PLATINUM 1.3: TICK-TOCK

“Asator and his lackeys will not try again. The loss of so many ships has put them a century behind at their construction efforts. We can finally rule them out as a world power, relegate them to the same status as the Empire of the East. Let them keep their petty tributes from the north-western reaches. We have the rest of the world to reap.”

– from the official memorandum of the Malice Council, Ismethara 990 NE

I stood alone in the street. I could hear the worms and beetles and other sliding, creeping things, writhing in the mud. The constant drone of the flies and gnats and other swarming, buzzing things that I did my best to pay no attention to.

I was leaving the place a complete mess. Until Em’s elemental returned there was going to be a ditch the size of a small hillock in the middle of the roadway, and there was blue demon-ichor on all the walls.

Zelurra sounded amused. “An evening none of them will forget either.”

I’d like to think so.

“No, not the magisters. The residents. Them.”

I wasn’t resisting, so she drew my eyes to the windows around us, one by one.

“Twenty-eight pairs of eyes on you.”

Well… at least we put on a show for them. It’d ruin it now if I summoned Flood Boy back to wipe the goo off the walls, wouldn’t it?

“I don’t think he’d appreciate it, either. Not that he’d have any choice… not like I have any –”

Okay, Zel!

I pulled up my scarf and hood, got my bearings, and moved to re-enter the alleyway I’d used to get here. It wouldn’t do to go getting lost, and I didn’t yet have any minions who could help with directions.

“I told you, showing your face would be a mistake. Giving your name, a mistake. These darkmages have friends, you know. You won’t be safe.”

I’ll have to take my chances. You know it’s not so simple. I liked it better when you gave me less advice and stuck to the whole perception thing.

With absolute relish I stepped back into the demi-plane of sewage and tried to keep to the places I’d put my feet when I’d come the other way, to minimise the puke and excrement on my boots.

“You mean you liked it better when you were making less mistakes. You asked me to give you advice when you bound me, remember? It’s not my fault if you don’t follow it. Besides, you can shut me up whenever you want, can’t you?”

You know I had to tell them who I was. The money is basically life or death, now, Zel. How long are we going to last on the streets? And it’s not just about Jaid and Jaroan.

“You humans and your money. You can get money other ways.”

We’ve been over this a million times. It doesn’t work like that.

“Only because you don’t want it to.”

She was right, to an extent. Sure, I could sell the fruits of my archmagery without the proper Magisterium licences. I’d be able to bottle up an infinite supply of Flood Boy’s fortified wine, and with a bit of subtlety I wouldn’t get someone like Emrelet knocking down the door and dragging me off to serve a sentence. On the other hand, obtaining the licence would mean I’d basically be their employee. Even if I worked protection I would have to pay a heavy tax. They might be magical policemen but they were still a guild at heart, and they owned magic in the great city of Mund. Their agents would stick their noses into anything – stick their lightning bolts into anyone – threatening to shake the lantern.

Entering the field of trade-magic meant playing by their rules: enchanters who performed as bards, wizards who worked construction, druids who healed for payment, diviners who offered the lords advice – they all paid handsomely for the right to ply their wares, all kept strictly within the bounds that’d been set down from on high. The mages had little choice, brought up within the systems of the Magisterium as they were trained, but even archmages were expected to submit to the rules. And we had the option of going underground, doing what took mages years to learn without all the discipline.

It was so much more fun my way, I imagined.

Doing official work like that, I’d be another piece assigned to a place on their chessboard, a glorified archmage-barkeep with great-looking profits on the books… a bodyguard equipped with a bunch of imaginary but basically-impenetrable shields working for exorbitant fees… a craftsman working ensorcellment into items to produce fantastical toys – but with only a fraction of the gold actually finding its way into my pockets.

I knew it was more than that. I wanted to be a champion. Why not? Sure, sorcerers weren’t the fanciest of mages. Our magic was possibly the least-showy. But why should that stop me? There were other sorcerer-champions out there – Redgate and Hellbane, Dustbringer and Direcrown, Netherhame and Shallowlie and… Well, there were six other sorcerer-champions. That I knew of.

Ah, no – Hellbane was dead, disintegrated months ago in the last Incursion, along with Mindbreaker. It was difficult to keep track sometimes.

It would probably be less difficult now. Now it would be personal. At some point, I’d probably meet those legendary figures whose names were whispered by the masses. Become one of them…

Sometimes even ordinary mages teamed up to work as champions – for sorcerers there were the Binding Brothers, and the Constellation… though the members of those groups were almost certainly highborn. Magery alone wasn’t enough to inspire the imagination; these teams of champions might’ve been making good money, but they never really seemed to achieve much of a following amongst the lowborn-folk.

Being a champion was the only path to making some coin, feeling good about myself, without feeling like I was giving up my freedom. I could take money from the obnoxious rich of the city, completely tax-free, for catching the twisted rich of the city, the darkmages. All at my own leisure.

That was where ‘Feychilde’ came in. All the best champions had the coolest names. Timesnatcher. Nighteye. Winterprince… Mindbreaker and Hellbane too, Celestium take their souls… Shadowcloud was the best – he was from southern Sticktown, they said. And there were the champions from when I was a kid, dead too, or retired – Everseer, Altermoon, Fingersnap, Quietsigh, Blazeborn… I knew the names of dozens, perhaps hundreds.

Well, the darkmages had cool names too, I guessed, but most of them weren’t even archmages. Some sounded scary. Breathstealer. Fireflood. Bloodlover. The Shadowcrafters.

Others were primarily scary because of their reputations, topping the most-wanted lists. Duskdown. Rainlost. Dreamlaughter. Those three were archmages, and if I got my own way I’d not meet them – ever, if possible.

Or at least not without some overpowered tricks up my sleeve.

Everything cool and scary was taken. I had a decent imagination, but for some reason I got stuck on the idea.

Feychilde.

My name wouldn’t instil fear in my enemies so much as trepidation. As my reputation swelled, my name would gather power, until everyone would be quaking in their boots at the notion of getting their behinds handed to them by someone called Feychilde. A self-avowed child, ripping you to pieces. Not good for the credibility.

No longer needing to be quiet, and with good cause to put as much distance as possible between myself and those twenty-eight pairs of watching eyes, I strode briskly towards home, keeping my eyes on my footing. I reached the spot with the streaky patches that looked reddish to my enhanced sight, where butchers had thrown out the blood, then the water to wash it clean. The diluted blood didn’t really have anywhere to go, though, so it had become something of a gory stream running down the opposite wall of the passage, welling up into puddles where the ground was uneven.

The aroma was just as bad as I remembered. I choked, and strode faster where I was able, but I was able to bear it without retching.

No matter how good it felt to actually begin my career as a champion, get recognition from the local magistry and get my first bounty – I felt like an impostor, as if I were fleeing the scene of a crime I’d committed. I had to admit that there was a temptation to the idea of giving up the fakery, becoming an archmage full-time as Kastyr. Did I really need to keep hiding who I was? Had I been right when I feared to say my name in front of the Six? I mean, they were going to be incarcerated, but they’d be able to talk. Word could have gotten out. And then I might have had any number of darkmages after me, the real me, which would’ve put everyone in danger.

But, then, who would be pals with people like those cannibals? Overeager body donors? It didn’t exactly sound like the basis for a long-term friendship.

“Most darkmages are nobles, remember. They’ll have friends in high places.”

They’re the Cannibal Six. They’re probably going to become intimate with the edge of an axe real soon. Why don’t you take a nap?

“Is that your command?” she grumbled.

I sighed aloud. It is.

At last, I exited the alleyway, stepping into another street. I turned left, walking downhill towards, I hoped, the areas I knew better – Helbert’s Bend, Cutterwells and Lord’s Knuckle. Barely broad enough for two wagons to cross, the dirt path here was less marked by wheel-ruts than most, instead showing the pockmarked tracks of a heavy amount of foot traffic. The houses loomed over the street, up to five or six storeys in height in places, the ever-present smog of the city obscuring the topmost floors. In one spot the upper levels so encroached into the empty space that the people living in the rooms on the third floor or above would be able to throw punches at someone in the window of the house across the street just by standing at the windowsill and swinging a fist.

Those windows up above me that admitted very little light were used as toilets by the residents. Not a vast improvement on the alleyways, the road was choked with refuse, human waste of both kinds clogging my path. The waste from human bodies flowed in the gutters – technically it was illegal to throw your expulsions out on the streets or in the alleys, though, in Sticktown at least, that particular law had gone unenforced for as long as anyone could remember.

But what occupied more of my attention was the other kind of human waste: the people whose lives were ruins, spilling out of the drinking-houses and pleasure-shops into the street to continue their merriments or confrontations out in the open, where the world could see them.

Most of the people here were either homeless or plastered or potentially dangerous, or some combination of the above, which was a good argument for keeping my head down and my business to myself. I passed dozens of people, forced into playing the will-they-smell-so-badly-of-urine-I-catch-the-scent game as I skirted the strangers in my way. The ones in groups were loud but it was only the weirdest loners who dared approach someone in mage robes. There were the ones who sat staring in silence until you walked close then reached out for you, and the ones who seemed sure they knew you right from the outset, approaching shakily and muttering to themselves as if rehearsing opening lines they forget to deliver – nailbiter-addicts, probably, given the state of their hands. And the ones who babbled into their near-empty bottles and seemed to think you wanted them to do so in close proximity to your face, they were just the best. There was even a long-haired, young guy just wearing nothing but a towel, lying on his back on the slick ground, crooning at me like the world’s most-resistible siren.

It was easy to skip forwards suddenly, out of reach of even the most dextrous inebriate I crossed paths with.

Letting all these degenerates know who I was, it would be a dangerous line to walk. As a champion, I had two choices: reveal my identity like a magister, or keep it secret like a darkmage. And this choice operated on two levels: I’d already revealed my identity to the magisters, but the public at large was a different thing. All champions supported the magisters when necessary, regardless as to whether they maintained a secret identity; backing-up the Magisterium was simply the price of operating freely.

The dark elves of Northril had invaded when I was a kid. It was one of my earliest memories: a steady, reassuring voice coming out of the very air telling everyone in the city to get indoors and barricade the entry-points. Every champion in the city had been called up for that. Champions helping to defend against assaults on official property by darkmages, groups like the Srol Heretics, was becoming more-and-more commonplace over the last few years, it seemed. And there were always the periodic Infernal Incursions; I wasn’t looking forward to those. All in all, it seemed from the news-papers and criers that there was a lot going on all the time. Mostly champions worked independently, making no waves, trying to combat evil on the local level. Taking out those on the wanted lists for instant cash was customary, and even just helping out in a capture gave a fractional reward. The rulers wanted those with the potential for great destruction putting their abilities to use protecting the city against said destruction, and they weren’t afraid to pay to get what they wanted.

And for this kind of work you didn’t need a licence, didn’t need any official vetting. All you had was the reassurance that if you put a foot out of line – killed a suspect, harmed an innocent – the full weight of the Magisterium would descend on you like a boot smushing a snail. If you didn’t go into hiding you’d be getting into battle after battle, and snails too tough to be smushed by a boot would find themselves being smushed by a mountain. If the Magisterium had to call in fifty, a hundred prepared mages, they would do it. It’d be a matter of departing the city – maybe even the Realm – or departing the mortal coil.

I took a side-street between two pubs leading towards Helbert’s Bend, keeping to the centre of the road where the boardwalks at the sides were clogged with groups of big-armed, hard-eyed guys in sooty overalls, all drinking strong-smelling ale in grim near-silence. Furnace-men, recently returned from their work in Hightown, feeding the fires that kept the city alive. A few of them looked at me then looked away. I was still wearing my mage’s robe. No one but magicians wore cloth cut like this, the sleeves so long, the hood so deep.

I passed a pair of watchmen, clad in leather breastplates embossed with the sigil of Sticktown, like a ‘H’ with a slightly longer cross-bar through the centre – supposedly representing the ever-present scaffolding that was the jewel in the crown of our district. Their twelve-spoked stars, the badges of their offices, were pinned to their chests, and rather rusty-looking. One had an upwards-pointing brass arrow on the other side of his chest, a symbol of rank.

When I saw them, they were twirling their truncheons and glowering at a group of miscreant kids on the next bend. And as I crossed in front of them, the high-ranking one turned to look at me, and nodded at me.

My instinct was to run away. Being a mage all of a sudden was weird. I slowly returned the nod, then jerked my head around to watch where I was going.

I hurried down the side-street, which was, if a little stinkier, mercifully less populated. I could stride a little faster, make better time. As much as I hadn’t wanted the encounter with Em and the others to end, once it was over, I wished I was home. I hated this wasted time, this pointless expenditure of energy. I felt like looking into that yith-thing sometime – but it was a demon. Perhaps there were fey options in the same vein… Anyway, it wasn’t like it’d be inconspicuous to ride a twenty-foot dragon-centipede right up to my front door. Definitely no powerful sorcerer hanging out in that building, no sir.

I’d figure something out. I’d have to. I didn’t want to invite trouble into the neighbourhood by being obvious about my newfound status as an archmage, as a champion. It went to the very core of the champion I was going to try to be: a true defender of my people. Of those I cared about.

Not those who made this mess, left the world this way. Left people in places like this. Twelve Hells, it wasn’t like the mass cleansing each full moon got rid of everything for everyone, and at any other time the ministrations of a druid cost you the very arm and leg they were supposed to be healing. It didn’t matter that they were supposedly keeping the water-supply clean with wizardry; we were subject to diseases in so many forms, we had names for them that they’d never heard in Hightown or Treetown or any of those fancy places. Most were curable, but there were always the magical diseases like wormface and brickblood, things that you’d never recover from.

Vaahn, Lord of Death, and his son Vaylech, the Fly-God, must’ve cherished our district like no other place in Materium.

Our phrase ‘drop off’ and its variants had spread throughout the city, but I doubted many who used the swear-word even knew where it originated – that it was a curse implying the dropping-off of a diseased body part. When I was a kid I saw a witch-doctor from Oldtown who’d come to Knuckle Market to peddle his philtres and elixirs of various kinds, looking at my mum as if she were speaking a foreign language when she asked for a potion to treat my dad’s splinterwince. The witch-doctor hadn’t come back again. They never did, not once they saw what things were really like. Rivertown, the Lowtowns – people there knew the deal. Knew what it was like, to be a forgotten breed, looked down on by every highborn we met, even as our toil was used to keep every highborn’s world ticking over.

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I reached familiar ground. The streets here weren’t laid out straight; there were no big buildings that weren’t just piles of apartments. This was true Sticktown. Instead, the ‘roadway’ was a twisting path of mud and wood that wove and criss-crossed on higher and lower levels. The bridges for other, higher paths that crossed this one I walked were built so low that someone two inches taller than me would have to mind their head on the beams as they walked beneath. Then at times I would see another roadway passing beneath me, glimpsing the street below between two buildings on my level. In places the street was barely wide enough for a wagon, but no one brought wagons down here. You might as well wear a ‘Kill me and take my stuff’ banner for a sash.

I grew up a thief, worked for the guild a little. I’d done things I wasn’t proud of: I’d never wrapped a cudgel around someone’s head, but I’d once bonked someone in the shin to stop them pursuing me and my friends. Just for that restraint I’d been accounted too moral around here. I recognised the absurdity, but that was the Sticktown way. Thank the gods my parents had given me an education…

And even I thought a wagon down here would be a tempting target.

As I made my way up Bagger’s Alley I found my usual alcove empty. It was located right on the bend where the pathway turned sharply back on itself like a ‘v’: a shadowy few feet between two disused doorways. It provided me a good point of view covering both avenues of approach while I walked up to it, and kept me hidden from both lines of sight while I stopped there.

I pulled off my robe, stuffing it into the thin satchel I’d worn beneath it. Now I was a typical city boy, in a homespun tunic and trousers, blue and green respectively. I kept my clothes as clean as possible, given that I only had two outfits and my robe, but the trousers would need a wash after tonight’s activities.

I stepped out of the alcove between the two walled porch-type structures, and I had a sudden blurred image in my mind, a vision of someone following me down the part of the alley behind me, where I couldn’t see now without backtracking.

Then the door nearest me suddenly drew my attention.

The enhanced hearing had picked something up. Footsteps? Inside.

Zelurra’s gift was strange. She’d explained little of the particulars before we ‘joined’ together, and I’d gleaned only a smattering of knowledge about how this joining process actually functioned since then. She was a narrow diviner, capable of local clairvoyance and furnished with a danger-sense I hadn’t quite wrapped my head around yet. When I joined with her I got a minor part of her regenerative effect and protection against mind-control, and my senses were amplified; my vision was clearer, sounds crisper, and I even found scents and tastes overpowering – I’d grown up in the filth here but I’d learned a new appreciation for how our region must’ve come across to strangers in the last couple of weeks.

However, I didn’t get the danger-sense. Not really. Not like her.

Even still, I felt like I was close to it now. I felt a squirming in my chest, my breath came haltingly into my lungs. Had the Six’s friends already caught up to me? How?

Wake up. Something’s coming.

“Yes. Yes, one behind you, one inside, one ahead. Just men. Ruffians. Armed.”

Damn it.

My hands were tied, metaphorically: I couldn’t use my powers. I wasn’t wearing my robe and I’d pulled my scarf down. The scarf didn’t matter. The clothes alone made me identifiable to a lot of people in the underworld around here.

One behind me, one inside the door just a few feet from me, and one ahead of me.

I quickly turned away from the door and my body sprang into motion, sprinting forwards. I tried to jam my scarf back up around my face at the same time, for what good it could do me. Ahead of me I saw the third she’d mentioned, at the far end of Bagger’s Alley. A bit shorter than me, stocky, wearing studded leather and with a naked knife thrust into his belt at the hip. A black mask pulled up over his nose. He hadn’t noticed me yet. Probably a Bagger’s Boy, given how he looked to be standing on watch – this was his territory. I thought they’d all been wiped out by the Wallside Gang. They were back, and this was no longer a safe place for me to change.

There were two exits on the right side as I approached him, one nearer to me and one nearer to the rogue. The noise I was making, he was going to notice me in an instant. I didn’t care. Running, I could reach the exit near me in about ten big lopes.

My heart pounded, and I was conscious of the fact that I wasn’t even really breathing.

The door behind me opened, and I heard a man curse under his breath. I heard both of them behind me, moving towards me. Slower than me.

The one ahead of me, the watcher at the end of Bagger’s Alley, noticed me just before I darted into the opening between two lopsided huts.

This was the unnamed passage we called Snowboard Stair. It forked two ways about ten yards in – one ascending, one descending, both routes going straight for fair distance each way, comprised of hundreds of very shallow wooden steps. It was narrow – no wider than five feet in places.

We’d spent a good few dozen winter days climbing the stair I was about to see on my left when I reached the fork. We used to get on our pieces of scrap wood and slide down to this point here, the middle – then turn and immediately slide down the second stair to the right. I’d let Jaid and Jaroan go first, then chased them down, snarling and waving my arms like a monster pursuing them to gobble them up. After a few laborious climbs all the way back up to the middle then all the way back up to the start again, they’d get tired, and we’d head home. But we always called it Snowboard Stair, even if it had been a few years since we’d last been here.

I took the left branch as I hit the fork, heading up the stairs. I figured they might expect a person in flight to go the easier route.

I immediately questioned my decision. Going uphill seemed to halve my speed. I was fast on my feet compared with most. Going downhill, I could’ve chosen to just fall and roll, ultimately, and hope for the best. Zel’s presence in me would heal me of most minor injuries, given time. If I suffered major ones – well, there were always the druids, or the priests of Wythyldwyn… though I’d have better luck getting someone to take me to the Giltergrove tomorrow on a litter and trying to get a quick healing spell thrown in for free when I turned in my pile of undead, than I would with the priests. It could be days before you were seen, and even then the results were variable at best.

Either way, a fall would be better than a knife between the ribs in a dark passageway with no one to help me.

But I’d gone uphill and I wasn’t going fast enough. The increased hearing made it plain, made the outcome inevitable. The one who’d been at the end of Bagger’s Alley had caught up to the others already, going at a far greater pace than his frame would have indicated. Stocky but muscular, not fat. They would reach the fork and I’d be close enough for them to see me.

This was tedious. I could use a shield, use an eldritch – but I’d be revealed, to people who surely could not be trusted to keep silent.

I’d gone no more than twenty feet into the upward stair when the three of them reached the fork; they only paused an instant before –

“There!” A victorious cry.

“This… way!” A huffing, somehow familiar voice.

The boards thumped beneath my feet. The boards thumped behind me as they gave chase.

“Knife!”

I threw myself onto my front and heard the whoosh. As I fell I tilted my chin upwards so that I didn’t break my nose, and I witnessed the shining arc of the hurled dagger, passing right through the space that the area between my shoulder-blades would have occupied. It was dark in this place for my pursuers; that had been a scarily-accurate throw. It hit the stairs a dozen or more feet ahead, an instant before I slammed into the stairs myself.

Zel’s yell might’ve saved my life – at least for the next few seconds, anyway.

Then I hit the stairs, and for a moment I would’ve preferred non-existence.

Pain travelled up my body: my shins, knees, ribs, and throat took the brunt of the impact, the edges of half a dozen planks of wood slamming straight into my unprotected flesh. I let out an “oof” as the breath fled my lungs in a single reverse-gasp.

One of them had me by the hair on the back of my head and yanked me up to my feet – I hurried to comply to keep him from tearing at my scalp.

I howled, just a little bit, and yelped, “Alright! You got me!”

He loosened his hold, then span me around and threw me up against the boards.

The narrow walls of the passageway were the back-walls of the upper storeys of buildings that faced into the next street after Bagger’s Alley. No doors. A dark tunnel crossed beneath this stair, leading to Cutterwell Way and Foundstone Circle. Not populated or much-travelled. We were alone here.

It was the stocky rogue in the studded leather armour from the end of the alley who’d grabbed me. Now I could see the dagger in his belt was missing, but he had others in his sleeves, the little pommels at the ends of the grips protruding from his cuffs.

If it hadn’t been for him, I’d have gotten away – I just knew it.

“Sweet Nentheleme, you are quick,” I moaned as I stood there reeling, trying to get my bearings.

“Turn out yer pockets,” he said in a gruff voice through his bandana-mask, reaching out to pat me down.

I stood and let him. His two pals, clad in similar armour and masks, had caught up. Both rogues were overweight; one tall, one short. They were already puffing for breath through the cloth across their mouths, though we hadn’t even been running for a minute.

“I’ve really got nothing, you know.”

He wasn’t stopping, checking me for pockets, a pouch, anything hidden.

“What’s with all the studded leather, anyway? Going to a party? That’s stuff’s not really effective, you know. I once saw a guy get stab-”

I dodged the first punch, a quick jab at my chin, and evaded straight into the hook, clocking me in the upper cheek, right on my scar.

I reeled, and he just continued frisking me. When his search turned up empty, he snarled and tore the satchel, the obvious target, straight off my shoulder.

“Wait – wait –” gasped the short, fat one.

The stocky rogue stopped, hand tight around my robe, half-free of the satchel, and looked across at him.

“He’s… may… he’s a… Kas?”

Oh, Celestium…

My scarf had slipped back down in my struggles with my first assailant – and now this one recognised me. On top of that, he was probably the one who came up behind me. There was a chance he had seen me enter Bagger’s Alley – seen me in the robe.

Damn it.

Now I knew why his voice had been familiar to me. It was him, Tanru. We’d sort-of grown up together, ranging the neighbourhood as delinquent kids in a group that numbered dozens. I’d not seen him in, oh, two or three years. And those years hadn’t been kind. His forehead-acne had become scars, and he’d ballooned in weight. Even with the facial covering I could tell his cheeks still had a pudgy, youthful look, like an oversized baby who’d been allowed to savage his own face with a red crayon.

“Well if it isn’t Tanny Dengen,” I said. “Running with the Bagger Boys now, I see? I thought you were a Knuckle-Head these days. Knuckle-Head till you died, you said to me.”

The stocky rogue looked between me and Tanny, eyeing us both with a cold, assessing gaze.

Tanny’s new to the group, and this quick fellow is his superior, I surmised. I had to try to keep Tanny on the back-foot, keep his mouth shut. Perhaps I could get him alone. Stop him talking about the mage robe.

“Nuh… no!” Tanny panted, scowling in protest at me, brows furrowing. Then he turned to his superior with a pleading expression. “He’s –”

“Sorry, I always have trouble tracking the affiliations of you guys.”

The superior turned his cold gaze back to me. “You tryin’ ter insult us, laddie?”

“Nah, I’m just observing that your loyalty is easily bought and sold.”

The tall fat one spoke for the first time, having taken the opportunity to catch a second wind, and his voice was high-pitched, nasal and fawning: “He is! He’s tryin’ ter insult yer, boss!”

The boss frowned, I could tell. I smiled.

This is unsalvageable. I made my decision.

“No!” Zel snapped. “Run, downhill.”

It’ll mean another dagger, if I don’t use a shield, and if he saw me –

“H-he’s a mage!” Tanny cried.

“What?” the boss hissed in disbelief. His eyes darted from me to Tanny but then straight back to me, as if re-thinking his instinct to glare at his subordinate. His gaze didn’t waver again but he took a subtle, half-step backwards.

Is it unsalvageable now, d’you think?

“I seen him in his robe, didn’t I?”

The boss looked down at the satchel and robe in his hands and, dropping the satchel, held up the robe for a moment.

Then it joined the satchel on the planks and he was drawing both the daggers in his sleeves in a single motion, moving as if to rub the insides of his forearms against each other, gripping the handles of the blades as he did so.

“’E knows yer name, Tanny,” the boss said, still staring fixedly at me, “knows who yer are. Yer gonna ‘av to do ‘im.”

Well, this had escalated quickly.

Undoubtedly the quick rogue with the daggers out would’ve had plenty of time to bury one or two of them in my chest, had I needed to start an incantation to use my magic. But I waved a hand in their direction and, though the rogues stood in the middle of me and the tear in reality I’d conjured behind them, enough of the coruscating red light fell between them for them to realise without turning that they had been instantaneously backlit by something viscerally, mind-rendingly terrifying.

“Now, I don’t normally do this,” I said, over the clicking. “Demons aren’t my thing. But I really have to make a bit of a point here. Can’t leave you guys with the wrong impression.”

They turned slightly, almost simultaneously, looking behind themselves out of the corners of their eyes.

Tick, tock. Tick, tock.

The huge, strange pendulum-tongue clicked out the rhythm of the razor-fiend’s dance as its sword-legs brought it back and forth, back and forth up and down the steps, looming above even the tallest one of them even when it walked on the lower ground.

“Don’t let them run – don’t try to run.”

The first four and a half words I spoke while looking at the kinkly-man. As the first part of my pronouncement unconsciously came out as “Gharar ondon rutan khalis,” the three rogues probably didn’t understand the inflection in the second four and a half words, directed at them.

I imagined they got the message, though, as the kinkly-man unfolded its blade-arms and encircled them with its prodigious reach.

“Way I see it, we’re both in a fix. You guys know who I am. I know who you guys are. Oh, don’t doubt it; I’ve seen you up close, and when people like me ask questions, people like you give me answers, so don’t think you could hide from me.”

Tick, tock. Tick, tock.

“Now, I’m trying to make a name for myself. As a champion!” I gave it all my bravado. “I suppose I’m not meant to kill you, but I am supposed to bring you in. And you – you’re supposed to tell everyone who I am – that Kas is a sorcerer. A powerful, archmage sorcerer.” I watched them as they swooned slightly, nonplussed with the realisation of how close they currently stood to a gruesome, skewering-type death. All three of them were now hanging on my every word. “So maybe we cut a deal.”

Tick, tock. Tick, tock.

“A…” the stocky rogue licked his lips, “deal?”

“You know – you don’t tell anyone who I am, or react to me in public; forget the last five minutes of your life occurred, go about your… enterprises unconcerned. For my part, I don’t turn you into the world’s three unhealthiest kebabs or see you locked up in prison for so long the Bagger Boys become a distant memory.”

They looked at one another. For some reason the leader seemed unable to lead all of a sudden. Perhaps he was demonphobic. He looked to be paralysed.

“I don’t want to have to beat you over the head with this – which I could do – literally – all night long – using huge pieces of metal – without getting tired – but this is the best offer you’re ever going to get here.”

“I wanna go, Clun,” Tanny moaned, eyes wide and knees knocking.

The stocky boss didn’t even have it in him to glare when Tanny used his name out of sheer terror. He just nodded, trembling, not meeting anyone’s eyes.

“Then go,” I said, gesturing for the fiend to step aside.

The three of them kept their heads bowed, their turnaround in demeanour interesting to observe. They shuffled down the sloping stairway, keeping close together, none of them even wanting to turn and look at my clock-eyed freak of a demon.

“Quite well-performed, Kas,” my companion congratulated me.

I don’t really feel like it worked, I admitted.

“You’d better pray each night for the continued safety of my identity,” I called softly out to the three rogues, by way of parting. “Anyone figures out who I am, my first thought is going to be of you. If I were you, I’d persuade anyone speculating about me to keep their mouths shut. Am I getting through?”

It was half-rhetorical anyway, but I was disappointed none of them replied as they continued their defeated shuffle, heading to the right at the fork, back towards Bagger’s Alley.

“Did you just ask them to kill anyone talking about you?”

“Shut their mouths, in a non-lethal fashion! Am I getting through?”

They were gone, around the corner.

I sighed. I needed to know that I was safe. That Jaid and Jaroan were safe. Then I’d gone and committed the cardinal sin of a secret identity on the first proper damn night, and now the three cut-throats I’d threatened and cajoled into silence wouldn’t even give me a confirmation that I could trust.

They were pretty brave, or stupid, or both, it occurred to me as I collected my things (and the now-abandoned dagger Clun had thrown at my back), dismissed my demon and went on my way. Anyone with some life to the grey goo between their ears would want to reassure the overpowered magician, offer a bunch of promises even if they weren’t planning to keep them… These guys had just wanted to get the hell out of here.

Or perhaps it was that I’d underestimated just how scary this kind of thing was to the common man. They’d probably never seen anything like my razor-fiend before, not up-close. Most people – sensible people and idiots alike – hid away during the Infernal Incursions. I certainly did.

Well, I had up till now. That had changed, hadn’t it? The next time the Mourning Bells rang, I’d be honour-bound to answer, or the magisters would put me on the wanted-list for shirking my duty to defend the city. Especially as an arch-sorcerer – my services would be in high demand.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe my powers would make the next Incursion a piece of cake.

I could always pray, right?

I cut out of Snowboard Stair and turned down the passage behind Hontor and Sons, the best bakers in the city, the scent of fresh loaves still lingering in the air to my augmented nostrils. It’d only be a few hours before they’d be up baking tomorrow morning’s first batch.

From there I turned right at the Gold Griffin, my local boozer, onto my street: Mud Lane. Mud Lane was one of the lowest parts of Sticktown, geologically, educationally, economically. It sloped down to a final dead end, but a number of alleys served to connect the lane to adjacent neighbourhoods – enough that I couldn’t count them off the top of my head.

The lane itself lived up to its name, and then some. Mud was the name of the game. We Mud Laners, we lived in it. We died in it. We fell over in it. Not necessarily in that order – though sometimes. Our bathwater was brown before we got more than our feet in, and if we shared the water between a few (as the twins and I were often forced to do) in the end it seemed like a bit of a pointless exercise, as it looked like a tub of warm sludge by the time the last person (invariably me) got out.

The first blocks of housing on either side of the lane were two storeys high, but they grew taller as you descended, keeping to a flat, uniform roof, with no gaps between the blocks on the upper levels. As low as the third floor (relative to the ground) there were bridges spanning the breadth of the lane, connecting the two sides of the lane overhead, with more and more the higher you got – some were old and sturdy, constructed with waist-high rails and room for two to walk abreast, while many, especially the newer ones, were little better than rope-bridges.

My home was almost half the way down the lane, on the third floor in the block on the right, near Springwalk, the alley that led back towards Cutterwells. I headed up the external stairwell that would bring me home by the fastest route, an array of planks that was little more than a skeleton of abandoned scaffolding.

It was pretty quiet for near-midnight on a weekend. I could pick out a few distant revellers by their raucous laughter, and there was the ever-present wailing of a number of babies, dogs and yobs. But it was relatively quiet, even with Zel’s perception-boost.

It was a short trip along the narrow wooden walkway, a single thin rail the only support, but I was sure of my footing here and I was virtually hopping, my hands shaking, as if the excitement of tonight’s adventures was catching up on me all of a sudden. I had done it.

“I did help, you know.”

Zel didn’t sound like she was needling me – she sounded genuinely offended. What’s more, she’d been keeping quiet, leaving me to my thoughts like I’d asked; I’d actually forgotten she was still active.

You did. I thank you, Zelurra. I couldn’t have done it without you.

“Damn right.”

I’ll wake you in the morning, okay?

“Goodnight, Kastyr.”

Then I was at my door. I gave the secret knock: two-four-two-one. As I stepped back I was rewarded with the sound of someone urgently tearing the various locks open.

It was Xantaire, backlit by the candle in the main room. She stared straight in my eyes, looking at me for some sign of how to react to my presence – she wavered on the razor’s edge between falling into despair or having her soul set free. She waited on a word from my lips.

I grinned.

I saw her begin to react, sucking in her breath, her eyes widening in delight.

“Success.”