooner or later we’d miss the cabals and the push against Laure would be endangered. Something needed to be done.”

Some had suggested mass executions of former soldiers, but Amadeus had found that ill-advised. It would simply replace known possible insurgents with military training for thrice their number in grieving relatives inclined to methods of insurgency that were harder to put down. If not worse. Callowans had long proven that they were perfectly willing to torch their own towns and cities while invaders were in them, should they be pushed far enough.

“The grey’s brought rambling with it,” Wither snorted. “You’re turning into a joke, Amadeus.”

The dark-haired man’s friendly smile did not waver.

“It occurred to me, then, that fighting the inevitable was pointless,” he said. “There would be rebel cabals. This was not an issue, however, so long as they were manageable rebel cabals.”

“So you started making your own rebel groups,” Wither dismissed. “Where spies were in the ranks from the start. I know the tale, Carrion Lord. It’s an old one – have you run out of cleverness, to be boasting of tricks decades old?”

“Ah,” the Carrion Lord said. “So you do remember.”

He cocked his head to the side.

“Why, then, did you old witches believe I wouldn’t catch you out using the same trick?”

Wither’s face went blank.

“Come now,” Amadeus murmured. “Alaya never bothered to understand your people beyond the levers that could be used to move them, Wither, but I made a study of you. Did you really think I wouldn’t figure out the Tribes have been making their own traitors for centuries?”

On the surface, the goblin custom of constant backstabbing and treachery was remarkably similar to broader Praesi philosophies: iron sharpening iron, echoes of jino-waza. But that was a surface resemblance only. Goblins always preferred taking from outsiders than each other. Competition was brutal within units – within a family, a tribe, within the Tribes – but unlike the governing philosophies of Praes the Tribes did have a concept of the ‘common good’ of their kind. They could and did sacrifice, if not for each other, then for the sake of their race. When the Goblin Rebellions became losing proposition, the Matrons always made the same decision: one or more turned traitor, the rest were butchered to appease the Tower.

There must always be someone in the Grey Eyries that Ater could deal with, else the talk might turn to annihilation instead of vassalage.

“You are grasping at straws,” Wither dismissed, “your position has become des-”

“It was cleverly done,” Amadeus honestly praised. “Whoever wins the war, wherever the balance of power lies, the Tribes will gain. Either Alaya keeps the Tower and you are confirmed the first High Lady of your kind, or the Grand Alliance prevails and the Confederation of the Grey Eyries is recognized as a sovereign nation by more than half the continent.”

It had been, in that classically goblin way, a viciously executed gambit. Because whether it was Wither that was the face of goblinkind going forward or the Confederation, the ‘loser’ would have to be drowned in blood. The deception risked being found out otherwise, the truth that the Matrons had planned this entire civil war of theirs from the start and that Wither was still very much one of them.

“You have nothing,” Wither said. “Not a thimble of proof to back this, because it is complete lunacy.”

“You played it too straight, Wither,” Amadeus told her, not unkindly. “That is what gave you away. We came to Foramen and there was not a single secret line of communication between you and the Matrons.”

He saw the realization sink into her, the way her large eyes narrowed in dismay. They had overcorrected in cutting off ties entirely. The Matrons should have been secretly negotiating with Wither if this was a genuine civil war. They’d wholly cut ties because they did not want the Eyes to catch them talking and figure out the entire affair was a ploy, which had been the very detail to confirm for Amadeus that it was all a ploy. Alaya would understand it too, if it was brought to her. Wither knew that.

And so she knew that Amadeus now had his fingers around a throat: hers and all the Tribes’.

“You sat on that for more than a year,” Wither finally said. “You’ve not simply been wandering around drinking and fucking the Lady of the Lake.”

Well, he’d not done just that.

“In the spirit of our understanding,” Amadeus amiably said, “I would like to make polite requests of you.”

“What is it you want, Carrion Lord?” Wither hissed. “You’ve turned the knife enough for a night.”

“I would like you to refrain from sallies outside your territory.”

“Fine,” Wither said, with ill grace.

“I would like use of your smuggling routes into Ater.”

She began to speak, but Amadeus raised a hand to interrupt her.

“I know the Matrons’ own were closed, but also Alaya left you your own as a reward,” he said. “Don’t bother.”

Wither grunted.

“Anything else?” she mocked.

“Oh, just one last thing,” Amadeus nonchalantly said.

The friendly smile turned thin and blade-like.

“I would like every last drop of goblinfire in possession of the Tribes.”

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