It delighted Nilesh’s heart, that Lord Emmereth was reinstated as Nithque.

The proclamation was made at midday on the steps of the Summer Palace. Thick crowds swirled around it, had done so since the Emperor’s death was announced. The Emperor had named the Lord of the Rising Sun as Nithque again in place of Lord Tardein, who was too broken with grief at his family’s deaths to go on. The gates of the city were to remain sealed. But the early signs were that the outbreak of plague was coming to an end. The prayers of the Emperor, the great sacrifices made by his people, the purging of the false High Priestess by those who had acted out of love of the God: all of these things had saved them. Great Tanis was merciful indeed.

“He will help us,” Nilesh assured the woman standing next to her in the Street of Closed Eyes. “He will put things to rights, now.” A regency council was appointed, headed of course by Lord Emmereth, including also Lord Tardein, Lord Amdelle, Remys the new Imperial Presence in the Temple, Lord Lochaiel the new Lord of the Moon’s Light the new Dweller in the House of Silver the late lamented Lord Verneth’s cousin and heir.

“You see? It will all be well now.”

The woman next to Nilesh grunted. Grudgingly hopeful, Nilesh thought.

The city was to remain under curfew. The Great Temple was to remain under guard.

Mutterings in the crowd at that. Angry, frightened voices. Nilesh sighed at them. Why could they not see?

The crowd shifted. Soldiers outside the palace. The crowd began reluctantly to disperse. Nilesh began to move with them. She was beginning to think about things like what to do with herself. Clean up the Five Corners and live there, perhaps. Or beg Lord Emmereth for help.

The man in the green coat, Cauvanh, was suddenly near her. Nilesh felt great surprise that he had not been killed in the Grey Square. He noticed her. Smiled.

“Hello, Nilesh.”

“Hello.” She remembered him shouting to the crowd to attack Lord Emmereth on the Temple steps. Drew back from him, afraid.

Angry.

“Nilesh?” He seemed sad that she was afraid and angry. “I just want to talk to you.” He had a bruise on his face. He was no longer wearing the green coat, but his shoes were the same and they had dark splashes on them, one was missing a button, its leather torn.

“Go away,” she hissed at him.

“You should be pleased,” Cauvanh said. “Your Lord Emmereth is Nithque again. He would not have been restored to his power had the rioting not broken out.”

“Go away.”

He looked saddened. “Keep safe, Nilesh. Go inside. Stay there.”

“Why?”

He shook his head. Went off into the crowd. She heard, she thought, his voice raised talking to a woman in a red dress. “… And why should the Temple remain under guard?”

Nilesh stood in the street. Confused. Everything was good again. Peaceful. Lord Emmereth Nithque. The city restored. She remembered Bilale talking with real excitement of some plans Lord Emmereth had to clean and improve the housing in Fair Flowers.

If only Lord Vorley would recover, she thought. Lord Vorley was in some way an enemy to Bilale. Yet to think of Lord Emmereth having to live without him grieved Nilesh’s heart.

She went back to the Five Corners. She had got the door mostly open, one of the women living further down the street had got her son to help. The rotting bodies still sat in the hallway, by the fountain, slumped on their beds. But she had found a storeroom that was clean. Soon, she thought, she would ask the soldiers patrolling the streets to help her. She had seen them stripping clean the baker’s house opposite, where all the inhabitants seemed to have died.

Noise woke her in the darkness. Shouts and cries. The rioting, she thought in horror. Lord Emmereth! Bilale! She pulled on her clothes and ran out into the street. Torchlight flickered on the walls. People stirring, stretching their heads from the windows, peering out. What is it? What is it?

A man came running towards her. He came from the direction of the palace. He was shouting, so fast and panicked Nilesh could barely understand.

“The Immish! The Immish! God’s knives!”

“What? What’s happening?” A woman in the street grabbed his hand. “Sit down! Tell me!”

“The Immish! Ah, God! I need to get back to my home! Bar your doors! Pray!”

He pushed the woman away, ran on.

Nilesh stood staring after him. People in the street were staring after him, talking, repeating “the Immish” in confused tones. What is it? What? More shouting, coming from the direction of the palace, the direction the man had come from.

The bell of the Great Temple began to sound. The twilight bell. Ringing out loud in the dark. It sounded like the strangest thing in all the world.

On and on.

“The Immish.” “The Immish.”

Nilesh began to run in the direction of the shouts.

The Temple bell fell silent. As terrifying as when it had begun to ring. More and more people were running, milling, standing staring caught in the flood. Everywhere the cries “what is it?” and the confused words “the Immish have come.” Nilesh ran on. Legs shaking. Bilale! she kept thinking. Bilale! Bilale! She came to the Court of the Broken Knife. An overturned candle beneath the faceless statue, a man sitting beside it panting, a crowd around him buzzing like flies. He was talking, telling them something, the crowd shouted angrily, swirled in the square, the same angry words. “The Immish!”

 “What is he saying?” Nilesh asked a woman on the edge of the crowd.

“The Immish have come,” the woman said. She was weeping. “Returned. Not just the palace. Soldiers. So many soldiers. We are overrun.”

They had come in at dusk. The Maskers’ Gate had been opened, though at dusk it should have been sealed and sealed. A company of soldiers, an army, thousands, heavily armed, a magelord at their head. The city was surrounded, besieged, occupied. The Immish were rounding up the great families. Killing them in their beds without mercy. Killing everyone.

“I don’t believe it,” a voice shouted. “It’s another trick, like the last time.”

“I saw them!” another voice shouted. “Immish soldiers.”

“To the palace!” A third voice. “Defend the city!” People began to move.

Nilesh looked at the faceless statue. Remembered the dead bodies piled in the Grey Square.

She followed the flow of the crowd down Moon and Sunlight. Through the Court of Evening Sorrows. Down the Street of Bones. On the corner of Gold Street and the Street of Children a knife-fighter lay in the dust. Abandoned. As though the fighting had been cut off in the midst, before he had been killed. Before the gates to the House of Glass two men sat with wounds and bloody knives. “The Immish!” they shouted hoarsely. “Go back to your homes! It’s too late! Too late!”

Lord Emmereth, thought Nilesh. Bilale. Oh, Bilale.

A troop of soldiers came towards them, down the Street of All Sorrows. The crowd stopped.

They were not Imperial soldiers. They were not armoured in shining gold.

Their armour was black. Thick, heavy corselets. Black helmets covering their faces, moulded into blank metal faces through which their eyes stared. They carried spears that ended in crescent hooks.

“The Immish,” the crowd whispered.

A couple of the spears were already stained dark with blood.

A soldier at the head of the troop strode forward. His helmet had a thick crest, like a horse’s mane. He did not have a spear. Carried a drawn sword.

“People of Sorlost,” he shouted. “Go back to your homes. The Immish Great Council has heard of your troubles. Murder. Treachery. Plague. The betrayal of your Temple to the Altrersyr demon king. And now the terrible death of your Emperor. The rightful Nithque, Lord Tardein, fearing for your safety, has appealed to the Immish Great Council for aid. And Immish has answered! We come to bring you and your children peace!”

Silence. The crowd shifted. The terrible spear hooks lowered behind the man with the crested helmet. Hooked blades reaching towards the crowd.

The man with the crested helmet said something in a different language to his soldiers. They took a step forward.

“Go back to your homes,” the man with the crested helmet went on. “Your city is safe. The Imperial Palace and the Temple are guarded. The Nithque Lord Tardein will address you tomorrow. You must return home.”

The hooked blades beckoned like fingers.

The crowd murmured and shifted. Began to move back away.

Lord Emmereth is the Nithque, thought Nilesh.

I don’t … I don’t understand.

She remembered again conversations she had overheard between Bilale and Lady Amdelle. Lord Verneth, Lord Rhyl, Lord Tardein, Lord Emmereth. Treachery and betrayal. Everything going round and round. She went slowly back down the Street of All Sorrows. Down the Street of Gold. The knife-fighter still sat in the corner, clutching his wound. There was another troop of black-armoured soldiers in the Court of the Broken Knife. The man who had sat beneath the statue had gone. She went back to the Five Corners. Lay down in the storeroom with a chair pressed up against the door.

“Your city has fallen into great turmoil,” a voice shouted in the street. “You have been betrayed and conspired against. But we come now to your aid.”

The Immish soldiers filed out through the city. Guards at the gates of the palace. Guards in the Great Temple, watching over the priestesses and Remys the new Imperial Presence. Guards in the Grey Square, in the Court of the Fountain, in the Court of the Broken Knife. Guards around the House of the East, the House of Flowers. Guards around the House of Breaking Waves where the true Nithque Lord Tardein tried to talk with an Immish general instead of weep for the death of his only son.

Six thousand men in black iron armour, black helmets that covered their faces like the priestesses’ masks, crescent-shaped hook-bladed spears, fat stabbing swords. A mage in a silver robe. A representative of the Immish Great Council who dreamed of trade opportunities. A general in the Immish army who had once hanged the Telean nobility from a gateway after a company of mercenaries betrayed the city to his spears.

Sorlost. The Eternal, the Golden City. The most beautiful, the first, the last, the undying. The unconquered. The unconquerable. The greatest of cities, that was old before Tarboran built her tombs, before the Godkings were even born. Its walls have never been breached: even Amrath himself dashed his armies to pieces against them to no avail and gave up in despair. Oh city of shit and sunlight! Oh city of dawn and the setting sun! So weak and defenceless and worn down. A dead man’s dreaming. A useless heap of crumbled rock. The decaying heart of the decayed remnant of the richest empire the world had ever known.

Sold to the Immish by March Verneth may the God Great Tanis the Lord of Living and Dying blast his bones to ashes, and Eloise Verneth may the God Great Tanis the Lord of Living and Dying choke her lungs with gold dust, and Cammor Tardein may the God Great Tanis the Lord of Living and Dying run his veins with molten lead. Sold for gold and diamonds. Sold for fear and honour. Sold for hate. Sold for revenge.

Such precious things.

Orhan Emmereth is a prisoner in his study. He hears his wife and his son weeping through the walls. His sister is a prisoner in her bedroom. She beats on the door begging her husband to let her out. His lover lies a prisoner on his sickbed. He stirs in his sleep and calls Orhan’s name.

“Traitor! Murderer! Monster! You did this! You brought this on us! I killed people for you! Because I believed in you! I’ll see you and everything that’s yours die in screaming pain! I swear!”

And how much will a man sacrifice, to make the world a better place?