Eight men, just as promised, clustered in the common room. The captain’s office opened up onto a balcony overlooking the tall space. None of those gathered looked up when she opened the door.

Three men played cards at a low table. A fourth stirred a pot set above the fire while the fifth just walked in with an armful of wet firewood. The final three were asleep on narrow cots, armour unceremoniously dropped to the floor.

There was no obvious discipline to these guards. They would be useless to her designs if the sty they lived in was anything to go by. Part of her had hoped to offer them a chance, invite them to the work, allow the option to be better.

Nothing here was worth salvaging. If she were a better woman, she would have turned around and walked back out into the storm to enter the home through the main door. Spare the wretches to their failure.

“Oy! Who’re ye?” One of the card players had finally looked up and met her gaze. It slid off her to Gheeor and the still-bloody sword he held. “Oy! What you done wi’h th’ captain?”

Catharina had to be impressed by the immediate reaction they showed.

Three of them drew swords. The cooks had dropped their work and grabbed the nearest pokers from the coals. Red-hot tips drew lines in the smoke of the room.

Five were too many to hold at once. But not too many to kill.

Catharina extended a hand and lightning arched from her fingers to strike the man closest to the fire. He crumpled with a short gasp of pain as she moved her aim to the next.

“Witch!” the first card-player screamed.

They all dove for cover with unexpected deftness. Even those previously asleep were moving, rolling off their beds before she could channel on them.

“See that you keep them busy,” she said to Gheeor. “Take the three unarmoured. I’ll deal with the others.”

He was moving before she’d finished speaking, vaulting over the railing to land in a crouch. He exploded towards the nearest unarmoured man, jumping the card table to swipe down with his sword at the cowering bastard. The guard screamed as he died, an arm nearly lopped off, sword stopping past his collar bone.

Catharina followed suit and threw another bolt of lightning at the first men. A table filled with armour pieces and miscellaneous weapons exploded to ashes as her lightning chased its quarry.

She dripped out her strength, careful not to blow out entire walls or bring the roof down onto them all. It would be a piss-poor showing if she got herself brained by some falling brick.

The first man had gotten his hands on a crossbow and brought it to bear, stopping to take aim. A mistake. Lightning uncoiled from her finger and blasted across the room. It hit the soldier in the chest and cooked his heart in its cradle. He dropped to the floor as the other two made for the stairs to rush her.

They had seen a tempest caller before, she realised as they desperately tried to close the distance. What they lacked in skill, they made up for in courage at least. A gesture turned them into burning effigies, skin and meat charring under the illum assault.

With Gheeor disembowelling his third victim, Catharina counted seven corpses. The eighth had turned tail and disappeared into an adjacent room. A lightning bolt shattered the door and the air filled with the smell of burning meat and fruit. Of any place to choose to hole up in, a pantry seemed like a poor choice.

A glance through the shattered door confirmed the kill. The guard lay sprawled against a burst crate of pears by the smell. It reminded Catharina that her only food for the day had been all the way in the morning, and her stomach growled.

“Shall we?” she asked as she stepped over the corpse nearest the exit. Gheeor had carved it from neck to groin.

“Aye. Reeks of dead meat in here.” He spat a glob of blood and blew his nose. Someone had gotten a punch in past his guard, a bright-red blotch spreading on his clean-shaved cheek. If it bothered him, he didn’t show it.

They stepped into the gathering dark to be blasted by rain. It blinded her for a moment, falling thick, whipped into a frenzy by howling gales.

“I’ve promised you a storm,” the god whispered on her shoulder. “Have I not delivered on my word? Are you not happy?”

She ignored him as they crouched and crossed the short road from guardhouse to the main building. Some of the tarps covering the flowers had been blown off along with the plants themselves. A poor wretch would be whipped come the calm.

The path snaked to the back of the house, leading to an unlocked servant’s entrance. Rain came down harder, a sheet of water bubbling in rivers by her feet. It made sense why the wealthy had built their homes the farthest from their businesses down in port. Filth washed down.

Well, so did blood.

“If one of you asks who I am,” she said as she entered what was a surprisingly narrow kitchen, “you will find those are poor last words.”

Four new faces regarded her. Three women dressed in the rags of commoners. The fourth was another fat man, the cook of the house by the looks of things.

A flash of lightning running down her arm had all of them drawing back, fear etched deep on their faces. Gheeor followed in and pressed a finger to his lips.

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“I suggest you keep mum and don’t try anything cute. It won’t end well.” His voice had the deep rumble that hers lacked and, for now, it kept everyone in the room quiet and frozen in place.

She wove quickly, channelling a stream of power that cut their strings for the time being. Bodies dropped to the floor nearly all at once, unhurt but unconscious. These were servants. Her aim wasn’t to harm them, though by the next bell she would have their lives turned inside out.

“Your nose’s bleeding,” Gheeor said as he dragged the fat cook away from his pots to pile in a corner with the rest.

Catharina wiped her nose on her sleeve. Funny how easy killing was. A thought and her lighting could strike down a target half-a-city away. Control was so much more difficult and vile, requiring conscious effort.

I should pace myself. Still more of the night to go.

“It’s nothing,” she said outward and cracked open the door leading inside.

Sure enough, there were two of the guards, standing like pillocks in a large, ornate hallway. Children ran and played around them. On a rainy day, the family would be inside, the children endlessly energetic. Somewhere there would be the mother, or their nanny, watching. She tripped one up with a burst of power, and it led to loud, encouraged bawling.

A woman dressed in rich robes came to bundle up the snot-faced boy. She carried him off to somewhere, the other one trailing after her, shouting it wasn’t his fault.

Two bolt, aimed precisely through the gap in the door, dropped the soldiers. Twenty heartbeats later, nobody came to check on them, so Gheeor went out and dragged the bodies in, piling them away from the servants. They smelled of cooked brains and burnt hair.

She had been prepared for a real fight, but this was embarrassing at best. How did men like this keep rein of their power when their households were nearly unprotected? An aelir’s Olden, even for a lowly third cousin of a Protector, would have been a swarm of guards, choke points, and hidden traps.

Posturing and the perception of strength. A man like Mihaal had a fleet at sea, true, but his castle was built of reeds. Fear stank up the entire place. She’d felt it on the servants and she’d felt it on the passers in the streets. Fear kept the rabble away… but they weren’t rabble.

She emerged from the kitchen and walked down the hallway, not paying much attention to the decor of the place. There were suits of polished armour and weapons on the walls, fine art and sculptures. May as well have been naked wood for all use she found for it.

An opulent home in a city little better than a white-washed gutter in Aztroa. This is what her people had been reduced to from the heroes of old. This is what the blood of a thousand worlds had diluted into, at least if the god drooling on her shoulder was to be believed. His whispered secrets straddled the line between faer story and possible reality.

The last of the guards fell without a whimper as well as she ascended the stairs. Still no other servants. No bustle. A large, empty home, richly decorated but little-lived in. The cries of the child echoed from some room, but she doubted his father had joined him.

It was so easy. So terribly easy to simply walk in and snatch it all away from them. Get the right information and the right tools, and the most powerful men in a city could fall like yellowed leaves. Little satisfaction in shaking them loose, knowing the tree was rotten to its core.

Gheeor pushed her out of the way as a flame orb passed between them to explode the richly sculpted railing. She stumbled and arched lightning in the direction of the attack.

The man rushed at her, diving under her strike to close the distance. His sword came up in an arc and it would have found her throat if not for Gheeor’s counter. Steel rang against steel and, for a horrifying moment, the large man was thrown back by the assault.

An ash eater guarded against them, infused with illum-drawn strength. His hand flashed fire again and she had to throw herself against and through the nearest door to avoid being speared on the burning lance. Immediately she heard her companion grunting. Then a blast of overheated air washed through the open door.

She rose in a hurry, heart pumping fast against her ribs, a smile cresting her lips. There was some fight here to be won after all. It wouldn’t simply all be handed to her. Good.

Swords met outside as Gheeor did as he’d been trained on the voyage. He closed in with the ash eater and forced him into a duel. She peeked out of the room. The men were locked in a tight dance atop the stairs, sword against sword, fists and knees trying to trip one another up. Fire raged at the opposite end of the corridor, a hole blown out into the outside.

A woman screamed somewhere lower. She’d come out of the room and witnessed the scene. In a moment she’d be running for the door, call in the dead guards, scream into the rain.

Lightning cut her down as she ran across the main hallway.

Catharina brought her strength to bear on the duellists, snaking a bolt around her bodyguard to hit the ash eater. He drew back, eyes wide, clothes smoking. He still held the sword and managed another parry. She felt his backwash of heat from across the distance, power drawn in to counter her assault.

Gheeor’s sword came down like thunder against the man’s guard before whatever he was weaving could be completed. He got his free hand on the ash eater’s shoulder, pulled, and headbutted the man.

A sword slipped from nerveless fingers and Gheeor struck again, hard enough that blood spurted from their meeting foreheads. That scythed the strength from the wizard and send him down to the floor in a boneless pile.

The personal bodyguard of a merchant lord wore a light leather tunic and loose trousers, looking like nothing more than a simple mercenary. Dark skin, black eyes, hair like pitch.

“Don’t kill him,” Catharina said. “Make him my offer if he comes to.”

She strode past the two and spared only a glance at the corpse of the woman. Smoke twirled up from the hole the bolt had blown through her rib cage. The children wailed somewhere out of sight.

Mihaal tried to brain her with a golden candle stick when she opened the door. She caught it, yanked it away and the man along with it. She’d expected and prepared for another of the captain’s bulk, some other version of a bloated parasite.

Instead, the cowering Mihaal looked barely more than a child himself. Forty summers if a day more, spindly like some insect, with runny eyes and a weak chin. This was a man making a fortune from selling humans into service? This…

She lashed out with a kick and sent him crashing against his richly decorated office. He babbled something, drew breath to scream for his men, but Catharina heard nothing of it.

A lightning bolt cut through him, burst his heart and cooked the flesh around the wound. She had nothing to say to someone of his pursuits.

Hacking the head off took a bit more effort than she’d anticipated. She’d never done a beheading before. Oddly, the aelir frowned on such things.

Blood dripped from her sack when she exited the room to find Gheeor cleaning his sword on the ash eater’s trousers. The man’s head had been split open, grey matter splattering the wooden pane of the wall. Soon it would burn.

“Refused the offer I take it.”

“Aye. Gurgled something about honour. More’s the pity.”

By now the fire had spread to engulf the inner walls of the corridor, racing to consume paintings and expensive carpeting. In a bell’s strike, there would be nothing left of the home even with the rain. Her night had only just begun.