Alchemical symbol: Antimony [https://i.imgur.com/7omjkx8.png]

Andra crouched on top of the wall beside Lump. Boss and Slight had already dropped down into the yard and stood by the small shuttered window. The dog stared at them, trembling and whining at the end of its chain. It was a large, blunt-faced animal, an old male. Drool trailed from its jaws.

Boss pried at the shutter. Wood creaked and cracked, the sharp noise loud in the quiet.

‘Careful,’ Slight hissed.

Boss peered through the window. ‘I can’t see nothing. It’s tight. Will you fit?’

‘Give me a leg up,’ Slight whispered.

Boss hoisted her up to the window. Slight put her head inside, then a shoulder, and with a twist of her hunched body the other shoulder was through. Another wriggle and she slithered and dropped out of sight.

The dog padded back and forth, its whining accompanied by the soft rattle of the chain. Faint noises followed Slight’s progress: shuffling, breathing, a grunt of effort before returning to the window.

A large joint of meat peeked over the sill. Boss grabbed it and heaved it up to Lump. Another leg joint followed the same path, and then a slab of ribs. Lump, finding he didn’t have enough hands, started passing the meat down to Mouse and Tick.

Andra stared in amazement. She hadn’t imagined so much meat in one place, such an abundance of fat-marbled red flesh. This must be a cache, a store of food for a kin — but what kin? No great number of humans lived in the house. They’d seen only one man and she’d heard no others moving about.

Joint after joint emerged from the window to be handed over the wall. The dog grew more agitated. Confused as it was, it knew this was wrong.

Slight’s face appeared in the window. ‘All right?’

‘We can’t carry no more.’ Boss raised her arms to help her down. ‘Hurry.’

Slight squeezed sideways out of the window. Boss lifted her onto the wall, then climbed up herself.

All of them dropped to the ground. They gathered up the meat, the small children each carrying one or two joints, Lump and Boss managing heavier loads. Together, they set off down the street. The smell of meat hung in the damp still air like fog.

Andra trailed after them. Though the meat was long dead, cold and bloodless and faintly tinged with rot, the scent filled the world from edge to edge. Hunger ached in her teeth and bones; she trembled.

Lamplight glared on the children’s faces, the joints of meat clutched in their arms. A bent grey-haired man stepped from a side-street. ‘Hey.’ He raised his lantern. ‘What you doing there?’

The smaller children shrank behind Boss and Lump. Andra hissed. Hunger had blinded and deafened her. She should have heard him coming and given warning — but she had not. Still, though she was far from fit, this was something she could deal with. She stalked forward, stepped between Boss and the man with his lamp.

The old man’s eyes widened. His mouth fell open. ‘Light defend us.’

Fixing him with an intent stare, she flexed her claws and growled. ‘Run.’

He uttered a strangled noise and ran back into the side-street. The swinging lantern threw wild shadows to chase along the house fronts.

‘Damn,’ Boss said. ‘I’m glad you’re on our side.’

The insistent clang of a bell echoed down the side-street, loud as the dog’s bark.

‘Shit.’ Boss waved her hands. ‘Go.’

Boss and Lump ran, the smaller ones trailing behind. Andra kept pace with Tick, who was slowest. The jangle of the bell fell into the distance and at the next junction, Boss halted to let the others catch up.

The children gathered beneath a street lamp, breathing heavily. The bell had stopped. The gas flare above them hissed as it burned. They stood at a crossroads. Lit by blue gas flame and silver moonlight, four streets stretched away from them, all silent and deserted, buildings shuttered and dark.

Uneasiness nagged at the edges of Andra’s hunger. There were humans all around, hidden behind those walls. Her hunger-sharpened nerves buzzed; she could almost count the warm breathing bodies. And where so many humans lived, there should be noise. Even in the deepest night, there should be people in the streets.

But there was no one.

They went on, Slight leading them on the straightest path home. Street by street the smell of human filth grew stronger, the buildings more cracked and worn and over-painted with pictures. Rubbish piled higher and rats skittered along the gutters.

‘Can’t believe we got so much,’ Slight said.

‘That poor watchman!’ Mouse said.

‘Oh, yeah. I thought we was goners.’ Slight glanced at Andra. ‘Man, he was scared.’

‘I told you she would help us,’ Mouse said.

‘But what do we do with the meat now we got it?’

‘Sell it,’ Boss said. ‘Meat’s expensive. We’ll get a lot for all this.’

Their voices were loud in the night quiet. They grinned and nudged one another with the happy excitement of hunters returning home laden with prey, full of stories of daring and narrow escapes.

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

Andra walked apart. Her wound ached deep within her and her legs felt heavy.

Boss stopped suddenly. ‘Shut up, all of you. What did you bring us this way for?’

‘Quickest way home,’ Slight said.

‘This goes by Broom Street.’ Boss waved to a wall marked with a red splash of paint like a ragged wound. ‘This is Blazes territory. Do you think they won’t be watching? You think we can just walk through carrying this?’

Slight frowned. ‘You want to go round by Angels Alley? That’s where the wolves are.’

‘Reds’ll take the meat and kill us.’

‘Yeah,’ Lump said. ‘Reds’re bad.’

‘Wolves will kill us and eat us,’ Slight said.

Boss scowled. ‘Fine. In between then, down the edge of the Scar.’

Slight glanced at the others. No one seemed inclined to argue with Boss. She shrugged. ‘All right. Scar it is.’

Alchemical symbol: Nickel [https://i.imgur.com/SX7htXR.png]

From black silence, sound returned. A voice: ‘I don’t like this.’

‘Yeah. Sooner we’re rid of him the better.’

His head lolled. His body hung, deadweight, supported by forces beyond him. Solid warmth to the right and left. After so along in the black (How long? Hours? Day? Lifetimes?) to feel anything was a vast comfort. He had thought he was dead.

There had been nothing, only blackness, and yet he’d seen — or somehow, known — his red-shrouded corpse on the pyre: the four Fire Adepts, the burst of white-hot flame searing his body; the House departing, marching in rank and file; servants shovelling grey ashes. Body to ash, ash to a little box, little box to a niche in the city wall — his honoured place beside his forefathers, a neat stone set over with an inscription.

Try as he might, the words of the inscription evaded him, clear but illegible, as if written in a foreign language.

‘I mean, I don’t like this. The drug.’

‘Filthy stuff. Still, not so bad for him? He’s well out of it. Won’t even care that he’s dead.’

A faint light split the darkness, little stars sparkling like dew on cobwebs. Nevin blinked, and suddenly the light burned and dazzled.

‘He may be a prig, but I reckon he’d rather a knife than this. I would. Even a noose.’

‘Dead’s dead in my book. Not like we get a choice.’

The blackness (colour of crows and the deeps of the earth, colour of his soul) shrank before the encroaching light: pure white blinding light filled with soft wings and shining faces and hands reaching out to comfort and support.

There were angels.

‘Bugger’s moving. Not so out of it now. Will he keep?’

Thick fingers prodded Nevin’s face. He laughed. He must have lost his boots, because he felt cobbles hard under his feet, but it didn’t matter — he floated weightless in the light. Perhaps he would float into the sky and join the clouds.

‘He’s in the white. Away with the angels. He’ll be no trouble.’

The cobbles snagged his feet. He must be moving. Or he remained stationary and the world moved. Angels spoke with the accents of slum-dwellers. Why not? Everything was equally possible and impossible. Everything was one thing, and it was Light.

But if all was Light, there was no difference between here and there. Neither time nor distance existed, and there was no movement. This struck him as a revelation, a truth so overwhelming his whole being rang with it like a pure-toned bell.

Areas of less-light shifted across his vision. Grey shapes bounded by straight lines moved (in defiance of the impossibility of motion) in time to the jolting of his body.

The light was fading from blinding to merely bright. Or he was fading from it — because the light was pure, and he was not, and so inevitably he must fall back to darkness and death. Which was sad, and with that came a memory, only not a memory, he was simply there at his mother’s funeral service, seven years old, kneeling on a hard stone floor with a cleric intoning over his head.

The Light is in you as in all things.

The words meant nothing then, but now he understood. Now he saw: the Light was everything, everywhere, and he was in it and of it. The ghostly grey street stretching ahead was Light, and the sketchy outlines of buildings were Light, and the two figures to either side of him, they were Light. Their souls shone like diamonds through grey fog.

How simple it all was. How very simple.

Even as the light dimmed, angels wrapped him in warmth and understanding. They supported him with their strength. They carried him forward, to what goal he didn’t know, but he was content to trust and wait for all to be revealed.

‘This is near enough, ain’t it? Can we drop him here?’

Movement stopped. Vision returned with sudden clarity: a blue gas flame burned with holy radiance; the windows of dark buildings loomed like the eyes of demons; shadows fluttered dark wings. His heart thumped with the memory of fear.

‘Further on. Angel’s Alley. We want to be sure, don’t we?’

A grunt of acknowledgement. More movement. The world returned to shades of grey. Now solid, now transparent, now solid again, and it was after all, a street, a street in the slums.

He remembered the slums. He remembered the city. Of course he remembered Athanor — he had sworn an oath, had he not, by the Light and in the Light — to defend the city, to serve his House, to honour his family. Beneath the great dome of the Temple, he had stood before his House, his heart so full of pride and joy and certainty, and he had sworn, he had dedicated his life to a noble purpose.

And since then, what had he done?

His father had set his half-sister on a path to madness and self-destruction, and Nevin had stood by and done nothing. His father had led Phylaxes into a civil war intended to destroy House Numisma and raise a tyrant to replace the city council, and Nevin had obeyed orders. The city had burned. Soldiers under his own command had died, far too many.

When danger came, he hadn’t defended the city. He had betrayed it. The blackness that had swallowed him was the blackness of his own soul. His own weakness, his own cowardice, his own failure.

Nevin halted, gazing at a city street silent in the moonlight. Two men gripped his arms in a friendly way. A big man, ugly with his flattened, scarred face, and a sharp-nosed man too small for his faded blue coat — their faces seemed familiar, like childhood friends not seen in many years.

The big man drew a knife. The blade shone like a sliver of the moon.

‘What you doing?’ the short man said.

‘Making sure of him.’

‘That wasn’t the plan. Let the wolves have him, that’s what Isidro said.’

‘What difference does it make? The wolves can still have him. They’re not fussy.’

Nevin stared past them, into the darkness between street lamps where the shadows hunched suddenly larger, dense and black and bristling with thick fur. The moonlight gleamed in two pairs of burning red eyes.

A surprised thought broke through the fog in his brain: in months of hunting, he hadn’t once set eyes on the pair of dire-wolves. But there was no doubt this was them — no dog was that large.

‘Oh, Light defend us,’ the big man whispered.

The short man turned and ran.

A push sent Nevin staggering. His legs gave way and he dropped to his knees on hard stone paving. And then the big man also ran, and Nevin was alone.

Alone except for two hulking dire-wolves. The stone from his grave, he saw it now, the inscription.

Captain Nevin vai Phylaxes: deceased in the course of his duty, eaten by wolves.