The world was upside down.
Hanno could not recall ever waking up hanging from his feet before, at least not in his own body. It would have been disorienting even if the strands of solid shadow binding his feet weren’t slowly turning, spinning his body with them. His wrists were behind his back and, he found out after flexing his muscles, tightly secured. Two layers of steel manacles and one of Night, if he was feeling it right. How characteristically thorough of Catherine. He was also, to his mild discomfort, naked from the belt up.
The room was chillier than he would like.
“Hey, look who’s up,” Archer’s voice cheerfully called out.
Now that the spinning was allowing to see more than a screen of Night and glimpses of the stone floor, Hanno found to his mild bemusement that he was being held in what looked like a dungeon. Like spider legs on glass, he felt an instinct skitter across his mind. A wrongness. Hanno cocked his head to the side.
“Is that an iron maiden?” he asked, genuinely curious.
Archer shrugged, seated on top of the open iron cabinet full of spikes. Her legs were wrapped around the head of a screaming ghost, keeping her in place.
“Came with the tower,” she told him. “You know Praesi.”
Hanno did not, save through memories not truly his own. Perhaps he was lucky, considering what he was looking at. A dozen torture racks, manacles to hang people up against the wall at twisted angles and some sort of… wheel with ropes? He spent a moment trying to work out where the person would go on the device, coming away with the conclusion that no matter where that was the exercise would be deeply painful. He pulled at his bindings again, but the steel did not give in the slightest. He then reached for Light, but while he could sense it Hanno could not seem to move it.
It was as if a deep and dark pit lay between his will and the gift of Above, not forbidding contact so much as keeping out of reach. It was, he thought, a much harder restraint to break than a simple forbidding would have been. Focusing, he tried to seize the smallest possible sliver of Light.
“I have been healed,” Hanno said, as silence would make his work obvious.
The absence of pain on his cheek and back had been noticeable enough, though he could not look to see if the wounds were closed.
“Some,” Archer said, wagging a finger in direction. “Mostly we kept it from getting worse, so don’t you go getting ideas.”
It worked. Hanno felt a well of satisfaction as a mote of Light moved just as he’d willed it. The binding is not perfect, he thought. At a guess, there was a lower bound to the quantity of Light he could be prevented from seizing. It was a common enough weakness in workings, given that most human minds had difficulty grasping the level of precision that was the given of the divine. Carefully, Hanno moved his mote slightly to the side before releasing it. It did not move.
The turning hid his pleased smile, and it was gone by the time he was facing his captor again.
“It is traditional for one to escape when held in a torture dungeon,” he reminded Archer.
“I could hamstring you if you want,” she offered with a sharp smile. “It’d take care of those pesky traditions for you.”
It was difficult, careful work. Hanno’s forehead beaded with sweat as, one mote at a time, he wove the Light into a chord. One that was stretching out, slowly but surely, towards him.
“You haven’t, though,” he mused. “Why, Archer? If the Warden truly intends to devour the Book of Some Things, as you said, why would she not take all possible measures to ensure I could not get in her way?”
Catherine Foundling was giving him, Hanno thought, a shot at stopping her. A pause. No, he thought, perhaps not him alone: he would be surprised if the First Prince were not already on her way to the tower. She had the spies to learn of this and Frederic would no doubt help her.
“Do I strike you as the woman with the plan, Shiny Boots?” Archer drawled. “I’m just obeying orders.”
He doubted that, but there was no point in pushing for answers she would not give. The chord lengthened and lengthened, his back shining with sweat from the work. It had been some time since he’d had to maintain so minute a focus for so long. These days his manipulations of Light tended for the large, not the small. A lesson to be learned, Hanno considered. Growing in power had caused him to lean towards the ram instead of the key when presented with a closed gate, but that might be a mistake.
A lesson, Hanno considered, brow creasing as he rotated away from his captor. Was that the entire purpose of this theatrical tantrum? To teach them a lesson? Spider legs pattered across the glass, the wrongness still crawling all over his mind. He was missing something.
“It won’t work,” he said. “Giving us a common enemy. Forcing us to work together.”
“Shit,” Indrani sighed. “You twat, I had ten silvers riding on you not figuring it out until Cordy showed up.”
It should have been beneath Hanno to derive even a crumb of satisfaction from having made the smug villainess lose something, but he was only human.
“Unfortunate,” Hanno lied, moving on immediately. “This is short-sighted of her, Archer. My differences with Hasenbach are not going to be ended by an evening of making common cause. We already have a common cause.”
The Grand Alliance, and beyond that Good. Cordelia Hasenbach, however, intended to suborn heroes to laws and crowns after having spent the last few years repeatedly demonstrating that both failed to serve their stated purpose even when the stakes were the highest possible ones. Hanno simply could not understand how someone could look at the behaviour of the Highest Assembly during and before the war then conclude that the likes of them should be given more power over heroes. There needed to be changes, that was true, but what was truly needed was an intermediary between Above’s champions and earthly powers.
Someone who could steer away from conflicts between them, not serve as some crown-appointed governor of heroes. It simply would not work, and it should not: heroes often found their Names fighting against corrupt authority, it was absurd that an entire system should be built around punishing them should they do this. Absurd and doomed to failure. Named would not bend to those laws, it would run against their nature. All it would accomplish was make heroes into outlaws so that another pack of vultures could feel a little safer plotting in their palaces.
The chord was stretching ever close to him, to his will, providence’s nudge making the efforts just a little easier. He must be approaching the close of his conversation with Archer, which would end with his breaking out of his bindings.
“I do not believe she is evil, Archer,” Hanno said. “But we disagree fundamentally on how the world should be. That is not something over which there can be compromise and it cannot be papered over by an evening of fighting side by side.”
“Well, you got us right pegged,” Archer mourned. “Guess we’ll just lose then.”
The chord connected even as she finished the last word, Light flooding through Hanno’s veins, and in the instant that followed the illusion shattered. Like a pane of glass being smashed.
Hanno was not in a dungeon and Archer was not sitting atop an iron maiden.
She was perched on a raised stone covered by runes and glyphs, an arrow loosely nocked to the bow on her knee, but it was not her the illusion had been meant to veil. It was their surroundings. They were in the great room that was the heart of the tower, the nexus where all the power converged, and here shadow dwelled like a living thing. Currents of Night flowed from channels in the walls and floor, rivers crossing the air, and everywhere copper gutters sprawled in esoteric patterns that stung his eyes. Glyphs covered every inch of stone, pulsing with something unseen that moved the tendrils of Night streaming down as if some great beast was breathing in and out.
Now that he was no longer blinded by the illusion, Hanno found the sheer amount of power flowing through the room suffocating. How was Archer unaffected? The darkness swirled lazily around her like smoke, almost playfully, and she gave no sign of feeling ill. His eyes moved past her, following the gutters inevitably leading towards the centre of the room. There lay a raised dais, on which a pedestal had been raised. And on that pedestal a simple leather book had been set down, one that would have seemed a simple manuscript if not for the way Hanno’s soul sang whenever he gazed at it. And in front of the artefact stood the third person in the tower heart.
The Warden of the East, leaning against her staff on the dais and wreathed in so much Night she seemed entirely made of it, cast a disgruntled glance in his direction and snapped her fingers. The darkness he’d woven the Light chord through deepened, grew longer, and the chord shattered in a thousand small motes. Utter surprise stilled him. That should not have been possible, Hanno knew. Night always broke when matched with Light. He’d thought his memory of it being devoured when he was captured was mistaken, that there’d been a misunderstanding on his part – an artefact had been used, perhaps.
“The fucking Sisters made that Light trap,” Catherine Foundling said, sounding both admiring and disgusted. “And you figured a way through in, what, eighty heartbeats at most? While hanging upside down and talking the whole time.”
She shook her head, muttering something that sounded like fucking heroes under her breath.
“We were at the good part,” Archer smiled at him. “Go on, Shiny Boots, tell us more about how you’ve figured all this out.”
He was still frozen, dripping with sweat and struggling with the surprise. Was it a trick, another illusion? It should not have been possible for Night to do this.
“What have you done, Warden?” Hanno harshly asked. “What is this?”
It was more than simply his own Light being suppressed, he realized. The Book he now saw, was fighting darkness encroaching from all sides. He’d not seen it at first because of the gloom, but there were thin strands of Night coming down from the ceiling and walls and trying to touch the holy artefact. They were being kept back by a presence that came in the form of an invisible globe – six, seven inches wide – but Hanno could feel the pressure against it. It was as if the entire tower and all its Night was bearing down on the Book through the tendrils, its weight slowly crushing the artefact. Snuffing out the Light within.
Night, he thought once more, should not have been able to do that. It should have dispersed, vanished, given ground.
“Are you,” Catherine Foundling idly asked, “asking me to tell you all about my Evil plan?”
It would not be a deal with a devil, she saw those as beneath her. Had Below itself blessed her with strength? Hanno’s stomach clenched. It was unlike the Hellgods to act so blatantly, but these were the end times. Rules grew weaker in the eyes of men and gods alike.
“How many patrons can a single lifetime fit, Catherine?” Hanno asked, hoping pricking her pride would loosen her tongue. “After this one, how many more do you have waiting in the wings?”
He got an amused glance back.
“That would absolutely have worked on me when I was seventeen,” the Warden admitted.
Archer loudly cleared her throat.
“Fine,” she corrected. “Maybe for a little while after too.”
He was not learning anything, but even a delay was worth buying. Soon the First Prince and others would – Hanno’s stomach clenched. Even as she had been speaking with him, he realized she had kept the ritual going. How? He found that sole eye watching him, amused. His thoughts must have been plain on his face.
“The first thing I did when this began,” the Warden of the East told him, “was figure out a ritual that I’d be able to walk away from before it ends. Made this whole affair longer than it had to be, all bludgeon and no finesse, but that way it accounted for you crashing the party. A worthwhile trade-off, yeah?”
Good, if he could get her talking…
“If you knew I would act stop you,” Hanno said, “then, on some level, you know this shouldn’t be done. You can still stop, Catherine. There have been no deaths and-”
“And I’m not breaking any laws,” she replied, tone mild. “Landing the tower was impolite, I suppose, but that’s not why you’re really here. What claim do you realistically have on the Book of Some Things, Hanno? You didn’t make it and it was ripped out of the Bard, not one of your charges. It has nothing to do with you.”
It was not happenstance, that Catherine Foundling had ensured she was both the Queen of Callow and the Warden of the East. It was her favourite tactic to use one title as cover for actions she took as the other: shaking Callowan swords and Grand Alliance laws at him now even as this room held more Night than he’d ever seen gathered in a single place. Bandying words with her would be pointless, Hanno thought, she could talk in circles until the Last Dusk. Directness was the only way through, stripping the fig leaf.
“It belongs,” he plainly said, “to the Warden of the West. Good’s stories in Good hands.”
The light of the room dimmed, shadows roiling as the invisible globe around the Book groaned.
“That’s nice,” the Warden of the East praised. “Good turn of phrase, very heroic.”
She leaned forward, the movement casting her sharp cheekbones even more harshly. One eye under a cloth as dark as Night, the other eerily knowing. Shadows melded into the long dark hair, threaded themselves around the forlorn staff of dead yew. There was not a man or woman of Calernia that would have seen her in that moment and not known her to be Below’s favourite daughter.
“Now tell me, Hanno of Arwad,” Catherine curiously asked, “what exactly is it that compels me to obey you?”
He blinked, honestly taken aback.
“You would destroy the Accords by denying this,” he slowly said. “Accords that you have-”
“No,” the Warden cut in. “They’ll still all sign, the nations, and they’re the part that matters. Even if the heroes balk – and a lot of them won’t – then most of what I want will be achieved. Try again.”
Gods Above, what was this?
“You would play these games when we prepare to march on the Crown of the Dead?” he asked, incredulous.
It might be that some would sign the Liesse Accords nonetheless, as she’d said, but they could not truly succeed without the support of the heroes. If too many refused the rules, they meant nothing. What was the point of this petty posturing when Calernia teetered on the brink of annihilation? The Dead King was loose.
“Yeah, we are about to do that aren’t we?” Archer drawled. “Cat, you must have forgot.”
Hanno himself had forgot she was there. Archer was someone who called attention to herself, but she was a candle to Catherine Foundling’s bonfire.
“Got distracted, I guess. Maybe it was all the concerned diplomats knocking at my door,” the Warden sharply smiled. “You know, so they could tell me their worries about the pissing match between Prince White and the First Prince sinking the Grand Alliance before it even began to march.”
Archer let out an overdone noise of understanding, all the while smiling like a cat playing with a crippled bird.
“Sorry, Shiny Boots, I interrupted,” Archer solicitously said. “You were saying something about games, the siege of Keter coming up?”
His jaw tightened. Catherine could have been lying about the diplomats, but he doubted it. It was usually her preference to use the truth as her knife. The implied reproach was not without merit if his rivalry with the First Prince was shaking the confidence of allies to such an extent.
“How many?” Hanno asked.
“Even if it had been only one,” the Warden of the East said, “it would have been too many.”
That was, he considered, true. He had not been wrong to step forward and act, but he had not tended to the situation as well as he should have. Authority was trust made action, and he had been wasting trust. All involved lost from this.
“I have been at fault,” Hanno frankly replied. “My error must me mended and will be.”
He then flicked a hard look around him.
“But my faults, whatever they might be, excuse none of this.”
“Excuse?” the Warden of the East laughed. “You seem to be misunderstanding something, Hanno. I have no need to excuse anything.”
The Night in the room billowed, like cloth in the wind, as if answering its mistress’s harsh laughter.
“Who is it that’s going to call me to account tomorrow?” she asked. “You?”
She looked him up and down, dismissive.
“How’s that working out?”
Then she gestured dismissively at the distance.
“Cordelia?” she continued. “She’s so badly in my debt she’d break an entire wagon of shovels digging her way back to daylight. Besides, neither of you actually commands a damned thing.”
Yet another reason the First Prince could not be the Warden of the West. She was too tightly bound to Procer and the debts of gratitude it would Callow – and that kingdom’s Black Queen, even after her abdication. The one-eyed priestess shrugged.
“You’ve split up Procer with your Prince White business,” the Warden said. “And she’s got her own loyalists in the heroes. You’re coming to me with threats and warnings, Hanno, while your fucking house is on fire.”
A fire that would be put out the moment he became Warden of the West. The First Prince would know better than to try to exploit heroes for political gains the way she had when he had been the White Knight. A Warden, unlike a Knight, would be able to refuse her when she next tried to mutilate a young girl’s corpse to appease the unappeasable. Besides, the dark-skinned hero was still a high officer of the Grand Alliance. She could not capture him like this without breaking the treaties she had signed.
“Unless you intend to keep me imprisoned until the end of this war,” Hanno flatly replied, “there will be consequences to this.”
It was only his own inclination to end this peacefully that would keep her from being scraped raw for this, and he was steadily losing it.
“No,” she bluntly said, “there won’t be.”
He stared at her in disbelief. Did she think herself invincible because Below’s stories had been silenced?
“You both need me too badly to pick that fight,” the Warden said. “See, if you actually do go after me it’s not going to be kept quiet. It’s going to come out, word’s going to spread. And what exactly do you think’s going to happen when people learn you’re coming after me to steal an artefact that was already in my possession?”
Hanno’s blood ran cold as he genuinely considered it. Even if he was the Warden by then, the amount of damage that conflict would cause just as they prepared to march on Keter…
“You would kill this entire continent for your pride?” he challenged.
“See, now we get to it,” Catherine Foundling mused. “You’re holding Calernia hostage, pretending you can’t bend but I should. She does the same, in her own way. And that’s the part that actually pisses me off, you know? That you’re both taking charity from me, depending on my goodwill, and then I for some godforsaken reason I have to pretend one of you is my equal.”
There was a cold, burning indignation in that dark eye that Hanno knew was too blistering to be feigned.
“You have not earned it,” Catherine Foundling said, smiling thin and sharp, “and this offends me.”
A blade-like smile, he thought. He’d seen it before on another face and liked it no better then.
“This is not,” Hanno slowly said, “posturing, is it?”
He’d seen from the start that Catherine was playing a game, that she was enforcing rules and preventing deaths. He had thought it to mean that she was not serious, but it was beginning to sink in that he’d been wrong.
It might be a game she was playing, but the Warden was deadly serious.
“I’ve played nice with you fine folk,” Catherine nonchalantly said. “But it looks like you need the same wake up call Tariq did.”
Night surged, swelled, the shapes of thousands of crows flapping their wings filling every surface. Cruel beaks and talons reached out for flesh to slice.
“My help is a decision,” the Warden of the East said. “It is not a right or a given. And the moment you begin to delude yourself otherwise, I will bury you in a shallow fucking grave.”
Hanno breathed out, sought his calm. The situation had deteriorated far beyond what he’d thought possible, but all was not lost. She was still talking and he was still alive. This was not yet over.
“Yet you have not,” he said. “So this is still a negotiation.”
Her haze hardened, and immediately he knew he had made a mistake.
“You’re not learning the lesson, Hanno,” Catherine Foundling mildly said. “See, for one you still think that you got me to monologue. That I was trying to hide any of this.”
The Book of Some Things screamed, pinpricks of Night beginning to slither through cracks in the globe. Tendrils of darkness were stretching out towards the artefact, hungry and foul. It was like hearing a child be beaten, a painting get ripped: ugly and impossible to take back.
“I didn’t need to bargain to eat the Book,” the one-eyed priestess said. “Or to shackle you. The difference between you and I, Hanno of Arwad, is that I’m the Warden of the East.”
She raised a hand, strands of Night coalescing around it as if they were eager.
“I murdered my own father for that Name,” the Warden said. “I’ve mutilated people I love, scarred my own flesh. That’s what I wield every time I call on Night, that’s the foundation of my authority.”
Darkness pulsed across the room, the breath of some gargantuan beast.
“And you think that your half-assed claim is equal to that?” she scorned. “What is it you’ve given up, Hanno, that you’ve sacrificed?”
“You have known tragedies,” Hanno acknowledged. “But how many of them were of your own making, Catherine?”
He met her eye.
“You think they are something to boast of?”
As pain raised one above others, made them worthy. It was the philosophy of the whip, both the master’s and the flagellant’s. Nothing more. Being hurt didn’t make you better. It just made you hurt.
“They’re something,” the Warden said. “They’re weight. Was it you put up against them, Hanno, what’s your foundation?”
She snorted.
“No longer having your hand held by angels,” she said. “Giving up the pretense you’re above petty mortal disputes. You’re standing where everyone else started and calling it a journey.”
Hanno’s fists clenched. How small his doubts and troubles seemed, made into a single turn of phrase. The globe cracked, groaned.
“You’ve never believed in anything but your right to climb,” Hanno harshly said. “I am not surprised you cannot grasp what faith means or what it costs but talk of it coming from you is like a fish speaking of flight.”
She smiled unpleasantly.
“Hey, maybe you’re right,” the Warden said. “Let’s find out. Which is stronger, between Light and Night?”
He stilled. Glimpsing what she was about to say before she said it.
“Light, huh,” the Warden said. “I wonder why I can shackle you then.”
Her eye burned cold.
“Between my authority and yours, Hanno of Arwad, there is no contest. Talk about faith all you want: it will keep ringing hollow as long as you hang up there.”
It fell into place. It was not some fresh power that had let her do this but the mantle she had claimed in the East. His mind spun, considering the enormity of that, but soon he realized she was not so strong as she pretended. There was a reason the Warden had chosen to ride a tower, to draw him into it: here, they were under her roof. A place under her authority, her power. And under that roof the Warden of the East could bend the rules her way, decree that Night would triumph over Light. He found his calm, the quiet place at the heart of him.
It was further away than he remembered, and smaller.
“You embraced your mantle first, that is all it means,” Hanno said. “Anything more is wishful paint over your regrets.”
“And Gods know I have a great many of those,” the Warden of the East said. “An army’s worth of ghosts. I have learned my failures, if only because they so lovingly haunt me. You, though?”
She shrugged casually, cuttingly.
“Hells, Hanno,” the Warden said, “now you’re telling me you want the Warden to guide to heroes the way you did as the White Knight. Can you even hear yourself talking? We’ve been down this road before.”
The one-eyed priestess raised her free hand, wiggling it mockingly.
“How many fingers is the next Mirror Knight going to cost you?” she said.
“Fingers for a life are not a trade I regret,” Hanno evenly replied. “Or ever will.”
“Then you’ll run out of those long before I run out of eyes,” the Warden replied. “Of course, it’ll all implode far quicker than that. Your house of cards comes down the moment you run into another Red Axe.”
His jaw clenched.
“Should I dig her up so she can be cut a third time?” Hanno bit out. “Maybe you can use the spectacle to buy back a deserter prince for a moon’s turn. And why stop there? We can dig up a whole graveyard of heroes to shame the full Highest Assembly into showing up the once. They can vote to leave and return to their palaces.”
The words were acid on his tongue, acid in his belly, but out they came anyway. He felt no cleaner for it, not relieved in the slightest. Spite lessened both the speaker and listener.
“There it is,” the Warden of the East smiled. “They’re heroes so they’re Good, and that means even their mistakes are always well intended. They shouldn’t be strangled with petty mortal laws, just helped out of their messes and allowed to waddle on into the next one. That’s the take you bring to the table, isn’t it? Or at least what it comes down to, when all the pretty words are stripped off.”
“It is one of your worst habits,” Hanno evenly replied, “to poison every well you do not own.”
He forced himself to be calm, to be steady. To not lean into the anger that burned in his belly.
“You pretend that villains and heroes are the same, that their difference is a simple matter of… abstract philosophy,” he said, “but it is not. Even the most vicious of us are trying to end evil, not spread it. You stand instead for rapists, cannibals and callous murderers. Our exceptions are your rule. You are indignant that I would free heroes to act because it would harm villains – but villains are only harmed by those actions because they choose to do evil.”
It was almost a relief to simply say it out loud. To do away with the pretence that there was something laudable about protecting Evil, that it was anything more than a compromise to allow it.
“The second chances you scorn are given, Catherine, because there is a difference between recklessness and malice,” Hanno said. “Heroes are not always right, always good. But they all can be, if they’re given help.”
The claps he received were openly mocking.
“Pretty speech,” the Warden of the East said. “Heroes would love it, I’m sure.”
A pause.
“But how about everybody else?”
He started in surprise.
“You cann-”
“What do you think the difference is for someone between getting killed by a cannibal murderer or the Saint of Swords?” the one-eyed priestess interrupted. “Nothing, Hanno. They’re still dead. And that’s the part you refuse to understand. They’re sick of my side, and right to be. But they’re sick of your side too.”
She leaned forward, eye cold.
“Do you think claimants grow on trees, Hanno?” she said. “That Cordelia just lucked into having a shot at being the Warden of the West? It’s almost like not everyone agrees with that little speech. The fucking arrogance of it, from you who’s never ruled so much as a village or had to do anything in a war but fight. The choices don’t stay nice and clean when you have to think about more than a hundred people at a time. How very convenient that you’ve limited how many you need to care about to that number.”
He barely heard the latter half of the tirade. She was right, Hanno thought with muted dismay. Not about what she thought, but she was right. In some way, he’d thought that Cordelia Hasenbach had become a claimant because she was the First Prince. Because she was powerful and prominent and one of the titles adorning her crown was ‘Warden of the West’. It had been a comfortable thought, one that fit with his opinion of the woman. It was also not how Names worked. That silent realization stilled his tongue. He could not speak until he’d swallowed it, as if it’d filled his throat.
“Ah,” the Warden smiled. “There we are. Catching up at last.”
“I-” Hanno started, then hesitated.
“You want the Book but you don’t have the law on your side,” Catherine Foundling said. “You don’t have the story either, and if you’re going to try to take it anyway what does that leave?”
A hard, cold smile.
“Just violence,” the Warden of the East said. “And I’m better at it than you.”
She looked him up and down, then shook her head.
“Throw him out of the tower, Archer,” she said.
“Cat?” Archer said, sounding surprised.
The Warden of the East met his eyes with her own.
“There’s nothing left to beat,” Catherine Foundling calmly said. “We’re done here.”
The words stung more than being tossed out into the grass, though Archer tried her best. Hanno was not surprised.
They had the ring of truth to them.
