Finn McLellan

@saranadosfiction.com

Disabled transmasc butch fantasy writer in this world, stabby bastards of various stripes in sundry fictional ones. Writing LGBTQ+ gaslamp fantasy (among other things) over at https://saranadosfiction.com/ @house_of_five@wandering.shop (they/he)

Fest winced. He still wasn’t used to girls swearing – truth be told, he wasn’t all that used to people swearing in general – and there was a distinct feeling at the back of his mind that well-bred young women oughtn’t to use that kind of language (though, admittedly, there was also a distinct feeling at the *front* of his mind that bringing that up here and now was probably the least helpful thing he could possibly do). Then again, given what had just happened, he honestly couldn’t fault her for it. “Are you *sure* he’s a Sinnlenst?” he asked, hopefully.

The glare he got in return could have stripped paint. “Of course I’m bloody sure. Who else would have the guts to pull that kind of stunt? Who else hates the Order that much, or wants to know that much about them? Who else is stupid enough to think that they can go up against us and *win*? He’s a gods-and-Spirits-damned Sinnlenst, or I’m a sodding jackalope.”

She had a point. She had a very good point. She had, in fact, a completely irrefutable argument. But, to his horror, Fest found the only thing currently occupying his overheated and overstressed brain after the irate werewolf had paused for breath was a mental image of her sporting a pair of antlers, alongside a set of oversized fluffy rabbit ears. Which, quite apart from being distinctly unhelpful when it came to solving their current predicament, was a fairly large problem in and of itself, because he was pretty sure that if he started laughing at this point in proceedings she was going to make a very good go at ripping his throat out.

“What?”

*Oh gods.* “Nothing! I- I was- Coffee. I should have some coffee.” He picked up his mug, downed the contents in one go – and then immediately started choking as the stone-cold coffee hit the back of his throat and somehow seemed to go down completely the wrong tube. “Aghk!”

*And wouldn’t that just be a grand addition to this whole mess?*

For a startled moment, she thought that there must have been some kind of accidental fire inside the room – a stray spark from the grate, perhaps, or a dropped cigarette butt – but it wasn’t anything close to woodsmoke or burning fabric that’d produced the scent filling her lungs and sticking in her throat. Not unless one of Mortimer’s ancestors had made some *very* interesting decisions when it came to carpentry and interior decorating.

“What the hells were you two *doing* in here?” she gasped, once she was sure she wasn’t about to either throw up or keel over, though she was fairly certain she had an idea of what the answer might be.

*Drinking would be bad enough when it comes to making terrible decisions. But Smoke? I thought you were smarter than that, Archer.*

Then again,she had a suspicion that it wasn’t Archer who’d been the driving force behind that particular decision – a suspicion which was upgraded to complete certainty when, through streaming eyes, she saw him dash across the room and wrench open the window and the shutters both in one sharp motion, letting in a howling blast of ice-cold wind that, to give him his due, did more than any amount of well-meaning fanning and fussing would’ve done to blow the smoke (and Smoke) out of her lungs.

*At least he remembered before I actually inhaled enough of it to make me sick, I suppose. That has to count for something.*

“Y’din’t need t’let the fuckin’ storm in,” Sabbat growled from the bed, though he didn’t sound entirely upset by the change. “Ain’t sayin’ a breath of air ain’t welcome, mind, but y’can leave the fuckin’ snow out of it.”

It felt like an eternity before she heard the door creak open again and, when she looked up, it was to find Archer looking down at her with an expression that seemed equal parts relief, resignation, and a fairly large amount of guilt.

“You’re still here,” he said, quietly, after a moment. “I… wasn’t certain you would be.”

“Takes more than that to scare me off.” She tried for a smile, though she had a suspicion it looked more forced than she’d intended. “How is he?”

“Bad. I don’t know why it’s escalated so damn quickly – the enchantment’s still functioning, thank the gods, so it’s nothing to do with that – but nothing I can do seems to be doing anything more than slowing it a little, and that’s with diving a damn sight too close to things I’d prefer to leave as a last resort.” His gaze flicked down to his bloodied left hand, just for a moment, before returning to her face. “How are *you* bearing up?”

“I’ll cope.”

“You shouldn’t have to.”

“Nor should you.” And, because she’d been dancing around the topic for too bloody long already, and because he needed to know, “I know why Sabbat’s getting worse. Or, at least, we have a very good suspicion.”

Archer’s eye narrowed, his yellow iris suddenly burning blazing gold in the candlelight. “Tell me.”

*And now we pray to the ancestors and every spirit listening that your love for him is stronger than your desire for revenge. That, or that I’m strong enough to knock you down and sit on you again.* “Poison. Nightshade.”

Something warm and solid pressed against his chest – he let go of the tree, tried to pry himself free of whatever it was, and found his hand trapped by fingers that seemed as hard and unyielding as iron bars.

“Breathe, Sabbat. I have you. Breathe.”

*What do you* think *I’m trying to do?!* But the pain was receding, ebbing back into wherever it hid itself between attacks and, after a minute or so of forcing himself to breathe slowly and deeply, the nausea followed it back down into the depths.

“It’s worse, isn’t it?”

“I-”

“If you say you’re fine,” Archer said, perfectly calmly, “I’m going to turn you upside down and hold you head-first over this ravine until you reconsider the wisdom of lying to me when I’m in the process of trying to save your life. Are we clear?”

“Fuckin’ crystal,” Sabbat growled, for want of anything else to say.

“Good. So, is it worse?”

“Aye.”

“Have you been trying to hide that from me?”

Of course he fucking had. Didn’t Archer know anything about him? “Take a fuckin’ guess.”

“Really? You surprise me. Although I suppose you did have other things to focus on.” He leant back on the bench, letting the reins go slack in his hands as the horses picked their way along the path, and said, casually: “Like that priest, for instance.”

*…Well, apparently sudden mind-numbing terror is a cure for nausea. Admittedly, that’s mostly because I’m too scared to be sick, but…*

He could always deny any knowledge of what Avebury was referring to, of course. After all, who was to say that this was anything to do with Anneke anyway?

*And if I believed that, I’d have a bridge to sell myself. Somehow I don’t think ‘what priest?’ is going to do anything except make him even more suspicious… especially since I’ve now taken long enough to answer that he’s going to assume that I’m making something up anyway and oh gods have I mentioned how much I hate every second of this?*

“You do know they’re linked to the Order, don’t you?” Avebury went on, apparently unfazed by the lack of response. “Not an actual member, as far as I’m aware, but they’re definitely a sympathiser.”

“… Oh. I… didn’t know that.”His voice was shaking – he bit down hard on the corner of his lip, hoping against hope that the Sinnlenst would take his obvious distress as a reaction to having accidentally befriended one of the enemy. *Because if he doesn’t, this is going to go bad very very quickly.*

“That’s not your fault – while they’re not entirely subtle about their opinions, they almost certainly hid their true colours in order to get close to you. I suspect they’re looking to get information out of you about what we’re up to… which, it occurs to me, could be *very* useful for us. Assuming you’re up to the challenge, of course.”

“Aye. Meetin’ at Northgate?”

“By the stables? I can do that. Call it eight bells?”

“Sounds good.” He flexed the fingers of his right hand experimentally. “Should be able t’take the rooftops back. Less likely t’run into Sinnlenst that way.”

“Good plan.” He leaned forward, resting the fingertips of his right hand carefully on Sabbat’s bandaged arm for a moment. “Promise me you’re not going to try ‘answering’ that damn message again.”

The unfrozen corner of Sabbat’s mouth twisted upward into a brief sneer. “Y’got some fuckin’ gall askin’ me for a damn oath on that.”

*Oh for crying out loud.* “Fine. I’m not asking you for a promise. I’m asking you, as a friend, to do me a favour and not injure yourself further when you’re already carrying a damn sight too many wounds for comfort – if for no other reason than if I have to come carry you bodily out of the Daggers because you’ve keeled over from bloodloss it’s going to waste valuable time *and* I am going to be exceptionally annoyed at the inconvenience. Is that acceptable?”

The assassin gave a short bark of laughter. “It’ll do. Bastard.”

“So you keep saying. My parents are married, you know.”

“Overly fuckin’ literal bastard, at that.” He flashed a quick, lopsided grin. “Alright. I ain’t goin’ t’cut on myself. Promise.”

“Thank you.”

“Given I don’t know what you’re referring to, I can hardly comment on that. But I’d suggest you move your hand – unless you’re really planning on drawing steel in the middle of a crowd.”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether you want to tell everyone here what you did.” Another new voice, again from the section of the crowd that seemed to be mostly made up of Tyburn’s faction. “We’re not stupid, Avebury. We know.”

“You don’t know shit!” Yet another new voice – a woman, this time, and from the group which seemed to be predominantly Avebury’s supporters. “Rumour-mongering magician-lovers!”

“Traitorous scum!”

“Cowards!”

Viola wasn’t entirely sure who threw the first punch – she saw Avebury’s arm move, heard someone’s fist thud into someone else’s face with bone-cracking force, and then someone had hold of her wrist and she was being yanked bodily sideways and out of the main body of the fray. She snarled, twisting round to bring her knee up between the legs of the person who’d grabbed her, but he dodged and she got him in the thigh instead, hard enough to make him swear but not hard enough for him to let go of her.

*Fine. New plan.*

She punched him in the face.

*Don’t look at him.*

*You know he’s in pain. You know there’s nothing you can do right now save what you’re already doing. You know that, if you hesitate here, if you get distracted, if you make a mistake, you won’t be the one paying for it.*

All true. All correct. All sensible, reasonable, logical advice.

And none of it made a blind bit of difference to the fact that it hurt to keep his attention fixed solely on the mechanical steps of the transfusion, an ache in his chest that felt as sharp and physical as a blade between the ribs.

*It’s almost over.*

*This* will *work.*

*This* will *be worth it, worth every single damn moment of it.*

All he had to do was keep looking down. Keep his eye fixed on the blade, the cut, the mechanical interface of scalpel and skin. Pretend it wasn’t *Sabbat’s* wrist he was holding, wasn’t *Sabbat’s* pulse beating slow and sluggish under his fingers, wasn’t *Sabbat’s* blood trickling warm and wet down the underside of his arm. Pretend all of this was happening to someone else, somewhere else, and that his sole investment and interest in the procedure was an entirely academic one.

Pretend he couldn’t smell the blood. The sweat. The candles.

The… smoke?

Archer winced. “I’m not. I’m saying that, short of divine intervention, he’s our best hope.”

“An’ if he can’t?”

“Then… I’ll think of something. Or you will. Or-“

“You ain’t that fuckin’ daft, Will. Y’know what happens if he can’t fix it.” The assassin’s tone was still determinedly casual, but there was a set to his jaw that belied his apparent indifference. “Reckon y’might need t’start thinkin’ about that, dependin’ on how the next couple of days go.”

“Or I find another way through this that doesn’t involve your death, self-inflicted or otherwise. If we- I mean, if I-” *damn you and myself and hope to all the gods that everything I’ve read is right and there is a way to do that which won’t bring you back as a hollow monstrous husk of the man I love…*

“No.”

Archer blinked. “No?”

“No,” Sabbat said, again, more forcefully this time. He stood up, the legs of his chair scraping against the floor. “Whatever you’re fuckin’ considerin’, Will, don’t.”

“But-“

“Last time I saw that face on someone, she’d just walked out under the fuckin’ noose. Whatever you’re thinkin’ of doin’, if it’s makin’ y’look like that, it ain’t worth it.” He coughed, grimaced, and then added, in a tone which implied that the previous conversation was now very much over: “I’m goin’ t’go find a bath. Y’comin’?”

“Then stop chewing on it until we get to the house!” Viola shot back, and then immediately regretted it as several heads turned in their direction. *Oh that’s the last thing we bloody need. If someone realises who I am – and that’s more likely than I’d hope, given what happened at the Daggers – then we’re both done for.*

Though, now she came to think of it, her outburst hadn’t prompted nearly as much of a reaction as it might’ve done – and, looking more closely at the crowd on the other side of the street, she had a sudden gut-lurching feeling she knew why.

“Trouble,” she said, lowering her voice and jerking her head towards the knot of people at the heart of the group. “Don’t think it’s a fight, not yet, but might be about to turn into one.”

To Mortimer’s credit, he didn’t waste time asking stupid questions. “Break or stay?”

“None of our business, and the longer we stick around here the more likely someone is to make one or both of us.”

“Then why’re you asking in the first place?”

“Because they’re all human. All of them. Which means whoever’s at the centre of all that mess might not be.”

“…Shit.”

*Knew Amelia made the right choice with you.* “We go in, then?”

“We go in.”

The fall’d done shit-all to help with the injuries he’d already been carrying, mind – from the way his leg was feeling, he doubted he’d be able to put weight on it any time soon, even if his back’d been sound – but no broken bones meant at least he wasn’t looking at weeks laid up, which meant-

*-that the next time that fucking dead bastard shows up, I’ll be ready for him.*

And all Caine had to do was be polite and stupid enough to sit around with his thumb up his arse and wait, rather than pressing the advantage and coming after wounded prey. Which, of course, he’d *definitely* be inclined to be doing, him being a complete fucking idiot and all.

*I’m not the prey, I’m the sodding* predator. *Fuck this.*

Course, he hadn’t needed to be able to walk to deal with Caine the first time (second, he supposed, if you counted assassinating him in the first place). But he’d dropped the remains of the bottle of acid somewhere around the time he’d been being thrown off a roof, and knifing the bastard likely wasn’t going to do much more than piss him off, even assuming he managed to get a blade in hand before-

*Shitting fuck!*

His foot caught on a loose cobble and a jolt of agony lanced up his spine, shattering the thought into razor-edged splinters and sending the world spinning dizzily off into darkness for a short, sickening moment. Fuck fuck fuck it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts

When things came back into focus again – or, at least, as much focus as he was currently fucking capable of – he was sitting on the ground, back against a wall, and someone was trying to talk to him.

“Y’want me t’find out who it was, teach ’em a lesson fer it?”

“Much as I appreciate the offer, no. Not least because you’re *supposed* to be resting.”

“Bin doin’ a fuck of a lot too much o’that of late. Want t’be up an’ doin’.”

“I know. Though, judging by everything I’ve seen and heard tonight, you’ve already been doing a good deal more than I’d have suggested for your first evening back on this side of the sky. Starting with tackling Caine into the godsdamn river.” *If I’d been there to stop you-*

Then he’d still have likely ended up with a broken nose for his trouble, and very probably the two of them would have wound up having a blazing row as a result.

*And instead, you managed to pull yourself out of there, acquire some dry clothes from somewhere – and I’m not going to ask too many questions about where – and, in the process,* somehow *discover a fact about the Turned that I didn’t come across in any of my hours of research.*

The part of his mind that was forever the scholar was desperate to know where in the name of the gods Sabbat had found that information, especially since he’d explicitly mentioned it not being in any of the books. The rest of his mind was well aware that, right now, pushing him on that point would likely be a very good way to precipitate the argument they’d only just avoided in the courtyard.

*Either that or he decides to tell me and the two of us spend the night elbow-deep in research and theory-crafting. And, while I’d not generally say no to that, I’ve about had my fill of research on that topic. For the next few days, at least.*

Besides, right now, he could think of a couple of other ways to spend the night that were, if not better, certainly a good deal more novel.

*Lady, protect me – or at the fucking least, keep me from embarrassing myself in front of folks who ain’t yours. Again.*

He took a breath, closed his eyes, and stepped over the threshold and into the Hall proper.

Crossing the wards felt like nothing so much as diving off the rail of the Arrow into a calm sea – a brief, hanging moment of weightlessness, a rush of pressure, and then the rest of the world dropping away into silence except for the thudding of his heart in his ears and the faint distorted buzz of whatever was going on above the surface.

*Could get used to this, if staying too long wouldn’t drown me.*

For a moment, he was somewhere and somewhen else entirely: under the water in the harbour, eyes stinging from the salt, diving down to hunt for treasure in the silt or chase the silver flicker-fast fish darting between the bellies of the merchant ships. Then his boot hit the flagstones on the other side of the door and he surfaced, light and heat and sound battering suddenly against his senses with enough force that he swayed sideways and had to prop himself up on the wall to keep from keeling over into the coatrack.

“Are you alright?” Archer said, from somewhere behind his shoulder.

“Aye, ‘m fine.”

“Need to sit down?”

“No.” *Yes.*

“Through here,” Verist said, limping past the two of them. “I’m afraid you’ll have to make do with a rather more barebones dinner, since I doubt Cyra’s still up, but there’s more than enough tea and brandy to go around.”

A digital portrait in flat colours of a character (Anneke) sitting crosslegged in a green armchair.

They have short and very curly black hair, dark brown skin, and red slit-pupiled eyes. They're wearing a grey robe with a white undershirt just visible at the collar, a black overrobe, a red braided belt, and soft red kneeboots with minimal black embroidery on them.

They're holding a very large book open and upright in their lap and scribbling in it - there are more books resting against the chair and tucked under it.

There's also a tea glass in a silver holder balanced somewhat precariously on the arm of the chair, which looks as though it may have been completely forgotten about given how engrossed Anneke is in what they're writing.

Lucky for her, then, that this wasn’t the only gate on this side of the city.

*Now I just have to hope that I’m right about where that one lets out, or this is going to be one hell of a diversion.*

She’d be able to make up the time either way, especially once she’d shucked her gear and gone four-footed, but anything which slowed her down meant that Caine was gaining on her, and that meant she’d have a whole lot less time to warn Mortimer (and the others) before he showed up.

*And I need to warn any local villages too – or, at least, get Verist to warn them, since I doubt they’ll take much notice of me. If there’s going to be a Turned hunting in the area, they need to know.*

Verist would also likely be able to phrase it more diplomatically than she could, inasmuch as he’d probably not out and say that there was a Turned around – and he’d also be significantly less likely to point out that their cubs, wandering off on their own to gather firewood or call their animals home, would be easy prey for something as strong and fast and amoral as Caine.

*Besides, even if he did mention that, they’d likely take it better coming from someone whose ancestors didn’t consider theirs to be prey. Even if I’m pretty sure it’s only a few isolated clans up in the far north who do that kind of thing now, and most of them know better than to hunt anywhere near here.*

She’d managed to work her way to the edge of the crowd by this point, and a quick sideways leap to avoid a skidding sleigh landed her safely in an alleyway, free from the crush and finally able to get a lungful of air which didn’t taste of wet wool and sweat and cologne. She took a moment to steady herself and then, with a brief prayer to the ancestors that she’d picked the right direction, set off running down the narrow street, taking the corner at the end of it with a speed which very almost sent her careening off the nearest wall.

Compared to the hell that’d been pulling on the damn dresses every morning, the shirt and trews went on as smooth as silk. And, with the addition of the waistcoat and the neckscarf, the person looking back at Sabrian in the mirror could’ve been any cabin boy or boat-boy off on shore leave and running back home through the streets of Dockside.

Sabrian grinned, watching the unfrozen corner of his reflection’s mouth twist upward in fierce triumph. *Hey, what d’you fucking know? I’m still me.*

Question was, was he still *Sabrian?* It’d been a perfectly serviceable name for most of his life so far, and he didn’t have too many problems with it in and of itself, but something about it didn’t quite fit right any more – that, and he’d heard it too many times in his uncle’s mouth for it not to come with an added ‘girl’ and ‘daughter’ that made his lip curl.

*Sa- Best be something close, else I’ll not know myself any more. Sabr… Sab… Saba…*

*Sabbat. I’ll be Sabbat.*

He wasn’t quite sure *why* he’d landed on that name, but the moment he tried it on he knew that it fit – curt, sharp, and stabbing-sounding in a way that ‘Sabrian’ just wasn’t. Perfect for the kind of person he was planning on becoming, in other words.

“Sabbat,” he said, and the boy in the mirror grinned lopsidedly back at him. “Sabbat. Aye, that’ll fuckin’ do.”

Ten minutes later, one of the second floor windows swung silently open. A shadow slid out of the darkness of the house, swarmed up the wall, and, moving with all the speed and agility of a born roof-runner, launched itself out into the empty space between the rooftops, hanging for a second in weightless flight before landing in a diving roll on the flat roof of the shop across the way.

The moon shone down. The fog rolled in. And the boy called Sabbat raced onward, chasing a brighter future.

“Are you alright?” Viola asked, turning to look at him with an expression that seemed equal parts worry and full-on shock. “You look like hell.”

*It that fucking obvious?* “Fuck *off*, Cervanso. ‘m fine.” *Except for the fact I’m fucking dying, but there’s sod-all you can do about that.*

“Of course you are. Your nose is bleeding, by the way.”

“Fuckin’-“

“Here.” A clean handkerchief – because of *course* Archer just happened to have one spare, wouldn’t be him if he wasn’t annoyingly put-together even in the middle of all this, would he? – landed in his lap, stark white against the black of his trews. “I’m assuming you’d rather me carry you up the stairs than Viola, and it’ll be a good deal easier for me to do so if you’re not bleeding on me.”

He’d let Cervanso half carry him back when Caine’d thrown him off the roof in Steepside – though there was hardly much ‘letting’ involved, given he’d been barely conscious at the time – but there was a world of difference between that and this and gods, it might be just the pain talking (more than enough of that to go around at the moment, after all), but if he was going to die without telling Archer he loved him, then at least he was going to do it having spent every second he could in his arms. That, and if *Archer* was carrying him, he’d not need to worry about falling asleep before they made it back to the room.

“Sabbat?”

*Fuck. Getting distracted.* “Aye.” He wiped his nose on his sleeve, leaving a bright red smear on the cuff, then balled up the handkerchief and pressed it against the lower part of his face. “Better?”

Archer sighed. “The point of the handkerchief was partially to *avoid* you having to use your shirt, but yes, better. Ready?”

^Be a fuck of a lot easier if I wasn’t trying to do this with a busted leg, a hole in my hand, and a whole parcel of injuries being kept at bay by a probably-cursed magical box, I’ll tell you that for fucking free.*

Then again, where’d the challenge be in that?

The stonework around the window was almost as iced-up as the sill, but the hinges on the shutters gave him the purchase he needed to hoist himself up and get a grip on the gutter, the cold metal biting into his palms even through the leather of his gloves. And from there, even with his leg and hand both not bearing weight the way they should, it was the matter of a few breaths (and a fairly substantial amount of silent swearing) to haul himself up and over and onto the snow-covered ledge jutting out from the base of the mansion’s sloped roof, ready to start the next stage of the climb.

Which was about the time his leg gave out and he fell flat on his face.

*Fuck!*

He managed to control the fall well enough that he didn’t slip off the ledge, at least, and the snow was deep enough to muffle any noise. Still hurt like hells, though, even through whatever the box was doing to him, and he bit his lip hard enough to draw blood trying to hold back a yell of mingled pain and frustration as his bodyweight landed squarely on his injured hand.

*Fuck fuck fuck fuck* fuck! *What fucking use am I going to be if my fucking leg won’t fucking work?!*

*More use than you’ll be if you get yourself killed because you fucking panicked, that’s for damn sure.*

The door wasn’t locked – which was odd, because Avebury seemed like the kind of person who’d not want anyone to go snooping around their stuff – and, when he put his hand to the doorknob, it opened faster than he’d expected, almost as though someone was pulling it from the other side.

*What the-*

It wasn’t Avebury.

Which made perfect sense, because Avebury was downstairs and there was no possible way that he could have got past Fest and into the room without him knowing, but also made absolutely no sense at all because the person standing in the doorway (and looking very much as though he was about to either throw up, pass out, or both, which was coincidentally also exactly how Fest was feeling at that precise moment) couldn’t possibly be here either.

“…Sabbat?”

The assassin lunged towards him – he flinched sideways, barely dodging out of the way, hand going to his throat to try and protect himself from an attack which he knew he couldn’t entirely avoid, and-

And Sabbat crashed to his knees on the floorboards, doubled over, and was loudly and violently sick.

*…That… doesn’t seem good.*

He wasn’t entirely sure what he was supposed to be doing – he had vague memories from childhood illnesses of his father patting his back and telling him it was better out than in, but he doubted that’d go down particularly well in this case – but standing around staring almost certainly wasn’t it.

The problem was, right now he honestly couldn’t think of anything else.

*So instead we hope to the ancestors that he knows what he’s doing – or, at least, that he can convince* them *of that for long enough for me to get an idea of the quickest way to take them out.*

“‘scuse me, gennelmen, ladies?” Fest’s voice, floating out of the fog, sounding a good deal more rural than his usual tones, and a good deal more slurred to boot. “Don’t suppose any of you have a light, do you? Only I must’ve taken a wrong turning back there, and I can’t read my map well enough in this murk to see where I’m *s’posed* to be going.”

*Oh you young idiot. That’s the oldest trick in the damn book, and you should know as much – you read enough of them.*

If he was planning on getting himself mugged, he was going the right way about it. If, on the other hand, he was planning on some kind of penny-dreadful-hero reversal…

Then I bloody hope you’re better with that blade than I’ve been assuming, because you’re likely facing down the Sinnlenst’s equivalents of me and Sabbat, and they’re going to be playing for keeps.

“No lights here, friend. Plenty of gaslamps back down the street you just came up, though.”

*And she’s already suspicious that he’s not what he’s pretending to be, if the scent of her is anything to go by. I really bloody hope you know what you’re doing, Fest.*

“I tried that, but none of them’re bright enough. Are you sure y’don’t have a light on you? A box of matches’d do.”

“Gods, are you deaf? You’ve come to the wrong temple, if you are.” Louder, and with more exaggerated enunciation, “We don’t have any lights. Sorry.”

Archer winced, looking away. “No. You’ve lost too much blood already. I’ll… Gods dammit, I’ll think of something.”

“Or you’ll stand there tryin’ t’be noble an’ starvin’ y’self an’ we’ll get fuckin’ nowhere.” He reached out, resting his left hand carefully on the other man’s shoulder. “You ain’t makin’ me do this, Will. An’ I ain’t doin’ it on account of thinkin’ I owe you anythin’. I ain’t doin’ it out of anythin’ other’n my own fuckin’ choice.”

“I could hardly ‘make’ *you* do anything,” the vampire said, with something that might’ve been a laugh. “But your point’s taken.” The tip of his tongue flicked out, licking the crust of dried blood from the corner of his mouth. “Gods. Are you certain?”

“Aye.”

Archer frowned. “You don’t sound-“

“Fuckin’ hellfire!” Sabbat growled, his fingers digging into the other man’s shoulder. “I said I was fuckin’ certain, an’ I’m fuckin’ certain. Fuckin’ do it an’ get it over with.” *Before I lose my nerve over the fact that my best friend’s looking at me like I’m fucking prey.*

“Thank you,” Archer said, quietly. He paused for a second, then added in a more normal tone, “You might want to let go of my shoulder.”

Sabbat blinked, caught off guard as much by the shift in tone as the request. Then, feeling oddly as though he was moving through treacle, he prised his fingers free of Archer’s shirt and began to pull his hand away.

As he did so, Archer reached up and, with a muttered ‘Let me’, caught hold of his wrist and turned it so the inside of his bared forearm faced towards the sky.

Then, very gently, he pulled Sabbat’s arm towards him, fastened his mouth over the wound that’d already been made, and began to drink.

“You do that, then. I’m not leaving without Fest.”

“An’ Archer told me t’keep the both of you safe. He ain’t easy t’kill permanently, you are.”

“He’s *pack.* We don’t leave pack behind!”

“He’s a fuckin’ *sorcerer*, Cervanso. Ain’t him y’need t’be worryin’ about right now.”

“We need to leave,” Mortimer said. He held up his hand, forestalling both of their objections. “Now.”

“What-?”

He pointed wordlessly behind the two of them, towards the entrance of the ballroom.

Caine, silhouetted against the light of the still-intact gaslamps in the hallway, stood up, letting something fall from his hand as he did so. It hit the floor with a heavy, sodden thump, rolled, and came to rest on its side, facing towards them.

The two humans couldn’t possibly see what it was, not at this distance. But, hearing Mortimer’s breath catch in his throat and seeing the way Sabbat’s shoulders tensed, she had a feeling they’d guessed.

Someone screamed.

Caine’s head turned, faster than any human should’ve been able to move – but then again, he wasn’t human any more, was he? – and he started to walk, slowly and deliberately, in the direction of the noise.

There was an empty, hanging moment.

Then people started running.

The newspaper-seller couldn’t have been more than twelve – a thin, ragged girl with short black hair sticking out from under her tattered cap, and small wind-chapped hands half-hidden in the sleeves of her too-big overcoat. She’d obviously just come from the printers, judging by the size of the pile of papers on her sled, and the tips of her fingers were stained black with new ink, contrasting starkly with the white of her skin.

“Extra! Extra! Hideous murder shocks city! Body found drained of all blood! Read all about it!”

Archer hadn’t been planning on buying a paper that morning. ‘Hadn’t’ being the operative word.

“How much?”

“Ha’penny, sir,” the girl said, breaking off her patter to peel a paper from the top of the stack. She handed it to him, then made a small sound of surprise as he passed her significantly more money than she’d requested. “You sure, sir?”

“Absolutely. Get yourself something hot to eat.” And then, quieter, “And take the rest to the slaughterhouse down by the river gate. They’ll sort you out, and it’s a damn sight better than rats.”

She nodded, then flashed him a shy grin, fangs briefly visible between her cracked lips. “Thank you, sir!”

“Don’t mention it.” He turned, walking away as the girl started back into her spiel once more, and made a concerted effort to pretend that he’d only picked up the paper out of the goodness of his heart and a vague sense of curiosity.

He wasn’t at all sure that it was working.

In lieu of an answer, the assassin held his arm out, twisting it so Fest and Archer could both see the inside of his forearm. There were a series of small cuts marking his skin – and, as they watched, another set opened up, lines and curves that almost looked like…

“They’re letters,” Fest breathed. “Oh holy gods. They’re letters.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere near your neck. And if I have to, I’ll tell you. Is that good enough?”

“Aye.”

Another pause, this one a good deal shorter, and then he felt Archer’s fingertips pressing against his scalp, ten cool points of pressure cutting through the warmth and fog of the room.

“There. Comfortable?”

“Aye.”

“Good,” Archer said, quietly. He took a deep breath, the sound hissing in Sabbat’s ears like waves drawing over sand, and then began, very slowly, to run his fingers through Sabbat’s hair in long, even strokes, pausing every so often to tease out a particularly stubborn knot.

It felt *good.* It felt better than it had any fucking right to, especially with that damn box right there on the side of the pool and Avebury only hours away from turning up and making this whole fucking mess even more complicated.

*Gods. Put this feeling in a fucking pipe and you can forget about the sixdamn Smoke.*

Course, the fact that his head and lungs were still full of the stuff probably had more to do with it than anything else. Certainly explained the warmth in his chest and the way that the steam rising off the pool seemed to be curling in and around itself, chasing its own shadow in and out of the patterns on the tiled walls.

*Shouldn’t’ve let myself get that far into the damn dreaming. Only meant to take the edge off.*

Then again, hadn’t Verist said he wanted them gone until sundown? Plenty of time to dream, then.

The blood wasn’t working.

It’d worked before – had worked every single other time he’d used it to calm Sabbat’s breathing or slow the shudders wracking his frame, enough so that he’d almost come to think of it as a routine part of the dark parody of domesticity that their lives had devolved into over the last few days – but now, now when they were so damn close to the ritual being finished, *now* something had changed, *now* the blood had stopped doing whatever it’d been doing… or, worse, whatever was wrong with Sabbat had gone far enough that it wasn’t making a difference any more.

He’d bled enough to leave him light-headed, smeared enough gore over Sabbat’s face to more than undo the time he’d spent helping the assassin wash in preparation for the evening, and all that it’d achieved was a mess of red smeared across the sweat-soaked sheets, a heavy slaughterhouse stink rotting in the sickness-sweet air, and the body of the man he loved thrashing and jerking on the bed, eyes rolled back, jaw clenched, breath hissing between his teeth, every muscle as tense and taut as though there was lightning arcing through his veins and sparking across his bloodied skin.

“Gods, what the hells am I supposed to *do?*”

What he wanted to do was hold him until the convulsions stopped, but gods, he’d enough knowledge to know how that would go with a seizure this bad. So all he could do was watch, and pray, and hate the fact that that was all he could do.

*It will stop. Every other time he’s had one of these attacks, it’s stopped within a few minutes. This should be no different.*

But none of the other attacks had resisted the blood in this way, and none of them had been this damn violent, so where was the guarantee that anything he’d seen so far was going to hold true for this?

“Eep?” he managed, and then winced. *Wrong answer.*

There was a brief, horrible silence.

Then Sabbat snarled, yanked Fest’s head back hard enough to make him yelp in mingled pain and surprise, and leaned in, close enough that the two of them were practically nose to nose. “Y’think I’m jokin’? Y’think I won’t just kill you an’ have done with it?”

“N-no!” Fest squeaked, eyes still squeezed shut in the vain hope that it might somehow make the situation any less terrifying. He swallowed, suddenly very very aware of quite how vulnerable his jugular was right now – vampires couldn’t *permanently* die of having their throats slit, of course, but that didn’t mean it was something he particularly wanted to experience. “I mean- I-” *Oh gods, I wish Viola was here. She’s the one who had an explanation for all of this.*

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t cut your fuckin’ throat right here and now,” the human growled.

“I can give you two.”

*Viola?!* Fest cracked an eye open, catching a brief glimpse of his saviour as she stepped into the room. *Oh thank the gods. Something’s going right for a change.*

“Don’t recall askin’ *you*,” Sabbat said, though he seemed more than a little taken aback by the new arrival (which, as far as Fest was concerned, was just fine by him).

“One:,” Viola went on, as though he’d not spoken. “He’s a vampire, so cutting his throat’ll do sod-all other than inconvenience him and get blood all over the bathroom. And two: I don’t want you to. I’ve already saved his life once today, and I’m damned if I’m having you put all that hard work to waste.”

Somehow, that actually made him feel better. He wasn't sneaking back into the university by the back gate because he wanted to dodge having to lie to his professors about how his apprenticeship had ended, he was deliberately using a less public entrance so he could spy on secret meetings going on under the noses of the academics and gain information for the secret society he was now very much a proper member of - and, given everything that'd happened over the last couple of weeks, he was starting to feel like he could actually call himself a proper spy into the bargain (or, at least, someone who was better at spycraft than the average student).

Which was a feeling that lasted right up until he rounded a corner and nearly walked straight into the one person he'd really bloody hoped to avoid actually coming face-to-face with until a good deal later in proceedings.

“I’ve had to wash bloodstains out of that kind of fabric before. I know how much work it takes.” *Not that you’d be doing the washing, I expect.* But, then again, she’d not seen any servants any of the times she’d been by his rooms, and it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that he did at least some of his own laundry. *Though you’re probably rich enough to just buy replacements if you need them. I know half ‘melia’s friends do that, when they can’t be bothered to send away for something to be cleaned.*

“I appreciate it. Let me know if you want to trade places, though, and I’ll strip down to my shirtsleeves.” He smiled, a brief flicker of an expression that somehow made him look suddenly a good deal younger and less world-weary. “I might not have had to deal with bloodstained coats all that much, but bloodstained *shirts* I understand very well.”

“Sabbat?”

“Oddly enough, no – or, at least, he’s not the reason I originally learned how to deal with that particular problem.”

“The Revolution, then?”

He nodded. “That and the Border War. Though I suspect your experiences were a little closer to home.”

“If you mean the assassination attempts on Amelia, then yes.” She crouched down, grabbed the eviscerated deer by the legs, and slung it over her shoulders, wincing as the motion sent a starburst of pain radiating outward from the still half-healed bulletwound in her shin. *I’m definitely going to need to have someone take a look at that at some point. Just… not right now.* “Shall we?”

“Lead the way.”

A screenshot from 4thewords showing a document titled 'Journalling' with a wordcount of 36133. The section of text we can see reads:

'If all of that's happening on the second day (which is the 1st of January by our reckoning, just to be awkward) then dinner that night is probably of the 'quiet and subdued' variety, since everyone's exhausted - especially if some of them have also had to go out and do storm-damage-prevention stuff as well as their normal duties. The big storm rolls in on the night of the second day, which also allows for several characters to be lying awake listening to the house creak and groan and the wind howl around the chimneys - entirely possible we have at least one person creeping through the hallways with a candelabra, because that's a fun trope and we want to lean heavily into the Gothic for this section.'

Sabbat’s voice. *At least he’s alive. For now. That doesn’t change what I need to do.* “Step aside, Viola. Please.”

“Archer! Fer fuck’s sake!”

“No. I’m not bloody moving, and you need to get a hold of yourself and *sit down.* Sir.”

“Step aside.” She might be strong – werewolves generally were, and she was a fighter besides – but he had height and experience on her, and the advantage of vampiric reflexes besides. It was the work of a moment to slip his off hand under her arm, wrap his fingers around her shoulder, and *twist*, pulling her off-balance as he slid his leg forward to sweep her front foot in a move that, if she’d not been trained enough to roll with the motion, would have landed her on her back on the floor.

As it was, she recovered better than he’d expected, grabbing hold of his shirt and yanking him backwards as she shifted her weight to counterbalance the momentum of the throw. He managed to drop his knife before he hit the ground – he’d been telling the truth when he said he didn’t want to hurt her, and werewolves could heal from broken bones a damn sight more easily than they could from a slashed artery – but, even without the blade to hand, he had more than enough ways to keep her down if she was going to insist on getting in his way and-

“*Will!*“

Something in the assassin’s tone cut through the fog filling his head, dragging his consciousness back into his body with a wrench that was almost physically painful (or maybe that was the sudden shock of realising that he was on the floor, on his back, and currently being pinned down by a very angry-looking and very naked werewolf).

“I …What in the *hells* just happened?”

$“No,” Archer said, and put as much cold command into the word as he could muster. *You are not dying on me. I forbid it.* Sabbat blinked. “What d’y’mean, ‘no’? Y’don’t get t’give me orders.” “I meant what I said. No. You are not dying. Not while I have the means to stop you, not unless you ask me to let you go.” He took a breath, steadying himself. “The ritual’s almost ready – another day or so of work, and it should be in a place where it’s more likely than not to work. If this poison won’t allow us that time, there’s an antidote, though it’s dangerous enough that I’d prefer to avoid using it unless we absolutely have to. And if that antidote fails, or the ritual fractures, then… then…” The words stuck in his throat, knife-edged and jagged as shards of volcanic glass. “Still not willin’… t’say it?” And something inside Archer’s skull snapped. *He’s right. If I’m not willing to have this damn conversation – if I’m not willing to use the bloody word around him – then I’ve no business trying to do this at all. And if hearing it makes him realise that he doesn’t want to go through with this… well, then I’ll know before the end.* He lowered his voice, leaning over the bed, his mouth a hair’s breadth from Sabbat’s ear. “Then I’ll do my best to Turn you and bring you back as who you’ve always been. And if that doesn’t work, if you come back wrong, if you lose what makes you *you* in the paths and mists between the lands of the living and dead, then I’ll hold you down, cut your throat from ear to ear, put a stake through your heart, and not let anyone else lay a finger on you until you’re burned and gone to ash and your soul safely harboured on the other side of the sky.” *There. Condemned from my own mouth.*$