A Practical Guide to Evil

The Lanteria quarter would burn twice, that’d been my decree.

It was a good thing Sarcella was mostly abandoned by now, or it might have been necessary to expel people from their homes to get our hands on enough lumber for the pyres. As it was, the Third Army’s sappers only had to tear down empty homes to raise the night’s work: heaps of wood large and tall enough for near six thousand corpses to be consigned to burning on them. Not all the dead bodies would be legionaries – not even most, as the addition of the priests from the House Insurgent had done much to improve the survivability of our wounded – but the soldiers of Levant would share in the farewell. I wasn’t leaving a few thousand corpses lying around when the Dead King was on the loose, no matter how far from the battlefield he was supposed to be. I watched in silence, pipe in my mouth, as companies of goblins methodically cleared out a space in the burn-out quarter and filled it with long rectangular piles of wood. They looked almost like giants’ graves, I thought, though the bodies would be laid to rest over and not under. There’d been talk of requisitioning oil and charcoal from the locals to help the blaze burn hot enough, but I’d put a stop to that.

There was no need for it, when I had Mighty under my command.

It was already night out when the strange procession began. Carts and stretchers bearing the dead, some covered with the thin bashfulness of a sheet. Some, but not all: there were too many dead, too few sheets of cloth. I’d heard a story once, back in Laure, about the elaborate funeral processions of the Fairfaxes. How the dead kings and queens were taken through the streets of the capital on a bier of bronze and iron as the bells rang in unison, until all the people of Laure had seen the remains with their own eyes. It’d take hours, the heads of the knightly orders and every other Fairfax walking along the cadaver as the people threw red carnations before them. The same flowers that grew in long swaths by the shores of the Silver Lake, though some said it was tradition as a nod to Selwin Fairfax’s death in the Red Flower Vales. The procession would end where it had begun, at the palace, and the ruler would be buried in the crypts below. A Fairfax is dead, a Fairfax reigns, the people would say, and the world would go on. No one threw flowers for my dead soldiers in the distance below, nor the Levantines so far away from home. Instead they had ash and embers, and the blackened husk of a district that might have been beautiful before we came to it.

The burial of kings and queens took the coin of a thousand soldiers’, and so a thousand soldiers were buried without a sound. That’d always been the way of the world, hadn’t it? The small died quiet, the great with theatre and oration – as unequal a bargain in death as it had been in life. It was a morose line of thought, but it paired well with my mood. The drow that had become my second shadows when shadow claimed the sky stood half-hidden and still as statues, not even stirring when the ashen path was stirred by careful footsteps. I’d not summoned General Abigail, though neither was I surprised she’d come to me. The latest arrangements I had made would cause most to cock an eyebrow. I didn’t turn to look at her, and repressed my amusement when I heard the Summerholm girl curse under her breath before climbing up. The two story house I’d claimed as my perch was now little more than a twisted up stone floor held up by load-bearing walls that let the wind through, but there was a path to take if you looked properly. I wouldn’t have made it up without a smudge of Night to chase away the pain in my leg, but with the coming of darkness miracles had come back to me through the turn of that astral tide.

There was a dull thump and louder cursing as the general of my army slipped halfway up and fell down on her ass, so I took pity on her and called out in Crepuscular. Mighty Miklaya leapt down and picked up the loudly protesting Callowan by the back of her neck before leaping up to my side and dropping her like a sack of cabbage. I nodded my thanks to it, and after a bow it vanished into the dark without a trace.

“They weren’t anywhere near that sprightly earlier, the pricks,” General Abigail muttered.

I turned to look at her and picked up on exactly when she remembered who she was on her belly in front of, complaining about allies. Abigail blanched and skittered up with the horrified haste of a cat near a goblin cookpot, saluting promptly. I wondered if she was aware that her armour now had tracks of soot all over it.

“General,” I said. “Sit.”

My pipe had long run out, though I was now officially out of herbs to stuff it with anyway. Robber had more important duties than to find me wakeleaf at the moment, though I’d send him out on the prowl before we left Sarcella. It was either that or actually trying the dried underground lake algae that Ivah had suggested, and I wasn’t nearly desperate enough to go for that. I suspected that drow tasted, well, tastes very differently than humans. It was the only reasonable explanation for some of the things they subjected themselves to eating and drinking.

“Your Majesty,” General Abigail said. “I’m not sure that’s, uh, entirely appropriate.”

I glanced at her amusedly. Court etiquette while on campaign? Besides, field promotion or not holding the title of general put her among the ten highest military officers in the kingdom. Technically she even outranked Grandmaster Brandon Talbot, though she wouldn’t have the authority to give him orders in most situations.

“I could make it a royal decree, if you’d prefer,” I said.

“Please don’t,” she said, then a heartbeat passed. “… Your Majesty.”

Very warily she sat at the edge of the floor as I had, legs dangling. My eyes returned to the procession of corpses, noting it had turned from a flood to a trickle. The preparations would be finished soon enough. I felt her hesitating at my side, but didn’t come to the rescue. If she was to continue working closely with me she’d have to find it in her to actually ask me questions without prompting.

“Ma’am, I meant to ask,” General Abigail said. “About the redeployments you ordered…”

It was enough of a step forward to deserve reward, I decided.

“You think they leave us vulnerable, now that the prisoners are being returned,” I completed.

She cleared her throat.

“I don’t mean to impugn the abilities of our allies,” she said. “But there’s a lot of Dominion grunts out there, and our captures marched back with their weapons. If they hit us by surprise when almost the entire army’s at the funeral, three thousand drow won’t cut it. They’ll catch us with our trousers down.”

Not an unwarranted assumption, for someone who didn’t know the Firstborn like I did.

“I did extract oaths from both Captain Elvera and the highborn boy that commands the vanguard,” I said.

General Abigail began to spit over the edge, before remembering once more that I was there and hastily stopping. I politely pretended not to notice the choke and coughing fit that ensued.

“My Da always said anyone that makes more than you do is probably out to get you,” Abigail solemnly said. “Double so for anyone not from Summerholm, triple if they’re Wasteland get.”

There was another pause, followed by an almost physical spike of fear.

“That wouldn’t mean you, Your Majesty,” she hurriedly said. “You’re a – I mean, everyone knows – he’s just an old drunk, didn’t mean nothing.”

I pondered that. I didn’t get a salary from the Tower anymore – Malicia was such a cheapskate, I’d only rebelled and tried to kill her the once – so in a sense I didn’t make more than my general. Unless you counted taxes and tariffs, or the kingdom’s treasury. I doubted telling her as much would actually help any, though, so I discarded the diversion.

“Razin Tanja might go back on his oath, even after what he swore it on,” I agreed. “He could be desperate enough he’d roll the dice on a victory washing his slate clean. Captain Elvera, I’m not so sure. Honour matters a lot more when it’s your own on the line instead of someone else’s.”

“Honour didn’t stop them from sneaking in at night and offing our general staff,” General Abigail bluntly said. “Beg your pardon, ma’am, but what do some Levant muckabouts know about anything like honour? They were quick enough to roll over for Procer and join up, after all that hard talk about them being deathly foes.”

“Akua’s Folly scared a lot of people,” I mildly said. “And honour doesn’t mean abandoning solid tactics.”

And they had been that, regardless of the personal cost to me. The other Callowan shuffled uncomfortably.

“Aren’t they your enemy, Your Majesty?” she asked.

Your, I thought. Interesting choice of words, and more telling than she probably realized. More so than the unspoken assumption: if they’re your enemy, why are you defending them?

“They won’t always be our enemy,” I said. “And even if they were sworn to stay one, it serves us nothing to lower them in our eyes. The moment you dismiss an opponent outright you stop understanding them. That’s dangerous thing, in our position.”

I threw her a bone after the lecture, wondering if Black had once done the same for me. If so he’d done it skillfully enough I hadn’t noticed.

“Most the three thousand drow are decoration,” I told her. “Defending bridges, like they are? I could have sent only two to stand guard with much the same effect. I just decided to temper the temptation for our friend Razin.”

General Abigail went still. I was pleased she picked up on the implications of that so quickly.

“Named?” she said. “Or just warlocks?”

“Priests, in a way,” I mused. “Though the kind even Lanterns wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley.”

The other woman breathed out sharply. I doubted she would be the last, when the scope of what the Might could do became clearer.

“How many of those are there, ma’am?” she croaked out.

“An empire’s worth,” I said.

And sometimes I fear even that might not be enough, for what’s to come, I thought.

“You and I – Callowans – we were taught to fear the monsters on the other side of the river,” I mused. “The hordes and the sorceries and the things that go out after dark.”

I clapped her shoulder, ignoring the flinch.

“But not this time, Abigail,” I said. “Tonight, you see, we’re looking at the river from the other side.”

I felt my honour guard of drow stir through the Night. People were approaching us, and not a moment too soon. I dragged myself up after reaching for my staff, turning to my shivering general.

“Time to go,” I said. “The dead have waited long enough.”

Once lit, the torches turned the darkened wreckage of Lanteria into a sea of fireflies.

It’d been some time since I last stood for a vigil. There’d been others after the one that followed Three Hills, grim heaps of ash made across Callow wherever my armies fought and died. Marchford, where the grim necessity of killing everyone touched by Corruption had made it even uglier business than usual. Liesse and Arcadia, Dormer and the blood-soaked fields of the Folly. Far north, after the Battle of the Camps. Had there even been a year, since I first gained command, without some of mine being given to the flame? Sometimes it felt like I’d been at war from the moment I had taken up Black’s knife, without ever a moment to catch my breath. But this wasn’t about me, not really. I owned a part of it, but so did every single of the almost eight thousand legionaries and officers standing in Lanteria. So did the Levantines across the river, though they might not see it that way. We’d bared our blades and wrecked all around us, each convinced that we were right, necessary, that the other side was damned and blind. I almost smiled at the thought. Had anyone ever gone to war believing they were in the wrong? I could not help but wonder at the people who’d once lived in this city, and watched it torn apart by foreign armies engaged in a war first started by a woman far away in Salia. They should not be forgot, even if they were my enemy’s people and not mine.

They too tread the same grounds that had my leg throbbing, whispering with every limping step: do not forget, that this was never a game. Do not forget, that you make mistakes. Do not forget, that there must be more than ruin. Do not forget.

These weren’t drow, so the crowd below spoke in murmurs that lapped at the platform the sappers had raised. I did not stand alone on it, did not have that gall when I’d come so late to the battle for Sarcella. General Abigail stood at my right side, cheeks reddened by the old Callowan remedy for chilly nights. She cut a good figure, in her polished armour freshly marked with the wings of a general glimmering in the glow of the magelights surrounding us. Bareheaded, her black locks brought out the sharp blue of her eyes. Spreading out from her right, the surviving general staff stood with us as well: the last remaining legate, a heavyset man by the name of Oakes, her Senior Mage and Staff Tribune. At my left I kept Robber and Mighty Jindrich, the latter of which was looking at the proceedings with strangely innocent fascination. Never before, I thought, must it have seen so many torches. The purpose of this had been as strange to it as its fascination was to me: drow did not have funerals the way the people of the surface did, not since the coming of Sve Noc. Corpses were just rotting meat that could not be eaten, nothing to be given any particular attention beyond disposal to avoid diseases. I’d waited long enough, I eventually decided. All the torches that would be lit already were.

I raised my staff, and a single horn was sounded by an officer below. The sound echoed across the district, and left silence in its wake. I’d been offered sorcerous help by the Third Army’s mages, but I had no need of it: the Night coiled in my veins, and when I spoke it was in a voice that resounded across all of Lanteria quarter.

“The first time I met Nauk of the Waxing Moons clan,” I said, “he called me dead weight and I nearly slugged him in the face.”

The officers standing next to me looked appalled, save for Robber who was grinning like a gleeful imp, but a ripple went through the crowd. There were greenskins who’d laughed outright, and many more soldiers who looked like they were feeling guilty about smiling at a funeral.

“It wasn’t even half a year after that the Fifteenth Legion was raised,” I continued. “And by then it didn’t even occur to me he wouldn’t be part of it. That was the kind of man he was, long before he put an arrow in a prince and got another name out of it.”

Grief and guilt, hand in hand. For the friend I was burying, in a way, for the second time. For what had remained of that friend in my general and I’d cravenly looked away from. Another regret for the list that would never, could never, be expiated. It always seemed like there were more pressing things to see to, didn’t it? Until the bells rang and you realized it’d become too late.

“He was brave,” I thoughtfully said. “We always say that, about those we bury, but he truly was. Kind, to those he owed kindness to, and always cannier than he let on. But most of all, when I remember him, I remember that the same night we met he marched most of a mile on a broken leg without a word of complaint. It’s a small thing, but it stands for more. There was not an ounce of give in him.”

My voice turned rueful.

“But then I speak to nothing you don’t already know, do I? Everything Nauk Princekiller had to give, you have made a part of you.”

My lips quirked, because this was a fool’s war but how could I not be proud of how they had fought it?

“The Third Army marched across the span of Iserre, pursued by fourfold its number and ambushed by Helike’s finest,” I said. “Yet when I found Sarcella, your banner flew. They rode you down, they burned you out, they stormed every single wall you raised – and the Third Army did not break.”

The last part rung louder like a rest, almost deserving of echo. There was a sea of faces splayed out below me: old and young, Praesi and Callowans and greenskins. Old Legion veterans come under fresh banner to ply the same harsh trade, youths who’d put on the armour with that burning need to do something that would matter. Some had joined for coin, some for purpose, some for having nowhere else to go. Some had put on the mail for their country, and among those there were hard-eyed Soninke and Taghreb who I thought might yet make that country after they went home with a blade in hand. Once you’d drunk from the cup of defiance the taste was not easily forgot, and they had all drunk deep. How many of them had sung on the march to Dormer, I wondered, joined their voices to that chilling song Nauk had penned? I had taken the armies of the east and told them they were owed better, that they could do better, and they had believed me.

Since that day they had been sharpened on bloody fields every bit the match of the Conquest’s, marched victorious through a gauntlet of horrors. And they’d done it without High Lords, without Dukes and Baronesses, without any of the old banners above their heads. One day those soldiers would go home, and those who would be their masters would not find them so easily bent to the old order. I’ve borrowed the strength of an empire and the godhead behind it, bared it at my foes like a blade, I thought, and some fools will tremble at that alone. But you, all of you. Oh, how they would tremble if they could look at you now. What you are and might yet do. In the golden glow of the torches they all seemed tinted by the same dye, as if they had shared some strange rite that left the same mark on all of them. Maybe they had, this lone column in the snow surrounded by foes. I saw all that and one thing more, a reflection of what I felt in my bones when looking at them: pride.

“I could praise you,” I said. “But what could I possibly speak that would ring louder than your record? Instead, I will say there are faces here that I recognize.”

It was true. More greenskins and Praesi than Callowans, who had come later to my campaigns, but more than a few of those as well. Legionaries and officers both, some who’d been under Nauk as far back as Three Hills.

“From the two thousand that charged Summer, at Five Armies and One,” I said. “From the first into the breach, at Dormer. From those who took the hellgate at the Doom of Liesse. From the Battle of the Camps, holding against three to one and hero’s wroth.”

I laughed.

“Have you ever fought a battle where you were not meant to lose?”

Laughter answered, harsh and grim and heartbreakingly proud.

“In the crucible of the Conquest,” I said, “names were granted to honour the greatest deeds of Legions. Cognomen, they are called. You have gone through crucible harsher still, and so this honour is long overdue.”

My voice rose.

“You are the Third Army of the Kingdom of Callow,” I proclaimed. “You have been the vanguard of our every victory, never once flinching nor breaking – and for that I name you dauntless.”

For a moment there was only silence, and my stomach dropped, but then roar drowned out everything. Thousands of throats screaming out into the night, a chorus of stomping feet and blades striking shields. Dauntless, I thought, letting the sea of noise wash over me. That had been impulse, but I did not regret it. I would see it put to the rolls, and I would see Nauk’s name written as the first general to command it. It was the only kind of grave marker he would have cared for, I suspected. The Third Army howled its approval, long and loud, and when the sound thinned General Abigail’s own tribune approached me with a torch, passing it to my hand. For the pyre, I knew. It was my right, as Queen of Callow, to throw the first one.

“We’ll all put friends to the flame tonight,” I said. “And there will be others, on other fields. So weep for the lost, but know that I can promise you this: in the end, they will remember us.”

I wanted to throw the torch. For the friend I’d loved, the memories I would still clutch now that he was gone. But this wasn’t about me, not really. I owned a part of it, but so did every single one of them. So instead I limped to Abigail and passed her the torch.

“Send them home, General,” I said.

Blue eyes met mine, unreadable, and slowly she nodded.

The torch flew, and the sea of fireflies followed.