In the long game, defeat was only part of the strategy.

Alone and beaten, Fabian Moor strode across a narrow bridge of stone. Cold purpose drove each of his steps as his path arced over a chasm so deep that light itself was swallowed into an endless void. He looked up at the luminescent stalactites that hung from the ceiling of a vast cavern like the spires of an inverted cityscape, glowing with a violet radiance. With a surge of intolerance, Moor gritted his teeth as he glimpsed something moving among the shadows there. A silhouette, dark and sleek against the pale light, left the cover of a stalactite and sailed down towards him with the slow beating of huge wings.

Without breaking his gait, Moor thrust out a hand. A point of light, no bigger than a pebble, shot from his palm and streaked upward. It hit the silhouette with a flash of silver-blue that illuminated a creature three times the size of any man. The creature recoiled, great leathery wings folding forward, a bellow of pain coming from a gaping maw manifestly designed for rending flesh. As the light faded, a bitter wind moaned around the cavern, followed by the sound of dull creaking. In the gloom, the creature's frozen body hit the bridge several paces ahead of Moor and shattered into a thousand glassy shards which glittered like jewels as they tumbled and spilled into the abyss.

Icy remnants crunched under Moor's boots as he continued onward.

The bridge ended at a promontory, where, before the rough and sheer cavern wall, a stone golem stood sentinel. A thick neck and broad shoulders supported its boulder-sized head. The wall of its chest tapered to a marginally thinner waist; massive fists dangled from powerful arms and hung down past the knees of tree-trunk legs. Hulking, easily twice Moor's height, the stone golem didn't move, but its eyeless sockets seemed to glare a challenge to the man standing before it.

Moor sneered up at its chipped and worn face. 'Well?' he said intolerantly. 'Let me in, you fool!'

The golem shifted its bulk, its joints rasping with the grind of stone on stone as it turned to face the cavern wall. Raising both massive fists, it punched out at the rock. The hard surface accepted the blows, turning to liquid, as if cowering in the face of a greater might. It then solidified, fusing the golem's arms to the wall at the wrists. The golem leaned back and heaved. With more grinding, the stony sentinel wrenched free a great section of the wall as easily as if it were pulling out a plug. Its footfalls were heavy as it bore the hunk of rock back a few paces to reveal a round opening.

Without a word, Moor stepped through the opening. A dull boom confirmed that the golem had resealed the way behind him.

Moor entered a circular chamber whose wall and floor were as smooth as if scooped out of the rock. Above, the domed ceiling was coated with a luminous substance that bathed the chamber in a warm, golden glow. A large round table of stone occupied the centre, around which four people sat. All of them stared at the new arrival, but not one uttered a word as he took his chair among them.

Only when he was seated did Moor acknowledge the pain from the injuries he had suffered to his ribs, and the deep fatigue overwhelming his body.

He felt eyes upon him. Each of these people was well-known to Moor, though he would hardly call them friends. They had all been summoned to this council chamber before, and always in secret, but never under such circumstances as these. Their dark cassocks were ripped and stained as Moor's own, and all but one carried visible wounds.

To his right sat obese Viktor Gadreel; the old man held a blooded cloth to his left eye, and shallow cuts and bruises decorated his bald head. To his left, Hagi Tabet's glassy eyes stared off into some unknown distance, a thin line of blood running down the side of her face from a head wound partially hidden by her short, matted hair. Further along, Yves Harrow was shaking, gritting his teeth against the pain of raw facial burns.

The one person present who displayed no obvious injuries was Mo Asajad. She sat calmly opposite Moor. Her long, raven hair was straight and neat; her gaunt, porcelain face was blemished only by a patch of scarring on her forehead – the same ritual scarring each of them bore with pride.

'Where is Lord Spiral?' Moor demanded of her.

'We do not know.' Asajad's thin, colourless lips gave him a cold smile. 'How goes your part in the war?'

Meeting her dark eyes with a chilly gaze of his own, Moor remained silent.

'Come now, Fabian,' she said. 'There's no shame in defeat.' Her smile grew thinner and colder. 'Even my own troops were destroyed today at the Falls of Dust and Silver. I thought I was to die, too, but then I was manifested here.'

Viktor Gadreel grunted. 'It is the same for us all, Fabian.' He removed the cloth from his face and looked at the blood upon it. His left eye was nothing more than red pulp. 'I lost over a thousand today, dead to a man at the Burrows of Underneath. I should have fallen with them.'

'So many dead,' Hagi Tabet whispered. With each passing moment, she seemed more and more lost. Whatever wound she had sustained, it had clearly addled her mind. 'It all happened so quickly ...'

'We didn't stand a chance,' added Yves Harrow. He closed his burnt eyelids and continued to shiver.

'So you see, Fabian,' Asajad purred, 'each of our armies suffered defeat in battle, and with synchronised precision, it would seem. But you didn't lead an army, did you? Your part in the war was of a more clandestine nature.' She gave him a pitying pout. 'I am assuming, by your presence, your mission to the Great Labyrinth was not a success?'

'What do you know of my mission, Asajad?' Moor's tone was guarded.

'Enough to make an educated guess that the little magickers of the Relic Guild proved too strong for even Lord Spiral's most trusted assassin.'

Moor rubbed a hand across his bruised ribs and averted his gaze.

'Oh, poor Fabian.' As Asajad's unhelpful amusement deepened, she looked at each person seated around the table. 'A sorry lot for sure,' she sighed. 'Yet, even in failure, our lord and master has seen fit to spare us from death, to bring us safely to this place. We must indeed be favoured.'

'But are we few all that remain?' Gadreel said. 'Did Lord Spiral save others?'

Before any could speculate further, there was a deep click and a square section in the middle of the round table began to rise.