To The Citadel and Back (Part 3) (Closed)

[LordLeopold]

((Foreword: In the previous quest in this story arc, I referred to the Baron of Radasanth as "Marion" due to an error on my part in researching Letho's excellent profile of Corone (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?t=88). I have continued to use this name for the sake of continuity, but I will adhere to other established names to the best of my ability in this thread.

Additionally, I feel that to follow the story it may be helpful to either read or at least skim the other two parts of To The Citadel and Back, which can be found here (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?t=141) and here (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?t=1641).))

As dawn passed into morning, the orchards of the Niema valley slowly came to life. Sunlight made the leaves glow soft and green against the bright blue sky. A light breeze rippled across them, bouncing hard, unripe pears against each other and knocking a few small jays into the air. They joined swooping wrens and cardinals, twittering to each other about the rapidly approaching autumn. Below the low canopy of the bent, gnarled fruit trees, planted in slightly crooked rows, crumbling stone walls barely higher than a man's waist demarcated the centuries-old boundaries of the valley farms. Another gust of wind rolled down from the peaks of the saw-toothed mountains on the horizon, bucking down gentle slopes and dales before reaching the broad, quiet river, kicking up tiny waves on its surface, catching the sun like a cracked mirror. In a long, narrow boat, a wrinkled crook of a man leaned against a pole, pushing the early morning's catch upstream through the shallows.

Following alongside the river, cutting through the dusty trees, the ancient South Road baked in the rising sun. Brown earth showed between the infrequent shattered paving stones like old scabs. A worn stele, leaning toward the eroding riverbank, marked seventeen miles from the capital. But for the muted birdsong in the air and the rustle of leaves, all was quiet. That was what made the stomp of a dozen horses' hooves all the more deafening to Baron Marion of Radasanthia as he bounced painfully on the back of a straining horse, pounding up the South Road, Radasanth long disappeared behind him. His hefty bulk was bound up in a purple and black robe, smeared with dirt and sweat. His face, paunchy and speckled with graying whiskers, was as sweaty as his dapple horse's neck. Green-coated City Guardsmen surrounded him on all sides, leaning down over their horses' manes, gritting their teeth, eyes locked ahead. Fear kept their heads from turning back, despite what they all knew followed close behind. As they tore past the mile marker to their right, one guard yelled forward from the back: "We're nearly to the guard station at Ladio's Bridge! The stables should hide us!" One guard huffed wordlessly in response, but the other men's mouths stayed pressed tightly closed.

It was incredible to think back over the past two days. Closing his eyes, trusting his horse to follow the road and his protectors, he played the scene again in his head. Hundreds of guardsmen, clinging to siege towers and creeping under tarps, closing around the mountainous Citadel. The first flames jumping through the air to the crenulated walls, the first explosions, the first screams, the first deaths. Men running to his side, dragging him from the battle, orders yelled and never heard, a soul-haunting song on the air, filling his chest and head. A rush through the city streets, watching frightened faces in windows and doorways flash past, splashing through mud and ducking through a hidden gateway in the city walls. His horse throwing a shoe and the mad scramble to find another one. Watching from afar as foreign armies rushed into Radasanth. Into his city. Seeing those horrible creatures in the sky. Imaging the monks finding Stevens, thinking of what horrible fate they would now consign to him. Was the old man dead? Would it matter?

A lurch around a bend and a sudden stop jolted the baron's eyes awake. The road had wound around the base of a hill, their path to this point now hidden behind a veritable wall of earth and trees. His guardsmen frowned around him, their eyes on the sky, as nervous as the pawing horses under them. Making a sharp curve, the river was spread out on three sides, a spit of land jutting out into the brown water. Launched from its tip was a graceful arch of white marble, flanked by two pockmarked stone torsos of what must have once been impressive statues of guardian gods. The road lead straight to the bridge, as it had for hundreds of years; wagon wheel ruts had been dug almost as deeply into it as the dirt road itself. Normally, a log would have been laid across the road at chest-level, supported by two posts, only to be removed by a toll-taker. This was the last outpost of the Barony of Radasanth, the only sign of government until almost the heart of Concordia. Marion had installed the border guard, and despite the circumstances managed to smile as he looked at the almost palatial way station beside the toll point, stables and barracks shining in the sunlight, resin still leaking from its logs.

But the log lay on the ground, splintered in half. Grimacing at it, Marion turned once again to the station. He hadn't noticed the black tar painted across the door of the stables, a painful disfigurement on the whitewash. The writing was scribbled and dripping, but could still be read - "Man over magic, might over Light."

"What the..." a guardsman muttered at the cryptic graffiti, momentarily abandoning his search of the sky. "What happened here?" Already nervous, the men drew closer together, glancing from their baron to the sky to the stable doors, their horses snorting and whinnying softly. Marion wished he could find words to comfort his subjects, but he found nothing in his throat except garbled mutterings. His horse pranced sideways, shaking its head, and he felt himself swaying dangerously, his size nearly tipping the horse over, his corpulent frame shaking with fear and exhaustion.

"M'lord, m'lord!" a voice cried out from the stables, where a grimy hand and face were now peeking out from between the two swinging doors. Marion turned his wobbling horse, his men pulling ever closer to him, and managed to wave at the figure. "Hurry my lord, the bandits may be back soon!" Marion shook his head slowly, pushing back a growing feeling that whatever control he could possibly exert over this situation was quickly slipping away. A sense of foreboding was filling him that seemed to lift him from the surroundings, turning the scene into a strange painting that was being pulled out of his sight into the shadows. He opened his mouth to call back to the man.

But instead of hearing his own wavering voice, the baron's ears were filled with a horrible trumpet blast, an apocalyptic roar that threw the entire world into a tailspin. Guards and horses screamed in confusion, arms flying, faces contorted, horses' legs kicking. Men were thrown to the ground, their steeds galloping in confused zig-zags toward the orchards. His own horse stomped backward, yelping almost like a dog. The smell of burning and a volcanic gust of air buffeted his body, nearly tearing the cape from his shoulders. A shadow fell across the men as a huge set of leathery wings, flapping against the hair with the booming of a cannon blast, consumed the sky above them. Flashing teeth and talons slashed down from the sky, the air filling with the odor of ash. A man screamed like a woman, and Marion found himself bouncing on the road, his elbow clacking against a paving stone, his horse rolling over his legs and scrambling away in fright. The ground shuddered as four trunks of legs slammed down, the crunch of dirt mingling in the air with the tearing of flesh and the splatter of blood.

Just as quickly as the nightmare had begun, it was over. Another bone-quaking roar, and the dragon lifted into the air, spraying fire from its venomous maw in a sort of victory cry. Crimson-tinged dirt caked its hooked claws and black hide. The beast rose a dozen feet in the air with every flap of its wings, each the size of a house's roof, its whip-like tail snapping back and forth. The rider perched on its back twitched the long reins strapped to his hands as his mount left the small massacre behind. Closing its thick legs under its body, the creature banked in the air, slowly circling around the crest of the bridge, the station's beams rattling underneath. As it rose higher in the air, shrinking into a vulture-sized smear on the winds blowing toward Radasanth, Marion rolled onto his stomach, feeling the bruises across his thighs already filling with warm blood.

It was now all quiet along the South Road in Radasanthia.

[EarlStevens]

Our man sits quietly, feeling the shock of snapping his jaws together behind closed lips. His teeth clack in his skull. Although it is a warm and bright morning outside - he has caught glimpses of flitting birds and a bright blue sky through the narrow windows of the Citadel - in this room it is cold, dark and cramped. Torches hiss on the walls, casting the masonry and woodwork in a gloomy orange light. The vaulted ceiling disappears somewhere above, hidden in shadow. There are no windows cut into the walls, and the only doors close so seamlessly with the stone around them that the room gives one the unnerving feeling of gestating in a rock womb. No noise echoes in from the outside world, although our man already knows that the hallways of the Citadel are mostly empty. After days of almost inhuman crowding and bustle, the cathedral has regurgitated all the monks, soldiers and drifters that had congregated within it. Its only habitants are monks, aged almost to infirmity, who are slowly sweeping up the detritus of the previous night's battle, restoring normality after an incredibly abnormal evening.

Our hero is slouching in a high-backed wooden chair, almost a throne, his arms crossed across his chest, staring at an insect's bore in the surface of the table before him. A few feet behind, swaying between two torches that seem to be sputtering far more feebly than the rest in the room, is his manservant. The ivory-masked fiend, eyes empty and mouth continually smiling, seems to be intent upon the back of its master's head, peering through the wood of the chair, ignoring the mumbled sounds filling the chamber. Our adventurer and part-time warrior is dressed in a black wool three-piece, a little frayed at the edges and singed at the seams, his dusty fedora atop his head, his unpolished cane resting across his knees. He sighs without realizing it, and begins cracking his knuckles. Something is being said around him, but he is by no means interested. Tired and confused from the previous night, he barely finds enough energy to keep his head up. This conference is an ordeal that he would prefer to nap through.

The night before, the city which surrounded the Citadel had risen up against it, its municipal gendarmes attacking it with siege and magical war. But the Citadel had held, and its ally army outside the city walls had rushed in, displacing its government and taking tenuous control of the city. And during the whole ordeal, the man who is our hero's body double had disappeared, which would have been nothing more than a strange twist in the story of our man being stranded in a strange magical land if the doppelganger hadn't also been the titular leader of the army which now controlled the city. And as a result, gambling on the possibility that only very few people knew that there are now two Leopold Stevenses running around, these monks were forcing him to pose as their Generalissimo, another Leopold Stevens from an entirely different world than our hero.

Sitting to one side of him is Sir Anthony Stevens, Viscount Darby. His hair is mussed, a smudge covers half his right cheek, and he is wearing some sort of brown uniform that pulls tightly at his chest and barely covers his wrists. Every once and a while he absent-mindedly scratches at his neck, where the coarse fiber rubs against his skin. He's frowning heavily, not that our man notices, and has begun to drum his fingers on the table as loudly as possible. Arrayed around the other tall chairs at the table is a strange and motley crew. Directly across from our man, elbows on the table, steepling his fingers and adopting an air of grandfatherly concern, is High Priest Peter O'Mally, his head just a bit balder than yesterday, the lines on his face just a bit deeper. Draped in white and green robes, sparkling with inlay and clean as a cat's whiskers, he is nodding slowly, like a man listening to a speech but thinking to himself.

To his right is a shorter, swarthier man with a heavy black moustache and quick green eyes. He is in a grey uniform like the one the viscount is wearing, but his is well-fitting, worn somewhat ragged from the rigors of battle but with the hint of fold lines running down his jacket's arms. An ornate metal helmet, punctuated by a single metal spike at the top, garnished with several painted feathers on the side, is balanced on the table beside him. He glances at our man every few seconds, emboldened by his affect of depression but still goaded by suspicion from staring. At O'Mally's other side is a narrow-faced, tanned bearded man, covered in a loose white garment, the top of chain mail visible at his collarbone between outer wrap and brown underclothes. His face is a mask of calm, but his fierce eyes betray an inner fire. Splayed out to either side is a collection of six men, some garbed as noblemen, others as soldiers, officers of the various factions of the Entente. One of their number, a small man with a red face in the riding clothes of a duke, is standing and speaking in a lilting Scottish accent. Although he hears the words, our man doesn't listen to their meaning.

"... and with the Corone Assembly in Concordia, we have taken possession of the Assembly Palace in their absence, contingent on their return. The chains have been raised in the river and all the gates to the Inner City are now under guard. With the Ai'Bron and the City Guard's help, we have secured most of the city, except for the Corone Armed Forces barracks, which remains under their guard. The Battle of Radasanth has been a success." One of the soldiers begins clapping, but no one joined him and after a few moments he stops, his face turning pink. O'Mally nods thoughtfully and lowered his hands.

"And the bandits?" he asks, almost wearily. "They haven't left the orchards yet?" The officer shakes his head.

"This Joel McMarmont and his League of Mankind are probably just tall tales thought up by traveling troublemakers," he replied. "A few smears of tar do not banditry make." O'Mally smiled without humor.

"I appreciate your lyrical assurances," he says, "But I'd rather be careful than regretful. If there is anyone in the orchard lands who wishes us ill, we have to assume they'll follow us here." A few men around the table nod, and one mutters a curse involving the Forgotten Ones, which elicits more nods. The red haired officer gives his own forces smile and sits down. An uneasy silence descends on the room for a few moments, as the only sound that can be heard is the drumming of Darby's fingers. Someone clears their throat, and O'Mally sucks in a breath, nodding with finality.

"I suppose..." he begins, but Darby abruptly stops his drumming and cuts him off.

"Refugees?" he says, turning it into a question. He gets nothing but blank stares in response. Looking from man to man, his face contorts. "Refugees!" he repeats, exasperated. "Bloody hell, don't you have those here?" Our man looks up from the table and slowly turns to Darby. Something in the emotion of his words has awakened our hero's interest, although only marginally. Emboldened by the attention, however melancholy, Darby continues. "The people leaving the city! A monk told me that dozens of families have been throwing whatever they can carry on their backs and are taking off. Shouldn't some sort of allocation..."

"That's not a problem. Who told you that was a problem?" The short swarthy fellow beside O'Mally interjects in a crisp German elide. "Who is this monk? He must be confused. There are no 'refugees,' as you say, Friend Prince-Viscount. There is no problem. The people of the city are happy to have security again." Darby, his mouth opened in shock, stared back at him, raising a finger in protest. The officer shakes his head. "No problems. Our men are thinking of throwing a parade."

"I did hear something about looting," our man mutters, almost under his breath. The whole room almost jumps in surprise at this, and the mustachioed soldier is now surprised, only responding with a cocked eyebrow.

"Hm?" O'Mally says, like a teacher coaxing a small child on the first day of class. "What was that?" Our man straightens, mutters "Oh hangment" to himself, clears his throat, and repeats:

"Er, looting. A monk mentioned it as Darby and I came here," In fact, what had happened was that two monks had been muttering to each other in the hallway, and had been so frightened at the sight of our hero's manservant that they had leapt sideways into two other monks carrying a table. Our hero had watched as Anthony Stevens and his hanger-on Silas Witherspoon grudgingly reached down to help them up. The two monks had been so excited, however, that they hadn't stopped chattering the entire time, and our man had picked up quite a sensational story on the events of the morning. "He, ah, said something about the Bazaar." The short soldier, now recovered, snorts.

"Who are all these monks? How do they hear all these things? I listen to facts. I can name the people who tell me about them. I can point to them. Where is this monk? The situation is fine. Battles are messy. War is confusing. Maybe your monk misunderstood something he saw. Maybe he was tired."

"Maybe he was right," the white-garbed bearded man on O'Mally's other side ripostes laconicly. A chorus of subdued gasps and mutters fills the air as the soldier turns to him. The white-garbed man adopts a bemused expression and meets his gaze.

"Amusing," the soldier snaps. "Amusing, Friend High Chief. If you do not trust my men to provide intelligence, find this so-called monk and ask him to do it for you. If you do not trust me to run this city, you can do it. Then you can explain to the Nar'oth why 'a monk' is more important than Ozternbergians to you desert people when he returns." Although the white-clad chief's face does not change, his eyes darken considerably. He does not respond, but nevertheless O'Mally intercedes.

"Now, now," he says, placing a hand on both men's shoulders. Both turn back to the center of the table, each exuding distaste. O'Mally nods and folds his hands in front of him again. "I'll remind you, Superior Officer Immelmann, that none of us run this city. Her people run it, and after the trial this afternoon we'll leave it to them. Assuming Generalissimo Leopold agrees?" he says, almost nonchalantly. Our man, who has been drifting back into his own misty dream world, suddenly feels three sets of eyes glance, for infinitesimal moments, in his direction. Each seems to want him to cry something different - agree heartily, cry out against this masquerade, chuckle in disdain - but he is far too tired and disgusted to do any of these.

"Oh, yes," he says, waving his hand. "Entirely." Nodding, O'Mally stands, and the council of war quickly stands and files out. The German soldier pauses as he makes for the door that has suddenly swung out from the wall, probing our man with skeptical eyes before turning on his heel, helmet under an arm, and marching out. In seemingly the blink of an eye, the room is empty except for O'Mally, Darby and our man, seated silently around the worn round table. The viscount crosses his arms tightly and stares at O'Mally until the last hollow sounds of footsteps fade outside. Clenching his teeth, he hisses words through them.

"You don't know where the devil Leopold is, and you're not doing one damned thing to find him," he forces out, and O'Mally's face wrinkles in an uncommon grimace. Reaching up to his face with his hands, he sits back down, holding his temples with his fingertips.

"It's not so easy," he breathes out, and Anthony coughs in disgust.

"Telling those men, bastards though they are, that Leo's been kidnapped is probably the best way of finding him again! God only knows what's happened to him out there, if he's even..." the words catch in the viscount's throat, and he reaches to his neck, pounding the table in front of him with his other fist. The thud seems to shake the room, and both men sit, chewing their tongues, while our man, his interest gradually growing in this new line of conversation, looks from one to the other. Imagining the fate of this other Leopold, out in the city somewhere as he is, makes our hero's mouth run dry and his stomach clench up. He remembers the feeling of having a man with his face standing before him, and a burst of panic runs through him, his heart suddenly racing. The horror is still fresh to him, and the confusion of the vision of his uncle that seeing the other Leopold had brought on only frightens him more.

And yet he also feels a strange camaraderie with his double: Lost in a strange place, with no one to comfort you, exhausted, perhaps brushing against death's cloak. There had been a battle last night, and if this other Leopold had been in it, too, that gave him some odd comfort. Perhaps the other man felt the same.

"Leopold is a symbol," O'Mally was replying, his voice finally reaching him. "He has always been a way of keeping the Entente together. He stands for something greater than us, he keeps our petty..."

"He's just a man," Anthony spits back, both hands now clenched into white fists on the table's edge. "He's just a regular, jolly good old man, and he can bleed and die just like anyone else." O'Mally sighs, shaking his head.

"I don't think he ever understood what I'm telling you, either. It's a pity that the truly great live their lives with only the vaguest humble notion of their own meaning." Anthony stares forward, his eyes blank. A minute of silence stands between them before he speaks again.

"You're talking about someone I don't know. I'm his brother, for goodness's sake. Leopold is a nice man but he's not a great one. You've created such a myth about him for this Entente of yours that you don't even know where it ends and the man begins. Leopold is a man! He is an average fellow who is right now in the middle of something he doesn't know one damn thing about. He is up to his neck in rising shit out there and you're pretending that he's sitting in this room with us so you don't have to explain something uncomfortable. Leo needs our help!"

"He won't get it if tell the rest of the Entente what has happened!" O'Mally fairly yells. "Don't you see? We've lost our Pontiff. I've lost our Pontiff. This city has lost its leaders, and our officers are at each other like children. We're all confused here, Anthony. We don't know what we've walked into and there is nobody telling us where to step next. Someone needs to look like they can grope through the dark to the other side, and if Leopold's gone then nobody will believe anyone can. I hope Leopold is safe, believe me, I have been on my knees when other people - when you! - were asleep, begging Ai'Bron to keep him alive. I know he's out there and he's more scared than anyone in this city right now, but nobody can know that. We are going to find him, alright? We are going to find him and no one will ask questions about it until we are out in the clear. We are going to be okay. But we have to wait, we have to keep this man," he points to our hero, who feels himself blanching, "right where he is. Do you understand me Anthony?"

The viscount just stares grimly ahead, and jerks to his feet. He storms out the nearest door, a wet line down his cheek sparkling in the torch light. O'Mally, who has found himself standing, shudders deeply, clutching his arms around himself, and whisks out another door.

Our man sits, the echoes of the yells still in his ears, soaking in what has just happened. He starts cracking his knuckles again.

[LordLeopold]

Leopold Stevens squinted into the swiftly rising sun, following the flight of what looked like a vulture. He was sure, though, that it was something else; something far larger, and perhaps more sinister. He remembered what a cloud of dragons moving across the sky to battle looked like. Thinking back to it, he felt his stomach flop. The wooden bench he was seated on jumped as the cart hit a bump in the road, and the duke winced as his aching joints crunched together. Sitting in the rumbling wooden contraption, pulled by a white-haired nag, the streets of Radasanth moving past at a trot, was not the most comfortable position he could imagine. Across from him, sulking angrily, lips pulled tight, was the colonel of the Radasanth City Guard. With graying sideburns and a lightly creased, but steel-hard face and flaming eyes, his waning physical strength was obviously more than matched by his personality. Yesterday, he had arrested Stevens on charges of treason. Now, Stevens was bringing him to trial for war crimes in an attack on the Citadel. Shaking his head at the irony, the duke tried to forget what had happened in between. Briefly, the image of a baked skull, burnt skin pulled tight over shining teeth in the grimace of death, flashes through his mind, and he closes his eyes, face falling. Shoulders hunching, he sighs deeply. And it's my army that did that...

The buildings around the cart were growing in size, pulling back from the dirt road, small gardens and courtyards opening up at the curb. Mud and brick was giving way to stone and, increasingly, marble and metal. Where earlier, donkeys and mules had been standing in front of open doorways, packs and furniture tossed on their backs as families prepared to leave the city, the street here was empty. As the homes grew, they began to look more and more like small fortresses. Although smoke rose from their chimneys, boards or planks were drawn across the windows, and no figures looked out from within to take in the morning air. The cart passed through a silent crossroad, and it jolted, creaking and popping, as the wheels bounced up and onto cobblestones. The babbling of the wheels on the road made Stevens raise his head and open his eyes once again. He clucked to himself as he looked around the neighborhood. "Now this is familiar..." he muttered.

The road had widened and split in two, a median of saplings and shrubs sprouting up between the paving. Buildings no longer lined the street. Instead, twelve-foot walls, some topped with angry spikes, rose on either side. Closed gates infrequently broke the monotony of stone and plaster. Stevens thought he saw a man point a crossbow down at them from atop one of the walls, but the figure quickly ducked away, silently leaving only a feel of distrust and unease on the duke's skin. Beyond the walls, the tips of stunted spires and plain domes peeked out, giving only the faintest hint of the compounds that filled this quarter of the city.

"The grotesquery of wealth," the colonel said, and Stevens turned to face him. The officer was scrunching up his mouth oddly like an unhappy child, unconsciously picking at the rope around his wrists with his index finger. "Every merchant's a king in his palace." Stevens matched his unpleasant face with a grimace of his own. He had been rich, in England. It seemed a very long time ago, but he could remember the estates and manors. Being in this part of the city again had even made him feel a pang of nostalgia.

"The poor houses stay open thanks to some of them," Stevens responded, spreading his hands a trifle too ostentatiously. The colonel looked at his spread arms and looked no less pleased.

"A man feels guilty because of the size of his house. It doesn't make him a saint." Although he sensed he was being baited, Stevens still opened his mouth to respond. However, he snapped it shut and rose unsteadily to his feet as something beyond the colonel caught his eye.

"Good mercy..." he muttered, and the colonel turned, muttering something far harsher. Walking on the other side of the median, surveying the street around them, were two city guardsmen and a monk. The guards kept their hands on their swords, while the monk seemed to be spending as much time looking at his companions as the buildings around him. Upon seeing Stevens teetering on the cart, the monk raised his arm and cheered, yelling something indistinct but obviously heart-felt. The guards looked far less excited, but leaned together, whispering, as they saw the colonel turned halfway around in the cart. Stevens smiled and waved back to the monk, sitting down, but guilt snapped through him. That monk had probably been on the ramparts of the Citadel last night. How many of his friends had died alongside him? How many lives had he snuffed out? How many of those deaths were Stevens's fault? He sighed again, feeling something cold and sad trying to leave his body along with his breath. Trying to distract himself, he focused in on the next thought in his mind: Why those city guardsmen were with that monk. They had been enemies not twelve hours before, and now they were strolling through the streets together?

"So it is a coup," the colonel snarled, and Stevens looked up at him again, seeing anger spreading from the man's eyes across his face. "The monks have taken control of the City Guards and the City. And they have the temerity to go on patrol, as if they're meant to run the place. Turning Radasanth into their own chapel of war..." he lowered his diatribe to an incomprehensible mutter about priestly plots and ancient promises. Stevens leaned back on the uncomfortable side of the cart, considering the matter. He was still lost in thoughts that didn't seem to be going anywhere as the driver brought the wagon to a stop, tut-tuting the horse gently.

"'Ere we are," the man said, pushing his shapeless cap back from his brow, turning to face the duke. "Surprised you thought'a this place. Ain't been people living 'ere for years." Stevens shook his head, dispelling his web of confusing thoughts, and managed something of a smile. He stood to get out of the cart, stepping over the fuming colonel's feet, and made a small jump from the back. His ankles seared with the shock as he hit the cobblestones, but he walked uncomplainingly around the cart, looking up at the paunchy driver, his face covered in splotches and bristles.

"In a way that makes it all the better," the duke replied, resting his hand on the man's boot toe in a somewhat reassuring gesture. "Do wait for me." The driver nodded, although he hesitated before doing so.

"Careful you watch over yer shoulder," he coughed, "Lord Nazroth was an alchemist. He filled the walls wit' poisons and whatnot." Stevens couldn't help but smile.

"Tall tales. I've heard quite a few about Nazroth, myself. I was here the night he disappeared, you know,” the driver's watery eyes widened, but Stevens stepped away, turning towards the gate. "Wait up for me, old boy." he repeated, his voice bouncing back off the cracking walls. He walked the few yards to the gate, jumping over a spot in the road where the cobblestones had been smashed and water had collected. That evening was slowly returning to him, now, as he reached the foot of the two massive wooden doors. The wood was coated in lichens and slime, but was still obviously too solid to give way to a firm push. Metal had been bolted to the door in ornate swirls and bars that were now rusted, pulling away from the veneer. Stevens dug behind a flourish with his fingernails and yanked the two-foot sliver of metal off the door entirely, letting it drop to the street with a clatter. Suddenly feeling impish, the duke rapped on the door with his knuckles, as if the sound, like acorns bouncing across a table, would draw a doorman out. Smiling, this time genuinely, the duke stepped back, looking up at the top of the doors and the fringe of spikes above them.

Much to his surprise - and slight consternation - he heard a shuffling in the courtyard, the sound of feet dragging through leaves. Taking another step back, Stevens looked back at the driver, whose face was now contorted in almost child-like horror. As he turned back to face the door, the duke found that one of the doors was grinding open on its rusty hinges, a band of sky and the courtyard beyond appearing in between the huge wooden panels. Although Stevens could feel a tense horror rising through him, tingling from his feet up through to shock like static electricity in his fingers, he couldn't help himself from stepping forward. He was drawn towards the opening door and whatever figure stood behind it. There was an unexpected excitement in the fear, some thrill in the unknown that chased away the gnawing beast of guilt in his heart. It was something like seeing the other Leopold Stevens in the Citadel, something that both repelled and attracted him. He felt he would have smiled as he pushed his way through the gap, if his face hadn't been a gray mask of dread.

[EarlStevens]

Superior Officer Max Immelmann stomps toward the main entrance hall of the Citadel, slamming his helmet on top of his head, and mutters something angrily to himself. He emerges from the shadowed corridor into the airy hall. Although the entrance doors are thrown wide open, the meagre light shining through the door and windows gives only a twilight's worth of glow. Darkness fills the recesses of the chamber. The few soldiers and monks hurrying across the wide floor are no more than wraiths, barely perceived. Some of them are carrying long, narrow pews, realigning them between the noble columns at either wall. The imposing stone and statuary reminds him of the sanctums of Ozternberg fortress, and for a moment he thinks back to his homeland, his imagination filling in the gaps that four years of absence have slowly burned into his memory. By now his son is probably learning to read. His humor turning blacker, he skirts the base of the melted statue of Ai'Bron and steps briskly down from the front dias to the floor, his jackboots clunking on the stone.

"Friend Superior Officer," a fellow with a weasel’s face in a gray uniform, with many fewer badges and medals sewn to his front, strides up to Immelmann, his fist over his heart in salute. Immelmann glances at the black armband bunched up at the man's armpit and frowns, but returns the salute. They sputter to each other in their native language, which would sound like nothing but coughs and hiccups to the few monks that might overhear them.

"Friend Watchman, reports from the field?" he replies, continuing his brisk pace, and the spy falls into pace beside him.

"Ja, a good many," he pushes a large sheaf of parchment into Immelmann's hands. It is too dark to read the bunched up writing on the page, and Immelmann sighs, folding it quickly and slipping it in his pocket, waiting for the summation. "Looting in the Bazaar has been limited by some of our men, but continues sporadically. Some citizens have been caught at checkpoints and the City Gates attempting to flee to the countryside. They've been turned back, but we cannot be sure how many have fled from the Outer City."

"It is not under control?" Immelmann frowns, tilting his head downward and looking at the spy from the corner of his eye as they approach the front doors. The junior officer shakes his head.

"It's too large, and too difficult to keep pace with events on the other side of the river," Immelmann exhales sharply. "The Entente forces, City Guard and monks have the Inner City well in hand. We can start moving outward by tomorrow." Immelmann opens his mouth and misses half a step, but checks himself, and they continue out the door into the weak sunshine, moving down the front steps and across the crunching gravel of the courtyard. He shrinks back slightly as they pass one of the arbarians, twenty-foot tall walking and talking trees. The creature's strange humming song, which moans in his ears like a dying man's last gasps, breaks his staidness, and he realizes that he and his spymaster are quickening their pace, almost running as they duck between the trees that have sprouted up around the Citadel. A monk had claimed they were massive bolts shot by the City Guard at the Citadel, which the arbarians had turned into sprouting trees by some musical magic. Immelmann was skeptical, but he swears he can almost hear the trees singing back to the arbarians.

As they break through the copse, the spymaster clears his throat and continues. "Yes, ah, and we've had little luck in finding the City Guardsmen who didn't surrender to the monks last night. I suspect they've either melted back into the civilian population or will soon give themselves up."

"Like the Neiholm Rebellion," Immelmann mutters, and the spy nods. They are marching across the courtyard to a makeshift corral, fashioned from planks of destroyed siege towers. Half a dozen nervous horses are snorting to each other in one corner of the enclosure, which is almost half a block long. At the other end, gnawing at what looks like half a goat, is a massive griffin, with glossy black feathers across its eagle's head and wings and a brass lion's body. Beside it, breathing rings of smoke through its mouth, is a brown-skinned dragon, covered with spikes and lumps down its back. Both have wings the size of carnival tents folded on either side of saddles, more like mounds of buckles and leather than a horse saddle, which clack and sway as the beasts readjust themselves. Each is three or four times as large as the biggest horse at the other end of the ring, but both wince and grovel at the yell of a keeper who stands at the edge of the ring, slicing open an apple and eating each sliver delicately. They approach the keeper, who nods to Immelmann and turns, yelling at the dragon, which rises from its haunches and trots over, causing the earth to shake and the horses to begin prancing nervously.

"As always," Immelmann says to the spymaster, "This briefing remains secret." The spymaster nods, but reluctantly.

"If I may speak freely, friend, I'm inclined to believe that this information is best dealt..."

"Now, now," Immelmann says, clapping him on the shoulder, nearly displacing an epaulette. "We're the military men, aren't we? They'll have their chance at the helm here. Only after us." Jumping up a series of boxes stacked at the side of the corral, Immelman leaps onto the flank of the dragon and scrambles up to the saddle. As he begins to latch belts around his thighs and snaps reins to clips on his gloves, he turns down to the spy and adds, as if now remembering: "Oh, and have you heard any rumors about Friend Generalissimo-King Leopold?" The spymaster blinks, surprised, but quickly regains his bearings.

"Ja, now that you mention it, odd things have been turning up," Immelmann cocks his head in interest. "The monks haven't stopped talking about how he was at the ramparts during the siege last night, but some of the City Guards have been muttering that he was arrested yesterday. Some of the soldiers are saying things about having seen him last night at the Armory, and I intercepted a report by courier that claims he should be on his way to the trial with a high-profile prisoner. The oddest stories are coming from some monks who are claiming that two Leopold Stevenses were seen a few nights ago in the Citadel, but I'm really not sure what to make of that." Immelmann twists down to tighten the last strap, holding him in a half-squat on the monstrous saddle, and feels the dragon straightening up under him, rising several feet in the air.

"Good, good," he calls down to the spy. "I'll ask that you keep that report. Give it to me with your final report at the end of the day. And Friend, remember: Leave the monks out of it." With that, the dragon leapt into the air, nearly knocking both men down with a harsh, hot wind.

********

Our man wanders into the Mess Hall, somewhere belowground in the Citadel, following the loudest sounds of voices echoing down the hallways. Hands in his pockets, sauntering slowly through the door, he looks something like a cross between a lonely man at a dance and a schoolmaster lazily surveying an empty classroom. The day before, an unusual mélange of soldiers, drifters and monks had filled the mess, but now it holds only a few bald men in loose robes, smiling to each other over steaming mugs. As our man walks into the room, they turn to him and begin cheering, raising their cups in the air in salute. One rushes up to him, embraces him, and shouts in his ear:

“The revolt is over! They caught the last of the rebels this morning in the Solarium!” Our man tilts his head, giving an awkward, somewhat confused grin, and pats the monk on the back a few times in staccato raps. The man releases him and runs back to his fellows, who start singing a boisterous song about beating badgers with “Slapping Sticks.” One of them forces a mug into our hero’s hands, and he looks down at it for a few seconds, still grinning awkwardly, and then takes a draught from it. His throat immediately burns with the taste of whiskey, but he swallows the gulp and raises his mug as the monks break into their refrain. He looks around for his manservant, but the ghoulish figure has once again disappeared, evaporating into the shadows. Sighing, our hero sits down, leaning his back against the edge of a thick table and taking other swig of the warm malt. Slowly, he begins to feel less lethargic, and feels the smile on his face become more genuine.

“Lord Leopold! Lord Leopold!” One of the monks, pimples still splattered across his forehead, crashes into the seat beside our hero, swaying slightly with drink. “You were totally… out there, you know, with that army?”

“The Entente!” one of the monks cries, and they all laugh. Our man smiles again, feeling his spirits rise with the laughter.

“Okay! Okay! The Entente! Okay,” the monk continues, snickering at himself. “How was that, were there any battles out there.”

“There weren’t any battles!” one of the monks cries. “Horace, come on!”

“No, no,” our man replies, waving his hand and putting down his mug. “It’s alright, we were a deuced army after all, eh boys?” Laughing, our man looks up at the doorway he has just come through. Standing there is Anthony Stevens, Silas at his elbow. Hands on his hips, Anthony shakes his head, scrunching up his mouth. Our man briefly meets his gaze, feeling the groping fingers of guilt and anger, but quickly looks away, back to the shining faces of the monks, who are now clustered around him, chattering about the man he is now pretending to be.

[LordLeopold]

Stevens steps through the door gingerly, and finds himself in an overgrown courtyard, its former elegance diminished but still dimly shining. The entrance to the abandoned mansion is set back from the gateway, at the far end of two wings that nearly meet the inside of the surrounding wall. Although paved, the ground has clearly become uneven in the years since the stone was laid down; the paving stones are cracked and tilted, some rising up until they seem to form misshapen steps leading to nowhere. Tall weeds and grass sprout from between the seams in the stone, some rising to shoulder-height. Shrubbery and small trees once grew in beds at the base of the mansion's walls, but they have either been choked by vines or have overgrown the beds, spreading out into the courtyard, smashing the paving further. The remains of a fountain are moldering near the doorway, tendrils of vine coating the stone. The mansion itself is stained from weather and time, black stripes running down the stone from the smashed gutters at the roof's edge. Windows are smashed in. A rat squeals at the sight of Stevens and ducks beneath the building. He can't help but mutter to himself, "Gaze upon my works, ye mighty, and despair."

As the door behind the duke groaned closed, he turned slowly to see what friend or foe had let him into this testament to evanescence. Pushing the wood closed, covered in a ratty, mouse-nibbled cloak, is a hunched over man, his face hidden by a heavy cowl. Muttering to himself, he pushes the door closed and slaps it with a horny old hand. Turning to Stevens, he raises his face, lowering the cowl wearily. His face his covered in dirt and soot, one eye wandering off, unfocused. As he opens his mouth to mumble to himself, his yellow and black teeth appear between cracked and bleeding lips. His nose has the crook of a boxer's, and what little hair he has is wispy and gray. Stevens feels the uncertain fear and loathing that the insane and homeless often arouse in the wealthy. Slowly reaching for his pockets, he realizes he is unarmed, and swallows. The hobbled man stamped forward, sniffing loudly, and spoke.

"Ah, professor, the captain has been waiting for you. Come, come," he waved one of his hooks of a hand and turned to race to the doorway, his bare feet making short little steps across the broken stone. Stevens watched the retreating figure, unsure of how to continue, running his tongue over his teeth in thought. It was immediately obvious that this squatter was afflicted with some crippling insanity. That could either make him entirely harmless or entirely deadly. Feeling that same horrific curiosity tugging him, Stevens nodded to himself, threw caution to the wind, and rushed after the man, treading carefully on the smashed courtyard.

As he drew closer to the door, Stevens found himself thinking back to the first - and last - time he had come here. It had been years ago. This entry promenade had been filled with well-dressed nobles and ladies, chatting fatuously, admiring each other's spouses. Although puzzled by the invitation when he had first received it in the inn room he used to rent, upon arriving at the party he had known immediately how to carry himself. Parties in his world had been much the same; at least some things were constant across England and Althanas. A few wide steps lead to the doorway, and Stevens caught up with his insane guide on the top one, nearly tripping on the slanted stone. Together they walked to the entrance, stepping daintily over the heavy wooden doors, which had both collapsed inward, lying flat across the marble floor. The interior of the mansion was no better. This reception hall, with a balcony ringing the roof, had once been decorated with numerous works of art, hanging tapestries and an impressive mosaic painted across the wide roof. An elegant stairway to the upper floors had stood opposite the entrance. Now the hall was largely empty. A few overturned plinths and a shattered vase were all that remained of the art. The balcony had collapsed along one wall, and the roof had cracked, water staining much of the mosaic a sickening black. In the middle of the hall the floor had been scalded black by cooking fires - probably those of this madman - and a pile of ashes and charred logs were still smoking in the middle of the scorch. Tatters of cloth and pieces of furniture lay haphazardly across the floor, and the first sprigs of weed were beginning to appear in the cracks between pieces of marble and granite in the floor. The staircase, although still standing, seemed to be sagging on one side, cracks appearing up and down the middle of the steps.

"The captain is busy now, you may wait here, professor," the madman sputtered, and limped to his pile of ash on the floor. As he prodded it with a still-green stick, Stevens let his feet carry him through the hall. He remembered meeting Findelfin the elf here, and smiled at the thought of the loquacious fellow. It had been their first proper adventure, fending off strange men in black suits and angry mansion guards. He remembered the blond-haired adventurer who was with Findelfin - where had that fellow gone, and why couldn't Stevens remember that unpronounceable name? - and the elderly librarian who had snuck with them into Lord Nazroth's library, uncovering evidence that the ignoble nobleman was an agent of Aesphestos and the Forgotten. Stevens shivered as he realized he was standing in the place where he had first come face-to-face with Aesphestos. Had it really been five years ago?

Immersing himself in his personal history here, Stevens felt a calm descending over him, a calm he hadn't felt in days. There was some sort of clue, he felt, in digging through his past, trying to divine how he had arrived at this point in his life. In a way, he guessed, this is where it had all begun: where the masked desert people called the kahh'jami had first appeared, bringing him into the Entente; where he had first become aware of the great evil threatening Althanas; where he had first had to truly face his own mortality alongside other men fighting for something good and pure. It gave him a shiver.

Looking around him, he focused in on a doorway only a few yards away. The thin door itself had come unhinged, and was wedged, barely standing, in the doorframe. Weak sunlight could be see through the cracks between the door and the molding. Stevens stepped toward it, pushing his cuffs back, ready to yank the rotting door from its frame. He heard the insane man howl behind him, but paid his jabbering little mind. "Professor, professor! The captain has forbidden it, those are his private quarters!" Stevens reached his fingers around either edge of the door, feeling his nails dig into the water-logged wood. His first yank nearly split the surprisingly firmly lodged door in half, but adjusting his grip further down the door, he gave another tug and ripped the door away. Trembling under the unexpected weight, he threw it to the side with a grunt. It hit the floor with a wet slap. Wiping off his sleeves and front, the duke stepped into the hallway.

He remembered stepping down this passage before, with Findelfin and company. The corridor was narrow, with slits for windows along the left side. Whatever glass had once been in them had shattered, and the breeze from outside swept in unhindered, giving some life to the deteriorating palace. The light that came in the hallway was meager, but enough to show a confusion of footsteps in the dirt that was layering the floor. Whatever that old nutter seems to think, someone's been in here, Stevens thought to himself, stepping down the hall. He couldn't help moving quietly, like a trespasser, despite the fact he was sure the place was abandoned. He tried the first door he came across, tugging the brass handle, but it was firmly stuck. Wheezing from the effort, the duke moved to the next, which was already ajar. Looking in, he gasped in terror as some bright figure jumped out from the dark toward him. Stepping back, he raised his arms.

Feeling no jolt, he looked through the crack in his sleeves and quickly lowered his arms, laughing nervously at himself. A foggy mirror was hanging on the far wall, a pane of bright reflection in the dark room, which on closer inspection seemed to be some sort of storage space. The mirror and a few boxes of candlesticks on exhausted shelves were all that was left in it, however, and Stevens moved on. He felt a sense of strong familiarity wash over him as he moved down to the next doorway, where two double doors stood, the floor beneath them polished smooth from where they had swung back and forth over the stone floor. The hodgepodge of feet in the grime seemed to be moving in and out of these doorways. Stevens stopped in front of the doors, smiling. Yes, this was the library where he and his fellows had first found books about the Forgotten Ones, where Findelfin had fought Nazroth to a stand-still, where the elf claimed a horrible dark sorcerer had appeared, tearing the very air to step out and chase Nazroth away. A thrill swept through him as he reached down to the doorknobs and threw both doors open dramatically.

The room was filled with the smell of must and decay. Surprisingly, hundreds of leather spines and rotting scrolls still lined the walls, and the only window in the room still held its glass. Furniture was overturned and sheets of parchment lay on the floor - some seemed to be stained black with blood - but generally the room had fared much better than the rest of the mansion. This, however, was not what attracted the duke's attention. Lying across the heavy table taking up the center of the room, splayed among torn books and rumbled maps, a lean, tan young man was on top of a pale, soft girl. As the doors moved open, both their heads turned to Stevens, and a shrill scream filled the air. The duke stumbled back, covering his eyes with his hand, and jumped aside, out of view of the doorway.

"Oh dear, terribly sorry, terribly sorry!" he cried, "I had no idea!" There was a scrambling in the library, the sound of bodies untangling and feet hitting the floor.

"It's okay, he's only a hobo," the man's voice could be heard around the corner. Stevens, his hand still over his eyes, frowned, and mouthed the word "Hobo?" But, uncovering his eyes and feeling his chin, looking down at the dirt, grime and even blood across his tattering clothes, he realized what a fright he must look. Although nuns of Ai'Bron had healed him earlier, taking away his tiredness and wounds, he knew how pale and baggy someone could look if they used a monk's healing in lieu of sleep, and he hadn't had a real night's sleep in nearly three days. Still, he couldn't keep his hand off his stubble, or his finger out of a hole in his sleeve.

After a minute, the young man stepped out from the library, adjusting his belt and the rapier hanging from it. With a narrow, muscular frame, his hair was jet black and his eyes were shifting and uncertain. His boots were soft leather, his clothes colored silk and frills. He was, it was clear to tell, a neighborhood boy: The son of one of the rich merchants of Radasanth. No more than twenty or twenty-one, he turned to look at the aging Stevens, his eyes resting on the holes and stains across his riding jacket. Sighing, he dug into his vest and pulled out a wide, thin gold coin and flipped it in Stevens's direction. The coin bounced off his chest and hit the ground, where it bounced with a tinkle.

"Stay out of here from now on, won't you?" The lad asked, and without waiting for an answer turned and strode to the end of the hall. Stepping up and grabbing both sides of one of the open windows, he heaved himself out. Squinting angrily at the coin on the floor, Stevens huffed and kicked it in his direction. It skidded and bounced down the hall ineffectively. Fuming, Stevens stepped back into the library's door. The delicate girl, balanced on the edge of the table, was slowly pulling her simple dress up around her shoulders, staring at a point in the floor. Her brown hair was unwashed, falling around her shoulders loosely. Even across the room, Stevens could see the black around her fingernails and on her palms. She bent down to buckle her plain shoes, and the blue bruises on her bare arms clashed strikingly with her milky skin. The duke cleared his throat and she turned her head, gasping, and leapt to her feet, backing along the side of the table, glancing around in vain or an open window or door.

"Oh, now, now, my dear," Stevens said, softly, taking a step back. "I only wanted to see if you were alright." The girl, her blue eyes sparking, looked back at him silently for a few seconds before bursting into tears.

[EarlStevens]

Our man steps out from the mess hall, the sound of laughter following him out the door. A big smile is plastered across his face, and he can't help but puzzle at why he felt so depressed earlier. The monks had been so cheerful, so willing with a joke and a clap on the back. Their heady brews hadn't hurt, either. Although he walks through a corridor of shadow and murk, it seemed that the hall just ahead and behind is lighted with a cheery glow. Our hero, when he was in the mess hall with those monks, was no longer the adventurer we have come to know and love. He took on the skin of Lord Leopold Stevens, and the monks had shown him something that he hadn't felt for the months he had spent trapped in one of their cells: Genuine love. Nothing of his man has changed. He is still the same collection of fears and hopes, memories and dreams, loves and hates. He has no new name, no new face. All that is strange now is the person others think they see in his clothes, another man entirely. Although our hero is himself, he is also the ultimate imposter, and that lie has lifted his spirits.

His feet move of their own accord, his mind too preoccupied with this new elation to guide them. They expertly move him through this Citadel that he barely knows, traipsing up and down stairs, tapping through antechambers and through doorways. Without realizing it, he emerges into the entrance hall of the Citadel. He isn't sure how long it has been since the sun has risen, but it seems barely brighter than dawn on the other side of the main doorways. Trees are growing on the outside. He thinks he can hear a birdsong. Whistling back at it, he moves to the pedestal of the melted statue and sits down, twirling his cane lightly with one hand.

He doesn't notice Silas Witherspoon sit down beside him, or Icarus and Petunia alighting on his other side. After a moment or two, however, he feels silent eyes staring into him, and turns to his left, where the hawk-sized dragon and the chicken are staring up at him. He smiles. "Why hello, old chaps," he says. Neither seems impressed. Petunia the chicken, especially, fixes him with an accusatory glare, clucking angrily to herself. Icarus, his wings folded at his sides, is making some stuttering sound in his throat, and only looks skeptical. Our posturing hero can't help but keep smiling, however. Hours before, he would have only seen blank eyes looking back into his own. Now there is personality there, a flickering life that he senses the other Leopold must share with them. Perhaps they are his daemon.

"Indeed, a hectic morning," Silas says at his other elbow, and our man turns back to him. "I do not profess to know the intricacies and finer points of the art and science of wars, but this one seems quite the complicated venture." Our man doesn't feel any irritation at the bloviations of this con-man, but rather pats him on the shoulder.

"We're in the same boat, then, Silas old man," he says. The two sit in commiserating silence, mutually overwhelmed. The hall is slowly filling with rows of pews, candelabras sprouting up among them as a team of monks moves the furniture into place. Their former use as barricades is obvious from the errant crossbow bolt sticking from a pew's leg or seat. Thoughts of the previous night's battle, the bangs and whimpers, swim in our man's head as he sees monks yanking the bolts out and playfully tossing them at each other. Rather than feeling them drag him down, however, they buoy him up. He imagines what a heroic figure Lord Leopold Stevens must strike during these battles, waving his men forward and crying out the orders of the day. His voice, his mouth, pushing men forward in spite of their baser nature.

"Where do you think Lord Leopold is?" Silas asked, his usual effervescent language sliced down to the marrow. A sort of fear can be heard on his words, giving them a furtive sound, like a man hiding his lesser emotions from his wife. Our man replies with another pat.

"There, there, old chum," he says, "We'll take this matter in hand. I've no doubt it'll all be sorted out." The magnanimous words of the monks' hero. Silas smiles. It's a cold smile, one our man isn't sure Witherspoon usually wears, but it seems to speak of some grim determination. Self-satisfied, our man turns back to the entranceway. Anthony Stevens is standing before him, his too-small uniform now exchanged for the flowing robes of one of the desert people. Apparently his new boots allowed him a stealthy approach. He walks forward, his foot-falls silent, frowning at Silas, who quickly stands up, putting a few more inches of distance between himself and our man.

"I see you've got new clothes," our man says, a half-smile on his face. Anthony plucks at the sand-colored cloth, strapped on with hidden clasps and string, and frowns more deeply.

"Wog clothes. Wouldn't wear them if I hadn't ruined my suit last night," he responds. "Still pretending to be my brother?" Our man stands up with a huff, the chicken and dragon at his side flapping clumsily to Anthony's feet. They turn and array against him, and he now faces three pairs of flashing eyes. A bit cowed, our man clears his throat.

"I say," he begins, "Perhaps a hero, a symbol, is what these people need. All else has fled them, and..." Our man stops as Anthony raises his hand to his face, pressing his thumb and forefinger to his brow. He sighs deeply. Gritting his teeth and pausing to begin again, our man stops as he sees something stirring in the shadows beside the doorway, far back over Anthony's shoulder. It shifts and takes form, a tall pillar of shadow topped by a white mask moving forward out of the darkness. His manservant has returned. Our man feels a pang of shock and fear, and words escape him.

"Why do you people keep insisting," Anthony begins, his voice strained with frustration, "On believing Leo is some sort of god? You, especially, who don't even know him." The manservant draws closer, a swelling guilt heralding its approach. "I can understand if you're having some sort of identity crisis. God knows we all are after finding out there are two of you, but I can't even imagine what both of you are going through. But despite what charade O'Mally and you are pulling, you aren't him!" Our man takes a step back, his euphoria slipping away as an army of darker feelings charge through him. His manservant is sliding up the inner aisle of the pews, monks leaping out of its path, clutching their hems fearfully. His mouth takes on a sharp slant. The refuge he has built for himself out of another man's soul is crumbling around him.

"Well, darling viscount," he snaps, "I shan't steal your brother away from you. It would sap your righteous indignation." The manservant glides around Anthony, and before he can respond the younger Stevens jumps as a chill envelops him. The ghoulish figure moves to our man's side, and a sickening chill descends over him. Anthony and Silas both slide backward a few steps, eyeing the ghastly creature. Inside our man feels a cancerous horror growing: A horror at the death rattle of the monk on the icy lake yesterday morning, a horror at the man's brains, spilled across the Citadel last night, a horror at how he had let himself be swallowed up by his doppelganger's persona. He doesn't have the energy to fight this wretchedness, and lets it eat through his body. He is returning to himself; yet he longs to escape again.

"Ah," O'Mally's voice rings through the entranceway, and they all turn to see him striding forward in full regalia at the head of a column of marching monks and soldiers. As he approaches, the priest lets his eyes slide quickly over Anthony, fixing on Silas and our man. "I trust you are ready for the trial."

[LordLeopold]

"Are you alright?" Stevens asked, stepping forward hesitantly. The girl, her face cast downward, nodded. She was clutching her arms around herself fiercely, against some cold wind that only she could feel. "Er... there, there," Stevens muttered, reaching out to pat her on the shoulder. His fingertips brushed her bare skin and she leapt back, her mouth open in a silent shriek, scrambling along the edge of the table, her dress catching on splinters. The duke drew back, himself, face flushing. Oh mercy, he thought to himself, crossing his arms and awkwardly looking about the room, as if the ceiling and silent books could give him guidance. He glanced at the tabletop, saw a smear of blood, and groaned, his heart aching. Looking again at the girl, who was now rubbing her reddening eyes with the back of her hands, he was caught in a surge of pity so strong he felt he could no longer stay silent.

"Ah, cold?" He managed to force out, and silently cursed how idiotic he sounded. She stayed silent, but moved her chin just enough to nod. Somewhat heartened, Stevens slowly rubbed his hands together. "I think the, ah, gentleman who stays here now may have a fire going in the main hall. Why don't..." he reached out again, but quickly pulled his hand back, his conscience snarling at him. He gestured toward the door, but the girl was already lost to him, venturing into some dark dream world. Stevens clasped his hands, befuddled, his eyes darting around once again. Looking down at his dirtied cuffs, an idea struck him, and he shrugged off his coat, revealing a tweed jacket, brown cravat and cotton shirt beneath. It was too hot for it, anyway. He leaned forward, careful not to touch her delicate shoulders, and draped the heavy cloth over her. She started, abruptly brought back to reality, but didn't leap back as violently. She looked over the dirty coat now covering her; though she didn't smile, something about her demeanor softened. She looked Stevens in the eye, almost befuddled, and he blushed again. "Come, come," he gestured toward the door. "This place is far too musty."

They walked into the main hall, Stevens a few steps ahead of the girl, both hesitantly picking their path toward the center of the room. As they approached the addled squatter, he looked both up and down, snapping his stick against the side of his leg like a field marshal. "Ah, the duchess has returned after so many years with the admiral. The war must finally be over. Oh happy day." he said, without any emotion. "I bet she's stolen my silverware," he continued, just as loudly, but adopted a conspiratorial face, as if his inner thoughts were spilling right from his brain to his mouth without him realizing it. "Her fingers were always a bit sticky, picky, ficky." The girl seemed on the verge of horror at this beastly fellow, and Stevens looked from one to the other, distressed. He quickly struck upon a solution, however.

"I say, old crumb," he directed to the vagabond. "Could you perhaps call on the captain's aide-de-camp, I believe he's preparing a text for me." The hobo snapped to attention.

"My honor, sir!" he said, and hobbled off, limping heavily. Stevens smiled to the girl, who seemed much relieved. Looking around him for something that might serve as a seat, the duke found a chair missing its legs, tipped over on its back. Picking it up, he placed it on its base before the girl, gesturing for her to take a seat. As she lowered herself carefully onto the threadbare cushion, the duke perched upon an overturned pedestal that was lying beside the ash pile like a log beside a campfire. He was immediately uncomfortable, his back and tailbone aching, but smiled as warmly as possible. The girl's face remained blank, but at least she was looking at him now.

"Ah, not much of a fire after all, eh?" he said with a half-laugh in his voice, and she looked at the ashes sadly. He chuckled a few seconds more before finding it too lonely and stopping. "So, my dear, do you live nearby?" The girl doesn't reply, which Stevens takes as a cue to continue. "I haven't been in Radasanth in ages. I used to live in an inn near the Citadel. Maybe you've heard of it? The Old Boar." The girl didn't speak, but the duke sensed something of a sparkle in her eye, a sense of remembrance of better times. "Always a warm fire in the winter, a cool cup of malt in the summer. Splendid." Stevens felt himself caught up in memories: evenings in the common room, chatting with Devon over half a turkey; a visit from Peter O'Mally every once and a while; morning calls from Bazaar distributors (had it really been so long since he had worked there?); tall tales with travelers from Concordia and Gisela. Two years in an army camp made you forget how warm and open a sturdy place to call home could be. Home - the word drew him back, not only to the inn, but to manors and chateaux, to running back to Blenheim Palace in the pouring rain, Anthony too small to keep up, Katrina bunching up her skirts as she pulled ahead.

"Should we try to find your family?" he asked, and regretted it in a second as the girl raised a hand to her face, covering her mouth. "Oh, ah... my brother's name is Anthony!" he said, trying desperately to find another topic. "He's out there somewhere, probably worried sick about me. I'm the one whose family we should be trying to find, ha ha!" she seemed no more satisfied now, and Stevens grasped out, his voice warbling. "I haven't even told you my name! Goodness, you know Anthony's but not even mine. Leopold Stevens." The girl smiled, and Stevens grinned back broadly, his teeth showing. "Duke of Marlborough," he continued, and although her smile shrank a bit, the name still brought her some small pleasure. Stevens tried to remember what other outrageous names he went by. "Marquess of Blandford. Oh, I'm a baron of Wormleighton. And a generalissimo!" The girl did laugh, shortly, holding her hand to her mouth, but Stevens knew this was worth peals. "And yours, dear lady?" he asked, holding out a hand and bowing his head in mock obsequiousness. She laughed again, putting her hand on his, her touch soft and cold.

"Marietta, m'lord," she said, quietly, and Stevens pulled his head up.

"Marietta! Call me Leopold," he shifted his hand, grabbing hers in a firm handshake. She jolted, surprised, but after a moment seemed amused. "Good show, good show." he said, and released her hand, leaning back. "Now, old girl, if you don't mind..." Stevens heard stumbling steps at the door and turned. Wavering in the doorway, clutching his side, blood coating his face, was the driver of the cart, his lips moving soundlessly. Stevens leapt to his feet. Marietta screamed. He rushed to the voluminous man, who was beginning to lower himself down on one knee. A gash split his scalp and forehead, and beneath the veneer of red his skin was deathly pale. Spit bubbled at his rubbery lips, and his eyes were slowly rolling in his head, light draining from them. He was pressing a hand over a bloody hole in his side. Stevens moaned, his hands already soaked with blood as he felt the man's neck for a pulse. Blood moved faintly between his fingers.

"Oh God," he said, helplessly, feeling the pulse fade away to nothing and the man's eyes roll back in his head. He had never seen a man die like this, so close to him, his breath still in the air. The air grew thick about him, as if filled with the driver's fleeing soul. It was chilling. Stevens wondered whether he would ever die like this, unexpectedly and among strangers. He hoped not. He remembered meeting the other Leopold Stevens in the Citadel, feeling the urge to stamp him out before the mirror image somehow erased him. If he had succeeded two nights ago, would that Leopold have died like this poor soul? Could he really do that to another person? He realized it didn't matter - he already had. The duke had brought this man here this morning, to the spot where he would die. Stevens murmured a quick prayer and tried to forget. Pressing the driver's eyes closed, he stood, looking out across the courtyard to the open gates. Where was the colonel?

"Oh, good, Peddler Sam has returned," the phlegmy voice of the squatter approached as the black robed man shuffled up to Stevens. "He's fallen down again - must be the vertigo. Up, up!" He reached down, snapping his fingers. Angrily, the duke slapped the man away. Even in his insanity, the vagabond suddenly realized that a life had just passed. He muttered something that might pass for a prayer and fell to his knees, pressing his hand against the grey, still-bleeding forehead. Stevens, still focused on the open gate, stepped outside. Hearing whimpering in the main hall, he turned to see Marietta, tears streaming down her cheeks.

"Marietta!" he called, "Marietta, stay here. I'll be back straight away. I'll only be gone a moment." She didn't seem convinced, but nodded. "There's a good girl," Stevens said, and turned back, quickly skipping between the overturned pavings, kicking through weeds and jumping over puddles. He stopped before reaching the door, trying to see as best he could to either side, searching for signs of whoever had killed the driver. He heard and saw nothing except the cart, now empty. Again lamenting the lack of his sword cane, Stevens took a deep breath, squaring his shoulders, and stepped out onto the street.

No one was on the road in either direction that he could see. A light breeze swept down the boulevard, its quiet whistle an exclamation point to how alone he was, and how exposed. The cart was intact, and the colonel was nowhere to be seen. Nor was the old nag that had brought them here, its reins and yolk snapped. Walking around the cart, all Stevens could find was the colonel's bonds, slashed, lying on the street. Other than that, the stones were as smooth and clean as before. Holding the cut ropes in his hands, Stevens looked up and down the road, his face scrunched in thought. The road curved somewhat down the block, so that all he could see in one direction was an unbroken chain of mansion walls. Down the other way, the road turned into dirt and wove off into the city, the walls of Inner Radasanth rising above townhouses in the distance. He was uphill from the old district, where the nobility made their homes among ancient monuments, parks and palaces. The baron's mansion was barely visible down the slope - he thought he could see tufts of black smoke rising from its grounds. But no one within sight could offer him aid.

"The patrol," he said aloud to himself, and immediately trudged back in the direction the cart had come, walking awkwardly over the cobblestones, crossing the grassy median. His joints were aching again, and the spongy turf felt much better than the uneven stone. He muttered angrily to himself about the confounded road, but kept up his pace. Down the next block he could see a figure sprawled on the street, and hastened his pace. As he drew closer, he noticed a black slick surrounding the figure, and moved faster in panic. "Oh no, oh dear Lord," he breathed, breaking into a run.

Lying on the pavement, a sea of blood soaking the road all around it, was the body of the monk from the patrol he had seen earlier. Stevens tasted vomit in the back of his throat as he bent over the body, one boot planted in the darkening red. "Cliffton," he said, remembering the look of terror on his friend's face when he had found him dead. The same night he had faced down his double in the Citadel. So much death. The taste of vomit was stronger. He couldn't look down at the man's face, although it was serene and unknowing, without thinking of the cold gray of Cliffton's. Looking away, he stumbled backward, trying to make for Nazroth's mansion again. He had to get away from that terrible stench of blood and death. Looking down at the blood on his hands, he felt faint.

"Hey! Hey you!" A coarse voice roared, and Stevens looked up, lifting his crimson palms, his vision slightly blurry. But the voice wasn't hailing him. Half a block away, two men, short swords drawn, wearing the armor and cloaks of one of the merchant families in the district, were standing over a huddled man who was slowly picking his way across the street. He was caked in dirt, his cloak no better than a torn sack, obviously some wretch who had snuck beyond their master's walls for the night and had recently been discovered. Stevens cocked his head, and although his head felt like he was swimming in a whirlpool, he opened his mouth to speak. He snapped it shut, though, as one of the guards pulled back his foot and landed a heavy kick in the man's stomach. With a grunt, he curled up, and the other guard swung down with a mailed fist, striking him across the head with the handle of his sword. Stevens, horrified, took a step back. For a moment, the wretch and the monk's corpse took on the same form as the man rolled over, another boot hitting his ribcage. Both the bleeding body and the quaking victim repelled him, and he turned, running, his legs beyond his control, forcing him back to the mansion. As he ran, his horror and sadness was drained, replaced by the rush of pain and excitement that a fierce run creates in a tired man. And he was tired. Another two bodies before breakfast.

He rushed past the empty cart, not bothering to close the gate behind him. Tripping over the corner of a stone, he caught himself, scraping his hands and knees, but pushed to his feet and moved on. There was only one place to be safe, now. He felt vile thinking of it as a haven - how much blood had seeped into its foundations? - but there was no choice. He knew he had to return, and what he had to do there. The past two days had proved it. He jumped up the stairs two at a time, pushing past the grumbling, crazed vagabond and sidestepping the body on the stairs.

"Marietta," he said to the girl, who had stopped crying but was holding her hands to her mouth, and again had adopted a cold mien of shock. "We have to get out of here. Do you know the way to the Citadel?"

[LordLeopold]

Marion started awake, his face locked in a silent scream forced by a forgotten nightmare. He wasn’t sure where he was, and when he tried to sit up he found he couldn’t. He lay back down on his sore back as he slowly realized where he was. He was lying on cool, smooth stone, the paved floor of some kind of large barn. The air was cold and dry and smelled of fresh wood and sap. It was dark and quiet inside, although hushed voices could be heard outside. The room was huge, and it was hard to see its entirety from the floor, and the baron wasn’t sure whether he was alone. He tried to get up again, straining against something pressing against his leg. Reaching down with his puffy hands, he could feel splints wrapped around his thigh, which flared with pain as his fingers touched it.

“Baron,” he heard someone say, and footsteps shuffled close, a man dressed as one of his guards hurried from the shadows. The sallow guard bent down and unsuccessfully tried to heave the baron into a sitting position. Marion almost immediately became impatient, and pushed him away with an angry snort. As the guard fell to the ground, wincing, Marion shook his head exasperatedly and let it rest heavily on the floor. The voices outside continued in a muffled, periodic way, like nurses outside a hospital room.

Marion decided he must be in the barracks near the river, and tried to gauge how long he had been sleeping: Anything to get his mind off the dragon attack. It was ironic, he thought, that for months he’d been trying to find a spare few days to tour the countryside. The guard at his side was shuddering to his feet, and Marion waved listlessly in his direction. “Get me someone more competent,” he said. The rumble of an opening door, a burst of warm air and a flood of light answered him. He could not look up over his bulging stomach to see who had opened the door, but several pairs of feet scraped across the stone before the door ground closed again, the cocoon of chilled darkness once again surrounding him. There was hushed chatter, undecipherable from this distance, and the slow patter of approaching boots. Marion’s guard stepped out of sight, despite the baron’s violent gesticulation in protest. More muted chatter, more soft stepping on the stones, and the doors opened and closed once again, a brief caress of light and warmth rolling over the room. For a few seconds more, the room felt totally empty, a complete quiet falling across it. Then a few deliberate footsteps, each one a soft rap, echoed off the beams and ceiling, as someone approached. There was a rustle of clothes and the squeal of leather boots as the man, who Marion could barely make out over the edge of his rotundity, sat down on the stone a few feet away. It was quiet again. Marion waited for the man to speak, but hearing nothing except his own raspy breathing, he quickly became anxious. Screwing up his energy, he rocked his body sideways, cursing his throbbing leg, and managed to slide like a sick cow onto his side.

He could see the man entirely now. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, a hand on each knee, his black eyes staring forward, he seemed some sort of serene demigod, descended to observe the actions of one of his many moral followers. On his head was a wide-brimmed hat of felt or cotton, flopping down at the edges and casting a grim shadow over his face, obscuring it to near-invisibility. Despite it, he was still striking. His face was sharp and long, and with his thick locks of black hair and sunken eyes he could pass as an overlarge crow or raven. Although there weren’t any lines on his face, he seemed incredibly old. Perhaps it was his mouth, which frowned with the disdain of an ancient cynic. His neck was buried by a coarse cravat, blossoming like a dead rose from his rough, poorly cut clothes. They were those of a middling yeoman, too large and poorly stitched together. They flowed about him, his heavy overcoat coming confused in the rolls and bunches with his plain, buttoned shirt and mud-stained trousers. Odd gray patches were sewn up his right sleeve, but they seemed to be decorative instead of just a poor repair job. His boots seemed to be the only thing he wore that fit him or had been made by someone with talent. Coming nearly up to his knees, they caught even the miniscule light in this room and gleamed from their thick soles to their overturned tops. It was difficult to keep his head up, sprawled as he was, but the baron managed to wriggle one of his flabby arms under it, propping himself uncomfortably.

“You’ve heard of me,” the man said, and the baron immediately knew who he was. Joel McMarmott, a brigand king who had promised to purge Corone of magicians and magical creatures. The stories that had been traveling around Radasanth about his followers and their violent exploits had never described him well, but those eyes made him obvious. They were the eyes of a mesmerist, and this man was Joel the Hypnotist. It had always struck the baron as an odd name for a warlord, but it seemed all too natural now. “And I’ve heard of you, and why you’re here.” The baron nodded, finding himself unable to think of anything to say. The Hypnotist stared back, his eyes black and motionless as ever, but his mouth seemed to now have acquired the beginnings of a smile. “We’re both men who’ve been spurred to action.” The baron nodded again. The Hypnotist picked up his hands and laced his fingers, resting his wrists across his thighs, letting his locked fists hang loosely. “This land is like a tub filled with water. When you drop an unwanted stone in it, something sloshes out. Us.” Marion found the metaphor idiotic but nodded yet again, his head moving almost of its own accord.

“Did you ever wonder,” the Hypnotist continued, now openly smiling, “How many picked themselves up out of their homes to follow me? Men with women at home. Women with children at their side. Children with no one. We didn’t have anything. My first sword was a part of a rail fence that I sharpened with my only knife. I remember weeks I didn’t eat. Alna always found us a way.” He bowed his head slightly as he said the name, and looked even more like a terrible crouching crow. “When we took this barracks last month… I shouldn’t say we took it. Your men gave us everything in it, and then themselves. When we received this barracks last month, we had 2,000 fighters with us. That includes everyone: the cook and his mother and everyone who sleeps under our tents. Which I should thank you for, your men gave us most of those, as well. I suppose you might be surprised at how many of your subjects want those mongrels and magicians out of our country.”

“You consider me responsible for the Entente being here?” the baron replied, speaking slowly and thickly as if eating molasses. He felt the Hypnotist had expected this response, as he nodded like a man who has just won a bet, although his mouth was frowning again.

“I think you are as upset now, that you have been expelled from your own palace, as all the rest of us have been since we were expelled from our own lands. We must feed and clothe these subhuman intruders, step aside when they ride through our roads, congratulate ourselves on being so tolerant as to allow them here. Mankind deserves some dignity more than what you have afforded us as their hosts, my lord. The time for your people to act, with your allowance or not, has come.” Marion continued nodding compulsively, thinking over how foolish he had been in allowing the Entente into his barony. They had starved the land, smashed his city and humiliated his people.

“What do you propose that we do?” the baron asked, scooting as best he could closer to the Hypnotist. McMarmott raised his hands to his chin, resting his head atop his fingers.

“I propose we march to Radasanth. We will ask the men untainted by magic to leave. And then kill the rest.”

[EarlStevens]

Our man steps out the entranceway of the Citadel into the sun. He feels the sunlight warming his face, still clammy from the dark interior of the fortress. Wishing it penetrated a bit deeper, he follows O’Mally down the front steps. Soft footsteps pat behind him, but he knows that he cannot hear the most frightening of his entourage; the shudders and contorted faces of those crossing his path make it clear that his manservant is not far behind. Cursing the ghoul and Anthony Stevens in turns, our man crunches out across the gravel of the main square surrounding the Citadel. Despite his dour mood, he cannot help but realize, thankfully, that this is the first time in months that he has left the heavy stone of the Citadel, and feels himself breathing a bit easier. The air is still here, but lacks the grave-like dampness and odor of the motionless air in the cathedral. Beneath his feet, the ground slightly gives way with each step, and he realizes how long he has been pacing across unforgiving stone. It sounds like the outdoors here. Noises cleave the air briefly before fading, instead of echoing hollowly like someone shouting into a bell. The sun isn’t filtered through sparkling dust or deadened by stained glass. It is a pleasant feeling, but fleeting.

“When the hell did this happen?” He hears Anthony asking close behind him as they reach a ring of trees shivering in the morning air. Although young, the trees are thick and their roots tangled together, spilling out of the ground and tripping our man up as he picks through them. A shattered metal spike and huge, wilted fletching sprouting from one of their bark makes their source clear – these are the remnants of the huge arrows which the arbarians had knocked out of the sky earlier. A low, familiar rumbling in the air turns our man’s head, and he can make out the swaying, leafy frame of one of the walking trees through the canopy, its arms slightly raised. It might be mistaken for an overgrown scarecrow, were it not nearly three stories tall. Tripping over a root, our hero stumbles out from the copse, and quickens his pace to catch up to O’Mally, as well as put a little more distance between himself and those singing trees.

O’Mally is standing between four of the Arab sorcerers, the five magicians muttering to each other in cryptic language. Feeling a strange tingle, as if a buzzing in his ears had spread all over his skin, our man realizes they’re all wielding their magic, snapping it about themselves. Although he can’t quite make out what it is they’re doing, he gets the sensation of some great power linking them all together, drawing their energy together to one end. About two dozen paces away, two monks are wrestling with the reins to a clutch of horses, snorting and kicking at the dust. Perhaps they find the magic being held in the air around them disturbing. Or perhaps it is his manservant, whose chilling presence has enveloped our man. He shivers and draws his arms close to his body, trying to keep himself looking forward. The viscount steps around him, hands clasped behind his back, and our man tightens his mouth and turns his eyes aside. It is then that he sees the cage, rumbling into place behind the horses.

Even without closely inspecting it, our man can assess its basic form. Heavy, rusty metal bands have been molded together to form its rectangular box shape. Thick bolts press the pieces together into a checkerboard of air and steel through which the far side of the cage can barely be seen. It is held on a thick wood and metal platform, part of a large-wheeled cart that looks as if it could hold up a house. Two oxen, weary looking beasts but still snorting ferociously, are yoked together to pull it along. Odd soldiers, dressed in cream colored uniforms and sneering at each other, are sitting or crouching at each corner of the cart, holding narrow, unsheathed swords at their sides. And inside it all is a severe looking, swarthy man, dressed all in red cloaks that reach his ankles. His clothes are much like O’Mally’s, the flowing capes and sleeves of a bishop, but his head is bare and he holds no crosier. His hands are latched together, hanging at his front, and he seems to have some sort of brace around his neck, connected to his wrist-clasps by a thick chain. His face is vaguely recognizable as one of the men who had been with the Pontiff two nights before. Obviously, this man is one of the war criminals who the monks intended to try at their court-martial. And it seems they’re taking no chances about his escape. Our man realizes that the magicians must be weaving some sort of magical net to keep this divine trapped in his cage.

“We’re ready now,” O’Mally says, turning around, ignoring Anthony and nodding to our man and Silas, who has stepped beside him. “Take any horse, it doesn’t matter which.” The two monks bring them forward and each man moves to a stirrup, hoisting himself awkwardly into place. There is a brief awkward moment as Anthony and O’Mally approach the same horse, but without looking into each other’s eyes, they both move to different steeds. Our man looks at it for a few moments before shrugging and deciding to take it. He steps into the stirrup and scrambles up. As he settles into his saddle and lays his cane across his horse’s back, Petunia the chicken collides with the horse’s mane, clutching the thick, coarse hair to steady herself from her awkward landing. Our man looks down into her beady eyes, and the two exchange sceptical glances. Each apparently satisfied, they break eye contact and Petunia settles down as best she can in the beast’s hair. Icarus perches on Silas’s shoulder, and Anthony groans loudly as the bevy of purple penguins, suddenly scurrying out from the trees, bounces in between the legs of his horse, causing it to whinny and stomp angrily. “They can go back,” O’Mally says after swinging himself into place and straightening his robes. The penguins don’t stop their clucking, but seem less enthusiastic, as if finally accepting that Anthony will have to go somewhere they can’t follow.

“We are settled,” one of the Arab magicians says to O’Mally, and our man realizes that none of the brown-clad magicians is riding a horse. Rather, each is astride a tall, sharp-taloned bird that reminds him of a fierce emu. Each snaps its razor of a beak and twitters, flapping stubby wings as the magicians nudge them past the horses into positions flanking the caged bishop. The guards sitting on the cart glance at each other sardonically but say nothing. O’Mally nods and kicks his horse’s flanks. Following him, the small convoy sets out, leaving the courtyard behind. A shadow passes over them and the ground shakes as they enter the city proper, and our man’s jaw drops as he sees a giant winged lizard, snarling in a cloud of dust and sand, stomping in a corral in the corner of the main square. A man seemed to be standing on its back, yelling to several figures skipping in and out of the dragon’s path. The astounding sight disappears behind the corner of an inn, and our man is only left with the impression of something scaly and deadly growling in the shadow of the Citadel.

The cavalcade moves in silence, only the creaking of leather and the clink of horseshoes against the occasional fragment of paving stone breaking the morning quiet. The streets they ride down are silent, as if in a small town on Sunday morning. “This area must have been evacuated during the battle,” our man thinks to himself. “Nobody’s come back yet, I suppose.” But it was something other than that. The pit of his stomach was heavy and tingling, his hands wet with nervousness. He felt like he was riding through a graveyard, the houses around him wooden crypts. Someone is watching them, but was it the blind eyes of a corpse or the squinting gaze of a cemetery keeper? Our hero realizes with a start that his manservant isn’t with them. Usually this would put his mind at ease, but now it seems ominous. He begins to wish that someone would say something, but can’t force himself to speak. Frowning at the back of O’Mally’s head, he begins to wonder whether the old man is keeping quiet just to spite him.

“Deuced creepy,” Anthony mutters behind him and to his right. Our man turns, still frowning. Now he finds himself upset that he hasn’t just been imagining things. Anthony looks back at him, wrinkling his forehead at our man’s face and raising one hand quizzically. The Citadel is slowly disappearing behind block after block of houses. They turn a corner onto a broad avenue and it vanishes entirely. Amazing how quickly it has disappeared. Or perhaps not, our man realizes he is entirely unsure how long they’ve been traveling through the city. Where was the sun in the sky when they left? It seems hotter and brighter, but as our hero turns to look around him he feels lightheaded and small spots appear at the edges of his vision. His mouth is dry, maybe he just seems some water. Opening his mouth, he tries to ask O’Mally if anyone has a canteen, but feels unable to force words out into the silence.

The road opens up into a square, a pillar standing in its center. The buildings lining the edge of the courtyard are taller here, and our man can see that further down the road they spread out into baronial, ornate facades and ancient buildings, obviously much richer than the neighborhood from which they have just emerged. There don’t seem to be any more people there, though; the street ahead is as dead as that behind. The square is still, only a prancing cat moving across it. Any small comfort – or disquiet – that the closeness of the buildings along the street may have given disappears as the massive square swallows up the entourage. From above, our man imagines, they must appear as tiny black seeds on a white plate. There is a certain loneliness to the thought.

They approach the central pillar. Characters are written across it in a strange, curvy script, wrapped around it and its granite base. A light wind whistles across our man’s ears. Abruptly, O’Mally stops his horse, which grumbles and shakes its head. The rest of the convoy stops, and our man suddenly and passionately wishes they had kept moving. Nervously turning back and forth, his eyes lock on a shadow passing between two walls, far down a side road. His manservant. His stomach sinks.

“Go back!” O’Mally cries, snapping his reins to the side and turning his horse awkwardly around. His face is calm but his eyes are flashing with anger and fear. Someone shrieks and a horse screams behind him. Our man looks back to see a magician falling from his mount, a narrow arrow sticking in his chest. The other magicians raise their arms, moving their mouths silently, and the magic around our man buzzes furiously, igniting in his bones and veins, disorienting him and making him feel nauseated. Blinking, he grabs at his face and moans. Arrows are hitting the ground around him and brushing past his head. One of the magicians yells a slurred curse. Something crashes nearby, and our man peeks out from his eyes to see the front of a four-storey building being ripped away by huge invisible hands, several men screaming and falling with the collapsing stone and wood. He lowers his hand, watching the incredible sight, as each house next to it implodes in clouds of dust and splinters, more tiny men in green cloaks and plumes buried in the rubble.

“Don’t separate…” O’Mally screams from behind before being overcome by a ear-shattering wail. There is a flash of blue and white flame from behind the magicians, engulfing the steel and wooden cart. Its piercing light forces our man to cover his eyes again, but not before he sees the charred corpses of the guards flung from the blast, disintegrating in mid-air. He feels his horse giving way under him. Already unsteady, he falls off as the stallion’s back legs collapse, and rolls across the ground, his hands and face stinging.

[EarlStevens]

Unsteadily, our man rises to his feet. Some terrible odor fills his nose and mouth, pricking his eyes. Oily black and grey smoke is slithering across his body, and he coughs, stumbling forward. Splotches of color in his vision cover the small breaks in the clouds of smog filling the air. A rhythmless hum is in his ears, and bumbling through the smoke, without sight or hearing, he can barely tell where the ground and sky are. It's all a heady confusion, like a stirred up riverbed or a blizzard at midnight. He gropes forward, mouthing words he can't hear. Eventually, after years of being lost, a figure forms head of him. Dark at first, framed by the meagre sunlight filtering weakly through the smoke, it steps closer, gathering shape and color, firming and brightening, a man emerging from the swirling, acrid mists. His robes are bright red, and as the last strands of fog between the two men parts, our man can see a wicked grin upon his face. They are only a few feet apart, and below the high whistle in his ears, our hero can feel the deep tremble of magic in the air. He realizes he doesn't have his cane. There are spinning orbs in front of the criminal priest's outstretched hand. It is impossible that they hold anything but death.

A sharp whine breaks through the cotton in his ears, and our man falls to one knee as sound and light break back through the confusion. He can hear again, his eyes are clear, and the smoke is quickly fading. Looking up at the priest above him, the man's face is pale with shock and horror, staring down at a smoldering ruin at his elbow. His arm has been blasted away, splatters of blood and flesh caked to his body where the magic projectile has torn him apart. The remains of the arm are red, charred black at the end of the stump, a bright spot of white at the center of the wound, like some strange pencil snapped in half. He doesn't scream, but his face betrays the pain well enough.

Our man hears a voice calling to him, but doesn't understand the words as his attention is fixated on the gore. He feels strong hands pulling him back, so firmly that he is yanked to his feet and dragged backwards, his heels bouncing along the ground. He is whipped past O'Mally, who is standing with his staff at his side, bands of smoke rising from its end, and feels the hands let down. The momentum keeps him moving backwards, and he knocks against two men who grab him and shake him. He nods his head vigorously, as if this will reassure them, and realizes from the sound of the voices that it is the Viscount Darby and Witherspoon behind him. It seems he is safe.

"Is he alright?" O'Mally asks over his shoulder.

"I am!" our man responds before the other two can. "I'm not quite..."

"Leave," O'Mally says, and our man can sense a quiver in the priest's voice. Anthony and Witherspoon pull our man straight and begin to lead him away by his elbows, mechanical in their obedience, but he cannot tear himself away from the scene. The last of the smoke has wafted away. Charred corpses of men and oxen and the remains of the prison cart are smoldering on the ground about them. Another horse, unburned, lies dead as well. The smell is still terrible. O'Mally stands with his back to them, one hand firmly planting his staff before him, the other quivering at his side. The red-cloaked priest seems to have recovered from his surprise, but his face is still pale and he continues to stare at the remains of his arm, held out before him in a most grotesque gesture. Magic is in the air.

"You're a traitor, Alvar," O'Mally says, his voice firm now. "You knew Aesphestos was amongst us and did nothing. And then you fought against your brothers in the Citadel." The priest doesn't respond, but lowers his arm to his side, grimacing. He outstretches his other arm, his remaining hand open, palm down. It moves slightly, in a way that our man immediately recognizes. Prestidigitation! A small, invisible magic pocket opens in midair and something leaps out of it, slapping against the priest's hand. He snatches it and slams its tip into the ground beside him. His own crosier, a heavy black staff with a gilded gold crook atop it. O'Mally recoils.

"Your monks didn't find it," the priest growls in a Castilian rasp. An erie feeling comes over our man, like his skin crawling away from his feet up toward his scalp. Witherspoon yelps beside him and the viscount groans, and he knows some strange wizardry is being wielded. Indeed, beside the Spanish priest, a large black pool, viscous and bubbling like tar, is seeping out of the ground. Our man has never seen this before, but he immediately knows what it must be, and a stark terror grips him.

"Necromancy?" O'Mally incredulously scoffs. "A dangerous game, Alvar. You're only helping the prosecution's case for your trial." The priest laughs, and our man has the strange feeling that O'Mally is smiling, too. No longer bubbling, the puddle of tar has spread and is now quivering, at first gently but increasingly violently. Now it is shaking and frothing like an opened champagne bottle. As if to complete the imagery, the puddle leaps into the air in a foaming jet, connecting with the stump of the Spanish priest's arm. It latches on like a long, squirming leech and disconnects from the ground entirely, worming up into the air, shaking and solidifying. Our man steps back, his throat dry, as the blob forms a palm and five fingers. The obsidian fist opens and closes, and it is clear that the priest has more than sufficiently replaced his lost limb.

"You could have stopped me," the priest says, still smiling viciously. O'Mally shrugs.

"I've always given you a fighting chance, Alvar. Ah, Anthony. You haven't left yet?" The viscount starts at our man's side, and tugs him more strongly at the elbow. Our hero, now sufficiently shaken, turns away from the two priests. Magic crackles in the air like venomous popcorn, screeching and hissing in his head. He looks into Anthony's eyes. "Where are we going?" He asks, breathless. Anthony grabs his lapel and yanks him, running for the edge of the courtyard, leaving the question unanswered. Behind them there is a massive, bone-fracturing explosion that nearly knocks them all to the ground. Clumps of dirt, fused into blocks of glass by fire and noise, shatter on the ground around them. A paving stone cartwheel past them like a renegade child's hoop, nearly slicing off Witherspoon's arm, bouncing up into the air and then coming down into the facade of a house, smashing through the building. Our man holds his head down and rushes for what may prove to be the illusory safety of the alleyways.

[LordLeopold]

Stevens's foot skidded across the stone and he nearly fell, but the duke managed to catch himself on the wall and keep upright. Ahead of him, Marietta was cautiously picking her way forward toward the dull sunlight at the end of the passageway. They were under the abandoned mansion, in what must have once been a back exit of sorts. Along one side of the passage was a raised platform, along which they walked, made up of heavy stones laid against the wall. Below the walkway was what must have once been a gutter or sluice for drainage from the estate outside; clay pipes protruded from the wall at regular intervals, and the entire passage was damp and chilly. The ceiling was low enough to force the duke to stoop slightly, but the timid maid ahead could stand straight and barely scrape the top of her head. Stevens doubted that anything flowed through this passage except during the heaviest of storms, like the one that had blown through a few nights ago. Aside from those infrequent showers, he imagined the passage was usually unused. No servants were left to scurry out this back way, no hot baths were being drawn in the house above that needed to be drained out this tunnel to the outside world. I wonder how she knew about this exit... Stevens thought. Then he remembered the unabashed, casual way in which the young noble had swung himself out the window. He'd been to this place before and probably left someone behind, fleeing the scene alone. Stevens frowned and ground his teeth.

Marietta paused as she reached the end of the tunnel, waiting for the duke to catch up to her, and then stepped outside. Stevens followed. The passage ended with an unadorned hole poked in the side of a shallow bank. Covered in low, yellow weeds, it sloped gently down to a large stream. On the other side of the small river, the bank was almost identical, and Stevens realized he was standing on the edge of a man-made trench. High walls from the exclusive manors sprung up at the crest of each bank, blocking off an exit except any that might exist far up- or downstream. The stream below was wide and shallow, sunlight piercing straight to the muddy, rocky bed. Flowing rapidly, the water carved through wide sandbanks and mudflats, at times babbling fiercely and at others quiet and nearly motionless. Tunnels similar to the one from which Stevens had just emerged also opened up along the bank to either side, some with heavy sheets of water sliding down from them to the canal below. There was a sweet, thick smell in the air, like something decaying. The duke had a few moments to take this all in before Marietta traipsed off along the bank and he was forced to follow her.

They walked downstream along a tiny, hard trail, packed down and narrow like a dogs' pathway in a fenced yard. It wagged and snaked through the grass, up and down the hill, passing in front of each drainage opening, smaller pathways linking it to those dark gateways when it didn't pass close enough by them. Steep little valleys had been worn into the ditch every few yards where water collected during downpours, and the two stepped or leapt gingerly over them. A few times the duke thought he espied a rat's tail in the grass, but the creatures fled at their approach, and all he really saw was a rustle of stalks and a small cloud of dirt.

Little changed about their surroundings for several minutes. On either side, the wall seemed little changed from property to property, and only occasionally would its stone change shades or a guard tower punctuate a change in ownership. After some time, however, as the walls became obviously newer and cleaner, and Marietta's pace increased, Stevens realized that they must be coming to the edge of this wealthy quarter. He was not sure, however, whether it would be safer to leave this ditch once they were able to access the streets. Before he had left the Armory earlier that morning, the officers had assured him that the Entente's army had the entire city under control. But if the City Guard had rebelled against all the monks, as they apparently had in this rich quarter, the streets might not be safe at all. And if any of those wanted posters were still fluttering about... They might yet come after me, again! Stevens thought.

The walls to either side suddenly ended. Emerging from the manor-framed ditch, Stevens felt uneasy and a little queasy. At the other side of the final walls were two plots of land that had been scraped clean and leveled. Stone and wood were scattered about them in the first stages of the medieval construction of what would eventually become large manors. Workers were trudging back and forth among the first stacked stones and columns being hoisted into place. String held between stakes in the ground marked off the future wings and walls. From the looks of the construction, these houses would be massive, easy rivals for the larger mansions of the city. It was what was pressed up against the very limits of the sites that surprised and unsettled the duke. Shacks, leaning heavily to one side or the other, were pressed cheek-to-jowl in a splintered row at the edge of the site, their warped walls marking the outer sides of where the perimeter walls would someday stand. Looking into the water at the bottom of the trench, Stevens saw children leaping about naked in the stream, women rubbing shirts together in the water and chatting quietly, dogs slurping up the smelly drainage and barking furiously. Homes were tumbling down the banks of the channel, almost falling into the water. Most were rickety wooden things, a few somehow stacked to two or even three stories, with half-dressed men hanging out the windows and standing on the roofs, smoking pipes together and yelling back and forth. A line of laundry was stretched from a house on one side of the bank to another opposite, the clothes dragging the loose cord almost to the water. Looking up the stream was a similar sight with no end.

"This is your neighborhood, eh?" Stevens asked Marietta, who was standing at his elbow. She didn't reply and began chewing her lip. After a few seconds she tromped off up the slope and through the construction site, toward a narrow street between two rows of homes. "Cheerio..." Stevens muttered and followed after her as fast as his aching knees would allow.

[LordLeopold]

Stevens followed the waifish figure past the edge of the construction site and into the narrow alleyways of the slum city. The roofs of these shacks slanted down to his shoulder level, most still slowly dripping water from their cracked and rusty edges. He had to dodge under fallen pipes that had once served as chimneys and duck through narrow spaces where walls had begun to collapse in toward each other. Underfoot the ground was stripped bare, the red mud coating the bottom and sides of his shoes. A small trench of syrupy, muddy rainwater drained through the alleyway, and Stevens shuffled bow-legged over the tiny stream, which Marietta easily walked beside. The duke noticed with what care she raised the hems of her dress, obviously not paid for with her own money, and how measured her leaps over piles of refuse or corroding boards were. She had obviously made this dash home many times before. Side-stepping a matted, three-legged dog that was groaning into the drainage stream, Stevens emerged from the alleyway and into what passed as the street.

The dirt here was bright red also, a color and slippery consistency that Stevens hadn’t seen elsewhere in the city, where thick layers of gravel, sand and paving usually hid the ground beneath. Water left over from the heavy rain was still collecting in deep trenches and puddles along either side of the road, and the heavy silt made it look like blood seeping up around a nasty scab. The road itself was slick and red, torn bare by years of rain and wind, eroded on either side until it looked like an old turtle’s back. What served as gutters on either side often did no better than provide a collecting pool for the run-off, which created massive puddles that leaked into the huts on either side. There was as much rotting and worn wood as fresh lumber or clay buildings up and down the street. Few shops were open out to the street, but many houses seemed to be little more than adirondacks, with their innards open for a passing pedestrian to see. What the duke could see was certainly not pretty: The closest open house seemed to be some sort of makeshift inn where a row of bunks against one wall served three hung-over men, and a burly woman with only one eye sulked along the other wall, leaning against an old barrel.

It was surprising how many people were in the street, mostly silent but some grumbling to each other and glancing about furtively. There were some skinny children with shaggy hair, and a few women hunched under heavy sacks and buckets, but most were angry men, from peach fuzzed youth to dotage, moving in menacing packs, clawing at their beards and stomping their boots in the mud. Stevens, keeping his eyes on whichever band was nearest, stepped over the moat at the edge of the street and scrambled as best he could to the top of the mound. Realizing Marietta was not beside him, he turned back to the alleyway. She was standing there, clutching a rope of her hair, eyes wide and lips quivering as she looked around the street from the grizzled faces to lecherous eyes. The duke could easily guess what terrible memories were beginning to cross her mind, and he picked his way toward her, careful not to fall, outstretching his hand and smiling. “There, there, dear girl,” he said, bringing himself to smile as best he could. “We’ve only a short way to the Citadel, I’m sure…”

“You shove off!” A coarse woman’s voice cried, and Stevens leapt back as a woman easily the size of a bison charged to Marietta’s side. Draped in a dirty, torn dress that looked like an old tablecloth and obviously missing several teeth, the rest of which were broad and blackened, the woman was a horrible and frightening sight. She put her arm around the tiny girl, who shrieked at the touch and began slapping at the woman’s bulk. “Ey, what have you done with my niece?” the woman bellowed, stepping menacingly toward the duke.

“Er, I daresay,” Stevens stammered, holding up his hands in a gesture of innocence. “I found this poor girl being barbarously treated by a young man I can only assume is her master’s son. I assure you I had no part in it. The name’s Lord Leopold Stevens, madam,” he yammered, bowing slightly and hoping fearfully that she had heard the name before. Perhaps his reputation would precede him; from the horrified look on her face, she seemed severely displeased.

“Ey, you took her away from her housework? You old blighter!” She raised the sack of potatoes she was carrying over one shoulder and threw it at Stevens. It hit him across the face and knocked him to the ground, where he hit the dirt on the seat of his pants and skidded down the hump several feet, smearing his trousers with red clay. “Now she’ll lose another one! Damn you!” A small crowd was beginning to gather around the quarrel, several men taking pipes out of their pockets and chewing the stems appreciatively, as if at the theater. Two began flashing pieces of coin at each other, as if beginning a bet.

“Well upon my word!” Stevens cried, pulling himself painfully to his feet, hearing his joints creaking loudly. “I save this woman from a lascivious attack and you assault me! This is simply uncivilized! I was merely trying to return to the Citadel when…”

“The Citadel?!” One of the men in the gathering crowd yelled out, waving his arms angrily, his face turning crimson around his scraggly beard. “You’re with the monks, ain’t ya?” Stevens was taken aback at the man’s theatrics but slowly nodded, hoping this yet might be his salvation. Rather than relieved, however, the crowd seemed incensed. The children who had gathered fled, and several people began shouting at the tops of their voices. As the crowd quickly grew, a few men stepped forward, raising their arms and shouting shrilly enough to quiet the rest. One of them, a middle-aged, fatherly man with tears in his eyes, took off his shapeless, soiled hat and stepped out beside Stevens. He cried out, overcoming obvious emotion:

“Those monks,” he began, and those in the crowd who had still been complaining to each other quickly silenced themselves. “Those monks came in with this army of theirs last night. We were all there to see it. They chased down the City Guard,” there was a chorus of boos and hisses from the crowd, which was still growing about them, but a raised hand from the speaker silenced those, too. Looking around, it appeared to Stevens that the entire neighborhood was flowing to this spot in the street, some rolling up their sleeves with menacing looks on their faces. Turning back to Marietta, Stevens found that both she and her large aunt had disappeared somewhere in the crowd.

“I know what we think about the City Guard.” the man kept it up, and the faces in the crowd nodded viciously. “But at least they was from our city, huh? These new soldiers, who knows? Well they’re in our city now. They took the whole place over. And we saw what they did to my boy Tommy last night!” A man in the crowd shouted something incomprehensible, and the angry cry picked up throughout the gathering. Although the cries were more distinct now, they were jumbled together and flowed into one angry river of tirades. The duke knew he could understand what was being said around him if he concentrated on one or two of the voices, but there were too many to choose from, too many shouting out and immediately going silent to pick one strand. All he sensed was a feeling of violation, of horror and revulsion and fierce independence.

“I think we oughta make them pay!” the man yelled out, another voice in the maelstrom, but it was obvious that those around him had already thought of this. Stevens thought he saw metal blades glinting above the men’s heads, heavy ropes and chains wrapped around fists, eyes narrowing into feral slits. “And if this guy,” the man gestured to Stevens, who leapt in fear, “Is with the monks and all them, we should start with him!” The duke felt his knees give way under him and swayed to keep steady. The man turned on him, pushing him toward the crowd. He felt heavy hands land on his shoulders, grab his arms and legs and hold him in place. It was an unreal feeling, staring into the inchoate, screaming crowd closing in around him. The sound was unbearable, the screams and shouts becoming a primal jungle roar in his ears. He whipped his head from side to side, yelling whatever futile protests came to his mind, kicking and swiping with his fists, gnashing his teeth as the furious bodies moved down upon him. All the faces were blurred into a single crying dirty body, a disgusting mass that could barely be called humanity.

But abruptly he felt the pressure on him lowering, the anger and heat drawing away from him. Looking beyond the writhing mass about him, he saw five men with spiked helmets on horseback, waving sabers in the air and charging at what was now a riot. All the figures surrounding him were turning, facing these new attackers, pushing toward them and away. Hands let go of his body and his attackers were flowing on either side, moving down the street. Before he fell to his hands and knees, he saw the first few men hit the horses like fog hitting mountains. The mountains began to crumble, and horse and soldier hit the ground under a thousand pounding fists. Falling to the ground, himself, the duke felt his arms and legs sink into the wet, crowd-churned mud. He cowered there as the last of the crowd moved past him, lowering his face to the ground. Shaking and tingling, he felt like his body was coming apart. His forehead sank into the clay, which was cool and wet against his cinder hot skin. The street smelled like old boots and manure, the smells of life. Digging his trembling fingers into the mud, he realized he hadn’t breathed in half a minute and gasped, collapsing fully into the ground, letting the red clay and rainwater dig into his body. Lying there, he let the minutes pass. Sleep slowly descended upon him.

A high-pitched scream and a jet of heat drew him awake, and Stevens raised his head. Five dead horses were in the street ahead, but no soldiers’ bodies were to be seen. Instead, there was a smoldering crater from which a skeletal, black torso was clawing the clay. Oily smoke rose from the scorched earth. The crowd had shattered back into single men who were screaming and scampering in all directions, some running past the duke, terrified, others trying to climb up and over shacks, others simply running in confused zigzags to nowhere. There was a heavy metallic crunch and clink from somewhere out of sight, around and down one of the narrow streets that intersected the sad one he was now on. Noises like taunt metal cords being plucked and thick pistons hissing rose in the air, and Stevens heavily pushed himself to his feet, covered in mushy red clay that sloughed from his front and face, falling in clumps to the ground. As dozens of men ran from the intersection, waving wildly and screaming, Stevens moved toward it, his head cocked, his fear of death greatly diminished in the afterglow of surviving a near assassination. He saw a spindly, angular piece of metal, draped in cable and tipped with spikes, move slowly from around the corner and plant itself in the mud. It pivoted, pulling something heavy into view, and Stevens frowned.

“Oh God have mercy on me,” he muttered as his feet stopped moving and terror quickly overtook him again. Clanking and jittering into view was a looming, eight-legged machine, barely holding itself up, huge metal pieces pulling and wheezing in conjunction to keep its body in defiance of gravity. Jets of steam and smoke blew from the contraption’s metal body, oil and water flowing from grates on its sides. The square metal head moved mechanically to face him as it clomped around the bend, jerkily moving into place like a slow second hand. He could make out the forms of men moving inside it through the slits in the metal panels that made up its side. It was a spider tank, built by the Engineer’s Guild for the Entente Army that had fought in the first Gisela Tournament. That had been years ago, but the improbable instrument still existed. And judging from the long, steaming mandible moving beneath its ungainly head, the machine was still lethal.

“Dear Lord, I hope they recognize me…” Stevens said, and stepped forward, waving his hands above his head and smiling. “I say, gentlemen!” he cried, “It’s Leopold Stevens! I’m alright!” The gears beneath the tank’s headpiece clanked together as the gunner moved its magical armaments into place. “Good gracious,” was all Stevens could manage before a bright jet of energy shot from the tip of the thick, wand-like protrusion beneath the cockpit and landed in the street a few yards ahead of him. A burst of fire and noise threw a cascade of red clay into the air, and the duke dove away from the blast, covering his head and closing his eyes tight. Almost immediately he stumbled to his feet, nearly falling back on his face in the slippery mud, and began running for the nearest cover. Beside him, a shack exploded in a ball of flame, the roof shooting into the air and the bottom half of a man smashing through the second floor of a building on the other side of the road like a macabre cannonball. Behind, the tank began clanking down the street, following the fleeing malcontents.

[LordLeopold]

High Priest Caspar Knaut, his body still aching in a dozen places, shifted from one buttock to the other and wheezed. On top of his stiff woolen robes was wrapped a heavy shawl, dyed as black as the ecclesiastical garb underneath. He was bareheaded, and felt the cold air pricking at his balding head uncomfortably. Pulling back his glistening white skin, he tried to form a stained, yellow smile at the guest sitting across the room from him. High above him the ceiling floated, somewhere in a mist of cobwebs and shadows. The room was littered with the detritus of an office long inhabited by the same scholar: papers, sticks of chalk, moldy remains of half-eaten lunches. A heavy desk, an indispensable piece of furniture for any of the High Priests of Ai'Bron, dominated the front of the room where he quivered sickly. A large tapestry hung behind him, depicting some monstrous battle scene. He coughed again.

Looking down at his hands, fresh scars shining above the lumps of veins, he thought about how close he must have been to dying in the past day. How much closer his brethren fighting the rebellion must have been to death because so much care was diverted his way, to keep him alive despite the incredible injuries he had suffered. He could still feel the burning grip of Aesphestos' magic imprinted in his flesh. It felt like he was still being squeezed roughly like a child in a rough blanket wrapped too tightly. Bunching the scarf up around his neck, he sighed and felt his lungs press against his ribcage, which seemed a little small. He may have survived the immediate attack, but he knew that whatever had happened to him would eventually end his life, if something deadlier didn't intervene in the meantime. Raising his hands to his eyes, he massaged the globes, watching lights dance on the inside of his eyelids as he did so. It was undeniable. He was old.

"Are you alright, your grace?" the monk across from him asked nervously, and Knaut lowered his hands, smiling weakly again. "A bit of the flu," he replied, and clasped his puffy fingers together on his lap. The ache in his joints moved outward through his marrow, toward his fingers and the top of his skull. He felt as if he was being ruined from within, as if the scars from Aesphestos' attack went deeper than his skin or even his flesh, down to his spirit.

Outwardly, he only continued to smile and scooted his chair forward a bit. "You were saying, my son?" The younger monk drew a breath, apparently unsure of how to continue but painfully aware of how he couldn't take his frightened report back. He would have to press on.

"Twelve monks. Just came in. Stabbed in the Bazaar." Knaut stopped dead, his mouth open slightly, air feebly sucked into his throat.

"Stabbed by whom?"

"Uh," he managed, the implications of what he was saying giving him a few seconds of pause. "City Guardsmen, we think." Feeling faint, Knaut leaned against the edge of his desk, closing his eyes tightly as the world spun around him. The fact that, for the time being, he was ultimately and utterly responsible for the Citadel and all his brethren in it, suddenly acquired an even more frightening weight than it had only a few moments earlier. He drew himself back inward, tying together his frayed emotions and focusing them, kicking around furiously in his head for a solution. Finally, he drew himself straight.

"Draw all the monks back to the Citadel and eject all the City Guard." As the monk tremulously stood and left the room, Knaut leaned back in his chair, his meager strength slowly draining. Civil war he thought to himself.

*******

Around the manor that the day before had housed the Baron of Radasanth there was little horticultural cheer to be had. What little grass and flowers were left on the ground were coated in mud and flattened. Entire swaths of earth had been torn and smashed into mudfields. Shrubs and vines had been ripped up and were lying in smoldering fires at the corners of the estate, where they were poked by sniggering conscript soldiers. Topiaries shaped like fanciful animals had been slashed by swords or scorched until they were no longer recognizable, so that the estate was littered with their remains like a strange graveyard. Gravel paths which had formerly been rolled flat were now gouged and scattered. A gardener was sitting on the stump of a distinguished old tree that had been felled by a dull blade, weeping into his shirtsleeves. The only thing constructive in sight was a gang of Ozternbergian soldiers in their spiked helmets and thick, drab uniforms, hacking away at hedges and rosebushes to clear a landing strip for their dragons across the remains of the garden. They were using the few garden tools that hadn't been smashed or stolen by the invaders. Outside the bounds of the wall, a contingent of powder-blue clad soldiers with immaculate golden helmets, each topped with a stuffed dove, marched in a continual loop around the property, the few remaining members of the baron's personal guard forced to march in time along with them.

Max Immelman grumbled angrily to himself as he paced back and forth, watching the progress of the landing strip construction. His polished black boots were quickly picking up the goopy dirt which was being churned to the surface by the construction, but he ignored it: just as he ignored most of the intelligence report that was being read back to him by a severe adjutant with a black armband. Immelman looked out of the corner of his eye at the band and kept grumbling. It was a sign of personal fealty to the Nar'oth, the messiah of his nation and herald of the end of evil in the world. Joseph von Ribbentrophen, a minor noble and mediocre military mind, was now the savior of the world and attracting a far more devoted following than the Emperor, himself. But he was something aside from minor and mediocre, Immelman feared. He was also mad, and this was the most fearsome thing of all. The reincarnation of the greatest emperor his people had ever known, and the only human king to stand at the Battle of Caradin, should at least be a little more worthy of respect than that.

"... an army is reported to be moving from the east..." Immelman heard through the buzz of the intelligence report, and quickly ended his reverie to face the officer, who was a bit startled by the sudden attention and nearly dropped his parchment.

"The east?" Immelman barked. "An army? Who? The Forgotten?" The officer blinked slowly, collecting himself.

"Our scouts flew too high to see distinctly, but they claim to have seen several banners of the governments of this continent." Immelman sneered and waved for the officer to continue, but deeply was troubled. If Corone had turned against them, there was little hope of holding the city. Entente forces could perhaps defeat an outside force, but if native armies attacked the city, it was not a great puzzle to decipher who Radasanth would support. Immelman shook his head and turned to ask the officer another question when a deep roar and a gust of wind slapped his body. The sky darkened for a brief moment and the officer's paper was torn from his hand. Shouting at the men on the landing strip, who were scattering and pointing at the sky, Immelman looked up and frowned. An enormous dragon had just buzzed the landing strip, and was wheeling through the air, probably preparing to swoop back down. Several more dragons were circling, far higher above, so high they seemed to be buzzards in the sky. It was a standard Ozternbergian landing. It appeared the Nar'oth and his entourage had returned.

A few minutes later, Immelman snapped to attention as the Nar'oth's dragon cantered to a stop in front of him. It was a muscled, red-skinned beast with a squat neck and a huge single horn extending from its brow. Spreading its wings one last time before finally folding them along its back, the beast briefly covered the sun, which shone through its membranous wings like the moon through fog. Its tail was long and snaked back and forth of its own accord, nearly clobbering a nimble-footed attendant soldier with the bone club at its tip. As the dragon settled on its haunches, several men rushed to link heavy chains to its bridle and saddle, keeping it in place for its rider. But that man didn't wait for them to finish, and leaped from the dragon's back, his jackboots thumping into the mud heavily. As Joseph von Ribbentrophen stepped forward, he unlatched his heavy dragonhide riding cloak and tossed it at a lieutenant, who nearly buckled under the weight. He was a large man, broad across the shoulders and face, who was no less imposing as he lurched forward, face red, mouth stretched thin. Most striking, however, was the disturbing burn scar across his forehead and shaved scalp. It took the form of a dragon, its tail curling nearly to the bridge of his nose, its wings spread above his eyebrows and its head snapping at his dome. Disgustingly painful to look at, it was the mark of the Nar'oth, the first sign of the end times.

"They fucked us, Max!" von Ribbentrophen screamed, tearing off his thick gloves and tossing them at the dazed lieutenant as he marched forward, boots pounding heavily with each step. "They nailed us right in the ass!" Immelman's mouth dropped in shock, and von Ribbentrophen grabbed his shoulder as he marched past, whipping him around and nearly pulling him alone. "We need some place to talk about this alone," he nearly shouted in Max's ear, and Immelman raised a hand weakly, managing to say "Perhaps the Baron's former quarters?" von Ribbentrophen, incandescent with rage, gritted his teeth and nodded, and Immelman managed to take the lead as best he could, steering the seething savior into the manor and up the stairs into the dingy room.

As Immelman closed the door, von Ribbentrophen marched to a chair that seemed to be made of sticks and threw himself into it. The wood groaned and the Nar'oth cursed, jumping up to his feet and pacing back and forth across the ratty carpet, eyes jumping from one spindly table to another. One was layered with maps and documents, all stained with red wine. A carafe was lying on its side atop all of them, and von Ribbentrophen yelled something incomprehensible, grabbed the glass, and threw it against a brass mirror standing in the corner, where it shattered. "Damn!" he cried, grabbing one of the heavy maps and, with some effort, tearing the thick animal skin it was painted upon. Immelman, screwing his courage up, crossed his arms and waited for the Nar'oth to calm. After a few minutes, seeing this was unlikely, he asked the only vapid question that came to mind.

"The coronation went smoothly?" he managed. von Ribbentrophen had been urgently called back to Ozternberg by a carrier pigeon. They had all been informed that the Emperor had died and that, by ancient law, the Nar'oth must bless the ascension of his heir. von Ribbentrophen snarled at Immelman and slammed his fist on the table.

"There was no coronation!" he shouted, his scream echoing off the stone of the tiny room's walls. Immelman, shocked silent, stood, his face locked into a stupid gape. The Nar'oth tore at his collar, loosening a button, and breathed deeply. His face lost a few shades of red. "It was all a trick," he continued, more calmly but still transparently furious. "We were tricked so I would leave and the monks could get into Radasanth. When I got there, the Emperor was fine. The old cocksucker was shocked to see me!" Immelman's jaw dropped at the lèse majesté, but von Ribbentrophen continued. "I flew back here and I went to our empty main camp. We looked like idiots! It's sheer luck I found you here, I just flew until I saw smoke and figured that you'd fouled up something else!"

"It was those scheming horseshit monks, I know it!" he cried, slamming his fist into his palm. "And we're not going to grin and bear it like a bunch of faggots!" Immelman, shocked to feeling faint at all the coarse language, moved to a chair and sat down. "First we're going to take care of these monks. We're going to get von Mansfield," Hearing one of his friends' names, Immelman blanched, but didn't interrupt. "Then we're going to end this Generalissimo charade and get rid of Stevens and his brother once and for all. We’ll firebomb them from the kyat dragons if they don't go willingly. Then..." rubbing his hands together, von Ribbentrophen's eyes gained an eager glint and he began chuckling, his mood visibly improving. He stood up and sat down several times, the medals on his uniform clanking, muttering things to himself and counting out numbers on his fingers.

Immelman sat back in the chair, crossing his arms, assessing the situation. So the monks had engineered the whole thing. It made a sick sense: They had distracted the Nar'oth and staged the siege in the city to present a reason to seize military power and present the Ozternbergians with a fait accompli when von Ribbentrophen returned. The attack on the Citadel, the Baron's attempt to destroy the Entente beginning with the monks, it had all been an act, and Peter O'Mally had orchestrated it all. Something about it didn't seem right. If the City Guards were in on the ploy, as they must have been, why did some of them seem to be revolting now? And if the monks had wanted to take over the Entente, couldn't there be a less risky way to go about it? Taking Radasanth, too, seemed unnecessary.

"What the hell are you doing here, anyway?" von Ribbentrophen asked, and Immelman looked up, slightly confused but quickly regaining his confidence.

"Right now, preparing to try the war criminals from the attack on the Citadel. They're being kept in the wine cellar before we send them to the House of Ministries. There's a treaty..." Immelman was cut off as von Ribbentrophen leapt to his feet.

"Release all of them," he said dismissively, waving his hand regally. "We'll have trials all right, but they'll be of Peter O'Mally and his kind. I've been expecting this for some time, but nothing this big," von Ribbentrophen rubbed his chin thoughtfully, his mania slowly dissipating. "I assume you have the city under control, at least?" he asked. Immelman nodded. Both men jumped, suddenly, as a wave of sound hit the building, causing the glass shards on the floor to jump and both men's bones to rattle. Both men cursed and ran to the small window, squeezing into so both could see. Out over the city, a dusty mushroom of smoke was rising into the air, like soot from a dragon's snout. Although it was already breaking apart in the wind, it still hovered menacingly over the cityscape. Another rumble filled the air and several lightning bolts jumped up and down between the sky and earth. Immelman's mouth went dry.

"Those damn monks!" von Ribbentrophen shouted, and turned for the door.

*******

Baron Marion raised his head from the rocking cart he was splayed out across, trying to see beyond the wobbling wooden platform to the men and horses riding alongside him. His leg had been wrapped firmly between two splints, and a bedroll had been placed under his head for comfort. Joel the Hypnotist was riding to his left, that he could see very easily. Some young man in very fine riding clothes - he looked very much like the Baron of Concordia, and Marion guessed the foppish boy was the noble's son - trotted on the other side. Above, the twisted branches of fruit trees passed quickly, the mottled sunlight streaming through them giving him a slight headache. He wasn't sure how close they were to Radasanth, but it didn't matter. Joel, he knew, had everything quite well in hand, especially since the other armies had met up with them a few miles back. Looking up at the small, hard pears growing overhead, he imagined what it would be like to be back in his mansion, with his wine in his hand and his woman in his bed. Magnificent!

Beside him, Joel tugged his hat closer over his eyes and smiled.

[EarlStevens]

Our man dashes forward, his head forced downward, trying to push smoke and dust aside with flaps of his arms. He watches the ground flicker past his kicking feet, trying not to look up as his ears rattle with another explosion and flecks of stone whiz past his ears. Whatever lassitude he felt earlier in the day has long since been left behind - his only concern now is the edge of the square ahead, and the bare hope of freedom. He assumes that Witherspoon and Darby are running to either side of him, but the buzzing in his head makes it impossible to pick out footsteps. He doesn't dare lift his eyes, and thus he runs, alone, toward the seemingly infinitely distant goal. Three days ago he wasn't sure he'd ever leave his tiny cell, squished and smashed at the bottom of a stone shaft. He'd longed for some great expanse around him, sunlight and cool wind over a hilltop. Now he curses how damnably unconfined he is.

Our man's running is suddenly ended as he is forcibly thrown to the ground, as if he has run into a wall and cracked his forehead against brick. Brain spinning, he raises a hand to his temple and looks up, hoping against hope that he has finally reached a building and with it an open door to safety. But there is nothing. The edge of the square still seems miles away. His running, which he realizes has left him breathless, sweating and already aching, seems to have done little good. Turning from side to side, he sees Anthony and Silas also looking about, dizzy and sprawled on the ground. The chicken and dragon are nowhere to be found. Our man groans and draws himself up, pushing off the ground. At least the explosions have stopped. Perhaps O'Mally has fended off the scarlet priest. In fact, the air is eerily calm, like the space under a bed sheet on a summer evening. Looking back up at the far freedom of houses and streets, our man mutters a curse. All that running for nothing? But he quickly realizes his folly as the air in front of him twists and fragments like a mirror shattering, the houses and stores across the square splitting in halves and thirds before disappearing entirely into a webwork of black splinters. As if a curtain, the very air itself draws back, revealing the priest O'Mally had called Alvar standing before them. It is immediately clear that, if there has been a victor in this battle, it has not been our ally O'Mally. Alvar smiles, oily and cruel, and steps forward, raising his crosier in the air.

Knowing you are about to die: It is a much less disconcerting feeling than he had expected. There have been a few fleeting moments in his life in which our hero thought he might be on the verge of passing. but nothing as certain as this. Before the moment was too shocking to effect realization, but now it is obvious. In an instant, though, he realizes what this strange world of Fairie is truly about, and smiles. "So the secret of life only comes right before death? A tragedy," he thinks. Looking beyond the smiling face of mortaliy before him, he sees another stark white, smiling mask atop a pillar of black, standing silently at the edge of the square. His manservant has returned. Yes, it all makes a lot of sense now. Resolution sets in. Our man raises his own walkingstick, gripped tight and until now forgotten in his hand. With a flick of his wrist he twists the shaft and a blade protrudes from its end. Alvar sneers at the stinger, and our man finds that the thin cane is growing heavy in his hand, turning from wood to lead in a few heartbeats. He staggers forward, trying to lift the weapon and make a stab at the priest, but it is too much, and he drops the staff to the ground where it thuds heavily. Our man leans forward, gasping, the effort of holding up the giant weight draining his strength after only a few seconds.

"Hey!" Anthony jumps to one side of our man, Silas to the other. Seeing them both appear from the corners of his eyes, our hero grins and waves in mock resignation.

"I've softened him up for you," he says, and Anthony barks a short laugh.

"Thank'ee," he says, raising a hand. "Silas, throw me whatever you've got in that case!" Witherspoon nods and throws open the clasps of his huge leather case with a wriggle of his arm and reaches inside. He throws something over our man's head, and Anthony snatches it at the end of its arc. Yelping as if he has grabbed a coal by accident, he drops it almost instantly. Both our man and Alvar look down at the black dagger lying in the dust. One might expect such a smooth blade to shine in the sunlight, but instead the weapon seems crafted of shadows, dark as the underside of a raincloud, giving no glint or reflection. Its blade is flat and razor-thin on one side, serrated and even grimmer on the other. It ends in a sharp point, and on the whole looks entirely like an animal's stinger.

"Poten-fah," Alvar says, his voice oddly wavering. And that is all he gets out of his mouth before a streak of silver hits him in the face, throwing him nearly to the ground. He reaches up to the glistening blob on his head, dipping into it with one hand. Trying to scrape the stuff off, he only seems to sink further in its clutches, as the goop hangs to his hand and stretches as he pulls his arm away. Expanding over his body, the metallic liquid seems like a devilish version of an Uncle Remus story. Our man steps back, watching the vile mess spread down the priest's neck and arm. A gurgling scream escapes from his mouth, barely visible as a shallow scoop in the slime.

"You were caught in a loop trap," our man hears O'Mally say as the bald high priest steps around him, staff held high, moving between the trio and their writhing enemy. "You only get anywhere once you stop running." He says, as if this suffices for an explanation. "Hold still for a few moments, I'll transport you to the Citadel." Anthony frowns and shakes his head.

"The last time you did that, we didn't end up where you wanted us to go. Blazes, what if you end up dumping us in a nimbus cloud a mile up this time?" O'Mally turns his head, looking out of the corner of his eye, and reveals a cut curving from the middle of his forehead to his ear, a swath of red pouring down his face. Our man grimaces and Anthony stops complaining.

"I'm sending you back to the Citadel," O'Mally says. "There you should...." he doesn't finish, as a rush of magic from Alvar flings the silver fluid from his face and to the ground, where it evaporates instantaneously. With a roar, the priest launches from the ground toward O'Mally, smacking him across the head with his staff and slamming his knee into the older priest's kidney. O'Mally crumples to the ground, but Alvar kicks at the dirt, causing an echoing explosion that launches his opponent into the air, where the crimson priest grabs the front of his robes and flings his body nearly twenty feet away. O'Mally hits a large semi-unearthed paving stone with a crunch, his body limp. Alvar spins to face our trio, now holding O'Mally's crosier in one hand and his own in another. Our man senses magic rushing into both weapons from Alvar's body. The red priest extends both staffs, touching their tips together. Joined, they glow and hiss with a heat that vaporizes the sweat on our hero's body.

Alvar and his weapons are smashed to the ground by a huge boulder, which then lifts itself into the air again and pounds down on the priest's body for good measure. Looking up, our man realizes the rock is merely an appendage, attached like a hand to a larger hulk of rock and dirt which towers above them, blocking out the sun with its height. Gasping, our man steps back, grasping at the ground for his weapon, which has returned to its normal weight. Atop the huge body, however, is a pea of a head, bald and glistening with blood.

"O'Mally!" Anthony yells, and the head turns and nods. It is indeed the priest, who has encased himself in a massive suit of stone. He steps forward and smashes a ton of rock on Alvar, who at this point seems almost certainly deceased. Anthony hoots, waving his arms excitedly: He is now holding the black, sharp weapon in one hand. Our man doesn't feel quite so excited, and looks over to Silas, who is equally unsteady, chewing his lip and watching the half-golem with shifting, fearful eyes. There is something unnatural and frightening about the priest-cum-statue, and our man doesn't know whether to cheer on the pummeling that his potential murderer is receiving or not.

"When you get to the Citadel..." O'Mally begins again, but his words are swallowed by an explosion that throws our man, Silas and Anthony onto their backs. Most of O'Mally's stone casing has been blown away by Alvar, who is now standing again, still wielding two crosiers. Both glow with a ethereal light, something like bottled lightning. His body half exposed, the rock crumbling around him, O'Mally stumbles back. Alvar lifts the crosiers and a wave of burning energy slaps his enemy, tearing away the last of the stone, tossing O'Mally back. The older priest skids across the ground but flips in the air and lands on his feet, a magic shield bracing him up. He holds one hand out to our trio, pushing them several yards back from the battle. The other he points at Alvar's black onyx arm, his lips moving silently and impossibly quickly. Looking down at his arm, the crimson priest's eyes open as red-hot crevasses begin opening across it surface, hissing steam and spreading with popping, whistling noises. His fingers begin breaking apart, falling to the ground and shattering. One crosier slips, and O'Mally opens his fingers. The shaft flies to his hand, and he immediately points it to our trio. Our man feels an unfamiliar cocoon of magic envelope him, and then the world jars around him, stopping and starting fitfully. Then all goes black.

[LordLeopold]

Stevens ducked into an alleyway barely wider than his chest and stumbled sideways slightly as he caught his breath. He gasped between his teeth, gritted against the pain in his muscles and joints. His body was flooded with anxious excitement at the explosions and death from which he had just extricated himself. His hands shook. A quaking sensation was beginning in his knees which would, if he didn't start walking soon, probably force him to sit down. People were screaming to each other and to nothing in particular in the street outside, splashing in the mud as they rushed in fright, from menaces real and imagined, in every direction. A terrified man with a gash down his forehead stumbled on the ridge of the eroded mud and screamed as a beam of fire hit him in the back, evaporating half his body in a misty red puff. Stevens gulped his bone-dry throat and scrambled further back in the alley, his boot squishing something and knocking a cloud of bottle-blue flies into the air.

Although slim and cramped, the alley was long and tortured, its kinks and odd turns a rough description of the unplanned nature of the construction around it. As the duke squirmed between two half-collapsed board walls he saw a heavy metal leg draped in thick steel cords pierce the remains laying in the middle of the road. He shuddered and withdrew further down the alley, which took a sharp right turn and swallowed him further into the body of the slum.

Down the alley was shockingly silent, with all the noises of war outside muffled below hearing. There were no windows or doorways into the passage that the duke could see; apparently the space had simply been created by the poor architectural skills of the laymen who had thrown up their homes in this part of the city. Indeed, the alley grew and narrowed from one building to the next, in some places falling into deep grooves where foundations had been planned and abandoned. Knee-deep puddles formed in these gouges, which Stevens flung himself over as best he could, inevitably wetting his toes at least a bit at the far edge. The clay below was wet and sticky, and stumbling along the duke felt like he was wading up a stream. He fumbled along as much by pushing himself along the splintered walls with his quivering arms as skidding with his unsteady feet. Above the sky was quiet and still. There were no clouds, the sun was unseen over the edge of the roofs, and the air was free of birds. Stevens felt almost as if he were the only person in the world, and was surprised to find the feeling liberating. His nerves were less ragged here, even as he made his way forward toward the certain end of his serenity, where he would again be dumped into hysterical chaos. He knew quite well what rioting lay ahead and behind, but the intermediate and immediate stillness was all that filled his mind. With this thought he realized that he hadn't felt so relaxed in quite literally years. Pausing, he leaned against the wall, his body no longer shaking, and held a hand to the side of his face.

He had thought about it as little as possible until now, but with this whiff of pleasant freedom his memories of his time before Althanas came flooding back. Quiet days of sunlight glinting from the caps of small waves, the sails pulling ropes that croaked against each other, a whistling breeze in the air. There was a satisfaction in those days, a satisfaction he didn't know how to feel again. There was also the feeling of quiet friendship with his butler, Bunter. Bunter, who had disappeared with him on the water that fateful night that had ended with him washing up on the shores of Corone. Stevens had once felt sad thinking about Bunter and his failed searches for the man, but now all that filled his chest when he imagined the stoic valet was a nostalgic resignation. Thinking about his time in Althanas he felt something entirely different. That man burning in the street, that girl raped in the mansion, that dead monk on the cobblestones. He clutched at his neck and leaned all his weight against a wall. Dragged down by a heavy guilt, his knees buckled and he nearly fell over, catching himself against a loose plank and barely staying on his feet.

A few dozen feet in front of him, one of the walls quivered and swung out at waist level. The trap door snapped into place and hung, suspended like a saluting arm across the alley. Voices hissed through the opening.

"Quick, get them out there. At least they'll be safe," a woman's frightened voice said, and a man's grunted back at her. Two tiny, scrawny children were pushed into the alley as the door quickly swung shut. The children's faces were black and grimy with huge tear smudges under each eye. Both were still rattling with sobs under their baggy, torn clothes. One was holding what looked like the ragged remains of some kind of stuffed toy. Each was so young and thin that their sex was hard to determine, and so frightened by the fact that their family had ejected them into this lonely alley that Stevens was unwilling to approach them no matter what kind of welcoming smile he might be able to force onto his face. He merely stared into their frozen eyes, wondering what they would be doing now if he had never come to Althanas at all, if this army hadn't come to their city and caused everything to tumble down atop their lives. The duke stepped back from them and turned, retracing his steps back down the alleyway.

In what seemed like no time he stepped back out into the street, ignoring the scorched corpse smeared across the muddy hump. There were significantly fewer people screaming and running past. Pillars of smoke were climbing into the air, one a few houses down on the street, flames engulfing the remains of a flimsy building. Glancing around to make sure the way was clear, Stevens struck out along the street, following the wake of destruction and death along the road. The spider tank had dug deep holes in the mud as it had clanked along, and its tracks were easy to follow even if the remains of its targets were not still smoldering along the way. Rumbles and screams could be heard faintly along the way, growing louder by the block. A man with no legs sat at the side of the road, looking down as if still confused that he only had smoking stumps instead of thighs. Stevens grimaced and rounded a corner, following the trail of the tank.

He stopped cold at the scene in front of him. The tank was sprawled across the remains of a flattened building, its legs splayed out, tendrils of wire and gushing, burst hydraulic beams spread around them. Its body was cracked open, a hatch at the very top swinging by one hinge. The pod that served as its head was rocking back and forth on its top, severed completely from its body. What looked like two hundred people were clustered around its smoking frame, chanting some terrible, incomprehensible shout. Some of them seemed to be passing blood-coated bodies above each other's heads in a weird victory demonstration. The bodies bobbed and moved like noodles on the surface of boiling water. They seemed to almost be alive again, but one was missing its head and another was mangled so badly that it barely seemed to be a human corpse at all. Five men stood on top of the remains of the weapon, waving swords in the air, nearly slicing the green plumes off each others' helmets. One of them was leering across the crowd, the men on either side of him avoiding his gaze. The golden cords at his shoulders made it obvious who he was. Looking out, his shaded eyes met Stevens's, and the duke saw the smile on his face falter, but not entirely disappear. The colonel raised a hand in a grim wave, the smile on his face forming a vicious V. Stevens, consumed by a clash of anger, surprise and muzzled thankfulness, simply raised a hand in response. He didn't even feel the club come down on the back of his head, drowning all in blackness.

[EarlStevens]

Our man opens his eyes to a blanched, far-away sky, open and free of clouds all the way to the sun. He stares into the white ball for a few seconds before it hurts and then sits up, blinking. Rubbing away the burning from the globes of his eyes, he slowly stands. Shoulders and neck aching, he moves his knuckles to them, trying to massage them to normality. Some weak wind is licking his face, but it isn't strong enough to blow away the wet, slick feel of the air or the fetid smell. Taking a blind step, he nearly stumbles over some rise on the ground, and catching his balance, his shoes splash through a shallow pool. He opens his eyes again, a spot in his vision glowing where he had stared at the sun.

He is standing on slightly uneven slabs of white stone, square puddles marking where the marble has sunk or risen as a block. Lines of dirt with tiny rows of grass are piled along some of the chinks between blocks. A few wet, rotting leaves cling to the rock, plastered as thin as Bible pages. Some of the stone is swirled with other, darker minerals, and the entire surface seems to be blackening with age and grime. Turning on his heel, our hero confronts the edge of a huge dome plated with stripes of oxidized copper against which his head must have been propped against earlier.

"This is a roof," he says to no one in particular, and looks around for its edges, for some hint as to where O'Mally's magic has sent him. As he walks toward the close horizon of the roof, a songbird swoops out of the sky and springs along beside him, chirping and dipping into puddles, fluffing out its brown feathers and pecking at the water. Its a cheery figure on the desolate stone, but our man finds himself looking around the roof for the baleful silhouette of his manservant, trying to find a narrow finger of night standing against the sky.

He reaches a slope in the roof so unexpected he almost falls down the surface. Standing at the cusp of the incline, he can see perhaps thirty feet of marble leading to the edge of the building, beyond which there is some terrifyingly indeterminate drop to the unseen ground beyond. Our man can see the tops of columns and the edge of another roof rising above the far edge of the roof, made of a similarly worn stone. "I'm still in the city," he mutters to himself and, damning caution, wobbly side-steps down to the edge of the roof. Tweeting anxiously, the songbird flies away, zipping past his shoulder and suicidally diving beyond the end of the ledge.

As our man peers over the edge to the street below, his heart begins to race, feeding the dizziness in his head. He is hanging at least sixty feet above a cobbled boulevard bordered by wide walkways punctuated with well-trimmed spikes of evergreen trees. Across the street, a forest of columns holds up an enormous facade with indecipherable runes etched across its surface. Despite the pale sunlight, the unadorned stone is exceedingly grim, and the imposing stone building seems about to overcome the street and slam into our hero's perch like an Argonaut's nightmare.

The brown spot of the songbird is erratically spiraling in the empty space between the overhanging tips of his shoes' soles and the spikes of the helmeted heads of the soldiers below. Two lines of them are stomping across the cobblestones, one of them shouting guttural orders to the others. From the roof he appears a tiny figure waving a crop a hair's breadth wide, the other soldiers two centipedes grunting alongside him. Our hero, wiping his sweaty hands on his smeared waistcoat, steps back from the height and toward the bronze dome.

Silas and the Viscount Darby are stumbling across the patchwork of marble and puddles as our man steps back onto the flat roof surface. "Thank God," Witherspoon says as the three meet, slapping our man's shoulder reassuringly. Darby, breathing heavily with a waxen face, merely nods and motions for our man to follow him.

"Where are we?" our hero asks Witherspoon, whose face is considerably more flushed.

"The House of Ministries," Witherspoon replies, falling into step beside him as they follow Darby. "The house of government, more or less. Beautiful inside, really. No better place for a parole hearing." Our man snickers but Witherspoon doesn't give the knowing grin of someone making a joke. "Don't spread that around," Anthony says over his shoulder as they rounded the green dome.

"Wasn't O'Mally sending us to the Citadel?" our man asks, a and Witherspoon does smile this time.

"Seems he missed!" Anthony turns his head and snarls: "Wouldn't be the first time. You're surprisingly flippant for two people who nearly died." Witherspoon grimaces, but our man, shocked into remembering what has just happened, stays somber.

"Well, is there a way off this roof at least?" he responds, and Darby shrugs dramatically.

"Well that's exactly..." with an splintering crunch like a cold watermelon being kicked, Anthony's sentence dies in his throat as his leg punches through the roof to the knee. All three men stop in their tracks, dramatically waiting for the other shoe to drop, glancing nervously about. When nothing happens for a few seconds, Witherspoon looks down at where Darby's leg had disappeared, and his mouth again forms a smile.

"Oh, you've discovered a trap door!"

[EarlStevens]

The three men dig their fingers between the edge of the decaying wood door and the grainy, eroding stone surrounding it, breaking off pieces of both under their fingernails. "Alright, steady now," Darby mutters under his breath, and our man sucks in a lungful of moldy breath before heaving in union with his fellows. Although rotted through in some parts, the door is still heavy and waterlogged, and takes a few uneasy seconds of straining before it groans open. Its sopping weight takes over as the team push the doorway fully open, and it swings heavily, its hinges shredding and the entire door coming apart as it thuds against the marble on the other side of the hole in the roof.

"Well," our man says, rubbing his hands together and peering down at the half-lit stairs below, "I don't mind going first." Darby markedly shrugs again. Before he turns to descend, Witherspoon pushes his walkingstick back into his hands.

"You lost it in transit," Witherspoon says, "Should prove of use in a scrape." Our man nods approvingly and turns down into the steps, a last glimpse of the checkerboard of reflected sky and mildewing stone quickly giving way to a dusty, cloudy semi-darkness. Fragments of the door are strewn on the creaking wooden steps below like shavings on a craftsman's floor, and our man kicks them down the stairs as he descends. The stairway, so vertical it's nearly a ladder, creaks mightily as Silas and Darby follow him, but the structure holds until they all reach the stone floor. Unlike the rain-slick roof, this attic is dry and suffused with fine dust and the smell of dessicated wood and leather. The roof is high enough that all the men can stand without stooping or worrying about scraping the tops of their heads. Indeterminate piles under sheets of burlap and yellowed cotton surround them on either side, making a sort of pathway meandering into the darkness.

Aside from the now blinding light streaming through the roof entrance, softer light is entering the attic space from an array of glassless windows, curving into an unseen distance behind piles of detritus, following the curve of the copper dome above. Our man approaches one of them, and gripping the stone on either side, leans his nose out, looking down into the belly of the building. Dizziness strikes him again, but not as badly this time; he is closer to the ground, now, but the interior of the building is less imposing, if equally somber, as the exterior.

He is looking down into what must be the central atrium of the House of Ministries, topped by the dome. Light is weakly shining from above his head, and by screwing his neck around he sees that the dome above him is centered on a sort of amber-tinted skylight, a circular jewel in the middle of a copper crown. The interior of the dome is divided into quadrants, onto which paintings of some mythological sequence have been frescoed: A dragon and a woman hover over a scene of men striding across an open landscape, dark figures leap over a burning city, men and elves bless a sword, figures wave a flag on a brown sanded shore. Unable to make sense of the narrative, our man turns back down to the floor below.

Blue-tinted columns are visible on the fringes of an elaborate marble inlay on the floor. An intricate pattern of shapes radiates out from what must be a towering statue at the center of the room. It's unclear from this height what exactly the statue is, but it is clearly monstrous in comparison to the people moving in its shadow. These figures surprise our hero, as most of them seem to be chained together in a line far longer than those of the needle-tipped soldiers outside.

"Parole hearing?" our man turns to Silas and points out the window, and the red-suited man takes his place at the window.

"Hm, quite unusual!" he mutters. "I've never been put in shackles..."

"Alright, gentlemen," Darby says, "Enough, we're not on a tour of the place, we need to get out." He pauses for a moment. "And get help for O'Mally." Our man nods, and Silas, his eyes focusing on one of the manacled men below for an extra second, follows them both through the moldering piles of rubbish, pushing through cobwebs and stepping over stray chair legs and rolled up rugs. Our man notices that the chicken and dragon who had been with them earlier were nowhere to be found, but no one was mentioning them, so he keeps it to himself. It is with that thought that our man suddenly realizes that the enervation of the past several hours had been sapped from his body. He felt oddly lighter than he had that morning, as if the motion of fleeing from the fighting in the Citadel and the rest of the city was creating a sort of inertia within him that kept him moving and vital. As the echoes of battle become more distant in his ears, he feels the sounds of life reentering him, as though reverberating through a long and distant tunnel.

"Ah!" the viscount Darby cries, and our man thinks he can hear it more clearly than his heavy breaths from a few seconds earlier, the muted look of surprise on Darby's face a bit clearer than the smile on Witherspoon's face on the roof. They have reached another trap door, this one considerably more intact than the one outside, with a large brass loop for a handle attached to one side. The three men crouch down around it after Darby flings it open, its well-oiled hinges making no noise. A ladder, which probably once led to the doorway in the ceiling, is lying on the carpeted floor below, and Darby mutters a curse under his breath. Our man gauges the distance the best he can and, in one quick motion, grabs the edge of the trap door, swings down, hanging by his fingers for a moment, and drops heavily onto the carpet, folding his legs under himself as he hits the floor to absorb the fall.

"Come on," he calls up to the two surprised faces above him.

[LordLeopold]

Stevens came to as his seat jostled underneath him, bouncing his head painfully against a plank of wood. He tried to lift his hands to the tender spot but found them unnaturally heavy; looking down at his wrists he saw two heavy metal bracelets locked around them. Between them was strung a thick, oily chain no more than a foot long. Stevens was briefly startled before another bounce of his seat knocked his head again, harder this time. Reaching clumsily back, he rubbed at the swelling bruise, one hand dangling oddly at his collar bone as he did so. He was sitting on the floor of what must've been at one point a hay cart - pieces of hay were jabbing into the back of his calves like little sticks. His back was resting against the wood making up the side of the cart, and with another jostle he could feel a second bruise, already formed and hardening, across the back of his neck and shoulders. I must've been walloped earlier, he thought to himself, and passed out. And now I'm someone's prisoner. How unpleasant.

Looking to his left and right, he was surrounded on almost all sides by men who looked like battered tramps: dusty, grizzled men with cuts over their eyebrows and swollen lips. Most wore clothes they seemed to have worn since mid-puberty, either too small or so dirty and torn it was impossible to tell their original color or exact shape. He was initially repulsed by them, but it was impossible to scoot away, as they were to both sides of him, and his body was aching horribly already. As he looked down at his own body, however, he realized his own riding coat and pants were slashed, muddied and worn. His face felt grainy from caked dirt and his neck itched from what must now be several days' worth of stubble. His hair felt matted, a greasy lump pressing down on his head. Despite years of breeding and culture, he couldn't look too much different than these men. The thought was not comforting.

Two soldiers, each with one hand on their rapiers and another on a billy club tucked into their belts, stood at the other side of the cart. They had the uniforms, polished boots and spiked helmets of Ozternbergians. They leaned against the side of the cart and looked over the prisoners, as if trying to decide who would attack first. There were about a dozen to pick from, a few of them with sacks pulled over their heads and tied into place, their arms drawn tightly behind their backs instead of hanging in front of them. Inspecting them from a few feet away, the Duke saw flares of green and smudged symbols across their clothes that meant they could only be one thing: City Guardsmen.

"What is this, where are we going?" Stevens asked, somewhat impetuously. The soldiers ignored him, but a few of the prisoners looked at him askance, trying to deter him with their eyes from talking any more but not wanting to seem like they were allied with him. Finding no answer, Stevens tried another tack. "See here, I don't think you know who I am." At this, the soldiers did seem to show a slight bit of interest, glancing at each other with a somewhat conspiratorial look. A few of the prisoners snickered, but the rest seemed more worried than amused.

"Alright, who are you then?" The soldier asked in the hard tones of his native land. Stevens, sensing a tone of deep sarcasm, began to wish he hadn't spoken but felt obliged to continue, in the vain hope they might recognize him through his beggarly appareance. He stiffly moved to one knee, crouching a bit to rise a little closer to the soldiers' level.

"Leopold Stevens, your generalissimo," he said as confidently as possible. The soldiers looked at him, then each other, as if unsure how to continue. Taking the initiative, one of them turned toward the unseen driver of the cart.

"Hey!" he yelled, "Turn around, we've got Leopold Stevens in here! Turns out we picked him up by mistake!"

"Shut the hell up, Gregor," the invisible driver's voice replied wearily as the soldiers laughed harshly. The prisoners who had sniggered earlier continued their cruel, quiet laughter while the rest of them looked embarrassed. Stevens felt his face blush as the laughter subsided and one of the soldiers leaned toward him.

"I've seen Leopold Stevens," he said, his wide face grinning, "And he's uglier than you." The soldier straightened, put his boot on Stevens's shoulder and kicked him back on his rear, causing a jolt of pain from his tail bone. Stevens felt like leaping at him, pelting him in the face with his fists, but instead just simmered, his face still red. He knew there was really nothing for it. He was truly a prisoner, his ragged appearance as damning as any striped jumpsuit and serial number. Resigned to his fate, he merely tried to appreciate the passing scenery as best he could while suppressing his angst.

The buildings passing on either side were growing taller, older and grander. As the road took on an incline, it seemed to broaden to either side of the cart, and sandstone and brick gave way to granite, limestone and marble. The huge bourgeoisie mansions of the merchants' quarter had either been incongruous and garish or hidden behind blank walls, but these buildings had obviously been built with the aesthetic of the street and each other in mind. Trees had been planted along the walkways, which were interspersed with gurgling fountains and wide benches. This was public architecture, a series of the sundry aspects of a feudal society with the sensibilities of Antiquity.

The cart jerked to a stop, several prisoners toppling over with the suddenness of it. Two more soldiers appeared at the open back of the cart, and without saying more than “go on now!” and “get moving!” the soldiers began pulling and pushing the prisoners out onto the street. Stevens stumbled and nearly fell as he was basically thrown from the cart. Nobody moved to help him – in fact most of the prisoners backed further from him, certain he was trouble. “Be careful with that one!” the soldier who had kicked him called to his fellows on the ground. “He’s important!” Stevens ran his tongue over his teeth to get rid of the nervous, angry energy the mockery excited with him.

As the soldiers herded them away from the cart, several more soldiers, these of a different nationality, fell into place beside them, their faces blank with the boredom of having done the same thing all day. These men were clad in gray, with soft boots which made no sound on the street, unlike the heavy soles of the Ozternbergians. Narrow swords swung at their sides, and their fair faces had the look of hungry ermines. All were lithe and tall, swaying slightly as they walked. Stevens recognized them as Niederoster soldiers, another contingent of the Entente of the Light. Although Niederoster’s nobility spoke the same language as the Ozternbergians, these soldiers were of some conquered tribe or nation which spoke another tongue and were known for their animalistic fury in battle. The darker-uniformed Ozternbergian soldiers stood a bit apart from them, tapping their fingers on the hilts of their swords.

Stevens was so busy surveying his captors that he nearly tripped again as his feet kicked against a short step. Catching his balance, he followed the rest of the prisoners up the stairs, a small rise from the street to a massive block of a building with a set of columns like the needles of a monkfish’s teeth. Each stair was only half a foot or less high, but each was wide enough to fill two or three strides before another step up was required. The stone of the stairs was whiter and cleaner than the rock of the enormous building, which was stained with streaks of black and whose chinks between blocks looked like gaping fissures at points.

Flanked by the soldiers, the prisoners – the hooded among them nearly falling on their faces at each step up – ascended the stairs and walked through the crenulated columns, of which there were off-set rows. Several sets of iron doors, taller than a man but squat and inconsequential under the unadorned rock that descended from above, had been flung open and the prisoners passed from the slanting shadows of the entrance into the soft light of the inner atrium. It was a bit like a cathedral, with a sort of transept leading from the entrance to a wider and higher inner space, topped with a dome. Columns lined the walls, these glistening and polished, blue with mineral swirls of black and frozen fossils splattering their surface. The marble underneath made each footstep a booming echo which jumped off the rib-like arches in the ceiling, across the indistinct friezes of the walls and bounced among the pillars.

Crossing the atrium, they passed a towering marble statue in the center of the hall, a severe woman. Stevens wasn’t sure which mythological figure this was, but the blindfold and the scales in one hand made it apparent which she would have been in London. A man in rags and another with a corolla balanced on his head, each smaller than a child, stood in awe at her feet on the pedestal. As they slowly shuffled past, Stevens could see his reflection in the polished black stone, distorted somewhat by the shape of the rock but still distinct. His whiskers were flecked with gray, his hair a tangled smudge across his head, mud caked across his clothes, which was flaking off in dry clumps that littered the ground as he walked. His back was slouched like a laborer’s, his mouth sagging in an intended frown. I’m not that old, Stevens futilely thought to himself.

It was empty and mostly silent in the atrium, but there were some hushed voices from corners beyond the pillars that lined the edge of the dome which hung above. He could see figures hurrying through the shadows at the edge of the room, where doors irregularly punctured the walls, but it was difficult to tell who or what they might be. Even less sure of what was happening than he had been in the jostling cart, the duke looked back down at his deteriorating shoes and kept frowning.

[EarlStevens]

Silas swings down to the carpet, landing on his hands and the tips of his shoes, and our man helps him stand up, dropping the walkingstick which he had awkwardly brought down during his leap. Darby is already down from the attic, stumbling around the room pushing furniture around, searching for something unidentified. The room they have fallen into seems to be some kind of office. Three rows of tables, each with two chairs pushed under them, are lined across the room. Piles of parchment, garnished with quills, weigh down them down. Across one wall is an array of shelves stacked with enormous ledgers, piles of scrolls and loose paper. There is an air of rapid departure to the office; several of the chairs have light, threadbare coats hanging across their backs or armrests. Although the furniture is obviously old and well-worn, it seems impermanent compared to the room itself, somehow smaller and weaker, like a new coffin recently interred in a family tomb.

"What is this, the accounting department?" our man asks, looking around. He picks up a huge sheet of paper from a yellowing stack and a cascade of fluffy, linty dust rolls off it onto the more recently-used side of the desk. “Huh… it is an accounting department.” He drops the palm frond sized parchment back onto its pile, where it coughs up a cloud of black dust. Darby grunts uninterestedly a few tables over and kicks a chair aside in futility.

“There’s nothing worth using as a weapon here,” he grumbles and walks over toward our man. “We’ll have to make do with what we have. Your swordcane alright?” Our man nods, twisting the knob and extending the blade before retracting it with another twist. “Good. Silas, pass me that dagger and keep Leo’s swordcane.” The con man picks up his traveling case from where he had dropped it from the trapdoor and undoes the clasps, pulling out the respective weapons. “Alright, boys,” Darby says as they arm themselves. “Look alive. We very well may have to fight our way out of here.” He turns toward the door, the cold black dagger in his hand cutting through the dust circulating in the air.

Silas starts after him, but stops as he realizes that our man isn’t following. Our hero is almost surprised that he is not automatically following Darby, but the silence of the rooms in the House of Ministries, the placid days insinuated by the heavy patina of dust on most of the books and papers, is such a contrast with the horrible noise of the fight earlier and the stomp of the soldiers’ boots outside, that he can’t find it within himself to face another battle. So he stands in place, Silas fidgeting beside him, as Darby opens the door wide enough for his head and peeks out into the hallway beyond.

“Looks clear,” he says. “Now we’ll go to the end…” he glances over his shoulder and realizes that no one is standing near. He faces our man and Silas, his face angry but his eyes darting and puzzled. “What are you lads waiting for?” He asks. Silas takes a step back, glancing from Darby to our man anxiously. Our hero takes a step forward, however, determined not to let Silas’s indecision leech over to him.

“There’s a platoon of soldiers out there on the street,” he insists, and Darby cocks his eyebrow. This only emboldens our hero. “I saw them earlier on the roof, before I met up with you two. Spiked helmets, heavy boots, they’re prepared for something…”

“Oh for God’s sake,” Darby responds, “Those are Ozternbergians. They’re on our side, you should know from when they showed up at the Citadel earlier. Tell me if you see anyone with green feathers in their caps, they seem to still be miffed about last night. Now, shall we?” He turns and darts out the door. Silas takes a few shuffling steps after him, his head half turned for approval, but our man holds his hand out, palm downward, dissuading him. A few seconds pass, and Darby reappears in the doorway.

“Christ! What now?” he snaps. Further emboldened, our man takes another step forward, jabbing his finger.

“And that priest in the red skirt? Wasn’t he on ‘our’ side at some point?” Darby crinkles his mouth into a grimace but doesn’t reply. Our man takes another step. “And the monks who aren’t trying to kill us don’t care if your brother lives or dies. Is anyone on my side?”

“Ah,” Darby responds, raising his finger now. “Your side.” Our man clenches his jaw as Silas, his eyes widening, takes another step closer to Darby. The viscount lowers his hand, nodding angrily, knowingly. “Silas?” he says, and the con-man moves all the way to the door, standing beside Darby. A few tense seconds strain past, the three men glaring into one another’s eyes, one uneasy stare after another. Then, without a word, Darby and Silas disappear through the doorway.

[EarlStevens]

For a minute or two, our man stands in the room, flexing and releasing his fists spasmodically, his face slightly quivering. This is totally unbelievable. He thinks to himself. In the span of less than two days, he has been asked to blindly trust the men he had risked his life escape. He had been forced into the guardianship of a man whose brother had tried to kill him. He had, more or less, been forced into a foreign city in a strange fairie world which he known for months only as the opposite side of the walls of his jail cell. And now, those same strangers who had demanded his obedience and trust were leaving him on his own. His anger quickly dampens, quieted by onrushing fear. He looks around the room with a strange, uncertain hope. "I never imagined I'd miss that deuced manservant..." he mutters to himself, wishing that one of the shadows in a corner or under a table will transform into his dark, ghoulish servant.

But the shadows remain on the ground, faded dark stains in the mellow sunlight. The dust and thick silence bind about him. The supreme loneliness of the moment quickly becomes unbearable. Our man allows himself a brief moment of disgust before jettisoning his pride and racing out the door.

The hallway outside is just as empty and silent, narrow and high. For a jolting moment our man looks up at the white strip of ceiling far above, the walls narrowing toward each other as they rise, and remembers his cold cell in the Citadel. He curses and looks down. A featureless brown carpet fills most of the floor, which is itself brown and patternless at the edges around the cloth. It is dusty here, also, but it is a grainy, sticky black dust that our man can feel working its way under his fingernails already. As the room is at the end of the hall, there is only one way to turn, and our man treads slowly, twisting his cane to reveal the blade.

No tapestries or paintings decorate the walls, which are covered in chipping, peeling paint. There are, however, a series of plinths topped with busts lining either side of the hall, all sculpted from dark marble. Too narrow for this statuary, the hall is even further slimmed by their presence. As he passes the busts - none of which our man recognizes - it is impossible not to see a thick layer of the adhesive dust clinging to their scalps and shoulders. A few of the pillars have cracked and been somehow stuck back together, the cicatrices not plastered over. The hall seems to end with a set of polished double doors, their stateliness indicating more elegant past inhabitants of the building. One of the doors is cracked open, and our man slides his fingers into the slit and opens it cautiously. Far beyond the doors, down a continuation of the hall, our man can see Silas and Darby, their backs to him, talking to one another at an open doorway. Gasping in a bit of courage, our man walks toward them.

Their conversation grows in our man's ears as he approaches. Darby is speaking more fiercely, stabbing his finger into his other palm, and thus is more audible.

"... I honestly couldn't care less," he is hissing. "Let him hang."

"But Tony, we can't leave him like this, in a place he's never..." Silas retorts breathlessly before Darby cuts him off.

"We didn't know he existed three days ago. The Ai'Bron had him locked away for Lord knows what reason." Darby snaps, counting off on his fingers, "The fact he looks exactly like Leo is frankly terrifying. And, speaking of Leo, he tried to kill him in the Citadel night before last. So like I said..." our man clears his throat, and Silas and Darby whip around, the conman shrinking back and the viscount raising his fists threateningly. When they see our man, their horror disappears, if not their shock. Silas at least seems embarrassed, but Darby simply straightens up, increasingly indignant.

"So here you are," he says. Our man nods silently. "Think we're on your side, eh?" Our man stays still. Darby shrugs. "We're not. But we're all you have."

"Vice versa," our hero says, biting the words off. Darby frowns. After an angry second, Silas sighs and plants his fists on his hips.

"Enough, enough! Gentlemen, I think we can all agree that our best chance, although some might be hesitant to accept it," Silas looks down his nose at our hero, "Is probably the Citadel. If I'm not mistaken, the government quarter is east of the Citadel, and the roads in this area are all well-marked. If we egress immediately, we should find ourselves well on our way to temporary safety. Hm?" The tension between our man and Darby is fractured as the two men look in shock to each other.

"By God," Darby says, "That's the most you've said at once in months, Silas." The con-man, though startled, barely pauses before responding.

"Why, you know that before my enforced reformation I made my living by talking suckers out of their money. And my brother-in-law always said I should be an attorney. So don't be so surprised. Shall we?" he turns toward the open doorway and steps through it. Our man clacks his tongue against his teeth, slightly surprised.

"I didn't even know he was married..." Darby huffs.

[EarlStevens]

The hall ends almost immediately after the doorway, dead-ending into yet another set of double doors, these even more stately than the last. Silas is standing in front of them, in the middle of a hallway that stretches out in either direction, equally drab and undusted as the one from which he has just emerged. Darby and our man step to either side of him, and the frigidity of the air makes it clear that whatever camaraderie had been forged by Silas's scolding was at best short-lived.

Burnished copper glows at the edges of the polished chestnut doors, and more indecipherable mythological scenes are carved onto its surface. Two handles hammered into the shapes of leaved branches are lined up at their center. Although the doors are obviously thick, muffled voices can be heard through them, the first sounds that have cracked the dusty silence since the descent from the attic. The three men unsteadily reach for the door handles almost simultaneously, squaring their shoulders. Our hero realizes that the blade in his cane is still unsheathed with a bit of shock, and thanks whatever celestial power is looking over him that Silas and Darby don't seem to have noticed the weapon thirty seconds earlier. Their hands all on the handles, the three men throw the doors open. They swing outward, grinding against the floor.

The three men step out onto a balcony overlooking a large room which remains mostly hidden by the sloping gallery. About a dozen rows of high-backed pews line either side of an aisle that leads to a painted white balustrade at the edge of the platform. Beyond the gallery opens a high room with an arched, fluted ceiling of bare stone. Narrow windows, wide enough for a man to shimmy through sideways, are sliced into the wall on one side, letting in shafts of light that stand out like partitions in the whirling dust. As one, the three men step down the aisle toward the edge, pushing through their growing trepidation.

Clearly visible over the edge of the gallery is another set of pews, standing like wooden wheat in short rows. They end at a high, brass-capped bar, beyond which is a podium standing before a high wooden structure like a judge's bench, with several tall chairs seated behind it at irregular intervals. Behind it is a higher platform that lacks chairs, but has enough space for two or three people to stand at a built-in writing desk that faces the pews. All the wood below is as cherry black as the blood puddled on a stabbed man's shirt.

It is not nearly as imposing or interesting, however, as the figures marshaled throughout the room. A dozen different men are seated and standing on the different levels of the bench, dressed in a motley collection of uniforms, capes and tunics. Our man realizes he has seem most of these types of garb in and around the Citadel earlier the same day; these are officials of the Entente. The uniforms of most of the men are totally different, splashed with dozens of types of medals and cords and striped with different colors, but they are all similar to other uniforms of the Entente's constituent nations. One of the men, older and somewhat stooped, is leaning against a staff and crozier, his body wrapped in the blue and white robes and sashes of an Ai'Bron priest. The others look merely like bored noblemen and courtiers.

Standing at the podium is the sulking figure of a barrel-chested man, sprouting from a horse's body as massive as a Clydesdale. Its withers twitch uncontrollably, its tail slapping against its own flesh. A prickling headache sweeps over our man's skull and spreads to his shoulders, and our hero realizes this centaur is a magician, and the two men, dwarfed beside it, are holding its magical fury in check. Filling the pews behind the bar are a group of ragged, sullen men - and even a few burly women - who are chained together with heavy rusted links. Their clothes are ragged, their hair greasy, their faces unwashed, obviously the dregs of the city. Soldiers with the same spiked helmets our man saw earlier are lining the aisles at the center and far edges of the room.

"The Entente are trying war criminals," Darby grumbles, and Silas nods furiously.

"War criminal?" Our man asks incredulously, "What in hangment is that?" Darby ignores him, but Silas just whispers "Victors' justice." The three fall silent as one of the men on the bench, a fellow in a crimson uniform with a spike on his helmet and a moustache on his face, reads tiredly from a stack of papers in front of him.

"... and the Entente contends that the offender knowingly violated the terms of the Treaty of Concordia protecting the sanctity of the Citadel for perpetuity and forever. To the articles read against him, how does the offender plea?"

Silas gasps as the centaur says "innocent." He whispers something to Darby, who slaps the balustrade and grins. "By God, you're right. That is him."

"Who?" Our man asks, but Darby continues to ignore him, and Silas leans over to him.

"That's Baron von Mansfield. He's an Ozternbergian, but a moderate sort. A friend of Lord Leopold. They call him the 'Crimson Count," after his fashion sense." Our man nods as if this explains everything. They watch the scene for half a minute more, mainly ignoring the legal mush being spoken below and focusing on the different characters arrayed below. Before our man can note the lack of defense attorneys in the trial, Darby turns away, leaning against the railing, his elbows resting atop it.

"Hmm..." he hums aloud. "There are stairways at either side of this gallery. Maybe we can find someone from the Entente down there who can help us get back to the Citadel. Shall we?" Silas silently nods and follows him immediately toward the far right corner of the balcony. Our hero, watching the two men's backs, realizes that whatever currency he had won with these two fellow during their earlier brush with death has been entirely swept away. Lonely again, he follows them.

[LordLeopold]

Two guards nodded at the prisoners and their escort before pushing the dignified old doors open. Stevens was herded from the dead silence of the main atrium into a smaller but no less impressive room. Quiet grumbles from more prisoners and the bored, short orders of soldiers, all hushed from reverence or fear, filled the silence that poured in from beyond the doorway.

The room itself was something between a chapel and a courtroom, which befitted the nervous semi-quiet of its occupants. Most of it was filled by perhaps two dozen rows of wooden benches, starting from the back wall of the room. The ceiling was lower and wooden toward the back of the room, obviously the bottom of a balcony, held up by varnished wooden pillars and casting a musty shadow over the entranceway. In the front of the courtroom, beyond a heavy wooden guardrail, was a series of judicial benches, stacked one atop each other like a brutalist wedding cake. Narrow windows beyond the balcony let in the room's only illumination. A wide aisle cut down the middle of the pews. Just beyond the door, it was half-blocked by a low table, only half again as high as a coffee table, around which three soldiers crouched, tossing massive, floppy cards around a small pile of coins. Unlike the prisoners' guards, they had multicolored uniforms with fur-lined capes and enormous shining buttons, and no facial hair except a few thin moustaches.

Dozens more guards, most either grey swathed Niederostians or severe Ozternbergians, all futilely trying to hide their boredom behind fierce, authoritarian frowns. They were hemming in what seemed like hundreds more men, scraggly and dirty, much like Stevens and his fellow prisoners. A few were shrouded by burlap or black bags tied over their faces. All were shackled, hands either resting on their laps or uncomfortably twisted behind them. As he looked over the crowd, Stevens and his fellows were nudged and pushed toward a relatively empty pew, where they were herded out of the aisle and stumbled into their seats, wood grinding against coccyx. There wasn't quite enough room on the bench for all of them, but the soldiers shoved them up against each other, jostling and chafing. Stevens made a noise of protest, but one of the half-bearded men beside him shot a stabbing glance and he sheepishly resorted to silence and directed his attention to the front of the room.

Official looking men were arranged at the bench, muttering among each other, scribbling with quills and pushing parchment to each other. Their uniforms made it clear that they represented the greater part of the Entente - monks, Ozternbergian soldiers, a loyal remnant of the Salvarian nobility, a few self-superior mages. More interesting, though, was the figure standing at the podium before the bench. Even from behind it was obvious, from the horse flanks, twitching tail and human torso towering above, that this was a centaur. And judging from the finely costumed magicians standing to either side of him, he was a sorcerer.

"Ahem," the Ozternbergian seated in the center of the wide bench cleared his throat, and the hushed grumbling in the hall lowered even further, to hoarse whispers. One of the husky voices in particular pricked Stevens's ears: "...and then the dragon swooped down right on top of the monks..." Stevens swiveled his head around, perhaps too drastically, and the speaker behind him jolted back, the men sitting to either side of him glaring at the duke for having interrupted the story. "What the hell do you want, brother?" the man directly behind Stevens growled, spit building at the corners of his mouth. The duke opened his mouth to respond, but the Ozternbergian continued, drowning out the remaining voices entirely, and a glare from a guard in the back of the room forced him to turn toward the front again.

The soldier spoke with an easily authoritative tone, but spoke the words in a tired style, like a student reciting a memorized school assignment. Although this made him sound unctuous, the fact his words carried such real and immediate repercussions that a cynical response would have been horribly misplaced. "Alright, I believe we're ready to continue with the trial. I assume, despite his silence, that the accused understands the punishment of death he faces?" Stevens felt a jolt at the bottom of his stomach, matched by a tingling at the back of his eyeballs that spread across his entire brain. A charge of death? This is the first step to the gallows? Fearfully glancing around, Stevens only saw grimy, grim faces, frowning and squinting: The sort of faces he had seen thrown into the back of police wagons, the sort on the front page of newspapers talking about recent guilty verdicts, the sort that ended up hanging from ropes, that same unwelcoming look frozen in place forever. The soldiers standing about had familiar faces, also. They were common on policemen on street corners in the dingiest neighborhoods, or frozen beside the recently dropped blade of a guillotine in Parisian daguerreotypes.

Stevens lifted his manacled hands to his neck, feeling the bulge of his windpipe and the quick pulsations of his arteries under his scrubby stubble. He imagined a blade slicing through the soft flesh, or how the itchy fibers of a rope would feel before the hatch dropped out from below his feet. His mouth went dry; his chest became heavy like a towel dropped in a bucket. He was too distracted to consider the irony of the moment, lurching in his seat, unable to sit in place. There would be no monks to revive him this time - if he died now, it would be final in a way death had never been on Althanas. The Grim Reaper, cheated for years in the Citadel dreamland, was finally coming to collect.

"Oh Lord... oh good Lord..." he chattered to himself, the men sitting to either side strenuously trying to ignore him. He looked back up to the bench, at the soldier who seemed within minutes of signing his death warrant. His face was fuzzy, no monocle glass there to define his features better. Stevens squinted and the man came into better but strained focus. His rising panic crested, a germ of hope growing within it. I recognize him!

"Mansfield! It's me! It's Leopold Stevens!" He shouted, lurching to his feet, rattling his manacles. The sour pageantry of the trial stopped, faces turning to him, men with bags of their heads twitching excitedly. Soldiers turned from Stevens to the presiding officer, mouths and eyes opening wide, hands moving to weapons. They looked at Mansfield, almost accusingly, the way that passengers on public transport angrily look at the target of a homeless schizophrenic as if he has brought the insanity upon himself. Mansfield stood slowly, confused, narrowing his eyes at the duke. Stevens gasped for breath, pleading with his eyes for understanding, praying Mansfield would see past the mask of dirt and weariness. For a hopeful, fleeting moment, he sensed Mansfield's face softening, his muscles loosening in recognition. But it was only that, a moment.

"I've never seen this man," he said, almost apologetically. "Someone quiet him down."

[EarlStevens]

"It's me! It's Leopold Stevens!" With that cry, our hero and his two companions stop dead at the top of the stairway. Our man feels a tremulous fear move down his spine, collecting in a burning patch across his chest. Was it only two nights ago... he thinks to himself, remembering what it was like to have his own face staring down at him, trying to drag the life from his throat. His armpits are already wet. Darby's face, though, has gone from a grim mask to a sort of terrified elation. He grabs Silas - whose own eyes have widened in shocked delight - and fairly drags him down the stairs in a joyful bumble, nearly diving headfirst as his feet trip over themselves at one point. Our man, dread drawing over him, slowly follows, both hands on his swordcane, tottering down the steps, so steep they nearly make a ladder.

Darby and Silas are standing at the foot of the stairs, their hopeful elation already vanquished, drawing their shoulders square. As our man steps down, between them, he sees three soldiers, straight-moustached men with gaudy, splashy uniforms, standing from a card table in the aisle at the center of the room, their eyes fixed on Darby and Silas, their hands resting on their sabre hilts. Our man looks down at the bladed cane in his hand and the dagger and swordcane Silas and Darby had at some point drawn from Silas's leather suitcase, and gulps.

But the minor is almost immediately obviated by a major one. The three soldiers hop back as the lower doorway into the hall is flung open, and with the stomp of jackboots and the swish of ironed wool, two columns of the Ozternbergian soldiers march into the room, the short swarthy man from the Citadel at their head.

"Max!" Baron von Mansfield cries from the bench. "What's going on? Is there some kind of emergency?" The soldiers stop as a unit, their boots clomping down in one final, echoing stomp. Immelman, tearing the gloves off his hands and tucking them behind his sabre belt, rests both his bare palms on the sword's hilt.

"Something like that," he replies in a booming voice, something of a ragged shout. "By order of the Nar'oth I am dissolving this court and freeing these defendants."

[LordLeopold]

Stevens shrank back as two of the silent grey guards stalked toward him, reaching for their narrow swords. His heart pounding in his throat, he couldn't find the words to protest further, to beg his old friend to see past the smears and gristle on his face. The fear of imminent death was already enough on its own, but now he was embarrassed and shamed by his appearance, the artificial gulf it created between him and the razored, pressed baron. There was some sort of sad gleam in his friend's eyes, though, as if some recognition struggled somewhere in his mind only to be quelled. Although his mouth was dry and his fingers were rattling against each other, he refused to sit down, as if by standing he could forestall the horrible inevitable.

As the troops marched into the room, themselves headed by another familiar though even less kind face, Stevens thought that perhaps he should feel relieved at the distraction. But all he felt was added apprehension; the circumstances of an unavoidable death were now less obvious, and he paradoxically felt even closer to vomiting, even as Immelman declared him free. Mansfield's face darkened, his head sagged: He looked hunted. He looked from Immelman's column, to the rows of soldiers along the walls, to the men rising to their feet on the bench beside him. The centaur snorted a half-whinny, half-chuckle, and the sorcerers standing beside him shifted from foot to foot, turning from the officer in front of them to the one behind.

"Max, what is this?" he asked, his voice teetering from authoritative to strained. Neither man smiled as their eyes locked across the room, each flexing their hands a few inches from their hilts. Their faces were frozen, like a prisoner waiting for the hatch to open and the noose to tighten, hoping that someone else would act before the peace shatters from their own missteps. The ranks of soldiers shifted nervously, their buckles and blades rustling against leather and wool. None of the prisoners dared breathe. Before the tension became unbearable, Immelman took a nervous step forward, his columns frozen behind him. Raising an arm tipped with an accusing finger, he opened his mouth.

But it was not his voice that shattered the quiet. There was a shattering, grinding noise like a grandfather clock falling over, a vibrating boom from the main atrium that rattled the room. Whatever was holding the tense peace in the hall shattered. In an instant, all order disappeared as the crowd exploded with as loud a roar as whatever had been demolished outside. The prisoners jumped to their feet, howling with the madness of injured animals, grasping with their clawed hands, swinging their chains, gnashing their mossy teeth. Already fearful, the soldiers lashed back with crazed fear, swinging down with their blades on uncovered heads, splitting skin and crushing bones. One of the men at the bench reached out, flares of light and fire spurting from his fingers, and raked an indiscriminate wave of magic across the room. Soldiers and prisoners fell to the floor as their flesh was seared away and the wooden pews splintered, embers branding whoever hadn't already fallen to the floor, their clothes or skin on fire. The feline, grey clad soldiers with narrow swords, some baring their huge teeth in funereal grins, unsheathed their swords and with a horrible grace padded across the backs of the pews like tightrope walkers, eyes locked on horrified Ozternbergians.

Stevens, his nose filled with the poisonous smell of burning human flesh that had barely faded from the attack by the spider tank, was nearly flattened by a scrawny, screeching prisoner flailing his chains blindly. Nearly bent double, squinting at his own feet, the duke tried to push his way to the wall, bouncing off the fear-crazed victims of the Entente's dragnet, barely in control of his trajectory. Finally, after an infinity of scratching greasy hands and kicking muddy boots, he hit the stone wall with his shoulder and pressed himself against it, struggling to straighten himself.

Across the rioting room, he could see the centaur raising his hands as the heavy chains around his wrists fell away. One of the sorcerers who had been guarding him was limping away, his head bloody. The other was splayed across the bar behind him, his body above the waist a mess of torn, burned meat hanging from cracked black bones reaching toward the ceiling. Mansfield, a resigned sort of horror on his face, was watching as the centaur pawed at the floor with his massive hoof. Stevens watched the beast clench his pitcher-sized fists, and for a disconcerting second it seemed he could feel those fingers pressing against his chained hands.

As the feeling passed, he looked down to see the manacles literally fly off his hands, magically unclasped. He watched the chains flop and flap into the air, joined by a flock of iron as the rest of the prisoners' chains jumped off their hands into the air. On the floor below the battle obliviously evolved as the cloud of metal hovered ever so briefly, weaving around each other like a flock of sparrows, before diving as a piece toward the bench and Mansfield. The soldier fell back, his hands over his face. But the Ai'Bron priest beside him, his crozier a rod of lightning in his hand, screamed a strange curse and the chains scattered, vaporizing in a constellation of tiny explosions. But the centaur had already turned toward the wall broken into a gallop. With a roaring explosion that dwarfed the riot's already quaking cacophony, the wall in front of him bloomed into a cloud of dust and smoke which immediately filled the room, pieces of rock pelting the walls like a splash of water hitting a ship's hull.

Blind and stunned, Stevens pushed off from the wall, shoving and bumping through the bleeding, sightless crowd toward the new doorway.