“SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

The words jumped him, out of his head and suddenly echoing off the walls of the chamber as he yelled. Metallic clang, he’d wrenched the last lock apart and hurled the cutters back down the row. The slaves flinched and moaned and huddled in the cells. None of them had ventured even as far as the broken-open doors.

See, you’re up against the system here, Gil. The reasonable voice again, it could almost have been Archeth, back in Ennishmin, talking him out of putting his dagger through the throat of an imperial commander. It’s pretty much an endless supply of enemies, something you’ll never finish as long as you live. You burn Hale, you’ve got to pretty much burn down the whole of Etterkal. And these scum-fucks are legal now. You burn down Etterkal, you’ve got to take on the Chancellery, the Watch, and Kaad’s fucking Committee, probably most of the upriver clans as well.

Hell, Gil, in the end, you’ll probably have to burn the whole of Trelayne into the fucking marshes.

For one fleeting moment, it was what he wanted to do. All he wanted to do. He could taste it, like old iron in the back of his mouth. He could smell the smoke.

“You all stay here,” he heard himself say. “I’m going to find clothes for you.”

He retreated from the cells, up the stairs and along the corridor, no clear idea how he was going to do this. The voice in his head jeering at him now . . .

And crossing the courtyard, he heard Girsh scream.

Terror and pain, loud enough to carry up out of the joyous longshank chamber, eldritch enough to raise the small hairs at the back of his neck. Not the sound of Eril’s make-haste surgery in progress, not anything remotely so prosaic.

Plans, considerations, the complications he faced all evaporated like river mist before the morning sun. His acceptance wiped every other consideration away. It was like seeing an old friend, like picking up an old, much-loved weapon. It was easy. Simplicity itself, the old, clean, steel call to death, or something very like.

His hands rose and unslung the Ravensfriend from his back once more. He paced across what remained of the courtyard space.

He found he was grinning in the cold.

Eril met him on the stairs. The Marsh Brotherhood enforcer came flying up the steps, face contorted with panic in a way Ringil would not have believed possible a few minutes ago. He saw Ringil and brandished his knife like a madman.

“It’s got him,” he shouted. “It took Girsh.”

Chilly tingle along Ringil’s spine.

“What did?” he asked.

“It’s a fucking—a wraith, a marsh demon, a—” Eril’s eyes were staring with what he’d seen. He tried to push past. “It came right out of the fucking wall, man! Girsh shot it with the crossbow, the bolt went through, fucking let me go.”

Ringil put a hand on Eril’s chest and slammed him hard against the wall. His gaze cut sideways and nailed the enforcer where he was.

“You stand!” he hissed. “Running isn’t going to help now. You stand there, you get a fucking grip, and tell me what happened.”

But he already knew what had happened. Knew what it had to be.

Dwenda.

He thought he heard laughter ghost upward from the chamber below. Eril swallowed hard, trembling, mastered himself.

“Listen, we’ve got to get out of here,” he said shakily. “You can’t fight this, it’s fucking sorcery, man. The bolt went right through, didn’t stop it, didn’t even touch it. It’s glowing fucking blue.”

“What makes you think this thing is going to let us run?”

The laughter again, unmistakable this time, echoing from the bottom of the stairs. Eril shuddered.

“That’s it,” he hissed. “That’s the noise it made.”

Ringil eyed the confines of the stairwell. It was knife-fighting ground at best, no space to wield the Ravensfriend. He nodded over his shoulder.

“Back outside. If it can come through a wall, we need some open ground.”

“Open ground?” Eril managed a choked laugh. “I told you, the bolt went right fucking through it. What are you going to do to it with a sword?”

Ringil ignored him, backed up the four or five steps he’d come down, through the door and out once more into the courtyard. Eril came with him, but he could see at a glance the enforcer was too close to breaking to be much help. It was a look he knew well enough, had seen on countless faces, League and imperial alike, at Rajal Beach and Demlarashan when the dragons came. It was in the eyes. Men were like blades, they would all break sooner or later, you included. But you looked around at the men you led, and in their eyes you saw what kind of steel you had to hand, how it had been forged and tempered, what blows, if any, it would take.

He sighed.

“Go on, get out of here.”

“What?” Eril’s grip on his knife shifted. He wet his lips. “Look—”

“I said go. You’re right. You can’t fight this.” Ringil suffered a sudden, overpowering urge to put a hand on Eril’s shoulder, on the point where it met the soft rise of his neck. He settled for a tight-lipped smile. “But I think I can.”

Faint bluish glow now, spilling up what he could see of the stairwell and staining the interior wall with its radiance. Ringil settled into a two-handed guard with the Ravensfriend. Eril was still hovering at his side, wavering on the edge of his own barely controlled terror.

“All right, I’ll stand wi—”

“No.” Sharper now; the time for gestures was past, and Ringil’s own fear was starting to eat into his resolve. “You get the fuck out of here while you still can. Get back to Milacar alive, tell him what happened here. Make sure the Brotherhood pay Girsh’s family their blood dues.”

“You—”

“Just fucking go, will you.” Ringil shot him a single angry glance, all he could spare from the will it took to face the doorway and whatever might be coming through it. There was a faint, melodic hum rising through the air now, and it put his teeth on edge. “You’ve already lost this one. Can’t you feel that? All you’re going to do if you stay is die.”

The thing that had killed Girsh spilled out into the courtyard.

There was a kind of relief in the moment, a letting go of other options that he knew well enough from the half a hundred battlefields in his past. But beside that old familiar slide, Ringil felt an icy blast of terror spike up his spine and into his head. The dwenda was nothing like he’d imagined it would be.

Hoiran’s twisted cock, you should be here to see this, Shalak. You and your circle of Aldrain enthusiasts. They’d shit milk and sugared biscuits.

It walked toward him like fire on paper, the dwenda, like a dancing blue rainstorm a dozen feet across, radiance falling and splashing back up off the floor again, jagged little fissures of brighter light in amid the general glow, eating up the normality of the courtyard paving and the chilly air like the sun chasing out shadows. And it laughed as it came, it chuckled and hummed to itself like a craftsman bent to a task he knew well, like a mountain stream or a well-fed fire, like all of these—the comparisons came to Ringil fully formed—but with an edge to the sounds that invaded his ears like stinging insects, set up a vicious, ringing echo, and left a tight, indefinable ache under his ribs.

“Run!” he screamed at Eril. It was the last breath he could spare.

It was not a man, it was not anything like a man. The eldritch, lordly creatures in Shalak’s manuscript scraps and illustrations, dropped away in his mind like puppet theater mockeries as the puppet master rises from behind his curtained façade for applause. The dwenda came on, it murmured at him, it sang to him and it shivered, it would have him for its own, and now he identified the ache that lay behind it all.