Queen Cleosiris was tired. One would think that a cultivator of profound power—a trifold adept with the Khet also awakened at an acolyte level—would not feel fatigue in the same way as a mortal, but alas. Cleosiris was queen, Arbiter of a hundred thousand souls, and she was fucking exhausted.

  She wanted to grind her fists into her eyes until she saw stars, to fret and worry and rub at the creases that recent stress had carved on her face, but instead she smiled. Like the good little monarch, the helpless little plaything of the greater powers.

  She kept the fake smile plastered on as she watched her enemies dance and mingle before her. A representative of Hefatiti caught her eye and waved jauntily, and she had to talk herself down from striding over to him and cutting him in half where he stood.

  The smug prick. She knew. She knew what he had planned. He’d organised this little get together in her palace, invited himself and his noble friends over for a few drinks at the expense of Idib’s labourers and farmhands, further straining her coffers as she tried to balance a realm on the decline. ‘A celebration of your new independence’ he’d called it.

  She wanted to spit.

  But she didn’t, because she was queen, and this was her role. Her men and women were out there fighting and dying, her people were working themselves to the bone, and so she would sit here in relative luxury and resist the urge to put every soul here to the flame. The captain of her Tomb Guard —a veteran seventeen years her senior named Usermontu—looked her way, but his stony face betrayed nothing of his thoughts. Even if he could read hers, she doubted he’d have anything to say. He was shockingly competent—he wouldn’t have the job if he wasn’t—but by the gods did he lack any kind of fire.

  That seemed true everybody in this strange world of intrigue and wealth though. Sometimes when she walked the streets at night, alone and disguised, she once more witnessed some of that animating fire. The way her people gave of themselves to each other. The surprised laughter, just a little too loud for the moment, the careless way they would stumble through their streets, the smiles that grew just a little wider than they realised when looking at one another at just the right time.

  Her thoughts tried to stray to the man who had once lit her entire world, who had brought out that same fire in her, but she crushed them ruthlessly. He was risking his life right now, the least she could do was to be ready when he returned.

  A traitorous little voice reminded her that he might never return. She let the pain work its way through her, let the panic claw at her heart, and then breathed it out. Slow and controlled. It was a real possibility, arguably the most likely outcome, and so she had prepared as best she could for it. But privately, in the sanctity of her own mind where none but her were permitted to tread, she didn’t believe he would fail.

  She had seen the swirling depths of emotion in his eyes that night at his hovel he called a home. Nobody with that much drive could fail when paired with the skill and grit she knew he possessed, unprecedented task or no. She only had to look at the transformation from the shell of a man she’d met in that hovel to the determined agent he’d walked into her palace as. No, Heshtat was risking his life for her, and while she wouldn’t wager the lives of all in Idib on her hope alone, she had no problem betting her heart against the outcome.

  Still, she had a job to do in the here and now. Plans that had begun to take shape years ago were drawing to a climax, and she needed to put the finishing touches on them. Or rather, she needed to avoid fucking them up. That was the frustrating thing about it all, really—she had prepared already, moved her pieces into position and bet everything on the outcome of the coming chaos—and now there was nothing left for her to do but wait. She’d already rolled the knucklebones, as her former lover would say, and now she just needed to see where they lay.

  Instead of dwelling uselessly on decisions already made, she turned her attention to the longer-term threats.

  The Desolate had taken more territory in the past decade than they had in the previous century. Creeping out of the upper nomes like a cancerous growth seeking to bring Amansi to its knees, it was a problem that Cleosiris felt entirely unprepared for. How to combat a force that had no supply lines? That travelled the Dreamscape in hungry packs and struck with no discernible pattern? An enemy that was drawn by their opponent’s own strength?

  A difficult proposition, but not one she could deal with currently, and it was a problem, at least, that plagued her own enemies as well. Hefatiti’s was the next province in line to be ravaged, and that was assuming the provinces further north could not prove a suitable bulwark. Cleosiris privately expected them to fail—they were like Idib in that sense, bereft of an undying lord to guide and protect them, a herd now shorn of its shepherd—but whatever she may think of the Empty Throne, she did not expect Hefatiti to be an easy nut to crack, even for the Desolate Hordes. So, a problem for later, though one she had no doubt she would have to deal with when the time came.

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  Of more immediate and concerning note was the God-Queen of Sasskania. She had a force massing on Amansi’s eastern border, ostensibly ready to combat the Desolate should they cross into the territory claimed by the Sasskanid Empire… suffice it to say, Cleosiris was sceptical of that high-minded ideal. The Badlands that spanned the rift between Amansi and Sasskania proper were poor and mostly claimed to give the Empire a buffer. She struggled to imagine the God-Queen wasting valuable resources to protect an area whose sole strategic purpose was to act as warning of invasion from the west.

  Then again, Heshtat had always spoken highly of the God-Queen. She had always discounted it; he’d been just a boy when he left, and lived most of his life in the spartan luxury of the Janissary’s barracks—not exactly an education free from propaganda. Still, she had heard rumours that the general in charge of the muster by the borders had made several diplomatic overtures to the squabbling provinces above the upper nomes; an offer of military alliance to drive back the Desolate from the valuable territories of Amansi. She didn’t know the veracity of those rumours and didn’t know what that general had asked for in recompense, but it did point to a proactive and perhaps more engaged ruler than she had initially suspected.

  Cleosiris couldn’t consider Amansi’s borders without her thoughts straying to her nominal husband and the father of her child. The famed and feared General of the West. The man that had cracked the nut of Amansi, had landed foreign troops on sacred soil, had occupied a city from the ancient empire for the first time in its history. She couldn’t hide a wince as she thought of him. A poison in the bloodstream of her city, slow acting but its consequence would release sooner than expected.

  Despite whatever she could say about the man and his soldiers, they were frighteningly competent. Enough so that Hefatiti and Khaemwaset—immortal Pharaohs and masters of multiple soul arts, nine-fold adepts and only a single step shy of the gods themselves—even they let an enemy squat atop an Amansi city for nigh on a decade rather than risk that fight. It was why she had invited the Aquiline Legion in to begin with, but now the future problems it had posed at the time were becoming current threats in the present.

  The legion and its great General had left to conquer more territory for the glory of the so-called republic, but they would be back. It would take years, she knew, for the General to travel the Bleeding Sea, to sack the ports and cities that lined it, to bring treasure and slaves back to Namor, then to depart toward Amansi once more on a fleet of great triremes. But years was a mortal measure, and they would pass faster than expected.

  How could Idib prepare for that reunion? Cleosiris did not intend to play the gushing bride again, did not intend to roll over and let the barbarian bastard sack her city once more. Her people had needed protection, and he had been the only way to ensure it then. But no longer. Heshtat would return with the Eye, and she would use it to safeguard Idib from the Pharaohs nearby and from the Generals and God-Queens and Enlightened and any other thrice-damned cultivators that tried to control and oppress them.

  She let the fire of her conviction burn hot inside her, even as she smiled sweetly at a senior clerk of the architectural guild that had been petitioning her for access to the palatial pyramid at the centre of her city. She’d marked him as unreliable, her Vizier Qar noting that he had strong ties to the guild’s headquarters in Khaemwaset’s province and significant debts to Hefatiti. No doubt he wanted access to spy on her construction, and perhaps worm his way into whatever plans she had been hatching. The people didn’t know it, but she had no doubt the Pharaohs and their courts and spies had inklings she was up to something. She could only hope that none knew exactly what it was though.

  Her smile almost slipped an inch at the thoughts, but she schooled her expression, giving a generous dip of the head to acknowledge a guard captain that she rated highly. These were the people worthy of her respect and admiration. The working people of Idib, the poor and the needy, the competent and the strong. Not the vultures that circled on high or the lions that prowled outside the gates.

  If only she could gain confirmation. She was growing desperate the closer her plans came to reality, and she needed the Eye to complete them. Gods, the waiting was torture. She wished to take up a blade and stride out of the city herself. To face her enemies on an open field, to surround herself in the battle din and reap their lives for the pain she and her people had endured at their hands.

  But she couldn’t, so she smiled and sat, sat and smiled, and all the while her mind raced.

  The Eye alone wouldn’t be enough. Amansi itself was weakening. Reality strained at the fabrics, the gods were less present than ever, the floods had still not come, and there were a hundred other problems facing them. A fucking demon had been harassing her villages toward her northern border not two years prior. How the fuck had that happened? And while she had dealt with it, it was, like everything seemed to be, a temporary fix.

  She sometimes felt like she was drowning beneath the weight of all of this. Give her a goal and she could see it through, but she had a thousand goals, and each needed to be weighed against others, each with different measures and timelines and resource requirements, and she had neither the time, the resources, nor the knowledge to combat them effectively. She felt like Wise Osirion, weighing the hearts of her people constantly on scales that were liable to tip over at any moment.

  How had the Undying Pharaohs managed it all for centuries? She knew the answer of course: they hadn’t. Of the original twelve, only four remained. Three in body, one in soul, and the other eight had passed beyond the Final Door long ago, whether willingly or not.

  Still, she suspected it would be easier to manage a decaying province when she had the power to level cities and divert floods, to marshal the desert itself to her goals and command life to spring from blasted gravel. She turned her gaze back to the courtiers and functionaries and the flirting, squabbling, rumour-mongering and rabble-rousing nonsense of high society.

  Soon she would know true power, and she would finally see what she could achieve with it. For her city, her province, and most of all, for her people.