She knew she should hate Telos for bringing this new ruin upon them, but she was learning she was a sucker for a man down on his luck. All the swaggering braggarts who had come into her House during her days as an innkeeper, looking to seduce her, either with their brawn, their bulging groins, or their coin-purses, and she had never been interested in any one of them. But one look at Telos’s wounded-kitten eyes and she felt her steely resolve melting. Curse him, she thought. He has cast some kind of spell on me. Maybe Qala could reverse it?

  Of course, Telos swaggered outrageously too, but she knew it to be a mask. She had seen the real him when he first knocked on her door, soaked through to the bone, like a frightened cat in the rain. She saw that same beaten look now, the fear creasing his brow. He had been made a god, given impossible strength, yet still he knew not his own power. He was clearly afraid of something. Imprisoned by it, even.

  Thus does memory hold power over us, she thought. She knew she was the same way. Her father’s departure had changed her forever. And even now, as she felt her heart softening towards a man for the first time in a decade, the old fears kept surfacing, making her question it, making her want to run. That was why she had truly grabbed his hand. Not just to comfort him, but to comfort herself.

  But now was not the time for deep psychological thoughts. The guards were closing. She suspected that they could fight their way out if it came to it. With Qala’s magic, and Telos, Jubal, and Urgal fighting, they could forge a path through and get onto The Jensen. But then what? They had no fuel, nowhere to go. And it was likely someone would get seriously hurt in the struggle. She knew Qala was drained. She had used significant reserves and could not be overly relied upon to heal wounds.

  “I’m sorry,” Telos whispered. “I have brought us to this. Again…”

  “Enough self pity!” Jubal snarled. He threw off his hood and raised himself to his full height. He had been walking with a deliberate stoop, trying to conceal his might. Now he towered, bull head brazenly displayed, immense musculature near ripping the fabric of his robe. He let out a bellowing roar and the guards faltered for a moment.

  Only a moment. They exchanged looks and muttered words. Their ranks closed, spears forward. Ylia heard the whine of crossbows ratcheting. Well trained, she thought. As if things weren’t hard enough.

  She raised her fists. It was a pity Jubal had never had time to give her those archery lessons. She promised herself that if she survived, she would learn.

  And then the mist came.

  Not just any mist. This was the thick, blackened smog of Engine fume—smelling like iron and dead secrets. But it was deeper even than the ordinary smoke, pitch dark, impossibly thick. It came onrushing like the waves that’d destroyed Wylhome, enveloping the guards, then Ylia and her friends with dreadful silence.

  Her heart felt as though it had two fishhooks embedded in it, pulling in opposite directions. Her breath was shallow, and not just from the clagging reek of the smog.

  The mists had come the day they took her father.

  The enforcers had come in silence, as the mist shrouded all. Had the day been clear, they might have seen them coming over the acres of land. But no. Mist had rendered them all blind. The door had shattered inward, yet somehow not broken the silent pall. Her father had screamed once, turned to face her. She remembered his face as vividly as a scar tattooed onto her own body. The horror, the realisation, the knowing, the regret.

  Mailed hands had grasped him, dragged him still screaming from the doorway—into the silence of the mist.

  She’d never seen him again.

  She shuddered now. This mist was altogether stranger—black rather than white, oily and blood-smelling rather than dewy—but it was the same phenomenon, the same dreadful silence.

  She could see nothing. Only Telos’s hand, still gripped in hers, kept her anchored.

  “Telos?” she cried. “Jubal? Qala?”

  She heard Urgal growling, felt something brush past her legs. She heard men shouting and arguing. The guards were lost, too. The mist had made islands of them. No one could see anyone else.

  “Link hands!” she cried.

  She felt someone feeling toward her—Qala’s slight hand. She remembered sitting with her in the bathhouse, the moment of intense bonding between them. She remembered the contours of Qala’s hands, so slight, so elegant, yet calloused too, the hands of a woman who had worked all her life, despite her royal blood.

  She heard the others calling to one another.

  “I’ve got you, Jubal.”

  “Qala, I have you.”

  “Xheng?”

  “We’re all linked!” Xheng said. “I think!”

  “Except Urgal,” Ylia said, but she could feel the cat about her shins, circling, using his tail to remain in touch with them. He had a low growl in his throat, a continuous noise of threat. “But he’s okay.”

  Where did this smog come from? An Engine?

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  But any Engine producing this much smoke must be on the verge of breaking down—or exploding.

  “What now?” Telos cried.

  Ylia was about to answer, saying she didn’t know, when she saw the roiling, undulating darkness of the smoke broken. Light was shining in the black pall, light in the shape of a man. Her eyes widened. The figure was pure luminosity, brilliant and golden and beautiful. His face was beaten gold, lit from within by some supernal spirituality. His clothes, however, were those of a jester, a fool. In fact, they were the clothes of The Idiot Tarod card. She wondered at that symbolism a moment.

  “D-Danyil?” she whispered.

  The Sumyrian smiled.

  “It seems I caught up to you just in time,” he said. “Come, follow me.”

  He turned and walked. Telos was technically at the head of the chain, and so she followed him. The smog thickened and coiled, so deep it might as well have been the black waters of the bottom of the ocean. Bolts whizzed through the blackness—far indeed from their mark. Then she heard shouts.

  “Don’t fire, you idiot! We can’t see a damn thing! You could hit one of your own.”

  A spearman staggered suddenly before their path. He turned wide-eyed and beheld Danyil.

  “Begone!” Danyil roared.

  The guardsman fell down like one dead, his eyes glassy. He trembled and rocked back and forth, muttering some prayer to himself. Danyil proceeded past him. Ylia shivered and followed. She felt Telos’s hand gripping hers tightly, and she took comfort in that.

  They went down the stairwell of the platform, across tracks, and then found another set of stairs. The station of Riches had multiple platforms, and they were now coming up on the other side. They walked for some time down the longer platform. Smudges in the shape of people occasionally loomed out of the darkness, but were soon swallowed again.

  And then she saw another light, quite different from Danyil’s.

  Flames, burning in a mouth of fury.

  She saw a face, sculpted from the blackest metal, illuminated by the inferno. She saw the hull of an Engine, a colossal machine, perhaps three times larger and longer than The Jensen. Her first thought looking at it was that it reminded her of Beltanus, a baroque machine rendered in darkest iron—though she suspected the actual metal was something far more otherworldly and strong. The head of the thing was pure nightmare, a gargoyle roaring, with hideous eyes in which burned supernatural flames. The whole driver’s cab had been sculpted to resemble some creature from a mythology alien to her world. It was this Engine that was rendering the smokescreen, though she suspected Danyil was augmenting the effect with his magic.

  “What is this?” Telos said, giving voice to the question on all of their lips.

  “It is called The Warmaster,” Danyil said. “It is the one thing that Talon and Beltanus ever worked upon together. They fought every step of the way. But they produced a masterpiece. Come, no time for history. In here!”

  Danyil touched a button upon the side of the driver’s cab and a door opened on metal sliders. The Sumyrian stepped within and the others all followed, one after another. Ylia made sure Urgal had leapt up to, then Danyil closed the door with a shrik of metal biting metal.

  If she had thought that the controls of The Jensen were complex, then this room proved that wrong. She could well believe Beltanus and Talon had agreed upon nothing, for the layout was simply maddening. Spigots and pipes erupted from every surface. There were three fireboxes, each seemingly with different purpose. Innumerable gauges showed displays of incomprehensible information. There were too many levers.

  Danyil pulled one of the levers, and the Engine let out a roar that shook the earth. No dragon could have rivalled that sound. The machine moved forward with surprising smoothness, however, its power more controlled than in human-made Engines, although perhaps it was also the case Danyil was a better engineer than she.

  “Why in Empress’s name would they make something that runs on our tracks?” Xheng said.

  “It was a gift,” Danyil said, looking out of the viewing window. The smog was clearing now as the Engine picked up speed. Ylia could see the guardsmen and the stationmaster, searching blindly. They would be spotted soon enough, but by then it would be too late—the Engine would be out of the station. She couldn’t believe they’d made it.

  “A gift?” Xheng said, brow furrowing.

  “Indeed. It was a gift to the kings of who ruled the kingdom before Aurelia. A poisoned gift, in some ways, for it was a reminder to the Old Kings that the gods could always build bigger and better things than they.”

  Ylia knew very little of history prior to the establishment of the Aurelia Empire in 111 of the Imperial Age. She had heard there was a kingdom here, thousands of years ago, and something happened that destroyed it. The continent was rediscovered many years later by Yarulian settlers. Only the smallest fragments of the original kingdom remained.

  “Who were they?” Ylia asked.

  “It does not matter now,” Danyil replied, a grace of deep regret in his voice that set her hairs standing on end. Some questions are best unanswered, she thought.

  Shouts went up. The guards had found them. Bolts whizzed, clanging uselessly off The Warmaster’s armoured hull. Ylia suspected it could take far more damage than that: cannonballs and black powder bombs and any manner of human ordinance.

  Danyil depressed the lever ever-so-slightly and The Warmaster roared again, accelerating with terrifying speed. The countryside blurred as the immense Engine bulldozed down the tracks, sparks flying as its wheels devoured steel. This is a monster! she thought. But she was glad of its protection.

  Telos approached Danyil and embraced the Sumyrian. Danyil flinched, surprised at first, then smiled and hugged Telos in return.

  “I am so glad you came back,” Telos said. “I don’t mean to look a gift horse in the mouth but… why?”

  Danyil smiled, secretively.

  “I pleaded with Beltanus. I said that given the odds stacked against you, his terms were unreasonable. He softened, eventually. He… cares very deeply for you, Telos. He himself is prohibited from interfering too directly in human concerns.” Danyil’s face shadowed. “Daimons are another matter. But he has gone ahead to our meeting point. This machine is faster than any human Engine, so we should make up for lost time.”

  Telos bowed low.

  “Thank you again, Danyil.”

  “Thank me by completing your quest, Telos. You have not yet set foot in Memory, and therefore, you have not yet been tested. But come, all things in their time. We must reach Dreamholding first.”