Grave Empire

Book 1: The Great Silence

by Richard Swan

Genres: Epic Fantasy; Fantasy action & adventure

Synopsis

Critically acclaimed author Richard Swan returns to the world of his beloved Empire of the Wolf trilogy in this epic, bloodthirsty new fantasy series set in an empire undergoing an industrial revolution, where sorcery and arcane practices are outlawed – and where an ancient prophecy threatens the coming end of days. Perfect for fans of John Gwynne and Andrzej Sapkowski.

Blood once turned the wheels of empire. Now it is money.

A new age of exploration and innovation has dawned, and the Empire of the Wolf stands to take its place as the foremost power in the known world. Glory and riches await.

But dark days are coming. A mysterious plague has broken out in the pagan kingdoms to the north, while in the south, the Empire’s proxy war in the lands of the wolfmen is weeks away from total collapse. 

Worse still is the message brought to the Empress by two heretic monks, who claim to have lost contact with the spirits of the afterlife. The monks believe this is the start of an ancient prophecy heralding the end of days—the Great Silence. 

It falls to Renata Rainer, a low-ranking ambassador to an enigmatic and vicious race of mermen, to seek answers from those who still practice the arcane arts. But with the road south beset by war and the Empire on the brink of supernatural catastrophe, soon there may not be a world left to save... 

Release date: February 4, 2025

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 464

Sample

“Armed conflict is a wellspring of certain misery, but is not to be avoided at any cost. There is such thing as an intolerable peace. The diplomat finds himself at the nexus of these two states. Their mission is an unenviable one: to avert both the former and the latter.”

FROM MANAGOLD’STHE THIRD WAY

The Imperial Office

SOVA

They were no strangers to the sound of pounding footsteps in the Imperial Office. Messengers bearing urgent dispatches rattled through the place daily. They were the same children who hounded people on the streets to buy pamphlets and newspapers and political polemics – and indeed the same children who coalesced into gangs and trapped well-to-do Sovans in back alleys and threatened them with knives. They were a bloody menace, though Renata had to respect their tenacity. Sova, after all, did a very good job of crushing the poor beneath its boot heel.

The scurrying footsteps were normally confined to the upper floors of the Imperial Office, where the more important diplomatic suites lay. There, entire staffs dedicated to the different peoples of the known world languished in opulence. There was the Office of the Western Kingdoms Alliance, the Office of the Principality of Casimir – the “Great Enemy” – the Office of the Kova Confederation. There were even offices for the pagans to the north and south, countries like Tolland and Draedaland, Manaeisland and Saekaland, mysterious, closed-off places which had once been part of the Sovan Empire. The Zyrahn Dynasties of the Southern Plains, Qaresh, the wolfmen of the Kasar Kyarai, the colonies of the distant New East – all of them had an extravagant office, a host of tame analysts, and a diplomatic staff.

Not so Renata’s office. This was a dingy place in the basement, what looked like a hare-brained professor’s study. Overstuffed bookshelves and framed nautical artworks lined every wall, whilst maps of the Jade Sea cluttered every surface. Where there was space, paraphernalia from that submarine realm lay scattered about – a jar of iridescent oyster pearls from Ozeanland, a hunting spear from the Iris Isles, and the pièce de résistance, the wrought-coral battle helm of Old Scar-Eye himself, the largest white shark known to mankind.

The place had the musty quality of an abandoned library. Natural light came in through a small blurry window at street level, and thanks to the contrivance of mirrors filled the chamber. Pipes, which gurgled frequently, ran across the junction of the wall and ceiling. In winter they wore coats and gloves and drank brandy-infused coffee constantly; in summer the air was so thick they could barely breathe.

Renata shared this place with her superior, His Excellency the Ambassador Didacus Maruska. On warm spring days like this one, it felt as though their combined breath filled half the chamber.

“Where do you think?”

Renata looked up from her copy of the Superior Dialecta Stygio. Maruska, a beacon of colour in his orange-and-red Qareshian kaftan, squinted at her.

She thought for a moment. “The Kasari Office,” she said.

Maruska stroked his formidable beard. It was greying by the day. “A safe choice,” he allowed.

It was a game they played. Each slamming office door had its own distinct timbre which resonated through the building, and they liked to guess who had received the dispatch.

Renata smiled, her expression wry. “Where else do the messengers go these days? The country is weeks from collapse.”

Maruska considered this – or pretended to. “Yes. I expect you are right.” He tapped the front of his newspaper. “And the goldmark with it.”

They listened for the inevitable thump of the heavy oak double doors of the Kasari office. But to Renata’s surprise, the footsteps continued. Now came the telltale slap of sandal against stone step.

She met Maruska’s eye. “Downstairs?”

“Probably got lost.”

He pulled out his pipe and began to thumb in tobacco leaf. He struck a match against the desk, next to where a newspaper lay. The headline, which took up much of the cover, read: WOLFMEN ROUT! NORTHERN KYARAI WEEKS FROM BEING OVERRUN. GOLDMARK TUMBLES, IMPERIAL BANK DESPAIRS!

“They’re coming closer,” Renata said in a sing-song voice as the footsteps grew in volume.

“Here, then,” the ambassador replied, filling the chamber with the sweet scent of Qareshian pipe smoke. Renata complained that it took all the air out of the room, though secretly she loved the smell of it.

“That doesn’t count as your guess,” she said.

Maruska winked at her. A moment later, there was a sharp rap at their door.

Renata stood and walked over to it, and pulled it open. There stood a young girl, perhaps ten years old, her face ruddy and perspiring from exertion. “Is this the… ‘Stygion Mer-men Office’?” she asked in gutter Saxan.

Renata nodded, still unconvinced. They hardly received letters at all, let alone urgent ones. “Yes.”

“Urgent message for Renata Rainer.” The girl held the letter out as though it would poison her if she held it any longer.

“Thank you,” Renata replied, taking it and giving her a penny.

“Well?” Maruska said, once the door was closed.

Renata opened and read the letter with an expression of bemusement. “This is Imperial letterhead,” she muttered. “From the Office of the Royal Court. They want me to report to Zobryv Gardens – immediately.”

“The embassy district? Why?”

“I don’t know,” Renata said. She put her shoes on and grabbed her purse. “But I’d better go. Are you coming?”

“It’s not addressed to me, is it?”

“No.”

He shrugged. “Well then, off you go.”

Renata walked quickly through the basement corridor of the Imperial Office, and then up several flights of stairs and into the main entrance hall. This was an imposing place of schach-pattern flooring and statues and portraits of famous ambassadorial staff. Above the main entrance was an enormous painting of the wolfman Zuberi, the “Saviour of Sova” – so named for some centuries-old battle in the city. His watchful lupine eyes never failed to elicit a shiver from her.

She exited the office directly on to Admiralty Square, where the desiccated grass crunched under her feet, and immediately turned left and then left again, passing down a narrow, bustling street between the Library of Sova and the Imperial Office. She cut over a bridge which crossed the westernmost branch of the brown River Sauber, covering her nose as she did so. It was coming to the time of year when the Sauber really began to smell, ripe as it was with effluents and iridescent with industrial outflow.

Zobryv Gardens itself was largely empty, though it would soon be full of the promenading wealthy and workers taking their lunch. It was a pleasant green space of broad walkways shaded by old-growth oaks, and grass lawns and flower beds ensconced in ornate iron railings. It was a pretty little corner of the city, quiet for somewhere so central, overlooked by the rear of a long terrace of foreign embassies along the Veleurian Road.

The letter had stipulated she hurry to a small walled garden near the centre of the park, and she moved quickly in spite of the spring warmth. She was intercepted for the last hundred yards by a well-dressed gentleman whom she felt she recognised, a young man in a spring suit of plain black cloth. He wore an urgent countenance. “Ms Rainer!” he said breathlessly. “Please, quickly, this way. There is a pressing matter which requires your expertise.”

“Yes, of course – lead on,” she replied, trying not to sound as breathless as she felt. She followed the man at a fast walk into the walled garden, a pleasant structure overgrown with intricate knots of ivy. Ahead and in the centre was a cluster of besuited gentlemen, all craning to see something at the edge of a fountain pond.

“I have her!” her escort called out to the group.

“Nema Victoria!”

“Thank goodness!”

“Over here, Secretary Rainer! Quick!”

Overcome with curiosity, Renata hurried into the centre of the group. A man was crouched down, and in his hands was a bizarre creature; half frog, half fish, and grafted together so expertly the thing writhed and wriggled in a deathless agony, with neither air to drink nor water to breathe.

The man looked at her sharply, wearing a wide, disingenuous grin. “It’s the Stygion ambassador, Miss Rainer!” he exclaimed. “He’s looking a little green around the gills!”

There was about three seconds of silence as the clot of men – all of whom she now realised were colleagues from the Imperial Office – studied her with idiot expressions of glee. Then a second man snatched something from his pocket and held it out. It was an elongated black shell, redolent of seawater.

“I think he’s pulled a mussel!”

And then all of them exploded into fits of red-faced, thigh-slapping laughter.

She met her half-sister in one of the kaffeehauses which sat in a row on Gooseneck Street. To the south was the enormous Imperial Stocks Exchange, and at lunchtime the place disgorged its occupants like an upturned waste bin. They filled the public houses which themselves filled the surrounding area like symbiotic fish, demanding beef steaks and ale and brandy and making as many deals there as they did in the Exchange itself.

The kaffeehaus was a dingy place filled with dark wood. In one corner, placed prominently, was a chalkboard with exchange rates for foreign currencies and the price of various commodities – furs, cotton, tobacco, silk. Once, this had been the preserve of the nouveau riche, who had come to ostentatiously drink expensive coffee filled with teaspoons of expensive sugar; now, like the surrounding taverns, it was a place of business for the merchant classes.

“And then they made a pun. Two puns,” Renata muttered. She had been careful not to give the men – boys, really, in spirit – the satisfaction of her ire. Instead she had simply rolled her eyes and left, biting down the fury which had filled her.

“What were the puns?” her half-sister asked. She was a beautiful woman. Where Renata had inherited her mother’s paper-pale skin, Amara had their father’s light brown colouring. She was a postgraduate student at the University of Sova, a talented linguist and secret pamphleteer, intelligent and headstrong and roguish. She fought off suitors daily – men and women alike – and affected to tire of it.

“Something about gills. One of them took out a mollusc and suggested the wretched creature had pulled a mussel.”

Amara put her hand over her mouth.

Renata squinted at her. “It’s not funny.”

“No,” Amara said, taking a long sip of coffee. “What utter beasts. What was the creature?”

Renata waved her off. “Some vivisectionist from the University had spliced a fish and a frog together. The thing cannot have lived for long after.”

“Still, not a bad likeness. For a mer-man, I mean. I know you have your whole… thing going on, but they are a little bit ghastly, Ren.”

Renata set her teeth. “I deal with enough of that in the Imperial Office. I don’t want to deal with it with you.”

“Sorry,” Amara said, though she wasn’t.

Renata sighed. “All this bloody… war. War in the Kyarai, war with Casimir. Everyone’s idea of diplomacy is to threaten, to shoot, to bludgeon terms out of your enemy. Capitulation is the only acceptable outcome. And I look around the streets and no one even seems to be that bothered about it. Parades of soldiers down the Petran Highway, lists of medal awards in the newspapers, pamphlets – there’s a new row of flags on Aleksandra the Valiant Boulevard, have you seen it?”

Amara inclined her head.

“Just dozens of them tied to the lamps, all the different regimental banners. It’s vulgar. I remember a time when ‘blackcoat’ was an insult. When did the city become so… martial?”

“Since Zelenka Haugenate took the throne?”

“Oh, don’t get me started on her. Our glorious new Empress. It’s still extraordinary to me how the Senate just…” Renata snapped her fingers, “decided to reinstitute the monarchy.”

“I am absolutely not going to get you started,” Amara said impishly. She had heard this diatribe before, many times. “I told you I can put you in touch with the pacifists up in Pike’s Bend.”

“No, I told you. It’s a proscribed organisation. I’ll lose my job.”

Amara shrugged slowly. “Well then.”

“Well then what? Put up or shut up?”

“Goodness me, you are prickly today. All because of some absurd lark. Really, Ren, this is precisely what they were… angling for.”

“Amara!” Renata snapped, but her sister was so pleased with the pun she spent a good few moments in hearty, silent laughter, and eventually Renata found herself coaxed into laughing as well.

After they had both calmed down, Renata finished the last of her coffee. The sugar had settled at the bottom, the last mouthful tepid and much too sweet. “How are you, anyway?” she asked when her sister had recovered herself. “How is Father?”

Amara waved a hand dismissively. “Fine. He’s fine. Off to the south to search for gold in the Reenwound.”

Their father, a successful and eccentric Zyrahn prospector, had made his fortune in diamond mining in the western half of the Kyarai – the country of the wolfmen – and had supplied all of his many children – of whom Renata and Amara were the eldest – with generous funds to pursue their interests. Renata almost never saw him, especially since her mother had died.

“And is there anyone you are seeing?”

“Do you mean have I been successfully wooed?” Amara winked. “No. Everyone bores me. The men and women of the University are such a dull lot. What about you? How is Alistair?”

Renata thought of her putative beau, a young poet whom she had met in a public house in Creusgate several months before. The man was lovely, but much too intense, and she had quickly tired of him. The fact that she worked for the Sovan state, too, was a source of near-endless argument. Sometimes it ended in lovemaking; more often it ended in resentful silence. Renata kept meaning to break it off, but she had been preoccupied, and their relationship had limped on like a dog with a broken leg.

“I’m sure he’s fine.”

“Oh dear. Who will be enough to tame the great Renata Rainer?” Amara said playfully. “Perhaps you could strap your legs up and learn to breathe underwater and marry a—”

“Oh, shut up,” Renata said, throwing her napkin at her sister. She looked around the kaffeehaus, at all the ruddy-faced merchants talking loudly to one another. A member of the establishment was updating the commodities prices on the chalkboard, which had prompted a fresh round of loud, excited chatter. It made conversation practically impossible.

“Well, I should be getting back,” she half shouted.

Amara reached across the table and took Renata’s hand in her own. The levity had gone; concern was writ large on her features. “Are you all right, Ren?”

“Why do you ask?” Renata replied. Such questions always put her back up.

“You always seem so highly strung. Sensitive to the goings-on of the world. I hate to think of those wretches in the Imperial Office making fun of you, especially given how hard you work.”

Amara’s sympathy came from a place of genuine affection, and so Renata made an effort to reciprocate her sincerity. Many made the mistake of thinking Amara a superficial creature.

“I’m afraid until someone discovers coal or iron or gold at the bottom of the Stygion Sea, the mer-men will always be little more than a curiosity to the Empire. And that is in the best case.”

“Don’t the mer-men have a thing about whales? I heard they boarded that whaling ship in the night. What was it called?” Amara snapped her fingers. “The Sophia Juras. Killed everyone on it.”

“That’s a silly rumour,” Renata lied.

Amara sighed. “Well. The important thing is you are all right. Do not spend your life thinking about mer-men, please. Have you even met one yet?”

“The ambassador is preparing an expedition for next year.”

“Ren,” Amara said gently. “The ambassador has been ‘preparing an expedition’ for as long as you have worked there. You might as well have remained at the University with me.”

“I never had your talent for languages.”

“You must speak Loxica pretty fluently.”

Renata snorted. “It’s mostly sign language.”

Amara grinned. “Show me something. How do you say ‘Amara is the best sister a lady could hope for’?”

Renata considered the question, and after a moment’s pause performed a silly flourish followed by a middle finger.

Amara’s eyes widened, then she snorted so loudly she clapped her hand over her mouth, and the two of them fell about laughing again, so long and hard that by the end Renata was crying tears of mirth.

“Now I really do need to get back to the office,” she said once they had calmed down. Around them, obese traders in groaning jackets and breeches eyed them with a mixture of lust and contempt.

Amara sighed. “Let’s do lunch next week, yes? Let’s get oysters like we used to when you lived in that ghastly apartment near the Creusgate magazine.”

“I still live there.”

“Oh, for Nema’s sake,” Amara said.

“Goodbye Amara.”

Renata could still hear her sister laughing as she left the kaffeehaus.

The bankers had returned to their banks by the time she crossed Gooseneck Street again. She stopped outside the Board of Trade building, where a Grozodan baker offered her a sweet bun from his cart, and she bought two – one for Maruska – then made her way back across Admiralty Square and into the Imperial Office. She ducked in just as an afternoon shower started in earnest, sloughing away the dust and dirt from the Sovan streets, and made her way back down to the basement, where Maruska sat in his chair, snoring lightly. She pursed her lips.

“I got you a pastry,” she said loudly. The old ambassador didn’t startle awake; he simply opened his eyes slowly.

“Thank you,” he said, taking the Grozodan sweet bun from her. He examined it, though there was no hint of honey or ground walnuts and pistachios such as he might have bought in Qaresh. Still, he managed to eat it.

Renata watched the rain splatter down into the streets, sending dirty streaks down the office’s solitary window. When it was cloudy, the room became very dingy indeed.

“You aren’t going to ask me what the message was?” she said eventually.

“What was the message?” Maruska asked.

“It was a lampoon. Men from upstairs, making fun of me. Making fun of us.”

“It is as it has ever been.”

“Doesn’t it bother you?” she asked, trying to affect nonchalance. “To be a laughing stock? To be…” she searched the office, “a joke?”

“We are not a joke, Ms Rainer.”

“Yes, well.” She waved him off. “Sometimes it feels like it.” She thought of her sister’s words, words spoken with affection but which had hit on Renata’s private fears. “I’ve not even met a mer-man.”

“To be a joke and to be perceived as a joke are two different things.”

In spite of her best efforts – she was a diplomat after all – she felt her anger briefly boil over. It was anger she should have spent on the men in Zobryv Gardens. “Spare me your mental gymnastics, Didi. It was humiliating.”

Maruska shifted in his chair. A moment later she heard the strike of a match, and the familiar smell of rosemary-and-sandalwood-scented tobacco.

“Do you know what the problem with the Imperial Office is?” he asked.

“There is only one?”

“Have you naught left to learn?” Maruska asked sharply.

Renata forced herself to relax again. She had run into the curtain wall of Maruska’s patience. Many regretted surmounting it.

Maruska pointed the bit of his pipe at her. “The problem with the Imperial Office is that it views every race of people on this world as a problem to be solved. A dog to be brought to heel. It thinks in terms of administrative ledgers, accounts, mathematical equations, supply trains and tons of powder. It sees the Kasar and the pagans and the Casimirs and the mer-men not as pieces in a common lot, but either as tools or as enemies. Does the gardener negotiate with the rake? Does the farmer entreat the ploughshare?”

“N—”

“Nay!” Maruska suddenly thundered, slamming a fist on the desktop. “He commands them! He bends them to his will, for they are naught but tools. And what of those he considers pests? The rats, the foxes, the wild dogs and pigs? They are killed! They are killed and they are skinned, and their meat and offal is cut out and cooked, and their bones are boiled for broth, and the blood is mixed into the soil for the plants or into the mortar for the bricks.” He clapped his hands together. “The farmer does not beg the vermin to leave, he does not barter with them, he does not offer them some of his corn in return that they leave the field be. Because the farmer has the ultimate power of life and death in his hands, though he does not think in those terms. The tools he will use, and the pests he will exterminate, and the land he will claim. They perceive us as a joke not because we simply seek to speak to the animals, but in their eyes, we have dressed the fox in a day suit. We have coiffed his fur and soothed his mange, and we have bespectacled him and given him a hat and shoes and a leather satchel filled with documents he cannot understand, and we have sat him at a table in our farmhouse and set out our terms. What are the terms, Miss Rainer?”

“Please leave the chickens be?”

Now Maruska laughed, a throaty sound enriched by years of smoke and brandy. “Precisely. Why are we here in this basement whilst our peers enjoy opulence? Because they see the Stygion as a dressed fox; something which should be shot or snared and clubbed, or otherwise cowed. Look at the way they use the Kasar in the northern Kyarai, not as equals, but as living weapons to claw and stab and shoot their compatriots in the south. Look at the way the gangs tour Sungate and round up wolfmen there to press into the Legions. Look how Sova seizes the lands in the east from the mountain tribesmen and turns them on each other.”

Renata collapsed into her chair opposite him. “Why do we bother? I mean, really, what is the point in all this?” She gestured to the stacks of waxed papers on the desk in front of her, messages to their Stygion counterparts a thousand miles away. They were little more than correspondents, maintaining a diplomatic channel because it was only slightly more expedient for the Sovans than to not do so. Certainly if Renata didn’t have a source of private funds, she would not be able to survive in her current role. The Imperial Office paid poverty wages because it traded on prestige. Perversely it meant that the place was overstuffed with the privately wealthy, scions of noble houses who were much too haughty and arrogant to make effective diplomatic negotiators. They were people who had never had to compromise, and, with the backing of the entire state apparatus, saw no reason to start now.

“Because no one else will,” Maruska said simply. “It is better to be a voice of dissent on the inside than on the outside. There is a saying in Qaresh. ‘There are two ways to blunt a blade; one is in its scabbard, the other is in the belly of your enemy.’”

“You Qareshians are very fond of your aphorisms, aren’t you?”

Maruska’s laugh rumbled throughout the office again. A moment later he stopped, cocking his head to one side; the thump of footsteps was once again sounding through the corridors. “Come; let us have one last game, and then I think we can be done for the afternoon.”

Renata blew out her lips as she listened. “The Kasar again.”

Maruska tutted. “Listen, that is the carpet in the Matria Paulaskas hallway. Listen how it softens the step.”

Renata smiled gamely, but the truth was she just wanted to go home now. “Fine; the Grozodans, then.”

“You are only saying that because you bought a Grozodan sweet bun earlier.”

Renata lapsed to silence. But once again they exchanged a look of surprise as the footsteps slapped against the stone steps leading down into the basement, and then across the undressed wooden floor of the corridor outside.

“Give me strength,” she muttered, pressing herself to her feet as there came another knock at the door. She yanked it open to see a different messenger this time, a lad in his teens who doffed his cap at the sight of her.

“Urgent message for the ambassador—”

“Oh, piss off,” she muttered.

The messenger said and did nothing for a moment, his face an expression of absolute bafflement.

“But it’s… from the Empre—”

“Yes, very good,” Renata muttered. She snatched her coat off its hook next to the door. “See you tomorrow, Didi,” she called over her shoulder, and, pushing past the messenger, made her way out of the building.

“Warfare is the achievement of one’s political aims through the application of armed force. In the same way we might lever a stubborn door open with an iron bar, so too might we lever open our enemy’s interests and degrade or destroy them. The trick, always, is knowing when and where to insert the bar.”

FROM MANAGOLD’STHE THIRD WAY

Fort Ingomar

ALDA RIVER VALLEY

Peter had seen bodies before. Accidents on the streets of Sova, or the victims of knife fights and duels. Communicable disease sometimes left entire sections of the city locked down and overstuffed with corpses. He’d had a sister, too, younger than him but older than his youngest brother, who had died from a pox. Her funeral was the only time he’d seen his father weep.

But to see the victims of such extravagant murder – even if it did form part of a broader picture of warfare – made him nauseous with fear. He knew he would be a target, but what a target he presented: white breeches, black coat with its white facings, silver frogging and polished pewter buttons, his black tricorn with its red, yellow and blue pompoms. So much of what he carried was valuable: his pistol and sabre and waxed greatcoat, his leather haversack filled with powder cartridges and food and a few scant personal effects. Even he himself was useful. He carried information in his brain, letters and orders from the officers in Maretsburg and Slavomire, and he was an officer and so could be ransomed. He would pass as neither frontiersman nor native. He was as conspicuous as it was possible to be, with no option for subterfuge, and useful as a corpse or a hostage to a great many people. The thought soured his guts and made him want to fold in on himself.

He followed his guide through the Alda River Valley. This was a broad, fractured country of some thirty thousand square miles, split down the middle by the Line of Demarcation, a boundary that had been established years before between the colonial settlers of Sova and those of Casimir and its client state, Sanque. The latter nation directly abutted the river valley to the west and funnelled a steady supply of men and arms into the basin. Only the proxy war that Sova and Casimir were fighting in the land of the wolfmen – the Kyarai – was preventing the valley from becoming one huge battlefield.

This was a place of treacherous mountain slopes and passes, of thick pine forests, of impenetrable clouds of rolling fog, of endless rain, of wolves and bears and sabrecats and tenacious, doughty natives. It was also a place of great natural wealth: endless timber for the Imperial Sovan Navy and for the furnaces of industry; furs, fish and meat, whalebone and oil; and if the latest surveys were to be believed, great seams of coal and iron ore, too. Sovan colonies to the east – Tajanastadt, Maretsburg, Linasburg, Valerija and Davorstadt – were already on the verge of self-sustaining, trading endlessly with the Kyarai and the Sovan Empire in return for manufactured goods. If the river valley could be tamed, then Sova could lay claim to one contiguous stretch of territory around the entire northern seaboard of the Jade Sea.

Peter was not filled with confidence. If Sova’s war in the Kyarai failed – and it increasingly looked like it would – then thousands of Casimirs would be diverted north. The valley would be entirely invested with the enemy, mere weeks after his arrival. The timing could not have been less auspicious.

After several hours, they reached the outermost parts of Fort Ingomar. The fort itself was situated on Aldaney Island, a large piece of land which briefly parted the River Alda before it rejoined and flowed out into the Stygion Sea. The bridge was guarded, though he had no trouble passing through. From there he saw that the island had been largely cleared of undergrowth to create a long, sloped glacis thick with grass; the trees had been cut down for stakes and permanent structures within the walls.

Fort Ingomar was an outwardly impressive place. It was surrounded by an earthen redoubt impregnated with sharpened stakes, which preceded a ditch; and behind that rose the scarp, a sloped wall twenty feet high which had been revetted with stone. The scarp was itself crowned by a parapet twelve feet deep; behind it, standing on the banquette, he could see Sovan soldiers watching him approach. Cannons, eight-pounders, were mounted at embrasures cut into the parapet, too. In the centre of the fort were several buildings – quarters, a powder magazine, stabling