It was a quiet afternoon in Tiltdown, the joyous romp of the Victory Day festivities now replaced by the empty feeling at the bottom of a beer glass. A lone tramp went rolling down the bare streets, wrapped head to toe in party streamers and crooning a love song to himself, but apart from him not a creature stirred outside that wasn’t nursing a splitting headache.

Tirce didn’t blame them. It was hard enough walking through Tiltdown when you were sober. Here the tenements crowded on the back of an upturned shelf of rock that had folded up and onto its side like the prow of a listing ship. Everything had to be built sideways since the lanes were so steep as to be almost vertical.

Tirce was feeling a little drunk herself just from looking at it, though that probably had more to do with the fact that she was dangling eight stories above the ground by her fingertips.

The water spout she was clinging to groaned and she pulled herself up on the rooftops before it decided to pitch her over. She rolled to her feet and began easing her way across the tiles, feeling for each toehold through her thin-soled shoes. One mistake and they would be scraping what was left of her off the cobblestones.

Past the billowing white sheets on the laundry lines strung between the tenements, Dance spied an open window across the street and a bedroom framed in warm candlelight. Her mark would never see it coming.

From beneath the folds of her cloak she took out her drawstring pouch containing her Cat’s Paw witchbrew. Swallowing powdered snow leopard claw, sedge and the essence of hemp. Taking several short, sharp breaths Tirce opened the channels in her blood.

Sarkomancy was all about remembrance, remembrance of a time when her people were indivisible from the beasts of the field. A time of danger and hunger, no doubt, yet also of such leaping, joyous freedom as to make the gods themselves envious. It was for this very reason that the Diad had shackled her people’s spirits to the will of their elvish overlords.

By partaking of the ‘old sin’, as the nuns called it, her people’s defiance lived on. Through it Tirce remembered the feeling of running through a tall field of grass with her sisters, each member of their pack a single fang in a jaw closing fast around a bleating, frightened prey-thing. She felt her muscles singing with pain and exhaustion, felt them bunch like coiled lightning right as she leapt for the bleeding haunches of her quarry, tasting sweet red richness when her teeth sank through the delicate neck and tore out its throat. It was tempting to indulge the purity of that moment, but she forced herself back before her mind went completely.

Looking across the rooftops with yellowed slits for pupils, the task seemed almost trivial. Tirce took a running leap, twisted through the air, effortlessly threading the web of laundry lines and shooting through the narrow crack of the window. She hit the soft pink rug to deaden the sound, tucking into graceful roll that brought to her feet next to the bunk bed, easy as breathing.

The two children under the covers fidgeted a little, but did not wake. Feeling the warm rush of success (and something far more primal that she quickly snuffed out), Tirce planted a light kiss on their cheeks and stole downstairs to make herself a cup of tea. Below the bedroom was a rotting flight of steps which led into a living room not much bigger than a broom closet. A fireplace, a table and three chairs were its only furnishings, that and the cookpot that doubled as their kettle. The glamour was already fading by the time the water came to a boil. Old magic was fickle and required a constant source of vitality. So instead she stopped her channeling and watched the steam curl through the slits in the boarded-up windows, her mind going numb in the silence.

It was for this moment of peace that Tirce had avoided using the front door, which creaked something awful and would bring her siblings down quicker than the phrase ‘plum pudding’. With Joras and Addeleigh upstairs and soundly asleep and the scent of steeping tea she could pretend that everything would be alright.

She heard footfalls on the doorstep, heavy and familiar. Tirce sighed. The quiet had been good while it lasted.

“Who among you is the master of this house!” Wunther bellowed, “Will none dare oppose me?”

The children came hurtling out of the room like a pair of loose cannonballs, slamming into Tirce’s back and clambering all over her in their haste to reach Wunther.

“It’s Uncle Wunther!” they squealed, “Uncle’s home!”

“Aye, well so am I,” Tirce protested.

“Did you bring us anything sweet?” Joras demanded. He was a loud boy of twelve with a mop of brown hair whose fringe reached his eyebrows.

“Just me, I’m afraid,” Wunther replied, his craggy face breaking into a smile. He was walking with a pronounced stoop today, one of his arms held stiffly bent, its hand shoved deep into his pocket. Joras pummeled him playfully in the arm and Wunther grimaced in a very convincing show of pain.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“I don’t believe you,” Addeleigh said with a toss of her auburn curls “Why are you hiding your hand in your pocket?”

“Alright, alright, you have me there. It’s a surprise,” Wunther said.

“A surprise?” the pair chorused.

“Aye, but it’s reserved only for the best of boys and the bonniest of lasses,” Wunther said as they begged, “So just you two get upstairs and wake up bright-eyed on the morrow. Prove that you deserve it, eh?”

“Go on, you brats,” Tirce said, who saw Wunther’s cheeks growing paler by the moment, “Go on now or I’ll warm your bottoms with the flat o’ my hand, so I will.”

She rolled up her sleeve and chased her siblings back up the stairs. Closing the door behind them, she reached Wunther’s side just in time to catch him before he collapsed to the floor.

“Oh, my blessed aunt,” he said in a pained gasp, “Damn tyke just had to hit me where I was sorest…”

Tirce carefully helped removed her uncle’s overcoat, strands of clotted blood peeling away from his crimson-soaked undershirt.

“Been playing at swords again, I see,” Tirce clicked her tongue, “Why don’t you stick to what you know, old man?”

“Aye, well, a battleaxe isn’t what you might call subtle. Traditional, sure. But you just try hiding one up your trousers, see how far that gets you.”

Tirce got out her sowing needle from a cupboard and passed it quickly over the fire several times. Wunther rolled up the hem of his shirt and whimpered quietly to himself as she worked on the wound, a long but shallow cut that stretched from waist to navel. With each stitch the needle dimpled the pliant flesh before punching through in tiny welts of crimson. Tirce’s stomach gurgled at the sight. Sometimes the last traces of the glamour refused to leave without a fight.

“Another inch and he’d have carved a fillet out of you,” she said, swallowing a mouthful of spittle.

“Blaise and the Twins are gone,” he told her gravely, his mask of good humor dropping away. Tirce stopped suturing and turned to him, ashen-faced. Not for the first time she felt a little piece of herself crumple up and die just then.

“How?” Tirce said when she’d found her voice again.

“I’m not sure. It was somebody—some thing out of a dark fable. It took the shape of a man, but the way it moved…” Wunther sucked in a heavy breath, remembering. Tirce looked at him in alarm. Her uncle was not one to tell tall tales, and although this sounded like the one about the bogeyman beneath the child’s bed, the look on his face was one of unmistakable fear.

First he told her of Redmaine’s mission out in the deep north beneath the ruined city of Wheelsborough, of the excavation that League’s forces had been making into the iron foundry. Then he came to the part where Blaise and the others had met their end, and his voice grew haggard and faint.

“It came at us right after we handed Blaise the goods. Must’ve been waiting there, watching us set up shop, listening in. If so, we were never the wiser. If the rangers hadn’t arrived just then to take us in, we would have all been lost. But it cut a path through a dozen men and skewered them like pork on a spit.”

Quickly Wunther related what had occurred on the bridge and how he, Goss and Pigafelli had made their escape.

“And you’re sure it wasn’t a man? Or a Shaemite?” Tirce asked, tying off the last of the sutures. Wunther slammed a fist on the table, partly in pain and partly in frustration at her words.

“Course it wasn’t no man! Show me the man born from his mother than can stomach a volley of bullets and then have his feet lopped off without flinching!”

“You might’ve just missed it,” Tirce feebly joked.

“Not bleeding likely,” Wunther took a sip of scalding tea and winced as he burnt his tongue, “No, we are dealing with forces beyond our mortal ken here. Perhaps it is some twisted thing that crawled up out of the Wasting, or a spell-wracked construct of flesh from the dungeons of the Ministry of Inquiries.”

Tirce shuddered. She had heard the stories too, and had sworn to die by her own hand before she allowed herself to be handed over to the tender mercies of the Ministry’s ‘dentists’.

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter where it came from. What matters is that we have what I think it came for—what Krein and Shinivon died for.”

“Which is?”

“This,” Wunther moved to take his hand out of his pocket but stiffened in agony as the stitches moved. Cursing, he managed to bring out the torc and laid it reverently on the kitchen table. Tirce stared at it as if it were a snake poised to spring. This was what the Twins had given up their lives for? A dented, dusty piece of jewelry?

“I know it don’t look like much,” Wunther admitted, seeing the look on her face, “It’s only a replica.”

“A replica of what?”

“A torc of Telei Metheri, girl. One of the Heavenly Levers. With it the Ephalim pacified the world three times over. They moved mountains and drank up the oceans, wrought changes upon the sunless skies in the Age of Wonders. This is a piece of their former godhood. Now it is the instrument of our freedom.”

Tirce reached out and held the torc in her palm. It felt surprisingly dense and heavy for its size, but apart from that she felt no tingling in the gift in her blood.

“How soon can we use it?” she asked at once.

“I don’t know,” Wunther said in answer to both questions, “Blaise didn’t either. We don’t even know if the thaumaturgists of the Powder Barons got it working. But there’s something down there, Tirce. Whatever it is, you’ve got to bring it back with you.”

“How?”

“With this,” Wunther slammed the lead-lined container that held the null-globe.

Tirce swayed in her seat. She felt as though she’d just been poleaxed to the noggin. She said: “But what about you? Aren’t you coming.”

“I’d only slow you down,” Wunther gestured at his wound, “Besides, that darkling thing has my scent now. Best you give it the slip while I work up some mischief here in the city to keep it occupied. Mintle and Pig will be there to help me, so don’t you go worrying about your old uncle. Besides, someone has to hide the children,” he cocked a thumb at the ceiling where a floor above, Addeleigh and Joras were sleeping.

“Go, Tirce," Wunther pleaded, "Go, and take the hopes of our people with you.”

“But I don’t know the way,” Tirce said faintly.

“No. But I reckon I know someone who will,” he added with some disgust, “Fogging chancers.”