“It’s time to begin, isn’t it…”

“Have you located the other Unseelie princes?” Cruce asked.

The roach god had to finish molding his many roach parts into the stumpy-legged shape of a human dwarf before he had the mouth to reply.

“All but one have been slain,” he said, when he’d completed his tongue. He craned his neck to stare up at the tall prince, roaches scuttling to shift position with his movement. It was complicated to function in this form. It required incessant readjustments, yet it was this mimicry of those around him that had enabled him to strike his first alliance long ago. The more he donned it, the more he despised its limitations, envied those who suffered none.

“Which one remains?”

“He was once a Highlander, now mutated.” He shifted slightly, settling the remaining stragglers into place, reinforcing his knees.

“Useless. Who killed my brethren?”

“Ryodan and Barrons.” He observed his new ally closely. “I was there, beneath the desk when they placed their heads on it.”

The winged prince demonstrated no weakness of rage at the news. He absorbed and moved on. The roach god’s satisfaction with his choice of allies increased. Success did not grace the stupidly violent, but the patient, the unseen, those who lurked and bided and seized the correct moment.

“The Seelie princes?” Cruce demanded.

“Dead as well. The last of them slain by the same two.”

“The concubine? The female that was in this cavern the night they imprisoned me,” Cruce clarified. “The one with the Unseelie king. You were there that night, were you not?”

“Ryodan bade me scatter my parts through the abbey that night, while the wards were down, listen and learn. He misses no opportunity. I’ve seen no sign of that woman.”

“And the Unseelie king?” Cruce said.

He shook his head, masses of roaches swaying and churning, but not one of them slipped. In his upright form, he was cohesive enough to do a few things. Far too gelatinous to do most. He resented that deeply. He was tiny, weak, in a world of giants who crushed him beneath their heels, drenched him with sticky hair spray or canned poisons that made him sick, sick, sick, even flushed him down a toilet as if he were excrement.

“No one leads my race. They are lost. Who do they follow?” Cruce said.

“They scatter, establishing small strongholds, warring among themselves. Most do nothing but feed and slaughter.”

Cruce shook his head. “The depths to which my race has descended.”

The roach god had studied the world carefully for eons. When the Fae began to walk openly, he had finally been able to show his face, too, as the powerful entity he was. He that knew the world’s best-kept secrets could rule it. He suffered no delusion of being king himself. But he intended to be the one who stood beside the king, granted every liberty.

In his estimation, the recently freed Unseelie and the Seelie who now had no ruler were primed to follow any powerful, focused Fae. He told the prince this. “Still,” he grated, “I have no way to open this chamber.” He measured his next words carefully. “There is an Unseelie princess on this world. She was the one who bargained for the prince’s deaths. She would see you slain as well if she knew you existed.”

“Is that a threat?” Ice flared out across the floor, instantly freezing his many feet to the hard, cold surface.

He’d not spoken carefully enough. “Of course not. A warning among allies.”

Cruce was silent for a time. Eventually the ice beneath the roach god’s feet warmed enough that he could shift and free himself. Then the prince murmured, “I believed the bitches destroyed long ago by the king himself. Is there only one?”

“I have only seen one. I’ve heard of no others.”

The prince thought about this, then said, “It must be risked, and if it draws her attention, so be it. How solid is the form you now wear?”

The burn of it. Not nearly solid enough. He’d walked among men long enough to have adopted their expressions, mimicking them when he mimicked their form. Roaches rearranged into a sour look with downturned mouth and narrowed eyes. He couldn’t imagine how smoothly such things would occur in a cohesive body.

Cruce read the answer on his face. He stood and plucked a single feather from an enormous black wing, gilded iridescent blue and silver. “Can you carry this out when you leave?”

The roach god nodded, thousands of hard shiny brown shells rustling to perform the simple task.

The prince asked him many more questions about things he would have deemed insignificant, much like Ryodan, but the kind that knit together a much vaster, cohesive view than the roach with his divided parts and eyes. The roach god answered them fully, omitting no detail, however minor, from the recent rash of papers hung on every street corner, to the strange black spheres and the talk he’d overheard about them, to the terror-inspiring walking trash heap he’d seen the other day.

When he was finished, Cruce said, “Find an Unseelie who calls himself Toc.” He described him to the roach god. “Tell him Cruce is on this planet and would see the Unseelie united, see them rule. Then tell him this…” The winged prince bent low and spoke at length, and the roach god nodded and committed his instructions to his very long memory.

“Before they come,” Cruce finished, “I need you to bring the ingredients I’ve instructed you to ask Toc to prepare. With it, I will make icefire. Once I’ve finished, you will conceal it where I instruct.”

“Will I be able to carry it?”

“That is why I chose it. One drop of Toc’s blood added to each drop of icefire will cause flames to explode, which no water can extinguish. It spreads rapidly. How fare you in fire?”

The roach god smiled. He’d survived nuclear fallout. Fire was nothing to him. “Do you really believe this will work? That you’ll be free in mere days?” He licked his lips with anticipation, rustling roach against roach. Freedom. So near. He would never be controlled again. And perhaps this new ally could force the gift he sought from his prior master.

Before this great winged prince crushed the arrogant prick like a bug.

Cruce laughed softly. “Not at all. But it will topple the first of many dominos. And once they begin to fall, my freedom is assured. Go find Toc and do as I’ve told you. And remember, when you next report to Ryodan, you must henceforth omit those areas of information I detailed.”

The roach god relaxed and let his body scatter into a horde of shining, virtually indestructible insects. He dispatched several parts of himself to collect the feather that had drifted to the floor of the cavern and scuttled off with it, tugging it into the unseen crack beneath the door.