Shadowdancer

[Whispers of Abyssion]

Sputtering arcane flame illuminated floors of featureless slate. Trapped in a grimy glass cage, creaking in time to an unfelt breeze, it swayed upon the empty wooden walls.

Seven figures sat at the round table below. They wore the shadow like heavy mantles, the silence like obfuscating hoods. Cold-blooded killers and ruthless businessmen all, some called this miserable town home and others visited only for their share of the spoils. Violence and hate swirled between them through the warm humidity.

The eighth figure stood at a safe distance, cursing his joss that they needed him in the here and the now. The authority of a far-off Jade Emperor, and a nearer but less effectual Governor, kept him nominally safe in their midst. But they could tear up that slip of paper at a drop of a fighting pin. He wouldn’t put it past them to blatantly ignore it if they so wished, either. Shivers raced up and down his spine at the chilling reality of the danger. The bitter fur of fear coated the back of his tongue.

An hourglass sat in lonely splendour at the centre of the table. His sea-salted gaze tracked individual grains of sand as they fell from the half-empty bowl. It was time.

“I’m the Commissioner of Ninedrakes,” he spoke, gravel on granite grating through the empty room as he stepped into the light. “Some of you know me. Others of you don’t. Let’s just say that I’d rather keep it that way. If I get to learn your faces, it’s because you’ve done something stupid and I’ve had the dubious pleasuring of putting you behind bars. I don’t like putting people behind bars. I tend to forget trivial things like feeding and watering them. In general, they don’t come out again.”

Straw-coloured hair, thinning from the stress of his job, topped his wide forehead and his sharp intelligent nose. Hawkish blue eyes swept the room from behind steel-rimmed spectacles, sliding with just the right amount of disdain from the faces of those assembled. None of them displayed the slightest concern at his threat. One or two even made obvious their amusement, as if daring him to exert his so-called authority. He had little doubt that he would fail, horribly, if he tried.

“I’ve just one more thing to say. I’m here to keep the peace. If you play by the rules, you’ll never have to see or hear from me again. If you overstep your boundaries, me and mine will come down on you like a mudslide in a typhoon. I have the Governor’s backing in this matter, but neither the interest nor the patience to partake in your little games. So don’t make me.”

The lapel pin on his collar glinted in fleeting authority, reflected in the false smiles and mocking glares that met him wherever he looked. Grimacing, he retreated back into his own private world. There, at least, he could actually maintain a semblance of order.

Now that he’d set the stage, the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. The strain clung to his skin, cold and clammy, and he reached out with his senses to relieve the mental pressure. Mould and rot ate at the ramshackle driftwood walls. Salty sea breeze rattled as it coursed past the hillside dwelling. Outside, the night shone clear with neither a single cloud in the sky nor the faintest hint of rain on the horizon.

The Thayne knew how he could use a shower. Without glancing downwards he could picture his sweat-stained silk shirt. How long had it been since he’d last seen enough clean water to bathe himself? How long had he gone without diluting his evening firewines? He gave up trying to answer his own questions and returned his attention to his charges, still forlorn in his wishes that he could be elsewhere.

“Well.” Finally another voice broke the deadlock, brutal and challenging. “Where shall we begin? Introductions?”

The flamboyant Nipponese raked a rough hand across a lantern jaw grizzled with stubble, his one good eye glaring at the others in fierce contempt. His other hand gesticulated in wild emphasis of the missing little fingertip. The fringes of an elaborate tattoo adorned the sides of his neck like some multi-hued vine. Wearing a suit jacket deliberately dishevelled and unkempt, he reminded the Commissioner of a tiger kept in check only by the frailest leash of civility.

“Perhaps you’d like to cooperate with us, then?”

The second man smiled at the first in deceptive amity, a cold-blooded reptile sizing up its prey. His resemblance to the Nipponese tiger ended at hair and eyes as dark as night. The thin black tie at his neck projected cold cruelty and immaculate precision, and he wore enough gold on his fingers to finance a small kingdom. Young, Cathayan, and ambitious, his star in the vast darkness of the Oriental underworld had risen meteorically in a mere matter of months.

“I’d sooner trust one of my whores than any of you lot,” a third voice spat. “Especially you poxy yellow-skinned monkeys. Your accents are terrible. I can't even understand any of what you’re saying!”

The Salvic giant, built like an ox and wielding a glare to match, represented the interests of the notorious Vorgruk-Stokes trading company. More inked than the Nipponese, more ostentatious than the Cathayan, his boorish bluster reared over them like a primitive display of dominance. The golden pierce through his lip spoke of his love of money and the pains that he would endure not only to earn it, but also to spend it. Its chain motif spoke of how he did so.

“Noo, gentlemen. Lit us aw behae.”

The rugged gruff grumble of the fourth member of the meeting rose to soothe and appease the ox’s bellowing. A clean-shaven dwarf with taut muscular features, short-cropped red hair bristled upon his scarred scalp. A large silver earring glinted in his torn left earlobe, and a linked necklace of golden rings nestled upon the bared hairs of his chest. His teeth sparkled white beneath a wide bearish grin, his hands raised against the bristling antagonism.

“The dwarf speaks sense. There is no point in fighting amongst ourselves here.”

Dressed with simple elegance in robes of flowing white, the fifth of the seven contrasted her fellows in both gender and race. But they listened when her elven voice spoke, even in the gentlest and least threatening of tones. The crossed hands insignia upon her fine-crafted silver coronet identified her as none less than a ranking member of the Syndicate. She sat to one side of the round table like a predatory owl, hands folded in her lap, her keen green eyes observing and missing nothing.

“Is there not? Or are you saying this to stab us in the back as soon as we leave this room?”

The sixth man’s dusky skin and broad silver eyes marked him as a spice merchant from Fallien. He wore an ankle-length thobe with military precision, and his suspicious gaze darted around the table as if following an erratic fly at high speed. His voice, equally chary, stabbed into the ears of those assembled in high-pitched indignation. Slender-fingered hands strayed close to the ornate scimitar borne in open prominence at his waist.

“And ‘ere I fought I were in civilised company.”

The seventh and final member brayed in brash amusement, adjusting the collar of his woollen suit as he sweltered in the heat. Sharp ferret-like features peered out from beneath an incongruous bowler hat. His eyes lingered like filmy slime on everything they touched, darting and predatory. Of those assembled he wielded the least personal power, for he made his living by facilitating and brokering deals between others. But of those assembled he also had the least to lose.

“You’re not. You’re in poxy Cathay,” the Salvic ox snarled.

“Noo noo, gentlemen. Lit us... hoo dae ye humans say thes again? Och aye. Lit us nae gie aff oan th’ wrang fit wi’ sic’ offensife words. An’ Ninedrakes isnae Cathayan, it…”

“Shaddup, you poxy dwarf. They canna understand us anyways. Poxy natives and their poxy tongues.”

The elf cleared her throat in delicate diplomacy. “May I suggest that it might be prudent to return to the topic at hand, before we all end up at each other’s throats?”

Both Nipponese and Cathayan representatives wore benign smiles suggesting that such would be a wise course of action indeed. The Salvic ox hawked and spat his derision into the shadows, making it abundantly clear that he did not fear the hatred lurking behind their thin polite veneers.

“As it stands,” the owlish elf continued, with a respectful nod to the Cathayan dragon upon whose territory, whose island, they currently met, “the rules are as follows. Somewhere in this town, a Man either has possession of a Fragment, or information about its location. We are still unsure of what powers this Fragment possesses, but we can guarantee that any Fragment will fetch a tidy sum with the correct buyers. Thus it is in our interests to acquire this artefact via any means necessary.”

The ferret raised his hand to interrupt. Without waiting for her to acknowledge him, he launched straight into his question.

“Pardon me ignorance, gents, bein’ not quite as educated as ya aw.” Yellowed teeth bared in what might have once passed as an appeasing grin. “Wot is a Fragment and why’re ya aw so interested in it?”

The elf turned to him her luminous gaze. Her eyes conveyed the utter disdain that only those of high education could manage towards lackards with neither discipline nor desire to spend long hours in study. The emerald she wore on her chest glinted at his insolence.

“A Fragment is an artefact of great power, human. A relic of unsurpassed workmanship and beauty, eclipsed only by the desire of those who know of such things to obtain it. Some say they take the form of memory, wrought from the heat of battle or from long years of peace, and thus are more potent than even the sharpest weapon and the greatest spell.”

The ferret subsided, greed gleaming in the depths of his copper-brown eyes. The Nipponese tiger preyed on the silence to raise his voice in turn.

“And we are all meeting here because?”

“Because it would be rude to run around each other’s islands without first receiving consent, would it not?” The Cathayan dragon smiled, flashing tea-stained teeth in patently false friendship. Seven pairs of eyes zeroed in on his face as one. He held de facto homeground advantage in Ninedrakes, able to call on endless legions of informants and street fighters. The others could not muster further resources than what they had brought with them. His offer to level the playing field thus smelt of more rotten fish than the morning harbour. “Because we should work together to capture this man before he leaves Ninedrakes, should we not?”

“It woods make sense,” the bearish dwarf agreed in amiable mildness. Unlike the dragon, his grin rang true. “Thaur woods be mair than enaw reward fur us aw, e’en if we split it accordin’ tae uir presence haur.”

“According to our contribution to the capture,” the Salvic ox interjected, his Fallienese counterpart nodding with equal vigour. “At least I’d add muscle to the search. You and the elf would just sit back and profit. A pox on you both.”

“I’d kick back too.” The Coronian ferret bared his fangs, once more provoking the greater powers in blatant, brash challenge. Alone of the seven he had no interest whatsoever in the fate of the city. Though his connections had bought him a place at the table, he had yet to earn the respect of the others, grudging or otherwise. Much less their trust, or what passed for such in a hellhole like this. “Kick back and let the bloomin’ others do the chuffin’ work. See, that’s wot I call profit.”

The others ignored him, bar the elf who gave him a lingering glare, and the ox who focused all his considerable enmity upon the slighter man. Shrugging, the weasel leaned back in his seat, whistling an empty tune. He debated whether he should raise his muddy boots onto the table. The thought of how they might react to that, with all their uppity airs and veiled hatreds, tickled his fancy and brought another toothy grin to his pinched features. For five sweet blessed seconds, it even took his mind off the accursed heat. But it would not do to jeopardise his position amongst them in such trivial jest. He succeeded in resisting the temptation.

Watching with care, the Commissioner filed away what information he could. Scratching at a rash on his upper arm, his eyes flicked to the hourglass as the last sands fell. The arcane flame overhead sputtered near the end of its lifespan. He coughed, coarse and courteous, resounding against the walls.

“So we are in agreement?”

Steepling his fingers and allowing himself a small victorious smile, the Cathayan dragon inclined his head to give his guests the floor. Still they smelled a rat, but he had set the bait too adroitly. By offering to leash his underlings, he granted them all a viable chance at retrieving either the Fragment or the Man who had information on it. Should he keep his word they gained an advantage; should he not, they lost nothing by agreeing to it now. One after another they nodded their accord to the Commissioner.

He watched them plot all the while, reading their thoughts with ease. How best to take advantage of the lull in hostilities? How best to backstab those who succeeded in acquiring the Fragment?

And in the back of their minds hung the doubt. Why had he proposed such uneven terms? What did he know that they didn’t? Where lay the trap?

The dragon watched them scheme, each of them lost in his webs. And he stifled another small smile.

The ferret waited until last to signify assent with a carefree wave. The Commissioner allowed his gaze to loiter for a curious moment longer on the newcomer to his jurisdiction. Then, he announced the unexpected with only a little of his surprise colouring his gravelly growl.

“We are in agreement.”

The dragon’s smile widened. Unfolding his fingers, he inclined his head in polite farewell.

“Then I suggest that we adjourn. Happy hunting, my good fellows.”

[Whispers of Abyssion]

A bucket of piss in his face woke him from blessed sleep. Spluttering and retching, he returned to the realm of the living. Rough hands tore the hempen hood from his shoulders, scorching burns across cheeks and brow. A steel-tipped boot slammed into the back of his thigh just above the knee, accompanied by a burst of ugly laughter.

His shins hit the dirt first. His face followed closely after. Jagged rocks tore into cotton robe and wiry muscle. The stench of sewage and raw waste mingled with the blood in his broken nostrils. Pain, bitter and coppery, flooded his tongue. His hands, tied taut behind his back, could only strain in powerless paralysis.

The jeers and heckles died, as if somebody had thrown a blanket over the audience. The prisoner used the unexpected reprieve to open his eyes. Dim light, swaying in tune with remnant echo, showed him only the imprint of his face in crimson-tinted mud.

“Now what do we have here?”

The same rough hands that had torn the hood from his shoulders now grabbed him by the hair and yanked his head backwards. The force of the action nearly tore his scalp from his skull. He bit down on his lips to stifle the surprise and the hurt, blinking mud and sweat and tears from his eyes. Face to face with the young and immaculate leader of Ninedrakes’s nebulous native underworld, he spat gritty sand and hot blood from his bruised mouth.

“Is this the rat who’s been scurrying itty-bitty through my sewers?” The King Dragon’s Common, cultured and cultivated, bore little trace of any accent. His slight frame perched in comfort upon a battered wooden stool. Gold encrusted fingers emphasised his words by playing imaginary tunes in the damp cellar air. “I wonder what tales he has to…”

“... serpent.”

“I beg your pardon?” Eyes of brittle onyx flashed in anger. The cultured tenor took on an adamantine edge. Obviously the King Dragon did not respond well to interruptions.

“They call me serpent,” Touma Kamikaji ground out through the chafing, constricted confines of his parched throat. The sweat of his audience hung heavy in his mind, its acrid tang enough to spur him from the grimy depths of his despair. “Not rat.”

The King Dragon’s irritation melted away. In its place rose bemusement and a modicum of respect. Most men in his prisoner’s position would by now wet their breeches in terror. “Master Serpent. And I am called Yi Cai. Perhaps you would like to regale us then with the tale of how you came to be slithering through our town without our permission?”

Harsh laughter swelled again from the assembled audience. Ten… twenty… possibly even thirty strong, trained fighters all. Grimly Touma tried again the bonds upon his wrist, but they budged nary a smidgen. He could feel neither the weight of his sword at his waist nor the ivory rod he usually kept tucked into the breast of his robes. They must have picked him clean while unconscious. They’d even liberated the black feather he pinned above his heart as a good luck charm. He stood no chance of escape on his own. Even if he did, he dared not leave without his accoutrements.

No, he had to talk his way…

A second crude boot, this time to his ribs, interrupted his deliberations. This time, not even he could prevent the grunt of pain from leaving his lips.

“I would speak if I were you, Master Serpent.” Yi Cai steepled his fingers in front of his chest, leaning forward and peered in encouragement at his captive. “There are plenty here who would be happy to rip out that forked tongue of yours.”

As if on cue a second figure stepped out alongside him. Through the haze that dimmed his vision, Touma could just about make out flowing black hair and a flower-patterned robe. The point of a needle glimmered in the lantern-light, long and thin and disturbing. His eyes widened.

“Are you...” he gasped, then cut himself off. Of course she was blind. Many who practised acupuncture or massage were, the better to sense the flow of energy through the bodies of their clients. And that made her dangerous. More than dangerous, in fact, for the less she relied on sight, the greater the chance she had of seeing through any deception.

The King Dragon sensed his involuntary fear. He prompted, “Your tale?”

Touma knew that they had trapped him. If he lied, they would torture him until he told the truth. If he told the truth, they would torture him anyways to ensure that he did not conceal anything.

So he smiled with all the strength he could muster. Then in fluent sing-song Cathayan, he informed Yi Cai that his sister had commended the lowly Serpent’s love-making skills over the King Dragon’s.

Yi Cai never flinched. His eyes never deviated from Touma’s. With a resigned sigh, he motioned forward the woman at his side.

Strong meaty hands pinioned Touma’s shoulders from behind as she approached. Entering the light, he saw that she wore needles upon her person to complement the one she held between slender, calloused fingers. Many more needles, in fact, held back her hair and bound the folds of her form-hugging cerulean skirts.

Introducing herself with only a predatory curl of her lips, she slammed Touma’s head backwards with an open-palmed blow to his forehead. Stars flickered before his eyes as his spine reeled and contorted. Before he could recover, the same palm grabbed him by the throat to twist his head upwards. The needle jabbed downwards and out of sight. All this she did with her eyes closed, as though she could had awareness of every nuance of the world about her without relying on such a mundane sense as sight.

Electric lances of pain stabbed at the centre of Touma’s frozen chest. His windpipe spasmed, choking on its own phlegm.

“I imagine that an erudite person such as yourself would know all about pressure points, no? Including what might happen then if I let just a little bit of my power run down my needle?”

Blood thundered through Touma’s mind. Explosive light and colour patterns blinded the back of his eyelids. Barely could he even understand her stilted Common, though her voice sounded silky and delicious in his ears.

“For example, I am right now not only choking you but also paralysing your lungs and stopping your heart. Interesting effect, no?”

With every passing moment, tenuous reality slipped from his grasp. No longer could he feel the hands propping up his shoulders. Or taste her jasmine perfume tinting the pools of coppery blood in his mouth. Or bask in the stony chill reflecting their distaste and amusement back at him from all directions. Oblivion beckoned, cold and black and oh so welcoming...

A sharp word in guttural Cathayan commanded him back to life. In weary reluctance he obeyed, lungs heaving for breath. Simultaneously his chest fought to expel all traces of his last meal, whenever that had been, from his stomach. How cold the sweat lingered upon the clammy flesh of his brow. How bitter the defeat on the tip of his tongue?

“Just like that I could burst your heart. Explode your brain. Rob you of your sight, or even your manhood should I so desire. So it would be a good idea to play along, no?”

A conspiratorial smile glimmered on her lips, just for him. She stepped back to reveal once more Yi Cai’s dispassionate mien. Somehow the agony had cleared Touma’s vision. He could now make out the filthy stone of the cold cell, the locked hatch up in one corner, and the flight of straw-strewn steps that presumably led to freedom. Dried fluid caked his lips, his mouth, his chin, his throat. Fresh blood streamed from his nose, metallic and sickening. His thoughts wrestled for clarity, trying to keep him committed to the only course of action that would see him out of this torture chamber alive. Nails dug for purchase in the flesh of his palms. He had to stay strong. He had to stay silent.

“Perhaps now you would be more willing to talk?” Yi Cai was saying, fingers still steepled in front of him. Deliberately he crossed his legs as well, and the shadows of the lantern light morphed his sharp features into something out of an ogre’s nightmare. “What do you know about the Fragment?”

His body continued to rebel against any semblance of control. Unable to reply, Touma could only glare at his captor in unbridled hate.

“Nothing,” he snarled at last, the lie sweet bliss to balm his wounded pride. To his surprise, he even managed to gather enough bloody saliva upon his tongue to stain Yi Cai’s feet with a wad of frothing pink. Trepidation ran through the ranks of fighters as they sensed the satisfaction the Serpent gained from resisting still.

The faintest of smiles ghosted about the King Dragon’s lips. Regarding his prey, he savoured the moment. Many defied him, some more than most. The longer they resisted, the greater the pleasure he derived from the experience. They all broke in the end.

They all did.

“Zhen Ji,” he gestured again to the needle woman, settling back to peer expectantly at Touma. How long would this filthy Nipponese ronin last, he who held such vital information about the prize sought by all Ninedrakes?

She bobbed her head in respectful acknowledgement. Long black hair trailed like a funeral veil behind her as she stepped back into the feeble light. Her closed features even held some semblance of sorrow for him. She had witnessed them all before, both the defiant and the broken. Not one escaped the carrion worms once the King Dragon finished with them.

“Do not make it more difficult for yourself, no?” Her fingers, toughened by her choice of profession, reached down to caress his blood-caked cheeks. Never once did she open her eyes to meet his angry gaze. “We would not want to spoil such handsome features, no?”

He told her that he knew the perfect brothel for her. In far-western Salvar, operated by a devil spawned from the deepest pits of the Great Nether, famed for the way in which he would…

Heartless needles stabbed between his left ribs. Breathless, excruciating agony flooded his mind, until at last he blacked out.

But not for long.

“Master Serpent?”

Insistent hands slapped at his cheeks through the blood-tinted fog. Convulsions wracked his upper torso, reaction both to the extreme pain and to the wet chill caused by the contents of yet another chamber pot. He stank, of blood and excrement and bile upon his tongue, and he could sense his nose wrinkling in distaste.

“Ah, Master Serpent. I do apologise for the ill treatment. We haven’t had rain in months, you see, and clean water is precious to us.”

Rough hands steadied his face and forced open his eyes. The King Dragon peered into them curiously, gauging the level of Touma’s discomfort. A small frown furrowed his brow when he realised that the Serpent intended to deny him still.

“You seem intent on making this difficult for me. Commendable, indeed.” Yi Cai smiled without mirth, cold and cruel. His dark eyes narrowed to reptilian slits. “Unfortunately, even I do not really have the time to listen to lies and deceptions for hours on end. So I intend to allow Zhen Ji here to step up her interrogations. Do not worry. We will get to the bottom of your story yet.”

Somebody in the crowd behind him sighed. A sigh of sorrow, and yet, of strange excitement and expectation.

“Zhen Ji?”

This time the needle slipped in behind Touma’s ear. His skull went numb, contracting to a single point of blinding whiteness that dominated his concentration. Try as he might, he could not think of anything else. The truth, the voices whispered. Tell them the truth…

“So brave, so stubborn. I think I might fall for you, no?” she crooned into his ear. “What do you say, you and I, after this is all done and dealt with, no?”

She wasn’t finished. The needle jiggled for better position before a second and then a third pierced into the back of his neck. His body went into paralysis once more. Ice flowed like death through his veins. Agony ignited in his head. Without meaning to, he began to weep silent molten tears.

“Now, pray tell.” Yi Cai’s voice echoed with authority through the confines of his skull, shattering all resistance it encountered. “Who are you, what are you doing here, and what do you know about the Fragment?”

Touma bit his tongue in a desperate bid to stay silent. Blood seeped upon his grit teeth, coppery and rich. The needles dug deeper into skin and bone, their icy pressure increasing.

“Your name?”

“Nnnggh!”

“Why are you in Ninedrakes?”

“Arrrr… scou… scouting…”

“Again, your name?”

“Ka… ka…”

“Your name!”

“Kaburagi!” he gasped, broken.

“Why are you in Ninedrakes?”

“S… Scouting! Shibata!”

Yi Cai’s eyes narrowed. He’d expected Master Serpent to be the Man he sought, not an operative of his hated Nipponese rivals. But his disappointment almost immediately dissipated. His keen mind deciphered the unexpected opportunity his prisoner had just handed him on a silver platter. Backed by powerful mercantile interests in their inviolate homeland, the Shibata-gumi had encroached too far and for too long upon his territory. Perhaps now he had a chance for revenge… perhaps…

“The Fragment?” he asked, just to be sure, his voice as cold as the will flowing through Zhen Ji’s needles and into his captive’s body. For all the tattered robes he wore, the man named Kaburagi might as well have knelt naked before the King Dragon’s scrutiny. “What do you know of the Fragment?”

“NOTHING!” The anguished, blurted scream reverberated in the small cellar. Some of the King Dragon’s men cringed from the sound, eardrums aching. “Nothing at all. I beg you, I’ll do anything… anything…”

Deep heaving breaths, punctuated by tearful sobs, shuddered through Touma’s body. Zhen Ji eased her touch. One pale, bony hand wiped the worst of the bloody tears from beneath his eyes, making sure he saw the blooded needle she still gripped between fore and index fingers. If the Serpent had any strength left, he might have recoiled. Instead his gaze fixated upon it in frozen horror, his mouth far too dry to spit again.

“I’ll do anything… anything… take you there… hidden hideout… lead you in… if I don’t report in they’ll change it… please… no more no more no more…”

Yi Cai glanced in pity at the blubbering husk of a man. As always at this stage of an interrogation, the pleasure that had suffused him earlier slipped away from his grasp. Would that he could have spent more time with a man of Kaburagi’s stature, for Zhen Ji could make a strong man dance beneath her needles for hours, even days. What pleasure he could have enjoyed then!

But for now time was of the essence. And thus they’d had to speed things up somewhat.

He turned to his henchwoman one last time, crossing his legs as he sat back down upon the stool and steepled his fingers before him. Pallid cheeks flushed in ecstasy, she didn’t acknowledge his attention until he coughed gently to clear his throat. She had even given up the pretence of blindness, dancing brown pupils dilated in sheer exhilaration.

“Make sure he’s telling the truth,” he ordered. Zhen Ji licked her lips in sensuous rapture, unable to contain the ecstatic tremors shuddering through her slender shoulders. The shadows carved terrifying caricatures from Yi Cai’s features as he added sternly, “But keep him alive. He might still have some use yet.”

And so she did.

For four hours more they interrogated the Serpent in front of their captive audience. They jabbed, probed, and forced him in and out of consciousness. At least, for four hours that he knew about. Beyond that, they could have tortured him for all eternity and he would not have remembered anything.

But he could not add anything pertinent to the information he’d already given them.

Not even when they finally let him be, collapsed in a senseless heap upon the cold stone of the cellar floor, with only the creaking lantern – its wick burning low now – for company.

Which was just as well, really, since the words Touma had spoken were exactly the lies he had wanted them to hear.

[Whispers of Abyssion]

The crescent moon hung low in the night, winking at the watchman as if sharing an unspoken joke. The rooftops of Ninedrakes’s harbour district sweltered, arrayed like a city of toys below his folded legs. The denizens of the late hour drank and rutted in the narrow lantern-lit alleyways. Wave-wrinkled sea glittered beneath the distant stars.

Fingers caressing hempen bow string, Leon Hredgarsson squeezed his wiry frame onto the ledge of a second floor window. Even at this latest of hours the Mulberry Palace bustled with strident activity and the muted clack-clack of sparrow tiles. The denizens of Ninedrakes loved like none other to drink and to gamble. The King Dragon and the Shibata-gumi both owned many establishments around town to cater to such desires. The Mulberry Palace, biggest of them all, seated two hundred patrons and made thousands of taels every night. But even it could not satisfy the city’s rapacious appetite.

A shouting match on the streets below attracted Leon’s interest. He craned his neck for a better look.

“That man’s going to get his head bashed in,” he remarked to nobody in particular. Diligently, he returned his attention to polishing the laminated cypress and bamboo of his weapon. Three other yojimbo - mercenary bodyguards - cared for their weapons in the small straw-matted room alongside him. The eldest of their number, a gruff one-armed swordsman by the name of Toshi, paused in sharpening his blade on a damp whetstone.

“He who gets distracted by a fly loses sight of the dragon,” the veteran of a hundred skirmishes growled, quoting an ancient Nipponese proverb. Sombre and grave, he made the words seem almost poetic in spite of the drone of hungry mosquitoes and the grassy stench of tatami grown stale and mouldy in the sweaty climes. “Don’t mind the riff-raff. They’re only here for the pleasure of throwing away their hard-earned money on a couple of hours of gambling and company. Keep your eyes open instead for those who lurk, those who scheme, those whose eyes dart from corner to corner and who most definitely are not here for fun.”

“Of course,” Leon replied, inclining his head in polite agreement. He switched to fluent Tradespeak, allowing him to better express his disgust. “But if the fool dies on our doorstep, then the superstitious natives will complain that the gods have cursed us with bad joss, and where will their kami-forsaken money go then? To those smelly Cathayans up the street? To that westerner with his golden lips and his house of horrors? Pish on both of them, and pish on the fools who drink themselves into death for no reason but to spite us.”

A small smile played about his lips as he returned his attention to the streets below. Both Taka, dusting the last of the oil from his freshly-forged sword, and Kanade, checking the fixing of her dagger, wore similar expressions despite their concentration. Even Toshi struggled to conceal a resigned twinkle in his unscarred eye. Half-breed Leon might be, but none could deny he possessed a certain corrosive charm.

One of the establishment’s armed retainers waded into the crowded streets to separate the two combatants, and altercation faded away. The first fighter, a drunken sailor from the fleet of battered Matarkhan war-junks moored in the harbour, stumbled away with a dozen cuts and bruises. Doubtless he would wander down the street for further trouble to drown the defeat that had driven him from his homeland. He would not be the first of their number to welcome death at the point of a knife.

The second, a stocky pockmarked Cathayan youth with bad teeth and a scar across his jaw, wrapped a protective arm around his girl of the night. She in turn kicked out at a bystander to the fight, a long-limbed, serpent-featured man moving with excruciating care, as if carrying a bad wound.

For some reason, Leon felt his eyes drawn to the courtesan, to the tight lines of her clothing and to the long needles holding up her hair. Something about her seemed... wrong. Too clean, perhaps, given that nobody in Ninedrakes had been able to bathe properly in weeks. Or perhaps something about her bearing, something that...

As if sensing his suspicion, her face turned upwards towards the open window. Somehow he got the feeling that she met his gaze, though she closed her eyes tight against the night. Surprise flickered across her dark pretty features, followed closely by an enticing smile that crept across her full lips. A cold, hard, viciously enticing smile.

“Is something the matter, Leon?” Taka, youngest of the yojimbo, first noticed the change in their watchman. Leon’s body rode out of the window just that little bit further, fingers tightening on the leather grip of his bow as his eyes sought the danger in the night. The cold, hard, vicious pit in his stomach would not recede.

A moment later, he found what he sought.

“There,” he indicated, free hand reaching for the quiver of black-fletched arrows at his side. Two streets away, milling crowds parted before the insistent advance of a hundred steel-capped boots. The winding thoroughfares, tall narrow buildings, and steep hillsides of central Ninedrakes had hidden them from sight. The boisterous commotion below had further masked their approach. But now the advancing swarm of street fighters swallowed the lanterns whole, one after another.

In an instant Toshi stood at Leon’s side.

“Taka, tell Lord Shibata that the King Dragon wants trouble. Protect him with your life.”

The boy acknowledged his orders with a serious nod, sheathing his oiled blade and scurrying from the room. Kanade took his place at the window, needing only one cool glance at the advancing horde to read the situation. Her slender neckline, artfully exposed beneath raised hair, glowed in the moonlight. She was twenty-five, hardened by a life of sex and subterfuge, as beautiful and as deadly as the dagger tucked into her belt.

“Kanade, you and I will rally the men. With any luck, this is only one of their probes. They’ll bluster a little and then leave.” Both knew that this was unlikely. The King Dragon had promised the previous evening to work together to retrieve the Fragment, and to respect each others’ boundaries and operations in the meantime. Such flagrant disregard for his own words could only mean one thing. Outright war.

But both yojimbo had sworn their lives to their duty. As had Taka. As had...

“Leon.” The gruff swordsman, hard features creased in grim battle-readiness, turned to the half-blood archer. “Let loose when they reach the gates. Don’t hesitate. And don’t let them reach the threshold.”

“Done,” the bowman promised, reaching over his shoulder for the first of his arrows.

But uncharacteristic worry flickered through his mind as he turned back to the streets, the pit in his stomach venomous and frigid. And only then did he realise that the cold-featured courtesan no longer accompanied her scarred companion.

To where in the kami’s name had she disappeared?


***

The Mulberry Palace burned.

Leon stumbled in legless abandon through a paper partition, shielding his face from a blast of flame with hands that even now clenched his precious bow. The quiver on his back lay long empty. The silvery crescents of unsheathed steel mounted on both bow-limbs dripped blood into the hissing flames. Robes of grass-green cotton stank with sweat and the entrails of those he had felled in his desperate struggle to stay alive. In the end, he’d forced them to retreat from the threshold and to fire the establishment instead.

But not before they had accomplished their primary aim.

Taka lay dead on the smoking floorboards before him, fingers grasping the hilt of his blade still sheathed. His death mask might have been peaceful, if half-a-dozen stiletto-thin needles, each the length of his hand, had not pierced it without care for its youthful handsomeness. Beyond him, Masanobu Shibata - the Tiger of Ninedrakes and the head of the Shibata-gumi - wore a snarl embodying enough defiance and anger to impress the war kami themselves. No less than a hundred needles, each the equal of those buried in his bodyguard’s features, pinned his flesh to the straw mats in a display of gruesome ritual. No tatami ever made could soak up all the blood. Waterfalls of red spilt to the polished cedar floor in viscous, lethargic cascades.

He could do nothing else here.

Grimacing, Leon turned away from the twinned corpses of comrade and employer. Coughing bleary-eyed on the thick smoke, he crouched low to the floor. He had to fight free of the firetrap, to find Toshi and Kanade and to make good his escape. Last he had seen them, they had stood back to back in the courtyard just before the gates. Cathayan street fighters had swarmed like ants, around and beyond their desperate last stand.

Perhaps they had fought their way free. More likely than not, they had failed. But what chance did he stand of escaping the trap of Ninedrakes without their presence? If he could not find support, the remaining seconds of his life would be worth as little as a gnat in the firestorm.

Another man might have given up hope, resigned to his fate and to opening his stomach in one last blaze of glory. But such was not Leon Hredgarsson’s way. He would fight, and he would survive. No matter the odds, no matter the dishonour, he would never succumb to the call of the three-legged rook. He had always harboured such recalcitrance. As the half-blooded son of a Scarabrian adventurer and a Nipponese miko, he’d had to fight for acceptance from the moment he’d come squalling into the world.

Drought-desiccated wood disintegrated beneath the hungry flame. One agonising step at a time he stumbled through the burning halls, thanking Toshi for hammering their layout into his head as a condition for his employment. An entire room gave way with a thunderous crash, smothering the flames below and buying him enough time to escape down the narrow stairs. By the time he reached the ground floor, he found himself wading knee-deep through dead bodies. Some were mercenaries in Shibata’s pay, others the Cathayan street thugs who’d come to kill them. The vast majority were innocent patrons and willow girls caught up in the conflagration. The stench of burning flesh roiled in the back of his head. Distorted limbs, black and brittle like charcoal, jutted from torsos forced into writhing contortions impossible for the living to attain.

From here he had nowhere left to go. Even if he could somehow force his way through the inferno, the milling shadows on the other side would not let him through unscathed. As if to emphasise the trap a gurgling shriek fanned the hungry flames, cut abruptly short by the sound of metal biting into meat.

The only route was the stairs from whence he had come... and even those lay threatened by the regrouping blaze.

And then he realised that his clothes had caught fire.

He’d stayed still for too long. Shocked from his reverie, he shed his robes with immodest haste. Somehow he managed to salvage a scrap of cloth large enough to shield his mouth and lungs. In a continuation of the same motion he loped back up the burning stairs, moments before renewed gouts of flickering smoke obscured them from sight.

In blind, desperate haste Leon turned the corner, naked save for his loincloth and still running as fast as he dared. But the rest of the hallway lay in a mangled heap some three metres below. The far end of the Palace lay collapsed in a cascade of wooden wall and slate-grey roof tile. Only the kami knew how many bodies the smouldering debris crushed beneath its corpse.

Furthermore he now stood in stark silhouette against the burning building. Raised voices and pointed fingers alerted the milling gangs to his presence.

Before they could get a clear shot he stepped back into cover, wishing that he had a few more arrows for his bow with which to take out his anger. Between the fires below and the smoke above, the threat of collapse and the cordon of thugs, his chances of survival lessened with every lung-searing breath. Strands of thin long hair worked free of his headknot, singed and nearly catching fire from flying embers. Sweat glistened on flame-tanned skin. Ashen cinder piled on parched tongue. His muscles knotted, gasping for clean oxygen. Brown eyes cast about him for a reprieve, any reprieve.

He made up his mind. Backing away, he gathered his limbs beneath him in cramping tension.

Then he leapt.

A stray quarrel whistled past his ear, nearly tearing away the whole lobe. Another skimmed past his legs, so close that he could feel the hot breath of its passage against his hairs. The crescent moon winked down upon him once more in knowing jest.

He landed hard upon the fired-clay tiles of the rooftop opposite. Some broke into jagged pieces upon impact, cascading to the ground so far below. One such piece drew a deep line of red upon the sole of his foot.

If they had been even marginally wet, he would have slipped and fallen to his death. Rolling with the momentum, somehow he jammed his bladed bow into the tiles and halted himself before he fell bodily into the muddy alleys. For a moment he lay there gasping for breath. He’d forgotten just how cool and sweet fresh air could be, even that as muggy and as mosquito-infested as that of Ninedrakes. He inhaled in thankful haste, replenishing what the impact had knocked loose.

Staggered shouts from below brought him back to reality. He dared not stay still again, for they would corner him and gut him like a common sewer rat. He had to keep moving. He had to...

Cramp took full hold of his exhausted muscles. He doubled up in pain, unable to move, unable even to breathe again. Precious seconds ticked by as his legs spasmed outwith his control. The shouts of pursuit grew closer, and closer still.

“I don’t think you’re getting anywhere with a leg like that. No?”

Slowly he rose to a crouch, bringing his bladed bow to a defensive stance across his body. Gingerly he tested the weight on his good leg, in the hope that he could kick away if necessary.

The voice hadn’t quite startled him, but the sheer calm of its utterance forced Leon to reconsider his instinctive hostility. It belonged to a shadow perched higher on the rooftop, silhouetted against the moon, legs crossed and smoking in languid grace from an unlit kiseru. A heartbeat later, pounding feet from below shook the line of lanterns lighting the alley. A trick of the light gave Leon the chance to recognise the wounded bystander the courtesan had kicked aside, just before everything had gone up in flames. There was no mistaking the serpent-like features.

The seat in which the man now sat had been empty before he’d taken the leap. Leon could have sworn it.

“You...”

Tall and thin, the man stood up to stretch long limbs, favouring Leon with a curious half-smile. Slender fingers toyed with a feather as black as night.

“The pinion feather of a dark angel,” he explained, noting Leon’s interest. Something flashed overhead amidst the roiling soot and smoke. “Because you never know when you might need a helping hand.”

Almost playfully he tucked the feather behind his ear, where it stuck out in jaunty mockery of those who might deride his sense of fashion. Dark brown eyes mesmerised the half-blooded archer in their mirror-like depths.

“I’ve been watching you. I like you. I might even need you.” The curious half-smile grew in Leon’s vision. In the back of his head he could sense the Cathayan thugs closing their net around him. A barbed quarrel sang in warning past his enraptured face. “But you don’t have much time now... so I’m only going to ask you once.”

A circular motion of the man’s free hand revealed a gaping mirror beneath the eaves of the building adjoining the roof they now stood on. It shimmered on the painted wood like a curtain of light, offering Leon a tantalising glimpse of escape... or of damnation. But the fiery pain of his missing earlobe, the growing agony of his burned skin, would all count for nothing against the black chill of death.

And to hesitate was not Leon’s way.

“Would you like to come with me?” the Serpent asked, forked tongue glistening in the ash-strewn moonlight.

Leon’s karma had been kind to him so far that night - at least, he still lived where so many others now lay dead.

So which way would his luck fall now?

[Whispers of Abyssion]

“And?”

The Commissioner grimaced, his face silhouetted by the aftermath of the destruction. As always, he cut straight to the chase.

“The Mulberry Palace is gone. So’s much of the surrounding area. No water, so we had to demolish it as a firebreak. We’re counting fifty, maybe even a hundred dead. Shibata’s one of them.”

“Definitely?” Long slim fingers drummed in beating caress upon her temples. Heat and humidity, constant companions in this wretched town, seethed upon her satin-smooth skin. But still she projected complete infallibility. It came naturally to her as a ranking member of the Syndicate. From her initiation in the streets of Anebrilith to her favoured posting in the seething capital of the Oriental underworld, she had never once lost control.

“I saw his body myself. Missing little finger and all. No mistaking it. It’s him.”

“And do you have any idea who did it?”

“Needle work. Precision stuff, but overkill. Yi Cai’s blind dog.”

“His blind bitch, you mean,” the elf laughed in musical scale. Exquisite fingers left her temples and reached instead for a golden goblet of the finest Coronian red. Nowadays she found maintaining the mental link a thirsty task. Through it, she could almost taste the burnt wood and barbecued flesh of Shibata’s fallen empire in the back of her mouth. Shuddering in disgust, she focused instead on other, more pleasant sensations. The touch of wind from the sea, the brilliance of the stars on the horizon. The whisper of brackish water pooling deep beneath the hard-packed earth. Her mind calmed as she returned to the problem at hand, and her clairvoyant vision cleared. “Did you know she was one of Bai Luan’s?”

“A Jade Fang?” Obviously the Commissioner did not. “What’s she doing here? What’s he doing helping Yi Cai?”

“A former Jade Fang,” Tirithiel Aldaelwa corrected with an offhanded wave. Stifling a smile, she savoured the sweet moment of victory that came from knowing something that the other person did not. Never would she grow tired of that delectable flavour upon the tip of her tongue. “Now, what do we do about her?”

The Commissioner paused to gather his wits, well aware that she enjoyed testing him almost as much as she enjoyed surprising him. Things had gone surprisingly well for Ninedrakes and for himself after he’d thrown his towel in with the Syndicate. But that didn’t mean he could take anything for granted. One false slip, and he too would find himself feeding the fish at the bottom of the bay. Or worse.

“... let her be,” he said after a moment of thought. His gruff voice disguised reluctance, and he worried the rash on his arm with altogether too much vigour for her liking. No wonder, for the admission warred with his innate desire to bring the perpetrator, the murderer, to justice. Such too was a price he had to pay. Working with the Syndicate had, amongst other benefits, granted him perspective. He could see the bigger picture now. Thinking only of Ninedrakes’s affairs, the Jade Fangs were nothing more than a small fish in a big, big pond.

“Very well, Commissioner,” Tirithiel smiled, elfin features sculpted into an inscrutable mask. Inwardly she vowed that the bitch would not survive the week. How dare she disturb the harmony, the perfect poised balance, of her personal demesne? The Syndicate would punish her, severely, for the infraction.

And what did that say about one of her most valuable pawns in this cesspit of a city? Was her Commissioner, the Pantheon bless his crotchety demeanour and the conscience he went to great lengths to hide, growing soft? Was it time to remove him from his position and replace him with another? He had served her loyally and well for three years now, but that meant little in the grand order of things. After all, even the Least Race thought little of three solar cycles. Why should she, of the elder folk, place such value on that time?

For she was the owl, all-powerful and all-seeing, and they were all but rats to scurry at her whim.

She pressed the matter, betraying no sign of the treacherous precipice upon which he walked.

“And your suggestion, Commissioner?”

Again his features contorted in that delightful patrician scowl, creasing the expanse of his brow. Flecks of ash and soot marred his wispy blond hair. One of his underlings called a question in guttural Cathayan. Only the silence of the scorched rubble replied.

This time, though, he did not hesitate.

“Beta-phi,” he advised. “Y... we don’t want to fall behind in the search for the Fragment. But as sure as Haidia’s hot we’re not going to play by Yi Cai’s rules. Call it... I don’t know. Call it a statement of intent. Puncture the rot from that festering sore upon Ninedrakes’s underworld. I know you well enough, ma’am, to tell that you’ve never been happy with his presence here.”

Tirithiel did not miss the Commissioner’s unobtrusive but quite intentional change of words. The diplomat within her quite appreciated how he deftly he aligned himself with the Syndicate in the matter. She paused to consider his counsel, as if she had not already arrived at the same conclusion the moment he had brought her news of Shibata’s downfall. A pity really. For all Shibata’s gregarious excesses, he had played the game with true style and finesse. Unlike the target of beta-phi.

Yes, she decided. He is correct. I wish not to allow the sore to fester any longer. And as for the Commissioner himself...

“And how do you wish to distribute the spoils, Commissioner?”

His scowl deepened, etching deep rifts into his smoke-stained complexion. The scorn in his eyes struck her mind like lightning, and for a moment she almost admired his ogreish visage.

“Does it look like I care?” he growled, sour and discontent. In abrupt dismissal he released the memory crystal that allowed her to speak to him in his mind. His presence faded, and so did the sordid stenches and sensations that had churned her stomach so. She found fire such a crude weapon, barbaric and indiscriminate. Only an uncouth savage like Yi Cai would have stooped to using it.

In relief she breathed of her perfumed bedchamber. The faintest touch of her mind lit another incense stick, adding sick-sweet notes of hibiscus and pine to the air filtering through her lungs. Another delicate sip of the beautifully balanced Coronian red helped to restore her to a state of rippleless calm.

He would have to go, she realised. He wavered too dangerously on the line between ability and unpredictability. She never quite knew what he was thinking, no matter how she tested and probed him. So far he had served her well, but who knew when he would crack? When that dangerous conscience of his would get the better of him altogether?

And why had he not mentioned the obvious? Yi Cai’s attack on Shibata confirmed what they already suspected, that the King Dragon had long since found either the Man or the Fragment. Why else would he put to them such favourable terms? Given the sheer speed and brutality with which he had moved against his Nipponese rivals, how long would it be before she too found herself between the Cathayan’s claws?

Yes, she nodded again, allowing the final dregs of wine to linger upon her tongue. He will have to go. As soon as all this is done and dealt with, he will have to go.

Satisfied with her conclusion, she replaced the goblet upon her night desk and clapped her hands. Her dark-robed handmaiden materialised instantly at the door.

“Astraea,” she said with imperious grace. “I wish to call upon an old friend. Do fetch me my gowns?”

The flickering candle light wrung Tirithiel’s face into something icy cold and cruel.


***

The insufferable dealings of one Andrej Ivanovitch had always irritated the residents of Ninedrakes. Not that Cathay, and the Orient at large, did not deal in slaves. Indentured servitude, in one fashion or another, had always formed the bottom-most rung of any powerful economy. But rather the Salvic don did not approach his operations with enough circumspect respect. Few found themselves entertained by dragging their faces through excrement, though they were happy enough to add to the pile and to take full advantage of its benefits.

Many thus shed tears of public grief at the innumerable lives lost when the pall descended upon the ox’s den during the darkest depths of night. But when they had torn enough hair, when the prying eyes had moved elsewhere, they whispered that karma had come back to bite the presumptuous outsider. That if he had paid more attention to the gods and to his joss, if he had greased the fingers of the King Dragon and listened to the warnings of the Green-Eyed Goddess, he might have survived to the dawn.

Tirithiel Aldaelwa glided through the benighted corridors, as graceful as she might have walked the halls of her own manse or the gardens of the Governor’s Palace. Silvery hair drifted behind her like a floating veil. Robes of snow-white silk billowed in an unfelt wind. Not a scholar of human behaviour, she could not speculate upon the peculiar local attitude to slavery. Did it come from cultural differences emphasising a greater degree of respect towards the downfallen? Or did it result from a simple desire to brush life’s harsh truths below the carpet and forget about them? She simply delighted in the sensations playing up and down her bare arms, reflecting in how liberating it felt to befoul her own hands every once in a while.

Life was so cheap here in the East, after all. One never knew when an earthquake would bury entire cities beneath tonnes of mud and rock, or when the divine winds would spirit whole populations into oblivion. Disaster, plague, death. The people of the Orient treated them as they would their own existence: an old friend to welcome and accept, not a harbinger of doom. They called it joss, not luck; karma, not fate. She’d struggled to come to grips with the philosophy at first, but now she had to admit she savoured it more often than not.

For tonight she was the disaster, the plague, the death.

Inert bodies prostrated before her passage: thugs, prostitutes, clientele. Some had fallen during coupling, melded together like fleshy sculptures in their twos and threes and fours. Others lay prone in cloudy dens suffused with the smoke of opium and spice. All gave homage to their killer in swift painless death, delivered unto them by sleep-induced suffocation. The Jade Emperor himself would be hard-pressed to find so many bodies kowtowing before him in such absolute submission.

The odour of their stale sweaty deaths mixed with the rancid rutting reek of the brothel’s primary pursuit. Whilst not as pleasant as her perfumes, the stench intoxicated her. A heady, animalistic tint graced the scene in lieu of the coppery metallic blood scent that would usually have accompanied such carnage. It pleased Tirithiel that she could revel in such marvellous obscenity.

She smiled in glorious victory. Silver coronet gleamed in a passing moonbeam. Emerald brilliance glowed at the centre of the intricate carcanet of filigreed gold around her neck. Her skin shone from within, as though the stars themselves burnt in feverish temper within her veins. Ethereal glow twisted her beauty into something dug up from the mutated depths of the frozen Berevaran wastes.

Ninedrakes’s nightlife wafted in through the open windows, refusing rest even at this most unholy of hours, even after the earlier disaster at the Mulberry Palace. Gambling tiles chattered in busy activity, punctuated by the bellows of the winners and the wails of the losers. Gaudy flowers of the night called out in sing-song proposition to potential clients. Lantern-lit shadows stirred beneath the unsteady tread of coolies who would not sober up again before noon. Ninedrakes harboured a unique essence: too many bodies crowded into too little space, lingering with salt from the sea and the flavour of every vice imaginable. The city seethed and simmered like an unwashed boil, a centuries-old rock waiting to wash the buildings and the people clean.

But here in the ox’s den, all lay quiet and still. She thought of it as an antiseptic island of serenity amidst the oceans of muck, sculpted from the filth by her own hands. Her feet slipped like ghosts upon the sweaty-cool floorboards, peeping in shy step from the folds of her gown. She held her head as high as any royalty, the sway of her hips regal and luscious as she walked the pre-dawn lassitude. Nothing could spoil the supremacy of the moment. Not the dead rats in the rushes or the good wine spilt upon the soiled sheets. Not the fires blazing unattended or the overturned chamber pots behind the half-open garderobe door. Not the monotony of the oppressive cubicles in which they had taken advantage of the girls like so many herd beasts. Not even the workbenches upon which lay the special blend of spice used to keep them docile but sexually responsive.

Calm, even, measured steps led her to her destination. Andrej’s offices and adjoining living quarters occupied the entire top floor of the establishment. He had spared little expense in decorating them with the coarse furs and heavy oaken furnishings of his homeland. Gifts and curios from around the world completed the eclectic, ostentatious décor. On the floorboards lay a large rug woven by the finest in Fallien. The head of an Istralothian sabrefang mounted the wall opposite his desk. A set of exquisite Matarkhan wind chimes worth a small nation lay silent by the windows. Tirithiel allowed herself a small frown. The rug clashed with the teak walls, and Andrej had left the wind chimes to sweat in humid sunlight when tradition and common sense decreed he should store them in the shade.

But her primary profession was of a purveyor of knowledge rather than of priceless goods. She let herself indulge no more than a passing interest in the insipid tastes of Andrej Ivanovitch.

The man himself had fled in a hurry, leaving drawers of valuables strewn across the floor. He had even left a cunning escape hatch half ajar by the corner bookcase. But she felt no emotion beyond mild disappointment at having let her prey escape. The thrill of the hunt, and her success in purging his operation from her domain, more than made up for that one little failure. Andrej was not the type of man who could rebuild after such a defeat. It would not be long before his corpse floated amidst the debris in Ninedrakes’s harbour. His superiors in Vorgruk-Stokes would catch up with him, or one of his many enemies - slave or otherwise - in the city itself would finish the job.

And in any case, his survival or death meant little to her. Neither did what little information he himself might carry in that thick skull of his. She could find out far more, with far less effort, by locating what she sought.

Inch by inch, crack by crack, her arcane sight swept the room. She probed every floorboard, every wall panel, every niche or hiding place he might have stored something important. Even Andrej had not been foolish enough to store anything important in his public office. But before long she struck gold in his bed quarters - a panel in the west wall, the size of a small window, discernible by its hollowness. Tracing the catch mechanism in her mind, her magic easily popped it open.

A stack of ledgers rewarded her efforts. A quick perusal ascertained that they detailed the movement of every coin beneath Andrej’s jurisdiction over the past three months. The right buyer would pay a fortune for such documents. Most likely she would even be able to use the information herself.

Smiling lightly, she gathered the crisp parchments in her arms.

Then she retraced her steps back the way she had come, sampling and savouring every moment with as much heady bliss as her inwards journey. The Commissioner awaited her pleasure near the entrance, sweltering in the muggy heat despite that the sun had yet to rise. A handful of bleary-eyed subordinates arrayed in formation behind him, uncomfortable with her presence.

She met his uncertain glance with but one short, sweet phrase.

“Tidy up behind me, would you?”

[Whispers of Abyssion]

Too big for the back alleys, the blinded brute blundered from flimsy wall to flimsy wall. Ramshackle eaves leaked wan moonlight upon his flushed features, pressing in upon him in a claustrophobic tangle of driftwood. Suppurating filth and the acrid stink of fresh urine clung to his bare feet. Gold-encrusted fingers clenched tight about a pair of oaken strongboxes. He had salvaged them in adrenaline-fuelled desperation just before the elf whore’s death fog seeped into his bedchamber. His slave, an ebony shadow looming even larger than he, followed him with infinite grace and silence despite the enormous chest of wealth hefted over his left shoulder.

“Pox on that bitch,” Andrej Ivanovitch swore in florid fluency. A stacked pile of crates half-blocked the crossroads in front of him, formed by the intersection of one cramped alley with the next. He barrelled straight through them in a clumsy cacophonic crash. “Pox on those worthless swords who cudnae just kill her. Pox on this poxy town. Pox on the bloody fools who sent me out here to die. Pox on the Man, pox on the Fragment, for stirring up this ruddy mess. Pox...”

The hidden pothole wrenched his legs away from beneath him. A mouthful of muck erased the rest of his curse. At length he resurfaced for air, sputtering incoherence. His slave offered a dark-skinned hand, but he batted it away and continued his angry tirade.

“Pox on you, too, slave!”

He’d had no warning of Tirithiel’s treachery. He’d only just escaped with the freshest of his acquisitions in tow, and only because he’d been inspecting it before putting it on the market the next day. Bright teeth and white eyes gleamed at him like pearls, from atop a body of pure corded muscle that glistened with sweat. Only a scrap of loincloth protected it from the humid night. Andrej had thought to pawn it off to a willing bidder as a farmhand or an oar slave. Now, in the unfortunate absence of those better suited to the job, it would have to buttle for the fugitive don.

Pound for pound, few in the populous but chronically malnourished Orient could match Andrej for muscle. The presence of a slave who did discomforted the Salvic expatriate more than he dared admit. Especially when his only protection was a slender dirk stashed in haste into his trousers belt.

Still, it seemed content to plod along behind him, shouldering without complaint the massive chest containing what else remained of his worldly valuables. Andrej had been unhappy in particular about leaving behind his Matarkhan wind chimes. They’d made the perfect sycophantic accompaniment to an evening spent breaking in a new whore who took his fancy. But as long as he had the wealth that the chest represented, he could survive. He could buy a new plot of land, build a new pleasure house. The next batch of flesh arrived by barge next week. If he could even borrow a place by then...

Unseen gazes crawled through the night, alighting on his skin like spawning turdroaches. The King Dragon paid for hundreds of Eyes in the alleys of Ninedrakes, and where his Eyes lingered his Fists strayed not far behind. Andrej knew that he had to get off the streets. He had to reach a safe haven where he could regroup and plan for the future. Out here he stood as much chance as the lone herd beast pursued by the hunting wolf pack.

He counted himself fortunate that the Marble Mansion, Ebrahim Sassani’s estate, lay not too far away. The Fallienese kingpin maintained many factories and warehouses in Ninedrakes, as well as the means to defend them. And was Andrej not Ebrahim’s single largest customer in these forsaken lands? Did he not fill the cartel’s coffers with Vorgruk-Stokes gold, buying prodigious quantities of spice to tame his pleasure women and bulk up his muscle flesh?

Ebrahim would lend him aid. Andrej was sure of it.

“Hurry it up, slave,” he snarled, venting vicious fear and frustration at his property. The permanent white smile in the face of dusky black grated on his nerves. When this was all behind him, Andrej resolved, he would concentrate on the pleasure side of the business. Exotic girls from all four corners of the world. Wealthy men everywhere always searched for fresh honey pots into which to dangle their wicks. Beautiful women with big tits would wait on him, not some freakish and dangerous improvised butler. To Haidia with the muscle trade, they could…

The first dagger swept in from on high, a false crescent moon flickering in the shadowy eaves. Instinctively Andrej freed the strongboxes from his iron grip, lashing out at the body behind it. His meaty fist connected only with thin night air. But the muscular forearm that followed in its wake – thicker than an oak trunk from his native Salvar – slammed fortuitously into his assailant’s neck. Brittle bones snapped like twigs. Momentum did the rest, carrying the broken body away from him until it splintered a nearby wall of driftwood planks.

The second dagger stabbed upwards at his vulnerable stomach less than a moment later. But the slight delay gave Andrej all the warning he needed. This time his giant palm grabbed hold of the would-be assassin’s face. The thinnest of shocked, terrified screams issued forth from between his fingers, until the crunch of cracking bone cut it off. Andrej sent the skull clear through the solid brick wall to his left, and the thunderous crash silenced it forever more.

“Poxy assassins,” the Salvic ox snarled, shaking the worst of the dripping blood, cranial gore, and tell-tale oily black hair from his fingers. Tinny blood mingled with the urine-soaked ground and the sweat on his upper lip, filling his lungs with the disgust he felt. “And that poxy Cathayan fornicator of cows and pigs.”

His evil-eyed dead-fish glare combed the vicinity. But only restless shadows and the reverberating echoes of his curses returned the compliment. Andrej hawked and spat, deft as any street beggar. Then he retrieved his strongboxes from the cloying mud and gestured in anger at his ever-beaming slave.

“Here you. We keep moving, or we end up like them.”


***

“That poxy elf and that poxy Cathayan git are in bed together, I tell you. On the Saint’s tits, they’re planning to rape us blind.”

“I see.”

Ebrahim Sassani’s bulging silver eyes darted around the room. They flitted over Andrej’s fuming face, and then over the large coffer still hefted over the slave’s shoulders. At length they settled upon the magnificent moustache of his manservant, bent double in the midst of adroitly replenishing the empty teacups. Faint motes of jasmine and myrrh, the favoured incenses of the Fallien mercantile class, whispered through the gossamer veils that curtained darkness from light. A delicious tinkle of flowing water cooled the air, emanating from the courtyard fountain fed by his private well. The stone walls of his manse sweated wet tears into the sweltering humidity. But he had built the palace to capture every last shred of breeze filtering from the sea. On nights like these, he blessed his judicious foresight.

“I see, indeed,” repeated the fly, rubbing his hands in thought. News of the King Dragon’s assault on the Mulberry Palace had already reached his ears. Was it truth, then, that Tirithiel and the Syndicate had thrown their weight behind Yi Cai?

“We should join together, you and me.” Andrej gestured expansively at the open strongbox, its treasures heaped in piles of gold and gem on the gleaming hand-polished mahogany tabletop. A less charitable person might have called it tribute, or a bribe. Andrej preferred to think of it as an investment. “Alone, she would swallow us whole. Together, we can make even that poxy whore hesitate.”

“Hm.”

A tapestry of rich purple and bright yellow dyes occupied place of honour on the far wall. Thick woollen rugs wove intricate patterns upon floor of polished stone. His manservant retreated to the pantry through doors of etched glass. Andrej did make a good point. They stood a far better chance of survival together. Even Tirithiel would then hesitate before launching an attack on the Marble Mansion. Unless she had further tricks up her sleeve?

“Give me a warehouse. Four walls and a roof, anything. Somewhere to put the next shipment of whores. Somewhere for them to work out of whilst I get my feet back beneath me. Take what’s on the table as collateral, and I’ll pay rent out of earnings. I’ll pay for the spice as usual too. In fact, give me enough space, and I’ll…”

The swirling pattern of the tiles upon the ceiling guided Ebrahim’s circular logic as he allowed his mind to meander from Andrej’s verbose vision. Flames flickered upon the chandelier arms high above his head, feeding upon the honeyed scent of moulded beeswax. Shadows stretched from priceless vases and bric-a-brac, dancing with every breath of breeze. Again, Andrej did argue his position well. It made sense to pursue a close business partnership with his biggest customer. Unless this was all Tirithiel’s trap, baited to draw them into mutual destruction?

Thought-lines etched sinuating valleys into the Fallienese’s brow. His needle-like glare pierced far further than the plush purple cushions of the divan upon which Andrej sat. Every bead of sweat spilling down his cheek reminded him that he had little time to make up his mind. He rubbed the rolls of fat around his stomach in absent thought. His guest, engrossed in a bloated vision of his future, didn't notice.

“… and, of course Ebrahim, you shall share in all the profits we stand to reap.”

“Of course,” Ebrahim murmured agreeably, nodding in a smile that reached neither his eyes nor his taut pinched lips. “Drink, my friend. Do drink.”

Andrej obliged, sipping with a grimace the hot herbal brew Ebrahim favoured. Usually he found it too light for his taste, bitter on the tongue and lacking the heady mix of sugar and alcohol of his usual pints of mead. But even he knew better than to outright refuse the hospitality of his host. And in truth the chase had given him a dreadful thirst. His slave’s hoarse rasping breaths only parched his throat even further. He sipped again, and the sip turned into a scalding gulp as he drained the dainty cup in a single draught.

Was that a hint of honey in the brew, making it far more palatable to his taste buds? Whatever it was, he found it quite pleasant. As if by magic Ebrahim’s manservant materialised at his side for another refill, and Andrej didn’t resist. But the big man’s blue-eyed glare remained firm and focused on his host.

Ebrahim met it with filmy pupils and drooped lids, his expression sunken and opaque. With all the care in the world, he allowed a small smile to touch the edge of his pale purple lips.

“Ah, my friend.” He spread his hands wide, his movements deliberate and fluid like the opening of a sluice gate. “Such a beautiful future you sketch out before me, the strokes of a master painter upon a canvas of time. And yet I cannot help but ask myself… Ebrahim, dear Ebrahim, where is my friend Andrej’s assurances that said beautiful future will ever come to materialise? A box full of baubles, even baubles as pretty as these, is not enough to convince me.”

Andrej’s mien darkened, storm clouds gathering over Salvic steppes.

“My friend,” he returned, deliberately mimicking Ebrahim’s choice of phrasing. “It would be a sad day indeed when old friends abandon each other to the…”

The big man stiffened. The world through his eyes spun and whirled. His head throbbed in time with every heartbeat. Pulsating numbness speared through his mind. The day had taken much out of him, and he must have been more tired than he realised, if…

“My friend, my friend, are you well?”

Ebrahim spoke his words with gentle, mild reproval. But in his dying moments before the blackness claimed him, Andrej realised exactly where he’d seen that sunken and opaque expression before. On the face of a scavenger eyeing a fresh corpse. In the eyes of a hunter as it loped towards helpless prey.

His realisation did him little good. He had already slumped back into the plush cushions, mouth half-agape in a drowsy snore. His powerful, muscular arms lay limp at his side, as lax as any newborn babe’s.

In truth, for a man in his position Andrej had put forth a decent proposal. He realised that he could no less avoid handing over control of his business to Ebrahim than he could have survived on his own in hostile Ninedrakes. So he thought to make himself subservient to Fallienese whims, strengthening his ties with the spice that fuelled his trade and insuring himself against any further loss. He built a platform to one day regain what he lost, excusing himself to his handlers at Vorgruk and Stokes in the process. Ebrahim, in turn, secured his hold over his greatest customer and stood to make a large profit from his share of the business.

Too bad for the ox, then, that the fly had already made up its mind.

For Ebrahim Sassani knew that he could survive the loss of Andrej’s friendship and custom. He could even survive his erstwhile friend withdrawing altogether from Ninedrakes. But he could not survive Tirithiel if the elf-whore dared to turn her full wrathful attention to him.

In the end, thus, the Fallienese merchant never really had much to choose between his next course of action. No matter what temptations Andrej dangled in front of him.

“I am afraid your master has fallen asleep on me,” Ebrahim told the ebon-skinned slave. His shrill whispers slid from the smooth contours of his furniture, the epitome of calmness. He shrugged sadly, eyes lost in the steaming cup of spiced tea that his manservant had poured for Andrej just in case. “Asad here shall show you the quarters where you and Andrej should stay. Perhaps you will keep watch over him for me?”

Blank white eyes stared back at him in half-witted stupidity. The slave allowed Ebrahim to divest him of the massive coffer of wealth, broad smile never leaving his weather-beaten features. Then the moustachioed Asad hefted Andrej over one shoulder, leading them both away into the depths of the Marble Manse.

Alone once more Ebrahim settled his great weight back in his chair, hands poised once more over his chest. Silver eyes drooped as they descended once more into thought.

Now. How best to proceed?

[Whispers of Abyssion]

“Ah. Zhen Ji.”

“Master Yi.”

She bowed low to his back, slim hands clasped in the folds of her skirt. Strands of silky black hair trailed down her cheeks, towards hardwood floorboards smoothed by the passage of those who had walked before. Fragile breasts trembled in sensual time to her every breath. Pink flush spotted her drawn cheeks. Her eyes never opened to the night, but still they basked in the aftermath of adrenaline and euphoria.

“Almost a shame that we had to dispose of that tiger Shibata. He was, for all his devilry, a worthy adversary.”

The King Dragon’s fingers lay steepled upon his folded legs. He sat on a hard cushion in his customary position before the open window. One hand at his side clasped the thin black tie he had worn about his neck. A whisper of night breeze ruffled his immaculate groomed scalp.

This residence was a particular favourite of his, situated on the tip of a sheer precipice overlooking Ninedrakes and its harbour. From here he could keep an eye on every aspect of his operations. Weapons running, smuggling, and piracy on the high seas. Gambling, counterfeiting, and dens of opium and vice in the city proper. Every last lantern dancing on the tapestry so far below belonged to him. And for every lantern he had ten pairs of Eyes and two Fists ready to do his bidding, to die at his whim.

“We have done it, no?” Zhen Ji straightened as a shaft of delicate moonlight broke through the racing clouds. Moments later it disappeared again, but not before Yi Cai glanced over his shoulder at her slender silhouette. “There is no shame, no?”

“You are beautiful, precious. Beautiful and cruel.” Affection touched his voice, but his eyes remained hard and cold. Zhen Ji’s shoulders melted beneath their scrutiny. “Now perhaps you should tell me what has happened since.”

“Of course, my master.”

She sidled closer, shapely thighs showing through the slits in her skirt. But he turned away from her mid-stride, features narrowed and clouded in thought. Her advance halted two paces from his motionless form.

“The Syndicate has moved against Andrej and Vorgruk-Stokes. According to the Lord of Beggars, Tirithiel herself took to the field to take him out. Andrej escaped to the Marble Manse, where it is our belief that Ebrahim will shelter him until…”

“No.”

“My master?” Trepidation touched the tip of her tongue. One fine plucked eyebrow arched upwards, questioning the creases in his suited back. The silence as he thought disoriented her, until at last he spoke again.

“No,” he repeated, breathing light and clear into the night. Muggy, incense-tinted air filled his lungs. She could picture his closed eyes, the pinch of thought between his brows, his fingers steepled as ever in his lap. “Would you, Zhen Ji, offer succour and aid to a defeated foe in these troubled times?”

She considered the problem briefly.

“I cannot say,” she admitted a moment later, eyelashes fluttering in coquettish admittance of defeat. “Some might, if only to absorb their foe’s power. But Ebrahim and Andrej were close partners, no? I am afraid that I do not know enough of the man to judge his reaction.”

The King Dragon grunted in soft respect for her graceful admission.

“I commend you for your devotion and your skills, precious. I will not begrudge you for misreading Ebrahim’s response. But know that he is a forager. An opportunist. A self-serving scavenger who will hesitate not to sell out a weakened friend for great profit. Andrej lacked the brains to see this when he went running to the only person he felt he could trust. But I…”

He thought a little more.

“No. Ebrahim would have plied his guest with spice, then wrapped him up in chains as an offering to Tirithiel in exchange for his own safety. Not the smartest of moves, but likely he feels he has little other chance to ride out this storm. Too bad for him, then.”

Problem solved, he shifted away from the open window to face his subordinate. An appreciative eye ran down supple curves enhanced by skin-tight silk. Gold rings glimmered upon his fingers in a surge of fiery pleasure.

“You let… Kaburagi, was it? You let him free again?”

“As you commanded,” she replied in sultry supplication. “We track him even now, let him drift to see if he managed to hide anything from us. The Mulberry Palace is gone, no? So anybody that makes contact with him will die before the hour is past. And if he tries to leave Ninedrakes…”

“Very good.” Yi Cai nodded, baring tea-stained teeth in a dirty smile. But once again his eyes never softened. “Now, do you have any further information about the Man?”

“Only rumours, my master. Sightings in the dog-eaters’ quarter, a whisper in the hillside shacks. One of our foremen at the docks swore that he saw a suspicious foreigner entering one of his warehouses. We spent the entire afternoon tearing the entire block down, with no luck. Would you like to see the deceitful tongue we harvested instead?”

The King Dragon shook his head, smiling in wry amusement. “And the Fragment?”

She grimaced, unhappy to bear bad tidings. “Even less, I am afraid. Some whisper that it has the power to devour whole worlds with but a single swing. Others that it can only disenchant rimewood staves by the light of a full blood moon. One blind old beggar swore to me that it was a magical cure for haemorrhoids and arthritis. I dared not ask whether it could do anything for blackened gums and bad body odour as well...”

“We must find it. The attack on Andrej held further meaning than just to purge the city of a pustulent blister. If she finds any more reason to suspect us... we must utilise its power to counteract hers, for otherwise we remain as helpless as mice in her shadow.”

“Of course, my...”

The only warning she had was a faint scrabble from beyond the window, a scrabble that had no right of passage there. Yi Cai’s eyes flickered upwards, but by then Zhen Ji had already sprung into motion.

The first berserker crashed through the ceiling two paces to the King Dragon’s left. It rebounded to its feet in culmination of the same motion that had brought it through two layers of reinforced hardwood as well as the ceramic tiles on the roof. The muscular bulk of what used to be an orc, two metres tall and almost as broad, hurtled towards them with unnatural swiftness. A rusted iron claw replaced its right forearm, a flail of linked bronze chains its left. Scars criss-crossed its flesh, naked to the eye save for a token loincloth across its groin and a sealed helm obscuring its face. She could sense the gruesome markings even through her closed eyelids, as clearly as if she could see them direct. The monks and hermits of the Thirteen Sacred Mountains wore similar tattoos to enhance their mystical powers, save they did not inscribe them into their muscles.

Faster than thought the first of her needles leapt into her hands. Faster still, the berserker lashed out with the chains in place of its left arm. In unceremonious haste she threw Yi Cai out of the way, away from the window and towards the only door to the private chamber. With the same movement she swayed into the attack. Bronze links gouged great gashes into the hardwood floor, scattering sharp splinters across her bare legs and arms. But she emerged from the shard storm with needles primed, ducking below the berserker’s enraged swipe of its claw only to pop up into its face. One stabbed low into the pain point between heart and lungs. The other reached for the abomination’s neck to cut off circulation to its brain.

The first snapped upon layers of thick muscle. The second failed to penetrate deep enough, jutting in incongruous exposure from the side of the berserker’s neck just below its helmet.

Metal chains tore across the back of her legs, knocking them out from beneath her. The claw rose high, poised for the killing blow.

Then the berserker staggered forwards, barely missing crushing her head beneath feet the size of a large dog as she rolled out of its path. Yi Cai stood in the doorway, meteor hammer buzzing as it returned to his hand on its corded string. The weighted metal hesitated not in lashing out a second time, parrying the whiplashing chains as they flailed past Zhen Ji’s face. Impact tore the string from Yi Cai’s hands, and he grimaced in abrupt pain as the force dislocated his little finger.

The big man loomed over him, cutting off what little light filtered through the open door. He’d come to take everything away again, everything that belonged to him, to him, his precious...

“Window,” he grunted, the unflustered cool of his usual persona wavering beneath unaccustomed pain. But he reached without hesitation for the next weapons on the rack.

Her attention snapped to his warning, in time to catch notice of the second rusty claw as it reached for purchase over the ledge. There was no mistaking the distinct rasp of steel on wood, nor the unmistakable stink as another unwashed body joined the fray. How much longer did they have?

Not long enough.

A faceless, soulless iron helmet lunged over the sill, followed closely by another pair of massive green shoulders. With no battle cry beyond the thunderous crash as it tore through the window frame like a paperweight through paper, it launched itself forwards…

…. only to lurch back again as Zhen Ji caught it flush in the throat with a flying knee backed by the momentum of a running leap and all her weight. Landing on the balls of her feet, she followed with a lightning-fast whirlwind of blows to its neck, to its shoulders, to its knees, to its ankles, keeping it off balance and reeling. One step, then another, it fell backwards before the onslaught.

“Zhen Ji!”

Senses like honed daggers, and her master’s support, more than made up for her blinded eyes. Screaming in equal parts frustration and ecstasy, she threw herself out of the way. Rusty metal cut the air behind her, then lashed at her legs as she continued her roll. She spat blood and stray hairs from her mouth, feeling silk tear as it snagged on a stray splinter. Then, abruptly, she ran out of room. Broken timbers dug into her feet. The solid wall at her back laughed at the claws rising high above her.

“Ay!”

Fire barked, tearing the night asunder. A hundred stone pellets tore open the chest of the berserker close to the window. It staggered backwards, reeling in mute pain.

Two spears drove into the bloodied mess of muscle and bone, lodging fast in sick impact. Yi Cai grasped their hafts with the strength of the desperate, ignoring the agony of his visibly misaligned finger. One of the spears smoked from a bamboo barrel slung beneath the blade. The other bore a similar barrel, still intact. The King Dragon snarled, gunpowder smoke swirling beneath his nostrils.

“I do not recall inviting you into my home.”

The second blast nearly split her eardrums. Point-blank against the berserker’s body, the pellets breathed fire through yielding tissue. Artistic splatters of blood sprayed in vibrant mess across window frame and wall. The stink of ruptured entrails overrode the upturned incense sticks in the far corner of the room. The berserker’s muscular arms spasmed once, flailing at the window threshold.

“Get. Out.”

Yi Cai reached out with one long leg and thrust at the gory ruin of what had once been a solid wall of flesh. It gave way with a soft squelch beneath his bare foot. Then the pressure told.

Silent as a falling star, the berserker plummeted towards the lantern lights of Ninedrakes so far below.

Recovered from the display of fire and acrid smoke, the other foe loomed behind him, claw raised for the killing blow.

Zhen Ji rose from the floor, transferring every last shred of momentum into her legs. Black hair cascaded in unbound glory over her eyes, granting her the appearance of a vengeant spectre. Almost daintily her foot flicked out at the abomination’s neck. Connecting with the needle already embedded there, it drove the slender steel another half-foot into the gnarled muscle-bound neck.

The berserker lurched. Limbs jerked at random. Lashing chains reached out at Yi Cai’s feet, as he retreated to the weapons rack and took up a pair of hook swords with bladed guards. Swiftly he slammed them down into the floor, catching the links of the chain in their grip, his eyes no longer surprised but dangerous and angry. Heaving with all his might, he drew the abomination off balance just as it brought its claw up to eviscerate Zhen Ji. The opening presented itself for her.

From the depths of her sleeves she slipped a further pair of needles, longer and thicker than the majority of those secreted about her person. Their serrated arrow heads glinted in another stray shaft of moonlight as she sprung one final time to the attack. This time it illuminated her not as an avatar of beauty, but rather as a harbinger of dark and deadly doom.

Both needles speared into the berserker’s neck, just below its wrought iron helm, one from each side.

Five hundred pounds of muscle, metal, and bone fell limp beneath her frail hands. Blood spurted from punctured carotids, courtesy of its still-pumping heart, but her weapons had snipped its spine in two. Aside from occasional jerky lolling of its head it stood there lifeless, a grotesque green-skinned caricature of life at its most virile. Then gravity took over, and it crashed to the floor with earth-splitting force.

Breathing heavily, she stood victorious over its prone form. Wiping blood from a split lip Yi Cai moved to join her, allowing his hook swords to clatter to the floor.

“Ebrahim’s assassins,” he remarked as if reciting facts from a text, composed in spite of the sweat staining his shirt. “Arcano-flagellants. Lobotomised warriors from the South Seas. Berserkers programmed only to kill. Ebrahim’s servants.”

“Why here?” Zhen Ji’s thin features betrayed both confusion and concern. Had her employer judged wrongly? If so…

The gears in Yi Cai’s brain whirred. Almost audibly they clicked to a conclusion.

They invaded his home. They intruded upon his privacy. They came to take everything, everything that he held precious...

“My study. Now.”

Zhen Ji needed not to see his adamantine black eyes. Heedless of her torn skirts, bruised limbs, and dishevelled hair, she sped from the ruined pleasure room without further delay. It took her barely the space of a heartbeat to cover the distance to Yi Cai’s nearby office and the valuable papers stored there. But even then her battle-honed senses missed the shadow slipping from the far corner of the room, carrying with it a sheaf of valuable papers her master would later discover missing.

“My lord? My lord, we heard…”

The entire commotion had spanned a minute, perhaps two. Yi Cai’s Fists, deliberately kept away from the room while Zhen Ji debriefed, had responded to the commotion with commendable swiftness. It didn’t stop him from lashing out at them with both hands and tongue. All the while his brain sifted through the consequences of the night’s violence. He didn’t like what he saw. He didn’t like what the direct assault on his person boded.

It was all he could do to promise himself that somebody would pay for this insolence.

Somebody would die.

[Whispers of Abyssion]

Rosy dawn tinted the eastern horizon, dainty rouge upon star-speckled black velvet.

Silence settled upon Ninedrakes. One by one the street lanterns fell dark, their fuel exhausted. The wind shifted to a steady south-easterly, escorting caravans of billowing clouds across inscrutable navy depths. Swift as an arrow it rattled through fire-gutted gambling palace, pacified brothel, and shattered hilltop villa. The fresh scent of the sea soothed the vices of the previous night as at long last they gave way to remorse and regret. Sparrows and seabirds scavenged in the dusty streets, mocking the bleary-eyed nomads whose downcast faces and hurried strides betrayed their guilt at staying out so late.

One such nomad stopped on the hillside, cocking his head as if not quite sure of his bearings. Then he stepped discreetly into the threshold of a nondescript ramshackle hut, one amongst many. Bamboo blinds stirred behind a grimy window. Hidden eyes looked over the newcomer, studying him for signs of treachery or subversion. Satisfied there were none, the rickety driftwood door jolted open a notch.

Leon Hredgarsson, lately of the Shibata-gumi and now companion of the serpent he knew only as Kaburagi, slipped inside like a shadow. Fresh bandages wrapped his flame-tanned skin, one ear muffled by a heavy cotton pad tied in place with lengths of twine. A grunt of effort sealed the bare dirt floor within from the onrushing sunrise. Terrapin gave him a nod from his seat by the window, the dreadlocked Sindhian tapping the stock of his repeater crossbow in languid greeting. In one shadowy corner Kaburagi crouched in meditation, the hilt of his katana propped up against his head. In the other, beneath the light of the single dim candle, Polecat and Auroch played Blind Man’s Bluff. It came as no surprise that the bored weasel-faced businessman seemed to be fleecing the half-ogre.

“Led ‘em a merry palance, I suppose?” Polecat slammed four battered aces to the dirt in triumph. But his bodyguard’s prize-fighter features remained blank, and he grimaced in disgust. Intense scrutiny transferred to his grimy, uneven fingernails. “Bet ‘ey’ve got their knickers in a twist, lookin’ for ya na.”

“Pick on somebody your own size,” Leon snapped in terse annoyance. He gave the dirt-faced businessman nary a second glance as he turned his back.

“Brin’ it, nappy face,” Polecat grinned with ease, gesturing towards the young half-Nipponese with a crooked finger. His other hand gathered the cards in an untidy pile before him. “Go on, try yer duck.”

Leon forced himself to pay no attention to Polecat’s mocking challenge. His head ached with fatigue and the whirlwind suddenness with which he’d had to adapt to his new circumstances. Instead he unstrung quiver and bow from his back and turned to his new employer.

“It’s far too quiet out there. After what happened last night…”

His voice, though hushed, carried a hint of urgency that even he could not quite place. Kaburagi’s eyes fluttered open despite their exhaustion. The fingers upon the hilt of his blacksteel blade clenched. The vein in his temple drew taut. The feather upon his chest fluttered in a chilly draught.

“Rumours?” he asked.

“Nothing new,” Leon answered in his halting Tradespeak. “Gossip’s torn between why so many Matarkhan refugees stream from the south, and what destroyed both the Mulberry Palace and the Salvic whorehouse in a single night. Nothing to suggest why none of the King Dragon’s Fists are combing this hillside for us.”

“Chasin’ ya ‘round town under the bloomin’ impression – why they ‘ave it, I dinna kna – that you have information, summit about the bleedin’ Fragment? That’s wot they’re doin’.” Oblivious to the tension crackling like static electricity on a thick rug, Polecat continued to collect the cards into some semblance of order. The cry of a dawn hawker sounded in the distance, sudden and sharp. Somewhere closer a lone cockerel answered. “Or could be catchin’ their noggins? ‘eaven and ‘ell, given all that went down ah’d be too.”

The sharp-featured Coronian paused, hawked, then spat a thick gob of snuff-stained spittle into the corner of his barebones hideaway. The nearby candle flame flickered in annoyance, sending angry shadows flitting across Terrapin’s features by the door. Tendrils of darkness played around the tattoos upon the Sindhian mercenary’s dark leathered cheeks. Heedless of any discomfort caused, Polecat reached up to scratch an oily nose.

“Reminds me, ya never did say ‘a ya escaped from that needle bizzich did ya?”

Kaburagi glanced upwards in tired resignation across the empty room. Untangling sore legs and scabbard from beneath him he rose to his feet, ears cocked against the night

“Illusion.”

Polecat paused again. “Beg pardon?”

Tattered card danced in dainty grace beneath the hard skin of the ferret’s fingers. He raised an eyebrow in Terrapin’s direction. The hired man smiled back in lazy lethargy, raising both hands as he conceded defeat. Salty sea air wafted through the gaps in the walls, fresh from the night’s vigil, lulling them both to sleep.

Kaburagi paid them no attention, reaching out to push at the wall behind him with the hilt of his blade. One of the wooden boards gave way. A section of polished mirror gleamed in the darkness, shimmering with reflections of places not here. An ebon-skinned slave slumped against the wall of a dim-lit dungeon, eyes fixed on his master’s slumbering form. A masqued wyrmkin woman danced at a high-society Ettermire ball, grinning with filed teeth at an unheard joke. A silver-haired angel perched on a mountain top, patiently awaiting her call to arms.

“Illusion, Polecat.”

“’and wavy, tricksy stuff?”

Polecat peered at the deck one last time, making sure he’d shuffled and cut it to his satisfaction. Then he dealt. A card for himself, the nine of chalices for Auroch. The half-ogre cocked his head in blank incomprehension, tossing two cockle shells onto the dusty floor between them.

“No. Simply the illusion to you that I’d successfully escaped.”

“Oh?” Polecat frowned, his brow folding as it struggled to process Kaburagi’s cryptic comeback. “Now, why do I get the bloomin’ feelin’ that…”

In the meantime he dealt again. A card for himself…

… the Hanged Man for Auroch.

Pithy curses formed on the tip of his tongue. He leapt from the floor as though it had caught fire beneath the seat of his pants. Not since his childhood as a street rat in Scara Brae had he moved so fast. Who dared to play such an unfunny joke on him? Who dared to tamper with his deck, inserting the most maligned of cards into a simple game of...

The rickety driftwood door exploded beneath a storm of steel quarrels the length of his hand. Terrapin staggered one step backwards from its shattered timbers, bringing his crossbow to bear against his shoulder. Before he could brace it, though, a second volley breached the walls. Scores of steel darts drove into his mahogany skin, puncturing flesh and drawing trickles of bright red blood until the mercenary resembled a hedgehog rather than a turtle. Momentum carried him further in reverse until he toppled over the legs of his chair, glazed eyes wide and disbelieving.

Even Auroch needed no further warning of the danger. He bellowed a boisterous battle cry, shaking off dull-eyed lassitude as he rose from his corner of the shack. Stray quarrels thudded into the meat of his shoulder and calf, but it would take far more than that to even inconvenience the massive half-ogre. One wrench of his bulging shoulders tore asunder the entire back wall. A shadowy back alley blinked at them beneath the dawning sun, stinking of sewage and urine despite the best efforts of the recent drought.

Mismatched eyes ran red with adrenaline and bloodlust. Wielding the broken wall as combined shield and club, he looked around for those who might threaten him or his employer. Together they scrambled clear.

“Bloody ‘ell…” Polecat swore beneath his breath, unable to hear himself over the swelling cacophony of sing-song Cathayan chatter.

The mob swarmed after him. A tide of unwashed bodies poured through the door over Terrapin’s corpse. One terrified glimpse in its direction caught the last of Leon’s bandaged leg disappearing through Kaburagi’s mirror. Solid glass rippled like quicksilver in their wake, then shattered with finality.

“… I can’t believe ‘is! He’s bloody tricked us! Again!”

How many years had he spent as that serpent’s dupe? Shouldn’t he have known better? Only a week ago he’d journeyed to this piss-pot middle-of-nowhere shanty town with little more explanation than to ‘shove a hornet into the arses of those stuck up pigs’. He’d taken the job because it sounded easy and paid well, and because it gave him scope to lord it over Touma in public for a change. Now the snake-tongued schemer had used Leon to lead the King Dragon’s men straight to him.

The day hadn’t even begun, and already he’d ruined his best pair of suede shoes. Moreover, he had no choice now but to run.

His toothy whistle pierced the ranks of the Cathayan street fighters. Jamming bowler hat down over sharp features, he indicated the far end of the alley and took off like a scalded weasel. Auroch followed in his path, a thunderous sprint that in the rainy season would have set off a mudslide or two.

Deeper into the labyrinth of alleys they fled. The hue and cry of pursuit never quite left them behind, ricocheting from the maze of ramshackle driftwood walls. Twice Auroch had to clear a new path through rickety shanties, leaving in his wake befuddled day labourers and their shouted bleary curses. The din only grew as fresh hunters joined the chase.

Left, right, left again. Always they fled away from the open waterfront where there was nowhere to hide. They could only hope to lose themselves in the web of dark alleys before Yi Cai’s lackeys caught up and quartered them. But dawn peeked warily over the rooftops to their rear, stripping away any shadow that might have cocooned their flight.

“That frickin’ bastard! I can’t believe ‘is!”

On whose recommendation had he come all the way to Ninedrakes? That bloody serpent’s! On whose suggestion had he spread word of the Man and the Fragment to light off this whole farce to begin with? That bloody serpent’s! And now that motherless son of a whore had the gall to abandon him to the pack of hyenas on his tail?

Polecat spat, cursed, braced his cap with one hand, and ran all the faster.

He tried everything in his power to evade the tightening noose. But the hunters knew the lay of the land far better than he did. Strung across the ins and outs of the hillside shanty town, the Eyes watched their every move. The Fists took their time, herding their prey into a dead end.

Polecat’s luck ran out even before the sun had fully risen. Walls of rock trapped him on three sides, solid enough that even his mighty half-ogre bodyguard could not break through. His pursuers cordoned off the fourth, a solid phalanx of repeater crossbows aimed at his face.

“Alrigh’, alrigh’.” His breaths coming in heavy stutters, the Coronian ferret did his best to hide behind Auroch and the flimsy driftwood shield. The stench of his own sweat and fear mingled with the slurping filth at his feet. Beyond the cordon the entire hillside woke in uproar, a hornet’s nest stirred into furore by the trespassing beasts. Almost hopefully he felt the need to stammer out the question, “But ya ain’t shootin’ at us, so ya ain’t gontae kill us?”

Crossbows remained trained upon him, but no quarrels flew. Their accursed tongue carried back and forth over his head, incomprehensible to his ears. Maybe they asked questions that nobody quite had the answer to. Maybe he could still talk his way out of this.

His breathing steadied, sunlight probing his eyes through Auroch’s muscular forearms. The half-ogre had slipped back into silence, but violence simmered just beneath the surface of his bronzed leather hide. Polecat himself might have made a snarky comment about how long it took them to get down to business, just to lighten the mood. But he was quite aware that a single step in the wrong direction would still see him end up as much a pincushion as the late and lamented Terrapin. He bit his tongue and grit his teeth, frustrated at their insolence.

In the end a greasy pockmarked young man stepped forward as their spokesman. He had bad teeth, and a vicious scar stretching from lip to throat knuckle.

“Arms up. Wood down.”

Present and past, thought ‘e’d never get round ter it.

Polecat allowed what he hoped was a semblance of an appeasing grin to cross his hollow cheeks. In wary caution he poked his head out from behind Auroch’s protective bulk.

“Na, na. Dont be ‘asty, na. Auroch, dont earwig ‘im until ‘e tells ‘is crossbows to piss off. I ain’t makin’ myself a bull’s eye that peasily.”

Still wearing that grin, he forced unwilling legs to take one step out. Then another. He took heart from the fact that the crossbowmen didn’t turn him into a particularly vehement example of a curse doll, though they did track his every move.

“Na. I’m willin’ ter speak ter your Kin’ Dragon. But not at ‘rra point. That’s just pishy. Not done. Get me?”

The pockmarked spokesman frowned, struggling to understand Polecat’s strong Scarabrian street rat accent. But Auroch’s defensive stance never shifted, making their combined intent quite clear. The street fighter’s scar tissue clenched a moment in thought. Then the Cathayan too raised his hands in a disarming grin.

“Okey then. Your choice.”

From the corner of his eye, Polecat caught motion at the top of the cliffs. Something small and hard, likely launched from a leather sling, struck him clean in the noggin. He fell to the ground like a sack of potatoes, a marionette with cut strings paralysed and in pain.

Auroch’s roars surged through his mind as the sudden violence spurred the half-ogre to resistance. But greater still sang the tidal wave of retreating blood, drowning out everything else altogether.

The darkness claimed him soon enough.

[Whispers of Abyssion]

The clarity of sunrise soon gave way to a cloudy morn. Night breezes departed with as much alacrity as they had arrived, leaving behind a city sweltering in its sweat and its stink. The harbour in particular drowned in abject stench. Prolonged drought and the low tide exposed heaps of sewage from the hillside shanties, leaving them to moulder in the stifling heat.

Tremulous uncertainty choked the streets. Neighbours whispered to one another in hushed voices. Street vendors passed on the latest gossip with all the relish of circling buzzards. The East Sea Devil, the Nipponese tiger, lay dead in the heart of his empire, torn apart by his own hired dogs and sacrificed to the daemons of Haidia. Vengeant ghosts from the western whoremaster’s sinful past reached out to pluck him and all his ox-headed lackeys from the Firmament. The storm gods themselves visited the King Dragon on his throne, warning him of misjudging the fate in store for Ninedrakes.

Of course, repeated telling had undoubtedly diluted any such stories before they arrived in the ears of Terlac Sertat. Confined aboard the chartered skyship Redoubtable he relied on his underlings to bring him information, but he doubted their monasterial regime encouraged any knack for story-telling. How that raconteur third cousin of his would have appreciated the experience! How he would have enjoyed sitting by with a thimble of Matarkhan snake wine to watch the tales grow! Or even to venture forth and join in the storymaking himself!

That was one whim in which Terlac dared not indulge. For perhaps the first time since his arrival, the bearish dwarf blessed the backwardness of the Orient. None dared to approach the skyship of their own accord, giving him a modicum of protection against any threat.

How the people of the city had quailed before the Redoubtable when he’d arrived, fleeing in terror before the airborne monstrosity! Men spoke of Ninedrakes as one of the busiest and most important ports in this part of the world, but it lacked even the most rudimentary aerodrome! Even Blightwater, gateway between East and West, had only just installed the facilities to handle sustained air traffic. He supposed that it would be a few years yet before they came to Cathay.

The Governor had insisted that the vessel moor at the most remote Thirty-first West Pier to prevent popular panic. This meant that Throld had another moment’s notice between life and death should the King Dragon send mob or assassin against him, but also left Huld with a whole separate set of security headaches altogether. Two smaller rowboats had dared to infringe upon the Redoubtable two days ago, not long after they had stopped gawking at its arrival. They had been politely but unequivocally sunk by single shots from the skyship’s hull-mounted swivel cannons. None had tried again since.

Combined with the conspicuous silence of the warehouses in his vicinity, the arrangements gave Terlac plenty of warning should the King Dragon send assassin or mob against him. Prioritising his safety and his security, the dwarf thus contented himself with sitting back and observing the calm before the storm. He watched as one of the local fishing boats, with its square hull and paper sails, trundled past his window in grudging respect of the exclusion zone.

Terlac raised his thimble in sardonic salute to the newcomer. Idly his merchant’s mind wondered how much cargo it could carry. How well could it ride the ocean waves? How much damage would it take in the divine storms that so ravaged this part of the world when summer segued into autumn?

Two sudden knocks on his cabin door brought him from his reverie. When he realised that they’d echoed from inside rather than from the hallway beyond, he allowed a small smile to touch his craggy features. Without turning, he downed the rest of his snake wine in a single throat-scalding gulp.

“Ah’ve bin expectin’ ye.”

“I’m honoured.”

The serpent stepped in silence from the shadows. His thin lips pursed about an unlit kiseru, and the black-lacquered scabbard for his katana hung loose at his side. A feather as black as night rested upon his chest. With supreme confidence he took two further steps into the pooled light at the centre of the room. Halting just out of blade-reach of the dwarf, his left hand strayed to the hilt at his waist and its familiar comfort of sharkskin-wrapped ebon. A small smile played about the corners of his pinched cheeks and the depths of his cunning brown-black eyes.

“Though of all the people who might come visiting, I can’t say why you might be expecting me.”

“Nae?”

Tapping the empty thimble against the oak window sill, Terlac shuffled about to face his guest. The dwarf wore naught but a spidersilk robe, hanging from the bulwark of his shoulders and gathered tight at his waist. A linked chain of heavy gold disks nestled between its folds upon the bristly red hairs of his chest. In his torn left earlobe glinted an earring of fine-wrought silver. Scratching his shaven chin, he grinned in disarming good nature in recognition of the swordsman’s pipe.

“Wine?” he asked, raising a toast to the height of his guest’s eyes. The Nipponese’s impassive refusal only broadened his bearish grin, and he gestured to the kiseru. “Bucky, aiblins? Nae? Ye dinnae mind if ah dae?”

Recirculated air tingled in cool touch upon their skin, a welcome change from the muggy heat outside. Once again the swordsman shook his head. Waiting patiently for the dwarf to refill his thimble from the stoppered flask on the nearby table, he allowed his eyes to roam about the typical dwarven décor. Bookcases of sturdy oak, tables of sturdy oak, a wardrobe of sturdy oak, and in one corner a bedstead of sturdy oak. An iron-framed mirror hid in the darkness by the door. A thick goat-wool rug laid out upon the floor provided some small semblance of comfort. The impression was one of functional utility rather than ostentatious luxury.

Terlac raised his drink again, in respectful acknowledgement of his guest's manners. He sipped, grimaced, and spoke.

“Ah apologise fur th’ state. Nae water tae clean things wi’. Thought we might be able tae purchase snake wine while we were here. Turns out th’ entire south is in uproar, an’ nobody knows why.”

Another sip, another grimace as strong undiluted liquor flowed down his throat. Terlac noted the pinch of effort between his guest’s eyes, fighting to decipher his accented Tradespeak. A wry resigned grin of his own touched his features. Nearly a year now had passed since he’d sought refuge in the north, after the fall of Hamdarim deep within Austral Dheathain. But still he had trouble communicating with those of his new homelands.

“Now, as tae why ah was expectin’ ye.” Stone-grey eyes twinkled as he began counting off on his free hand. “You’re th’ body who escaped from th’ Kin’ Dragon just afair th’ Mulberry Palace burned. You’re th’ body who rescued Shibata’s kid. You den used him tae trap ‘at foul-mouthed Scarabrian puppit ay yours. Dinnae be modest now. Ah’ve plenty ay reason tae be expectin’ ye.”

“Ahh.” Pulling the kiseru away with his free hand, again a smile played about the serpent’s lips. But it never quite touched his eyes. “Then let me lay my cards out as well, master Terlac. Of all the players in this game, you’re the one I can’t quite fathom. The Scarabrian, as you’ve quite correctly deduced, is my puppet. The Salvic and the Fallienese sought profit, the Nipponese and the Cathayan power, the elf knowledge. But you, I can’t quite place. What is your interest in these lands, and in the Fragment?”

“Ay course.”

Terlac sipped yet again of his wine before turning back to his window. Cooking fires smoked upon the distant shore, preparing fish and gruel for the army of coolies who laboured in the warehouses adjoining the docks. A second fishing boat meandered past the Redoubtable, this one laden with the dawn catch. A salty smog of sea and sweat lay low over the harbour like a funeral pall. He could force himself to picture the world outside as normal enough, business as usual. But even he couldn’t fail to notice that fewer people wandered the streets than the previous day. Something lingered in the shadows like a bad omen, and Terlac didn’t much feel like finding out what.

“On one hand, ah represent th’ interests ay mah clan. We seek legitimate business in this area, an’ obviously events ay this magnitude are difficult tae ignore. Ah had enough clout tae give myself a place at th’ table, an’ so ah attended.”

He paused to give enough time for his guest to understand. The furrows in the human’s brow deepened, drew taut, relaxed.

“And on the other?”

“Let’s just say ‘at we hae particular interest in a number ay highly placed personages. Extremely particular interest.” Terlac grinned again. This time its bearish breadth didn’t quite promise peace and prosperity.

“Oh?” The Nipponese’s hand inched closer to loosening his katana from its scabbard.

“’ey now. Ah can ken ye gettin’ all leery like, but ye can trust that ahm nae yer enemy. Ah swear it on mah ancestors. Ahm nae daft enough tae even think ay takin’ ye on. More likely than nae yer man’s outwith this door standin’ over mah two kimers ay war?”

Something flickered in the man’s eyes, acknowledging the dwarf’s oath - and the deduction that he was not alone. Terlac’s white teeth flashed, never once wavering.

“An’ ahm nae interested in a Fragment that doesnae exist.”

The swordsman’s smile drew even tauter. At this rate it would snap at any minute.

“Now, now.” In one smooth movement Terlac finished his drink, replaced the thimble on the window sill, and raised both hands in appeasement. “Ahm certain it’s only th’ elf an’ ah who kens for sure. An’ she cannae afford tae ignore its existence, just in case it actually is real. Obsessed, ‘at body is, dangerously so. Me, however…”

“Should I assume, then, that you’re willing to retreat from this game?” The swordsman’s left thumb flicked upwards, freeing his sword from its scabbard at last. His weight dropped forwards in a light crouch, the fingers of his right hand flexing at his side as though itching for just one more provocation. Terlac carefully kept his hands up in the open where his guest could see them.

“Right now, ah’d dae anythin’ tae stop ye drawin’ oan me.” He surprised them both with deep, rich laughter. “Tell ye what, ah’ll sweeten th’ deal. ‘at blade, is darksteel isnae it? Raw material, rumoured tae cut through the fabric of magic itself?”

The Nipponese’s expression gave nothing away. But by the way the silence breathed, Terlac knew that he’d landed the serpent hook, line, and sinker.

“Keep me in yer good books for three months while ah go back tae mah clan about it. Visit me ‘en, an’ ah’ll tell ye all we ken. If you’re nae satisfied wi’ what we can dig up, ye can claim yer fair share ay blood gild. Else we can start tae build a workin’ relationship. What say ye?”

The swordsman’s eyes narrowed to the thinnest of menacing slits. “I say that you seem entirely too familiar with my interests for my liking.”

Terlac laughed again, offering the flask of snake wine. His guest refused once more with the curtest of gestures, leaving the dwarf to pour himself another short measure and down half of it in a single mouthful.

“Wi’ a sword like ‘at an’ a secret agenda like yours? A guess, but ah’d hae wagered a pair ay honours on it.”

“Only gold? Or your life as well?”

The dwarf grimaced, fleshy face contorting into a mask of comical pathos. His hands rose once more in admittance of defeat.

“Aye, it looks like it.”

The grin fell from Terlac’s face. So too did the smile from the serpent’s. Stony grey eyes stared for long stern moments into the depths of murky black.

Then the swordsman straightened from his fighting stance. His thumb left the guard of his katana, and it slipped snugly back into its scabbard with an audible click. Tension seeped from his shoulders into the cool shipboard air, dissipating like so much wispy smoke. He even managed another crooked curl about his dry lips.

“Very well, Terlac Sartet. Three months. I shall see you then.”

He bowed low, infusing the gesture with the respect accorded to an equal in his country of birth. Terlac returned it with another courteous salute of his drinking thimble, emptying it for the third time in his guest’s presence.

Or un-presence, given that a heartbeat later his guest simply slipped from sight. Heavy mantles of shadow retreated from the centre of his cabin, revealing once more the dusty corners where floor met wall. Only the lingering touch of stale body odour and charred wood hinted that the human had ever stood there. Terlac allowed himself to bask for a heartbeat in the renewed pool of mid-noon light flooding his cabin.

He waited until completely sure that the swordsman had left before speaking again.

“Ktrya?”

The bare wooden ceiling over his head shifted at his call. An expressionless dark elven woman hid in a cavity there. Runic tattoos decorated her dusky cheek, binding her in service to the Sartet clan. Her eyes, young and alert, peered at him like a pair of fiery garnets from the shadows of her hidey-hole.

“Yes, Terlac?

“Dae check on Nkhya an’ Chra for me, will ye? Ah dinnae think he’d dae any lastin’ harm just tae make a point, but ah seem tae hae underestimated his ability nae tae let himself enter yer killin’ circle either, sae...”

The youngest of his three ‘kimers of war’ nodded acquiescence. One moment eyes of burnished flame stared back at him from above. In the next she’d disappeared, a wisp of smoke in the recycled breeze.

That left him alone again to frown at the now-empty bottle of snake wine. With one last look at the coolie gangs gathering on the waterfront, Terlac turned away from the window to his writing desk. He kept a bottle of the finest grain spirit in the bottom drawer. Seeing as he’d somehow managed to make it out without the darksteel blade shaving another foot’s worth of height from his body…

A piece of crinkled rice paper lay on his desk, distinct from the heavy goatskin parchment his clan used for all its correspondence. Inscribed upon it in flowing calligraphic hand was the date three months from now and two addresses. The first address pointed to a nondescript location in Blightwater’s Tenements. The second, crossed out, represented the clan’s warehouse in Radasanth, where he had scheduled a clan meeting on that date. It made no further reference to their agreement, but the implication was quite clear.

I can find you, wherever you are, whenever I wish.

Terlac scratched the side of his head, then the base of his bristly chin. He wondered how he would explain things to Captain Huld and the crew of the Redoubtable. A mere two months after arriving in Ninedrakes, only a third of the way through their charter, he now needed them to turn their vessel about and head back to Gunnbad at full throttle.

He allowed himself one last look at the city’s skyline, and at the sea horizon to the east.

“Better batten down th’ hatches, laddie,” he said to nobody in particular. “Storm’s comin’.”

Grinning in defeat, he decided to make it a double measure of the spirit instead.


***

With his employer’s mirror-walking abilities on his side Leon had found it an easy task to disable the dwarf’s ladies of war. Making sure he didn’t get caught in retreat to the rendezvous point had been an altogether more difficult one. In the end he’d just about slipped undiscovered to the mirror in the disused starboard hold of the corvette-class skyship, where at length Kaburagi retrieved him.

“You allowed him to live?”

Surprise coloured his question. He’d only worked with the serpent for a day, after all. Some of the intricacies of his new working environment still eluded him. Shibata had not been the friendliest of employers, and would have quite happily have disposed of potential partners such as Terlac just to make a point.

But Kaburagi’s firm dispassionate glare stalled him in his tracks.

“Survivors tell tales. Tales enhance reputations. Reputations cause tongues to wag.” The serpent replaced the kiseru into the folds of his robes. His hand once again strayed to the hilt of his blade. “What’s the use to me of just another corpse? It’s not as if I can get it to talk.”

Or to do my work for me, he added in his mind.

He beckoned for Leon to follow. He had much to do, and only until nightfall to do it. With the tiger dead, the ferret safely sequestered in the dragon’s dungeons, and the bear convinced to leave, he could now activate the first of his pawns for the endgame.

Ginuvo of the Ebon Sands. Let the fools of Ninedrakes fear your name forever more.

[Whispers of Abyssion]

Tendrils of unrest spread like contagion through the city streets, merely the visible symptoms of a more insidious plague. Coolie gangs clashed with tradesmen on the crowded waterfront, incited to violence by some unseen hand. Fishermen woke from their slumber to find the docks besieged by massed ranks of the Governor’s militia fighting to contain the strife. Afternoon heat fuelled their fury, and they too erupted in spontaneous insurrection. Rival street thugs waged running battles up and down the twisted alleyways of the hillside shanty towns. Entire districts rose in orchestrated riot, dragging the Commissioner and his battalions from one end of the town to the other.

Amidst the violence the wind picked up once more, howling in from the southwest in fitful gusts and squalls. Tirithiel’s sprawling villa on the island promontory bore the brunt of the brewing storm. Perhaps it would rain again at last, the owlish elf mused as she watched the sea roil. Perhaps this dratted heat would finally ease towards something more suited to the winter month.

But the promise of downpour in the scurrying low-bellied clouds did little to ease the headache rooted in her mind. She turned away from the rattling bay windows in a sweep of pale beige gowns. Bathed in the incoming night, she breathed deep of perfumed humidity to steady her thoughts. Her faultless features, carved by a craftsman’s hand from sculpted marble, faced her visitor across a low table of Matarkhan glass.

“I will say this once, Ebrahim Sassani, and I will not repeat myself on this matter. The Syndicate, and thus I, have no intention of participating in an outright war between yourself and whoever you might deem your enemy.”

“And does this noble isolation apply also to those you might deem your enemy, Madame Tirithiel?” Fingers pursed and eyes bulging, the Fallienese fly pressed the point in his high-pitched wheedle. Sweat dampened the nape of his neck beneath his slick black locks. His manservant stood vigil behind him, blind and mute and deaf for the duration of the conversation, but his bearing unbent and unbowed.

“If you are referring to the incident with Andrej Ivanovitch…” – Tirithiel bothered not to disguise her distaste as she spat the name through the thin lines of her mouth – “… then you are of course aware that the Commissioner placed a warrant for his arrest early this morning.”

Of course Ebrahim was aware: much of the turmoil upon Ninedrakes stemmed from said warrant. A veritable tide of Eyes and Fists combed the island for the fugitive, leaving no rock unturned and no hovel unsearched. Mountains of silver taels and the King Dragon’s favour awaited he who found the Salvic whoremaster’s head. A mob of vigilantes, thirsting for foreign blood, had nearly cornered Ebrahim himself on his way to petition Tirithiel. His lips puckered in remembered anger against the clamour of the rising wind.

“At the King Dragon’s insistence, of which I have little doubt. Ever has he looked with greed towards the business stolen from his pleasure houses by Andrej’s slaves. And yet I am more than willing to hand the Salvic ox over to you, to give you the credit for his capture, if only you…”

“I asked you not to make me repeat myself, Ebrahim.” Anger flickered across the cold set of Tirithiel’s jaw line. She sipped from her goblet of fine Coronian red, the fingers of her right hand clenching it tight enough to threaten breakage of the crafted crystal. Her left arm lounged in languid grace upon a cushion of plush red velvet, but the throbbing beat of a single fine blue vein spoke of how close she strayed to erupting.

But Ebrahim had no option but to press his claim.

“Even with proof that the King Dragon conspires for us to fight amongst ourselves? Even with proof that he knows naught of any Man, or any Fragment?” Asad had risked life and limb to acquire the incriminating orders from the King Dragon’s office. The endeavour had also cost Ebrahim the lives of two of his valuable arcano-flagellants. His actions would damn him if he didn’t reap their rewards now. He would be twice-damned indeed if she didn’t accept his peace offering.

“Even with said proof, Ebrahim, the Syndicate must remain impartial and aloof of all ongoings. I am afraid I cannot help you in this matter.”

“Madame…”

The emerald upon her breast flashed in fury. Her eyes followed suit. A thunderclap of arcane power sundered the growling eve, and the plain white walls of the room cowered beneath ghostly green glow.

“Ebrahim.”

Harsh hate infused his name. His rotund body rocked backwards as if slapped, silver pupils wide with surprise. His jaw clamped shut of its own accord before it could continue to plead. His fingers went slack in his lap, as if they had forgotten to fidget.

The strength of his fear returned her to reality. She shivered, as though the polished walls themselves fought to contain her wrath. Something on the cloudy distance shuddered in response to her obvious effort, but at length she subsided.

“Ebrahim,” she began again, in a more controlled voice. Translucent hairs fell into place upon her shoulders. The crossed hand insignia of the coronet on her brow ceased its flaring gleam. “Your help in bringing the sinner and fugitive Andrej to justice will not go unnoticed. Perhaps it might even be that I could convince Yi Cai to look favourably upon your current predicament.”

The Fallienese merchant knew better than to push his luck any further. He needed a moment to compose himself as he rose from her luxurious settee, fussing over the folds of his thobe. Unfocused and itinerant, his eyes darted from starlit chandelier to spidersilk lace veil, from the grey cloud racing in beyond her seaward window to the dispassionate cold of the marble floor beneath his feet. In frantic desperation they searched for another path out of his predicament, but her resentful glare doomed his efforts to futility.

She offered her hand in haughty dignity, and somehow he bent to brush dry lips against her silken skin.

“Madame Tirithiel,” he squeaked in undignified retreat. “Your aid is much appreciated as always.”


***

“Appreciated, my warty back side. Not since leaving Fallien have I lied so blatantly through my teeth. That treacherous fowl means to betray us and watch us burn.”

Dry grit rasped through the open toes of Ebrahim’s sandals, gathering like rustmold upon the sheer white of his robes. Searing heat shimmered in the dustdevils that ran alongside him, pooling in sweaty trickles down his pudgy belly. Asad trailed in his wake, shrouded in demure black and stroking his luxuriant moustache. The militia escort they had requested from the Commissioner spread out in front, keeping the milling crowds at bay. Sullen, hostile gazes arrowed upon their persons from all around.

“Perhaps she believes that with the dog Shibata dead, the ox Andrej neutralised, and the bearish dwarf fled, she can survive as an equal to the King Dragon?”

News of Terlac’s hasty departure from Ninedrakes had reached him just before he’d set off to meet Tirithiel. So much for the doughty fortitude of dwarves, Ebrahim thought to himself. Doubtless the overnight destruction of both the Mulberry Palace and Andrej’s whorehouse had scared him off. The loss of yet another of those who sat at the table made it more imperative than ever that Ebrahim secure Tirithiel’s services as an ally. But now…

“Asad, I require your thoughts. I release you to speak freely on this matter.” A leathery frown creased Ebrahim’s sloping forehead, his weight rolling with every stride. “Do we have any chance of befriending the King Dragon?”

“Unlikely, sire. We did, after all, launch an unprovoked attack on their place of sleeping.” Asad’s wry voice wrung all hope from his master’s tentative notion.

“Of course, of course.” Ebrahim’s hands fluttered in an airy sad wave, mimicking the lifeless quiver of a grocer’s flag by the side of the road. Unlit lanterns dangled overhead in faded red livery, dancing to the same unfelt breeze. “If Yi Cai is our enemy and Tirithiel refuses to aid us, then what options do we have?”

“We could ally with Andrej, my lord, but…”

The Fallienese merchant snorted in loud disgust, finishing his manservant’s thoughts for him.

“… but he has less worth now than a cow with no flow. He has no power, no men, and we control all his material wealth. And what use is gold if we cannot even buy the mercenaries to protect ourselves with? Every man, woman, and child in this wretched city is beholden to the King Dragon. Even if we could find somebody, the people of this land distrust outsiders with a passion that even Suravani would admire. They might take our money, but they would abandon us at the first opportunity. They have no concept of honour whatsoever.”

A gob of spittle ricocheted from the dust at his feet as if to emphasise his words. He stopped in his tracks, sweeping the dust-blighted eaves with his bulbous gaze for the perpetrator of such outrage. But all he could see was an indistinguishable crowd of hostile faces, aimed in his direction from every balcony and rooftop, every darkened alley and patch of muddy road. His escort fingered their truncheons in nervous tension, sensing the simmering violence. Raising their voices they cleared a path before them, but if anything the brooding glowers increased in their intensity. Asad drew imperceptibly closer to his employer.

“In which case, why do we not ask the Commissioner for protection?”

“Because he could not defend a strongbox from a wet paper bag. Because he is already in the King Dragon’s pocket, or that pernicious fowl’s. Because the only way he could reasonably hope protect us would be to put us behind bars, which he has already threatened to do. We would never recover from such a loss of face.”

Asad nodded, having gone over the salient points himself beforehand. Tirithiel’s outburst had not permanently damaged Ebrahim’s mental acuity if he could still think that far ahead. The manservant’s eyes squinted against the setting sun as their winding path took them into its gaze. His voice dropped to a whisper in his master’s ears, as dry as the desert sands from whence they both hailed.

“Of course, sire. In which case, I respectfully submit that we have but two options. The first is to sit still, defend our holdings, discreetly apologise to the King Dragon, and hope that when this all blows over we are still standing.”

“Wishful.” Ebrahim grunted through his high, thin nose. Pampered fingers played on the hilt of the scimitar at his waist. “The second?”

“Run, sire. We abandon Ninedrakes altogether. Without Andrej our operations return only the most minimal margin of profit, and the King Dragon’s opium dens nibble away at our spice market with every passing month. Furthermore, the news from Matarkha is disquieting in the extreme. Perhaps it is time that…”

Qwai loh!

From a thousand throats the cry rose as one. In a heartbeat the crowd turned nasty.

A mass of sweaty, grimy human bodies surged forth. One of the Commissioner’s escort buckled beneath the deluge of angry fists and bared teeth, the sheer tide of humanity sweeping him from his feet. His comrades counterattacked with bared snarls. Truncheons rose and fell in a steady meat grinder rhythm until the momentum of the charge broke. But when it receded, it left behind little more than a motionless bundle in the dust, of what had moments before been a watchful, trained man-at-arms.

The sudden silence of the late afternoon sun beat down on the militiaman’s broken corpse. Hostile glares retreated half a sandy street, nursing bruises and broken bones, but their seething anger never dissipated.

Jangled nerves broke beneath their implacable wrath. Instinctively the eyes of the escort looked for their own avenues of escape.

And in that moment movement flashed from the opposite direction, decisive in action and malicious in intent. A young man leapt from the lee of a market stall, lanky limbs extended at full stretch. Years of opium and snuff stained his broken teeth, his sharp features pockmarked by childhood disease. Wiry arms aimed a knife of flashing silver at the Fallienese merchant’s face.

Four steps away.

Three.

Two, and his face disintegrated in a cloud of blood and gore. Asad’s bare hands eviscerated the assailant’s torso in vicious scissoring motions, then proceeded to disembowel him organ by organ. Black cloak flowed in watery grace that contrasted starkly with the gruesome gibbets falling to the sands. Thirsty earth drank of the assassin’s life. A nearby crow eyed the flesh of an exposed ribcage. A weakly beating heart lay lonely and desolate beneath the dispassionate twilight.

Silence reigned, and dripping fluid.

Then pandemonium, as jeering commoner and militia escort alike turned to flee.

“Master. Sire.”

Sweat beaded on Ebrahim’s pale skin. Pale fingers clenched tight upon the amethyst-tipped hilt of his scimitar. His gaze refused to focus on any particular aspect of the atrocity, not least his own blood-drenched thobe. Asad pushed him in gentle but firm command through the chaos. A salty humid wind blew dusty squalls in their wake.

“I apologise for the mess, sire. The Marble Manse is but a minute away. Once there, I accept any punishment you wish to inflict… for now, I must insist that we make haste before they regroup.”

“Of… of course.” Hands fretted in the lap of his robes. His stomach would have retched from the stench and the sights, had it not frozen solid in fear. Bulging silver eyes darted left and right in search of sanctuary. The streets flooded with screaming men, panicking for now but just as swiftly turned to anger. Shanty shacks clustered about dark urine-smelling alleyways that could so easily harbour deadly ambush. Not so far in the distance rose the walled and gated compound that was his refuge, his sanctum.

In that moment, he decided that Asad had a point. So too, ironically, had the dwarf Terlac. Ninedrakes was worth neither his life nor all the treasures and wealth he’d accumulated there. Ebrahim did not wish to still be sitting amidst the luxuries of his lounge when the King Dragon finally decided to put the Marble Manse to flame.

He smelled the fires on the wind. He tasted the fear in the air. Fury swelled and crested through the rancid stench of the streets. He could feel, rather than see beyond his blank eyelids, the tide of bodies surging once more in his direction.

He needed safety and silence.

He needed time to plan his escape.

Asad’s hands flashed again, carving a path of safety through the fleeing flesh. Blood splattered again upon Ebrahim’s robes, crimson flowers upon a field of milky white. His hands shook outwith his control.

The gates of his sanctum beckoned.

[Whispers of Abyssion]

Dewy droplets, humidity condensed upon sun-shunned stone, spilled like steady tears into the corner of the cell. The stench of damp sewage left in their wake would have better befit the city’s cesspool of a harbour. Rank rot suffused the air, untreated meat left to fester.

Stray shafts of twilight pierced the pooled underground darkness. Pallid skin glowed beneath the bloody illumination: a mighty ox-like figure sprawled in comatose listlessness over a bench of naked stone. A second form, corded muscle of ebon black, slumped like solid shadow against the wall. His pupil-less stare heeded not the brackish water spilling over his legs, never once wavering from an indeterminate point on the far wall.

Until serpentine features glimmered in the pond of dirty water at his feet. Black-brown gaze, weary but proud, pierced the slave’s soul. Thin heat-chapped lips murmured an unheard word of command.

Recognition, electric and searing, flickered through eyes of pale white.

Powerful limbs unfolded upon the sweaty stone, one after another like a panther waking from a nap. Shoulders flexed to work the cricks from the slave’s muscle-bound neck. He rose from the dirt, joints popping with audible strain.

His attention alighted on the drugged and slumbering ox.

Soles whispered upon the dusty floor. One step at a time they approached, each muted footfall a death knell through the musty air. His looming shadow blocked off the window set high in the wall behind him, enveloping the ox in ominous black. Long and powerful, his arm reached out towards a neck pulsing in fitful stops and starts.

With a casual twist of his wrist, he put an end to his master’s spice-fuelled misery. Andrej Ivanovitch never woke from his feverish nightmare.


***

How many had died in their path? How many had he carved to shreds in exchange for his master’s safety?

Hands dripping with flesh and gore, Asad bundled Ebrahim into an unceremonious heap through the grand double doors. Wiry muscle strained beneath his tailored waistcoat as he drew the heavy hardwood closed behind him. Shouts of fury and retribution resounded like rolling thunder in the streets beyond, dying an ignominious death when the gates finally slammed shut.

“Sire, we…”

The words died beneath his stiff upper lip. Greeted by the cool silence of the graveyard, such a stark contrast to the heated passions of the world outside, he knew in heartbeats that something was wrong. Ebrahim’s face, paler than any ghost, warned him that the danger was not merely present, but also imminent. He spun on his toes...

... and faced a beast from his darkest nightmares. A deathseeker from beyond the southern seas. A monster of muscle and murder. It stalked without erring towards his charge.

Not for a heartbeat did Asad pause to consider how the slave had freed himself from the underground cell, or what might have happened to Andrej in the process. Not for a heartbeat did he dwell on whether this was another of the King Dragon’s elaborate ploys, or if Tirithiel had known this would happen upon their return to the Marble Manse. He didn’t even wonder why he’d failed to recognise the danger in the slave upon their first meeting, or what sorcery had wrought the genial, dumb giant into an avatar of death. His instincts screamed only terror, in recognition of the pointed bloodlust in the black man-mountain’s eyes.

He hesitated not as he bit down on the capsule embedded in his teeth. Spice flooded his tongue like molten lead. Fiery heat raced through his veins, pulsating through his mind. His skin drew taut over muscle and bone. His lips drew short to expose sharp serrated teeth. The veins in his temple thundered with every heartbeat; dark red blood flooded the whites of his eyes, dousing the black of his pupils in loathing and revulsion. His moustache quivered, sensing the impending death of his foe.

Snarling with incomprehensible hate, he started towards the slave. He held his body low, balanced on the balls of his feet, knees bent and hands held at his sides. Blurry mirage disguised his steps. Every gnarled finger a vicious weapon capable of tearing organs from flesh, he spasmed in taut-knuckled aggression as he reached for his prey. Blood dripped to the marble tiles with each barely-leashed movement.

He would eviscerate the slave. Just as he had eviscerated the pockmarked Cathayan assassin. Just as he had eviscerated dozens of assassins sent after his master over the years. He had sworn to defend Ebrahim from all threats, at all costs. This monster, this mountain of grinning terror, this deathseeker from the southern shores... he would die like the rest.

Something thick and strong caught him mid-flight, wrapping like a meaty scarf around his neck. But his digits were honed like knives of bone, and now they tore at the offending hand. His wiry legs kicked at the body behind it, landing a dozen solid blows. His lips curled like a wild beast, baring feral fury for the world to see.

His arms snapped like twigs before that pearly grin. Even so he gouged great strips of flesh from the hand that bound him. Not when the deathseeker shifted grip upon his neck did he stop. Not even when the slave utilised the new-found leverage to pluck his limbs from his body, one by one.

An eternity of instants passed as the mighty hands tore his neck from his shoulders. His head fell to the floor, bouncing twice in a spreading pool of red. His blooded eyes quivered, focused on his foe in furious rage. His fanged teeth snapped at stray fingers and toes. All in vain, as fiery life slipped from his grasp.

The last thing he saw was his master cowering in the corner, hands trembling upon his jewelled scimitar.

“Simorgh! Homa!”

The sheer shock of Asad’s comprehensive dismemberment restored words to Ebrahim’s lips. A second pair of masked arcano-flagellants materialised from hidden passageways in the wall, one to each side of the berserk slave. Bulging green muscles groaned in sepulchral hunger as they identified their prey.

In one massive hand the deathseeker held Asad’s torso, pumping slick blood onto the polished marble floor. He hurled the useless mass of flesh towards the abomination on his left. Rusty claws swept out to bat the broken body aside, shearing through bone as a lesser blade might cut parchment.

The distraction gave him the opportunity to throw himself headlong against the one to the right. Jangling chains lashed at his chest, leaving lacerating trails upon bulwarks of pure muscle, but they did nothing to diminish his momentum. Long iron claws swung in from the side, but he just grabbed the berserker’s wrist where metal met flesh, holding fast in a vice of adamantium. In spice-fuelled frenzy the arcano-flagellant tried to worm its way free. Bronze links clashed against his chest, tearing strips of skin and bruising the bone.

His other hand still clutched Asad’s right leg. He raised it high, towards starry chandeliers glinting in twilight, before bringing it crashing down upon his quarry

Once.

Twice.

Again.

The other mindless servitor reared up behind him in muted anger. He planted his weight, shifted his hips, and tossed it over his shoulder into the first. Both arcano-flagellants went down in a tangle of bloodied limbs and metallic prostheses. The scent of their own blood worked them into further frenzy. Their wild attempts to work themselves free shredded even greater chunks of flesh from each other’s bodies.

The brief respite gave the deathseeker a chance to scan the crimson-drenched audience hall. His milky glare settled on Ebrahim. Caught between the battle to his fore and the closed doors protecting him from the mob, the Fallienese merchant had nowhere to run. The utter silence of the three combatants, bar the fervent jangle of his arcano-flagellants’ chains, only emphasised the terror leaking down the inside of his robes. The merchant shrunk in upon himself, jowls quivering, scimitar forgotten beneath fingers frozen taut. His eyes bulged in fear as they darted from one grisly sight to the next, the fly caught amidst the butchery.

The black-skinned slave grinned at him in bloodthirsty promise. Strips of flesh dangled from his arm and bruises welled on his chest, but still he seemed perfectly at home upon the crimson-drenched gore-stained marble. Simorgh and Homa were little more than his prey. Ebrahim was a lamb to the slaughter.

Before the arcano-flagellants could recover their footing, the deathseeker lunged. A ruthless roundhouse kick sent Homa – the one he’d beat upon with Asad’s dismembered limb – flying towards Ebrahim and the barred door. Free of its sibling at last, Simorgh swiped at his shoulder with the claw embedded into its right forearm. The blade made solid contact. But it dug but a centimetre into his leathery skin, failing even to draw blood.

He stomped down on the inside of Simorgh’s knee, pulverising it with a crunch that echoed in vicious agony throughout the marble antechamber. The arcano-flagellant stumbled, flailing desperately with its chains. It succeeded only in placing its face in line with his elbow. Another crack resounded, thick bone mask cracking and splintering beneath the force. Simorgh’s claw swiped at its tormentor in blind rage, only for the deathseeker to intercept the blow with ease. His potent grip crushed the arm as well, leaving it limp and useless at the servitor’s side.

Still Simorgh stumbled forth. From behind, jangling chains announced Homa’s loping charge as it rushed to its brethren’s aid. The deathseeker feinted low as if to smash Simorgh’s good leg, then instead grabbed the fumbling arcano-flagellant by the face. Arms striving beneath the weight, still grinning like a maniac, he swung the bulky berserker like a massive fleshy flail in its own right. Homa checked its momentum but could not prevent rusty claws from goring into its compatriot’s back. Disoriented by the impact, the second berserker stumbled away.

He tossed Simorgh aside like a broken doll, limp limbs and all. Sheer instinct caused Homa to react to the noise, cocking its sightless head at wet thud upon slick marble. It gave the deathseeker all the opening he needed. He grabbed hold of the arcano-flagellant’s head from behind, one hand where each ear would once have been.

He squeezed. Harder and harder, both arms bulging with the effort. Veins popped and tendons strained. Homa’s hands and legs flailed uselessly in his grasp, chains singing out in chaotic cacophony. On the other side of the room Simorgh dragged itself to its feet, fresh spice pulsing through its veins and allowing it to ignore its broken body. In great pain it tried to assist its comrade, limp arm and shattered leg hindering its progress across the blood-slick floor.

Cracks appeared across Homa’s bone mask. Each break rang out like an Alerian gunshot through the soaring columns, echoing from the semicircular steps leading into the lounge proper. And then the crushing pressure reached the arcano-flagellant’s skull.

Its cranium shattered. A visceral explosion of blood, bone, and brain matter splattered across the deathseeker’s torso, painting it a fresh coat of red beneath the gloaming twilight. What remained of Homa’s body entered violent, uncoordinated death spasms.

Drenched in the gore of his foes, he turned to Simorgh… and Ebrahim beyond.

“Sim… Simorgh… Asad…”

Slow, deliberate steps whispered towards the staggering arcano-flagellant. To its credit, it never once faltered. Not when its weakly flailing chains failed to make even the slightest of impressions upon the solid citadel of muscular flesh. Not when the deathseeker grabbed hold of its cracked mask in one mighty palm. Not when he slammed its skull into the marble floor.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Not even when the deathseeker stood one last time, leaving Simorgh’s head little more than a smear upon the floor of pristine white.

Only Ebrahim now stood before him, cowering in mute horror by the doors shut and barred. Every tremor sent waves of fear quivering through the rolls of fat around his waist. His bulging eyes ranged across the abattoir that had once been his home. Asad’s dismembered corpse slumbered silent in a lake of red, limbs scattered to the winds. Homa lay broken in the far corner, Simorgh at the black slave’s bare feet.

No matter how he tried to hide in the darkness behind his closed lids, red-tinted light imprinted horrific nightmares in his mind. His body could do naught but breathe of the stink: blood and excrement and above all, death. The floor ran slick with thick fluid and fleshy matter, painting the walls in a rusty artistic mess.

Ebrahim was at heart a scavenger, a fly. On an average day, he might have even felt at home amongst the broken and the downtrodden.

But this was not his demesne. This was the domain of the butcher, of the killer.

This was the domain of the deathseeker.

A meaty black hand reached for Ebrahim’s face.


***

Not five minutes later, Kaburagi and Leon stepped through the etched glass doors in Ebrahim’s luxurious lounge. They did not find it difficult to locate the slave. They simply followed the smeared stench of recent death, and the sound of overwhelming silence.

One look into the desecrated audience hall told them all they needed to know. Leon immediately stepped back inside, fighting to control his heaving stomach. Kaburagi remained behind to analyse the scene in dispassionate interest. He confirmed Ebrahim’s death by the fragment of skull – still containing a bulging silver eye – hanging from the chandelier overhead. Only then did he turn to the hall’s sole living occupant.

“Well done, Ginuvo.”

Kaburagi smiled in exhaustion and triumph, matching the large grin rippling across the features of the ebon-skinned deathseeker. Sibilant and sure, his tenor echoed throughout the blood-drenched butcher house.

“Follow me. We have one last job to do.”

Silmeria of the Silver Skies, come to me now. May you be the sword above my head, poised to strike at my time of direst need.

[Whispers of Abyssion]

The bloodshed in the Marble Manse broke the spirits of those who sowed the violence in the streets. Combatants retreated to their lairs for a moment of respite and the chance to lick their wounds.

The remains of the gloaming twilight passed by in fitful calm. Night descended upon the western horizon, hounded by banks of heavy clouds, driven by an unyielding westerly. In time the darkness grew absolute, the gale winds howling and relentless.

With said darkness came those who had nothing left to lose.

Sudden blasts of smoke and flame shook the shadows. The walls of the King Dragon’s fortified headquarters quaked beneath the assault, voices of panic and alarm soaring into the blustery night. Through the broken gates paced a one-armed ronin. Wailing winds whipped ashy detritus at robes of pure funereal white. His grim features hardened in tranquil fury. His hard eyes glittered like polished obsidian. Distant thunder shattered upon dishevelled topknot and unkempt beard.

A Fist stumbled forth to accost him, eyes unfocused and ears still ringing. The silvery arc of the ronin’s blade flickered in the torchlight, tearing the young man’s throat open to the night. Blood splattered in artful spray upon the canvas of paved stone.

“I come for Yi Cai’s head, for death to the King Dragon! I seek vengeance for Shibata Masanobu, the Tiger of Ninedrakes!”

Bellowing his battle cry to the cinders and the kindling, the grizzled yojimbo Toshi raised his katana to the Stance of Shadow and launched himself into the milling mob.

Further blasts rocked the night, of concussive force and of combusting flame. Hungry fires took hold upon the dry wooden outhouses to either side of the stone path. Disoriented men spilled from their beds, their sleep-addled cries only adding to the confusion and panic. Through it all the lone ronin ran, cutting down with merciless ferocity any who barred his way.

He broke through the far end of the mob, weaving through barren plum trees to shake off the few who retained the presence of mind to follow him. Leaders and officers at last began to impose order upon the panic of their fighting men. But their primary concern had to be to contain the fire before it could spread to the neighbouring compounds. Unhindered, it would lay waste to the entirety of Ninedrakes’s shanty towns. Only two men stood guard at the next gate, in addition to the three who followed the arcing trail of blood his blade left in its wake.

Prior to his death charge he would have gladly chewed off the hand that offered odds of five to one. Not that he would have hesitated even if they were five hundred to one. All men died, fluttering to the earth like a cherry petal in the heat of spring. At least this way he would strike one final blow for his honour and for that of his late employer.

Straw sandals pivoted in the dust, graceful and precise. The two guards at the gate had only just raised their spears when the wall behind them disintegrated in stone shrapnel and splintered wood. Their comrades hesitated for the briefest of heartbeats, caught in the realisation that the blast could be no coincidence. In that moment the ronin struck. Torchlight flickered in the steel of his blade. A downwards stroke split the first man from collarbone to hip. Its reverse motion took the next frightened face off at the neck. The third man fell on his backside, abandoning his cudgel to crawl away from the demon silhouetted in wreathing flame.

Grimacing, Toshi let him go. Reaching down with his good arm, taking care not to slice open his torso by mistake, he plucked a large wooden splinter from the back of his calf. A slow trickle of blood wet his fingers, coated by dust stirred up from the ruined gate. He dried them on his empty sleeve before finding a new grip on the hilt of his blade. The air felt humid and sticky upon his wound, the howling wind surprisingly cool.

But the way before him lay open. He breathed of the oncoming rain and bellowed,

“Yi Cai! Cowardly lizard, prepare to die!”

Over the mangled rubble he clambered, a spectre of doom rising through fire-tinted smoke. His chipped steel blade dripped with blood and visceral gore, gleaming in dull salute as he lowered it to the Stance of Light. His hounding gaze alighted on the brightly-accoutred butterfly awaiting his arrival in the next courtyard. Her head cocked to one side as he advanced, eyes closed to the night but fingers primed at her side.

“Dog,” Zhen Ji spat, the wind tearing black locks across her face. Fresh bandages wrapped her arms courtesy of the splinters that had marred her flawless skin, but still she moved with the deathly grace of a cyanide moth. A fluttery flicker of fine fingers sent a dozen sharp-pointed needles speeding through the shadows towards him.

“Murderess,” he growled in reply, planting his feet upon the treacherous rock. Dark memories of his lord’s mutilated body flashed behind his eyelids. He could picture every needle that punctured the tiger’s leathery hide, and it only drew forth the anger from his soul.

Down swung his sword, in tune to a mighty kiai shout that shook the foundations upon which he stood. The force of its passage knocked aside the projectiles she had flung in his direction. One needle buried itself in his arm, two in his right leg, but none dug deep enough to hamper his charge.

Zhen Ji met him halfway, sliding serrated blades from her sleeves and catching his sword in a crossed guard. Before he could bring weight to bear to force her to her knees, she lashed out with whip-like legs. Twice she caught him in the side of his stomach. Pain flared as he felt something break.

Then the tip of a Nipponese dagger sprouted from the front of her throat. She staggered backwards into her assassin, surprise blooming upon her features attractive but cruel. Thin needle-swords clattered to the stone beneath her feet as she clawed desperately at her airways, every movement ripping the wound wider. Her eyes opened at last, luscious and bright and beautiful. Lifeblood trickled from the point of the blade through her throat, and that was the last thing she ever saw.

“For Lord Masanobu,” Kanade whispered from behind her, audible just to the three of them beneath the blanketing gale. In vindictive hate she twisted the blade through her Cathayan counterpart’s bony neck. Only then did she tear it free, with an unladylike grunt and a brutal heave. Bright red flowers blossomed on the robes of pure white she wore.

Zhen Ji died before ever hitting the ground.

A roar of disapproval rose from the surrounding terraces. A hundred or more thugs poured from the shadows, baying their anger at seeing their champion bested by such underhanded treachery. Kanade flicked the blood clean of her dagger, subtly allowing Toshi to lean on her as he stood to meet them.

“That was the last of my black powder,” she whispered in his ear, indicating the breached wall. His grunt of acknowledgement caused further pain to flicker through his ribs.

“Stay close. From here on in we do things the old-fashioned way.”

One last moment he allowed his weight to rest on her shoulders, grateful for her support. His bloody fingers found their grip again upon the hilt of his katana. Then his voice soared in victorious vengeance above the typhoon’s fury.

“Your pawn lies dead, King Dragon!” A touch of venom turned the title into a vicious curse. “We now come for you! For the Tiger of Ninedrakes, for Shibata Masanobu!”

“For Lord Masanobu!” Kanade echoed… and froze.

Black-bellied clouds scuttled in haste overhead. Shadows swirled before her eyes. Darkness coalesced beneath the flickering braziers. The King Dragon stepped forth beneath the eaves of his terrace, eying them in a curious mixture of sorrow and triumph.

Why… why’s he…?

Then her wide eyes flicked to the sword that hammered pommel-first into her gut. She went down without a sound, slender breasts spasming as they struggled for air.

Toshi whirled on the spot. Chipped steel blade descended without hesitation, the force of a lightning bolt manifesting with the thunder of another kiai. But his shadowy foe slipped from his grasp like mist through his fingers, dancing two steps backwards and out of reach.

He was a young man, slender and graceful and beautiful to behold. Fine bones cast dark shadows upon hollow cheeks. Delicate chin curled in a grin vicious and arrogant. Twin swords, broader of blade and less delicate than Toshi’s katana, spun in spell-binding dance beneath his fingers. Contemptuously he slipped within the ronin’s guard, sending Kanade sprawling into the waiting mass of thugs with a merciless boot to her side. Toshi leapt back, but not before his opponent sliced through his robes to draw thin red lines upon his hairy chest.

“I am Feng Wu of the Jade Fang,” he announced, full red lips curling in disgust. “I am unlike that half-trained amateur Zhen Ji. You will not find me an easy kill.”

The words washed over Toshi’s face without registering, lost in the lashing night wind. Kanade’s gasping breaths entered one ear and exited out the other, desperation mixed with terror as rough hands stripped her bare. His mask of concentration slipped for that crucial instant. Confusion rippled through his eyes, followed in equal measure by anger, disbelief, and hate.

Leon?

What was he doing amongst the crowd?

What was he doing dressed as one of them?

The broad blade dug into his bowels, tearing through skin and flesh just enough to eviscerate the precious organs within. Agony flared in the wake of cold wave-beaten steel.

In that instant Toshi knew he was a doomed man. Though he might linger for hours in excruciating agony, the damage to his internal organs was beyond fatal. Already the first torturous tsunami breached the shock and waning adrenaline that defended his mind. It was all he could do not to scream. The tip of his katana wavered, then plummeted towards the ground, threatening to slip from nerveless fingers.

But still he focused on the familiar face in the crowd. Steady brown eyes stared back at him in a curious mixture of sympathy and regret.

Traitor.

The swordsman who called himself Feng Wu melted back into the crowd, admiring his handiwork. Bright red gut blood splattered the paved stones at Toshi’s feet. The mob of thugs closed in, a wall of steel blades and cruel glares. They left just enough room for two of their number to drag the now-naked Kanade before her erstwhile superior. Hefty shoves forced her to her knees. They meant to violate her, the ronin realised, again and again as he bled to death before her eyes. She clung to stony silence in one last gesture of defiance, but he knew her well enough to recognise the raw terror coursing through her mind.

Try as he might, his fingers failed to grip the hilt of his blade. The first of her would-be tormentors stepped up behind her, grimy fingers fumbling at the gleaming steel buckle of his belt. He shared a crude joke with the audience, sing-song Cathayan rasping like a file through Toshi’s ears. A vicious wave of humour rippled through the assembled army, their banners fluttering in merciless mockery of his helpless mind.

Toshi felt the world waver.

For... veng...

Muscles spasmed. A tide of fire crested from his broken intestines through his head. Ruptured entrails stank of pungent death over a crowd of coppery blood and unwashed sweat. His knees buckled, his legs tottered. The tip of his blade scraped across the stone in screeching protest. Only superhuman effort kept him upright.

His eyes never left his woman. Kanade’s mouth moved in silent prayer as she wisely spent her last moments of sanity commending her soul to heaven, steeling herself for the ordeal to come. He recognised the syllables she whispered in repetitive mantra as the name of her younger sister.

She would die badly, and he along with her. But that was just his karma, he supposed, payback for the lives he himself had taken over his many years of soldiery. There was only one thing left to do now, and that was to ensure that the cherry petal fell with as much grace and poise as...

The black katana speared downwards from the heavens, nearly decapitating Kanade as it impaled her throat. A second spray of arterial red splattered across the grimy grey ground.

“Shi... ho...” Kanade’s lips whispered one last time, frothing and bubbling at the corner with bright pink blood. The light escaped her eyes, and she found peace.

For a stunned heartbeat none of the mob dared to move. Their hesitation proved to be their undoing.

Arced lightning slammed into the hilt of the black blade from the roiling clouds overhead. Where the tendrils of heaven’s wrath tore upon the fabric of the earth a temporary arch formed. In the split instant of its existence another will reached out to grab hold of the arcane energies, moulding them to its own ends. Manifest power wrenched upon the fabric of reality, unseen hands taking hold of the Firmament and giving it an almighty pull.

When it snapped back into place with a ground-shaking shudder, two shadows rose from the fog of pulverised dust and vaporised humidity.

The first reached out towards the two Fists who kept hold of Kanade’s lifeless arms in senseless shock. Mighty ebon palms closed over their scalps, biceps bulging as they lifted them clear of the ground. Tendons tensed as fingers squeezed. Those nearest quailed at the audible crack of shattering skull: the faint of heart losing their stomachs where they stood, the smartest amongst them turning to run.

Pearl-white teeth bared in a grin, the deathseeker launched himself into the fray. Within moments he had carved himself a circle of broken corpses, sending the survivors fleeing towards the terraces in disarray.

Through the carnage walked a second figure, calm and unruffled as if he knew for certain that the violence could never touch him. A single black feather fluttered incongruously upon the breast of his flowing cotton robes. One long arm, clad in sleeves of tattered flannel, reached out to retrieve his black blade without ever breaking pace. Kanade’s glassy-eyed corpse slid to the ground as he shook the blood from the darksteel edge, returning it to its scabbard in a single fluid motion. Her naked skin, as smooth as silk and as white as paper, gleamed in ghostly death beneath the shuddering wind-lashed braziers.

A shadow rose behind him, one of the Fists fleeing Ginuvo’s rampage. But before it could bring its glaive to bear, a single arrow snapped through the darkness and sprouted squarely through its throat. Momentum and sheer panic took the thug another two steps, mere human once more as he gurgled in incomprehensible horror. A second black-fletched arrow took him through the eyes. He collapsed to the ground, inert.

Toshi’s pupils dilated in recognition of what he had just seen... and in understanding.

Moments later he stood free. Remnant arcs of the deepest darkest purple seared into his vision, strokes of a mystical blade cutting through the intangible veil of fear that had pinned him to the ground. Thunderclaps rolled once more overhead in time with the newcomer’s arts. He shed his paralysis like a hunting hound shed the cloying mud of the chase. Serene calm returned in its place, a soothing balm to treat the torn and bleeding muscles of his groin. By all means he should not have still stood. But stand he did, given strength by the one final blooming of the beautiful flower called his death.

The newcomer leaned close to Toshi’s ear, standing just far enough away to make sure that the one-armed ronin kept sight of his erstwhile underling. Leon bowed slightly, formally, somehow conveying a life’s worth of gratitude and apology and respect in a single insignificant gesture.

“Would you let him get away with so defiling the sacred ritual of seppuku?” the serpent whispered softly.

Something stirred within Toshi’s weather-beaten heart. He could smell the sea amidst the sewage, a fresh wind from the north like those that had heralded a profitable catch in the home of his youth. In his deepest of hearts he had always yearned to return to Nippon, to the fishing village where his childhood sweetheart dwelt, though the Emperor himself might forbid any who left from setting foot upon Imperial soil again. Now he knew for certain that would never happen, yet the knowledge left him with a semblance of bittersweet comfort. A dream that would never come true was still a dream worth chasing, a dream worth dreaming. Even at the very end.

Kanade had known that she would die tonight. She had known that she would never see her sister again. And she had faced her end with dignity and honour.

He too had known that he would die tonight. Would he fail to follow her lead?

Would he fail to teach Leon his final lesson, how a true man died?

No.

“I... Le...”

The newcomer nodded, snake-like eyes conveying rare sincerity. His sword, dark as the abyssal depths of night, whispered into the safety of its black-lacquered sheath.

“I accept full responsibility for his fate. So I swear, by my ancestors and by yours.”

Toshi nodded in weary grace, one last smile touching his parched lips. Then the tip of his own katana rose from the blood-stained pavement, aimed at the terrace opposite where Yi Cai watched with Feng Wu now at his side. His voice rang out through the brewing storm, surprisingly clarion and clear.

“For Shibata Masanobu!”

One step forward.

“For Gamou Takachiyo!”

Another. His blade rose to his shoulders.

“For Mikogami Kanade!”

He broke out into a tottering run.

“For Amano Toshihide!”

With the might of a man bound for certain death the ronin carved a bloody swathe through the ranks of assembled men. He heeded neither his safety nor the agony of his disembowelled viscera. He made it two-thirds of the way across the courtyard, leaving a trail of demon-shocked survivors and dismembered limbs in his wake. At last a hedge of a dozen spears transfixed him mid-stroke.

Toshi breathed his last where he stood, savage smile wrought across his features, sword still clasped as an extension of his only arm. He had satisfied his honour. Fulfilled his glory.

The heavens opened up at last. Thunderous downpour washed away the blood that stained the stone gardens.

[Whispers of Abyssion]

Some in Ninedrakes counted their blessings upon the typhoon’s arrival. Lashing gales chased away the stale humidity that lurked in the lee of the sheltered valleys. Reservoirs emptied by long months of drought drank their fill of the generous heavens. What violence still raged on the streets ceased with as much alacrity as it had begun, nature’s irrefutable will quenching the day’s unrest. Clouds roiled and raced overhead, smothering the night beneath thick blankets of angry black.

For others, it came as a nightmare. Divine winds descended on the harbour, swamping fleets of junks and rickety sampans upon the rocky beaches. Rivers of rain ran off the parched hard-packed earth, gathering momentum into muddy deluges that wiped half-a-dozen shanty towns from the face of Althanas along with all their denizens. Entire communities huddled beneath the dubious shelter of driftwood and scavenged stone, wondering when the next squall or wave would claim them all.

And for a select few it mattered not at all.

The ebon deathseeker hurled one last screaming torso clear of his killing ground, tossing aside in nonchalant disdain the leg he had ripped from his victim. Broken like a rag doll, the body crashed amidst its erstwhile comrades. But the King Dragon paid and trained his Fists enough that they didn’t easily break and flee. And he had enough leverage over their dependants to ensure that they would protect him to the death, if needs be through virtue of sheer numbers alone. They scrambled into a wary but defiant circle around the berserk warrior.

Blood drizzled down the deathseeker’s muscular arms to the packed earth at his feet. Taking advantage of the lull he spared a glance to the dead one-armed ronin, propped up like a garden ornament by death exertion and bamboo spear. He bowed his head in a rare gesture of respect, rivulets of rain running from his bald pate.

The archer who had hidden himself amongst the street thugs also paid tribute, face glistening in the wet to hide his hot tears. Then he too stepped forth into the garden, nocking a black-feathered arrow to his flame-scarred bow.

Yi Cai bowed to them all, straightening his collar as he stood tall once more. After all, he had formalities to observe.

“I welcome you back to my humble abode, Master Kaburagi,” he called, exerting the effort to make himself heard over the driving rain. Already pools of standing water had started to form beneath the torrential deluge. They quailed beneath the ongoing beating, growing with every passing second. “Or is it Master Serpent? I get so terribly confused these days, trying to keep up with your many aliases.”

His lips parted in a predatory smile.

“How heartless of you to leave the last of the tiger’s men to his death.”

“No more heartless than you, King Dragon,” the serpent returned at a shout from behind the safety of his henchmen, his bantering words music through the percussive rain. He inclined his head towards Zhen Ji’s body and waited. Alone of all the men in the courtyard, the face of the Nipponese traitor who’d called himself Kaburagi reflected nothing but mirror-like calm. Yi Cai licked his lips in hungry anticipation.

“But of course.” The King Dragon injected just enough emotion into his voice to sound sorrowful. But the curl of his lips matched the disdainful smirk on Feng Wu’s sharp features. His Jade Fang bodyguard shifted his weight, bound by coin and contract to Yi Cai’s commands but clearly itching to get to grips with his new enemies. “She would have done anything for me. For her love of me.”

“And the hound died for his honour,” Kaburagi’s sharp tenor returned, this time indicating Toshi’s snarling corpse. “You and I both know how foolish they were.”

“Indeed,” Yi Cai chuckled. “Perhaps as foolish as yourself?”

A slow sweep of his billowing golden sleeves parted the packed ranks of Fists behind him. Their movement revealed the hog-tied form of the massive half-ogre bodyguard he’d captured that morning, trussed up like a beast ready for the roast. One of the Fists held a gleaming sword to the throat of the Coronian ferret, the businessman called Polecat.

The serpent barely raised an eyebrow. But his archer’s bowstring wavered beyond what could be expected from the rain running down his brow and into his eyes. The half-ogre lay as still as a corpse waiting for the grave, drugged and beaten almost beyond recognition. Dried blood clotted Polecat’s temples. An ugly combination of five o’clock shadow and purpling bruise sheathed his sharp jaw. His eyes drowned in the darkness of ten hours spent in an underground pit without enough room to sit. He peered at his boss through one good eye.

“Guv’nah,” he whispered in a hoarse attempt at humour. If he could have tipped his hat, he would have. Once more Yi Cai’s heart soared in appreciation. Those he had broken numbered many, but it was always the few who showed spirit and resolve in the face of torture and death that he admired.

Kaburagi met the greeting with cold fortitude. Nary a flicker of emotion raced through his fine cheekbones or the thin line of his nose.

“Do you think to use him as a shield against me? If so, I must hasten to correct you of your error.”

“That would depend on your intentions, would it not?” Yi Cai’s teeth glistened, dull and tea-stained. “In any case, you cared enough to deliberately allow us to capture him, knowing that I would keep him safe just in case he might prove a useful chip to bargain with. After all, such would be much better than letting him roam the streets where a cheap shot by Andrej or Ebrahim could simply...”

He made a flicking motion with both hands and all ten digits, unhampered by the thick bandage that wrapped the broken little finger of his left hand to its neighbour for support. The serpent inclined his head, a fencer acknowledging the touch.

Yi Cai shifted his weight forwards, as if he and his foe sat across a table of business negotiations rather than in a courtyard with two hundred bloodthirsty underlings poised for violence. If only the circumstances would have allowed him to steeple his fingers in deliberation. He settled instead for settling the thin black tie at his neck before folding them across his groin.

“My demands have not changed since we first met, Master Serpent. What do you know of the Fragment? Or rather, what are you willing to tell me now?”

Kaburagi paused as if to think. But the set of his brow never once wavered, not even when further tongues of forked lightning crackled across the low-hanging sky.

Only then, in the knowing gleam deep within those blunt black eyes, did Yi Cai realise that the serpent had trapped him.

“In the interests of transparency, then, might I suggest you reveal who sits behind those sliding panels?” A languid wave of Kaburagi’s left hand indicated the paper walls behind Yi Cai. “For we both know who you work for.”

The King Dragon’s cruel smile froze in place. For a moment he hovered on the verge of refusal, of ordering the bloodbath and allowing nature’s relentless pounding wrath to take care of the resulting mess. Rain and wind lashed upon their twin exposed faces, howling in dreadful cacophony in the ears of all who watched and waited.

Then the panels behind him parted of their own accord, rescuing him from thankless decision. Two figures stepped out from the depths of his abode. One was the Commissioner of Ninedrakes, pale and ragged from the long day of dealing with riot and revolt.

The other was Tirithiel Aldaelwa, representative of the Syndicate, impartial and aloof observer of all that occurred in Ninedrakes. Her emerald eyes flashed at the serpent’s mocking bow. Yi Cai shivered to see just how dangerously she held her head high, a mana bomb primed for explosion. She had always frightened him, from the day she’d elevated him to his position as King Dragon above the piled corpses of his predecessors. But he had never let that fear show, and for that reason alone she still tolerated his presence.

“The Fragment, snake.” Her silky voice whipped harsh and cold through the torrent of needles falling from the sky. “Or I fry you where you stand.”

“I think not,” Kaburagi returned, gaze suddenly as hard as dragon bone. “I was talking to the King Dragon, Mistress, so I beg your indulgence to ignore you in favour of more important matters.”

They could hear her sharp inhalation even through the raging typhoon. Her jewellery flashed. Thunder rolled overhead, almost inaudible beneath the hammering of raindrops upon dirt and stone. Blood swirled in pretty patterns upon the muddy rainwater pooling at Kaburagi’s feet, seeping into his thin socks. She would smear the insolent Nipponese and his underlings into three more fleshy blots upon the gardenscape. She would atomise them, burn them to their bones and scatter their ashes across the continent. She would..

Only the Commissioner’s hand on her shoulder restrained her from lashing out there and then.

“Important matters?”

This time the King Dragon raised an eyebrow, mastering the thunderous beat of his heart. He hated surrendering further initiative, but he had already found himself outmanoeuvred on the field of words. That left, perhaps regrettably, only the field of battle... but there he had the absolute advantage. He could afford to hear Kaburagi out before deciding on his fate. A restless rustle swept like an immaterial wave through the ranks of the assembled Fists. Feng Wu’s fingers played upon the hilts of his swords, ready to strike at a moment's notice. The die had been cast.

Kaburagi smiled.

“How does it feel to be undisputed lord of Ninedrakes, King Dragon?” Wind howled and rain drummed, but his enunciated words pierced the storm without any visible effort. “To have wiped away the blight of the tiger, Masanobu Shibata, at long last? To have dealt with the ox and the fly, Andrej Ivanovitch and Ebrahim Sassani, with no more than a few whispered words? To have captured the ferret Polecat and driven away the bear Terlac Sartet with but a raised finger? Whose name will the Lord of Beggars whisper as the true power in this city now? Some foreign usurper’s, or yours?”

Almost unwillingly Yi Cai matched Kaburagi’s amusement. His hand rose in mimicry of the swordsman’s earlier gesture, acknowledging the touch in turn.

“It is, one admits, not a bad feeling.”

“Of course it is not.” The serpent ignored Tirithiel’s narrowing suspicions as they focused on his vulnerable rainstruck form. “You rid yourself of the petty infighting that has long blighted Ninedrakes. You strike a blow in the Jade Emperor’s name, driving the wretched qwai loh from the Middle Kingdom.

“And you buy yourself time against the threat in the south.”

Kaburagi spoke the final line in nonchalant ease, but immediately the tension spiked. The King Dragon’s glare snapped to his counterpart’s, narrowing to reptilian slits. The serpent matched it with equal flaring intensity. The archer’s bow wavered and the deathseeker’s muscles tensed. Even the Commissioner’s tired pale blue gaze betrayed sudden interest. Only fuming Tirithiel and bloodthirsty Feng Wu remained somewhat unconcerned.

The moment passed.

Yi Cai nodded.

“We understand each other then.”

“Of course. Your payment was to bring to Tirithiel the Fragment or the Man, dead or alive. I am here. You have done so. Thus you have no more need to linger, no more need to sacrifice any more of your newfound but fragile power. Am I not correct?”

“I could crush you.”

“Like a bug,” the serpent agreed amiably, drawing another matching smile from the King Dragon. It was a shame really. If not such dire enemies, they might have even been close friends. “But who knows what damage I could do to you on the way? Would you run that risk, or would you rather Tirithiel dealt with me?”

In the end, Yi Cai didn’t even have to weigh his options. Let the owl singe herself at the serpent’s fangs. Let the Syndicate burn its fingers upon the unknown foreign treasure. He had played his part in this charade, and had come out the stronger for it. Now, he had no more need to participate.

“Let them go,” he told Feng Wu. He received a hard stare in turn, but shook his head to stifle his hired hand’s killing instinct. With some disappointment, the Jade Fang assassin signalled for obeisance. “We have finished here for tonight. Let us leave.”

A soft sigh rose from the assembled ranks his Fists: relief, mixed with the realisation that they would live to die another day. That they could now seek shelter from the retribution of the heavens before the King Dragon’s orders killed them all.

Yi Cai felt himself relaxing as well, tension seeping from his shoulders. He spared one last glance at the courtyard, at the devastation that Shibata’s dogs had wrought upon his peaceful home. Then his eyes alighted on Zhen Ji’s corpse, lying face-down in a diluted puddle of her own blood. Something remarkably like genuine sorrow touched the depths of his rock-hard soul. Whatever her idiosyncrasies and quirks, whatever her peculiar tastes in pleasure and in torture, she had died in his service. When the dust settled, he would light an incense stick in her honour, and another one for all the others who had died for him this night. It would not be the first such offering he made to the gods. Neither would it be his last.

He turned to leave. One last time, almost as an afterthought, he spoke.

“I promise you safe conduct from this city, Master Serpent, if you leave before this storm subsides. For services rendered, and for amusement provided. Beyond that, I consider you fair game.”

The man who called himself Kaburagi nodded, still wearing that small smile, as if he had expected nothing less. One last time, Yi Cai bared his teeth to match it.

“It would be very much a pleasure if we could work together again.”

[Whispers of Abyssion]

Eventually the courtyard cleared of Yi Cai’s men. Silence filled the void left behind by their exodus. Only their dead remained, dozens of nameless faceless Fists in glassy-eyed contortion and slumber. Zhen Ji lay face-up in a pool of her own blood by the wrecked wall, shock and disbelief still writ large across her powdered cheeks. Kanade’s naked curves glistened as the rain battered her peaceful prone back. Propped up by a dozen bamboo spears Toshi stood in glory as the new centrepiece of the stone garden, the fingers of his hand wrapped in a death grip around the hilt of his sword. The Commissioner gazed upon their corpses in drooping, wordless sorrow.

Pooling rainwater turned the garden into treacherous quagmire. Puddles lapped in suppurating warmth at the feet of Kaburagi and his men. Pungent, the stink of death wafted over overflowing sewage and overwhelming petrichor. Ozone lingered in the back of his nose, fuming from the rigid set of Tirithiel’s shoulders like vapour from a geyser poised to erupt.

He dared not risk even the slightest provocation. Never before had he seen her wound so tight, drawn so taut. How long ago had she lost all semblance of composure and control? Certainly long before Kaburagi’s taunts had hammered the last hinge from her mind. He’d probably seen it in her flushed cheeks at the remains of Andrej’s whorehouse, and again when he’d told her of Ebrahim’s death and she’d recounted to him the Fallienese merchant’s rude pleas. With newfound clarity he watched her teeter on the precipice of control, mesmerised by the abyssal insanity beckoning so far below. He noted the way she glared at Zhen Ji’s unseeing face, and how she tsked once in disappointment. How she then transferred her glare to the serpent, hungry anticipation replacing her regret.

And in the meantime he stood by her shoulder, taking her side in an argument destined to blow the top off Ninedrakes as he knew it. What was more, the thrice-damned rash on his left arm still itched like the high heavens.

Thayne, he hated his job sometimes.

Yi Cai’s men had abandoned the ferret and his half-ogre upon the terrace. Manacles of cold iron shackled the latter from doing much more than groan in muffled pain as his consciousness returned. The former could only clutch at his woollen hat, trembling with physical and mental exhaustion. Zhen Ji’s death stare arrested his beady eyes, usually so darting and lively. Darkness lingered there, and remembered terror.

The Commissioner took pity on the dishevelled wretch. Reaching into his belt, he fished out a slender dirk and tossed it at Polecat’s feet. The Scarabrian stared at it for a moment longer, as if attempting to comprehend its exact purpose. Then over the hammering of raindrops rose the sound of steel sawing through hempen rope. Muted grunts followed as Polecat helped his massive bodyguard to his feet. At a nod from their Nipponese master, they slipped from the scene in weary retreat.

That left just six.

Tirithiel led her contingent beneath the sheltered eaves of the King Dragon’s palace, filigreed gold carcanet flaring in emerald flame. Her owlish gaze matched the ferocity and brilliance of the jewel upon her breast. Silver coronet nestled in translucent hair, the crossed hands of the Syndicate passing stern judgement upon proceedings. The Commissioner stood to one side, as inconspicuous as he could make himself. Astraea, Tirithiel’s dark-robed handmaiden, stood at her other shoulder in contemplation equally unseen and unheard.

In the middle of the stone garden, drenched in blood and rain, Kaburagi made his stand. The muscles on his archer’s arms quivered under the strain as sustained adrenaline took its toll. His deathseeker’s pearly eyes erred not from the elven representative’s brilliant green, the glare of a predator seeking prey worthy of its name. Kaburagi between them stood almost at ease. One hand rested upon the hilt of his darksteel blade. The other swept ragged hair from his eyes, slicking it back across his scalp.

Thunder rolled overhead. Raindrops the size of his thumb continued to pelt down. The Commissioner scarcely dared to breathe, so thick did the humid heat settle in his lungs. Wind howled and earth cowered, until at last Tirithiel could contain herself no longer.

“Where is the Fragment?”

She enunciated every word with crystalline power, pounding their psyches with all the delicate subtlety of a sledgehammer. The deathseeker blinked. The archer flinched. The interloper let the words wash over him like wind over a rock.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?””

The Commissioner’s jaw fell half an inch from his face. What purpose did it serve to further anger the most powerful arcane practitioner in Ninedrakes? He stepped forward almost before he knew it, cursing the instinct even before his foot fell. One hand tugged nervously at the collar of his silk shirt, causing the lapel pin there to glint in the light of what braziers remained standing.

“Master...” What had Yi Cai called him again? Ah yes. “Master Serpent. I do not know what you are trying to accomplish here, but you have lost. Lady Tirithiel has won. Whatever Fragment you own, whatever information you hold of its whereabouts or its fate, is hers by right. You would do well to tell her before matters spiral from control.”

“Control?” Black-brown eyes, mirror-like pools of sheer calm, turned their attention to him. A small, sly smile played about the Serpent’s lips. The Commissioner recoiled, unsettled, unable to fathom the depths that probed his soul. “What control is this that you speak of? The plottings of a petty crime lord? The whims of an insane sorceress? The delusions of an overreaching policeman?”

His tranquil gaze lingered just long enough to make the point.

“No. I would not say a word. Not for all the control on Althanas.”

Even as the Commissioner admired the Nipponese’s sheer resolve, he quailed beneath the pressure building on his back. Magma poured into volcanic chambers primed to explode, winds funnelling into the heart of the hurricane. For the sake of Ninedrakes, for the sake of everything he had ever worked for, he had to give it one last try. He could not take responsibility for the elemental catastrophe that awaited his failure.

“Master Serpent, I ask you to reconsider. We could pay you, perhaps with inside knowledge of the activities of Vorgruk and Stokes in this area? Trust me on this, you do not wish to anger the lady any further. Even a snake knows better than to...”

“No.”

The man cut him off before he could waste any more breath. The Commissioner faltered, unwilling to believe his ears.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I am a serpent, Commissioner. I slither through the shadows, plotting in the darkness, hiding in the night.” Kaburagi’s voice echoed proud and clear over the driving rain. Nature’s wrath manifest could not bend his back before those who would seek to bring him low. “But once I have chosen to strike I do not retreat.”

As calm as a mirror pool, he faced down Tirithiel’s fury.

“Thrice I tell you no. Prise the knowledge from my dying lips, she-elf, or be gone back to the forsaken grove where you belong.”

The Commissioner winced. The ozone flared to a painful crescendo in the back of his nose. With reluctant care he stepped out of the line of fire.

And not a moment too soon.

“Mortal.” Tirithiel spat the word like poison from her lips. Her eyes glared the fangs of adders. Her fingers wove the ghostly flame of the fae. “I tire of this game.”

The emerald upon her breast flared in tune with her cresting wrath. How dare they not only defy her, but mock her too? How dare they deny her rightful prize, the power promised to her by her birth and her deeds?

By the Star Father’s will, she would inflict such agony upon them that they would prostrate before her and beg to be set free.

Rampant wrath wrought havoc upon the Firmament. A tsunami of brilliant green energy swept towards the three puny mortals who stood in her path. Banks of searing steam rose where curtain of rain met wave of foxfyre. Motionless upon the drenched stone, the features of the dead writhed beneath the ethereal radiance. Electric discharge, bitter and intense, choked the lungs of those still living.

Dark silver flashed, shrouded by a lingering purple-black halo as hollow as a moonless night. It moved too swiftly for the Commissioner to track. But the sudden disappearance of the fae flame, and the audible snick as Kaburagi’s blade returned to its scabbard, told him all he needed to know.

Tirithiel, too, had not missed it. No longer did she veil herself in the sagacity and wisdom of an ancient owl. Awash in triumph and greed, her eyes gleamed instead with the avaricious glare of a thieving magpie.

“Darksteel. Nullstone. Morphite. Fragment of the Daemon Realms.”

Tall she rose, terrible as the dawn. Inner light burst from her skin. Unleashed from her physical form to wreak havoc upon the world, her centuries-old spirit left no room for shadow in the gardens before her. Coruscant power danced at her fingertips. Bolts of blinding radiance lashed out indiscriminately towards her foes. Chips of splintered stone pierced the thundering downpour where they made cratered impact. The Commissioner flinched from the impacts. Alongside him Astraea gave a muted groan as her mistress stepped out from the shelter of the terrace eaves and into the bloody, muddy quagmire of battle.

Kaburagi side-stepped with utter cool as one particularly incandescent blast of superheated lightning flayed the air in which he had stood. Flying stone grazed his cheeks, and he could smell singed hair over the stink of puissant force. He held his sword before him like a warding staff, bracing the spine of the blade against the magic that shredded his wards as though they were wet paper.

The archer loosed one black-fletched arrow from his flame-scarred bow, then another. Both perished in flecks of ash as Tirithiel batted them aside with her mind. Narrowing her eyes at the affront the elf concentrated upon the young man’s bandaged burns and cotton-padded earlobe. A single concussive blow sent Kaburagi reeling, wiping the smug smirk from his handsome native features. A second, and the archer vanished, thrown across the courtyard to slam against the unbroken wall opposite. Falling rain dampened the rising cloud of stone and dust, revealing his broken body motionless amongst puddling blood and offal.

Shadows reared behind Tirithiel. Somehow the mountainous deathseeker had used the arrows as a distraction to sneak behind her, looming over her eerie form like a monster out of myth. The Commissioner choked upon a warning gasp, knowing that whatever he could say would come too late before those massive fists curled about her.

Except that the elf placed a palm in front of the deathseeker’s face... and the southerner froze, straining against an invisible force that effortlessly locked him in place. Muscles clenched taut against the arcane cage, eyes of pupil-less white bulging as they fought to get to grips with their foe. Now the Commissioner could see the fresh wounds upon his massive frame: gouged muscle where rusty claws had torn at his skin, welts and bruises across his ribs from a savage beating. Still the deathseeker strove against his invisible bonds, teeth bared against the foe that might finally grant him death.

But Tirithiel paid him no attention. Emerald eyes snapped back to the black sword, predator focusing on prey. Her free hand continued to flog Kaburagi with tendrils of coruscating light.

Closer, ever closer they drew in upon his form. Tighter, ever tighter they forced him to dance. Repeated blasts tore his skin, shredded his robes, and left charred trails upon his limbs. More than once he escaped certain incineration with a blur of illusive escape. But the lashing light followed him without fail through scorched mist. Tirithiel’s gleeful smile curled tauter, ever tauter upon her thin cheekbones. Her elfin beauty no longer masked the insane sadism that fuelled the bright glow of her arcane prowess.

Her fingers snapped upright, her palm brandished as an arcane focus. The same prison that locked the deathseeker in place now slammed down upon the Serpent as well. His desperate dance ceased in abrupt stillness, and no effort of will could work his magic beneath her brilliant beryl glare.

The Commissioner knew how it felt to cower beneath the full force of Tirithiel’s will. Once before, a month after he’d found himself in her employ, he’d stood up to her against her unlawful acquisition of a piece of jewellery from his predecessor - the same emerald carcanet she now wore around her neck, in fact. She had demonstrated to him the full consequences of defying her, drowning him beneath a torrent of icy power. Slippery, intangible, inescapable, he would have had more luck flailing beneath a thousand-foot waterfall. She had warned him not to flout her again before setting him free. For more than three years he had picked his fights with care, never once openly challenging her authority.

He pitied the young Nipponese who had failed to heed his lesson. But he could only watch and wait before the impending doom. Tirithiel’s offensive magics ceased their cacophony. They left a deafening ear-pounding void that even the howl of the wind and the percussive patter of rain could not pierce.

A void broken by a single sound.

“Ha.”

At first the Commissioner could not believe his ears, so faint was the cough beneath the rolling thunder and the beat of the rain upon the pavestones and bloody puddles.

“Hahaha.”

Then he realised he hadn’t dreamed it. The serpent, Kaburagi, was actually laughing. Raw, throaty sound reverberated upon the drowned cadavers, completely inappropriate amidst the carnage. It was as though the man could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he had given voice to his mirth in his life, and yet found his current situation worthy of amusement. Impressive, given that he should not even have been able to draw breath beneath Tirithiel’s focused will.

But still the Nipponese spoke in his accented Common, his voice as clear and as focused as it had been when he had goaded Tirithiel into her assault. And the black feather fluttered at his breast, proud and unbowed.

“Do you truly know so little of the land in which you live?”

The Commissioner’s eyes narrowed in sudden suspicion. And then realisation. A curt drawn breath in his ear told him that Astraea had recognised the incongruity as well.

“Do you truly believe it thunders during a typhoon?”

[Whispers of Abyssion]

A thunderbolt fell from the heavens.

A thunderbolt armoured in white. A thunderbolt bracketed by wings of the darkest night.

Silvery hair flowed in its wake like a gravity-defying waterfall. Raindrops traced silky, glistening paths across its alabaster skin. Eyes of the purest mythril focused for a breath upon the Commissioner’s gaping shock.

A bloody scimitar rose from the pavestones.

And Tirithiel’s bisected body fell to the puddles on either side. The heat of the blade’s passage had cauterised the wound, smoking into the rain. What remained of the she-elf’s gloating expression, carved in twain by the most decisive of blows, hit the soiled waters with a soft desolate splash.

Accumulated power backfired with a blinding flash. Reality jolted in anger, stuttered in haphazard havoc, then finally reasserted its authority. Thick cloying air rushed in to fill the space that Tirithiel’s magic had vacated, wrenching their minds with violent, lung-crushing pops. Mingled stenches of death and rain and the unbridled arcane fumed upon their tongues. The aroma was rich enough to cause most of them to retch.

Touma Kamikaji, known as Kaburagi, the serpent, and many other names besides, breathed of his sweet success.

“Silmeria,” he nodded in as composed a gasp he could manage. “I appreciate your aid.”

“The Lesser-Born threatened you,” she replied in lilting, childish sing-song. Flicked the gore from glowing steel, she folded dark wings against her back. One hand reached out to caress the feather that Touma wore upon his chest. “I allow no one to threaten you.”

Touma nodded again, using the moment’s respite to take stock of the situation. His head throbbed with every heartbeat, an unseen ogre grating an iron-studded club through the neurons of his mind. A heavy weight between his shoulder blades hampered his breathing, as though he failed to draw enough oxygen into his lungs to compensate for his body’s demands. Swollen blisters on fingers and forearm gave him a good idea of how close Tirithiel had come to burning through his meagre magical defences. Stabbing agony in his side warned him of a cracked rib or two, though thankfully it lacked the grinding pain of broken bone. Both legs seemed to function, even if they ached as though a million small meteorites pounded the skin. He could look forward to enough bruises on the morrow to prevent him from walking, but for now he could still count on his dwindling reserves of adrenaline to see him through. Stepping between the two halves of Tirithiel’s smouldering corpse, he sheathed at last the ominous purple-black steel of his glowering blade.

At least I know something now of what Nanashi must have felt facing the Forgotten One.

Two deep breaths focused his mental defences. Acrid fumes rose from singed hairs and charred elf-flesh, giving him something solid, something real, to concentrate upon. Within seconds the pain began to recede, filtered from his mind. Cold, hard logic took over.

A swift probe of his surroundings told him all he needed to know.

“Ginuvo, see to Leon if you don’t mind. I think he may still be alive.”

The ebon-skinned deathseeker rose at his command, a walking mountain breaking the pile of corpses pooled at his feet. He shook his head in pained silence, as if disappointed to find himself still standing. Then he grunted something that might have been assent - a veritable verbal torrent from the normally non-responsive Ginuvo - and moved to obey his lord’s command.

Touma didn’t bother to watch him go. Either he had misjudged his newest recruit and Leon had perished, or he had not and the man had survived. In grim acceptance he surveyed the wreckage of his robes, torn and scarred where Tirithiel’s magic had taken its toll. He waded up to his ankles in gory puddles, his socks a stinking ruin. He resolved to pretend that nothing was amiss. He also resolved to take a long purifying bath at the first available opportunity.

“Silmeria, you’re with me. We have...”

A bright flash caught his attention, sloshing in the water at his feet. Just in time Touma suppressed his initial instinct to pick it up. With more care, he peered down for a closer look.

It was Tirithiel’s carcanet, fine-wrought filigreed gold with the glimmering emerald set in its centre. He frowned, creasing his brow. Silmeria’s scimitar had most certainly traced a path through it when she’d carved the elf in two. Tirithiel’s headpiece, delicate silver hands clasped in cooperation, lay sundered in two over the glassy whites of her eyes. So how did the carcanet remain whole?

Urgently he gestured for Silmeria to retrieve the artefact. She did so without fuss, her eyes pale and unperturbed.

“Khal’jaren’s eyes,” a sudden voice swore in mild irritation through the pouring rain. Touma’s gaze snapped upwards as the Commissioner stepped from the eaves, one eyebrow held crooked beneath his lined forehead. Tirithiel’s handmaiden stood in the shadows behind him in eerily submissive silence, her face averted beneath a spider-silk veil. “Took me years to set this up. Now you’ve brought it down around my ears. I’m going to have to skip town before everything unravels, you realise.”

“You know what this is all about?”

Touma’s voice could not quite disguise its scepticism. He took one heavy step towards the Commissioner, shearing a bow wave through the ripples of raindrops hitting the lake of blood. Only when the straw-haired bureaucrat raised both hands in hasty submission did he halt.

“Do you wish for me to call Phillipe?” Silmeria had not missed the inherent wince in Touma’s movements. Her unnerving eyes turned dangerous as she faced the grim-featured Commissioner and his dark-robed companion. “Or Angelus, or Hiroyuki, to ask them some... questions?”

A raised palm caused her to subside. Touma met her gaze in gentle reassurance. A nonchalant wave of his serpentine fingers gave the man permission to speak.

The Commissioner grimaced, pushing steel-rimmed spectacles up his hawkish nose.

“You did this because you’re making a point.” Piercing blue eyes swept across the carnage the intruders had wrought upon Yi Cai’s garden. The wind’s howls waxed and waned like a hyperactive lunar tide, tearing greedily upon their meagre sopping garments. Rain splattered in steady streams upon the man’s balding pate, running in rivulets down his sharp nose and thin cheeks. “I’ll stake my career that you were the one who originally spread rumours of a Fragment in Ninedrakes. Misinformation to engineer this particular moment in time.”

Touma inclined his head graciously. The gesture betrayed neither assent nor disagreement, inviting the Commissioner to continue. The other man grunted in non-committance, allowing his gaze to linger on Toshi, on Kanade, on Zhen Ji. All prominent members of the crime syndicates infesting Ninedrakes, all names he should have been happy to see struck off his list of worries. Surrounded by all their deaths, though, he could not bring himself to feel any joy.

“Doubtless that dwarf Terlac saw through it, didn’t he? That’s why he left.” Breath left his lungs into the muggy, stormy night. Only a couple of braziers remained lit after the devastation of the battle, and they were not enough to reveal the Serpent’s face from inscrutable shadow. “No doubt he would have expected Tirithiel to do the same, one elder race to another. But blinded by long decades of staring into a future helpless for both herself and her people, the mere promise of power was enough to seduce her into madness.”

“You would take her part?”

The Commissioner grunted again. Something shifted in his contours of his jaw, like a fox shedding its mask. A myriad of lifetimes flickered through his features like the colours of a harlequin, until they settled on something deep blue and inscrutable.

“No.” His voice had changed somewhat, gaining in deep-throated respectability what it lost in gravelly intimidation. He removed his spectacles to protect them from the rain, and somehow his gaze never wavered in its intensity. “But on her behalf, and on behalf of the Literati, I apologise to you.”

At last the ghost of a smile played about Touma’s lips. Shadows and subterfuge meant everything to the game of whispers, but little surpassed the satisfaction of forcing an opponent to reveal the cards he held.

The Queen of Sceptres falls. The Knight of Pentacles shows his hand.

And yet...

“The Literati?” the Nipponese mused, more to himself than to the Commissioner. “Not the Syndicate?”

The Commissioner’s eyes crinkled in creased crow’s feet, not letting on any more than defeat obliged him to say. He waited for another moment while Touma gathered his thoughts, then continued.

“In the end, though, our interests align, do they not? The King Dragon is now established as undisputed monarch of Ninedrakes, its surrounding territories, its harbour and its commerce. One by one his foes have fallen, whether by their own machinations or by yours. With me gone, the Governor will roll right into his pocket. And now Cathay’s flank stands ready against the darkness further south.”

A shiver ran through their ranks at the mention of what threatened them all. Silmeria in particular drew in upon herself, her eyes liquid pools of moonlight, her slender frame trembling in empathic fear. The Commissioner noted her reaction, a frown of his own moulding his folded brow. Alongside him Astraea stiffened, almost imperceptible beneath her veil of shadow.

Eventually he broke the silence of the howling wind and the driving rain.

“A question for a question, Master Serpent?”

Touma thought for only a moment before nodding his assent. “Very well.”

“You could have taken them all by yourself, should you have so desired. Even Tirithiel, as you have proved here today. So why the subtlety? Why the deception?”

“And give them the opportunity to band together against me?” Touma snorted, scornful derision touching his features in a rare moment of candid sincerity. “I have not survived this long by being so careless, Commissioner.”

“And the emerald?”

“... that’s two questions,” Silmeria pointed out in a peevish pout, her pinion feathers still quivering. Touma hushed her with a raised finger to her dark purple lips.

“I claim it as my spoil.”

“Yi Cai will not be happy,” the Commissioner pointed out, wry humour touching his lips. One hand moved to shelter his eyes against the needle-like raindrops.

But as he finished his sentence, both rain and wind abated. The typhoon still bucked and veered upon the western horizon. A new bank of black hung ominously in the east. But for a few precious moments they could relax in peace and in quiet.

Grey cloud barrelled past overhead, reflected in the pools of muddy water and blood coating the courtyard. With the wind receded, reeking death hung heavy and suffocating over the vicinity. A stray shaft of starlight pierced the cover, and the world didn’t seem quite so bad any more.

But Touma’s features contorted into a mask of utter hate, so absolute that the storm nearly saw fit to come rushing in once more. Dark eyes fixated in a death glare upon the Commissioner’s face. His voice, so imperturbable and serene, emerged through clenched throat in a deep and vicious snarl.

“Tell him. If he wants his share, come bow his head to me.”

The Commissioner staggered at the sheer fury the serpent condensed into the phrase. For a heartbeat or two he could barely breathe. Then he remembered that the King Dragon had captured and tortured the man for a night, after all. Could he be so surprised at the unbridled fury?

No. And he thanked his stars that he was not Yi Cai. The Serpent seemed not the type of person who would so easily forgive a slight. One day, when all had passed and the King Dragon least expected it, there would be a reckoning.

“I see,” he managed to choke out at last through a throat clenched in remnant fear. “I remind you then that I owe you an answer in return.”

Touma blinked once to clear his mind. Then he smiled his small smile, fingers relaxing on the hilt of his blade. The tranquillity of his surroundings only enhanced its sinister, baleful malignance.

“I would know your name.”

A brief breeze stirred the tension between them. The Commissioner relented.

“Reikhart Fowler, at your service.” He bowed low, using his whole body rather than just from his waist, returning the smile in first true greeting. Part of his soul shrank from the thought of what power this man now held over him. But in his loss he could not complain. He doubted that his superior would either. After all, his organisation could make great use of an operative this skilful, this deft. “Undoubtedly we will meet again, Touma Kamikaji.”

His final cryptic words hung over the blooded courtyard. With one last bow, Reikhart and Astraea disappeared into the shadowy eaves of the King Dragon’s mansion, leaving behind an empty rift of unanswered questions.

But not for long. Silmeria stepped to Touma’s side with urgent haste, mythril eyes snapping to the breach in the compound’s walls.

“My lord, Yi Cai’s assassins approach. I believe that he may mean to do you harm.”

“Of course he does,” Touma sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose in weary exhaustion. His other hand settled again to the hilt of his sword. “We intruded upon his demesne and wrought havoc upon the sanctity of his home. As the new true king of this city, he cannot afford to lose face.”

He felt Ginuvo’s mountainous presence amble up behind him. The deathseeker slung Leon’s unconscious form over one shoulder like a sack of potatoes. The archer was badly battered and bruised but still breathing. He had much to learn about working with the Fraternity, but it was not his way to die without a fight. At least they had not lost that life. The circling blackbirds overhead would not feast on his body tonight.

Touma focused on that cheery thought. One moment the muggy air hung still and silent. The next, a gaping mouth of cool dark oblivion - anchored on the low-hanging eaves of Yi Cai’s palatial home - beckoned them to safety and beyond. Fresh cold air blasted at them from the portal, accompanied by the faintest taste of seasoned wood and the promise of a hearty meal on the fire. His mental defences almost slipped at that, and for a moment all his aches and agonies returned at once. It took every last shred of his mental fortitude to remain upright and to maintain the vital Way home.

Ginuvo needed no urging, disappearing into the maw with nary a breath of hesitation. Silmeria caught Touma’s eyes and followed, emerald set in filigreed gold still held between her dainty fingers.

Touma spared one last look about him at the carnage he had caused. In the courtyard around him, alone, he could put names to no less than four of the gory anonymous heaps of motionless flesh and bone. Tirithiel Aldaelwa. Toshihide Amano. Kanade Mikogami. Zhen Ji.

Owl. Hound. Dog. Butterfly.

When he extended it to the city as a whole, how many more could he name? Ebrahim Sassani. Asad Parsi. Andrej Ivanovitch. Terrapin. Takachiyo Gamou. Masanobu Shibata. The list went on.

Fly. Spider. Ox. Turtle. Puppy. Tiger.

And of the nameless Fists and other hired thugs who had perished since his arrival? Could he even begin to count their loss?

Then he allowed himself to remember what he had gained in return. A strong and prosperous Ninedrakes unified behind its new leader, a bulwark against the hordes of utsusemi driving north through the burning ruins of the Matarkhan Sultanate.

And the emerald carcanet, the Fragment of the Elder Race, now nestled safely in Silmeria’s hands.

Some might have called the price high. Some might have flinched from their goal, their duty, in the face of such sacrifice. But not Touma Kamikaji. Not the Serpent Tamer.

The eye of the storm passed overhead.

He left Ninedrakes to its ephemeral embrace.

[Leoric]

Hello Whispers, I am Leoric and i am going to be your Judge for this thread. If you have any questions or concerns about the Judgement feel free to toss me a PM or get a hold of me via Chat.

Thread Title: Shadowdancer
Judgment Type: Full Rubric
Participants: Whispers of Abyssion


Plot: 20/30

Story- 6/10
The story as a whole was rather interesting, it kept the reader engrossed in the story and kept them coming back for more. Now that being said there are a few things that detract from the overall story. For example Each post is a different view point, it stops the reader from being able to enjoy one nice story but instead gets to read multiple. In the end this hurts the story as you don't really get the whole picture until much later on. A lower score was awarded only because of the sudden and abrupt changes between each chapter.


Setting- 7/10
You explained the setting really nicely and completed the picture in the readers head at all times. However, the picture was painted too much and it felt like certain areas began to bleed through with one another. Example between first and second post. For awhile it seemed like that man was still in the same building as the first post. Which could make the reader reread to make sure they haven't missed anything. All in all setting was nicely done.


Pacing- 6/10
The pacing was solid, every post seemed to be fast where it needed to be and slow where it needed to be. However it could have been improved. A few instances were in the first post during the talking, That seemed to drag on. It was meant to be a tense political adventure but some readers might feel like they had to dredge through a waist deep swamp just to get to the good bits later on. Also your constant switching between scenes caused a bit of a dip here as you had to spend time resetting the scene. However you did repaint the scene beautifully each time.


Character: 20/30

Communication- 6/10
The communication was almost masterfully done. In the very first post you show off your skills. Mostly with the Dwarf and the Ferret. It really brought the characters to life. However, a few characters felt like they could have been more 3 dimensional with a few racial specific dialogue lines (The Halfbreed for example). Otherwise your choice to type the accent really added a new dimension having to figure out exactly what the dwarf was trying to say. However, it also hurt the score as it could cause a few individuals headaches as they tried to sift through his dialect. Your strong point is bringing your characters to life.


Action-7/10
Action was fairly well done. Some posts had it done masterfully and others felt like they were just glazed over. For example I will use your third post. There was so much more that you could of done there and made it more interesting to read. As it stands it felt like you just glazed over what could have been an awesome and well-written scene.


Persona- 6/10
The torture scene in post two was by far your best. However, the reader didn't know it was all a lie. The emotions you chose to depict made it seem like he was spilling out the truth. Here it felt like you could of added a few more emotions into the mix. Maybe you could of slowed down just enough to add more emotions into the mix and cause the reader to know that Yi Cai was being mislead. As it stands your persona of each character in this story really did shine.


Prose: 22/30

Mechanics- 7/10
There was a few occasions where certain words, from the various dialects, seemed to have caused me to pause. As well as misspelled words, such as 'taels' instead of 'tales'. (third post, second paragraph and Ninth post, seventh paragraph) Try reading out your posts to yourself as a form of editing. It helps catch most errors in the writing.


Clarity- 7/10
This suffered a little bit in part to you writing the accents instead of just stating they had one. It could cause the reader a lot of time and effort trying to decipher what was just said. This is a neat way to better understand just how rough his accent was but in the end it felt like it detracted from the clarity of the posts. However, your actions and what was being done in every post was clear and well written and this helped achieve a nice reading experience.


Technique- 8/10
Technique was very nicely done, you foreshadowed a bit here and there. Your flowery writing at times could make it feel over bearing at points. Your personification seemed to serve you well, I have yet to see a bad use of it in your writing. Over all your technique was very nicely done.


Wildcard: 8/10
It was an impressive read and it really made me think of the author David Eddings. Although his writing is flowery he really tends to bring his characters to life in a way I have yet to see anywhere else, until now. Nicely done and I look forward to reading more of your work.


Final Score: 70/100

Whispers of Abyssion receives:

2050 EXP!
250 GP!

Congratulations!

[Lye]

EXP & GP Added.