By the light of the spell-cratered moon they came, three figures moving low and swift against a bleeding horizon. Behind them was the great white Wasting where nothing grew but the shadows. Ahead loomed the black walls of the fortress-city rearing high into the sunset skies.

Their work that night lay somewhere between, in the maze of zigzagging trenches that had once encircled the defenses in rings of fire and steel. Now all they held were pools of stagnant water and bones long since picked clean by the rats.

Well, almost. There wasn’t a rodent alive more thorough than Ravelin and his crew. He was a wiry, sandy-haired fellow of about twenty years by his own hazy estimate, with restless, nervous eyes that never ceased darting about in his waking hours. Even as he led his crew through the twisting route Ravelin kept his gaze fixed on ground, picking it over for the slightest gleam of profit. Like the other two chancers he wore an ill-fitting greatcoat which blended into the grey clay of their surroundings, its front lined with deep pockets. Pockets which at the moment felt distressingly light, a defect which Ravelin hoped to remedy before this run was over.

“We haven’t got all night, skipper,” Spade reminded him, “You’re parsing for pennies when we should be digging up diamonds. Assuming they exist, of course,” he added dubiously. Spade was terribly energetic for a cripple with a peg leg, though to call it that would’ve been a disservice. The false limb was a gnomish masterwork that he’d had commissioned back in the good old days when the corpses were still fresh and the pickings good. Fashioned from cunning springs and articulated wooden joints, currently it was held together with so much baling wire that it jangled with every step that he took.

Its bald, pudgy, snaggle-toothed owner had fared little better with the passage of time. But Ravelin knew only too well how looks could be deceiving. He’d spent most of his childhood serving beneath Spade in an apprenticeship most cruel and unforgiving, though he didn’t take it personally any more than Spade did the dueling scar which Ravelin had left him, a thin line carving down his lips and throat which marked the relatively peaceful transfer of power. Ravelin had never regretted his decision to spare Spade and keep him on the crew: the old man knew the Wasting like the crack of his arse.

“When have I ever led you astray?” Ravelin muttered distractedly.

“Is the question all rhetorical-like, or did you want me to go through the list?”

Muster cackled somewhere in the darkness behind them, an ugly sound that made Ravelin wince. The third member of their crew wasn’t exactly the brightest candle in the chandelier, but Ravelin needed the extra muscle for hauling back the loot. Ravelin certainly hadn’t signed him on for his looks—Muster had the kind of face only a mother could love, provided that she was blind as a bat.

“Button up your lips,” Ravelin said sharply, “We’re close. D’you see that gun battery, dead ahead?”

Before them the trench rose at a gentle incline and climbed up the side of a low embankment. On its peak squatted a row of sinister tubes, their muzzles trained on the city below.

“Aye. Wot about it?” Muster frowned.

“Somewhere up there is a trove worth its weight in gaudy gems,” Ravelin said, “At the very least, it’ll settle our debt with Viago.”

The debt you saddled us with, that is. Ravelin wanted to add. But that would’ve been so much wasted breath. When Viago sent your crew to retrieve a prized specimen you were expected to deliver, not to quail at the first sign of trouble and chuck the goods down the nearest hole in blind panic. That was shitting the bed, so to speak, and the thing about shitting the bed was that it didn’t matter who had done it, since it stank to high heaven all the same. As skipper of the crew, Ravelin was personally responsible for any cock-ups on their end, regardless of personal involvement. One thing was for certain, that was the last time he was sending out Muster and Spade unsupervised—they just didn’t have the knack for navigation that Ravelin possessed.

“Why then, my bonnie lads,” Spade said, rubbing his palms together, “With a score like that, we could be looking to retire early! All we’d have to do is find a decent fence and then—poof!” he spread his hands with a dramatic flourish, “We vanish with the morning mists, and poor Viago never the wiser.”

“Oh, we’d vanish alright,” Ravelin snorted, “Viago would make dead sure of it.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Spade said, “The Wasting’s an awfully big place to get lost in. However far the hetman’s reach may stretch, that he can’t keep all of it to himself. Think about it. Us three, free men at last.”

“Aye, free to spend the rest of our lives looking over our shoulders," Ravelin sighed, “Look, we’ve been over this already. We’ve got a good thing going here. Like it or not, Viago knows all the best spots, all the best connections.”

“So we do all the dirty work, and he gets a cut of our blood and treasure?” Muster grumbled, “Rum deal, if you ask me.”

“I wasn’t,” Ravelin said shortly, settling the argument. Spade took out a bottle of pig fat and greased the moving parts of his leg.

Then noiselessly they crept up the passage till they reached the emplacements. Dragon fire had melted one of the cannons into a pool of slag, but the rest were still intact even after years of rain and rust, a testament to dwarfish engineering. Spiked helmets and duramite armor lay strewn along the walls of the trench where the gun crews had tried to escape the death raining down from above.

Ravelin stood up and risked a peek down the length of one of the barrels. He could just barely make out the militiamen making their rounds atop Lufthaven’s battlements, ants crawling atop a mass of stone and mortar that loomed up like the sheer face of a mountain. Here and there appeared gaps in the parapets where the Iron Axiom had blasted through with cannonade and storms of roiling magicka. Hillocks of shattered masonry formed the high-water mark of their efforts to scrub the city off the face of the earth.

Clever little bastards, those dwarves. Given time they would have cracked the city open like walnut. But the Wasting had put an end such notions. The remnants of their failure now served enterprising gentlemen like Ravelin who sought private routes in and out of the city. The militia just didn’t have the manpower to cover all the gaps in the rubble. A chancer worth his salt could pass from one end to the other without ever seeing a patrol.

Heat prisms mounted on the battlements stabbed into the gloom, the gloom melting back at the touch of their scintillating beams. One of the turrets came sweeping their way and they all ducked with practiced swiftness, kissing dirt till it had passed.

“It’s a lovely view, I’ll grant you that,” Spade said with growing impatience, “Picturesque, even. But I’m starting feel a little naked up here, skipper. And if there’s one lesson I learned from my poor old mother, it’s never to get naked unless yer to be paid for it.”

“Where’s that fogging score you kept going on about?” Muster added with his usual tact.

“It’s like you two hardly know me at all,” Ravelin said ruefully. He nudged a pile of armor whose steel links had fused together under indescribable temperatures and it fell clattering aside to reveal the entrance of a dugout.

“Bless my soul,” Spade’s eyes shone with interest as he peered into the underground passage, “This place almost looks untouched.”

“That’s because it is,” Ravelin said, “I hid the entrance myself when I found it two months ago.”

“So why hasn’t you cleaned it out since then?” Muster said, his pudgy face twisting in suspicion.

“Thought I’d save it for you, sweetheart,” Ravelin grunted, “Besides. This here is at least a three-man job.”

He pointed at the floor of the entrance where a pair of boots stood, the soot-blackened bones protruding from them neatly sheared off at the shins. Where the rest of the skeleton had gone was a mystery.

“Booby trapped,” Spade spat bitterly, “Fool of a chancer never saw it coming.”

Spade slipped out a thin wooden rod and gave it a twist, and with a snap it lengthened out into a 10-foot pole. All three of them pressed their bellies to the wall as Spade carefully probed the corners and crevices of the entrance, working the sensitive tool blind.

Thwip!

There was a blinding heat-flash followed by an angry hiss of what sounded like a dozen teakettles boiling over. Spade flung away the smoldering stub of his prober.

“Solefire charges,” the old man mused, “They’ll make a fine addition to our collection.”

Spade snickered and drew his long bollock dagger and started the process all over again, working his way down into the underground chamber. He stopped inches away from a second glittering tripwire and followed it back to an unassuming white ceramic pot, undoing the knot attached to its striker with delicate fingers.

“Hot potato!” Spade teased, suddenly thrusting the charge into Ravelin’s fumbling hands.

“Arselicker,” Ravelin swore, pocketing the minor treasure. Heat trickled through his coat pocket into his chest. The solefire would command a good price among the street gangs of the city, and an even higher one among the rebels.

Spade entered first and went over the rest of the room with a fine-toothed comb, carrying his peg leg on a lanyard around his neck and occasionally using it to push aside objects.

“It’s clean,” he announced. Ravelin and Muster crouched into the low space, heads knocking against the overhead beams even as they went bent over double. A table at around knee-height dominated the center of the room, upon which a map of the city was pinned and outlined in grid squares. Around it and spaced with the same mathematical precision were rows of shallow hollows dug into the subsoil. It was said that the dwarfs lay in these hollows and gestated in pools of their own filth. Having only been a child at the war’s conclusion, Ravelin had never seen a living dwarf, but the dead one occupying one of the hollows seemed to lend credence to this theory.

A cocoon of rust-eaten metal enclosed the desiccated flesh of the humanoid. In one armored fist it clutched a hinged tin box that made Ravelin’s heart flutter with anticipation.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Spade dug around the margins of the box with his knife tip, and then again with the rim of the lid. When he was satisfied he stepped aside and let Ravelin lift up the lid. The box held two plump cylinders of flaky, obsidian material.

“What did I tell you,” Ravelin breathed giddily, “Here there be diamonds.”

“I’ll be damned,” Muster laughed, scooping up the box, “Darkflares!”

There came a soft click that turned Ravelin’s bowels to water.

“Get clear! It’s live!” he screamed. Knowing it was too late to stop the pressure plate-driven mechanism which had set into motion their inevitable immolation, Ravelin threw himself onto the box and clutched it to his stomach, why, he did not know, and shutting his eyes tight, waited for the end.

But the seconds ticked by and he began to feel increasingly silly.

“Don’t be a deadheaded fool,” Spade growled, seizing Ravelin by the collar and dragging him arsebackwards out of the dugout. Muster had bailed without a moment’s hesitation with the goods in hand and they bundled into each other, all three collapsing in an ungainly heap. Moments later came the muffled crump of the detonation and a shower of sods belted the back of their nechs,

In the next minute they were exhausted and fell to their knees, gasping for breath. Ravelin gave Muster a shove with his bootheel.

“You fogging lackwit! If we lose this haul then we might as well cut our own throats and save Viago the trouble of doing it for us,” Ravelin said, “He still hasn’t forgiven us for last time, remember?”

“It was an honest mistake. If Spade hadn’t botched his end—what, you think I wanted to lose the goods in that godbloody deathtrap?” Muster whined, “This here’s my livelihood, same as yours.”

“Your livelihood, is it?” Ravelin needled him, “Why don’t you try juggling little colored balls for a change? That’d be righteous work for a clown like you—”

Quick as sin Muster’s hand plunged into his coat and came out, punch-dagger drawn. At the same moment, Ravelin seized Muster’s knife hand by the wrist, trapping it in place while he ripped out the two-shot he kept in his boot all wrapped up in an oilskin. He stuck the muzzle into Muster’s cheek, heard him gulp as the hammer went click.

“Simmer down, the both of you!” Spade shouted, pulling them apart, “Bad enough we have to make this run without you two idiots making holes in each other. Muster made a mistake, and now he’s paying for it. Don’t go making another one.”

“Waste of good lead anyway,” Ravelin shrugged. He holstered the two-shot and got to his feet, turning his back on Muster in a show of utter contempt. Muster muttered dire threats under his breath but made no move. He was too much of a coward to act on his own plans.

Ravelin stood up and risked a peek over the top of the trench. He could just barely make out the contours of Lufthaven’s walls, a mass of stone and mortar rearing up out of the dark like the sheer face of a mountain, stretching forty unbroken miles from the eastern plains to the banks of the river Wendle.

“Should’ve brought the periscope,” Spade said, “What’s your read, Ravi?”

Ravelin thought it over for a bit, then decided: “There are too many lights between us and the assault trench. So we make for the floodways.”

The assault trench was the more direct route and provided solid cover, assuming you could reach it in time before the crossbowmen on the walls stuffed you full of more goose feathers than a taxidermy flamingo. The floodways would make for slower going, but they still had some hours before dawn. Time enough for evil deeds done in the dark. They could crawl down by the Drill Head, skirting the puddles of steaming acid at the bottom of the craters nearby. From there it was but a few yards to the grate they’d hidden under a pile of stones…

“I hates the floodways,” Muster was complaining, “If you think it’s wet up here, it’ll be a lake of misery down there.”

Ravelin turned to shut him up but then stopped, the first trickling of dread working its way up his stomach. Their surroundings had become bright enough for him to see Muster’s doughy face, an unnatural illumination which bathed the earth in sickly phosphorescence.

“They’re rising early tonight,” Spade said, “Just our luck.”

“We’re fogged,” Muster added, and meant it quite literally.

Ravelin felt the instinctive urge to vacate his bowels, a sensation felt by all chancers as the tides of death rose and a pale miasma began curling out of the ground in tendrils of green mist, rolling into the bottoms of channels and pits. From the mud a bony hand emerged, groping and scratching, the flesh gnawed clean off the fingers where the rats had been. This was followed by an arm in a tattered greatcoat sleeve, and then the rest of the corpse dragged itself upright, slime oozing out of its rotted, yellowed teeth. In its fists it clutched a splintered flagpole, the battle standard trailing behind it in tatters.

“Oh, hullo,” the ghoul mumbled glumly, “It’s that time of the day again, is it?”

In reply, Ravelin shot it in the face. It took one juddering step forward before falling back into the water with a splash.

“Righto. Be seeing you, then,” it managed to gurgle before the waters closed over its mouth. More corpses began to emerge from the mud, brushing the soil from their sodden uniforms and stumbling towards the chancer crew.

“Leg it, boys!” Spade hissed. But the shot had drawn the attention of the watchers on the walls, and now the hot glare of a dozen of heat prisms converged on their position, illuminating the waking dead. Ravelin heard the creak of crossbows ratcheting under tension and officers barking orders down the line. Then came a lethal rain of bolts which cut down a dozen ghouls. But for every one that fell, three more clawed their way to the surface, their bodies filling up the passageways on either side. Ravelin’s skin prickled, the air around them growing dry as a winter’s day as the heat prisms cast their rays of invisible destruction. Heads and torsos ruptured into messy sacks of smoking flesh, the moisture within them boiling away in an instant. Worse still, the miasma had begun flowing into their section of the trench. The chancers fumbled for the nosebags hanging around their necks. Ravelin had just finished tying on his when a face pushed up between his boots like some hideous daisy, rotten teeth gleaming yellow.

“New day, fresh meat, alright—let’s eat!” it jeered. Ravelin backed away in panic as the torso broke through and came scuttling after him, fingers digging furrows in the earth. He fired a second time, missing even though his target was barely three yards away. Damn these powder weapons—they had about as much accuracy as a drunkard scrawling his name on a wall in piss. He pulled a hatchet from his belt and cleaved the top of its head off, sending black viscera spilling over its face. But the corpse only cackled, long black tongue lapped up the rancid liquids which dripped into its lips.

Ravelin raised his hatchet for the killing blow and made the mistake of straightening up from his crouch. A bolt whistled past and he staggered, a burning line across his cheek where the point had grazed him.

“Juicy, juicy, juicy!” the ghoul crowed, snatching at his legs. Spade seized it and heaved it over the top, where a volley from the walls studded it with bodkins.

“They have us pinned!” Muster said, a master at stating the obvious, “What do we do?”

Ravelin saw at the tide of death rolling in from either side and made the only decision left to them.

“We black out,” he said, punching a hand into his rucksack. Spade nodded and took out an oilskin parcel of his own, flinging the wrapping aside to reveal the fat snout of his blunderbuss. A corpse came wading across a flooded crater and reached top of the trench with shattered pike angling for a stab.

“Would you mind holding still?” it said in an almost reasonable tone.

Spade raised the blunderbuss and cut it in half at the waist with a blast. Ears ringing, Ravelin’s hand closed over the darkflare and he tore it out, setting it on the ground then thumbing the dwarven glyph etched into its base, shouting:

“Fire and away!”

Psssh-unk!

The cylinder went spiraling high into the air, trailing twin tails of fire. There was a soft pop and searching beams were blotted out by a globe of inky blackness devouring all the light it touched. A shame, really. Ravelin hated using up his own goods like this, but judging by the confused shouts from the walls, the militia were blinded. The three chancers went up and over the top and dashed towards the cover of the darkflare, dodging around the slow-moving ghouls as they went.

Almost there! Ravelin’s lungs were on fire, his breath coming hot and heavy through his nosebag, slowly suffocating him. As they plunged towards the nothingness of the darkflare, a hand seized Ravelin’s sleeve and yanked him back. Stars erupted in his vision as something blunt crunched hard into the side of his head, a glancing blow. Through eyes blurry with blood and tears he saw Muster raising his cudgel for another swing that would cave in Ravelin’s head.

So the bastard had some spine in him after all!

Lips bared in a silent grimace, Ravelin drove his head into Muster’s stomach in a tackle that sent them both sprawling into a nearby pit, rolling over and over each other, punching and kicking and flailing in wild abandon, heedless of the sinister green mist waiting at the bottom. There was a crunch like breaking glass as Muster’s nosebag struck a loose stone, and then the miasma folded them into its embrace.

“Grrggkkh!” Ravelin heard Muster’s gurgling scream as the tendrils crept into his broken nosebag and down his throat. Hoping to the gods that his own valves hadn’t cracked during the fall, Ravelin dragged himself out of the crater. He looked back and saw Muster on his back, limbs flailing in the air he drowned in a sea of living acid.

In the next moment Ravelin was swallowed by the nothingness of the darkflare, running blind with his arms outstretched and groping. He broke through and saw Spade up ahead, hopping along as fast as his leg would allow.

“Where’s Muster?” asked the cripple.

“Ran off somewhere, the fool. He’s on his own,” Ravelin lied. In a few strides he overtook Spade and reached the secret grate first. Kicking the stones aside, he pulled it open with a screech of rusty hinges and ducked into the tunnels below.

“We made it!” Spade said, “Talk about a close shave. Shame about Muster though, isn’t it?”

“Yes. A shame.”

Ravelin slammed the grate shut before Spade could enter, barring the latch and stepping back.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Spade demanded.

“Where did you hide it, Spade?”

“I haven’t the foggiest notion what you’re talking about,” Spade slammed on the grate with his fist, “But if you don’t let me in right now, so help me, I’ll—"

“You ditched that last haul on purpose. You were going to sell it for yourself, cut Viago out of the profits, go independent. Muster tried to kill me just now. I’m guessing that the plan was for you to off me here right after I got you through the patrols. But he was impatient. He didn’t have the brains to come up with a plan like that. You do. Where’s the stash, Spade?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

The ghouls were getting closer now, strolling nonchalantly as if they had all the time in the world. Spade looked into Ravelin’s eyes, saw the calm certainty of death reflected in them. All at once the old man seemed to collapse in on himself, sagging against the grate.

“Taught you well, didn’t I?” Spade said, a strange smile flitting over his face. This could only end one way, and they both knew it.

“Too well,” agreed Ravelin, just to keep up appearances, “Tell me where you hid it and I’ll let you in.”

“That’s the deal?”

“It is.”

Blood trickled into the corner of Ravelin eyes, stinging like tears. Spade grinned and began filling his blunderbuss from his powder horn.

“It’s at the base of the nor-eastern bulwark, close to the postern gate.”

Ravelin nodded and turned away.

“You can’t do this to me, Ravi!” Spade screamed, “Please! This is no way for a man to go, and you know it!”

The corpses formed a ring around Spade and closed in, mumbling to themselves at the prospect of a cornered meal. Ravelin heard the click of a cocked hammer as Spade levelled the blunderbuss at his back.

“Open this gate right now or I’ll blow you to hell!”

“You might want to save that for later,” Ravelin said over his shoulder. He kept on walking on down the tunnel, Spade’s shouts fading as he went.

#

Some hours later he emerged from an open manhole lid within the city walls, every inch of him plastered with filth.

Ravelin took a moment to breathe it all in. Day was just starting to break over the squat tenements and lanes, and it seemed to Ravelin that he had never seen a morning more beautiful His eyes traced the vaunted spires of the Principia in the distance, walls of soft white alabaster shaded pink by the dawn. As he watched, something behind one of the arched windows caught the light, sparkling like a jewel or a drop of crystal dew.

Pretty. Ravelin wondered idly if the people living up there had ever seen the view from his end. Then again, it would’ve been wasted on anyone other than a chancer.

From the tunnel behind him he thought he heard the distant echo of a shot. Ravelin lowered his head in silence for a moment. Then, shouldering his rucksack, he went to get breakfast.