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And so the fortress that Chancellor Alaya of the Confederation of Praes – a name yet to be officially ratified, but now that the Tribes had given ground she knew where the votes lay – rode had not been granted a name, though it didn’t stop soldiers and servants from calling it the Limping Sister when they thought no one was listening. The sobriquet was apt enough: the construct was smaller than the three behemoths known as the Old Mothers that’d followed Catherine Foundling west, and of the smaller ‘sisters’ this one was by far the slowest.

“An imperfection in the central ritual array,” High Lord Sargon had told her. “Too much bleed, it lets wind buffet the shields and slow us down.”

“And the lights at night?” Alaya had asked, morbidly curious.

“Not ghosts, Your Grace, that is mere superstition,” the High Lord of Wolof had been quick to assure her.

Perhaps a little too quick, she’d thought, and the muttered ‘probably’ she was fairly certain he’d added under his breath had done nothing to reassure her. The uncertainty left her to consider whether being haunted by the giant spiders used to raise the fortresses would be better or worse than being haunted by humans, which sadly was not even the most outlandish question Alaya had been forced to ponder over her many years of rule. That still remained whether or not devils, some of which considered souls a form of currency, should be made to pay taxes over any such gains made within the borders of Praes – and more specifically what the monetary value of a soul should be.

There had been spirited debated over the matter, some of her advisor even noting that if devils paid taxes they might be considered to be citizens of the Empire in some ways, and purely to piss her off Amadeus had returned to Ater with an entire treatise about- Alaya’s stomach clenched. She heard the sound of the knife sinking into flesh, the small gasp as the stood there helpless, and the orc across the table paused in his sentence.

“Your Grace,” General Grem One-Eye said, “is something the matter?”

I think you’d understand, One-Eye, Alaya thought. Better than most, for you loved him too. But she was not looking for understanding, much less comfort. Life had been breathed back into the husk she’d become so that she might serve a purpose, to serve as the bridge between the old Praes and the new, but Alaya of Satus knew better than to call it a second chance. There was too much blood on her hands for that, too many sins for her to answer for – and at the end of her road, the Warden would be waiting with a sword in hand. So what did it matter, that sometimes she came across a familiar turn of phrase in a report and she choked on a sob? She was not meant to escape the shadow she had cast, and so there could be no use at all in confiding in anyone.

Not even someone who’d understand.

“No,” Alaya replied, tone smoothed into calm. “Please continue, general.”

Grem One-Eye slowly nodded, then resumed his report on the estimated timing of the Praesi forces marching to reinforce the Grand Alliance’s siege of Keter. Though in principle the private armies of the High Lords had all been disbanded when the soon-Confederation of Praes was founded in Ater, in practice that had not been feasible. Breaking up the armies and reorganizing them under the command of the Black Knight, High Marshal Nim, would take months that they simply could not spare. Instead the commanders of those armies had been temporarily drafted into the Legions as auxiliaries with their forces under them.

The sheer amount of supply trains that had involved was staggering, given that the armies of the High Lords were themselves made up of the armies of lesser lords, and it had been one of the reasons that Praes’ armies had been staggered into three waves as they began marching west. Some of the house troops were acclimating to the changes better than others and General Grem was not shy in pointing out those that trailed behind: Takisha’s lot were the worst offenders, the High Lady of Kahtan’s already loose grip on her many vassals having further weakened since the Fall. Not that the need to acclimate was in short supply, these days.

Grem One-Eye had taken with good grace his demotion from being the senior military commander of the Empire to being a general under High Marshal Nim for the Confederation, but he could not quite hide the lost look that sometimes flickered across his rough face. While he’d been a prisoner the fate of Praes had passed him by, leaving him to emerge into a strange new world where he was not quite certain where he fit.

Alaya could sympathize.

“Warlord Hakram tells us that the Grand Alliance’s main host will be arriving on the outskirts of Keter within the week,” General Grem concluded, “which puts us in the area of fourteen days behind.”

“Evidently it was the right decision to send the bulk of our sappers with Marshal Nim,” High Lord Sargon said, offering up a boyishly crooked smile. “It is best that the siege works be in full swing when we arrive.”

He’d grown, Alaya thought, into quite a dangerous young man now that his soul was no longer held in a box. Thought outwardly the High Lord of Wolof was dedicating himself to the campaign against Keter with great enthusiasm, Ime had already picked up on his longer game. He meant to gain acclaim from being instrumental to Praes’ contributions to the war: most of the flying fortresses had been raised by Sargon and his cadres of Wolofite mages, or according to Sahelian rituals he’d handed out. Circulating said rituals outside Wolof had been a great gift, and earned him personal regard among mages and highborn beyond the broader gain of having his name associated to every single such fortress.

What he meant to do with the acclaim was still unclear but given the offers he’d already floated to help with the reconstruction of Ater she suspected he was already beginning to position himself as her successor. The people of the capital had long memories and would not soon forget High Lord Sargon Sahelian putting roofs over their heads again. If he bartered his marriage well and remained liked in Ater, well, it was only a matter of courting enough of the greenskin vote for Sargon to serve as the Chancellor after her.

Alaya was not yet sure whether she should help or hinder him. One of many decisions that would have to be taken after the war.

“We have our part to play before lending our aid in the reduction of Keter,” Alaya said. “One just as important as securing the foothold, in some ways.”

Grim nods all around. Procer was falling apart behind them, but the Hellgates opening would turn what was a slow descent into annihilation into a heedless tumble down the cliff.

“Speaking of,” Chancellor Alaya idly said, eyes turning to the last person at the table. “Are we still making good time, Lady Nahiza?”

Nahiza Serrif was not, strictly speaking, a lady – though highborn, she had never been in line for a title. But as one of the most brilliant mages of Praes’ last generation, once a rival to Wekesa and Dumisai of Aksum, she was usually granted the title out of courtesy. Not that the sullen, sour-faced old woman had ever cared. She was infamous for two things. The first was her reluctance to ever leave the mage tower she’d won by killing the Necromancer and making his ghoul army eat itself as well.

The second was her genuinely foul temper.

“Do I look like a ship captain, Chancellor?” Nahiza grunted. “Find a window and look out, if you’re that curious.”

High Lord Sargon cleared his throat.

“I’m told we are on track to arrive in time,” he contributed.

“Cribbed your cousin’s notes to figure that out too, did you?” Lady Nahiza peevishly said.

Sargon was visibly angered by the comment, cheeks reddening, which rather impressed Alaya. It was hard to get under his skin these days.

“Your insinuations,” Sargon bit out, “do you-”

“We’ll get there in time, don’t you worry about it,” Nahiza interrupted, addressing the Chancellor. “With a few hours to spare, I’d say. The sister’s limp is not so crippling when you figure out how to talk to her, no matter how many meddling boys botch their numbers.”

The High Lord of Wolof’s expression further darkened, to Alaya’s private amusement. The old mage was not the most helpful of this informal council, but she did have a way of making even the most tedious meetings entertaining. Still, better to end this before it got out of hand.

“Then I believe the day’s business is at an end and we may adjourn,” Alaya pleasantly said. “I will see you all tomorrow.”

There was some shuffling around the table as they rose and offered the bow mandated by the new modes of etiquette, save for Lady Nahiza who walked out of the room without acknowledging anyone else. The only time General Grem had commented on it, she’d chewed him out for making fun of an old woman’s shrinking bladder and no one had quite dared to call her out on what was most likely – but not certainly – a brazen lie. Alaya did not linger, instead taking to the luxurious halls of the flying fortress at a brisk pace with her personal bodyguards following behind.

Even before it had been known that she would travel on this particular construct it had been one of the most comfortable, the entire central bastion having been salvaged from the ruin of one of the fortresses that Dread Empress Regalia the Second had raised for her invasion of Callow. It had been meant as her personal vessel, but never been used – it’d been sabotaged by the High Lord of Kahtan, as Regalia’s popularity early in her reign had worried many of the High Seats. They’d wanted to blacken her name a little, unaware that the once-promising empress would be largely remembered for starting the Sixty Years War in the centuries to follow.

It’d since served as a sort of fortified mansion outside Ater for whoever held the Tower and been further touched up for comfort, which had made it a natural pick when the Wasteland was scoured for potential fortresses after the Fall. The suite that Alaya had inherited was almost as comfortable as her old accommodations and near as thoroughly warded, which had been a pleasant surprise when she made her home there. Still, it was not why she had chosen this fortress out of all the others. The reason for that was just ahead of her, past a door that opened at her bodyguard’s knock and revealed a dedicated scrying room.

The mirrors and pools were without the frills and ornaments that their equivalents from the Tower had accumulated over the centuries, but no less functional for them. In truth, given that the Grand Alliance – by which she meant Catherine Foundling, staring down the crowns west of the Whitecaps – had shared some of the improvements on the old scrying rituals that’d been made in the Arsenal. It was not the scrying room Alaya had come for, however, but instead the smaller one attached to it. A glorified cupboard crammed with shelves of scrolls and a desk groaning under piles of parchment, with a single seat held out for visitors.

There Ime sat, hair drawn back into a loose braid and wearing a pair of ivory-framed spectacles. She’d always hated reading in magelight without them, and there was no other lighting in her packed archive room. Alaya turned to dismiss her guards with a glance and a smile, stepping into the room and closing the door before sliding into the seat.

“Chancellor,” her spymistress greeted her.

“Ime,” Alaya replied.

It was… not the same as it once had been, between the two of them. Ime had betrayed her. Betrayed her to the only person in all of Praes willing to do anything to keep her alive, but it had still been a betrayal. That changed things. Alaya was not one prone to unconditional trust, but there had been few people alive she trusted as much as the woman on the other side of the desk. That the trust had been shown warranted and not with the same act added shades to the act that the dark-skinned woman was not yet sure how to parse. It did not help she could no longer read her spymistress through the means she once had.

Connect, like her Name and all her aspects, was gone. Never to come back, if the age lines now touching her once perfectly smooth skin was any indication.

“You have news for me?” Alaya asked.

“Word from Duskwood,” Ime agreed. “The Warden has crushed a plot of the Dead King’s to steal the Night, dealt with the rebellion within the drow and now marches on Keter with reinforcements.”

“How many?”

“Fifteen thousand,” she replied. “Many of them Mighty.”

A considerable force, especially after nightfall, though these days thousands of soldiers felt like nothing more than drops in a pond. There were only so many battles that could be fought – won or lost – before the numbers began to feel… unreal. Disconnected from the brutal realities of the war on Keter.

“She wasted no time,” Alaya finally said. “She can’t have been there longer than three weeks.”

“Probably less,” Ime ruefully said, “but then she’s become rather formidable, hasn’t she? Little Catherine Foundling, who would have thought.”

Amadeus did. But then Alaya doubted even he had suspected that his apprentice was to become one of the leading figures of their era – arguably the leading figure. There were others just as powerful or as influential, but none who had their fingers in quite as many pies as the Black Queen.

“I never thought she’d make it this far,” Alaya admitted. “Even when she returned from the Everdark at the head of an army out of legend, I expected her to stumble in Procer.”

“She still lacks polish,” Ime frankly said. “She’s just very skilled at putting herself in situations where it doesn’t matter – and she’ll run out of those, come times of peace.”

Alaya was not so sure. Of all the traits Catherine Foundling had inherited from the man she’d called her father just in time to murder him, perhaps the one that mattered most was the knack to find talent and bind it to her. What will it matter that she lacks polish, when her foremost diplomat is Cordelia Hasenbach? It did not get more polished than the former First Prince, who unlike Alaya had given up her crown with dignity and elegance that could only be envied.

“We’ll see,” Alaya said, then looked away.

The collection of scrolls was not particularly fascinating, but it allowed her the time go gather her thoughts.

“All that’s left is Keter,” she finally said. “It will be our crucible.”

“If the siege fails, the continent is lost,” Ime quietly agreed. “And we’ve begun building ships in Nok, but it won’t be enough even if we hold the Whitecaps for years afterwards. We just don’t have the resources or the sailors to get more than a third of Praes across the sea.”

If that, Alaya thought, and that was if Callow and the Legions volunteered to die to the lost to delay the advance of the dead. She had seen the numbers, though, and she agreed with Marshal Juniper’s opinion: if Procer was lost, so was Calernia. The population of the Principate was simply too large for any army to have a hope of holding against it once the Dead King armed it and sent it after his enemies. Her lips thinned. She had begun it all, she knew. A desperate bargain made with Keter had given the Hidden Horror his opening to come out of his lair.

It would have happened without her, she knew, for the old monster was a deft hand at convincing others to call on him. But it could not be denied that the pact had been her own, and so she had a share of responsibility in all the deaths that had followed from it. It was a dizzying thought, too large for guilt to truly reach her over it – it was simply too enormous a concept for it to be able to feel personal enough for guilt to follow. Oh, and it was a complicated chain besides. Would Alaya have ever struck the bargain, without the Tenth Crusade marching on Praes?

No, and yet how much of Hasenbach’s eagerness for that march had come from her own meddling in Procer? Which itself had come out of fear of Proceran meddling in their affairs, and on and on it went without end. There could be no beginning or end to human affairs, save the First Dawn and the Last Dusk. Everything else flowed from those threads, an unbroken tapestry. Yet Alaya had made a decision and now Calernia teetered on the brink.

That was not nothing.

“We must prepare what we can to flee,” Alaya said, “but I cannot disagree – there would be no mitigating the death blow that would be defeat in Keter.”

“We’re sending the largest coalition army in the history of Calernia after the city, at least,” Ime noted. “There’s never been that large an alliance facing a common foe.”

“It only speaks to the truth that we are all desperate,” the chancellor grimly replied. “Empress Basilia committed the League because she knows she will be unable the win the war by the time it reaches her doorstep.”

She breathed out.

“Lets us not pretend that this is anything but a gamble, Ime,” Alaya said. “We roll the dice on Keter because at least with a roll there is a chance of victory.”

In a more traditional war, there no longer was. That ship had sailed the moment the Proceran fronts collapsed and the dead poured into the heartlands. The odds might be against the Grand Alliance when it besieged the Crown of the Dead, but at least defeat was not writ in stone – and it was the only real chance the nations of the living had to defeat the Dead King.

Unfortunately for them all, the Hidden Horror knew that as well.

“He’ll be waiting for us,” Ime said, echoing her own thoughts. “With all the nastiest tricks he still has up his sleeve.”

And that was the stuff of nightmares, though Alaya’s own would burn green for years to come.

“He always defends Keter most fiercely during crusades,” the chancellor quietly said. “It is the only ground he has never ceded.”

“It’s the only ground no crusade has ever taken,” Ime darkly said.

And so that was their last hope: taking a city that had not fallen in several millennia from the immortal lich that had spent all that time devising fresh blasphemies to defend it.

“This is not a crusade,” Alaya said, injecting confidence into her voice. “And Keter has never faced us.”

The other woman slowly nodded.

“I suppose it hasn’t,” Ime murmured.

Silence filled the room, neither of them pressed to break it. Alaya leaned back into her seat, closing her eyes, and for the first time today allowed herself to feel how fucking exhausted she was. Like string pulled so taut it was beginning to fray. There was always so much to do and she could not afford to rest, not when Maddie had died so she’d get this shot fixing their mess. And she was not sure whether it made her want to sob or laugh, that she could only allow herself this speck of sincerity when shut in this room with a woman who’d betrayed her. A woman she had kept as her spymistress and closest advisor, for all that, because who the Hells else was left?

Alaya had not been one of the Calamities in life, and in death they’d left her behind again.

But there was work to be done, an oath to keep, so piece by piece Alaya of Satus put herself back together again. Her eyes opened and she rose to her feet, meeting Ime’s gaze.

“Tonight,” the Chancellor of Praes said. “Tonight you’ll see why this one is different.”

You and all the Grand Alliance, Alaya thought.

Though the wind whipped wildly at the walls, she did not feel so much as a breeze.

Alaya’s hands gripped the arms of her throne as she sat ramrod straight, her stomach clenching as the fortress plunged through the sky. Lady Nahiza was gigging almost girlishly, sorcery swirling around her in strands so thick they were visible to the naked eye – the old woman kept guiding the construct down, through the clouds that fled under them until there was a hole in night’s roof and moonlight plunged down after them. The city of Sauvion had been levelled by Keter’s Due when the Hellgate was opened mere miles to the north of it, leaving behind only husks that looked like charred bones under the moon’s eye.

The gate itself stood above a bed of ashes, perfect and round and sealed by the sorcery of the Gigantes. Behind some howling Hell waited to be unleashed, the runes burned onto the sides of the gate awaiting to bind the infernal host to the Hidden Horror’s will. An army of tireless monsters, awaiting only the end of the ‘Riddle of the Lock’ to be unleashed.

The fortress shuddered as it hit the ground, force rippling out in a shockwave. Alaya, seated at the very top of the highest tower, saw every detail of it. The clouds of ash and dust that kicked up, the rolling wave of earth and stone the impact sent outwards. The flying fortress landed on the ground of the Principality of Cleves like a hammer’s blow, the few undead that had been close enough to contest the arrival of Alaya’s force crushed and scattered. Coming out of the Twilight Ways high in the sky had given the Original Abomination no warning, and now it was too late.

Lady Nahiza turned towards her, grey eyes wild with warlock’s flee and tanned cheeks flush with pleasure. In her hand, she held a stone orb covered in runes.

“Your permission, Chancellor?” the sorcerers asked.

Alaya’s eyes moved to the Hellgate, staring down the smooth surface.

“Begin,” she ordered.

Sorcery flared, the orb burning bright as the sister-runes in the depths of the fortress sent the signal to the mage cabals that had been preparing the ritual for hours. Alaya had, when she felt the noose tightening around her neck, tried to bargain with a way out for the Grand Alliance: her finest diabolists had agreed that a Greater Breach could not be closed, save perhaps through the wrath of a Choir, but that it could be… added to. Seven days a year, that had been the lock Alaya proposed to add. Devils would only be able to cross during those seven days and nights, buying the Grand Alliance at least another year to deal with the Dead King.

Alaya of Satus, who had once been Malicia, watched the gate as below her sorcery bloomed. The Dead King’s gate, the end of the mistake she’d made that had begun it all. That had cost her almost everyone she loved. But there was one last gesture she could make in the face of that, for while she had been seeking the words of mages Amadeus had been doing the same. Only it was Nahiza Serrif he had sought, asking her entirely different questions.

“So tonight, King of Death,” Alaya said, “listen closely, for you hear our last song. My part and his – half from the grave as is ever your due.”

And magic filled the night as the Riddle of the Lock died, the first step of the ritual coalescing into burning shackles around the Hellgate. Seven nights and seven days, beginning now. Alaya’s refrain, fitted to the song. In the breath that followed the first devil crossed, a hulking shape covered in spikes, but the sorcery was not yet finished. The second step, brazenly mad, began with half a ton of coal was set alight. Smoke billowed out in thick trails through vents, the heat feeding into arrays whose powers mirrored that of the gate. Thousands of aurelii’s worth of the most expensive magical reagents known to man were being expended every thirty breaths, cabals of mages at the beginning of constant rotations spending themselves raw.

The diabolists were stealing the leash on the devils beginning to pour out of the gate, and the sound of it was Amadeus’ refrain.

It would keep going for seven night and seven days, until the gate closed for a year and Alaya sent the thousands of devils that had been stolen north with one order only: make war on the dead. The two of them had shaken the world once upon a time, when they’d been young and the worst of them had not yet caught up to the best.

“One last time, Maddie,” Allie softly said. “You and me against the world.”

Thunder rumbled, but what did she have to fear? She was the one who’d brought it.