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‘Indeed. Yet it haunts you-you cry out in your sleep-’

‘Lies! Someone mocks you with such untruths, Triban Gnol! I have come here, have I not, to inform you of the impending triumph of my plans. Every detail coming to fullest fruition. This effort of yours now, pathetically trans-parent as it is, is entirely unnecessary. As I told you, your position is secure. You are, and will remain, entirely essential.’Advertisement

‘As you say, Invigilator.’

Karos Invictad turned to leave. ‘As soon as you learn of Bruthen Trana’s return…’

‘You shall be informed at once.’

‘Excellent. I am pleased.’ He paused at the door but did not turn round. ‘Regarding that K’risnan under the Ceda’s protection…’

‘I am sure something can be arranged.’

‘I am doubly pleased, Chancellor. Now, fare you well.’

The door closed. The odious, insane creature was gone.

Odious and insane, yes, but… now the wealthiest man in the empire. He would have to play this carefully, very carefully indeed. Yet Karos Invictad has revealed his own flaw. Too eager to gloat and too ready to give in to that eagerness. All too soon.

The Emperor of a Thousand Deaths remains on the throne.

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A foreign army uninterested in negotiation approaches.

A champion who is a god will soon draw his sword.

Karos Invictad has the hands of a child. A vicious child, crooning as he watches them pull out the entrails of his still-alive pet cat. Or dog. Or abject prisoner in one of his cells. A child, yes, but one unleashed, free to do and be as he pleases.

By the Errant, children are such monsters.

Tonight, the Chancellor realized, he would summon a child for himself. For his own pleasure. And he would destroy that child, as only an adult with beautiful hands could. Destroy it utterly.

It was the only thing one could do with monsters.

The one-eyed god standing unseen in the throne room was furious. Ignorance was ever the enemy, and the Errant understood that he was under assault. By Chancellor Triban Gnol. By Hannan Mosag. The clash of these two forces of the empire was something that the Emperor on his throne barely sensed-the Errant was sure of that. Rhulad was trapped in his own cage of emotions, terror wielding all its instruments of torture, poking, jabbing, twisting deep. Yet the Errant had witnessed with clear eyes-no, a clear eye-in the fraught audience now past, just how vicious this battle was becoming.

But 1 cannot fathom their secrets. Neither Triban Gnol’s nor Hannan Mosag’s. This is my realm. Mine!

He might renew one old path. The one leading into the Chancellor’s bedroom. But even then, when that relationship had been in fullest bloom, Triban Gnol held to his secrets. Sinking into his various personas of innocent victim and wide-eyed child, he had become little more than a simpleton when with the Errant-with Turudal Brizad, the Consort to the Queen, who never grew old-and would not be moved from the games he so needed. No, that would not work, because it never had.

Was there any other way to the Chancellor?

Even now, Triban Gnol was a godless creature. Not one to bend knee to the Errant. So that path, too, was closed. I could simply follow him. Everywhere. Piece together his scheme by listening to the orders he delivers, by reading the missives he despatches. By hoping he talks in his sleep. Abyss below!

Furious, indeed. At his own growing panic as the convergence drew ever closer. His knowledge was no better when it came to Hannan Mosag, although some details were beyond dissembling. The power of the Crippled God, for one. Yet even there, the Warlock King was no simple servant, no mindless slave to that chaotic promise. He had sought the sword now in Rhulad’s hands, after all. As with any other god, the Fallen One played no favourites. First to arrive at the altar… No, Hannan Mosag would hold to no delusions there.

The Errant glanced once more at Rhulad, this Emperor of a Thousand Deaths. The fool, for all his bulk, now sat on that throne in painful insignificance-so obvious it hurt to just look at him. Alone in this vast domed chamber, the thousand deaths refracted into ten thousand flinches in those glittering eyes.

The Chancellor and his retinue were gone. The Ceda away with his broken handful as well. Not a guard in sight, yet Rhulad remained. Sitting, burnished coins gleaming. And on his face all that had been private, unrevealed, was now loosed in expressive array. All the pathos, the abject hauntings-the Errant had seen, had always seen, in face after face spanning too many years to count, the divide of the soul, the difference between the face that knew it was being watched, and the face that believed in its solitude. Bifurcation. And he had witnessed when inside crawled outside to a seemingly unseeing world. pqdm.com