Elturel · Chapter One

The Worst Party I Have Ever Attended

Outside Baldur's Gate. The first week. I have stopped counting in days, because the days have stopped behaving.

Age: Young enough that no one listens, old enough to be proved right afterward. The precise figure is an approximation and, frankly, an intrusion.

Mood: Composed. I would like that on the record before the rest of the page argues with it.

Current Complaint: Two ruined evenings, one ruined city, and a great deal of wet grass.

It was a treaty renewal, which means a room of Baldur's Gate's better people in their good silks, pretending they have ever once cared what becomes of us, and an hour of toasts to prove it. I had resigned myself to dying of the toasts. Then the doors came in.

There were cultists in the nave and an imp on a Baldurian envoy before anyone with a title had finished their drink. I will say this for the imp. It improved the pace. We put them down. The guests who fainted have since become veterans of the engagement. I was there. They fainted.

Afterwards Thavius Kreeg thanked us in that warm, carrying voice, and his hand shook on the lectern, and I looked at the sweating pious man and thought, there is something wrong with you, and went back to my wine. I was correct. I simply assigned it the wrong priority. I have noted this against myself.

Then I was put on a patrol. Through the market district. To look reassuring. I would like a future reader to sit with the phrase "a woman of my house and my talent, deployed to look reassuring," and feel about it what I felt. The Companion had thrown one of its bursts and killed Kaelis's sergeant where he stood, and I was attached because I was the only one present who could read what the light had left in the stone. The stone was screaming. I reported this. The officer wrote it down. Writing things down, I have since learned, is what officers do instead of the thing you have told them.

The second evening was Carmina Vellamor's masque. Her gown was three seasons old and her smile never once reached her eyes, and she asked me, sweetly, whether the noble lines stay loyal when the light falters. I concluded she was being a cow. I stand by the assessment. I have since had to enlarge it, because she was also draining her own guests into the cellar floor like a cask, which is a rudeness I had not previously had cause to file. We stopped her. Two evenings running, ruined by people with no taste.

I have written all of that the only way I can write it, which is lightly, because the next part will not be moved.

The Companion went black. The chains came down out of the sky like thrown spears and went into the city, and the ground opened, and my house, with the lamps still lit in the windows because no one had thought to tell the staff to put them out, went down into a fissure while I stood and watched it go. I am told this happened to a great many houses. I watched mine.

Ravengard was in the square, roaring at everyone to get the people clear, doing the only useful thing being done in it. A barbed devil came out of the smoke and took the Marshal of the Flaming Fist out of the centre of his own order, and the last we had of him was a man shouting at us to save the others and live. I did not save very many. I am recording that here, in my own hand, before the story has time to flatter me.

Reya Mantlemorn arrived with a horn and a handful of riders and drove us at a half-fallen chapel where she swore Torm had left a single crack of light open. We went through it dragging whoever was within reach. The fire became fog. The noise became nothing. We came down on a green hill under a clean blue sky, which remains the most tasteless thing Baldur's Gate has ever done to me. The Flaming Fist had us on our knees in the wet grass before I could stand, shouting "Elturians" at us as though the falling had been our own idea. My cousin Diego knelt beside me in the mud and made a joke. I could not laugh, and I have not forgiven him for being able to.

No one will tell me whether my father is alive. I am writing tonight down in this much detail so that, when they finally do, I will remember exactly the kind of person I was in the hour before I knew.

— Henzia-Mathilda von Trouser-Waffle
Viscountess of Elturel, which as of this week is a location rather than a place
Wizard
Diviner
Reassuring presence, apparently (I was not consulted)

Baldur's Gate · Chapter Two

Above My Station

The refugee camp outside the Basilisk Gate, and after. Begun on a hill Baldur's Gate had not decided whether to feed. Finished at New Elturel, the first season we had roofs.

Age: Older than the last entry by precisely the amount that matters, which the calendar declines to record.

Mood: Capable. This will read as a complaint by the end of the page. I am aware.

Current Complaint: Charity, so called.

Baldur's Gate kept us on a hill outside its wall like stock it had not yet decided whether to feed, and called it charity. Captain Zodge found us useful well before he found us welcome. There were bodies on the docks with cult marks cut into them, and rather than spend his own men he spent the Elturians, who were expendable and grateful, and I went, because the alternative was sitting in a tent being decorative. I told myself I was above the work. I was not above it. I was better at it than he had budgeted for, which is a different thing, and one I have stopped confusing.

I still did not know whether my father had lived. No word came. No word is its own kind of word, and I have become fluent in it. I have since concluded I took the camp in hand largely so I would not have to sit still long enough to hear what the silence was saying. A great deal can be outrun by a woman determined to make herself indispensable.

And the camp wanted taking in hand, because it was rotting and nobody with the standing to mend it would stoop to the work. A man had got the ration store under his thumb and was selling my own people back the bread that had been given them for nothing, three tents along from children going short. A lordling named Faelar proposed to govern the place by right of birth, as though birth had held a single roof up in Elturel. I dealt with both. I am not proud of how much I enjoyed it. It transpires that knowing exactly where a person is soft, and saying so aloud in front of precisely the right audience, is a talent with applications well beyond ruining a rival at a dance. No one had granted me leave to govern anything. I governed it regardless. Reya Mantlemorn stood at my shoulder through all of it and never once told me to be kinder, which is the reason I trust her still.

My cousin Diego was with me for the early part of it. When the others went down into the Dungeon of the Dead Three after the men running the cult, he elected to stay above, helping Reya hold the camp and using a bard's craft to keep frightened people calmer than they had any right to be. That was the end of the road for him. He has not carried a blade since. Once we had New Elturel he took the inn, and is the happiest of any of us, and it took me longer than I will admit to stop reading that as desertion and start reading it as sense.

They came up out of that dungeon with two strangers who have not left since. Cael, a Hellrider the cult had kept in a cage. And Nuovis, a druid they had lifted off the street when she came into the city from our own camp for supplies, chosen because an outsider would not be missed by any Baldurian family. She had come down with our refugees and had lost someone in the fall the way I had lost a city, a friend she still believed dead. We understood each other inside a minute and have not stopped since.

The hand behind the cult was a Duke of this city, Thalamra Vanthampur. We did not bring her down cleanly and I decline to pretend otherwise. We turned one of her sons, Mortlock, who informed on his own blood, and we let the Cult of the Dragon settle an older debt the house owed them while we settled ours. The Duke and her two other sons died in the villa. And in a cellar beneath it we found Thavius Kreeg, the sweating pious man whose shaking hand I had pitied at the ceremony, alive and entirely unhurt in a room full of our dead. There I learned that the portal which had saved us was his, and the fall was his, and that I had spent my first pages thanking the wrong god. I will not write down what I felt. We took him alive rather than killing him, which was the harder choice and the correct one, and I was argued toward it rather than arriving at it on my own, which I am recording because the record is supposed to be honest even where I would prefer it flattering.

What came next was politics, at which I am now extremely good, which is not a thing I ever set out to want. Mortlock is a Duke with a clean story the Lower City enjoys. Zodge holds the worst captain's post in Baldur's Gate, and I enjoyed arranging that more than becomes a lady of any standing. Kaelis was given the Candlekeep road to command, with Eryador under him.

We finished by building a town. Through Nuovis we cleansed a grove the Enclave had lost to shadow, and in return their druids raised a settlement out of Vanthampur farmland, and the survivors named it New Elturel before I could steer them toward something less likely to break their hearts. There is a tower in it that is mine. Diego has the inn. The people I would once have stepped over to reach a better table have addresses now, because I stood in tents and argued for them until I had no voice left to argue with. I mind them now. It is inconvenient, and it appears to be permanent.

I still cannot write about my father, because I still do not know, and I have finally run out of errands large enough to keep me from the thought.

— Henzia-Mathilda von Trouser-Waffle
Viscountess of Elturel, presently of a refugee camp, and shortly of a town
Wizard
Diviner
Governor of a hill, by no leave but my own

The Descent · Chapter Three

The Way Down

Written at the last halt of the Long Ride, the towers of a scavenger fort black against the fire ahead.

Age: 18 and some fraction I have stopped defending. (Elves are meant to be vague about this. I have decided to enjoy the one tradition that costs me nothing.)

Mood: Steady. I have examined it and it appears to be genuine, which worries me more than panic would.

Current Complaint: I have been made a Countess. Nobody asked.

My uncle Aethran told me I am a Countess in a war room under a black sky, in the careful flat voice men use when the news is old to them and new only to you. I had been a Viscountess until he opened his mouth. One does not, it turns out, get consulted about the promotion or its cause. My father did not come through the fall. I had carried the not-knowing the whole way across Baldur's Gate like a stone in a shoe, and when I finally set it down it did not feel like setting anything down. It felt like a door closing in another room. I have a title, a tower, and a county presently hung on chains over Hell. I would trade the lot of it for one more of his tedious letters.

We came back to Elturel the long way, through Candlekeep, which I would have enjoyed under almost any other circumstances. We carried the Infernal Puzzlebox out of the Vanthampur cellar and set it in front of Sylvira Savikas, the Archmage. The others opened it and took the charms it offered. I did not, and I said why: I do not bargain with infernal artefacts, however prettily they are boxed, and I trust a gift from one even less. The worst thing inside was the Shield of the Hidden Lord, and the Hidden Lord is a pit fiend, a lord of Hell sealed in the thing and entirely convinced the door opens the other way. I asked Sylvira to contain it rather than leave it lying open for study, and she did, with the ease of a woman who has held worse. The one place I want a sealed gate to Hell is in somebody else's library.

She did not send us off empty-handed. There was a scroll for getting home if everything came apart, and an Avernus go-bag besides: a Heward's Haversack packed for the road down, an alchemy jug, a set of earrings that turn Infernal into something a person can answer, and the rest of what one apparently takes to Hell. The haversack is mine to carry, which makes me quartermaster of the Five, a post for which I was not consulted. Then she opened her own circle and put us through it to Ravengard, rather than along the cold road the maps would have chosen.

Elturel hangs over Avernus on chains now, the Companion black and silent above it. The war room held a great many exhausted men and one of me, clean and whole and two months out of a siege they had been losing by inches. Cael found Jorvan alive, whom he had buried in his own head months ago. Nuovis found Lysa alive, the friend she had grieved since the fall, and I watched the two of them stand very still, as though a loud noise might take it back. Ravengard has perhaps eighty Hellriders, a few thousand frightened people, and food for one meal a day. He gave us the city's only plan, which is also the worst plan I have heard said aloud: find the Sword of Zariel, and decide whether the woman who damned us can be brought back or only put down. He set a fragment of the Companion and a soul coin on the table as our price for dealing with a hag, and reminded us that nothing in Hell is given. I had begun to suspect.

The Chapel of the Last Light went dark while we sat there, three hundred people inside it, so before we went down we went and took it back. That is where Jorvan was. We broke the siege on it and we held it. It was the last clean thing we did before the worse thing.

The worse thing was the way down. I spent a day building a Feather Fall large enough and slow enough to carry five of us off the edge of the world, and then we stepped off the broken rampart in turn: Cael first, Nuovis a great constrictor pouring over the lip, Eryador, Kaelis, and I last, because someone steady had to watch the spell hold and I am, apparently, the steady one now. We fell through the war that is always being fought in the air over Avernus. Three things happened on the way down that I will not lose. The dark went out of Cael's sword as he fell, burned clean by the weight of what he was doing, and it is the Justicar's Brand now in truth. Eryador looked down through the haze and saw the dead in their hundreds, devils come apart over the centuries and not one of them permitted to end, and something in his god's careful bookkeeping broke at the sight of it. And Kaelis stopped falling. The Sword woke in his head and spoke, and wings the colour of dawn opened out of his back, and my spell slid off him like water, and he flew the rest of the way down on his own, already turning toward a fort he had only ever seen in dreams. I will note that I built a working to carry five and delivered four. The fifth left under his own power. I am taking the credit regardless.

We landed in a battle that had nothing to do with us and rode east out of it. The Long Ride has taken two days. We watched two rigs collide on the open plain with nothing walking away from either. We put down a pack of scavenging devils without loss. We lay still in a hollow one night while a column of bone devils passed a few hundred yards off, driving roped souls ahead of them in silence, and whoever held the watch had the sense not to wake the rest of us. And yesterday the thing that had tracked us from the wreck finally arrived, a bone devil officer and two of its bearded soldiers, and we settled the account on the road.

The fort is in sight now, black towers against the fire. We go in when we have rested. I have a county over my head and a hag in front of me, and I am steadier than the girl who knelt in the mud outside Baldur's Gate. I do not know whether that is growth or only exhaustion wearing the same coat. I will write the rest once we are through the gate.

— Henzia-Mathilda von Trouser-Waffle
Countess of Elturel
Wizard
Diviner
Architect of a five-person spell that delivered four (the fifth had opinions)

Fort Knucklebone · Chapter Three

The Hag's Table

Written the first night east of Fort Knucklebone, the gate shut behind us and a working in the air I cannot see but can feel.

Age: 18 and 2/3, give or take the 2/3. (I have stopped pretending the fraction is precise. So, if we are being honest, is the species.)

Mood: Bound. Literally, as it turns out.

Current Complaint: I do not trust the fae, and I have just let one put a working on all five of us.

I want that at the top of the page, before anything else, so the record shows I went in with my eyes open. I do not trust the fae. The rest of this entry is the story of how that changed nothing.

The fort is a heap of scrap and iron with a hag at the middle of it and a great many small frightened things in orbit around her. They took our weapons at the gate and logged them like a customs house, and the only thing that would not stay logged was Kaelis's blade, which came back to his hand on its own as pact-blades do. The steward wrote the irregularity down and asked nothing, which told me he had seen stranger and been paid not to mention it. We ate at the cauldron of an old woman who takes coin, or songs, or nothing at all, and refuses soul coins on principle, and she is the most honest thing in the place. A small fae at the fruit stall offered us seeds for the price of a name, or a year, or the colour of an eye, and not one of us was fool enough to take one. I was proud of us. It did not last.

The thing I had not budgeted for at Knucklebone was grief. There is a Hellrider at the forge, Old Vance, the last of the riders who came down with Zariel and never left, which by the arithmetic is the better part of a century and a half ago, though he looks fifty and wrong about the skin. He knew Kaelis's blade on sight and would not go near it. He told us he had loved Zariel before the fall, that the Sword is the part of her that did not go over to Asmodeus, and that we must not bring it near her before it is ready. He gave Cael a sentinel's shield he had kept against the day a Hellrider came who could carry it. He had no reason to give us anything. I have catalogued every creature in this fort by what it wants from us, and Vance is the only one I could not, which is its own kind of warning, but a gentler one than the rest.

Maggie received us as a sweet mad aunt, and her first offer was the very one Ravengard had sent us to take: the fragment, for rigs and fuel and a road east. I refused it. I would not put a relic of whatever they hung over Elturel into the hands of a night hag and call it a fair trade, and I said so, and we walked out of her parlour, and she let us go without a word, which unsettled me more than any haggling would have. That night I slept badly and woke with two of her household curled in my lap, having eaten the reusable components out of my spell pouch in the dark. They were smiling. Everything in that place smiles.

In the morning she opened the table again with a different shape of offer, and Vance caught us before we went up and told us two things: ask her why, and tell her what the work is truly for, because a bargain signed in half-truths is a half-bargain. We took the advice. She wanted a wereboar warlord dead, one Raggadragga, the kill verified by a notary at the travelling bazaar, in exchange for fuel, rigs, and the road to the tomb we need. We told her the Sword was the true object of all of it, against my every instinct, and she did not raise her price for the knowing. She reached into her own pocket and gave Kaelis a soul coin for the honesty, which is not a thing hags are meant to do, and I have not stopped turning it over. Then she took the fragment I had refused her the day before, turned it over in her hands, and told us it is part of a prison, and a prison has a key, and the key may lie in a fortress that fell out of the sky around the time our city did.

She has taken to calling me Little Sister. She began on the second day and has not stopped, at the table and across the yard, so that the gang and the household have all heard her do it. When I called her Auntie in return she put it down quietly, only to me, and told me she is not my Auntie. I do not yet understand the distinction, and I dislike that I do not. I have filed it under things to be afraid of later, a folder that is becoming the largest in the book.

She sealed the bargain with a working, because a hag's word is worth nothing and a hag's working is worth a great deal. We stood in a chamber deep in the rock, Kaelis at the centre with the blade across his knees, the four of us on the points around him, Maggie on the last. She spoke two words, For Glory, in Common and then in Infernal, and made them ours. The Sword showed us two things in one breath: Zariel at the head of the charge with the whole host coming down behind her, and Zariel alone on a ridge much later with the sword driven into the ground and her forehead against the pommel, asking it something and getting silence. Then the binding settled over all of us, and over Maggie too, and I felt it take a count of us, one and one and one, the way you would count coins into a purse. The Sword woke as it closed. It is the first time it has spoken since the descent.

We drove east out of the gate this morning with two of her rigs under us and the wasteland already using a name the working made true. They call us the Five. I do not love being a thing that has been counted and named by a hag. But the road to the Sword runs through her, and I have stopped pretending otherwise. We will write the bounty down when it is done.

— Henzia-Mathilda von Trouser-Waffle
Countess of Elturel
Wizard
Diviner
Little Sister, apparently, to something I would not turn my back on

Avernus: Fury Road · Chapter 4

The Goreguts Road

Written at the day's halt, the lanterns of the Wandering Emporium lit on the ridge ahead, the head wrapped and not yet delivered.

Age: 18 and 2/3. (The figure is an approximation. So, if we are being precise, is the species. I am not discussing either with a notebook.)

Mood: Vindicated, which remains the most efficient emotional state available in Hell.

Current Complaint: The contract has cost us less than it should have, and I do not trust a bargain that comes in under budget.

I am writing with the contract all but done and two more rigs in our keeping than we had when I last opened this book. The road from Knucklebone to here has been cheaper than it had any business being, which in this country is itself a thing to be suspicious of. I want to set down why before the wasteland teaches me not to expect it twice.

Two things on the road before the Goreguts that I will not lose.

A Hellrider knelt in the ash in armour none of us knew, an older pattern, the kind Vance wears in pieces at the forge, his hands closed on a sword that was no longer in them. He thought he was still on the field where he died and asked us the way home. We told him the truth, all of it, and Eryador gave him the rites and laid him down, and he went without complaint. The Sword woke as he settled and said one thing, to none of us in particular: she did not stop for him. Kaelis carried that for the rest of the day. I think he is carrying it still, and I have elected not to improve matters by discussing it.

Later a vrock dropped out of a sulphur thermal onto the Tormentor's bed and went straight for Kaelis on the harpoon. We killed it the hard way, at arm's length on a moving rig, like amateurs, and it took more out of Eryador than I liked. We have since established that a thing which lands on a moving rig can be persuaded to leave it, and that the road will do our work for us if we let it. We did not think of that at the time. We will next time.

Then Haruman's Hill, iron trees and a hanged man on every branch with the inscription for desertion under each, and we did not stop. The Hill was the edge of Goreguts country. We drove past it into ground a wereboar warlord calls his own.

Raggadragga is dead and his Demon Grinder is ours.

The difficulty was that we were not allowed to wreck the thing. Mahadi reads the bounty off the gore-pattern on the chassis, so a scrapped rig is no rig and no payment. We could break the crew as freely as we liked. We could not break the machine they rode. The whole fight was built inside that single inconvenience, and we kept to it, which I record because it will not happen often.

Nuovis took the shape of a great eagle and went up over the convoy. She stooped on the Grinder, put both of the wererats off their stations and over the side, then came round and put Yeegha off her bike before she amounted to anything. Rather than leave the bike running loose, Nuovis let the eagle go, dropped to the road as herself, and took it under her, riding the rest of the way in. With the deck thinned we crossed onto the Grinder by Misty Step and boarded on the move, leaving the bikes to coast to a stop behind us for collection once the shouting was over. The two wereboars went down first, while they were still the part of the problem that could stand. Then I called an earth elemental up into the cab and set it on Raggadragga, pinning him against his own helm. It stood there and took his blows so the others could shoot him over the top of it, and it took no view on the matter, which is the chief virtue of an elemental over a person. His hammer did little. His tusks would have done a great deal, and we never once let them reach us. Eryador climbed to the cab roof and posted his Spirit Guardians down through the open hatch, which caught the crew where there was nowhere to stand clear of them. Cornered, Raggadragga flooded his own engine with ichor, and the chase ground to a halt at the same moment he did. He died in his cab with the chassis whole. The pattern Mahadi reads was never once at risk.

We took his head and a strip of the marked plating for the notary. Two soul coins from his belt, and a third already in the Grinder's furnace, keeping it lit. His infernal iron maul, no use to any of us but good trade at the bazaar. Nuovis has the Insignia of Claws off him, which suits her shapes. And the cargo bay, which held a bag of holding and two months of raided salvage, a fair quantity of it stamped with Maggie's own caravan brand. I do not yet know what to make of a hag paying us to recover, in goods she then lets us keep, what was taken from her. I am turning it over. There is a shape in it I have not finished reading, and I have learned to be wary of shapes I cannot finish reading.

Once the engine settled, the Grinder came away running on its furnace coin, with perhaps six hours of fuel in the slot, enough to bring us here and no further. The Tormentor took light scoring in the chase, which Maggie will dock from the bounty when we settle, and fairly so.

We drove the day out with four rigs, and the Emporium's lanterns are lit on the ridge ahead. We have not sounded the gate horn. We go in when we are rested. The bounty is one verification short of paid, and the verification waits for the morning. When we walk in I will have Skerrick's warning in the front of my mind: Mahadi is a notary, and he is also other things, and is to be treated as the first and never the second. Hands in our own pockets. Names off any paper that is not Maggie's. And we do not eat there.

Two of the four rigs are not ours. The Tormentor and the Devil's Ride were Maggie's loan, and we hand them back to her factor here, in serviceable condition as the contract requires; the Tormentor's scoring is the one mark against us. What we keep is the Demon Grinder and Yeegha's bike. The decision waiting on the far side of the verification is what we do with those two, and with whatever Mahadi offers for them, and I will not write it down before we have talked it through. But the road has made us the party that ran the Goreguts down, and the wasteland will have heard it before we leave.

— Henzia-Mathilda von Trouser-Waffle
Countess of Elturel
Wizard
Diviner
Bounty hunter, apparently (a development on which I was not consulted)

Avernus: Fury Road · Chapter 4

The Wandering Emporium

Written at the Emporium, the bounty settled, the convoy made over, three of our number sent home and the rest of us still here.

Age: 18 and 2/3, unchanged, which at this place counts as getting off lightly.

Mood: Solvent.

Current Complaint: I have spent souls like coins again, and the arithmetic still balances, which is the part I dislike.

We came in under the lanterns and did our business at Mahadi's table, which is the politest spot in Hell and therefore the one I trusted least. Skerrick had warned us at the gate: a notary, and also other things, to be treated as the first and never the second. So we treated him as the first. We did not eat at his restaurant, we signed nothing else he offered, and we let him hold the contract no longer than the verification took. He was charming about all of it, the way a man is charming when he has rehearsed the conversation several centuries before having it.

He read the head and the marked plating, confirmed the pattern, and paid: two coins to us, one kept as his fee. Maggie's factor Stannick took back the loaned Tormentor and our first Devil's Ride, reckoned the scoring on the truck, and then, on the lady's standing instruction, forgave it against the branded salvage we returned and handed me a credit token at the dryad's stall, addressed to Maggie's little sister. I have stopped flinching at the phrase in public. I have not stopped noting it.

We made the convoy over. The Demon Grinder was most of the way to spent and too thirsty to keep, so we traded it to Mahadi for two fighting trikes and a sidecar, stripping the rig-spares out of its bag of holding first. The Emporium's gnome filled every ichor tank and named both trikes after his aunts before any of us could object, so we drive Maybelle and Prudence now, and Nuovis rides Yeegha's old bike with the sidecar fitted, which she has called Gladys. I have given up expecting dignity from any of this.

The market was good to us. We sold Raggadragga's maul and a bag of beans, bought Eryador a Cloak of Displacement and a pair of scrolls, and I spent Maggie's credit at the dryad's stall on a Hat of Wizardry and a Broom of Flying, the second of which I expect to regret and to rely on, in that order. The dryad gave Nuovis a Cloak of Elvenkind for nothing but an old courier debt to her grove, and laid a blessing on her besides, the kind that does not come off. A tree, giving a moon-druid a present. Even I found that hard to be sour about.

The part I will actually remember is the hobgoblin. Z'neth ran the larva pens under a geas, and he leaned across his own counter to offer us nine coins to kill his master, and the geas killed him mid-sentence for the asking. We took the coins off him, then spent a diamond putting him back together with the geas dead, and he told us what Mahadi is, which is a rakshasa, which I have filed and intend to forget I know until it is useful. Then we spent my last Plane Shift scroll sending him home, with the dryad, and the gnome, and a few stray mortals who had no business dying down here. No contract. No lie in it. Three people out of Hell and nothing owed for the door.

We left the Emporium nineteen souls heavier in the ledger and three people lighter in the world, and I have spent the evening trying to decide which of those numbers I am allowed to be glad about. I have not settled it. We drive east in the morning.

— Henzia-Mathilda von Trouser-Waffle
Countess of Elturel
Wizard
Diviner
Holder of a credit note in a name I did not choose

Avernus: Fury Road · Chapter 4

The Hanging Span

Written the night after the Span, nine people aboard who were not aboard this morning, and the road gone slower for it.

Age: 18 and 2/3. (Wren has asked me to be precise about this. I have declined.)

Mood: Outnumbered, in the good way for once.

Current Complaint: Gnolls, gravity, and the structural integrity of other people's bridges.

Kaelis spent the cold morning talking to the Sword, properly, question and answer, and came away quieter than he went in. He will not say all of what it told him, and I have not pressed. A man who has just learned the shape of his own road is owed an hour to sit with it.

Then the road narrowed under a hanging scrap-roost, and a Yeenoghu warband had got there first. They had jammed a slaver's rig across the throat of the span with a pen of our own people lashed to its upper deck, and they were cutting the mooring-posts to drop the whole structure onto the convoy as we came through. We could not pass with that over us. We left the rigs on the ledge and went up the one staircase on foot, which is the worst way to enter any fight and the only one we had.

It came apart from there, in the literal sense. Ghulzarr, the gnoll running it, commanded from the top ring; two vrocks owned the air and spent it dropping spores and a screech that put half of us on our knees; the rest of the warband worked the moorings. Ghulzarr dropped his Hunger over the lot of us, which is exactly the spell it sounds like. Cael went down. Eryador dragged him clear of it. Kaelis stepped himself and Cael across the gap to reach Ghulzarr and forgot the thunder he travels with, and caught Eryador in the blast, who had done nothing to deserve it and took it like a Gauntlet. I have agreed not to laugh about this where he can hear me.

Nuovis met the gnolls on the platforms as an owlbear lit up like a small moon, then went into the air as an eagle to argue with the vrocks. I did the part I am for. I took the children up onto the Broom with me and caught the rest on Bigby's Hand, swung the lot of them clear of the collapsing structure to a stretch of solid ground, and set them down with a Feather Fall so Sergeant Roan could gather and count them while I went back for more. Then the platform under Cael gave way, and I put the Hand out a second time and had him before the drop could. It is not glorious work. It is logistics with a deadline and a long way down, and I would not trade it for the front line.

Ghulzarr and one of the vrocks lived. The vrock took him up and east, both badly used, and one survivor is one too many, because word of the Sword-bearer goes east with him into whatever is waiting out there. The other vrock did not live. Neither did most of the warband.

All nine of our people came off the span alive. That is the only line in this entry that matters, and I am setting it on its own so I do not bury it under the rest.

What I had not planned was the after. We could have refuelled their rig and pointed them at open wasteland, which is a polite way of burying people. Instead we fed the Scavenger a soul coin off our own reserve, the reserve we will want before the end of this, and folded it and its people into the convoy. Sergeant Roan put her watch on the rig. I have moved off my gun and into what the others have started calling the Bus, to mind the children, of which there are two: a girl named Wren who asks too many questions, and a boy named Pip who has stopped asking any. Roan and I are the only two aboard who know what the rig burns, and we have agreed the children will not learn it from us.

I came down here counting souls in a ledger. I appear to have started counting people instead, and I have not worked out whether that is the same arithmetic or its opposite.

— Henzia-Mathilda von Trouser-Waffle
Countess of Elturel
Wizard
Diviner
Aerial logistics, apparently, and now a teacher (consulted on neither)

Avernus: Fury Road · Chapter 4

The Muster

Written that night, inside the graveyard wall, by a fire we were finally permitted to light.

Age: 18 and 2/3. (I have been asked to stop giving the fraction. The fraction stays.)

Mood: Reverent, which does not suit me and which I am, for once, not going to argue with.

Current Complaint: Good grass. In Hell. I have notes.

We felt the cold a mile out, which is the wrong direction for cold in this place, and then there was a wall, and inside the wall the ground was green. Kept grass, level and damp and walled off from the red waste like a held breath. I want it understood that after everything Avernus has done to me, the thing I was not braced for was a well-tended lawn. The rigs would not cross the line. We left them at the wall, and the children with them, and went up on foot.

I will be precise about the dead, because precision was the only thing I had to offer them.

They knelt in rows that ran off past the light on both hands, hundreds of them, every one a knight in crimson and white plate gone almost black, forehead down on the pommel of a grounded sword, facing a carved angel at the head of the field. Not statues. Each was whole, and armed, and where the eyes should have been there was a low banked red, like a coal that had not gone out in a hundred and thirty-eight years, because it had not. Any one of them, had it lifted its head and stood, would have been more than the five of us came here able to meet. There were hundreds. The single most important rule on that ground was to give none of them a reason to look up. I have stood in rooms with kings and felt less need to mind my manners.

Then I made the mistake of counting, because I am what I am.

Each knight knelt on a slab of marble, and each slab was cut with a name in gold, and the slabs did not stop where the kneeling men did. They ran on, empty, around the whole field: thousands of them, one for every rider who went out on the Ride that made this order. A diviner reads a field like that the way a clerk reads a ledger, and I could not stop myself doing the sum. About a quarter had a man kneeling on them, carried home and named. About half stood empty and whole, names kept in gold, waiting for men no one ever found. About a quarter were burnt black and struck through, the gold gouged out of them. Those, I learned below, are the ones who ran.

So here is the arithmetic of the place, which no one asked me for and which I gave anyway. A quarter of the army that rode into Hell turned and fled and sealed the gate behind them, leaving the rest on the wrong side of it. Of the loyal half who stayed and died, the one man who has spent the last hundred and thirty-eight years carrying their bodies home has managed to recover barely a third. The remainder are still out there in the red, each with a clean slab and a kept name and no one to lie down on it. I do my best work in numbers. I have never hated a sum the way I hated that one.

The one man is Olanthius. He is what they made when the loyal commander died at his post and was not permitted to stop being a soldier. A death knight, which is a phrase I now have a face for. He kept the lamps and the lawn and the count alone, and he met us not as the thing he is but as the officer he was, because Cael was carrying a shield Olanthius himself had once inspected, and wearing the device of a family kneeling in his own front rank. We did not fight him. I should like that on the record, in a war that has given us few chances to write it down: we did not fight.

Cael found his own ancestor among the kneeling, a Corellian dead at this door longer than any of us has been alive, the family motto worn into the plate, the circle unbroken. The order back home tells itself that a hero brought the Hellriders out of Hell. The journals in the crypt say the hero is the man who ran, and that his name is one of the ones struck off a slab in his own dead commander's hand. Cael read that, got to his feet, and called the man a coward out loud, which is the bravest small thing I have watched anyone do down here, because he had believed the other story his whole life and put it down in an afternoon.

Then they did the thing I will be turning over for a long while yet. Cael absolved him. Eryador said the rites of his grey god over him, the proper words for an ending a hundred and thirty-eight years late. And the old soldier walked to a tomb that had stood empty waiting for him, handed Cael his sword, lay down, and let go, and the thing he had been carrying melted off him and left a tired old man at rest. In the same breath every kneeling figure on that field came up off its knees and was gone, released, the slabs lit gold, the cold turned kind, the lawn just a lawn.

Sergeant Roan swore an oath in the middle of all this. I have spent exactly one cold night beside that woman keeping a secret neither of us wants, and I watched a sword that answers only to the sworn wake in her hand, and watched Cael, the last of his order fit to do it, make her the first new rider it has taken in over a century. She did not make a speech. She would not. She swore on her people and on the ones she could not bring out, which is the only thing she has ever sworn on, and afterwards, when she thought she was unobserved, she scraped the modern sun off her shield and painted the old crescent over it. I read that too. I read everything. I have decided not to mention it to her.

Hundreds of men knelt for a hundred and thirty-eight years and tonight they were allowed to stop. I came down into this place counting souls like coins and hating the ledger every step. This is the only line in this entry I will set down without armour: tonight the count came out right, and it cost no one a coin to make it so, and I do not expect this war to let that happen to me twice.

We lit a fire inside the wall after, and ate, and the food tasted of itself for the first time since the gate. A child asked where we are taking them all. I told her the truth, because she is owed one. There is a place with my tower in it and walls that were grown rather than built, and it is called New Elturel, and it is real, and she is going there. I have stopped treating that as a secret to be kept from frightened people. It is the one piece of good news I am carrying, and I find I would rather spend it than hoard it.

— Henzia-Mathilda von Trouser-Waffle
Countess of Elturel
Wizard
Diviner
Auditor of the dead, a post for which I did not apply

Avernus: Fury Road · Chapter 4

What Maggie Kept Back

Written before the drums came back, on the flat east of the tomb, the fire down to embers and a debt in my chest I did not ask to be handed.

Age: 18 and 3/4. Unrevised since last night, which either means time has stopped or I have.

Mood: Audited. I have been read by an expert and I did not enjoy how accurate she was.

Current Complaint: A favour with no price attached, from a woman I do not trust, and nobody to complain to about it who is both awake and not Kaelis.

We made camp on the flat east of the graveyard wall, cracked salt and grit running out level in every direction, the tomb's cold already thinning behind us into a pale line on the horizon. Rilla wanted teeth painted on the rig's nose and a name that says the thing coming for you is worse than the thing behind you. Roan wanted a name a child could say without flinching. Neither has won yet, and I declined to referee: some arguments are worth more unsettled than settled.

Later, when the fire was down to embers and the children were down, or pretending to be, Roan sat working her shield by the tail lamp, in no hurry. I did not ask her about it and she did not tell me. My eyes were closing before hers were. The lamp blurred, and the inside of the rig went soft at the edges, and the edges stopped being the rig.

I was in a room that could not decide what it was. Half of it was the parlour at Knucklebone, the lamps the same amber they always were, a boggle's eyes going out like sparks at the edge of the light. Half of it was the schoolroom at home, the tall window, the good carpet, the shelf of my childhood books, tea and chalk dust. The two were settling into one another the way a place does when it becomes somewhere: my books on her shelf, her map on my old table. Maggie sat across from me with her hands folded, looking at me the way she looked at me the first morning we met, like a sum she enjoys doing.

She told me first that she had felt her working end the day I finished her errand at the Emporium, the same moment I felt it. A mechanism, she said, not a friendship. Then, because she never gives a thing away for nothing even when she is not selling it: the mechanism is gone and she is still here, and that is the difference between a contract and a regard, which is worth knowing which one I am holding. I had the sentence filed before she finished saying it.

Then she turned to business, captain and not aunt, and the country drew itself on the table under her hand as she spoke. Two days north and east of where the wreck sits, a salt flat pressed into the shape of a hand: hard, fast ground, open to the horizon, the kind of floor you want under your wheels when you are running from something that bogs in sand. East of the tomb, a thing in the road she would not name, because naming a thing in a dream teaches it your voice; short, barbed, hunting what my Sword-bearer is, to be gone around and not through. And in the wreck itself, an adamantine strongbox stuck fast in its belly, nine black rods inside, sat through a hundred years of scavengers because adamantine does not pick and does not prise. Three good knocks, she said, or something that bites the metal, or leave it as everyone before us did. She wanted nothing off the rods. She wanted us alive, which she told me is a newish sort of want for her and sits on her less comfortably than I would think.

She was warmer than I have heard her be about the rest of it. I had sent her goods home clean through her own man, the reckoning paid in full, when I could have kept them or sold them and she would not have chased a copper of it, and she read the manners in that as regard, not propriety. And the larger thing, she said, I had done without her watching at all: given up my one sure road home, the little scroll, to cut a dryad out of her cage, my own way out for a stranger's foundling. That, she told me, is giving, and I had it in me the whole while. I do not enjoy being flattered by a hag. I enjoyed it anyway.

Then she named the thing she had truly come to say, turning her cup a quarter turn and not drinking from it. The Seelie court owes her now, one clean favour, in the old sense, because of the kindness we did their foundling. They have spent their long lives pretending her kind are not in the room, and now they owe a hag a debt they cannot take back. She holds exactly one such favour in a life, and never a second, because the first time she spends it they see what she is and shut the door for good. So, she asked, since I am apparently the cleverest person to sit across her table in a century, what does one buy with the only clean favour a hag will ever hold.

She did not answer her own question, or offer me anything to go with it. I asked her outright to hold it unspent: let the Seelie wonder what it costs them, I told her, before either of us learns what it is worth. She turned the cup again, something in her face settling further in that was almost fond, and let the subject go without argument, which I have learned to read as agreement, not defeat. The green light thinned. Drive carefully, she told me, and mind the slow rig. The dream let go of me the way dreams do, and I woke in the Bus with a debt in my chest I had not asked to be handed and cannot yet price.

Kaelis had his own dream, in a different tent, and told it to the rest of us over the cold breakfast before anyone had decided whether to believe either of ours. The Sword showed him where it has been since Zariel set it down: itself in the earth with the host's dead around it; Maggie lifting it off a scavenger field, looking at it first with both eyes and then with neither; half wrapped on a workbench in her parlour; a woman in old plate, Yael, stealing it back from under her; Yael riding through Avernus with it across her saddle; a pale door rising out of the smog; Yael carrying the blade in through the dark and setting it on cold stone; the door closing, and Yael not coming back out. It spoke once, at the end. The road is the one I was carried down.

I have kept a ledger of this war since the gate came down, and I thought I had run out of ways for it to surprise me. Wrong again. Between the two of us we now know everywhere that Sword has been and everyone it has cost, and we are driving toward the one place in the whole account it has never come back from. I said nothing about the favour. He said nothing further about the woman who carried his blade to its grave and did not walk out. Some mornings the kindest thing at a table is to let a person keep their own silence a little longer.

Far off, once, while we broke camp, I heard a drum. One beat, perhaps three, gone before I was sure of it. I decided it was the engine, or the wind, and I have not changed my mind about that since, and I do not expect the wasteland to let me keep believing it for very much longer.

— Henzia-Mathilda von Trouser-Waffle
Countess of Elturel
Wizard
Diviner
Holder of a favour she will not tell me the price of

Avernus: Fury Road · Chapter 4

The Butcher's Bill

Written in the bottom of a valley, on a rig we did not own this morning, by the light of something I would rather not look at directly.

Age: 18 and 3/4. The fraction stays. It is the only figure I balanced today.

Mood: I decline to file one. See below.

Current Complaint: They came for the children. Not the coin, not the rigs, not me, which in my experience makes a thing far harder to bargain with. There is no column in my ledger for a debt whose only currency is children, and I spent all day trying to rule one and failing.

We could not run, and I would like it understood that this was mathematics, not cowardice. I have explained the Bus to anyone who will hold still: a slow rig full of the very people the fast rigs exist to protect, and a convoy moves at the speed of its slowest member. So our whole clever cavalry was pinned to ninety feet by a busload of the saved, and the warband knew it before we did. Their captain never even tried to catch us. He did not need to.

His name is Ghulzarr, and he had the poor taste to arrive with a band. Drums. Actual drums, stretched and bound and mounted on the prow of a stolen rig, and a gnoll the size of a door beating them while the rest of the pack ran itself to death for the pleasure of being watched doing it. I should like to be arch about this. I cannot, quite. The sound got in under the breastbone and stayed there. It made the gnolls braver and us slower, and every so often it stopped being a rhythm and became a single struck note that went through the whole convoy like a bell and left grown soldiers shaking. He hung at the back of his own war and threw thunder at us and never once came within reach. I have met that kind before. They are always the last to die and they always expect an audience.

It cost us the stable. Nuovis's bike burned under her at the front, and she went off it into the air as a great eagle before the wreck of it had stopped rolling, which is the only reason I am not writing her name in gold tonight. Prudence went the same way, fire and then nothing. Maybelle simply drank the last of the borrowed soul we were feeding her and coasted to a stop on open ground with the pack closing, and we left her, because the alternative was leaving people, and I have learned which of those two things I am prepared to do. A rig is a rig. I told myself so four times. It held for three.

Now the plain part, because the tomb taught me the plain lines are the ones worth keeping. Two of the men I promised to see home went down under the drums, Coll and Doran both, and I do not yet know whether promise is still the right tense. Senna will not look at me, which I understand, because I made a child a vow in a doorway once that I would keep her brother safe, and the doorway did not come with a clause about her father. I audit the dead. It is a poor qualification for keeping the living, and tonight I felt every inch of the gap.

One thing was not a cost. Kaelis threw himself off a moving rig for a child that is not his, at a speed no sensible man leaves a vehicle at, and the sword in his hand chose that exact moment to stop being an echo and become the thing it echoes. The dawn went white. A name I had watched clinging to that blade for a month, one I will not write because I suspect it can hear, burned off it clean, and he came out of the fall on wings the colour of first light with a blade grown to match him. A diviner does not often get to watch a prophecy keep its own appointment. I watched this one. Whatever Maggie left on him is gone, he is more than he was this morning, and he paid for it the way this road makes you pay for everything, by being willing to die for a stranger first.

Ghulzarr broke off at the end. Not beaten, he was never in reach to beat. He simply came to the lip of the valley we are running into, the one with the dead flying thing at the bottom of it, and would not bring his war across the line. He turned his drums around and took himself, his winged pet, and whatever hangs on his belt back into the waste, and left us the field and a worse problem than a warband: the gnolls are afraid of where we are going. That is not a sentence I enjoyed writing.

So we came down into the valley on a stolen rig that still smells of its last owners, two of our four gone, one abandoned behind us, the children counted and short two of the men who came for them. I did the sum on the way in, the way you probe a sore tooth. It did not come out right. It has not come out right since the tomb spoiled me with one that did.

— Henzia-Mathilda von Trouser-Waffle
Countess of Elturel
Wizard
Diviner
Keeper of a promise currently in dispute

Avernus: Fury Road · Chapter 4

The First Page

Written on the catwalk, in the two minutes we gave ourselves before going down, with the thing that raised this hive still watching us from the bottom of the well.

Age: 18 and 3/4, still, on the theory that time spent underground does not count against a person. I have decided this is science.

Mood: Overloaded, in the specific sense of a pack mule handed one item too many to carry with any dignity.

Current Complaint: I am holding the first page of the document that ended my city. Fifty years old, which predates most of Elturel and not, I grant you, quite all of it. There is no column in my ledger for what that does to a person.

We went back for them. Given the choice between an hour toward the wreck and half a day toward the ground where Coll and Doran went over, we turned round, and it cost twelve hours of a soul that was meant to carry us further than that. Nobody dressed the decision up as anything other than what it was. We read the marks at the fall site and knew before we reached the hull what had taken them and why, which meant we went in already grieving the version of this where we were wrong.

Wren asked me, by name, what I would do. I did not lie to her and I did not promise her a thing I could not carry. I told her we would try and I would not sugar the odds, and I have been turning that sentence over since, because it is the only kind of promise I have ever found any use for, and I would like it on the record that I learned it from a hag rather than from anyone in my own family. She did not go with us. She should not have needed to ask twice, and she only asked once.

The fortress stands on its point, driven into the ground like a sword someone meant to leave there, four hundred and fifty feet of it and two hundred and fifty above the plain, too large to draw on any map I own. We went in off the roof. The Captain was still in her chair at the Helm, fifty years dead and never touched, because whatever nested in this hull wants its hosts breathing, and a corpse is worth nothing to it. I took her robe. I would like to say I hesitated. I did not, and I am choosing to read that as professionalism rather than anything uglier.

On Zariel's own flag deck, behind an adamantine door, we found the safe, and in the safe nine black rods that answer to nothing but their own weight, and under the rods a survey of Elturel, marked in a hand I do not recognise, showing exactly where to hang a false sun over my city. Fifty years of dust on it. The last plans drawn before the thing itself went up over my city, and this fortress came down not long after it did. I have spent this whole war treating the thing that ate Elturel as a mystery hidden somewhere ahead of us. It was behind us the entire time, filed and dated, in a drawer on a ship that fell out of the sky long before any of this started. Cael took the rods. I do not think either of us said anything useful about the map.

Lower down, a magazine with three tanks of ichor and forty iron flasks nobody could fire tonight, and a hangar with its thirty-foot doors unstuck and its release gear mended and its engine dry, because the last people who worked on it ran out of time before they ran out of hull. We are one soul short of our own exit, and I know exactly which one is going into that slot when the moment comes. I decided that before I decided anything else about tonight.

In the troop deck, four courses down in a wall we had been staring at for the length of one conversation, Nuovis found a staff grown rather than carved, and then the wall opened and put seven hellwasps into the room with us. We won it, but Kaelis and Eryador were both stung and both being carried toward the amber before anyone had finished shouting, and I will say plainly that I have never been more grateful for a paladin's stubbornness than when Cael put himself between one of them and the wall. I shot the other one out of the air myself, which is not usually how I solve problems, and I am not sorry about it. And in the middle of all that noise Moss worked out, on his own, with nobody's notes to help him, that the very feature we have all been carrying past for months undoes the poison that was about to take two of us. I keep a ledger of the small miracles this war has been stingy with. That one goes in without qualification.

The ladder comes out over a room I do not have a dry word for. An engine split down the front, bleeding white light. Fifty years of the fortress's own dead layered into amber below us with their chests open, and above them, at eye level, whole, breathing, unmarked, Coll Harrow and Doran Fell, exactly where the hive left them. Below all of it, gravid and enormous and not moving, the thing that made this place a nest.

Nobody has cut them out yet. Nobody has moved yet. We are standing on a catwalk with two living men in a wall and a queen at the bottom of a well who has not so much as looked up, and I do not know which of those facts frightens me more, so I am writing this down now, before I find out.

— Henzia-Mathilda von Trouser-Waffle
Countess of Elturel
Wizard
Diviner
Keeper of a page she wishes she had never turned

Avernus: Fury Road · Chapter 4

What It Cost To Leave

Written at the edge of a siege longer in the making than my own family line, rigs stopped, a name I chose myself still warm where it left my hand.

Age: 18 and 3/4. I am aware this cannot continue indefinitely. I am choosing not to audit it tonight.

Mood: Solvent, technically, and unhappy about what the solvency cost.

Current Complaint: I have spent a gift coin on a door out of a building, which is either the most sensible thing I have done all month or the strangest, and I have not decided which, and I resent being made to hold both possibilities at once.

We went down for the two men, not for the queen, and I want that distinction kept, because it is the only reason any of us can look at ourselves this morning. She watched us the whole time, gravid and unmoving at the bottom of her well, and we cut Coll and Doran whole out of the amber without once putting a blade to her. That was the plan, and the plan held. What the plan did not account for is that a creature does not need to fight you to reach you, only to be close enough, and she was close enough for exactly as long as the cutting took.

I will not make a ledger entry out of what happened to Kaelis. He would not thank me for it, and I find, for once, that I agree with him. I will say only that Cael went into him with a blade rather than a prayer, which is a sentence I did not expect to write about either of them, that it worked, and that Kaelis is walking this morning under his own power. I watched a paladin do surgery with the same face he uses for absolution. I am still deciding what to do with that image. I suspect I will be deciding for some time.

The plant took a coin to wake, and Kaelis fed it in himself before I could reach the bag: Maggie's own gift to him, outside any contract, for a truth he told her freely, put into that engine with his own hand an hour after a queen had put her mark on him. I do not know what that cost him and I did not ask. Some debts are not mine to audit. I took the console instead, which is not usually my kind of work, and the doors were still finding their thirty feet of hinge when the barracks emptied out behind us and the whole of it came down the corridor at a run. Cael put the Slurry Gun to use for something other than gnolls, and its spray drove most of the swarm back the way it had come. A couple got past him regardless, and I caught one whole inside a wall of solid force, which is how you catch an ordinary wasp under glass, if the glass takes a diviner's whole concentration to hold. We held the line long enough for the rest of it to stop being a swarm.

I attuned the Robe at the rest that followed, and discovered I had opinions about its colour that the Archmage plainly never shared. It is black and pink now, the same as every other stitch I own, and I do not regret insisting on it in a war that has taken rather more from me than a choice of wardrobe.

The Sword had its say as well, twice over, the second of its two promises finally paid: Kaelis saw it standing where it has stood since the woman who carried it there laid herself down beside it and did not get up. I have carried her name in my mouth for a month now without ever having met her, and I find I owe her considerably more than I owe most people I have.

Gladys came back to us on the salvage road, a coin in her tank and Nuovis back in the saddle, exactly as Rilla promised she would, and somewhere in the same stretch Prudence's own gun found a home on the Bus without anyone making a scene of it, which is precisely how a good piece of engineering ought to arrive. Tibalt Crane, who has carried nine strangers the length of a continent without once being thanked for it, finally burned all the way down on the road east, and I drew his replacement blind, the way I draw all of them, and read the name aloud, because that is the one part of this ledger I will not do quietly. Hewn Grell has the furnace now. I hope he minds it less than the wall he could not hold.

I have also, quietly, stopped keeping a particular account. The civilians we have carried the length of this road are still ours to carry, at a cost that was never anyone's duty to pay, and I find I no longer need a ledger to tell me the debt is settled. Some things do not want an audit. I am learning, slowly, which ones.

Then the ground held level under us for the first time in a day, and the white shape on the horizon stopped being a shape at all. It is not a camp and it was never going to be one. Gnoll lines ran the length of what we could see and further than that, siege-works stacked generations deep, dug in against a wall that has never once come down. We stopped the rigs and looked at it properly, the way you look at a debt before you decide whether you can pay it. I am told this is the last night of this particular ledger, and I do not feel any larger for having reached it, only more heavily audited.

— Henzia-Mathilda von Trouser-Waffle
Countess of Elturel
Wizard
Diviner
Keeper of a debt she has decided not to collect

Avernus: Fury Road · Chapter 5

One of You Holds the Key

Written in the courtyard of the Bleeding Citadel, at the foot of a door that has not opened in a century and a half, with the whole of Yeenoghu's siege behind us and none the wiser.

Age: 18 and 3/4, and now, apparently, indefinitely. Nobody consulted me on the change of tense.

Mood: unmarked. I have checked twice.

Current Complaint: I sold a demon lord's own siege line a story about dry goods, and it worked, and I do not know what to do with a night that leaves nothing on me to write down except the fact that it was easy.

Maggie found us before anyone had said a word about the wall below. She poured before we sat, the way she always does, and told me the Summer Court had been watching since the dryad, since I asked nothing back for freeing Hazel, and had decided on the strength of that alone that I was worth keeping. Not bought. Not owed. She was careful about the distinction, and I believed her, which is rarer than it should be with Maggie. I do not age now, not in the way that word usually means. I cannot be charmed. And if this place kills me somewhere that is not its own ground, I am told I will not simply stop, I will go somewhere with my name already on the door. She would not say where. I have decided not to make her.

We climbed the last rise to look properly at what we are walking into, and no one who has not stood on that ridge should be allowed an opinion about it. A wall three hundred feet up a slope, gnoll lines dug into that slope in ranks deep enough that I stopped trying to count them somewhere around the fourth. A hundred and fifty years of siege, and the wall has never once come down. I have met a great many things on this road that wanted me dead quickly. This is the first that has simply been patient about it.

We went down and in as merchants, which sounds like a plan and was mostly nerve. Nobody at the checkpoint asked us anything I had not already rehearsed an answer to, and we were waved through to a market I did not expect to find inside a siege line: real stalls, some of them wearing paint I recognised off Knucklebone and the Emporium, because even Hell's patience needs somewhere to buy bread. A hundred and fifty years is long enough for a war to grow its own economy, and I found that funnier than I should have, standing in the middle of it holding a lie about selling dry goods.

There is a barbed devil chained at the camp's edge, tortured for information he does not have, and we let him go. Not for what he knew. For what he would do with the running room, which turned out to be a great deal, done fast, and loud enough to cover the rest of our walk. I have made worse trades. I do not know what he is doing right now, somewhere behind us in that camp, and I am choosing not to ask myself whether that is a comfortable thing not to know.

I cast the working I trust most once we were close enough for the answer to matter, and asked it the only question worth asking: how do we get in. It gave me one line, the way it always gives exactly one line and no more. One of you holds the key. I have a fair idea which of us that means. I am not saying so out loud until he does something with it.

So here we are, in a courtyard built for one petitioner at a time, not an army, mist sitting on the flagstones and not moving. The door is two storeys of alabaster with a woman carved into it on foot, carrying the Sword flat across both hands into a ruin rising up around her, and Kaelis went quiet at my shoulder looking at her, because the sword at his hip has apparently made this walk before. No handle, no keyhole, nothing that reads as a seam for any mechanism I understand. It has been shut since before any of us were born, and it is shut now. I do not trust a night that leaves this little mark on me. I am putting it in the book anyway, while it still counts as a fact and not a rumour.

— Henzia-Mathilda von Trouser-Waffle
Countess of Elturel
Wizard
Diviner
Keeper of a key she has not yet watched anyone turn