Saber shoved Pitch and Powder toward where Vice and Dagger were clearing the way, and then drew an estoc nearly as long as a spear and vaulted over them in a perfect jackknife that scraped his boots across the ceiling.

He landed just behind Dagger and Vice, and his slender blade whispered between the cannons of Vice's fists and feet, and the thunder of Dagger's hammer. The floor sloped ever down, deeper into the warren as they danced between each other in the close confines. Spaces no smaller than a wink between bodies were enough for Powder, her bullets cracked between leather to drop anything with too many teeth. Pitch heaved vials and handfuls of dust that burned and ignited and ate flesh in dirty puffs of hungry acid. The air stank of chemicals, gunpowder and guts.

"They're getting bigger!" Saber shouted as he turned to guard their rear. Powder kept one hand on Saber's shoulder and her gun barked from under his arm.

"That is their way," Vice said. "Each one we kill feeds one that remains."

"Pitch, can you buy us some space?" Dagger yelled.

Pitch moved to the rear of the party while the rest of The Armory formed up around him. He dug a trench in the dirt floor with the heel of his boot, took two pouches from his waist and mixed them into the ditch. The chemicals mixed, sparked and sizzled into a thick smoke that filled the tunnel.

"Back!" Pitch yelled, coughing and hacking from the noxious curtain. He doubled over, retching and Saber grabbed him by the belt and dragged him to safety just as a demon burst through the barrier, screaming as its flesh smoked down to its warped bones. It gurgled and dissolved. Others tried to follow and met the same fate.

"Fuck, that's some nasty shit," Pitch said, and swigged from a vial to soothe his burned throat. "But it won't hold long. They'll swarm it and use it up."

Their rear protected for the moment, they cut their way ahead. Claws twitched in the dirt in angry farewells, plaintive, idiot calls to come back, fight, be our meat. Even with Pitch's chemicals Dagger could feel her shoulders getting stupid, her waist and back aching with every swing. The tunnel ahead was blessedly empty but dangerously narrow. If they continued, they'd be fighting single file.

"Powder, Saber," Dagger ordered.

"I see it, Captain," Powder said.

"Yep," Saber said.

"Saber, at the back with Vice. Vice, be a wall. Saber, be where he isn't."

"Got it," Saber yelled.

"Powder, with me," Dagger said. "We'll take the unknown. I want your shotguns going off under my arms and between my swings."

"Captain."

"We keep Pitch in the middle, understood?" Dagger said. "He's got cooking to do. Let's move!"

They advanced in a shuffle. Behind them they could hear the scrabbling of claws as the demons fought through Pitch's chemical wall. In the center of the group, Pitch mixed furiously, precariously blending powder and alcohol between a pair of flasks. Their nostrils wouldn't take another dose — even he could feel his sinuses had thickened with the residue. He grinned tightly. If they lived, the hangover was going to be incandescent. They would breath knives for a month. Luckily, I've got something for that too, he thought, I've got something for everything. The liquid in his flasks glowed, eerie and delicious.

Dagger advanced with Powder's hand on her broad back and a scattergun beneath Dagger's arm like a deadly purse. Behind them Vice walked backwards, his armored fists crossed before him to meet the brunt of whatever rushed up the tunnel. Saber stepped lightly behind him, his estoc in a ready grip.

"They come," Vice muttered to Saber.

"Mmhm."

Dagger pushed her way deeper into the tunnel, her shoulders rasped against the rough stone. "Hold!" she ordered. "Powder, cover me."

"They come!" Vice called again.

"So, stop them!" Dagger shot back.

The Armory held their position as demons crashed into Vice, who battered them against the walls, floor and each other, his pliers-like armored fingers ripping and bashing. Saber's blade flickered through the gaps in Vice's brutal, economic movements and slithered into flesh again and again.

In front, Dagger knelt and Powder stood over her with a scattergun in each hand, driving her eyes into the narrow darkness ahead, waiting to give her irons a chance to speak. Dagger laid her hammer on the ground and took a sharp spearhead from her belt and screwed it into the top of the head. She stood, her beastly weapon now a halberd fit for a blacksmith with a grudge against gods.

"Moving," Dagger said, and advanced behind her spear.

Two demons rushed her, their forms at first just fast shadows, and then their squealing skin wedged together in the tight confines. They thrashed at each other, claws scrabbling for friction against the walls, ceiling, floor and even each other. Dagger stepped in and drove her hammer into the blended mass of them. The spearhead popped one swollen body like a balloon and crunched into bone somewhere beyond. She kicked the other, nearly losing her boot to its jaws.

"Powder!" Dagger yelled and stood tall, her hammer over her head. For a slivered moment she looked like a statue as Powder snugged herself against Dagger's back, shoved a scattergun under each of her arms, and cut loose blind. Lead and fire cleared the way ahead, and turned the demons into little more than bone-flecked gel against the stone and dirt.

"Dose ready," Pitch said and handed the smoking flask to Dagger, who took a gulp and passed it to Powder. Their bodies flooded with new energy, the air almost crystalline. Dagger gestured and shuffled positions with Saber and Vice to take the brunt of the rush from behind. When Vice and Saber had drunk, and Pitch had swallowed the flask's final sip, Dagger again slid into the lead. The stone walls grew rougher and showed less the traces of miner's tools and more the ragged marks of animal clawing.

"They're trying to widen the tunnel," Dagger noted. "We have to finish this fast."

They burst out of the corridor and into an atrium of stone and darkness. The air was thick and warm. The Armory had killed wet, crawling creatures with too many teeth every step of the way, idiot, locust things that pounced on their own dead and ate the leavings — but in that atrium of rough stone, a sight cut through their jade and Pitch's sedatives.

"Well," Saber said, "that's just needlessly fucked up."

At the atrium's center was a swarm of demons, far smaller than any they'd faced so far, and two larger, corpulent ones that were covered in tooth-jagged scars. They shuffled around the brood of little demons like nursemaids, shoving and herding the squalling spawn into little clumps. The baby demons nestled close to their minders and ripped small gobbets of flesh from their plump legs, backs and paunches. The nursemaid demons didn't seem bothered, rather they turned themselves this way and that so the little horrors could find new flesh to eat, like sows lying on their sides so their newborn piglets could find a nipple. The ragged holes in their bodies healed almost instantly.

The nursemaid demons turned eyeless heads to regard The Armory. They hissed a warning but did not advance.

"Is that—" Powder said.

"Yeah," Pitch said. "They're nursing."

"No, I meant that," Powder said, pointing beyond the demons to the center of the room to a pulsing boulder of sweaty fleshy that writhed on the ground. The room reeked of charnel and ammonia.

"The gate," Pitch said in a voice both awed and horrified. "I've only ever seen scholars’ drawings. But that looks more like..."

"It looks like a..." Saber said.

"Leave it in your heads, both of you," Dagger said, staring in disgust.

A gate was a thing of wood, stone or iron. It was a symbol of protection, a barrier with safety on the far side. It was not a big pulsing sack with veiny, rippling flesh and a sphincter-like opening at one end. It was not supposed to squat like an obese tumor, shifting its weight to and fro in a bed of its own filth.

It was not supposed to be alive.

The gate convulsed and a shrieking eyeless horror oozed from the puckered opening on a wave of mucous, and landed thrashing and keening into this unfamiliar world.

A gate did not heave and gasp in the throes of birth.

The baby horror was already growing as a nursemaid demon rushed over to tend to it.

"This is an abomination," Vice said.

"You know,” Saber said, “before today I only thought I knew what that word meant.”

Powder giggled. "Don't leave Saber alone with it," she said, pointing at the pucker of the gate's business end.

"Oh, c'mon, Powder. Not even I'm that depraved."

"Tell me you weren't thinking about it."

The duelist shut his mouth with a click.

The gate shuddered and the pucker sealed itself as the mass settled with what could only be a relieved sigh. Extending from it were snarls of fleshy tubes that led to vibrating bubbles of skin.

"We have to sever the boilers," Pitch said, pointing at the bubbles. "That's where it's drawing its power."

"Boilers?" Dagger asked.

"Fine," Pitch said. "You think of a better word."

One of the nursemaid demons wrenched open a connected bubble and stuffed in pieces of dead miner, helmet, apron and all. The gate shook and chunked like it was swallowing. The sphincter rippled as it expelled a gasp of foul air.

"I think it just burped," Saber said.

"How do we close that?" Powder asked. "It's not like it's a fucking door."

"Kill it and burn it," Dagger said. "Pitch?"

"White phosphorus," the alchemist said. "It's too wet for ordinary fire."

"Vice?" Dagger said.

"I can seal the breech it came through. The Vigil will aid me. No god of our world would suffer this thing's existence."

The rest of the group looked at each other. It was unnerving when Vice talked about his dead god as if it wasn't.

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As The Armory approached, the nursemaid demons gathered their young charges, shielding the infants behind their bodies. Then they turned their maws to the ceiling and screamed as one, a piercing whistle of sound that drilled its way into The Armory's ears.

"Cry for help," Dagger noted.

"Yes," Vice said and shook out his shoulders.

"But we slaughtered everything on the way here," Saber said.

"You sure about that?" Powder said.

A mass formed beyond the gate, a ripple in the darkness out of reach of Pitch's phosphorescent paint. It could have been a moving wall. It stretched across the cavern as it advanced toward The Armory, and stepped into the range of the light, breaking across the gate like a slow wave.

"I thought the miners were all dead?" Saber said.

It was a wall of men and women. They still wore the heavy canvas aprons and leather gloves of their trade. Tools dangled from their belts. They walked on stiff legs. Their hands twitched. Their eyes were blank, their mouths open and slack.

"Zombies?" Dagger said with a snort. "That's a children's story."

The miners stepped between The Armory and the demon infants and spasming gate, but advanced no further. Behind the living barrier, the nursemaid demons furiously fed human slurry into the boilers.

"Why aren't they attacking?" Powder asked.

The human wall swayed, their shoulders bumping into each other idiotically.

"Powder, cover me," Pitch said.

"Go," Powder said, one of her pistols up. Pitch stopped a half dozen feet from the human wall. Their eyes did not focus on him. They did not turn their heads. He took another step and reached out a hand.

"Pitch!" Dagger yelled.

"It's an experiment," he called back. One of the shambling miners lifted a limp hand toward Pitch and its chest caved in with a crack as Powder fired. The miner fell and Pitch grabbed its apron and dragged the corpse back to The Armory as the shambling miners closed ranks around the gap. Pitch rolled the dead miner over and a wet little something ripped free from the corpse's skull and skittered toward the miners. It squealed as it was crushed beneath a shuffling boot.

"What was that?" Dagger asked.

"Some kind of parasite, I think," Pitch said, staring down at a hole in the back of the miner's head. "Shows a primitive knowledge of human movement, bipedal walking being as complicated as it is. But they're not attacking. Perhaps they don't have a handle on the higher motor functions enough to fight. Yet. Very interesting."

"So glad you're fascinated," Dagger said.

Vice stared at the wall of miners. "Life must be preserved," he muttered.

"Since when?" Dagger asked him.

"This isn't life, Vice," Pitch said. "This is anima past its prime."

"Pitch," Dagger asked, "could they recover if we get those things off their skulls?"

Pitch thought for a moment. "Possible. If they're only on the outside of the skull. Saber, lend me one of your knives."

"Hurry up," Dagger said with a glance at the wall. Their shuffling had grown more animated. Their fingers twitched and their heads turned this way and that. One by one, sets of dead, staring eyes focused on The Armory. Saber handed Pitch something more chisel than knife and the alchemist slid it into the hole in the back of the miner's head. He levered open the skull like he was cracking an oyster. Inside was filled with a honeycomb of fibrous mucal strands.

"Most of the brain's gone," Pitch said. "But it's possible their souls are still intact."

"Without their brains?" Dagger asked.

Pitch shrugged. "Nobody can agree where the soul is kept. Before my time with you, I would have argued it was only a metaphor."

Dagger nodded. "If their souls are still in there, you know what happens when we kill."

"I'd say it’s still better than this," Pitch said, gestured at the shuffling zombie wall. "Trapped in their meat. If I were in that wall, I'd want this to end."

"Deliverance," Vice said with a reverent sigh. "I misjudged you, Pitch."

"Not really, Vice," Pitch said. "I would have done it without checking if you weren't here."

From behind his back, the alchemist took a squat bottle with a rope loop wrapped around its neck. He poured in a fine dust from a pouch and re-sealed it. As the chemicals within mixed, they glowed with a sickly yellow light. Pitch tossed it at the wall. One of the miners reached out and caught it, clutching it to her chest.

"Impressive," Pitch said. "They're learning fast."

"Yeah," Dagger said. "Cute. Powder? Before it learns to throw?"

Powder fired. The bottle shattered. The chemicals met air and burst into gouts of liquid fire that splashed over the miners, consuming half the wall. The miners staggered. The wall broke.

"With me!" Dagger shouted and lunged forward, swinging her hammer in a mighty arc that felled three of the shambling miners. The Armory moved like farmers threshing a field of grain. The miners that hadn't burned tried feebly to fight back but the creatures bored into their skulls hadn't mastered their bodies. The Armory cut, shot, burned and battered them to spare parts. The tiny creatures that had burrowed into the miners' skulls ripped loose of their puppets in a panic and were stomped beneath boot heels like tavern roaches or else ran into the fire, sizzled and died.

Through the dying flames and smoke, The Armory pushed forward, the floor slick and tacky under their boots. Their last barrier gone, the nursemaid demons faced The Armory, their mouths slack and screaming, empty of teeth. Their hands did not have claws, their bodies were awkward and not built to fight. They were walking feed troughs, but they were all that was left. Their young charges continued to gnaw on their thick haunches and climbed their backs to rip mouthfuls from their shoulders and necks.

"We have to stop the eating," Pitch called. "They little ones are growing."

Powder fired and her bullet tore a hole through the shoulder of one of the nursemaids. It rocked back and squealed at her, but the hole filled in seconds with new flesh, making a fresh patch of scar. Four of the demon infants rushed Saber, climbed up his trousers and bore him to the ground, their teeth scraping and rasping on his leathers. Screaming, he rolled and slammed himself into the ground, crushing two. Vice picked the rest off the duelist and smashed them together until they ceased moving. He threw them too far to become a meal, then grabbed a nursemaid, held it down and drove his fist against its fleshy skull. After it went limp, Dagger brought down her hammer over and over until it was paste and mud. Powder dragged Saber to his feet and then opened up on the last nursemaid demon with her scatterguns and made half of it disappear.

"Heal from that," she spat out.

Pitch poured acid over the writhing, half-gone creature.

The Armory turned its attention to the swarm of infant demons. They shuffled and keened pathetically as The Armory pulped them against the stone. When the cavern was quiet but for the pulsing, sucking noises of the gate, the bravos stood, panting and staring at the obscene thing.

"Vice," Dagger said, "get started."

Vice knelt and began to mutter. The gate spasmed.

"Sever the boilers," Vice muttered between prayers.

Saber and Powder went to each of the fleshy tumors. After he cut though the tendrils connecting them to the gate, she destroyed them with her shotguns. The gate whined and wriggled. It tried to move, but it was too heavy. Vestigial legs poked and squirmed from under its bulk.

Pitch threw two glass jars at the gate, one filled with chalky rocks and water, and the other filled with captive fire. They shattered and the chemicals inside smoked and blazed as they hit open air. The gate shook and made wet kissing sounds with its birth opening as if gulping to breathe around the white-hot conflagration. An old-garlic reek filled the cavern. Dagger swung her hammer down on the gate. Power fired her scatterguns again and again. Saber chopped with big strokes of his cleavers. They worked artlessly until the thing was a lumpy, sizzling mess in the dirt.

"This is never gonna wash off," Saber said, fruitlessly trying to find something clean to wipe his mouth.

Dagger turned back to the praying monk. "What are we waiting for?"

Vice did not answer. His head was bowed and his lips moved. Without the sucking, gurgling noises of the gate and the squeals of the baby demons, The Armory could hear his repeated phrases, intense and plaintive. Dagger shook her head and sifted the gate's leftover meat with her boot and the spike end of her hammer's handle. She kicked a misshapen bone out of the way and toed along the floor of the mine. She bent down and pushed her fingers into the muck.

"There's something under here," she said, wiping her hand on her trousers. "Pitch, I need more light."

Pitch produced a bundle of acrid-smelling cloth. "Drive your hammer into the floor."

Dagger stood and stabbed her hammer's spiked handle deep into the ground and Pitch wrapped the head with the cloth and then took out flint and tinder. Sparks danced across the reactive cloth, and it blazed with a bright, white light. Dagger knelt and again probed the slurry, this time with her belt knife.

"There's something carved it into the stone," she said. "It was done with tools, not claws."

"Let me see," Pitch said and bent down near her. "Yes, I see it. But I don't recognize it. This might be more Vice's line than mine."

"Vice!" Dagger called over her shoulder.

The monk still did not move.

"Vice!" Dagger shouted even louder.

Vice tilted his face up to the ceiling of the cavern, his eyelids closed and the eyeballs behind them flitting back and forth rapidly.

"Hey, Vice, the Vigil's over here with its tits out," Saber shouted.

Vice growled and bowed his head. He unclasped his hands. "Saber, I am going to punch you in the face."

"You can punch him later," Dagger said.

"Hey!" Saber protested.

"Vice! Now!" Dagger continued. "Come look at this."

Vice got off his knees and looked over Dagger's shoulder.

"It is a ritual sigil," he said, "this is how they called the gate."

"How does it work?" Pitch asked.

"By belief, Pitch," Vice said.

"Nothing happens just because you believe it," Pitch said.

"Belief is as strong as any science," Vice muttered.

"How were those prayers going?" Pitch muttered.

"I... there was no answer," Vice said, missing Pitch's sarcasm. His tone was anguished.

"It's probably like they told us," Pitch said, "this place is hidden. Even with the demons gone."

Vice gave Pitch a grateful look and straightened his back.

"Would the sigils keep working?" Dagger asked. "Could whoever carved this do it again, even if with the gate and all the demons dead?"

"Yes," Vice said. "This symbol weakens the membrane between the worlds and calls to another. In this case, a world where these creatures are plentiful. One they have devoured."

"Who would want something like that?" Dagger asked, not out of outrage, but curiosity.

"Somebody who believed the world was better eaten," Vice said.

"It wasn't the demons themselves," Pitch noted. "They don't plan."

Dagger grunted. "How do we get rid of it?"

"Could just blow it up," Powder said.

"Do it," Dagger muttered.

"Pitch," Powder said and gestured to the sludge that had once been a gate, "can you burn some of this shit off so I can see what I'm doing?"

The alchemist poured acid from a jar over the slurry on the ground, and it sizzled as it ate the gate's meat down to smoke and crystalline dust.

"Why is that making me hungry?" Saber muttered at the smell of dissolving, quick-burning flesh.

"Because, as usual," Vice said, "your appetites have outstripped your brains."

Saber shrugged. "It's a gift."

Powder set her bag down, removed several slim sticks of dynamite and laid them in the sigil's grooves. She took out a spool of fuse and attached one end to the dynamite.

"Time to go," she said, and played out the fuse behind as The Armory made their back through the mine. They heard nervous skittering in the darkness, the sound of claw on stone.

"What do we do about the stragglers?" Powder asked, gesturing at a demon trying to hide behind a rock and hissing at them. "I don't want to waste bullets."

"We close the gate," Dagger said. "Whatever doesn't die in the blast, the locals can clean up."

"If there's any locals left," Saber muttered.

The journey back, as is often the case with walks into the unknown, felt shorter.

The Armory burst gasping and squinting into the sunlight. The fetid rank of the yard tasted like fine wine after the murk of the tunnels and the smell of burning flesh. Powder lit the fuse, and it shot back into the tunnel behind them like a firefly.

"Stop right there," a strange voice commanded and all around them was the sound of swords being drawn and rifle hammers being cocked. Dagger blinked until the half-moon of liveried soldiers blocking their way came into focus.

"Who the fuck are you?" Dagger asked.

"The Queen's guard."

"Which queen?"

"Our queen is not a witch!"

"Not what I meant."

"Do you not know where you are?" The soldier asked.

"Frequently," Saber answered, fingering the hilt of one of his swords and looking speculatively at the ring of weapons. "We're out. Job's done. We could just sell this one dear. All those miners back there. They gotta be worth an exit."

"Hold, Saber," Dagger said.

"What were you doing down there?" The soldier asked.

"Solving your demon problem," Dagger said.

"How?"

Dagger held up a finger. They stood. The soldiers shifted nervously.

Several moments passed and nothing happened.

"Powder?" Dagger turned to the sharpshooter. "Little quieter than your usual work."

"Captain, it's a lot of fuse. Just wait."

"You're making us look bad in front of the yokels," Saber said with a giggle.

"Shut up, Saber," Powder said. "Captain, I know my business."

The gunner turned to the soldiers. "Sorry for the delay. Think of it as a dramatic pause. Like the theater."

"What?" The guards' leader asked.

Then the ground shook and a tempest of dust burst out of the mouth of the mine. The soldiers all flinched and then retrained their weapons on The Armory. Dagger looked behind them, waving a hand and coughing.

"Your mine will need to be re-dug," she said, "but the gate is dead."

"What gate? Why would you kill a gate?"

"Dead," Dagger sighed. "Closed. Whatever. You had to be there."

"What?" The soldier asked again.

"This lot seem easily confused," Pitch muttered.

"Now," Dagger said to the soldiers, "what's this about a queen?"

"Queen Dinar S'ylin Amarenta Qual D'sine, Fortieth of her Line, Jeweled Light of the Citadel requests your presence. You will come with us."

Dagger blinked at the barrage of titles.

"How's he remember all that?" Saber muttered to Powder.

"Probably gets beheaded at dawn if he doesn't," Powder muttered.

"That would motivate me," Saber said.

"Nothing motivates you to remember anybody's name, Saber," Powder said. "That's why you end up in so many duels with husbands, wives and shepherds."

"I've always thought it was better if I can't remember their names, so they know it's nothing serious."

"It's not better," Powder said.

"Come with us," the soldier repeated, trying again to take command of the situation.

"Why?" Dagger asked in a bored voice. "Because you said so?"

"You're outnumbered ten to one!"

"That's a shit reason," Dagger said, "We'd only be outnumbered for the first three seconds."

"Our queen has a job for you," an older soldier called out. He was grizzled and scarred. "Paid in gold."

Dagger grunted. "You should have opened with that. How far?"

"We have a carriage waiting," the first soldier said.

"I changed my mind," Dagger said.

The soldiers shifted nervously.

"You should have opened with carriage, " Dagger said with an exhausted sigh.