The wagon rattled along the Iron Road, the ancient highway between the Ymaltian Mountains and the Thousand Lakes capital of Wintotashum.

The Tainted Cabalist Castellac sat cross-legged in the back, eyes closed, his heart beating at a snail’s pace. For the thousandth time, he checked the wards he’d established about himself, designed to alert him to the presence of hostile sorcery. A surprise attack could come at any moment—from the Thousand Lakes priests of the Five or from the Soreshi who hadn’t allied themselves to the Tainted Cabal—and even those who had. Castellac trusted no one, least of all his fellow Cabalists.

This madcap scheme had been proposed by the Abbess, curse her withered tits for coming to Nax-Ur-Vadim and upsetting the apple cart. But it had been her pallid shitbag of a son who’d chosen Castellac for the mission. What that meant in reality was that Uspeth considered him a threat and wanted him out of the way.

Castellac took no comfort from the thought that he was so near the top of the heap. All he felt was an impending sense of doom. Of course, that was how he always felt. The only thing that had changed was the magnitude of the feeling, the closeness of the doom. He was always on tenterhooks, expecting the figurative knife in the back. That was why he ate so much—to quell the ever-rising tide of panic. It was why, over the long months since the Tainted Cabal had come to the Ymaltian Mountains, he had grown so fat.

“Wintotashum ahead,” called the driver from up front—a newly ordained Cabalist named Haleki, a petty sorceress who had stumbled upon the more destructive elements of the dusk-tide and had run afoul of the Order of Eternal Vigilance in the Pristart Combine. That had brought her to the Cabal’s attention, and she had been rescued from the knights’ dungeons right under their pious noses. Haleki hadn’t realized it yet, but her plight hadn’t improved. It had considerably worsened.

When the Cabal’s agents had recruited Castellac all those years ago, they had forced him to give up his comfortable life as an alchemist, where he was making good money selling fool’s gold to the rich and stupid, and instead introduced him to their own harsh disciplines and perversions. Those perversions disgusted him, yet he craved them more and more. Waking or sleeping, unsavory needs boiled within him, and he threw himself headlong into the orgies and the unnatural couplings with lesser demons. He’d even enjoyed them for a while, until the revulsion returned, along with an unhealthy dose of shame. Not that either stopped him. The compulsion was too great.

If Wintotashum was near, he had to stop moping and start preparing. It was no easy task, he had been reliably informed, to break into King Aelfyr’s Scriptorium.

Of course, even if Castellac were to succeed, he’d be the last person to benefit from retrieving the memory crystal. Morudjin’s firsthand experience of the summoning of Nysrog was the most sought after secret in the Tainted Cabal. It followed that, once the memory crystal was safely in the hands of the Abbess or her cretinous son, Castellac would be disappeared.

In an effort to contain his fear, he went over his mission once more in his mind.

Although the Necromancer Queen of Niyas had been dead for years, rumor had it that her agent, an old Niyandrian sorcerer named Lengar, still lived in the city. More fool he, if that were the case. Lengar, it seemed, had achieved with stealth what the Tainted Cabal hadn’t managed with force.

Uspeth had been trying for months now to rouse the Soreshi into a hammer to wield against King Aelfyr, and all he had achieved was a few burning villages—until his mother, the Abbess, had arrived with her own ideas of how things should be done. Of course, she gave Uspeth the credit, but everyone knew who was really in charge.

And so Castellac and Haleki had been sent to find the old Niyandrian sorcerer and persuade him that helping them was in his best interests. It wouldn’t be, of course. Once he had served his purpose, he would be given two choices: join the Tainted Cabal or join his beloved queen in the realm of the dead. The difficult part, though, was finding him. Wintotashum was a big city, and neither Castellac nor Haleki had contacts there.

The wagon slowed, then came to a faltering stop. Outside, Castellac could hear Lakelander accents—gate guards, presumably—and Haleki answering with her own passable impression of a Thousand Lakes citizen. They had arrived.

He briefly entertained the idea of leaping from the back of the wagon and begging the King’s protection, then revealing the presence of the Tainted Cabal in Aelfyr’s lands. But fear gripped him in its paralyzing clutch. No one, not even a king, could help him. He was in for life, a fact that had been made painfully clear to him at his initiation.

And so he didn’t leave the wagon and beg for help. Instead, he prayed to Nysrog, and as ever, he couldn’t tell if the response he received was the demon lord’s voice in his head or his own twisted thoughts, clutching at straws.

Every petition you make to me, every heartfelt prayer, is one step closer to liberation from fear, one rung of the ladder higher than your mediocre brothers and sisters.

He shuddered, but at the same time he wondered: Was he ready to challenge Uspeth, or even the Abbess herself? Did he even want to, when the reality was, the higher you rose in the Tainted Cabal, the bigger the target on your back?

“Are you ready?” Haleki called from outside as the wagon got underway again, bumping along an uneven street.

“Of course I’m ready!” Castellac replied.

He cursed himself for not masking his irritability.

What if she construed it as a weakness?