“Death pit? You mean the Lady’s Reach.”

  “That’s what her murdering scum are like to call it. It’s no mystery what goes on there. Folk rounded up by her soldiers are taken to the pit. Once through the gates, they never come out. You can smell the stink of death from miles away.”

  The sergeant spoke no word of a lie that I could detect, but doubt lingered. Clearly, Evadine had grown cruel in her delusions, but still I resisted the notion she would sink to wholesale murder. The Scourge, I reminded myself. We now live amid the Second Scourge.

  “The witch queen’s pit is our prime objective,” Roulgarth assured the fellow with another pat to the shoulder. “Go now and rest. Tomorrow you can guide me to our brothers in the hills.”

  “She’s not there,” I told Roulgarth when the sergeant had knuckled his forehead and stomped off. “Our best intelligence puts her at Athiltor.”

  “While I now have intelligence that my people are being slaughtered en masse at this pit of hers.”

  “The Lady’s Reach is well prepared against assault. Taking it will be costly.”

  Roulgarth’s visage was implacable. “Nevertheless, that is where my Caerith and any Alundian willing to march with me will go. You can go where you will, Scribe.”

  “Your Caerith?”

  Roulgarth’s features twitched in repressed anger and he turned to leave.

  “Of course the Crown Host will go with you,” I said, making him pause. The annoyed frown faded from his brow only to return when I added, “It seems to be the only place in this ravaged land where we’ll find any fucking horses.”

  The smell told the truth of the place before the walls even came into view, an acrid melange of rot and oil-laced smoke. Dark, wispy columns rose above the walls lining the southern hills beyond which lay the castle I had once spilled a great deal of blood to defend. The reek of death was familiar to many in this host, and we smelt it here. The Paelith rode ahead to reconnoitre the defences, returning near dusk to report them sparsely held.

  “It could be a ruse,” Wilhum warned when Roulgarth suggested an immediate assault. “Perhaps they hope to tempt us into rash action. Just the kind of thing our esteemed lord marshal would’ve come up with when we held the place.” He inclined his head at me with a sardonic grin that quickly shifted into a sad, reflective frown. “Seems such a long time ago, now.”

  For this campaign, Leannor had forsaken her usual luxurious tent for a more modest arrangement of two standard size canvases stitched together. It made for an uncomfortable council as the army’s captains crowded around my sketch of the Lady’s Reach.

  “Walls of such length would require thousands to repel a determined assault,” Roulgarth said, tracing a finger along the outer defences. “My people report most of the garrison fled north weeks ago, and those that remain rarely venture forth on patrol. My guess is no more than a few hundred. In any case—” he stood back, settling a hard gaze first on me, then Leannor “—while Alundians are suffering in that pit, I will not sit idle.”

  “Nor would I countenance any delay, my lord,” Leannor assured him. “For they are my son’s subjects, to be cherished and protected by his host. My lord Scribe, be so good as to make the necessary preparations and attack as soon as is practicable.”

  I doubt any person present was unaware of the stark irony of an Algathinet commanding her army into battle to rescue folk her family had waged war on not so long ago. Roulgarth had it right: What absurdity is war.

  Thanks to our advantage in numbers, I was able to order a multipronged attack on the walls. I split the Crown Host into three contingents, taking personal command of the smallest which, not coincidentally, contained the companies with the highest number of veterans. I also persuaded Roulgarth to allow me to borrow several dozen veilisch archers to accompany our attack. The second and marginally stronger contingent I placed in the hands of Desmena Lehville, while the largest I put under Wilhum’s command. He was ordered to lead them against the most easily scaled section of wall where the hills dipped into a wide draw. While these companies, bearing a veritable forest of scaling ladders, drew most of the defenders, mine and Desmena’s divisions climbed the more difficult routes to the west. With the Crown Host assault underway, Roulgarth led the Caerith and his growing band of Alundians in a wide march to the east, intending to assault the main gate with a huge ram. In the event, their attack was never delivered for it transpired that the Lady’s Reach was even more poorly garrisoned than expected.

  All three divisions of the Crown Host successfully scaled the walls, meeting a brief shower of arrows and sundry missiles before cresting the battlements. Clambering into the gap between crenelations, I found myself confronted by no more than a dozen Covenant soldiers. None of them were especially well armoured, clad in the hardy leather garb of the artisan rather than mail or plate. They had been driven back from the wall’s edge by deadly accurate volleys from the veilisch’s flat bows, a few lying dead or wounded with fletched shafts jutting from their chest or neck. Still, they were undaunted in their defiance, shouting out a familiar if discordant exhortation at the sight of me: “We live for the Lady! We fight for the Lady! We die for the Lady!”

  One came at me with a blacksmith’s hammer in one hand and a hatchet in the other. From the pitch of hatred I saw on his screaming face, I concluded he must have recognised the great traitor. He was both brawny and fast, closing on me in a few steps with a bellowing roar that ended when my sword swept up to cleave his face from chin to brow. I kicked him aside and hacked down the markedly less impressive figure behind him, a stick-thin man wielding a billhook with more enthusiasm than expertise. Juhlina and the rest of the scouts soon scrambled to my side and the subsequent struggle was a brief one, distinguished mostly by our foe’s refusal to surrender. My subsequent discoveries at the Lady’s Reach would cause me no end of bitter regret for the swift end we gave them.

  “Martyrs’ arses, the stink of it,” Tiler grunted, squinting at the smoke-hazed vale below. It rose from a dozen or so large bonfires situated in a loose circle around the once ruined Walvern Castle. The holdfast had grown in size since my last visit, the walls repaired and augmented with an outer ring of defences. The tower atop the inner mound was much the same, even featuring a bright, blazing beacon as it had during the days of the siege.

  “They called for aid,” Juhlina observed, nodding to the beacon. “Their queen didn’t see fit to answer.”

  “Haul the ladders up and let’s get on,” I said, peering through the pall of smoke at the castle. I couldn’t tell if there were any defenders atop the battlements, but it would be foolish not to expect another fight before this day was done. The odour grew even thicker when we descended the hills, forcing many among us to tie a scarf around their faces to ward off the worst of it. It was as we neared the first of the bonfires and I saw the girl that the source of the stink became horribly obvious.

  She was perhaps thirteen years old, clad in a plain woollen dress with bows tied into her hair, a common custom in northern Alundia. I knew what she was from the way the smoke from the bonfire seeped through rather than around her. Even if it hadn’t, the utter bafflement and despair on her small, oval face would have told the tale.

  “I can’t find my mother,” she said. “I think that might be her.” She pointed a finger at something in the base of the bonfire. “Or maybe that.” The finger moved a little to the right. “But I can’t tell. Will you help me find her?”

  “Captain?” Tiler asked when I came to a halt.

  “A moment,” I said, moving to the girl’s side. Following the line of her extended arm I made out a skull in the fire’s smouldering fuel. Charred flesh still clung to it in places but it was unrecognisable. So too the others surrounding it amid a jagged jumble of blackened bones. The earth around the fire was greasy with rendered fat and at such close proximity the stench was enough to make me gag.

  “Is it her?” the girl in the woollen dress asked, looking up at me with hopeful eyes.

  “Yes,” I said, swallowing bile and forcing a smile. “She’s waiting for you. Go to her now.”

  She gave a solemn nod, features set in a serious frown that might once have made me laugh. Stepping forward, she raised her arms as if to embrace someone. I lost sight of her amid the swirling grey smoke. Whether she followed her mother to whatever awaited their souls, I would never know.

  “How many, do you reckon?” Tiler wondered, voice muffled by the scarf covering his nose and mouth.

  “Two… three hundred,” Juhlina said before casting her gaze towards the other fires. “And this is just one of many.”

  “I want prisoners,” I said, turning away from the pile of ashen skulls and starting towards the castle with a purposeful stride.

  At first it seemed I would be disappointed, for our assault on Walvern Castle was met with only more corpses. They littered the courtyard we entered through an open and unguarded gate. We found more lying in storerooms and stairwells when I ordered a thorough search. Most were clad in the same artisans’ garb as the defenders on the outer walls, but men and women in Supplicants’ robes also lay among them. I concluded swiftly that these were cowardly fanatics, preferring death by their own hand to an assuredly more gruesome end in battle. Some had evidently drunk poison while others had opened their wrists or slashed their necks. A few among the poison drinkers hadn’t yet completely succumbed, one young Supplicant blinking at me in strained detestation when I crouched at her side.

  “What did you do here?” I demanded of her.

  She blinked slowly, the lids sliding over orbs that retained a gleam of hatred. “We live… for the… Lady… traitor…” she murmured, her face contorting with the effort of trying to spit at me, but death claimed her before it escaped her lips. I reasoned she must have died a contented soul, for I saw no vestige of her shade in that castle, nor any of the other servants of the Ascendant Queen who had perished here. Death, I was learning, was terribly unfair in who it left to linger as a tormented spectre.

  It was Tiler who found our only captive, he and another scout dragging him down the steps from the tower to dump him at my feet. “Looks like he tried to slit his wrists,” Tiler reported, delivering a hard kick to the man’s back. “Didn’t cut deep enough did you, you worthless fuck!”

  I had seen Tiler angry many times, but the scale of his rage was of a different order now. He shook with it, his features bunched as if about to weep. “Things were done in there, Captain,” he rasped at me, casting a fearful look over his shoulder at the tower. “They had folk in the cells…” He choked off, taking a moment to master himself before adding hoarsely, “Young ’uns, some of them.”

  I turned my attention to the man kneeling before me, a fellow of broad stature that nevertheless appeared shrunken in his misery. The dried blood covering his forearms was a testament to his failed suicide and he hunched in bent-backed despair, weeping softly.

  “Look at me,” I instructed. The captive shuddered out a sob and complied, presenting me with the haggard, gaunt features of a man reduced to near madness. He was so changed in appearance it took me a moment to recognise this pitiable wretch as the former soldier and mason’s son who had overseen Walvern Castle’s transformation into the Lady’s Reach.

  “Sergeant Castellan Estrik,” I said. “What have you done here?”

  Estrik regarded me with empty eyes that leaked tears down a face that was as baffled as it was sorrowful. “What the Ascendant Queen commanded, my lord,” he replied in a thin whisper.

  I crouched before him, looking intently into his face. “She commanded you to the torture and murder of innocents?”

  “Innocents?” He shook his head. “No, my lord. They were the Malecite’s spawn. Every one of them. She saw it, the malignancy lurking inside them all. It must be driven out, she said. A task she entrusted to me. My holy duty—”

  Juhlina’s fist was a blur at the edge of my vision, descending to smash into Estrik’s face. Blood erupted and teeth shattered as he reeled from the blow. “Holy duty!” Juhlina raged, hammering more punches. “You fucker!”

  It required strenuous efforts from Tiler and myself to drag her off Estrik, by which time his jaw was broken. No more answers would be forthcoming, not that I expected anything he said to have even the slightest connection to sanity. Still, the castellan’s failure to kill himself told me something.

  “You knew,” I said before the scouts dragged him away to await the princess regent’s justice. Tiler had been all for hanging him from the walls there and then, but I decreed it was better for Leannor to pass judgement. Even in extremes, there should be some vestige of law.

  Sagging in his bonds, Estrik failed to respond so I took hold of his hair and jerked his head up, meeting his eyes. “You knew she was mad. You knew what you were doing here was wrong. But still, you did it.”

  He slurred something, grinding his broken jaw in a feeble attempt at speech. I saw an entreaty in his face when they took him away, a plea for understanding. Like many who had made the sojourn to join Evadine during our days in the forest, he had come in search of a figure worthy of his faith. The Alundian war and her rise to queendom must have buttressed his belief whereas it eventually destroyed mine. If it hadn’t, I might one day have found myself in command of a place like this, though I fancy I’d have found the fortitude to slit my wrists when justice came calling.

  It transpired that Estrik was not the only survivor of the Lady’s Reach garrison, Desmena capturing a few during her assault and Roulgarth’s toalisch bringing in a half-dozen more. Before passing judgement on the captives, Leannor insisted on making a fulsome tour of the site, from the gruesome contents of the tower dungeons and the still smoking bonfires. In addition to the burnt bodies, we discovered several shallow mass graves near the east-facing walls. At Leannor’s request, Ayin compiled an estimate of the dead, arriving at a figure close to eight thousand. Most were Alundian, though not all. Some wore the garb of churls from Alberis and the other duchies. It appeared Evadine had decided upon the Lady’s Reach as the place of torment and execution for all her enemies.

  The princess regent’s verdict was predictable though her lack of inventiveness in the proscribed form of execution was not. “Just hang them,” she said, waving a hand at our pathetic clutch of prisoners. “And get these bodies in the ground. I weary of the smell.”

  Her tone and bearing belied the apparent callousness of her words. Her voice had the strained quality of a suppressed sob and her posture posed in a regal bearing that didn’t conceal the twitching of her hands. Burying the bodies required two days’ labour from the Crown Host. I worked the companies in shifts, keen to ensure all saw the evidence of our enemy’s malignancy, but also spreading the burden of such awful work. Nor did I spare myself, taking my turn hauling the stiffened cadavers from their ignominious pit to a series of orderly trenches where they were laid side by side. It was clear that most had been strangled, the marks of the cord still visible on many their necks. Although, there were many who bore the telltale mark of the heated iron or the barbed whip. The corpses from the bonfires would remain forever nameless but some from the pit were recognised by the Alundians who joined in the labour, leading to a recurrent chorus of piteous sobbing or grief-stricken wailing. Leannor ordered Ayin to make a list of those that could be identified.

  Once the last body had been laid to rest and the trenches filled in, the princess regent addressed the assembled ranks of the Crown Host from atop the walls of Walvern Castle. The Alundians and a fair number of Caerith also clustered on the fringes to listen. The princess regent began by reading out a list Ayin had compiled of those victims that could be identified, ensuring a reverential hush settled upon the crowd as she spoke on.

  “I’ll not lay claim to the voice of a Martyr.” An honest statement since she was obliged to shout to ensure her speech reached the ears of all present. Still, although lacking the effortless, commanding oratory Evadine enjoyed, the address of the princess regent that evening has been rightly celebrated. “For we have learned to our cost that to tolerate false claims of divinity is to invite upon ourselves the worst calamity. Here, in this place of horrors, we see where it leads. Here lie the fruits of our toleration, our foolish indolence. Yes, I say our, for I will not pretend to be blameless. I knew years ago that I would be doing this realm the greatest service by striking Evadine Courlain dead. But I did not. That was my crime. That was my folly. I confess it to you now, for, if we are to win this war, there must be truth and trust between us.

  “I will not speak to you of glory. I will not beseech you to look to your faith or your lords for guidance, for none is needed now. Here in this place you know full well for what you fight. The False Queen speaks of the Second Scourge, and yet this is what she inflicts upon the world. She is our scourge, a blight upon all that lives. Accordingly, in the name of King Arthin, I hereby prescribe sentence of death upon the pretender Evadine Courlain and all those who follow her. We will have justice, or we will have death.”

  Evadine would have made a flourish of this statement, raised a fist or brandished a sword. Leannor merely spoke it in the same, anger-inflected shout, but it was enough. A low, ugly growl of agreement rippled through the ranks then built to a steady, repeated chant.

  “Justice or death! Justice or death! Justice or death!”

  To my surprise, even the Alundians took up the chant. There were a few at first. But soon every one of this ragged, hard-bitten group, who would have delighted in this woman’s demise not so long ago, gave strident voice to the same cry.

  “JUSTICE OR DEATH! JUSTICE OR DEATH!”

  The hundred or so Caerith present showed no inclination to follow suit, displaying the same grim bafflement that had coloured their demeanour since arriving at this valley of horrors. They drifted away as the chanting continued, leaving one bulky figure behind, standing in immobile contemplation of the filled graves. When Leannor departed the walls and the shouting slowly died away, I dismissed the Crown Host to their encampment, instructing their captains that the usual injunction against drunkenness was lifted for the night. After an ordeal such as this, they required some form of release. The resultant brawls and general disorder were a small price to pay if it spared them a nightmare-filled slumber.