Season 5

Synopsis

Three roads out of Vigil

They came down from Vigil with an Iophanite’s message and split up for five weeks. Mikhail stayed for the library and read the Wraithblade’s curse down to its mechanism: it fastens on the hungriest man in a room and seeds outward through everyone beholden to him, and has been broken once, by a hundred men who died of the hammering. Under it lay the old sacrilege: Clan Saytar, the emperor’s own, forcing souls into the elements before their time, which is what the ooze beneath Haudh-Gwenn is. If alchemy made it, alchemy can unmake it. Aldo spent his month inside Haudh-Gwenn wearing other men’s faces and read the ring around Beltran to the man: six hollowing out, one a servant rather than a believer, and buyable. Koa went to The Crack to tell the woman he is engaged to that her sickness was a nightmare of her own making, and told her badly. Then a vial of soul-ooze went missing from Ashanti’s stores, and a search of the camp turned it up empty among his fiancée’s things. She had been eating it, and he talked her into a supervised withdrawal rather than a road home to a river thick with it.

What the withdrawal let out

He fetched a fresh vial out of the Mól sewers himself, and a Chantry physician besides, and the withdrawal broke Gwen open. The masked Slumbering Queen stood over her own bed with the vial uncorked, put the whole camp to sleep in a breath, and was brought down only by the two in it whom sleep does not touch, and by Koa refusing to let go. Two people in one body, and only one of them had chosen anything. The ooze was very likely the only reason her Magiauredo had not killed her already; cut off from it she has months, perhaps two years. Baku went into a cell for a promise to help her friend, phrased to cover either woman, and Leon Yaegar would not gamble on which. The three met again at Ridh, in a pitchfork mob Mikhail had earned them, and rode north.

The anvil under Wraithblade Keep

They went over Wraithblade Keep’s wall at midnight and took it room by room; its goblins still fought in concert years after the sword left. The shrine at the end was locked from the outside, its altar bare but for a clean ring in the dust the shape of a sword; under the altar stone, electrum threaded through rock into metal, lay a Mól anvil. Below it Nancáro met them stronger than ever, and talked longer than he ever had. The curses hold one another up, so they must fall within seconds, or they mend inside a moon. Sunrise is the only clock every keep shares, and Mikhail’s longitudes put the Grove five minutes behind Haudh-Gwenn and the Valley of Doom twelve, too far back to fall in the same breath. They took three and left the Valley alone. Then Nancáro spent himself nearly to nothing joining two map rooms through the ethereal, and the company walked from one keep into another to reach the Grove’s crystal. Mikhail went down alone to where the death-tree’s roots leave the world, and played a crystal loose from the boundary with a lute rather than hammer at it and wake the blights in the roots.

Loshev, and what was owed there

They rode home to a robbed town. The raiders had taken only what they called their own, cut tendons rather than throats, and gone south. Hinta had trained at their forge and named them: the Muharib, the last of the Mól great clans still living. The council wanted a hunt and did not get one: the raiders were foreign and skilled, chasing them risked a war Loshev could not fight, and Beltran came first. Nathan Fox demanded something for the refusal and got it: Haudh-Gwenn’s forbidden standing army, Ostrad taken twice for its grain, and Beltran’s money behind the Ten Lashes. Fox had meanwhile bought the town guard out from under Tariq. And the sulfur following Yullen Gemsmith’s son proved to be a quasit in the councilman’s chimney, whispering a young man’s own wants back at him; behind it lay a patient scheme to buy and break the council, a third of it done. They killed the demon, burned every ledger, and sent Cleven to Harad as a man who had been used, since a trial would have cost Yullen his seat and bought nobody anything; a mercy Koa argued against, and lost. There, through Shahid, Ashanti laid out the chemistry that would break the ooze, and spent her next stretch of work not on a spare catalyst but on something Gwen might survive drinking, Gwen being the one short of time.

Back into Haudh-Gwenn, under other faces

The Queen sat up in Gwen’s bed to offer peace, said her own home was under siege, and left Mikhail a present he had not found. Gwen refused to be told any part of the plan, in case her dreams carry it. Leon Yaegar killed the idea of moving everyone to Wraithblade Keep (you do not settle your people on a curse you mean to pull down), and set the order instead: the lieutenants, then the sword, then the curses. They crossed the bridge in borrowed faces into a city that had decided they were dead. There is a countersign passing between strangers, a memorial being scrubbed off a wall by paid men, and a walking tax collected daily on a rumor the company itself once started. The Chantry has split: healers sent to tend Beltran’s army heard whispers there and went over to Orsugo; the one who came back had her robes burned into her flesh. Lady Talia Salahaudhi, who joins up a resistance she insists she did not found, wants Beltran discredited before he is removed: killed cleanly he becomes a martyr and his people inherit him; painted first, he drags the councilors who went along with him down too. The dismantling started anyway: Orvayne cured of the sword in his own bedroom, Zarif taken drunk and crated off, and Venros run down through the Color Stay’s rotting halls as vapor and cut in three, since one of their own would be wearing Zarif’s face within a day and Venros read minds. In his room were Beltran’s own short orders, signed with a letter: I’m watching you while you watch the others.