After what felt like hours of down and dirty street fighting, Fia and Cleric Vass stepped out into a square with a fountain in the centre of it and bodies scattered all around. It must have been one of Redstone’s chief market squares, for the place was ringed with witchlights that cast an ethereal luminescence on the scene. The cobbles were perfectly set and had been worn smooth by the passing of years and hundreds of thousands of feet.

Combat raged here too in places, but there was a different energy to it. These particular Frekirie soldiers weren’t making any move to advance. They repulsed the sporadic attacks of the guerilla fighters, keeping them back with rotating flintlock and crossbow fire. The smell of death was not so strong here as in other parts of the town; the coppery tang of blood and the sharp, pungent smell of shit, piss and split guts less oppressive.

Redmond Marr sat atop his bay stallion, surrounded by a dozen or so Frekirie infantrymen. There was a map of Redstone in his lap, along with a glass oil lantern. His eyes flicked from the knots of fighting men around him, to the windows of the houses that faced the square where, no doubt, scores of Redstone residents were peeking through their heavily shuttered windows. His supercilious gaze scanned the distant rooftops, where here and there the glow of burgeoning fires could be seen.

Fia and the cleric moved across the square. Two soldiers attempted to accost them, but Fia’s course was set and there was no way that she’d be diverted from it by some lunk-headed fighting man. She sidestepped the first axe swing and let the man stumble past her onto Cleric Vass’ waiting knife, kicked out at the knee of the woman coming in hot behind the first and heard something crunch. The female warrior’s leg gave out and she fell back heavily onto her arse. Without breaking stride, Fia gave her a love lick across the neck with her broadsword and opened her throat.

“Redmond!” she bellowed, yelling louder than she’d had cause to in years. “Redmond fucking Marr!”

Her voice bounced off the stone buildings and found her half-brother’s ear, snapping his head around.

The cold blue eyes narrowed, even as his personal guard drew around him, blocking Fia off. Their swords were bared to a man, and there were a few cradling flintlock pistols at the rear of the group.

“Wait!” Redmond snapped. “Wait, dammit! Let her approach. I’d hear what she has to say before we set to doing anything irreversible.”

The guards backed away as commanded. Slowly, carefully, they arranged themselves in a crescent around Redmond.

Fia came forward, stopping when she was about twenty yards from her half-brother.

“Don’t suppose I can convince you to cease this madness, can I, Red?” she asked. “I know our mother would––”

“Save your entreaties, and save your breath,” snapped Redmond.

“Much obliged,” Fia said mildly. “It’s been a taxing night. I ain’t got much of it left.”

“No. No, you haven’t.”

They stared across the expanse of empty cobblestones at one another.

“You should’ve tried a little harder at finding your absolution at the bottom of a bottle, sister,” Redmond said, breaking the brittle silence. “Makes me think that you can’t have loved Arlen as much as you make out, otherwise you would’ve succumbed to bottle-rot a long time ago. Still, maybe you just had an epiphany. Maybe you realised that Arlen was too weak and pathetic to have ever made a strong Count.”

“You need to stop your bleatin’ and yammerin’ very soon, little boy,” Fia said. “It don’t do for a sheep to bait a wolf so.”

“You could’ve just given Gunn up and gone away, Fia,” Redmond continued, his voice rising, the control on his anger slipping. “You could’ve given him up like you gave Arlen up, like you gave the rest of the family up when you ran away! But, no! Of course, you had to come back and fuck me over, just as I was about to use the Imperator to achieve more than any Count of any tribeland has ever achieved in Fallaros’ fucking history!”

“I’m going to kill you for what you did to Arlen, Redmond, and for what you did to me,” Fia said, her tone as equanimous as if she were talking about the weather.

Redmond tried for a mirthless laugh, but only managed a panting snarl through a demented, disparaging grin.

Fia raised her voice. “I’m going to kill you because you’ve sold this tribeland and everyone in it to the Imperator. Sold it to him for more land than I reckon you know what to do with, and for a crown that you’ll be wearing around your neck like a fucking collar.”

Redmond Marr’s pale face flushed. His sneering, shit-eating grin faltered and slid from his face.

“I’m going to kill you, Red,” Fia said again. “But I ain’t going to like it none.”

Redmond sat back on his horse and looked down his aquiline nose at Fia.

He has our mother’s nose, Fia realised detachedly.

“This isn’t like the stories, Fia,” her half-brother said. “There’s no prolonged toe-to-toe battle to the death here.” He turned his head. “Kill her.”

It was not the soldiers that moved first, though.

The witchlight nearest Redmond Marr cut out abruptly––didn’t fade, but simply ceased to shine.

The black-haired witch stepped smoothly, impossibly, out of the patch of shadow created and thrust out her hand towards Fia. The cobblestones in front of her popped into the air one after another. They tore themselves free of the ground in a line, exploding like river rocks left too long in a campfire, as the thaumaturgy ripped through the air and headed straight for Fia.

It was all so fast that Fia had no time to think what to do––didn’t know if there was anything she could do. Her body tensed, but her sword hung uselessly at her side.

And then Cleric Vass was in front of her, dropping into the path of the spell from Fia knew not where. The tattoos on the older man’s face burned cherry red as he knelt with one knee to the cobbled square. His arms were extended and his hands outspread. He roared words that stung Fia’s ears as the leather-clad witch’s spell rushed to meet him.

The impact of the thaumaturgical blast making contact with the god-talker was like nothing Fia had ever felt. The air itself buckled under the strain of the collision, the cobbles bursting outward in a thirty-foot concentric ring of broken stone. Due to her proximity to Cleric Vass, Fia was flung off her feet and sent skipping and bouncing across the plaza like a pebble across a pond. She smacked hard into the base of the fountain. The breath left her body in a brutal rush.

Gasping, she raised her face from the ground, spots of blood pattering on the cobbles.

“Vass…” she wheezed, blinking away tears and trying to focus.

There should have been nothing left of the quiet spoken man with the lined face and patient eyes. Yet, when Fia’s eyes focused, she saw Cleric Vass rising to his feet.

“How the––” Fia started to say.

The cleric moved like a storm-wind, dust rising and robes snapping in the wake of his speed as he charged across the plaza. He covered the twenty yards that separated himself and the black-haired witch in a heartbeat––too fast for it to be anything but thaumaturgy. He ploughed into her and lifted her bodily from her feet, drove her backwards into, and through, a cart stacked with bags of flour.

The heavy cart exploded with the violence of the impact. Flour billowed into the air in a great cloud as the cart splintered apart, the separated halves flipping clean over to land upside-down with a deafening crash.

Cleric Vass continued to drive the witch back. The pair of them smashed through the stone and glass front of an apothecary’s store, disappearing from sight. Lights of blue and orange flared and flickered briefly from within the confines of apothecary’ shop, accompanied by indistinct cries.

Then, silence.

Suddenly, the light flared so brightly that night became day and Fia was left with sunspots across her vision. All the shutters on the windows of the three-story building exploded outwards, reduced to flinders. Two figures––that Fia guessed were the apothecary and his wife––dressed in nightshirts and scorched black and red, were propelled out into the street where they landed with matching wet thuds. There was a dull, subterranean, vaguely metallic, boom from deep within the building. Then, the entire stone and timber edifice simply collapsed in on itself in a pall of expanding stone dust.

It was the most overt and formidable display of thaumaturgy Fia had ever seen.

“Fuck me running,” she whispered, hauling herself to her feet. As she leaned unsteadily against the lip of the fountain, Redmond turned his face to her, his expression aghast at what had just happened to his thaumaturgist.

“Fucking kill her!” he screamed at his milling soldiers.

As one, the twelve infantrymen rushed forward. The two men armed with flintlocks raised their weapons.

There were twin rolling cracks. The heads of the two Frekirie soldier’s burst apart and they fell, dropping their pistols. Fia turned, dazed, and saw Gunn’s two sharpshooters, Winnie and Rule, standing at the head of a set of stairs cut into the hill and overlooking the plaza. Their rifle barrels were smoking.

In front of them, and much nearer to hand, was Gunn himself, followed by Boni Woe, Breck and Kerr. They were pelting across the plaza, cutting down any soldier foolish enough to get in their way. They charged straight through the fountain, kicking up a spray that was flat white in the glare of the witchlights, vaulted the lip and ran past Fia.

It was fighting the likes of which gave Fia a whole new respect for Gunn, his men, and the fact that she and her ragtag crew had managed to avoid being killed by them at all.

Kerr might’ve only had one good arm, but the grizzled old bastard knew what to do with it. He wielded a mace with the professional efficiency of one who’s made a life and a career out of fighting and killing; no stroke was wasted, no movement made unless it was necessary in the destruction process.

Breck was huge and powerful, looking like the sort of lad who’d eat anything that didn’t eat him first. He carried a war hammer and a buckler and used both with an intelligence that belayed his simple looks, often maiming an enemy by breaking a knee or shattering an elbow and leaving them for Boni to dispatch.

Boni Woe screamed and cackled, moving here and there to apply a cunning knife through a chink in some armour, slice a tendon, or cut a throat.

But it was Torsten Gunn that caught and held Fia’s eye. The man moved like the weather, like a rolling thunderhead across a plain; sure, unstoppable and filled with brooding threat.

He set upon the onrushing guards so wrathfully that Fia saw the battle-rage turn to watery timidity in the faces of the men nearest him. He ducked the first wild sword swing, barrelled his shoulder into the next man to send him reeling back, and then cut savagely through the thigh of the third soldier so that she fell screaming in a spray of dark blood. A knife appeared in his free palm as he parried an axe cut with his sword, and he hurled the blade underhand so that it smacked meatily into the groin of a woman converging on Fia. Then, turning his attention back to the swordsman he was keeping at bay, he turned a second stroke, spinning the man’s shortsword away, and cut him so hard down the front of his head that his face split in two, his bottom jaw bursting apart.

Fia, still somewhat stupefied from being driven into the fountain, fell clumsily on the woman with the knife in her groin and hacked at her with her sword until she was dead.

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Breathing heavily, gasping, covered in blood and spit and dirt, she got unsteadily to her feet, only to find that the brutal dust-up was already all but over.

Gunn cut the hand from the wrist of an axe-wielder before ramming his sword through his leather cuirass, then whipped his flintlock from his belt and shot the final man in the back as he fled for his life. He ripped his sword free of the axeman’s chest, and the two bodies hit the deck at the same time.

Fia looked across the stretch of cobbles that divided her half-brother and herself.

Redmond Marr still sat atop his horse in the midst of a haze of flour, covered from crown to biscuit in white powder. The map of Redstone still sat in his lap along with the oil lantern. His countenance was a chalk mask of undisguised anguish.

He looked around at his slaughtered guard, at Boni Woe as she stepped forward, placed the point of her spear to the back of one mortally injured man’s neck and leaned casually on it. There was a sloppy grinding crunch. The soldier jerked and was still.

“Looks like you ain’t going to be needing that map after all, Red,” Fia called, walking slowly closer.

“You don’t understand,” Redmond whined at Fia. “You’ve never bloody understood, you stupid bitch cunt!”

“Such language,” said Boni Woe.

“The Imperator… You think he’s going to stop with me gone?” Redmond continued. “I was this isle’s best hope, but you robbed me of it, just like you robbed me of so much! The Imperator will still fall on Fallaros like a storm, only there’ll be no buffer between it and him now! Wait until you witness the capabilities of his Vansgrimans. He’ll be sending them soon! They’re already on their way!”

His hand twitched towards the ornate gold and ivory-butted pistol that hung at his belt.

Fia tipped her heart-shaped head to one side, her strange opalescent eyes never leaving her half-brother’s face.

“I’d hoped the fire would have killed you,” Redmond said. “But you, like our mother, just won’t die.”

A sardonic smile twisted Fia’s features.

“Hell, you know that I’m the kind of lucky son of a bitch who’d be able to kiss fire and walk away whistling,” she said.

Redmond’s hand twitched towards his pistol again. His eyes narrowed.

“It’s like you said, Red, there ain’t going to be no prolonged toe-to-toe battle to the death here,” Fia said.

She drew her pistol from her belt before Redmond could so much as get a finger to his own weapon.

The shot punched through the glass lantern that sat in her half-brother’s lap and smacked into his stomach. The flame, freed from its glass prison, licked out and ignited the flour dust that hung heavy in the still pre-dawn air.

There was a rush of instantaneous, blossoming flame as the flour dust combusted with extreme ferocity. Such was the violence of the ignition that Redmond Marr and his horse were engulfed in a blinding flash of incandescent fire before he could so much as utter a cry. Fia, Gunn, Kerr, Boni and Breck stumbled backwards with their hands over their faces as the heat washed over them.

It took only a moment or two for the fire to consume the flour, but by the time the conflagration died, Viscount Redmond Marr lay crushed, burned and dead under his burned, dead horse.

It was the work of a moment.

Fia stepped closer to the smoking body of her half-brother and looked down at the curled fingers, the thin blackened arms, and the pointed, melted face. She was reminded of nothing so much as a dead spider.

“For Arlen,” she said.

Fia turned back, swaying a little, to the four longriders that had come to her aid. Behind Gunn, Breck, Kerr and Boni, she could see Rule and Winnie walking down the stairs they’d been standing at the top of.

Around them, as if triggered by the catalyst that had been the death of Redmond Marr, the fighting was dying down. Fia supposed that she shouldn’t have been surprised by the sight of Frekirie soldiers putting up their swords, dropping crossbows and flintlocks, and suing for mercy. They were close enough to have seen what happened, and to have heard much, and it didn’t make much sense to carry on risking your life when the man you’d sworn to fight for was a smouldering husk.

Fia watched Gunn scan the plaza with his grey eyes, taking in the last of the fighting in this part of the city.

“You two,” he said to Winnie and Rule as they strode up with their rifles over their shoulders. “I need the pair of you to get about and spread word through Redstone that that piece of shit Redmond Marr is dead. Let our lot know that Frekirie troops that throw down their arms are to be spared. Best you do the talkin’, Rule, and let Winnie cover you.”

The mute, Winnie, grinned sardonically and slapped the back of her hand with two fingers in the traditional Fallaros sign for someone to go fuck themselves. The two women hefted their rifles and walked quickly away.

“Hey, Rule?” Gunn called after them.

“Yeah, boss?” the one-eyed sharpshooter replied.

“Tell ‘em that there’s a new Marr come back to town,” said Gunn, glancing at Fia with a glint in his eye.

As Rule and Winnie ankled off, Boni spat on the ground and turned to Gunn.

“Well, now that fucker is taken care of, what the hell do we do n––”

The air split in front of the fountain, a sizzling, spitting rent in the very fabric of the world. Light, a warm wind, and the clean smell of salt and sea air blasted through, in the same way that light and noise spills from a tavern door at night.

“Thaumaturgy!” Fia said. “Everyone get the fuck back, now!”

Out through the thaumaturgical rift stepped two large figures. They squeezed through the tight gap with difficulty, their brawny frames, clad in sleeveless leather cuirasses and fighting skirts, appearing to catch on the smooth edges of the tear.

Once they had stepped through, it was revealed that one was a man and the other a woman, though they both clearly hailed from the same people. They were both tall, with long hair of a deep peacock-blue colour tied in matted braids, and well-muscled frames. The man had a dark scrubby beard. Both, Fia saw, had the same lifeless, disinterested eyes and both, she noted, carried the same queer-looking flintlocks at their sides.

Once they were through the rift, the thaumaturgical interstice instantly began to shrink behind them until, with a faint sputtering sound, it closed.

Boni looked from Gunn’s face, to Fia’s, to those of the newcomers standing stock-still some twenty paces away.

“Who the fuck is this now?” she asked no one in particular.

“We,” the woman said, her words entwined in a pleasant, melodic accent, “are messengers sent from the Imperator.”

These words elicited a slight shuffling from the assembled longriders; hands gripped weapons a little tighter, fingers moved closer to the handles of throwing knives and pistol butts.

“And what the hell kind of message might that son of a bitch be looking to send?” Fia asked. “If he’s after Redmond, I’m afraid he’s a little late…”

“Redmond’s a little late!” Boni sneered.

The two towering figures regarded the reeking corpse of Redmond Marr impassively.

“Our lord knows about the death of his servant,” the man said. “It’s why he elected to burn so much thaumaturgy and send us all the way here from across the sea. He would have derived great pleasure in sending more of us, but his powers are yet limited.”

“And where have you pretty pair come from?” Gunn asked.

“From Vansgrima,” the woman replied.

Gunn’s mordacious smile turned even more cold and predatory than it already had been.

“I thought as much,” he said.

“What’s the Imperator’s message?” Fia asked.

The male Vansgriman warrior regarded Fia out of his flat, dead eyes.

“We are the message, Fia Marr,” he said. “The Imperator would ask you to mark it well.”

The big hands of the two Vansgrimans dropped to the holsters that hung at their belts and drew forth their outlandish pistols.

Breck, surprisingly for a big man, had his flintlock out of his belt before any of the other longriders––even before Fia or Gunn. His ball punched into the female warrior’s upper arm, ripping a chunk of meat out of her bicep and sending blood splashing up against the brightening sky behind her.

The woman jerked with the impact of the slug, but her face showed not a hint of pain or shock.

Her own pistol bucked in her hand. The bullet caught the big outlaw in the shoulder, spinning him on the spot and sending his flintlock flying as he fell to the cobbles.

At the same moment, as his fellow was making her move, the male Vansgriman warrior drew his pistol and swung it up towards Fia.

The world slowed, as if allowing Fia’s final seconds to stretch beyond their span so that she could savour her last few moments.

Her own flintlock had only just cleared her belt, when the cold eye of the Vansgriman’s pistol muzzle settled on her.

The man’s finger tightened on the trigger.

Fia thought of Arlen, of her mother and her father, and of Gunn. She fought to get her hand up, determined to kill this big son of a bitch before she was left bleeding and empty in the dust.

There was a blur in front of her.

Gunn was quick––real quick.

He threw himself across Fia’s path, raising a pistol of his own as he stepped into the line of the Vansgriman’s shot.

Six shots rang out; the noise clattered around the stone plaza, bounced off the cobbles and out into the fog-mantled hills.

Gunn jerked where he stood as the six bullets thumped into his chest, his arm, his stomach. Twitched like a pugilist fighting some unseen opponent.

As pistol smoke curled from the barrel of the Vansgriman’s weapon, Gunn dropped with a weary sigh to his knees, his pistol falling from his nerveless fingers.

Kerr had started forward with his mace raised, but he only managed to get half a dozen strides before the woman turned her peculiar pistol on him and squeezed the trigger five times in quick succession. The staccato reports of the five pistol shots rolled out, causing window shutters to be thrown open around the plaza by those residents who’d been hiding behind them.

The veteran longrider staggered backwards, blood bursting from his torn body as the slugs burrowed into him. Disbelief was writ across his weathered face, his red hair falling to obscure his vision. He reeled forward, roaring and wheezing and trying to get at the Vansgriman who had done for him, but his legs gave out and he sprawled lifeless on the hard, cold cobbles.

Fia’s pistol jerked in her hand, although she was unaware she’d pulled the trigger. The ball took the male warrior in the neck, tore the side of it clean away, and Fia saw something that made her go cold.

Metal, and the greasy glimmer of thaumaturgy.

The Vansgriman strode slowly towards her, oblivious to the blood pouring out of his wound and down his chest.

“We are the message, Fia Marr,” he said. “We are a promise of the future.”

Fia screamed an animal shriek at her advancing foe.

Boniface Woe was not a woman to stand idle while the killing was being done. Even as Kerr was tottering towards the Vansgriman woman, she was slipping around the flank with her spear in her hand.

As Kerr fell, Boni took advantage of the Vansgriman’s concentration and threw her spear right at the female warrior’s head from a distance of ten feet.

Fia snatched up Gunn’s fallen pistol and pointed it at the approaching warrior.

“Future ain’t here yet,” she said, and pulled the trigger.

The ball hit the man in the bridge of his nose and blew out the back of his head like an eggshell exploding.

The greasy magic that Fia could see running across the bloody implanted metal in the man’s neck faded. Without a sound, he pitched forward onto his face and lay still.

At the same time, Boni’s spear ripped through the side of the female warrior’s head. A large lump of brain was stuck to the protruding point of the weapon as the spear tip crunched out of her skull. She went over sideways like a tree, twitched, and died.

Fia dropped to her knees, only registering that her enemies were both dead in the periphery of her mind.

“You ain’t going to die, Gunn,” she said, grabbing the longrider by the collar and pulling his head into her lap.

“Course I am. We all do,” the outlaw said.

“You sound morose, Torsten Gunn. It don’t suit you.”

Gunn snorted weakly. Blood came out of his nose, speckled his stubbly top lip.“I’ve just… been shot six fuckin’ times. I’d say that’s as good… a reason as… any.”

“I mean you’re not dying today.”

“If I was a gamblin’ man, I’d sure as shit take those odds.”

Fia tried to scoff, but found her voice wasn’t up to the task. “You’re trying to tell me, after all the shit you’ve pulled in this life, that you ain’t a gambling man?”

Gunn smiled tiredly, his head nodding before jerking up again.

“Gamblin’ is only fun… if you already know the outcome.”

“Gods-damn it, Gunn, don’t you leave me too!” Fia said earnestly. “I’m going to need your help.”

“My apologies, Miss McCrae, but… I gotta go.”

“Go? Go? Go where?"

Gunn’s rugged face relaxed into a smile. His grey eyes flickered, slipping her gaze, staring at her but seeing some other face, perhaps. His fingers came up and touched her cheek and they were callused and cold. “Ain’t got a clue,” he said softly, “but that’s why I’ve gotta go there.”