The Court Beneath

Phil Kelly

A lone figure trudged towards Castle Couronne, stopping for a moment to examine his reflection in the steel of his sword. The face reflected in the blade was the dirt-streaked mask of a beggar. Grimacing, the knight tried to wash off the worst of the dirt in a puddle by the side of the road. A cart towed by a pair of malnourished mules rumbled past, splashing yet more filth onto his already stained surcoat.

The knight looked up at the skies and sighed deeply before returning to his reflection. If anything he had made the scarecrow in the steel look worse. The exposed streaks of pale flesh only served to accentuate the layers of filth he had accrued over the long years of his quest.

Gone for a five-year and nothing to show for it. Well, nothing but some ugly scars, a few loose teeth and a bad case of ringworm, that was. His money-purse had been stolen long ago, and his noble steed lost to the forest two years previously. He still had his sword, at least – he’d paid good silver for it to be chained to his wrist as a gesture of commitment – and his shield was still intact, more or less. Yet the fact remained that here he was, about to address the Grand Court of Couronne whilst looking little better than a pauper’s arse.

He smelt the part, too; the powdered harpies of the Grand Court were going to eat him alive. No matter that Bretonnia had been rid of many a monster since his travels began. He had met with prophets and ghosts alike on his travels; had even fought alongside the Green Knight himself at one point. The courtiers cared not for hollow boasts, however. Without proof of his victories they were like to dismiss such claims as the ravings of a madman.

Shaking his head, the knight trudged on. There was little choice. An army of the dead was said to be shambling towards the peasant villages to the north, the renegade sorcerer Myldeon adding to their number with every corpse-pit he passed. Though they were loath to admit it, the Grand Court had made a powerful enemy the day they chased Myldeon from their ranks for practising the forbidden arts. The knight whispered a quiet oath to the Lady that the necromancer would be brought to justice before he had raised half the kingdom from their graves. Scowling at the wilful incompetence of Bretonnia’s gentry, the knight made his way into the shadow of the crenellated monstrosity known as Castle Couronne.

The towering edifice looked as if the father of giants had knocked down three perfectly good fortresses and piled them one atop another before employing a mad architect to fortify the results beyond all reason. Gilded spires jutted out from precarious sub-mansions like fungi, gargoyles leered from stone kennels, towers sprouted from walls buttressed with twisted oak trees. Murder-holes and arrow slits perforated every crooked wall from top to bottom, and tattered pennants fluttered from the trebuchets and mangonels cresting its many towers. A pair of majestic stone dracogryphs guarded a broad bridge over a moat of bubbling pitch. It was a lunatic king’s fantasy groaning in the wind, a wyrdstone-tainted nightmare made real.

For the knight, it was home.

Two densely muscled men-at-arms sidled out of the shadows of the gatehouse to bar his way, their hook-ended polearms thrust towards his face. Even over the stench of the moat he could smell the wine on their breath – Alabier Red, and a bad year at that. One of the guardsmen had an eye missing, replaced with a rusting nugget of ironstone. The other had a smile that had been crudely widened by a blade, a common punishment for the low-born who laughed out of turn.

‘Let me pass, in the name of my father. In the name of the king,’ said the knight, drawing himself up to his full height as he approached the guards.

Their polearms did not move an inch, each hovering a hand’s breadth from his face.

Shaking his head, the knight grabbed his gauntlet in his teeth and pulled his sword hand free, wiping the worst of the muck from the battered face of his shield and flicking it into the bubbling pitch of the moat. The gesture revealed a lion rampant on a field of blue and red. It had seen far better days, but it was undeniably the royal heraldry of Couronne.

A tense moment passed. As one, the men-at-arms kneeled, their polearms lifted and their eyes cast down.

Sir Louen of Couronne took a deep breath and marched inside.

A fine mist of rain fell as Louen and Brocard the Bold rode their noble steeds along the winding road. Castle Couronne dwindled in the distance behind them. Some twenty metres behind the two Bretonnian lords was a single lance of knights, their brightly-coloured pennants slicked flat with damp. Leather-patched squires rode behind them in sodden silence. It would have been extremely charitable to call it an army. It was barely even an escort.

‘Sixteen swords, Brocard. Sixteen,’ said Louen, despondently.

‘At least his lordship gave you a good horse, Louen,’ replied Brocard, frowning as he flicked rainwater from the immaculate steel unicorn that curved over his left shoulder. ‘Ancient or not, you know how the man loves his purebreds.’

‘And the humiliation to go with it. How low the flame of chivalry has burned,’ muttered Louen into his tangled beard, ‘if but sixteen souls can be roused to defend the land.’

‘Lady’s sake, don’t be so dramatic, Louen,’ said Brocard, fixing him with a reproachful glance from his famously mismatched eyes. One was blue, one green; their colours were echoed upon his personal heraldry and the caparison of his mighty charger. ‘What did you expect, turning up after five years with nothing to show for your efforts besides a beggar’s plea?’ he said. ‘If you ask me you were lucky to get more than a boot up the backside. And if the necromancer has raised as many as you say, it’s a wonder you rallied anyone at all.’

‘Why, thanks. When did you become such a bloody realist?’

Brocard’s easy smile disappeared in an instant. Louen decided not to press the matter. The rain pattered down as they rode on in silence, passing the burnt-out windmills and tumbledown chapels that typified the Marches of Couronne. Autumn had the twisted trees of the land in its grasp, and rotting mulch covered the sides of the dirt track. Every mile or so a twisted body lay by the side of the path, rainwater gathering in its eye sockets. Careless, thought Louen. They should have been buried face down, crow’s feet in the mouth, as was the proper custom. His father had an infamous distrust of superstition, and Louen knew enough to see it for the dangerous indulgence it truly was. No wonder Myldeon had amassed such a throng.

Thunderclouds mustered on the horizon. A lone magpie croaked from its perch atop a rusting thief-cage, half-heartedly pecking at the wet meat of its occupant.

As the sun passed high overhead, Louen eased his horse into a slow trot. Brocard rode alongside him, returned from counsel with the knights in the lance behind. They travelled in silence for a few minutes more.

‘A lot can happen in five years, Louen,’ said Brocard, suddenly.

‘What’s that?’ asked Louen, jolted from thoughts of the conflict to come.

‘I said, a lot has happened since you’ve been gone.’

‘I feared as much. Not good news, either, judging by your demeanour.’

‘No, Louen,’ replied Brocard. ‘Sadly not. We have little enough of that these days.’

‘Care to tell me about it?’

Brocard looked back over his shoulder at the fifteen knights riding behind them, then met Louen’s gaze.

‘In a while, perhaps,’ he sighed.

They rode onwards for a few hours more, Louen moving up and down the column talking to the men he would soon be fighting alongside. As the sun began to sink, a moss-covered bridge forced them to cross a trickling brook in single file. Before the rest of the knights could catch up, Louen spurred his steed to catch up with Brocard’s heavily-armoured stallion.

‘You’ve changed, old friend,’ said Louen, riding close.

‘You noticed,’ said Brocard, bitterly.

‘It’s bad, then?’

‘Yes,’ said the knight, his magnificent armour clinking as he slumped in the saddle, head hung. He held his gauntlet to his face, thumb and finger rubbing his eyes. ‘It’s really bad,’ he said, voice barely audible over the rain.

‘Eleanor?’

‘No. Our son.’

‘Landuin? Bright lad.’

‘Too bright,’ said Brocard, his voice cracking. ‘He was… He was Taken, Louen.’

‘What?’ said Louen, turning in his saddle with a jerk. ‘Landuin was… Really?’

Brocard’s face twisted into a knot of unresolved grief. ‘His bed was empty and the sheets were cold as ice. He was Taken. I won’t see him again.’

The knight’s expression was so tragic that Louen felt his gut churn hollow.

‘Well,’ said Louen, not knowing what else to say, ‘I’ll be damned.’

‘No, my friend,’ said Brocard, wiping his eyes. ‘It’s not you that’s damned.’

The knights rose at dawn, their squires buckling their ornate suits of armour plate by plate. Their heavily-muscled horses churned the rich earth, nervous despite their impeccable breeding.

Louen shook out the last shreds of a troubling dream and parted the boughs of his makeshift bivouac, dislodging a silver curtain of dewdrops and a fat-bodied spider in the process. Frowning, he watched the knights make ready.

‘Sixteen,’ he sighed to himself, pulling his armour on piece by tarnished piece. ‘A lance of ten-and-seven in total, with a rusting tip at that.’ The cold of the earth had sunk into the core of his bones. Five years of this, he thought, and it never gets easier.

A squire approached him, offering a bowl of hot rabbit gruel from the campfire. Louen waved it away. ‘Your need is greater,’ he said with a weary smile, ‘a growing lad like you. Though if you’ve a platter of smoked bacon and a feather-stuffed blanket behind your back, I’ll take them off your hands.’ He earned a shy half-smile in response before the squire took his leave, eyes averted.

The smell the stew left hanging in the damp air was delicious, and Louen’s empty stomach growled low. Taking his longknife from its scabbard, he sliced off a piece of edible fungus from a nearby tree and chewed it hard, hoping to appease his gut. One day I’ll sleep in a bed again, he promised himself, perhaps with a woman or two to warm it. And on that day I’ll eat rabbit stew, stuffed swan, roast boar, and more besides. Today, though, I’ll like as not be up to my armpits in corpses by lunchtime. Still, the deed needs done.

The knight rubbed his aching knees, blinking the sleep out of his eyes as he twisted his head from one side to the other with a series of dull cracks. Something strange hung in the air, a feeling of disquiet more than anything tangible. He sniffed, his senses slowly waking up. There it was; the faintest whiff of rotten flesh, carried on the wind.

‘I fear they’re coming to us, my friend,’ said Brocard, his spurs clinking as he strode up to Louen’s makeshift bivouac. The big knight’s handsome features were troubled. ‘You’d better say your devotions now, if you still want to make the charge.’

Louen nodded silently, taking his friend’s hand as he got to his feet. ‘Brocard,’ he said, ‘thank you for this. I’ll repay you if I can.’

‘It’s for the land, Louen. No need to speak of debt.’

‘As you say, old friend,’ said Louen. ‘Look for the single living man amongst the dead. Take the lance straight for him, squires to each side. Kill him true, and the numbers of the foe are of little import.’

‘Aye, I hear you. The necromancer – spitted like a boar.’

‘Make sure of it.’

Combing his beard with his fingers, Louen took his leave from Brocard and knelt by his horse, saying a quiet prayer to the Lady. He allowed himself a brief moment’s peace before straightening his tunic and striding towards the embroidered tents that dotted the clearing.

‘Knights of Couronne,’ he called out, pushing his way through dripping branches. ‘I bid you good day!’

He was greeted by a rough chorus of grunts and half-hearted greetings from the knights strapping on the last of their armour. A scattered handful stood to attention, their sword hilts raised in salute.

‘Today we draw blades together,’ called out Louen, drawing his sword from its scabbard. ‘Today we fight for the land once more.’

He paced around the edge of the clearing, looking each of the knights in the eye one by one. A few of them nodded their respect as he passed.

‘Today we reclaim our realm from the kingdom of death,’ said Louen, eyes glowering. ‘Breathe it, I bid you – it’s there. Smell it. That’s the taint of death, my friends. The stink of dark magic.’

He paused for a moment, his back to the rest of them as he scowled out across the countryside. Sure enough, there was movement in the fields below.

‘It seeps across the lands, polluting our rivers, choking our villages, spreading like a plague. And there is nothing to stop it.’

He paused, spinning on his heel to face them.

‘Nothing but the sons of Couronne!’ he roared.

A ragged cheer went up from the assembled knights as they gathered in front of Louen in loose groups.

‘Today we show the Lady we are worthy of her favour!’ shouted Louen. ‘Today we hunt, and today we kill!’

His men cheered, raising their swords to the sky in salute.

Louen raised his sword in both hands, his eyes wild.

‘Death to the villain, Myldeon!’

‘Death!’ called out Brocard. ‘Death!’

The knights joined the morbid chant, shouting and clashing their swords upon their shields until rain shook from the trees.

‘Lady, we beseech thee!’ shouted Louen over the warcry of his men. ‘Fair goddess of Bretonnia, guide our blades and strengthen our shields! Give us your blessing that we might scour the land of the traitor and the dead! Watch over us as we ride!’

Stepping onto his stirrup, Louen heaved himself into the saddle of his horse, tendrils of morning mist swirling in his wake.

‘To war!’

The knights roared in response, mounting up with practised ease and riding downhill after Louen with heraldic pennants streaming. They formed up into a lance three abreast before cresting a sloped ridge.

The misty hillsides below stretched away for miles. A sea of brown-grey bodies stumbled through the fields towards them, their numbers enough to make a lesser man faint. A lake glimmered silver in the valley at their back, potentially trapping them if all went well. Yet there were thousands of corpse-things spreading out across the landscape. Less than half a mile distant was an ancient barrow, the pallid form of the necromancer atop its lintel. Arrayed around him was a bodyguard of undead knights, their heraldry and posture somehow prideful even in death. Louen’s frown deepened. Even Myldeon’s elite had them outnumbered three to one.

The low moans of the dead carried over the pounding of hooves as the knights pushed their mounts to the gallop. Mounted squires fanned out on either side to prevent their masters being flanked, but Louen knew in his heart that there was no way they could succeed against such untold numbers. He whispered a quick prayer to the Lady nevertheless, and spurred his mount to full speed.

A single brass horn sounded in the morning air just as the wedge of Bretonnian knights hit the undead throng like a hunting spear thrust into an unprotected gut. It plunged deep into their ranks, splashing black blood and rotten flesh with the violence of the impact. The sheer momentum of the charge was a weapon in its own right. As the cavalry galloped onwards the dead were flung aside or trampled by the dozen. The knights plunged their lances through chests, throats, arms, heads, their wielders revelling in the power of their charge and the fact that their lances were still holding true against such meagre opposition. One after another the flesh-things came apart. Hundreds of the living corpses were put down before the Bretonnians had slowed at all.

But slow they did.

Such was the success of the initial charge that the squires flanking their knightly lords had long been left behind. Louen could see no end to the number of mottled bodies pressing in against them. One by one, the lances of Couronne’s finest were dragged from their hands by the corpses impaled upon them.

Swords drawn, the knights hacked and kicked at the dead men clutching at them, fighting hard to reach the necromancer on the barrow ahead. Cold hands grasped at caparisons, uneven teeth sank into the legs of man and horse alike. The low moaning of the horde was cut through with shouts of rage and the panicked whinny of bloodied horses.

To the left, Louen saw Red Rebelond pulled from the saddle, then Guido the Gut alongside him, his warhammer falling from lifeless hands. Sir Heverte’s warhorse, Steelshoe, went down under the weight of a dozen of the throng, trapping his master beneath him. Heverte’s unicorn helm was torn off, and Louen saw dead fingers sink into the proud knight’s face. His expression grim, Louen cast around, stabbing and slashing at the gormless creatures below as he searched frantically for the robed figure that would be controlling the horde. The barrow top was empty.

‘Louen!’ shouted Brocard. ‘Over here!’

Far ahead, his friend’s silvered armour glinted in the morning sun. Mace flashing, Brocard was determinedly smashing his way towards a gaunt and hunchbacked figure. The pale warlock was surrounded by his skeletal men-at-arms, long-dead knights formed up in a grotesque mockery of an honour guard. Their ancient blades rained blows upon Brocard’s shield and stabbed at his rune-inscribed breastplate, but they had little effect. Brocard was laughing manically, smashing skulls and ribcages with each sweep of his eagle-headed mace. Yet for all his bravado he was quickly becoming surrounded by the necromancer’s undead elite. The Lady must be proud, thought Louen, but he’s alone, and in over his head.

Louen spurred his horse on, the steed stamping and trampling its way through the living dead towards the other knight. Louen cut away arms and hands wherever one of the stinking creatures gained purchase on his horse’s armour. Ignoring Brocard’s plight for a moment, he hacked and gouged his way through the throng where it was thinnest. Suddenly there were no more of the creatures in front of Louen. His warhorse burst out of the churned mud by the side of the lake. He veered right and rode hard along the bank, plunging back into the battle as close to the barrow as possible. His blade met bone again and again, his warhorse’s flailing hooves adding to the tally as they caved in skulls and splintered ribcages. Before long Louen had carved a path so deep that the skeletal knights had pressed in all around.

Incredibly, Brocard had fought his way to the shrivelled necromancer retreating to the side of the lake. The knight bellowed a wordless challenge, pointing his mace at Myldeon. In response, the mage pointed a crooked finger at him and narrowed his eyes. A beam of black light flashed, and Brocard was flung back across the corpses of the slain, thick smoke streaming from his armour. The smell of roasted meat hung in the air.

Louen gave an involuntary cry as his horse was slowly pulled down by the sheer weight of the dead surrounding him. Mounting the saddle, he turned his sidelong fall into a leap, barrelling into the host of skeletal knights and knocking three of them to the ground before scrabbling to his feet. He was on the verge of frenzy as he elbowed and punched through the moss-covered bones of the wights, desperate to reach Brocard’s side. Terror lent him strength. He barged his way through the ranks to find his companion’s silvered armour smouldering, the body within curled like a burnt insect. The fallen knight’s body was ruined, his once-handsome face a mask of charred flesh.

A crowing laugh of triumph rang out, and the necromancer vanished behind a veil of mist.

Consumed by a tidal wave of rage and frustration, Louen lashed out at the skeletal undead around him, each chattering skull sporting a dead man’s grin. His violent outburst bought him a moment’s reprieve, and he cast a last horrified look at the silvered corpse that was all that remained of his friend. A haggard face was reflected back at him, streaked with dirt and on the verge of panic as the dead closed in.

Exhausted, Louen splashed into the mud at the lake’s edge, forced back by a press of dead flesh. Dozens of grasping corpses snatched at his vambraces and breastplate, ripping away pieces of armour and scraps of sun-bleached cloth. They clawed at his sword, his gauntlets, his shield. One of the creatures yanked at his helmet, pulling it violently to one side. Louen was forced to twist his head free and abandon it entirely, snarling in disgust as the creature broke its teeth on his heraldic crest. He cried out as steel-hard fingers dug deep into his tensed thigh. Rich red blood coursed over ragged yellow nails.

Everywhere he looked, death masks moaned and drooled. A throng of the cursed things pushed forwards, falling over themselves in their eagerness to reach him. Every time one toppled into the muck, two more clambered over it, teeth chattering in their cannibalistic fever. Cold fingers quested for his mouth and his eye sockets, seeking purchase.

‘You rotting bastards!’ Louen shouted as he slashed and shoved. ‘By the Lady, get back into the mud!’ He hacked at those nearest him, fighting for the room to swing his blade and turning his head to draw a breath of clean air. His muscles burnt inside, pain flaring in every limb.

Yet with each downward stroke another one of the creatures fell, for his ancestral blade was the finest Bretonnian steel and his foes’ flesh as soft as rot. The lake’s edge was strewn with hundreds of contorted corpses. Unclean fluids tainted its waters for a league in either direction. Some of the dead bodies were those of other Bretonnian knights, glints of silver and splashes of primary colour in a field of grey-brown limbs.

Fear touched Louen’s heart. The chance of victory, so tangible earlier that day, was a fading memory. The dead were so many that this had become little more than a battle for survival.

‘No,’ he said, biting his lip hard in an effort to clear the despair from his thoughts, ‘not yet, not yet.’ He was a knight of Couronne and the royal blood of Bretonnia flowed in his veins. Myldeon could not be allowed to win. The necromancer’s mud-spattered puppets were a plague upon the land.

Grinding his teeth, the lone knight squinted away the sweat in his eyes and swung once more, taking a corpse-thing’s jaw from its face and toppling another with the backswing. He spat in disgust as stale blood spattered his greying beard, the taste of it like vinegar on his lips. His next swing took another corpse in the chest, and as his sword caught in its ribs he kicked the creature from the blade. The effort of yanking his injured leg from the mud sent a sick wave of pain and tiredness through him. His knee gave way, and for horrible second he though he would pitch over, joining the corpses in the green-grey water. Only the grasping fingers of a dead man, caught in the wool of his tunic, kept Louen upright.

Exhaustion was his real enemy; a black shroud lurking on the edge of his vision that threatened to swallow him whole.

‘Escape,’ Louen muttered through his teeth. Escape was the only option left, he thought. To where, though? All that lay ahead was a field of living corpses, and all that lay behind was deepening water. There was no way out but to fight.

Once, twice, Louen stabbed his sword into a pair of the dead things that pressed up against his shield. He shoved their bodies away with a surge of effort, stumbling along the lake’s edge in the hope of finding a path to freedom. Brackish water splashed his face as he churned through the thick black mud, clearing his thoughts a little. He caught a brief glimpse of the battle around him, or rather its aftermath. The necromancer’s undead host stretched away in both directions along the perimeter of the lake. A thousand dead eyes were staring straight at him.

Letting out a roar of anger and hopelessness, Louen hacked at the corpses lurching through the water towards him. Limbs fell away in sprays of stale blood, heads were severed from necks with each sword stroke. Yet still the haunted things came on, splashing and stumbling through the shallows. They cared not for their losses; they had been dead a long time before the necromancer Myldeon had torn them out of their graves.

A wall of clammy flesh pushed up against his shield arm as the horde surged forwards once more, and a mocking laugh echoed through the evening mist behind them. Louen caught a glimpse of a white-robed figure standing tall on a gnarled stump, a fallen comrade’s crested helmet raised above his head with the decapitated head still inside. Blood spattered his pallid face, an unholy sacrament the knight was powerless to stop.

The tide of the dead came on, pressing, surging. Another step back, then another. Mud sucked at Louen’s armoured feet. Water lapped the backs of his thighs. He felt a sharp stab of pain as rotten teeth sank into his cheek.

With a cry, the knight pitched backwards into the lake.

Ice-cold water pushed frozen fingers through Louen’s matted hair and closed over his face. A corpse fell on top of him, its toothless mouth working frantically. He scrabbled backwards, elbowing the creature from him, kicking the grasping fingers closing around his legs away.

The twilight sky above dimmed as his body was pulled down by the weight of his armour. Bubbles streamed from his mouth and nose. Desperate, he expended precious breath to fight free from the arms that thrashed and dangled from the surface of the water. Down and down he sank, farther and farther into the cold and the dark. Streamers of dank weed brushed against his face.

This armour, he thought; the very same armour that has saved my life from daemons and dragons alike is now to prove the death of me. What a useless way to die. Too tired to get it off. Too tired to do anything but drown.

A few rays of evening sunlight penetrated the mosaic of corpses above him. Just as his lungs burned their last and his mouth filled with foul-tasting fluid, Louen caught a glimpse of his reflection in the blade of his sword.

Shafts of twilight flashed across Louen’s blade as ice-cold water rushed into his lungs with painful force. He flailed and thrashed, his injured leg leaking clouds of blood, but it was no use. The weight of his armour was drawing him down into the depths, the light of the world above dwindling to darkness.

Louen could feel his veins burning, every one alight. The pain was so total that inside it there was a strange kind of peace. Lungs full, he had no option but to consume the essence of the lake, taking it into himself, becoming one with it, filling his chest with it. A minute passed, then another. Still he sank.

Still he lived. What wonder was this?

The murk was becoming lighter. A vague shimmering, at first, then a lambent, omnipresent glow that illuminated waving fronds and strange, horned fish. An unbearable pressure built inside his head as he sank, only to vanish with a dull pop. The water tasted like… it tasted like thick air, nothing more. Breathable. Reassuring, even.

Yet there is still no bottom, thought Louen as he sank further into the darkness. A strange notion entered his head, his suspicions coalescing around it like a pearl around a speck of grit. The knight kicked out, scissoring his legs, surprised at the ease of movement. He was no longer slow and cumbersome, either, but able to move quite naturally despite his armour. This must be the afterlife, he thought; if so, Lady alone knows why my leg still stings so damn much.

Something lithe and silver flashed in the emerald depths, little more than a serpentine line in the distance. Sensing danger, Louen tightened his shield-straps with his teeth and raised his sword, thankful of the wrist-chain that had kept his blade to hand even whilst upon the threshold of death.

The line in the distance became a dot, then a blurred disc, then a monstrous, armoured mouth yawning wide enough to swallow a horse. Louen jerked away at the last moment, eyes wide, but could not clear its path entirely. The thing’s plated head smashed into him with battering-ram force, violently knocking him aside. Lights burst in his head, fading to a dull confusion. That impact was the clash of steel on steel, he thought. I’d know it anywhere; even underwater. As he flailed to regain control he glimpsed a tapered mass of silvered muscle streaming past in a storm of blood-coloured bubbles.

Pulling himself upright with a scooping motion of his shield, Louen whipped his head left and right, desperately scanning for the water-beast that was intent upon devouring him. All he could see was soft, green water and dappled shadow.

Some nameless instinct made Louen look down.

A giant fanged maw was rushing up towards him. Louen burbled an involuntary cry as he twisted his body, pulling his shield close in defence. The creature’s steel-plated teeth crashed into it with terrific force. Louen felt ribs splinter in his chest. He caught a glimpse of a giant black eye rushing past, malevolent and cold. Almost without thinking he stabbed hard at the creature’s muscled flank.

His blade stuck fast. Louen’s sword arm was all but ripped from its socket as he was pulled through the water at breathtaking speed. Columns of bubbles blasted past him. The aquatic horror raged further into the depths, thrashing left and right in an attempt to dislodge the troublesome barb in its flank. Louen ground his teeth with the sheer effort of staying conscious as his body was battered and bruised against the beast’s massive frame.

‘Lady!’ he shouted, his words badly distorted by the water. ‘Give me strength, I beg you!’ Slowly, painfully, he forced his good leg upwards onto the blade stuck in the beast’s flank, using his ancestral sword as a man uses a branch to climb a tree. Held fast by his wrist-chain, he looped his injured leg around the sword, trying to lever it free. Nothing, not even an inch. It was stuck fast in the beast’s steel-plated flank.

Louen cast around desperately, water rushing into his eyes, his mouth, his ears. Looping the wrist-chain under the hilt and over the blade, he pushed his armoured forearm against the section at his wrist, leaning all his weight into it. The protesting chain finally gave with a dull snap, its sudden release nearly carrying Louen into the trackless depths.

Mustering his strength, Louen hooked his foot around the lost blade’s guard and scrabbled up closer to the creature’s armoured spine, water pounding him relentlessly. Down it went, frantic to reach some nameless destination. A terrible, final cold threatened to consume Louen, seeping into his bones like the chill of the grave.

With a bubbling shout of anger, Louen raised his shield above his head, gripping the edge with his empty sword hand before bringing it down hard. His aim was true. He jammed the point of the shield a full metre under the monstrosity’s topmost spinal plate, feeling a grim satisfaction as the thing shuddered in response. Louen fought the rush of water with his whole body, drawing his longknife and gripping it in his teeth. Taking the shield’s upper edge in both hands, he yanked backwards with all his muscled weight, letting the thunderous rush of water add to his efforts. A moment’s resistance and the creature’s dorsal plate tore free.

For a heartbeat Louen was torn away with it, but his reactions were fast enough for him to grab the edge of the gap in the creature’s dorsal plates. Fighting hard, he dragged himself up to the beast’s spinal ridge once more. The creature bucked and rolled like a wild destrier, but Louen clung on. With a great overarm swing he stabbed his longknife deep into the creature’s ridged spine, burying it right up to its gilded hilt.

The beast’s wild thrashing turned into convulsions, then spasmodic shudders, then a slow, drifting stillness. Blossoms of dark ichor mingled with Louen’s own lifeblood in a foul-tasting cloud.

Thick ribbons of black blood stretched away from Louen’s limbs. As he drifted downwards his eyes blinked, drooped, and then closed altogether. His broken body fell away into the darkness, abandoned to the icy waters of his last sleep.

‘Awake, sir knight. The feast awaits.’

Louen cautiously opened one eye. He was alive, but his head was pounding like a troubadour’s drum and his ribs throbbed where they had been broken. He had awoken from his strange fever-dream to find himself in a forest of some kind; that was plain enough. Shafts of hazy cyan light dappled through the canopy towards him. Up above, the slender trees of the forest swung gently back and forth, their leaves like translucent fingers. Schools of dainty silver birds soared from one slender trunk to another. A diamond-skinned trout undulated past, its scales iridescent in the hazy light.

Not birds. Fish.

Louen sat up violently, drawing in a massive lungful of water and coughing hard. It took a moment before he realised he could breathe as easily as ever. There was a pale-skinned woman crouching an arm’s length in front of him, her smirk half-hidden as she put her hand to her mouth in mock concern. Shimmering auburn hair fanned out around her head, and a thin blue-green dress clung to every curve of her body. Louen recovered his wits, quickly looking down out of respect. He half expected to glimpse a fish tail below her waist, but instead saw only a pair of dainty feet, one covering the other. Neither touched the sand underneath.

‘Sir Knight, you are safe here,’ she said, raising his chin with the back of her hand. ‘It is safe to look, to touch, to eat...’

‘I… ah, yes. One moment, my lady,’ said Louen, struggling to stand on the shifting shale that passed for the ground underfoot. ‘I nearly got eaten myself, truth be told, just a moment ago. My name is simply Louen – at your service.’ He bowed low, slowly toppling to the left before righting himself with a frown.

The water-damsel giggled and touched her lips. ‘I saw you kill the lake-lion,’ she whispered, eyes wide. ‘My queen will be impressed.’

‘A lion?’ said Louen, shaking his head. ‘I… I’m not sure I’m in the right place, I should be–’

‘Shh,’ interrupted the girl, a slender finger silencing him. Tilting her head to one side, she gently traced the outline of Louen’s mouth, rather too slowly for his liking. Yet there were worse fates to be borne.

‘Come, Louen of the Land,’ she said, ‘the court awaits you.’ She whirled around in the water, hair spiralling behind, and scissored away in a flash of bare white legs. She looked back over her shoulder for a moment, playfulness glinting in her eyes. ‘All will become clear soon enough, brave knight,’ she said. ‘Do not fear.’

Eyebrows raised, Louen shook his head slowly and trudged across the sandy bottom of the lake after her.

The girl led him through the water into a madman’s dream. A great knurled mass of volcanic rock stretched into the distance, each skull-like bubble and lump crested with a silver platter bearing an artfully arranged display of waterfruit. Orb-like glowfish drifted a few metres above, as stately and pompous as kings at their own coronations. Eels as thick as Louen’s thigh poked needle-tooth heads from hiding-nests that very much reminded him of eye sockets, pinching platters of colourful food in their sharp teeth and moving them from one rocky protrusion to another in a slow interlocking dance.

For all the strangeness of the scene, it was the diners at the feast that made Louen’s hand stray close to his longknife. To his left, a dapper lord with a web-crested horsehead glared imperiously at him, while to the right a pair of tall females with the elongated anatomies of pipefish batted long eyelashes. A man-sized water spider ignored him as it eagerly conveyed the contents of a half-dozen dishes into its clacking maw, the dragonfly nymph sitting opposite tutting its mandibles in prim disapproval. Each of the surreal courtiers was armoured head to toe in sculpted and engraved steel that fitted their bizarre anatomies to the inch. A respectful distance behind the courtiers stood pale-skinned young men, armoured in scalloped plate and holding dishes brimming with exotic foods.

Presiding over the banquet was a stunning female figure, the water around her glowing like liquid gold. She wore a plated corset of mother-of-pearl, and her immaculate features were haloed in a crown of luscious silver locks that curled and twirled against each other like courting snakes. Can it really be her?

Louen knelt on the sands, his eyes cast down respectfully. He felt a great warmth in his soul that transcended his mortal senses. It is her, he concluded. The Lady of the Lake. I kneel before the goddess I have worshipped since I was a child.

Louen’s heart was a balled fist in his chest, his breath so short he thought he might drown after all. Even seated she was statuesque; standing, she would have been taller even than Brocard. As he thought of his friend, Louen felt a stab of pain that had nothing to do with his broken ribs.

He chanced a look at the sands nearby. Kneeling before the Lady was the water-damsel that had led Louen to the feast. For all her youthful beauty she was a drab serf in comparison to her mistress. The nymph took the goddess’s proffered hand and kissed it before whispering something Louen could not hear and flowing away into the background, joining a clique of similarly attired beauties. They began to sing softly, a fluid melody that wound through the water like a living thing.

The numinous woman looked down at Louen with piercing intensity. Distracted by the strange song of the nymphs, he had subconsciously raised his gaze to look upon her, and she met his eyes with an imperious expression. Suddenly, he felt all his warm and golden feelings turn to sludge. The diners around the goddess stilled and put down their silverware. Every eye stared at the knight in their midst. Louen was reminded of a similar experience in the battle on the shores above. He was not entirely sure which of the two he liked least.

‘Louen of the Land,’ the queen said, her silk-and-honey tones resonating inside Louen’s head. ‘I bid you welcome to my court.’

Louen bowed even further, his head dipped almost to the sand.

‘I give you my thanks, fairest Lady and Goddess of All.’

‘You know me, then, lord-of-the-mud?’

‘I believe so, yes. I stand before no less than the true queen of Bretonnia, the Lady of the Lake.’

She said nothing for a moment, her lambent eyes examining every inch of the tattered knight in front of her. The eerie harmonies of her handmaidens ebbed and flowed behind her like the lapping of water on the lake’s edge.

‘That is… one of my names. And you, by your shield, are a royal son of the realm mortals call Couronne.’

‘I am, my Lady,’ he said, fighting to keep his voice from shaking. ‘I am at your service, as I have been since I could wield a sword.’

‘You slew a lake-lion, human,’ she said, her beautiful eyes narrowed. ‘No small feat of arms. Perhaps you are too interesting to be sliced open, gutted and served to my friends as I had originally intended.’

Louen remained on his knees, eyes downcast, as he ventured a reply.

‘If you refer to the dread beast that attacked me, then I can only apologise, my Lady,’ said Louen. ‘I acted in self-defence alone. Had I known it was your personal guardian, I would have swum into its gullet with a smile.’

The Lady’s expression did not change, though her eyes flickered with amusement for a second. Halfway down the table the handmaiden who had led Louen to the table giggled nervously.

‘Perhaps I should take you as a guardian in its place,’ she replied. Her armoured courtiers clacked and bubbled in what Louen took as an approximation of sycophantic laughter. ‘Though I have many others, each formidable in their own ways.’

‘I pray I never cross them, my Lady.’

‘As well you might. And you slew the beast with this alone?’ she asked, pointing at the longknife hanging by Louen’s groin.

Louen looked down, abashed. ‘I lost my bondsword in the battle, a priceless heirloom of Couronne.’

‘Perhaps it was a shackle to a former life. A chain that needed to be broken.’

Louen’s brow furrowed. ‘As you say, my Lady.’

‘A knight without a sword is a sorry creature,’ she said with a half-smile. ‘And one with the courage to use it for the good of all should not go without.’

As she spoke, her hair pulled itself back from around her head, furling into a complex web of plaits as the many-legged dishes near her seat scuttled to one side to make room. Planting her hands on the banquet table, the Lady took a long, deep breath before exhaling a long stream of silver bubbles into the water from her pursed lips, moving her head slowly from left to right as she did so. The bubbles coalesced horizontally in the shape of a sword, shimmering and jostling in the glowing light of their creator.

The Lady raised a delicate hand and ran it along the apparition. As her palm passed across the blade it solidified into shining silverine. Brightly coloured bubbles turned into gems upon its hilt. It was the Sword of Couronne, unmistakably, only somehow more so – a sword of spirit as much as of physical substance. The goddess took it by the hilt and gently touched its blade to each of Louen’s shoulders in turn.

‘Rise, Sir Louen, land-knight, slayer of monsters and bane of the dead. You have spirit I thought long lost to this land. I dub thee Louen Leoncoeur; Heart of the Lion.’

‘I… I thank you, my Lady,’ he stammered as he met her gaze. ‘It is an honour beyond measure to be named by a divine being more beautiful than the sun.’

‘Enough of such fine words,’ she said, handing him the sword hilt-first. He bowed deeply once more and sheathed it in the scabbard across his back. ‘Be seated, Sir Knight,’ she continued. ‘We have much to discuss about the lands above.’

‘Just so, my queen. I believe that Couronne is in great danger,’ said Louen, sombrely.

‘The whole of Bretonnia is beset. The flower of chivalry is withering on the vine. They need a strong leader, Louen Leoncoeur. Even now dark souls plague my lands with those who belong dead.’

She beckoned to one of the servants standing to attention in the murk. He came forwards, a pale-skinned and serious youth with the muscular build of a swimmer. His scalloped armour depicted a stylised legion of warriors riding fantastic underwater beasts.

‘Serve our guest, please, Landuin. He will need his strength.’

Silently, the youth carefully placed a wriggling morsel onto Louen’s plate. One of his eyes was green, the other blue.

Louen studied the boy as he attempted to dissect the many-legged thing curling on his plate and fork it into his mouth. It was strangely nourishing, but the riot of feelings surging within him meant he tasted it not at all.

‘I used to know a young man named Landuin, long ago,’ said Louen, carefully. ‘He had the most remarkable eyes, eyes that hinted at hidden depths.’

The Lady turned her head, her gaze spearing him like a lance.

‘The gifted ones I take, as is my due. It has ever been this way. Power unharnessed cannot be allowed to turn sour.’

‘True,’ said Louen. An awkward moment passed. ‘But…’

‘Continue,’ she sighed.

‘With the greatest respect, my Lady… perhaps a gifted child’s parents might prove equal to the task, given the chance?’

‘Watch your tongue, Sir Knight, I may have need of it,’ she said, her expression cold. ‘Your kind bleed the land white to serve your own selfish ends. I take my own tithe for the good of all. It can be no other way.’

‘Is that because these… gifted ones can turn to dark paths, as it is whispered of the Empire?’

‘Left to mortal paths, those with the Gift can soon become prey for powers far more terrible than myself. Be thankful I return the females to guide you in your wars.’

‘Wars I have fought in your name for longer than I care to remember.’

‘Your devotion has not gone unnoticed,’ she replied, delicately dissecting a many-legged creature that belonged under a stone. ‘Hence your current status as a charmingly naïve courtier instead of a thoroughly drowned corpse.’

‘I would gladly give my life to defend Bretonnia a hundred times over, as would my kin.’

‘Yet you lost them all in a charge that had no hope of victory. How many of Couronne’s finest rode with you?’ she asked.

Louen reddened, his cheeks burning even in the cool of the water. ‘Sixteen, in truth.’

‘Sixteen,’ she said, flatly.

‘It… It proved insufficient.’

‘I would imagine so. The Grail Companions made do with less, but Gilles the Uniter you are not – not yet at least. For the land to thrive, there must be hope.’

‘I have always believed so, my Lady. Perhaps if…’

‘Perhaps if you were to drink from the Grail, you would have the power to unite Bretonnia?’

Louen looked down, abashed that his thoughts were so transparent.

‘You have thought of little else these past five years, Louen,’ she laughed. ‘Sir knight, you have already drunk of that chalice.’

‘My Lady?’

‘You have. Listen well, oh brave and charming fool. I am the land, and the land is me; we are one. When the land sickens, my powers fade; when it thrives, I am whole. The waters of Bretonnia are my blood; they flow in my veins just as I flow in their valleys. The lake is the Grail, just as the sacred spring or the trickling brook is the Grail. What you truly seek is not a physical thing at all, but my blessing and my gift.’

Louen was too stunned to reply. Understanding rose within him like the dawn, and he met the Lady’s gaze with newfound awe.

‘But I am not worthy of it,’ he said, his eyes wide.

The Lady smiled kindly. ‘Few are,’ she said, ‘but you have a strong heart, a quick mind, and a humility that serves you better than any shield. It will suffice, Louen. It will have to.’

She rose to her full height, the intertwining songs of her nymph handmaidens rising with her. Louen was lost in awe at the sheer majesty of the sight. Bringing her arms together, she cupped her hands, holding them out to Louen’s mouth. The water within them glowed gold, illuminated from within. Hesitantly, he took them in his own; two calloused gloves of scarred skin against her slender white fingers. Dipping his head, the knight drank deep.

Radiance poured into him like liquid sunlight. Burning heat flowed through his veins as his body was renewed and strengthened by the glory of his goddess. His heart thundered as strong as a bull’s, his muscles became hard as oak, and the years fell away from him like snow melting in the spring sun. He felt like roaring, laughing, running, bursting apart into a being of pure light.

The Lady of the Lake glowed with pleasure as Louen rose reborn from the sands. On a sudden impulse she took his face in her hands and kissed him. Her lips were surprisingly warm. A summer in paradise passed before she broke away.

‘I like you, you old lion,’ she said, tilting her head to one side. ‘I sense true greatness in you.’

Still stunned from the kiss, it was all Louen could do to draw his newly-fashioned blade and present it to her.

‘My sword and my soul are yours to command, my Lady.’

‘You and I have much work to do, I feel,’ said the goddess.

‘I am but one man, my queen,’ Louen whispered, his expression troubled.

‘You speak the truth; even with my blessing, victory is a distant hope. Yet all is not lost. Bretonnia’s long-mourned sons will ride with you, for a while. It is time they made their presence felt.’

The armoured youths around the banqueting table came forwards, their servant’s finery replaced by full battle dress. As one they drew the longswords at their hips, kneeling before Louen as knights kneel before a king. Landuin was at their head, his mismatched eyes glittering with the reflected glory of the goddess.

‘I cannot offer you enough thanks, my Lady,’ said Louen, his voice hoarse with emotion. ‘You have given gifts beyond measure.’

‘Louen Leoncoeur of Bretonnia,’ she said. ‘Reclaim the lands in my name, and this will be just the beginning.’

The water-beast undulated through the depths like a horse in full charge, its powerful and fin-ridged legs driving it ever upwards through the lake. Its rippling hide shimmered like chainmail, and a long and viciously toothed head topped a crested neck, reminding Louen of a hunter-fish more than a warhorse. Its fluid gait spoke of a very different musculature, yet the power in its frame was undeniable, and it obeyed Louen’s thoughts before he had even given them voice.

Behind Louen came a host of proud young knights, each one a stolen son of Bretonnia grown to powerful maturity. Pale of skin and regal in stature, they wielded a variety of strange weapons, from longspears to tridents to flails that ended in silvered hooks. Light glimmered from their skin, as it did from their steeds.

At Louen’s side rode Landuin, Brocard’s son and the unofficial champion of the host churning through the water to the land above. Landuin met Louen’s gaze as fingers of sunlight began to dapple the water overhead, nodding solemnly with approval. Louen felt a fierce pride blossom in his heart. He hadn’t felt this good, this pure, in years; decades, if he was to be honest with himself.

Louen and Landuin burst out of the lake like hunting sharks breaching for prey. A great spray of droplets sent prisms of colour through the evening air. Thundering onto the lake’s shore, they rode pell-mell for the host of grey-brown bodies shambling in the distance, their warbeasts’ splayed hooves thudding through the mud. Close behind them, rank upon rank of Bretonnia’s lost sons breached the surface of the lake and galloped across the waters to the shore, steeds snorting and hissing through their dagger-like teeth. Flaxen hair and scalloped pennants rippled, swirling in the air as if they were still underwater.

Looking back, Louen’s head swam with the magnitude of what had happened since his baptism in the lake. Despite the feeling that days had passed, the undead horde had barely moved a mile from the lake’s shore. The same sun that had set on Brocard, Rebelond and the rest glimmered on the horizon as if reluctant to admit defeat.

The water-horsemen formed up into a series of wedges behind Louen as his beast hammered across the fields towards the graveyard host. Somehow he could feel the beast relishing the solidity of the ground underfoot just as a hound relishes the feel of cool water upon its skin. Elation sang in his veins, a feeling of power that made him giddy. He would never be tired again, he could feel it. Sleep was now the concern of lesser men. Louen had too much fighting to do for such indulgences.

‘Sons of Bretonnia!’ he shouted as the host bore down on Myldeon’s legions. ‘We ride for unity!’

A fierce shout echoed from behind him. Some of the corpse-things ahead began to turn around.

‘We ride for the living!’ Louen shouted, his teeth bared in a snarl.

More of the undead host turned at the thunder of the oncoming cavalry. Slowly, clumsily, they began to form up into ranks, turning to face the Bretonnian charge. At the horde’s heart was a white-robed figure, his escort bolstered by the brightly attired corpses of those that Louen had once counted his friends.

‘We ride for vengeance!’ screamed Louen. A host of young voices roared in unison behind him, untold years of rage waiting to be unleashed.

‘We ride for the Lady!’

The charge hit home with the force of a tidal wave. The unliving puppets that Myldeon had bound to his will were smashed into the mud with the force of the impact, decaying bodies practically splashing apart as the silver host thundered home. Scaled warbeasts snapped and kicked and thrashed, hooked flails tore limbs from joints, tridents and longspears sent bodies flying through the air. The host ground mercilessly through phalanx after phalanx of corpse-things with not a single loss.

Louen was a bolt of silvered lightning at the heart of the storm. Even to be near one so blessed was deadly to the foul half-things ranged against him. Skin sloughed from flesh and flesh fell from bone as the magic holding the rotten creatures together began to unravel in his wake. Unstoppable, Louen struck left and right with the Sword of Couronne, each decapitating blow leaving a slowly fading curve of silver light hanging in the air. A succession of glittering arcs stretched across the corpse-field like the magical script of some ancient race.

Blood pounding in his ears, Louen guided his beast towards the necromancer at the heart of the horde. ‘With me!’ he shouted, his warbeast trampling the soft limbs of the undead as it pounded towards their prey. Landuin and three-dozen knights rode down the morass of dead flesh in front of them, cutting into their commander’s wake with the ease of a chariot scything through a field of wheatsheafs. Louen’s heart leapt in his chest; less than a hundred metres separated him from the fiend Myldeon and his skeletal bodyguard. A curse flew from the necromancer’s lips, spat in a puff of blood. To Louen’s right, three of the silvered host blackened and twisted before exploding in a cloud of gore. The remainder rode on, stamping and crunching their way through the dread bodyguard that sought to protect their master.

An armoured figure suddenly reared up from amongst the ranks, his yellow and black heraldry obscured by mud and dried blood. Guido the Gut, unmistakably – that famous belly hung out from a rent in his armour in dangling loops of intestines. What remained of his once-prized lance was braced against his foot, broken during his last charge and imperfectly set. Yet it was still an eight-foot shaft of Bretonnian oak. It took Louen’s charging warbeast in the base of the throat, spitting it through. Louen was thrown into a crowd of skeletons, slamming bodily into them in an explosion of bone and rust. Snarling, he pushed himself from the mass of bleached bones and dented armour. A rusted blade was stuck through his sword arm at a sickening angle, piercing his elbow from one side to the other.

It was not blood that flowed out from the wound, but golden, liquid light.

Louen barely had time to think before what was left of Red Rebelond was upon him, twinned blades flashing. Worse still, the corpse of Sir Heverte was pushing out from the skeletal ranks to Louen’s flank, jaw hanging loose. His arm stuck through, Louen was hard pressed to stop the fury of the dual assault.

The charred corpse of Brocard closed the triangle behind him, his great mace swinging like a pendulum to knock skeletons and knights alike into the mud. Ducking a clumsy thrust from Rebelond, Louen’s glowing blade took Sir Heverte in the neck. As the knight’s grimacing head tumbled to the ground, Louen’s lightning-fast backswing smashed Red Rebelond from his feet. Against all reason Heverte’s headless corpse came on, wrapping its cold limbs around Louen’s arms. Myldeon’s laughter rang in the air as Brocard loomed behind his former friend, mace raised.

There was a flash as Landuin’s warbeast leapt in a great curve over the wall of bone formed by Myldeon’s skeletal bodyguard. Barbed spear lowered, the young knight’s strike took Brocard in the chest. A single well-placed thrust broke the necromancer’s spell over the dead knight; the armoured corpse came apart instantly, its ashes scattered to the four winds in the wake of Landuin’s charge. Behind the young knight came a tight wedge of Bretonnia’s lost sons, smashing the bulk of Myldeon’s skeletal bodyguard into the mud and leaving the necromancer vulnerable.

Vaulting from the back of his warbeast with a cry, Landuin brought his longsword swinging down towards Myldeon in a great killing arc. The witch-fiend rattled a twisted wand towards Landuin, his face a rictus of malice. The young knight suddenly found himself frozen in mid air, unable to move. A muttered phrase spilt from the necromancer’s lips. Suddenly the fallen wights that Landuin’s brethren had smashed into the mud stumbled upright once more. Like marionettes jerked into life, they formed a wall of bone and bat-winged armour to block Louen’s path. Behind them Myldeon grinned, sharpened teeth slicked with blood as he drew a long sacrificial knife.

Inspiration flashed bright in Louen’s mind. Slashing open his shield-straps with his glowing blade, he brought the steel symbol of Couronne carving round in a great arc, putting all his newfound strength behind it in one great throw. The pointed end of the shield smashed through ribcage and armour alike in a spray of bone and rust, neither spine nor skull slowing its passage. Louen’s aim was true. The shield slammed into Myldeon’s scrawny neck, neatly decapitating him in a spray of gore before clattering to the ground. Blood hissed upon the rampant lion of the shield’s heraldry like rain on a hot plate.

As the headless body of their master tumbled to the ground, the skeletal men-at-arms and lurching zombies bearing down upon Louen collapsed. An invisible wave of release passed out from the dead necromancer’s body and across the muddy fields. Undead toppled by the dozen, then by the hundred, until nothing was left but a miles-wide charnel pit.

Louen looked down at the twice-dead knights around him as the lost sons of Bretonnia tended their own wounded amidst the corpses. The fury of battle was ebbing away, replaced by a great sadness.

Face grim, Louen took stock of how many good men had been lost, closing their eyes one after another and saying a quick prayer to the Lady for their souls to be reclaimed by the land. Never again, he swore to himself. Bretonnia will be reborn healthy and strong, if it takes one year or a hundred.

As Louen gathered a token from each of his lost knights to return to their loved ones, liquid light drizzled from the wound at his elbow, spattering his surcoat with bright spots of gold and forming small puddles in the mud by his feet. His arm hardly hurt at all, even when he pulled out the rusted sword, and as soon as the blade was gone the wound visibly began to heal.

Shaking his head in disbelief, Louen stood over the largest puddle of the strange substance that flowed in his veins. Movement caught his eye on the ground at his feet, and he looked down in puzzlement at his reflection.

The Lady of the Lake looked up at him from the pool of lifeblood and smiled.

Gilead’s Curse

Chapter 11

It is coming. If I live out these last few hours, I will live long enough to tell the end of this cursed tale. It should have been about the skaven, and it was in a way. It was about them, and it was not about them. If they were the beginning, then it is time to reveal what the end of the story is about, and that is the right way of things after all.

It is about riddles. It is about time and the tides. It is about men and mortality. It is about being caught in the middle of things. It is about how alike we are to other races, and how different we are from them.

I’m not alike to an elf, and neither are you, and yet… and yet…

In the end, we are more alike than you could possibly imagine. More alike to the skaven, too. We’re all alpha, all mortal. We must all make ready to die.

The omega. There’s no death to be had for the omega. No end in the end.

Enough of my riddles, I hear you cry, but they’re the riddles that were told to me, and they’re not nearly so taxing as the riddles that will unfold yet.

Come close and listen, and see if you can work out what old Professor Mondelblatt knew. I’m not sure Gilead ever did. Gather round, and don’t try my patience with questions. It’ll all come out, right or wrong. It’ll all come out, eventually.

Professor Mondelblatt checked his timepiece. He held it to his ear, wound it, and checked it again. Then he turned an hourglass in his study, and then he turned another and another. There were a dozen or more of them sitting on a library table in an alcove beside the fireplace, pushed well back, and unlit, so that Gilead had not noticed them when he had been in the room before.

They were of different sizes, and the sands were of various colours and grades, some coarse, some fine, all moving at different speeds through apertures of different diameters. No two hourglasses were alike, and Gilead could not say with any certainty how much time each of them might measure, although a cursory examination of at least some of them would give him a reasonable idea of their durations.

‘It is ironic, is it not,’ said Mondelblatt, turning to the elf, ‘that in the deepest depths of the Southlands where sand is the only constant, time is not measured in the stuff at all?’

‘It isn’t?’ asked Gilead, humouring the old man.

‘It isn’t,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘In the Southlands, where water is scarce, where it is hard to find and very, very precious it is, nonetheless used to measure the passage of time. A double irony.’

Mondelblatt made an odd noise in the back of his throat, dry and rasping, and then began to cough extravagantly.

Gilead took a step towards the old man, a mixture of alarm and exasperation on his face. Mondelblatt held up a hand to stop the elf coming any closer, and wheezed.

‘Don’t you recognise a dying man’s laugh?’ he asked.

‘A double irony?’ asked Gilead, who didn’t want to draw attention to his concerns for the old man.

‘Sand does not represent time where the sands of time can never run dry,’ said Mondelblatt.

‘You talk in riddles, old man,’ said Gilead.

‘Our human riddles, our preoccupation with sex and death, are so alien to you, elf, but I suppose that should come as no surprise,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘We humans know that our lives are short. Look how I have aged since first we met, when I was little more than a youth. A callow, ambitious youth, but a youth, nonetheless, and look how little you are changed by the passage of the same quantity of sand through my hourglasses. Man is ruled by the sands of time. You are not… Or not so much, at least.’

‘And the Southlanders?’ asked Gilead.

‘The South is all sand,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘The South is all sand and all death, and time is measured in water, the bringer of life. Time and life mean nothing there.’

‘More riddles,’ said Gilead.

‘You are ancient,’ said Mondelblatt, ‘and a very great deal of sand will flow before your end is nigh, a very great deal of sand, indeed. I measure the span of my life in these glass bulbs of sand in their little wooden and brass and bone frames, but I could measure yours in the sand of a great desert, or in a mountain range of shifting dunes. The two are not so very different, one from the other. In the end, we are both mortal.

‘There is not enough sand in the world to spend on the existence of a Southland tomb-dweller, not enough sand for a single one of them. They do not live, of course, but they inhabit the world just the same. They inhabit it, and they seek to corrupt it, and when they are done we will all be dust and we will all be sand, and there will be only time and not a single mortal remaining to spend it.’

Gilead caught sight of something out of the corner of his eye, and he glanced at the table. Something had stilled. One of the dozen or so hourglasses had come to a stop. Time had trickled through from the upper reservoir, and the sand in the apparatus was no longer shifting, no longer passing. Time was standing still. The elf did not hesitate. He took a step towards the table, and, with one swift movement, he flipped the hourglass in its frame, and the sand began to trickle once more.

Mondelblatt looked into Gilead’s eyes and breathed a sigh of a relief, as deep a sigh as he was capable of breathing.

Gilead looked down at the hand resting on the frame of the hourglass that he had just flipped as the almost black sand trickled through the aperture, two or three grains at a time. He cast his long, slender fingers up and down the dark wooden frame, tracing the lines and curves of the stylised shapes carved there.

The carvings were ancient and worn and indistinct, but Gilead recognised them, nonetheless: they were the same as the shaky drawings that Mondelblatt had made in his notebook before giving it to Fithvael; they were the same as the carvings on the newel posts in the hole-in-the-wall inn where they had stayed the night before. Gilead traced the images of scarabs and scorpions, of locusts and spiders, and snakes and serpents. He traced the outlines of desert-dwelling insects and arachnids, the outlines of the mythic creatures, the totems and sigils of the Southlanders.

‘Is it about time?’ asked Gilead. ‘Or is it about sand?’

Mondelblatt made the odd sound in the back of his throat again, and again, the elf thought that the old man might expire before he’d had a chance to learn all that he would need to know about what must surely befall Nuln… what must befall the Empire.

‘It is about life and it is about death, and it is about life in death and death in life,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘There is no time.’

‘Enough with the riddles, old man,’ said Gilead. ‘You surround yourself with timepieces and you fill your mind with knowledge about sand. There are reasons for that. I know that there are reasons for that.’

‘I cheated you, elf. You know that I cheated and I stole from you,’ said Mondelblatt.

‘I should not trust you, old man,’ said Gilead, ‘but I would be a fool not to. You know things that I do not know. Your life is short and you have filled it with study for a reason, even if the only reasons are guilt and shame.’

‘And pride,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘Pride is a great motivator.’

‘Tell me,’ said Gilead.

‘That’s another irony,’ said the professor. ‘What it has taken me a lifetime to learn… The knowledge it has taken fifty years for me to accrue cannot be translated to you in minutes or hours, or even in days or weeks or months. It is all for nothing. It is all useless.’

‘Then tell me only what I need to know,’ said Gilead.

‘There is no shorthand,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘There is not shortcut, no direct route. A great artist becomes what he is, can draw a convincing portrait with a few quick flicks of his brush, only after a lifetime of practice. Those thirty seconds it takes to wield the brush mean nothing; it is the lifetime that enables him.’

‘At least tell me what is coming, who is coming, and when and how,’ said Gilead. ‘You know that much.’

‘I know everything, and I know nothing,’ said Mondelblatt, ‘and I am old and tired. I must rest for a while.’

Fithvael’s visit to Eyk’s End, as fascinating as it was, took rather longer than he hoped and expected, and he left wishing that he hadn’t mentioned Professor Mondelblatt at all. The old man’s name had the cartographer bustling back and forth, pulling open plan-chest drawers and offering a wide range of maps of the city of various scales and types. They showed all manner of features from topographical and geological studies to conventional street maps; some concentrated on industrial and commercial areas, others divided the city by ethnicity, prosperity, religion and any number of other permutations.

Fithvael decided on a simple, folded street map to a scale that was easy for him to handle as he travelled on foot across the city. It was critical that he worked quickly and without encumbrances, and continually referring to a map that needed to be spread out over several square feet was not practical. Then, after a moment’s reflection, he asked for a second map, if such a thing existed, of the undercrofts, cellars and basements of the city. The cartographer tipped his head on one side for a moment and then disappeared behind the counter where he reached into the lowest of the plan-chest drawers. The map he retrieved was hand-drawn in black ink on grey paper and the calligraphy was quite different from the clean simple script on the street map; it also had fold lines in it so deep that the paper was separating in places. The cartographer began to lay the map out, and then thought better of it.

‘No, I can’t. I can’t let you take it,’ he said.

‘It’s very old,’ said Fithvael.

‘Just one. Just one of a kind,’ said the cartographer. ‘It should be in the museum, in the museum of the Puissant Fellowship of Skilled Cartographers, and it will be, too, just as soon as I’m dead.’

‘May I look at it, at least?’ asked Fithvael.

‘Yes, do,’ said the cartographer. ‘Yes, do look, but don’t touch. I can’t let you take it.’

Fithvael peered at the map for several minutes, his fingers hovering over its surface. Every time they dipped to within an inch of the fragile, grey paper, the cartographer sucked his breath in sharply through his teeth, and Fithvael lifted his fingers a little away, not wanting to disconcert the little man who clearly wanted to assist him in any way he could.

Eventually, the elf looked up, to meet the gaze of the cartographer’s rather too close set eyes. He nodded at the little man, and gestured at the short, slender pencil that nestled in the tuft of hair above his left ear.

‘May I borrow that?’ asked the elf.

The cartographer removed the pencil, licked the lead in preparation for whatever Fithvael had in mind and handed the drawing implement to the elf.

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Oh yes. With pleasure.’

Quickly, and with deft strokes, Fithvael transferred the outlines of the undercrofts and cellars from the old map onto the street map, working out how the city beneath fitted with the city above, how the underground rooms followed the lines of the streets and buildings, clustered under the university, spread in a wide arc across half of the city, traversed districts that, on the surface seemed separate, and formed discrete areas below ground where the city spread indiscriminately above ground.

The job done, Fithvael spent a few minutes thanking the cartographer, paying him and saying his farewells, all the time wondering what, or who he was reminded of. Then, he was back in the centre of the city, starting with the university building and environs, and looking for anything that resembled the little drawings that Mondelblatt had scribbled in his notebook.

It took him several minutes to find the first of them, a gargoyle high on the wall of the faculty residences of the university, but soon he was seeing them everywhere: in the carvings on the plinth of the Great Statue of Sebastian Veit and on the architraves and mullions of the College of Engineering. Fithvael jotted notes on his street map, and continued on in wide circles, spending much of the day working his way around the city, marking the positions of various representations of the creatures on his list. They were carved into wood and stone, painted onto street and shop signs, and woven into letters and numbers. They appeared at ground level in kerbstones and foundation stones, in the wrought-iron grilles of storm drains, and as spouts at the bottoms of drainpipes. They were cast as door knobs and knockers, and etched into locks and escutcheons, and the harder Fithvael looked the more evidence he found of the exotic insects and reptiles.

It was as if the city of Nuln had been hiding some long lost secret, some mystery from those who dwelt and worked within its walls. Fithvael looked around as he noted the positions of a row of ornate, cast street lamps close to Magnus Gate. They were covered in a myriad renditions of the creatures he had been seeking out for the past three or four hours, teeming with a host of locusts crawling over the backs of scorpions, who seemed to be wrestling with scarabs extending their wing cases to escape the thronging layers of insect life. Serpents writhed around the bases of the lamps, some smooth and fat with flat heads and great venomous fangs, others with broad, flaring throats and staring eyes. Fithvael had never seen an iron casting so complex, so impossibly intricate or so extraordinary, and yet no one seemed to pay the street furniture the slightest attention.

Fithvael walked from Altgate to Temple Gate and along the Commercial Way to the local coach house. Then the sigils took him in an arc through Neuestadt across the corner of Links Park, along Cake Street and back to Temple Gate. In only a few hours, his entire map was covered in dots, dashes, slashes to left and right, strokes and crescents. Sometimes a single mark was repeated over and over again in an area, sometimes two or more coincided, and, as with the street lamps, some areas of the elf’s map were crosshatched with multiple marks.

The city and its people were quite different from the last time that Fithvael had been within its walls. It was too quiet. The hum of busy people going about their daily lives was subdued. Fithvael was not conspicuous, because no one looked at each other, and no one looked at him.

In any town or city, anywhere in the Empire, Fithvael, Gilead, Laban, any elf had to be circumspect. Elves had to dress appropriately, round their shoulders, stand low in their knees, cover their heads and hands as much as possible, speak as little as they could get away with and as low in their throats as possible. They had to keep to the scrappiest slums, the darkest corners, the most over-populated areas of town. They had to skulk and sneak and avoid being noticed at all and any costs.

Not here. Not now.

Except.

Surn Strallan was on the Great Bridge before the cart hit the stone slope that marked the approach. He hugged the left-hand wall of the bridge, not wanting to walk out in the open, but not at all sure why. Something wasn’t right. For the first time in his life, Strallan could not feel the movement of air coming up the River Reik, driving a corridor of wind through the city, eternally responsible for its weather systems. The water and the air above it were never still… ever.

Strallan took a deep breath and looked over the side of the bridge. The water beneath was like a millpond. There was not the slightest ebb and flow. In fact, the water did not look liquid at all: it was dull and grey and lifeless. He had never seen it look like that before. Strallan stopped and placed his hand on one of the wall’s capping stones.

He thought he felt a rumble under his feet, and he looked up as the cart with its strange beasts of burden shimmied onto the bridge, hissing slightly as it displaced yet more sand.

He thought it odd that he should feel the movement of the cart on a solid, stone bridge. He thought it odd that he should hear the strange shushing sound of sand being displaced from several yards away, over what should have been the everyday breath of the air, the lap of the water around the abutments, and the sounds of other traffic crossing the bridge. Then the stone under his hand began to shift and crumble.

Strallan was terrified. He was so afraid that he was rooted to the spot. He could not move his feet or remove his hand from where it lay on top of the bridge wall. He could not blink or peel his eyes away from the stone flags that made up the surface of the road beneath his feet, the road that the cart wheels were traversing, spewing and shifting their little drifts and wakes of sand along as they went.

His mouth was dry.

This much fear should have generated a drenching sweat, but there was nothing. His brow, his armpits, his palms, were all dry.

It was only after the cart had passed that Strallan was able to blink and turn his head. He watched the cart as it trundled away, his gaze homing in on the strange earthenware jars that stood in rows on the back of the vehicle with their wax seals in the shapes of snakes and strange insects that he did not recognise.

When the cart dipped below the apex of the bridge and began its descent down the slope and into the north side of the city, the distant whisper of shifting sand disappeared in favour of a sound much closer to the boy. It was the sound of trickling sand.

The capping stone felt gritty under Strallan’s palm, and he lifted his hand to find it covered in a layer of sandstone dust as if the bridge were corroding before his very eyes. Then he looked down to see that the mortar holding the stones together had ceased to adhere, and was drying and crumbling away. The trickling sound was of the dry, dusty mortar falling away from the joints and collecting around the boy’s feet.

Surn Strallan was as afraid as he had ever been. He did not know what was happening, but he knew that they should have prevented the cart from entering the great city of Nuln, while they had the chance. He knew that he had not done his job, that his guard boss had not done his job. He could not go back there. It was too late.

Surn Strallan drew together what little courage he had left and was determined to take his fears to the city guards. He didn’t know whether they would believe him. He didn’t know how he would make them believe him, but he knew that he must try to make them understand.

The cart was strange, far too strange and threatening for one boy to comprehend on his own. It was from another world, a world that he did not understand. It filled him with fear and loathing, and with trepidation and dread.

He had tried to tell his boss that something was wrong, and nothing had come of it, except that, now, he was alone in the city with his fears. It was up to him to find someone who would listen to him, who would allay his fears, and who would fight for his city.

Everything was up to Surn Strallan, and the boy wasn’t sure whether he was man enough for the task.

Strallan took a deep breath, rubbed his hands together to get rid of as much of the sandy stone grit as he could, waited for a minute or two to make sure that the cart had passed out of view, and then made a dash for the far side of the Great Bridge. He did not know which direction the cart would take, but he knew that he wouldn’t have to encounter it again on his way across the city to one of the watch houses.

The Bridge watch house was one of the toughest in Nuln. The walled city was well-protected and most of the inner-city watch houses did little more than deal with day-to-day policing matters. The Bridge Watch was different.

The Bridge Watch dealt with everything and everyone that came through the northern docks. The guards didn’t just deal with petty crime and domestic disputes; they dealt with smuggling, racketeering and duty evasion; they dealt with merchant seamen and stevedores, and their drinking and brawling, not to mention their illicit trade in contraband and their whoring. They also dealt with insurrection and terrorism and other genuine threats to the security of the city and the safety of its inhabitants.

Surn Strallan couldn’t decide whether this was a good thing, or a bad thing. He wasn’t at all sure whether he would be taken seriously, and, if he was taken seriously, and the Bridge Watch went after the strangers and their cart, he wasn’t at all sure just how extreme their actions might turn out to be.

On the other hand, if Strallan was forced to turn right off the Great Bridge and find his way to the Handelbezirk Watch, there was a chance he could persuade them to do something. He had a cousin on the squad, even though he didn’t like him very much, and wouldn’t trust him further than he could throw him.

Handelbezirk was a mid-rent area of the city and when times were good it thrived peacefully enough. Since the famine had begun to take hold, it had become a sullen, grubbing place full of dissatisfaction and petulance. Strallan often thought that he preferred the truly poor and bereft, who seemed to have more spirit in their tired bones, who complained less and helped each other out when it was needed. This miserable lot only seemed to gripe behind each other’s backs and snipe to each other’s faces. There wasn’t much crime, but what there was tended to be spiteful and destructive, mostly vandalism and domestic violence.

Even with a relation who might be willing to stand up for him, Strallan doubted whether the guards at the Handelbezirk watch house would take him seriously or be willing to spend any time or energy investigating one cart with its odd-shaped cargo and its rows of clay jars.

He was damned either way, but he had to do something.

As he stepped off the Great Bridge, Surn Strallan looked to the left, and then to the right, and shuddered. He didn’t know whether he was shuddering because he’d spotted the cart driving out along the dock towards Kleinmoot, or because seeing it going in that direction meant that he had no choice but to turn left and make his way along Siden Strasse to the Bridge watch house.

Fithvael stepped deftly. He didn’t quite cross the mouth of the alley, but hugged the shadows of the far wall, the west wall of a tall building two-thirds of the way down Hauptstrasse. It had been a beautifully kept emporium trading in antiques, but without regular custom, it appeared to have been closed for some time, although the windows onto the street were obviously still cleaned regularly, so someone had some hope of business improving again, one day.

Surn Strallan stopped before he reached the entrance to the alley, and looked around.

It had been a long day. It had been a very long day, and he began to wonder when he had decided it was a good idea to follow the strange man. It was the looking. It was all the looking, and the mortar. That was what had drawn him. Besides, he couldn’t bear to follow the strange cart after what had begun to happen on the Great Bridge, and he hadn’t been able to make anybody at the watch house listen to him.

First, his boss on the South Gate had waved the cart through with barely a glance. He’d let Strallan follow it, but that was an indulgence, and a way of keeping the boy busy. He was more trouble than he was worth; he’d known from the start that being conscientious wouldn’t get him very far; his cousin in the Handelbezirk watch house had warned him of that, but he didn’t seem able to help himself. This strange, tall, slender, old man seemed conscientious. He looked at things, examined them, and he was methodical and meticulous. Strallan had noticed it immediately, and he liked those things about the stranger. Those things made him feel safe.

The guards at the Bridge watch house hadn’t made him feel safe at all. They hadn’t wanted to listen to him. They hadn’t wanted to talk to him, and when he hadn’t taken the hint, they’d laughed him out of the watch house. Anyone who could bully a merchant seaman willing to trade contraband on the north docks of Nuln wasn’t going to take any nonsense from a raw recruit who belonged to a gate unit, and a second rate, poorly regarded gate unit at that. Strallan had left with his tail between his legs, a bruised jaw and the feeling that he ought to have known better.

Where had the strange fellow disappeared to?

Strallan took a step or two back the way he had come, and then stepped off the curb and looked across the street, but the foot traffic was light and there was no sign of the man in the hooded cloak. The boy reasoned that the man he was following must simply have quickened his pace, and so he hopped back onto the narrow pavement and continued on his way.

One arm came across Strallan’s body and the other hand around his face so quickly that he didn’t have time to draw breath, let alone scream, despite the fact that a stabbing pain shot through his jaw where he’d been thumped by the watch guard.

Strallan felt tears stinging his widening eyes, but when it came time for the drops to form in the corners of his eyes, nothing happened. In practice, he’d always managed to bite the hand that attacked him, but life wasn’t like practice, and the hand holding his face felt like it had the tensile strength of a steel gauntlet without the unwieldiness.

Strallan tried to throw an elbow and defend himself that way, but the arm around his body pinned both of his elbows to his sides, and he couldn’t move at all. Then he realised that the grip on his torso was so firm that he couldn’t feel his hands properly, that his arms were very nearly numb and that he really didn’t have any room to inhale.

Strallan began to panic.

Just how strong was his assailant?

Then he remembered that he had legs.

He’d been pulled, bodily, into the alley, and he’d been virtually lifted off his feet in the fray, and all he’d been able to do was pinwheel his lower limbs, hitting empty air and scuffing the rough, uneven, cobbled surface of the alley with his boots. His attacker had placed him back on his feet, though, once he’d pulled him off the street, so, standing firm, Strallan had one last chance to fight back.

There was no point bringing a knee up, as his attacker still stood behind him, so Strallan tried throwing a heel backwards, hoping to drive it into a shin or groin. His foot went nowhere.

The man standing behind him was only as wide as he was, albeit he seemed to loom over him, so was clearly very much taller, but he seemed to be hewn not from human flesh but from something altogether firmer, stronger, less yielding, more… more…

Then it spoke.

‘Calm down,’ it said in the strangest accent. Its tone was light and calm and almost lyrical. It was a tuneful, musical, beautiful voice.

Surn would have felt his body relax, instinctively, had he been able to breathe.

Fithvael felt the young man’s body respond to his voice, and he relaxed the muscles in his left arm, which was wrapped all the way around the boy, his hand grasping Strallan’s right forearm.

‘Breathe.’

Surn took one short, shallow breath, breathed out a sigh of relief, and then filled his lungs.

Fithvael could feel the boy shaking slightly in his grasp, and made sure he held him upright so that he didn’t fall in a faint, but not so firmly that he could not breathe. He must find out the boy’s intentions, but he didn’t want to do him any harm. This was one of very few people in the city who seemed really alive and engaged with the world. The elf was concerned that the majority of the people of Nuln seemed to take no heed of their surroundings; they seemed to walk around in a daze, as if there was nothing left worth fighting for, as if their lives were already over. They were like the dead walking.

‘Don’t move,’ said Fithvael. ‘Breathe.’ He knew that the youngest members of the youngest races were always the most suggestible, and that a little magic can go a long way, and he used his knowledge to exert what mind control he could over the human youth to manage the situation. The last thing he wanted to do was hurt him.

Surn Strallan breathed in another deep breath. He wasn’t quite sure what was happening to him, but he was aware that any panic he might have felt had entirely left his body. He still didn’t know who had attacked him or what his assailant wanted from him, but he was no longer afraid of the tall, hard-bodied man that still held him in his muscular, martial embrace.

‘Now tell me,’ said Fithvael. ‘Why are you following me?’

‘It’s the stuff you’re looking at,’ said Strallan. ‘The bugs… They look like bugs, and snakes. What are those things? Why are you looking at them? Why are they on the jars on the back of that cart?’

‘What cart?’ asked Fithvael, his voice rising closer to its natural pitch as his guard dropped and his interest rose.

‘The sand,’ said Strallan. ‘What’s with all the sand?’

‘I’m going to let go of you,’ said Fithvael, ‘and you’re not going to run. Do you understand?’

‘Why would I run?’ asked Strallan. ‘Something’s happening, and you’re the first one to take me seriously.’

‘You understand?’ asked Fithvael again.

‘I understand,’ said Surn Strallan, sighing deeply with a relief that he had no idea he would feel. ‘I don’t know what I understand, but as sure as Ulric’s my god and the Knights of the White Wolf are his martial lords of the Empire, I understand something.’

The streets of Nuln did not bustle. They did not throng. As dawn turned to morning, people began to move around, leaving their homes for their places of work, entering or leaving the city as the routines of their lives dictated, going about their business, but they did so with a lack of energy or purpose borne of too many seasons of want and deprivation.

The cart had travelled for days, weeks, months, grinding out the miles, crossing the deserts of the Southlands, rolling ever northwards, skirting seas, scaling mountains, taking no heed of the rising and setting of the sun, the waxing and waning of the moons or the changing positions of the stars in the night skies.

The travellers had one will, one purpose, one task to perform. They pushed the burden of the vehicle on the quietest roads, through the loneliest regions of the most barren lands. They had no reason to draw attention to their mission, no desire to commingle. They were at the mercy of no mortal functions, and heeded not the time that passed. It was as nothing to them.

They neither ate nor slept, nor sweated nor defecated. They did not drink so need not follow watercourses or streams as other travellers must, and they did not breathe. They did not communicate one with another. They were of one purpose, and that purpose was all and everything to each of them and to all of them, and it required no discussion and no agreement. They needed nothing from one another, practically, materially, spiritually or emotionally.

They were automata, but they were not machines. They were beings, but they were not living.

Before they entered the South Gate of the city of Nuln, they had encountered nothing and no one that had stood in the way of their progress, by design, because of the routes that they travelled, and by the unbending nature of their intent.

It was nothing and everything to them to slice a carotid, pierce a femoral, gouge an iliac: always the arteries. When there had still been humans in the Southlands, that had been their pleasure. It had always been blood and sand, sand and blood: sand in all its perfect forms, and arterial blood, blazing hot and flaming red like the sun setting on the desert horizon. Only bloodless did a human body become something they recognised, only naked of its flesh could it be considered clean, and only clean could it be immortal. Dirt and death were the same. Heat and liquid, and food and faeces, were the same as dirt, were the same as death, were the essence of mortal life and the scourge of eternal life.

Once they entered the city of Nuln, whatever the temptations, however repellent the sounds and smells of meagre human life, however badly the three beings accompanying the cart wanted to shed the blood of the filthy mortal beings, however driven they were to disembowel and eviscerate the humans, cleansing and rebirthing them, purifying and sterilising, and desiccating and immortalising, they must cleave to their mission, and they must not falter.

They entered by the South Gate, apparently without incident. They did not even have to stop the cart. They did not have to look at the guards, despite being the only vehicle on the road, and potentially vulnerable. They kept their hoods up and their heads down, and they trundled on. They did not increase their speed, nor did they slow their pace. They were, if their minds comprehended such a concept, nonchalant, insouciant even. They were strangers, but they acted with the sort of composure that made them seem harmless, beyond reproach.

They did not see Surn Strallan’s reaction to their entrance to the city, to the sand that gathered in the creases of his boots, and if they had noticed him following them, they would not have considered the boy a threat. They might have cut an artery because they could, but not because he forced their hands, not because they must.

There had been only one mistake on the road to the Great Bridge. They had not been prepared for the child.

The sand was their power, their magic. They needed the sand; they could not do without it. Where they travelled, it travelled in their wake. There was no halting its flow unless the cart halted, and when its wheels rolled once more, the sands trickled anew. They did not see the child sitting on the kerbstone. They did not see it because of its small size. They did not see it because of its utter lack of significance to them. They did not see its naked hands and feet. They did not know how susceptible it would be to the sands of time when they came into contact with its skin, when it breathed in their dusty particles.

The cart did not stop, and its beasts of burden and its lead man did not speak one to another. They did not need to speak to know that they were in accord. They could not counter a commotion. They could not reason away a death by desiccation. They could not justify the presence of the sand. They could only keep moving.

They must cross the Great Bridge, thankful that so few people were yet moving around the city, and then they would take the back roads and wider alleys. They would come into contact with fewer people. The few people they would come into contact with in the more private, hidden parts of the city, they would encounter more closely, fatally closely, perhaps, but there would be no more accidents. They would take control.

The cart turned right immediately after crossing the Great Bridge, instead of heading north along the main thoroughfare of Emmanuelplatz. When he caught sight of the Feierplatz opening up in front of him, and a small, but not insignificant, number of people beginning to gather there, the leader of the trio signalled a left and drove them up the alley behind the Church of the Drunken where they encountered only the comatose forms of a pair of inebriated beggars in their squalor. The sand that rolled up to them, nestling in a drift against the backs of the legs of one of the pair, looked dense and grey in the dark shadow of the tall, black-stone church, more like ash than sand. As the cart rolled on, and the man closest to the wall groaned and tried to turn over, the mortar between the stones above him began to trickle free of its joints, landing in gritty patches on his upturned face, making him spit and cough and choke.

The cart crossed Emmanuelplatz between the Dragon on one side of the thoroughfare and the Cooked Goose on the other. The smell of sex and secretions emanated from the first and cooked grease from the other, and the three strangers were reminded, once again, of the very earthbound nature of the beings that inhabited this great city that had once thrived under their great auspices. Not this city, but another like it, another on this site, straddling this great river, during an era when water had done more than measure the passage of time, during an era that lived beyond the memories even of these immortals. Not this city, although this Nuln still bore the marks of what had gone before, still wore the signs, still carried the totems and, by extension, a little of their magic, some memory of what had once been.

As tall and imposing as he was, the lead man got a view across the corner of Reik Platz where the market was in full swing, or what passed for full swing this season. Conversations were muted. No one wanted to haggle, and bartering had become popular again where need had supplanted greed. Trade was done for necessities. There was no frivolity. There were no luxuries, and trade took time. No one wanted to waste energy on too much talk or too heated an argument, but everyone wanted to secure what they needed, while only parting with what they could manage without. Everything was a trade-off and no trade-off seemed favourable to anyone.

The cart did not falter or linger, it merely trundled onwards at the same pace, at the same rate, never hesitating, its wheels turning and turning, and never ceasing. It turned corners without stopping or even seeming to slow down, and, when it came time to cross a street there simply appeared to be a natural gap in whatever traffic there might be. The sand shushed and hissed, and shushed, and spread in its wake from the tall, hard wheels of the cart, and the beasts of burden continued their work, relentlessly, without tiring, without stopping, without talking.

They encountered no one as they traversed the north side of the Drog Strasse. The public spaces, once green and pleasant, had grown so depressingly beige that the few children who had been born or had managed to survive over the past few years were not taken there by their mothers to play, although their mothers had been taken there to play by their own dames only a score of years before.

The lead man had chosen to cross north of the Drog Strasse because he could smell the testosterone of the guards of the Bridge Watch only a few hundred yards away on the other side of the park. It smelled stronger in their blood, urine and faeces than anything else, and smelled more pungently of mortality than any other physique composition known to the most famous anatomists of the Empire, currently resident at the city’s university.

It was not difficult to avoid.

The cart turned right, where it must, at Rillingheim Platz adjacent to the Cartwright’s Guild.

If they had been sentient, like men, the strangers might have understood the irony.

The cart they laboured to propel the thousands of miles and the hundreds of days from the depths of the Southlands through the Empire to the city of Nuln, with all the attendant privations, not that these undead automata registered want or need or desire in the fleshly, physical ways that mortals must, did not require repairs. The wheels had never, in all that time, after all those miles, required the services of a cartwright. The wheels ground the sands of time and the sands honed the wheels, and the perfect marriage kept the cart rolling interminably.

This was the end of their journey.

Against the south-west wall of the university, where many students had their first lustful encounters, the three strangers and their burden came to rest.

They drove the last few yards of their journey beneath the archway into the yard at the rear of the narrow building that not only hugged the high wall of the university, but penetrated it, the only unofficial entrance to the hallowed halls of one of the greatest educational establishments of the Empire.

The beasts of burden with their bound extremities almost did not know how to stop. The wheels of the cart almost did not stop. The yoke of the cart met the wall of the yard and the wheels kept spinning, and the sand kept hissing and shushing, and collecting in a wake until it was so deep that the wheels were buried to their hubs in sand and could no longer move.

The cart was immovable, solid, as if it had been there for a hundred years or a thousand, and the true work of the three strangers and the cargo that the cart had carried so far for so long was about to begin.

The seventeen women and two boys who worked in the bawdy house were dead within moments, none of them knowing what had hit them, all dying quickly, spraying arterial blood in all directions. Bodies desiccated fast under the influence of the magic brought by the strangers, and breathless silence reigned as they went to work.

The smallest of them removed his outer garments to reveal his bindings and his skeleton beneath, older than time, whiter than bone-white with a girdle of gold, decorated with turquoise scarabs, slung around his pelvis.

The second of them, equally obviously female, if it should matter at all, despite the structure of her bones being somewhat larger, also removed her outer coverings. Her hands and feet unencumbered by layers of rags, she moved swiftly and easily, adjusted the twin sigils of scorpion and locust on her ornamental breastplate, and joined her comrade.

Just as their pace on the road had been methodical and rhythmic, their movements unloading the jars from the back of the cart were meticulous and economical. Their strides were deliberate. There were no false-steps, no half-swings. They did not falter, but were determined, as if every movement were inevitable, programmed eons ago, before the beginnings of time, as if the order of things were predestined.

The jars were taken one in each hand, hoisted one onto each shoulder, walked across the yard into the bawdy house, and taken directly down into the cellar where they were racked and shelved.

The tallest of the strangers, who had led the cart, had not yet disrobed, but he had swept the shelves clear of the supplies that had been racked there with one great sweep of his staff. Provisions lay in a heap on the floor, some of the jars broken and spilled, the last of the preserved and cured meats and pickled eggs already desiccating in the drying air. Soon there would be nothing but dust where they had been.

The greying cloth that wrapped the end of the staff caught on a nail in one of the shelves, and the bandage-wrapped finger bones grasped the haft harder, pulling to free it. The cloth uncurled and, once free, unwound in a long, lazy spiral that fell silently to the floor.

The staff was more than just a walking stick. It was also an impressive bladed weapon and some sort of religious artefact. The curved blade that made up the top third of the staff appeared to be made of solid gold, its honed edge glinting in what little light penetrated into the darkness of the cool cellar. Hieroglyphics were carved into the inside of the curve, and a series of spikes crowned the anterior edge. The haft of the weapon appeared to be made from the long bone of some massive, but fine-boned animal, but it was impossible to tell what creature it might have come from. A long, horn-shaped hook was attached to the other end of the haft, making for a double-ended weapon that could prove spectacularly dangerous when wielded by an experienced combatant.

As the two tomb guards placed the last of the jars with their strange markings and their ancient wax seals on the shelves in the cool cellar, the liche priest divested himself of his robes and bindings, flexed his back and chest, rose to his full, impressive height, and wielded his staff, curving it in a two-handed arc into the brick wall at the rear of the cellar.

Every brick in the wall had been marked, each one cut into with a chisel and carved with a sigil: a symbol of a winged scarab or a scuttling one, of a locust or a scorpion or an arachnid, or of a serpent or a hooded snake. The mortar between the bricks, solid only hours before, had been trickling away ever since the cart had wheeled into the yard and locked itself in place with the spinning of the irrevocable sands of time. When the heavy, blunt, rear edge of the blade connected with the centre of the wall, the bricks flew back into the room in all directions, rather than going with the direction of the force of the blow. The liche priest stood his ground, and none of the spiralling, revolving bricks hit him, but the tomb guards ducked, spreading their feet wide, so that they could lunge and dive away from the flying bricks without falling. Golden light poured from the cavity beyond the bricks, beams of it following the trajectories of the bricks as they began to bounce off the three remaining walls of the room beneath the recently vacant bawdy house.

The room beyond the bawdy house cellar, the secret room buried beneath the University of Nuln, long forgotten, if it had ever been known of by the human inhabitants of that fair city, was as it should be, was as it had been left, was as they remembered it. A great golden plinth, which appeared to grow seamlessly out of the floor, and which was producing the golden illumination, stood at the centre of the room, oriented north to south. The walls were studded with turquoise and gold, and bone-white and arterial blood-red, and the same motifs occurred over and over again in various combinations. Along the south wall a series of ornate gold sconces, each with a carved sigil, held an ancient banner stained with the dust of ages and of battles long ago fought and forgotten. The room was part shrine and last resting place, but there was one final rite to perform, a final rite that the liche priest had returned to complete.

He took his position at the north end of the plinth, the head, and waited.

He waited while the tomb guards returned to the cart. He waited while they relieved the vehicle of its final burden, and he waited while they returned to the shrine room with it.

The liche priest waited while the tomb guards placed the sarcophagus gently but squarely on the plinth, its head at the north end, its feet at the south. Then he waited while they took up their positions, the male guard at the left shoulder of the tomb and the female guard at the right.

Still the Southlanders made no sound. The tomb guards did not breathe heavily under the weight of their burden, since the weight was as nothing to them, and there was no reason for them to breathe. There was no gasp of wonder or surprise, since they felt nothing so prosaic as wonder, and, besides, there was no need for them to breathe. Their understanding of their situations was complete. It was so old, so well-learned that there was no need for them to speak, one to another, of any of it. Everything had gone to plan, because the plan was too old, too honed, too irrefutable, too unalterable.

The three companions had been together since long before leaving the Southlands, and that had been long ago indeed, and not a single word had passed between them since before they had loaded the cart. There was no need for words. There should never be a need for any one of them to utter a word to any other of them.

There were rituals to perform, and many of those were wordless, too, but where words were required they would be articulated unerringly correctly through long knowledge of them, through millions of silent repetitions in the memory of the individual who would eventually bear the privilege of their utterance. Nothing more was required or desirable. Nothing more would add to the mission, and what did not add could only detract from the outcomes.

Mondelblatt had never had so many bodies in his room all at once. He never took more than two students for a tutorial in his study at any one time, and his colleagues had never cleaved to him very readily. He rather relished filling his rooms with so many people, so many people that he could think of as ‘young’, because they were strong and upright and quick of mind and straight of back, despite their bone ages, and so many of them Gilead’s kind.

The study was a busy place, stacked with books and papers and with the timepieces, the hourglasses that the professor had begun to collect when he had first taken an interest in sand and time, not very long after he had gained tenure at the university.

They had quickly realised that there was no room to spread out, and had decided that the bed was the best place to examine Fithvael’s findings. The old elf stood at the foot of the bed, smoothed the counterpane and spread out his street map with all its annotations.

Surn Strallan stood nervously with his back flat against the door that led from the study back into the staircase and, from there, to the communal and public areas of the university. He kept his hand firmly on the door knob at the small of his back so that he could be the first to escape, watching the others through the wide-open bedroom door.

Fithvael had managed to keep him fairly calm using the trick with his voice, but now he was in the room adjacent to where the very strange, elderly professor was holding court. Academic types had always been a mystery to Strallan, and, what’s more, had been held up to him throughout his childhood, not only as the worst examples of the boogieman, but as the stuff of genuine nightmares, the sort that could come true at any moment. Under any other circumstances being in close proximity to an elderly, barely continent academic would have been Surn Strallan’s worst nightmare. Today, he had gone up against the Bridge Watch and had his face punched and his arse kicked, he had witnessed the infiltration of his beloved city by the undead host and he was talking tactics with a family of elves. Still, he wondered whether Professor Mondelblatt didn’t pose the worst threat to his immediate safety.

Surn Strallan was pretty convinced that he was going to die. He wasn’t sure whether he was simply going to fall down dead, because there was nothing else for it, or whether the events of the day marked the end of the world as he, or for that matter anyone else, knew it. It didn’t matter; he remained convinced that he was going to die.

Then something happened.

Suddenly, everything seemed to go very quiet.

Gilead, for that was what the head elf was called, raised his head from where he was scrutinising Fithvael’s map, to look around the room, his unblinking eyes penetrating every corner, every nook and cranny. Then he stepped back into the study. He looked at Strallan, and then walked over to the table full of hourglasses in the alcove.

Silence had fallen when the hourglasses had all run out of sand. All of the hourglasses had run out of sand at the very same moment.

Gilead raised the index finger of his right hand and pressed it against the empty glass bulb in the top half of one of the hourglasses. It swung slightly in its frame, but the elf did not put enough pressure on it to turn it over and begin the sands of time moving again.

Then the faint sound of moving sand could be heard. The shushing and hissing of trickling sand began to fill the room. Gilead looked at Strallan and Strallan shrugged. All of the sand in all of the hourglasses had collected in the bottom bulbs. They were all dormant, all still. The passage of time had stopped. The sound of sand was not coming from the hourglasses.

Everyone was still for several long moments. Only the sound of their breathing, Mondelblatt’s shallow wheeze and Strallan’s rapid gasping racing away from the elves’ slow, steady respiration was audible over the faint trickling swish of falling sand.

‘Look!’ said Laban, pointing at the sill below the bedroom window.

‘They are here,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘The boy was right. The cart is what we dreaded it might be.’

‘They are in the city,’ said Fithvael.

‘Worse than that,’ said Gilead. ‘They have begun their work.’

Sand gathered slowly on the sill, and trickled gradually over its edge, falling onto the floor and forming a shallow ridge on the rug below, not so much a line in the sand as a line of sand.

‘What… is… it?’ asked Surn Strallan.

Mondelblatt looked at him and smiled.

‘Didn’t you know?’ he asked. ‘Glass is made of the sands of time, too. Dust to dust... ashes to ashes. Sand to glass… and back to sand.’

Cold Trade

Andy Hoare

The Adeptus Astra Cartographica listed the world by the short form designator SK0402/78Φ, but the locals called it ‘Quag.’ It was an unpleasant little name for an unpleasant little world, but Brielle Gerrit, daughter of the infamous rogue trader Lucien Gerrit and next in line to inherit the Arcadius Warrant of Trade, had good reason to visit it. The corner of her mouth curling into a covetous grin, Brielle’s hand was subconsciously drawn to the hidden pocket in her uniform jacket and the small object nestled within. Her costume was similar to that worn by the highest ranked officers of the Imperial Navy fleet of a sector very, very far away, and she most certainly did not bear the commission that granted her the right to wear it. But that just made the wearing of the deep blue frock coat with its shining gold epaulettes and fancy braiding all the more fun.

‘Commencing final approach, mistress,’ the pilot announced from the cockpit, snapping Brielle’s attentions back to the here and now. She was seated in the astrodome of her Aquila-class shuttle, a small vessel configured as her personal transport and clad in the red and gold livery of the Arcadius clan of rogue traders. Really, she should have been strapped safely into her grav couch in the shuttle’s passenger compartment, but she had always preferred to witness atmospheric interface first hand rather than relayed through a pict-slate. Her pilot, Ganna, was a trusted retainer of the clan and he had given up objecting to his mistress’s habits years ago.

‘How long?’ Brielle said into her vox-pickup, the sound of Quag’s atmosphere fusion-blasting the shuttle’s outer skin making normal conversation impossible.

‘We’ll be through the upper cloud layer momentarily, mistress,’ Ganna replied, the faintly mechanical edge to his voice betraying the latest of the machine augmentations he had recently been fitted with, at his own instigation. ‘Stand by…’

Brielle gripped the handles beneath the armoured glass dome and raised herself upwards to look out. As she did so, the flames licking the shuttle’s outer skin wisped away, and the scene opened up before her. The surface of the world below lurched upwards as Ganna brought the shuttle onto a new heading, the landscape resolving itself from the swirling mists.

‘What a dump,’ Brielle sneered, flicking her head back sharply as a stray plait fell across her face. ‘Where’s the settlement?’

‘Just over the horizon, mistress,’ Ganna replied. ‘And if I might say so, I agree. It is a dump.’

‘Hmm,’ Brielle replied, settling in to watch the final approach, even if it was the final approach to an absolute festering boil of planet. As the shuttle gradually shed velocity and altitude, the landscape came into focus, not that Brielle paid it much attention. The surface of Quag was, as its name suggested, dominated by endless tracts of swamps, bogs, marshes and pretty much every variation on the theme of stinking, bubbling foulness. The planet’s shallow seas were only distinguishable from its landmasses by the relative lack of trees, and even on the so-called land, these were twisted, stunted things that resembled skeletal limbs grasping for the wan skies. It wasn’t pretty.

As the shuttle descended still lower, bucking sharply as it ploughed through the occasional pocket of atmospheric disturbance, Brielle caught sight of several small clusters of lights, out in the swamps and none closer to its neighbour than a hundred kilometres. The grin returned to Brielle’s lips as she regarded the lonely, twinkling pinpricks. She knew exactly what they represented, though she would save that information for later.

At the exact moment that a burst of machine chatter spewed through the vox-net, Brielle located the shuttle’s destination. Quagtown, some of the locals called it, while others preferred the settlement. Brielle’s word for it wasn’t fit to be expressed near those locals, though most would secretly agree with her general view of the badland town that even now was hoving into view. If the planet of Quag was a cesspit, then its only major settlement, below them, was the sump.

‘Three minutes, mistress,’ Ganna announced. ‘Transmitting key now.’

As machine code blurted harshly in the background, Brielle watched Quagtown grow nearer. The first thing she saw was the towering rock column on which it was perched, a natural formation that looked anything but. The column was the only feature of its type on the entire world, resembling a flat-topped stalagmite rearing a kilometre into the air. At the summit was clustered the settlement itself, its oldest quarters built on the cap and the later ones clinging precariously to its sides. From this distance, the town looked like so many layers of festering metallic junk piled randomly on top of one another, and to be honest, it didn’t look much different close up.

Both Brielle and Ganna remained silent as the machine chatter burbled away, and Brielle fancied she could discern the to and fro of electronic conversation in the atonal stream. After a minute or so, during which the shuttle continued its approach to the ramshackle town, the chatter ceased, to be replaced by a solid, grating tone.

‘Did they go for it?’ said Brielle, her gaze fixed on the command terminal before her. A small data-relay slate showed a line of text, but while Brielle was relatively conversant in such things, the code was unknown to her.

‘I believe they did, mistress,’ Ganna replied, his cranial feed allowing him to read the data faster than it could be deciphered and relayed through a command terminal. ‘Stand by… confirmed. Sector three nine zero high,’ he said, and Brielle saw him nod towards the rapidly closing settlement.

Following his directions and gesture, Brielle saw what her pilot was indicating, for the shuttle was now only a kilometre or so out from the top of the column and Ganna was bringing it around on a wide, lazy turn. A guttering fire had been lit at the summit of a thin, precarious-looking tower constructed from a jumble of metal stanchions from which protruded numerous aerials and revolving scanner dishes. As the distance closed still further, she could make out small figures clinging to the framework, many of which had scanning devices raised to their eyes. They were all clearly heavily armed.

As the shuttle banked, Brielle saw movement at the base of the tower, and just for a moment, the breath caught in her throat. What looked like a multi-launch missile system was tracking the shuttle as it approached, at least a dozen snub-nosed projectiles nestled in an oversized hopper just ready to shoot her down and really ruin her day.

But, Brielle realised, that was Ganna’s point. If the missile launcher was going to fire it would have done so by now. Letting out the breath she had been holding, she scanned the bulk of the ugly settlement as the shuttle completed its turn and fired its manoeuvring jets for landing. Close in, the details of its construction were revealed, and it was a miracle that had nothing to do with the God-Emperor of Mankind that the place stayed together at all. Quagtown was constructed from a bizarre mix of junk, much of it evidently scavenged from small spacecraft and surface vehicles to judge by by the haphazard surface detail. These disparate elements were supported and conjoined by a twisted mass of wood harvested from the trees in the swamps far below, and the whole lot was lashed together by what must have been hundreds of thousands of metres of vine, again gathered from the lands all around.

And atop this confused, impossible mess of uncivil engineering was a vaguely circular landing platform roughly fifty metres in diameter. The pitted, blast-scorched surface was made from hundreds of deck plates welded crudely together and held up by a forest of wood and metal struts. It was crossed by dozens of snaking feed conduits and fuel lines, and numerous cargo crates were piled haphazardly at its edges. Guidance lumens set into the surface flashed a seemingly random pattern, no two of them the same colour, and Ganna fine-tuned the shuttle’s approach, firing its landing jets as the vessel slowed to a halt above what Brielle assumed was its assigned berth.

From her vantage point in the astrodome Brielle was afforded a view of the entire landing platform, and she could see that three other vessels were already docked. One was a battered old Arvus lighter, and it was clear to Brielle’s practised eye that it had once belonged to the defence fleet of a system spinward of Quag. Its new owner had made a very amateur attempt at painting over the livery of the vessel he had no doubt acquired via less than legitimate channels, and the spectacle brought a wry grin to Brielle’s lips.

A second vessel was of a pattern Brielle had never actually seen in the flesh, though she had certainly seen it depicted in the Arcadius clan’s archives held at the Zealandia Hab. In form it resembled some massively oversized insect, its domed, multi-faceted eyes forming its cockpit. Its wings were currently swept back into a stowed position, but Brielle knew they were fitted with an anti-grav array that granted the small ship such agility and grace it was no wonder its type was highly sought after by all manner of unusual or downright dangerous characters. Whether this was owned by an underworld lord, a powerful bounty hunter or even another rogue trader like herself Brielle could not say, though she silently resolved to be watchful.

The third vessel sat upon the uneven surface of the landing deck was a squat, armoured brick of a shuttle, and it was being tended by an indentured service crew, who were themselves being closely watched by a gang of heavily augmented and no doubt combat-glanded thugs. This was evidence of two primary facts. The first was that it had only recently arrived at Quagtown, its owner having paid for an immediate, quick turnaround service to ensure it was ready for an expeditious departure. The second fact that presented itself to Brielle was that the individual who she had come to this festering dump of a town to meet with had arrived ahead of her, exactly as she had anticipated he would.

‘Set us down, Ganna,’ Brielle ordered, a thrill of danger and expectation fluttering through her belly. ‘Let’s do what we came here to do…’

The instant Brielle and Ganna climbed out of the Aquila and took a breath of the air, she halted.

‘Damn it,’ she cursed as the stale air filled her lungs. ‘Forgot my filtration plugs, this place stinks like an ork’s…’

‘Take my rebreather, mistress.’ Ganna interrupted her unladylike outburst, unhooking his breathing mask from about his neck and passing it to Brielle.

But Brielle was already walking away from the shuttle, waving the offer away dismissively. ‘Make sure the cargo’s unloaded,’ she called back as she stalked away across the deck.

Caught between his concern for his mistress and the need to fulfil her order, Ganna muttered beneath his breath as he turned hurriedly towards the open passenger compartment. At the head of the short ramp stood two burly figures, each as much metallic machine as biological flesh. The biomechanical, mind-scrubbed servitors carried between them a heavy, armoured chest, the expressions on their hybrid metal-flesh faces dead-eyed and blank.

‘Imperative meta-nine,’ Ganna barked at the servitors, the code phrase causing them to stir as they recognised and acknowledged the words of a duly authorised superior. ‘Heeding signal zero zero actual,’ he ordered, and stood aside as the mindless automatons marched down the short ramp in perfect lockstep and headed off after Brielle. With a final glance at the shuttle, Ganna punched a glowing rune plate mounted by the hatch, cycling the passenger bay to its sealed state, and followed after his mistress.

The metallic surface rang beneath the tread of Brielle’s heavy, knee-high boots, and it took Ganna only seconds to catch up with her. The air was hot in the vicinity of the idling shuttles and scented by a nauseous mixture of fuel, filth and sin. Knowing that if anything untoward happened to Brielle, her father would hunt him down and feed him to the sump-rats in his cruiser’s sub-decks, he determined to stay as close to her as it was possible to do, though he knew from experience that would really get on her nerves.

‘Hey there!’ Brielle called out to a cluster of ground crew struggling to affix a large feed-line to the intake on the armoured shuttle sharing the landing pad with her own Aquila. When the men seemed to ignore her, choosing instead to concentrate on their duty, she raised an eyebrow and planted her fists firmly on her hips.

Just as Ganna stepped up beside her, Brielle started forwards towards the ground crew, and at that very moment a pair of towering guards stepped in from nearby to bar her path. Obviously brothers, the pair were clearly in the employ of the local underworld, for they were heavily augmented as well as covered in the tattooed sigils that proclaimed the complex web of patronage commanding their loyalty. Brielle read it in a glance, and knew instantly that the pair belonged to one of the lowlife flesh brokers that dealt out of Quagtown.

Casting a seemingly casual glance over the bulk of the armoured shuttle the men were tending, Brielle craned her neck to look up into the face of the nearest thug. By the saints, they breed them homely around these parts, she thought to herself.

‘Listen, boys,’ she said sweetly, drawing a look of scepticism from both men. ‘I need my lander overwatched while I’m doing business in town. What’s the local scrip?’

Brielle knew full well what form of currency the locals would prefer, and how much of it they would demand, but she didn’t want to play that card, not yet at least. After a moment of thinking hard on the matter, one thug replied, ‘How much overwatch you need?’

‘All of it,’ Brielle replied on a whim, drawing a raised eyebrow from Ganna. In truth, it didn’t matter what and how much she laid out for local security, not in the big picture, but she needed to make an impression in the right quarters.

‘Half the crew’re busy on this job,’ the more talkative of the brothers replied, jerking the thumb of a mechanical hand towards the armoured shuttle.

‘I’ll pay double whatever they’re on,’ Brielle replied mischievously. ‘In clan-bonded deaths-heads.’

The two thugs glanced at one another with eyes alight with greed, seeming to reach an unspoken agreement within seconds.

‘Half now,’ she interjected before either could reply, producing a single coin worth more than both men would normally earn in a month and holding it up where both could see. ‘Half later, if you make me happy.’

‘Done,’ they said as one, clearly believing that Brielle had been.

‘Then I’ll leave it to you,’ Brielle said, dropping the coin into the open hand of the nearest of the pair. She watched the two heavies pull their fellows off of the duty they were on and muster them to guard her own vessel. As the pair walked away, the two servitors close behind, the landing deck rang to the sound of the local hired muscle spreading the word that a sweet job was in the offing. Knowing it was unseemly to mock the hard of thinking, Brielle suppressed a sly grin and set off into Quagtown.

‘Holy Terra,’ Brielle muttered as the four turned into what passed as the town’s main thoroughfare. ‘It actually looks more of a dump than they say…’

The thoroughfare couldn’t really be called a street, because it was more a valley between ramshackle buildings, and travel along it was not in a straight, flat line, but up and down across the numerous gantries, platforms, ledges and walkways that connected each building to the next. The buildings themselves were a tumbledown mess of sheet metals and unidentifiable machine components, with all manner of shipping containers providing the most desirable real estate. The numerous walkways were in many cases little more than parallel lengths of spar or rotted timber, with tread plate or mesh lashed crudely between with great lengths of dried vine.

But worst of all was the population. Every available space along the walkways and gantries was filled by the scum of Quagtown. Rag-clad beggars panhandled from the gutters while those afflicted by a variety of chemical addictions shivered and sweated in the shadows. Thieves and blaggers eyed Brielle and her party lasciviously, while meat-headed bullies and scarred mercs looked them over for hidden threats. The wealthy, a relative term in such frontier hellholes for the truly rich would pay to be anywhere else, promenaded along the gantries displaying what portable wealth their guards could be trusted to protect, while painted doxies fluttered their lashes from half-open doorways.

Brielle’s eyes narrowed as she saw a number of mutants in amongst the press, individuals whose bodies were twisted and malformed and whose faces were more akin to those of beasts. Several of them sported skin and hair of garish hues; though it was possible the effect was artificial, as numerous subcultures across the Imperium pursued the most outlandish of fashions. Several had additional limbs, an effect which only the wealthiest could, or indeed would, pay for, for it required the services of the most skilled of flesh-crafters to carry out well. Clearly, these were true mutants, born into their genetic heresy.

On many of the million and more worlds of the Imperium, such debased individuals would be ruthlessly controlled or even culled. They might be allowed to repent their sin of impurity by toiling their short, bitter lives away in the lathes and foundries of some brutal labour-prison, but rarely were they allowed to show their malformed faces in such a public manner. Only on or beyond the frontier was it possible for such creatures to walk about openly, unchallenged by the authorities.

If the presence of the mutants was a rare sight on a human world, that of the creature stalking along the uppermost gantry was an outright spectacle. A spindly being, its body vaguely humanoid but its overlong, stilt-like arms employed as an additional pair of legs, was progressing with something akin to grace from one building to the next. Its skin was dusty grey with mottled, darker patches down its back, and instead of clothing it wore what could only be a combat rig, a form of webbing with numerous pouches and packs attached all over. Its head was long and aquiline, sporting three pairs of eyes along its sides, while its mouth was a tiny, leechlike opening at the end of its proboscis snout. Brielle was fascinated, for she had never before encountered its species nor read of it in all of her education.

A crude, grunting shout from another walkway made Brielle instantly aware of another type of alien, and one that she had encountered on numerous worlds. Indeed, the barbarous, green-skinned orks plagued the known galaxy, their anarchic empires forming great lesions of war and disturbance that meant that no Imperial sector was ever safe from their incessant invasions and migrations. A group of the hulking xenos was making its way along a walkway clinging precariously to the side of a building constructed from a huge, cylindrical fuel transport, shouldering people aside and growling at passers-by. Brielle’s lip curled in disgust, for these beasts truly were the scum of the universe, and it was rare for them to be tolerated even in such recidivist sumps as Quagtown. The place got even lower in her estimation.

Brielle halted at a relatively open gallery, standing aside as a party of drunken lay-techs staggered by, and scanned the buildings and walkways before her. Reaching into a pocket, she drew out a small data-slate, aware of the numerous eyes amongst the passers-by that followed the motion while trying to look as if they weren’t. With a flick of an activation rune, she awoke the slumbering machine, a rough schematic of the town appearing on its green-glowing surface.

As she studied the map, Brielle’s brow furrowed. She’d paid a lot for it yet now, in the field, it seemed suddenly to bear scant resemblance to reality. The data had been purchased from an indentured sprint-skipper who supposedly knew the local wilderness zones better than anyone in the region, and the man had staked his reputation it was as accurate and up to date as it was possible to be. Brielle had made sure she had dirt on the skipper though, and knew exactly which interzone scum-ports he liked to haunt when off duty. If anything happened, he would be tracked down and shown the error of his ways in terminal fashion; she had made the arrangements before leaving.

But, despite the schematic’s inconsistencies, Brielle was finally able to make some sense of it, and it soon became evident that part of the cause of the inaccuracies was the constant rebuilding of the ramshackle junk town. With nothing more sturdy than flotsam and jetsam to build their town from, the locals were forced to replace sections as they fell apart or came away from their precarious perch. A kind of pattern gradually formed, and Brielle was able to get her bearings. The building she was looking for was less than fifty metres distant, though it was not yet visible in the confused jumble of structures. To reach it she would have to wend her way up, down and across a crazy mess of walkways and galleries, passing through the mass of scrofulous locals. With a sense of cold dread, she saw that the path would almost certainly cause her to intersect with the group of orks, and with a weary resignation, she just knew they were going to be trouble…

Having climbed the winding stairs and walkways, the locals muttering with surly bitterness at the need to stand aside as the lumbering servitors marched through the crowd without any hint of concern for those forced to clear the way, Brielle’s small party came face to face with the orks as both stepped on to a narrow gantry high above the thoroughfare.

Brielle halted as she stepped on to the walkway and looking downwards realised that she could see through the mesh under her feet to the crowded thoroughfare twenty metres or so below. Looking back up, she saw that the lead ork had also stopped, and was grunting some orky quip to its three mates, who laughed uproariously at the unheard comment.

‘Something funny?’ Brielle called out, knowing from experience that orks were a demonstrative species that respected action and attitude far more than words and thought. The biggest ork looked her over dismissively, and Brielle took the opportunity to appraise it in turn.

Like most of its species, the ork was massive, taller than an average human and at least three times the bulk. Its short legs were bowed and muscular, its torso hunchbacked and top-heavy. Its burly arms were almost long enough to touch the ground and its impressively ugly head sat so low between its shoulders it appeared to have no neck. It was carrying an array of weaponry, from pistols to cleavers, all stowed for now inside the bright red cummerbund wrapped about its middle. The barbarous creature’s attire was a bizarre mixture of crudely stitched scraps and elements clearly intended to ape human modes of fashion. It wore a long, ragged frock coat, its hem frayed and dirty. On its head was perched a bicorn hat, and one of its beady, pig-like eyes was covered by a patch.

Brielle grinned ever so slightly as she saw the details of the row of medals and other adornments crudely attached to its chest. Each was a roughly stamped icon that served to identify the bearer, to one who knew how to read them.

‘Move,’ the creature growled, its voice a low, threatening rumble. Ganna cast a wary glance at his mistress, but Brielle remained exactly where she was, folding her arms across her chest and nodding smugly to herself.

‘You speak well,’ she said, and she meant it. The fact that the ork had used even a single word in the Gothic of the Imperium marked it out as a uniquely gifted individual. ‘For one of Skarkill’s boys, anyway.’

From the ork’s reaction to her statement, Brielle saw that she had read its glyph-medals correctly. It was indeed a member of the same clan as the ork warlord she had named. The ork folded its arms in apparent imitation of Brielle’s posture, the simple act serving to corroborate Brielle’s suspicions. By aping human modes of dress and language, by copying her stance, and by its very presence in a human-dominated settlement, the ork revealed itself to be a member of the Blood Axe clan. That meant it was almost certainly an associate of the warlord Skarkill, a being that Brielle’s family had encountered several times in this region of space.

‘Who you?’ it grunted, its single, leering red eye looking Brielle up and down. ‘You Admiral wossname? Vonigut the turd?’

‘No,’ Brielle said dryly. ‘I am not Lord Admiral Alasandre Vonicurt the Third.’ The officer in question was a man of two centuries’ service, Brielle knew, and well known for his exceptional girth and prodigious facial hair. Orks weren’t the most observant of aliens, but still…

‘I am Brielle Gerrit,’ she said archly, suppressing her annoyance with an effort of will. ‘Of the Rogue Trader Clan Arcadius.’

The ork seemed to think hard on that, for it evidently recognised the name despite its inability to tell one human from another. Brielle’s fingers tapped against her arm and she flicked Ganna a glance that spoke volumes of her opinion of the greenskin’s mental skills. She became aware that much of the noise and general hubbub of the thoroughfare had quietened down and that scores of upturned faces were watching the confrontation eagerly. What happened here might affect her entire visit to Quag, she realised. At length, the beast rumbled deep in its barrel chest, and it squinted its eye at Brielle.

‘Hired Skarkill’s mob?’ the ork said. ‘Big fight on church planet?’

‘There we go,’ said Brielle, relieved that the ork was indeed of the clan she thought it was, and an underling of the warlord Skarkill. ‘The Arcadius had need of your clan’s services on Briganta Regis. Skarkill’s army took the city and hardly looted it at all. Everyone came away with a profit, and Skarkill said some nice words to my father. You remember those words?’

Now the entire thoroughfare went quiet as hundreds of the locals waited to see how things would play out. Brielle had no doubt that the greenskin mercenary would have terrorised many of these people, and that a fair few of them would be eager to see it put in its place. Others might have a vested interest in her being the one to come off the worse, though…

‘He said,’ the ork slurred, the effort to recall its lord’s words clearly taxing its tiny mind. ‘Ever you need something done, you just got to ask.’

‘That he did,’ said Brielle, moving towards the make or break point of the conversation. ‘Now, I need something done, understood?’

‘You want something killed?’ the alien mercenary said, suddenly animated as it believed itself back on more familiar territory.

‘No,’ said Brielle, eliciting visible disappointment from the ork. Lowering her voice so that only those on the walkway could hear her, she said, ‘I need you to step aside and let me pass.’

The crowds below had not heard Brielle’s demand, perceiving only a protracted silence during which the woman in the frock coat with the elaborate eye makeup and outlandishly plaited hair seemed to face down an alien warrior several times her bulk, and which had refused to give way to a single one of them all the time it had been in Quagtown. A ripple of excitement passed through the crowd and someone started issuing odds. Soon, bets were being placed and money was furtively changing hands, and then, the confrontation reached its conclusion.

The massive, green-skinned brute nodded at the woman and grunted at its companions. Now utterly silent, the crowd was clearly expecting an explosive and highly entertaining outburst of violence.

But then, the ork stepped aside so that the walkway was clear for Brielle and her party to proceed across. The crowd exclaimed in shock and outrage, while several ruined bookkeepers made a sudden dash for the nearest side alley.

‘Thank you,’ Brielle said to the ork quietly and not without relief as she walked past, fighting hard to keep her voice steady so wildly was her heart pounding. ‘Skarkill and my father will both be very pleased with your service, and I’m sure you’ll be paid well.’

A moment later Brielle and Ganna were across, the two servitors stomping along after them, and the orks had continued on their way. ‘Mistress,’ Ganna hissed once he was sure that no one would overhear. ‘If your father ever hears that I allowed you to do what you just did, he’d…’

‘I know,’ said Brielle, dismissing her pilot’s complaint with a wave of a hand. ‘He’d be furious at you. He’d be even more furious at me, though…’

Realising that his mistress was talking about more than he had knowledge of, Ganna slowed his pace and fixed Brielle with a dark stare. ‘Might I ask why, mistress?’

‘Because it wasn’t him that hired the Blood Axes at Briganta Regis,’ she said. ‘It was the rebels. We were on the other side.’

Now Ganna halted entirely and rounded on Brielle as the colour drained from his face. ‘What if he’d…’

‘Remembered that little detail?’ Brielle interjected. ‘I was counting on him not being able to tell one human from another, as he proved when he mistook me for that pig Admiral Vonicurt. He had a choice between risking his warlord’s wrath or losing face in front of a few humans. Luckily, he decided he cared more what his boss thought of him than us.’

Brielle’s audacity was too blatant for Ganna to reply, so she fished the data-slate from her pocket and looked around for the building that was their destination. ‘There it is,’ she said, setting off again. ‘Are you coming?’

‘I think I’d better, mistress,’ Ganna mumbled towards Brielle’s retreating back. ‘I think I’d better…’

‘Hold it right there, miss,’ demanded the stubjack guarding the door to the nondescript building. ‘What’s in the crate?’

Brielle looked the man up and down, determining in less than two seconds that he was wearing armour concealed beneath his scruffy overalls and padded jacket, and armed with at least one hidden pistol weapon. She could take him if she needed, she judged, but there were three others of his type loitering nearby, thinking they were acting casual but clearly in on the action.

‘Nothing that should worry you,’ she said, not feeling a tenth of the cockiness she put into her voice. ‘Let me pass and we’ll all have a far nicer day, is that clear?’

The stubjack cast what he obviously thought was a furtive glance at the nearby group, and Brielle knew for sure that they were guarding the place as well. ‘I said, what’s in the crate?’ the man repeated as his fellows ambled over, his voice lower and more threatening than the first time.

‘And I said, nothing that should worry you,’ Brielle replied. ‘Looks like we’re stuck, doesn’t it?’

‘Not really,’ the stubjack said as his three fellow, equally heavily armed and armoured guards appeared at Brielle and Ganna’s back. The pair were surrounded by men much bigger than them, but still she refused to be cowed.

‘Listen,’ said Brielle, lowering her voice so that the guards were forced to lean in and concentrate to hear her clearly. It was a trick she’d learned from a particularly sadistic tutor growing up on Chogoris, and it forced the listener to concentrate on the speaker. ‘I’ve already faced down a bunch of orks today, and they were far bigger than you. Let. Me. Pass,’ she growled.

The man blinked as he held Brielle’s gaze. Word had clearly spread quickly throughout the small town; hardly surprising, she thought, given the nature of its inhabitants. He glanced towards the crate held securely between the two servitors, evidently weighing up his desire to know what was inside it against his sense of self-preservation. Though he might try to hide behind the need to ensure that nothing dangerous was permitted inside the building he was employed to protect, Brielle knew that in reality, he was hoping it contained something he could take a cut of. Well, it most certainly didn’t.

Swallowing hard, the man reached a decision. He nodded to his fellows and, with far more reluctance than the ork on the walkway, stepped aside to allow Brielle and her companions to pass. Grinning with theatrical sweetness, Brielle moved past him; allowing Ganna to push open the battered door, which appeared to be made from the rear hatch of a Chimera armoured carrier, for her to enter the darkness waiting inside.

Beyond the hatch, Brielle was plunged into shadow, which became pitch blackness the moment the guard slammed the portal shut after the servitors had passed through. Her heart pounding, she took a deep breath and straightened her back, before stepping forwards into the unknown with one hand held lightly out before her. She soon found the floor to be littered with small fragments of debris, though she couldn’t tell, and didn’t really want to know, exactly what she was treading on.

A moment later, she became aware of a muted, but rowdy noise from somewhere up ahead, and stepped forwards until her hand brushed against what felt like a metallic surface. The sound was definitely coming from the other side of what she guessed to be a second hatchway, and even as she listened she became aware of voices and wild strains of half-heard melody.

‘Ready?’ she said, as much to herself as to her loyal retainer. Without waiting for an answer, she pushed on the hatchway, and saw for the first time the interior of the place where she had come to earn herself a small fortune.

The space was far larger than seemed possible from the outside, for what seemed like a random jumble of shipping containers and tumbledown shanties was in fact a cunningly wrought building, housing an establishment known, amongst certain circles at least, across the entire region. It had no official name, though those in the know often called it ‘Quagtown Palace’ and a variety of similar titles, all of them deliberately and sarcastically investing the place with an entirely undeserved grandiloquence.

The crowded interior was in essence a huge, shabby theatre, dominated by a stage at the far end that was framed by great swirls of crudely but ambitiously made baroque detailing. The stage blazed with light made hazy by the banks of acrid smoke drifting through the air, and as she stepped through Brielle found she could make out very little of whatever spectacle was being enacted on that stage, though it was clear that the crowd seated before it most certainly could. Row upon row of tattered, mismatched velvet and leather seating, much of it scavenged from a wide variety of vehicles, accommodated an audience of several hundred. Every one of them was shrieking, whooping and clapping at whatever was happening on the distant, smoke-obscured stage.

The sounds Brielle had dimly heard through the hatch were suddenly so loud they made her wince. An anarchic cacophony of raucous crowd noise and skirling, wild cadences produced by some unseen band competed with the hubbub of conversation, merriment and clinking drinking vessels.

Moving forwards to afford Ganna space to pass through the inner hatch, Brielle took in more of her surroundings. The walls were lined with shadowed nooks and counters that sold all manner of wares, most of them alcoholic and probably decidedly unhealthy to imbibe without a large dose of counter-tox taken beforehand.

Seated around the bar area, Brielle saw a variety of underworld scum. She recognised the types from a hundred frontier star ports and way stations: out of work crew, surly press gangers, harried looking lay-techs and in amongst them all, the dark-eyed, tight-lipped ship’s masters and other higher-ranked crew. Serving staff shimmied through the smoky scene carrying trays of refreshments and soliciting the richer-looking patrons for whatever further services they might desire. The sight made Brielle’s lip curl in disgust, but a part of her found the whole sordid spectacle somehow alluring, despite her upbringing in the tenets of the Imperial Creed.

‘Is this the right place?’ said Ganna as he appeared at Brielle’s side, the two servitors still waiting in the passageway. ‘It looks kind of…’

‘Fun,’ Brielle interrupted. ‘And yes, it is the right place. Shall we find a table?’

‘Drink, ma’am?’ said the waitress, who appeared at the table several minutes after Brielle and Ganna had found themselves somewhere to sit. It was far from ideal, Brielle knew, but if things played out right she’d be moving on pretty soon anyway. The servitors were stood immediately behind her, eliciting numerous furtive glances from those nearby. The glances told Brielle who was who and what they were here for. Many really wanted to know what was in the crate, while plenty more were keen to look anywhere else, deliberate in their efforts to blend into the crowd and not to draw attention to themselves. They were the dangerous ones, Brielle thought with a small, wry smile.

‘Hmm?’ Brielle replied, leaning back against the scruffy, padded seat and propping her elbows on its back as she looked around at the crowd one last time before addressing the waitress’s question. ‘I don’t suppose you stock Erisian Hors d’age?’ she said, knowing full well they didn’t.

The waitress looked blankly back at Brielle, and just for a moment she suspected the girl might have undergone some form of pre-frontal neurosurgery, though her forehead bore no obvious scars.

‘Ganymedian Marc?’ she pressed mischievously, her curiosity piqued by the waitress’s continued silence. Maybe she was under some form of xenos dominance, Brielle thought, like those priests on Briganta Regis…

‘Asuave?’ she said finally, realising she wasn’t going to get an entertaining reaction.

‘Certainly, ma’am,’ the waitress replied. ‘Terran vintage is it? Void-sealed to give that complex flavour…?’

Brielle’s eyes narrowed and Ganna coughed uncomfortably. ‘Two shots of whatever you’ve got,’ she said finally, slightly put out by the sudden feeling that it was she who had been made sport of. Before she could say anything more, the waitress had disappeared into the crowd, leaving Brielle and Ganna with a view of the large stage dominating the establishment.

‘Mistress,’ said Ganna. It was obvious he was about to chastise her as only a retainer as valued as he would ever dare. ‘Do we really want to draw so much attention to ourselves?’

Brielle grinned widely as she settled in for the wait for the drinks. ‘Yes, Ganna. That’s exactly what we want. Now will you relax?’

With that, Brielle set her feet upon the low table, crossing her heavy boots as she tried to work out what was happening on the gilded stage. Entertainment varied so wildly across the Imperium it was often damn near impossible to decipher what was going on, each style depending on so many different cultural idioms they made little or no sense to outsiders. Even amongst those cultures that weren’t rooted in a single location, the galaxy was such a huge place that what entertained one audience was utterly impenetrable to another. Nevertheless, Brielle had been raised in the uniquely free, wide-roaming culture of a rogue trader clan, and certainly considered herself open minded when it came to such things. What she saw unfolding on the stage before her however was quite some way from anything she had seen before.

The stage was obscured by banks of drifting smoke illuminated red, violet and purple by the array of lumen-bulbs mounted at its head, but as Brielle watched, the smoke drifted past, turning what was a hazy, half-seen blur into something shockingly solid. At the centre of the stage stood an impossibly tall, almost skeletally thin man wearing a bizarre costume that seemed to be made from a hundred different items of clothing thrown randomly together. On his head he wore a tall stovepipe hat and his eyes were made bug-like and bulging by a pair of heavy duty goggles inset with magnifying glass. He held in one hand an ancient brass vox-horn, while the other gesticulated towards the other dozen or so figures sharing the stage with him.

The stage show was clearly some form of exhibition, and the spectacle on display was a group of mutants whose bodies were so malformed by genetic deviation they would have been shot on sight on any civilised world, and most frontier or badland ones too. Brielle’s first reaction was to reach for the laspistol holstered in her belt, but she caught herself before her hand could close around the grip. Clearly, if the mutants were dangerous they wouldn’t be on show in such a way, she told herself, though in truth she was far from convinced that was the case.

The largest of the mutants was a hulking brute, and Brielle was only slightly relieved to see its ankles were clapped in irons, a long, heavy chain snaking off behind the striped curtain behind. It was at least as massive as an ogryn, one of the stable, largely tolerated mutant strains recognised by most of the Imperium as a sanctioned branch of the human family tree. But its size was the only thing the beast had in common with the ogryns. Its skin looked like pockmarked bark and its hands, which were clad in heavy metal straps, were long, serrated claws. Its face was barely visible off-centre in its chest, and consisted of a huge lower jaw, a massive brow and a pair of beady black eyes nestled in the folds between.

As if this hulking brute wasn’t unusual enough, the rest of the mutants clustered on the stage were just as extreme, though thankfully none were anywhere near so large. One had multiple-jointed arms three times the normal length, while another had three heads, none of which had any visible mouth. One mutant was little more than a head mounted in a bizarre mechanical ambulatory contraption, while another had no head at all, its facial features set instead in the centre of a grossly distended belly.

With a flourish that brought forth another wave of applause from the audience, the scarecrow-like impresario introduced the next act. The lights dimmed to be replaced by a single, harsh sodium beam, and as the applause died away a stir of movement from overhead drew Brielle’s attention.

To a flurry of wheezing, atonal music emanating from a pit out of sight in front of the stage, a garishly painted hoop descended from the rafters over the stage, and seated daintily upon it was a female figure that sent the crowd truly wild. Its legs were fused together into a shape resembling the body of a fish, but that was far from its strangest feature. Upon its shoulders sat two heads, each of which was dominated by hugely pouting, bright red lips. Neither face had any other features, yet the crowd clearly viewed the creature as the very pinnacle of female beauty. Even as Brielle watched, the figure stirred into motion, her hips writhing suggestively until the hoop in which she was perched began to swing back and forth, each pass taking her further out over the whooping crowd, who reached upwards with groping hands to get just a touch of the object of their devotion.

‘Enjoying the show?’ a voice said from behind Brielle, and she froze, determined not to betray the fact that she hadn’t heard the speaker approach. She had been entranced by the figure swinging in the hoop, hypnotised by the truly bizarre spectacle, but her attention, if not her gaze, was now entirely fixed on the man who had spoken.

‘Seen better,’ she said casually as Ganna turned around to look at the speaker directly. Brielle herself waited a few seconds more, then turned her head languidly to face him, praying as she did so that the front would work.

The speaker was, as she had guessed it would be, the man she had come to Quag to meet. His name was Baron Gussy, though Brielle had been unable to discover if either or both were titles, affectations or nicknames. While at first glance he appeared a tall, slender man of indeterminate age, that effect was only short-lived. He wore the outfit of some ancient princeling, consisting of a jerkin made of brightly shimmering material, puffed sleeves, garish hose and an improbably large codpiece that brought a dirty smirk to Brielle’s lips. But again, as outlandish as it was, it wasn’t his attire that made his appearance unusual. It was his features.

Baron Gussy was a patchwork man, in every sense of the word. Every one of his features had been bought, or more often simply taken, from someone else, and recombined into the form standing over Brielle right now. His face was a jigsaw puzzle, each small section grafted to the next. Brielle had no idea how he thought the effect looked anything like natural, for no two parts were exactly matched. Perhaps that was the point, she realised. Perhaps he sought to deliberately project an air of macabre eccentricity, the better to put those he dealt with at a disadvantage.

Brielle’s source had told her that the effect was not limited to the baron’s face, however, and that every organ in his body had been sourced from someone else’s; to create, so he told the loose-lipped doxies that kept him warm each night, the perfect example of mankind. Brielle couldn’t see it herself.

His mismatched lips twisted into an unctuous grin, the baron bowed slightly at the waist and with a flourish indicated a shadowed alcove guarded by several more stubjacks of the type she had confronted outside. As she stood, she couldn’t help but notice the covetous glance he cast towards the crate held between the two servitors.

‘Shall we retire to somewhere more private, Madam Gerrit?’ he said. Making her way past the baron, Brielle could not help but notice the furtive glances cast her way by many amongst the crowd. Many were appeared unhealthily curious, but the acid glares of a pair of richly dressed women nearby made her scowl with irritation, for clearly they thought her some morsel picked up for the baron’s entertainment.

‘Come on, Ganna,’ she snapped as the waitress returned with their Asuave, a nasty little glimmer in her otherwise blank eyes.

Accompanied by a trio of obviously glanded house stubjacks, Baron Gussy led Brielle and her party through the crowded establishment, the masses parting without complaint as they advanced. Brielle fought the urge to pat the pocket hidden in the breast of her frock coat, and forced herself to be calm. She knew what she was doing, she told herself. She was walking right into the jaws of a trap, that was what she was doing, but that was the entire point of this little expedition…

At length, the lead stubjack reached an archway decorated with some mad artisan’s idea of baroque finery, and turned to wait as the rest caught up. Brielle took the brief opportunity to study the scene, acutely aware that she might have need to exit it very quickly indeed if this all went wrong. The low arch led off to a private seating area, a low table set between plush, cushioned sofas. A low-hanging chandelier, its guttering flames blue from the gas that fed them, provided just enough light for clandestine business to be conducted comfortably in the shadowy nook.

‘Please,’ Baron Gussy demurred as he took position beside the arch, the stubjack looming behind him. ‘Make yourself comfortable. But first, Madam Gerrit, you will understand if I take a few… precautions.’

Brielle’s eyes narrowed in suspicion, but she remained silent until she had some idea what the baron was intimating. Eyes open, mouth shut; that was what her father had taught her, and he’d done all right for himself, she mused.

At a nod from the baron, the stubjack following on behind the group reached into the inside of his jacket, Brielle’s breath catching in her throat as she and Ganna exchanged a silent look. She doubted Gussy intended harm, not quite yet at least, yet she was still relieved when the stubjack pulled nothing more dangerous than a portable scanning device from his pocket.

Brielle swallowed hard, but kept her expression as uncaring as she could as the stubjack ambled up to her, the scanner’s main unit in one hand and its detectrix-wand in the other. She raised one eyebrow in mild surprise that the lump had the skills to operate the device. But then, she’d once seen a ptera-squirrel trained to serve drinks to the worthies of a minor Navigator House; only for the creature to enter the second stage of its life cycle, morph into a ravening beast of teeth and claws, and butcher half the family before the dessert course had even been fully served.

‘’scuse me, ma’am,’ the man slurred as he approached, gesturing with the wand for Brielle to raise her arms. She felt a flush of irritation and the intense desire to knee the meathead in the groin, and the feeling only got more intense as he wafted the wand up and down, tracing the contours of her body as the control unit bleeped and burbled. Even when the machine chimed to indicate no hidden weapons had been detected, the stubjack continued to play the wand over Brielle’s body, until a cough from his master caused him to step back, a sneer on his grox-ugly face.

‘She’s clear,’ the leering goon announced, and ambled up to Ganna with less enthusiasm than he had Brielle. ‘Up,’ he ordered, but before the pilot could raise his arms, Brielle interjected.

‘He’s heavily augmented. He’ll set that thing off even on its lowest threshold.’

The stubjack hesitated and looked to the baron for guidance.

‘Then he can wait out here,’ said Gussy, his tone sending a quiver of silent revulsion up Brielle’s spine. ‘He’ll be well looked after; you have my word on that. Now, Madam Gerrit, shall we?’

Brielle met Ganna’s eye, the pilot nodding slightly to assure her that he was fine with waiting outside, though he was obviously less than happy to allow her to enter the baron’s lair on her own. Telling herself it would all work out to plan, Brielle waved the two servitors forwards towards the arch.

‘That won’t be necessary, madam,’ Baron Gussy said, the faintest hint of triumph in his voice.

Brielle’s heart thundered in her chest, but she managed to keep her voice level as she replied, ‘Baron, the exchange?’

‘Has nothing to do with that crate, Brielle. I’ve been in this business for a while, you know, and can spot a decoy easily enough. I assume the item is secreted about your person, in some shielded pocket perhaps?’

Brielle afforded the smug bastard a shallow tip of the head and flashed him an ego-quenching smile. ‘Fair enough,’ she said, and gestured for the servitors to set the crate down out of the way, before stepping beneath the low archway and into the private alcove.

Without waiting to be invited, Brielle seated herself amongst the plush cushions, leaning back in an effort to appear entirely at ease with the situation despite what she felt inside. The air was sweet with incense, and not the sacred type burned in the shrines of the Ecclesiarchy. Despite its veneer of luxury, the place was cheap and dirty, soiled with a heady mix of sin and ennui.

‘Ah,’ said the baron, his voice dripping with what he evidently thought was sophistication and charm. Brielle had been patronised by far better men than he and she only ever tolerated it when there was a profit to be made. Now, sadly, was one of those times. ‘Make yourself comfortable, my dear, and we’ll begin.’

With a curt gesture, the baron despatched one of the stubjacks to stand in the archway, before seating himself opposite the low table from Brielle. The flickering gaslight cast by the low chandelier seemed to exaggerate the patchwork effect of his skin and highlight the fact that each of his eyes was a different colour and size. In fact, the way he was sitting, it appeared almost as if his legs were a different length, the joints somehow wrong.

‘I’m afraid we’re all out of Erisian Hors d’age,’ he said, a sly glint in his eye – the smaller, dark brown one. ‘Though I was once offered an early first century M.37 amasec from the equatorial foothills of San Leor.’

Always the amasec, Brielle thought to herself. With a million worlds in the Imperium you’d think these people would try something different…

‘I’m fine,’ Brielle replied, not actually wanting to risk drinking whatever might be set before her.

‘Quite sensible,’ said the baron. ‘Perhaps later, after we’ve done business, eh?’

Not on your life, Brielle thought sharply. ‘That would be nice,’ she said sweetly. ‘Speaking of which…?’

‘Indeed,’ said the baron, reclining back into the cushioned seating as he spoke. It was clear from the predatory glint in his eye that he was about to play all of his hand at once, as Brielle had been counting on him doing. ‘You have the item on your person. Please place it on the table where I can see it.’

Hesitating slightly for effect, Brielle smiled coyly. She reached up and slid her hand into the lining of her frock coat’s left breast, watching him follow the movement with his mismatched eyes. With a deft motion, she unsealed the hidden, null-weave lined pocket and withdrew an object the size and shape of a simple, unadorned ring.

Reaching forwards slowly, she placed the ring in the centre of the table, before leaning back to watch the baron’s reaction. By the gleam in his eye, the larger, blue one this time, she knew he was hooked.

‘What is its pedigree?’ he said, his gaze fixed with unwavering intensity on the small item.

‘It was retrieved from one of the rediscovered fane worlds spinward of the Ring of Fire,’ said Brielle, and as far as she knew it had been.

‘By whom?’ he demanded, his voice tinged with something akin to lust.

‘By a flesh-wright clan out of the fourth quadrant,’ she said, though that part of the tale was far from certain too.

‘And you came into possession of it how?’ he leered, his mask of sophistication and charm now almost entirely slipped. ‘Tell me how you found this… wonder.’

‘The flesh-wrights were contracted by a… competitor of the Arcadius,’ she said, more certain of this part of the story, for she had been present throughout much of it. ‘But they came off worse in a small war over trade rights with the Ultima Centauri annex. This,’ she waved languidly towards the ring, ‘was part of the settlement.’

‘Have you… tested it?’ the baron all but whispered.

You must be mad, Brielle thought. She knew full well what it was said to be capable of. The ring was said to be imbued with the power of some impossibly ancient and thankfully extinct xenos race that, when worn, reshaped the flesh of the bearer into new and extreme forms. It was said that it took a mind of great power to control the drastic process, but that the results were spectacular, or hideous, depending on the willpower of the wearer. Though Brielle herself was undecided on the veracity of the claims, she had little doubt that Baron Gussy was mad enough to believe them and to try to utilise the artefact’s power, hence the exchange.

Speaking of which, Brielle thought. ‘And you have the icon ready?’ she asked, making every effort to sound casual and relaxed despite her fluttering belly. If he’d just produce the icon and let her get on her way, she knew an eldar corsair prince who was prepared to cede a paradise world for possession of it.

But she knew it wasn’t going to be that simple.

Tearing his eyes from the small ring in the centre of the table, Baron Gussy leaned back in the sofa and as he did so, he reached up to his own collar, just as Brielle had minutes before. Undoing the first few buttons of his jerkin and the shirt beneath, he revealed far more than the patchwork skin of his chest. About his neck, secured by a simple leather thong, was a gleaming, bone-white pendant, a sacred icon a mad alien was prepared to pay an entire world to possess.

‘How much is this worth to you?’ said Gussy.

Here we go, thought Brielle. She knew he wouldn’t be able to resist it, though a small part of her had dared hope he might be reasonable.

‘How much are you worth?’ he continued.

‘Baron,’ she said, interrupting him in the hope that he might allow himself to be diverted, and to avoid the otherwise inevitable unpleasantness. ‘I’d far rather…’

‘I’d far rather you listen, my dear,’ he interjected. ‘Rather than interrupt. It’s so rude.’

Brielle nodded sullenly, allowing the fool his moment of vainglory.

‘I’ve decided I want to expand my operations. I think a spot of extortion is in order.’

Brielle sighed and cast her eyes to the ceiling in what she hoped was a display of nonchalant dismissal. ‘Go on then,’ she breathed. ‘Name it.’

The little display had the effect Brielle had hoped for, the baron’s expression changing instantly from haughty pseudo-sophistication to flushed annoyance. Strange, she thought, how each section of the flesh on his patchwork face went a slightly different colour.

‘You shall remain here,’ he said coldly, all pretence of civility gone. ‘Your father shall receive my demand when I’ve considered just what you might be worth.’

‘You can’t even pronounce how much I’m worth,’ Brielle replied, her voice low and dangerous. This idiot was really starting to annoy her now.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure,’ said Gussy. ‘I’m told the trade routes on the far eastern fringe have been drying up for a few years now. They say there’s a shadow out there, and that worlds are just falling silent, one system at a time.’

Brielle said nothing. Eyes open, mouth shut.

‘Remind me,’ said Gussy. ‘Where does the Arcadius derive most of its wealth…?’

‘You don’t know half what you think you do, baron,’ Brielle all but growled, though in truth it surprised her just how much knowledge of her family’s business he had. It was true that something was stirring out beyond the eastern fringe and that it was affecting the trade routes the Clan Arcadius had relied upon for generations, but that was far from the whole picture.

‘I know enough,’ he snapped. ‘Enough to know that your father might be keen to shed certain peripheral assets to have you returned safely to him.’

‘Peripheral assets?’ said Brielle. ‘What are you…’

‘I know the Arcadius owns half of Zealandia. How about that for an opening offer, hmm?’

Brielle was stunned. How this petty underworld crimelord thought he could get away with wresting ownership of a significant Terran conurbation was beyond her. Clearly, the man’s ego outmatched his ability by some degree.

‘Enough,’ she said, waving a hand dismissively and leaning back once more. With a sudden motion, she swung her legs up and planted her booted feet on the low table, sending the priceless xenos ring pattering across the stained carpet. Gussy tried as hard as he could to look unconcerned, but his mismatched eyes tracked the ring as it rolled to a halt, then they switched back to Brielle. ‘I’m offering you this one chance to play nice, Baron Gussy, then things get messy. Understood?’

The baron’s lips twisted into a mocking sneer. Messy it is then.

Flicking her head back in a gesture that some might have taken for arrogance, Brielle caused one of her intricately plaited braids of dark hair to drop down across her face. She made to reach up and hook the errant strand away, but as finger and thumb closed about the braid, she squeezed, triggering the small, Jokaero-built device secreted within.

‘This,’ she said to the baron, ‘is a ground to orbit transmitter.’

‘Nonsense,’ he replied, though he licked his lips with evident nervousness. ‘There’s no way you’d have got it through the scanner.’

‘Perhaps I wouldn’t have, if your goon had had his mind on his duty, and not my…’

‘You’re bluffing.’

‘My light cruiser is, right now, holding geosynchronous orbit overhead. My spies have passed on the locations of a number of your holdings out in the swamps, and even as we speak, several macro-scale bombardment batteries are trained on each. If I’m not back soon, with the icon, those holdings are getting bombed right back to the Dark Age.

‘Got it?’

‘You’re bluffing,’ he repeated, before standing as if to intimidate her.

Her gaze fixed unblinkingly on his, Brielle brought the lock of hair to her mouth, squeezed, and said, ‘Fairlight, target alpha, now.’

A bead of sweat appeared on one of the sections of flesh on Baron Gussy’s forehead and he flexed his velvet-gloved hands as he stood over the reclining Brielle. The moment stretched on for what seemed an age, and then a ghost of a smirk appeared at the baron’s lips as he evidently decided that Brielle was, as he had hoped, bluffing.

But she wasn’t. His smile vanished as a sound like distant thunder rolled over Quagtown, a low, growling tremor passing up through the rock, transmitted through the metal and timber construction and causing the flickering chandelier to shake ever so slightly, yet ominously.

Gussy was the first to break the impasse, and he turned sharply to the house stubjack standing in the archway. ‘Find out what that was, now!’

‘That was your safe house twenty kilometres due south taking a direct hit from an orbital bombardment,’ she said, not trying particularly hard not to smirk.

‘What…?’ he stammered. ‘How did you…?’

‘And that,’ she said as a second, far stronger rumble brought a wave of panicked shouts from the crowd in the main part of the palace, ‘was your secret clearing house on the ridgeline seventy east.’

‘You spoiled little harpy!’ the baron spat, his rage exploding as several of his guards pressed into the archway with concern and confusion writ large on their faces. Brielle simply smiled and remained outwardly nonchalant, though she knew the moment of truth was at hand.

‘Give me the icon,’ she said flatly, ‘and your little pleasure lodge on the coast doesn’t get flattened.’

His eyes wide with dumb horror, the baron reached up to the icon at this throat and grasped it in a fist. ‘You’re mad! I’m not giving you a…’

In the blink of an eye, Brielle was up off of the cushioned sofa, propelling herself through the air in a cat-like leap that brought her into contact with the stunned baron. The two went down in a confused tangle, and when they came up again, the guards pressing in with pistols raised, Brielle had Gussy by the neck. One hand was twisted about the thong on which the eldar icon hung, constricting his neck and cutting off his breathing. Even now, each segment of his patchwork face was going a different shade of purple. The other hand was reaching under the upturned table, retrieving something mislaid but a moment before.

‘Back, meatheads!’ Brielle shouted, putting as much authority as she could into the order. ‘Ganna! Are you there, Ganna?’ she shouted as the guards took a step back, clearly not knowing what the hell to do.

‘Here, mistress!’ the pilot’s strained voice sounded from somewhere behind the wall of hired muscle. ‘I’m a little…’

‘Let him go or your boss gets it,’ Brielle demanded, one hand twisting the thong still more and causing the baron to squeal in sudden panic while the other deposited a small object in a voluminous coat pocket.

‘Do it!’ he managed, his voice high-pitched and breathless. ‘Do as she says!’

There was a moment of tense, uncertain silence, before the guards lowered their pistols and started backing out of the alcove, though they moved slowly and were obviously ready to react to any sudden movement.

Brielle jerked on the thong and shoved Gussy forwards, using his stumbling body as a shield should any of the goons open fire. It was a somewhat hollow gesture, she knew, and one that relied on them being more concerned that their boss lived than that she died, but it seemed to be having the desired effect. Within seconds, the goons had all backed out of the alcove, revealing Ganna and the servitors, the former’s concern etched across his face, the latter as blank-eyed and vacant as ever.

‘Time we were leaving,’ said Brielle, moving backwards towards the entrance. Ganna voiced a word of command and he and the two servitors set off after her, the already spooked crowd scattering at the sight of so many drawn weapons.

Just then, one of the guards made the worst move of his career. Raising a knock-off Arbites-issue stubber, he shouted, ‘Let him go or I’ll shoot your damn head clean off your…’

The idiot never got to complete his sentence, a shockingly loud blast filling the air and turning his entire chest cavity into a smoking, ragged mess even as he looked down with incomprehension. A moment later, the guard crashed backwards to the deck, revealing Ganna, his concealed, forearm mounted bolt pistol ready to fire at anyone else that fancied early retirement.

‘Now it’s time we were leaving…’ said Brielle, dragging the squirming Baron Gussy by the neck as she reached the hatch.

The flight back to the landing pad took far longer than Brielle had planned, for the entire town was in uproar. It wasn’t the panic at the Quagtown Palace that Brielle had unleashed that had got the population so stirred up, but the continuous stream of fire lancing down through the murky clouds to strike death and destruction at seemingly random points out in the swamplands surrounding the settlement. Though the target of every bombardment was in fact one of Baron Gussy’s holdings, the rest of the criminal fraternity weren’t to know that. Every petty crime lord in the town thought he was the target of the attacks, and that they were being mounted by some bitter rival suddenly possessed of an overwhelming weight of orbital firepower.

At length however Brielle, her prisoner, who was by now being carried between the two servitors, and Ganna reached the head of the ramshackle iron stairway leading up to the landing pad. The deck was a riot of activity as the ground crew fought to get craft ready for a hasty departure, but Brielle’s shuttle was, fortunately, still present, and intact. The guards she had employed to watch over the shuttle, largely as a means of announcing her presence to the local crime scene, were milling nearby, more interested in the distant, blossoming explosions than doing their job.

Knowing her small party had but seconds before they were noticed, Brielle rounded on the baron and gripped the alien icon hung about his neck. ‘Mine, I think,’ she said, before tearing it free with a savage twist.

‘The shuttle!’ Brielle yelled to her pilot. ‘Run!’

Ganna and Brielle powered forwards, but the servitors were left behind, the struggling Baron Gussy still held firmly between them in their vice-like, biomechanical grip. In seconds, the pair had reached the shuttle and the access ramp was lowering on screaming hydraulics. The baron started raving at the guards to apprehend Brielle and her pilot.

The ramp seemed to Brielle to be lowering far slower than it ever had. The roar of a handgun split the air and a hard round spanged off the hull right by Brielle’s head, forcing her to duck down as Ganna tracked the firer with his concealed weapon.

A burst of stubber fire from off to the left told the pair that a stand-up fight wasn’t a great proposition, and an instant later the hull where Brielle had been standing just a moment before was peppered with rounds, sending up a riot of angry sparks.

Fortunately, the ramp was now lowered enough for Brielle to throw herself inside, and within seconds Ganna was in too, scrambling for the cockpit even as Brielle threw the hatch into reverse and hard rounds continued to ricochet from the hull.

At the sound of the engines powering up to full output, Brielle collapsed onto the deck, her head spinning with a potent mix of adrenaline and relief. Those, and something more, she thought as she collapsed in a fit of dirty giggles.

It took Baron Gussy’s minions almost an hour to prise the mind-locked servitors’ grip off of his arms, and by the time they had, he was beyond furious. Stalking back to the Quagtown Palace, his guards barging the panicked locals out of his path, he raged at this turn of events. He had sought to take advantage of a rumour that the fortunes of the Arcadius were on the wane thanks to a decline in trade from the eastern fringe, but he was lucky to have come away with his life. Lucien Gerrit’s daughter was a she-devil, he saw, but she had made one crucial mistake. She had left him alive, an enemy at her back. That thought fired him with a curious mix of dread and desire. How he longed to break the Arcadius, he thought, and how he’d like to…

Before he realised it, the baron was back at the palace, its main hall now empty of patrons and the floors strewn with the detritus of panic. Drinking vessels were scattered or smashed across the ground and tables and chairs were upturned. His mouth twisting into a nasty sneer, Gussy made for his alcove, determined at least to recover the ring Brielle had offered in exchange for the eldar icon.

It wasn’t there. Of course it wasn’t, he thought. That harpy must have snatched it up in the confusion of her escape, and left him with nothing at all to show for his attempted double cross.

He could really use a drink, but it looked like the serving staff had all fled, along with the stampeding patrons. Resolving to fetch his own, he looked about for a discarded bottle, but instead, his eyes settled on the stasis crate Brielle’s two servitors had carried into the palace. They had set it down by the alcove, he realised as his eyes narrowed in suspicion, at her word…

‘No…’ he breathed as his eyes darted nervously about the dark, empty hall. Several of the stitched-together segments of skin on his forehead began to sweat, and one of his mismatched eyes started to twitch involuntarily. ‘No, no, no,’ he stammered as he closed on the box, his gaze fixating on the status panel on its side, a red tell-tale indicating that the stasis field had just deactivated. ‘There’s no way you…’

But she had. Three seconds after the blinking light turned solid, the overloaded core of the plasma charge that had been placed in stasis an instant before it went critical detonated. Baron Gussy saw his fate an instant before it overtook him, the second to last thing to enter his mind a curse on the Arcadius and all their daughters. The very last thing to enter his mind was the ravening nucleonic fires of the plasma charge as its core went into meltdown, the discreet blast wave expanding to neatly and utterly destroy the shabby interior of the Quagtown Palace whilst leaving its exterior with barely a scratch. To the denizens of Quagtown, the bass roar was yet more evidence of their impending doom, touching off a stampede as hundreds fled to be anywhere but in the centre of their tumbledown settlement.

For many months after, only the toughest of mutants would be able to survive the radiation within that ramshackle shell. By that time, Brielle Gerrit would be light years away, perhaps visiting the golden shores of a paradise world that had recently come into her possession…

The Problem of Three-Toll Bridge

Josh Reynolds

‘Look closely, Vido,’ Zavant Konniger said, his breath pooling around his head in a foggy halo. The ice-house was as cold as the Reik in winter. ‘Tell me what you see.’

The halfling shivered and stamped a hairy foot, trying to keep his blood flowing. Beneath his soles, Vido could feel the thrum of the Reik. He scrubbed his hands together and blew into them as he stepped up to the plank table on which the body lay. It had only been a day or so, but outside the ice-house it was summer-time and a man as dead as Wolfgang Krassner was would spoil all too quickly. The family was travelling down from Talabheim to collect him, or what was left of him, and the authorities had decided to wait a day or so before packing him in salt for the trip back, at Konniger’s request. They’d made room for the body by pushing aside the chain-hung pig carcasses and the baskets of fish waiting to be salted.

Krassner had been one half of a duel held on the Three-Toll Bridge, and had come off the worse despite a reputation for blade-work. The other half, a wet noodle named Jaeger, was considered a fairly good swordsman, but Krassner should have made a dog’s breakfast of him according to those public-spirited individuals who watched the duel play out. Since duels were now illegal thanks to the newly elected Emperor Karl Franz’s distaste for the practice, and the two had been stupid enough to have it in full view of the watch-house, Jaeger was arrested.

Fortunately for Jaeger his father was Gustav Jaeger, of Jaeger and Sons, a merchant house of some distinction and no little fiduciary influence. Unfortunately, Krassner’s family had influence as well, and Jaeger was still rotting in the cells and bound for the crow-jig, unless Konniger could prove he hadn’t murdered the man more than a dozen witnesses said he had.

‘R-rich,’ Vido said, trying to stop his teeth from chattering. Despite the cold, Konniger gave no sign of discomfort. The lean, ascetic shape of the Great Sage of Altdorf neither trembled nor twitched in his thin robe. Vido suspected that Konniger’s internal temperature was far colder than any Reik-side ice-house. ‘He was rich,’ he said, picking at the frost-stiffened clothes.

‘Mm, obviously, otherwise our client’s son would not be facing the gallows. Continue,’ Konniger said, gesturing sharply.

Vido grimaced and leaned in. He could smell the body despite the cold. Queasily, he lifted one of the corpse’s hands. ‘He’s a swordsman, and he practised regularly, judging by the calluses.’ He looked at Konniger, and the sage motioned for him to continue. Vido gestured to the wound on Krassner’s belly. ‘Not good enough, I guess.’

‘What else?’

‘What else do we need to know?’ Vido said. ‘It seems fairly clear to me, Master. He was stabbed in a duel.’ He shrugged. It wasn’t his business if potty aristos wanted to go around stabbing one another in duels. Frankly, Vido thought that there were too many of them as it was and that their propensity for duelling was some form of natural selection, like you saw in rats or goblins. Hanging Jaeger would likely only improve the breed.

Konniger grunted. ‘Your powers of observation are, as ever, startlingly lacking, Vido.’ He tapped two fingers against Krassner’s blue lips. ‘Do not look to the obvious, Vido. If you do, you will only see what you expect to see. Always look for what shouldn’t be there.’

‘Like the hole in his guts?’ Vido asked.

Konniger didn’t answer. Instead he leaned over the corpse. His fingers traced the contours of the forearms, the shoulders, the scalp, the jaw and finally the neck, pausing at certain junctures before moving on. ‘Ha,’ Konniger said. Vido winced as the sage forced the corpse’s head to the side. ‘There.’

Vido peered around Konniger. ‘What is that?’ The indicated spot was a small plum-coloured bruise on the corpse’s neck that put Vido in mind of a snake or rat bite.

‘As I said, that is what shouldn’t be here.’ Konniger waved a hand in Vido’s face and snapped his fingers. ‘Knife,’ he said. Vido extracted one of the half-dozen blades he carried concealed about his person and handed it, hilt first, to Konniger. The sage took it without looking and jabbed it expertly into the corpse’s neck, just above the bruise. Not for the first time, Vido thought that his master would have made an excellent assassin, had not ratiocination been his driving obsession. Konniger swiftly turned the blade and with a few flicks of his wrist had excised the wound completely. Balancing the tatter of flesh on the end of the knife, he peered at it. ‘Slide,’ he said.

Vido hastily unwound the leather roll he had slung across his chest. He carefully unlaced the straps and gently unrolled it, revealing a length of tools and instruments safely ensconced in thin pockets within. With shaking fingers he extracted a glass disc, ringed with brass and intricately hinged, from a padded pouch. Popping it open, he held it up so that Konniger could deposit the lump into it. ‘Careful with that,’ Konniger said as he wiped the knife blade on Vido’s sleeve. ‘It’s likely poisonous.’

Vido froze. Konniger handed him the knife back. ‘Do hurry up, Vido,’ he said, moving past Vido towards the door. ‘We have a murderer to visit.’ Hurriedly, Vido closed the disc, sealing the sample between two panes of sturdy glass.

Outside, the Luitpolsstrasse district of Altdorf spread wild in all of its urban glory. Crooked roofs and slumping chimneys marked the horizon and high brick buildings slouched together in neighbourhoods like antagonistic wolf packs, bristling for a fight. There were crows on the gutters and rats ambled bold as day across the cobbles.

‘See anything of interest, Herr Konniger?’ the watchman stationed outside of the ice-house said, leaning against the wall and bouncing an apple on his palm. ‘Did the dead man give you an alibi for the killer, perhaps?’ He took a bite of the apple as Konniger peered down his nose at him.

‘Corporal… Grygsson, is it?’ Konniger said. ‘A Nordlander, I believe, late of Salzenmund, given the way your belt is knotted. Said belt is bear leather, unless I miss my guess. The Salzenmund watch are known colloquially as the ‘Bear-Baiters’. Make note of his hands, Vido. See how they are fat and square, despite the leanness of his frame, indicative of a particularly strong grip. Strangler’s hands, the Arabyans call them. That apple, by the by, has been soaked in horse urine in order to keep its shine. I wouldn’t take a second bite.’

Grygsson had acquired the slightly stunned look that many got when they first encountered Konniger in the flesh. He looked at the apple in his hand and then back at the sage. ‘What?’

‘You bought, or, more likely, simply took that apple from the stall of Hamhock Shivers, late of Marienburg, formerly of the Moot, currently of Pinchpenny Street,’ Konniger said. ‘Hamhock has discovered that watchmen only take the shiniest apples for their unofficial street tax, and thus soaks certain apples in horse urine in order to enliven the shine. No, the dead man gave no alibi, but he was most helpful regardless.’

Grygsson dropped the apple. His face had taken on an unhealthy cast. His mouth worked wordlessly and then, with what Vido thought was commendable fortitude, he regained control of himself. ‘The captain said you might want to see our duellist,’ he croaked. ‘I’m here to escort you to Three-Toll House.’

‘You’re here to see if I found anything, if I’m any judge of Captain Stotlmeyer,’ Konniger said. ‘But lead on, corporal, by all means.’

Vido felt some sympathy for the watchman, though he wasn’t a fan of the watch in general. Between one of Hamhock’s piss-apples and the figurative blunt-force trauma of meeting Konniger, it was shaping up to be a bad day for Corporal Grygsson.

The ice-house wasn’t far from the Three-Toll watch-house, which Vido figured meant that Konniger was right. ‘Old Stall’, Captain Stotlmeyer when he was at home, was infamous for wanting to know everything and acting on nothing. He ruled the Luitpolsstrasse with a light touch, taking money with both hands from either side.

Vido had frequented the Luitpolsstrasse in his former life; it was a home for all sorts, not just criminals. He kept one hand on his purse and the other on his knife as they walked. Beggars, many of whom were known to Vido and all of whom were sensible enough to stay away from Konniger, skulked on the riverbank, scavenging whatever bounty the Reik chose to disgorge. There were dozens of little docks and jetties striking out in all directions from a handful of wharfs. Altdorf had a peculiar quality to it, like something grown rather than built, especially on this side of the river.

A shout caught his attention. Vido’s eyes widened as he saw the parade of placard-waving figures squeezing out of one of the area’s crooked, winding streets. ‘Master,’ he said urgently, as the warm air began to become close with bellowed slogans and off-key singing.

‘Mock-beggars,’ Grygsson spat, one hand on his sword. ‘They’ve been acting up of late.’ Altdorf had its fair share of dangers, but recently, the Luitpolsstrasse had become the hunting ground of a particularly aggressive breed of political agitator. The mock-beggars were mostly made up of the unrulier elements of the lower classes, with mobs of over-excited students from the University and the usual anti-imperialist, anti-provincial, freistadt types making up the hard core. Their number had begun to swell in recent months, since the election of Karl Franz to the Imperial Seat and the usual flurry of new taxes a new Emperor brought with him.

Konniger smiled placidly. ‘Indeed. Calm yourself, Vido, corporal. We are not the target. I believe they’re heading for the Fish Wharf.’

‘Stotlmeyer should let us at them,’ Grygsson grumbled, half to himself.

‘And then what?’ Konniger said. ‘There are more of them than you, and they know all of the best hiding places. Let us not forget the mess that the rabble-rouser Yevgeny Yefimovich caused during the Great Fog, eh?’

‘I was in Salzenmund then,’ Grygsson said.

‘I wasn’t,’ Konniger said blithely. ‘I should like to talk to my client before dark, corporal.’

Grygsson made a face, but didn’t protest Konniger’s chiding tone. Vido had figured him for a quick learner. Three-Toll Bridge was visible in the near distance and the smell of the river seemed to cling to every cobble and corner. It wasn’t an unpleasant smell, if you were used to it.

The watch-house, on the other hand, smelled like, well, a watch-house. Vido’s nose wrinkled as Grygsson led them in. Watchmen were coming in and out, some looking the worse for wear. If the mock-beggars were out, that meant the Committee for Vigilance was as well. Not to mention the Hooks and the Fishes and the Crab Street Claws and every other two-bit gang with a grudge. They’d be brawling in the streets before dark and likely after dark as well.

‘Jaeger’s in the cells,’ Grygsson said, leading Konniger and Vido deeper into the watch-house. It had been built in the wake of the Great Fog Riot, right onto one of the bridge’s pylons, making use of the ancient dwarfen stonework. The pylon was in reality a thick tower of stone, connecting the street to the bridge and built to defend the latter from an incursion from either direction. The cells were, of course, at the bottom, with the bilges and the rats.

They moved down damp stairs soft with moss and mould and Vido shuddered, mentally thanking Ranald, patron of thieves and luck, for never having ended up in a place such as this. Grygsson stopped at a cell – more an alcove, really – just above the water line at the bottom of the curving stairs. ‘Here we are,’ he said, unlocking the door and slamming it inwards with the instinctive ferocity of a man who’d been thumped by more than one prisoner in his career.

Jaeger flinched at the noise, and at first glance Vido didn’t think he was much capable of thumping anyone, let alone Grygsson. He was young and lean, with a mop of now-filthy straw-coloured hair obscuring his features. There were no chains in the cells, but he was shin deep in river water. ‘I–I demand to see the watch-captain!’ he said, voice cracking.

‘As singularly useless a demand as it is a foolish one,’ Konniger said as he gazed at Jaeger. ‘Your father said that you were possessed of an academic turn of mind, Herr Jaeger.’

‘My father,’ Jaeger repeated dumbly. He blinked. ‘He sent you to purchase my freedom then?’ he asked, his shoulders stiffening. ‘I’ll not have it! I’ll not use his wealth to buy my peace of mind while other poor souls languish in these torturer’s dungeons.’

‘The only other poor soul down here is Mad Harry, who’s mad and eats faces when he’s not talking to his pet rat,’ Grygsson said, leaning against the door frame, his arms crossed.

‘Even so, I refuse. I shall suffer as the common man suffers,’ Jaeger said, turning away. If he’d had a cloak, he’d have swept it around him majestically, Vido knew. Instead, he wrapped his thin arms around himself and shivered, looking like a half-drowned alley cat.

Konniger cocked his head, his hands clasped behind his back. ‘But you are not the common man, are you, Herr Jaeger? Felix Jaeger, eight and ten years as of last solstice, son of Gustav and Renata Jaeger, middle brother of three, the ‘sons’ of the firm Jaeger and Sons. Your father is one of the wealthiest men in Altdorf and as such is easily capable of affording the set fees for my not inconsiderable services. Mutual friends supposedly recommended said services to Gustav and thus, here I am.’

‘And who are you, then?’ Jaeger snapped, glaring at Konniger over his shoulder.

‘I am the man who is going to keep you from doing the crow-jig on the gallows,’ Konniger said. He turned and, before Grygsson could react, yanked the latter’s sword from its sheath and flung it to Jaeger, who caught it instinctively and with more skill than Vido had expected. Konniger stepped into the cell, heedless of the filthy water slopping around his robe. ‘Try and get past me, Herr Jaeger. Show me the skills with which you bested Krassner.’

Jaeger looked at the sword in his hand and then at Konniger as if the latter had gone mad. Vido might have thought the same had he not long ago grown used to Konniger’s methods. Grygsson made to bull into the cell, but Konniger flung up a hand. ‘Hold, corporal. I assure you that Jaeger is no threat to me or indeed to anyone, sword or no. He is, quite simply, too incompetent to be dangerous.’

‘I say,’ Jaeger spluttered.

‘You are a poet, Jaeger, and not a very good one. While your skills with a blade are highly ranked, you have, as yet, never fought an opponent outside of the chalk ring of the University arms-master. I believe you lack the necessary ruthlessness to draw blood.’

‘I drew Krassner’s blood well enough,’ Jaeger said. But his eyes were wide and white and Vido knew he was afraid.

‘Did you?’ Konniger said, spreading his arms. ‘Show me, poet.’

Jaeger’s face flushed. With a splash, he lunged. Konniger’s hand moved so quickly that Vido missed it, seeing only the sparks scraped from the wall of the cell as the sage’s palm struck the side of the blade and gently diverted it from its intended path. Jaeger scrambled back, mouth working but no sound coming out. ‘You are quick, but obvious,’ Konniger lectured.

Jaeger lunged again and Konniger repeated his earlier gesture with the opposite hand. The sage frowned. ‘A passable lunge, better, but still obvious to an experienced swordsman, which Krassner was, by all accounts,’ he said. ‘What did he say to you, Jaeger? Did you truly think you could defeat him?’

‘Of course I did!’ Jaeger huffed and darted forwards. Konniger caught the blade between his palms and frowned.

‘Then you were more foolish than my initial observations attested. Krassner was implicated in no less than fifteen deaths, all from duels. His family’s influence was enough to keep him from the gallows. He was a trained killer, Jaeger. He should have killed you.’

Jaeger grunted and tried a fancy strike that even Vido saw coming. Konniger’s arms moved like strips of silk in a breeze and then somehow Jaeger was upside down against the far wall and the sword was in Konniger’s hand. The sage passed it back to the astonished Grygsson. ‘But he didn’t, did he?’ Konniger said as Jaeger righted himself, water streaming from him. ‘He baited you and you fell for it, but he’s the one who wound up dead. Intriguing…’ Konniger nodded sharply and turned.

‘Wait – what about me?’ Jaeger coughed.

‘I suggest prayer, if you wish to contribute,’ Konniger said without turning around. He stepped out of the cell and Grygsson slammed the door with far too much relish for Vido’s liking. Konniger glanced at the halfling. ‘Come, Vido, I wish to examine that sample we collected before we proceed any further with this investigation.’

‘Better hurry, Konniger,’ Grygsson said nastily. ‘Those with the say want this over and done with. Jaeger’s due for the high jump as soon as Krassner’s relatives arrive.’

Konniger ignored the watchman and started up the stairs. Vido scrambled to keep up. ‘Master, do you truly think that bit of flesh holds the answer?’

‘Quite the opposite,’ Konniger said. ‘I believe it will only lead to more questions.’

As they left the watch-house, Vido breathed a sigh of relief. He could hear the sounds of the mock-beggars’ protest echoing over the wharf, and saw watchmen heading towards the noise. He wondered whether the Hooks and Fishes would get involved. The wharfs of the Luitpolsstrasse were their territory. Or worse, someone like Vesper Klasst, Altdorf’s premier criminal, could become entangled in the affairs of the mob.

‘He won’t,’ Konniger said, not looking at Vido. The halfling blinked, startled.

‘I didn’t–’

‘Your features are as easy to read as a Nehekharan papyrus, Vido,’ Konniger said, hands behind his back. ‘No, Klasst will stay out of this. As will the rest of Altdorf’s more larcenous citizens. The mock-beggars are the purveyors of a less stable form of mischief than men like Klasst prefer. Signs and chants and heretical pamphlets are nastier weapons than coshes and knives.’

‘It’s not like Altdorf hasn’t seen its share of loudmouths,’ Vido said, shrugging.

Something on the wharf exploded. It wasn’t an unexpected occurrence these days, given the state of things. Revolutionaries liked setting fires and sometimes those fires set off a store room full of flour or an illicit black powder shipment. Vido nearly fell, though Konniger didn’t as much as twitch. Vido wondered whether he’d been expecting it. ‘Mm, yes, but is it only confined to Altdorf?’ the sage said, stroking his chin, the distant fire reflected in his eyes. He extended his arm and snapped his fingers. ‘Give me my instrument roll. You will not need it where you’re going.’

‘Whuh–where am I going?’ Vido said hesitantly. He heard the sounds of fighting on the wharf. Someone was ringing a fire bell and the halfling was filled with the sudden, urgent need to be anywhere other than where he was.

Konniger gestured. ‘Into the Luitpolsstrasse, of course,’ he said. ‘I want to know everything there is to know about that duel, Vido. I want to know why, where, when, how and who and you will find all of that out for me, while I attend to other matters.’

‘But–’ Vido began.

‘I would hurry, were I you,’ Konniger said, beginning to walk away. ‘Things are only going to grow more difficult as night draws closer.’

‘But–’ Vido said, watching his master leave.

‘Hurry, Vido,’ Konniger called out, without either turning or slowing. ‘The game is afoot!’

On the wharfs, something else exploded. Vido flinched and began making his way towards the cramped streets and alleys of Altdorf’s slums, leaving the river behind as quickly as possible.

The Luitpolsstrasse curled up in the eastern quarter of Altdorf like a rat in a nest, nestled between two branches of the Reik. It was a jungle of wrong-angled buildings and narrow streets that curled back on one another like worm tunnels in soil. It was also more active than Vido recalled, fairly humming with life and movement. Twice he had to dodge into side-streets to avoid protest parades. People flung things from windows and doorways at the protesters and the latter, true to form, responded by breaking from the march to either throw things back or charge doorways. The air was heavy, as if a storm were squatting overhead. Something, somewhere, was burning.

To Vido, it seemed that the Luitpolsstrasse was a bomb and its fuse was fast dwindling. He dodged groups engaged in impromptu street-brawls and sought safety in his old haunts. Several were closed, but the Scalded Cat was open and doing fair business. The tavern was a slouching beast of a building, a wooden boil encrusting a section of the city wall. Vido felt right at home within the foul-smelling structure.

Coins changed hands for all sorts of reasons in places like this, and no one batted an eye at Vido’s questions so long as they were accompanied by a round of watered-down ale or wine. He left the Scalded Cat after buying three rounds of the house bilge, his purse lighter by half, but his head full of information.

Everybody knew Krassner, if not personally then by reputation. He duelled so often that most privately thought that he was being paid to do so. That wasn’t unusual in and of itself. Being a paid duellist was practically a respected career in Marienburg, and they weren’t thin on the ground in Altdorf despite the new Emperor’s distaste for it. But Krassner was only a youth, though his taste for the fleshpots and his undeniable streak of savagery separated him from the usual run of University boys. When the latter entered the Luitpolsstrasse it was usually on a dare or to prove their manhood. Most were lucky to see the next dawn. But Krassner had found a home with the mock-beggars, as, somewhat surprisingly, had Jaeger.

Those two hadn’t been the only University students in the mock-beggars, but they were the loudest. Krassner was a proponent of the Yefimovich method – violent revolution, hanging the aristocracy and instituting a Tilean Republic-style government, which had clashed with Jaeger’s outspoken opinions on civil disobedience. In fact, Jaeger had been the pen behind the last round of tracts and pamphlets that the mock-beggars had disseminated, the ones that favoured public discourse, non-violent resistance to aristocratic repression and an immediate cessation to the Buckle-Tax as well as the Pigeon-Tax and a subsequent refund for those afflicted.

Vido had gathered a handful of the tracts and he read them as he moved towards the next tavern. Konniger had been wrong for once; Jaeger had the makings of a fine poet and Vido felt his tiny, corrupt heart stir as he read both The Call to (Metaphorical) Arms and The Summons to (Literal) Action, though he felt that Jaeger’s representation of the Moot’s system of benign local tyranny as an agrarian utopia could have done with Jaeger actually having been to the Moot at some point. This was mostly because Vido didn’t think ‘utopia’ when he thought of the Moot, so much as he thought ‘vast quantities of goat dung’. Still, there were flashes of brilliance amidst the purple prose.

Jaeger’s lack of familiarity with agricultural realities aside, Vido was quite proud of himself. He’d ferreted out more than just the connection between the two. He’d learned that Krassner challenging Jaeger to a duel hadn’t been simply a fit of murderous whimsy.

So absorbed was he in the texts and the information he’d learned that he didn’t notice that he was being shadowed until well after the third tavern. He caught sight of them as he left the Cuckolded Rooster. There were at least four of them, and they were bigger than he liked. Vido darted away from the main street, leaving a trail of pamphlets in his wake. His shadows followed quickly.

He scurried through alleys and backstreets, aiming himself back towards the river, cursing himself for having been so free with his coin. If he could get back to Three-Toll Bridge, they’d fade away sure enough. That was, if they were just common bashers looking to investigate his depressingly light coin purse. The thought that they might be something else lent him speed.

Konniger had made a number of enemies, and by extension of his status, they were Vido’s enemies as well. The men pursuing him could easily have worked for Klasst or some other criminal that Konniger had discomfited. Vido’s heart began to thump faster.

The Luitpolsstrasse seemed to contract and expand around him as he ran. There were people everywhere and slogans and chants filled the air. The boiling point was drawing close and Vido had no intention of being in the area when it exploded.

He clambered up a wooden fence that split an alley in two. Behind him, feet splashed through puddles and one of his pursuers cursed and Vido suddenly realised that he wasn’t going to reach the bridge. Vido dropped down, groping for a knife. One of the men hit the fence, splintering it and nearly causing it to collapse on Vido, who danced back against the wall. The fence-breaker groped for the halfling.

Vido yanked a knife free of its sheath and pinned the groper’s hand to a section of fallen fencing, eliciting a howl of pain. Then he snatched up a length of jagged wood and walloped the pinned man upside the head, silencing him. The others forced their way through the remains of the fence as Vido drew another knife and skipped back into the darkness of the alley.

‘Come on then lads, one at a time, one at a time, plenty of me to go around,’ he said with more bravado than he felt. The men approached warily. Blades glinted in their hands. Vido tensed, ready to move. He never got the chance.

A slim, dark shape detached itself from the alley wall like a spider and a thin, solid fist caught one of the men across the jaw with a satisfying crunch. The others reacted with surprise and Vido threw his own punch, south of the closest belt buckle, eliciting a shrill scream. As the man crumpled, clutching his crotch, the last turned to flee, only to have his legs swept out from under him by Vido’s rescuer. His head bounced off the cobbles and he stared up at the darkening sky blankly.

‘Vido, my disappointment is exceeded only by my frustration,’ Konniger said, rising to his feet. He had exchanged his robes for a darkly-dyed outfit that resembled something a burglar would wear. ‘If you cannot handle a quartet of street-trash on your own, what good are you?’

‘I was handling it fine,’ Vido protested.

‘I beg to differ. You lack even the most basic facility in regards to thwarting pursuit.’ Konniger sank to his haunches beside the man he’d slugged and grabbed his chin. He twisted the man’s head aside and said, ‘Ha. There, as I thought.’

‘What?’ Vido looked and saw what looked like new-made scars on the man’s neck.

‘There were similar scars on Krassner’s wrists and inner arms.’

‘He was a duellist,’ Vido said.

‘Are you blind as well as obtuse?’ Konniger said. ‘Can you not tell the difference between marks made by blades and those made by teeth?’

Vido swallowed and said, ‘T-teeth?’

‘Fangs, Vido,’ Konniger said. He peered at the others. ‘Each of these men will have similar marks, though likely in different places. I’m told it is akin to imbibing the more potent varieties of alcohol, with similar long-term effects on those of weak character.’

‘You aren’t saying what I think you’re saying, are you?’ Vido asked as a shiver ran through him.

‘The evidence speaks for itself, Vido. Come, I wish to examine the scene of the crime before things come to a head, as they must.’ Konniger rose smoothly.

‘What were you even doing out here, master?’ Vido said. He blinked. ‘Were you following me?’

‘For a time, yes,’ Konniger said, striding out of the alleyway. ‘I used you as a stalking goat, Vido, a career for which you are singularly qualified.’

‘You knew!’ Vido said accusingly. ‘You knew someone would come after me!’

‘I suspected, yes.’

‘So what was that about examining that sample – was that all just for my benefit?’ Vido wanted to yell and scream at Konniger, though he knew it’d be like yelling at a wall.

‘Hardly, though I was quite aware of what I was looking at in the ice-house. Further examination was required for confirmation of my initial assessment. Remember, Vido, theories are not proof, in and of themselves.’ Konniger glanced at the fuming halfling. ‘Too, I needed facts, which I assume you gathered, given the resulting pursuit.’ Konniger stopped and cocked his head. ‘Tell me what you learned.’

‘Why? Likely you already know it!’

Konniger smacked the side of Vido’s head. ‘What did I just say about theories and proof? Sometimes I despair of ever planting the seeds of my methodology within that thick skull of yours.’ Vido rubbed his head ruefully and prepared to respond when Konniger turned away. ‘Tell me as we walk. Our time is limited.’

Konniger remained silent as Vido told him everything he’d learned. Around them, people hurried to and fro, as if preparing for a siege. Vido wondered whether the rest of Altdorf was aware of what was going on, or whether they even cared. How long before the temple bells began to ring and the aristos set their hired mercenaries on anyone who crossed the bridges from the eastern quarter? It’d be the Great Fog all over again.

‘You’re certain?’ Konniger said, as they stepped around a growing brawl between pamphleteers. ‘Krassner was set on Jaeger?’

‘That’s the word,’ Vido said, hopping aside as a tangle of gouging fingers, jabbing knees and virulent cursing rolled past him. ‘Krassner and Jaeger were on opposite factions, and Krassner’s lot wanted Jaeger to shut up about all that peaceful resistance nonsense.’

‘Mm.’ Konniger’s eyes narrowed and Vido was reminded of a falcon on the hunt. ‘And now, with the voice of the moderates locked in the cells, Krassner’s supporters have free rein, despite Krassner himself being dead.’

‘That’s just it,’ Vido said. ‘They’re howling about Jaeger being a tool of Imperial Oppression and Krassner being a Martyr of the People. Half the mobs out here are baying for Jaeger’s blood. The other half want to storm the Emperor’s Palace.’ He cursed as a falling body splashed mud on him. The streets were getting dangerous, and fire bells were ringing steadily. Vido looked at the sage. ‘Did he do it, master? Did Jaeger kill Krassner?’

‘In a manner of speaking, Krassner killed himself,’ Konniger said. ‘The wound on his neck contained traces of a dart crafted from bone, as I suspected. The dart itself had been smeared in the venom of the hixa, a nasty little insect native to the Great Desert, long thought extinct. The venom itself would not have been enough to kill a man of Krassner’s endurance, but it would have slowed him, made him awkward.’

‘So… someone shot Krassner so that Jaeger could kill him?’ Vido said, scratching his head.

Konniger said nothing. The bridge was in sight and he hurried towards it. There were mobs on the wharfs, some of whom were throwing things at the boats and barques which still slid down the Reik in the gloaming of eventide. On the other side of the bridge in the temple district, Vido saw improvised barricades being set up. ‘We’re going to be caught right in the thick of it,’ he muttered.

‘Some storms look worse than they truly are,’ Konniger said. There were watchmen on the bridge, clutching spears and shields that likely hadn’t seen use since the last riots. They made to block Konniger’s way, but a shouted command caused them to step aside. Vido hurried past them, practically stepping on the sage’s heels.

Grygsson was waiting on them, his face sour. He glared over the rail of the bridge at the mobs and muttered a curse. ‘They’re closing the river-gates,’ he said, looking at Konniger as if it were the sage’s fault.

‘As I hoped,’ Konniger said. ‘The Emperor is an intelligent man, despite his youth. I assume you have orders to hold the bridge?’

Grygsson spat and nodded. ‘Stotlmeyer is hiding in the watch-house, so I’m in charge. Captain Kleindeinst is seeing to the bridges leading into the Konigsplatz and the University, and the docks as well. Filthy Harald will keep the Hooks and Fishes from getting too excited and trying to join in.’

‘I’m sure he will,’ Konniger said smoothly. ‘Kleindeinst’s methods are infamously effective.’ Vido shuddered. Filthy Harald wasn’t a man to cross. They said he’d killed the Countess of Wissenland’s brother in a duel with nothing but a knife. ‘I need to examine the spot where Krassner was killed.’

‘What? Why?’ Grygsson said. ‘It’s not like that matters now… the whole city is a barrel of black powder just waiting for the torch to fall.’

‘That is your concern, corporal, not mine. I have my duty, even as you do,’ Konniger said, stepping past Grygsson. Grygsson growled wordlessly, but waved Konniger past.

‘Maybe we should be concerned about it, master,’ Vido said, following Konniger towards the centre of the bridge. ‘I mean, getting caught in a riot…’

‘That is not a riot, Vido. That is a carefully orchestrated mummer’s play,’ Konniger said dismissively.

‘What?’

‘Coincidence is just that,’ Konniger said, stopping. ‘It rarely occurs, and never with such frequency and precision. The duel was merely the second act in a play that I have seen before, at length. Middenheim, Marienburg, Copher, Miragliano, the setting changes, but the lines are the same.’ Konniger spread his arms. ‘The scene does not change, though it might take place on an Altdorf bridge or a plaza in Magritta. Two men stand facing one another, one the voice of caution and common sense, the other of upheaval and anarchy. The crowd bays for blood and swords or knives or what have you flash and a man dies. The mob follows the victor in baring its fangs at the authorities. Nothing of consequence occurs, save that the solid foundation of the authority is undermined ever so slightly, and cracks form in the stone of control.’

‘I thought it was just a duel,’ Vido said hesitantly.

Konniger wasn’t listening. He turned in place, eyes closed. ‘It is a constant process, like the lapping of the river at the roots of the mountain. The end result is the same. The mountain is replaced by the river. In time, a new mountain rises and it begins again.’

Vido swallowed. There were fires on the wharf and in the river a boat was burning as it sank. The purple of evening was lit up by the light of the fires. The bridge trembled beneath his feet. He thought of the marks on his attacker’s throat earlier. He saw Konniger looking at him. The sage had lowered his arms and held his hands clasped before his face, his index fingers pressed to his thin lips. ‘It is monstrous in its enormity, is it not?’ he said softly.

He pointed. ‘The duel took place here. Krassner and Jaeger circled one another, the former confidently, the latter hesitantly. Despite my earlier assertions, Jaeger is a fine swordsman, if unsure of his own skill. That skill is likely why Krassner’s… patron decided not to take any chances. Krassner’s previous opponents had been out of shape, old, or simply unable to defend themselves against a trained killer. Coincidentally, they were all leaders of the non-violent factions of the disorganised organisation known colloquially as ‘mock-beggars’. But Jaeger… Jaeger had a chance.’

Konniger turned, sweeping a hand out. ‘The crowd pressed close, providing the perfect camouflage.’ He turned. ‘Depending on where Krassner was standing, the assassin was likely positioned nearby. But Jaeger was too quick, or perhaps he did something unexpected. Regardless, the dart meant for him pierced Krassner’s neck. Krassner staggered… right onto the point of Jaeger’s sword.’ Konniger smiled thinly. ‘Jaeger was arrested, which proved to be a blessing in disguise, both for him and those who’d sought his death.’

‘I don’t see how it’s much of a blessing that he’s locked up and gallows bound,’ Vido said.

‘Oh but it is, Vido,’ Konniger said. ‘Otherwise he’d almost certainly be dead. But, locked up, there’s no need to kill him, not until the time comes to clean up any loose ends.’

‘You’re saying someone planned all of this?’ Vido said, trying to process it all. He gestured wildly towards the wharf and the fires. ‘All of this, for what?’

‘That is what I intend to find out,’ Konniger said.

‘And how are we going to do that?’

‘Simple. We are going to wait for whoever comes to kill Jaeger and confront them,’ Konniger said, starting towards the watch-house.

‘What?’ Vido fairly shrieked. ‘You can’t be serious!’

‘Indeed I am,’ Konniger said.

‘But – but master, the marks! You know what that means!’ Vido hurried after him. ‘You know what will likely be coming for him.’

‘Yes,’ Konniger said, peering at the last strip of sunlight as it slid over the horizon. ‘I do indeed know who will be coming for him.’

Vido stopped. What had he heard there in Konniger’s normally icy tones; fear, or something else? The halfling thought of an incident several years before, and of the steadily growing pile of vellum scrolls that occupied an expanding territory within Konniger’s study. And he wondered whether or not his master had been taken by the madness that sent rats charging into the jaws of cats. ‘Come along, Vido,’ Konniger called over his shoulder. He strode along the bridge as if he were out for an evening stroll, rather than walking towards what looked to Vido to be an unpleasant situation.

Drums beat along the river. The mock-beggars were out in force, carrying torches and lanterns and dressed for revolution. They surged towards the Three-Toll Bridge, as their leaders shouted about ousting the money-changers, tearing the gilt off the temples and other, altogether less comprehensible things. Grygsson and the watch were there to meet them, shields raised and spears outthrust. The mob struck the line with a roar and clubs and knives chopped into painted wood.

Grygsson stood just behind the line, bellowing orders, his sword in hand. As he and Konniger drew closer to the brawl, Vido heard a chant of ‘kill the aristo spy!’ and he tugged on Konniger’s sleeve. ‘Master, I think they’re going for Jaeger,’ he said urgently.

‘Why do you think we’re heading in this direction?’ Konniger snapped. ‘Grygsson, we need to get into the watch-house!’

The corporal paused in his exhortations only long enough to shout a curse at Konniger and then he turned back to the fight at hand. Konniger spat his own curse. ‘Lout; he’s so focused on defending the bridge, he’ll lose the watch-house.’

Vido saw that the sage was correct. The watch had formed up at the narrowest point of the bridge, rather than close to the watch-house. The side and rear elements of the mob were heading for the watch-house, trying to use an improvised battering ram to take out the sturdy doors. ‘Is that a ship’s mast?’ Vido said.

Konniger didn’t reply. Instead, he seemed focused on the crowd of waiting revolutionaries behind the battering ram. His keen gaze swept the angry, excited, ecstatic faces there as if memorising them. Vido knew who he was looking for and said a silent prayer to Ranald that Konniger was wrong. They’d barely survived the first time they’d tangled with her. Their luck might not hold a second time.

‘What are we going to do?’ Vido said.

‘We’re going to get to Jaeger first,’ Konniger said grimly.

‘And how’re we going to do that? There’s too many of them,’ Vido said.

‘Simple,’ Konniger said. ‘We shall take the back way.’

‘Back – what?’ Vido said, confused. Konniger started towards the side of the bridge and Vido got a sinking sensation in his belly. ‘Oh. Oh no, no, no, that’s not good at all.’ Despite his misgivings, he joined Konniger at the side of the bridge. The sage leaned over the rail, looking down at the river. He grabbed Vido by the shoulder with talon-like fingers and pointed into the darkness below.

‘There! What do you see, Vido?’

Trying to ignore the sound of the battering ram striking the door and the clash of weapons, Vido peered in the direction Konniger had indicated. His eyes narrowed and he saw that there was a small jetty there, where the bridge pylon met the water. ‘Is that a door?’ he said.

‘Of course it’s a door,’ Konniger said. ‘And it’s how we’re going to get to Jaeger before the mob.’

‘And how are you expecting to do that? It’s not like either of us can fly,’ Vido said, but he already knew the answer. Konniger stretched and cracked his knuckles.

‘You were quite the thief in your day, Vido. Let’s see if the old saw about halfling memories is true, eh?’ With that, Konniger hopped up onto the rail and swung himself over the side of the bridge. Vido looked up at the sky and made the sign of Ranald.

‘Patron of fools, thieves and foolish thieves, please look after me,’ Vido muttered, climbing over the rail with a resigned whimper. It wasn’t that he wasn’t confident in his abilities in that regard. It was simply that they were ill-equipped for what was likely awaiting them at their destination. That didn’t seem to concern Konniger, however, which meant he either had a plan, or he was coming up with one as they climbed. Whichever it turned out to be, Vido hoped it was enough.

Konniger climbed like a spider, which didn’t surprise Vido one bit. The sage looked like a bag of bones, but looks could be deceiving. He was far stronger than many bashers of Vido’s acquaintance, and quicker than a rat. Without his robes, there was an odd sort of grace to his movements, a jittery agility that saw him creep along the ledge of the rail and then slip down and climb hand over hand towards the plinth. Vido took a breath and followed him.

The stone was slippery and the going was slow, but as Vido dug his fingers and toes into the spaces between stones, he felt the old skills and instincts, never far below the surface, coming back to him. The Reik yawned hungrily below him, black and swift. Vido looked down and swallowed. He’d seen bodies, and not-quite bodies, sink into those waters before, and vanish with nary a blip to mark their presence. There were still boats on the river, despite the fires on the wharfs and what was likely fighting on the docks, going by the sound of bells coming from the latter. More bells sounded from the temple district and then from the quarter where the University sprawled. The whole of Altdorf seemed to be singing out in alarm and for a moment, the world spun around Vido. With a jerk, he stopped himself from sliding from his perch, his heart thudding in his chest.

What was going on in the city? Was it really as bad as it seemed, or was Konniger right and it was all just a smokescreen? Gritting the question between his teeth, the halfling began to climb along the ledge. Konniger was already halfway to the plinth, scrambling like a cat. Vido quickened his pace.

The plinth was a solid column of brick and broad stone long ago uprooted from the deep places of the river by dwarfen ingenuity. Each of the six plinths was hollow, constructed to be a fortress in and of itself, capable of standing off an enemy force for months if not years. There was a rumour that the dwarf King Ironbeard, far back in Sigmar’s time, had hidden a fabulous treasure in one of the plinths as well, though Vido had never put much credence in it.

Only the one plinth was in use now, and it was certainly under siege. The crowd around it had grown as Grygsson and his men had been pushed back along the bridge. The sheer weight of numbers was their undoing. Konniger had been right. There weren’t enough watchmen.

Konniger had swung himself from the bridge to the plinth, his thin fingers finding holds invisible to Vido’s eye. Despite the sage’s apparent lack of effort, Vido could see the sheen of sweat on his master’s face and the tremble in his limbs. He knew how Konniger felt himself, for his muscles were already aching with the strain of not falling.

He could feel the stones beneath him tremble as the mob’s makeshift battering ram struck the door again. The sooner he got down, the better. He swung out from the rail, reaching for the plinth. His fingers found purchase and he slapped himself to it as quickly as he could.

‘Hurry, Vido,’ Konniger called up from below. ‘Time is our enemy!’

Vido grunted and began to descend. It seemed to take an eternity, and when he was finally able to drop to the stone jetty, he was shaking and shivering with fatigue. Puffing, he leaned forwards, trying to control his breathing. Konniger didn’t seem to be out of breath. Instead, he was inspecting the door. ‘They locked it?’ Vido wheezed in disbelief.

‘Not locked. Merely warped and ancient.’ Konniger stepped back and sent a sharp kick into the door. It groaned as it popped inwards in a cloud of mould and soft splinters. ‘Let’s go. Stay close to me.’

‘No fear there,’ Vido gulped. He kept his hand on his knife as he followed the sage into the darkness of the hollow plinth. There was a recursive coil of flat, uneven stone stairs leading downwards to the level above where the cells were. Water clung in fat droplets to the walls and stairs and there was a creeping moss growing in the corners. Vido’s fingers tapped nervously on the pommel of his knife, and even with his better-than-human vision, the darkness was almost solid. He traced the wall with his free hand as they moved downwards. How Konniger was finding his way, Vido couldn’t say. The sage had his tricks and he didn’t always share them. From above them came the crash of the battering ram as it finally beat the watch-house door down. There were muffled shouts, and the sound of steel meeting steel slithered down.

‘Master, what are we going to do when we get to Jaeger’s cell?’ Vido whispered. For a moment, he thought Konniger hadn’t heard him. He saw the dim shape of Konniger pause and turn.

‘We must get there first, Vido, before we start worrying about what to do. Hurry up and stay close.’

Torchlight from the landing below stretched towards them, but Vido felt no relief. In fact, he felt quite the opposite. A fear grew in him, hard and primal, the fear of a mouse which knows that it is being watched by an unseen cat. There was a strange smell in the air, like far away desert blossoms and rotting orchids, and beneath those, the harsh tang of old blood.

Jaeger’s cell door was off its hinges and broken against the wall. The fight upstairs was still going on, but it was a sideshow, even as Konniger had claimed.

‘Hello, Zavant,’ a woman’s voice purred, only it wasn’t a woman’s voice in the same way that a tiger’s growl wasn’t that of an alley cat. Konniger froze and then visibly forced himself to relax, closing his eyes and sighing.

‘Lady Khemalla,’ he said, and Vido felt his bowels clench. Khemalla of Lahmia, the ancient and monstrous vampire they had crossed swords with some years earlier, during the so-called Case of the Tilean Widow. Konniger had been forced to make common cause with Vesper Klasst in hunting the creature, and even then they’d only just barely escaped with their lives. And now, here she was again and even worse, they didn’t have Klasst’s hardened killers to run interference.

A hand, at once dusky and pale, extended from the open cell and gestured languidly for them to approach. Konniger waved Vido back against the wall and stepped forwards, his hands clasped tightly behind his back.

‘Your heart pounds like a drum, Zavant,’ Khemalla said. Vido couldn’t see her, but he recognised the blackly syrupy tones from his nightmares well enough. ‘It beats so fiercely, like the wings of a dove in a cage of bone.’

‘Anticipation,’ Konniger said curtly.

Khemalla let loose a throaty chuckle. ‘Have you composed any more poetry for me, my sage?’

Vido blinked, not liking that one bit. He hadn’t thought Konniger had responded to any of the scrolls. Why would he, after all? But… what if he had? Konniger had done many things that Vido considered the worst type of foolishness in the name of knowledge, from taking wyrdstone powder in his pipe to translating the peculiarly predatory works of the mad poet Abashim of Copher.

‘It lacks the joyous decadence of Volpaire, but…’ Khemalla trailed off. Vido could imagine the look on her face. It made him shudder.

‘A momentary diversion, nothing more,’ Konniger said. ‘A game within a game, something you know quite a bit about.’

‘Yes, quite.’ Vido heard a rustle of skirts. ‘You knew it was me, and yet you came anyway?’

‘I thought it best to confront you directly,’ Konniger said.

‘Or perhaps, you simply desired to look upon my face once more?’ From a normal woman, the words would have been flirtatious. From a creature like Khemalla, they were terrifying in their implications.

‘In a way,’ Konniger said. ‘I wished to tell you that I knew your scheme. For two years, we have exchanged pleasantries – jabs and ripostes done in ink and hints. You teased and I thought. Once, you told me that Altdorf was one of many battlefields upon which you manoeuvred. I have come to block those manoeuvres.’

‘Have you?’ Khemalla said. Cloth rustled and Konniger stepped back. Vido heard something heavy suddenly thump to the floor. ‘How disappointing; wherever shall I get a new opponent of your calibre?’

‘I am hoping to provide you with entertainment for many years to come, my lady,’ Konniger said smoothly. Vido heard neither tremble nor hesitation in his master’s voice. ‘Release the boy.’

Khemalla laughed, low and long. ‘Now why would I do that, when I have engineered a city-wide rebellion to reach him?’

‘Because you want to know what I know, and I will not tell you unless you release him.’

‘I could simply pry the secrets from your mind, Zavant,’ Khemalla said. She stepped closer, and Konniger’s back was pressed to the wall, his hands knotted into fists. She stepped out of the cell, one arm half-extended before her, talon-tipped fingers spread and bent, her terrible, beautiful face twisted into a mask of gloating anticipation. Her other hand was wrapped around the scalp of the unconscious Jaeger, and rivulets of blood ran down his face and neck from where her claws pierced his flesh.

‘You can try,’ Konniger said, not flinching as she reached for him. His eyes flickered in Vido’s direction and the halfling’s heart nearly stopped. ‘Now, Vido,’ the sage said loudly.

Khemalla whirled, quicker than a serpent, fangs bared in a bestial hiss. Vido froze, but only for a moment. Instinctively, he drew his knife and hurled it with every ounce of skill and strength he possessed, knowing even as it left his hand that unless Ranald himself was on the stairs, it would do no good. Khemalla snarled and batted the blade from the air, her eyes flashing an ugly crimson through the veil of her night-black hair.

This is it, thought Vido, and he closed his eyes.

Khemalla screamed. Vido’s eyes sprang open and he saw the vampire release Jaeger and reel back into the cell, flailing blindly. Konniger had stepped forwards, hands cupped before him, and blown a cloud of… something into her face. The smell of burning pork and bone filled the narrow confines of the landing and Vido gagged. ‘What did you do? What was that?’ he said, too relieved to be angry that his master had once again used him as bait.

‘Powdered silver,’ Konniger said, clapping his hands. ‘And I have more where that came from, Lady Khemalla.’

From inside the cell came a snarl in reply. There was nothing human in that sound and it held the promise of hours of agony for anyone listening. Konniger gestured to Jaeger, who was unconscious. Vido envied him a bit. ‘Make yourself useful, Vido. Pull him aside.’

Vido did as he bade and Konniger stepped over the youth’s body and into the cell. Vido pulled Jaeger up against the opposite wall and watched as his master confronted death made flesh.

Khemalla’s beauty had been distorted by an angry red rash of suppurating blisters that cut a scar across her porcelain features. Her hands too were blistered and she hissed through a barrier of fingers. ‘I’m going to twist your head off, meat,’ she growled.

‘No, you won’t,’ Konniger said. Vido heard the tension in his voice. ‘I did not come unprepared, Lady Khemalla.’ Konniger extended one hand to his side and drew two fingers across the door frame in a complicated gesture. Khemalla shrilled and sank back, like a she-wolf confronted by a flaming brand. ‘Despite my expulsion from the temple, I am still quite versed in the methods of the divine.’

‘Prayers won’t save you,’ Khemalla spat, lowering her hands. Her muscles tensed in an altogether inhuman fashion and Vido drew a second knife.

‘No, but they will hold you at bay long enough for us to come to an understanding,’ Konniger said quickly. ‘I am no sorcerer or necromancer, Khemalla, but I am sage enough to know how to trap a creature such as you for long enough for the proper authorities to deal with you.’ Konniger’s eyes narrowed. ‘And trap you I will. I will bind you to this cell and my binding will hold until the Grand Theogonist himself can make it permanent. Is that how you wish this to end? Do you wish to live out the remainder of your eternity sealed away here, in this cell?’

‘You will be locked in here with me,’ Khemalla said, flexing her talons.

‘A price I am quite willing to pay, I assure you,’ Konniger snarled. He flung up a hand. ‘What is it to be, Khemalla? Do we live, or do we die?’

The vampire hesitated. ‘Speak,’ she said after a moment that lasted for an eternity to Vido’s fear-drenched perceptions.

‘I know everything. I know that recent, periodic uprisings in Imperial provinces and beyond were due to your influence. I even suspect I know why, but I have one question… why did the boy need to die? Why did he need to die by your hand?’

Khemalla’s burnt features twisted into a smile. ‘Who said anything about death? If I had wanted him dead, I could have let the mob I accompanied here have him, no?’

‘Then why did you come here?’

Khemalla straightened, once again every inch the noblewoman, despite the fading red marks on her face and hands. ‘Destiny, Zavant. It is a plague which afflicts all men, some more than others. It clings like grave mould to some, heaping upon them, making them burn bright to our eyes. You burn, but not quite so brightly as young Felix. I hoped to sever that destiny, for my Sisterhood’s seers have foreseen that it will be inimical to us in certain ways, in years to come. When it resisted my shears, I decided to possess what I could not destroy. Perhaps he could become a replacement for poor, unlucky Wolfgang. Or perhaps I shall simply dash out his brains on the wall.’

‘Perhaps you will do nothing with him at all,’ Konniger said.

‘He is too dangerous. He has too much influence with the mob for our liking.’ Khemalla shook her head.

Konniger grunted. ‘So I was right. These outbreaks of violence… you are weakening the authority of the Emperor. You are seeking to undermine the stability of the Empire.’

Khemalla’s eyes flashed. ‘Your empire only has the stability we allow it, Zavant. It is built on our shoulders, by our grace and mercy. We have but to shrug and your petty kingdom will shiver to flinders.’

‘But Jaeger is a danger to that,’ Konniger said.

Khemalla sniffed. ‘Poets always are. Look at that fool Detlef Sierck or the minstrel Orfeo. Stories are the only thing which last longer than the Sisterhood, and have more power. What sort of stories will he write, do you think?’

‘None any will read,’ Konniger said softly.

Khemalla cocked her head. ‘Destiny says otherwise.’

‘Destiny, like a river, can be diverted. As it stands, if he is exonerated, he will sway the mob to non-violence. No more riots. A new game begins, and it’d be one you would have to scramble to learn. But there are ways other than death or enslavement to keep him from doing so,’ Konniger said.

Khemalla’s eyes glittered, but she said nothing. Vido held his breath.

‘My investigation will reveal that Jaeger did indeed kill Krassner, and that he did so as an impetuous young man confronting an agent provocateur. He will be released because he agreed to tell the watch everything he knew about the mock-beggars. My influence is enough to get certain parties to provide evidence to back up my findings. Jaeger will be released, and the ‘truth’ behind the affair leaked. Krassner’s reputation for violence and depravity will ensure the silence of his family and that Jaeger is borne no particular ill-will for his death by the mob, but he will never be trusted again. Too, having met his father, I can say that revealing the full extent of his son’s dealings to him will ensure that Jaeger is cut off from his family as well. He will be isolated from influence.’

‘Yes, Gustav is quite touchy about propriety,’ Khemalla murmured. She tapped her lip. ‘And what are you offering me in return, Zavant?’

Konniger tensed. ‘A favour,’ he said.

‘A favour,’ Khemalla repeated. ‘You offer me a single favour, in return for sparing Jaeger and yourself and your ridiculous little servant?’ She stared at Konniger like a tigress at tethered goat and Vido imagined that in other circumstances, she might have licked her lips. ‘One… single… favour, from Zavant Konniger,’ she said throatily.

‘One favour,’ Konniger said again.

‘Done,’ Khemalla said, clapping her hands together like a young girl. She cocked her head and gestured. ‘It seems my mob has been dispersed. I must be going.’ She stepped past Konniger, her fingers stretching out to caress his cheek before he could dodge aside. Vido realised that she could have been on the sage before he blinked, let alone incanted a binding spell. ‘I look forward to your next poem, my sweet Zavant,’ she purred.

And then she was gone, leaving behind only the echoes of taunting laughter.

Konniger seemed to deflate, and he staggered out of the cell, sweat dripping down his face. Vido swallowed. ‘Master, are you–’

Konniger waved a hand, but did not reply. Instead, he peered at the stairs, his face set like stone. Then, with a shiver, he closed his eyes and said, simply, ‘Damnation.’

‘What is it master?’ Vido said.

‘She beat me, Vido.’ Konniger straightened and chuckled bitterly. ‘I was so worried about the tiger in front of me that I backed into the pit behind me.’ He clapped his hands together and a sharp, savage bark of laughter escaped him. ‘If it were not her, if she were anyone else, I would not contemplate it, but she…’

Vido looked at him blankly. Konniger sighed.

‘Gustav, Vido. She mentioned Jaeger’s father by name. And he was recommended to me by a mutual friend, whose identity I did not bother to inquire after, like a fool.’ He looked at Vido. ‘You are the gambler here, Vido. What are the odds that she arranged this entire matter in order to put me into the position of offering her such a prize?’

Vido gaped for a moment and then shook his head and looked down at Jaeger, who groaned softly and began to stir. ‘No odds I’d take, I can tell you that.’

‘Yes,’ Konniger said, leaning against the wall. He closed his eyes and smiled crookedly. ‘Still, it’s quite flattering, don’t you think?’

PARIAH - AN EXCLUSIVE EXTRACT

CHAPTER 8

Which is of the Secretary

I had returned, and washed, and was awaiting dinner, when I was informed that the Secretary wanted to see me.

We were in the refectory, all of us except Byzanti, who had not yet returned from her function that day. Corlam and Roud were playing regicide on Mentor Murlees’s scuffed old board. Maphrodite, who was nimble, and quick to memorise physical actions, was helping Faria to learn the steps of a dance, a quadrille, that she would soon be obliged to perform as part of her current function. There was much laughter from the younger students watching this palaver.

Mentor Murlees came in, stood for a while to enjoy the amusement of the dancing, and then told me that the Secretary had asked for me. I went up at once. The Secretary did not debrief every day, or even every function, but some missions were considered important, and he expected a personal report.

I knocked, and he called me into his room. There was a large and welcoming fire burning in the iron grate of his fireplace, and his room was stacked, as ever, with books. They were his books, all notebooks, all filled with his own handwriting. They were of all shapes and sizes, for I believe he acquired them from many different stationers and binders. I do not know what made him write certain things in certain formats of book; I do not know how they were differentiated, or what sort of scheme he followed. The volumes were not even labelled. I do not know how he ever found any reference he went searching for.

There were no other books in his room, no published books, or books by other authors; no data-slates, no memory spools. His notebooks, all sizes and shapes and colours and ages, lined the shelves, the skirting boards, the library tables, the mantle, the side desk, the writing table and the plant stands. They were packed in boxes under the settle and the chaise, and stacked in teetering towers against the walls between the book cases, like the spires of a hive ravaged by clanwar.

‘Come in, Beta,’ he said, pointing me to an armchair. I had to move a pile of notebooks onto the floor to make a seat for myself. He was perched on the chaise, a stylus in his hand, and a notebook open on his lap.

He had eaten. There was a tray of dishes waiting to be taken away. He often ate early so he could press on with his work into the evening. A bottle of amasec sat on the small tray table beside him, along with a tiny porcelain thimble cup with a delicate handle. He liked a small amasec now and then. It was his only vice, I believe. He did not use any other intoxicants, not even lho-sticks, like Mam Mordaunt did. We never saw her smoke them, but we could smell them on her gown and hair.

‘How did you go today?’ he asked.

I explained it to him, and made a good account, though I left out the business with the warblind, and with Sister Bismillah, for he would have no interest in either. I talked about Blackwards, and made sure he understood that I fully appreciated the nature of the function. The Blackwards family’s age-old business in what they called collectibles had resulted in them acquiring many unusual artefacts, if only temporarily before they moved them to a buyer. The Ordos had believed for a long time that they were trafficking proscribed items. The purpose of the function was to determine if this traffic was deliberate or inadvertent, and to gauge the hazard levels of the items trafficked. I knew I would be visiting for several days as Laurael Raeside, examining their operation and stock under the pretence of assembling a portfolio for a mercurial and wealthy off-world collector.

The Secretary nodded along to my account, and took some notes. He asked a few questions, the most curious of which was, ‘Were you noticed today?’

I was puzzled. If we were detected or marked upon during a function, in any way, we were always sure to report it.

‘I was not, sir,’ I replied.

‘Not going to or coming from the function?’ he asked.

‘Not at all.’

He nodded.

‘Is there a reason you ask?’ I said.

He shook his head and cleared his throat. I heard the crackle at that moment. It was a particularly distinctive quality of his. The only one, in fact.

The Secretary was, I suppose, an unremarkable man. In his fifties, as I would guess, he was of average height and medium build, with ordinary hair, indifferent eyes, and a not-unusual face. He wore dark clothes, and his voice was plain and level. Nothing about him really stood out, apart from his inordinate collection of notebooks, of course.

And his cough.

I do not believe his cough was the consequence of any illness. It was more of a nervous affectation, or a habit. He simply cleared his throat from time to time. But when he did it, there was, behind the sound of the cough, another sound, a sound that lurked beneath like an echo or a shadow. It was a crackle. That is how I can best describe it: a crackle or prickle, like the fuzz of a vox signal, like static, like something very brittle crinkling.

It was curious. It was the first thing I ever marked about him. It would be the last, too.

The Secretary’s name was Ebon Nastrand. We only ever referred to him by his title.

He coughed again, accompanied by that crackle of vox static. It sounded as though he was trying to dislodge something gritty and fibrous from the chimney of his throat.

‘I have my reasons, Beta,’ he began. The door opened, and a young man walked in without knocking.

‘I am so sorry, Secretary,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realise you had company.’

I started in genuine surprise. The young man, the intruder, was Judika Sowl.

‘Judika?’ I asked.

‘Beta.’ He smiled, but it was a nervous, awkward smile, the smile of someone caught in the middle of doing something illicit. He glanced at the Secretary, eyes hunting for a hint of what to do.

‘You came back,’ I said, marvelling. In truth, I was so taken by surprise, I didn’t really read the trace micro-expressions of awkwardness to begin with.

‘I did,’ he said, laughing a breezy laugh and lighting a smile, the smile I remembered so well.

‘No one ever comes back,’ I said. It was true. In my memory, and in the recollections of students who were seniors when I first matriculated, no student of the Maze Undue had ever returned after they had graduated.

Judika Sowl had been three years ahead of me, and had graduated and departed two winters previously. I had, I must confess, been rather captivated by him. He was immensely talented and rather beautiful. He was still tall and slender, though his loose black locks had been trimmed to a more sober, businesslike cut. He had also been kind to me, tolerating the gaucherie of what Maphrodite had named my ‘crush’. He’d never treated me like a junior, or mocked my moony fancy, which must have been very obvious.

‘Close the door there, Judika, and sit with us,’ the Secretary instructed. He turned to me.

‘It is unusual for a pupil to return,’ he admitted. ‘Judika only arrived tonight, and there hasn’t been a chance to present him to the students and welcome him home. I was going to bring him to the top room presently, but you get to preview the good news, Beta.’

My mind hovered over what circumstances might have sent him back to us. We were all destined to serve the Ordos. Had Judika been found wanting in some way? Had he been sent back to the Maze Undue for remedial training?

‘A matter has brought me back,’ Judika began. He spoke carefully, as if deciding what he was going to say as he went along.

‘Work has brought him back,’ said the Secretary. He cleared his throat. There was a crackle of static.

‘You are in service with the Ordos, though?’ I asked.

‘Of course he is,’ laughed the Secretary.

‘Is it…’ I hesitated. ‘Is it as exciting and fulfilling as we always dreamed?’

‘It is very rewarding,’ he said firmly.

‘Where are you posted?’

‘I’m not allowed to say.’

‘Do you serve a famous inquisitor?’

‘I’m not allowed to say, Beta.’

I nodded. Of course he wasn’t.

‘Are you at least allowed to tell me what rank you hold?’ I asked.

Judika glanced at the Secretary.

‘Interrogator,’ said the Secretary. ‘Judika has already risen to the rank of interrogator. We are very proud of him. And not at all surprised.’

The Secretary looked over at Judika. The look, now I come to recollect it, was rather pointed, though I did not especially notice that at the time.

‘I was just telling Beta that issues of security are arising,’ he said.

‘Were you?’ replied Judika. He sat back on the old, cracked, red leather of the lounger, as if composing himself comfortably. He smoothed the tails of his coat over his crossed legs. ‘That’s probably wise.’

‘She has just begun a function,’ the Secretary went on, ‘involving the Blackwards and their famous emporium.’

‘Ah,’ said Judika, as if this explained everything.

The Secretary looked back at me.

‘You understood from the outset, Beta,’ he said, ‘that your present function was important. Some functions are practice, merely exercises to hone a student’s skills.’

‘This one is not,’ I said.

He nodded.

‘Not at all. What I omitted to tell you was that it comes with an element of danger attached.’

‘Jeopardy does not concern me,’ I said.

‘That’s good,’ said the Secretary.

‘But,’ I added, ‘it is better to know, to be prepared. Is there a reason you didn’t tell me?’

‘Only a concern that an awareness could betray you,’ the Secretary replied. He took up his tiny thimble cup daintily and sipped from it. ‘You might overcompensate, be over-wary, and thus give yourself away.’

I understood, though I was disappointed that the Secretary imagined me to be that clumsy.

‘What kind of danger might the Blackwards represent?’ I asked.

‘None at all,’ said Judika. ‘The Blackwards are nothing. But if they are guilty of the crimes we suspect, then they will have contacts.’

‘Beta,’ said the Secretary, ‘we suspect that a significant heretic society is operating in Queen Mab. It is likely they are procuring certain relics through the Blackwards, or have the Blackwards on a retainer to perform such work. It is likely they have inveigled influence at many levels of the city’s social structure. And it is possible they have detected the existence of the Maze Undue.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘For the school to function, it must remain secret,’ said Judika. ‘If the Maze Undue has been detected, we must act to identify and eliminate the threat, or else pack up and move the school.’

‘To another part of the city?’ I asked, aghast.

The Secretary and Judika glanced at one another.

‘To another world,’ replied the Secretary.

‘If the Maze Undue is compromised,’ said Judika, ‘it will be necessary. The training and preparation of agents such as you is too valuable to the Holy Ordos to be put at risk.’

‘So what must happen?’ I asked.

‘We will carry on for now,’ said the Secretary. ‘Judika has been sent by the Ordos, may the Throne bless him, to review the situation. He will watch over us, and assess if we are at risk.’

‘With luck, I might be able to smoke out and sanction this menace,’ said Judika.

‘Judika will be our guardian angel for a while,’ said the Secretary. He cleared his throat. Static prickled.

‘So, tomorrow?’ I asked.

‘Go back,’ said the Secretary. ‘Continue with your function. All functions must continue for now. You are not the only pupil engaged in something that is more than an exercise.’

‘In the evening, when you return,’ said Judika, ‘perhaps you could brief me and the Secretary personally? We’ll do that daily, just for now. Ebon will be waiting for you.’

‘Of course,’ I said. I was slightly dumbfounded, because he had just referred to the Secretary by his name, his forename no less, as if they were old friends or equals.

‘Well, you need a good night’s rest,’ said the Secretary. ‘Is there anything else you want to ask us before you go to dinner and then retire?’

‘Yes, Secretary,’ I said. ‘Is it the Cognitae?’

CHAPTER 9

Of apprehension

They both stared at me.

‘You said a word then,’ began the Secretary. ‘Beta, what was it, the word you used?’

‘The word was Cognitae, sir,’ I replied.

‘And why… why would you use that word, Beta?’ he asked.

‘It is a deduction, sir,’ I said plainly. ‘A heretic society, of influence and power. This is what I understand the Cognitae to be. So I asked the question.’

‘When did you ever hear such a word?’ asked Judika stiffly.

‘Last year,’ I replied. I didn’t much like his tone. It seemed as though he was preparing to scold me. The Secretary could scold me. Any of the mentors could, except perhaps Murlees, who frankly did not have it in him to be harsh. But Judika Sowl could not. Not even if he were a high and mighty interrogator these days.

I looked at the Secretary.

‘When the man broke in last year, and attacked Mentor Saur. He said the word before he died. Mentor Saur told me it was the name of a damnable and black society. I told all this to Mam Mordaunt.’

‘She did,’ the Secretary told Judika, ‘she did indeed. It was an unpleasant incident, which we had hoped would be isolated.’

He looked back at me. He cleared his throat, but still the static would not clear away.

‘Beta,’ he said carefully, ‘I do not believe that either Thaddeus or Mam Mordaunt told you very much about the Cognitae at all. Yet you presume–’

‘It was a deduction, sir,’ I said. ‘I simply made a deduction, and connected the few facts I knew. Was it wrong of me to speculate? Was it wrong of me to ask?’

‘Not at all,’ said the Secretary. ‘I think it’s very fine that you did. It proves that you are among our very best, and that your temper is of the finest quality.’

I saw that Judika was watching me very carefully. I don’t think he liked hearing me complimented in this way. I had once found those eyes so very appealing, but now they seemed dark and hard, like the copper coins they place on the eyes of the dead down at the Feygate Charnel.

‘Do not mention the word, or the idea, to anyone,’ the Secretary told me. ‘I will prepare some notes for you, personally, that we can review tomorrow. A few pointers.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ I said.

‘You know that the Cognitae impersonate, don’t you?’ asked Judika.

‘Yes.’

‘They act to effect infiltration, and they are trained in methods very similar to the ones we hone here at the Maze Undue.’

‘That is how it seems to me,’ I agreed, ‘and they impersonate even servants of the Holy Ordos.’

‘They do,’ replied Judika. ‘So be on your guard. If anyone confronts you, and shows you a rosette to prove his or her authority, do not believe it.’

‘I will not,’ I assured him.

‘What should I do instead?’ I asked the Secretary as an afterthought.

The Secretary hesitated, so Judika answered me instead.

‘Kill them,’ he said.

I had little appetite for the evening meal. I picked at it. No one seemed to notice, because the Secretary came in, and brought Judika to show to everyone. Faria, Corlam, Byzanti (who was, by that time, returned for the day) and Maphrodite had all known him in the old days, and they leapt up to greet him, and quizzed him incessantly. He laughed, and answered their prattle evasively.

Through it all, he kept looking past them at me. His eyes were still hard, like the coins of the dead.

I went off to my room to sleep. From the refectory, I heard laughter and voices, and later, a viol and tambor.

Later still, the Maze Undue was silent.

I woke, in the pitch darkness of night’s deepest part. The house had gone to sleep, and the lights had been put out. I had fallen asleep in my cot, over the book I had been reading, and my lamp had burned out. I had been dreaming. In the dream, I had seen endless dusty shelves lined with bric-a-brac, a piece of dream that I presumed had been inspired by my visit to the Blackwards emporium. I fancy that, at some point, the dolls from the shop window turned up too, and spoke to me, or rather made silent clacks of their wooden mouth-mechanisms. I felt eyes watching me as well, throughout the dream. I did not see the face the eyes belonged to, but they seemed as hard as copper coins, so I presumed they belonged to Judika Sowl.

I should say, for the record, that I set no store by the content of dreams. I have yet to be convinced by the work of dreamreaders and oneirocriticks, and have little belief in the prophetic nature of dreams, even though the Good and the Great of Mankind’s Imperium have often been led by clear and precise dream visions down through history.

Dreams haven’t, in my experience, had any authentic currency, and I mistrust those who fancy otherwise. Dreams are too ephemeral, too flimsy. They are simply the events of the day, disjointed and lent odd emphasis by our resting minds, and then swirled about like leaf-litter in an autumn breeze so that they seem to possess a life of their own, and seem to shuffle into some cryptic meaning.

Dreams are simply our minds resting, and saving to memory recent happenings and sights. They are like a system reset, I think, for the human mind. They have no purpose, and carry no weight.

Nevertheless, they can be unsettling.

I awoke in the dark, and felt, with a false certainty that dreaming can reinforce, that the eyes were still upon me.

It was the most curious feeling. I lay still for a moment, imagining it to be my dream lingering. I felt that it would shortly dispel, as all dreams do.

But it did not. I felt that I was not alone, or rather that there was, in the Maze Undue, some intrusive presence, a force, some malign entity that had got in while we slumbered and was spying on us all.

I got out of bed and pulled on some clothes, the nearest that were to hand in the darkness. It was cold, distinctly cold. Given the high position of the Maze Undue, it was often cold during the night, when the winds off the Mountains assailed Highgate Hill, but this cold was peculiar.

I struck a match, not to ignite my lamp and gain light, but to hold up a flame. It flickered and bent.

It was as I thought. The Maze Undue was old, and it had significant character and idiosyncrasies. Live in a place like this long enough, and you come to know them. I knew that in my room, a flame would only stir in a breeze if the breeze was coming up along the hall from the west end of the landing, and that the only way a breeze like that could occur was if the lower stair door had been left open.

I shook out the match. I pulled on my boots and stepped out into the hallway, pulling the door of my room closed behind me.

It was dark, but my eyes adjusted. Some little starlight was seeping in through the skylights and smudged window panes, and certain shapes had a silver outline. The rest was blue-black darkness. I could plainly feel the breeze now, gentle but distinct.

I was sure that no one had intruded. Someone had merely left a door unlatched down below. The Maze Undue was soundly guarded by wards and charms, by sensors, by motion detectors and by tripwires, especially in the ragged hem of the skirts. It was not a place that someone could simply break into undetected.

Except the man in the drill, the ruthless Cognitae agent, he had broken in.

I steadied myself. The key word was undetected. If someone had broken in, the alarms would have been tripped. The Cognitae assassin had broken in, but Mentor Saur had discovered him before he could penetrate beyond the drill.

I reached the stairs. Looking down over the banister rail into the deep, tight, long drop of the wooden staircase, I could see very little. I had expected to see a pale cast of light coming in through the open door below. There was no light. I felt the breeze again, against my cheek.

I crept down, all six flights, to the lower stair door. I made no sound. I knew which of the old, worn steps to avoid because they groaned or complained under a weight, and I knew exactly where to place my feet on others, so as to prevent them from creaking.

I reached the lower stair door. There was no cast of light at the foot of the stairs because the door was not open, not even ajar. It was shut, and bolted from my side, the inside. There was no breeze. Not even the slightest cold gust slid like a knife around the edges of the door.

I started back up the stairs again. I confess that I was experiencing a little anxiety. My solid, rational explanation had been disproved.

I went back up the stairs. Halfway up the six flights, I misstepped and made a stair creak. I froze. I waited. Nothing moved. Nothing else made a sound. I breathed out, and mentally scolded myself. Anxiety had made me careless, and had forced an error out of me. Anxiety engendered haste, Mentor Saur always taught us, and haste breeds carelessness. Carelessness is your enemy. Carelessness is not big or strong, nor even menacing, but he is an enemy that will kill you quick enough. Knowledge, for the other part, is an ally. Use knowledge, and he will guard and repay you. Do not allow Carelessness to make you turn your back on Knowledge, not even for a instant.

I knew the house. I knew the Maze Undue in intimate detail, and that was my ally, my Knowledge. But here was treacherous Carelessness forcing me to ignore that Knowledge and step upon a wooden stair that would betray me.

I reprimanded myself, and resumed my ascent with greater confidence and determination.

Back on the landing where I had begun my descent, on my own hallway, I stood for a moment. I felt the breeze again, quite distinctly. It could not be coming from below, that I had established.

There was only one other possibility. It was coming from above.

Now, above my hall the staircase leads onto landings and ladders, and a cluster of disused attics. We didn’t go up there, because the floors were rotten and unsafe, and so I had not considered it. But if an attic window had swung open, or a section of old slate work fallen away, that would explain the breeze.

I went up. The stairs took me to the next landing. Then a ladder gave me access to the roof-hole, and I pulled myself up into the attics. It was dusty, fearsomely dusty: as dusty, I fancied, as the legendary City of Dust, said to lie out in the Sunderland. I wanted to cough, but I kept the dry tickle under control.

The attics were spaces of beams and rafters, of platforms and planked shelves, of stone walls with old windows, which had been internal for centuries after some conversion or extension, but which served now as doors into other compartments. The ceilings were low in some places, and towering in others, slopes of tiled skin and wooden rib. Cobwebs drifted like smoke.

We had come up as children, when the attics were a place of escape and recreation. The ceiling of the fourth hall had fallen in after heavy rains, and after that we were forbidden. I remembered it, though, every turn and nook. I saw places where we had scratched our names on beams or slates or brick. Many names. The names of pupils who had been forgotten long before I ever came into the Maze Undue. Here, still, was a doll, a little pale thing with a china face, that some pupil had set upon a cross-tie years ago and had never come back for. We had found it during our explorations, thick with dust, but had not dared to touch or move it. It belonged here. As I saw it that night, with more adult eyes, I felt it had not been so much set down and forgotten, as deliberately placed, as if this cross-tie was its new station in life, a seat from which it should watch and guard.

In another place, I found a small glass beaker that we had left there eight or nine years before. We had gone hunting spiders, and the beaker was to cup over them. But we had found none, though the roofspace was thick with cobwebs. The beaker had been put down and never collected.

A breath of wind stirred through the attics. I moved ahead, and found that an old, boarded partition had been removed, a partition that stoppered one of the places where the Scholam Orbus and the Maze Undue wound into one another. Was it the work of children, coming up through the orphanage, taking down boards to explore? We had done just that, when we had been the children of the orphanage.

I half-expected to hear the laughter of a child, distant and stifled, tinkling back through the attic gloom, from hiding places. From the past.

And I did.

Writing the words here, just recalling it, I still feel the sharp, quick temperature drop of fear. It was not the most frightening thing that had ever happened to me, but it was close; it would make a shortlist of the very most frightening. The nature of it, in particular, the unexceptional fact of it, made it worse. An everyday sound, rendered uncanny by the situation, and delivered on cue.

I told myself it was simply my fancy. I reassured myself that it was self-suggestion. I had been thinking of it, and my imagination had supplied the rest.

Then I laughed out loud, realising that an instant of fear had deprived me of my sensible faculties. I had barely considered the simplest and most logical explanation: it was children. It was children from next door, sneaking in and exploring after dark.

I clambered over a low beam, dislodging decades of dust like talcum powder, and entered the next part of the roofspace world, homing in, as I thought, on the laughter I had heard.

But through the space, across the next boarded floor of the attic, no dust was disturbed. I was lithe enough, and I had not been able to move without swirling the stuff around. If children were here, even small children, there would be footprints on the boards.

Then, just ahead through the beams and cross-ties, I glimpsed something move. Something white… spectral, as it seemed to me.

I moved forwards. It did not hear me at first. Then it turned, and found me facing it.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked Sister Tharpe. ‘And how have you left no footprints in the dust?’

CHAPTER 10

Which concerns a desperate struggle

Sister Tharpe stared at me, her green eyes like the active lights of a weapon visor.

‘I did not hear you,’ she said. Surprise had taken even more of the fake Zuskite accent out of her voice.

‘You were not supposed to,’ I replied.

She composed herself. She was in her sorority’s robes, and her starched headdress had caught the starlight, making the whiteness I had glimpsed.

‘Beta, isn’t it?’ she asked.

She knew full well. Even in the low light, I could read her face: surprise, the awkwardness of being caught, and by me especially. She was trying to hide all of that, of course.

‘Sister Tharpe,’ I said firmly. ‘What are you doing here?’

She shrugged.

‘I confess, I could not sleep,’ she said. ‘I am new here, new to the scholam. I could not settle, even when all the children were soundly off. I thought I would look around, explore. I thought the activity might calm me and, may the Emperor protect, tire me enough for slumber.’

‘You are not in the scholam,’ I said. ‘You are in the Maze Undue.’

‘Am I?’ she said. ‘I had no notion.’

A lie. Easy to spot, from tone alone.

‘You must have known,’ I said. ‘You took away boards and came through a wall space that had been shut up.’

‘I didn’t realise, Beta,’ she said.

She used my name. An interesting ploy, meant to diffuse the tension. I wasn’t having it. I was fairly sure I knew what she was, and I was fast regretting not arming myself before leaving my room. I remembered Judika’s surprising words. But how does one arm oneself to kill a nun?

Not that she was. This Tharpe was no sister of the orphanage, though she had shown sense in keeping her robes on when she went spying so she could claim to have taken a wrong turn on her midnight walk if caught.

‘Who are you?’ I asked.

‘Bismillah told you,’ she replied.

‘Sister Bismillah doesn’t know you either,’ I replied. ‘How have you not disturbed the dust?’

She glanced down, and saw that I had noticed the unnatural manner of her passage. She looked at me squarely.

‘Let me pass,’ she said. ‘Let me go back to the orphanage. This is a mistake. Let me pass, and I won’t have–’

She stopped.

‘You won’t have to do what?’ I asked. ‘Hurt me?’

‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ she said. She sounded as if she was telling the truth, but all good lies sound that way, don’t they?

‘I can assure you,’ I replied, ‘you won’t hurt me.’

She came at me. I was ready for it. I had already guessed how she would attack. I had guessed it from the undisturbed dust, and so I knew not to be looking for a tension in the muscles, and knew not to be waiting for a sudden flex and leap.

She flew at me. I mean this literally. She was a telekine, and the force of her mind propelled her at me as though she had been fired from a circus cannon.

But I was ready. I dropped to my right, leading with my shoulder, snapping at the knees, just as Mentor Saur had taught us in evasion class. She went over me, and I rolled under her, coming up with my hand on my cuff.

She landed on a crossbeam. She was poised, knees bent, her arms wide, the tails of her robes trailing. She looked like a great white-crested owl perched upon a branch. She turned, springing down. Dust kicked up around her feet as she landed. Her mind was no longer lifting her. It was reaching for me. I felt it close around me, like the coils of a constricting snake, pinning me, pinning my arms, imprisoning me.

I turned my cuff to dead.

The null of the pariah broke her grip and cancelled her outreaching mind. She cried out, in shock and distress, to find her extension gone. The telekine, so used to the freedom of mental agility, always feels especially deprived by the un-limited blank.

She stumbled, the heel of her palm pressed against her forehead in pain. She cursed, in a language I didn’t know. She lunged.

I read the placement of her feet, the angle of her bodyline. I made a passing block, as Mentor Saur had taught me.

I was utterly unprepared for her strength. Even the impact of deflection threw me sideways. I hit a cross-tie with my shoulder, bounced off, and gasped in pain. The impact rattled dust and cobwebs out of the rafters and the blackness of the roofspace, swirling it around us like flour from a sifter.

Now a kick came. It was impeded slightly by the skirts of the sorority robes she was wearing. I ducked under the cross-tie I had struck, putting it between us, and her kick splintered the old wood, shaking out more dust like powder snow upon us.

I backed away. She swung under the tie, and threw a chop with one hand, followed by a jab with the other. I blocked the first with a forearm, and twisted my body to let the second pass my ribs. Just blocking hurt: the slap bruised my bones. The old boards under us were shivering and quaking.

She kicked in again, a spin kick. I leapt out of its path, then caught her ankle, and wrenched it, hoping to flip her off balance and onto her face.

But her balance was superb. She adjusted, on one leg, and turned the sweeping kick into a heel punch. Her foot, trapped between my hands, pistoned into my chest.

I fell backwards and my shoulder blades crashed into another cross-tie, bringing down a further deluge of dust. Winded and slightly stunned, I could not recover, but fell backwards under the tie, rolling and coughing.

She came under the tie, and reached for me. I realised that her level of training was superb. Even deprived of her telekine talents, she would take me down very easily. It was not a level of skill that had been honed in a ring by a mentor, day after day. It was a level of skill finessed through practical application. She had fought before. Many times. She had killed this way.

But she had not killed me. She was reaching out for me. She wanted me subdued. Why the restraint?

I didn’t care, in fairness. All I recognised was that her restraint was a weakness I could exploit. As she reached for me, I grabbed her hand and pulled her hard, so that her head and shoulder collided with an upright beam. This impact brought actual slates down out of the roof. They shattered on the boards beside her.

I was still prone. I hooked out my left leg, and swept her feet away before she could recover.

She landed hard, with a crash that shivered the whole section of the attic, filling the close air with more dust. I rolled aside to regain my feet, but by then I had entirely forgotten where in the roofspace I was.

The flooring ended and there was a drop of about two metres into a deeper space. I went over it and landed badly, injuring, in particular, my right elbow and wrist. My impact was the loudest yet. Several old wooden crates fell over, and my left heel cracked through the floor boarding, punching a hole in the plaster ceiling beneath. Light filtered up through this hole.

She leaped down beside me, and made to grab me again. I evaded, executed a half-turn, and blocked her next two blows, though my right arm hurt in the accomplishment of this.

In retaliation, I drove in a jab that actually struck home. She reeled slightly, and I moved in again, throwing a longer, extended jab.

I knew she would see it coming, and slide out of its line. In fact, I was counting on her doing so.

Because I was standing on the hem of her robes.

She tried to dodge, found herself pinned and tightly constrained by her habit, and her balance went. My blow hit, with little effect, but she was already wrong-footed and falling. She had been brought down by the sorority robes that, though she wore them convincingly, she was not at all used to.

She hit the floor heavily, and the floor gave way.

A section of the rotting attic boards, and the joists beneath them, unable to withstand further punishment, collapsed under her in a detonation of dust and splinters, and the most considerable uproar of snapping wood. She, and the whole portion of the ailing floor, dropped away into the corridor below with an almighty crash.

The damage to the ancient and decrepit house, once begun, could not be easily limited. What weakened flooring remained let out a warning groan, then proceeded to give under me too. Unable to grab anything, I dropped with it, feet first. It was a long drop, nevertheless, and the landing spilled me over. Pieces of roof and slate, and board and fibre continued to rain down on me.

I was dazed for a moment. The impact of the landing had shaken me. A piece of falling tile had struck me on the head, and made my vision and senses swim. I was choking on the dust.

We had come down into the upper hallway called the Top Walk. It was wood panelled, and lit at intervals with wall-mounted gas lamps. Though illuminated, this space seemed more impenetrable to human vision than the darkness of the attics above. Centuries of dust clogged the air like the autumn fogs that come up onto the marshlands south of Toilgate, curdled and yellow. The lamps made visibility worse, rendering the air as bright smoke. It was harder to see anything here than it had been upstairs in the dark. All I could make out were piles of plaster chunks, broken boards and cracked tiles that had been deposited on the hallway carpet.

I looked around, found a wall, leaned against it, and coughed some more. I could hear a bell ringing. The commotion had finally caused the Maze Undue’s night alarm to be rung. Were those footsteps racing up the wooden stairs below, or was it just the blood pounding in my ears?

My right arm throbbed with pain at the wrist and elbow, my left knee too, and I was sure that the tile had left a gash on my scalp, because that was the most painful thing of all.

I searched for her in the swirl. The yellow dust seemed sulphurous and toxic. I wondered what ancient residues of glue and animal hair and plaster had aerosolised because of the collapse. What foul old particles were we breathing in?

I took up a shard of tile, perhaps even the very one that had stung my head, and clutched it as a makeshift weapon, like the scrapers used on hides by primitive humans.

Where was she? A figure darted through the glowing dust ahead of me. She was trying to flee.

I followed. She had found the door at the end of the hall, slamming it open, letting in a welcome draught of cold air that blew back and thinned the noxious dust. I was still coughing.

I heard a shout, and saw Judika running up behind me. His face was grim. He was carrying a fine autopistol, and was busily loading it for use. It was a Hecuter 116. I knew this from the pattern books Mentor Saur forced us to study. I knew that it carried a clip of forty solid rounds, that it was accurate to almost half a kilometre, that the small, dense rounds could penetrate most surfaces, including standard body armours. The weapon had a bluey metal sheen and a black and white bone grip. That meant it was a custom-finished piece, a vanity gun, not bought from an armourer’s standard stock.

A vanity piece. Was this Judika nowadays? A high-and-mighty interrogator with a custom gun, and airs and graces too, no doubt?

‘Intruder,’ I snapped, spitting to clear my throat.

‘We are aware,’ he replied. ‘Which way?’

I pointed.

‘Stay back,’ he said. ‘And turn on your cuff.’

‘What?’ I exclaimed. ‘She’s a telekine. A vicious one.’

‘Turn on your cuff!’ he insisted. ‘Beta, it’s not my order! It’s the Secretary’s. If we don’t blunt her, we can track her mind.’

Could we, indeed? I knew of no one in the Maze Undue who had such psychic gifts. But then we knew nothing about the faculties of the Secretary or the other mentors. We had never seen them tested by such an invasion.

I set my cuff to live.

Judika led the way down the hall, the pistol raised. He looked like he knew what to do with it, but then Saur had trained him too.

The air was filmed with dust, but visibility was better. We spotted her, dashing into the opening of a small, narrow staircase that led back up into the attics. Perhaps she intended to double back through the rambling dimensions of the roof.

Judika rushed up after her. I was close behind, close enough to see him come up over the lip of the attic floor and take aim. The gunfire was deafening in the closed space. Flames barked from the snout of the gun. The shots ripped into cross-ties, shattered wooden crates and the dry and empty bottles inside, and punched out some of the tiles. Each impact was an explosion of dust and splinters.

Sister Tharpe had taken cover. We saw her dart, low, from behind a stack of packing crates towards the more significant shield of a brick chimney breast. Judika fired again, stitching three shots across the chimney that painted the air red with brick dust.

He paused, edged around, and fired a third burst. This time he hit something more significant. Something flopped onto the blackened boards. I thought at first he had killed her, but it was simply her starched white headdress, mangled and dirty.

I felt a sudden, wallowing ebb of telekinesis. Judika was about to resume firing.

‘Wait!’ I cried.

He did not. He blasted again, a stream of shots.

Sister Tharpe had emerged from behind the chimney stack, striding out to meet the bullets.

She was smiling.

Her headdress was already missing. As she appeared, she stepped out of her sorority robes too, all badged with soot and dust, and freed herself of them. It was a curiously sexual manoeuvre, letting her garments fall away behind her. She was like a courtesan in the comfort of her boudoir, advancing lasciviously upon her client.

Unburdened by the bulky robes, she was even taller and more slender than I had imagined. She was dressed in a tight bodyglove of brown leather. Her hair, black as Old Night, had been bound up in a tight chignon in order that it might fit underneath the headdress.

She met the bullets. A sharp, fluid gesture of her right hand, as one would make to brush aside a persistent horsefly, made them all turn aside at right angles and rip into the underside slope of the roof, shattering the slates.

Judika snarled and fired again.

She cried out in reply, a growl of defiance, and raised both hands, stopping the next six rounds with an invisible wall that squashed them flat and sent them scattering like coins onto the floorboards.

‘Desist,’ she said.

She made a clutching gesture with her right hand, then jerked it aside. The gun ripped free of Judika’s grip and flew across the attic. He threw himself at her, but she crossed her arms in front of her body, her fingertips aiming at the floor, and Judika left the ground.

She drove him up into the roof, cracking a rafter and smashing roof tiles so they rained down everywhere. Then she threw him aside. Judika slammed into a cross-tie and tumbled onto the floor.

I knew he would not be getting back up for some time. Part of me sincerely hoped that he was not badly hurt. The integrity of the Maze Undue, and the personal welfare of a boy whom I had been smitten with for a long time was at stake. In that regard, I was vengeful and unrestrained.

But part of me thought he deserved the bumps and rough handling because of his foolishness. We were blanks, and we go against a telekine limited? What had the Secretary been thinking? What was Judika Sowl thinking? Why were we ignoring our key strength and our basic training?

I had reached the pistol, where it had fallen. I would take it up, disarm my cuff, and force her to surrender or forfeit her life.

I reached for the gun, but my grab was arrested. An object suddenly pinned the cuff of my tunic to the floorboards. It was a long, silver pin, driven in like a railway spike by invisible hands. I was trapped, unable to pull my sleeve free. The gun, tantalisingly out of reach, rose up, and flew away to the very far end of the long attic.

The silver pin dug itself out, and raced off into the air like a guided missile. My hand freed, I rolled and turned.

Sister Tharpe walked towards me, the silver pin orbiting her like a pet bird. A second silver pin, twin of the first, drew itself out of the tight bun of her black hair, and began to rotate around her in an opposite orbit. Every time they passed close to me, I heard them hum.

‘Beta,’ she said. ‘This was not supposed to occur. An unfortunate turn of events. I am leaving now. Do not attempt to obstruct me.’

+She will not have to.+

The psionic pronouncement made me wince. Mind-voices are often ghastly contortions of their owner’s flesh voice.

This was scarcely human.

I saw sudden and considerable alarm cross Sister Tharpe’s face.

Something came up into the attic to join us. I did not know where it came from, apart from ‘out of someone’s mind’, though in fact the thought ‘out of the daemonic maelstrom’ also occurred to me.

It was a thought-form. I saw it as a blur, a blur of reddish light, like a piece of a swollen, bloody sunset fashioned into a vaguely human shape and then allowed to walk free. It oozed up into the cold darkness of the attic and faced Sister Tharpe.

It sizzled. It crackled and seethed, as though it was made from a swarm of angry neon insects, or as though it was a scorching, radioactive thing that was cooking the very air.

Then the true battle began.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2012 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Cheol Joo Lee

© Games Workshop Limited, 2012. All rights reserved.

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