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  “You broke my sword, Breed,” he said in a voice that I felt as much as heard.

  “Sorry?”

  His laughter sounded like a rock slide. “Oh, Breed, there are some trivial imps and some petty demons, I’ll grant you that, but a demon dedicated to stealing pen nibs? You really believed that?” He laughed again and squeezed a little harder. “You are without doubt the most stupid creature I have ever encountered. Some might say, too stupid to live.”

  “I helped you.” The growing pressure lessened, but I was still dangling by my neck over a precipice.

  “Helped? We made a deal. I showed you the way out, and you took me over the seal.”

  He took a step back and released me. I fell in a heap and sucked in a huge gulp of air. The demon rolled his heavily muscled shoulders and cracked all fourteen fingers that terminated in gleaming black talons. Preferring one death to another, I got ready to leap over the edge.

  “What are you the demon of?” I asked, trying to buy myself time to come up with a better plan than jumping off a cliff.

  “Oh, you know, vengeance, destruction, laying waste to civilization, crushing empires under my heel that kind of thing. The more pressing question is, what am I going to do with you?”

  “Let me go?” I asked, somewhat hopefully it must be said. The demon reached a taloned hand towards the seal. A lance of white-hot fire leaped from its fingers and engulfed the ring. The air burned black and bitter as the metal melted and ran between the cobbles.

  “That’s better,” he said. A curtain of steam rose between us. “Let you go? That would be fair, I suppose, only I don’t want everyone to know I’m back just yet. I’d like to surprise them.” He winked.

  “I won’t tell anyone anything, I promise.” Even as I said it I knew it was a lie, and so did he.

  Before I could leap backwards and take my chance with rocks and gravity, he grabbed me again. Once again, his iron-hard fingers closed around my throat. This time he swung me so hard into the rock face that it felt like I’d dented the mountain with my head. Now I fought like a cornered thoasa. I kicked, I punched, and I bit and made no impression whatsoever. With my eyes bugging out of my skull, I used the last of my breath and hissed, “Shallunsard.” The pressure lessened.

  “That is the name the world knew me by.” He released me.

  I slid down the wall, I was saved. I had power over a demon lord. I was,

  “Of course, that isn’t my true name.”

  Fucked. I was fucked.

  The demon threw his head back and laughed like thunder. “What? You didn’t really? Ah, Breed, if only the rest of the world was as stupid as you.” It held out its hand.

  I fished the hilt of Dawnslight from my tunic and handed it over. Caught by the dying rays of the suns’ light the gems flashed a crimson farewell. The demon raised his free hand above his head, the air grew heavy and crackled with energy.

  “Let’s make a deal,” I begged, cringing away from the blast of fire that I knew was coming.

  His hand hung over me like a hawk’s claw poised to crush a rabbit’s skull. The suns haloed him in scarlet. I held my breath. After an eternity, the demon lowered his hand.

  “Very well, Breed. I have a task for you, perform it and I won’t kill you, fail and, well you know the rest.”

  “Anything. Thank you.” I could have kissed him.

  “Bring me the Hammer of the North.”

  Euphoric at being alive, it sounded like a fine idea. “Certainly, right away,” I said, and then the magnitude of what he asked sank in. “You mean the Hammer of the North’s hammer, don’t you?”

  He nodded. “Yes, I do.”

  “He’s been dead for a very long time.”

  “You owe me a debt, Breed.”

  “Funny, that’s how I ended up being chased by a dragon.”

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me? Now, do we have a deal, or do I turn you into a pile of ash?”

  “Since you put it that way.”

  The demon held out his hand. I gripped it.

  “How long do I have?”

  He grinned. “A year and a day.”

  “Deal.”

  As soon as the words left my mouth, my hand began to burn. I tried to pull away, but the demon held me fast. When he let go I saw that a black sigil had been burnt into my palm, marking me out as the demon’s own. I looked up, a salty oath on my lips, but Shallunsard had vanished.

  3

  Appleton does not smell of apples. Appleton smells of shit and misery, which perfectly summed up my situation.

  My father was a Thoasa, the toughest breed of warspawn. They can survive for weeks on nothing more than a few mouthfuls of brackish water, run for twenty miles without tiring, and still fight like ten bastards in a sack at the end of it. So, it’s a shame that my mother is human. That less hardy side of my lineage was currently desperate to add the contents of my stomach to the corrosive salmagundi of viscera sloshing around in the bottom of the honey pot in which I was hiding.

  As I slipped and skidded in the greasy waste, I tried to follow the thread of events back to where everything had started to unravel. Stealing the sapphire from the dragon hadn’t gone exactly to plan, I’ll grant, and then I’d inadvertently loosed a vengeful demon on the world. What irked me more was this latest indignity. I had been forced to hide in a gong pot just because I was a couple of days late getting back to Appleton. Two poxy days and my own mother had put a bounty on my head.

  The honey wagon slowed. A yelled greeting-come-warning was followed by the creak of gates telling me we’d arrived at the city. I hunkered down out of habit rather than fear of discovery. Not even the most zealous greenshanks would think to search a honey wagon for fugitives. Why would they? Only a lunatic or a desperate fool would hide in a shit pot.

  The team of urux pulling the wagon bellowed lugubriously when the driver encouraged them on with a few licks of the lash. My fragrant carriage jounced against its neighbors, and I slid around the pot like an oily rag. After a halting, five-mile journey from the dump to the city, I was covered in filth, and despite the best efforts of tear ducts and nictitating membranes, the stinging fumes were blinding. My finely tuned sense of smell had also been bludgeoned to uselessness by the olfactory assault of putrid effluvia.

  After the last outbreak of plague, all tannery waste and night soil was required by law to be dumped at least five miles from the city. The Imperial Factors who ran Appleton didn’t give a crusty scab about public health, but they did need a workforce to dig and refine enough calthracite to supply the Empirifex’s Royal Cannoneers. It was almost funny that a rogue like me had benefitted from an Imperial law. I would have laughed if I wasn’t trying not to breathe.

  The pots clattered hollowly against each other as we rolled along, much like the heads of the two Blades who’d waylaid me on my way back to the city. After a brief and pointy exchange with the pair of foolhardy opportunists, I left them in the shallow grave they’d prepared for me. It was a bit of a squeeze fitting them both in there, but where there’s a sword there’s a way. Their clumsy attempt had at least warned me that Mother had made good on her threat to put a bounty on my head should I be late. I wasn’t surprised, she had a vicious reputation to maintain.

  The wagon slowed almost to a halt. I lifted the pot lid a finger’s width and saw that we’d reached the crossroad of Pater Lane and Main Street. Seven-foot mounds of grey-dusted urux shit banked the busy thoroughfare. Everything in Appleton is gray, even the shit. Height of summer, depth of winter, the soot that falls from the calth burners paints all seasons the same uniform shade of hopeless.

  After we crossed the Silverlight River the urux gathered pace and channeled their breath through the hollow bones of their crests. The beasts’ ululating cries rolled through the timber and daub canyons of Old Town’s shanties and dilapidated mills. Minutes later, the mournful cries of their stablemates flowed back towards us.

  I didn’t leap out as soon as the cart pulled into the gong
farmers’ yard. I lifted the lid a crack and waited for the dead-eyed driver to unhitch the urux. Unsurprisingly, the yard was empty save for her and the animals. As she led them to their stalls I saw the locked bronze cuff on her wrist that marked her out as a self-indentured servant. It made sense, given the job. Pawning yourself to the state was common practice amongst the poor of Appleton and this was the fate of many a poor cull who had fallen on hard times. With the animals bedded down, she grabbed her coat and left the yard. I waited a few minutes before tipping the lid and vaulting to the ground.

  I landed with a squelch; rancid fat oozed between my toes. It was times like this that having seven, clawed toes on each foot was a massive pain in the arse. I wished, albeit briefly, that I’d inherited Mother’s fleshy little human feet that could be shoved into a neat pair of shoes and not get covered in filth every damn day.

  Cursing under my breath, I squeezed a handful of stinking, gong juice from my hair spines. It did nothing to improve my grimy appearance, but I felt a yard less wretched without rotting viscera dripping down my back. My left hand itched. I scratched it, remembered the black sigil of the demon Shallunsard that was embedded in my palm.

  I had a year and a day to find the hammer of the Hammer of the North, the weapon of the greatest hero the world had ever known, if Mother didn’t do for me first. I laughed at the absurdity of the situation and tore a strip of cloth from the lining of my jerkin to bind around my hand. There was no point adding ‘demon-marked’ to the list of reasons to kill me.

  Despite my appearance and exotic aroma, nobody gave me a second look as I made my way along Tannery Lane. In this part of Old Town, I’d have drawn more attention if I wasn’t covered in filth. I took a few random turns to make sure that I wasn’t being followed before heading down Grinder’s Snicket. Wedged between clapboard warehouses, at the end of the narrow passageway, a flight of steps led to the cellar under Blookmann’s Grindery.

  In a dark corner of the cellar, behind a row of storage racks that were never moved, used, or inspected, there was a cunningly hidden sewer entrance. The Blookmann family and their employees were well paid to ignore it, along with the shady types who used it.

  I was about to congratulate myself on evading my brothers and sisters of the blade when I saw something move under a piece of sacking that was crumpled by the cellar door. The suns hadn’t quite set, but thuggish shadows mobbed the alley and fell heavily across the doorway. I tried to arrow my gaze through the murky depth only to find that it was a little too dark down there. I sniffed the air. Someone was using hedge magic. The spell to deepen shadows was a favorite among the stealthily inclined members of the Midnight Court. Scribed on bloodclay tablets, they could be used once. They were a nice little earner for sorcerers of modest skill or for those who wanted to stay on the right side of the Paradox of Power.

  Whoever had cast this one had used it in the right place, but they hadn’t taken their smell into account. Free of the gong pot, my senses were my own again. I tasted the air and let the ambient funk of the alley wash over my tongue. The lurker was human and either a male or someone who had recently been pissed on by a male. Whoever they were, they hadn’t washed in a while and had recently dined on pickled garlic. Nevermind a thoasa, a rotnosed poxmonger would have been able to smell the tang of cheap wine vinegar that cut through the alley’s background perfume of cat piss, pigeon shit, and grindstone dust.

  It was an amateur mistake, very sloppy.

  Outwardly, I affected an air of feckless nonchalance as I strolled towards the cellar. Inside I was drawn as taut as a bowstring, ready to spring into action. I waited until I was half a stride from the steps before I snatched my blades from their scabbards and leaped.

  As planned, I landed inches from my would-be ambusher, leaving him scant room to maneuver. He spat a curse and threw the sack aside. Like me, he was using two long knives, the weapons of choice for discerning, back-alley brawlers. Unlike me, he wasn’t very good. He swung his steels, but I parried both blades, inside to out, and kneed him in the jewels. As he folded I butted him in the face. Gargling snot and blood, he took a seat in the corner. I rocked him off to sleep with a smack in the teeth and then had a quick rummage through his personals. The ghost of a familiar odor clung to the tumble of silvers that I found in his purse. I gave the coins a lick and a sniff. They smelled of failure and self-abuse. They smelled of my old mate, Sketh.

  There are those who say that Appleton’s sewers are nothing more than a shit-smeared, fat-calked labyrinth. A treacherous maggot burrow where only the desperate or the deadly venture willingly. Here be monsters, they say, which I know to be true, for I am one, and this is my home. The passage under the grindery isn’t the safest way to get to the Nest and therefore seldom used, which was why I chose it. From here I could either take a long and time-consuming detour, or a shorter but more perilous route. I paused briefly to weigh up the relative dangers of keeping Mother waiting longer, against the risk of taking the potentially fatal shortcut. An image of her scowling visage floated before my mind’s eye, tipping the scale decidedly in favor of the shortcut.

  Nobody knew if Ludo had ever been a single person. Some speculated that it had been a sorcerer who’d pushed the Paradox of Power too far. Other’s said that they, he, she, or it, had always been the way it was, just another freak birthed too near some old Schism-tainted battleground. The only fact about Ludo that was beyond speculation was that it was a deadly cove of the highest order.

  I was hoping that the guardian of Mother’s backdoor would be out fishing the sewer flow for ‘treasures’ when I passed through its lair. I am often disappointed and today was no exception. I paused before the bloodstained door to Ludo’s lair which was swinging gently on well-oiled hinges. Long before Mother had moved the Guild into the sewers, someone, perhaps Ludo itself, had blocked all but two of the entrances to the collection chamber that lay between me and my destination. It had been Ludo’s home for as long as I could remember and as all knew, if the doors were locked, it meant that Ludo had a visitor, as it liked to call the poor culls it lured to their deaths.

  “Come iiiin,” Ludo sang in an unsettling twine of baritone and falsetto. I sheathed my blades and entered. Previously, when I’d gone to see Ludo to beg a favor for Mother or take the shortcut through its home, I’d felt a thrill of fear as invigorating as it was disturbing. I was therefore disappointed to find that after almost being killed by a dragon and a demon in the space of a week, the thrilling terror of a visit to Ludo was somewhat muted. Thoasa hadn’t been bred to be emotional, they’d been bred to kill demons for the Mage Lords. Even now, seven hundred years after the Schism War, the descendants of those mage-bred warriors were known to be a coldly practical breed of warspawn. It was the human in me that enjoyed the spikes and troughs of stirred emotions.

  I took in the room with a casual glance. A rusting walkway spiraled up the wall before tapering off beside a blocked-up doorway. As usual, it was piled with a wide variety of objects that Ludo had either fished from the sewer or stolen from its many victims. Today I hardly thought about the coins and jewels that lay scattered amid odd shoes, broken buckets, and yellowing bones. I just wanted to get in and out in one piece, although at a push, I’d settle for alive.

  As usual, Ludo was dressed in a motley outfit sewn from mismatched swatches of fabric that the more ghoulishly inclined gossips swore had been cut from the clothes of its many victims. It had artlessly posed itself for my benefit and was leaning against a broken alabaster column with a mildewed book held daintily —and upside down— in its giant, red claw. Belying Ludo’s imitation of gentility and refinement was the collection of severed heads that had been nailed to the wall. In various states of decay, from skull to still dripping, the gaps in their ranks were a grim reminder to be extremely wary around this cove.

  Over the years there had been several doomed attempts by heroes and rogues alike to kill Ludo and plunder its hoard. Mother had never officially sanctioned any of those attem
pts, although I know she would have happily taken her cut of the loot had any of them succeeded. Officially, Ludo and Mother had an understanding. She didn’t move against it or kick up a fuss when one of the Nest’s less cautious patrons vanished, and Ludo kept an eye on the back door to her territory. It was a pact between monsters which, thus far, had extended some protection to me as Mother’s only offspring, but hereabouts I never took my safety for granted. Ludo flipped the book it wasn’t reading closed and beamed a wet-lipped smile with both of its lopsided mouths. Imagine taking two humans, sticking their eyes on stalks, replacing the right arm of one with a massive lobster claw and the left arm of the other with a flaccid tentacle. Then imagine the two unfortunates had been squashed together in some infernal vice. That’s what Ludo looked like. Its smell was equally unique, akin to a bowl of overripe fruit and maggoty bread, with a subtle hint of licorice. Its gender was another mystery, as not even the lowest slubberdegullion in the sewer had dared a sniff of that hem and lived to tell the tale.

  It watched me intently, both pairs of gray eyes dancing merrily on the end of weaving stalks. Like a fleshy jigsaw, its vaguely human skulls were distended, flattened, and bulging where nature had deemed necessary in order to accommodate its warped design. Greasy fronds of hair the color of curdled milk clung to its sallow pate. Two extra legs unfolded from somewhere beneath its gaudy raiment and the two halves glided apart. But not the voice. When Ludo spoke, its voices remained in disturbingly perfect unison.

  “Dear friend has come to visit. Dear friend smells very tasty, like a ripe skin fruit plucked straight from the flow. Mmm… luscious,” Ludo both rumbled and squealed. “What pretty thing have you brought Ludo, what treasure?” Its eyestalks contracted and extended excitedly, both halves licked their rouged, too-full lips.

  I took out the ambusher’s purse and tossed it to the half of Ludo with the pincer. The claw snapped shut on the bag like a bear trap. It weighed the pouch appreciatively before tipping the coins into its human hand.