“And Arthur’s champion was Cai, and he marched forth with sword and spear and shield against the champion of the Fey. They fell upon each other with terrible fury, and shattered spear and shield and dealt each other fell wounds. The Fey champion, as was his treasonous nature, tried to strike down Cai with sorcery, but Morgan Half-Fey, first and greatest of the witches, dealt him back in kind, and Cai fed the blackbirds with a single biting blow of his steel. And thus was Arthur’s entry into the Sunken City assured.”

Bran the Wise, The Conquest of Anwwn.

Tane Bayder, 11 September 1582 AAA. Trackford.

The Whirling Prop wasn’t hard to find. They’d managed to get an actual airship propeller mounted over the pub’s entrance, a trophy taken after Halidon’s Hill from a 3rd Rate Bombardier. The wooden surface was still pitted and cracked from burning wyvern vitriol, and one of the blades had snapped off. The ship’s name, Moonlight, was engraved on the propeller, faintly visible despite the damage.

Besides, it was the preferred haunt of most of the officers in the occupation force. She’d been there a hundred times before.

It was empty this time of morning, too late for drunks sleeping off hangovers to still be there, and far too early for any customers. That would have made it a bad rendezvous-enough people around to listen in, not enough to drown out individual conversations- so she’d arranged to meet with Mene outside.

She leaned back against the corner of the public house, fidgeting. She felt both exhausted and more awake than she’d ever been. Her memories of the duel seemed almost scattered, though not as badly as after the first few times she’d gotten into a serious fight.

Tane forced herself to breath slowly. In her experience ignoring the battle rush until it died away was the best way to deal with it.

“You win? You’re not poked full of holes, so I’m guessing so.” Someone said behind her.

Tane’s hands shot to her blades on reflex, but she recognized Mene’s voice and lifted her hands away, then turned to face her.

“He won. He threw himself onto my sword and disarmed me.” Tane said, surprised at the anger creeping into her voice.

Mene visibly flinched.

“He did what?”

“He got himself fucking impaled to beat me. I lost without taking a scratch.”

She furrowed her brows.

“You said you’d disarm him. Not kill him.”

“I tried. That was how he got me. And he wasn’t dead last I saw him. Not dying either. Barely seemed to feel it.”

“How…”

Mene leaned against the wall, slowly breathing out.

“No idea. I’ve seen people who just keep fighting until they bleed out, doesn’t matter how many holes you poke in them. And I’ve people recover from wounds that should have been deadly.”

“Mother above... if he lives or dies, I still won’t know whether to be relieved.” Mene said.

“If I’d disarmed him or killed him cleanly, at least you’d only have one thing to be uncertain about.” Tane said.

Mene laughed nervously.

“The break-in go alright?”

“Yeah, I got his strongbox.”

“Didn’t he bother securing it?”

“His sort always stick that sort of thing in a bloody vault or assume they’re so scary no one will ever steal from them. No middle ground. Traharn turned out to be the latter. Can’t get it at it because it’s locked, but he only hid it under his bed. Now it’s under mine.“

Tane chuckled.

“I need to check on my company. I’ll see you midday tomorrow.”

“Alright. I’ll get to lockpicking it.” Mene said.

*

“Where’s Sace?” Tane asked as she pushed open the doors to her companies improvised barracks.

“Upstairs, with Byd and Morgan, cap.” Blodwen said. The trooper was sitting by the door, her arm in a sling. She was recovering well, from what Connor had said. So was Gryff, although his scar was going to be even worse looking once the minor infections died down. Last she’d visited him, he was not enjoying the fact that he could only mumble without pulling his stitches and having to repeat the whole painful process.

Tane dodged past the grenadiers in the commandeered common room, many of them visibly relieved that she’d survived. They didn’t say anything out loud, though. Duelling was something best not discussed openly.

She pushed her way up into the private room, absent-mindedly rubbing her bruised wrist before realizing with a start that she actually had bruised it.

“How’d muster go?” she asked. With herself absent on “business” and Gryff recovering, Sace was technically the company commander. That probably wasn’t for the better. Sace was bright and wanted to do well in the army, but her family had forced her to take a commission-they had too many daughters to marry off, and Sace was too much of a deist for the seminary-and she didn’t have the ability to think under pressure needed for a company commander. Tane was aiming to get her selected for a staff position as soon as possible.

Still better than what a lot of line units are stuck with.

The short girl smiled when she saw Tane enter. “Oh, I enjoyed being captain for a day. Got to fob the cornet off to Bydevere, too. Everyone accounted for, no illnesses to report, Rhianne’s miraculously un-pregnant. Slach’s had some of the stitches on his buff coat come undone, those’ll need to be fixed. Should get the other ones looked at too, to see if it was bad luck or a bad batch."

“Bydevere, get it looked at by a tailor and fixed. Anyhow, the private business is resolved satisfactorily.” Tane said as she pulled out a chair and sat down.

Morgan looked up from the desk. She was absent mindedly tracing ritual circles on the desk. “Honour, love or money?”

Tane shrugged. “I’d arrange anything about money at a better time of day and anything about love wouldn’t get in the way of army business.”

“Ah.” Bydevere said. “Of course. If you’d been killed, what would have happened to the promotions?”

Tane shrugged. “Gryff to captain, Sace to lieutenant, you to cornet. Probably Haynes to QM.”

Bydevere looked less than pleased at that as well. Getting outranked by an upjumped commoner was one thing. Getting outranked by a seventeen year old girl with little combat experience was quite another.

“Order of precedence.” Tane said. “Not my rules. Anyhow, Sace, I want you to run the company drill tonight. I’ll just be observing.”

“Ah, yes, ma’am.” Sace said. She looked more than a little nervous.

“You still running about playing spies with that thieftaker? That why you won’t be with your unit?” Bydevere asked.

“I’ll be doing that tomorrow, not tonight. This is to see if Sace can handle the company. I want all of my officers to be able to lead the company if it comes to it.”

Bydevere grunted in acknowledgement. “At the rate you’re going, we’re going to need to know how. First you got Gryff’s face blown off using us as bait, that was bad enough, now you’re getting into goddamn duels after running about breaking into houses with that mercenary lowlife who’s probably feeding information to the fucking Carfa-“

“Those sharpshooters were going to kill someone sooner or later, but because we were there and ready for it, drawing them out at the time and place of our choosing, we took them down rather than having to dig some poor line company out of the middle of a mob after their captain got killed. And now that we have the advantage, I’m using that to begin rolling up the rest of their organization. Dismissed. I’ll see you all at night drill.” Tane said, her voice low and hard.

She met with Mene late the next day, at her apartment.

Mene was leaning on the tiny balcony of the staircase, waiting. She was wearing a full length dress under her cloak, not her usual petticoat breeches and cheap coat, and her cheeks were rosy from the cold.

She waved when she saw Tane coming.

“Got the lock?” Tane asked.

Mene looked pleased with herself. “Took a bit of work, but I broke it.”

“Oh, excellent. What’s he got inside? Anything useful?”

She smiled. “Interesting, certainly. Useful, I’ll have to take more of a look at it.”

Mene opened the door to her apartment, where the contents of the box where spread out on her bed. Her tiny desk was too small to accommodate them.

Tane glanced across the sheets. Dozens of letters carpeted the bed, with a few large, torn out book pages peeking out from under them.

“See for yourself” Mene said, ushering Tane in then stepping in after her.

Tane picked up one of the letters and began to read, manoeuvring herself into the light coming in from the sole window.

22 January 1582

“My dearest, I hope to see you again soon, to converse with your fine mind, to look upon your elegant face, to watch you lead the city you have lived in so many years to freedom from the boot we have most cruelly placed upon your throat.

She skimmed down the letter. More of the same, apparently by a rather long winded writer, signed by an “Arace V.” Her eyes swam

Most likely Arace Veulnor, General Breuce Veulnor’s wife.

Traharn with Arace? Mother above, I’ll just need to show this to Breuce and watch the fun.

She picked up another one. That one was downright pornographic. The rest were along the same lines, though they were written in two different hands, and half were signed by “Arace V” and the other half by “AH.”

Not Traharn, then.

“These are bloody love letters.” Tane said. “And shit ones too. Anyone who thinks stabbing is a good metaphor for fucking has never been bloody stabbed.”

Mene chuckled. “I worked that part out. Wonder what he-Oh. Oh, bugger.”

It took a moment to click.

They had letters in Traharn Hast’s possession by an AH that would be rather awkward if released.

The letters they’d found from Brenna’s house said the letter writer, the old man, had leverage over Avon Heveria, leader of the Patriot’s Brigade in Trackford.

The old man, the coiled serpent’s apparent leader, was Traharn Hast, and was blackmailing Heveria.

“You were right. Traharn’s up to his eyeballs in the brigade. Or was.” Tane said.

“So we can take him down?“ Mene said, relieved.

Tane shook her head. “Traharn’s already out of the game. We go after him directly, every other trouble maker goes to ground or starts getting organized for a real fight.”

“But we still have him.” Mene said. “If it comes to it.”

“If he survives, which is a damn sight unlikely. I thrust him through the lungs. If blood loss doesn’t get him, pneumonia might.” Tane said.

She glanced at one of the pages under the letters and pulled it out.

It was Fusangese text around a network of diagrams like ritual circles, with notes in brythwic scrawled around it.

“Traharn doesn’t seem the sort to be interested in ritual magic.” Tane said.

“He did cover his house in sigils. Like he’s hiding something.”

“There is that.”

She picked up another one. The text on it was almost like spoked circles and half-moons, with bars crossing through it here and there. She swore she’d seen that kind of text somewhere before.

It wasn’t human.

“Oh, fuck, he’s got fair folk texts in here.” Tane said.

“What?”

“Can’t read any of it, but the notes…”

Her eyes flicked across the notes. A lot of jargon about bindings, bait, communicating with entities, and the like. She knew the basics of how it all worked, but little beyond that. Normally try to lure in demons-or if you were ambitious, more intelligent aetheric entities-with the dead souls of animals, then bind them with an aetheric net, created with ritual circles drawn in witch’s chalk, once they feel into your trap. Like fishing in the sea of souls.

“You’re a witch, you make sense of any of this?”

Tane passed her the page.

Mene squinted at the text for a long while.

“He’s talking about trying to use sacrifices to lure something in, and some kind of ritual circle. It’s all very disjointed, and I’m not a ritualist anyway. Natural magic for me.”

Tane rubbed her face. “I’ll show it to Morgan, see if she can get it translated.”

“She’s a ritualist, isn’t she?”

“And quite a good one.” Tane said.

“What should we do with the letters?” Mene asked.

“Do what Traharn did.” Tane said. “Make the patriot’s brigade dance to our tune."

*

She caught Avon Heveria as he was returning to his house, late at night. He was holding a lantern to light his way, and had his cloak pulled up over his face.

She stepped out of the darkness, throwing back her cloak away to reveal her hilts.

“We need to ta-“

He whirled around, drawing and cocking a pistol. His face was pale with shock.

“Don’t take another step or I kill you.”

Tane raised her hands. He was too close to run and too far to disarm. Deescalating was her best bet.

“You do that, the good general will find out some things you’d rather he wouldn’t. Now put down the gun and talk.”

“Wha-oh. Oh.”

“Indeed.”

He pushed his pistol to half-cock and lowered it. Tane stepped closer. His face was pale, and she could see his hands were shaking.

Surprise, most likely.

“Did Traharn send you?” he asked.

“No.”

“Then how?”

“Strongboxes aren’t that strong. Traharn has no evidence now, Veulnor will dismiss it without that. He’s quite in love with Arace. Now, talk. What the hell is the coiled serpent?”

“I don’t negotiate with blackmailers.”

“If you don’t cooperate with blackmailers, then what did Traharn have those letters for? If you don’t talk, I’ll just release the letters, use them to convict Traharn for blackmail and let you get skewered in a duel. Not my problem.”

She began to turn away from him.

“Wait, wait, I can explain.”

“Oh, can you?”

She turned back to him.

“What is the coiled serpent?”

He sighed, took a deep breath, and began to explain, his voice hushed.

“A few years ago, a whole lot of the Patriot’s Brigade didn’t just want to put pressure on the Commonwealth and prepare for war. They wanted to start one. When Traharn Hast arrived, he fit himself right into it. They were overjoyed to have a professional fighter with contacts all over the place working for them. He got them organized and they started pushing the Trackford Regiment towards his aims. I tried to force them out, but Traharn blackmailed me to look the other way and give him funding while he formed his most hardline supporters into cells. The coiled serpent, he called it, after a pamphlet saying Carfane should be like a snake waiting to strike any and all enemies that dare tread on it.”

“How many members?”

“I don’t know. He had a dozen or so followers when he started. Any other time I start looking into his affairs, he threatens me. Except when he needs help with some scheme or another, then he threatens me if I don’t get myself involved.”

“What schemes?” Tane asked.

“Smuggling stolen weapons into the city. Logistics for raids. Gathering intelligence. Money. Recruiting. That sort of thing. I never get the details, just what he needs.” Avon sounded almost resigned.

Smuggling weapons into Trackford? Raid logistics? Oh, dear.

“Pretend that you’ve genuinely gone over to Traharn’s side without needing the letters to keep you in line. Keep trying to get information from him. If you lie to me about anything, I’ll release the letters. If you try and skip town, I’ll release them anyway just to spite you, and tell Traharn you’ve been dancing to my tune. Then I’ll convince Veulnor to have all your businesses investigated for tax fraud. Knowing what your lot are like, they won’t survive.”

She guessed she could only carry out half the threats she’d made, but Avon didn’t know who she was and had no way to know that.

“Now, on the other hand, when Traharn and the coiled serpent are completely neutralized, I’ll destroy the letters. I’m betting Traharn didn’t offer to do that. Now, goodnight until we meet again.”

She doffed her hat at him and walked off into the darkness, smiling to herself.