“Set it down, nice and easy,” the Blackcloak ordered, his sword-hand never wavering. The coal-faced taleweaver complied without question, eyes of deep green wandering across the battlefield he’d elected to ignore. They alighted first upon Obahyurur’s inert form, face down in the river mud, then on Sigrun kneeling at the feet of a primed Alerian musket. She empathised with the look on his face; she recognised it from when she spent an hour or so reading scrolls only to find that somehow the entire day had passed her by.

That didn’t stop her from sniggering in satisfaction when the Blackcloaks dumped the bewildered taleweaver alongside her.

“There’s definitely only the two of them,” the Alerian second-in-command murmured in his youthful commander’s ear. “But Ulfar’s gone, and Zilkas won’t be able to fight with that shoulder wound.”

Perhaps he thought to keep the information private, but his actions only betrayed the typical lack of respect the dark elves held for the dwarves they called their allies. Sigrun had spent all her life in the mines, and though her eyes would never compare to those of that nanun-kulum, she could pick out the squeak of a blind molerat at a thousand paces. Even the taleweaver, a surface dweller if ever she’d seen one, had his ears primed and the line of his jaw set.

“That thing cracked Ulfar's skull open. Of course he's dead. Zilkas will just have to keep up.” The squad commander obscured his face with hood and mask, but still his anger and disgust emanated like the waves of heat from an open furnace. “More importantly…”

Together the Blackcloaks disappeared from her peripheral vision. The primed musket in the small of her back dissuaded her from following them with her head, so instead she closed her eyes and allowed the rolling night to take control.

The River Elleduin lapped upon the reeds and the mud of the ford, a loquacious lullaby lilting and loving.

“Told you that they weren’t… too many young… Greencloaks, not…”

Night insects chirped tentative queries into the aftermath of the violence, wondering what had happened to shatter their serene slumber so.

“Stop… matter now. Ready…”

The remains of the taleweaver’s campfire smouldered in wispy shadows, acrid and angry where the Blackcloaks had hurriedly extinguished them.

“Need to know… why…”

Stone clinked against metal and glass, a cacophony of breakables beneath an uncaring grasp. The strident symphony lasted for a few seconds longer while the Blackcloak commander searched for something within the satchels his men had carried. Then heavy bootsteps in the soft ground brought the shadowy figure back into view.

“So,” the dark elf spat at them both, one eye fixed on his subordinate. “I suppose this is what you hargluk are both after?”

Something landed in the mud before them, splattering their knees with the impact. Sigrun’s eyes leapt to a piece of hard granite, infused with enough runic power to make the hackles on the back of her neck rise in salutation. It took her a couple more moments to recognise what she saw, but she could mistake neither the master-wrought stone nor the sheer power that had shorn it from its mother-rock. She blinked in surprise and leaned close, forgetting that the Blackcloak standing behind her had orders to blow her head off if she so much as twitched.

“That’s a fragment of an Anvil of Power.” Sigrun whistled through her front teeth as her trained gaze picked out the trails of coursing power etched into the worn granite face like veins of electric-blue. “A makeshift one, not one of the ancient True Anvils, but whoever struck those runes upon it was one master runesmith. Don’t know if there’s ten dwarves in all of Kachuck who can wield power like that.”

She looked up, transferring grey-gleaming attention from the artefact to those who surrounded her. The elf’s mask had slipped into something resembling surprise that she would speak so freely of the value of the item. The taleweaver wore something more aghast, stricken that she dared to share precious clan-ken without regard for the consequences.

“But no, that’s not what I or he are after,” she told the Blackcloak before he could recover. “We’re here for something else. A different artefact. Something called a muse. ‘Strewth!”

Her eyes narrowed, and she wriggled free from the grasp of her captor, trying to ignore the muzzle sighted upon the back of her head.

“You wouldn’t know anything about it, would you?”