Kuinkazner’s bid to win Sanzakarth was entirely due to two factions who surreptitiously aided him but would have abandoned him at once had either of them discovered the other. The first group was the mysterious Reeves of Shalamar, foreign imperialists who underwrote Kuinkazner’s war machine with gold smuggled through the country’s far western ports facing the Sea of Shalamar.

The second group was a cabal of sadistic sorcerers who terrorized southern Sanzakarth under the name of the Warlocks of Eoln. Ainuox the Demonosopher, a ruthless demon-catcher whose atrocities made Kuinkazner’s injustices look mild in comparison, led them. Other Warlocks were known: Sulomanix the Usher, the Memory of Rites, Shoon Sykanubalor, Helanuock (also known as Glass Helane or the Glasswright), Orcusa the Curse-Wright, and Spindleknot.

The Warlocks cared nothing for gold or precious jewels as such baubles meant little to the truly malevolent. No, they offered Kuinkazner something all those coins could never buy: the blackest and fiercest cast of forbidden magic. The Warlocks put terrible depth-dwelling creatures under Kuinkazner’s command, and the nexus of that command was the ancient religious capital of Anzukar, sometimes spelled Ansuqar.

One of Kuinkazer’s soul-vessels, the one that enclosed his lust, presided from Anzukar, defended by a formidable inner circle of knights, assassins, and lower-ranking sorcerers. Yes, that lecherous sliver of Kuinkazner was safe in Anzukar, far from the Sabler regiments encamped at Anzioch. Still, he was not safe from the highly resourceful Blackthorns, Yales, and Paledragons who formed their redoubtable inner circle within the political hems of the Paledragon Amendment. They had proved this more than once by reaching out and striking Anzukar when all its bureaucrats, believing themselves safe, roared in their revels. Such boldness put the officers in Anzukar on their heels, but from such ambushes, they could recover. However, when the report came that Kuinkazner’s supreme military terror, the hell strong and unconquerable Saintless, had been defeated, the entirety of Kuinkazner’s political momentum lurched to a stop. As outer battalions and brigades fell away from their master’s goal, Kuinkazner defected from himself: the soul-vessels that contained his lust and his wrath were permanently disaffected from each other. No longer bound to his angrier twin, the Kuinkazner who had so faithfully held Anzukar abandoned it.

This Kuinkazer fled into the western desert with a swift coterie of guards, leaving his officers to administer the capital in his absence. Several nights later, having evaded Sand Hoven looting along the edges of the war, they found rest in Khel Marjon. In that little-known oasis of spring water, figs, Ghafs, and date palms, Kuinkazner and his cohorts genuinely believed themselves safe for the night. Tomorrow they would press on to more remote western sanctuaries, ones Kuinkazner was sure were not on any Sabler map. He reasoned that he would be forever free in a few more days, having vanished within that vast Dry Silence where only the cunning survived.

Khel Marjon was distinguished from the desolation by a great jutting prow of white stone. According to local legend, a prophet had split the stone with a song. Since then, there flowed from that fissure the fresh waters of Khel Marjon—the “Prophet’s bath.”

These waters had flowed for over six thousand years, an inexhaustible reprieve from the hot killing sands surrounding it. The oasis comprised a small but deep lake, the excess of which poured lazily over a small stone dam, barely the height of a man, where it snaked off into the desert for forty leagues. Ruins surrounded the oasis: toppled ramparts, stone arches standing off by themselves, unfinished bastions, and other evidence of old occupations and defeats. The only useful structures that remained were a stone bridge over a narrow pinch in the lake and a slender tower near the spring itself.

Kuinkazner had been promised a safe night’s sleep at Khel Marjon by an old companion and former raider who went by the peculiar name ‘Blackjaw’ or ‘the Blackjaw.’ However, when Kuinkazner arrived, he was told Blackjaw was away on a night raid and would return three days hence. Kuinkazner trusted Blackjaw as much as anyone with Blackjaw’s reputation should be trusted: they had tried to kill each other at least once in the past. And though Kuinkazner could not bring himself to believe Blackjaw would betray him to the Sablers, an order they both opposed, the absence of his old friend disquieted him. Unwilling to take a chance, Kuinkazner invoked the memory of his friend’s hospitality until Blackjaw’s officers agreed to let him and his men spend the night in a five-story structure that had once served as a bailiff’s tower. Situated in the middle of the bridge, it was wider than the bridge, which bulged around its sides in a narrow walkway. Stone guardhouses and iron gates defended both sides of the bridge. Secondary gates, also iron, were erected about twenty feet from both sides of the tower.

It was to this edifice that Kuinkazner entrusted himself and his officers. After ordering that they not be disturbed until dawn, not even for the company of those beauties that belonged to Blackjaw’s exceptional harem, Kuinkazner passed out some gold to the bridge guards: a reward heightening their alertness and loyalty. There was no cause for celebration—at least not yet. For Kuinkazner, the night was to pass with modest drink and common distractions, for he knew the resourcefulness of those who sought him. Secretly, however, he fantasized about the young dancers he had denied himself and his men. After divesting his great outer maroon cloak, only his matching leather and black breastplate remained, as did his daggers at his waist. As he settled in for the evening, he laid his scimitar across his lap as his officers ate, played the lute, and spoke of escape.

It is a long-standing opinion—now a proverb in many places—that a man's soul is as much the architect of his face as his father is. By this rule, one sees a friend’s face when reading his letters, recognizes the work of his brush upon the canvas, or hears those notes he orders through the clarion. A man may have his father’s jaw or his mother’s eyes, but his soul is his own as heaven never recycles its patents. So strong is this stamp that it is hard to fool someone overly fond or familiar with it, though forgers try.

Those who met Kuinkazner for the first time could not reconcile his voice and manners with his face. Though they dared not say it, Kuinkazner appeared more like a man at a masquerade playing his part from behind a disguise. And that was not far from the truth, though sorcery had provided him seven identical masks of flesh and not of porcelain or velvet. The spell that divided the warlord into seven bodies, occupied at different times and locations, was now years into effect. It was an enchantment, yes, but an old and imperfect one. Indeed, the ordination that determined all men should be themselves and not someone else was rubbing the outlaw magic threadbare: Destiny having her say.

Consequently, no matter where he was, he gave the itching impression of a man caught wearing someone else’s clothes. He frequently fumbled, often in small ways that alarmed no one. His soul and nine decades of being himself still believed him so tall with such-and-such a stride and reach, all now entirely different from the body he had invaded. And though well into his darting possession of seven innocent men, he remained unwelcomed within their clay, an alien within their warm estates. Indeed, their bones, their blood, and their muscles rebelled beat after beat, breath after breath, and stretch after stretch against the eminent domain of a strange conqueror who had recast their flesh as colonies by a dark and imperial craft.

The men he had abducted and violated were septuplets, being seven handsome men. But now, the spell that captured them was ebbing, and errors were forming. The original magic enabled Kuinkazner’s mind to shuttle among his seven vessels as needed: warring here, battling there, relaxing, politicking, throwing banquets. When in one body, the other six slept according to a strict schedule, one sustained by rites. Loyalists surrounded those other comatose bodies, their preservation attended by chanting clerics wielding spices and gauze while local governors curated the warlord’s regional ambitions. But as the spell decayed, its primary parameter buckled. To everyone’s worry, all seven of Kuinkazner’s vessels woke one day simultaneously, six being unscheduled because the strange power that held his soul together as it moved among its seven endpoints inverted, resulting in a sudden sevenfold schism:

There were now seven Kuinkazners.

Since the warlord’s virtues were too atrophied to serve as a measure, the spell split along those muscular vices common to all men: wrath, greed, sloth, gluttony, lust, pride, and envy. Within a fortnight, each Kuinkazner manifested a singular deadly sin, excluding all other moods. Now stranded within themselves, when all seven Kuinkazners received word that their “other selves” had awakened, there were a few quivering weeks of cooperation-by-correspondence among them. Alas, vices are vices. In little time, each Kuinkazner became suspicious of the “impostors” that looked just like him in all those important far-off places. A sort of mania ensued, with each blaming the other six. In an irony that reversed the entire purpose of the enchantment, the warlord Kuinkazner was bitterly divorced from himself sevenfold. This dissension was direct, irreversible, and worsening.

Only two of Kuinkazner’s soulish vessels had eluded capture by the Sablers. They were those that signaled his lust and his wrath, the former at Anzukar and the latter marching south to Anzioch, respectively.

The seven victims of Kuinkazner’s plot were septuplets. They had a singular look, and it was a good one. They were young and handsome, tall, broad-shouldered with brown eyes and thick black hair—at least they were in the beginning. Unfortunately, in the months after the spell’s failure, each body was coarsened by the unrestrained vice that now dominated it. The body of Kuinkazner’s wrath was now scarred and burned and limped from many battles, while his gluttony had so fattened its vessel that none could properly bathe him. The warlord’s sloth was wasting away at a coastal palace while his lust was reeling from disease, even the slow madding creep of syphilis. His greed worsened to avarice: hoarding gold, jewels, and treasures, all of which he counted over and over in never-ending mumbling audits. Each vessel was racked and ruined apace. Those clerics and officers who tried to rescue the warlord from his fetishes he executed and replaced as regularly as they complained.