Benno watched Onus as the Lonely Son hunched over the Shenandoah’s console.

It’s not exactly obvious, he’d said. How to deal with a Warden-killing Permanent was not exactly obvious. How to deal with Benno was not exactly obvious.

“We’re ready,” Onus said, straightening up and turning around. Then he frowned at Benno. “Why are you wearing that?”

Benno looked down at his yellow raincoat. “I like it,” he said.

Onus shrugged his blue eyebrows. “Fair enough.” He touched his pocket, in which he kept the Tefached, then took a deep breath. “I don’t know what to expect in Albeddon. I didn’t know what to expect in Kerr’s Realm, but at least I was pretty certain Kerr would be our only foe there. It’s possible, where we’re going, that we will be dealing not only with the Chieftain, but with the Twins as well. And who knows what else.”

Benno nodded. “I’m ready.”

“And like Kerr,” Onus went on, “they know we are coming.”

Benno nodded again.

Onus stood for a moment, as if figuring out how to say the next part.

It’s not exactly obvious.

Then, having said nothing, he turned back to the console and touched the screen.

#

At first, Benno thought they were mountains.

They towered over the expanse of flat, cracked earth below the Shenandoah. They were red, like the red sky, which seethed like a wound, and strangely atilt, as if they might topple at any moment. Though they were too far away to say for sure—far toward the horizon—it appeared that they were running with rivulets of dark liquid, like so many veins. And what Benno thought was black smoke whipping around the mountain’s peaks, he discerned, as Onus guided the Shenandoah down to the ground, and Benno’s eyes adjusted to Albeddon’s harsh red glare, were in fact crows. Swarms of crows, darting and landing and feasting.

They were not mountains. At least, they were not mountains made of rock.

Onus stepped away from the console and surveyed the landscape. “I can’t believe it,” he said, quietly. “It used to be so beautiful here. There used to be forests. Cities.” He blinked out at the ranges of bodies—million, perhaps billions—piled into the sky. “What have they done…”

Even through the Shenandoah’s presumably airtight exterior, Benno could already smell the iron.

“This is Luridia’s legacy,” Onus said, his eyes dark. “Continents of death. This is what Edda and I wanted to stop.”

Benno touched Onus’ arm. “There’s someone there,” he said, nodding out.

Onus followed his gaze, and together they peered at the figure standing across the flat expanse, maybe a hundred yards from the Shenandoah, a dark shape amid the red wasteland. Something fluttered behind them in the wind, either a cape or locks of long black hair.

“Neoline,” Onus said, grave. “The Chieftain.”

Benno nodded. “Let’s go talk to her.”

“There will be no talking,” Onus said.

“We’ll see,” said Benno, raising Gemma to his lips. “Let us out,” he said, then led Onus across the plain.

#

Mara was reminded of a documentary she’d watched a long time ago. It was about a drug kingpin in Colombia, who had built himself a palace on top of a hill in the middle of a slum. The palace was, naturally, grandiose, with many stories, a swimming pool, a tennis court—even a zoo, in which he kept exotic and dangerous animals. And the whole thing was surrounded by a twenty-foot high wall draped with barbed wire. Outside the wall, the slum sprawled, a stark contrast to the opulence of the palace: Shacks and huts, raw sewage, stray dogs, a portrait of abject poverty. The documentary explained the kingpin’s reason for doing this as a method to tap cheap—if not free—labor from the impoverished population, as well as to buffer himself from law enforcement, since the police were loathe to enter the slum.

The Fenix Estate was very similar, though on a far grander scale. She stood just inside the wall—draped not with barbed wire but lined instead with vicious-looking finials—at the mouth of a long, manicured driveway that wound up through lush pastures in the direction of the house, which rambled with countless ells and wings, adorned with statues and fountains, all beneath a big, pristine sky. Off to the side, within a fenced-in section of pasture, a pair of animals—something between a horse and a dog—galloped, then paused to nibble some grass, then galloped again. There was a collection of low trees, an orchard perhaps, on the house’s other side. A family of birds paddled across a small pond.

But behind her, just beyond the walls—the entrance of which stood open, a sign, she took, of arrogance rather than invitation—a hovel sprawled as far as she could see. Thousands or tens of thousands of shacks, all stained various shades of brown, built along narrow, trash-strewn sidewalks. There were clotheslines strung between the shacks on which clothes hung in the windless air. The few people she could see from her vantage appeared emaciated, shambling along the sidewalks toeing at garbage in search of something with value, or leaning against the sheetmetal exteriors of their homes, looking back at her from tired eyes.

Mara had never seen such disparity. Looking between the slum and the estate, it was almost as if two disparate places, from two separate Realms, had been thrust side-by-side as some kind of cruel joke.

She started up the driveway, clutching the Gemstoke in her fist, which was concealed by the over-long sleeve of her coat.

As she neared the house, a man emerged from the ornate entrance. He appeared fifty, with a litter of gray stubble that climbed high up his cheeks and extended far down his neck. He wore a hat similar to a bowler, except with a much wider rim, and as he approached Mara, he walked with the exaggerated mosey of a cowboy.

“Afternoon, ma’am,” he said when he was twenty feet away, tipping his hat and eyeing Mara from below his thick gray eyebrows, satisfied, it seemed, that she had not crawled out of the slum.

Mara nodded at him. “Hello,” she said.

“Beautiful day.” The man gestured the to pastures.

Mara held her Gemstoke tightly. “I’m looking for Ann-Copse Fenix,” she said.

The man frowned. “That’s my grandmother. But she’s been dead for centuries.” He frowned deeper. “Did you know her?”

Mara shook her head. “I’m here on behalf of Benno Haim. The Warden Killer.”

The man’s frown dissolved into a bewildered stare. “Sorry. Who?”

“You haven’t heard about any of that?” Mara asked. “The Wardens of Sul being killed?”

The man shrugged and grinned, a bit embarrassed, it seemed. “We don’t get a lot of news out here in Ayora. Not about stuff happening in other Realms. And Wardens of Sul don’t concern us much. At least not beyond academic musings.” He scratched his chin. “Though that’s something, isn’t it? Someone killing Wardens?”

Mara nodded slowly. “It is.” She looked out at the soft blue sky settled over the trees and the pastures, then down at the smoggy sea of slanted shacks and dirty streets.

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“And you have something to do with that?” the man asked, one eyebrow raised.

Mara turned back to him. “Hm?”

“These Wardens being killed?”

“No. Well, yes.”

The man nodded, then shrugged. “Well I’m not a Warden of Sul, so…” He held up his palms as if to say, Don’t shoot.

Mara chuckled politely.

“So is there something I can help you with?” the man asked.

“I was told that your grandmother bred Dream Prowlers.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I need some information about them.”

“Well what would you like to know? If you’re looking to purchase one, I have a new litter coming in a couple months. Unless you don’t mind an adolescent. It’s not true what they say, even the adolescents are very agreeable. They just need a little more patience. But if you have your heart set on a newborn, you’ll have to wait.”

“No, nothing like that.” Mara racked her brain for all of the questions Benno had given her to ask, and then settled on simplifying them. “I need to know how they work.”

The man nodded. “Alright. I mean, in what way?”

“I need to know how they see what they see. Or how they gain access to the people whose dreams they watch. For example, if I wanted my Dream Prowler to watch the dreams of somebody who was in another Realm, but I didn’t know which Realm, how would I go about—”

“Tell you what,” the man said, scratching his chin again. “My grandmother wrote a book about them. No one was really interested in it, I don’t think, but she had enough knowledge that she didn’t know what else to do with it all. We still have some copies inside, I’m happy to give you one. It’ll explain what you want to know better than I ever could.” He gestured back toward the house. “If you’d like to come in, I’ll dig one out of the study for you.”

Mara looked up at the house, where a tendril of gray smoke rose lazily from one of the many chimneys, and despite the warm air, a frigid shiver passed down her back.

“…Or you could wait here,” the man said, shrinking under an expression on Mara’s face she hadn’t realized she was making. “And I’ll go fetch it presently.”

“Thank you,” Mara said.

The man tipped his hat, then turned and hurried back to the house.

Mara looked back out at the pastures, where the pair of horse-dogs galloped. This was the easy part. Benno had warned her of that. It was the next part that would be hard… Where she had to go next was dangerous. Though it could not possibly be worse than where she’d been for the last two years, lost in that house, lost in her own mind and in Kerr’s mind, lurching through those dark, low rooms with Zev, together in their demented anguish, and yet completely alone.

The man returned shortly with a thin book bound in hard leather, and handed it to Mara. She read its title: Breeding and Operating Dream Prowlers; thoughts from a hobbyist by Ann-Copse Fenix, then slid it into her coat pocket.

“Thank you for this,” Mara said.

“Most welcome,” the man tipped his hat again. “Anything else I can help you with before you’re on your way?”

Mara glanced back at the slum. “What is it your family does?” she asked.

The man frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean… What is your business? How do you afford all this land?”

The man shrugged. “Old family money,” he said.

“From what?”

The man’s gray eyebrows bent low over his eyes. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I never really thought ask.”

#

The hard ground scrrrched under their feet as Benno led Onus across the plain.

A ubiquitous low rumble rolled down from the mountains of bodies, like ceaseless thunder, and Benno realized, with a heavy, sickening despair, that it was the amalgamation of a million frenzied crows, and the drone of a trillion frantic flies.

Neoline grew taller as they neared. Or appeared to. She was easily as tall as Onus, and clad in dark metal armor covered with countless nicks and dents. Her cape—it was a cape after all—danced in the hot wind, twice the length of her body. She wore a mask that totally concealed her face, adorned with rows of metal teeth like an angler fish, with no obvious eye holes or other apertures. In one hand, she held what appeared to be some combination of a sword and a revolver, the long blade protruding from a hilt with two enormous muzzles, one against either edge, and a huge cylinder below the hand-guard that might house rounds a wide as Benno’s arm.

She was the definition of fearsome. And this was furthered—or exacerbated—by the two colossal Baba’ba’ksums that floated beside her, one on either side. Each one was three times as big as the one Edda and her crew had captured in Middleforest. Their tails twitched in sync with Neoline’s cape. Their empty eyes stared, it seemed, directly at Benno.

Onus slowed to a stop twenty yards away. Benno continued forward another ten yards, then stopped as well, and for a long time—a minute or more—there was only the thundering drone of the crows and the flies.

“You look so soft,” the Chieftain Neoline said then, her deep voice booming out from behind her mask and rolling across the plain. “Though after awhile, everything starts to look soft. I should know better than to trust my eyes. But I still fall prey to that deception. It is our nature, I think. As the living.”

Benno’s raincoat fluttered along his body.

The Chieftain turned her head to look off at the rotting mountains, and her armor clinked. “For them, though? There is no deception left for them. They see things as they truly are. They see what is real. We see visions. Illusions. But the dead… They see only truth. Infinite, impeccable truth. They know the answer to every question. They are, in all ways that matter, gods.” She turned back to Benno. “Wouldn’t you say?”

Benno shook his head. “I wouldn’t know.”

The Chieftain’s shoulders rose and fell, as if she was laughing, though she made no sound. “I remember the first person I killed,” she said once she’d stilled. “I was just a child. So many thousands of years ago, and yet as clear in my mind as you are before me. I cut a man’s head off. After he attacked my mother. I intended only to slit his throat, but once I’d started, once the first hot fingers of blood caressed my skin, I could not stop. I knew then, before I knew much of anything, that I would kill again. I knew it was the purpose of my life. I grew up in a poor region in a poor Realm. There were wars there—skirmishes, really, ancient ethnic conflicts—and I cut my teeth young. I did not fight for any side. I fought for myself. For the practice. For the pleasure. I learned to adore the fleeting moments of others’ pain. The small parts of the bitter pain. The sounds that men make when death fills their eyes. The ways their mouths trace impossible words, and their fingers curl as if around something that only they can feel. The terror. The evacuation of bowls. The pleading. The calling out, of the fiercest warriors, in their final moments, for their mothers. And the smells… The smell of rent flesh. The smell of burning flesh. The smell of rotting flesh…” Again her shoulders rose and fell. “I never could have imagined that this would be my fate…” She gestured out at the wasteland with her free hand. “It was more than I deserved. I have been so lucky.”

The smoke of crows whipped along the mountains’ ridges.

“And now it is over.” Neoline’s mask tilted toward Benno. “I will not engage you in combat.”

Benno felt Onus’ eyes on him, but kept his own eyes forward.

“Sul has chosen you over us,” she continued. “This is humiliation enough. And I will not suffer additional humiliation in defeat. So strike me down, and do it with the magnificent violence I am owed.” She lifted her weapon out toward the mountains.

The Baba’ba’ksums seemed to glance at Neoline, then at each other.

Benno took a step forward. “You can spare yourself,” he said, knowing she could not. “It is Sul I seek. Lead me to the Gray Wastes, and our business will be finished.”

“I cannot reach the Wastes with any greater ease than anyone else,” Neoline said. “Sul has abandoned us.” She lifted her sword up, and then trust it down into the hard earth, where it stuck fast. “Sul will abandon you, too.”

“The Twins,” said Onus then, stepping up beside Benno. “Are they here?”

Neoline’s dark armor reflected the red sky like smoldering fire. “No,” she said. “They had other business to attend to.”

“Business more important than facing the Warden Killer?” Onus’ voice dripped with incredulousness and irritation. “They are in hiding! They are cowards!”

“I do not speak for them,” Neoline said, turning her masked face from Onus back toward Benno. “Now do what you came here for. It has been a thousand years. My accomplishments have been glorious. My crusades have been documented in the stomachs of the crows and flies. In this way, I will live for eternity. And in death I will know truth. Now let my true reign begin.”

The hot, ferric air scraped along the hard ground.

Onus looked over at Benno and shrugged. “What are you waiting for?”

Benno ran his fingers through his beard and looked up at the Chieftain. “You said that Sul abandoned you. What did you mean?”

Neoline was silent for a long moment. “After the War, Sul rewarded us with Permanence. Then we were cast forth, to our Realms and our enterprises. We thought we were his apostles. We thought he would speak through us. But once we were positioned, we never heard from him again. That was over a thousand years ago. Neither I nor the other Wardens have had any contact with Sul since the War ended.”

Benno frowned deeply. “You called Sul he.”

Neoline nodded. “Yes. He. Sul is a boy.”

“A man?”

“No. A boy.”

Benno’s eyes searched the cracked ground, thoughts hemorrhaging through his mind.

“Benno,” Onus hissed.

Benno looked over.

“Get on with it.”

Sul is a boy.

Benno ran his fingers through his beard, shook away his thoughts, and started forward.

Neoline stood her ground. Her Baba’ba’ksums’ snouts darted anxiously, though they, too, made no effort to flee.

Benno cleared his throat as he stopped an arm’s-length from the Chieftain. “Do you know,” he started, his raincoat dancing along with Neoline’s cape. “Why Sul was watching my son? Do you know why he made me this way?”

Neoline’s dark mask angled down toward Benno. “You do not ask the dog why its master reads poetry.”

Benno nodded slowly, as if this answer was sufficient—and perhaps it was. Then he looked up at the Baba’ba’ksums. “Do you two want to leave?”

“They are my holdings,” Neoline answered. “They go where I go.”

The Baba’ba’ksums glanced, again, at one another.

Benno shrugged. “I’ll ask them again in a minute,” he said, and then reached up and took hold of the Chieftain’s armor, which folded like fabric in his impossible grip, and he pulled her down toward him, and though she did her best to maintain her pride, and to not fight back, her body quickly undertook its own panicked rebellion. But this made no difference to Benno.