VISGOTH ENJORRAN SOLLERS STRODE FORTH from the Chamber of the Synod, his metal-clad boots ringing loudly upon the flagstones of the Holy See with each heavy step. He trailed behind him a bevy of clerks and acolytes, but while his mask of office concealed his scowl, all of them knew better than to interrupt his thoughts.
Upon reaching the doors of his private chambers—set aside for him during his visit to Imer for the trial—he turned to those lower-ranking members of the priesthood who followed him and curtly demanded they speak their piece, whatever it might be. Each told him whatever information they had to impart, their voices hushed and hurried, and to each he gave whatever orders were required. He was there to serve the will of Menoth, after all, and in Menoth’s name, nothing was unendurable. His own emotional turmoil could wait until his duty had been completed.
Only when all of the other priests and clerks had been dismissed, his chamber door was safely shut behind him, and the two Knights Exemplar stationed outside it as his guards were standing in disciplined silence, did he allow himself the luxury of slamming his mailed fist down on the long table dominating the center of the room.
For some time, he stood there, his shoulders hunched forward, his fist on the surface of the table clenched so tightly that, beneath his glove, his knuckles were as white as his vestments. Inside his scrutator’s mask, his breath sounded harsh and loud, and he forced it to quiet by reciting passages from the Canon of the True Law in his mind. Normally, the words would have relaxed him, reminded him of his place at the feet of the Creator, but today they did little to allay his fears.
One by one, he opened his fingers, laying his palm flat on the table’s surface, pushing down against the hard red rock. As a vice scrutator and master of Tower Judgment, Sollers was not a man accustomed to disappointment or fear. His was a will that was seldom contested, and when he encountered fear, it had generally been in the eyes of the unbeliever stretched upon the wrack or awaiting the fire of cleansing. But today, he felt fear uncoiling like a black snake in his stomach, and even here, at the heart of empire of the One Faith, inside the largest temple to Menoth ever built, he felt as distant from the words of the Creator as he ever had.
Only a few hours hence, he had sat in the Chamber of the Synod and watched as Feora, Priestess of the Flame, came striding in. She eschewed the standard, simple robes of a supplicant being questioned before the Synod and instead was dressed in her full warcaster regalia, her arrogant countenance covered by a golden mask to indicate her station. She walked without the slightest hesitation—shoulders back, head up. Confident, proud. Her display had set his teeth on edge and had sent twitches through his arms with his desire to stand up and strike her down where she stood. But he had contented himself with the certainty that the Synod would punish her for her treachery. Had that been his own pride going before his destruction and quite possibly the destruction of all they had built?
Now, in the aftermath, he cast about to find the moment when he realized it was all going wrong. There must have been some point during the trial when his error had become clear to him, he reasoned. Some words spoken by Feora in her own defense, some look exchanged by the other visgoths that signaled the sea change coming. Some moment when he knew what the verdict was going to be before it was delivered.
Visgoth Jasrun, standing before that august company and before Feora herself, whose eyes were expressionlessly dark and shining, announced her vindication for all to hear. He had praised her “heroism in the face of dire circumstance,” had called her a “bastion of the Protectorate.” The words still rang in Sollers’ ears. Not the ones he would have used to describe her actions—more like “perfidious,” even “treasonous”—but they were little surprise coming from the lips of Morgimer Jasrun, whom Sollers had long believed to be in the warcaster’s pocket.
No, the surprise had come just before, when the Synod cast their votes. Sollers had been shocked to see a split in the ranks of the scrutators, something that had rarely happened in his many years as a member of the Synod; he was doubly shocked because Feora’s actions had gone directly against the orders of the hierarch himself. And yet, when the time came to pass judgment, only three voices had found Feora guilty. Besides himself, only Visgoth Var Bodalin, the head scrutator initiation, and Visgoth Juviah Rhoven of Sul had cast their votes against her.
Even Visgoth Delcon Vesher, a man Sollers would have said was beyond corruption and was devoted exclusively to the Word of the True Law, had thrown his lot in with the Priestess of the Flame. Feora had entered the Chamber of the Synod a potential traitor—Sollers had even entertained the thought that she might find herself under his care in Tower Judgment—but she had strode forth a hero.
It wasn’t her pardon that truly rankled him, however. It was the division within the Synod—a grim reminder of the dark days before its formation, before the coming of Hierarch Garrick Voyle and the beginning of the Great Crusade.
Straightening his spine, he let his shoulder blades fall back from the hunched position in which he had been standing. His breathing had slowed, even if he felt no more calm within himself. Slowly, he walked across the red stone floor of his chamber to the large open window that looked out over the capital of Imer. From here he could see the blazing towers of the Flameguard Temple, where even now Feora was likely basking in her victory. He could see across the rooftops to the tall walls that surrounded the city, walls the Lawgiver had taught them to build when the race of man was still in its infancy. The walls that had protected them for so long from the predations of the barbarian, the unbeliever, and the children of the Devourer.
Beyond those walls were the desert and the ramshackle tent cities of pilgrims and would-be converts who awaited entry into the great city. Beyond the desert lay the rest of Caen, and beyond Caen? The vast wilderness of Urcaen, where the Lawgiver himself dwelt in the City of Man, waging his eternal war against chaos and disorder.
Closing his eyes, Sollers prayed to Menoth for wisdom. The other visgoths he knew to be honorable men, true children of the Creator, who held Menoth’s will paramount and who would do anything to secure the sanctity of the True Faith. Were they right in their judgment and he wrong? Was it his pride that was blinding him and not Feora’s after all?
He asked these questions in all sincerity, but the Lawgiver chose not to answer, and so each time, Sollers circled back to the same conclusion: When the faithful could not be counted on for obedience to the word of the theocracy, when the actions of one warcaster were seen as more important than the word of the hierarch, when treason not only went unpunished but was praised as heroism, then what chance, what hope, was there that the True Faith would survive?
Looking out at the mighty walls of the city that formed the heart of the Protectorate, Sollers wondered if he had not just seen the first cracks that would eventually bring them down.
* * *
WEEKS LATER AND MANY MILES FROM IMER, Sollers stood on a distant rampart and watched a very different scene unfold. Below him, the Bloodstone Marches spread out from the base of Tower Judgment, stretching as far as the eye could see. At the foot of the tower, the smokestacks of the Factorium spoke to the industry of the war effort, but farther distant was a more troubling sight. To the east, dark shapes massed like storm clouds gathering on the horizon.
When he was a child, Sollers had once kicked over a rotted log to reveal a roiling mass of black beetles groping blindly over one another. The image had haunted his nightmares for weeks afterward, and in his dreams he imagined he could hear the scrape of their chitin, the gnashing of their mandibles. He remembered dreams in which their crawling bodies covered him, suffocating him. He remembered waking with his face drenched in cold sweat.
He also remembered his mother sitting at his bedside, her arm around his shoulders. “They’re just blind things that don’t know any better,” she had told him. “Don’t fear them because they live in the dark; pity them because they’ve been denied the light.”
The scene before him reminded him of those beetles. Thousands of skorne soldiers in their red-lacquered armor, paingivers driving forth beasts from the blasted wastes with blows from barbed whips, slaves laboring beneath the lash. From this distance, they seemed to swarm over one another, their individuality broken down into one writhing mass. Mindless, blind, but insatiable, like the beetles that had terrified him as a child. Unlike the beetles, however, these were not creatures he could afford to pity.
Sollers had dealt with the skorne before. They were cruel fighters, disciplined and merciless. He could almost have respected them, seeing in their ascetic dedication a mirror of the endurance required of those who followed the word of the True Law, but the skorne seemed to him to be godless creatures with empty spaces where their souls should be.
When their army first began to arrive en masse, he had sent a runner to take word of the siege to the Northern Crusade and Hierarch Severius, as well as to the rest of the Synod in Imer, and then he had begun issuing orders to his depleted garrison to prepare for battle. Outwardly, he had remained calm. He was the master of Tower Judgment, and his troops needed to believe he was as unshakable, as unassailable, as the structure itself. Inwardly, however, he seethed.
It had been only a matter of days since the garrisons of Tower Judgment were ransacked on Feora’s orders. The word had come to him that several phalanxes of Temple Flameguard were desperately needed to hold positions in the southern regions of the Protectorate, an area that had been depleted by the demands of the Northern Crusade. He could see it as nothing but a direct retaliation for his vote in the Chamber of the Synod weeks before.
Now, though Tower Judgment still held a small army, it felt to Sollers as if he commanded but a shadow of the force that should have defended the tower. And with the skorne suddenly upon his doorstep—as though they had been waiting and watching for the Flameguard to depart before they descended upon him like a plague—he harbored grave doubts that reinforcements from the capital would arrive in time.
Though he knew his messengers would find the ears of allies in Imer, the dispensation of troops would ultimately be up to Feora, and he had little faith she would rush to his aid. The whole thing appeared too well timed to be accidental, and though collusion should have been out of the question, Sollers felt as if this were perhaps a judgment being levied against him. If so, it seemed harsh indeed that the integrity of the Protectorate’s northern border should suffer for his convictions.
Beneath his scrutator’s mask, he silently mouthed the words of the Canon of True Law. There is no pain unbearable in the name of Menoth. There is no fear unassailable with faith in Menoth. There is a place for us all at the feet of Menoth.
Behind him, Sollers heard footsteps on the stone of the tower floor, and before he even turned to see the initiate kneeling before him, he already knew the message.
“I will speak with their general,” Sollers said, and the initiate nodded, briefly flummoxed, and then bowed again and withdrew.
* * *
LORD ARBITER HEXERIS STOOD ATOP a blood-red rise of sandstone and watched the man approach. Even in his armor, surrounded by his knights and guards, the man seemed small to Hexeris, as all humans seemed small to the towering lord tyrant, who had trained in his youth as one of the heavily armored Cataphracts before focusing his attentions on the arts of mortitheurgery and the craft of the extollers.
Hexeris had never met the man before, but he knew enough of his history—had negotiated with him through proxies in previous communications between the Army of the Western Reaches and this human’s desert nation—to know the man was named Visgoth Sollers. He was one of the most politically powerful men in his tiny empire, and the mask he wore marked him as a scrutator, a member of his religion’s torturer caste. There were some among Hexeris’ people who saw a kinship between these scrutators and the paingiver castes, but to Hexeris they seemed as children hiding in their parents’ shadow. They embraced suffering because they thought it brought them closer to their god; none among them had seen the greater wisdom that suffering was a source of potentially inexhaustible power.
The mask the visgoth wore was meant to hide his visage and to put the fear of their deity into his fellow humans, but the lord tyrant did not need to see his foe’s face to know his spirit. Hexeris’ powers allowed him to see past such disguises, and he knew there was fear in the heart of his enemy, though he had to admit a certain grudging respect that the fear the human felt wasn’t of Hexeris or his armies. Its roots ran deeper, though the lord tyrant had no doubt he would be able to extract them, given enough time.
As the human’s retinue drew near, Hexeris made it a point to step forward, away from his own guards, though he knew the human forces could be mowed down in an instant by Venators and Cataphract arcuarii should they make a move against him. He enjoyed asserting his dominance over the human, using his towering height and his obvious lack of fear to give himself the psychological advantage.
Yet the human, accustomed though he was to being feared by his own kind, showed no hesitation to meet the lord tyrant on his own terms, matching his gesture to step away from his own guardians, though Hexeris saw the grips of the various knights and Temple Flameguard tighten on the hafts of their weapons.
The human had obviously studied the customs of the skorne, and he greeted Hexeris with an open-palmed gesture of his right hand, along with the slightest incline of his head, an acknowledgement that each of them was the leader of their respective armies and that only combat would tell which was superior.
“You asked to meet with me, and I am here,” the human said in a harsh voice. “What brings your army to the feet of Tower Judgment?”
“In the past, your people and mine have made mutually beneficial arrangements for freedom of travel through the Marches,” Hexeris replied. “Yet your people have ignored these pacts for your own gain.”
It was a pretext for what was to come next; Hexeris knew full well that both sides had violated the terms of the agreement more than once in minor skirmishes. “Nonetheless, in light of our past friendship, the archdomina is willing to show mercy. If you surrender your fortress at once, then your people will be spared and allowed to live as slaves within our empire. In deference to your rank, you and a small retinue might even be granted peaceful retreat back to your capital without interference from my soldiers.“
Hexeris knew the human saw through his deceptions and knew exactly what was being demanded of him. It was no compromise at all. Hexeris looked past his adversary at the massive structure the humans called Tower Judgment, and even though he scorned the torture of the humans as the work of uncommitted amateurs, he had to acknowledge the resemblance of the tower to the paingivers’ Plaza of Excruciation, and he knew it would serve as an admirable stronghold and anchor point within the northern Bloodstone Marches, something his troops desperately needed.
While the strategic significance of the tower was what Hexeris assumed the human would understand, it was actually only a small piece of what Hexeris saw when he gazed upon its walls. Amateurs though they were in the arts of pain, the humans had nevertheless subjected this structure to decades of excruciation and imprisonment, and Hexeris could all but feel the mortitheurgical potential pour forth from its stones.
The tower would fall, one way or another, and the humans within it would be put to the lash or put to the sword. But Hexeris enjoyed offering the human leader these unacceptable terms, like a ferox toying with its food before the kill.
When he had called the visgoth forth, he had thought perhaps there was some chance he would take the offer of surrender. Hexeris knew the tower was under-manned; it could not hold out against an indefinite siege. He knew their victory was a matter of time, not of chance or of skill. But if the humans would lay down their arms and surrender the tower without a fight, then the structure could be taken undamaged and would make a better fortress.
He had abandoned those hopes the moment he laid eyes on the scrutator, but that was acceptable as well. More battle meant more opportunities for his troops to seek glory in combat and more energy for him to harvest from the suffering and death that followed.
“Of course,” the visgoth replied, “your generous offer is not one I could respond to here in the field. I will need to consult with my advisors and seek the wisdom of Menoth before deciding on the best course of action.”
“Naturally,” Hexeris replied, allowing himself a smile, unhidden by any mask or helm, at the dance they were performing. “You have until sunrise.”
It was more time than the fortress should have been given to secure its defenses, but it was little sacrifice, as the lord tyrant’s forces would not be fully in position to attack until then anyway. And besides, the harder the battle, the greater the glory for his soldiers.
The human nodded his masked head and turned to walk back to his knights, who relaxed only slightly when he was once more within the protection of their armored ring. Hexeris didn’t return to his own retinue right away—he stood exposed on the sandstone rise, watching his enemy withdraw until the human forces were out of sight. Then he looked up at the tower, its shadow rising above him against the sinking sun, and allowed himself to imagine how it would look once the pennants of House Kurshon flew from its battlements.