Lord Marshal Caedmon Vale

Lord Marshal Caedmon Vale commanded the Justicar’s Legion, the Supreme Ruler’s army of law, when it intervened in the civil war in Iskandar, and governed the occupation that followed. He was iron-grey and weathered by campaigns fought across Ashkar, and he came before the Veinwright throne in white armour and a red judicial sash, without a helmet.

He arrived carrying a decree that named no rightful victor. It recognised neither the rebel council nor the absolute claims of the throne, and ordered an end to necromancy, the disarmament of unlawful forces and the protection of civilians. To a country worn out by war it sounded like salvation. He was scrupulous, courteous and exact with words: he judged prisoners as individuals, gave even his enemies fair warning, and held that the dead do not require vengeance while the living require justice.

The scruple cut both ways. He destroyed the rebel army at Lareth Plain in less than a day, and then turned the same law on the loyalists. He demanded the Veinwright royal records, priests, fortresses and burial grounds — temporarily, he said, until Iskandar was secure — and burned Greywatch, a keep held for the throne by a priest and his risen dead. After that his inspections became purges, and at the Tomb of First Kings his soldiers fought King Varyon’s last loyalists over the right to search the Veinwright dead.

He was not blind to what he had walked into. He had seen children hiding from rebel raiders and bodies bound into walls alike, and he asked Varyon to help him find the line between Veinwright tradition and the horrors done in its name. He allowed that the Gilded Coven might have manipulated the war and the Shadow Weavers concealed the truth, and promised to investigate. Much of the intelligence that guided him had come from those same Shadow Weavers, and their part in it was never exposed.

At the end he stood where Veinwright kings had once announced their coronations, read out that the rebellion was defeated, the necromancy contained and the roads and courts restored, and declared the Legion’s intervention a success.

Every word of it was true. He said it in a square of ruined homes, emptied prisons, sealed crypts, and streets patrolled by foreign soldiers.