The Legion Arrives
The Justicar’s Legion entered Iskandar beneath white banners, on a raw winter morning with sleet in the wind and the road through the eastern passes frozen into ruts as hard as iron.
Lord Marshal Caedmon Vale rode at the head of the column with the cold full in his face, and behind him, for the first time in years, the people of Iskandar saw an army whose colours did not belong to either side of their civil war.
Its soldiers came down out of the passes in disciplined columns, their armour bright despite the winter roads. White cloaks hung from their shoulders, and the red seals of lawful authority were fixed to their shields. Above them flew the scales and sword of the Legion, a sign recognised throughout Ashkar as a promise of order, protection and impartial judgment.
Caedmon had watched that banner go up over a great many places, and he had learned that people read it the way they read the weather: according to whatever they had been afraid of the night before.
He was a man past the middle of his life, his hair iron-grey and cropped close, his face weathered by campaigns fought across half of Ashkar until it had something of the colour and grain of old saddle leather. His armour was white, and across it ran the red judicial sash that marked him as a judge as well as a soldier.
He had a habit his officers grumbled about and secretly admired: every order he gave was copied before it left his hand, every seal was checked by three officers, and his messengers rode in pairs, so that no word of his could be lost, altered or invented on the road. He was courteous to everyone and exact with everyone, and he did not believe in luck.
In a sealed case strapped behind his saddle he carried the decree of the Supreme Ruler. He knew it by heart. It named no rightful victor in the civil war. It recognised neither the authority of the separatist council nor the absolute claims of the Veinwright throne.
It ordered an immediate end to necromancy, the disarmament of unlawful forces and the protection of civilians throughout Iskandar, and it said nothing whatever about who had been right, which was, Caedmon thought, the most merciful thing about it.
To those who had endured years of war, the words sounded like salvation, and he watched them land village by village as the column came down into the valleys. Villagers came out of burned homes to stand at the roadside in the sleet and watch the Legion pass.
Refugees knelt beside the roads with their bundles at their knees. Children reached up toward the soldiers, and the soldiers, who had been told to expect it, handed them bread from the sealed supply wagons without breaking step.
The Legion paid for grain, in coin and at the price asked, and a quartermaster wrote down every sack. It punished looting. It hanged two mercenaries caught robbing a farmhouse, though the men swore on their knees that they served the separatists and had every right to what they took; Caedmon heard them out, had their claim written down in full, and hanged them anyway at the roadside. Its healers pitched their tents at every halt and treated anyone brought before them, regardless of banner.
For a brief time, it seemed to the people along those roads that justice itself had come down out of the mountains and entered Iskandar. Caedmon did not think of it in such large words.
He thought about the road ahead, and the bread wagons, and the sealed case behind his saddle, and the city at the end of all of it, where a king was waiting to learn what the decree would mean for him.
The news ran ahead of the column faster than any horse. It reached the capital long before he did, and afterwards there were people in the palace who said that in those first days even King Varyon allowed himself to hope.
The Supreme Ruler’s decree reached the palace three days before the Legion arrived. King Varyon read it in the Hall of Remembrance, in the thin grey light that fell from the high narrow windows, while the surviving members of his court waited below the ancestral throne and the names of the dead looked down on all of them from the pillars.
It was very quiet. Somewhere beneath the polished black floor, in the royal crypts, water was dripping, and he could hear it between the lines.
The decree did not demand his immediate abdication. He read that part twice, the circlet of bone cold against his brow, and that alone made it seem more merciful than any terms the Free Provinces had offered him.
The rest was less kind. It ordered all Veinwright field priests detained. It granted the Legion authority to inspect royal fortresses, crypts and military records, and it required loyalist forces to cooperate until the necromantic threat had been contained.
General Tharos read the decree over the king’s shoulder, close enough that Varyon could smell the oil and old iron of the armour he still wore into council, its blood-marks scrubbed at and never quite gone.
“They enter as allies,” he said.
Lady Elianor shook her head. She stood at the foot of the steps with her hands folded, as straight as if she were still riding beneath a truce banner. “They enter as arbiters.”
“Better arbiters than separatists.”
“Arbiters do not arrive with twenty thousand soldiers.”
Queen-Regent Ysara sat in her place near the throne, her black mantle gathered around her like folded wings, the dark markings of the highest priests making her eyes seem set deeper than they were. She had not spoken since the seal was broken. When she did, she moved nothing but her mouth.
“They have come to take Iskandar.”
Varyon folded the decree along its creases and laid it on his knee. “They have come because we failed to contain it.”
“We failed because our enemies were armed by outsiders and guided through our defences by shadows.”
“And because our own priests raised civilians from their graves.”
Ysara’s expression hardened, the old parchment of her face drawing tight across the bone. “You still speak as though admitting guilt will earn mercy.”
“I speak as though guilt exists.”
“Guilt belongs to those who lose.”
Lady Elianor looked toward the old queen, and Varyon watched her decide not to let it pass. “That belief is why the kingdom is dying.”
Ysara smiled without warmth. “The kingdom is dying because people like you taught the king to doubt his right to rule.”
General Tharos struck the table with his fist, and every inkwell on it jumped. “Enough.”
He turned to Varyon, and his voice dropped to the flat tone he used for reading out a muster. “The Legion can defeat the separatists. Their troops are disciplined, supplied, and untouched by this war. If we cooperate, we may regain the western provinces.”
“And afterward?” Elianor asked.
“Afterward, the king negotiates from strength.”
“With an army occupying his capital?”
Tharos faced her squarely across the table. “Would you prefer Rusk?”
“No.”
“Then choose the danger in front of us.”
King Varyon looked past them both toward the skulls behind the throne: twelve of them, the black wax in their sockets, the jaws sewn shut with gold thread, the faces of every Veinwright who had sat here before him.
He had made every decision of this war by choosing between dangers. He could have listed them for the skulls one after another, the way a clerk reads down a column, and each time the danger he had chosen had grown worse than the one he feared.
“Open the eastern gates,” he said.
Ysara rose, and the foot of her staff struck the black floor once, hard enough to ring. “Varyon.”
“The Legion enters under my protection.”
“They enter under the Supreme Ruler’s authority.”
“And I will not oppose that authority while separatist forces stand within sight of the capital.”
The queen-regent descended from her seat slowly, one step and then the staff and then the next step, until she stood on the same stone as her nephew and the feathers of her mantle stirred in the draught from the doors.
“You invite the headsman inside because wolves are at the wall.”
Varyon looked at her for a long moment. She had taught him, when he was a boy whose feet did not reach the floor from that seat, that mercy was useful only when it was remembered as a gift from the throne, and he found that he no longer believed her, and that it did not help.
“Then let us hope he remembers which creature he came to kill.”
Beneath the floor, in the dark of the crypts, the water went on dripping.
The Free Provinces welcomed the Legion publicly. Darien Rusk sat at the long table in the council hall while the proclamation was read aloud, a cold draught coming in under the doors and the rain drumming on the shutters, and listened to the council praise the Supreme Ruler for intervening against Veinwright necromancy in language so warm it might have been written for a wedding.
Then he went back to his room above the hall and wrote to the Legion himself, in his plainest hand, offering access to separatist-held territories and assistance in locating royal crypt sites, and sent the letter east with envoys he trusted.
Privately, the rebel commanders prepared for war. They had expected intervention eventually. The Gilded Coven had warned them that the Supreme Ruler could not ignore the reports forever, and its advisers, who sat in good coats at the far end of the council table and never voted, assured the council that the Legion would focus upon the Veinwright loyalists.
Rusk had sat through those assurances with the old scar on his left cheek pulled tight, as it always was when he frowned, and a ledger open in front of him that he did not need to read.
The separatists were told to appear cooperative. The advice came in a list, delivered in a soft voice, and Rusk wrote each item down because he wanted it on paper in front of witnesses.
Disarm selected militias. Release minor prisoners. Invite Legion inspectors into towns where the evidence of rebel atrocities had already been removed. Present themselves as a lawful provincial movement defending the living from occult tyranny.
He looked at the third line for a long time after the others had moved on. He was a soldier before he was anything else, and he knew what it meant when an adviser said already.
The plan might have succeeded had the separatist movement still been controlled by its council. It was not, and nobody in that hall knew it better than Rusk, who kept the muster rolls and could count how many of the companies on them still answered when he wrote.
Years of war had filled the ranks with men and women who no longer cared about charters, assemblies or political legitimacy. Entire warbands followed local chieftains rather than Darien Rusk.
Former miners had become raiders. Displaced farmers had become soldiers who survived by taking from other villages. Provincial officers commanded territory as their own personal fiefdoms, and collected from it, and hanged in it, and wrote to the council only when they wanted something.
They had begun the war demanding freedom. Many of them now knew only conquest, and had learned to like the taste of it.
When the Legion ordered the separatist army to halt outside Lareth Plain, the council agreed, and Rusk voted with it. Three rebel commanders ignored the order.
They believed the Legion had come to finish what they had begun, and that it would thank them for the help, and they marched east toward the capital with their banners up and their drums going as if they were already riding into a city that loved them.
Word of what followed came to Rusk in pieces, the way bad news always came that winter, carried by riders who had changed horses twice. Lord Marshal Caedmon had given the three commanders one final warning. The rebel commanders had sent back the messenger’s severed hand.
Rusk sat with that report on his knee until the candle burned down. He did not need to be told what came next. He had been in enough campaigns to know what an army like that did with an answer like that.
The Legion advanced at dawn.
There was frost on Lareth Plain that morning, a thin white skin over the stubble fields that crackled under boots and melted to black where the horses stood.
The signal towers the Legion had raised during the night stood up out of the mist in a long line, raw timber still weeping sap, and from beneath his white pavilion Lord Marshal Caedmon could see the rebel host forming on the far side of the field, red banners and the broken crown, drums and shouting, a great deal of noise and not much order.
The Battle of Lareth Plain lasted less than a day. Caedmon had read every report of this war he could obtain before he crossed the passes, and he knew how the separatists had won it.
They had defeated the Veinwright armies through numbers, deception, local knowledge and the collapse of loyalist command. None of those advantages existed against the Legion, and he had spent the winter making certain of it.
Justicar infantry moved as a single wall of shields. Their formations opened and closed with the precision of machinery, and heavy cavalry struck only after the enemy lines had been fixed in place.
The archers fired in measured volleys, guided by flags from the signal towers, so that the arrows came down in sheets at the moment and the place they were wanted and nowhere else.
Every order was copied. Every seal was checked by three officers. Messengers travelled in pairs under guard. Caedmon had read the accounts of Halren’s Bridge with particular attention, and the tricks that had crippled the loyalists there — the orders no one had written, the riders who turned the wrong way — found no easy target here.
The separatist army charged with the confidence born of years of victory. It broke upon the Legion’s centre like a wave on a quay.
Caedmon watched it from beneath the pavilion as the rebel companies threw themselves against the shield wall, again and again, with the mist burning off around them. He saw courage in them, and it moved him more than he would have admitted to his officers.
He also saw exhaustion, poor discipline and commanders competing for glory, riding up and down their own lines shouting at one another while their people died in front of them.
He ordered the centre to yield three measured steps.
The flags went up on the towers. The shield wall stepped back, once, twice, three times, in perfect order, and to the men hammering at it the retreat looked like the beginning of collapse. The rebels believed the Legion was weakening. They surged into the gap with a roar that carried right across the plain.
The Justicar lines closed around them. Cavalry struck from both flanks at once.
By midday, the separatist army had ceased to exist as an organised force. Thousands surrendered. Thousands fled west across the frozen fields, throwing away whatever slowed them. Hundreds threw down their red banners and begged to be recognised as civilians, and some of them may even have been telling the truth.
The Legion accepted every surrender offered before sunset. Those who went on fighting after the final horn were killed, as the terms had said they would be, and Caedmon signed the order for it himself and had it copied twice.
When the field fell silent, white-cloaked healers moved out among the bodies with their lanterns and their satchels, and they treated wounded rebels before asking their allegiance.
The story spread across Iskandar within days, and it grew as it went. The Justicar’s Legion had broken in a single morning the army that years of loyalist resistance had failed to stop.
No villages had been burned. No dead had been raised. No prisoners had been mutilated. To the exhausted people of the eastern provinces, the victory seemed almost divine, and Caedmon, hearing the word used, found that it made him uneasy.
Bells rang in the capital as the Legion came back along the eastern road. Crowds filled the streets from wall to wall. King Varyon ordered the royal gates opened for the returning Legion, and for the first time since the rebellion began, the citizens of Iskandar cheered an army entering it.
Caedmon rode beneath the palace walls with flowers falling around him from the balconies, winter flowers, small and pale, that caught in his horse’s mane and on the white of his shoulders. He looked up into the faces above him and saw hope in them. He also saw fear.
The two often looked alike from a distance.
Darien Rusk survived Lareth Plain. He sat out the end of that winter in a wet camp on a hillside west of the plain, where the wind never stopped and the smoke from the cookfires lay flat along the ground, and he read the reports as they came in and felt the movement he had built come apart in his hands like wet paper.
He had opposed the unauthorised advance and had taken no part in the battle, but defeat destroyed what remained of his authority all the same. The Free Provinces fractured within weeks. Some councils surrendered to the Legion and asked for terms.
Others denounced Rusk as a coward, in proclamations nailed to the doors of halls where he had once been cheered, and he read those too, and put his thumb to the scar on his cheek as though it ached.
Local commanders abandoned the broken crown and gathered whatever followers remained loyal to them personally. The most violent bands fled into the wilderness, carrying weapons, stolen supplies and years of hatred, and they did not send word to anyone about where they were going.
They no longer trusted provincial assemblies. They no longer believed laws could protect them. They believed only that strength survived, and that everything else was a story told by people who had never gone hungry.
Among the refugees of the rebellion were soldiers who had lost homes, families and any future within lawful society. Rusk saw one such band go past his camp at dusk, a few dozen riders on stolen horses, going west without lights.
They had carved symbols into their armour that he did not recognise, and the crowns had been broken off the captured banners they carried, so that only the ragged poles remained. They had sworn, the reports said, never again to kneel before a throne.
They disappeared into the badlands, the forests and the ruined territories beyond the roads. The Legion classified them as scattered insurgents. The Gilded Coven regarded them as an unfortunate loss. The Shadow Weavers continued to observe them, as they observed everything, and said nothing about what they saw.
No one yet called them the Apocalypse Horde.
The defeat of the separatist armies should have ended the civil war. Lord Marshal Caedmon stood in the square of a western town on a grey, dripping afternoon and watched his soldiers take the broken crown down from the front of the old customs house, and he understood, watching the faces at the windows, that it had done no such thing. It had only revealed how many wars had been hidden inside it.
The Legion occupied the rebel-held cities and restored the trade roads. It reopened the granaries and posted guards on them, and disarmed the militias, and removed the separatist banners from government buildings one by one, folding each of them and recording it in a ledger, because Caedmon would not have it said afterwards that his soldiers had burned anyone’s colours in the street.
At first, the people cooperated. Justicar judges replaced the revolutionary councils with temporary civic tribunals. Royal tax collectors were forbidden from returning until investigations could be completed, an order that won the Legion more friends in the west than any battle.
Captured separatist officers were tried for murder, looting and unlawful warfare, in open session, with the charges read aloud and the witnesses heard in full.
Some were acquitted. Some were imprisoned. Some were executed. Caedmon reviewed every sentence himself before he sealed it, and the Legion’s judgments appeared measured, because they were.
That earned trust, and he could feel it coming in like a tide. Veinwright loyalists welcomed the restoration of order. Noble families returned from exile with their wagons and their servants. Priests emerged from hiding, blinking, into streets that were safe for them again. Royal officials travelled west in good coats, believing the kingdom would soon be whole.
Then Legion inspectors began opening the crypts.
Lord Marshal Caedmon met King Varyon in the Hall of Remembrance on a bright, bitter morning, with the sun coming down from the narrow windows in long pale blades that lay across the black floor and did nothing at all to warm it.
Varyon sat beneath the skulls of his ancestors and watched the marshal walk the length of the hall toward him, unhurried, his boots loud on the stone, and thought that he had never seen a man so plainly at ease in another man’s house.
The marshal wore no helmet before the throne, and the thin light found the iron-grey of his hair and the red judicial sash across his white armour. At the foot of the steps he stopped and bowed deeply, with a courtesy so exact that it could not have been faulted by the oldest master of ceremonies in the kingdom.
“Your Majesty.”
Varyon rose and descended the throne steps. “Lord Marshal. Iskandar owes your Legion many lives.”
“The Legion serves the realm.”
“You defeated the separatists.”
“We defeated an unlawful army.”
The distinction was deliberate. Varyon noticed it, as he was meant to, and felt the warmth of the morning’s welcome go out of the room.
“Then the surviving rebels will be returned to my authority?”
“They will remain under Legion custody until their individual crimes are judged.”
“They rebelled against the Veinwright throne.”
“They also fought within territories where the legitimacy of your officials is disputed.”
Queen-Regent Ysara watched from her place beside the throne, motionless inside her feathers. “So the invaders receive trials while our dead remain unavenged.”
Caedmon turned toward her and inclined his head, as courteous to her as he had been to the king. “The dead do not require vengeance. The living require justice.”
Ysara’s eyes narrowed in their dark markings. “Spoken like a man whose family was not burned in its tombs.”
The marshal did not answer the insult. He drew a sealed document from inside his sash and presented it to the king with both hands.
“This authorises inspection of all military crypts and mortuary temples.”
“We have already arrested the Mortarchs in the capital.”
“And those outside it?”
“Many are missing.”
“Greywatch?”
“Lost.”
“To the separatists?”
Varyon hesitated. He found that he did not want to say it aloud in this room, under these skulls, to this man.
“No.”
Caedmon studied him. “Then to whom?”
“The dead.”
The marshal’s face did not change at all, and Varyon thought that perhaps he had already known, and had wanted to hear the king say it.
General Tharos spoke from the council table, where he had been sitting with his arms folded over his blood-marked breastplate. “Greywatch no longer answers commands. The priest controlling it has established his own authority.”
“How many corpses?”
“Unknown.”
“Hundreds?”
“Possibly.”
“Thousands?”
No one answered. In the silence Varyon could hear the brazier ticking as it cooled, and a guard shifting his weight by the doors.
Caedmon looked toward the king. “And there are other sites.”
Varyon nodded. “Yes.”
“How many?”
“We do not know.”
The marshal laid the inspection order on the table, squared it to the edge with one finger, and left his hand resting on it. “This is why the Legion cannot withdraw.”
Lady Elianor stepped forward from among the ministers. “No one is asking you to withdraw before the necromancy is contained.”
Queen-Regent Ysara looked toward her with open disgust, as though Elianor had said something obscene at a funeral.
Caedmon went on as if neither woman had spoken. “All loyalist units must disarm while our investigation proceeds.”
General Tharos laughed once, a short hard sound with no humour in it. “That will not happen.”
“The separatist army is defeated.”
“Its remnants still control roads. Its warbands have fled into the wilderness. The dead infest our own fortresses.”
“Then Legion troops will maintain security.”
“You ask the king’s army to surrender its weapons inside its own kingdom.”
“I ask an army compromised by necromancy to submit to lawful inspection.”
Tharos got to his feet and stepped closer, until the two soldiers stood an arm’s length apart, the blood-marked armour and the white. “My soldiers fought the dead as often as they fought beside them.”
“And others concealed their use.”
“We were fighting for survival.”
“So claims every commander who violates the law.”
King Varyon raised a hand between them, and both men stopped. “What exactly do you require?”
Caedmon faced him, and recited it as a clerk recites a schedule. “Access to all royal records concerning necromancy. Custody of every field priest. Disarmament of formations suspected of using the dead. Temporary Legion authority over military fortresses and burial sites.”
“Temporary.”
“Until Iskandar is secure.”
“Who decides when that is?”
“The Supreme Ruler.”
The answer settled over the court like dust settling in a shut room. The Legion had arrived to save Iskandar. It had also arrived to take control of it, and Varyon saw that the marshal did not consider those two things to be in any way at odds.
He looked past Caedmon toward the open doors of the hall. Beyond them stood Justicar guards in white, two on either side, their spears grounded. They had been placed there for his protection, the morning the Legion came in under the flowers.
He wondered when they had stopped being his guards and become his jailers, and whether there had been a particular morning when it happened, and whether he had slept through it.
“You will have access to the crypts,” he said.
General Tharos turned toward him sharply. “Majesty.”
“But the royal army will not disarm.”
Caedmon’s expression remained composed. “Then I will require written assurances that no loyalist commander will obstruct our investigations.”
“You will have them.”
“And any violation will be treated as resistance to the Supreme Ruler’s decree.”
Varyon nodded slowly. “So be it.”
Caedmon bowed again, as deeply as before, and withdrew down the long hall with the light lying across his white shoulders. The meeting had ended with every courtesy preserved. Varyon did not believe for a moment that peace had been achieved, and he had seen in the marshal’s face, just before the bow, that Caedmon did not believe it either.
The first loyalist arrests began at Fort Ilyen, and General Tharos heard of them from one of his own officers, a mud-spattered captain who came into the war room at the palace barracks with the rain still running off his cloak and stood at the edge of the map table as if he did not want to put his news down on it.
Legion inspectors had discovered twenty-six animated corpses sealed behind a stone wall beneath the armoury. The fort commander claimed he had not known they were there.
His soldiers supported the claim, every one of them, and Tharos, who had known a good many garrison soldiers, thought that it might even be true. It did not matter. The dead wore loyalist armour, and the binding marks on them were recent.
Lord Marshal Caedmon had ordered the commander detained pending investigation. The garrison protested. A captain drew his sword. The Legion disarmed the entire fort, every man of it, in the space of an afternoon, and no one died. The incident was recorded as a lawful intervention.
Tharos had his clerk read that phrase out twice. Then he sent the captain to get dry, and sat alone at the map with his fists on the table, looking at the small black marker that stood for Fort Ilyen and thinking that he would have done the same thing in the marshal’s place, and hating that he knew it.
The reports kept coming. At Eastwall, inspectors uncovered ritual ledgers naming soldiers whose bodies had been retained after death; the families had been told the men were buried, and had tended the graves. The local Mortarch had fled. The commander insisted the records predated his appointment, and Tharos believed that too, and the commander was arrested all the same.
At Karth Vale, a Justicar tribunal found evidence that prisoners had been executed for use as necromantic soldiers. Two officers confessed. Seven denied any knowledge of it. All nine were taken into custody, and Tharos read the nine names twice over and knew some of them.
Each discovery confirmed the Legion’s fears. Each arrest frightened loyalists elsewhere, and the fear moved faster along the roads than any Justicar column. Commanders began burning records before the inspectors arrived. Priests moved bodies to hidden crypts by night. Veinwright families concealed their ancestral relics in walls and wells and under floors, believing the Legion intended to confiscate every object associated with the old rites.
The concealment created further suspicion. Tharos could see the shape of it from his war room as plainly as he had ever seen a battle line.
The more the loyalists hid, the more the Legion searched. The more the Legion searched, the more the loyalists believed eradication had begun, and he did not know any longer, sitting there with the rain on the shutters, which of them was wrong.
The Gilded Coven encouraged both interpretations. Its representatives came to Lord Marshal Caedmon’s headquarters on a clear cold morning when the frost had not yet gone off the courtyard, three of them in sober coats with their hats in their hands, and they congratulated the Supreme Ruler, through him, on the Legion’s victories.
They offered funds for reconstruction. They had already supplied food to the occupied cities, wagon after wagon of it, and Caedmon had been grateful and had said so in writing.
They also provided lists of suspected necromancers. Caedmon took the lists from them with thanks and laid them on his desk, a neat stack of good paper in a clerk’s careful hand, and after they had gone he sat for a long while with his palm flat on the top sheet.
Some of the names belonged to genuine field priests. Others belonged to noble rivals, to debtors, and to officials who had attempted to expose Gilded involvement in the rebellion. Nothing on the paper said which was which, and Caedmon, who had no way of telling, knew only that a list given freely was rarely given for nothing, and that he had a decree to carry out.
The Justicar’s Legion did not accept every accusation. It investigated them, carefully and in order, with every finding written down. That was enough. A Veinwright lord publicly accused of necromancy lost his authority even when acquitted.
Merchants refused his coin. Servants left his estate. His neighbours reported every lamp lit in his windows after midnight as evidence of ritual practice, and the Legion, being thorough, investigated those reports as well.
The Gilded Coven had used rebellion to weaken the throne. Now it used law to strip what remained, and the law did not notice that it was being used.
The Shadow Weavers proved even more useful. Their papers came to Caedmon’s desk without ceremony, brought by grey-coated clerks whose faces he could never afterwards have described, and they knew things no one else in Iskandar seemed to know.
They had access to hidden routes, private correspondence and names omitted from official records. They guided Legion inspectors to secret chambers beneath loyalist fortresses, and the inspectors went where they were pointed, and came back with what they had found.
Many of the chambers contained evidence. Caedmon could not know, and the papers did not say, that some of them had been known to the Weavers for years, or that a few had been prepared shortly before their discovery. When inspectors found forbidden remains, the Shadow Weavers never claimed credit. They merely provided another lead, folded once and sealed with plain grey wax.
Their reliability impressed the Legion. It impressed Caedmon, who valued reliability above most virtues and had found very little of it in Iskandar. Their reports impressed the Supreme Ruler, and within the inner court their influence expanded.
In time a dispatch came under the Supreme Ruler’s seal, and Caedmon had three officers check the seal before he read it: the Shadow Weavers were granted authority to assess threats across Iskandar, to question captured agents and to examine messages sent between Veinwright commanders.
The reward promised by the Gilded Coven was taking shape. Every secret uncovered made the Shadow Weavers appear more necessary, and every lead they gave was better than the last.
No one asked why so many secrets had first been allowed to grow. Caedmon signed for the dispatch, had it copied, and filed the copy with the others in the long locked case behind his desk, and outside his window the frost went slowly off the courtyard stones.
King Varyon protested after the arrest of Lady Meren Veinwright, and he heard of that arrest the way he heard of everything now, from a report laid before him in the Hall of Remembrance by a minister who did not quite meet his eyes.
It was snowing outside the narrow windows, a thin dry snow that did not settle, and the light in the hall was the colour of pewter.
Lady Meren was seventy years old and had never commanded soldiers in her life. Her estate contained an ancestral chamber where the preserved bodies of her parents rested according to family tradition, as the bodies of the Veinwright dead had rested for three hundred years. A Gilded report accused her of maintaining undead servants.
Legion soldiers searched the estate. They found no animated dead. They found mortuary texts, ritual knives, sealed organs and records of communion with her ancestors, and every one of those practices was legal under old Iskandari law. Under the Supreme Ruler’s emergency decree, they were evidence of possible necromancy.
Lady Meren refused to surrender the remains. A Justicar captain ordered the chamber sealed. Her household guards resisted, and three men died. Lady Meren was taken to the capital in chains, and the report noted that she had walked to the cart without assistance.
When King Varyon demanded her release, Lord Marshal Caedmon received him in the former separatist council hall. The provincial banners were gone from its walls, and the pale squares where they had hung were still visible on the plaster beside the new white standards of the Legion. That choice of location was not accidental, and Varyon understood it the moment he crossed the threshold.
“You arrested a member of my family for burying her parents,” Varyon said.
Caedmon stood behind a plain table with his hands clasped at his back. “We arrested her after armed resistance to a lawful inspection.”
“You entered her ancestral chamber.”
“We had credible intelligence.”
“From whom?”
“I cannot disclose that.”
“The Gilded Coven?”
Caedmon remained silent.
“The Shadow Weavers?”
“Sources are protected for good reason.”
Varyon stepped closer, until only the table stood between them. “My people are being accused by those who helped destroy this kingdom.”
“Your people are being investigated because corpses marched under their banners.”
“And separatists who butchered Veinwright families now walk free.”
“They do not walk free.”
“Darien Rusk does.”
“He opposed the final unlawful offensive and has cooperated with Legion authority.”
“He led the rebellion.”
“He will be judged.”
“When?”
“When the evidence is complete.”
Varyon laid one hand flat on the table, and the silver veins embroidered on his sleeve caught the grey light. “You possess years of evidence.”
“We possess accusations made by both sides during a civil war.”
Varyon stared at him. “But accusations of necromancy require immediate chains.”
“Because necromancy can create further victims after the original crime.”
“So can rebellion.”
Caedmon’s patience began to thin. Varyon saw it go, not in his voice, which stayed as level as ever, but in the set of his weathered jaw. “I did not come to preserve your throne.”
“No. You came to preserve order.”
“Yes.”
“And if order requires destroying my people?”
The marshal’s face hardened. “No people are above the law.”
“That was not my question.”
Caedmon turned from the table and walked to the window. Outside, Justicar soldiers patrolled streets that had once belonged to the separatist government, white cloaks moving two by two between the shuttered shops, and a few people on the corners stopped talking as they passed. When he spoke again he did not turn round.
“When we entered Iskandar,” he said, “we found children hiding in cellars from rebel raiders. We found loyalist prisoners nailed to trees. We also found graves emptied, bodies bound into walls, and dead men guarding rooms filled with civilians intended for future use.”
Varyon looked away. He had read the same reports, and some of them he had been unable to finish.
Caedmon turned toward him at last. “You ask me to distinguish your traditions from the horrors committed in their name.”
“There is a distinction.”
“Then help me find it.”
“I have.”
“You protect priests.”
“I ordered them arrested.”
“Some escaped through royal tunnels.”
“Without my knowledge.”
“You refused to disarm commanders whose forts contained corpses.”
“Because the rebellion was not ended.”
“You still speak as though every restraint is an attempt to erase you.”
“Because every restraint falls only upon us.”
Caedmon came back across the room and stopped in front of him, close enough now that Varyon could see the fine lines the campaigns had cut around his eyes. “The separatists were defeated in battle. Their councils were dissolved. Their commanders are imprisoned or scattered.”
“Their cause is treated as misguided.”
“Some of it was.”
“And ours?”
“Your cause has become inseparable from what your loyalists did to preserve it.”
Varyon’s voice lowered, as it always did when he meant a thing most. “That is what our enemies wanted.”
“Perhaps.”
The answer surprised him. He had expected a denial, or a lecture, or one of the marshal’s exact and courteous distinctions. He had not expected to be agreed with.
Caedmon went on, in the same even voice. “Perhaps the Gilded Coven manipulated the war. Perhaps the Shadow Weavers concealed truths. Perhaps the separatists committed greater crimes than the reports admit.”
“Then investigate them.”
“I will.”
“But first you investigate us.”
“Because your dead are still walking.”
The king had no answer to that, and he knew it, and so did the man in front of him.
Greywatch remained beyond royal control. Unmarked necromantic bands had been sighted in the east. Bodies were disappearing from battlefields long after the fighting had ended, and no one in the palace could say where they were going. Whatever justification had begun the practice, it had long since escaped the throne.
The catastrophe was real. That did not make the judgment impartial. Varyon stood in the hall that had belonged to his enemies and looked at the pale squares on the plaster where their banners had hung, and could not, for the life of him, have said which of those two truths was heavier.
The Legion marched on Greywatch in the first weeks of spring, when the snow had gone back into the high places and the eastern road was mud to the axles. Lord Marshal Caedmon led the force personally.
King Varyon had offered General Tharos and loyalist troops to assist, and Caedmon had refused, courteously and in writing, because he did not intend to bring men who might hesitate to a place where hesitation would kill them.
He saw the fortress first from the ridge above the valley, on a still, overcast morning that smelled of wet earth and something under it that he did not want to name. It had changed since its first defence.
Black growth covered the stones, crawling up the walls in sheets like lichen grown in a single night. Human shapes stood motionless upon the battlements, hundreds of them, not one moving. No banners flew above the walls at all.
A delegation of Justicar priests approached the gate under a white flag and demanded surrender in the name of the Supreme Ruler. Their voices carried a long way in that silence.
Commander Avel Teren appeared above the gate. He had been dead for months. His skin had tightened against his skull until the shape of the bone showed through it, and black bindings crossed his throat where a living man’s collar would have been.
He wore the same armour in which he had once defended the fortress, dented and dark with old weather, and he stood at the parapet as straight as any officer on parade.
“Greywatch remains loyal to the Veinwright throne,” he said.
The voice did not come from his mouth alone. It echoed from every corpse upon the walls at once, hundreds of dead throats speaking the same words in the same breath, and among the Justicar ranks Caedmon heard the small sound a column makes when every man in it stops breathing.
Caedmon rode forward to the head of the delegation and looked upward. “By decree of the Supreme Ruler, all necromantic practices are forbidden. Open the gates and release the living.”
“The living are protected.”
“By whom?”
“The faithful dead.”
Behind the marshal, Justicar soldiers made signs against corruption, touching brow and breast, and the priests drew their censers close.
Caedmon raised his voice, and it carried back off the black stones. “Who commands you?”
For several moments the fortress was silent. A crow went over, high up, and did not land. Then every corpse on the walls turned its head at the same instant toward the chapel tower, with a sound like dry leaves moving, and Caedmon followed their gaze.
Brother Caldris stood there in his burial cloth, thin as a stick, his blackened hands raised to the grey sky.
“Necessity commands us.”
The gates opened. The dead came out.
There were more than a thousand of them. Loyalist soldiers marched beside separatist corpses, villagers, prisoners and bodies too decayed to identify, all in the same slow, unbroken stride. Some carried weapons. Others had nothing, and fought with broken hands and teeth.
The Legion held formation, and Caedmon, watching the line take the weight and not bend, had never been prouder of anything in his life. The dead struck the shield wall and went on pushing even as the spears went through them. Justicar priests raised their censers of sanctified flame, and white fire spread across the front ranks of the dead like oil across water.
The corpses did not scream. The living soldiers did.
Some among the undead still possessed enough memory to speak. They called out names as they burned and pushed and died again: the names of wives, of children, of commanders, of kings. A dead separatist begged his former comrades to run while his own body clawed at a Justicar shield, his voice breaking with terror, his hands never pausing.
Caedmon ordered the fortress burned.
By nightfall Greywatch was a pillar of flame visible across the eastern provinces, roaring up into the dark with sparks going off it like flocks of birds. The Legion destroyed every body it found.
The chapel collapsed in the small hours with a sound Caedmon felt through the soles of his boots, and Brother Caldris vanished beneath the ruins. No living defenders were rescued. Whether any had remained inside was never known.
The victory confirmed every warning that had brought the Legion to Iskandar. It also destroyed one of the oldest Veinwright fortresses, and Caedmon, standing on the ridge at dawn with the ash drifting down on his white shoulders like grey snow, knew how both halves of that would be told.
To the rest of Ashkar, Greywatch proved that intervention had been necessary. To the Veinwright loyalists, it proved that the Legion would burn their history to cleanse their crimes.
Both conclusions were true.
After Greywatch, the inspections became purges. Lady Elianor Vale rode out to the Legion’s headquarters under her white truce banner twice a week that spring, through streets that smelled of wet ash and new lime, and she came to hate the word that was never spoken there. It was never used officially. The Legion called them security operations.
Mortuary temples were sealed. Crypt priests were detained. Ancestral relics were confiscated for examination, carried out of houses in crates with their contents listed on the lids. Families were required to declare their preserved remains, ritual texts, burial chambers and hereditary practices, and Elianor watched them queue in the cold outside the Justicar offices to do it, clutching papers they could not read.
Failure to declare them was treated as concealment. Possession of forbidden rites became evidence of intent. Association with an accused priest became cause for questioning.
Elianor had once warned the king that the people did not distinguish between sacred tradition and necromancy, and now she sat across tables from men who did not distinguish either, and it gave her no satisfaction at all to have been right.
The Legion believed it was dismantling the structures that had allowed necromancy to spread. Many Justicars acted honourably, and she would not let anyone at court say otherwise in her hearing.
They protected prisoners. They prevented mobs from attacking Veinwright homes. They punished soldiers who stole from sealed temples. They recorded every confiscated object and promised its eventual return, and she believed that most of them meant it.
But law applied through fear does not remain clean. Local informants used the investigations to settle old feuds. Separatist sympathisers accused former loyalists. Nobles accused rivals. Gilded lenders exposed debtors.
Shadow Weavers delivered names without ever explaining how they had obtained them, and Elianor, reading their papers across the marshal’s table, thought of the forged orders at Halren’s Bridge and the riders who had turned on their own infantry, and said nothing, because she had nothing she could prove.
The prisons filled. The innocent went in beside the guilty, through the same doors, in the same carts. To the Legion, this was the tragic burden of restoring order. To the Veinwrights, it was the eradication they had always feared, arriving at last with clerks.
Around the king, the court came apart in three directions. Queen-Regent Ysara withdrew with several noble houses into the northern crypt districts and did not come back to the Hall of Remembrance. General Tharos secretly moved weapons to loyalist strongholds.
Lady Elianor continued negotiating with the Legion, though fewer people on either side trusted her with every week that passed, and some of the old nobility had stopped speaking to her in the corridors.
King Varyon remained upon the throne. The throne no longer ruled Iskandar. Justicar patrols controlled the streets. Justicar judges controlled the prisons. Justicar seals appeared upon royal doors, red wax on the black wood, and the king was consulted as a symbol and ignored as an authority.
Every morning he sat beneath the preserved skulls of his ancestors and received reports of another arrest, and Elianor stood at the foot of the steps and listened with him. One named a priest who had raised soldiers. Another named a woman who kept her husband’s embalmed heart. Another named three children accused of hiding a burial text.
Varyon signed petitions for review. Elianor laid them before him herself, and he read each one through before he signed it, slowly, in the thin light, with his quiet voice asking her the same few questions every time: how old, and where, and who had made the accusation. Some of the petitions were accepted.
Most disappeared into the growing machinery of judgment, and were never heard of again, and every morning there were more.
Darien Rusk was brought before the king once more on a wet spring afternoon, when the rain was running in thin threads down the high windows of the Hall of Remembrance and the thin shafts of light had gone grey and soft as wool.
Varyon watched him come the length of the hall between two Justicar guards and thought how strange it was that the man who had broken his kingdom should look so ordinary walking toward him.
He was no longer wearing a commander’s armour. He wore a worn coat with a darker patch on the breast where the broken crown had been removed, and his beard grew as unevenly as ever, and the scar across his left cheek had gone pale in the cold. Years had passed since they first faced one another through the uprising. Both men looked older.
Varyon dismissed the guards to the edge of the hall. They went, though not far.
“You won,” the king said.
Rusk looked around at the Justicar banners hanging beside the royal standard, white beside black, and his scar tightened. “Did I?”
“The separatists broke the throne.”
“The Legion broke the separatists.”
“And now it breaks what remains of us.”
Rusk’s expression tightened further. “I did not ask for this.”
“You accepted Gilded weapons.”
“So did your chancellor.”
“You worked with them.”
“I believed they wanted the throne weakened.”
“They wanted the kingdom ruined.”
Rusk looked past Varyon toward the skulls behind the throne, the black wax, the sewn gold mouths, and was quiet a moment before he answered.
“The kingdom was already ruined for many of us.”
“And now?”
“Now it is ruined for everyone.”
The king descended the steps, and his dark robes whispered on the stone. “Why are you still free?”
“I am not.”
“Not in chains.”
“Chains are not always made of iron.”
Rusk glanced up toward the shadowed balconies that ran along the upper wall of the hall. Varyon followed his gaze. He saw no one there, only the dark between the pillars and the names of the dead carved into the stone. That meant nothing, and both of them knew it.
“The Legion wants my testimony,” Rusk said, setting the items out one after another in the plain voice of an officer presenting evidence. “The Gilded Coven wants my name attached to the new government. The Shadow Weavers want me to remember only what benefits them.”
“And what do you want?”
Rusk considered the question, as though it were one nobody had asked him for a long time. “To know when the rebellion stopped belonging to us.”
“It never belonged to you.”
Anger flashed across the former commander’s face, quick and hot, the first unguarded thing Varyon had seen in it. “We bled for it.”
“That made you useful. Not powerful.”
Rusk looked away toward the rain on the windows. Varyon lowered his voice until it would not carry to the guards.
“Tell the Legion what the Gilded Coven did.”
“I have.”
“And?”
“They ask for proof.”
“The Shadow Weavers?”
“I never saw their faces.”
“Neither did I.”
Rusk laughed, a short and bitter sound that went up into the vaults and did not come back. “Then perhaps that is how they win.”
The guards returned to take him away. He went with them as far as the middle of the hall, and then he stopped and turned back, and the guards, after a glance at one another, let him.
“I believed surrendering your throne would save Iskandar.”
Varyon stood beneath it, with the twelve skulls at his back. “So did I, once.”
“You never surrendered.”
“No.”
“Then perhaps neither of us believed enough in peace.”
After he was gone, King Varyon remained alone in the hall. The rain had thickened against the windows. Above him the black royal banner hung beside the white standard of the Legion, and a draught from somewhere beneath the floor, from the crypts perhaps, stirred them both.
The two fabrics moved in the same wind.
The final break came at the Tomb of First Kings. King Varyon reached it in the grey hour before noon, on a horse lathered from the road, with the wind coming hard and cold across the high moor and bending the heather flat around the old stones.
He had ridden most of the night. He could smell rain coming, and woodsmoke, and the sour sweat of a great many frightened people standing in one place.
The site was older than Iskandar’s capital. Every Veinwright ruler had sworn the coronation oath there, Varyon among them, a boy with his aunt’s hand heavy on his shoulder, and beneath its stone sanctuary rested the earliest ancestors of the dynasty.
Legion investigators had received intelligence that High Mortarch Selkos had escaped imprisonment and taken refuge within the tomb. The report had come through Shadow Weaver channels, as so many reports did now.
Lord Marshal Caedmon had ordered the site surrounded, and King Varyon had ridden there before the Legion could enter, because he could think of nothing else in the world that he still had the power to do.
He found hundreds of Veinwright loyalists gathered before the sealed doors. Some were soldiers, in black and silver, with their swords already out. Most were families: old men and women in mourning masks, mothers with children on their hips, whole households who had walked out from the villages with their ancestors’ emblems carried before them on poles. They believed the Legion had come to destroy the founders.
General Tharos stood at their head, on the sanctuary steps, in his blood-marked armour.
“You cannot let them enter,” he told the king.
Varyon swung down from the saddle, stiff from the night’s riding. “If Selkos is inside —”
“He is not.”
“You are certain?”
“No.”
“Then move the people.”
Tharos looked out over the crowd behind him, at the children, at the old men leaning on their sticks, and his jaw set. “They will not move.”
Beyond the loyalist crowd, Legion formations blocked every road across the moor, white and still and patient, as though they had grown there. Lord Marshal Caedmon approached the space between the two lines beneath a white flag, on foot, bareheaded, with two officers at his back.
“Your Majesty, order them to disperse.”
Varyon looked toward the families surrounding the tomb. “They believe you will desecrate it.”
“We will inspect it.”
“You burned Greywatch.”
“Greywatch attacked us with an army of dead.”
“They will say the tomb contains weapons.”
“If it does not, it will be returned.”
“When?”
Caedmon’s expression tightened, and for the first time since Varyon had known him the marshal seemed to have no exact and courteous answer ready.
“This cannot continue.”
“No,” Varyon said. “It cannot.”
The king walked out between the two forces, alone, the wind pulling at his heavy robes. Behind him stood the last loyalists of the Veinwright throne. Before him stood the army that had saved Iskandar from the separatists and now held the kingdom beneath its law.
He stopped in the trampled heather halfway between them, where both sides could see him, and raised his quiet voice until it carried.
“No soldier enters the tomb.”
General Tharos drew his sword in salute. The loyalists cheered, a ragged, desperate sound that the wind snatched up and flung across the moor. On the far side, Justicar shields locked into position with a single heavy clap, like a door closing.
Caedmon stared at the king. “You defy the Supreme Ruler’s decree.”
“I defend the graves of my people.”
“If Selkos is inside, he may be raising the founders.”
“Then I will enter.”
“Alone?”
“With those I choose.”
Caedmon looked past him toward the armed loyalists on the steps, the drawn swords, the black and silver. “No.”
The word carried across the field. Varyon heard it go out over the heads of the crowd behind him, and felt them hear it.
For years, he had feared this moment. Not the loss of territory, which he had survived. Not military defeat, which he had survived as well.
He had feared the moment when an outside power would declare that the Veinwrights could no longer be trusted even with their own dead, and now it had come, on a cold moor in the wind, and it had come courteously.
“You came to stop a catastrophe,” the king said.
“I did.”
“You defeated the rebellion.”
“Yes.”
“You restored the roads.”
“Yes.”
“And still you remain.”
“The threat remains.”
“Because you now define my people as the threat.”
“I define forbidden necromancy as the threat.”
“You no longer distinguish between them.”
Caedmon’s gaze moved slowly across the crowd behind the king: the burial masks, the black robes, the ancestral emblems raised on their poles above the heads of frightened children.
“Then help me distinguish them.”
Varyon turned and looked at the frightened families.
They had spent years hearing that surrender meant extinction. Every arrest had confirmed it for them. Every sealed crypt had deepened it. Every lawful order the Legion gave now sounded to them like the first words of their own erasure, and he could see it in their faces, in the way the mothers held the children, in the way the old men gripped their sticks.
Perhaps he could still have dispersed them. Perhaps Caedmon could still have withdrawn. Perhaps the tomb could have been searched by agreement, with the king’s own hand on the door and the marshal’s clerks writing down every bone. But history had consumed too much trust, and there was not enough of it left on that moor to build anything with.
From somewhere within the crowd, a spell was cast. Black light struck the ground before the Justicar line and threw up a spray of earth and burning heather.
No one knew who released it. Some later blamed a hidden Mortarch. Others claimed it was a Shadow Weaver planted among the loyalists. The Legion saw only forbidden magic.
A Justicar horn sounded, long and hard. General Tharos shouted for the loyalists to hold. Varyon, standing alone between the lines with his empty hands half raised, heard the hiss over his head and knew the sound before he understood it.
The first arrows crossed the space between them.
The King’s Peace ended before either ruler commanded it.
The battle at the Tomb of First Kings was brief and brutal, and Lord Marshal Caedmon fought it on foot among his own front ranks, because there was no time to do anything else. The rain that had threatened all morning arrived in the first minutes, cold and slanting, and turned the trampled heather to black slime underfoot.
The loyalists fought to protect the sanctuary. The Legion fought believing that necromancers were attempting to unleash the ancient dead, and Caedmon, with the memory of Greywatch still in his nose, believed it as much as any of them.
Justicar soldiers advanced behind tower shields. The Veinwright defenders used the tomb walls as fortifications, firing down from the old stones, and families fled screaming between the formations with their emblems dropped in the mud.
General Tharos held the sanctuary steps. Caedmon saw him there through the rain, a broad figure in dark armour planted at the top of the stair, and saw a Justicar hammer come down and shatter his sword arm. Tharos took the sword in the other hand and went on fighting. The marshal had seen a great many brave men in his life, and few braver.
“The king,” he said to the officers at his side. “Take him alive.”
He had the order passed in pairs, as he always did, even then.
King Varyon stood before the tomb doors with the sword of the first Veinwright ruler drawn at last. Caedmon saw it from a dozen yards away: an old blade, beautifully made, with bone set into the hilt and the rain running off it.
The blade was ceremonial. It had been made for oaths, not for fighting, and it broke against the first Justicar shield it met, with a high clear sound like a bell cracked in the cold.
Varyon fell beneath the impact and lay still in the mud at the foot of the doors.
When the king woke, the fighting was over. Caedmon was standing over him with the rain dripping from his iron-grey hair, and behind him the tomb stood open.
Inside, by the light of Justicar lanterns, the inspectors found preserved kings lying in their niches, mortuary texts, ritual vessels and chambers prepared for ancestral communion. Caedmon went down among them himself and walked the length of every passage. They found no undead army. They did not find High Mortarch Selkos.
They found one narrow passage, recently opened, behind a founder’s sarcophagus. The stone that had sealed it lay to one side with fresh scrapes on it. Caedmon held a lantern into the opening and saw rough steps going down, and beyond the reach of the light nothing at all.
It led into darkness.
By evening a report had come through the Shadow Weavers, folded once and sealed with plain grey wax, stating that Selkos had likely escaped before the battle. Caedmon read it twice, standing at the top of the sanctuary steps where Tharos had stood, with the rain thinning around him and the dead being laid out in rows on the moor below.
The evidence that had drawn the Legion to the tomb had been accurate enough to justify the search. It had also been false enough to ensure the bloodshed. He folded the report along its crease and gave it to his clerk to be copied.
King Varyon was returned to the capital under guard. He rode in a closed carriage with Justicar outriders on every side, and through a gap in the curtain he watched the moor go by, and then the farms, and then the first streets, where people stood in their doorways to see the carriage pass and did not cheer and did not jeer, but only watched.
The Legion did not depose him. Not yet. Officially, he remained the ruler of Iskandar. In practice, every royal command he gave now required Justicar approval, and came back to him with a red seal on it beside his own.
General Tharos was imprisoned, his shattered arm bound against his chest. Queen-Regent Ysara vanished into the northern districts. Hundreds of loyalists were detained after the battle. The Legion announced a Grand Inquest into necromancy, rebellion, obstruction of justice and crimes committed during the civil war, and its heralds read the proclamation at every crossroads in the kingdom.
The separatist armies had been defeated. The roads had been restored. The dead at Greywatch had been burned. Yet Iskandar was no longer free of war; its war had only changed form. Spears became testimony. Battlefields became tribunals. Loyalty became evidence, and tradition became suspicion, and Varyon could hear the change in his own capital as clearly as he had once heard the warning bells.
The people who had cheered the Legion’s arrival now lowered their voices when white cloaks passed. Some still regarded the Justicars as saviours. Others called them occupiers. Both remembered Lareth Plain, where the Legion had ended the separatist threat. Both remembered the Tomb of First Kings, where it had turned its weapons upon the loyalists.
Lord Marshal Caedmon stood before the Supreme Ruler’s seal in the great square and announced that order had been restored. Varyon heard it from the palace, the marshal’s level voice carried up to the high windows by the heralds who repeated it, every word copied and exact.
Beyond the capital, separatist survivors gathered in the wilderness. Beneath hidden crypts, forbidden priests continued their rites. The Gilded Coven purchased ruined estates for a fraction of their value, one signature at a time. The Shadow Weavers entered deeper into the Supreme Ruler’s confidence, rewarded for intelligence that had exposed danger after danger.
And upon a throne surrounded by silent ancestors, with the twelve skulls at his back and the thin light lying across the black floor, King Varyon finally understood the shape of his defeat.
The Legion had not come to conquer Iskandar. It had come to save it.
That was why no one had known when the rescue ended and the conquest began.
End of Act IV