“Fools, all of them, fools and knaves that put me on my path and washed their hands of the consequences. Whether he sits in Kurikuneku or in Kivv, in Tel Ezer or z’Ark, Almaydase or Dresh or the glittering shining tower of HaDakel, all are the same. I’ll climb, I’ll climb, I’ll find them. Rend their flesh and eat their eyes. Tie their intestines in knots and burn their hands and put needles in their ears and rip the nails from the tips of their fingers and toes and drown them, slowly, in all the blood they’ve spilled

This is the rightful fate of every emperor and king –“

-Words scratched on the walls of Cigdem Nacar’s cell, beneath Etyslund

The same evening, in another place

Stepan’s hands easily forgot their work and their cunning, and his eyes wandered from the dials and switches of his radio, from the simple console where his messages were written out to be sent like fleeting birds to the north. The answers he got from Aleks were fewer and further between, now, quick notes confirming little more than the progress of his work and the fact that he – and his sisters – were alive and well.

He knew from what the militia scouts told him, and from the secondhand intel they’d gotten from the Adma, that things were getting worse, especially south of Etyslund. No soldiers had yet come here, but the Invictans were massing. The intelligence Luca had been smuggling out of Carakhte was grim: thousands of soldiers, a garrison that she and her agents couldn’t definitively count. And the time to execute her plan still hadn’t come. Even Stepan wasn’t sure why she was delaying now. Perhaps it wasn’t the perfect time, but would there ever be such a thing?

Though he couldn’t hear the prisoner in the cell below him, Stepan felt as though he could almost detect the vibrations of the old soldier pacing down there. The footsteps, imagined though they might be, rang in his skull, shook him from toes to crown, and set him walking winding paths through the old library.

The building was scarred, still, whatever holes they might plug with clay and stone. The marks of battle, the stone hewn from the walls and thrown to the four winds, Stepan could never muster the courage to gather it all up and bring it back to the core. Even seasons later, the dust of that stone was imbued in the very earth here.

He recalled the soft feeling of skin ripping away under chunks of propelled stone that should have been nerveless, senseless… screams of fear and pain and of rage, such rage!

There was a part of him that expected the building’s halls to be back to the way they were before. The paths he’d walked years ago, when the library truly stood, they were engraved in his mind. His fingers, already callused from weeks of the same, trailed against rough-shaped stone as he walked down the corridors. With the Sower’s Gift heavy on his shoulders he caught electric moment-glimpses of his own mind weeks ago, when his fingertips had been softer and raw and had left tiny trails of blood against these same stones. They were fainter now than they’d been as the evidence faded into almost nothing.

Huddled in the center with his hands held tight over his head, and Luca bright next to him with the wind in her grip, and the dead soldier howling through the walls and tearing at the stone… how it hurt every time he tore away rock and ground it to dust and

There was a cold and quiet corner of the building, a place where there had once been a small grate. Though broken and misshapen, its spine twisted, the stone remembered when that small grate had become a back entrance. The day had power enough to sit heavy in one’s memory, even the memory of stone and clay and earth. Now the grate was gone – lost in the chaos of Etyslund’s battle, perhaps. But there was a small tunnel, roughly carved by the stone from its own body and cut into the unwilling earth beneath.

Stepan’s slow and haunted steps carried him down that staircase until it turned sharply to the left. To enter, Stepan had to pass between two tightly-placed stalagmites. A too-smooth wall of stone blocked his path at the bottom of the staircase. He placed his hand on it and it sprung to life, falling down through the stone-flesh beneath it and undulating under his feet, striking back up behind him to form a wall again. Again, too smooth for stone, and again, cold as the dead.

Cigdem Nacar sat in the small room beyond, in a thin grey shirt and short pants that didn’t conceal the gooseflesh on his legs from the cold. His body was more than a little bent now, his legs bunched up beneath him, but as Stepan entered the old soldier’s eyes lit up. He looked excited to see his captor, happy almost. Stepan looked around at the four walls, the floor and the ceiling, at the mind-bending smoothness of it all. He thought perhaps he could stare into that stone for hours and see a million patterns that were not there.

“What is it?” Cigdem said, voice rough and dry. “Do you have more questions?”

Stepan entered the room and knelt next to Cigdem. A season ago, he would never have dared – the soldier, though old, was burly and musclebound and probably could have throttled Stepan with his bare hands, at least back then. But he was getting weaker these days – perhaps he’d finally given up on his exercise regimen after being locked in a Sower-shaped prison for so long. Perhaps the food they brought him wasn’t enough to maintain his growth. Either way, Stepan no longer felt fear when he looked into Cigdem’s eyes.

“Not a question, exactly,” he said, “but a request.”

Cigdem raised his head, looked Stepan in the eyes, and leaned back against the too-smooth stone wall. His back slipped and he nearly fell down, then he pushed himself again up against the wall, righting his posture. His shoulders shook with laughter. “You have a request for me?” Cigdem slapped the stone wall next to him, and his hand came away red, the skin flushed. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed all this time,” he continued in a rasp, “but I’m not in the position to accept or deny requests.”

Stepan stood silently, crossing his arms.

Scoffing, Cigdem shifted positions so that his legs were stretched out in front of him, and continued. “In general, when we take a prisoner, we do not make requests of that prisoner. We give them orders, and they can either comply or be punished. So what exactly are you ordering me to do?”

Stepan sighed and looked away from Cigdem. In this small room, even that quiet sound echoed. Stepan looked up at the ceiling, where two small holes were drilled (or rather, shaped by Stepan’s own Cultivation magic) through the roof to the surface. “The Emperor’s armies are massing at Carakhte, I believe.”

“And?” Cigdem said, mockery in his tone. “What concern is that of mine? I am a prisoner and no longer part of this. why shoulld care who wins and who dies?”

“I know about your conversations with Luca,” Stepan said. “I know that you passed information to her and I know you sincerely hope for her success, because I don’t think for a second you’d be able to conceal your true intentions from Luca Buday of all people.”

“That’s true,” Cigdem said. “I would like to see the Emperor defeated by you people. That would be poetic, wouldn’t it? The Invictan Emperor, God incarnate, killed by a bunch of backward, provincial bumpkins! It’s the perfect payback for putting me in this position.”

“Every time I hear from Luca, it’s business-as-usual. Nothing has changed. The armies are massing, smaller parties are raiding in the south, and soon enough they’re going to start marching to Kivv. We can’t just wait around for something to change enough that Luca decides it’s safe to strike… but by the time that happens…” Stepan couldn’t help beginning to pace a little, though as he talked he grew uncomfortably aware of Cigdem’s presence in the room and of how little space was between them. Even with the unnatural calm of the Sower’s gift, he felt the discomfort – reason alone warned him of the threat. Stepan could easily overpower Cigdem if need be, but Cigdem was a clever soldier and might have some kind of trick up his sleeve. But Luca had come down to this cell so many times and had never felt threatened…

Cigdem grinned, showing gums recessed from weeks of intense hunger and thirst. “So what do you think she will do, then? Nothing?”

“I don’t know,” Stepan muttered. “But I intend to make sure that she does something. So…”

Now or never –

Stepan touched the wall to his left and lowered the barrier of stone behind him. Light from the staircase behind and the hallway above it streamed into the room.

Cigdem staggered up to his feet and started to dash forward. If he’d been at his best, if he’d been well-fed, Cigdem probably could have crossed the room in an instant and thrown his arm around Stepan’s neck to capture him. in the flash of recognition that passed between them, Stepan knew that. Cigdem’s thoughts, Cigdem’s memories, Cigdem’s visualization of this moment in the seconds before it happened, shows him closing the gap before Stepan could so much as react. But Cigdem was weak and tired and hungry, and he stumbled, and Stepan Cultivated the stone so that it wrapped around Cigdem’s ankles. Stopped in his tracks, Cigdem leaned forward awkwardly, his momentum still carrying his upper body. He would have fallen over had Stepan not moved forward and braced Cigdem against himself.

“Relax,” Stepan said. Cigdem reached out with hunger-weak arms and Stepan batted away the attack. “I am asking you – asking – if you will come with me to Carakhte.”

“You know I might betray you,” Cigdem said, gesturing at the stone holding him down.

“I’m not so easy to overcome,” replied Stepan, “even if I am just an old man.”

“I might be older than you, Valer,” Cigdem muttered between gritted teeth. “You want me to come to Carakhte with you… and what? Storm the gates alone?”

“No, I’ll pose as your prisoner. I’ll have important information to be passed on to the garrison commander. I know there is a garrison of thousands in Carkahte. We’ll destroy them – burn the border-town to the ground if we have to.” Stepan flashed a smile. “Don’t you want that?”

“You know I lived in that border-town for a while,” Cigdem said. “I have friends there, in fact. Even if few of them are likely to remember me anymore.”

“Some friends, if they don’t remember you.”

“You wouldn’t understand.” Cigdem shook his head. “But what’s a few more sacrifices now? I don’t have all the information – I’m just a ranger captain, not worth much in the grand scheme. But I am not stupid either, and I know how important this war is to the Emperor. He’ll be there in the flesh when the army marches. I would guess that’s the moment Luca is waiting for to strike – she wants to take the Emperor out along with everyone else.”

“Leave that idiocy to the Adma,” Stepan said, releasing Cigdem from his stone restraints and stepping away, gesturing for the soldier to follow him up the staircase. “We don’t have time to worry about that when we’re trying to prevent an attack. Even without the Emperor, wouldn’t the army still strike?”

“Yes,” Cigdem said. “Most likely. But the Emperor is important, and powerful, and he’ll likely be accompanied by his even more powerful heir.”

“We can worry about that on the way to Carakhte,” Stepan said. “One of your land vehicles is behind the library – we dragged it out of the muck after the battle, but none of our militia has bothered learning to use it. I spent a little time learning to operate it. Let’s get your things, just enough so the gurads of Carakhte will let you in, and let’s get moving.