“Who does he think he is? He acts like he owns the whole bloody town,” Gabriel’s ranting was causing condensation to form on the inside of his leather hood. Droplets coalesced near his forehead only to be dislodged by his awkward, blind tramping. Flecks of moisture spattered against his nose with each pothole.

“He doesn’t need to own the whole town. He owns us,” Lydia said lividly.

“How does that work? We accidentally kill one or two guys and now we’re indebted to him for all eternity?”

“Pretty much exactly how it works, actually,” Nail-puller answered.

“Well it’s bullshit. It’s not like we killed one of his people, or even someone he liked all that much!” Gabriel grumbled.

“You killed on his turf, and you need his protection to save from gettin’ lynched. Seems pretty fair to me,” Gabriel could hear that Nail-Puller was fishing something out of her teeth, “Would have been a lot worse for you if the boss hadn’t gone out of his way to secure a lasting business deal with the Albrights. You got lucky. Could ‘ave just gutted you for ruining a good thing.”

“You’re telling me we’re supposed to be grateful that he stabbed us in the back and set us up to get killed?” Gabriel was justifiably sullen.

“This ain’t no summer market, merc. You’re in the underworld, here. We all hustle and deal to secure a little piece of Jandrir for ourselves. Screamer made a savvy decision to make a bit from both sides. No reason not to; he didn’t owe you shit.”

“So you’re all just constantly throwing each other under the carriage wheel, and that’s okay with you?”

“You learn pretty quick to be clever with your words. You get an eye for what’s been missed out,” Screamer’s lieutenant snickered.

“Still sounds like horse crap to me. A lie of omission is still a lie. Obviously it was a given that we didn’t want Albright tipped off and to be left marching merrily to our deaths. But, no, he still wants to say, “’I did not lie. I never lie,’” Gabriel failed miserably in his impersonation of Screamer’s deep basso.

There was a subtle change in the sound of Nail-puller’s footfalls as she hesitated mid-step, “You called the boss a liar?”

“Well, not in so many words,” Gabriel bumbled.

“And actually lived to tell the tale?”

“I suppose I may have implied he was a liar.”

“Gods, he must really like you. Fuck knows why,” Nail-puller mumbled the last bit into her collar.

“What the hell is the deal with that anyway? We’re supposed to think that stealing and killing are all well and good but lying is some kind of forbidden taboo?” Gabirel finished his rant with a ‘tch’.

“There’s gotta be a code. Be chaos if there weren’t a code. We’re lucky that Screamer sticks to his.”

“Oh yeah, a real paragon of virtue.”

Gabriel had a mini heart-attack when Nail-puller ripped the hood off of his face, leaving a damp smear from chin to hairline. It was dark, and it took Gabriel’s eyes a moment to adjust to the gentle pulse of Jandrir’s light pollution.

Nail-puller was face-to-face with him, but she didn’t wear her characteristic snarl. Her features were soft, melancholic even.

“Listen, let me clue you in on a thing or two about Screamer. May as well, seeing as he’s adopted you as his little pup,” she hawked up a globule of phlegm and spat it into the gutter, “for now.”

“Yay.”

“The Western slums used to be the territory of a guy called the Cobbler. He had a few operations, but his main money-spinner was drugs. Epsith, Lain, SS, you name it, he’d deal in it.”

“Why have we stopped?” Lydia asked, shifting Albright’s literal dead-weight on her shoulder.

Nail-puller rolled her eyes and tugged Lydia’s hood off before continuing, “Cobbler would hide the drugs in the heels and soles of shoes, and send them on the road bundled up in the chests of legit traders and caravan operators. Hence the name,” she added for the slow and obtuse, “It was good business, and low risk. Even if a shipment were discovered, nobody could ever be fingered for the crime. The merchants ‘knew nuffin’, just the same as the porters and shoemakers ‘knew nuffin’. Authorities could never say for sure at which stage the drugs had been stashed.”

“And how does this relate to Screamer screwing us like the guest of honour at a Succubus’ house party?” Gabriel asked.

“Shut it. I’m getting there,” Nail-puller made a show of having to rearrange her thoughts, “The story goes that Cobbler got greedy, as folk do, and stiffed a couple of well-respected merchants on their cut. Not entirely sure about the why, but the point is that the merchants decided to take the case through the courts, and they won the right to legally go after the Cobbler. Plan was to make an example of him, show they couldn’t be played for fools. So, they pitched in and got a few hirelings to run around town and shake up Cobbler’s operation. The trouble was, it was all about the show for them, and they weren’t all that concerned with what one might call a proper investigation.”

Lydia sighed and poked a little Soldier’s Solace into her mouth.

Nail-puller eyed the warrior curiously, but shrugged off whatever she had to say and carried on with her story, “Now, some say that the merchants got their hands on Cobbler and tore him to bits, sending him back out into the world as a changed man - our Screamer,” she looked up and down the street, “That’s not what I reckon though. Rumour has it that some of Cobbler’s people decided to throw the authorities for a loop, and told the investigators that Cobbler, was just a cobbler. Whether they believed it, or were just plain lazy, these scumbags went and bagged themselves the first black cobbler they could find. They found a nice Agryssan bloke working for a pittance and nabbed him. Description was close enough, so they thought, and what’s one Agryssan for another?” She shook her head in disgust, “Then? They tortured him, and tortured him, and tortured him, until his own friends and family wouldn’t recognize him anymore. All they needed was a confession, and then they could go back to their bosses and make sweet.”

“Isn’t Jandrir just charming, Lydia?” Gabriel said.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“Fucking lovely.”

“Find me a city without a few piss stains in the corners and I’ll sell you my bloody kidneys,” Nail-puller sneered, “Anyway, despite everything, the guy wouldn’t crack. ‘We’ll make you scream,’ they said. ‘You’ll beg for your life,’ they said. ‘You’ll howl like a little girl’. No matter what they did, though, the li’l ol’ cobbler never broke. He didn’t lie, he didn’t confess, and he didn’t scream,” she grinned maniacally, “They kept him there for years, some say. Named him Screamer to taunt him. Eventually they promised that the day he screamed would be the day they finally let him die,” Nail-puller deftly snatched Lydia’s next pinch of Solder’s Solace and deposited it in her own mouth with a cheeky wink.

Lydia glared unblinking as she fished for more of the root.

“Don’t know if he broke out, don’t know if his captors eventually got bored of him,” Nail-puller continued, “but one day Screamer walked into the light of day again, a complete mockery of what he’d been before. People like to say that the first thing he did was turn around to his torturers and offer them a job, and that those are the self-same bodyguards that watch over him today.”

“Interesting choice of company,” Gabriel mumbled.

“Next, he did what the authorities couldn’t, and tracked down the real Cobbler and those whose lies had protected the bastard. Screamer butchered and chopped away at anyone who had a hand in landing him in the dungeons. He wasn’t interested in any other crimes, he wasn’t there to become a hero, he just wanted to punish all those liars and cheats who had taken his life away from him. Went he got them, he hung them from their own doorways, dangling by their entrails. He instructed their grievin’ families not to cut them down ‘til the maggots had eaten their liars’ tongues,” she nodded to herself as if checking in with an ancient memory, “The rest of Cobbler’s people? He took them on as his own. With Cobbler gone, Screamer sat down in the old hustler’s seat and carried on his empire like nothin’ ever happened.”

“And Cobbler’s men just accepted that? They didn’t fight back?” Gabriel doubted.

“For what? Whose going to reward you? Cobbler was nowhere to be found, and it’s tough to make a grab for power against a man who just gutted half the hierarchy.”

“I’m confused,” Gabriel frowned, “How can people still not be sure if Cobbler and Screamer are the same person?”

Nail-puller’s tongue was working along her gums, “There were plenty of dead bodies around at that time, so they say, but Cobbler’s wasn’t one of them. He’d gone to ground whilst the merchants were after him, so some just assumed they’d found the right guy in Screamer. Others think that Screamer offed Cobbler on the quiet, to make it easier to take over. Personally, I think the guy is still alive, locked in a basement somewhere. Stories get about that every day, before he starts his morning business, Screamer goes down into a hidden basement, where he keeps Cobbler chained to the walls, bound and broken, stewin’ in his own shit,” her eyes were alight, “Each day he cuts a little bit more off, and a little bit more, and a little bit more. Can’t be naught left of the man now, but still Screamer won’t allow the aether take him. Supposedly he made Cobbler the opposite promise to the one he was given; if Cobbler can make it one day without screaming, then, and only then, will Screamer let him die.”

The air had some real weight to it. The narrow street they had stopped in felt oppressive and claustrophobic. It was easy to imagine eyes and ears in every crack of plaster, every splinter of wood. Jandrir felt alive in the most ominous way possible. Suddenly, it was a silent watcher, a witness to pain and misery. It was a living tomb.

“What a load of old bollocks!” Gabriel announced, and carried on in the direction they had been going, “Come on, let’s grab the others and tuck Lance in for the last time.”

Lydia spread the cadaver’s weight across her shoulders and followed her captain.

Nail-puller watched in mute disbelief as the mercenaries plodded off nonchalantly. She checked behind her before following, and said a short prayer to gods she only half believed in.

One turn of the clock later, and Gabriel and his band of merry men and women were standing inside Jandrir’s oldest and largest cemetery, located on Founder’s Hill. Most of the gravestones were too worn and eroded for the names to be seen, and the paths had long since been taken over by weeds and moss.

The graves on the surface were those of Jandrir’s oldest noble families, Nail-puller had informed them before buggering off. A huge spike in the population a mere thirty years after Jandrir was established rendered standard burial practices impossible, and since then it had become the norm to inhume the dearly departed underground, in a large network of crypts, that reportedly mirrored Jandrir’s surface sprawl of alleys and avenues.

They had been directed to the oldest of these crypt entrances, an imposing, dilapidated portal to the Jandriran underworld. It was constructed of gigantic lumps of glossy, dark stone, glued together with coarse mortar, and shards of broken pottery. Curiously, the glimmering, mirror-like surface was completely devoid of lichen, ivy, or any vegetation whatsoever. The grass at the base of the structure even leaned away from the gates, as if cowering in fear.

“Who had, ‘journey into an undercity of the dead’, as their guess for the next shite thing to happen to us this month?” Gabriel asked casually.

Vish raised his hand.

“Well done. You just won the right to go first,” Gabriel said, clapping the mind-mapper on the back.

“Oh, well, woah now, what would people think of me as a gentleman if I did not offer that honour to the good ladies of our group?” Vish said.

“They’d think you a sniveling coward.”

“And they would be right!” Vish stepped aside and gave a low bow, “Lady Lydia, by your lead.”

“Dick,” Lydia snorted, barging passed the pair of inept mercenaries with Lance still bundled neatly on her back.

Black iron gates blocked her entrance into the crypts. She rattled the spiraled chords of ancient metal like a prisoner in her cell.

“Locked,” Lydia informed them, “This was a waste of fucking time.”

As soon as she finished speaking there was a soft but distinct clicking sound.

The five of them looked down at the lock.

Gingerly, Lydia reached out and gave the gate a shove.

It swung open easily, with only the faintest hint of a creak.

They looked at each other uneasily.

“Ho-ho-ho, no,” Vish said, turning around to walk away.

“Now hang on, Screamer did say we might be surprised by what we found here,” Gabriel said, halting the mind-mapper.

“A haunted graveyard? Not that surprising, really,” Vish said, trying to duck under Gabriel’s arms.

“Look, I’m sure there are more rational explanations than that. Maybe there’s a pressure switch or something, and Lydia stepping on it opened the lock.”

“What would be the point of having a locked gate, that unlocked whenever you walked up to it?” Vish asked.

“It was just a flipping suggestion. I don’t know, maybe Nail-puller opened it somehow, or maybe rattling the gate just happened to do the trick! It’s an old mechanism, after all.”

Vish considered this, “Maybe that one?”

“Yes, maybe that one,” Gabriel said, looking at them each in turn, “There’s a rational explanation for everything.”

There were still more uneasy faces than reassured ones, but nobody was running… yet.

“Let’s get this over with,” Lydia sighed, shouldering the gate fully open and leading the way inside.

Figo stopped in the entrance to light a lantern. The warm incandescent glow revealed a long staircase descending into darkness that the light could not budge. The stairs were of the same glass-like rock that the exterior was made of. They bowed slightly in the middle, worn down by the shuffling of Jandrirans who had probably long since departed this mortal realm.

“This one is all yours, captain,” Lydia said, grabbing the lantern from Figo and thrusting it into Gabriel’s chest.

“Fine, if that’s what it will take to show you all that we are perfectly safe,” Gabriel said, a slight rattle to his voice.

One by one, they tiptoed down the stairs and into the caverns below. When they had descended roughly twenty or so steps, they heard another soft creak, followed by a clatter that echoed through the corridor and through their very bones.

The flame of the lantern guttered and died.

“Was that..?” Figo said with a gulp.

“Yeah, yeah it was,” Vish confirmed, looking back at the gate they instinctively knew was now locked again.

“Okay, don’t panic. Don’t panic,” Gabriel said, near hyperventilating, “Remember, there’s always a rational explanation.”

A gentle breeze funneled through the crypts. It was warm and stuffy, and yet still sent a chill down their spines. It howled like the cries of the eternally tormented.

Vish clucked his tongue, “Yep, and this time the rational explanation is probably that someone wants us very, very dead.”