‘You’re lying,’ Ahmann said, his voice hard and sure. ‘You’re hiding something from me. What is it?’ The crown continued to brighten as his eyes bored into her, and Inevera felt powerless before them.

‘The demon prince destroyed my dice,’ she blurted, hating the admission, but afraid to dissemble further until she understood what was happening. He was using one of the hidden powers of the crown.

According to the Evejah’ting, the sacred metal was etched with wards on both sides around the demon bone core. Inevera hungered for the secrets of those wards, but she could not unravel them without taking the precious artefact apart, and even she would not dare such sacrilege.

Ahmann’s look was sour. ‘You could have simply told me.’

Inevera ignored the comment. ‘I have begun carving a new set. I will be able to cast the bones again soon.’

‘Perhaps one of your Jiwah Sen should cast in the meantime,’ Ahmann said. ‘This cannot wait.’

‘It can,’ Inevera said. ‘First snow is three months away, and you have more immediate concerns.’

Ahmann nodded. ‘Waning.’

Inevera woke with Ahmann’s arms clutching at her possessively, even as he slept.

Careful not to wake him, she put her thumb into a pressure point on Ahmann’s arm, numbing it long enough for her to slip free of the bed. Her bare feet sank into the rich carpet, and she padded so softly across the floor that the belled anklets she still wore did not make a sound.

Ahmann grew more powerful every day, sleeping less and less, but even the Deliverer needed to close his eyes for an hour or three, and she had seen to it that he was relaxed. His seed ran slowly down her leg as she strode to the terrace. She wondered if a child would come of their union. Without the dice she could not know for sure, but their loving had been powerful, and it was too long since she had borne him a son.

Eunuch guards opened the great glass doors. Inevera paid them no mind as she strode past, relishing the warm breeze and the feel of sunlight on her skin. The guards who shadowed Ahmann’s wives had neither stones nor spears, and would not dare so much as glance at her bottom.

Inevera leaned on the marble railing looking out over Everam’s Bounty, the green land once known as Rizon. There was a rush of power as she surveyed the land, tingling like the sun on her skin and the seed on her thigh.

Ahmann’s greenland palace was a paltry thing. Its previous owner, Duke Edon of Fort Rizon, had been a weak ruler, coming from a long line of such. Surrounded by vast riches, they had been unable to squeeze forth more than a trickle of gold from their subjects. With such abundance, Edon could have had a palace to make an Andrah sigh with envy. Instead his seat stood a mere four storeys and had but two wings, its walls thin and low. Inevera knew a dozen dama who held better back in Krasia. It was hardly fit for Shar’Dama Ka, though still preferable to the pavilions they had used on their journey through the desert.

Already her finest artisans were drawing plans to tear this ‘manse’ down and build in its place a palace so grand its spires would touch the bottom of Heaven itself, and an underpalace reaching so deep into the Ala that the mother of demons would tremble in the abyss.

But while the line of Edon was weak, they had not been utter fools. The hill they had chosen for their seat had an incomparable view. Everam’s Bounty spread out before her, blooming as far as the eye could see, full of rich soil and an abundance of rivers and streams. Neat rows of crops and trees, cut into straight edges by wide dirt roads, fanned out from the inner city like the spokes in a wheel, here a cornfield, there an orchard. A hundred tributary villages, easily divided among the tribes to sate their lust for plunder after the difficult passage through the desert and hard winter’s march.

The greenlanders outnumbered her people greatly, but they were not warriors. Between Inevera’s foretellings and Ahmann’s Sharum, they had taken the duchy as easily as a cat takes a mouse. Their wealth had made the chin soft.

It was fitting that Ahmann build a seat of power here, but it would not do for their people to grow too comfortable in this land of plenty. She had cast the dice while red blood was still wet on the warriors’ spears, and seen the same fate awaiting her own people if they did not press on to further conquest in the green lands. The desert had made them hard, and that hardness was sorely needed in the war to come.

Much as she hated to admit it, there was merit in the khaffit’s plan to strike Lakton before winter.

Inevera went back inside, signalling her servants for hot water and scented oil. They clad her in translucent red silk. Another woman might have felt vulnerable leaving her pillow chamber in so little, but Inevera was the Damajah, and none would dare molest her.

Silently, she descended the stair her slaves had cut deep into the rock of the hill, leading down into a great natural cavern. Eunuch guards drifted in her van and wake, though Inevera felt no threat as she approached her place of power. She was blind without her dice, unable to foretell danger, but even if a mad assailant or rogue alagai got past her guards, she was not without defences of her own.

At last she reached a great stone door, and the guards took places to the sides as she produced the only key from a pouch at her waist. The key itself was a fake, turning with a meaningless click, but as her hand drew near the locks, the gold-plated hora on her bracelet warmed, specially warded to matching bones within the locks, sliding the heavy bolts free. Even if a thief skilled at warding guessed the trick, the bracelet would be impossible to duplicate, and Inevera kept it on her person at all times. Though it weighed tons, the door swung inward silently at a touch, and closed just as smoothly behind her.

Within, she drifted through passages never touched by Everam’s light. She carried no lamp in the blackness, but the chain of thin warded gold coins around her head warmed slightly, opening her senses to the magic all around her. The power of the abyss hummed in the walls and drifted in the air like smoke, lighting her way as if she strode in clear day.

Inevera did not fear the power around her. Rather, she gloried in it. Everam had created the Ala, and the power at its centre was His as well. The servants of Nie might exploit the magic at its source, but it was not theirs. Warding was the art of stealing that power back and turning it to Everam’s purposes.

She glided along until she reached a special spot in the rock wall, then knelt, shifting a stone aside to reveal her warding tools, hora pouch, and the rendered bones of the demon prince Ahmann had killed, glowing more fiercely with magic than any hora she had ever known.

Ahmann did not believe it to be Alagai Ka, father of demons, but no doubt the creature was his get, powerful in ways even Inevera did not fully understand. It had taken her hora pouch and absorbed its magic effortlessly, leaving her nothing but ashes in place of her connection to Everam.

But while Inevera was blind, she did not waste time on tears, carving boldly into the demon’s bones. Her skill had increased tenfold since her years as Betrothed, and now she could see her work clearly in the wardlight. Already three of the seven dice were restored to her, more powerful by far than those lost. Would that they could give her even partial seeing, like a man with one eye, but the seven worked in harmony, the parts useless without their full sum.

The sun was nearing its apex when she emerged from the Chamber of Shadows and returned to the palace proper. Melan and Asavi were waiting for her as she approached the throne room, falling in behind her as the Sharum guards bowed and opened the doors to admit her.