… 6th Year of the Reign of the Divine King
… Thalan
Burning ash was falling from the sky.
Striding out to the forefront of her alchemical army, the Geist surveyed the path of ruin left in her wake. They opposed her with swords and shields, only an occasional musketeer among them; it gave her a good laugh as she ordered her phlanx of golems, nearly impervious to their conventional weaponry and tactics, to mow them down like fall wheat. Rank by rank, the defenders of the city were trampled, almost like dominoes set up just for her to topple at leisure.
Tethered to her through means long ago forgotten by those who claimed that alchemy was a wretched perversion, the golems were without their own minds, and so obeyed her without question. The pain she felt transferred to her by the forged bond ached like broken bones and bruises; a great many were damaged or outright destroyed on the march in. But as much as it hurt to maintain control over them, it was nothing compared to the cold satisfaction numbing the pain as she walked over the corpses of the fools who followed the so-called Divine King.
The burning wreckage around her now was Thalan, the Divine King’s remade capital. He re-christened it with a new name after murdering the true king and claiming the throne for himself a decade before. As a child, her father called it the City of the Thrones, and he said it was because every king and queen had their bones entombed in the seat they ruled from, then enshrined in the great cathedral at the center of the city. Even after his death, she remained curious about this cathedral her father spoke of, wondering why people could care so much about things that were absolutely meaningless the moment they were dead.
Taking care of a chair, she thought, was an awful waste of time and resources.
A few hours before sunrise, she marched her golem army straight through that cathedral and ground it into nothing more spectacular than a pile of stone rubble over countless tons of silver, gold, and jewels. Not a throne remained in one piece following her rampage. No doubt the same people that admired the lines of gaudy chairs in the past were now sifting through the wreckage to claim what they could and flee into the countryside, trying with everything they had left to escape the army tearing down the city piece by piece.
All that mattered now was she could see him atop his tower, wearing his five-pointed crown of steel and gold stolen from the severed head of the last Emperor of Leheit. It glimmered, as if to mock her in the dawning sunlight, the perfect target for the archers and musketeers marching up behind her in the shadows of her golem shields.
Wisely, the man fled as soon as he saw her standing on the battlefield, no doubt to disappear into one of the many escape tunnels that existed throughout his last stronghold. Long ago, her father showed her sketches of the castle he grew up in, the same castle before her now. The kings and queens who built it up or expanded upon it over the centuries had been absolutely paranoid; the secret passageways were labyrinthine and numerous, and no one had known of all of them in well over a hundred years.
The hunt, she thought with a cruel smile, is on.
“The last of Zelig’s army has surrendered, my lady.”
She glanced to her left and saw her general leaving the ranks where he preferred to lead. Even though he always called her “my lady” in public, she heard the name he christened her with soon after he joined their forces. He called her Morveren, the legendary black bird from Geist mythology—the inescapable messenger of Death. Legends said it was the moor raven that went forth and collected the eyes of the dead, to be tallied by its master so room could be made for them in the underworld. She never collected anything from the dead herself, but being called by such a name did much to keep the mundane people afraid and well away.
There were only a few people she could stand to have in her company these days, and Gideon was the first among any of them. He did not cower before her like the soldiers; wasn’t insane like Seraphina, or a gutless wormtongue, like Christofer. Gideon preferred the company of his hawks and falcons, and she preferred his quiet and easily underestimated presence at her side. He always spoke the truth; such a thing she could not get from anyone else these days, even from the man whose life she saved, who now lead them to victory over their mortal enemies.
He waited for a minute more before asking, “What do you wish to do with them?”
Morveren glanced back up at the tower that Zelig fled, then looked back at her general and shrugged. “I don’t care. I came here for the king. Let Kilian decide what to do with his lackeys.”
She didn’t miss the man’s face grow sickly and pale at her dismissal of the prisoners. “My lady, Kilian will surely use them—”
The Geist turned on her heels and stared into the man’s gray-green eyes. “I don’t care!” She seized his elbows and attempted to shake some sense into him. Anyone else would have cowered beneath her focused gaze, but Gideon always faced her without fear. That was why she preferred his presence. “Zelig is so close, I can feel his blood on my hands, Gideon—I will rip his heart out like he did Mother’s, and then I will feed his mangled carcass to every crow between here and the sea! It will be GLORIOUS!”
“If you’re going to catch him, you best move your feet.”
Morveren turned and saw the half-ivory, half-onyx mask of her second-in-command, slightly marred by flecks of the enemy’s blood. Unlike the rest of her followers, the woman viewed using muskets and arrows as uncouth. If she would take a life, she did it at a distance from where she could look them directly in the eye. That was why the alchemist tolerated her presence; few were the people with the stomach to look into the faces of dying men.
Pointing to the castle battlements, she said, “You’re coming with me, Sigrid. I need your sight.”
The woman pulled her fingers through her long tail of silvery-blond hair to free it of the knots of battle and nodded. “You need to decide what to do with the prisoners first. You know what Kilian will do to them.”
“Let him experiment,” muttered Morveren. “As if I care if a few more of Zelig’s fools have their souls ripped out.”
“You should care.” Her voice became scolding and matronly in an instant. “He’s bastardizing your mother’s gift and pissing on her legacy every time he uses it to tear a soul out of the Living Time to create those things.”
Incensed, the alchemist snapped and clutched air with her fist, sending Sigrid flying backwards as an ear-rending pop exploded behind her. All the atmosphere within the area she focused on compressed itself at her command and drug the woman away into the abruptly created vacuum. The general’s mask fell away, revealing the beautiful, unscarred face of a Geist with pale blue-on-black eyes and a scolding countenance so similar to her mother’s, it forced Morveren to look away. Seeing Sigrid’s true face was like peering back through the years before everything went wrong, and that was a place she could not be until she was finished exacting her revenge.
“My lady,” said Gideon softly, falling to one knee before her, “please, if nothing else, order them executed. They fought well and do not deserve to suffer.”
Morveren stared down at the man, then nodded and pointed off to where she knew the army’s stragglers would be herded. “Go, tell Pholias I have ordered him to shoot them dead and burn them. In that order.”
The man lowered his head briefly, then stood and took off at a sprint in the direction she indicated. In seconds, he was lost in the still-settling dust that drifted lazily between the half-decimated streets of Thalan. By the time he disappeared, Sigrid righted herself and replaced her mask, once again staring at her from behind a black-and-white featureless mold of her own face.
“What will you do once Zelig is dead?”
The Geist looked back at her army of golems, closed her eyes briefly, and severed her connection to them with a thought. Bereft of purpose and direction, the creatures all slouched in unison, becoming mere lumps of stone and steel lined up in a phalanx formation in the middle of what was the city’s main market square. They would stay there until she needed them again, or until time and weather rusted and eroded them into nothing.
“Auriana.”
“He still breathes,” she answered Sigrid in a cold tone. “I am reserving future decisions for when that statement becomes false.”