By day fifteen.Fifteen days in, fifteen more to go before the contract was binding and Varek's secondary kill mechanism expired. Fifteen days during which anyone who wanted to void the marriage had a legal window and a strong motivation.I was using the time.Moira's messenger crows were extraordinary. She had forty-three of them — each one trained over years to specific routes, specific recipients, specific levels of discretion. She did not use them for correspondence, she used them for observation — they carried no messages out, only brought things back. Specimens, samples. Occasionally a folded note from one of the scholars she had been corresponding with anonymously for decades, men and women who believed they were writing to a reclusive colleague in the eastern provinces.I sat at the workbench on day eight and asked her if I could use three of them."For what?" she said."Intelligence, I need eyes in three cities — Vethara, the Iphikara junction, and a village called Asprос in

They came at dawn on the seventeenth day.The dead land carries sound differently from living ground — no grass to absorb it, no trees to break it, just flat dead soil that sends everything straight up and straight across. Five hundred boots hitting that ground made a sound like a slow, steady drumbeat starting about two miles out.I was already at the library window when the first column crested the ridge.Imperial colors, Kaleth sunburst on every standard. Full ceremonial armor on the officers, which meant this was designed to be seen as well as felt — a show of force for anyone watching, which at this distance meant me and Moira and the dead land.Elpida appeared at my shoulder almost immediately."Second wave," she said."Five hundred, more than I expected.""Varek is recalibrating, the first wave was surgical. This is a statement.""A statement that says what, exactly.""That the Emperor of Kaleth is not embarrassed by failing to kill you once." She paused. "He is embarrassed by

The crow was still there at dawn.It had not moved from the boundary line all night — that precise edge where the dead soil met living ground, sitting with its message capsule and its complete indifference to the cold. I watched it from the library window for twenty minutes before I went down to retrieve it.The capsule contained a single strip of paper, seven words in a script I did not recognize.I brought it to Moira.She read it once and set it on the bench. "Aevhic script," she said."I don't know that script.""Very few people do, it predates the Pantheon by several thousand years." She picked it up again. "It says: the vessel reads correctly, the time is now."I looked at the strip of paper, at the seven words I could not read. "Who wrote it," I said.Moira set the paper down. "Someone who was alive before the Pantheon existed," she said. "And who has apparently been watching you long enough to form an opinion about your reading comprehension."I sent the crow back with no re

The thirty-first morning arrived without ceremony.No bells, no announcement. The dead land outside did nothing, what it always did, in complete silence, with total commitment. The bench was empty because Moira had finally slept, the sounds from below had stopped at the fifth hour for the first time in six days.I sat on the edge of my bed and looked at the small glass bottle on the nightstand — the regulator compound, measured, stoppered and left there without a word. I picked it up, the color was off in an interesting way, too dark for what it contained, and the smell when I unstoppered it was exactly as bad as she had promised. I drank it in one pull and spent thirty seconds regretting that decision intensely.Then I went downstairs to find Elpida.She was already awake, she was always already awake. I had begun to suspect she did not sleep so much as temporarily redistribute her attention to lower-priority tasks.She looked up when I came in, looked at my face then at the window w

Cinderwall announced itself before we arrived.Three miles out the road changed. The particular weight of a place where large numbers of people had been existing under sustained stress for months. Smoke from multiple fire sources. The low mechanical noise of siege operations and underneath all of it, faint but constant, the sound of fighting that had been going on long enough that the men doing it had stopped making noise about it.Professional violence. The worst kind, the kind that had become routine.We stopped on a ridge overlooking the valley. The city sat at the far end — high walls, old stone, the kind of construction that said this place had been defending itself for centuries and had opinions about how to do it. Around the walls, the coalition's siege camp spread in three separate arcs, each one flying different colors. To the east, where the wall showed a patched section of newer stone, Xavha's personal standard flew — a plain black flag, no symbol, which told me everything