Three days later Lord Redmal’s soldiers opened the road-gates to let us cross the border into Attar. Redmal’s grandfather had built a fort across the road fifty years ago to let the folk of Gelleth know they weren’t welcome. Merl Gellethar had flattened it in a dispute a decade before I reduced him to poisoned dust. Attar soldiers now infested the fort’s ruins and watched the Gilden Guard with undisguised awe as they streamed past.

On the map Attar is a sizeable land, but the Engine of Wrong still turns and turns at Nathal as it has for ten centuries, and the north of Attar is a wasteland. I’m told it’s not a poison or disease that keeps men away from Nathal and the lands around it, just a feeling, just the certainty that nothing there is right.

It took a day to cross the Attar hill country, where they keep the vineyards on the southern slopes and grow the grapes from which the Blood of Attar is fermented, a wine found at many royal tables. On the margins of the wine lands, as the hills smoothed themselves out for tobacco fields and small farmsteads, Red Kent came riding back from the column’s vanguard with news.

‘Another guard column ahead, sire,’ he said, as humble and loyal as you please. I think Kent loved being a knight more than anything and, burned as he was, with that scary rasping voice, he made a good king’s fist to send into trouble and to end it.

‘Not the last we’ll see, I suspect. Who is it?’

He paused and then I knew. Who else would it be. I owned every other land east of us until the sea.

‘It’s from Ancrath, a hundred guard.’

The votes of Ancrath and Gelleth, both resting in my father’s hand.

I thought again of falling leaves and wondered if it wasn’t time for another old man, full to the brim with poison, to make that final drop.

11

Chella’s Story

Five years of marching back and forth. Five years scurrying to do the Dead King’s bidding. Always on the edge of things, as far from his court as one could be and still remain in the empire. Chella spent five years wading through mud and shit simply to rise enough in the Dead King’s esteem for him to call her to court and seek an accounting for her failure. And she had come eagerly, racing across the broken empire just to face his judgment, just to stand before the inhumanity of the lichkin and have the Dead King watch her from the flesh into which he had settled deepest. Five wasted years – each one Jorg Ancrath’s fault.

‘There’s a reason I’m having to hurt you.’

Chella walked around the stone pillar, a slow circle, hiding her irritation. The young man followed her with his eyes until the pillar took her from sight. She heard the clank of chains as he craned his head to look for her return. He had blue eyes, like many of these Brettan men, and he watched her as much as he watched the iron needle between her finger and thumb.

‘Where’s Sula?’ He asked his question again. In the few patches without mud his hair showed blond, a golden hue. He met her gaze through locks matted with dirt and blood. Mire-ghouls had taken him and a woman near the Reed Sea during the Dead King’s advance. Sigils on his uniform had marked him as wind-sworn and led him to this inspection.

‘Kai.’ Chella kept her voice tender, moving in quick and close, driving the needle two inches into the muscle of his inner thigh. ‘Kai Summerson.’ Her lips close enough to his ear for the blond hair to tickle. ‘You have to let go of these attachments.’

He ground his teeth together, tension bunching around his jaw. After a moment he looked up again. ‘Where—’

Chella pulled the needle free. ‘Pain helps remind you of what is important. The first important fact is that I don’t have much time to waste on you and if you don’t cooperate quickly I will just give you back to the ghouls and let them eat you piece by piece. The second important fact is that you’re alive and that pain is not the only thing you can feel. I’m offering you a rare chance. Power, pleasure, a future.’

‘Where is S—’

Chella slapped him across the face, hard enough to hurt her hand. ‘Here.’ She didn’t need to speak. She just pulled the thread that bound her to each of her returned. Sula stepped from the shadow into Kai’s line of sight. The ghouls hadn’t left her pretty. Flesh and skin hung in a wet flap revealing her cheekbone, jaw, broken teeth, and the dark stump of her tongue. The dead girl watched Kai without curiosity. He sucked in a breath, gasping a deeper hurt than the needle had yet put in him. Perhaps she’d been his sweetheart. Surely more than a passing fancy.

‘Sula?’ Tears misted his eyes.

‘Oh, grow up.’ Boredom and anxiety nipped at Chella’s heels and neither would help her turn him. ‘She’s dead. You’re not. You can accept her death and find yourself a new direction, or you can join her. The world is changing. Are you going to change with it, Kai?’

Chella flicked her fingers at Sula and the corpse collapsed, ungainly, air belching as her stomach folded.

‘Is she still “your girl”, Kai? Does true love survive where flesh corrupts? What was she to you? A pretty face, a quick panting release? There’s no romance in death, Kai, and death’s the flip side of our coin.’ She ran her fingers up into that blond hair of his. ‘We’re just meat on bones, waiting to rot. Find your pleasure where you will, by all means, but don’t dress it up in sweetness and promises. There’s nothing left to pin your loyalty on any more, Kai. Give it up.’

She took his wrist below the manacle and drove the needle through his palm, past clenched fingers. He cried out then, half a curse, half a scream, starting to break. Soon it would be all scream.

‘W-what do you want?’ He gasped his words past clenched teeth.

‘Me? I want what you should want,’ Chella said. ‘I want what the Dead King wants me to want. The Dead King doesn’t need your loyalty, he just requires that you do what he tells you to do. And when he has nothing for us to do, our time is our own.’

Chella pulled the needle free and licked the blood off it. She slid her other hand down across Kai’s ribs and the hard muscle of his stomach, sweat slick.

‘What do you want me for?’ he asked.

Not stupid this one. And a survivor – at his core a survivor ready to do whatever is needed. Lead him slowly though, step by step.

Chella ran her hand lower. Even survivors balk if shown too much of the path at once. There’s a road to hell that is paved with good intentions but it’s a long route. The quicker path is paved with the kind of ignorance that clever men who just don’t want to know are best at.

‘You have talents that are rare, Kai.’

‘The Dead King wants to recruit sky-sworn now?’

‘Sky-sworn, rock-sworn, flame-sworn, sea-sworn.’ Chella pricked his ribs with each word. ‘They are all sworn, and men who can swear once can swear again. We’re the same, you and I, we reach through into other places. What do you think the necromancers are, Kai? Monsters? Dead things?’

‘You’re dead. Everyone knows necromancers rise from the grave.’

Chella leaned in close, close enough that he could bite her neck if he chose, her lips at his ear once more. ‘Death-sworn.’