The Chimmeract had once been the hub of all light-parcel communications in the western boroughs, a minor wonder in an age of daily miracles. Bundles of conduits ran through the marble chambers, each one woven from thousands of crystalline threads that were as fine and supple as silk. Everything from royal decrees and mercantile transactions, to weather reports and the meaningless chatter of the peasantry had all flowed into the silicon obelisks which dominated each room, the surfaces of which were etched with cramped sorcerous sigils that dispatched the light-parcels to their recipients more swiftly than the speed of thought.

Now the empty halls echoed to the sound of Viago’s autoharness screeching across the stone floors, its motions somewhere in between a snake on its belly and a hermit crab. Carpets of purple ivy crept in from a rent in the dome above, entwining themselves around the conduits like, along which they spread like a poison curling its way through a man’s stiffening veins.

Ravelin followed Viago to a grand chamber where all the conduits joined together in a broad central shaft. The threads were all pale and inert now, but once this had been the confluence of a thousand rivers of light plunging into a well of darkness.

Viago splayed out his forelimbs, his belly dangling over the chasm like a monstrous, overripe gourd.

“That was a fine piece of work, Ravi,” he began, “I always factor in some losses to pilferage into my monthly figures. But you rounded off that little error, didn’t you? Tell me—and this is just between us girls—was it a dagger in the dark, or did you tamper with the filters in their nosebags?”

From the throat of the shaft Ravelin could’ve sworn he heard the distant echo of a shot. What he had done to his companions had been infinitely worse than either of those options. Vividly he remembered Muster’s frantic gesticulations as his lungs drowned in bloody phlegm, the wild, excited gibbering of the ghouls as they cornered Spatz. Given the choice, a chancer would always take eating a mouthful of hot lead over being left to the tender mercies of the unliving. Spatz was right: it was no way for a man to go.

“Does this make us even?” Ravelin asked, ignoring the question.

“Not till all my darlings are back in my loving care,” Viago said, rummaging through the sack of vestiges.

“You’ll get your stash,” Ravelin promised.

“No doubt. In the meantime, I have something else lined up for you.”

There was always ‘something else’ as far as the hetman was concerned. Viago reached for the side of the shaft and with a tiny chisel pried open a crack in the stone. A panel swung slid up to expose a row of circular indentations. Viago fitted the sparkie into one of these hollows. There was a satisfying click as its bottom slotted in, a perfect fit. A brief spark flared amid the coils. Within moments one of the lifeless conduits stirred to life, a warm, flaxen glow trickling down its length.

“It’s an old light-parcel line,” Viago explained, “Runs direct from Eastern Headquarters to the Dragon’s Maw.”

The Maw was a series of outer defenses guarding the road designed to break the momentum of an assault on the city, the spade-shaped outline of their walls allowing mutually supporting fire between their heat prism batteries and sharpshooter detachments. The latter were deadly even in pitch black conditions. Last month a crew of five green youths had tried fording the moat against the advice of their elders and betters. And so they’d waded into the shallows, where a lone marksman had picked them off one by one. Afterwards the garrison had hung their bodies from the ramparts, and it was said that each of them had had a neat hole right placed between the eyes. The thought of walking downrange of a such a virtuoso made Ravelin’s palms sweat.

“I didn’t think they had the means to keep their lines open,” Ravelin said.

“And neither do they,” Viago gloated, “Took me three years of scrounging parts to mend the linkages, and them none the wiser. Now, have a listen to this.”

Viago went to his workshop and rummaged around in the clutter until he unearthed a square of metal with a protrusion in one corner that looked like nothing so much as a brass earlobe. A sphere made of some glassy, vitreous material spun upon a hub in its center, its gleaming face scored by infinitesimally tiny scratches.

This vestige was called a vocoscribe, and had been rare even during the height of the League. Viago brushed an activation rune on its side and delicate jointed fingers extended from hidden slots to brush the sphere’s marred surface. From the earlobe came a soft crackle, then a groan that flattened out into a disembodied voice, which said:

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

“…in any case, we’re to be reassigned to the rear. Stahlka has instructed us to leave a skeleton crew behind while the bulk of us go put down the disturbances inside the capital.”

“Police actions? Isn’t that what the bleedin’ Army of the Interior is for?” replied a second voice, high-pitched and nasally.

“It’s a waste of time, yes. All the rebels who were involved in the plot are long gone by now. If they truly wanted to catch the bastards behind the deed, they’d send us out into the Wasting while the trail’s still warm.”

“So why have us go through all this trouble?”

“Don’t be naïve. Stahlka doesn’t want justice—it wants punishment. The rebels didn’t just blow up some commoner shantytown, they struck at the highest powers in the land! And I hear the mastermind was a shaemish harlot, no less.”

“Shaemish, eh? When will those people learn not to snap at the hand that feeds.”

“Oh, they’ll learn all right. The good dentists in the Ministry of Inquiries have drawn up a list of nearly a hundred suspected individuals from the shaemish quarter in Tiltdown. We’re to bring them in for questioning.”

“That’s a lot of teeth to collect,” said his companion with a low whistle.

“And fingernails,” agreed the first, his voice as pleasant as the grinding of a millstone, “We’ve also been instructed to triple the number of arrests by roping in their co-conspirators. Friends, lovers, relations, and so on.”

“How do we tell the conspirators from all the innocents?”

“Simple,” the first voice joked, “They won’t cough up nearly as much money as the rest.”

The two shared a nasty chuckle at that.

“This ought to be good fun, colonel. I haven’t had a shaemish wench in a dog’s age.”

“You’re a horrible old thing, you know that? Only kidding. Aye, at the very least it’ll get us away from this place and its tides of undead. I’m getting sick of keeping house for Stahlka and its nasty little projects. Speaking of which—”

Abruptly the globe stopped spinning and the voices cut off.

“Was that who I think it was?” Ravelin asked, his mouth hanging slack in awe. Everyone knew the hetman had ears in the highest places, but this wholly unprecedented. Viago nodded:

“Colonel Laprix of the Auric Line Regiment. That snippet was taken from inside his personal study. D’you see what I’m getting at?”

Ravelin tried not to let the sudden surge of excitement show on his face. Already his mind was swarming with the possibilities. A gap had just appeared in the city’s defenses, a golden opportunity for those chancers with the stones to seize it. The land around the Maw was a long stretch of hard-baked clay where the heat prisms had immolated everything in sight. The trenches there were not the mazelike rat nests that the ghouls usually dug, but shallow and easily traversed. The moat was the only real hurdle, and without the vigilance of the regimental sharpshooters, a simple raft would do the trick.

Beyond that was uncharted territory right up to the western edge of the Engine Tombs, a valley where once the Enemy had gathered its most potent war engines in an armored fist to shatter the bulwarks. But after the cannons had talked and the heat lances simmered down, all that had remained were towers of burnt, twisted metal. It was the single largest deposit of vestiges along the entire front, and a treasure trove for those chancers lucky enough to survive the trek.

“I suppose cutting across the Maw might be helpful,” Ravelin observed with affected nonchalance. Viago’s eyes glittered with merriment.

“Don’t play coy with me, lad. I can see you licking your lips already. This route would shave off two whole days of travel to the Engine Tombs, and you know it.”

“What are we after this time? Ersatz-armor? Thunder mesh? Vectoral vortices?”

“Nothing.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Not a godbloody thing,” Viago repeated, “And if you bring me any vestiges, I swear by the Shibboulah, I’ll have you shot. This new route won’t last long, so we’d best make the most it.”

“But hetman…it’s the Engine Tombs,” Ravelin protested.

“Ah, Ravi,” Viago shook his head, “When will you learn that there are more important things in life than these toys with which we barter.”

“Toys?” Ravelin choked. Briefly he wondered if years of confinement in the autoharness had finally driven the gnome to madness. It probably itched something awful in there, not to mention the smell.

“I’ve taken on cargo from some rather desperate individuals,” Viago explained, “They’re willing to pay us twelve hundred semestras for a single run.”

“You should’ve led with that,” said Ravelin, warming slightly to the idea, “Go on.”

“It leaves tomorrow from the eastern floodgate, bound for the Pale Woods.”

“Erm, hetman. Don’t you mean the other way around?”

“No, I don’t.”

Ravelin furrowed his brow in confusion. There was only one kind of cargo that went over the walls and into the Wasting instead of the opposite way.

People.

“A meat wagon,” Ravelin realized with dawning horror, “You want me to drive a meat wagon through Dragon’s Maw and into uncharted territory. You’re insane.”

“Insanely wealthy, you mean! That is, if we hold up our end of the bargain!” Viago cackled, “They need someone who knows the Wasting like the back of his hand. Do this and we can settle your debt.”

Guiding civilians beyond the walls was among the most dangerous assignments a chancer could take on. Not only would they be ignorant of the thousands of guises that death could assume out in the field, but they were bound to be desperate individuals. Political dissidents, criminals, racial deviants—people with nothing to lose made for poor companions.

“And if I refuse?”

“We could always settle things the other way,” Viago said, leaning forward and steepling his scalpel-digits, each finger so sharp that they seemed to vanish at their tips.

“Point taken,” Ravelin said quickly, “Tomorrow then, hetman.”