A Practical Guide to Evil

When was the last time I’d gone even six months without sleeping in a tent?

The thought amused more the more I thought about it. Elizabeth Alban, the ol’ Queen of Blades herself, had conquered the closest thing there ever was to a Callowan empire before the Watch slit her throat in her bed. My war record had led people to compare us on occasion – apparently there was a ballad and everything – but I actually figured I had more in common with her successor: Richard the Elder. They only started calling him the Elder in later histories, see, after he named his eldest son Richard as well. At the time they’d called him ‘Richard Saddlesore’. The sobriquet was well-earned, considering he’d spent nearly all his reign moving from one side of his realm to another putting down rebellions.

Most everything the Queen of Blades had conquered west of the Whitecaps rose up the moment she died, and then Callowan nobles afraid of the growing power of the Albans promptly crowned his cousin the moment he crossed the mountains to handle said revolts. Praes had inevitably thrown its hat into the ring when they smelled blood, of course, never mind that they’d just gotten whipped back into the Wasteland under Regalia II. King Richard the Elder had actually done pretty well at staving off the collapse of his inherited ‘empire’ for a generation, only ceding independence to a few western territories, but by the time he’d died in his late thirties it’d been almost a decade since he’d last set foot in his own capital.

It’d been much shorter than that, for me, but I couldn’t deny that I’d spent most of my reign as Queen of Callow outside my kingdom. There was always another fire to put out, wasn’t there? I raised a small cup of wine in the air, drawing a raised eyebrow from Akua.

“You and me both, Richard,” I muttered. “May we rest our buttocks in the next world.”

There was a moment of silence.

“I’m not touching that,” Vivienne decided.

Hakram, the sole loyal soul in this nest of traitors, raised his cup of water to match my toast and we drank. The four of us had convened in my tent, around the beautiful table that Indrani was still adding to. The last relief was parts of the Battle of Hainaut, and I was always careful to sit on the other side. Robber would have loved the sight of him striking a match and the Dead King’s plans going up in flames, but I still couldn’t look at the carved goblin face without my gut clenching. There were quite a few seats prepared, since even before most of us stayed for the upcoming war council we had a report to entertain. We couldn’t really finalize our plans for the night without Masego’s seal of approval.

The phalanges had notified us he’d returned through the Ways and Zeze wasn’t the type to go wash and change before reporting, so I wasn’t even halfway done with my cup by the time he swept in past my guards. His informal pupil followed, my waved hand stopping the legionaries from taking issue with it, and I rolled my eye at Masego as he dropped himself into the seat across from me. The black robes he still wore had a subtle gold filigree, nowadays, but aside from that little of him had changed since he’d first become the Hierophant.

He still bore the same long braids inlaid with trinkets, wore the same black silk eyecloth over his burning glass eyes – nowadays a match to the one I wore over the eye the Hawk had taken from me – and wore the same comfortably worn old boots. The only change was that he’d begun to grow a beard: still glorified stubble, for now, but it rather suited his face and made him look older. A little like his father, actually, though the Warlock’s beard had been much fuller. He looked tired but in a good mood, which I took as a good sign.

“The warding scheme has changed from what you outlined, Akua,” Hierophant said.

Behind him, already forgot, his recent shadow was shuffling about on her feet awkwardly. The Apprentice, the young Ashuran mage known as Sapan, was coated in dust from head to toe and visibly exhausted. He’d probably made her do all the groundwork, I thought with a twinge of amusement. She looked hesitant to take a seat at my table without an explicit invitation, so I took pity on her and caught her eye before nodding in invitation. She bowed her head in thanks, sliding into a chair even as Masego helped himself to a pitcher of magically cooled water with equally magically obtained lemon quarters floating in it.

If you counted sending a cohort of goblins to empty High Lord Sargon’s orchards as magic, anyway.

“It was a possibility, as I mentioned when we discussed the matter,” Akua replied. “Yet the central patterns remained the same, I expect?”

Masego drank deep of his cup of water, filling it again almost immediately and not noticing Apprentice’s hand inching halfway towards it before she drew back with a sigh.

“More or less,” Masego agreed. “They mostly made changes to more strongly close off entry by Arcadia or the Ways. Recent modifications, about as old as the Arsenal. I imagine the city will have received the same work.”

We’d expected as much, but it was useful to know both those options were off the table if it came to an assault on Wolof.

“You managed it anyway,” I said, half a question.

Under the cloth he rolled his eyes at me.

“It was not that sophisticated a ward,” Masego said. “Of course I cracked it, Catherine. It’s done, and it was subtle enough they won’t notice.”

He mulled over things for a moment longer, dutiful in his attempt to make a report – though apparently not dutiful enough to ever read the text about how to give them the Legions had written. Not for lack of opportunity, since Juniper still had a scroll thrown into his tent at least once a month. I was pretty sure Indrani was making a pyramid.

“Sapan crawled uphill for half an hour under an illusion to place my artefact against the bottom of the wall,” Hierophant noted. “She did well. She should get a raise.”

Apprentice look startled and a little flattered, but there was one detail wrong there. I cleared my throat, but Hakram took one for the team and spoke up first.

“We don’t actually pay her,” Adjutant informed him.

Masego eyed me skeptically, brow rising.

“Is that slavery?” he asked. “We’re against that, I feel. I’m against that.”

“We’re against slavery,” I confirmed. “There’s laws and everything.”

He seemed pleased at me personally, like I actually had anything to do about that.

“Experience could be considered to be her compensation,” Akua suggested.

Well, she had been Evil for decades. That was bound to leave marks.

“Spoken like someone who’s never had to pay taxes in their damned life,” I muttered under my breath.

Her lips quirked in a sly smile but she did not deign to answer my accusation. Gods, now I had to pay the girl otherwise fifteen-year-old me would have slit my throat over it. Mind you, that girl had never been one to mind a bit of knifing so it wasn’t as strong a remonstration as you’d think.

“We’ll put aside a stipend for you on top of what the Grand Alliance already offers,” I told Apprentice. “Your help in this is much appreciated, Sapan.”

The dark-haired girl licked her lips, nervous, and nodded.

“May I – Your Majesty – could I… trade that for an hour a day with Lord Hierophant’s grimoires?” she hesitantly asked.

I turned an eye to Masego, who actually looked rather charmed. He’d taken well to her since Hainaut, I suspected it was half the reason Hanno had agreed to lend her to us – the other half being Arthur had come along too and the two were thick as thieves.

“Keep her out of the dangerous stuff,” I said.

“Of course,” he immediately agreed, sounding surprised.

Ah, my mistake.

“Akua,” I said, “please go with them and tell him what the dangerous stuff is.”

“I feel like the situation has gone in someway disastrously wrong, when I am called upon as the voice of sorcerous restraint,” the golden-eyed shade noted, but she was still smiling.

“Tell me about it,” I sighed.

She rose smoothly, offering me an ironic bow I rolled my eye at, and linked an arm with Masego as he did the same. They immediately started arguing in Mthethwa about what qualified as ‘safe’ – Zeze was insisting that the smiting spell was exactly that, so long as you kept it aimed at the enemy – while Sapan followed suit after affording me a deeper bow.

“I’ll see to the stipend,” Adjutant gravelled. “And extract a fuller report out of them while you two handle the war council.”

Though the Night had been shattered and broken first by the Dead King’s sorcery and then Hierophant’s even harsher mercy, I had still been bound to the power in a deep and intimate way. Night came slower these days, and it was granted only by the will of the Sisters where once it had flown freely, but the mark of Sve Noc on my soul had not waned. I could still sense the coming of night like a sixth sense, through that strange instinct that was inhumanly accurate. And what I sensed told me that, as usual, Hakram was right. Nightfall was only two hours away, which meant we’d be cutting it close if we didn’t split to attend to our duties.

“Much appreciated,” I replied.

We rose to follow the others after scratching a few notes on parchment with his bone hand, sending in a few phalanges after him to prepare the tent for the war council. Juniper, as was her habit, came in half an hour early to make sure everything was to her tastes. I’d forgotten how tall she was, in our years physically apart: she still had almost two feet on me, and she was built thick. With that grim, broad face and the sharp white fangs she made for an even more imposing sight than before now that we were older. Which made it all the more of a contrast when Aisha followed in behind her, the very picture of a quintessential Taghreb beauty with her carefully styled hair and elegant smile.

“Move the maps away from wine carafe,” Juniper ordered a phalange in a growl. “Whose bright idea was that?”

“Good evening, Catherine,” Staff Tribune Aisha Bishara greeted me.

The faint exasperation at her friend and superior’s growling about was a worn and beloved habit, almost made a game between them from years of use.

“Aisha,” I grinned back. “Juniper.”

She turned to look at us, almost surprised, and nodded.

“Catherine, Vivienne,” she curtly replied.

Vivienne was no more offended than I, the two of us well used to the Hellhound’s ways. At times, though, it felt like she was being twice as hard as she used to be to make up for the way she’d been knocked out of the war for two years. Even now Aisha had told me that she visibly trembled when exhausted and slept uneasily at least a few nights a month. I wouldn’t have placed her in command if she were any worse, even if she would likely never have forgiven me for that, but sometimes I was still… concerned. I kept it to myself, though. There was no doubt in my mind that she’d see it as an insult.

Our war council streamed in, either early or on time. General Zola Osei, Hune’s successor who’d ended up as Juniper’s second in the cobbled together First and Second Army we’d taken east – some had taken to calling it the Fifth as a jest. Grandmaster Brandon Talbot for the Order, and for the Dominion the two lordlings that Tariq had placed in my care before his death: Aquiline Osena and Razin Tanja. Named, too, though their seats were lesser ones. Alexis the Argent, the Silver Huntress, and Arthur Foundling with her. The Concocter didn’t usually show to meetings like this, but the Barrow Sword did and seated himself by Vivienne. Ishaq would have been a good pick to leave out west, but I had a purpose for him here: it wasn’t a coincidence I kept making him work with the Blood. The Grey Pilgrim had asked three boons of me, and I intended on seeing all of them through.

“Let’s not waste time,” Marshal Juniper of Callow began, voice rough. “Night’s coming and we have a schedule to keep. We received confirmation from Hierophant that the assault on Jinon is feasible, so we’ll be going through with it.”

Wolof was, in part, fed water by an aqueduct whose source was in the hills to the northeast of the city – the Jinon Hills. The place where the structure connected with the city walls was fortified, naturally, but so was the source in in the hills that the water flowed from. A small but solid and heavily warded fortress had been raised there, over an underground basin where overflow could be directed to when heavy rains struck the aqueduct hard. There shouldn’t be more than two or three hundred soldiers there but all my officers were in agreement that the fortress of Jinon – I’d yet to get a definitive answer on whether the hills were named after the fortress or the other way around – would be a nightmare to assault.

Tall and heavy walls, steep slopes all around and there was bound to be a heavy mage contingent garrisoned. We could take the fortress by assaulting the walls, there was no doubt about that. We had the numbers. But it would be very costly in casualties and we honestly couldn’t afford that. We were already going to be starkly outnumbered in the latter parts of this campaign, throwing away lives on a hard assault would be sheer stupidity. We did need the place, though, in part to pressure Sargon and also because it was crucial to some other schemes I had in mind. Which was why I’d sat with Juniper and Pickler to plot Jinon’s fall, and then sent Masego ahead to make sure what we intended was possible.

“I’ll be leading that part of our offensive personally,” I said. “For that purpose, I’ll be taking two cohorts, our false guards and whatever warband Lady Aquiline deems fit to grant me.”

Which, given how Levantine honour worked, would lead her to…

“I will go myself,” Aquiline Osena replied without hesitation. “And take my slayers as retinue.”

There we go, I thought. One of them with me to keep an eye on, and I’d pass off Razin to Hakram and the Barrow Sword.

“Good fit,” I nodded, and she straightened her back some.

It was true, even if it wasn’t the only reason she’d picked her most prestigious unit to take into battle with me. Levantines were surprisingly good at night work and surprise approaches, I’d found, which I really should have expected given that they spent most of their time raiding each other back in the Dominion.

“Taking Jinon will be tricky work,” Juniper said. “It could go badly for us if Wolof tries a sortie at our back while it happens. Which is why we’ll be drawing Sargon’s attention elsewhere as that attack happens.”

She tapped a finger on our map of Wolof and its outskirts, everyone’s eyes following towards the west. It was the fishing villages by the shore of the Wasaliti she was indicating. Sinka, they were commonly called. There was no port proper for Wolof – nowhere near enough river trade to warrant it – so it was all very informal, with the Sahelians effectively owning one of the villages and keeping their own barges there while the rest of the villages were left in the hands of merchants and locals under the loose supervision of an appointed seneschal.

“The Sahelians no longer have a significant river fleet, courtesy of Princess Vivienne during the Liesse Rebellion,” Juniper continued, which drew some laughs and cheers, “but Sinka is still a major asset to the city. It’s a source of fish and lumber – they send people across to cut from the Greywood – and they import goods from further south through it. It will be a blow for them to lose the district. Fortunately, its defences are limited. General Zola, if you would?”

The dark-skinned woman cleared her throat.

“Our scouts have confirmed a garrison of around five hundred, most of them household troops,” General Zola said. “The walls are mud brick and wood, and only three of the five villages have them. The barracks are reinforced, however, and built to be defended. There are also two watchtowers, so we can safely assume we will be seen approaching.”

From the corner of my eye I saw Arthur leaning forward, itching to ask a question but holding himself back. Going wider, I saw incomprehension in the eyes of the Blood and even Ishaq. I raised a hand, stopping Zola before she could continue her briefing.

“Squire,” I said. “Out with it.”

His eyes widened for a moment, but he gathered himself quick.

“Why are you so sure we’ll be seen, ma’am?” he asked the general. “It’ll be under cover of dark and we have scrying countermeasures.”

Ah, so that was it. I glanced at Zola, silently indicating I was going to cut in. I forgot, sometimes, that he was young. And that some of the people at this table had never truly had to consider what it would mean, going to war with Praesi.

“Aisha,” I idly said, “would you please put your hand to a candle?”

A few people raised their voices to object in surprise and she gave me a dry look for the dramatics, but the tent went silent when she placed her hand over the open flame without so much as a twitch. She drew it away after a few heartbeats, revealing to all smooth skin unmarred by burns.

“This is the Dread Empire of Praes,” I flatly said. “We’ve gotten used to having the upper hand in sorcery, fighting out west, but leave that behind you: we’re now facing the makers of all the spells we cribbed. It’s in the blood here, Squire. If they don’t have a spell then they’ll have someone whose blood lets them see in the dark, or a monster that smells the wind, a pack of flying devils or a hundred other things. They’ll see us coming, count on it. It’s what they do.”

I’d not meant it to, but I caught a certain amount of pride in the bearing of my Praesi officers after the tirade. I couldn’t begrudge them that, I thought. Where you were born, is stayed with you. Good and bad. And in the end, I had not forgotten it was not only my countrymen who had joined the voices to the tune of In Dread Crowned when we marched on Dormer. There was a difference between hating the high lords of Praes and hating Praesi. I passed the proverbial baton back to Zola, who finished outlining what we knew of Sinka’s defences as well as the plan of attack.

It was a fairly simple straightforward thrust with three thousand foot from the south, led by Vivienne but commanded by General Zola herself, with a screen of goblin skirmishers up front. Another two thousand foot, half of them Levantine and under the overall command of Razin Tanja, would move between the city and Sinka to dissuade a sortie. They’d have the two thousand horsemen of the Order of Broken Bells waiting in the wings for support. We’d keep a loose reserve of three thousand to throw at either battlefield, just in case. Afterwards it came to distributing Named, and there I took the lead again.

“The Silver Huntress will lend her skills to our skirmishers, though she will remain an independent command free to act as she sees fit,” I laid out. “Squire and Apprentice will accompany Princess Vivienne, under her authority. The Barrow Sword will go with Lord Razin. The Hierophant will be accompanying me, and as usual the Concocter is not to be considered a combat asset.”

Lady Alexis worked better when left alone when she wasn’t the leader, I’d found. Not unlike Archer, though both would resent the comparison. As for the two young Named, this was as much about them keeping Vivienne’s head on her neck as it was the other way around. Admittedly, when it came to Arthur I did have other motives. Getting him used to obeying my chosen successor was a necessary precaution, as far as I was concerned, especially now that the Jacks had established that a dynastic marriage was a dead end should he become a locus of opposition. Finding that out had been relatively simple: we’d sent one of the Jacks around his age to make advances, he’d gently let her down by telling her he was not interested in women that way.

Adjutant had insisted I could have simply asked, but this was probably safer. The Squire might not easily figure out why he’d been asked the question, but he’d know people with stronger insights into Callow’s politics who very much would.

“Expect surprises,” Juniper gravelled, concluding the council. “We’ll be surprising them too, but don’t forget for the moment they had the same day to plan that we did.”

I toasted to that, finally polishing the last of my wine, and to war we went.

I didn’t like being blind, and I didn’t mean in the losing-an-eye-sense.

Although, to be fair, I wasn’t enamoured with that one either. What I meant, though was that I’d gotten used to being able to rely on Night to get a good view of the battlefield even as fights were happening. Unfortunately, drawing on that kind of power so close to mages of the calibre Wolof was going to field would be like unveiling a lantern in a black pit. Impossible to miss. Being robbed of that view was making me restless, though, especially since I was distinctive enough in appearance that I couldn’t be on the front seat of either of the large ox-drawn wagons going up the smooth hillside path. It was pretty comfortable huddled out in the back, at least, except for the part where Masego was absolutely demolishing me at shatranj.

“How is everyone I know so good at this game?” I complained in a whisper, losing my last mage to a pin.

“I still play with Indrani regularly,” Zeze informed me just as quietly. “Although you have always been terrible at this.”

“I’m pretty widely known as a cunning schemer, Masego,” I told him, a little affronted.

I sent a knight forward, hoping to at least make my death throes interesting. If I had to lose to him a fourth time in a row, someone was going to get killed.

“Yes,” he happily acknowledged. “One who just lost her chancellor. Kingtip in three.”

I cursed, and it was an awfully close thing when I decided against the cart suddenly shaking and toppling the board by happenstance. Damned thing was enchanted to stick anyway, I wouldn’t be fooling anyone. The two of us were playing in the dark, since it was as day to our common sum of exactly one meat eye. We were nestled between the kind of barrels and crates that Wolof used to send oil and foodstuffs up to Jinon, though naturally they were actually full of soldiers. Who I hoped we’d been whispering quietly enough had not all heard me getting repeatedly brutalized at shatranj by my own court wizard.

There were only twenty soldiers by wagon, since more would drag noticeably on the road, but we had more forces at hand. Some of them were even visible. Armours the Callowan treasury had kept since the Doom of Liesse had been brought out of the vaults and polished up, meaning that the thirty handpicked Soninke legionaries making up our drivers and foot escort of the wagons were in genuine Sahelian household armour. That ought to sell the illusion some, though I wouldn’t be relying entirely on it. We had more forces out there in the hills, hidden. Part of it was a cohort of regulars we’d walked out of the Ways out of easy detection range and then snuck closer to the fortress, while the rest was Aquiline Osena’s handpicked slayers. Two hundred of them.

Those moved around like shadows, probably the finest human sneaks I’d seen – not quite in the league of goblins, but close.

Our wagon began to slow and I cast a glance at Masego, whose eyes swivelled in their sockets. He nodded. We had arrived. As Hierophant began putting away the shatranj board I swallowed a groan of pain and began wiggling around until I had my elbows on a crate and could discreetly look out the front of the wagon. Sergeant Kadeem was a large and bulky man, enough so that I’d heard a few jokes about him being a dark-skinned orc, but he was deft with the reins. His family were travelling traders, apparently. Moving slightly to the side of him to get a better angle, I had my first close up look at the fortress of Jinon. Heavy stone blocks, I noted, granite that looked to have been fitted together without mortar.

No wonder Pickler had been adamant trebuchets wouldn’t do much.

I studied the gatehouse that’d be our way in closely, as it was the key. Two squat bastions crowded a gate wide enough for a cart to pass and then some, pale yellow magelights hovering above it. There were two sets of gates, both thick wood barded with steel, but they were open: only the portcullis in front of them both was down. From above, the gatehouse rampart, I hard voices hailing us in Mthethwa. It was Captain Diara who answered them – we’d picked her because she was native to Wolof and cold-blooded by reputation – and she put irritation in her voice as she told them to hurry up so she could unload the goods and leave. Masego got closer to me and I glanced at him curiously.

“My amendment to the wards appears to be intact,” Hierophant murmured.

I nodded. So far, so good. The guards above insisted there had been no planned supply run, which was true, but we’d thought ahead: Captain Diara waved around papers she informed them were proof, signed by her superior in the city. Hakram was a splendid forger and Akua had helped get the details right, should they actually bother to look at them. See, if we were infiltrating a Proceran fortress then the papers would be what they looked at. This was a Praesi fortress, though, so when the agitated guards went to get their office the man in question scoffed and ordered one of them to go tell a scrying mage to contact the city for confirmation.

This would be where the plan fell apart, if I hadn’t brought Hierophant along.

We waited for some time, Masego’s eyes on the sky, and eventually there was a subtle ripple of power as Hierophant wrested the scrying spell the slightest pit, pulling apart the magic so it failed. Thrice more they tried it, and Masego played it artfully: on the second try he let it pass through for a moment, severing the connection late. We were pretending that the city was under magical attack, that it was why the spells weren’t working. Captain Diara, meanwhile, pretended to grow increasingly agitated. She asked for names, claimed she would speak to her relatives in the High Lord’s service about this, cursed them for lazy incompetents. I was impressed, she was definitely getting a commendation. We’d been at this for more than half an hour now, so the officer who’d ordered scrying fell back on the tried and true method of all career soldiers: he kicked the problem up the ladder.

“Describe me the armour of the officer they went to get,” I asked Masego.

He did, quietly, and my lips thinned. That was the fortress’s commander, for sure. They’d not wasted time going to the top, then. The woman in question, who introduced herself to Captain Diara as Lady Semira, proved to be a calming presence. She ordered for soldiers to take position behind the portcullis and then told Diara to come forward alone with the papers proving she was truly here under orders. So now we’re putting Hakram’s forgeries to the test, I thought. Diara didn’t hesitate, passing the papers before the portcullis closed anew and they were sent up to Lady Semira.

“These appear to be in order,” Lady Semira said, looking down from above.

If I bent, I could make out a glimpse of her standing above. Tall and imperious, with eyes a hue between yellow and brown.

“Is there a particular reason, Captain Diara, that this run was not handled by Tabansi instead?” she asked.

I tensed.

“Didn’t ask, my lady,” Diara replied. “If it doesn’t help me get back into bed, it’s not my concern.”

“So I see,” Lady Semira replied, tone amused. “It will only be a moment, captain.”

I breathed out. Had we gotten away with it?

“She is gesturing at soldiers,” Masego told me, studying the scene with his eldritch eyes. “One just went towards the barracks. Others are being told to… head towards the gate?”

Evidently we had not gotten away with it. It was the second string to our bow that’d make or break this.

“Progress?” I quietly asked Hierophant.

“Not there yet,” Masego replied.

Sighed. That meant there was only one thing for me to do. I cracked the side of my neck and dragged myself up.

“Signal me when the time comes,” I asked him.

I dropped into the front seat next to Sergeant Kadeem, who hid his startlement well. I pulled the Mantle of Woe tight around me and went rifling through the pockets, finding my pipe with a little noise of satisfaction and unceremoniously beginning to stuff it with wakeleaf. I handed Kadeem a match and he gallantly struck it on his arm before lighting my pipe for me. Good man.

“Tell everyone to be ready to fight,” I murmured around the rim. “Soon.”

He froze then nodded, retreating into the back of the wagon and leaving me to pull at my pipe under the stare of the soldiers up on the rampart. I breathed in deep the of the acrid smoke, letting it sear my lungs before I spat it back out in a stream. Up there, behind the crenelation, Lady Semira was watching me through narrowed eyes as her fingers tightened around the stone until the knuckles paled. Even out east it seemed that my reputation preceded me.

“Black Queen,” the commander greeted me, voice laudably even. “It seems we now dispense with the deceptions.”

I shrugged.

“What was it that gave it away?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“Captain Tabansi was publicly drowned last week, for having stolen Sahelian goods and sold them on the black market,” Lady Semira said. “The entire garrison was made to watch.”

Which, admittedly, would make it difficult to lead a supply run. Not impossible, mind you. This was Praes.

“That’d to it,” I ruefully said.

If we’d had Scribe with us I might have heard of even a relatively minor incident like that, but I’d sent her off with Archer. It had paid off in other ways, but there were costs to everything.

“I am under orders to avoid fighting you if I can, Your Majesty,” Lady Semira told me. “Your ploy was well-crafted, but it has failed. My soldiers are on the walls and my mages awake. I would invite you to withdraw, and offer my oath no attempt will be made to hinder your departure.”

I smiled, because I knew something she didn’t. When I’d sat with Pickler and Juniper to figure out how we might take Jinon as bloodlessly as we could, eventually we’d stumbled unto an interesting question: where did the shit go? Jinon had one source of water, and they couldn’t foul it. It fed right into the aqueduct that Wolof used. So a pit under it? The fortress had existed for several centuries, though, it would have filled by now. If this were Callow it would be a matter of chamber pots and dumping them somewhere far enough the smell wouldn’t reach the walls, but Wolof was rich. Nobles served in its garrison too, people not used to roughing it.

So instead they’d had built latrines, sophisticated little things that dumped their filth neatly outside the fortress into a series of pits.

“You’re polite,” I said, approvingly. “So let me make an offer back: if you and your garrison surrender, you will be treated under Callowan terms for prisoners. No mistreatment, regular meals and you’ll be offered up at the first prisoner trade with your sworn lord.”

It was Praesi who’d built the latrine, so of course it wasn’t that simple. They were a paranoid bunch, Wastelanders. The latrines tunnels were too small for someone to crawl up and they were warded in case someone tried to send devils through instead. The Sahelians had, however, made a small mistake. I breathed in the smoke, the end of the pipe burning like a red eye in the dark, and when I breathed out I let the grey drift upwards. No wind, tonight, so it stayed around me like a crown of fumes.

“I do not deny your power, Black Queen,” Lady Semira carefully said. “Yet the wards of this fortress are old and powerful. You will not find them easy to batter down. And steel will not carry this day if your might cannot. I can only-”

A hand tapped my shoulder. Masego, giving me his signal. I smiled. I’d kept her talking long enough, baited enough soldiers to the walls.

“It’s over,” I interrupted. “You’ve lost.”

Her face tightened with anger.

“Close the gates,” Lady Semira ordered.

There was a long heartbeat of silence as nothing happened. Then I put fingers to my mouth and whistled, meeting her eyes. Barrels and crates cracked open, soldiers crawling out armed to the teeth, and out of the dark came marching the first of the two cohorts I’d brought. Aquiline and her slayers crept up the hill, still unseen. But the killing blow was something else entirely. There was a distant sound of cackling, and a heartbeat later the portcullis began rising to the vivid horror of the Sahelian soldiers manning the gate. The cohort of goblins I’d sent up the latrines had seized the most important room in the gatehouse, the one controlling the portcullis and gates. There would be no preventing our entry. To hammer that point home, Hierophant came out of the wagon to sit by my side and put an end to any hope of wards or sorcery stopping us.

See, the latrines were too small for humans to crawl up them. And the wards had been meant to stop devils going up, not goblins, because the Grey Eyries were on the other side of Praes and no Sahelian had ever had to defend this fortress against them. All it had taken to make my cohort’s infiltration entirely unseen was Masego disabling the small part of the wards that would trigger an alarm if something large entered through the latrines, the kind of small detail that it would take an in-depth check of the wards to notice.

But, as this land of diabolists ought to know, the devil was in the details.

“Sleight of hand, Semira,” I told my enemy, not unkindly. “If you’re watching me, you’re not watching where you should be.”

I breathed in deep of the wakeleaf, then blew out one last breath.

“So,” I said. “Are you going to surrender now, or do I need to… how did you put it again? Ah, yes.”

I met her eyes with my own.

“Batter you down,” I coldly said.

The possibility of violence hung in the air, thick as smoke, while the noblewoman weighed her chances. She eyed my forces once again, then finally grimaced.

“Jinon is yours, Black Queen,” Lady Semira said.

Well, I thought as my men began cheering, it’s a small victory, but it’s a start.