I dismounted.

  Val followed suit soon after, then Zoi and Lore too, for good measure.

  With a heavy weight in my chest, I approached the closest of the bodies littering the road out of town. I wanted there to be a good explanation for a slaughter of this scale. I wanted these two hundreds or so citizens of Tradum to have died for good reason, not simply to fulfil the whims of the Players and their Council. I found myself wanting to find evidence that these people have been corrupted by the malae, their souls lost to the void, leaving only empty husks capable of spreading the malae’s touch across the world.

  But there was no corruption. Only wounds and arrows with their heads buried into flesh. These people had posed no danger. Their only crime had been that they’d fled. They had organised themselves enough to flee Tradum as a group, hoping that their numbers would be enough that some, at least, would escape. I really hoped some had escaped.

  ‘Monsters,’ Val said.

  I was about to argue with her, to say that these people weren’t corrupted, but then I looked at her. My wife wasn’t calling the dead monsters; she was condemning those that had done this.

  This sight echoed how this journey had begun. Val and I had stood in the ruins of Plainside, with so many dead at the pyroknight’s hand. My wife—then a near-stranger—had opened my eyes to the true crimes of the Players, to what their kind were truly capable of. More and more, the world’s eyes were opening too. Already hundreds had joined Arzak’s network. If news got out about this, then surely the tides would turn.

  I strode back over to the horse and remounted. ‘Zoi. Get those fire magicks ready.’

  The tiefling nodded.

  We rode towards town.

  * * *

  We went where the soldiers were most concentrated. I portalled us from rooftop to rooftop, able to make use of my new ability upgrade to keep more pairs of portals open as the six of us traversed the city. Nobody commented on it, and I suspected nobody even noticed. I’d have to point it out to Val at some point later, but right then maybe wasn’t the time.

  Corminar and I scouted from the rooftops as we travelled, communicating only with nods and gestures, keeping our presence here as minimal as possible. If one of the empire’s soldiers saw us, then we would have to flee and start all over again. The people of Tradum maybe didn’t have that long.

  The elf nodded me over to the edge of the rooftop, then pointedly stared down at a large warehouse building. There were no windows, and the one entrance I could see was guarded by a team of soldiers in golden surcoats. They stood squarely at attention, the importance of their job apparently made clear, and their eyes swept the streets under the light of the full moon. This was surely it: their centre of corruption operations in the city.

  Using my portal magicks, I could get us inside without alerting those guarding the warehouse, but if there were more soldiers inside, we’d be quickly outnumbered. There was little we could do about that, however; we’d just have to hope.

  I turned and waved Zoi over, and whispered to her, ‘Get ready. You’re on. If you see malae inside, you burn them, and you burn them hard. But you have to keep the fire under control; I don’t want Tradum burning to the ground on our watch.’

  Zoi nodded. ‘It makes a change from my usual work, at least. And if those inside focus their attack on me, as a result?’

  ‘Good point. We’ll have someone protect you.’ I turned to my wife, feeling that she’d be best placed to watch over the tiefling, considering they’d become so close so quickly. ‘Val, will you—’

  ‘No,’ Zoi cut in, looking over at Arzak. ‘I want the orc.’

  I raised my eyebrows in surprise, then looked over at my green friend. Arzak—also with her eyebrows raised—nodded, then stood over at Zoi’s side. ‘OK,’ I whispered, raising my hand and preparing to open a portal to inside the warehouse. ‘Get ready. We—’

  Corminar’s head spun to face me, then he shook his head pointedly, gesturing for me to look over the edge of the rooftop once more.

  I looked down at the soldiers just outside the warehouse, and realised that the door had opened. Out poured another half dozen soldiers, most of them much the same as those stationed outside the building, but one of them in particular stood out.

  ‘A knight of the realm,’ I whispered, staring at the huge, towering man with a magickally flaming sword sheathed at his side and a flaming shield hooked on his back. These were senior soldiers in Empress Amira’s army, those whose strength gave them power, and command. Perhaps these knights of the realm weren’t as strong as Players, but when there were twenty soldiers to back them up, we were better off not crossing their path. And where there was one knight, there could well be more.

  We held back, only Corminar and I daring to poke our heads up over the edge, to minimise the risk of being spotted. The team shifted from foot to foot as we waited for the knight and additional soldiers to stop their conversations and move on, and for the door to close. None of us wanted to be here, in this eerie ghost town, with every moment that passed increasing the likelihood of being spotted. But all we could do was wait it out.

  Finally the moment came that the knight finished his conversation with the soldiers posted outside the warehouse, and Corminar and I kept both still and quiet as we watched him and his unit depart down the empty cobbled street.

  I turned back to the team, and gave them the nod. With the flick of my wrist, I opened a portal, one side on the rooftop, the other placed blindly within the warehouse. I stepped through first, plunging myself into darkness, as in this warehouse there was not even the light of the full moon to shine down on us.

  I found myself standing in an aisle between rows of stacked crates, each maybe two foot in every dimension and piled six crates high. As Lore stepped through the portal behind me, it took me a moment to place the symbol on the crates. It was the same icon the malae traffickers had used in Coldharbour; this was where their goods had gone to. We were in the right place.

  I crept along the aisle, my hands tracing the edge of the stacked crates gently, barely touching them at all. The pressure from my fingertips was enough only to make sure I didn’t stumble into them; the last thing I wanted to happen was to free another of those monsters.

  As more of the team stepped lightly through the portal behind me, I poked my head around the corner at the end of the aisle. There were more rows still of stacked malae crates, but then, at the other side of the warehouse, I saw a plinth not unlike the one Alenna had used in her surgery.

  A man was strapped to it, unconscious. And a member of Amira’s golden army stood over him, malae clutched in armoured glove.

  I realised then that I hadn’t truly believed it. I hadn’t truly believed that Amira’s army had figured out how to replicate Alenna’s super soldier experiments. But… no, that wasn’t it. I believed that. I just didn’t believe that they would replicate it. And yet, here was the evidence. Did they know what they were dealing with? Did they know what could happen if anything went wrong? And did they care what happened to civilians?

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  I did not have my mother’s near-invisibility abilities, but in this low, low light, I didn’t need it. I opened another portal at my side to bridge the distance between myself and the man operating on the unconscious local. Without a moment of hesitation, I activated my Stealth passives and stabbed the man in the side of the neck. This man deserved no mercy. Nobody involved in any of this deserved anything but hell.

  I ignored the resulting notifications, my attention drawn instead to the malae fallen on the floor at my side, the monster seeming to stare up at me though it had no visible eyes to speak of.

  ‘Zoi,’ I said, then opened a portal beneath the malae. Having never encountered portal magicks before, it had not yet adapted to them, and it fell to the floor in front of the tiefling’s feet.

  She blasted it with raging, focused inferno, the heat so great that I instantly felt it tickling at my skin, even twenty feet away. She blasted it until nothing could possibly have survived such flames, and then she blasted it some more. The squealing of dying malae had ceased after maybe two seconds, but that didn’t stop Zoi. Like the rest of us, she knew better than to take any chances with the malae.

  ‘Corminar, Arzak,’ I said, gesturing to the man on the table. ‘Get him out of here.’

  Arzak nodded, but otherwise, they followed this instruction without saying a word. They hesitated at the man’s side, looking for signs of corruption, and only once they were satisfied that he was still healthy did they unbuckle the clamps around his extremities. When they’d disappeared through the portal amidst the stacked crates of malae, I closed the portal behind them, and ushered the rest of the team away from the packaged, smuggled creatures.

  ‘Zoi,’ I said, ‘I think you know what to do.’

  The tiefling nodded, then stepped forward a single pace in front of me, Val and Lore. As she raised her hands to cast the fire-summoning spell, I cast a spell of my own.

  A bubble of Silence appeared around the crates of malae, making sure that no sound that occurred inside could be heard outside of it. I did this not just to make sure our presence here remained unnoticed, but to spare us all the terrible noise of dying, burning monstrosities.

  The flames engulfed them, the boxes beginning to shake almost imperceptibly from the malae struggling against their charcoal destiny.

  As the malae squealed mutely, Zoi stood silent, taking in the sight of fire licking at the crates and the creatures. She kept her hands raised, arms stretched out wide at either side. When I stepped to her side, I saw the reflection of the flames flickering in her eyes, and though her mouth didn’t warp into a smile, I could see joy behind those irises.

  Was this what the team wondered about me? Did they think I took joy in my killing of the Players? Was that why I occasionally saw worried glances sent my way, did they think me growing slowly corrupted by my power? Val had grown beyond those suspicions these days, but the rest of the team… I saw how they looked at me. I saw how they wondered.

  ‘Enjoying yourself?’ I asked Zoi.

  She looked at me with wide eyes, as though caught in the act. ‘Should I regret that I’ve made these things hurt?’

  I shook my head. ‘Extinguish the flames when you’re done.’ I turned to the rest of the team as I opened a portal back onto the rooftop. ‘We should get out of here before we’re noticed. We—’

  ‘Wait,’ Lore said, his eyes drifting over the charred remains of the crates that had once held the seeds of corruption.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘This ain’t enough of em,’ Lore said. ‘We saw hundreds before, maybe even a thousand. They’ve already moved them on. Maybe there are an odd few still in the city somewhere, but…’

  Val gulped. ‘The malae slip through our fingers again.’

  The building was cast in silence once more, this time not through means of my Worldbending magicks; we simply stood quiet in the revelation that we were too late once again. But… were we?

  ‘No,’ I said, activating my portal relays, ten tiny portals floating around me. With the flick of my wrist, I sent them soaring back onto the rooftop, and then in different directions above the city. ‘No, not this time.’

  ‘You have a plan?’ Val asked, but it wasn’t a question; I could see the glee in her eyes. She knew I did. She knew me well enough for that.

  ‘Yes. We get everyone out of Tradum. And then we go after them.’