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    <title>II. The Retreat to Kearvan Weal  </title>
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        <h2>II. The Retreat to Kearvan Weal</h2>
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      <p>"It was <em>lunacy</em> to bring her here," snarls the Glaistig, Queen Consort to the King of Immolations, and then she bares her teeth and stamps angrily at the rough stone floor of the hall with her goatish hooves. There's still blood in her tangled ash-blonde hair, bloodstains on her long green gown and a few spatters drying on her face. It might only be her own blood, the vampire woman named Selwith Tinker thinks, or it might be the blood of the Glaistig's defeated King. Either way, it hardly seems to matter now.</p>
      <p>"Then tell me, my Lady, where would <em>you</em> have had us take it?" Selwith snarls back, staring the Glaistig directly in her simmering yellow eyes, and never mind propriety or inevitable recriminations or the Glaistig's celebrated temper. A nervous murmur begins at one end of the long hall and moves to and fro through the press of bodies, passed from one to another of the creatures who have crowded into the deep rift near the roiling, molten heart of the world. The ragged handful of captains and corporals and sergeants of the Dragon's army who have somehow survived the Weaver's latest and boldest assault upon the Dog's Bridge, all the leathery wings and skittering, jointed legs, the spiderkin and troll wives, the werewolves and demons and sloe-eyed wraith folk. The lucky ones who lived long enough to be driven back by the silver shields and lances of white light, who fled like midnight before an untimely dawn, racing one another across the hublands, over glistening lava fields and dry calderas, through ash storms and oil marshes and steam to the black dunes and beyond, past the shattered foothills and into the deep mountain passes, coming finally to the ancient gates of the Dragon's hall at Kearvan Weal. Now, as one, they cringe and draw back from the Glaistig and Selwith Tinker, from the broken but not yet dead thing lying on the floor between them.</p>
      <p>The Queen Consort narrows her eyes and licks at her thin, pale lips. "Should I think you wondrous brave, vampire, for dragging this filth into our last sanctuary? Did you expect there might be some reward for your fatuous audacity? The Weaver's Arch Seraph, and you bring it still <em>breathing</em> here amongst us."</p>
      <p>"And I say to you again," Selwith replies, baring her own teeth, her razor canines and incisors, and she leans nearer the Glaistig, "where <em>would</em> you have had me take her?"</p>
      <p>"Why is it still living?" the Glaistig asks and kicks viciously at the unconscious form sprawled between them. "That, my dear witless Selwith, is the question which I would put to you in this hour. Why, by all that burns, is this abomination still drawing air? Why have you not divided its wings from its shoulder blades and its head from off its throat?"</p>
      <p>Selwith Tinker smiles and takes one step back, then bows her head as she unsheathes her sword and holds it out to the Queen Consort. "Perhaps," she says, "it's only that I had no desire to rob my glorious Lady, newly widowed and so freshly come down from her tower into this war, of the honour of sealing all our fates. Take my own blade, my Queen, and deliver the whole world into the arms of the Weaver."</p>
      <p>"Don't mock me," the Glaistig growls, and the folds of her gown shift and flutter furiously. "Whatever favor you may have wrestled from my husband, do <em>not</em> consider it handed down to me."</p>
      <p>"I wouldn't dare, my Lady, neither his good favor nor his knowledge of our enemies."</p>
      <p>The Glaistig snorts and turns to address one of her court ministers, a tall man in vestments the color of embers and smoke. "What is this fool saying, Bartolomei?"</p>
      <p>The minister frowns and glances anxiously from the Queen Consort to the fallen Seraph and back again to the Glaistig. He swallows and clears his throat. When he speaks, Selwith can hear the fear in his voice.</p>
      <p>"This is indeed a very delicate matter, your Grace. The Weaver has invested her most terrible magics in the creation of these beings, these <em>fiends</em> that she's set against us. They cannot simply be killed. That is, they can <em>die,</em> yes, certainly, but their deaths, as best we have been able to ascertain, would trigger a sort of, well, let's say a sort of inertial countercurrent. A vortex, so to speak."</p>
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        <em>"Please,</em> my Lady," Selwith persists, speaking loud enough that she knows everyone and everything in the hall will hear her. "Honor me this day by striking the death blow with my humble, undeserving-"</p>
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        <em>"Silence,"</em> the minister hisses and snatches the vampire's weapon from her hands. There's a dim, hesitant titter of laughter from somewhere in the crowd which the Glaistig's minister immediately stifles by rapping the butt-end of his staff sharply against the paving stones. "By this childish impudence, you hazard your <em>own</em> undoing, Captain Selwith," he sneers, and a moment later, the sword dissolves into wisps of iron-scented vapor that are quickly scattered by the hot wind blowing through the hall.</p>
      <p>"Good sirrah, I meant no offense," Selwith Tinker says, still smiling. "I assure you, I have not this day escaped the Weaver's noose only to lose my head for the sullied honor of a dead king's prized trollop."</p>
      <p>And this time the laughter rises like a storm, like an ugly bit of flotsam buoyed on the crest of a wave, echoing off the high obsidian walls of Kearvan Weal. The Glaistig's minister repeatedly strikes his staff against the stones to no avail, and soon the laughter has been joined by hoarse shouts and catcalls and profanities shrieked and bellowed in a dozen black tongues. Selwith stands up straight and spreads her wings, welcoming any reprisals, any challenge after the frenzied retreat from the bridge. Better to end it here, she thinks, than endure another century with the memory of that defeat, the merciless red slaughter as the Weaver's shock troops finally broke the King's lines and surged over the ramparts. Better to die now and be finished and maybe take this preening bitch down with her, than wait for the Dragon to wake or for the Weaver to track them all back to the Weal. She draws a dagger from her belt, steel forged in ages of free night before the coming of the Weaver, before this war, but the Glaistig shakes her head and turns away. The minister steps between them, and Selwith flares her nostrils and looks down at the bright and shining face of the fallen Seraph. She spits, and her saliva sizzles on its armor, the cuirass forged from platinum and gold and the fossil bone of leviathans. She stops smiling and glances up at the Glaistig's minister.</p>
      <p>"Then <em>you</em> tell me, Bartolemei, what we <em>are</em> to do with my trophy. Now that we have captured it, can the Weaver's magic be turned against her? Is there in all your vast and hallowed wisdom any antidote for <em>this</em> poison?"</p>
      <p>"They've crossed the bridge?" the minister asks instead of answering her. "The Weaver's army is on the hub?"</p>
      <p>"What the fuck do you think?" Selwith Tinker snaps back at him and tucks her ebony wings away. The Glaistig's minister nods once, his face gone almost as colorless as the flesh of this new evil the Weaver's conjured, and then he kneels to get a better look at the Seraph.</p>
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