> How fortunate we are that the Ordfey is now confined to ancient history, and that humankind, by dint of our population, will forevermore have the power to keep the cruelty of elves in check! But let us not delude ourselves, dear reader: the cruelty of elves is also the cruelty of men. We are capable of just the same wickedness. —Denrick Roth, Elves

A MOMENT OF MERCY

Cellar of an unknown address 09.06.03.12.11

Adrey couldn’t decide whether what she was feeling was pain or pleasure.

On the one hand, the bathwater was only just on the right side of poaching hot, and the salts, soaps and oils dissolved within it cut into her wounds like wet fire. She actually shrieked a little as she was forced to sit down, unable to lift herself back out again thanks to the way her wrists were shackled to the bath’s handgrips.

On the other hand, after several seconds of breathing through clenched teeth, the torment dissolved away and swirled off her just as though the thin film of her own dried blood that coated her skin was the very carrier of pain, and in being washed away it balmed her injuries as well.

And then there was the warm, soft, slick, soapy nearness of Mari Pelton, whose solution to bathing her prisoner, apparently, was to disrobe and step into the bath with her so she could cuddle up close and attend to every inch of Adrey’s abused body as though they were the oldest and most intimate of friends. Adrey couldn’t decide whether her touch and calculated eroticism were revolting or…

No. No, they were revolting. She had to hold on to that fact. She had to remember that this was her enemy, and the orchestrator of her tortures, even though a confused, desperate and starving part of her wanted to turn into the ample embrace of Mari’s bosom and weep for comfort.

She knew what would happen if she did. Mari would reward her with kindness and compassion and warm words and comforts and Adrey would be spared from torture for a time. That was the game: submit and take refuge in Mari, and there would be no pain. Resist her and cleave to her loyalties to the Blackdrake Network and to Ellaenie, and there would be more pain than Adrey could endure…and then Mari would be there on the far side of it to tempt her again. And again, and again, until she inevitably broke.

Adrey had endured the cycle twice now. Already, the thought of a third session with Mari’s husband Kal lit a horrible cold inferno of dread in her belly.

She sighed and whimpered as Mari delicately massaged healing balms and oils into her back. She’d bear the whip-scars for the rest of her life, Adrey knew. Farewell, low-backed dresses…

The thought was so absurd, it almost made her cough up a black laugh despite her situation. Mari certainly noticed.

“Steel for your thoughts, beloved?” she purred, and Adrey shivered again.

The terrifying truth was…she had already felt the stirrings of a powerful attraction to Mari Pelton right from the moment they first met. Adrey had never bothered to look closely at that side of herself before: she was a noblewoman, the countess of Whitcairn. She would, had things not turned out as they did, have found a suitable husband to secure both their estates with heirs. There was no point in being enticed by women, when men were beautiful enough, handsome enough, fun enough and exciting enough anyway.

But enticed she was. It had always been there, like the one dancer in the chorus line who still managed to draw the eye so that everyone knew they were destined to be prima donna. And now, Mari Pelton had somehow identified that flaw in Adrey’s armor and was remorselessly pouring herself into it.

“I was just…imagining myself in a backless gown…” Adrey admitted, too exhausted to try and say anything but the truth. Inadequate sleep and the exertion of being tortured were already combining to leave her quite adrift in her own head, and she hadn’t eaten in…well, more than a day, now. A day and a half?

Mari kissed the side of her neck. “You’ll look gorgeous in one.”

“My back’s all—”

“Your back is beautiful, beloved.” Mari’s fingers walked up Adrey’s spine, sending confused jolts ahead of them. Then she leaned forward and kissed one of the wounds. “You’ve got our mark on you now. Our mark of ownership.”

Adrey trembled. Not yet, she reminded herself. Too early. She was going to have to endure much more pain and humiliation at Kal’s hands before the time was right to exploit Mari’s greed. Move too early, and Mari would suspect the ploy.

…Move too late, and it might not be a ploy at all.

“Ownership,” she repeated hollowly.

“Oh yes. You’ll look quite exquisite at our parties, pet. We’ll show off your stripes, and parade you around in a collar so everyone will know, you’re ours.”

“I’ll fucking kill you first,” Adrey promised, spurred into snarling.

Mari tutted. “Aww…bad girl. You haven’t learned your manners yet.” There was not even a mote of malice or vindictiveness in her words, just loving reprimand. “Kal will want to…correct that. But I can still talk him down if you give me some small truth instead.”

Adrey didn’t reply.

“…Something harmless, dear. We know Ellaenie Banmor and Gilber Drevin both write into the city to contact agents in their spy network. We know this…who else writes in?”

Adrey remained silent.

“Kal has been talking about using fire on you, beloved.” Mari exerted some magic, and Adrey felt some of her wounds healing rapidly under a tide of cool, soothing magical power. “Trust me, you won’t endure the branding iron.”

Adrey trembled, and couldn’t hold back a sob of genuine terror that ran down her cheeks and dripped into the ruddy bathwater. But she remained silent. Her only hope, her only hope, lay in holding out long enough for them to buy her eventual apparent capitulation without question. Behind her, Mari sighed and stopped massaging.

“Well, you wouldn’t be so fascinating if you broke easily,” she acknowledged. “You’re very tough, dear Adrey. Much tougher than we thought you would be. Kal thought you’d break after just the first session with him.”

“…Have you done this before?” Adrey asked, buying some time. Any minute now, she knew, Mari was going to rise from the bath and leave her to Kal’s utter lack of mercies.

Mari laughed softly, and kissed the back of her neck again. “I ask the questions, darling.”

“But you have,” Adrey pressed.

Mari’s response was to sigh, then quite aruptly grab Adrey’s head and pull it back sharply. The motion yanked Adrey’s wrists hard against her handcuffs, and she gasped in pain and shock. Mari thrust a small glass bottle between her lips and tipped a liquid into Adrey’s mouth that tasted overpoweringly of bitter mustard. The taste made Adrey gag, and she tried to cough and spit it out, but Mari clamped a hand over her mouth and throat and held her tight. Adrey kicked and writhed, straining furiously against her bonds, but it was hopeless. She was too weakened by torture and deprivation, too well restrained, and Mari seemed surprisingly strong as she pinced Adrey’s nose shut, completely shutting off her air.

Adrey tried to shriek and curse at her, tried to bite, but Mari’s other hand held her jaw shut. A burning commenced in her chest, the terrible fire of lungs yearning to take a new breath as the last one was burned away by exertion. Her rage and defiance turned to fear in an instant, then crashed into full panic. Her thrashing legs churned the bathwater and flung it all around the room, one of the shackles bit into her so hard it drew blood—

And she swallowed. She couldn’t not.

The bitter brew burned as it went down, and Adrey wondered if this was how she died, if her questions and defiance had pushed Mari past the point of giving up on her and she’d opted instead to just poison her and have done. For long seconds she went tense, even as Mari took her hand away and let her gasp for breath. At any moment, she expected to feel hideous painful cramps in her stomach, or a sense of dizziness, or…or however it felt when one died of poison.

But nothing much seemed to happen. The potion settled queasily in her stomach, and she cleared her throat to try and hack away the vile aftertaste, but other than that…

Mari caressed her face. “There. Silly girl. Afraid of a little medicine?”

Adrey looked her in the eye for the first time all night. Her sparkling brown eyes, alive with playful concern and tender forebearance. Very…very beautiful eyes….

No. No! Drugs. Drugs and pain. Don’t trust her. Can’t trust her!

The plan. She could…stick to the plan. Let Mari think she’d…she’d won…

Too early! Drugged! Not now!

She could…

Can’t!

She…

She blinked slowly. “…No…Mistress…”

Mari’s eyes filled with triumph. “Good girl..”

Praise felt good. Mari’s wet, soft body felt good against her skin. The bath felt good. Adrey’s inner voice fell silent, and she smiled stupidly at the beautiful woman who was being so kind to her.

“Good girl,” Mari whispered again, stroking her hair and kissing her brow, and Adrey felt…amazing.

She relaxed into Mari’s bosom, and for a time forgot the pain, and all that would come tomorrow.

----------------------------------------

> Sir. I note that Sir Arnand Bole has published the latest in his long-running and successful series of books recounting the true stories of infamous murders from all across Garanhir. I do not know which disturbs me more about this series: the lavish detail with which Sir Arnand recounts such brutal events, or the fact that the general public seem to lap it up, especially women. I do not know what morbid beast lurks in the feminine psyche that such grotesque material fascinates them so, but I know many otherwise sweet and blameless ladies who can gossip about nothing else but the various grisly murders they have read in his books. It is most unseemly, and I encourage your readers to boycott this latest release. —Letter to the editor, printed in the Auldenheigh Post newspaper.

MURDER SCENE

Park End, Auldenheigh 09.03.03.12.12

“It’s murder, sarge.”

Bothroyd didn’t need telling that, he could smell it.

He hadn’t slept well last night, despite his best efforts and those of his wife Effie plus a large stiff drink. Too many fears and worries had haunted his mind, fearing for the Countess, and his city, and his squad, his friends, the Network…

What fitful winks he’d grabbed had been nightmarish. So when the runner had come for him before dawn, he’d climbed out of bed, kissed Effie and told her he loved her, and got back to work. He may be running on thick black coffee and grim bloody-mindedness, but by the Hounds he’d see this whole business through one way or another.

He hadn’t been expecting to attend a murder in Park End, though. Even before he was outside its gated and railed front garden, he could smell the loathsome cocktail of blood, voided bowels and the early onset of rot which together spoke to an experienced man of violent death.

It was certainly bad enough to keep the crowd away. They were lingering a ways down the street. The constable guarding the front gate looked wan and restless.

“Arright. Victim?”

“Three victims that we’ve seen, prob’ly five. The Harrow family, father, mother an’ son. They ‘ad a butler an’ scullery made too, but we can’t get in through th’ front door wi’out disturbing the crime scene.” The constable glanced over his shoulder, and even though Bothroyd knew him to be a years-long veteran, distress still flashed across his face. “…’tis grim in there, sarge.”

Bothroyd nodded. “Go on an’ keep the crowd away,” he said, kindly. The younger man nodded and marched off as quick as he could without undermining the dignity of the uniform.

Bothroyd took a second to steel himself, then opened the front door.

The constable hadn’t been exaggerating. Blood wasn’t a pleasant substance at the best of times, and three people’s worth had spilled across the tiles in the entryway, some…hmm…ten hours ago.

The boy was closest to the door. Lad might just have been old enough to call himself an adult, by law…maybe. Mrs. Harrow lay facing him, her own face not peaceful, but still faintly wearing the terrible anguish of a woman who’d just watched her child die.

Bothroyd put it out of his mind. Much as he’d have liked to close the poor thing’s eyes and settle her face, that wasn’t his role. Instead, he took a second to survey the bloody scene rather than tromp straight in and ruin it with his bloody boots.

He had seen many a slit throat before. There was a right way to do it and a wrong way, and the murderer in this case knew the right way. And they’d used a blade as keen as glass, surgeon-sharp. Gruesome as their deaths were, neither mother nor son would have suffered long. They’d been killed right, quick and as relatively painless as any knife kill could be. Was that mercy, or pragmatism?

The real anomaly, though, was the footprints. Bare feet, which immediately stood out as strange. Rich families and working servants wore boots and shoes about the house, usually only taking them off for bathing or bedtime. And indeed, the Harrows were still booted and wearing their coats like they’d come home from a walk in the park.

Jed squatted to examine the nearest print. His knees protested, but like fuck was he going to kneel in this mess. He put his hand out and took the measure of the print with his thumb and index finger. The foot was narrow and long in proportion, and small. Dainty, even. The print was clearer toward the front, as though whoever left it had been resting their weight forward on the balls and toes.

Thinking on it…he hadn’t noted any such prints on the doorstep, nor the path. He retreated back out the front door and cast around, but sure enough the flagstones were unblemished. He frowned, then turned and looked up. The house was three storeys tall, built of the warm yellowish-white stone beloved of rich folk. It was a status symbol in this city to be able to afford to keep such stone clean and pale and unblemished, and yet above him, on the sill of an upper-storey window, he could make out a reddish smear. And another below the gabled dormer above it, right where a skilled second-storey man would consider to be the easiest route up the wall and onto the rooftops. And from there…

He sighed and looked left and right. The street was a solid terrace of townhouses, running all the way to the park in one direction, and down to a dense tangle of buildings in the other. Someone on the rooftops could go a long way without having to come down.

Further, if they could leap like an elf.

A commotion among the crowd caught his attention. An elderly woman was pleading and wailing at the constables to let her through. Mother of one of the victims, most likely. The lads were doing a decent job of keeping calm, but he could see things were like to get emotional in short order. The crowd were restless.

He ducked back inside the house, edged around the pool of congealed gore, and explored the rest of the house. Sure enough, he found the scullery maid and the butler, both just as dead as their employers and with similar cruel skill. The scullery and kitchen were full of more bloody bare waifish footprints.

With a sigh, he unlocked the back door so the inspectors wouldn’t have to traipse through the hallway to investigate these two poor buggers, and headed back outside. The crowd was definitely getting restless, and the lads needed more to give them than platitudes and assurances. He would have to do his best to soothe them.

…And try and forestall any trouble. Coppicer was right, a couple of suitable loudmouths and a heavy-handed approach to silencing them could turn anything into the spark that’d light off the gunpowder. A mass murder would certainly do it.

As he emerged onto the street, though, he saw there as more to it than loudmouths. A squad of men in the sky blue and cloud white livery of Clear Skies marines had marched in from somewhere, and were now setting up a cordon across the road, further from the crime scene than was strictly necessary, and belligerently ordering the onlookers further back.

“Th’ bloody shades take it, what’re are you fools playin’ at?” he demanded of them as he marched up. Sure enough, the marines all rounded on him with narrowed eyes and fierce expressions.

“An’ who’re you, then, constable?” their leader demanded. Bothroyd’s eye settled on the double stripes of a corporal, and he got up in the man’s face.

“That would be Serjant. Y’see this little ducal crown on me shoulder, lad?” he asked, quietly. “That’s the Big Hat. Means I’m far enough above you that I get to shit in ‘yer ‘at an’ you get to thank me. So stow the bloody attitude afore I get annoyed wi’ ye.”

The man scowled, but glanced left and right, saw the other constable glowering at him, and decided to pick his battles. “…Jus’ controllin’ the crowd, Serjant,” he said, defiantly.

“By showin’ up, pushin’ ‘em further back than’s needed an’ makin’ threats when it’s your bloody fault they’re up close on your cordon? Shite work, lad. Pull your men up level wi’ that gate there, an’ all will be well.”

“My orders were—”

“If you’re about to tell me your orders was to set up too far forward, then either you’re a bloody liar, or your superior’s a bloody fool an’ you shouldn’t be listenin’ to ‘im,” Bothroyd interrupted him. “Pull. Your men. Back.”

There was a long, tense moment, during which the corporal’s eyes narrowed to hateful slits…then relaxed into disingenuous acquiescence. “…Aye aye, serjant.” He turned, beckoned sharply, and his squad retreated barely to the cordon limit Bothroyd had set.

“Cheeky cocksnoggers,” one of the constables muttered.

Sure enough, the crowd relaxed as the marines sauntered away, but now they were looking expectantly at Bothroyd. He tucked his thumbs in his belt, straightened, and ran a level gaze over all of them, trying to gauge who was just an onlooker, who might be family or friends of the victims, who might be trouble.

“…My name is Serjant Jed Bothroyd,” he declared after a moment of expectant silence. “I’m not the inspector, they’ve yet to arrive. A full statement will ‘ave to wait until they’ve ‘ad time to conduct a proper investigation, but I can confirm the deaths o’ Mr. an’ Mrs. Harrow, their son, their butler an’ their scullery maid.”

A sigh ran through the crowd. Several people dotted here and there throughout it reacted with grief, turning away to collect their emotions, clutching tight to each other, a gasp and a sob…the old woman said “Oh!” and sank to the ground, her face a mask of shock and despair. At a guess, Bothroyd reckoned she must be the scullery maid’s mother.

“Is it murder, serjant?” Somebody called from the back.

“I’m afraid it is,” Jed nodded, solemnly.

“Who?” Somebody else demanded. “Who did it?” Several voices shouted in support of the query.

“I regret to report, the killers left no conclusive evidence o’ their identity that I’ve been able to see,” Bothroyd replied, neutrally and professionally. “Per’aps the inspectors’ll find more’n my ol’ eyes can see at first glance. For the time being—” he continued, directing his attention specifically to a couple of men who were clearly eager to advance past the cordon “—it’s best if the ‘ouse an’ the victims are left undisturbed. That way, the investigation’ll ‘ave th’ best chance o’ findin’ summat to bring the killers to justice.”

“You must know something!” a woman cried, wringing a handkerchief between gloved hands.

“If’n I do or don’t, ma’am, I’d rather not speak it aloud for fear the culprit’s within earshot.” Bothroyd’s words and tone were carefully pitched so that not even the most aggressive plant in the crowd could find something to incite them with.

One of the men at the back tried regardless. “Are you saying one of us did it?”

Jed gave him a steady look, full of the promise that he’d remember the young man’s face, then blanked the question for the ridiculous barb it was. “I appreciate some of you will want ‘ta ‘ead back to your homes, an’ unless I’m mistaken there’s some among you as are close wi’ the deceased. Those of you who want to get ‘ome, I’m sympathetic but trust me, you don’t want to be too near right now. ‘Tis not pleasant up past the cordon. My suggestion is, find a friend who’ll put you up for the day. Friends an’ relatives o’ the victims…I’ll talk wi’ you as I’m able.”

It worked. He noted the troublemaker scowl at a few others and slink away from the back of the group, thwarted in their attempts to incite anger…for now. They’d try later, Jed guessed.

The inspectors arrived while Jed was doing his best to console the old woman, not that there was much consolation to give. The old girl was a widow, and the Harrows’ maid had been her only child, her only kin in all the world. Jed had seen enough of life to know that this wound was a mortal one to her. Soon, there would be a sixth victim to this tragedy, though officially uncounted.

He watched her go, said a small internal prayer for her, then turned to the inspectors.

“You took your bloody time,” he commented.

Inspector Gunroy gave him a deeply tired look. “It’s a busy day, serjant.”

“…Busy how?”

Gunroy gestured toward the house. “There’s six others like this, that I know of. More, I daresay.”

“Them elves ‘ad a killin’ spree last night,” Bothroyd muttered. Gunroy gave him a sharp look, then produced a small flask from his inside pocket and swigged a dram of whisky.

“You’ve a sharp eye. You should have become an inspector.”

“Reckon I make a better serjant, sir….what’s linkin’ these murders?”

“I don’t know yet. They seem to be random. A well-to-do family in Park End, an art seller in Long Oaks, a boarding house for middle-class ladies in Porterlands—”

“What?!” Jed turned to face him, startled and suddenly ice-cold as all his blood drained into his boots. “Which street?”

“Uh, Well Street.”

“Not Mistress Brooknetter’s place?”

“The very same.”

Fuck. The Network. Jed had no idea the Harrows had been involved, but he knew the art seller….and Hatpin.

Gunroy misread the dismay on his face. “Did you…know her?”

“I know one of the lodgers…all dead?”

“Couldn’t say. Nalesmith’s handling that one. I’m sorry, Serjant, I had no idea.”

“I’ll…uh…I’ll head down there, if’n that’s alright, Inspector.”

“Of course.”

Jed turned and strode away, his mind whirling and turning over the possibilities. Had Adrey been Encircled? That seemed most likely, except…except Jed was fairly sure he knew what the Countess knew, and if he didn’t know about the Harrows, then he was reasonably confident Adrey didn’t know them either. And of course, she knew him, and elvish assassins had entirely failed to come for him and Effie in the night…

Dammit, he didn’t know enough. Not yet. And he rather suspected he didn’t have enough time to discover more. He might have talked down a small group this morning, but by evening the whole city would be snarling over the murders, and if he was any judge those Clear Skies goons had orders to stir things up, and they’d do it with malicious glee. And then…

….And then things would be moving too fast to stop.

He put his head down, turned his collar up as a grey rain started to fall, and forged ahead regardless.

----------------------------------------

> “Whatever happens, firewood is destined either for ash or for rot. But who has ever cooked a meal on rot?” —Yunei proverb, attributed to the Second Perfect Emperor

PREPARING FOR CHANGE

The Gate, Yunei Empire, Yonguitang Earthmote 09.06.03.12.12

The Proper Way contained intricate rules for almost every conceivable circumstance. For instance, the lady of a city’s lord, when appearing alongside him while he read an Imperial proclamation, was expected to wear her makeup a certain way. But, if she was appearing on her husband’s behalf in his absence to deliver the proclamation herself, there was a subtly different etiquette.

It was, frankly, absurd. But even with the divine impetus of the Crowns pushing change upon them, the Empire would never be inclined to change quickly. And so Di-Ha, even though she was tasked with speaking on her husband’s behalf, must still do the Proper thing and symbolically stand behind him by speaking from behind a banner bearing his house crest.

It was all very poetic. The positioning of man and woman in these ceremonies was traditional, but not without purpose. The man’s place in front put him in a position of leadership, but also guardianship. His decisions led the family, but it was also his duty to be the one exposed to danger. The wife’s place behind was a position of support, but also safety; it was her duty to faithfully be the foundation and steady footing on which he could rely, but also to be protected by him even at the cost of his life.

So the ancient enlightened ones had written, anyway. They painted such a romantic ideal that Di-Ha rather suspected none of them had ever actually wed.

Then again…she missed Deng-Nah terribly. In the circumstances, the Proper Way allowed her to once again enjoy the company of her friends whom she’d appointed as her husband’s mistress consorts, and so she at least did not have to endure loneliness in bed of a night. But as pleasant as Sumi’s (entirely chaste) company in particular was, there was simply no substitute for being able to snuggle into her man in the cold depths of night.

Truthfully, the most important thing the makeup did for her today was disguise her tiredness. As a noble lady, the care and nightly provision for her child was not, in theory, actually her duty…but what mother could ignore her own infant’s cries? Even if all she did was go to check that all was well, the many interruptions per night did make her rest less restful.

The makeup covered for that. When she considered herself in a mirror of silvered glass, Di-Ha had to acknowledge that one could not possibly tell that here was a sleep-deprived mother. She looked entirely Proper, being ethereal, as white as cloud and a serene as a still lake.

Off in the wings, the ceremony’s coordinator snapped his fan open then closed, giving the signal she had been waiting for. Di-Ha shuffled forward in tiny steps, the length of her stride constrained by the sewn hem of her robes, accepted the respectful bow of the assembled crowd, returned it, and knelt. A functionary scurried forward with the scroll and held it before her.

She scanned its perfect calligraphy, then straightened her back, summoned her public voice, and read the declaration.

“By decree of His Most Enlightened Majesty, the Divine Emperor, the Refined One, Most Perfect Soul, True Master of the Proper Way, Inheritor of the Golden Palace, Resurrected One Hundred Times,” she read, aware that the Emperor had done her and all listeners a courtesy in requiring only the bare Proper minimum of his epithets and titles. “This, his most humble and loyal servant Di-Ha, wife of Deng-Nah of the On Clan, Lord of the Gate and Emissary of the Court, reads the Imperial proclamation.”

There was expectant silence. Rumour had spread all over the Empire since the Crowns themselves had intervened at court, and the actual content of the proclamation was not likely to be a surprise to anyone. But there was a difference between expecting something, and actually hearing it.

“The Gates of the Perfect Empire have remained shut for a thousand years!” she announced, focusing on giving her voice the correct balance of power and musicality. A man might roar or bellow such words, but a woman must enunciate them sweetly, almost sing them. This too was the Proper Way. “Now, the world changes and we, the enlightened and proper children of Yunei the First Teacher, are tasked with doing our part not only for ourselves, but for all humankind.”

The attendant rolled the scroll flawlessly in time with her words, so that the line she was reading and declaring was always in the middle. She made a note to commend him for his precision later.

“To that end! The great gates of our empire are to be opened, and trade and contact with those who dwell beyond is to commence at once! It is no longer criminal to speak with or to acknowledge those who bear the brand of the exile! Business may commence across the border, and citizens of our Empire who hold the rank of merchant of the third class **or higher may acquire foreign tools and airships if they are able! To leave the Empire’s borders is no longer a crime of exile, and those who return from abroad will be welcomed home and their brow left unmarked!”

The attendant continued to roll the scroll for her, and she continued to read, pitching each word, each note, for maximum clarity.

“It is to be understood that the former policy of isolation was wise and foresighted, as it has preserved our great people against a rot and evil that has spread across foreign lands! Yet it does not behove us to stand and watch this foe consume the world, lest it be our fate to be consumed last for the crime of inaction! It is Proper, upon seeing a distant threat, to march out and confront it! So we shall do, in the name of our future, in the name of the Divine Ones who made us, and in the name of the highest perfect good beyond them!”

One last turn of the scroll, and she was at the end. “Long live the Emperor! Long live the Empire! Long live the Children of Yunei!”

The crowd, of course, dutifully took up chanting ’long live the Emperor! Long live the Empire! Long live the Children of Yunei!’ and continued it long after Di-Ha had risen, bowed, and retreated from the dais. She could still hear them as her palanquin bearers jogged through the streets back to the On family estate and her most honored guest.

Lady Dragon was waiting for her in the Fire Gate garden, sitting regally beside the flame pit and reading, with Deng-Sho in her arms. She looked up as Di-Ha alighted from the palanquin and gave her the small smile of good friends, a gesture which rushed straight to Di-Ha’s heart and filled it with warmth. But the fact was…she and the Golden River had become friends in the month since the Crowns appeared at court. Lady Dragon had even been present to hold her hand and reassure her through Deng-Sho’s birth.

It had been, as the Winter Queen had promised, an easy birth. Still an ordeal, of course, and Di-Ha’s first time. Having the Herald there had helped immeasurably, even though she’d felt entirely unworthy of such consideration. But it seemed Dragon had chosen to be her friend, and so friends they now were. Who could ask for better?

“Is he behaving?” she asked. It was amazing how quickly Shosho had changed in just a month. He’d come into the world tiny and pink and wrinkled, and now he was round and fat and strong, with big bright eyes that locked on to her face and, after a second or two, creased in the biggest, brightest smile that just made her almost want to weep for how beautiful he was.

Dragon handed him up to her with an indulgent smile. “He has been a perfect gentleman,” she said.

Di-Ha smiled and sat down to consider the book Dragon was reading. It was bound in the foreign style, its printed pages secured between two thick cover boards and the whole thing wrapped in stained green leather. It seemed a sensible way to do things, she thought. “You are reading to him?”

Dragon smiled and shook her head. “He is far too young. I am reading for myself, and if he likes the sound of my voice, that is good.”

“What is it? I cannot read these words…”

“Poetry, of course.” Dragon smiled and indicated a slim ribbon that marked her progress through the book. “They write rather good poetry in foreign lands, actually. Though, the rules and customs are very different of course.”

“Do you have a favourite?” Di-Ha asked, settling her son in her arms. He smiled at her, so she smiled back, waving her fingers and lightly touching his nose.

“How can one have only a single favourite?” Dragon asked, but she was smiling. She thought for a second. “…This one seems apt,” she decided, and began to recite.

“The perfect tea is brewed with care.

Select the perfect leafy tips, Follow the graceful ritual, Meditate on each step, Pour water at the ideal heat, Steep patiently until the gentle flavor blossoms, Serve in a lacquered bowl. This is care.

Throw in a teabag. Spoon in sugar, Dump on boiling water, Splash in some milk, Mash the bag with the spoon until the brew tans, Serve in an old mug. This is careless.

But make it for me out of love, And either way, the tea is perfect.”

The language was unknown to Di-Ha, but somehow she understood the words through some magic of Dragon’s doing which even conveyed subtle distinctions of meaning and intent that a straightforward translation might have missed.

“…What a peculiar sentiment,” she said, softly. “Surely if you love someone, you should put your utmost into doing them a service in the Proper way?”

“Usually, perhaps. But which is more important, the gesture or the precision with which it is made?” Dragon’s molten gold eyes had a twinkle in them.

Di-Ha frowned. “…What sort of people drink their tea with sugar and milk anyway? And what is a ‘teabag’?”

Dragon laughed. “In Enerlend, they use machines to chop black tea to a fine powder and package it in little paper bags, so it is quick and simple to brew a cup of tea at any time. The resulting drink is…barely acceptable, so they often sweeten it with milk and sugar to overcome its deficiencies.”

Di-Ha pulled a face. “These people really do need saving,” she said, and Dragon let out an unguarded giggle.

“Do not be so quick to judge them harshly,” she said, covering her mouth demurely. “They may forego the Yunei virtue of patient dilligence, but in its place they have ambition and industry. They may not brew a Proper cup of tea…but they have wonders and delights of their own, I assure you.”

“You sound quite fond of them…” Di-Ha ventured.

“I am fond of all peoples. The children of Yunei are my chosen, the ones with the most special place in my heart, but why should that mean I cannot love them all? No matter their foibles.”

“…Perhaps the Golden River’s heart has room enough in it for such love. Mine is…more limited in scope.” Di-Ha caressed her son’s downy head.

“How often mortals underestimate their own capacity,” Lady Dragon replied, warmly.

Di-Ha was about to ask her what she meant when Dragon looked up and away sharply, as though hearing the distant note of a signal horn. She rose to her feet, setting her book of poetry aside as she did so, and her expression turned grim. Di-Ha looked up to follow her gaze, and realized she was staring at Garanhir.

“My lady?”

Dragon glanced back at her. “It’s started.”

“Already?”

“Not the war…something terrible is happening. Or, is about to happen. Something—” Dragon’s usually serene features creased in a moment of brief pain, then she took a step back and with a dull boom and a rush of hot air she was ascending, expanding, lengthening. Di-Ha covered her son’s head to shield him from the hot gale that streamed off her as the Golden River took to the skies.

In her head, parting words boomed with the force of a roar. Find your father-in-law. Tell him to be ready.

“I will!” Di-Ha called, and then Dragon’s serpentine form was an undulating ribbon of gold in the distance, which dwindled at an incredible rate until the Herald was gone. Deng-Sho wriggled and protested in her arms, and she bounced him close until he settled, then passed him to his waiting nanny and marched off to go find Deng-Li.

Apparently, things were moving quicker than expected.

----------------------------------------

BROKEN

Cellar of an unknown house 09.06.03.12.12

When Kal came for Adrey, she wasn’t asleep. She didn’t respond to his hard slap across the face, nor utter a sound as he once again unshackled her and dragged her from the bed she was shackled to. The drug Mari had given her had worn off after only an hour or two, but the things she’d done, and thought, and felt under its influence…

Adrey’s violation seemed complete. It wasn’t enough for the Peltons to brutalize her body, they’d gone and vandalized her mind as well.

This time, Kal didn’t extract a single scream from her. No matter what he did, no matter how inventive his tortures, Adrey just hung in the frame, too dry to weep and too broken to even protest as she was…worked on. Even the branding iron he pressed to the back of her neck—a letter P which he spent several seconds brandishing in front of her face, waiting for her to show any recognition—didn’t elicit anything more than a shudder and brief screwing-shut of her eyes as the heat seared away something precious inside her she’d never get back.

Adrey was beyond pain, now. It had no hold on her. It was just…a thing that was happening. She wasn’t afraid of it any longer. She wasn’t even afraid of dying. If Kal had promised to murder her, she would have just hung there and waited for it.

He didn’t. Nor did he get bored quickly. Instead, he prowled around to in front of her while the new burn was still steaming on the back of her neck, and looked her in the eye. Adrey didn’t look back. Her gaze was on…nothing.

For the first time, he spoke to her. “…Hmm. I think you’re ready to behave yourself. Aren’t you, pet?”

“…Yes, master.” Adrey’s voice came out in a dry, quiet mumble. She had no strength to put any life or passion into it. It was like talking in her sleep, in a dream.

“Tell me about your cover story. Where is your safehouse, and what name do you live under while you’re there?”

“Miss Brooknetters’ lodging house on Well Street, Porterside. They know me as Mrs. Adelia Rubb.”

“Who is your handler?”

“Skinner.”

“Tell me more.”

“The only name he ever gave me is Skinner. A thin man. Fifties. Has ‘HIT HARD’ tattooed on his knuckles. Missing the pinky of his right hand.”

“Other contacts?”

“Serjant Jed Bothroyd, of the Constabulary.”

“Everyone, Pet. Tell me everyone.”

“Mutt. A young lad, dark-skinned. Wears a mustache. He was my support runner. That’s everyone.”

And Sadie. But Adrey didn’t give up Sadie. Sadie wasn’t anyone, yet.

Kal was nodding though. Clearly, he was satisfied. He gripped Adrey’s chin and tilted her head up. “Look me in the eye,” he commanded, and Adrey did so. They seemed to her like utterly pitiless holes in his face, rather than actual eyes. There was no human warmth in there. Just…satisfaction. He was looking at her like she was a horseshoe he’d just finished beating into shape.

And she felt like exactly that. She was too hollow inside now. Nothing mattered. In the end, it had been Mari’s potion and the love she’d felt, the love she’d shown under its influence that finally broke Adrey’s will.

“You know the way this works, now,” Kal told her. “You’re our pet. Say it.”

“I’m your pet, Master.” The words were automatic, unthinking. She didn’t mean them. She didn’t not mean them, either. They were just meaningless sounds, the right meaningless sounds. It was both true and a lie at the same time.

“Good pet. So long as you’re nice and complaint like this, you’ll get kindness. You understand that, don’t you.”

“Yes, Master.”

“Yes indeed. Did you enjoy your bath with Mari earlier?”

“Yes, Master.” Crowns forgive her, but it was the truth.

“Would you like me to show you similar kindness?”

“Yes, Master.” The right noises to avoid punishment. Nothing more. She would do anything he wanted, now.

Kal saw through her, and chuckled. “Don’t lie to me. Of course you wouldn’t. Not yet. Your training has only begun, Pet. This was just the first lesson. There will be more.” He turned and walked away. “But for now…you’ve earned a little more love from Mari. Thank me.”

“Thank you, Master.”

Kal gave a satisfied grunt, and left.

Adrey hung in the frame and felt nothing at all. Oh, there was still pain but it was…out there, somehow. News from a distant land, not touching the core of her. Guilt and sorrow and shame, too, those seemed like things she ought to be feeling, she ought to be grieving for the comrades and friends she’d just given up. It didn’t matter that everyone talked under torture…she had. Her failure was complete.

The plan, the hope she’d held on to like a tiny candle in the dark, guttered and went out, leaving behind nothing at all. Just an empty vessel for the Peltons to play with and discard, and Adrey couldn’t even summon up enough of herself to resent or fear that.

When Mari Pelton bustled into the basement a few minutes later, she found Adrey still dangling from her shackles, unmoving from where Kal had left her. She tutted, and set about applying healing magic and crooning soft words about how good Adrey was, how brave Adrey was, how perfect Adrey was.

But all throughout, she didn’t use Adrey’s name. She called her ‘Pet.’

Pet obediently allowed herself to be tended to. She allowed Mari to bathe her again, and tend her wounds, and even feed her a heartening soup. All throughout, she thanked her Mistress for this kindness, and was a Good Girl. And the broken majority of her defeated mind meant it.

Her opportunity very nearly slipped her grasp. It came, and would have gone again in an instant, except some inner reserve, some last little spark of Adrey noticed it…and took the opportunity.

It came as Mari was tucking her back into bed, attaching her restraints again, in the same pattern as always. Right ankle. Left ankle. Left wrist. Right wri—

Adrey kissed her. Right as Mari was close enough to reach, just before her lips were out of reach, Adrey surged up and kissed her with a river of broken tears washing her cheeks. Every ounce of pain, terror, desperation, failure and helplessness went into the kiss, transformed into the best display of broken passion she could manage.

And Mari fell for it. It was, in fact, exactly what Mari wanted. She purred a delighted “Good Girl…” and indulged herself in this new and unexpected pleasure for several of the most hateful, and most hopeful, seconds of Adrey’s life. Though she dared not think about hate or hope at all, lest her lips falter and betray her. Instead she kissed the woman she detested with all the fierce hunger she could muster, keeping her mind numb to all but the (sickeningly truthful) impulse to surrender herself and be a Good Pet.

Eventually, Mari sat up, wobbling and dazed and clearly very, very satisfied indeed. She looked down at Adrey, who lay trembling and staring up at her with wide, conflicted, confused eyes: She giggled.

“Well…excellent,” she said. She touched up her hair, wiped her smeared lipstick with a fingertip, and stood. She cast a last look at Adrey’s bound figure, stroked Adrey’s face, whispered “Good girl,” again, and almost stumbled from the room.

Adrey remained still, listening. She heard the creak and thud of Mari climbing the stairs. She heard the door above, and voices, and then—

And then the sound she’d been waiting for. Kal and Mari really did like to work out their passions on each other.

She took a deep breath…and carefully extracted her right wrist from the shackle Mari had been too distracted to finish closing.

She twisted, stretching across to reach her left wrist, and her probing fingers found exactly what she’d known they would. The shackles were basic things, shiny steel held by pinching their loose ends together and fitting a bolt and padlock. Fortunately, Adrey knew padlocks. And she knew these were good enough to restrain a woman with both hands bound, but not a woman with one hand free who’d been trained in locks and how to break them. All that cheap padlocks like these needed was the right pressure in the right place, a sharp tug—

—Click!—

—and the plan had worked. It had worked! She hated what she’d had to give up, what she’d had to do to earn this opportunity, and she knew she would never feel clean or whole ever again, but with two more clicks her ankles were released and she was free!

And the Peltons, in their arrogance, had left her clothes and her weapons on display at the far end of the room to mock her.

----------------------------------------

Mari’s world was alive with triumph and sensation. She’d won.

Oh, that kiss! Shades, that kiss had been something special. She’d been anticipating something like it for a couple of days now, and it had been everything she dreamed of and more. She could still taste it on her lips, not just the sweetness of Adrey’s tongue but the salt tang of her broken tears and, she fancied, the bitter medley of emotions behind it.

Poor girl. Her mind must be a terribly messy place right now. But that was okay: Mari would help her sort it out. Their pet would be perfect, now that she’d finally given in.

For now, though…she wanted to celebrate her victory. And for that, she had her stallion. Kal’s powerful body was always so terribly thrilling to her, as he gave her a taste of where Adrey’s head must be right now. He was in control of her, ruling her, dominating her. She was completely in his grasp as he pinned her to the kitchen table by her throat and made both it and her shake with the force of his violent lovemaking.

Life was perfect.

“Oh, yes…yes! Right there! Just like that!”

Kal gasped and went rigid, and Mari moaned in surprised frustration. Surely he hadn’t climaxed yet? Kal usually went so long, and…no, she couldn’t feel—

Something hot and liquid spattered her navel and she opened her eyes, confused that it was outside when she could still feel him inside. She looked up into her husband’s face: His expression was open-mouthed, confused, horrified.

And there was a solid three inches of pointed steel protruding from his sternum. Blood dripped from its tip onto her belly.

Even as Mari got her head around this fact, the daggerpoint whipped back through and out of him, and a gout of blood erupted from the hole, heart’s blood still being squirted directly out of the skewered organ as it thrashed and pumped madly around the fatal wound, then went abruptly still.

Kal’s eyes rolled back in his head, he toppled over sideways and crashed to the ground. Behind him was Adrey Mossjoy, scarred and branded and starved, covered in blood…

And absolutely not broken. The look in her eyes was pure cold determination.

Mari opened her mouth to say something, anything, to plead, to defiantly taunt, to persuade, to scream in terror or wail in grief for her husband’s death, or, no, to command with the full power of her magic—

But Adrey was not like her, nor like Kal. Mari would have gloated and taunted the victim of such a reversal. That was what she’d been counting on, that there was still a conversation to come between them, that the wonderful kiss of just a few minutes ago had actually been genuine in some way, that Adrey would feel enough to say something to her, to want to hear her say something, to force her to beg for her life—

But Adrey just wanted her dead. The Hatpin sunk into Mari’s throat, and whatever last words Mari Pelton might have had were lost in a choking, surprised cough and a gurgle.

There was surprisingly little pain. That didn’t seem…just…somehow.

She…deserved…

Pain…

----------------------------------------

For long seconds, the room was almost quiet. Not perfectly so: Kal’s corpse emitted a low moan as its own bodyweight slowly forced the air from its lungs, and Mari’s limbs were still spasming with post-mortem nerve tremors. Her blood ran off the table to patter softly on the stone floor.

Adrey let out a shuddering breath, then sniffed, hiccuped, sobbed once, then got herself **under control with a wrench of fierce will.

She was reasonably certain there was nobody else in the house. Certainly she’d never heard Mari or Kal talking to anyone in this kitchen, nor heard any sounds no matter how she listened to suggest a servant, but she wasn’t about to take chances. With hatpin in one hand and slashing short-knife in the other she stalked from room to room and made absolutely certain she was alone.

She was in a country house, the sort of “cottage” that rich people commissioned to enjoy the bucolic aesthetic. As predicted, really: they’d been torturing her in a cellar with a ground-level window, you couldn’t do that in the city without somebody overhearing. They were up in the hills dexterward of Auldenheigh, with a frankly excellent view of Auldenheigh laid out before them, maybe nine or ten miles away, with a smaller village closer to hand, a mile or two away down the valley. Auldmill? No. Crowvale.

Her scouting excursion revealed neither dovecote nor carrier pigeons, nor any sign of a third horse in the stables that a rider might have taken. She couldn’t rule out telepathic communication of course, not considering the magical talent Mari had demonstrated…but there was no sense in worrying about that. And if she hurried back to the city, she might be in time to warn Skinner, Bothroyd and the others.

Urgent though that thought was, though, finding a mirror in the master bedroom shocked her into stillness.

She was…marked. All over. Her whole body was a woven tapestry of white scars and pale lines. She’d picked up a few nicks and cuts in training with Skinner and her other blade tutors over the years, but now, she barely recognized the body she saw. Days of torture while barely being given enough food and water to endure had starved her down more than she’d thought. That ripped, tattered skin hugged close over too-lean ribs and haggard muscle, stretched tight over gaunt cheeks and had gone sunken and dark around eyes which had once sparkled back at her and now reflected only dull resolve.

Unconsciously, she transferred her hatpin to her left hand and brought her fingers up to touch the very last mark they’d made on her. The letter P, picked out in wrinkled coarse flesh that still hurt from where Mari’s magic hadn’t quite soothed the deepest layers of the burn. P for Pelton. P for Pet.

Her stomach convulsed, and she doubled over to painfully throw up the soup Mari had given her earlier. Like the snap of an elastic band breaking under tension, everything that had happened, everything she had endured and what had nearly become of her and what she had done and what she had nearly done all hit her at once and for some minutes she could do nothing but flop to the ground and weep until her dehydrated body would yield no more tears, though her eyes still painfully tried to.

She was so tired. Not enough sleep, the exertion of torture, the stress of planning and executing her escape, the terrible wracking sobs…she was so, so very tired that all she wanted was to fall asleep right there on the floor and perhaps wake up later and proceed from there…or perhaps be captured by the Peltons’ allies, perhaps be killed.

Right then, it almost didn’t matter to her.

Almost.

Instead, she labored heavily to her feet, retrieved her weapons, and…and…

She couldn’t return to the cellar. Even though her clothes and other weapons were down there, she just couldn’t. No matter how much she reasoned and tried to compel herself with logic, her body disobeyed her and refused to take one step through the cellar door and back down those stairs. In the end, she took some of Mari’s clothes from the wardrobe in the master bedroom. The fit was all wrong, Mari having been shorter, curvier, more buxom and more generous in the waist and hips, but it was that or go walking through the village and back to the city in naught but her scars.

She made do. A belt here and a ribbon there adjusted the fit enough to not be obvious at a casual glance. She could be…she could be Miss Emily Bell. It was a persona she’d invented some time ago and not yet used.

She paused by the kitchen door to look at her captors one last time, and nearly broke down in tears again. Kal’s lumpen form lay half on his side on the floor by the table, but Mari was still spread-eagled on its surface and her head fell back over the table’s near side so that her open eyes seemed to stare at Adrey with an expression of…was that sorrow? Guilt?

It couldn’t be…could it?

Without quite knowing why, she entered the room and reached out to touch Mari’s corpse-cold cheek. The insane urge to kiss the dead woman’s forehead and apologize flashed through Adrey’s mind, accompanied by a swell of…grief?

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

Fuck. They really had broken her, on some level.

She steeled herself to spit in Mari’s face instead, but found she couldn’t do that either. As much as she hated them and what they’d done to her, what they’d wanted to do to her, and as much as they had violated her in ways she would never be able to forgive even if she somehow healed from them…

There was no point. It was just a corpse. She’d already taken her vengeance.

In the end, she settled for closing the body’s eyes so they would stop looking at her. Then she shivered, turned away, marched out of the house, saddled up a horse, and rode away.

It was only once the cottage behind her was lost from view around a bend in the lane that she finally took a good look at Auldenheigh, and saw that it was burning.

----------------------------------------

HATPIN

Auldenheigh 09.06.03.12.12

Sure enough, Well Street was cordoned off, and the cordon had been moved far back by the time Bothroyd arrived. The Clear Skies men responsible for it gave Bothroyd a look of muted disdain as he strode up to and through their cordon, but apparently they didn’t yet have the authority to boss the constabulary around.

Their expressions suggested they soon would, though. And that they would enjoy that power when it was finally theirs.

Winter’s tits, things were turning bad. Whatever Civorage and his collaborators were up to, it was coming to a head. And these murders played into it somehow, Jed was sure. Not just the Harrows over on Park End, but now…

Inspector Nalesmith looked up from writing his notes and gave him a grim nod as Jed slowed to approach him. Raksuul’s love, the blood was even dripping down the front doorstep…

“Serjant. Thought you were on beat up in the old city today.”

“I, uh…know a couple of the lodgers ‘ere,” Jed ventured, which was as close to the truth as he dared go. Fortunately, Nalesemith didn’t interrogate him: his face screwed up in a moment’s sympathetic pain, and he put a hand on Bothroyd’s shoulder.

“Oh, I’m sorry Jed. Which lodgers?”

“Addie Rubb an’ Sadie Peason.”

Nalesmith’s eyes narrowed. “…Interesting.”

“Somethin’ the matter, Ben?”

“You tell me. Your two friends aren’t among the dead.”

Well, Adrey’s absence was no surprise at all, but Sadie—! Jed inflated with a sudden feeling of hope, which was immediately tempered by the spy’s traditional paranoia. Sadie had literally only been on the very threshold of being recruited before Adrey’s capture. There was no actual trust in her yet.

Fortunately, Jed himself had an ocean of trust built up with Ben Nalesmith, who accurately took his reaction as a blend of delighted hope and increased worry, and nodded grimly. “If you knew ‘em…perhaps you’d better come inside. You might add something to my investigation.”

“Elves again?” Jed asked.

“So it seems. Not like I found a vamdraech lying around, but…well, you’ll see.”

He guided Jed through the door, stepping carefully around the little runnel in the middle of the hall where the worn tiles had channeled somebody’s blood into a thin stream.

The source turned out to be Esme Brooknetter, lying face-down and sprawled heavily alongside the kitchen table. Jed sighed as he knelt down to study the old girl. Credit to her, the ol’ battleaxe had died with a weapon in her hand in the form of the fireplace poker, but of course it had done her no good against Fey assassins. Her killers had clearly danced around her aggressive flailing and delivered a pair of fatal strikes, one in the armpit and one in the side of her neck. Both represented mercifully quick deaths, at least, and there was a pattern emerging there. The elves hadn’t killed with any particular malice, just terrible dispassionate efficiency.

It was definitely the elves again, though. The same bare footprints circled the room like the steps in a grisly dance illustration.

Larnie Midge and Mellie Corroy were huddled together in a corner of the living room, arms wrapped around each other and their throats cut so exquisitely that Jed guessed a single stroke had done for them both. His heart couldn’t help but ache for them, nor fail to burn with disgust for their killer. Cruelty and sadism he could almost understand, in a twisted way. And the ancient elves would certainly have made sport of two young ladies, and he could almost understand that. But to just…end them? Swiftly, efficiently, with neither undue suffering nor pity, when they posed no threat whatsoever?

That was a mindset Jed didn’t understand at all.

The intriguing thing was that both Sadie’s room and “Adelia’s” had been thoroughly tossed about. Even the walls had been broken as the elves rooted out every conceivable hiding place…which meant they had expected to find and kill both women.

That implied two things to Jed. First, that the Network was very, very badly compromised at quite a high level, and second that the leak couldn’t have been Adrey. But it only implied those things. Implications could be deliberately created by a sufficiently wily and foresighted enemy.

Nalesmith watched him take all this in, and demonstrated why he was an inspector when he asked, “How did you know them, Jed?”

“Through work.”

“…Somehow I doubt you collared two posh young ladies like these girls for streetwalking.”

Bothroyd sighed. He briefly considered what he might say, knowing that an evasion would just make the inspector suspicious, and trying to claim it wasn’t important would be flatly denied. Dammit. His concern and compassion might have just put him in a compromising position, just like Skinner had always told him it would.

“You’re askin’ questions I can’t answer, inspector,” he said.

“Won’t, you mean.”

“Ben…” Bothroyd turned to face him. “You’ve a good eye, an’ good instincts. So, yes, I’m into some shite I can’t talk about. That’s all I can say.”

Ben Nalesmith considered him for a long second, then an even longer one. The house was quiet as only a house full of corpses can be, a silence punctuated only by the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall…until somewhere far distant off in the city, there was a distant crack and a pop. Both men glanced out the window, and saw that one of the patrolling airships out on the far side of the river had fired a signal flare, and now a message light on its prow was winking the drunken rhythm of a message: E…C…L…I…P…S…E…

Jed frowned. There wasn’t one scheduled for today, was there? No, he was quite sure there wasn’t. But that only made the already ominous word gain new significance, though what exactly it meant here and now remained opaque to him.

In any case, the sight of it broke the silence between them. Nalesmith frowned in equal discomfort, then leaned forward and lowered his voice. “What’s happening in this city is wrong, Jed. It’s been wrong for years.”

“…Say what you mean, Ben. We’re past time for careful talk, I think.”

“I mean, the Oneists, and the Clear Skies, and the new Duke and all these laws and the curfew and all that. It’s so bloody wrong. And…wrong it may have been but at least it was peaceful. But now all the rules got ramped up and these new airships and marines have come in and…” Nalesmith sighed and glanced out the window toward the signalling airship again. “We’re one spark away from the whole city going up in flames, and it’s like there’s some madman standing around with a lit match and a big grin on his face just waiting for the perfect moment.”

“You’re not loyal to the duke?” Bothroyd asked.

“Fuck the duke. It should still be Duchess Ellaenie in the palace. There; I’ve said it. If that gets me dragged off to Brackishmarsh, I no longer bloody care.”

This could be a test, Jed thought. Nalesmith could be saying it to get him to agree, and then when he did he’d be arrested for sedition, but…on the other hand…on the other hand, the network was so well compromised that elvish killers were knocking out its safehouses and through-stations. There was probably no need for such games any longer. And Ben Nalesmith had always seemed an honest, honorable sort…

He made his decision, and nodded. “Well said. But if you’re looking to get in closer to the shite I’m into…don’t. Not yet. Not now.”

“I’m not stupid, Jed. There’s a resistance. I think you’re in it, and I want in.”

“Now, of all times?”

“Especially now.”

Whatever Jed would have said next would forever go unspoken. Before he could even think what to say, he heard the sound he’d been waiting for and dreading all day. And it was close. It was far too bloody close. It was right outside, from the Clear Skies cordon right here on Well Street. A rippling blast and crackle, followed by screaming and shouts.

It was the sound of armed men shooting into a crowd.

----------------------------------------

SITTING AND WORRYING

A safehouse, Auldenheigh 09.06.03.12.12

Skinner prowled his office, moving an assortment of little tokens on a map in response to runners who came and went with news every few minutes. When he wasn’t playing with the map, he was playing with a large sheet of brown paper he’d tacked to the wall, on which a variety of seemingly random words had been scrawled in two columns: “Anvil,” “Hatpin,” “Lavender, “”Cascade,” “Gallant” and more down the left, “Bracken,” “Sable,” “Whitestone,” and many more down the right. He’d spent some time sticking more pins in the sheet by each word and connecting them with lengths of string, muttering to himself as he paced and drank coffee from a battered and badly stained infantryman’s tin mug.

It all meant nothing to Sadie Peason, who in any case was too numb with shock, grief, horror, terror and a dozen other overwhelming emotions to think very hard about anything. Still, it was a puzzle her mind had latched onto. It was…safer…than thinking too hard about the fact that Mrs. Brooknetter, Larnie and Mellie were dead, that Addie was probably dead, and that she herself was only alive because of the ruffian now prowling between his map, notes and wall chart and radiating the same energy as a caged tiger.

Skinner hadn’t come for her personally, of course. That had been the job of a dark-skinned lad named “Mutt” who’d knocked somewhat impertinently on Sadie’s window in the dead of night and explained first that he was a friend of Adelia’s, and second that she was likely in quite terrible danger and needed to come with him immediately.

At the time, Sadie wasn’t sure if going with him had been foolish or not. In hindsight…

Over the course of the day, as reports came in, Skinner had sighed and crossed out some of the words on his chart. Then he’d hung some more string.

Try as she might, Sadie could see no discernible logic in the connections. Perhaps that was just because she didn’t know exactly what the words signified, nor the columns. But if Skinner’s pacing was any indicator, he couldn’t see any particular logic in the connections either, and it was driving him to irritability.

The latest report, however, seemed to crush him. A skinny, elderly bald man came and went with a note, Skinner read it, scrawled the word “ECLIPSE” on the board at the bottom, then finally stopped pacing. Instead he came and sat next to Sadie. After a few silent seconds, he produced a slim metal flask from inside his vest, and added its contents to his coffee.

“…How bad is it?” Sadie asked, quietly.

“Bloody bad.”

“Any…any news on Addie?”

“Not yet.”

Silence. It sounded like somebody was letting off fireworks outside, some distance away. Sadie couldn’t remember the last time there had been fireworks in Auldenheigh. She rather suspected they weren’t fireworks at all.

“…Are we going to be okay?”

Skinner sighed, and handed her his flask. Sadie was not a drinker of strong spirits by inclination, so she didn’t exactly enjoy the first mouthful…but she took a second regardless.

“Ugh…” She cleared her throat and handed back the flask. “What is that?”

“Brandy. Good brandy. Somethin’ me aul’ grandma used to tell me, she said ‘there’s three things in life smart folks ain’t stingy on: boots, clothes, an’ spirits.’” He affected a grim smile, raised the flask in toast to his presumably deceased grandparent, and swigged it.

“…Surely you should buy the best of everything, if you can?”

“Nah. Tools, for instance. You buy cheap tools first. If’n you wear out the cheap one, then you know you’re usin’ it enough to need the good ones.”

“Huh.”

“You grew up wi’ money, of course.”

“Not as much as you might think…” Sadie began, then blinked when he glanced at her. “…But more than you, I daresay.”

“Pretty easy to have more’n none at all,” Skinner agreed.

“So…why are you doing this?” Sadie asked.

“’Ow d’you mean?”

“Well, I mean…A lot of the Oneist rhetoric is about how evil the rich are, keeping the poor downtrodden and stealing their hard work—”

Skinner’s laugh interrupted her. He sipped his brandy a last time, then put the flask away, shaking his head. “Well, ‘fer a start, I know a fuckin’ scam when I see one.”

“Ah, well—”

“But…” he raised a hand to show he had more to add. “I grew up poor because me ‘da was a gambler an’ a drinker who couldn’t ‘old down a job for long, beat ‘ma ‘alf dead more’n once, beat ‘alf me teeth out on the day I caught ‘im touchin’ me sister, an’ finally got chucked in’t river in a sack full o’ bricks ‘cuz ‘e owed money ‘e didn’t ‘ave to some very nasty fuckers. I never blamed the toffs for us bein’ poor. I knew exactly who was to blame.”

“Yes, but even without him—”

“What I’m sayin’ is…there’s bastards in every walk o’ life. There’s bastard mill owners, an’ bastard mill workers. There’s bastard landlords, an’ there’s bastard tenants. An’ yeah, it’s ‘ardly fuckin’ fair that one kind o’ bastard gets to lounge around on fancy furniture, wearin’ fancy clothes at fancy parties an’ havin’ their floors scrubbed by a girl who only gets paid a brass a day, but anyone who claims they can make the world fair all in one go is the worst kind o’ bastard of all: a stupid bastard. ‘Cuz if even the bloody Crowns can’t do it, or won’t, then who the fuck among us grubby lot can, or should?”

“You don’t want the world to be a better place?”

“Oh, you’ve got me wrong, love. I do. Why d’you think I’m ‘ere, fightin’ this fight?” he waved a hand at his map. “I jus’ don’t think there’s an easy solution to the world, an’ whatever it is, it sure as shit don’t involve murder an’ takin’ away folks’ free will. Some’ow, whatever a better world looks like, it’s still gotta be one where folks’re free to be bastards.”

“Even bastards like your father?”

Skinner shrugged, then looked up as a bird arrived on the windowsill. He hopped to his feet, retrieved the pigeon, untied the message from its leg, and transferred it to a wicker basket where it cooed and crooned alongside half a dozen others of its kind. He unrolled the note, read it, then tossed it into the fire.

“Make yourself useful,” he said. “I assume you can write.”

“Of course.”

“Write, then.” He indicated a pen and a stack of papers on one end of his table. “We’ve got messages to send out.”

Sadie scrambled to comply, honestly glad of something to do. As he dictated each note, she took them down with what she hoped was the right balance of alacrity and clarity, and he affixed each one to a bird. The notes were incomprehensible strings of yet more seemingly random words and phrases, such as ‘Barfly set in stone. Chicken for dinner. Bellringer’s Lane.’ or ’Lighthouse out of oil. Gravel for supper. Copper’s Alley.’

Sadie could see there was a structure and sense to the communiques, but Skinner didn’t explain it and she didn’t ask. She didn’t want to know. Somehow, she sensed it was safest for a lot of people, herself included, if she didn’t know.

Aside from Skinner’s dictations, the scratching of her pen, and the occasional interruption as a man or pigeon came and went, the room was silent. But that just let the sound of what was happening outside drift in. Sadie concentrated on writing and tried to block out the knowledge that people were dying out there, that each distant rippling crackle of gunshots punctuated another massacre.

She tried not to think of…of Miss Brooknetter. And Larnie and Mellie. And Addie.

She tried to keep her hand from shaking.

Eventually, a pigeon came in whose message caused Skinner to pull the paper chart down from the wall, wad it up and throw it in the fire. He swept his various tokens and markers into a satchel, folded up the map and beckoned for Sadie to follow. In seconds, his command post was all packed up as though it had never been here.

“Where are we going?” Sadie asked.

“Relocating. This place isn’t safe any longer.”

“But—”

“I know, it’s a warzone out there. Trust me.”

Sadie had no choice. She bobbed her head nervously, wondered when or if the world would stop upending itself, and meekly followed him down the stairs and out into a back alley. Mutt was waiting there with coats and hats, which Sadie threw around herself. They smelled of potatos, damp and mothballs, but from a distance she would just be a desperate, hunched figure in a brown raincoat.

Outdoors, the muffled sounds that had made her so anxious were ten times louder and more immediate. She could smell smoke on the air, and not just woodsmoke either. There’s was a sharp, acrid, sulphurous note in there she’d never tasted before but which she guessed must be gunpowder. She could hear shouting, too. A distant, indistinct roar of voices raised in anger and violence that made her tremble.

“Come on,” Mutt ushered them down the alley. “The battle’s comin’ this way.”

Sadie put her head down and scurried along in Skinner’s footsteps. Sure enough, the shouting and shooting were both getting nearer. As she ran, something huge and heavy wallowed overhead, an airship that bellied past amidst the stench of lift-gas and burnt ethanol exhaust as it described a wide arc so low that it nearly clipped off chimneypots and roof tiles, rolling so that its port side tipped downwards…

Just before it vanished out of sight, it fired, and the thunder of its guns tried to kick all the air out of her chest. She’d never heard or felt anything so loud in all her life, and she yelped as primal panic tried to seize her.

In the aftermath of the ship’s bombardment, the shouting and screaming had a now tenor…and the backwash of its engines carried a new reek to her nostrils, a horrible meaty bloody stench that reminded her in equal parts of a cheap butcher shop and an open sewer. Somewhere, mere yards away, terrible ruin had been inflicted on far too many human bodies.

There was no other possible response: they put their heads down and ran.

----------------------------------------

> “I love horses. They eat grass, produce fertilizer, and will pull or carry pretty much whatever you want, all day long. If they could fly, we would have no need of airships.” —Derghan Keegh

IN A DITCH

Crow Vale, Enerlend 09.06.03.12.12

Adrey woke as soon as she hit the ground, though it took her muddled thoughts a few seconds to reassemble themselves and piece together the notion that she’d fainted in the saddle and fallen off her horse.

It hurt, a bit. Probably it would have hurt more if Adrey’s personal understanding of pain hadn’t been subject to such violent recalibration so recently. As it was, compared to Kal Pelton’s inventive sadism, a few bruises and grazes were nothing.

Even so…she found herself too weak to move. Though she tried, she just…she just couldn’t. The fatigue of torture had caught her up, and the surge of strength she’d found in her escape was gone, utterly spent. Now, it was catching up on her that she’d had little to eat or drink for three days except the thin soup Mari had spoon-fed her. She was starved, dehydrated, tormented…

And…

She rested her head and shut her stinging eyes. The horse, having paused to sniff at her and nudge her with his nose, decided she wasn’t about to get up and wandered off to go crop the grass nearby.

What was even the point? She’d spilled what she knew under torture, and the Peltons had had plenty of time to send off a bird or even a human rider before her escape. And the city was…

She opened her eyes and lolled her head over to look at it. From this vantage, she could see quite a lot of Auldenheigh, and the whole conurbation seemed to be at war. Smoke rose not only in columns, but in walls where entire streets were on fire. Orbiting airships quartered the districts, and the sound of their cannons was like thunder amidst distant hills.

People were dying down there, and she was too weak to save even one. Her body just wanted to lie here and sleep, and her will to push through and keep going was all spent. She couldn’t even summon the impetus to feel anything. All she could do was…watch.

A tear trickled down the crease of her nose, down her cheek, and off her chin. She felt it, but couldn’t even care enough to wipe it away.

After a time—perhaps a minute, perhaps an hour, perhaps seconds, perhaps a lifetime—she became aware of boots crunching on the gravelly road nearby. She wanted to turn her head, but even that was too much effort, now.

The boots’ owner squatted down next to her. “Are you alright?”

Adrey managed the faintest twitch of her head, left and right. The voice was female, light and soft, but…distracted, somehow. As if the speaker’s attention was elsewhere.

“No, I suppose you wouldn’t be.” A thin, pale hand reached out and caressed her cheek far too intimately. The voice tutted. “Oh my dear, they really did brutalize you.”

Adrey shivered. She was utterly at the mercy of this stranger, and somehow she could just tell that they weren’t a friend. Some hopeless bottom creaked and groaned in her soul like it was about to fall out. Had she escaped from the Peltons only to fall into somebody else’s hands?

Slim cool fingers brushed away her tears. “Hushh…hush. Here and now, you’re safe. Better than safe, in fact. I want nothing from you.”

“…Help me…” Adrey managed. Her own voice sounded pathetic even to her.

“Of course.” The hand’s palm pressed lightly to her cheek and…

It was like being struck by lightning. It was agony, yet at the same time it cleansed her. In an instant, all of Adrey’s pain and fatigue was blown away like beating the dust out of a carpet, and she jerked up into a seating position with a shocked gasp.

Her rescuer was a woman dressed in black. Her clothes were…well, to Adrey’s eye, as a student of fashion, disguise, and clothing in general, her clothes were a mess. No two components of her garb seemed to match, and though each was clearly well-made and would have been expensive, the result was rather as though a down-on-her-luck socialite had gone and salvaged whatever she could find from a few hundred years’ worth of abandoned wardrobes. The little black lace bolero around her shoulders and upper arms had been a fashionable replacement for shawls about forty years ago, for instance. She was wearing it over a half-corset and blouse that was the present cutting edge of fashion over in Urstlend, but the skirts and petticoats were of a cut that had fallen out of fashion more than a hundred years ago, and the Crowns alone knew when that kind of feathery stole had ever been in vogue. It was shedding feathers like a dead crow’s wing, and several blew away on the breeze as the woman smiled and stood up again.

She wasn’t bothering with either hat or headscarf at all. But it was her expression that really made Adrey stop and stare at her: she’d never seen somebody who looked so bored. Even her posture was a disaffected slouch, and if Adrey was any judge she hadn’t done more than vaguely wave a comb at her wheat blonde tresses in some time. The hair had a tangled look to it that was just on the wrong side of the line between artful dishevelment and genuine neglect.

It had to be said though that her face was even more beautiful than Mari’s had been, in a gaunt way. But it was entirely devoid of enthusiasm or spirit. Eyes like a pair of scuffed brass coins gave Adrey a brief glance up and down more out of resigned attention to detail than any real interest, then stood up and turned to the city where, at last, the faintest twitch of a smile touched lips which would have been full and beautiful if not perpetually pulled down at the corners.

“There,” she said.

“I…” Crowns, Adrey almost sobbed. All her pain was gone, instantly and completely. It was the first time in days she’d felt whole and undamaged in body. “Thank you! Oh, Crowns! I don’t know how to—”

“Don’t bother,” the woman said.

“But—”

“What do you feel?” the woman asked, softly. She pointed toward the city with the barest lift of her chin, though there was sluggish weight in the movement, as though even such a minimal gesture had been dredged up out of some fathomless sump of ennui.

“I…well…about what?” Adrey asked. She could have stood up, she felt, but she didn’t. Not yet.

“About your home burning. Do you feel something? Anything at all?”

“Of course I do!”

“What?”

“I—Um.” Adrey blinked at her, utterly confused. Who was this woman? “I—Well. Sorrow?”

“Just that?”

“…Anger.”

“Good…”

“And fear. For…for people I care about.”

“Powerful fear?”

“Yes! And…” Adrey blinked then surged to her feet, spurred by the realization of her own emotions. “I…I’m sorry, I’m grateful, but I can’t stay here. I need to get down there, I need to—!”

For the first time, an actual smile flowered over the woman’s face and she took a deep breath as though savoring the first cool breeze after too long in a stuffy parlour. “There,” she whispered. “Oh, there’s some passion at last…”

Adrey blinked at her, far too confused to ask any questions or say anything. Then she set her jaw and strode off toward the horse. She wasn’t about to waste this healing, however weird the healer might be. “Thank you. Truly. But I have to be going.”

“Not without this.”

Adrey turned. “Without what—?” she began, but the woman pressed something into her hands that completely numbed her mind.

It was a box, maybe four inches to a side, made of nearly seamless polished wood save for a seam around the equator. Greenish runes hovered the scant width of a fingernail paring above the wood, shimmering and squirming around her fingers.

The woman with the brass eyes finally met her gaze and shrugged. “I’ll want that back, once you have used it,” she said.

“…You know what this is?” Adrey asked, hardly able to believe she was holding one.

“Oh yes. But before I tell you what exactly it is, I need to extract a promise from you. Promise on whatever you hold dear, I don’t care.”

“…Promise what, exactly?” Adrey asked.

“Show no mercy.” The woman’s gaze, though still somehow dull and listless, bored into her soul. “No remorse, no quarter given. When you get your shot at Nils Civorage…you’ll stab him before he can say a word.”

Her words lit a fire Adrey couldn’t have believed she’d feel a few minutes before. “When I get my shot?” she asked.

“Oh yes. It’ll be soon.”

“How can you possibly know—?”

“I do. Do you swear?”

“To do what I would have done anyway?” Adrey almost snarled. “I swear it. The moment I lay eyes on that bastard, he’s dead.”

A kind of sated hunger that reminded Adrey all-too-keenly of Mari Pelton flickered briefly in her rescuer’s dull eyes, but vanished as quickly as it had come. “In that case…”

She reached out and touched Adrey’s cheek again. This time Adrey had the strength to shiver and recoil; she opened her mouth to snap at the stranger not to do that, wondering if she’d ever be able to enjoy contact like that ever again—

And then went rigid as knowledge slammed into her brain with the force of a punch to the forehead.

In her hand, the Word Vault snapped open.

----------------------------------------

DODGING THROUGH A WARZONE

Auldenheigh 09.06.03.12.12

Total insanity was Auldenheigh’s only rule now, and staying out of its way had sent Bothroyd and Nalesmith far out of their path.

They ditched their uniforms. It had quickly become apparent that the Constabulary, in its attempts to keep order, had been interpreted by both sides as being on the other side, meaning anyone wearing the dark blue coat or the domed helmet was asking to get either shot by the Clear Skies guildmen, or strung up by the general public.

In hindsight, and with the knowledge he’d gained from being part of the Network, Jed could see the genius at work. Years of little changes, each no more significant than a single slice of meat from the ham, no more weighty than a single barleycorn in the barrel, had drip-drip-dripped into Auldenheigh, year on year, until the population were right on the perfect tipping point of being just frustrated and angry enough to dream of revolt, but never quite desperate enough.

What in the Crowns’ names the Clear Skies marines were getting out of being the ones to give them that final push, Jed didn’t know. Was it money? The promise of a position of authority in the new order to come once the revolt was put down? Were they just mental thralls under Civorage’s power?

Part of him hoped and believed it was the latter. Somehow, he had enough faith in humanity to still believe that no self-interested lad would be both pointlessly cruel to ordinary folks and blind to his own chances in the ensuing maelstrom. Better for them to be innocent victims, too. He could cope with that.

Cold fuckin’ comfort if one of them sniped him, though.

At least a lifetime on the beat had given Jed a near-perfect mental map of Auldenheigh’s endless maze of streets, alleyways, lanes, rows and arcades.

The streets and lanes, they avoided as much as they could, conscious that these were the battlefields. Most were empty. Some were carpeted in bodies. Some were carpeted in body, in the horrible slurry of stinking matter left behind when cannon fire passed through crowds. Even the apparently empty ones they scuttled across in a hunched sprint, imagining sniper’s bullets or a squad marching around the corner to catch them in the open.

The lanes and cul-de-sacs were often barricaded off, and they avoided them. The alleyways felt claustrophobic and constrained, each one a tunnel from danger to danger with nowhere to escape. Human rat-traps.

The arcades, in fact, turned out to be quite crowded.

Unsurprising, really. During Eclipse and inclement weather, the covered arcades and marketplaces were kept lit and served as shelters for those who lacked the means to keep their own homes properly lit and warm…or, indeed, who lacked a home. It made sense that people who were used to viewing them as safe havens would turn to them in the face of the violence unfolding outside. There were armed men watching the entrances when Jed and Ben came jogging down the street, and they shifted uneasily but didn’t yet raise their weapons. Not fully, at least.

“That you, Serjant Bothroyd?” one of them asked, and Jed recognized a fellow he’d helped stay out of the gangs, many years back. He’d had a nickname…what was it again? Oh. Yes.

“Aye, it’s me.” Jed shook his hand. “Good to see you takin’ care o’ folks, Cagey.”

Cagey shrugged. “Somebody ‘ad to. Hardly recognized you out of uniform…”

“Rather not get shot,” Jed shrugged. “Everyone alright in there?”

Cagey shrugged again. “Scared shitless. An’ that goes double for me an’ Howler here. If them Clear Skies come down this way…” He gave a complicated, worried little shrug that made it quite plain just how long he thought they’d hold out with two revolvers versus a squad of marines. But also that he’d be willing to do it, if it bought the people sheltering behind him the time they needed to escape.

Jed patted him on the shoulder. “You’re better of barricadin’ the door and pretendin’ you’re not there, lads. Anyway. We need to get through to Banmor Bridge,” he said.

“Banmore bridge?” Cagey frowned. “Why?”

“Gotta get over the river.”

“Not by Banmor Bridge you won’t. It ain’t there no more. One o’ them big airships smashed it.”

“Fuck me…” Nalesmith muttered. “They’re really bloody serious.”

“Word I got is, the Guild blew it down after the citizen militia took it,” Cagey said. “They still ‘old all the other ones. No-one gets over the river now.”

It made sense. All part of the strategy, presumably.

“Why’re they doing this?” Howler asked. He was a youngish lad, perhaps in his mid twenties. A fighter and a brawler, if Jed was any judge, but no soldier. And he never got an answer.

From somewhere behind there came a sharp thump, a hissing whistle, and Whistler staggered clutching at the arrow that had buried itself right in the notch of his throat. Another drilled into Cagey’s chest just below his armpit, and a third into Nalesmith’s back. All three men went down in a second.

“Shit!” Jed ducked into the scanty cover of the arcade doorway, and reached for Nalesmith. The inspector was still alive, having been caught in the shoulder rather than dead-center, but there was still a yard of wood sticking out of him and he let out a cry of agony as Jed hauled him none-too-gently through the door.

Howler was already dead, his eyes vacant and blood pouring from both the wound and his slack moouth. Cagey managed to crawl a little way, then went still with a rattling exhalation.

A woman in the nurse’s uniform of Black Hill Hospital came running, followed by the men who presumably had been watching the other entrance. For a minute or so, all was screaming and confusion: a young woman shrieked in grief as she ran to Cagey’s side and cradled his head, an older man tried futilely to wake Howler before pulling the young man’s limp body to his chest and weeping. The nurse descended on Nalesmith and started cutting his clothes away to get a better look at the damage. Jed bullied the guards from the other end into sealing this end of the arcade by piling up whatever shop furniture and other heavy objects they could find, then knelt at Nalesmith’s side.

“Will he live?”

“I need a magestone,” the nurse snapped, packing the writhing inspector’s wound with bandage cloth. Jed produced a lightstone from his pouch. It was a big one, a flat river pebble so full of charge it almost hummed. Perfect for night-time patrols when a man might need a long dim light or a big bright one. She seized it, slipped it into her mouth to keep both hands free, and pressed them down hard on Nalesmith’s punctured shoulder: he groaned, but her hands fairly flooded with blue light and within seconds he relaxed.

She relaxed as well, then spat the stone out. “He’ll live. What happened?”

Jed picked up the arrow she’d pulled from his colleague’s back. “…Bloody elves is what happened.”

“Elves?” Someone nearby asked. The word got passed back into the group of refugees hiding in the arcade, and Jed could hear the sound of a panic starting…and suspicion. There were elves sheltering among them, ordinary working folks from some of Garanhir’s native set, and one of them, a green-skinned Gülfey, found himself in the middle of a ring of suspicious glares.

Whatever drama might have come of that, however, went unresolved. Before the elf could even open his mouth, there was a splintering crash from above, and people scattered shrieking in an attempt to escape as the broken windows came down among them.

With it came the elves. Slim, skyclad and sexless, they skipped among the raining glass either heedless of the danger, or confident they could avoid it. Maybe they could. Four of them landed among the civilians, and then there were just four blurs, darting and whirling to and fro faster than the shuttle of a power loom, and wherever they changed direction, somebody died.

Jed has his pistol out, but there was no hope of shooting one fo them. They were in among the civilians, and far too fast. Even so he tracked back and forth while his blood and breath pounded in his ears, holding back panic with the grim determination to fight until—

Flash. The pistol spun out of his hand, swatted aside with a clatter of steel on steel. At the same instant, another knife appeared at his throat. Appeared…but didn’t cut. It belonged to a new figure, a fifth elf whose whole-face mask tickled it ear as it leaned in and whispered in his ear.

“Run, Serjant. The sooner you run, the more of them will live…”

“I—” Jed began, but the elvish blade whipped away leaving the faintest shaving cut on his throat, and he was shoved forward.

“Run now, or I slay the nurse.”

Jed didn’t turn. He didn’t look. He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t even curse. He just lumbered into a run, and the moment he did the slaughter ceased.

“Fa ube kine…” the elf commented, keeping pace with him. “Go on: vama!”

There was nothing for it. Jed couldn’t have fought five elves on his best day as a young man. All he could do was obey, and pray to the Crowns that whatever sick game these elves were playing included a measure of honesty. Gasping, panting and shaking, he put his head down and fled as commanded.

Behind him he heard laughter…but mercifully not the sound of murder.

Not yet, anyway.

----------------------------------------

WATCHING FROM AFAR

Iaka’s sanctum, the Unbroken Earthmote 09.06.03.12.12

The view through the Left Hand’s eyes, Civorage thought, was really quite informative. The elf evaluated humans in much the same way a human might evaluate a cow, and through the psychic link was conveyed much of the Left Hand’s disdain and amusement. The fat old serjant ran like a steam locomotive getting up to speed, with much puffing and chuffing and blowing, and rather more activity than acceleration.

“Why him?” he asked aloud.

Lady Iaka was not in a position to answer him verbally. She rose suspended in the midst of her column of light, her arms outstretched to her sides and slightly forward, palms upturned and fingers splayed, but her head was bowed down to her chest with the effort of concentration. The air within her sanctum was hot enough to tighten the skin, and Civorage couldn’t even approach her throne: the temperature near it was hot enough to cook. But the Forsaken herself was either immune to or protected from the scalding heat.

Civorage didn’t know very much about magic, but he knew it didn’t usually heat the air in any noticeable degree, and indeed couldn’t do it efficiently even if a mage set out to do so deliberately. The furnace blast around Iaka spoke to unfathomable power, which she herself was serving as the fulcrum for.

She could answer him telepathicaly, however. Apparently her great work was not yet demanding all her focus.

He is special to Duchess Ellaenie. Or rather, he is special to one who is as a sister to her.

“Why Ellaenie, then?” Civorage asked, noting that Iaka had used the girl’s rank as though it still belonged to her.

Think. The hex laid upon you was laid by her mentor, in an act of sacrifice while protecting her, and for the sake of protecting her. The skein of magic thus woven is wide and subtle, but it focuses around her, and thus around those who are dear to her.

“I knew such relationships were significant in the mundane sense…” Civorage mused. He closed his eyes and watched the Left Hand run up a wall and follow after the running constable at roof height.

As opposed to?

“Well…the arcane. The magical. The…deeper senses.”

A hollow distinction. All is empty. All is interconnected. There are no levels or gradations, Nils. There is only…proximity. And even that is an illusion.

He sensed a pulse of amusement in echo of his own nonplussed frown.

You of all people cannot understand, of course. To you, minds are real things.

“If they’re not real, then how can there be a Word of Creation describing them?”

You will see, once we get you a second Word. Now: where is the Countess?

“The Right Hand nearly has her,” Civorage said, shifting his focus. Unlike their sibling, the Right Hand was running over open fields some distance from the city, setting a hard sprint that not even a horse at full gallop could match. He attuned to their mind just in time to watch them arrive at a quaint, pleasant little cottage on the outskirts of Crowvale. A gentlemen’s weekend retreat. Just the sort of place the Peltons would—

The Right Hand paused and sniffed the air, then slowed to a cautious jog. The air near the house bore the familiar scent of human blood, and when they slid up to the kitchen door…

They drew their blade and slipped inside, before pausing and staring in consternation at the scene before them. The Peltons were dead: Kal lay in a crumpled heap beside the kitchen table with his trousers around his ankles and a hole right through his heart. Mari’s body lay sprawled obscenely on the tabletop, with a neat puncture in her throat. It seemed their prisoner had escaped, and rudely interrupted their lovemaking on the way out.

“…We may have a problem. The Countess escaped. And robbed me of the satisfaction of punishing the Peltons myself.”

Vexing, but their lives are as good a drop in the storm as any other.

“What about the Countess? I thought you said she’s important?”

She did not go far…She…wait…what is that?

Before Civorage could ask, Iaka went rigid and bit back a shriek as the magic around her flared anew. She fought it under control, but just for a second, in the uncontroled surging, Civorage caught a glimpse of what she was sensing.

And he knew that, somehow, the plan had gone very wrong.

----------------------------------------

> “To my lasting regret, of course, my visit to the Yunei Empire never took me beyond their great gate. I have heard many stories of the Imperial Palace, however. To hear Yunei exiles and refugees describe it, the palace covers such a broad footprint and contains so many people that it would be counted a good-sized town or perhaps even a small city among the Garanese. One wonders if any foreigner will ever enjoy the opportunity to explore its halls and learn its secrets… —Prince Ruber of Valai, My Travels.

MUSTER AND PARADE

The Imperial Palace, Yonguitang Earthmote 09.06.03.12.12

It had been a long time since the Imperial Army had mustered. Hundreds of years, certainly. In fact, if the Emperor knew his family’s history, the last time had been three hundred and six years prior, when his esteemed ancestor had been compelled to put down a rebellion in Go Xong Province. And that had been considered a shockingly proactive act for the Enlightened One: under normal circumstances, the Emperor neither mustered nor commanded; instead his loyal lords and subjects mustered and commanded on his behalf.

There would be no controversy this time. When the Crowns themselves came seeking the Yunei people’s military aid, how could it be Proper for anyone but the Emperor to muster troops under his own banner.

It was an astonishing sight. The palace’s grand parade ground was vast, the largest walled-in space in all the Nested Worlds according to Prince Sayf. And still it was crowded right to the edges with neat rectangles of men, arranged so closely together that there was scarcely room for two horses to ride in opposite directions between them. As the Emperor watched, the nearest rank delivered their salute to him and to Prince Sayf by removing their helmets, thrusting them in the air and uttering a united cry of “Strength! Courage! Unity! Perfection!” before, in complete unison, effecting a perfect left-face and marching in file to wheel around the corner and back toward the ground’s water gate and exit. As soon as they were gone, the next set of platoons would step forward to deliver the same salute, and so on.

The Emperor bowed to each and every one. He was under no illusions about what he was asking of these soldiers. They were leaving the Empire and the earthmote of their birth to fight on foreign soil, and he had been shown what Garanese war looked like. Cannons and mortars were one thing, but his brave spearmen and archers were going up against lines of men armed with rifles that could shoot twice as fast as even the best archers, at better than twice the range.

That had been a sobering vision. Prince Sayf had shown him a historical battle from some forty years previously, at a place called “Snake River,” and the Emperor had shivered to see so many men cut down so quickly by the disciplined volleys of fire that thundered back and forth between their clashing lines.

His soldiers were unprepared for such warfare. They were unprepared to face any Garanese army in the field. In the city, though…

FIghting in the city would be bloody, but winnable. The enemy did not have enough men there to stand against the Yunei. But after they had liberated it would come the war against the other lords of Garanhir, the “Dukes.” And for that…

Prince Sayf did something that no mortal would normally do: he laid a comforting hand on the Emperor’s shoulder. “You have regrets?”

“…Wishes, perhaps. A wish for more time.”

“Ah, time.” The Crown nodded. “It is because of time that we are in this predicament, yes?”

“Too much time spent secure in our own superiority. I have…never been more truly powerful than I am in this moment. And yet also I see how powerless my past predicament made us all.”

“Your ‘past predicament’ was part of the very thing that has given your people the opportunity to stand and fight at all. It is a strategy that paid off, in its way. Do not lament it, even though the time has come to discard it.”

“Still, if I had the power to step back as this one you spoke of does…”

“My son…look at me. Power is the very nature of what I am, yes? And I count as deep friend one who is at least as far beyond me as I am beyond a beetle in a pond. We have not acted, until now. He has restrained his hand, whose hand can do all but anything with a mere thought. There are reasons for our restraint.” He patted the Emperor’s shoulder again. “Trust in that, my son. We are neither perfect nor gods, but we are far from unwise or unaware. Always is your good in our minds.”

They paused to bow to the next platoon.

“Our good will mean many of their deaths.”

“It will.”

“It will be a great tragedy.”

“So it always must be, in war. Death, however, is not the end.”

“This, I already knew,” the Emperor gently reminded him.

“Of course.” Sayf inclined his head subtly, both in acknowledgment and to remind him that there were other ears listening.

The conversation was set aside for a time, as ranks of men came forward, saluted, and departed until at last the parade square was empty save for the fading echoes of platoon captains shouting their men into whatever maneuvers awaited them beyond the gates. The Emperor sighed and, playing the cordial host, gestured behind them through the great doors toward the gardens.

The King of Crowns was holding a court of his own amidst the splendor of the Imperial garden. He had found a particularly bent and venerable fig tree on the shores of an ornamental lake, and was seated cross-legged among its roots. The air around him shimmered, though this was far too small a word to describe the effect as seen from outside. For many man-heights in every direction, the world about the Greatest One seemed…more, somehow. The Emperor must have seen and sat beneath that tree himself a hundred times, and yet he could not ever remember seeing it look quite so much a tree as it did in that moment. Its leaves seemed more lustrous and green, its trunk more gnarled and elderly. Without any change at all, that fig tree had become a paragon example of itself. The faintest hint of rainbow light played and rippled in the boundary between this smaller, lesser, weaker world, and the bubble of greatness in which King Eärrach had wrapped himself.

The Emperor knew some of the truth of it, now; in the presence of the King of Crowns, reality in the deepest sense of the word was far, far more actual.

Seated in a half-circle about King Eärrach were the Emperor’s chosen generals, all very Proper and proven men whom he trusted. They were leaders of supreme dignity and gravity in their own right, but in front of the Crown they seemed as novices again, sitting at their giant master’s feet to hear wisdom and take instruction.

Instruction they were certainly receiving.

“Airships are not immune to the weapons you have, General Liung. A trebuchet loaded with a fire pot will pose a great threat to them, though it must be aimed upwards and forward of the ship’s path. Heavy bed crossbows likewise, especially if they are loaded with harpoons to snag and tear the bags. It is not the hopeless fight you fear, though I will not pretend they shall be easy prey for your siege troops. Fortunately, the enemy do not have many, and there are some they will certainly choose to withdraw rather than risk.”

As General Liung bowed low in gratitude, the Emperor became aware that the Lady of Mists and Queen Winter were also present, though they had seated themselves quietly in the background of this meeting. Though, as he had already learned, Lady Haust in particular had a habit of choosing to cease being here and suddenly be there whenever the fancy took her. She caught his gaze—if, indeed, that was possible through her opaque veil—inclined her head with a small smile, and leaned forward to whisper in King Eärrach’s ear.

The King of Crowns glanced up at the new arrivals, and nodded. “The parade is over, my friends. It is time for you to go to your armies and put into effect these things we discussed.”

He nodded and extended the shimmer around the Emperor. As always, the disconcerting feeling of impossible amplification from within washed over and through his very body and soul. The King being what he was, it was far, far easier to bring others closer to his level of being than it was to condescend down toward their own.

At the same moment Eärrach did the reverse for the departing generals, all of whom…seemed somehow vastly less now by comparison. The Emperor knew that if he were to lay even the gentlest touch on any of them as he was now, the force of it would obliterate them completely.

“I always did like this tree,” he commented instead as he sat down. “I planted its sapling in my first incarnation. It pleases me that you find it so agreeable, my lord.”

The difference in stature was almost as a towering Enerlish sitting next to his toddling babe, to say nothing of all the rest. Yet Eärrach was friendly, and spoke as with a valued companion.

“Men have been sitting under trees such as this and seeking enlightenment since before even I was born,” he commented, glancing up at it with more than a little fondness. “The ancient symbology you invoke by this fig of all things is…” the King rumbled in amusement. “Oh, how I ache to tell all the old stories!”

“It’s hardly an accident,” Lord Sayf pointed out, settling down beside him. “You’re the one who wove those old stories into the fabric and image of it all. You can’t claim surprise when echoes of them come popping up.”

“Of course I did!” Eärrach laughed heartily. “How could I have hoped to improve on the old masterwork? And yet, all men are free, are they not? Do they not choose their actions?”

“Not free from sentiment. And yours is powerful, old friend.”

“What about him isn’t?” Queen Talvi commented, with a faint twinkle of mischief in her blue eyes.

“His sense of modesty, for a start…”

“Ha!” He was, of course, as minimally clad as was Proper for a hunter and athlete of his unassailable stature…

Even the Emperor laughed. It was quite impossible not to, nor was there any reason to restrain himself. He was in the company of friends who had been friends for…well, forever. And the love between them was as obvious as it was infectious. By whatever ultimate reasons they had, they chose to include him in their circle, and that was a gift quite beyond expectation.

At least, until the moment when the merriment ended as sharply and unpleasantly as jumping into an ice-cold bath. All four of the Crowns turned as one and raised their faces to the sky, their gazes piercing haze and cloud to stare up at Garanhir. After a few seconds, Prince Sayf uttered the restrained “hmm…” of a man who had just encountered an unexpected inconvenience.

“…My Lords and Ladies?”

“One moment, please.” The four glanced at each other. The Emperor got the distinct impression of a conversation happening in those glances, one he was not exactly excluded from, merely one that passed too quickly for him to even notice before it was over.

“I think it must be you, Winter. Like before.”

The Queen of Ice rose to her feet, dusting off her skirts with a resigned sigh. “I think so, yes.”

“Then go with my blessing.” With that curious formality, the King laid his brutish hands delicately atop her head…and power flowed forth from him into her, unseen but felt. So much of it, it seemed to the Emperor as if his very soul might be blown away as smoke from the sheer force of its movement.

Queen Talvi winced, as one enduring a great but momentary suffering, but she gave no complaint. She simply bowed politely to the Emperor in the manner of a friend who must unexpectedly take her leave, then stepped behind the tree and vanished as though it were a gatepost.

Eärrach looked down at him with a sad expression on his impossibly handsome face. “I have bolstered her strength against some nasty possibilities now afoot,” he explained.

“What has happened?”

The three lingering Crowns exchanged another one of those conversations-at-a-glance. This time, it was Lady Haust who spoke. Beneath her cowl, the set of her lips was thin, grim and troubled.

“A Word of Creation has been spoken,” she said.

----------------------------------------

SEEING TOO MUCH

Crow Vale, Enerlend 09.06.03.12.12

On any other day, in any other state of mind, she might have endured it. But today Adrey’s sanity, was already drawn right to its breaking point by days of torment and perverse seduction.

It couldn’t survive what the Word revealed.

Nothing was real. Nothing. There was no such thing as reality, no such thing as solid ground or the breeze or light. It was all just…pretending at being real, waiting lazily until compelled by circumstance to be…and then, like an idle layabout worker, doing only the bare necessary minimum before returning to sullen nothingness.

She spun and whirled, searched with tears streaming down her cheeks for anything, anything solid enough to grasp and hold onto, but there was nothing at all. The whole universe was just…lies. Lies, and a game of terrible weighted dice.

On and on it went, deeper and deeper. Her own body, her own mind, just an endless dance of collapsing waves, everything, everything everything!

Nothing Kal and Mari had done to her had been half so terrible a torment. The Word tore away every comfortable delusion she’d ever had about the world, shredded them and tossed them to the breeze. She collapsed to her nonexistent knees in mud that was nothing more than a pretense, felt a heart that wasn’t real hammer and pound illusory blood through her head. She couldn’t breathe. The air wasn’t real, but she couldn’t get enough of it!

She shoved her fingers against her temples, trying to claw the Word back out of her brain, but it was too late. She knew, now. She knew that everything she had ever seen, touched, tasted, scented, felt and heard was just the momentary tipping of scales, and she could see the exquisite balance of those scales. In every moment and in every detail, she saw them tip and balance, deciding between endless possibilities and settling on what, for the briefest of instants, became the illusion of truth.

But that wasn’t what destroyed her.

The worst part was seeing the hand on the scales.

----------------------------------------

RUNNING THROUGH THE BACK ALLEYS

Auldenheigh 09.06.03.12.12

The hunters first found them as they darted across the road from alleyway to alleyway, somewhere in Stone Circles. Mutt paused to wave Sadie across, then—

Sadie would never forget the sound of it. The meaty thump of steel and wood thudding to a stop in his flesh. The choked, strangled cough he emitted as the impact drove all the air from his lungs. She saw the look on his face as he blinked down at the arrow protruding from his ribs, the confused way he reached up and touched it.

Then Skinner grabbed her and dragged her out of the street. She heard Mutt collapse behind her, glanced back, saw he was still struggling for life—

“He’s still—!”

“No ‘e’s not! Run!”

He dragged her down alleyways and through back yards, under market awnings and along colonnades. Sadie had never run so fast nor so long in her life, and every step became a miracle. Her breath was ragged and hot in her lungs, her legs felt like sacks of porridge, but she didn’t dare allow herself to falter.

Time passed. Was it minutes or hours? No way of knowing. There was nothing but the blur of flight and fear, and endless tight spaces rushing past while her body begged for mercy. Every so often she caught a glimpse of dark figures on the rooftops, and arrows would come raining down to clack among their ankles or clatter off the stones in front of them.

She finally collapsed when Skinner slowed and stopped. He too was spent, and he leaned against the wall with his skinny chest heaving. Sadie had never felt so sick or so beaten: she folded up on the ground and trembled, expecting that any second she’d feel the fatal sting of an arrow.

It didn’t come. Eventually she mustered the strength to look around and saw that they were among the hanging cloths at the back of dyer’s. All she saw in every direction were fabrics in red and blue. No rooftops. No arrows. It was, for only a moment, a brief respite.

Skinner didn’t seem to view it as a relief. He was already pacing like a caged beast, his face alive with the effort of thinking.

“We’re bein’ ‘erded,” he commented as Sadie staggered to her feet. “Pushed somewhere.”

“We are?”

“Oh, aye. They’re keepin’ us trapped against th’ river, pushin’ us dexter.”

“But…if they’re herding us, doesn’t that mean they want us alive? Can’t we just not go the way they want us to?”

“They won’t just let us go, lass. If they can’t ‘ave us where they want us, they’ll murder us.”

“So…we just do what they want?”

“Believe me, I’d rather not…”

An arrow thumped into the wooden post of a dying rack a few inches from Sadie’s head. Despite the leaden weight of her legs, she flinced away from it with a yelp, only for a second arrow to judder to a halt right next to her, this time in the doorpost. The message was clear: ‘we can kill you any time we like.’

“…Fuck. Break’s over,” Skinner groaned. “C’mon. I’ll get us out of this yet…”

Sadie wanted to tell him not to make promises he couldn’t keep, but she spared her breath. Instead, she got moving again.

Above her, the elves skipped from rooftop to rooftop in eerie silence.

----------------------------------------

HERDED

Auldenheigh 09.06.03.12.12

Wallgate road. Everyone who lived in the city knew it. It ought to have been, as it was at all other times, an artery flowing with Clear Skies troops or barricaded by them against the civilian militias. Instead, Jed limped down it as fast as his aching limbs could go. The elves jogged alongside him like sheepdogs trotting alongside a compliant ram. He’d almost have felt better if they would taunt him, prod him, make sport with him, but…no.

No, the creepy fuckers didn’t have that much personality. There was something…insect-like about them. You couldn’t tell one from another, and not just in the commonplace way of one man struggling to tell folks of a different ethnicity apart. No, these elves were identical in almost every detail. Even their bodies, skyclad as they were, betrayed almost nothing in the way of difference unless one took far too close a look.

Identical unfeeling black eyes watched him from identical expressionless grey faces framed by identical dark hair. Each one wore an identical harness to carry their blades, bow and quivers, and identical pouches for provisions and suchlike. They were as alike as blades of grass, as different as leaves on the same branch.

All except the masked one. That one wore armor of boiled leather and fine chain over padded backings of fur, but the armor and the mask were both designed to make them utterly anonymous. Whatever extra personality they’d kept over their peers…Jed couldn’t really see it. But there was a wicked streak there. A malicious reminder that this was an elf, a fey. They weren’t a nice and cuddly race. They were folk whose idea of entertainment, upon a time, had been to skin some poor bastard alive. And the masked one gave the impression of not having changed much in that regard.

It was all Jed could do to pray that he wasn’t wheezing his way toward a similar fate as he staggered down Wallgate Road, weaving between abandoned wagons and carriages. A tram lay knocked off the rails, skewed drunkenly across the carriageway by the force of what must have been an airship’s broadside, and its innards were still boiling with sooty black-edged flame. Some poor bugger lolled half out of the wreckage, and their blackened bones dripped burning fat down the blistered paintwork onto what remained of some other anonymous victim. The stink and sight of it made Bothroyd retch, and he dropped to his hands and knees as his midriff spasmed in disgust.

“You’ll all…bloody pay…for this…” he wheezed at his masked tormentor. The elf didn’t reply beyond setting a hand pointedly to its weapon. Jed shook his head. “Fuck you. I’m done bein’ your plaything.”

“Then we shall return to that arcade and finish what we started,” the elf replied. It turned and started to lope back in the direction they’d come, and Jed groaned as he knew he was beaten.

“No…wait…”

They didn’t stop.

“Wait!” He lurched to his feet and did his best to keep running. “Just leave ‘em alone!”

The masked elf made a curt flicking gesture, and they fell in around him again.

“The next time you defy me in any degree, they will die. Uka kenasir?”

“…I understand.”

“Adequate. Now run. Don’t worry, fat one: it isn’t far now.”

Jed put his head down and kept moving. “Very bloody reassuring…” he muttered.

“Was that defiance I just heard?” the elf asked. When Jed decided the wisest reply was silence, they nodded and goaded him onwards with a swat from a discarded riding crop they’d picked up.

They passed the shattered remains of Banmor Bridge. What had once been a fair and wide span high enough to not impede any of the usual river traffic was now a pair of sad, broken abutments on opposite sides of the water, and two divorced piles still jutting up from among the toppled stone bricks. There had been a barricade on that bridge not too long ago, made from whatever its builders could pile up: park benches, garden railings, furniture, an overturned wagon. Now, it was a smouldering heap of ashes, charred metal, and corpses.

Up ahead, the Bluewater Bridge was still intact, and Jed guessed it must be their destination. All the other bridges were upriver behind him, and Wallgate Road ran on in an almost straight line right to the other end of Garanhir. Somehow, he doubted they were going to make him stumble all the way to Frudlend.

His prediction was proven correct when the masked elf gave him a swat to goad him up the bridge as they drew level. He groaned as he saw what was coming the other way. More elves. And, stumbling along in front of them in sweat-soaked shirtsleeves, the skinny, tattooed figure of Skinner.

There was a young lady with him. Jed had never met Sadie Peason before, but he guessed it could be no-one else. She had that same upper-middle class look as all the tenants at Miss Brooknetter’s house, and she also looked near-dead from exhaustion, and grimly determined to remain upright despite terror that was making her tremble from head to toe.

They met in the middle of the bridge, where Skinner gave him a resigned, stoic look. “…’Ey up, Jed.”

“Got you too, then,” Bothroyd noted.

“Got th’ whole bloody city, ‘aven’t they?”

“What are they going to do with us?” Sadie quavered. Jed sighed, feeling a pang of guilt and grief on her behalf. Somewhere out there, he had grandchildren of about the same age. Crowns, let them be alright.

“We are going to kill you, of course,” The masked elf stated, flatly. A quirk of their head betrayed some irritation at Sadie’s fearful whimper. “It is your lot. You are human. You die. The best your ephemeral kind can ask for is a swift, painless and meaningful death. That is what we shall grant you.”

“Seems to me like you’re givin’ us a reason to not go quietly,” Skinner pointed out, in an oddly mild tone. He fished inside his vest and produced a tobacco pouch.

“You will. If you do not, I will see to it that she suffers.” The elf indicated Sadie, who burst into tears.

Skinner started thumbing leaf into a short clay pipe. “So. What’re you waitin’ for?” he asked.

“The fourth sacrifice. The countess.”

Sacrifice. Jed caught Skinner’s eye, and saw equal comprehension there. This wasn’t just some game of sadism on the elves’ part, this was purposeful. And the masked one had spoken about their deaths being meaningful, somehow.

Skinner thumbed some more tobacco into his pipe. “You need all four of us, then?”

Several of the elves blurred. One moment, they were standing a good distance away. The next they were holding Skinner, Bothroyd and Sadie tight, their hands clamped tight around their jaws and squeezing it open. One of them shoved their fingers in Jed’s mouth, dug around among his teeth, and eventually retreated without finding anything. Sadie’s likewise gave up empty-handed and dropped the sobbing girl to the deck. Only Skinner’s backed away with a suicide pill pinched delicately between thumb and forefinger.

“…Indeed,” the masked one said, as the pill was tossed over the side and into the Heigh.

“Ugh…fuck.” Skinner watched the pill go ruefully. “Wasn’t gonna use it anyhow. Not if it’ll cost the lass ‘er dignity.”

“Having the sense to spare her needless suffering is the only intelligence you have yet shown.” The elf hopped up on the bridge’s wall and arranged themselves comfortably. “Why resist the coming peace? Why fight to prolong your suffering? Senseless.”

Skinner tamped down his pipe and took out a matchbook. “Suffering ain’t real,” he said. “It’s jus’ a state of mind. You endure it, you overcome it, you grow stronger. You’re not savin’ us from aught, you’re just murderin’ us all in a fancy way an’ claimin’ you’l get to feel good about it after.”

“Course, you’d feel good about it anyway, wouldn’t you?” Jed added. “You’re an old elf, ain’tcha? DIdn’t learn your lesson last time, even though the Crowns themselves beat it into you?”

Whatever philosophical argument was about to ensue was supposed to be a distraction. Maybe the elves just didn’t know what they were looking at, maybe they had no idea what TNT was. It was the only way to explain how they could have missed the parcels of it sewn into Skinner’s vest. There was certainly enough of it there to blast the three humans instantly and painlessly out of this life and deny these buggers their sacrifice. Jed kept his expression solemn and turned his eyes downward as Skinner lit the match and started to puff up his pipe. He wouldn’t give the elves any hint or warning. If they were dead anyway…better this way.

But the detonation never came.

There was a new bloom of light in the sky, but unlike to all the explosions that had marked the day up until this point. This one was brilliant, blinding, and oddly hued. Pinks and greens flickered and tore wildly up from somewhere out in the city, struck one of the Clear Skies airships and—

—and…removed it. The ship reeled and lurched under an assault of crackling power, then simply ceased to be. **There was a hint of dust blowing away on the breeze, and then the sound of its demise reached them. It was a rumble, a crackle, a boom, a roar and an inhumanly loud hysterical shriek all rolled into one. It was an insane sound that began as a subterranean jolt before climbing up through the entire range of human hearing with enough force to leave the ears feeling like they were packed with cloth. Skinner dropped his match involuntarily to clamp his hands over his ears, just like Sadie and Jed and all the elves.

It was only the beginning. A dazzling mote of light shot into the air, shedding a sphere of misty concussion as it did so. Jed saw the shockwave rippling out into the sky, watched it smash roof tiles, shatter windows and sweep down the river in a frothy spray.

He flung himself flat just in time. The violence of its passing was like nothing he’d experienced or dreamed, though he didn’t hear it. Instead, he felt it as a hammer-blow in every fibre of his weary body, and in its aftermath something wet tickled down his cheeks to mingle with his sideburns. When he touched it, his fingers came away red.

Skinner was trying to say something, but he sounded like he was shouting through a mile of mattress down. His pointing finger drew Jed’s gaze, though: the spark was above them now, and even as he watched it reached out a whip of seething lightning as vibrant red as a brothel’s window light that left behind black voids in the air. A number of these clustered briefly around another airship, like tapioca pearls: the ship was wrenched apart with a violence that staggered Jed’s soul, and the splinters fell into those terrible wounds in reality like leaves being drawn into a storm drain before they snapped close.

Then the spark descended among them, and Jed could do nothing more than stare in mute, stupid awe.

Adrey Mossjoy alighted on the bridge with a staggering crash that fractured the stones for yards all around her. But it wasn’t Adrey as Bothroyd had last seen her. The last time he’d seen an expression like that had been some crazy fool who’d taken a whole cocktail of experimental drugs and decided to fight everyone and everything in the worlds. It had taken one officer per limb to finally restrain him.

Adrey had that same look. She was not at home to reason or sanity, now. Her movements were stumbling, slow and jerky, a far cry from her usual dancer’s poise, and her eyes were hollow, sunken and yet wild with paranoia. They fixed on Jed, then passed on as if there was no actual thought behind them, only an animal selection process.

They settled instead on the astonished elves, and her gaze un-made them.

Jed turned his face away, but not quite fast enough. The vision of that last tormented second of the masked elf’s existence was burned behind his eyelids in purple and green now, but he doubted he’d ever quite be able to describe it. They were elves, they’d be back eventually, but…

But something about what he’d seen made him doubt whether these ones would return.

When he reopened his eyes, Adrey had stumbled away across the bridge, casting her friends only the barest glance without acknowledgement, before raising her hands and pointing. This time, her target was the Ring of Eternity, whose captain seemed to have caught on that there was some devastating force at work in Auldenheigh. The ship’s many great engines were going full tilt, driving her forward with impressive acceleration for something so huge, but it was futile. A fist made of ethereally-hued lightning clenched around it, and Jed couldn’t tell whether the blast that tore the huge Oneist flagship apart was Adrey’s doing, or the detonation of its magazine.

She didn’t stop there, though. Now the power was crackling out of Adrey’s skin at random, earthing itself on nearby statues and reducing them to slag, arcing upriver to reduce what remained of Banmor Bridge to a steaming field of fractured glass. Sadie shrieked and curled into a tight ball as one sizzling finger of Adrey’s wild magic scored along the cobbles within a foot of her and left behind a trench full of fine dust.

Jed tried to stagger toward the Countess, certain he’d never survive getting close to her. Adrey was haloed in power now and it was cracking the flagstones, making cast iron lampposts dribble like candlewax. He tried to shout to her, but couldn’t tell if his voice was lost in the thunder of her presence, or if he was just stone deaf. The temperature plummeted as he waded toward her, fighting through the stinging burn…until he realized he wasn’t moving at all.

“It’s alright,” a soft voice told him, and a cool, slender hand with skin as delicate as old vellum rested lightly on his shoulder. The touch was followed by a grandmotherly kiss on the cheek and suddenly all of Jed’s fatigue and pain was gone. He felt whole and refreshed again…and protected.

Queen Talvi smiled at him. “I have her,” she said, and stepped lightly past Jed and through the thundering waves of devastation as though they were a light breeze. She raised her hand and the mad destruction arcing off Adrey’s body struck her palm. Adrey turned toward her with her teeth bared in a feral psychotic snarl, and Jed grimaced as all around them the bridge endured a terrible savaging. Statues and lampposts flipped away like reeds in a storm, stone cracked and glowed, but still Talvi glided on with infinite serene poise.

Adrey faltered, cowereing back and putting up her arms to shade her face as though the Crown was blinding bright, but Talvi lowered her hand, spread her arms, wrapped them around her, and drew her into an embrace.

Jed was close enough to hear what she said, or perhaps she allowed it to be heard. She rocked Adrey like a mother comforting a distressed toddler, stroked her hair, and crooned softly in her ear. “It’s alright, dear. It’s alright. You’re safe now…”

By degrees, the storm subsided. Underneath its racket, he heard choking, terrified sobs. He’d never imagined he’d see Adrey of all people so broken.

“Make it stop…” Adrey buried her face in the Crown’s breast and groaned pitiably. “Make it real again, please!”

Talvi made a soft “ohhh” sound that spoke of boundless sympathy. No, more than sympathy—understanding. As though she’d been through this very thing herself, long ago.

“Shhh….shh darling. It’s okay,” she said, and continued to stroke Adrey’s hair. Unconditional love rolled off her in a gentle flood, no less overpowering than the destructive energies of a moment before but far more wholesome. “You’re not ready to understand it all yet, I know. You need to forget, beloved. I’ll help you forget…”

She kissed the top of Adrey’s head. A last few feeble sparks arced off Adrey’s fingertips into the cobblestones, flickered, failed, and the world at last became still and silent.

Well…no. Not silent at all. When Jed looked away to give them some privacy, he could see that every airship in the sky was burning and crashing. Many had already impacted, and their blazing wreckage had come smashing down among the buildings, razing entire streets to rubble.

Even so, there was a stillness to the scene. The gunfire that had formed the background noise of Auldenheigh all day was now silent. The devastattion Adrey had wrought in those few terrifying seconds had shocked the whole city into peace.

Adrey’s sobbing hitched in her throat, then became a sigh of the most profound relief. And then…she was asleep. Or fainted dead away. One or the other. Talvi lowered her gracefully to the ground and rested Adrey’s head in her lap to run her pale, slim fingers affectionately through her hair.

“There,” she hummed, softly. “Sleep. Sleep and forget. When you awake, you’ll remember only what you need…”

“Milady Crown…” Skinner ventured. Talvi looked up and him and smiled gently, but touched a finger to her lips.

“Will…will she be alright?” Sadie asked, venturing to kneel by Adrey.

“She will, dear girl.”

Sadie took Adrey’s hand. “What happened to her?”

Talvi sighed. “Cruelty.”

“I…” Sadie’s eyes teared up, not out of fear any longer, but out of concern for a woman she hardly knew.

Talvi’s own pale eyes were no less full of sorrow. “She was shown what she was not ready for, at the moment when she was weakest. It was more than she could bear.” She stroked Adrey’s brow once more, then gently transfered her into Sadie’s lap instead. “Do not think less of her. Older and wiser minds have fared worse in the same trial. Take care of her.”

Sadie was trembling, but she nodded.

“Is there aught else you’ll do for us, Queen?” Skinner asked.

Talvi shook her head, though she did at least look sorrowful. “I have healed what was beyond any human power to mend, and that is the only action the Crowns permit ourselves. The rest must be in your hands.”

“…Lots to do,” Jed commented, still watching the fires and ruin.

“You will have help. Soon.” Talvi rose gracefully to her feet. “Take heart. Allies are coming.”

“Which allies, Milady Crown?”

Talvi’s only reply was a small smile, and then she was…gone. A cool breeze blew across the bridge and she went with it, vanishing from their sight neither suddenly nor gradually, but just as if they’d stopped paying attention for a few seconds and she had slipped away while they were distracted.

“…What did she mean by that?” Sadie asked, clearly still a bit shell-shocked and tremulous.

“I’m not sure,” Jed mused, contemplating Adrey’s slumbering form for a moment. The poor girl looked gaunt and badly used, and she was wearing clothes that weren’t hers, too generous in the hip and bust. Just what had she endured?

Questions for later. “We’d best get out th’ streets before it gets busy out here,” he advised.

“Right,” Skinner agreed. “C’mon, lass. Let’s get ‘er up an’ somewhere safe…”

“R-right.”

They hoisted Adrey up, draped her between them, and started back toward the leading end of the bridge. None of them were moving fast, being too tired, too strained, and too frankly amazed at their own survival to exert themselves further. But Adrey’s fireworks seemed to have put a stop to everything, and though nobody seemed ready to emerge from their shelters just yet, neither did it seem there was to be any further fighting today. For the first time in Jed’s life, Auldenheigh was silent as they limped back home.

He hoped and prayed that meant the battle was over.

He suspected the war had only just begun.