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

The body was that of a young man, about twenty years old. In life he’d been tall and muscular, better fed than most in the slums. Now he curled on his side in a puddle of congealed blood, his white shirt in red rags.

Nevin nudged the corpse with his boot. Stiff. So he’d died sometime in the night.

Shallow wounds criss-crossed the chest and arms. Chunks of flesh had been torn from the face. The throat had been ripped out. In the grey morning light, the exposed flesh was a pale, bloodless pink.

And the smell—

Acid burned the back of Nevin’s throat. He swallowed and turned away, fighting a surge of nausea.

The corpse lay in a room off the hallway of a large building, once a tenement block. Rags and filth and empty glass vials suggested people had been living here, finding shelter in what was left of the walls.

They had left other signs too, crude pictures scratched into sooty stonework, illiterate glyphs scrawled in charcoal and paint. Gang marks, Nevin assumed, though he only recognised the lightning motif of the Blazes. The Snakes had dominated before the Burning. With their downfall, gangs had proliferated. Most had vanished as quickly as they’d appeared, leaving nothing but a layer of graffiti soon over-written by other hands.

Following the tangled history round the walls, he drifted into the hallway. Voices reached him from the street outside.

‘Not a wolf kill,’ Shanra muttered.

‘So what’s his lordship at?’ Vil’s sothron drawl verged on insolence, as usual.

They must not realise he could hear them — but Jerard was out there, and in Nevin’s absence, discipline was his responsibility.

Nevin gritted his teeth. He’d wanted an experienced officer as his second, but good officers weren’t assigned to patrol work, let alone his patrol. Even his common soldiers were the dregs no one else wanted. Nor could he do much about it. Complaining would do his reputation no favours, and at best, he’d be handed a fresh batch of rejects, probably worse than these.

Out on the street the common soldiers laughed. No doubt Vil was joking again. Damn Jerard. Why isn’t he doing his job?

Nevin shook his head sharply. Irritation with the men, while justified, wasn’t important right now. He had to follow this lead. It was his duty — to family, to the city. He took a deep breath and reluctantly returned to the dead.

Focus on the details.

A snake tattoo coiled round the left arm, vibrant blood-red. Scarf tied round the same arm, also red. Empty knife sheath: whatever blade he carried had been taken, either by his killer or some opportunist scavenger. No coin pouch.

Nevin spread his hand, compared his own fingers to the claw marks. Not that he needed to. He knew exactly what did this, had known at first sight.

A bloody path through the rubbish showed where the body had been dragged. Nevin followed the trail back to the hallway, out to the street.

The beggar who’d led them to the body naturally hadn’t hung around once he had his penny. Jerard stood a few yards down the street, scowling at the gutter. The hunter and the three common soldiers slouched against the wall of the ruined building.

Gram saw Nevin and straightened, his face an acne-splotched map of alarm. Shanra, a norther woman of typically stout and stoic design, merely eyed him and nodded.

Tall, dark-skinned Vil had his back to him. ‘Waste of time,’ he said, ‘If you ask me.’

‘No one asked you, Vilathrai,’ Nevin said.

Vil jumped and grinned sheepishly. Nevin treated him to a few seconds of cold stare before turning his attention to the hunter. ‘Did the dog get anything?’

The hunter was a short-bodied norther, face tanned to creased leather. Two of her front teeth were missing. ‘No wolf, this. Claws like a big cat, but it’d be demon-damned big, one of them sothron buggers maybe. Dog got something. Just to the block across the way, where he come from, most like.’

Before the Burning, rows of matching tenement blocks had faced each other across Wear Street, lodgings for factory workers and their families, on the edge of the slums but not of it.

The building at Nevin’s back, along with everything west of Wear Street, had burned. Months afterward, they were still hollow shells.

Along the street ran a straight line of broken paving, showing where a gas pipe had exploded. The line ended at the block opposite, which sagged as a precarious half-building, one side reduced to rubble. The neighbouring block had survived intact and four floors of windows overlooked the ruin where the body was found.

‘Someone may have seen what happened,’ Nevin said.

Jerard eyed Nevin coldly. ‘So? This isn’t a wolf kill.’

The three common soldiers watched the exchange, trying not to look interested. Nevin gestured Jerard to follow him down the street, round a corner into an alley. There was no one about, no one but a thin woman crouched against the wall, gazing at nothing. She rocked slowly. Red scabs crusted her mouth and nose.

Once out of view and ear-shot of the common soldiers, Nevin faced Jerard, eye to eye, and spoke in a hard low voice. ‘Do you have a problem with me?’

Jerard didn’t drop his gaze. ‘We’re wasting time. The hunter says this isn’t a wolf kill. Any fool could see it.’

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

‘And am I fool?’

Muscles tensed in Jerard’s jaw. ‘Your career may be over, but mine isn’t. We have orders. We’re meant to be hunting wolves, not grubbing after dead slum-filth.’

Nevin gripped the hilt of his sword. ‘Let me be very clear with you. I’m in command here. You are my second. You don’t have to like me or my orders, but you don’t talk to me that way in front of the men.’

‘Sir.’ Jerard’s eyes remained cold and unyielding. From his fashionably long fair hair and chiselled good looks to his parade-ready uniform and shining breastplate, he was the model Phylaxes officer.

Three years younger than Nevin, fresh out of training, bright and ambitious — in him, Nevin recognised his younger self, the officer he’d been before the Burning, someone with all his brittle edges as yet undamaged by the world. Someone with hope.

Nevin couldn’t bear to look at him. His glare landed on the thin woman. She flinched and slunk away, weaving her unsteady way along the gutter.

Where she’d sat, there was a picture on the wall, white chalk on black stone. Four rough strokes made a child’s version of a gallows. A bird perched on top, a black bird outlined in white, and below a man’s body dangled.

Nevin pointed to the hanged man. ‘Do you know what that is?’

The figure wore a cloak. Only a single flowing chalk line, but clearly a long cloak.

Jerard clutched his own spotless red cloak to keep it from the grubby walls. ‘Should I?’

Nevin had seen the hanged man before. Always the same design, the bird, the cloak. He didn’t know what it meant, but it made him uneasy.

Since the Burning, many things made him uneasy. Everyone pretended nothing was wrong, that the foundations of the world had briefly shaken but now order was restored and all was well.

But all wasn’t well. What had been done couldn’t be undone. Laws could not be un-broken. The dead remained dead.

Oh, the House’s old leaders, the guilty and the scapegoats, they’d shuffled off to dishonourable retirement or punishment postings. The new leaders were duly horrified and contrite. Anyone would think they’d been in some other city the whole time, not right here, following orders.

‘Jerard.’ Nevin looked at the younger man, not knowing whether to hate or pity him. I’m 25, he thought. I feel old. ‘Orders aren’t the only thing that matters.’

Jerard’s expression froze on polite disdain, like he wouldn’t much mind if Nevin was the next dead body he saw.

Nevin suppressed a sigh. ‘Take the men over to the wasteland. See if the hunter can find a trail. I’ll join you there later.’

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The final flight of stairs slanted to the left. No step was level and each groaned and bent under Nevin’s boots as if about to collapse.

On the lower floors he’d knocked at every door with a window onto the street. Of course no one had seen anything, or if they had, they weren’t talking. He’d gained nothing but irritation and probably lice.

Like the staircase, the top floor sloped. Three apartments looked outward onto the street and the ruined building where the body had been found. The doors on the other side of the corridor belonged to rooms facing onto the inner yard.

Children’s clothing hung on a line slung across the landing. From beyond that came the muffled sound of raised voices. Nevin pushed past the laundry. The argument came from one of the inner doors.

‘We won’t have the money in a week or a month. What if he comes back?’ a female voice shouted.

Nevin approached. Behind the door, conversation continued, though too quiet to make out words. He knocked.

An abrupt silence fell.

‘Who’s there?’ She sounded scared.

‘Captain Nevin vai Phylaxes. Open up.’

From inside came the sound of wood scraping heavily over wood. The door creaked slowly open, revealing a child — a girl, rather. Small and skinny, she had dark hair cut very short, and wore a shapeless grey shift.

Nevin guessed she was fourteen, maybe as old as sixteen. She clutched a glass bottle in a white-knuckled grip, clear liquid sloshing inside. Her eyes widened at the sight of his red cloak and breastplate.

A pungent medicinal smell wafted from the room behind her, where a white-bearded old man hunched over a small table. Dark oily liquid bubbled and dripped through a tangle of glass tubes and flasks heated by a gas-burner.

‘Names?’ Nevin asked.

‘Benedict the alchemist.’ She nodded toward the old man, who half rose as if he wanted to approach but was uncertain if it was a good idea, or if his legs would manage the distance.

‘And you?’

‘Thea, sir.’

She retreated to the old man’s side as Nevin stepped into the room. A blanket-covered cot bed occupied the far corner, along with a mattress on the floor. Besides the beds, there was the table, the chair the old man sat in, a three-legged stool and a small gas stove for cooking.

One wall held shelves of bottles and jars, neatly arranged and labelled with various symbols. The single window overlooked the inner yard. The squeals of playing children drifted in, along with damp outside air.

Everything was clean and orderly, except for a large wet patch on the floorboards by the shelves. Someone had recently been scrubbing the floor.

‘A man was killed last night,’ Nevin said. ‘Near here. He had—’ He twirled his finger round his arm to demonstrate. ‘—a snake tattoo.’

The girl clutched the old alchemist’s shoulder. Both quickly hid it, but the news had surprised them. And something more than surprise: relief.

‘My, my.’ The old man patted the girl’s hand. ‘How unpleasant.’

‘Have you seen a young man with a red snake tattoo? A member of the Blazes, I think. He might have been in the building yesterday.’

Benedict shook his head. ‘I don’t go out much these days, sir.’

‘We’re respectable people,’ the girl said.

Most slum-dwellers had a nasal accent and a too-fast way of talking, loaded with gutter slang. The alchemist and the girl (his grandchild?) spoke like up-town people, comparatively genteel. Perhaps they’d come down in the world.

‘I’m not accusing you of anything. But if you help us—’ Nevin paused, calculating. ‘There’s a bounty on Snakes, even for information, up to thirty forints.’ A sizeable sum for people who had very little.

The girl bit her lip. The old man squinted, rheumy eyes all innocent confusion.

Nevin frowned. They obviously knew something, and he’d thought the money sufficient temptation — but slum-dwellers were all alike. Too stupid and cowardly to crawl from their own filth.

He turned to go. ‘One more thing, while I’m here. Have either of you seen a woman with claws on her hands?’ He held up his hands, fingers crooked.

The girl stared, tense as a startled bird. ‘Light, no.’ She swallowed. ‘Is she dangerous?’

‘Perhaps.’ Nevin watched her. Her chin was raised, she met his gaze boldly. She wasn’t as scared as she was before. ‘I hope not.’

She laughed. ‘We hear the wolves at night and that’s bad enough, isn’t it, Benedict?’

The old man blinked. ‘Oh, indeed. We don’t go out at night. It’s not safe.’

‘Gossip greatly exaggerates the danger,’ Nevin said. ‘Still, you’re wise to be careful. Keep your door secured.’

A wooden chest beside the door must have been the heavy object he’d heard the girl shifting.

‘Yes,’ Thea said. ‘Thank you, Captain. We’ll be sure to do that.’