Lord Maximillian Stonewater was a very happy man.

  Resplendent in a crisp white shirt and burgundy waistcoat, his navy?blue coat’s tails brushing the limestone like a dancer’s frill, the Baron of Clayton emerged from the immense ironwood doors of Oaleholder’s Great Hall with all the composure of a man who had long since ceased to be impressed by grandeur – his own or otherwise.

  A soft click reverberated behind him as the doors shut. A muted drumbeat calling his triumph.

  Though his countenance remained suitably solemn – befitting a Peer of the Realm in the Kingdom of Helvecone – there were hints, perceptible solely to the most observant, of the elation that stirred beneath the powdered fa?ade. The faint tremor of his jowls, the subtle twitch of one over-starched cheek, and the slow climb of a smug satisfaction up towards his over-curled wig all betrayed his jubilation.

  He began his descent down the Great Hall’s limestone stairs – broad, pale steps polished by centuries of patrician boots – and immediately felt the familiar constriction of garments made for a man of slightly more modest dimensions. His thighs protested within his breeches, his belly strained against his waistcoat, and his neck – of which there was precious little – pressed indignantly into the folds of his starched stock.

  Above, the heavens swirled with golds and oranges as the sun made its final retreat behind the western horizon. A cold northern wind had begun to stir the hanging crimson banners and scatter the day’s warmth. All rather typical weather for the northern Omoritsi coast in autumn, the baron thought, with the dispassionate interest of a man who had long ceased to be surprised by anything outside his own portfolio.

  A distant bell tolled thrice, its clear notes slicing through the humid sunset. Hold Divine Cathedral, preparing for the Feast of All Saints on the morrow.

  By the time he reached the midway point of the descent, the weight of gravity and girth had combined to rather disagreeable effect. His neckcloth was now sodden, the powder on his face had given way to blotches of sweat, and every breath rose before him in great gusts of mist, each one more laboured than the last.

  From his perch, he spied his landau below – navy paint dull in the fading light, gold filigree catching the last of the day’s glow. The coachman stood by the door, swaying gently in place like a drunkard in a sermon.

  Lord Stonewater frowned.

  He believed the coachman was named Henry – though he’d never bothered to ask. The notion that his coachman might be inebriated on duty offended Lord Stonewater not only as an employer but as a man of standards. The coachman, in fact, offended him in every particular.

  But there were more pleasing thoughts to be had, and the baron indulged them as he waddled the remaining steps – of which there were still too many.

  He had, mere moments earlier, concluded a most profitable arrangement with representatives of the Falchovarian Republic – concerning sulphur, of all things. Through his contacts in the mining companies of the far Al’thalith Peninsula, he had given the Republic access to a seemingly endless supply of the foul substance. Though his resources were modest on a kingdom’s scale, the margins he stood to make from selling it on to the Republic – at what they foolishly believed to be a bargain – were significant. Within five years, his coffers would double.

  And to think, the frogs had imagined themselves the victors in the negotiation.

  True, the Republic and Helvecone had been at war mere months prior, but such details had little bearing on the baron’s sense of loyalty – which was, at best, an intermittent thing. Money spoke louder than allegiance, and louder still than sentiment. His only regret was failing to fleece yet more from the dastardly collectivists.

  Fortunately, the stairs seemed to be drawing to a close. Which meant, rather less fortunately, that the baron would have to end his thoughts on a sour note.

  Reaching the landau at last, Lord Stonewater addressed his coachman with a single, cutting observation.

  “You are drunk,” the baron panted, each word sending sprays of powdered sweat at the coachman.

  “N-no, sher, y’r Lor’ship,” the man stammered with offensive candour, “shober as a vicar on a Shunday, yer Lor’ship.”

  Lord Stonewater’s gaze slid over the man’s dishevelled appearance: the navy coat crusted with dust and old stains, the fraying cotton trousers, the thin moustache twitching like a rat’s tail. Even the ragged bicorne atop his head, no doubt worn to mask the retreat of hair, failed to redeem him.

  The stench of spirits clung to him as thick as fog.

  “Hmph,” the baron harrumphed dismissively, and stepped into the carriage.

  The coachman – if indeed the term still applied – smirked faintly as he shut the door. Lord Stonewater had not even spotted the shift in expression. He made a mental note to have the man dismissed upon return to the inn; Oaleholder was not short of men willing to drive a baron’s coach.

  He deposited his bulk upon the rear-facing bench, its upholstery groaning in protest, and sagged into his seat with a relief that quickly gave way to flatulence, belching, and other gaseous exertions borne of too much wine and too little exercise. The scent that followed was immediate and noxious.

  Unbeknownst to the baron, a concealed eye stared at him through a peephole in the facing bench. A single bead of light shone around the pupil – watchful and unblinking.

  Above, the coachman – who was, in fact, not Henry – snapped the reins. The two unfortunate horses lurched forward, and the landau rolled into the evening bustle of Oaleholder’s Inner City.

  They rolled down Craglen Street, a wide and well-paved artery of commerce flanked by tall terraced buildings of tasteful stonework and iron-railed balconies. The streets thronged with carriages, pedestrians, hawkers, and errand boys. Lords and merchants brushed shoulders with clerks and pickpockets alike, while the great and the grasping hurried to their respective pursuits.

  Their landau was but one carriage among many – unremarkable to the passersby, who had no idea that within it sat a baron whose fortunes had just doubled and whose coachman was not, in fact, his coachman.

  Crossing through Craglen Gate into the Outer City, the transformation was immediate. The neat elegance of the terraces gave way to slanting rooftops, asymmetrical walls, and a general air of neglect. Cobbled alleys branched away like fractured bones, each leading into gloomier quarters.

  As they turned onto a narrower street, they passed a gaggle of urchins skylarking by the roadside. The children – thin, ragged, and fearless – paused to gawk at the carriage.

  The driver raised two fingers at them in lazy insult. The result was a chorus of hoots and jeers. A few of the boys darted behind a leaning fence, only to re-emerge brandishing a heavy branch.

  They did not throw it at Lord Stonewater’s landau.

  Instead, with practised aim, they hurled it into the spokes of a trailing carriage. There was a tremendous crack of splintered wood, a squeal of metal, the panicked neighs of horses, and the bellowing of a furious driver – all receding behind them as their landau moved on.

  Within the relative silence of his compartment, the Baron of Clayton stirred.

  “By my authority, Henry – what in the Devil’s gravelly name is that clamour!?” he barked, too indolent to part the curtains and look himself.

  No reply came. Instead, the bench opposite him sprang open.

  From within it emerged a figure clad in a dark green cloak, face shrouded in a dark bandana, movements fast and lethal. And Baron Maximillian Stonewater, who had thought the possibility of danger was rarely more than theoretical, found himself very suddenly reacquainted with the notion.

  “WHO–“

  Then – darkness.

  Lord Stonewater’s final utterance had not even formed in full.

  A gloved hand sealed his mouth before the sentence could escape entirely. Simultaneously, a slender stiletto penetrated the mastoid area under the baron’s left ear, slipping upward between cartilage and bone. Once embedded deep within the soft architecture of the cerebrum, the assassin rotated the blade sharply – clockwise, counter-clockwise, clockwise – destroying all meaningful structure. What had once been ambition, greed, and the vague memory of the Grand Hall’s triumph became a twitching carcass.

  Ethan Harbinger waited for one breath after the spasms began before withdrawing the blade. He did so with deliberate care, ensuring no sound but the faint suction of steel leaving viscera. With his other hand, he reached into the folds of his cloak and withdrew a cloth that had been unwashed since the Siege of Oaleholder.

  He was too slow.

  A narrow arterial jet, bright crimson and speckled with particulate grey matter, erupted from the baron’s now-ventilated head. In one streak, it painted the compartment bench, soaked a portion of Ethan’s cloak, and left a fine mist upon his left boot. There was no melodrama to it. No great struggle. Just fluids reacting to decompression.

  “Tch,” Ethan clicked his tongue, a soft reprimand delivered to himself.

  Shoddy. The insertion angle had been off. He had known it the moment the blade made contact with the sphenoid ridge. He would have to adjust for cranial density in men of Stonewater’s corpulence in future engagements.

  He wiped the stiletto on the baron’s navy tailcoat and returned it to its sheath beneath his cloak, noting the sticky resistance of drying blood on the blade. Another item to clean. Another ritual to perform when they were safe.

  Cloth still pressed to the corpse’s ear, Ethan rapped twice on the wooden partition. His associate in the coachman’s perch responded at once, applying the whip and accelerating the emaciated horses into a strained trot. Neither man said a word.

  Moments later, Stonewater’s involuntary post-mortem functions made their presence known. Peristalsis released the contents of his bowels and bladder simultaneously. Faeces, urine, and gastric vapours spilled into his breeches and seeped out across the velvet seat. The stench was immediate and exacting – a mixture of unfiltered meat, rich wine, and the slow rot of self-indulgence.

  Ethan did not flinch. He merely adjusted the cadaver until he could sit on the opposing bench. His eyes flicked once to the baron’s corpse. The face was slack, the mouth half open, the tongue protruding at a grotesque angle. The wig had shifted during the struggle, hanging now like an ill-fitted pelt and holding the dirty cloth close to the perforation under the man’s ear.

  He had expected silence in the aftermath. Instead, there was the slow groan of carriage wheels, the incessant jostling of the undercarriage, and the faint, wet noises of bodily seepage inching its way across the floorboards.

  How marvellous, he thought indignantly. Another dead nobleman and his piss on my boots. Shoddy, indeed.

  From his position, he assessed the compartment once more. Two small windows, one on either side. Both curtained. One lamp – cold, likely empty of oil. No internal lock on the door. Upholstery thick enough to dull sound but not muffle it entirely. If something went wrong, the odds of Ethan being caught unawares were slim. Not zero, but comfortably low.

  The body continued to twitch intermittently. Reflexes. Ghost signals firing down nerves from a ruined terminal.

  Nothing to be done about it. No reason to dwell.

  He leaned back, arms crossed, eyes fixed not on the corpse but on the doors either side of him, and settled himself for a long, frowsty ride.

  An hour later, the carriage rolled past the iron gates of an empty summer estate, the sun having long since absconded behind a blanket of low-hanging cloud, leaving only the dim flicker of oil lamps to stand sentry. The glow they cast barely reached the stonework beneath, let alone the road beyond. Cheap oil, likely watered down. It smelt of fish and resignation.

  The estate itself had been left dormant for the season – its skeleton crew of one custodian, one footman, and one maid conveniently absent, either bribed or frightened off. Ethan had not inquired which. The result was the same: no witnesses, no delays, no one to scream when the stench of decaying flesh came rolling up the driveway.

  The carriage halted beside a side entrance to a barn, its boards warped and swollen from years of rain and mildew. With a low grunt, Ethan opened the door and hopped down, taking in the first clean air he had tasted in hours. Not that it lasted.

  He reached inside, seizing the corpse of Lord Stonewater by the wrist – cold, slick, and distended by subcutaneous gases – and gave it a forceful tug.

  It barely budged.

  “Simon,” Ethan said, voice low and edged, “get off your arse and help.”

  Simon Gershom, still dressed in his coachman’s disguise save for the bicorne, reluctantly descended from the perch. He ripped off the faux moustache and wiped away some of the grime, smearing more than cleaning.

  The face that emerged was, kindly put, a face.

  Thick brows the same colour as his dirty brown hair, high cheekbones covered in crusty scabs of recent pox – more on the right than on the left – and a permanent smile emerging from heavy his lower lip. Though a prominent chin and hooked nose revealed some eastern ancestry that his complexion did not.

  As Simon reached the door, the smell struck him full in the face.

  “Hurk – God’s bleedin’ arsehole, Ethan! What’s that stench?” he gagged, pulling his collar up over his nose.

  “The inside of a man’s bowels, mostly,” Ethan pointed at the corpse, prompting Simon to take hold. “They tend to empty when the brain gets churned into gruel. A fact well known by every assassin but you, apparently.”

  With both men hauling on the bloated mass, the late Baron of Clayton eventually slid from the seat and struck the earth with a noise not unlike a sack of wet laundry being dropped from a height – followed by a squelch as fluids escaped the seams of his garments.

  “Thrice-damned, fat fucking nobles,” Ethan muttered, adjusting his grip. “No discipline in life, no dignity in death.”

  Ethan had left the dirty cloth beside Stonewater’s ear during the ride – an attempt to stem further leakage. Predictably, it had failed. The cloth, now sodden, clung to the face like a second skin, and the blood had begun to weep from beneath it, tracing thin lines down the jaw and neck.

  The effect was ghoulish, to say the least.

  They began the slow drag into the barn. With each heave, the cadaver expelled another insult to creation – a deep sigh, a wet gurgle, an intestinal whistle. Twice, the body audibly voided itself again. The ground beneath them grew patchy with dark trails.

  Need to wash those off later. No traces.

  Once inside, they deposited Stonewater into a pile of old straw, now more blood-matting than bedding. Ethan closed the door behind them, drew the bolt, and retrieved an Argand lamp from a nearby shelf.

  Flint sparked. Light bloomed.

  The corpse looked even worse under illumination. Jaw hung slack, one eye half-open, glassy pupil fixed on the ceiling as if unsure whether the soul had finished its departure. The chest was bloated, the limbs already stiffening.

  Ethan knelt beside it with the nonchalance of a man gutting fish. “Mouth first,” he said aloud, forcing the jaw wide, inspecting the dentition. “Two gold molars. One gold canine. Incisor too. Extravagant prick.”

  He let go of the head and drew out a pair of iron pliers – no polish, no ornamentation, just a butcher’s tools. Simon made a choking sound behind him.

  “Ya ain’t actually gonna–”

  Ethan gripped the first golden tooth – the top incisor.

  Simon swallowed audibly. “God have mercy, but y’are...”

  “Warren would sermonise you for that blasphemy,” Ethan replied, pulling the incisor out with one tug. “Now kindly search the pockets before I decide to look if your teeth are worth selling.”

  Simon muttered something and knelt beside him, rifling through the sullied clothes with visible reluctance. Meanwhile, Ethan took his pliers to the golden molar gave them a firm twist. There was resistance, of course. The gums had begun to stiffen and dry, but a sharp jerk broke the seal. The sound was wet, the blood was minimal – viscous and dark, more oil than liquid.

  Tooth by tooth he worked, wiping the pliers on Stonewater’s tailcoat between extractions.

  “Oi. Got his coin purse,” Simon said, holding it aloft like it was diseased. “And some nobby-lookin’ books. Calf leather or somethin’.”

  “Good. Count the coin. Read the journals. Pretend you are useful.”

  “Are them gold teeth worth yankin’ his fuckin’ gob out for, even?”

  Ethan gave another pull – there was a crack as the jaw dislocated – and dropped the canine into a small pouch.

  “The golden ones are only a bonus. I’ll be pulling all of them.”

  He looked up at Simon rifling through the coin purse.

  “Teeth do not digest, Simon. And when some overzealous constable orders his underlings to root through pig shite for a lark, I would rather they not find anything that matches a missing Peer of the Realm.”

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  As if on cue, a low grunt issued from the far end of the barn. Two scores of pigs, skeletal and silent until now, shifted in their pen. Beady eyes reflected the dull lamplight like wet stones. They had not been fed in almost a fortnight. They would eat anything now, even shite-covered aristocracy.

  Simon eyed them at a squint. “Yeah, sure – ain’t the pigs already a bit of a giveaway, though?”

  “This is a wealthy merchant’s summer estate,” Ethan replied with a grunt as he pulled the last upper molar. “Keeping swine is not uncommon. For meat. For show. For tax breaks. No one will ask questions.”

  The top of the mouth was finished, and half of the dead baron’s dentition now lay inside his pouch. His pliers found the lower jaw.

  “Besides,” Ethan added, “by dawn, there shan’t be enough of Maximillian Stonewater left to ask questions about.”

  Simon exhaled and shook the purse.

  “Well, cheers for that, yer Lor’ship – ten guineas, two crowns, four shillings and six pence,” he said with a trembling grin. “Call it eleven quid – we’re laughin’.”

  Ethan grunted. “What sort of baron carries pennies…”

  “...I might’ve already nicked the ha’pennies. And the farthings. For me troubles.”

  Simon grinned, a pox scab flaking off his cheek.

  Ethan snorted. “Keep them, you damned niggard. What about the journals?”

  “First book’s some ledger thing. Smith and Co’s Buildin’ Socheetee,” Simon muttered, thumbing through the parchment with haste, eyes darting between columns of ink and the butcher’s work unfolding not three feet away. “Stonewater’s got coin stacked high enough to make a Bishop spurt in his robes. Numbers I ain’t even got names for, bollock me if ya want me to count ‘em. Second one’s spicier. Diary. Looks like dear Max was plannin’ to make a fat pile floggin’ sulphur to the frogs. Probably just finished doin’ the deal ‘fore we, y’know... did him in.”

  Ethan, gloves now covered in clotting oral discharge, did not look up. “So, the hit was political,” he remarked dryly. “I’ll be taking those five shillings later.”

  The final molar came free with a wet pop, followed by a small rivulet of a dead man's ichor. Ethan inspected the pliers, then the prize. The tooth still had a bit of nerve-flesh clinging to its root. He wiped it on the baron’s blue cravat without comment.

  He seized the corpse beneath the shoulders and nodded for Simon to take the legs.

  Simon made the attempt, grunting as they began the corpse’s final journey. “How the Devil is sellin’ sulphur grounds for gettin’ done in? Yer more full o' shite than his lor’ship’s trousers.”

  Ethan did not rise to the bait, explaining calmly, “Helvecone and the Republic were at war until the spring. We survived, for better or worse. What stayed the frogs’ advance was our sabotage of their sulphur shipments. No powder means no guns. No guns means no slaughter. Someone, likely wearing a coronet, decided that selling sulphur to our former executioners qualified as treason.”

  He paused to adjust his grip. The baron’s corpse sloughed to one side with the wet elasticity of an overfilled wineskin. Ethan corrected the angle and resumed.

  “Stonewater, predictably, attempted to profit from his home Kingdom’s haemorrhage. A model capitalist. The Regency disapproved. So they summoned Best. Best summoned us. And here we are, shifting twenty stone of dead intrigue into a pigpen.”

  Ethan looked up. “And here you are, owing me my five fucking shillings.”

  Simon wheezed, brow sweating with exertion. “I’ll toss… toss you... a whole fuckin’ crown... if you shut yer gob... ‘til we chuck him in.”

  “A crown is five shillings, you cretin.”

  Simon had not the breath to reply.

  Their trek ended at the lip of the pig enclosure. The pen reeked of starvation and stale filth. The swine, gaunt and glassy-eyed, lifted their heads with sluggish interest. When the corpse was finally heaved over the fence, it landed with a wet crunch – ribs fracturing beneath the weight of the fall.

  The pigs hesitated. Approached cautiously.

  Then one snorted and took a bite.

  A moment later, the pen exploded in a frenzy of noise and movement – snorts turned to squeals, hooves pounded the muck, and teeth tore through silk, skin, fat, and fascia with ravenous indiscrimination. Within moments, the baron was reduced to a heaving mound of squelching flesh and crunching bones, stripped of all distinguishing features. One sow pulled ten feet of small intestine out of the gored abdomen before another snatched at the other end.

  The rope of flesh grew taut between them, oscillating like a strung lute string. Then, with a wet rip, it split down the middle, half-digested bolus mass leaking from both ends as each pig slurped the organ.

  In just under an hour, the Baron of Clayton was reduced to red straw and bone fragments – an innocuous swine troth.

  “Virgin’s tits, they even gone and ate his shite-stained trousers!” Simon whispered, half in laughter, half in retch.

  “They will do the same to you,” Ethan remarked from his side. “If you don’t give me what you owe.”

  Simon rolled his eyes and dug into his pocket, producing the coins and journals. “Yeah yeah, keep yer hair on. Here – five guineas, crown, nine shilling’. Tight-arsed bastard.”

  Then, after a thought. “Niggard.”

  His grin was as shit-eating as the pigs.

  Ethan took the money and slipped them into his purse, the coins clinking against teeth.

  Simon noticed. Gasped.

  “You did not keep the fuckin’ teeth!”

  “They’re gold,” Ethan said, as if explaining the concept of coinage to an infant. “And Denny the Dentist pays handsomely for human enamel. Good business. Or a fetish. Possibly both.”

  “Huh,” Simon raised a brow. Shuddered. “Sometimes, I wish I had yer bendy-arsed conscience, Ethan. Sometimes.”

  Ethan looked over the barn with one last calculating sweep. No unexpected movement. No foreign noise. Nothing but swine gorging themselves on political residue and gnawing at the bones of conspiracy.

  “We part ways here,” he stated, adjusting his gloves. The bloodstains were barely noticeable on the dark leather. “I shall leave first. Wait fifteen minutes, burn the carriage, then follow. Don’t get caught by the lawmen.”

  “Got it. See ya back home,” Simon muttered, still eyeing the pigpen like it might sprout arms and drag him in next.

  Ethan said nothing further. He stepped out into the night with his cloak drawn close and his conscience unburdened.

  Work was work, after all.

  Ethan stepped out of the barn to find the landau carriage missing. So too was the spoor of blood and excrement they had dragged through the dirt. Mister Best’s men had clearly come through – efficiently, if not creatively – removing all material traces of the baron’s untimely demise.

  A pity. He had entertained the thought of stealing a horse. It was a long walk to Oaleholder, and uneven cobbles punished the knees.

  He made his way across the grounds, favouring shadow over speed, and approached the gate by the servants’ quarters. It was barred shut, and for reasons unclear, brightly lit by an oil lamp that hissed as it burned through its reservoir. Excessive illumination at a gate reserved for scullery drudges and servants. Curious and suspicious in equal measure.

  He did not linger.

  Circling back to the main entrance revealed yet more tampering. The gates had been shut; another calling card of Best’s men. The lamp above it barely qualified under the standards of His Majesty’s Street Lighting Act of seventeen-ninety-four – dim, unmaintained, guttering in the wind. That suited Ethan well enough. Light was a liability.

  He identified a shadowed section of wall flanked by two dying lanterns and moved with intent. Two strides backwards, then a burst of speed. At the wall, he leapt, one foot kicking off the bark of a nearby poplar. Momentum carried him upwards; his hands found the gap between wrought iron spikes and used them to vault cleanly over. He landed on cobbles, rolled, and came to his feet with practised grace.

  Berkeley Estates loomed around him – one of many opulent holdings clustered along Oaleholder’s western fringe. A place where the wealthy played at rural living between committee sessions and whoring. Each lamp flanking the road was only passably bright, making the centre coated in shadow – which was the route he took.

  Ethan permitted himself a grin. The vault had been clean, athletic, and silent. Adept enough to wash off the sour taste of a shoddy kill. The wall had stood a good foot taller than he – seven feet, at minimum. Something, at least, had gone accordingly well.

  His hood had come loose in the landing. Unkempt black hair, stringy with sweat and grease, spilled over his face like wet rope. He slicked it back with one palm and, in the same motion, pulled down the bandana covering his features with the other. A single, fluid act. Had there been an onlooker, they might have imagined his face materialised from the dark itself.

  The night air hit him at once – salt, smoke, and stench from distant tanneries. Better than the barn, though only marginally. His complexion, now exposed, was pallid to the point of sickliness. A third of it was obscured by a thick, uneven stubble that stubbornly refused to organise itself into anything resembling a beard. Low nose, heavy brow, and downturned lips gave him a naturally sullen cast. The cut scar that traced from his left eye and into his scruff completed the ensemble.

  Currently, however, he was grinning. An expression that made him look less like a man and more like a cadaver forced to smile through rigor mortis. Or a victim of lockjaw. He had heard both before.

  But it was the eyes that unsettled most beholders of his visage. Pale blue, almost translucent, and faintly luminescent in proximity to arcane phenomena. That glow ebbed and flowed, a tell-tale sign that made subterfuge difficult and confrontation inevitable. His eyes were a curse masquerading as a tool. Magical signatures made his skin crawl, sometimes quite literally. At greater concentrations, the sensation became dizziness, then nausea. Annoying, but tolerable.

  And profitable, when looking for enchanted trinkets to pilfer.

  The smile vanished. He reached the main road and merged with the heavy traffic. A roiling sea of flesh and carriage surged eastward – war refugees, profiteering tradesmen, devout pilgrims, each clutching their own vain hopes and parcels. Ahead loomed Oaleholder’s curtain wall and the Stoic Keep. Both appeared only as deeper shadows within the surrounding murk, backlit by flickering lamps and choked beneath overcast skies. No moon. No stars. Just the suffocating dark of All Saints’ Eve.

  They all think themselves safe now, within the city’s bosom, Ethan reflected on the throng around him. Secure behind thick stone and soldiery. Imbeciles.

  Most would be dead by winter’s end. Disease, robbery, opportunistic violence – Oaleholder’s holy trinity.

  As if to illustrate the point, a woman’s scream erupted ahead.

  “Let go, you thief!”

  Ethan’s head turned slightly, enough to catch the tableau – a ragged half-elf clutching a satchel and a male figure, face obscured by a bandana not unlike his own, attempting to wrest it free.

  The crowd responded with textbook precision – parting around the scene as though the pavement had cracked open. None intervened. A few jeered. Others gawped at the audacity.

  None moved to help.

  Faye and half-faye received little more than tolerance in Helvecone, and even that was in short supply.

  Ethan walked on.

  The shot came next. One flintlock discharge, hollow and tinny. Ethan thought it sounded like an old Queen Anne’s pistol and decided it would not fire again without a gunsmith’s intervention.

  That did not prevent women from shrieking or men from howling with panic, as if the city gates themselves had collapsed atop them.

  The shrill of a lawman’s whistle followed. Order would return. It always did – with heavy prejudice.

  Ethan did not look back. Nor did he slow.

  Another cluster of gawpers obstructed his path – he shoved his way through without preamble or apology. Flesh parted for him the same way it had for the scene of the crime.

  Roughly ten minutes later, another voice cut through the mire of chatter, hoofbeats, and groaning axles.

  “Ahoy, scallop!”

  The accent was atrocious, some bastardised attempt at Crowg County gibberish.

  “How’s 'bout ye gie ‘em feeble legs a rest ‘n’ hop in, ey?”

  Simon.

  He was seated atop a four-horse stagecoach and had affixed the same horrid moustache to his upper lip – glue visible even at a distance. He waggled the bristles as punctuation.

  “How unspeakably generous of you,” Ethan replied, voice dry as kindling. “My legs could indeed use a respite.”

  He manoeuvred through the crowd of rouges and misanthropes, dodging spiteful feet that tried to trip him. One he kicked out of the way on principle. He reached the step and boarded without fanfare.

  “Forrard, ye lazy geldings! Har har!” Simon bellowed, whipping the horses entirely without necessity. The coach was already in motion.

  Ethan seated himself on the fore-to-aft bench within the compartment. The interior was dim, lit by twin oil lamps fixed to opposing walls. Curtains had been drawn to cover the windows – privacy over decor.

  “How fortuitous it is to find ourselves reacquainted so soon, Mister Harbinger,” came the smooth, affectless drawl from across the coach. “One presumes your enterprise concluded with success.”

  Ethan regarded the speaker, seeing him clearly despite the dim light. Mister Best, framed by the coach’s velvet upholstery. A man of indeterminate age but unmistakable power. His hair, cropped and silvered, betrayed occasional stubborn patches of brown that refused to yield. The time-etched face was one long protest against frivolity – pursed lips, thin brows, and eyes that had seen enough to cease reacting.

  Even now, not a single twitch. Mastery of discipline bordering on embalmment.

  “Indeed, Mister Best. Lord Maximillian Stonewater, Baron of Clayton, now enjoys an extended exploration of porcine digestion. Quite intimately, or so I heard.”

  Best snapped his fingers. Once.

  The gaunt valet beside him – a figure whom Ethan had never seen move unless required – produced a hulking coin pouch and passed it across with ritualistic solemnity.

  “Much obliged, Rupert,” Ethan offered as he stowed the purse within his cloak.

  “Five hundred guineas, Mister Harbinger,” Best affirmed, voice clipped. He disliked the courtesy being misdirected toward his servant, which made the exercise worthwhile in and of itself.

  The hulking slab of beef occupying the seat beside Ethan shifted his weight and flexed. A low grunt followed, like a distant avalanche. Protest, perhaps. Or perhaps the bloody flux. Ethan hardly cared which.

  Best raised a hand and the brute settled. Though his volcanic breathing remained pathologically loud.

  “Why?” Ethan asked.

  Best tilted his head. “Why what, Mister Harbinger?”

  “Stonewater intended to engage in sulphur trade with the Republic. An operation now rendered permanently inoperative,” Ethan stated, not mentioning how he came to possess this information. “I comprehend the strategic value in hobbling the Republic’s powder production. What I fail to apprehend is why assassination was favoured over less... terminal avenues.”

  Best’s eyes lingered on his. Rupert the valet remained motionless. Meat Man respired stertorously.

  “I fear the subtleties of His Majesty’s diplomatic calculus lie beyond the remit for which you have been compensated, Mister Harbinger.”

  You are paid to kill, not question. Kindly keep to your corner of the chessboard, Ethan translated. Prick.

  “His Majesty’s calculus, or yours, Mister Best?” Ethan’s voice clipped the edge of irritation.

  The words left his mouth before he had properly approved them. Shoddy, again. He noted the lapse with silent self-contempt.

  “Why, Mister Harbinger,” Best replied, not smiling but somehow sounding like he was. “In Oaleholder, one wonders whether a distinction between the two exists at all.”

  Three knocks sounded from the partition to coachman’s perch. The vehicle began to decelerate.

  “We have arrived at your residence. I anticipate our next meeting with great interest. Tonight has been, as always, a deep pleasure.”

  The smugness had was gone, if it was ever there at all.

  “I hope, Mister Best, that such a meeting lies in a comfortably distant future. Good evening.”

  He hopped out of the stagecoach.

  “Ah, Mister Harbinger,” Best called after him. “I daresay you may be in for a surprise.”

  Ethan turned to reply, but the door slammed shut and the coach rattled off, its wheels whisper-quiet against the cobblestones. Unnaturally so.

  He exhaled slowly, turning to survey his surroundings.

  Westbank. He had been deposited at the tail end of a narrow street, hemmed on both sides by terraced hovels so poorly maintained one could scarcely distinguish where the stonework ended and the mildew began.

  The street was virtually lightless. Despite the mandates of the Lighting Act – requiring an oil lamp above every threshold – not a single lantern had been affixed. To the layman, visibility was restricted to the faintest glimmers that bled through boarded windows and warping shutters.

  Ethan’s vision functioned as well in dark as it did in day – albeit colourblind. Lack of light made little to no difference.

  This negligence to hang lamps was not a rebellion – not currently, anyway. The city's paupers simply did not possess the luxury of defiance for defiance’s sake. This state of affairs was the result of chronic theft.

  When the Lighting Act had been announced the previous year, lawmen conducted house-to-house visits under the pretext of education. In practice, it had been a convenient excuse for petty confiscations. Anything not nailed down or hidden had been deemed 'suspicious' and seized. Pawnshops flourished. Stomachs emptied.

  On the night the Lighting Act came into force, Oaleholder briefly flared into a golden twilight – oil flames illuminating every corner of the city for precisely four hours.

  Then, the lanterns began to vanish.

  By dawn, most had been spirited away by thieves or residents simply attempting to avoid them. The next day, the very same lanterns reappeared on costermongers’ carts, then disappeared again by evening. A city-wide game began. Whosoever pilfered the most lanterns overnight earned the unofficial title of official victor.

  Authorities responded with escalating fines for unlit doorways. The people bore this until they could bear it no longer.

  Then, the people snapped.

  On the final night of November, righteous wrath overflowed. Lawmen, thieves, and any suspected of being either – most of them half-faye – were seized by mobs. Lynchings became common. Sham courts gave way to gallows strung on lamp-posts whose oil had been siphoned dry.

  Gutters ran red until midday.

  The Lord Mayor, fearing full-scale rebellion, petitioned the Crown for aid. None came. The Royal Army was preoccupied – busy bleeding to death under the Republic’s blue standards. The local garrison, consisting largely of gang pressed drunks, defected with glee. Rather than cull the uprising, they joined in the slaughter and looting, their better armaments serving as both coercers and deterrents.

  In a spasm of bureaucratic cowardice, the Lord Mayor relented. The Lighting Act would no longer apply in Oaleholder. His Majesty’s Government approved an exclusion clause, permitting the poor to spend what few coins they had on bread and gin, rather than brass and oil.

  Remarkably, the plan had succeeded. The mobs dispersed, their bloodlust slated, their meagre wealth secured.

  By the time the torches guttered and the pitchforks were laid to rest, the streets lay thick with the entrails of over ten thousand dead. Amongst the worst afflicted were the constabulary – predictable, given their propensity to stand precisely where people wished to swing – and the faye. Not being human had often meant being the problem. Or at least part of it, logic be damned.

  Ethan had weathered the carnage in the only manner guaranteed to succeed: joining it. The mobs offered a convenient smokescreen for those inclined to resolve older disputes. In his case, this included his landlord, whose recent threats of eviction had come with neither justification nor the foresight to stay alive.

  Today, a year on, the clerks of Oaleholder Great Hall remained at a bureaucratic impasse, unable to assign proper ownership to the dwellings whose occupants had been summarily dismembered. Ethan, thus far, had not been queried as to his legal right to remain in his home. He suspected Mister Best had applied a thumb to the appropriate scale.

  The thought soured his mouth.

  His contested house stood nearly at the far end of the street, where the bloodstains had largely yielded to rain and time, save a few obstinate traces in the mortar. He recalled the mound of bodies he had climbed that night to reach the threshold – slippery, but manageable.

  It was constructed of the same dull brick and listing architecture as its neighbours. As a result, the edifice offered nothing of note to the passing eye. He approached the entrance, extracted his first ring of keys, and opened the front door – a wafer-thin panel of wood that might as well have been parchment – also made to look like his neighbours’. Beyond it stood the real deterrent: a small vestibule ending in a cast-iron door sunk into a reinforced frame, the kind that had required a second wall to be built inside the hallway. From a second set of keys he unlocked its three discrete mechanisms, stepped through, and closed both doors behind him.

  Though unimpressive from without, the house had been kept scrupulously clean within. The ground floor comprised a parlour, kitchen, and a small water closet. The floor above contained two bedrooms – one for Ethan and one for Simon, though occupancy remained intermittent.

  Every window bore reinforcement: dwarven alloy frames fitted with cross-hatched rods of the same composition. Even as narrow as a quill’s shaft, the bars remained impervious to most burglars and all but the most destructively armed contract killers.

  He hung his cloak in the hallway – dark green Elsian silk with gold-threaded seams – followed by the horse-leather belt that bore his flintlock pistol and stiletto.

  Boots came off next – caked in enough filth to plant turnips – and were replaced with cotton-padded slip-ons. He retrieved his coin purse from one of the cloak’s inner pockets and made his way to the parlour.

  There, he lit the Argand lamp resting on the side table, and surveyed the room.

  The entire far wall was occupied by a colossal bookshelf, mahogany, with a three-quarter fill of tomes, atlases, monographs, and periodicals, all arranged with a librarian’s fixation. Atop a thick oriental carpet sat a coffee table, likewise mahogany, flanked by an upholstered settee and his preferred armchair – overstuffed and angled just-so. The sight of it brought an involuntary flicker of contentment, which he duly quashed.

  Diligence before comfort, Harbinger.

  He turned to the mantelpiece, where a variety of small figurines stood arranged in no particular theme. A few had been purchased through legitimate means; the rest had either been gifted or – more commonly – liberated from former owners under questionable circumstances.

  His hand reached for a bronze statuette of a toad clutching a coin in its mouth. He rotated it clockwise. The mechanism underneath responded smoothly. A moment later, a narrow section of wall to the mantelpiece’s far left eased forward in near silence.

  Ethan took the char-blackened fire stoker, inserted it under the new panel, and prodded until he located a slanted bore. The tip slid into place. One soft click followed. Nothing further. He withdrew the rod, re-secured the wall panel, and returned the stoker to its usual resting place.

  Above the mantle hung a family portrait. On the right stood Missus Elspeth Harbinger, black-haired and sharp-featured, smiling with soft fondness. To the left towered Mister Dunwald Harbinger, jaw like a battering ram, glaring forward with the expression of a man who believed the artist was paid too much. Between them stood a boy – not yet ten – his back stiffened, chin lifted, expression caught awkwardly between solemn and constipated.

  A younger Ethan. Not yet marred by the realities of the world, if already suspicious of their existence.

  He pressed both hands to the painting and pushed it inward, the action vaguely melancholic. The section of wall behind it yielded, then swung open on silent hinges.

  A cupboard emerged. Within lay a small chest fashioned from dwarven alloy, devoid of keyhole. Beside it sat a riflebore musket, the arms of House Harbinger – two crossed keys – branded into its oaken stock. Scrolls filled the shelves above, each rolled and bound in a ribbon of distinct colour.

  Each one reminding him of titles he held in name only.

  He withdrew a slender metal rod from the chest’s side and bit down on it. Warmth flooded his molars, spreading into his jaw. His irises pulsed bright blue as the aether reacted. Returning the rod to its sheath, he waited. The chest responded with a soft whirr, then parted open.

  Inside, a modest fortune: coins, pearls, and a clutter of gemstones, glittering in the dim light. Valued conservatively, the contents came to perhaps twenty thousand sterlings – twenty times the chest’s cost from that travelling Caravan of dwarves, elves, and gnomes.

  He added Mister Best’s five hundred guineas to the hoard, placing it alongside the earlier half he had received at the job’s commencement. With the assignment now formally concluded, Ethan closed the chest, waited for the whirring to stop, and sealed the hidden cupboard again.

  Looking up at the likeness of this family, he briefly considered whether to fetch firewood and boil a kettle. A glance to the longcase clock – its brass pendulum swinging with implacable patience – told him it was half past six.

  There are some errands yet to attend. Diligence before comfort.

  He sighed and took Mister Best’s emptied coin purse, filled it instead with the dry remains of Lord Stonewater’s teeth – roots now hardened to a crusted maroon – dressed himself, and departed, locking all five locks behind him.

  Once more, Ethan vanished into the night.

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