Yo, TTT

Hey guys,

We've been PRETTY LAX about this forum.  I wonder if the wonky formatting and whatnot have been keeping us from being really involved.  Maybe we want to look into editable Google docs or something?

Anyway, I really don't want TTT to die.

IRA III

The Golden Road was thick with travelers. A fisherman from Leonholt City, Lord Lyonel Vandemair's seat in the southeast, told them the rebel queen meant to sack Rassian and fire its churches. An old woman traveling with her daughter's family said the true queen was coming back to oust the traitorous s. An unwashed vagrant claimed that sorcerers from hell commanded both sides of the war and meant to drown Artaxas in blood.

They went down the rugged coast to Vastanbul where an army of Easterners was encamped in the shadow of the city's salt-eaten walls and the seabird-infested cliffs that fell away into the sluggish sea with its slow waves and sucking sounds. Vandemair's lions, Evraheim's stooping eagle, the thorny coronet of Rosecrown, the proud ram of Ramm and a score of others snapped and fluttered beneath the Imperial and the swords-and-wings. The Grieving Reach itself, the passage between north and south, lay like an old corpse at the mercy of the ocean. It was a broad expanse of marshland, reed-covered tidal flats shot through with tangled watercourses like an old man's sprung veins. Ira removed his felt cap and ran a hand through his sweaty hair. This is where it happened.

The Rhyddish legions had died screaming on that drab, blotchy stretch of floodplain. How many skeletons lay under the sand and clay? How many still went about in mourning blue for the sons, the fathers, the daughters and sisters whose minds Sepirahkt had scraped clean or shattered. Ira could feel it when he opened his First Eye: the enduring stain of that bloody day. Terror and madness soaked the very soil like salt sewn by conquering legions. It's a bad place now, whatever it was before.

Ira led his nag along the cliffside path. Edrea rode her carthorse, Brutus, ahead of him. There was a checkpoint cordon at the base of the cliff road. Sandbags and coils of barbed wire stretched like a snake from the cliffs beneath the city walls to the rough tumble of broken stone that led down to the sea. Logistics officers manned a dozen crossing points from chemical-board desks and it was to the back of the shortest line of travelers that Edrea took them. Beyond the soldiers and their barricade the road dwindled to a profusion of muddy, rutted tracks half-filled with brackish water. The tide wouldn't be in for hours. Ragged trains of men, women, horses, even a few automobiles were making their way across the flats toward the flat green country on the other side. Three hundred miles of the clean Eastern air before the Waste.

They had papers. A vulturous woman in a little harbor town called Wrath had made them up for a disgusting sum. They were Lyella Pin and her hired man, Audley, which seemed good enough for the unshaven officer who waved them through the checkpoint without apparent interest. Ira kept his head down and his cap pulled low, but if there were photographs circulating they'd know him by the wormlike scar that hooked from the corner of his mouth up past his eye in a ghoulish grin. Marius made sure I'd never travel incognito again. At least his uncle had botched the job, though sitting a saddle still made Ira's wounded stomach itch and ache. He preferred to walk.

Salt mud sucked at Ira's boots. His horse tossed her head and whinnied as she picked her way over the flats. It was naked country, raped and oozing. Ira looked back at the thousands of tents pitched like barnacles in the shadow of Vastanbul. The remains of the clash between John Blackwall and the Eastern Houses still littered the mudflats. Gulls roosted by the hundreds on the blasted hulks of tanks and trucks. Heaps of greasy ash were all that remained of the dead, burned to safeguard against plague. The Vastani Bridge, the railroad span that crossed the marshy plain on three huge pylons, had been blasted at its center and chunks of concrete and twisted steel lay strewn about the mud like a giant's forgotten bones. Ira walked through its tangled shadow.

His First Eye found the birds among the circling clouds who had tasted flesh either in the battle's wake or on some other day, and for a while he hung above the Reach on dirty wings and watched the haggard skeins of refugees stumble like drunks across the pitted, muddy earth, through stands of thick marsh grass and pools of standing water. He watched them through the eyes of clever water rats, and yellow marsh snakes the length of a man's arm. There was nothing to see, though, and nothing to feel but fear and despair, so he closed his Eye and left the spying to the rats.

Horses flicked their tails at biting flies. Men and women burdened beneath the weight of their uprooted lives toiled through the muck and standing water. This is hell, thought Ira. He crushed a fly against his cheek and flicked the bloody corpse into the mud. An old woman staggered past him with a child of three or four held in her trembling arms. Beyond her a balding man in laborer's clothes stood staring in despair at an automobile with smoking pouring from its bonnet. Ragged children clustered around the man like motes of dust. The sinners just walk around, wondering what's happened. They don't know they're already dead.

Past the muddy graveyard of Lord John's defeat the land formed a sandy ramp in a cut that ran up into the witchgrass of the vertiginous coast. A few scrawny maples grew gnarled and windblown from the arid soil and besides the crying seabirds there were great black clouds of sparrows whipping back and forth across the sky like schools of fish. The Golden Road, a shaped stone highway as old as Vulgar Dosht and running alongside the elevated highway called the Road of Thorns, returned a few hours after they'd left the fish-stinking Reach at their back. Ira took off his coat, lit a cigarette and tried to ignore the blister forming on his left heel. When he did mount his swaybacked mare the Reach was a whiff of salt on the wind.

The flat land nodded and the sun sweated them. It was senescent country. Empty. Flat. Knee-high grass as far as the eye could see in every direction. The other travelers thinned. They fell behind, forged ahead, took other roads out into the vast green sea. Ira watched them go and felt nothing. I spent my whole life a mad fisherwoman's son trying to get north. Now I'm a prince, headed south. I wonder if the bitch's cottage is still there? The sun gasped its way toward the shimmering horizon.

Ira drowsed in the saddle, slipping in and out of dreams about an endless plain covered in a foot of brackish water, translucent trees growing up from the silt. Edrea's gloved hand like a vise on his shoulder dragged him rudely back into the waking world. It was dark, or nearly dark, and a canvas-topped troop truck blazoned with the Rosecrown coronet and the Kvalus bull approached them on a parallel track. Dust swirled in the truck's wake and danced in its headlights. There were men on the running boards with guns. Ira started to open his First Eye, but Edrea's grip on his arm tightened.

“No sorcery,” the old woman said through gritted teeth. “They aren't here for us.”

The truck passed them by. Its reddish taillights receded into the flat, dark distance.

They pitched their camp in the gloom beneath the branches of a dead baobab. The tree's swollen trunk was hollow and stank of guano. Ira pissed against the knotted bole while heat lightning spidered glasscrack-wise across the inky sky. Since Marius had opened him it burned when he pissed, a sensation like forcing ice chips through his cock. Wind whistled through the nodding grass and made the tree creak with old voices. It's too flat here, Ira thought as he buttoned his trousers, hands stiff with the gathering chill. One sniper in a blind and we're meat.

Edrea was brushing her horse by their impromptu picket line, a pair of metal stakes driven into the ground to keep the animals wandering. The horses watched Ira approach. Their soft dark eyes were empty in the firelight. Ira lit a cigarette. “How much longer until we're past the Imperial patrols?”

“The Throne's patrols.” Edrea bent and lifted Brutus's hoof. The huge horse snorted agreeably. “There hasn't been an Empire since your grandmother's murder.”

“How much longer?”

“A day. Two days. Lord Sumner Hammerton is waiting for us at the edge of the Waste.”

“And then what?”

“Valsir. Then Golden Harbor. War.”

War. He was sick to death of guns and tanks and sorcerers. He'd been bled, stuck, shot, and played for a sap since that day at Second Genault when his uncle had left him for dead on the shore. There are people who have to answer for this. He put a hand to his half-healed stomach. Eating anything but the blandest food still gave him unbearable cramps, and he'd taken shits he'd thought would be the end of him. I'm still alive, though, and I can still make them answer.

Lorne had to go. That much he knew, or felt in his ruined gut. His uncle, too, or else he'd never be truly safe. The rest of the Kvaluses, the Rosecrowns, and the rest of their angel-worshiping ilk, and it remained to be seen whether or not the Umzadi could be bought. Ira rubbed his nag's neck, but the old horse just looked glassily at him. “I've been wondering,” he said. “The Third Eye. Kazimir mentioned it to me, and I've read enough of the Conqueror's Gospel to know it has something to do with the soul. Why can't I open mine?” And oh, but I've tried. Hours and hours of pointless meditation wasted in Lorne's little mansion.

Edrea prized a stone loose from Brutus's dinner plate-sized hoof and let the big horse go. She lit a long, black cigarillo. “The Leviathans could do strange things with their Eye,” she said after a while. “Your uncle was imprisoned by his own soul, warped into shackles and warden both, and most priests agree that's how the House kept Eleazora in thrall for so long. No sorcerer outside the Imperial House has ever touched that kind of magic, and there's nothing I can do to help you use it.”

They sat in silence by their campfire well into the night. Ira ate tinned corn and pickled beets while Edrea read through a slim leather-bound folio. The stars were clear and bright. Bats swarmed in the warm night air, looping madly around one another in a rush to gorge themselves on as many insects as they could eat before sunup. The voice of heat lightning murmured in the distance when Edrea slid her folio back into her satchel and looked up at Ira.

“Your mother was a gentle woman.” She unscrewed her thermos and took a drink, then wiped her chin. “When you were born she was taken by a black depression. For weeks she kept to her bed. She would weep at the very sight of you. It happens to women sometimes after childbirth, and Lyannis was morbid at the best of times. Twice she tried to end her own life. Only Kazimir's surgeons kept her from succeeding.

“It took her the best part of a year to recover her strength, to leave her bed and take you in her arms. Still, there were days she sat by the window and stared out at nothing for hours. She wouldn't speak, she wouldn't eat. We feared she might die.”

“Before Lorne could get another whelp on her.” I'll never forget, teacher; you lied to me. “What's the point of this story?”

Edrea looked older than usual in the firelight. Too old to be out riding on the eastern plains in the dead of night. “Not everyone is made for war.” She puffed on her cigarillo. “We're riding toward blood, my prince, and I know what blood does to young men. You've seen your share of killing. If you chose to take ship to Barkult or Al-Dosht or Jek then, well, that would be that.” She took the cigarillo from her mouth. “Do you understand me?”

It was a door she held open for him, a way out of the web woven by people like Sofia, like Luke, like Kazimir, and Lord John. Ira looked down at his twisted hands, at the iron ring on his little finger that was all he had left of his dead, broken mother. When had anyone ever offered him a way out? Never. Not even Sofia would have done this for me. I could go...not back to the coast, but somewhere good. Somewhere new. I could ride off into obscurity, sign on with some half-penny crew out of Lion's Bay or Stone Harbor... And then what? Would he live his life as a deckhand, a corsair, a clam diver? My home a shack by the docks of some foreign city, my wife a crabber's daughter, my children dirty ragamuffins, my grave a pit dusted with lime. He chewed the inside of his scarred cheek, his forced half-grin. “No.”

“No,” Edrea repeated, disappointed. “Of course. As you wish.” She rose and went to unroll her pallet among the roots of the baobab tree.

When Ira slept he dreamt of little girls with scabby knees laughing as they raced through the shallows beneath the rotten piers of some dead city. Their hair was dark as the sea, their eyes grey as gull feathers. The elder carried the younger on her back up a crumbling stone stair to the bones of a ruined lighthouse overlooking a great black bay mobbed with circling seabirds. “There it is,” said the older girl, her sister's moon-wide eyes peering over her shoulder. “That's where it happened.”

Ira woke with a splitting headache and an aching bladder. He had a long, stinging piss behind the tree while Edrea, who had already risen, saddled Brutus. They rode away from the baobab before first light touched the grasses. The half-light of dawn lurked by the horizon when they returned to the road. Six miles into their day's ride they passed the first slave farm they'd seen since coming south of the Reach. Ira, his head still pounding, watched the slaves toil in their sweating hundreds. Dark-skinned Islanders, ashen Xuli, hairy men from the archipelagos north of the Shatterstones, and the lanky coffee-hued men of Barkult sweated with sickles, scythes, and handcarts among the ripe head-high grain in the endless summer heat of the south. Every slave, men and women both, was branded with a livid eagle. Evraheim's chattel.

The whole empire rests on their shoulders, and when they're old and bent they'll go sailing off to Heaven to feed the Throne's brood. Where was the justice in that? Where was the justice in any of it? Nobles are leeches, but what does that make me?

Some slaves watched them from behind the chain-link fence that ran for miles and miles along the fields, and then that was gone and they went on into the morning and the grasslands. A few cars passed them, and a handful of ox carts and carriages, but foot traffic was non-existent. Even when they rode past a little trading town no one came out to recommend hotels or beg custom. The east still went in fear of John's defeated armies, or else the soldiers of their own rulers. There were signs to justify their fears, as well. Twice they passed Blackwall men and townsfolk strung up from makeshift gallows by the roadside, and once a burning car left to smolder in a ditch. The next town they saw was a blackened skeleton, the one after that a still-smoking grave. A crashed airship lay like a whale's shark-stripped carcass in a field and dead men, carbonized husks, spilled from its ruptured gondola.

“It will be worse in the open grassland where John fled,” Edrea said when they stopped to water the horses at a cattle trough. The cattle, great beasts with cut horns and wet noses, watched them placidly from their pastureland. “He was always a hard man, and defeat makes the best soldiers into ravening dogs.”

Ira spat through his teeth and pushed a hand through his sweat-dampened hair. “As long as he stops sniffing himself long enough to crack Laurent and the East.”

Lord Sumner Hammerton met them a week later at the desert's edge where the waving grasses of the eastern plains gave way to bare gorse and dead acacias standing black and thorny in the sunlight. The herds of antelope, wild cattle, and bison that roamed the east were nowhere to be found. Vultures perched in the branches of every tree, and once Ira saw a strange long-snouted beast scratching at a termite hill, but life was sparse and dusty on the burning plain. Lord Sumner's legion rode dark, men, camels, and horses dressed in duns and tans, greys and browns in place of their commander's own blue and white. Even the trucks and their lone tank had been repainted to blend into the barren landscape.

Sumner himself was a stocky, white-bearded man with leathery skin and windswept hair. He found them in the shadow of a lonely red pillar of time-eaten rock, him and his ragtag band of survivors sent to escort the prince and his tutor south to dusty Valsir. He climbed down from his horse and knelt. His men did the same.  “Highness,” the old man said. “House Hammerton is at your service.” The irritation at bowing to a younger man was plain in Sumner's terse voice.

“Thank you, Dominus.” Ira didn't bother dismounting. “It's been a hard ride. How many days until we reach Valsir?” His horse dropped a load of dung, spattering its own fetlocks.

The bearded nobleman stood. “Three days, highness, and I have good news for a change.” He cracked a smile. “Lady Yvaine fled back to Golden Harbor last week, defeated.”

Small favors. “Good news indeed,” said Edrea. “Has Lord John pursued?”

“Not yet.” Lord Sumner, aided by a slave, climbed back into the saddle. “He's pacifying Valsir before he rides out. The angel-lovers are throwing a tantrum over some priestess dying in the siege.” The bearded noble's men were on their feet again and preparing their own mounts and vehicles to move out from the shadow of the standing stone. Ira heeled his nag forward to ride beside Lord Sumner. A peek through his First Eye showed the seers in the old man's honor guard; three of them dressed as rank-and-file soldiers with Hammerton's warhammer on their collars. Like most seers they'd shaved their heads and their pale scalps were peeling in the sunlight.

He doesn't trust me, Ira thought. The old man's unease and anger were there to read, jumping like the lines on a pulse tracker. His men were similarly on edge. They've been dodging the Church out here for months and now they're babysitting a man they've never met and some old sorcerer crone; I can't blame them for being sour about it.

They made good time that first day, though Ira's nose and cheeks were peeling and he'd sweated through his shirt by the time they made camp beside a muddy oasis. Sumner ate with his men, clapped their backs when they joked, shared out his liquor like a lax uncle, and joined them in their crudest marching songs. Ira had a place by the nobleman's fire, but neither the man nor his knights or soldiers so much as looked his way. He considered easing their disease and resentment with his Eye, but with Sumner's seers so close it seemed more likely to start a fight than to win him any friends.

“This is ridiculous.” Ira wolfed down his stew of tinned spinach, onions, and leathery beef. The broth warmed him against the cold night air. “What have I ever done to the old man?”

“He's been fighting wars since before you were born.” Edrea had crumbled stale crackers into her own stew and was fishing unenthusiastically for the pieces with her spoon. “Leave him be. Even princes can't be loved by every lord who swears his House to theirs.”

Ira lit a cigarette. Out beyond the circles of the camp's fires the eyes of jackals glowed like coals, and for an instant the cigarette's end matched them. He smoked it, watching Lord Sumner trade war stories with one of his client knights, a bull-necked man with a brown roadrunner on his ceramic breastplate. I could blast them all to slop. He blew smoke. One second and this whole camp is a charnel house. Ani had told him stories when he was a boy of Rassianus kings and queens who had brought whole cities to their knees with the strength of their sorcery. Aurax the Mad had once, in a fit of wrath, reduced Rassian to cinders from the Palace to Leviathan Bay.

Edrea rose, stretched, and departed for the tent the men had set aside for her. Ira sat by the fire and smoked until one by one the soldiers drifted away to their posts or their pallets. Lord Sumner gave him a stiff bow before taking his own leave, and then it was only Ira, the dark, and the fading fire. That night he dreamed of a tree that was a woman, her eyes dark knots in the rotten bark, her fingers twisted branches, her mouth a black pit working, working, always moving, never speaking.

Beautiful boy, came the woman's voice, not from the tree but from far, far away and deep, deep beneath the earth. All our sins are crashing down.

Ira woke shaking and sweaty in his slant-topped tent. It was still dark. He went out to the water barrels, drank deeply, splashed tepid water on his face, and watched the gelid sun rise fat and shimmery from the belly of the night.  

Sofia III

The countryside was bare as a priest's tonsured scalp. Once again Sofia sat in the backseat of a long black car rumbling down the Iron Road to Rassian, but this time it was with an army at her back. The ladies and lords of the Hornea, Brightwater, Welker, Gross, Anchor, and Brahm were all shut up in their castles with what men Laurent had left them. Most of the wealth and arms of the lands around the capital were now nestled in Rassian's bosom, along with the lion's share of the autumn crop. Between that harvest and a constant stream of grain and beef from the Rhydderlands in the south Laurent could sit on his ass until summer without fear of plague or famine in his city.

The snow was melting. Even at night meltwater flowed fast in the ditches beside the road and cascaded down the rolling hills in makeshift streams that would dry up and die in summer. The moon was full and washed the fertile countryside in argent light. The legions left churned earth and stubbled fields in their wake as they marched west to buy a fleet.

The baby kicked and Sofia's stomach roiled. She had reports to go over, clipboards stuffed with messages from her uncle's spies, from Kazimir's, from quartermasters and legion tribunes. Lord Rhovan's legions were embattled at Cold Fords but had both guns and numbers to their advantage. The rail lines running from the Empire's northern half to Rassian had been cut, the bridges dynamited so that the only way in was through the gates or the harbor. This war will bury me in paper. She set the reports on the seat and pinched the bridge of her nose. Her gown was tight and her swollen breasts had been tender since the morning sickness started; it made for frequent headaches.

Sieur Magnus, seated opposite her, looked up. “Are you well, Highness?”

Am I well? I'm losing a war I haven't started and my child is determined to transform me into some sort of dairy cow. “It's nothing, Magnus. I'm anxious to see the night's business done.”

“Lord Norman is a snake,” Sieur Magnus said reassuringly, “but we have his back to the sea. His ships will be yours.”

Gull's Folly, the seat of House Daguerre, was the westernmost of all the Hornea's great fortifications. It was a plain, stark place, a square tower with foundations hacked from the granite and basalt of the seaward cliffs. Its pilings stretched down to the dark, wild surf where the lights of Lord Norman's battle fleet rocked at anchor. Stepping from her car Sofia thought that the armada looked like a city, all buildings moored loosely one to another and subject to the sea's ruinous whims. A hundred ships. Two hundred. Enough to break Laurent ?

Sieur Magnus, Sieur Enri, and Sieur Jayne walked with Sofia toward the lighted tower. In her headpiece of gold filigree and trailing dress of midnight silk, its train embroidered with leviathans rampant, Sofia knew she looked her part. Still her palms were damp with perspiration. Daguerre's black cormorant on blue flew from a hundred flagpoles hammered into the naked stone along the path and at the gates men waited to admit them. Lord Norman's steward, a dour Rhyddish woman all in mourning blue with her Lord's cormorant tattooed on her wrinkled brow.

Sofia held out her hand. The woman kissed it.

“Take me to him.”

The climb to Lord Norman's apartments was a steep one. Sofia counted two hundred steps before they came to a landing with a seaward window on the left and a stout oaken door on the right. She took a moment to catch her breath before waving to the steward to admit them. The old woman opened the door on a long, low-ceilinged room forested with plain-cut beams of cedar. At a dining table sat a long-faced man with a head of thinning grey hair and a great red-veined beak of a nose. He wore a plain silk dressing gown and a stained undershirt. “Your majesty,” he said, looking up from his newspaper and his bowl of fruit and yogurt.

“Lord Norman.” Sofia took the seat at the table's end as her knights took up positions by the door. Mistrust radiated from Sieur Magnus like heat from sun-warmed pavement. I don't trust him either, but I have no choice.

Norman Daguerre folded his paper and set it aside. He produced a silver cigarette holder, extracted a cigarette, and lit it. “You want my fleet.” Smoke trickled from his hairy nostrils. He scooped up a spoonful of peaches and yogurt and, holding his cigarette between the first two fingers of his right hand, ate. “One hundred and sixty-six ships.”

Sofia clasped her hands in her lap as the baby kicked again. She hoped the dress Lord Kazimir's tailors had sewed for her hid her rounded stomach well enough. “I am your Queen.”

Lord Norman took a long drag on his cigarette. “What of it? I have a telegram from Rassian saying there's a king wants my ships as well. He'll pay, too, though that part's what we call a silent understanding.” He spoke the last words in a stage whisper. “So why should you get them?”

“It is your duty, Dominus. You served my grandmother-”

“Duty!” Lord Norman threw up his hands as if to ward off evil. “If I started doing my duty now, then where would I be tomorrow? I fought for Ysandre because I thought she'd win, and when the war was at an end and I knew I'd laid my bets like a fool I hurried off to Rassian to bend my knee to old Hanley.   You'll need a better reason than duty if I'm to send my men off to die with you.”

Sofia leaned back in her seat and let her Eye fall just the slightest bit open. At once the hundreds of minds within the tower assaulted her with their clamor, but she shoved them aside and focused her scrutiny on Norman. The knot in her stomach loosened as she probed the edges of the nobleman's mind. He would be trained against succumbing to a seer's influence, but she could still sound out his thoughts in safety. With a flicker of surprise she came upon herself seen through his eyes, a silly girl playing games with knights and cannon. Very well, let's change the game.

“Laurent is a fool.” She took her headpiece off. Her oiled hair slid out of its elegant knot and fell around her shoulders. “Give him your fleet and he'll take your oath for a year, maybe two, before his mother tells him you're plotting against him, or else he suspects it himself, and what's worse is that you will be plotting against him.” She reached back and loosened the satin ribbons binding her bodice. Dead God, that feels good. “So he'll have your head if he's feeling impatient, and if he's in a patient mood you'll rot in a dungeon less your hands, your tongue, your feet and most likely your cock.”

“A frightening tale,” said Lord Norman, looking thoroughly un-frightened.

“No,” said Sofia, shaking her head. “The frightening part is what happens when he's bored with you and you go down to the harbor to board a ship bound for heaven.”

He stubbed his cigarette out in his half-eaten bowl of yogurt. “The same heaven you would topple. You're an ambitious one.”

“I wouldn't be here otherwise.” She stood, knowing she gave Lord Norman a brief glimpse of her breasts. “I'd be in a ditch beside the Iron Road, where the Throne tried to put me.

“I'll require your answer by sunrise.” She turned to go.

“Exclusive fishing rights for the eastern coast, a one percent stake in all Rassian-based businesses and Imperial initiatives, the patronage of the Imperial Navy at my shipyards, primacy in the provinces of the Hornea and the exile of every living member of House Brightwater with their lands and titles ceded to my family, my son Nathan to assume governance of those lands at once, a one-time cash payment of six million marks, the marriage of your firstborn to one of my own children of fitting age, and...oh, let us say the restoration of my right to whale in northern waters.”

Sofia looked back at Lord Norman. He had lit another cigarette and was slumped indolently in his seat, his skinny legs crossed, his hands on his belly.

“Is that all?”

“Yes,” he said, smiling, “that should do it. Just.”

She closed her Eye. “Then consider it done, Lord Governor.”

In the shadow of Gull's Folly the legions were pitching camp. From the tower gates it seemed a river of men and machinery stretched back along the road, miles and miles of violence coiled up like a fist. Sofia inhaled deeply. She'd given Lord Norman enough to ensure that if the war tipped in her favor House Daguerre would rest comfortably on the spoils for a century. That Lord Norman had sons and had not so much as breathed the word “marriage” spoke volumes of his confidence in her achieving that outcome. What will he do if I fail? Fall to the floor and grovel, pleading that he was forced into treason by sorcery? She started down the banner-lined track toward the camp's outskirts. She had to piss, an occurrence now so common it no longer even irritated her.

Sieur Magnus fell in at her side like a gigantic bald raven. “You did well, highness.”

Sofia pulled a sour face. “I gave him everything but my underclothes.”

“You needed his ships, highness.” Magnus looked distinctly uncomfortable. “The northern fleet is small and outdated, and Leviathan Bay is strongly defended.”

The council tent was abandoned except for Lord Kazimir and the dwarf, Tilly Lemure. She had come south with her brothers and even wore a soldier's uniform in miniature, Lemure's water strider stitched on the collar. Seated on a high stool she perused a welter of dusty maps and troop movement reports. What a strange little woman, Sofia thought as she left Magnus and Enri and slipped through the tent flap into the musty murk of the tent.

“Your majesty.” Tilly looked up from her study of the maps. “Lord Norman is with us?”

“He is,” Sofia said. She sat down at the table's head and dipped her hands in a silver ewer set out for departed diners. Sieur Jayne brought a towel for her to dry them on. “Once we meet Lord Rhovan we will be ready to take the capital.”

The little red-haired woman had proven herself useful time and time again. She'd plotted courses for their long and troop-burdened advance, advised the quartermasters in planning their camps and even set with deft brilliance supply lines that kept even the poor fruits of the marshland provinces flowing quick and undetected across the breadth of the Hornea. Talia frowned down at a map of Rassian and its countryside. “My brothers say I should return to our fortress at Blackwater Pool.”

“War's a game,” Sofia said. She took a cigarette from a little brass dish on the table and lit it. “Men like to pretend they're best at it, to keep us away from the swords.” She felt cruel, rebellious, and bold. Beside her Sieur Jayne, who had earned her own knighthood driving the Umzadi from the coast, flashed a crooked smile.

The dwarf's oversized brow wrinkled. “Will you be on the battlefield, your majesty?”

“Yes.” Though Sieur Magnus had spent hours trying to convince her otherwise. “I'll command from the deck of Lord Norman's Masquerade.”

“I've read accounts.” The girl deftly rolled the map and returned it to its leather tube. Her face was pale. “I've never been in a battle, though.”

“Neither have I.” It felt strange to admit it when every day was spent playing the Queen, the Empress, the grand commander. The last woman of House Rassianus to take the field had been Queen Valeria the Wrathful, Lysander's youngest daughter who had seen nine of her brothers and sisters buried within the palace walls before herself rising to the throne. It had been she who finished her father's bloody work, bringing the Broken Isle, the Rhydderlands and the deep south of Artaxas into the imperial fold with two decades of brutal war.

“I think I'll stay, then.” Tilly climbed down from her stool and curtsied before leaving the pavilion. As the flaps parted Sofia glimpsed for an instant the lights of her new fleet rocking gently on the black waters of the bay. She watched the ships for a long, cold while and thought of Rassian. What would she do once she'd taken it? Bigger wheels than me are spinning. I have to be prepared.

“Highness?” Magnus, still standing like a pillar beside the tent's entrance, looked at her. “Do you need anything?”

A wave of nausea swept over Sofia, a tidal swell of it. Her stomach, now noticeably rounded, clenched and roiled. She looked up at the night. “No.”

Ysabelle III

 YSABELLE

Lord Rhovan, dressed for battle, sat his charger in the brittle chill of spring dawn. His ceramic alloy plate was a deep, dark red and his snorting, ill-tempered mount was the color of blood. He wore a pistol at his left hip and across his knees was a long-handled warhammer heavy enough to smash a knight's ceramic breastplate into his lungs. It reminded Ysabelle of Fyodor's hammer, that Eye-stained thing with its broken stone head and splintery handle. Sieur Boris sat beside his liege with the manticore banner flying from his ceremonial pike.

Lord Rhossart was too fat for armor; he wore a fur-trimmed coat over his red suit and orange vest. His mount was a placid, stocky mare. Vitali had gone south to pledge the allegiance of the Northern Provinces to Sofia's cause, but the rest of Lord Rhovan's family and client lords were with him on the field. Lord Renfield Urquhart, Lady Bazhukov with her gimlet eyes and massive shoulders, Sieur Simeon Yarinoff, and the pitiless Harkov triplets who ruled their lands jointly. Them and their families, those who'd been knighted and blooded. A few northern priests, Fyodor among them, walked alongside the horses in their bearskin cloaks and old-fashioned armor.

The town of Cold Fords lay at their back, and before them were the three frozen rivers that gave it its name. A mile away on the near bank were arrayed the legions of Sieur Siegfried Ramm, the man everyone said had killed King Luke on the night of Lord Saul's and little Rhossart's deaths. Half of us are gone, thought Ysabelle. Now they said her aunt, still Anaias's vassal, had been crushed by the Blackwalls beneath the walls of Valsir. Ysard's brother had died in that city. I never want to see it again. Not if I live to be a hundred.

Ysard, her cousin and protector, rode beside her in the thick of Lord Rhovan's command. He wore no armor and stubble darkened his once clean-shaven jaw. His green stormcoat was rumpled and soiled, his shirt collar yellow with sweat. The long yellow scarf he wore was stained with dark blotches of wine, unless it was blood. He'd spent much of his time in Cold Fords at the pubs and wine sinks, drowning his brother Yannis's memory in cheap liquor. They were close, she remembered from their visits. Hardly away from each other. On Ysabelle's other side Master Drusus cut a cleaner figure in his black suit, good winter coat, and flashing spectacles. He'd found a round fur hat somewhere to cover his balding head.

Across the mile-wide no-man's land between armies, another command prepared itself to treat with Rhovan's. The gilded armor of the Knights Corpus flashed in the wintery sunlight. Atticus Cloyt, the radical scholar who'd founded Mule's Point University, had disparaged the Knights Corpus as a bad joke on the legacy of the Knights of the Branch, but Sieur Siegfried and his cronies looked impressive enough. We outnumber them, though. Her father's captain of the guard, Sieur Bowman Grant, had taught her how to take a rough account of a legion's strength by its standards and formations. At least forty thousand of them. Two full legions to our three and change.

A hush full over the assembled nobility. Lord Rhovan looked out over the tundra to where Ramm's escort had formed an honor guard around him. “Now,” he said, and heeled his horse forward.

They advanced, thirty-odd men and women in fur, wool, kevlar, and ballistic plate. Ysabelle urged her pony after them. It felt strange. Wrong. What am I doing here? It should be my father, or my aunt. Except she's on the other side of the war.

Closer, Ysabelle recognized most of Sieur Siegfried's men from court. There was squat, squinty Geoffrey Vanciber, there Abram Reincrow and his sister Lethe, and beside them the barrel-chested figure of Sieur Robert Rath. A few collegiate sorcerers with shaved heads and red robes trimmed in golden vair rode beside Sieur Siegfried, while behind him rode a tall, hooded figure in a brown cloak that hid his face. The knight himself was tall, his dirty-blond hair windblown and messy, his blue eyes lively. He smiled as the two groups drew near one another.

“Lord Rhovan,” said the traitor knight, flashing his charming grin as he pulled back on his golden stallion's reins. The horse halted with a snort. “It doesn't look as though you've come to dip your banners to the King. Are we going to have a tiff in front of the children?”

“Surrender or die, regicide.” Lord Rhovan's scowl was black as a thunderhead. “The north knows no monarch but Sofia Rassianus.”

“And yet,” said Sieur Siegfried, “you've spent thirty years doing an excellent impression of a province that recognized Luke Kvalus as its king and sovereign.”

Rhovan's face tightened. His knights had murder in their eyes and their hands were on the butts of their guns, the hilts of their swords. Ysabelle's pony whinnied and stepped back, shying from the violence in the air. She glanced left at where Fyodor stood with his hard-faced brothers. The priest was frowning at Lady Bazhukov, who sat brooding in her saddle with her sword half-drawn.

“I offer your men the chance to take up valorous arms,” said Lord Rhovan through clenched teeth. “You'll face trial for your crimes once Rassian is taken.”

Sieur Siegfried looked unimpressed. “Well then,” he said, “I suppose that's that. Vitali?”

The brown-cloaked man threw back his hood. Lord Rhovan gaped, speechless, at his son.

Vitali? But he went south to meet the Queen's armies. Ysabelle's heart was a frozen lump of stone inside her breast. He can't be here.

Lady Bazhukov's sword took Lord Rhovan's head off in a spray of blood. Red droplets struck Ysabelle's sleeve and her mount's flank. The pony spooked and broke into a gallop as Sieur Boris turned his mount, his bearded face bloodless, and was cut down in a hail of bullets. The two armies stood silent and dark against the snowy plain, their breath misting before them, as in the dead white space between their ranks the two honor guards came together in a bloody tangle. A few of the northerners tried to break for freedom, but sorcerous fire engulfed them as they fled. Lord Rhossart was shouting for his sword when two men dragged him from his horse.

Ysabelle saw Master Drusus slump in his saddle, then fall to the ground. She saw Ysard dueling Sieur Geoffrey until another of the Knights Corpus rode up and shot her cousin through the heart, then again in the head. She twisted, thumping her heels against her pony's heaving flanks, but the animal just plunged on through the brittle snow. I'm going to die, she thought as an Imperial sorcerer met her eyes across the churned expanse. I don't know enough to stop him.

He was theatrical. There was no burst of flame, no thunder of phantasmal guns. Instead a great bear of hoarfrost, snow, and frozen dirt heaved itself up out of the ground and lunged at Ysabelle and her pony with a roar like rotten ice breaking. The pony screamed as icy claws raked its rump. The bear shambled after them. No, thought Ysabelle. No. This is ridiculous. She opened her Second Eye, swallowing the bile it brought to her throat.

There is no bear. Snow doesn't live.

The construct collapsed mid-lunge, its feeble ideation unable to stand up to sorcerous scrutiny. Ysabelle laughed out loud, fury and grief forgotten in that golden moment. Then something heavy hit her in the stomach. She grunted, doubling over, and saw blood in her spit as it dribbled onto the pommel of her saddle. The snow raced by beneath her. My womb, she thought sadly. Her glove, pressed to her belly, came away red with blood. The world was fuzzing around the edges, and what sounds she could still hear were screams and the thunder of hooves.

She turned, her head spinning, and saw a knight on horseback pounding toward her, a rifle in his hands. He shouted something and then sparks flared around his flying hair and he went up like an oily rag. His horse had just started to burn when the world ran together and dribbled down into a deep, black hole, and then there was nothing left at all.

YSABELLE II

YSABELLE

The caribou herds were gone when Fyodor took her in the grey predawn light to the field where before they had coursed in their endless thousands and tens of thousands. The field of snow was churned to slush and mud. A few packs of lean grey wolves feasted on unfortunate stragglers, ripping at meat already freezing in the bitter cold. Ysabelle stood on the roadside with her teacher, shivering in her fur-trimmed coat, woolen dress and fez. Winter is unkind, she thought.

IRA IV

 Dead leaves and snow skirled through the open cellar door. It banged against its frame, caught helpless in the gusting wind. Ira dressed himself in the simple workman's clothes laid out for him. Felt cap, long pressed-wool overcoat, starched shirt and stained waistcoat. The shoes were cracked, the socks thick and knobbly. He rubbed his hands together, trying to chafe some warmth back into them. His stomach ached where Marius had opened it. Uncle, he thought, I owe you a favor.

ANORA II

Anora walked barefoot along the shore, beyond the reeking clamor of the dockside and the industrial riot of Leviathan Bay. Seagulls hopped ahead of her through the seaweed and melting snow, shrieking in their ugly, metallic voices. Concrete pipes large enough to swallow automobiles whole, their mouths crusted with icicles, belched runoff into trenches laid in the sand and small grey crabs scuttled in and out of the sluggish streams. Anora brought her foot down on one. Its shell broke beneath her weight and purplish ichor oozed out onto the sweep of the shore. It felt like stepping on an egg. The crab died, after a time, and Anora walked on.

Jonathan III

“It isn't fair,” she said. She lay slumped on a fainting couch, too drunk to stand, her blue evening dress soaked in the blood of the slave she'd killed. An empty wine bottle lay on its side by her dangling fingers. Jonathan stood by the fireplace, his bad leg complaining at the abuse he'd heaped upon it dragging Alisayne up the stairs to the study adjoining her apartments. She had done nothing but drink and repeat the same three words over and over while outside the muted sounds of shelling rolled over the city like thunder.

Anora I

 ANORA

Anora helped her brother buckle on his lacquered white bamboo armor over the thin sheath of ceramic plate his slaves had fitted to his slender frame over his leather quilting. “I don't see why father insists you lead the legions personally,” she said as she cinched tight the breastplate's straps. Her brother's apartments in the Lysandric Palace were bright and spacious, warm even in winter thanks to the Palace's furnaces. White linen curtains bellied over heating registers while outside snow fell on the grim industrial city. The koi in the ornamental pools set into the floor swam in dumb circles.

Saul I

Traveling by sea did not agree with Saul Lyr's stomach. Now that he was chained in the squalid brig of a wallowing Moshangari barge, the sea had decided to escalate the conflict from squabble to all-out war. For the hundredth time in as many minutes the former Chancellor of the Empire of Artaxas retched weakly, his neck and back aching with the strain. His breakfast, what he'd managed to choke down of it, was splattered across the deck in a drying puddle. The air in the brig was sharp with the acid stink of vomit. Saul had nothing left in him to bring up.

This is hell, he thought as he lay gasping on the deck, his stubble fouled with crusted vomit, his hands chained behind his back. Once a day his jailer, a heavy-featured Moshangari woman, brought a dipper full of brackish water and a crust of stale black bread. Sometimes, without apparent reason, she gave him the bounty of a boot to the stomach. His collection of bruises was fast becoming spectacular. What did it matter, though? His wife, his children, his king: all dead. Stephen's plans had come to nothing; his secret alliance had disintegrated with John's army on the Reach, and the Dead God only knew if Sofia survived. Saul coughed, then lay wheezing for a while. The deck rocked back and forth, back and forth as though the barge were a mother trying to shake its noisome child to death.

How long have I been at sea?

It seemed he should have known the answer. Once he had set great store by dates and punctuality, by knowing the names and faces of Stephen's court and the potentates of the Church, his secret enemy. He had forgotten all of them, now, and what did it matter? What had any of it mattered?

Somewhere within the ship's monolithic bulk, engines thundered and boomed. Saul knew he was going to Heaven, and that there was nothing he could do about it. Like his father before him he would sail out beyond the Empire's waters to that chain of islands forbidden to all but the Throne's sanctioned captains and shipping concerns. White sand, palm trees nodding in the sea breeze, men and women shuffling dead-eyed through cattle runs topped with barbed wire as eyeless drones flew in slavering circles above them, waiting to be fed. Paradise.

When three days later the ship's rocking and wallowing came to an end, Saul knew he was right. For a day's sailing in every direction the sea was dead calm around Eleazora's seat. When he and Stephen had gone to renew the Flesh Tithe agreements with her six years before, it had sent shivers up his spine to see the ocean stretched out around him like a plane of glass. It made it too easy to see what was under the clear blue water, down in the depths. In the darkness of his cell in the ship's brig he fell into an exhausted sleep.

In the morning, Saul's gaoler came for him with two priests in the long red robes and broad-brimmed hats of the Imperial Inquisition. Saul said nothing as he was unchained and taken up through the bowels of the ship, half-dragged by the Moshangari woman who'd made him her special project. His legs were weak and the wan sunlight abovedecks made his eyes smart. The forecastle was empty, the smokestacks above the bridge silent and dark like ash-blackened watchtowers.

The older of the two priests, a woman of forty or so with pale skin and a livid scar that ran from her upper lip to just below her right eye, removed her hat and turned to look at Saul as his captor forced him to his knees at the base of the forecastle stair where the woman and her fellow Inquisitor, a young man with doughy features and cold, bored eyes both stood. She was bald, her scalp scraped clean of hair. “Saul Lyr,” she said. “You know where you are.”

“Yes,” said Saul. His voice was hoarse and faint, barely audible over the gentle slap of the calm sea against the hull of the barge as it cut through the water, coasting on momentum.

“You are a traitor to Crown and Throne,” said the Inquisitor. “You know this.”

The sunlight plunged knives into Saul's watering eyes. The Inquisitor swam before him, a sexless spike of red with eyes like lumps of coal set badly in the waxen sockets of her skull. Behind her were the sky and the cries of circling gulls. “Yes,” Saul said. His chapped lips bled, some.

“There is no god but Our Lady, the Empress of Heaven,” said the Inquisitor. “How can a sin against Heaven be forgiven?”

“I don't-”

The gaoler's weathered hands looped a garroting cord around Saul's neck before he could so much as shout. His breath hissed pitifully though his constricted airway as, weakened, he fought against his assailant. Black spots formed and burst before his eyes. His feet skidded over the deck. She was dragging him to the rail while the Inquisitors watched, silent and impassive. He kicked and fought, wheezing for air. His feet left the deck as the gaoler knotted the garroting cord around his throat and lifted him bodily in her arms. He heard her swear, “fuck,” and then the deck spun and he was over the rail, flailing at the ship's barnacle-crusted hull with desperate strength. He hit the water as though it were concrete and what remained of his breath was crushed from his lungs. Cold swallowed him, bone-chilling and absolute.

My sins will go down to the sea and drown. Saul kicked frantically, trying to distance himself from the ship even as he scrabbled with numb fingers at the cord around his throat. He saw Katrina drifting past him, young and beautiful with flowers in her hair and her mother's ugly iron bridal torc around her neck. In her arms she held their children, pink and new. In an instant she was gone and Saul struggled alone beneath the water, silvery bubbles flowing from his open mouth. He could not loose the cord about his throat, and blackness edged in ever closer about his vision. I am going to die.

He fainted.

The dull shock of impact as his cheekbone cracked against the barge's deck brought him shivering and spitting back to wakefulness. For an instant he thought he lay sprawled in the mud on the Grieving Reach, Sieur Arman standing before him over his father's corpse, Saul's knifeman slung over one massive shoulder. That was a long time ago. Another life. A pace away the two Inquisitors were deep in conversation with a naked, skeletal Regent. The angel's haloed palms glowed with a soft golden light. Her eyes were like cut emeralds, bright and alive with an inner fire. Saul was reminded of an albino crocodile he had seen in his uncle Isseles' menagerie at Golden Harbor.

“Mother says that you are late,” said the Regent. Her voice was flat and uninflected. Water dripped from her naked skin and puddled on the deck around her feet. Behind her knelt the ship's crew in serried ranks, eyes downcast and lips moving in silent prayer.

The Inquisitors prostrated themselves. “Our blood is Heaven's,” said the elder of the two.

The angel watched them, head tilted birdlike to one side. Without warning, she struck. The younger Inquisitor screamed piteously as pale hands flipped him over onto his back like a mud crab and split his ribs apart with impossible strength. The angel plunged her head into his open chest and began to gorge, ripping and tearing with sharp white teeth. Blood drenched the deck. The angel's high, thin shoulder blades rose and fell as she swallowed. The dying Inquisitor's eyes rolled back into his head as the angel straddled his hips, her knees at the level of her arched back.

Saul retched, breath rasping in his tortured throat. He watched the angel feast, unable to look away. He thought of his years working in the capital with Ithuriel and the twins. Had they glutted themselves on man each morning before their ablutions? He had never seen a Regent naked before. A cloaca lay between her lean, muscular legs and her breasts, devoid of nipples, were small and firm. An alien bone structure shifted beneath her milky skin. They eat us like children handed sweets, thought Saul as the Regent withdrew from her kill, ragged scraps of flesh dangling from her mouth. The surviving Inquisitor did not look up. How many has she seen taken?

The angel looked at Saul and her emerald eyes held his. “My mother awaits you,” she said, and in a flicker of white she vanished over the rail and back into the sea.

Saul lay soaked and shivering on the deck, ignored by the sailors going about their business, by the prostrate Inquisitor and her dead companion, by the Moshangari gaoler kneeling at the rail and by the gulls that circled overhead like the souls of the ravenous damned.    

Jonathan II

The attack had been ruthless and swift, faster even than sorcerers could have managed. Two of the city's standing munitions plants had been bombed along with the slave markets abutting the Plaza of Servitude and the aerodrome in the shadow of the Serpentspire, not to mention the Spire itself. There had been no irreparable damage, and little loss of life, but the implications of the strike were clear. Golden Harbor could hurt the occupying armies at will and with impunity. Or, almost. One of their flying machines had crashed on the Street of Locusts, a notorious haunt for grifters, thieves and footpads of all sorts. The machine had come down in amongst the stalls of the street's ragged merchants and smashed them, along with itself, to flinders. A pilot in flying leathers and aviation goggles lay slumped in the cockpit, her face a mask of blood. A broken propeller spun drunkenly at the thing's crumpled prow while guardsmen shouted at the crowds to keep their distance.

Jonathan pushed shut the door of his car and limped toward the wreck, ignoring the screams of the wounded and the cries of a fat Angelist priestess on the street corner inciting the people to repent of their sins against the Throne. His leg was still stiff and it began to ache as he approached the site of the crash. The machine had plowed into the street at an angle, losing one of its two-tiered wings in the crash. What is that thing? The remaining wing sported a pair of smoking machine guns, one twisted nearly into a perfect knot. Thank God it loosed its bombs before the crash, thought Jonathan, thinking back to the smoldering orchard. Alisayne, who had gone ahead in her own car, was already there with Sieur Walton, Sieur Paul and Lord Graham's crook-backed majordomo, Clarissa. Sieur Paul studiously ignored Jonathan's approach. The bearded seer's eyes were bloodshot, his hair disheveled. He spoke in terse, brusque sentences to Clarissa as they examined the wreck together in company with several black-robed Al-Doshti mathematicians.

“What brought it down?” asked Jonathan as he reached Alisayne's side.

“Nothing we did,” said Clarissa. With her limp black hair, round spectacles and spindly arms she looked something like a starved spider. She rubbed her long, thin hands together. “Mechanical failure, I think. Whatever it is, it's complicated.”

“The Throne knows our iniquities!” the priestess cried. “Her judgment is upon us! Beware, those false of heart who work against Her ministry!”

“Do you have that bitch's name?” said Jonathan to Alisayne.

“Your man Avery is on it,” said the Princess.

Jonathan glanced at the milling crowd around the priestess, but he saw no sign of his spymaster. A good sign, all in all. Avery Lurier was slick as glass and cleverer than a snake. “What are we looking at, Al?” His voice was all but lost in the chaos of the crowded street.

“I have no fucking idea,” said Alisayne. She gestured toward the distant bulk of the Serpentspire with her cigarette holder. “I've ordered most of our flak guns brought to the Spire's grounds, but whether or not they'll do any good against something so fast remains to be fucking seen.” She put the plastic holder to her lips and inhaled. The cigarette's tip flared red. She looked lovely in her strapless blue dress, pinned hat and black half-veil. She wore long black gloves that went up to her elbows like a Xuli courtesan's.

“They'll strike again,” said Jonathan, watching Clarissa pick over the wreck as the mathematicians scribbled notes and the guardsmen shoved back with batons and riot shields against the roaring crowds. “What's the fleet's disposition?”

“We lost the Siren with all hands,” said Alisayne. She flicked ashes onto the street and lit another cigarette. “The Maiden and the Lord James were both damaged by machine-gun fire, but they can still fly. I've ordered everything we have left in the air spread out and placed on full alert.”

“We are sinners in a land of sin!” said the priestess, her jowls trembling.

“I want that woman dead,” said Jonathan through clenched teeth. A small voice answered from the pit of his stomach. Haven't you killed enough? But no, it's never enough for you.

Alisayne smoked furiously, tapping one foot against the blistered pavement. “Can we move it?” she said, raising her voice over the cries of the crowd.

Clarissa looked back over her stooped shoulder at Alisayne. “I can get it back to the Spire, Princess,” said the sorceress, “but it will take some time. A few hours, maybe. Less, if you can get a truck through the crowds.”

“I'll see what I can do,” said Alisayne. She dropped her cigarette to the street and ground it out beneath the heel of her shoe. “If I don't return in half an hour, you and however many others you need are to shift it yourselves. I want it inside the Spire before Lyr hits us again.”

“Understood, Princess,” said Clarissa, ducking into a shallow bow.

“The Throne knows our hearts,” said the priestess, spit flying from her lips. “She knows that we betray her, and at peril to our souls!”

Her listeners stared glassy-eyed, a crowd coalescing from the shrieking disorder.

They returned to the Serpentspire together, sitting in silence opposite one another in the back of a long, dark automobile driven by a Belfast man. Alisayne smoked incessantly. Her breath smelled of sour wine, lemons and tobacco in the enclosed space. Jonathan remembered her as she had been in their childhood, during their painful transition into the brutal Artaxi political arena. They had played on the sun-warmed rocks by the sea in the shadow of Drear's Harrow where Lady Jacqueline lay dying of fever. They had kissed there where the drainage pipes emptied into the ocean. She had been his first, though he had not been hers. He lit a cigarette and blue-grey smoke coiled around him.

“You're ugly when you mope, Jonathan,” said Alisayne as they left the merchants' quarter, drove through a Blackwall checkpoint and entered the more prosperous circumference of the Serpentspire's precincts. “Stop reminiscing. I need you here.”

“You need me nowhere,” he said, and the petulance in his voice surprised him.

She moved across the cabin to sit beside him, her thigh soft against his aching leg. Her hand fell on his wrist. “Of course I need you, Jonathan,” she said. The warmth of her breath brushed his neck and he remembered the sticky length of her against him when they had been thirteen and wild. “I've always needed you.”

Their lips met and then his hands were fumbling with her dress, pulling it up above her garters and her underthings, wet to the touch as she unbuckled his belt. He took her in the back of the car, skin squealing against leather, their breath coming hot and short as her painted nails raked his back. Jonathan grunted, thrusting against the coolness of her, the smoothness of her skin and the soft red curve of her lips. Outside, beyond the auto's tinted windows, the city raged and rioted. This is how it always was, he thought, biting the side of her neck. This is how it should have been, forever.

As they were pulling through the Serpentspire's tall gates and onto its still-smoldering grounds, Jonathan buttoned his shirt and waistcoat while Alisayne adjusted the combs and pins holding her hair in place. They passed through the lines of the flak cannons and artillery pieces Alisayne had ordered into position, now aswarm with munitions officers and slaves laboring to haul shells into place. A valet opened the car door and they stepped out into the dry, hard heat of winter in Valsir. Squinting against the light Jonathan could see the fleet maneuvering in the distance like a school of sharks. Outside the walls, cracked open by his own guns in the days before the taking of the city, lady Lyr's armies waited behind his own earthworks, expanded to accommodate their greater numbers.

You were always the strategist, Bernard, thought Jonathan as, leaning on his cane, he followed Alisayne into the shadow of the Spire and up its monumental marble steps. He turned, halfway up, to look back at the gates where Clarissa and a handful of sorcerers, escorted by a full detachment of Belfast troops, were manipulating the wreckage of the flying machine onto the grounds amidst a welter of air-warping power. He breathed the dry air. I'm going to die here. When he turned his attention back to the Spire's soaring entryway he saw Alisayne frozen in it, a slave prostrated at her feet.

“I knows only what I am told,” the slave groveled. “Lord Graham commanded this unworthy one to tell Your Highness that the Queen is alive and has broadcast her coronation to the Empire. If you wish, His Lordship invites you to join-”

Jonathan saw what was coming in Alisayne's blue-grey eyes, in the scream that stretched the muscles in her throat like cords and in the distortion of the air around her, as though some great brush had smeared an artist's oils across the world. “No!” he cried.

You're not like me.

The slave blew apart in a cloud of blood and meat, splattering the dozens of priests, merchants, officers and officials moving about their business in the Spire's entrance hall. Alisayne, smeared with blood from head to toe, stood trembling and gasping over a piled of pulped organs and splintered bone. “Motherfucker,” she said through bared white teeth, ignoring the horrified stares of the hall's occupants.

Jonathan limped up the steps as the carious aura of Alisayne's Eye faded. He gripped her arm and at once she sagged against him, just so much dead weight. His leg nearly buckled, but he bore the pain and began to half-drag, half-lead her across the blood-slicked tiles of the entrance hall. “It's alright,” he said, again and again as they passed by rows of silent, bloodied onlookers. “It's alright.”

He thought he saw Sieur Bernard's face in every glistening pool of blood.

Prophet's Tomb: Sofia II

 SOFIA

She walked above Artaxas on the echo of the continent, her feet sending ripples through the clarity of the bottomless sky. Below her the Empire lay spread out, a dagger plunging from the trackless pole down into the belly of the sea, framed on three sides by the crescent moon of the Cradle where lay the moldering cities of Moshangar, of Xul and Al-Dosht and a dozen other petty empires decrepit with the weight of ages and burdened with the jealousies of petty gods. To the west, between Artaxas and its hoary parent, lay tiny Umzad with its shores of white sand and its forests of weeping cherry trees. In the east, four hundred miles or less from Leviathan's Bay, something ugly waited on the open sea. A thousand, thousand mouths screamed up from the still waters.

Prophet's Tomb: Ysabelle I

 They said her father had betrayed King Stephen and the Holy Marshal, repaid their trust in him with cutthroats and rank treason. They said the Church and the new King, Anaias, had taken him to answer for his crimes. When Fyodor gave her the news, it was already a week old. She had thrown a tantrum in the library, refusing to continue her studies. The wonder of the Eyes, an awakening from blindness into blazing sunlight, had transformed from naked joy to the taste of cold ashes in her mouth. Her grandmother was dead, her family disgraced and in chains.

Prophet's Tomb: Ira I

 IRA

Come in out of the cold, you poor thing. How far you traveled, and that boy half-froze to death. Come in and rest, poor darling. What's your name, dear?

Prophet's Tomb Chapter III: Alisayne

The wine was a tart Rhyddish red from Lyr's private cellars, one of the last bottles from the Memorial Vintage commemorating three hundred years of Rassianus rule. To me, thought Alisayne, upending the bottle. Wine. Was there anything sweeter? A few ruby-red droplets ran down her chin, staining white skin with artificial blood. She took another swallow, and then another before she lay back in her folding canvas chair and set the bottle, now half-empty, down on the balcony floor. Glass touched tile with a distinctive clink. “Lovely,” said Alisayne.

Prophet's Tomb: Magnus I

MAGNUS

The angels came as they had at the battle of the Grieving Reach. Dragonfly wings filled the air with that dry, insistent rattle that set Magnus's teeth on edge and made his scarred cheeks ache. The eager, phlegmy screams of the drones drove needles into his ears. An instant later he saw the first of them as it buzzed over the crumbling walls of the fortress. He opened his Second Eye, embraced the flaying of his reality as the skin of the air peeled back around him in blasted curls. Beside him on the steps of the keep, Ilia did the same.   Burn, Sieur Magnus thought, wrapping the angel in memories of fire. The angel burst into flames like an oil-soaked fagot and crashed into the keep, keening in agony. It hit the courtyard dead and smoldering.

Terror Summer Goals Update I

Meri's Dead is finished three days late, and it's on to Prophet's Tomb.

I'm pretty behind on submissions.

Prophet's Altar Chapter I: IRA

PART ONE: LEVIATHAN

            My only son.  I write to you knowing that my mind is fading, that what little time I have left will be spent in dying rather than with you.  I wish that you were grown, for there is much I wish to tell you.

IRA

Fanfiction: Battleverse

Archibald stepped through himself. He felt things, things like flux, inversion, and nausea. It was like taking the world's grandest stage before the crowned heads of Europe, like leaping from a clifftop into the wind. One moment he stood in his gloomy bedchamber with Coppersworth, Wellsley, and Lady Elizabeth, and the next his slippers scuffed against wet paving stones. He stood with the others in an expansive courtyard overshadowed by a castle, its towers and battlements reaching toward the slate-grey sky like crude stone fingers. Its slit windows were dark, its parapets manned only by worn gargoyles. Rain fell gloomily.

Summer Goals: Terror

My summer goals for writing:

1) Submit two somethings, anything, weekly to agents or publishers.
2) Finish Meri's Dead by the end of May
3) Finish Prophet's Tomb by the end of June
4) Finish redrafting The Etherist by the end of July
5) Direct, produce, and co-star in Braxton & Lawrence: The Magical Explodvaganza in TWO STARTLING DIMENSIONS on a budget of less than 40 USD.
6) Post here every week and review everything posted on time.

THE TREASURE WAS INSIDE US ALL ALONG