Operation Heckler & Koch

Scribe Notes

Scribe Notes

Black, also called Sir Archibald — Knight of the Void, noble of Alusia, in service to the Seagate Adventurers' Guild — writes.

Part 1: The Heckler Line

Chapter 1: Terms of Engagement

I have learned to distrust a commission that begins with a man asking whether one is from Alusia.

Present Company

We were gathered at the Guild that morning without much notion of what for, which is the usual way of it, so we made our introductions. Kel I have kept company with before, though she gave one anyway: an elf transformed into a drow and wrapped in an illusion of an ordinary, entirely unmemorable human woman. A dream weaver. She works upon the mind — illusions, silent speech between us, and a talent for persuasion I would call binding if she were not listening. She does not fight, she told the room. She stands at the back and directs.

Tulip I knew a little, and know better now. An earth mage, black-skinned with hair the colour of a lit fire, though we were shortly to hide all of that. She travels with animals and cares more for them than for most people, which is a defensible position. She let slip, in the way one lets slip a thing one wants noticed, that the Archangel Michael is presently displeased with her. I did not ask.

The other two were new to me. Dross is a human of middle build, dusty, so nondescript that describing him is a labour; only a badly scarred left hand catches the eye. A warlock of the homely sort: unborn children, crops, livestock. He is not much interested in killing people, though he does not mind hurting them where it is called for. He carries a familiar called Tabitha, plays music, and understands bureaucracy, which in my experience is the rarer gift. Jedburgh is not human, is in his late fifties, and is built like a brick outhouse without moving like one. He carries a glaive and wears grey leather armour he cheerfully calls an elephant's scrotum. A good ranger, a decent spy, and by his own admission an absolute crap namer.

For my own part I gave them Black, or Sir Archibald. Human enough to look at, six feet, skin the colour of chocolate with an amber undertone — a souvenir of a drink I very nearly did not survive. I told them I was a good-hearted little fellow, which is how I like to sell myself. Kel observed that I am very likely the only person who would describe me that way. She is usually right. It is one of her less endearing habits.

A Jimmy Comes Recruiting

Then the recruiter arrived, and I recognised the breed at once. "This is a Jimmy, is it?" I said, and it was. He served a doctor, not the Guild, and he wanted Alusians who could work magic, because where we were going magic is rare and those who have it are, as he put it, very odd and usually Nazis. The last such fellow blew himself up standing too close to an airship, and took the airship with him. There would also be occultists with their rituals, and worse, the Transuranians — five-limbed things with a five-sided torso, a head that can be made into a crown, and powerful minds.

The destination was a version of Reich: our own war-torn Earth of the middle years of that century, but a duplicate of it, thrown off by recent meddling with time. Late in 1942, after Dunkirk, after the Battle of Britain. I have walked in a great many places and still felt a small cold thing turn over in my chest at a duplicate of it. Planes are not supposed to breed.

Paying in Advance

The Guild set aside a purse for the five of us and advanced a portion of it to equip ourselves, which is the Guild's way of saying it expects a return. Most of it went on the deepest enchantments Uzi would lay on us, since there would be nothing of the kind to buy on the far side. Kel and I paid for our own, so the party's money stretched to three others.

I then spent a good deal more of my own than I was ever likely to see again. From Callas, three draughts to thicken my hide to a troll's — worth their price, Jedburgh pointed out, because they can be cast at range and shared about. I brewed three philtres against mind-work myself; that is my own trade and I trust my own hand. From the Bishop, five restoratives and a pair of potions against a broken mind; five waters of healing; and from Sebastian two sets of shadow wings, bound and waiting on a word. It came to rather more than my fifth share. It always does. I have long since made peace with being the one the others borrow from.

Dross bought a crystal of vision and an amulet of chalcedony, which keeps the undead from coming close — prudent, given who else is coming through to that plane. Tulip bought a luck amulet, and Dross, Jedburgh and Tulip took waters of healing from Rommel. Wind walking and feather falling were bought from Ty, though I did not note who ended up holding what. There was idle talk of a carpet that renders a legal opinion on whether one has committed a crime, which established at least that killing a German soldier in a war is very nearly the opposite of one.

Cards on the Table

Before we left, Dross laid out the cards. The reading came clean and strong, which I have learned is not the same as good: the Devil, the Five of Swords, the Star reversed, and all four face cards of the sword suit together. He read it well — entanglement, a conflict nobody walks away from a winner, a loss of clarity or trust, and, in his phrase, which has stayed with me, a chessboard rather than a battlefield. Manipulation; matters strategic and interpersonal rather than of the heart or the sword arm.

I said that was what the potions against a broken mind were for. Kel said she would only control our minds with our consent. I said she would have that consent shortly after she had controlled our minds. She did not deny it.

Thin Air

We purified ourselves, and Kel put an illusion on the party to make us average-looking humans. I habitually change my face where Nazis are involved. Then Callas took us through the earth to Novodom, on the first Moonday of Vintage.

Novodom surprised me. A walled metropolis of the old style, thriving, the people healthy, not one shambling corpse on its streets — I looked. But so many people are packed inside those walls that magic runs thin, and by daylight Dross found his craft dragging at him like a wet cloak. What amused me was the Jimmy. He counted the spellcasters in the crowd and grew genuinely alarmed. Where he comes from, one in a city would be a national emergency.

He took us to the Inn of Santa Maria, in the expensive quarter, which is not an inn but a hospitium kept by monks who charge like wounded bulls — the better, no doubt, to give alms to the poor. An acolyte led us up to our employer's suite.

Fine Print

Dr Wormwood has dark hair wound into a bun and horn-rimmed spectacles, a robe cut as a man's would be with a white coat over it, and riding boots without buckle or lace. She ordered tea, sat us down, and explained the shape of the thing.

The Germans and the undead both come out of a third plane. The undead came in vast swathes — walking corpses spreading plague, and greater things behind them that she declined to describe. The Germans are not fighting that horde. They are running from it, and their invasion of the plane she calls Cataclysm Earth is a flight dressed up as a conquest. To buy room they have allied with the Transuranians, who are meddling with the passage of the undead and holding the door for a while.

I asked whether she was certain the Nazis on Reich and those coming into Cataclysm Earth were the same men. She admitted the difficulty: the shift in time may have made a copy, and a copy is hard to be certain of from outside. Her analysis of the temporal grain finds the duplicate of Reich well enough. What she cannot do is be there herself. That is what we are for.

The commission has two halves, and she was candid about which is which. We are to rescue a British agent in the south of France and get them over the border into Spain, which is neutral, and whose ruler leans towards Berlin but whose treasury leans towards American money. Then — the part that matters to her — we are to investigate a ruin in Spain not far from where the agent will be set down. She believes it holds information about the interference with time, possibly measurements taken by Phoenician astrologers before the birth of Christ. The rescue is the story she has sold British High Command to explain an untraceable team from nowhere. The investigation is what she is paying for.

Dross asked which took priority if the two pulled apart. The investigation. I said that stopping the agent from handing over what they know would itself count as a rescue of a sort, and nobody argued, which is a bleak thing to be right about before one has met the man.

Making Up the Numbers

Then the arithmetic of the crossing. One does not walk more than six through the Abyss — not a hard wall, Jedburgh explained, so much as a threshold past which the residents take an interest. There were five of us, and I was sorry to say that Hordling would count. Dross at once offered to banish Tabitha and call her back by ritual on the far side.

Mine was not so neat. We turned over the options like men discussing an artillery placement: change Hordling into a mouse and cage him — no help, and he would sulk for a season; leave him with Arnulf, who can be trusted, though not to stop what Hordling would do to an unattended laboratory; hire a troll to mind him. Tulip suggested his minder have some means of sending word if he broke loose. I said they would be sending word every five minutes, and it would be kinder to come back afterwards and deal with the consequences. Dr Wormwood said, before anybody could ask, that we were not leaving him with her. I told her it had never been the plan.

It was Kel who unpicked it. If neither Dr Wormwood nor the Jimmy, who was only guiding us, counted, then five of us and Hordling made six exactly. He came. He looked extremely pleased with himself, and I am fairly sure he understood every word of the debate.

Dr Wormwood offered two more things. She drew blood from each of us and made each a syringe of our own, to bring us back from the edge. And she had syringes that put knowledge into a man, unfolding over weeks, so that one wakes gradually knowing French, or German, or how to drive. Kel asked for geography as well as tongues, and could have it. I have a serviceable measure of the language already, so I asked after the driving. She could copy a weapon skill from a sample; Tulip wanted the trident, and I told her she was welcome to copy off me, but would take nothing on that score myself. I can teach myself a weapon. It is the one thing I have never had to buy. Tulip asked whether anybody had the whip, for a balrog-tail whip she owns and cannot use, and I said the whip seemed to me a dishonourable weapon. Kel said she has no need of one. People do what she says. She whips minds, not bodies. I have decided not to think about that too closely.

We took a night at the hospitium, and Kel handed round a case of remarkably fresh cigarettes, on the grounds that a relaxing smoke is good for the lungs. Jedburgh declined. Loudly.

Chapter 2: The Long Way Round

Running on Empty

The rune portal stands a little outside the town and does not look like anything at all — a rock, the runes hidden in the ground about it, gems set into the stone and every gem smeared thickly with bound earth. Tulip spotted the earthwork at a glance. I said it was to stop people prying the stones out with crowbars, and that Dross could hardly have been expected to notice, being so busy prying them out with a crowbar. He took it well.

We would have used the Pattern, which is faster, but somebody had used it lately and it was still filling up again. So we touched the rock, waited half an hour, and passed through.

I know the price of such portals and still do not enjoy it. The crossing takes whatever a body keeps in reserve against a long day, and one arrives hollowed out and heavy-limbed. The Astral is a vague plane, bushes and slopes fading into grey mist at a hundred yards, and we walked an hour through it on legs that did not want to walk before we stood at the edge looking down into the Abyss.

A mile of climb, straight down. The Jimmy began to clamber. Dross woke his carpet instead, and the weaving held for hours beyond what he had promised, and he ferried us down in stages. Jedburgh became an eagle and flew down, though everything he carried transformed with him and was no use until he was a man again. Dross wondered aloud whether we ought to be watching our strength, and then answered himself: perhaps we are in a peaceful place where nothing bad can happen. He is an optimist. In the Abyss.

An Interested Party

Two or three days crossing it, walking and not fighting, brought our strength slowly back. Then we came to a river a mile wide, and beside it a figure leaning on a staff, so utterly black that all one could make out was the profile, an outline cut from nothing.

I brought up my black sight and saw him properly, and was glad. "My lord," I said. "My lord indeed." Moonlight Sleeping on a Midnight Lake is a demon lord, and I have the honour of his acquaintance. He had heard we were bound for the recent manifestation of Reich and thought he might come along and be of use — as an interested party, he was careful to say, not an employer. I told him I understood entirely. I know how it is.

Tulip asked who on earth this was, and I made a hash of it — I called him Midnight Sleeping on a Moonlit Lake, a different demon lord altogether; I have always got the two mixed up. He corrected me with more patience than I deserved. Kel asked whether he could be trusted. Completely, I said, as much as one trusts anyone. He is one of the good guys, I think, and I am aware how that sentence looks written down. The party has met Jade Rain, and if they could stomach her they can stomach him. His wife is called de Winter, a fact I had to be reminded of in front of him, which was not my finest hour. According to her letters she is well. When one is a demon lord, he said, one must get out among one's people and show one's face.

Speaking of showing, he said, and drew out of the staff itself a monkey-shaped demon about the size of a hobbit. Short Fuse. A bit on the dangerous side, we were told, and he throws around a great deal of black powder. I asked whether he was the sort one fires and forgets. On reflection: fire, and do not forget, and run.

I had a couple of Mills and Boon novels about me, and gave them to Moonlight for his wife. He was genuinely delighted; he could go home at last, after this, he said. There is a great deal to be said for being the one person in the Abyss who remembers that a demon lord's wife likes a love story. Then he struck his staff, three more staves peeled away from it and took up a triangle around us, and we walked on.

The Staves Do the Work

I should like to write that we fought our way across the Abyss. We did not. Waves of demons tried to roll straight over the party, and the staves simply mowed them down — dragon flame from one, a fury of unseen force from another, other devastation I could not name and did not want to. It went on for days: what would have been the death of all five of us, handled without hurry by three sticks of wood while their owner strolled beside us discussing his correspondence. I found it instructive to be reminded how far above me the ladder goes.

At Moonlight's suggestion we collected the remains, which make excellent material for a working alchemist, and I am one. Dross asked whether they would serve for sleeping dust or poison dust. The poison works exactly as it should. The sleeping dust still forces a man to resist, but if he fails he sleeps for the barest fraction of the proper time, and I would not stake a plan on it. Hordling was in his element. Anything poisonous went into him, and he burped his opinions at us so continuously that nobody could follow a word.

Tulip, meanwhile, leaned out and made the noises one makes at a cat to one of the demons attacking us. It regarded her with a flat and specific loathing, and neither came closer nor attacked, and I decided the safest thing was to look elsewhere and claim to have seen nothing.

Ten days or so more, and another river, which Moonlight bridged out of nothing. On the far side we came out at the new version of Reich.

Nobody Home

The approach is unlike any plane I have entered. One roadway climbs the flank of a mountain — it does not feel like climbing; one walks and arrives — and at the top stands a castle of black stone, walled and towered, unmanned, with nothing living inside it and no way onward except through it. Moonlight did not know what it was for; investigating those fortifications is one of his own tasks. I have rarely found a thing more unsettling than a demon lord admitting he has not worked something out.

Before we went through, Kel got a description of the local dress out of the Jimmy. The men wear high-waisted trousers with a crease sharp enough to cut, grey or brown, blue if they work in the city; narrow ties; pale shirts; hats. The women wear hats almost always, often veiled, and dresses to mid-calf with a jacket, matched or deliberately clashing, but always thought about. Nobody but the very poorest dresses casually. Kel put grey suits on all of us, and at Tulip's request dressed her as a man — she was not, she said, wearing that skirt thing. Jedburgh observed that a uniform would be safer still, but we did not yet know what one looked like there.

Mind the Gap

Then through the castle, into that plane's own Astral, and out into a tunnel at Victoria Underground Station, London, walking up into the crowd like anyone else.

Moonlight took one look at the press of people, remarked that he had best go home before he frightened the locals, struck his staff on the ground, and was consumed in a burst of fire. Not one soul noticed. A few stepped around the space where he had been without knowing why, and closed up over the gap and went on with their day.

A man in uniform and a peaked cap was waiting: Captain Glendinning, whose English is the sort one only acquires at Eton, all cut glass and clipped edges. Jedburgh could not follow a word of it. I could. He had been instructed, for reasons he did not understand, to give us the date. Monday, the nineteenth of October, 1942.

The Brown Train

He indicated a specially secured military vehicle, which was a van in an advanced state of collapse. I offered to drive; I had been practising. He was keen to be spared the job, but I did not have clearance, so into the back I went, having established that whatever happened next was not my fault. The thing lurched off banging and reeking like a foundry, and within five minutes he put us out at a railway station, told us to look for a brown train, and left.

The brown train came after about five minutes, one carriage, empty, and one of ours noticed that the men driving it wore blindfolds. Kel quietly opened her silent speech between us after that. A picnic hamper waited in the compartment, wine and food, laid on by somebody who knew we were coming and would never be told who we were.

Not a Thermometer in the Place

Nine hours of that, arriving just before midnight. We knew our station because its sign had not been painted out, and carried no red diagonal band to mark it secret: Achnacarry.

An elderly Scot was waiting with a horse and dog cart, his accent thick enough that the others struggled and I heard him clear as a bell — one of the few advantages of having been about as long as I have. He is the house's dogsbody, and will run us to the station and fetch what we want from the village. Achnacarry lies on the western side of Scotland, the seat of Clan Cameron, where the commandos come to be trained. Kel asked him who was in charge. He told her, with feeling, that he had no idea, that everyone seemed to be, and that when somebody told him to do a thing he did it.

I asked him for mercury, very nearly the only thing I want from that village, and a great deal of it. Mercury comes in thermometers, he said, which is a tedious way to get at it. Then it turned out there is not a single thermometer in the whole of Achnacarry. Never mind — I shall find something.

The butler, Macavity, Scots as well but far more cultured and clear to everyone, told us the admiral would wait until we had refreshed ourselves. Footmen took us up — one room for the women, one for the men — unpacked our gear, and ran baths. After a fortnight in the Abyss the bath did as much for my morale as the enchantments did for my hide.

Chapter 3: Compromised

An American Affair

The library holds a wooden globe a yard across and a conference table ringed with green velvet chairs, and Admiral Rollins sat at it in dress uniform with a brandy at his elbow. He has the face of a basset hound, the saddest-looking man I have met in a long while. I read his insignia while he poured, and found a decoration added very recently — not a promotion, an honour. A man who has just been given an honour and looks like that has usually been given it for something he would rather not have done.

It was the very early morning of the twentieth by then, and he laid it out plainly. In the coming weeks the Allies will begin an operation to drive the Germans and Italians out of North Africa — Operation Torch. It is to be seen as an American affair, because they want the American public brought fully into the war, and because the British units in the area must not be seen to deliver the win. There is dissension to be discouraged. I have served princes long enough to recognise that reasoning, and I did not like hearing it in a war this size.

Not Without Reason

The difficulty is that one of their most productive escape lines — Heckler — is believed compromised. A whole sweep of lines has suddenly been rolled up: Belgium, the north of France, Brittany. Too many at once for anything but a double agent, Rollins said. Heckler survives only because the agent who runs it is extremely paranoid. Not, as Jedburgh observed, without reason. Not a bad way to be, I said, and meant it.

Heckler runs out of Lyon, where the Gestapo also have their headquarters, and a new man of theirs called Klaus Barbie, presently in Switzerland, is expected to take charge of that area soon. Our task is to get the leader of the line out before it is rolled up, without going into Lyon ourselves, which would draw more attention than we could survive.

The escape route runs over the Pyrenees to a small coastal town, where a farmhouse and landing field have been hired through another agent, and an aeroplane can lift the agent out. Crossing the mountains, Rollins said, is a cakewalk. Getting from Perpignan to that coast is not. The sea is out: the Germans expect a build-up of Atlantic shipping and have put submarines and warships along that coast from Gibraltar to Malta.

A Falling Duck

As for getting in: training here first, and then they mean to fly us down and fling us out of the aeroplane. "That sounds like fun," I said, and Rollins did not smile.

They cannot land us. Near Perpignan one comes into range of naval gunnery and anti-aircraft barrages, and the place is thick with fighters. Their honest estimate is that a man under a parachute is dead the moment it opens — a sitting duck; a falling duck, Dross corrected. The aeroplane is to be a Vickers Wellesley, a Barnes Wallis design, which Jedburgh named before Rollins could. They found no German aircraft with the range, and in any case would rather like the pilot back.

Dross asked about flying ourselves over the mountains through one of the passes, and they produced photographic topographical maps of the Pyrenees, clear enough for anyone who has flown to read at a glance. Tulip made the sound point that we should plan an overland route as a fallback. Kel suggested painting the underside of Dross's carpet black. Dross said it is a lovely embroidered thing and he is not painting it black, and only relented on the promise of a replacement.

Another carpet was spoken of at some point — rhomboid, a tapestry really, decorated round the edge with an eagle worked into it in blue, which must keep moving or drop out of the sky. It is not Dross's. I did not establish whose it is, and I have written it down precisely because I did not.

Too Tidy by Half

I should record, out of order, a thing that happened before we went down to the library. Dross used his ring after his bath, and Short Fuse appeared to him, choosing his words like a man reciting something he has been made to memorise — almost, Dross said, as though somebody else's words were in his mouth. The last of the goetic demons, the seventy-second, is involved in this affair, and he is one of five, a cabal who call themselves the Final Five.

It went down about as well as one would expect. Kel said we ought to ask for a rise in our fee, and I named a figure that would have made the Guild swallow its tongue. Jedburgh went looking up which of the seventy-two the last one is. Dross observed that there are five of them and five of us, which was almost too tidy. I said the tidy ones should be running for the hills.

When Dross went back to Short Fuse a couple of days later, he got only the shape of the arrangement: Moonlight reaches the creature when Moonlight chooses, and until then it knows precisely as much as we do, and will talk freely to Dross but begin no conversation with anybody else. If I were a monkey-shaped demon full of black powder, loose in a castle crawling with commandos, I would keep my own counsel as well.

Pass It On

Over the following days various people came to brief us. One who came for Jedburgh was a woman of dusky skin and extraordinary beauty: the Princess Noor Inayat Khan, here at Achnacarry for commando training for the second time, a native French speaker with German besides and by all accounts a formidable radio operator. She gave Jedburgh an object brought to her by a Hindu mystic, who said that whoever held it would know who to give it to. So far as we can tell it is of no use to anyone at present. She also told us that if we ever have to come out overland, we can find safety for a short while at Seine, in Paris.

Two weeks are set aside for training, and we may not get to keep them: the moment the information they are waiting on arrives, we go.

Which leaves, as Kel put it, one problem: how to get from the aeroplane to the ground without dying. Jedburgh says he can carry everybody. Dross means to use his carpet. I can step out of the thing and come to the ground unhurt, which the others found harder to believe than I expected.

A Thousand Miles from Ben Nevis

I had the better part of a fortnight in which to become somebody else, and an invitation to a shooting party, and I could not have told you at the outset which of the two would prove harder on me. Two days into it I had established the things that matter. Where the kitchen is. Who keeps the kettle. How many cups of tea a man may ask for in a morning before the cook looks at him sideways — a good deal more than one would expect, which tells you how thoroughly everybody in that house has stopped being surprised by anything.

Jedburgh did the geography. We are in the north-west of Scotland, near enough to Ben Nevis, and Perpignan is a thousand miles off, give or take — a city, though no metropolis, and, which I ought to have asked sooner, not in the Reich proper at all but in the part of France the Germans have left under its own government, which is a polite fiction. There is a German presence, a prison of theirs, and the head of the secret police there is due to be replaced by one Klaus Barbie. The admiral attached that name to Lyon. Either the fellow is to have both, or somebody's information is wrong, and I do not much like either answer.

I keep coming back to those cards. A chessboard, not a battlefield. All four swords, and the Star reversed.

I have crossed the Abyss with a demon lord at my shoulder and watched three walking sticks kill more things than I could count. What waits for us is a paranoid agent in Lyon, a traitor somewhere in a chain of frightened people, and a fall out of an aeroplane onto a coast bristling with guns.

I find I would rather have the demons.

Chapter 4: Cover Stories

Unusual Tastes

It was Macavity who raised the shoot — Macavity, whom I have heard called both butler and ghillie, and who is both. We might care to take part, he said; it would come round on the Saturday after next. I said yes before I had thought, which is not like me, but the words out on Corniger had already arranged themselves in my head. A fortnight of castles, briefing rooms and the back of a collapsing van. A man wants a horse under him.

He showed us the guns: enormous double-barrelled things, the youngest more than fifty years old, kept with a care that borders on devotion. The bore is wide enough to see daylight down, and what comes out is not shot but a single slug, a splinter of cadmium wrapped in lead. I handled one with a maker's eye and took measurements and notes, because I like to know how a thing is put together before I trust my life to somebody else firing it near me. They are too heavy to be worked twice in a hurry, so every shooter has a loader and a pair of guns to swap between. Jedburgh has the shoulders and the knack for it. I do not, and said so. I have never used a ranged weapon in earnest in my life and did not propose to start.

They are made for him by a man in London whom Macavity described as strange, then as quite odd, then, in the tone of one closing a subject, as having unusual tastes. I observed that this seems to be the way of these things. Kel said there was nothing wrong with a live-fire exercise provided one had interrogated the prisoners first. She said it perfectly pleasantly. Everybody heard it and nobody looked at her.

Standing there with the thing broken open over my arm, I worked out what a slug like that would do to a man, and then what it would do to me, which is a different sum. The shell of force I carry would swallow the whole of it. I remember thinking that a comfortable arrangement. Comfortable arrangements are how one ends the day with an antler in one's elbow.

A Stab in the Back

Dr Wormwood's syringes came out that evening, since the stuff takes weeks to unfold. Dross needed French and did not want it, a combination I have some sympathy with. The things are horrid. There is a grinding noise as the cogs turn and drive the material down into the spine, and it is that, rather than the needle, that undoes a man.

I offered to hold him down and do it for him, or to have him look at something interesting over there while I stabbed him in the back. Dross replied with great dignity that he did not require that sort of help. Jedburgh, a better man than I am, offered to take the pain out of it. In the end Kel managed it: she caught his eye and held it and pushed her own needle in at the same moment, so that he had somebody to watch instead of something to feel, and afterwards offered him a cigarette, for his lungs. Dross took the cigarette.

Married on Paper

Kel said we needed cover identities settled before training began, and it turned into the pleasantest hour I have spent since we arrived. She is a skilled tailor, a real trade that will bear inspection, and proposed to sit that under a farmer's wife. Jedburgh took a local doctor, which suits his age and manner. Dross offered himself as an itinerant musician composing odes to the glory of the Reich — he was being funny, and then discovered it works, because such men exist and are tolerated. He was on the point of adding that he might be a gypsy when he thought better of it out loud. In that country, in this year, it would be a short life.

That left me. Vintner, I said, since it fits the farming theme and is one of the few honest trades I actually possess. I can talk about wine for as long as anybody cares to listen and a good deal longer.

Four such people moving about together want a reason, and the obvious one was a family. Kel and Jedburgh married — Jedburgh observed he was old for a first wife and would have to be a second husband, Kel began congratulating him, and I asked why, when she was the one marrying him. We will be given papers with the fiddling details left blank.

Kel also wants the real cut of German uniforms, so that she can lay the image of one over any of us at need; she has worn that disguise before and enjoyed it more than is entirely healthy. She asked me to put a real one on so that she could study it until she had it exactly. I would rather she practised on me than got it wrong at a checkpoint.

Gone to Ground

The papers took longer. We will carry spares, the sort that hang a man if searched with them and save him if he can produce them later. I said Hordling could put them in his pockets, and then said in fairness that I could not guarantee they would still be there. Dross's answer was better: give them to Tabitha and send her home, where nobody can search her, and call her back when they are wanted. Nobody could think of a reason a German policeman would search a terrier, but nobody could think of a reason he would not.

Dross also has her making sleep dust, which we may want badly and nobody else has the patience for. If Hordling were to carry anything, I suggested, Kel could put a picture of an ordinary dog over him first. That remains the plan if the terrier is unavailable.

Nothing English

Weapons were settled on the same principle. Nothing English, because anything English found on us hangs the man who supplied it as well. So: Lugers, Mausers, and the machine pistol the Germans call a Schmeisser. Jedburgh proposed several others before he was told, gently, that they had not been invented yet. There was unbecoming admiration around the table for German equipment — their grenades carry more powder and throw further — until Kel observed that they had all the best gear and lost anyway.

They also produced a concealed sword for Kel, the house having nobody good enough to use it: a rapier about two-thirds the usual length, very quick, made for a lady, built to get inside the reach of a longer blade — useless pressed against a man, murderous at that one distance. It is disguised as a parasol. She took it before he had finished describing it.

She asked for code phrases for the resistance and was told we would have them before we were put out of the aeroplane. She asked where our agent is and was told nobody knows, because he is still moving. That is the second time I have heard a man described as too paranoid to be found, and been asked to find him.

Learning by Heart

Then we had days to spend. Jedburgh gave a full week to weapons. He considered pushing his naming further and decided against it — no name of his is near enough the top of its ladder to be worth the effort, though he can banish a thing well enough — and asked Kel which counterspells she wanted him carrying. She did not know what we were going to meet, which is the honest answer and no help at all.

I took the offer of training in small blades and came away with the short sword. I had never bothered with one — I have always been able to pick a thing up and swing it — but a short blade goes places a lance and a mace do not, and where we are going, most of the places worth going are indoors.

Kel drilled us. She is a military scientist of high standing, and she taught us her commands until we knew them without thinking, which is the only way they are any use, and had us practise the silent speech until everyone was easy with it, including pushing an image across rather than words. She studied maps of Perpignan and then — the part I liked — wrote a poem about the city, being a courtier of high rank, and set the poem into her memory by another art entirely, so that she carries the streets and numbers of the place perfectly off a verse. That is one of the cleverer things I have watched done.

Dross learned to drive, which the house paid for in dented motor cars, with Kel in the passenger seat abusing him in German, which she maintains is the correct language for the purpose. He said it was tremendously helpful, and I think he half meant it.

No Passengers

As for the aeroplane, Jedburgh will be an eagle, Dross has the carpet, and the murmuration will lift three. I can fly, one way or another, or fall a very long way and get up again, which the others still do not entirely believe.

I put myself forward as a passenger service and had to withdraw the offer, because Corniger will carry nobody who is not a virgin — he has the fixed opinion that he is a unicorn. I asked the question straight out. The answers were not encouraging. Kel said it was a very personal question and then answered it anyway. I can give nobody a lift.

Blue Sky Only

The shoot works like this. A loch runs north from the castle, and eleven miles up, at a place called Morrigan, the guns stand on a hilltop with no cover worth the name. Quarry that turn and run south come to a waterfall and an old bridge over a pool the locals call the Witch Pool, and a second party hidden under the bridge takes them out of the air as they pass. Every shooter has his loader, his pair of guns, and a couple of pikemen at his back.

Dross asked whether we should not all go to one place rather than split so early, and he was right. Morrigan, then: unless something confronts them there they may not turn south at all, and the party under the bridge sits in the wet with nothing to shoot. So we all went to Morrigan.

We were advised to wear as much armour as we could get away with; Jedburgh asked whether he was expected to dress in tweeds, and was not answered. And we were given the one rule, which admits no exceptions: fire only if you can see blue sky behind what you are firing at. Every year there are accidents. It is why they are a clan and not a family.

Chapter 5: First Flight

Grinding the Gears

On the morning of the shoot — the last Saturday of October, and cold — Dross drove us up the road above the shore, sometimes fifty feet above the water and sometimes level with it, grinding the gears the whole way while Kel swore at him steadily in German. I sat in the back and thought that I have arrived at battles in worse company.

We left the car at Morrigan and walked to the top of the hill, and I saw at once what they had meant about exposure. There is nothing up there. You stand on the skyline and wait for something to come at you out of the north.

Only then did we ask what we were shooting. Perytons: stags crossed with birds, if you can hold that picture in your head, and not game in any sense I recognise. They are man-killers, and what they take is the heart. And their shadows do not match them. A Peryton's shadow shows the shape of the person it is about to eat. I would have said I was past being unsettled by anything with wings. I would have been wrong.

Standing Out

Kel laid a false stretch of ground across the hilltop, wide enough for the whole party and good for most of a day, and everyone stepped inside it and vanished. Everyone except me. Somebody has to be visible or the things fly straight past, so I stayed in the open on Corniger, and Macavity and his commandos stayed out with me. Kel advised me not to stand too near Macavity, who becomes a complete lunatic the moment he starts pulling a trigger.

Tulip put the strength of stone into our arms and an armour of earth over us, and she is very good at both, and I was glad of them within the hour.

Then they fed us, the most civilised part of the day: a piping breakfast of beef soup with pepper and vodka in it, devilled kidneys, everything hot. There would be two flights, and the first was to be done by a quarter to ten so that there would be time for morning tea before the second. That is my favourite sentence anyone has said to me on this plane.

Out of the North

They came just before the quarter hour, out of the north, far faster than anything had prepared me for: two ranks, barely five feet apart across and twenty feet one above the other, dropping down the sky in a line.

Macavity opened it. He had promised a Sten and it was in fact a Bren on its bipod, and he lay on his belly and put a burst straight up into them to draw them onto himself while his three commandos stood over him with pikes. It worked far better than he can have wanted. One he crippled so badly that it fell out of the flight and did not get up.

The rest came down on top of him, three together, and in seconds he was on his back on the grass with one standing over him spraying blood in the cold air. The commandos dragged him out of it, and that was the last useful thing Macavity did that morning. I have not decided since whether he is a brave man or simply had no idea what he was inviting us to.

Riding for a Fall

Jedburgh put a slug into one at the chest, which did not kill it but took the speed out of it, and after that it was only a matter of catching it.

I did what I came to do. I put Corniger at the line and charged down it with the lance, and it is a very long time since I have done that properly against something that deserved it. I killed one outright on the way through — the lance went in and it simply stopped being alive — and touched several others in passing. It is an extremely good horse.

Then they all came for me, which was the plan and no less unpleasant for it. Corniger got us out from under the first pass by mincing sideways at exactly the right instant, a piece of schooling I paid a great deal for and have never regretted. The rest got through. The shell of force took the first and held. The second smashed my helmet in and rang my skull like a bell. And one struck at the second head I carry, the Abzazu head, and it went out like a candle and stayed out for the rest of the fight. It is not pain exactly. It is more as though a room in the house had gone dark with somebody still in it.

So I did the sensible thing, which I ought to have done before the charge and did not because I wanted the charge. Corniger has a shoe I have been saving — the shoe of the herd — and I set it going, and where there had been one of us there were suddenly seven, mount and rider, all doing the same things at once. And I drew the void up around myself on top of it. After that they were welcome to try.

Beside Myself

What followed I have only in pieces. Tulip could not lift a shoot gun — they want a strength she has not got, and I have seen her carry an injured goat further than I would have, so that is no reflection on her. She fired her issued pistol into them steadily all morning, and every one of those small holes told in the end.

Dross's first fear would not take; I saw his face when it failed. The second went in like a knife, and the Peryton broke out of the fight and went south as hard as it could fly. Morocco, apparently. I said it was off to Spain then, and laughed, and then stopped laughing, because so are we.

Kel worked from inside her false ground and did more damage than any gun on that hill. Against a dream weaver a beast's stubbornness counts for nothing; she took them out of themselves one after another, and they came down out of the sky asleep. Jedburgh charged one on foot and killed it with the glaive, which he should not have been able to do, their hides turning a cutting edge — he hit it so hard the resistance stopped mattering. Then one caught him properly and gored his off arm to ruin, a blow that should have put him down senseless and did not, because he is made the way he is made. His glaive is braided to his wrist, so he did not lose it either.

Then it was my turn again, and this is the part I keep going back over. Three landed on me at once and struck through everything — one drove an antler into the joint of my elbow so hard the tip snapped off inside, another opened my arm along its length — and I saw it happen and felt nothing whatever. It was not my elbow. Kel called out that there were seven of me; the blows had gone into copies, and I watched myself gored twice over from four feet away and then watched the pieces of myself come apart and go out. It is an unwholesome thing to see even when it saves your life, and it did. Kel told Dross, not quietly, that I am a good deal harder to kill than the rest of them, being an immortal sort of character, and that any of them would have died several times over where I stood. She meant it kindly. I did not enjoy hearing it as much as I ought to have.

Meanwhile Tulip got to Macavity, a few moments from finished, and brought him back and held him there. Later she reached hands of earth up out of the ground and took hold of them where they flew. I put the void on one of them with everything I had, which is the whole of a man's attention, and the thing barely noticed. That was humbling. So I went back to Indigo and hit them with the mace until they stopped, which is less elegant and worked considerably better.

Elevenses

At the end two were still up and neither going to last, and Kel and Dross put them down before I could reach them with the mace, which was probably kinder to everybody. One got away — the one Dross frightened. Eleven for the bag. The morning had been remarkably successful, they said, by which they meant nobody died. Normally this is done by weight of numbers — enough guns on the hill that the flight breaks and runs down to the bridge — and the occasional death in a year is accepted as the price. I said aloud that Macavity had rather underestimated these things, and nobody contradicted me.

They feed you at eleven on that hill, and everything they hand you is made to be eaten with one hand. I have thought about that a good deal since. First I went round and asked what everyone had. Jedburgh had a ruined arm, still open, still useless; he could neither lift the big gun nor fight, which he pointed out was the entire reason he had come. Two months mending, he told me cheerfully, and it means he cannot go out over that coast under a canopy, which does not matter because he can fly, and is nevertheless a complete pig. Kel's casting hand was spent; reaching into a thing's head takes something food will not put back, and she had done it a great many times in a short morning. Nobody carried anything for the deep hurts, the sort that do not simply close over. I do, as it happens. It was not the moment for it.

I had come out of it with a dented helmet, a ringing skull and no wound that wanted mending. I record that because of what follows, and because I remember standing in the wind feeling rather pleased with myself.

The break was an hour and a half, two if we wanted, and Tulip, a quick and unfussy healer, spent all of it going along the line putting people back together. Macavity took a great deal of it, having gone in and out of the world twice already that day, and Jedburgh took what he could use. She asked whether I wanted any. I said no.

Then they fed us properly, on a hilltop, in the wind, with the dead laid out below us: venison rolls and game pie, beef and pastry, raspberry with vodka poured through it, cream horns swimming in custard. Somebody explained at length, with real feeling, that the whole tradition of the mid-morning break is food a man can hold in one fist — pasties, game pies, meat sealed under aspic — so the other hand is free for a cup, or a bottle, or a gun. I enjoyed the lecture more than anything else on this plane.

Affairs of the Heart

I took the hearts. I did not explain why and nobody asked, which is one of the things I like about this party.

Before we went back out I handed round amulets of a kind I carry a number of: worn over the heart and woken with a drop of your own blood, they do nothing until the moment your body gives out, then pour healing into you once and burn themselves to nothing. One use. One life. I gave them to Tulip, Jedburgh, Dross and Kel, which left me a couple of dozen, so nobody need feel they had taken my last. Dross asked the name. A Second Chance, I told him. He said it was aptly named, which it is.

I did not explain that either, so I will here. I watched Macavity go down under three of them in a breath, and Tulip haul him back, and it occurred to me while we ate that the next to go down might be somewhere she could not reach. I would rather spend a trinket than stand over a friend afterwards working out what I might have done.

Chapter 6: Shorthanded

Baiting the Trap

Jedburgh raised traps first, being a ranger of sorts, and the idea came apart twice over: he could not set them one-armed, and it would not have mattered, because the things never touch the ground until they are on top of you. Binding animals was the best idea, as he is very strong at it, and no use either: whatever a Peryton is, it is not an animal in the sense the working means. Earth is no good against a thing in the air, and Tulip had not brought out her fiercer workings that morning.

Kel proposed letting Macavity and his men stand out front and take the charge again. I said what I thought of that — he had been all but killed by a single pass — and we settled on something better. Kel laid down four illusions, a line of soldiers with weapons levelled, the sort of thing a stooping animal cannot resist. She wanted straw men underneath to give them something solid to strike, but nobody at the house had the hands or the hours to make them, so our line was made of nothing whatever and stood there looking dangerous.

Jedburgh's contribution was the good one: get them lined up on the false soldiers and put lightning straight down the row, because whatever else they are, they do not shrug off magic. He gave Tulip a bolt of her own to hold. Then came a long, careful business of standing everyone in the right place, since the lightning runs a fixed length and does not care whose spine is at the end of it. Dross would hold a fear ready for anything that came for me. I would hold my charge until after the lightning went, which is not how I like to fight, and was right.

Dross also wondered whether their antlers count as silver or magic, since Tabitha cannot be hurt by anything else. Probably they do, being magical creatures, and he had better assume the worse. She stayed out of it and made coffee, which was of more use to me personally.

Too Good to Be True

They came out of the high air with a great space between the ranks, far faster than the first flight, dropping the whole way. Then everything worked at once, which almost never happens.

Dross's fear went into one and it broke off and fled, unable to say what it was afraid of. Kel reached into two more and they stopped being awake and fell out of the sky. The lightning went down the row exactly as Jedburgh had drawn it and caught both of the ones lined up on it, and neither could hold the air afterwards; one lay stunned in the grass. Macavity swung the Bren round — his commandos had the sense to be elsewhere this time — and put another down. And I rode the one nearest me down with the lance, and it stopped being alive with no fuss at all.

Kel said we had killed them all. Dross pointed out that one was only sleeping. It was, in fairness, resting very deeply.

Sharp Antlered Doom!

The next flight put us right. Then the one after that.

They came in low over the false soldiers and somebody said to look at the grass. Every shadow coming up that hill was mine — four of me, striding along beneath them at exactly their speed. I had been told about this and written it down and thought myself unmoved by it. It is a different thing to see your own outline laid on the ground four times over by creatures still eight hundred feet away that have already decided.

Tulip had the worst of it. One came down on her and did three separate pieces of ruin in a single pass — opened her chest, crippled the arm, laid her leg open — and she went out of her senses and stayed nearly emptied for the rest of it. She has almost nothing to spare at the best of times. It was very close.

Jedburgh was standing under one when it came apart in the air and was drenched head to boots in its blood. He observed that there are worse things, and he would know. Macavity put a shot up through one from behind and took its foreleg off at the wrist, and there followed a short argument about whether a bullet running the length of a creature's great artery counts as a shot through the heart. I did not much care for the discussion. These things pull hearts out of men on the wing. But you cannot mind that and enjoy the other, so I let them argue.

Some Things Are Gone

Three of them came onto me at once and four blows came through.

The first opened my chest, deep, the kind that takes something out of a man besides blood. The shell of force swallowed the next whole. The third got past the shell and did more of the same. And the fourth took my left hand off at the wrist.

I saw it go. There was no moment of not knowing; I watched my own hand leave my arm and land in the grass, and my first coherent thought was not about the hand at all. It was that this has now happened twice in almost the same way — they come through the shell and then the harm is real — and that I must work out how to stop it, because I cannot go on being told by these creatures which parts of me I may keep. I said as much out loud. Nobody argued.

I have a vial for this: sardonyx, which does the deep injuries first, then the ordinary wounds, then the weariness, and must be drunk all at once. I turned it over while the fight went on and came to the answer I already knew. It will close a wound and mend a crushed thing. It will not put a hand back on an arm any more than an eye back in a head. Some things are gone when they are gone.

Cleanup

So I dropped the shield and went on with my right. Everything is harder that way — the reach is wrong, the weight is wrong, the horse expects you to sit somewhere you no longer do. I still hit one hard enough to end it, one-handed, off-side and bleeding, and I record that out of pure vanity because there is nobody else I can tell.

I asked Tulip to pick my hand up for me; she could not, being senseless in the grass with her chest open. Kel got it and kept it out of the dirt, and I held it against the stump for a while afterwards, on the chance. There is a woman who could put it back. She is weeks away on another world entirely, and by the time she could be reached it would be no use to anybody.

Kel finished the last of them; it went out like a lamp, smoke coming off one wing as it dropped. Three flights of four came after the break, and two broke and ran south toward the bridge and the pool, where the second party had lain in the wet since dawn with nothing to shoot. I hope they enjoyed themselves. Ten accounted for on our hill, on top of the morning's eleven.

An Even Trade

Back at the castle we went through what the beasts had carried. None of it is magical. We will have it looked at properly anyway, because that is exactly the sort of thing a man says confidently right up until he is wrong; Dross can do it quickly, and Jedburgh talked of learning the trick so the two of them could get through it in an afternoon.

The beasts themselves are another matter. They carry iron in their bodies, and their antlers are shot through with their own blood, which is magical. Forty hours at the castle forge, which somebody will have to stand and do, and the antlers can be cut at the branchings and set across the shoulders of a breastplate that turns magic as well as steel. The morning's eleven sets make exactly two: one cut small, for an elf, and one for the rest of us. Kel said the house would surely do that much for their favourite commandos. The feathers were a poorer return. Only one bird in eleven had a cape in it, but that one will be worth having — light, it will take a blow for you, and there is something else in it nobody has yet named.

The second breastplate was mine by right of kills and no use to me, since I already wear metal and one does not layer such things. Kel said give it to Jedburgh, who fights in the front and has nothing so good, and that was the right answer.

And there was an iron leg. Nobody else in this party keeps a mount, so it was mine by default, and Corniger took an immediate and unmistakable interest in it, and it is now fitted to him. He is delighted. He has an extra hoof and I have one hand fewer, and if he has noticed the arithmetic he has been too polite to say so.

Chapter 7: Made to Measure

Fittings All Round

The house retains a seamstress, a brisk sort of woman, and we spent a pleasant hour spending her time for her.

Dross took the fencing cape, feather-lined or fur, which wants making up properly; it hangs across exactly the angles where a man holding a blade out in front of him is open, and turns a little of what comes in there. Jedburgh made the point that mattered more: whatever height they put us out of the aeroplane at, it will be cold, and none of us owns a coat worth the name. So: greatcoats. Three days apiece, one seamstress, one garment at a time.

Above Her Station

Kel wanted a fascinator, which I had to have described to me — a very small hat of almost nothing, worn at night, that announces a woman's standing before she has said a word. That is the difficulty. You may not wear one unless you are gentry or better, Kel is not certain her invented past will bear the weight, and it wants a milliner rather than a seamstress; Edinburgh, if not London.

So Kel asked the commander whether he could simply buy her a minor title, which I thought magnificent, and was told such things are the King's to give and nobody else's. Jedburgh proposed she become a Scottish widow, then, warming to it, the Black Widow of McMurdo, then an order of the Empire, which he assured her is the usual route and takes rather longer. Kel asked whether marrying into gentry and divorcing would answer. Jedburgh reminded her what year this is, and what happened the last time a divorce was placed near the throne of this country, and the subject lapsed.

The Spoils of War

I had drunk the vial on the hill. The chest wound went, and the lesser damage with it, and my wrist ended the day exactly as the Perytons had left it.

That left Tulip, whose injuries came to precisely what a full dose of the vial will carry — the chest and the crippled arm, no more and no less — which is the kind of luck I have learned to be suspicious of. But the vial was empty, and filling it is not a matter of pouring something in. You put your own life into it, a measure at a time, and it holds what you gave until somebody drinks. I mend faster than most men by some way, and even so I could not fill it in a day or in five.

It took the days that followed, giving a little and getting it back and giving again, and at the end she drank it and stood up whole. Kel offered a herbalist's draught to hurry my end along; I did not need one. Jedburgh's leftover hurt we decided to leave alone — weakness and nothing more, gone by itself in three weeks if he lets it. He was quite cheerful about that. He is quite cheerful about most of it, which I have decided is either courage or a want of imagination and is probably both.

Nothing Could Possibly Go Wrong

Quiet days are also, conveniently, time to design a hand.

I have been an armourer a very long while and a mechanician for rather less, and between them I can make almost anything with joints in it. The question is what to make it of. The elegant answer — and I want it on record that I thought of it while still bleeding — is substance with no form wrapped around form with no substance, which would be beautiful and would work and which I do not yet know how to build. The practical answer is quicksilver, which this whole country appears not to contain a single flask of.

Dross suggested dynamite. Then, on reflection, plastic explosive. It was pointed out that whoever stands next to me would have views on this, and he agreed it might be improved by also setting fire to it, and I said that nothing could possibly go wrong. Jedburgh offered me something of his to fasten on meanwhile and I turned it down; the grown ones are weak, and there are other reasons.

I would like it done before we go. A man can charge with a lance one-handed. He cannot shake hands, or hold a glass and a cigarette at once, or eat politely in company that watches which hand you use — and where we are going, being remembered is how you die.

Keeping Company

The last of it came as intelligence, and it is the part I keep turning over.

A man from the Ahnenerbe was seen speaking with Klaus Barbie, who has the Gestapo. The sighting came from an informant they call Gex, dated the last day of October, and reached us the day after through the decrypts, out of the ground between France and Switzerland not far from Geneva. The ancestral-heritage people and the secret police are talking on the very ground we are shortly to be dropped onto, which is not a coincidence I am prepared to enjoy.

Ultima Thule

Not all of the Ahnenerbe are lunatics, which surprised me; many are genuine scholars seconded into it, who now spend their lives being consulted by lunatics. The Germans are the finest Sumerologists alive, and much of that talent has gone into hunting an origin for the Aryan people somewhere in the north of the world, by way of ancient Persia, whose name is the same word. Sievers runs it, a manager rather than a scholar; above him it is somebody's pet project, and the man whose pet it is believes it will father a rebirth of the whole race.

They sent an expedition to Tibet to look for the mystics and found nothing, and another to the far south three years ago and found nothing there either. And they have spent enormous sums looking for Ultima Thule among the islands inside the Arctic circle, hunting a paradise in the ice and whatever is left of Coeus — a Titan of the cold north, and of intellect, on the grounds that cold sheds a light of its own.

The most useful part was the plainest. Our side does not want the thing because we believe in it. We want it because the Germans will move heaven and earth to have it, and the surest way to stop them is to be standing on it first. That is not a crusade. That is a race, and races are lost.

I put it to them that if there is a real thing under all this, it might be the northern celestial pillar — and a pillar is a way off this plane, which would explain rather a lot about what the enemy wants. Dross asked whether that might be why they came here at all. Nobody answered either of us, and I noticed that nobody answered.

Meanwhile the war goes on being the war. The Germans have convinced themselves a large American convoy is assembling to supply Malta, and are pulling their submarines into the Mediterranean to wait at the narrows; our people know because they have been reading the enemy's sea traffic since May. And we will be put out over France at between two and six hundred feet, low enough that the coats may prove unnecessary and that there is no second attempt.

There is a left hand in a cloth somewhere that I have not yet been able to make myself throw away. I would like the new one finished before we jump.

Chapter 8: Borrowed Time

They gave us a week before they put us into France, and we spent it the way men do when they know it is the last week of its kind: arguing about monsters, reading other people's books, and making things with our hands. I have one hand. I spent the week on the other.

Careful What You Call For

It began, as these conversations usually do, with Tulip wanting a pet.

Dross can bring through creatures with enchantment already in them, and offered to fetch one for her to hold. Jedburgh pointed out, patiently, that we had already settled that she could not. The beasts in question are not animals in any sense that matters. They think, and speak several tongues, and the working that bends a dumb beast is not the working that holds a thing capable of arguing back. Tulip has the first and not the second, and said so.

"There's not much point in summoning one if you can't control it," she said. "It'll just rock on up and eat ya."

There the matter rested — except that Dross observed, with the air of a man who has thought about it before, that if we were surrounded by Germans and invisible at the time, a large unbound horror appearing among them might answer very well. Kel liked that. Her position is that the correct place for a monster is somebody else's problem. Tulip has not given up on a nightmare dog of her own. I make no prediction.

A Face That Opens Doors

Dross has been given a face that does a great deal of work for him, and it did more that day. Bethaniel, who keeps the house's collections, took to him on sight — there was nothing subtle about it — and within the quarter hour was leading him off to see books that might interest a man like him. The rest of us followed, a library being a library.

Six or seven hundred years of things arriving and nothing ever leaving, which is my favourite kind of room. The weapons are mostly display and mostly enormous, claymores in sets or fixed to the walls, made to be looked at by the fifth generation of a family. The small things are better: fine, dainty daggers out of the Indian peninsula, kris blades with their waved edges, curved things I could not place, semi-precious stones, ceramic from half the world. I have made weapons a long time and jewellery longer, and could have been left in that room a fortnight without complaining once.

And there were scrolls. Bethaniel knows little of witch-work, and most of that local — a story that witches used the waters near here, a pleasant spot people still travel a good distance to see.

An Impolite Look

There were three, and they were incantations. Dross had never met such a thing; Kel had, and explained. An incantation is a second shape for a spell you already have, the same working turned to a different purpose, prepared in about an hour and held ready. It is inert unless you know the underlying spell, and learning it costs a man a piece of the growth he would otherwise have put into himself. Tulip added what I had not thought of: once loaded, some of your own strength stays tied up in it until you spend it. You must decide in the morning what you will want by evening, which is harder than it sounds.

They want matrices as well, Jedburgh noted, and I said I could probably make him one; I have worked gold a long while. Dross found it takes something over a week of study to make one for himself, which settles who is doing it.

The first calls lightning down, and wants fulminating gold as its catalyst. I knew what that was and let it be explained anyway, for the pleasure of watching the others' faces. It is what is left when you put gold through nitric acid and aqua regia and one or two other things, and it is so violently reactive that a shock will set it off, or a shake, or a spark, or nothing at all. Look at it in an impolite way and it is liable to go off. One carries it under water in a sealed container, inside a box packed with something that will neither conduct nor hold a static charge, and walks very carefully. Dross wanted to know whether the rest of us would go with it if it went up while he carried it. We would. I said it sounded like a win to me — worst case, you simply charge — and that risk near reward is the best kind of reward. What the lightning does when it arrives is not complicated. It kills.

The second is Hex, what has become of the old evil eye. It was once a minor curse that made a man worse at everything by a little for days. Now it is meaner and more useful: under your eye, a man's natural resistance to being worked upon thins, so that everything after bites deeper. The third was for speaking with animals and enchanted creatures, which after the morning's conversation seemed almost pointed.

I said the real value of the arrangement is variety; Kel, more practically, that it gives a caster a reason to master the dull spells nobody troubles with. Dross, with no wish to rob a library, was uneasy about taking the scrolls, and nearly asked the wrong woman — he had Bethaniel down in his head as the seamstress, and was told otherwise. She was perfectly happy for us to have them. There are no witches here, she said. Nobody else can use them.

Handiwork

Then we settled the week. Jedburgh has decided to be a healer, which surprises nobody who has watched how much of his own blood he mislays in an average afternoon; he put work into that, a full week into the winged helm, and the rest into drilling with his weapons. Kel spent days at the writing desk pursuing a title by letter, began two workings and finished neither, and was sour about it. Dross went deeper into his gem-making and his troll-skin, both well in hand, and made a start on the incantations.

I spent the week building the hand.

It is a difficult thing to make and worse to make one-handed, which I should have foreseen: every operation that wants a piece held while it is worked has to be solved twice. With neither quicksilver nor my elegant answer, it is a made thing of joints and pins like any other, and the whole of it went through my remaining fingers a hundred times over. Somebody remarked that a healer's craft would be a handy thing for Jedburgh to have, then apologised for the pun, and I said it was quite handy for me as well. That was the closest I came all week to discussing it.

I will not write that it is finished. I will write that a week went into it, and that I would like it to serve.

Fellow Travellers

Tulip, meanwhile, asked who else lives around here, and got two answers she did not expect.

The first are the Red Brothers: genuine foxes, remarkably red, entirely intelligent, and communists to a tail, mostly out of Poland. These speak English, Polish and a little Russian, will talk to you about the Marxist dialectic and the coming end of capitalism, and hold a certain book about a farm of animals to be holy doctrine. Jedburgh, who has read it, offered four legs good and two legs better and was not corrected. Tulip asked whether vixens are treated as equals and got more answer than she expected: a vixen can drop four kits in a season, which makes her worth a great deal to a commune, so they would rather she took no risks — though nobody says so out loud to a vixen bigger than they are.

This group got out of Poland with some Polish airmen and came here to liaise with the Russians; the Poles, up to their prime minister, know almost nothing about them. A fox carrying a message to another fox is not a man carrying a message to another man. Tulip asked whether they wanted human minions, and was informed that she had said the quiet part aloud.

The eagles are the ones to worry about. Golden eagles, not to be trifled with — when they come at you they manifest two heads. Tulip once had an eagle owl on her arm and could not get over its size, and a golden eagle is larger still. They were hunted hard in the last century for what they did to livestock, and in Switzerland have a long and specific reputation for carrying off children of seven or so. I said it did not sound pleasant. That was the whole of my contribution and it remains my view.

In His Image

On the morning of the eighth the transmission came in, and the week stopped being a week.

Barbie has moved into Lyon, and is running the search in person: everyone connected with the Heckler Line, the network we are being sent to help.

We have a black-and-white photograph of him, and Kel sat down with it at once and began learning to wear his face. A photograph takes her about half an hour to fix well enough to work from; a living man would take an hour, and a quarter of an hour watching him would give her something she could rely on. She is remarkably good at this and maintains that she is not a spy, which I have stopped arguing with.

The man is in Lyon tearing that network apart by the roots, and one of my companions spent the morning practising being him.

Chapter 9: A Leap of Faith

Brandy and Cigars

By the afternoon we knew that Operation Torch had gone in on the Mauretanian coast — Casablanca, Oran, Algiers — and the fighting had properly begun. What follows concerns us: the part of France the Germans had left under its own government is under German military occupation from that day, and the SOE spent the afternoon working out where their people are and which of them are still doing what they did last week.

At nine, over brandy and cigars, which I record because the contrast struck me, came a second transmission. They have no record of Barbie leaving Gex — a town on the border of France and Switzerland, I now understand; I had taken it for a man's name, and written it down as one, and was wrong. He reached Lyon without travelling in any manner that could be observed. He did not fly, which nobody believes; he went by private car, which everybody does.

He certainly did not go by train, because the resistance has its people inside the trains, and they would have had him. Those people watch and do nothing else. They are not to help escapers or interfere or be spent on anything short of desperation, because knowing what the Germans move and where is worth more than any single life they could pull off a platform. It is a cold arithmetic and I cannot fault it.

Then we were told to have an early night, and I was in bed before eleven.

The Last Train Out

The same transmission carried Diana's last message, garbled, because she had no time to make it clean.

She had been in Lyon destroying every scrap of the line's documentation there, and it made her late getting out. She hurt her stump doing it, was struggling badly by the end and could not say so directly, and what she did say went astray. The radio operator took it to mean some foreign agent was harassing her, and helpfully suggested the man be killed. She had no time to correct him. She said never mind, and went.

I said, when this was read to us, that they are a waste of time. I stand by it. A woman with one leg is burning papers with the Gestapo closing on her, and the answer down the wire is an offer to murder a stranger neither party can name.

The Gestapo came to the brothel she had been working out of — exactly where I would put a wireless set — and she had gone, and taken the equipment with her, because if it had been found the women there would have been taken in her place. That cost her time she did not have. She made the eleven o'clock train out of Lyon, the last, due into Perpignan at about a quarter past six in the morning.

Whoever He Is

There was a flap on in the morning. She did not arrive, and nobody can say where between Lyon and Perpignan she stopped being on that train. Hubert has not made contact either — the man who was to meet her, who has the map, and who is to take us over the mountains into Spain. The standing arrangement holds regardless: the Place de la République in Perpignan, from half past ten until half past four, which depends entirely on nobody having thought to watch him.

They gave us her photograph over breakfast: a woman in her late thirties or early forties in a brown suit, a rather lacy blouse, and a black tie of the kind cowboys wear. It is a face you would not turn round for in the street, which I assume is the point of her.

And the last word they had: that Cuthbert is causing her trouble and has to be killed, whoever he is. Nobody knows who he is, nor how the name is spelled. Tulip said it sounded like a man's name but might as easily be a pet name for something. Jedburgh said, correctly, that it is a codename, and codenames are chosen precisely so that people like us cannot tell.

I will put down what I think and let the record embarrass me later. Out of the same wire on the same night we have been told that her leg is giving her serious trouble, and that a man nobody can identify is giving her serious trouble and must be killed. I do not say they are the same trouble. I say that the last time somebody misread that woman's words, the answer was also an offer to kill a man who did not exist, and nobody in that room has noticed the pattern.

The Quiet Ones

Jedburgh knew who she was before they finished telling us. The limping lady, he said. Virginia Hall. Tulip had it too — the one with the wooden leg — right down to the detail.

She is American and with the SOE, which is not the usual arrangement, and by every account the best of them. Most instructive was her recruiting. The men who came forward to join a secret resistance were overwhelmingly the men who most wanted to be seen joining one, the sort who explain their important work at length in a public house. She would not have them. She took the ones who could keep their mouths shut, a much smaller field and a much better one.

A French cell leader once parachuted in and immediately told her that if she had any difficulties she should come to him, as he knew his business. She thanked him, went straight to her radio operator, and made certain none of her people ever went near him again. He was, apparently, a complete clown. And she got men out of Gestapo prisons, more than once — afterwards abandoned as a policy for what it cost in the people spent doing it. Not because it could not be done. Because she was the only one who could do it.

Her own side never made proper use of her. That irritates me, and it is not a new complaint about anybody's government.

A Busy Last Ten Minutes

They are putting us into a Wellesley, chosen for its enormous range, since its speed is poor. Jedburgh worked the flight out loud: a thousand miles at something over two hundred an hour comes to four and a half hours, so the day starts at five, we board at about half past, and we are over Perpignan by a quarter past nine. In broad daylight. Jedburgh observed that this would be exciting. It would.

Which is why we are not staying in the aeroplane. The airfield at Rivesaltes, a few miles outside Perpignan, holds fighters a hundred miles an hour faster than a Wellesley, and that arithmetic needs no explaining. Dross proposed we leave ten or twenty miles out and go the rest of the way on his carpet, unseen; Kel and Tabitha can lay concealment over the party for something like half an hour between them, and the carpet will hold for three and a half. Dross would rather be on an invisible carpet than inside that thing when the fighters come up, and he is right. I said I looked forward to seeing how well it worked out, and asked what could possibly go wrong.

There is a nuisance in the working. The carpet keeps the pace set when you call it up, and if it ever stops keeping that pace it stops being a carpet. You cannot hover and step off; you must hold speed and concentration all the way down and end it deliberately in the last moments, or it ends itself. Nor can it be called up inside the aeroplane and ridden out through the door — you go out first and it catches you, and you had better not dawdle in the doorway.

Cover Does Not Take Sides

The word first thing was that it would be an appalling day, and I said what one says: of course it would. Kel thought it to our advantage — more cover for us — and I agreed, and added the other half, which is that cover does not know whose side it is on. If they cannot see us coming, we cannot see them coming.

The worst of it is the wind, blowing hard enough to have a name — a broussard, a windstorm well out of its season. The same system turns to rain over the Mediterranean, and North Africa has had sudden downpours from it all week, which did not inconvenience the landings in Morocco in the slightest.

So: a hard morning, a bomber warming up, rations packed. Two people we need are missing and a third is a name nobody can spell. Somewhere south of us a woman with one leg is on a train, or off it, or worse, and we are four and a half hours and a long fall away from finding out which. A week's work sits in my kit where a hand should be. I should like the chance to shake somebody's with it.

Look for the Crater

There is a knack to falling that I picked up in the Garden of Eden, and this was the first morning it ever earned its keep. The last hour at Achnacarry went on paperwork and poison, which is about the usual proportion.

Dross had found Kel a better story for her title: that she is of the Hungarian gentry — the middling landholders who fill the offices and drive the nationalist movements — and seeks recognition so as to be of more use against the Germans. Nobody in London can check it and everyone has reason to want it true. Then he laced the letters with a philtre of his own, for the warmth it leaves behind, so that whichever clerk opens them will be fond of her before he has read a line. I observed that the Foreign Office will end up handling their post with tongs. She also filled her cigarette case, French and by all accounts unpleasant, which turned out to matter more than the letters did.

Then the workings. Dross had prepared his skin-changes days before — they keep for weeks, which is the point of them — to set in the air on himself, Kel, Tulip and Tabitha. Jedburgh can take the eagle himself. Tulip had her own workings laid in, one of them giving her back what casting on the rest of us costs her, the only reason she is willing to do it at all. Kel had her phantom armour, and laid mind speech over the party so that we could talk without beaks. Dross had Tabitha set a finding on me, since I would be out of everyone's earshot the moment I left the aeroplane, and Tabitha can find a man a good long way off.

I would not need wings, I told them; I intended to jump out and fall into the ground. This was not received as well as I had hoped. Tulip asked whether I would take harm from hitting the earth, and I said that for some of us that part is optional. Jedburgh asked whether it was one of those thousand-year skills, what David used to teach when he fell off buildings. I said I had come away from the Garden of Eden with a thing, and the thing is a matter of inertia: mine goes to nothing at the moment of arrival and comes back a few breaths later.

Kel allowed that we might fall for a while. I said we would stop eventually. Jedburgh said of course we would — that is what the ground is for. Kel said it was a good trick, and that finding me afterwards would be simple enough: they need only look for the crater.

A Story for the Pilots

We went in the Wellesley under Captain Glendinning, with a co-pilot who could take her if anything happened to him and no guns aboard; she had been stripped of everything that slowed her and the bomb bay filled with extra tanks. I said we probably had barely enough fuel to reach the place, which shows how little I know about aeroplanes; fuel was never the difficulty. We left at half past eight and ran her flat out, and it took four hours. It is a wretched machine to be a passenger in at its best.

We crossed at a great height and came down toward a very low cloud layer, and the wind was the real trouble — a hard gale off the sea, the Mediterranean grey on our left as we ran south. I was told, with some relish, that the man who meant to fall into the ground would have less bother from the wind than the birds would, and so it proved. It is winter here, and overcast, and no part of the day was bright.

At thirty miles out we went. Kel's last question before she changed was whether an owl may keep hold of a cigarette, and the slipstream answered no. It was a valiant attempt. From the air we saw a column of forty or fifty military lorries running south on the main road, faster than we were, pulling in at the airfield in the northern suburb at Rivesaltes; and, a little after, a small open touring car coming out of it behind a pair of Gestapo motorcyclists.

I meant to jump half a minute behind the others so as to be on the ground before them, and was told, patiently, that half a minute at our speed would put me down near Narbonne. I took the farmland between Rivesaltes and the airfield instead. Kel observed that the pilots would dine out on this for years: the commandos they carried into France, none of them wearing a parachute, all of whom jumped.

Chapter 10: Dead on Arrival

Passed Over

I came down in a field about a mile short of the road and did not leave a crater, which I record in the interests of accuracy.

You hit, and you stop, and for a few seconds you are a very heavy thing the world has not yet decided how to move again, and then it gives you back your weight and you get up. I was dressed as I have been since Scotland — a vintner, a farmer of some kind — which means a tatty linen shirt with the buttons torn off, a felt hat, and straw poking out of everything. It is a good disguise for this country because it is not a disguise. Half the men on that road were wearing it honestly.

Twenty minutes to the road and two hours along it. There was almost no motor traffic; petrol is rationed and the bicycles have inherited the country. I had one moment on the verge where a man in my position might easily have been noticed, and was not, and I have been fortunate too long to enquire closely into it. I thought about riding, and thought better of it. Corniger stands out.

Half an hour along, the lorries passed me and turned off east toward the aerodrome, and beyond them I could see fighters on the runway being inspected by a man in a uniform so well cut it must have been made for him by hand. He wore a monocle, which in that army is not an affectation but a statement of birth; a baron at the least. Then the little touring car came past me, motorcyclists ahead, and the man in the back was Wolfram Sievers, reading a file and looking extremely busy. Neither he nor his escort spared a glance for a farmer walking south in the mud. I thought briefly about asking him for a lift, then about what would follow, and carried on walking.

The Man We Came to Meet

The others had come down among the trees on the boulevard beside the Parc Saint-Vincennes, near enough the middle of the city to be convenient and green enough to be private, and nobody had looked up as a party of owls went over with an eagle in attendance.

They changed back and laid counterspells across one another, and Kel handed round her dreadful French cigarettes while Dross kept her company out of politeness. Tabitha kept a thread on me throughout — the only accurate report anybody had of me for two hours. Meanwhile they established that the Place de la République is two miles or so on foot from where they landed, and that the man we were to meet there, whom Scotland had given us as Hubert, was called Gilbert. Nobody has yet explained how the name of the only man in France who can take us over the mountains came to be written down wrong, and I have stopped expecting an explanation.

We joined up about ninety minutes later, short of the bridges, and I told them what I had seen on the road. Then we went in together, because the square holds an open market and people arrive at it in groups, and a group is invisible in a way that five careful individuals are not.

It was crawling with Gestapo, and several people lay dead on the ground, shot to pieces. The French who had not run were corralled into the corners having their papers gone through one at a time, and nobody was moving toward the middle. I did not wait to learn more. I took the party out of it quickly, which I would do again.

Kel saw more than I did on the way out, and what she saw was Gilbert, dead in the square with an ambulance attending him — theatre, not medicine — and men going through his belongings as he lay there. He had been dead twenty minutes, perhaps half an hour. We had come four hours by air and two on foot to keep an appointment, and missed him by about the length of a decent lunch.

Club Colours

While the rest of us were leaving, Jedburgh's attention had been caught by the ties.

Men of that trade wear black or dark grey, sometimes brown, and colour in a tie means something: a school, a regiment, a club, a society you are meant to notice without asking. Five men in the square in black suits and white shirts wore ties of no ordinary kind, standing about the Gestapo but not quite of them. Jedburgh looked at them properly from a long way off across the square, which cost him most of what he might have learned. He got three of the five. Men, all of them, with nothing borrowed and nothing hidden underneath — ordinary short-lived human beings, which was the last comfortable thing about them.

The greatest working any of the three commanded was the summoning of demonic kings. I asked to have that repeated, and Kel repeated it: demonic kings, which makes that man the finest summoner in the square and an occultist beyond question. Useful to know. Not comfortable.

Jedburgh also asked whether anything had been done to them with Vril. Yes, and within the month. More would take an hour's divination standing much closer, and any of the five might have felt it. Jedburgh would rather do that work once their bodies had cooled, and these are exactly the sort of men to carry a death curse for whoever kills them. Kel put it more briefly. There is a large group of very dangerous people here, she said, and we should be somewhere else.

The Opera This Season

We went, and Kel got us out without a single one of them looking at us twice.

She keeps a whole young woman of good family for occasions like this, and brought her out entire: shocked, sickened by the killing, only just arrived in this beautiful city to see her brother married. A gendarme came over to take her details and be of assistance, and got the full performance — the charm, the grace, the little catch in the voice — and was so moved that he undertook to help her find somewhere to stay, patted her hand, mentioned that the opera this season is Turandot, and slipped her his card.

Kel thanked him beautifully. What she thought of him came down the mind speech to the rest of us, and it was not beautiful at all, and none of us disagreed with a word of it. A Frenchman in a French square, French dead on the cobbles behind him, handing his card to a pretty stranger.

Nobody wanted to go closer to the men in the ties, in person or in conversation. We put distance between us and the square.

Standing Vigil

We took a good café a few hundred feet south of the Courts of Justice — civil buildings, no soldiers — with the Hôtel Aragon not far off if we needed it.

How were we to know when the Germans had finished with the square? I said one can generally feel the tension come out of a street, which is true and useless. Dross had a better answer: Tabitha. She watched from too far off to speak to us mind to mind, and came back on her own four feet at about half past three to say they had gone, taking Gilbert's body, and that before they went they had performed a ritual of some kind over the place where he fell. She could not say what. She could say that something is still there.

I did not like that and I like it less written down. They shot a man in a public square in the middle of the afternoon, and then, before an audience of corralled civilians, did magic over the stain.

We went back a little later in ones and twos, in no hurry, since men who have just cleared a place watch it hardest in the first hour. Kel went first. The market was gone, the shops shut, the block empty — and over the corner where he died stood three Feldgendarmerie, with a heavy chalk outline at their feet. Dross thought of watching through his crystal from a distance, and dropped the idea himself: the seeing lasts a fraction of the time it takes to set up, and the work wanted an hour. I said the plain shape of it out loud. Men do not guard a patch of ground they intend to forget. Either we get in without anybody knowing, or the guard goes away.

The Changing of the Guard

What followed was assembled out of other people's ideas, which is how the good plans usually arrive.

Dross could work unseen — the concealment covers five minutes in, half an hour of ritual and five minutes out, with nothing to spare — but laying out tarot cards invisible a few feet from three armed policemen asks a great deal of everybody's nerve. Kel suggested dressing us as their own military police, sent to replace them. Then Tulip, who prefers a simple plan to a clever one, put the last piece in: do not replace them at all; have a superior officer send them somewhere else. Kel said that was genius, and it was.

The guard changed in due course, rather casually, three men strolling in to relieve three who went off to find a pub. Kel put the uniforms of the German military police over us, making herself the senior man without blinking, and Jedburgh and I stood where we were told. Jedburgh had picked the destination: the hospital, across the river, three kilometres as the crow goes and four or five by the bridges. Then Kel, in a voice I had not heard her use before, pointed and gave orders and berated them, and they turned north and went, in step, at exactly the pace men keep when a senior officer may still be watching.

I have been on both sides of that transaction over a long life and it never stops being funny. They are Germans. They like to be told.

I Don't Know, I'm Dead

Dross went in behind us, unseen, knelt on the chalk, and asked Gilbert five short questions. He did not need the body, only the place where the man fell, which the Germans had helpfully marked out in white.

The first useful answer was that we had been wrong about him from the beginning. He was never supposed to meet us at all. His work is bringing people over the mountains into Spain, and the meeting in the square was hers: Diana is the name Virginia Hall goes by, and Gilbert was to take her over once she came in on the last train from Lyon. We were supposed to find her and bring her to him. Instead he waited in a public square all morning for a woman who never came, and by two in the afternoon somebody had shot him for it.

Asked how we might reach her now, he said he did not know, on the grounds that he was dead. I have had worse conversations with the living.

Jedburgh spent that hour on the residue of the Germans' working. A summoning had been done there, of marquises of hell, and he caught the name one of them is called by, though not the deeper name that would give a man purchase on it: Samigina, Marquis of Lost Souls. I said at the time that there was nothing in it we could use except the name. But it was done over the place where a man of the escape lines had just been killed, by people who wear the wrong ties, and I would rather have that written down than not.

Chapter 11: The Far Side of the Room

Legwork

So we came back to the only question that matters, which is where she is.

Dross tried a finding on her and got nothing; his reach is long but not unlimited, and she is not inside it. We fell back on reasoning, which is not evidence. She is careful, experienced, and has been warned more than once about the trains. If she smelled danger she got off early, somewhere on the long road from Lyon — Rivesaltes is only the last stop before Narbonne on the way down — and came the rest of the way by other means, or has not come at all.

Dross proposed, in all seriousness, that we put a finding on Cuthbert. This is where I learned that Cuthbert is her leg — the wooden leg she walks on, named as a person names a thing they have to live with. Scotland was reading a woman's complaint about her own stump and offering to murder it. Dross argued that a thing with a name might have a true one, which seemed entirely reasonable to me. We were not permitted to try it.

Off the Books

What worked was ordinary tradecraft — the first thing they give a spy and the last thing that saves him — and Jedburgh and I worked it through, having had the run of the city for a few hours.

A woman in her position, arriving alone, does not go to a good hotel; the good ones are careful who sleeps in them and keep lists. She goes to a modest place close to the square where she was to be met. That narrowed it a long way, and Jedburgh knew the rest: the Hôtel de la Loge, a safe house on the O'Leary line that has been quietly moving people toward Spain for a year.

Sewn Up

We put our disguises away outside, went in as ourselves, handed over our ration books like honest citizens, and took rooms for the night.

Somewhere in the falling and the impersonation of German policemen, it had escaped my notice that we carry a suitcase with a quarter of a million francs in it. I said this was most unusual; I am accustomed to scraping together enough for coffee. Apparently it is standard — Hall herself first went into Lyon with a great deal more than most men see in a lifetime — and Tulip, sensibly, had us break it up and sew it about our persons rather than leave it in one case in one room.

Eating Well

Then we ate, and I am obliged to report that we ate extremely well. Provençal cooking, the coast not thirty miles away, and a good deal of fish in that kitchen that has never troubled a ration book. There was bouillabaisse. It cost a sum that would appal any local family and did not trouble us in the slightest, which is its own small indecency, and I enjoyed every mouthful.

Jedburgh saw her at the same moment I did; the others never picked her out at all. She looks nothing like the photograph. Across that dining room sat a middle-aged farmer's wife, rustic, dressed much as we are but rather better at it, eating quietly and troubling nobody. Beside her chair was one of those enormous soft bags older women carry their knitting in. I said it was big enough for a decent handgun. I was corrected: it is big enough for a submachine gun.

Dropping the Name

And there we sat, in the same room as the woman we had crossed a thousand miles to find, unable to think of a way to say good evening to her.

Consider it from her side. Her contact was shot dead in a public square this afternoon, so somebody knew where he would be and when, and exactly one conclusion is available to her: she is blown. A stranger who walks up to her table tonight is not a friend. He is proof. Dross suggested mind speech, and I said no — imagine a voice arriving inside your skull, at dinner, in an occupied country, with no acquaintance with magic whatever. It does not matter whether she works out it is sorcery. She stops believing her own head in the same minute she stops believing she is safe, with a bag beside her chair. She would do the safest thing available to her, first, and I would not blame her for a second of it.

Dross wondered whether Tabitha might go over and be charming, which has the merit that Tabitha would probably survive it. Tulip asked whether London had given us a recognition phrase — the right question, with the wrong answer: nothing. Kel proposed dropping the name Diana into a conversation nearby, loudly enough to carry, and Dross refined it into something with no threat in it: two travellers at the next table remarking what a shame it is that Diana is not here to enjoy this restaurant. She hears her own name, spoken with affection, by people who are not looking at her and are not coming closer. I do not hate it.

My own suggestion was worse, and I record it because a journal that keeps only the good ideas is a work of fiction. I proposed putting an illusion of Gilbert on one of us and letting her see a dead man walk in. It was pointed out that she may well have watched him die.

She was on the far side of a dining room, and she may as well have been on the far side of the Pyrenees.

The Rehearsal

It is an unsettling thing to watch a woman kill herself over a conversation nobody has had yet.

Three ways were on the table. The first was to take her: sleep dust in the face, a prepared skin held against her for half a minute, and she is a mouse in somebody's pocket and then in Spain. The second was a code word spoken where she could hear it, leaving the next move to her. The third was to speak into her mind. I said again what I had said against that: give her enough to decide with, and let her decide. I added that if her line has been rolled up, whoever rolled it up has her code name too, and a code name the enemy already knows is not a greeting but bait.

I was outvoted. Tulip came round to the code word; everybody else liked the mind speech, and Dross was confident a woman of her profession would take it in her stride. Kel, to her great credit, would not simply run it. She could look a little way down the road before we set foot on it, she said, and wrote out the message she meant to send — greetings, we hope Cuthbert is treating you well, we are an occult unit out of London sent to bring you over into Spain, here is a word you may check with London — and bent over her soup and worked the thing so quietly that nobody at the neighbouring tables looked up.

It goes beautifully. That is the part I keep returning to. The message is clear, the code word good, she has every reason to believe us. And at the moment we touch her mind, she excuses herself from dinner, goes upstairs, and blows her brains out.

I record without pride that I looked smug. Kel told me that as the whole thing went to pieces and the Germans hauled us away, I could console myself with having said so, and that this was not helping. She was right about that too. We took the mind speech off the table, and I sat for a while with a mouthful of very good fish, thinking how narrow the door had been and how nearly we had all walked through it. Dross, meanwhile, had slipped off to the bathroom and spent a minute preparing a mouse skin, in case matters ended up there anyway. He has a talent for quiet preparation while the rest of us talk.

Chapter 12: Cousin Cuthbert

Between Courses

The other thing about a code word is that you must say it out loud, in front of everybody in the room. So first Kel went and had a look at everybody in it.

It is a small dining room, forty feet by twenty at most, holding something over a dozen minds, and getting into them was not easy. This country gives little back to anyone working here — the workings come dear and land badly — and she was turned aside once, and once had the thing come apart in her hands and had to start again. What I saw from across the table was a woman stirring her soup, peppering it, taking a slurp, and staring into the bowl as though it had insulted her. She got there in the end. She always does; it simply costs her more than she lets on.

Four of the guests work for the same escape line as this house. They were talking quietly among themselves, and none of them was a German taking notes, which was the answer I wanted. Better still: they know Diana — as a quiet local woman with a cough who keeps to herself. Not as the American, not as the woman who took over the line. Her cover was holding in the one room where it mattered most.

What worried them was the camp. There is an internment camp out here as well as the airfield, holding something like two thousand people — Jews, Gypsies, communists; Jedburgh supplied the occupiers' word for them, which I will not repeat with any affection. The four were turning over whether anything could be run against the place and getting nowhere, because there is nowhere for four hotel guests to get. Kel passed it all to us mind to mind. I said, out loud and in the hearing of my own conscience, that it is not what we came here to do. That remains true and it is not much of an answer.

A Pity About His Leg

Kel wanted to bump into her in the hallway and murmur the word as she passed. I did not want us within ten feet of her.

A signal should cost the receiver nothing to ignore. A woman blocked in a corridor by a stranger has been cornered, and everything after is a question of how fast her hand moves. So we said it at our own table, loudly, to each other, with her nearer the door than we were and nothing between her and it. The frame was mine — what a pity your cousin could not come, the one with the bad leg — and Dross supplied the rest, a Cuthbert from Piccadilly, because London is the one thing in that sentence she cannot mistake for coincidence. So I said it. It is a shame about his sore leg. It kept him from making the journey.

She heard it. She sat a while working through what it could be and arrived, quite visibly, at the only conclusion available: somebody in this room is trying to reach her without frightening her. Then she caught my eye and held it about as long as good manners allow, collected her things, and left with one glance back over her shoulder.

I gave her twenty or thirty seconds and excused myself, at which point it occurred to me that I had no idea which room was hers. Kel had thought of that first. She had put her listening on the woman before she stood and rode behind her eyes up the stairs, and the number arrived in my head as an image, the only traffic that goes that way; my mind does not speak back.

Making Her Acquaintance

I knocked. The door opened a crack and then wide enough to let me in, and behind it was a middle-aged woman holding the largest revolver I have seen indoors — the kind a man wears on his hip in the American west, absurd and entirely serviceable in her hand.

I said, good to meet you, Diana. My name is Archibald. Then I told her that the man she had come to meet had been killed by the Germans. She had already known it, and it had already knocked the wind out of her, and she took it a second time without putting the gun down. He had been a friend of hers.

Something Going Around

Then she gave me the thing she had been carrying alone, and I have not been able to put it down since.

On her way south she shared a train with Wolfram Sievers. She knew enough of who he is to sit still and listen, and she overheard that he has plans for the people held at the camp here. Most of the internees are to be moved west in a convoy of trucks to another camp, Gurs. But a small contingent, almost all women, is to be taken up into the mountains to a place called Saint-Marcel.

That matched intelligence she had taken before her line was betrayed. Work is being done up there that began from the papers of a bacteriologist named Robert Koch, who spent his life telling one strain of disease from another. Built on top of him is something they call the Conan Bacterium. As she understands it, it records the signature of life itself — the pattern a body is copied from — and repairs damage to that pattern. Kel called it super healing. I said it sounded like a zombie virus to me, and Diana said, without any pleasure at all, that it has every hallmark of a death plague.

I have made worse jokes than the ones I made next, but not many, and I set them down because a journal that keeps only the creditable remarks is a novel. I observed that a plague which brings the dead back to work would put every slaver on the continent out of business; Kel observed that it makes for a cheaper workforce, which is simply capitalism; I said they would be prisoners with jobs. We were laughing in an occupied country about a thing being done to two thousand people ten miles up the road. I do not think it was contempt. It is what you do when the alternative is to sit still and feel the size of it.

Not a Good Trait in This Game

What she kept coming back to was how they had found Gilbert at all.

He was not the usual sort. The Maquis is full of men who cannot resist telling a woman in a bar what they did last week, and he was not one of them — past sixty, a farm labourer, still very active and utterly uninterested in being admired. Yet somebody put a bullet in him at a time and place only a handful of people knew.

The pressure on her has been extraordinary. Their posters carry no photograph, because nobody has one, only a written description, and what it dwells on is the limp. They call her the Limper. And the screws came down hard once the Allies went into North Africa: the Germans answered Torch by occupying the whole of France, precisely so they could take resistance work apart at their leisure, uncertain what was coming next and paranoid about all of it.

So she knows she was betrayed, though not by whom, and cannot rule out somebody in this very line, in this very hotel. But she has a suspicion. A priest, until recently in a parish north-east of Paris, famous for preaching against the Germans from his own pulpit and warmly pro-Ally, has made it his business to meet everybody in the movement and know them. Too curious, she said. Too nosy, I said, which is not a good trait in this game. Perhaps he is only a brave man with an unfortunate manner. I said it is best to assume otherwise until proven, and she did not argue.

Not a Vampire

I offered to have her meet the rest of the team, so that I could stop being a relay, and was most of the way through the sentence before remembering that I had just watched her shoot herself over exactly this.

So we warned her first, which is the whole of what I had argued at dinner. I explained that one of my people can speak mind to mind, makes a net of it that we all sit inside, reads nothing out of you that you do not send, and is not a vampire. We have made sure of that. Kel pointed out that Diana has seen her walking about in daylight; Dross wondered whether we had ever properly tested her against crosses and garlic, and I said that in this country you could hardly test anyone against garlic, since it is in everything, including the fish stew.

Then Kel made the working a second time and offered her the link, and she took it. I could not feel what Kel felt, but Kel told us: the woman is badly frightened and living right on the edge of herself, and what frightens her most is not the camp but what is being done to the people out of it. Kel gave a name and a face into the link, and Dross did the same: glad to meet you, and we hope to be of some assistance.

And afterwards we learned the thing that shut the argument for good. A voice arriving in her skull unannounced, in this country, in this month, would have meant to her that a vampire had found her — and she would rather have finished it herself than learn what one wanted with her.

Session Notes

Session 1: A Chessboard, Not a Battlefield

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Items Acquired Kel: Waybread (unpriced) Potion of Restore Sanity (unpriced) Ranger syringe (rank 4) (unpriced) Revivification syringe (unpriced) Black: Waybread (unpriced) Potion of Restore Sanity (unpriced) Trollskin potion R9 — 1125 sp Mind Shield potion R9 (unpriced) Restorative R10 — 200 sp Waters of Healing R10 — 400 sp Shadow Wings R6 (invested) — 600 sp Mills & Boon books (unpriced) Revivification syringe (unpriced) Dross: Waybread (unpriced) Potion of Restore Sanity (unpriced) Mouse skin (skin change) (unpriced) Owl skin (skin change) (unpriced) Eel skin (skin change) (unpriced) Crystal of Vision — 1000 sp Chalcedony amulet (undead ward) — 4800 sp Waters of Healing — 400 sp Revivification syringe (unpriced) Jedburgh: Waybread (unpriced) Potion of Restore Sanity (unpriced) Waters of Healing — 400 sp Revivification syringe (unpriced) Tulip: Waybread (unpriced) Potion of Restore Sanity (unpriced) Luck Amulet — 2400 sp Waters of Healing — 400 sp Revivification syringe (unpriced) Party (shared resources): Waybread (unpriced) Wind Walk (unpriced) Feather Fall (unpriced) Driving syringe (unpriced) French language syringe (unpriced) German language syringe (unpriced) English language syringe (unpriced) Balance brought forward: 0 sp Received this session: 40,000 sp Spent this session: 37,500 sp Balance carried forward: 2,500 sp Session Summary The party — Kel, Tulip, Dross, Jedburgh and Black — was recruited at the Seagate Guild by an agent of Dr Wormwood for a mission to Reich, a temporally duplicated version of wartime Earth in late 1942. They spent the Guild's advance and a good deal of their own money on enchantments and consumables, and Dross's card reading turned up the Devil, the Five of Swords, the Star reversed and all four face cards of the sword suit — a chessboard rather than a battlefield. Callas then took them through the earth to Novodom on 3 Vintage, where Dr Wormwood laid out the commission: the Germans are fleeing an undead horde into Cataclysm Earth with Transuranian help, and the real objective is a Phoenician-era ruin in Spain rather than the British agent they are ostensibly rescuing. Keeping the crossing party to six took some argument before Hordling was allowed to come, and Wormwood supplied syringes that impart language, geography, driving and copied weapon skills over several weeks. The rune portal outside Novodom put them into the Astral and then over the edge into the Abyss, a mile of climb down. At the first river they met the demon lord Moonlight Sleeping on a Midnight Lake, who joined them as an interested party and lent them Short Fuse; for the rest of the fortnight-long crossing his staves destroyed every demon wave without the party fighting, and Black harvested the remains for alchemy. They left the Abyss through an unmanned castle of black stone that Moonlight admitted he had not been able to explain, and emerged at Victoria Underground Station in London on 19 October 1942. A train north brought them to Achnacarry House in Scotland, where Admiral Rollins briefed them on Operation Torch and on the compromised Heckler escape line running out of Gestapo-held Lyon. The insertion plan has no landing — a Vickers Wellesley is to fly them near Perpignan and put them out over a coast thick with anti-aircraft fire. Short Fuse separately delivered a warning that the seventy-second goetic demon is involved and belongs to a cabal calling itself the Final Five. The session ended with two weeks of commando training beginning at Achnacarry, a first briefing from Princess Noor Inayat Khan, and the party still without a survivable way to get from the aeroplane to the ground. Chronological Timeline Date Event Day 1 (5 Oct) Guild commission; Novodom; Wormwood's briefing Day 2 (6 Oct) Rune Portal; descent into the Abyss Day 3 (7 Oct) Abyss crossing Day 4 (8 Oct) Abyss crossing Day 5 (9 Oct) Moonlight Sleeping joins at the river Day 6 (10 Oct) Demon waves; remains harvested Day 7 (11 Oct) Demon waves; remains harvested Day 8 (12 Oct) Demon waves; remains harvested Day 9 (13 Oct) Demon waves; remains harvested Day 10 (14 Oct) Demon waves; remains harvested Day 11 (15 Oct) Demon waves; remains harvested Day 12 (16 Oct) Demon waves; remains harvested Day 13 (17 Oct) Demon waves; remains harvested Day 14 (18 Oct) Demon waves; remains harvested Day 15 (Mon 19 Oct) Force Bridge; Reich; London; train north Day 16 (20 Oct) Admiral Rollins briefs; training begins

Session 2: A Family of Sorts

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Items Acquired Kel: Concealed small sword (unpriced) Forged identity papers (unpriced) Party (shared resources): Peryton antlers (unpriced) Peryton feathers (cape-grade) (unpriced) Black: Peryton hearts (unpriced) Forged identity papers (unpriced) Dross: Forged identity papers (unpriced) Jedburgh: Forged identity papers (unpriced) Balance brought forward: 2,500 sp Balance carried forward: 2,500 sp Session Summary Two days into the party's stay at Achnacarry, Short Fuse confirmed he could add nothing about the seventy-second demon until Moonlight next contacts him, and the destination was filled in: Perpignan, roughly a thousand miles south, in Vichy France rather than the Reich proper, with a German presence, a Nazi prison, and Klaus Barbie due to take over the secret police there. Macavity invited the party to the estate's annual shoot on the Saturday after next and showed them the shoot's guns — enormous double-barrelled pieces firing a cadmium-and-lead slug, supplied by an odd little man in London. Through the training period the party took Dr Wormwood's knowledge syringes, Dross taking French with Kel steadying him; settled cover identities as a family, Kel a tailor and farmer's wife married to Jedburgh's local doctor, Black a vintner, Dross an itinerant musician; and worked out how to carry their spare papers and what to carry them with, sending Tabitha home with the documents where she cannot be searched, choosing German small arms over traceable English ones, and accepting a concealed rapier for Kel. The remaining days went on Jedburgh's weapons training, Black's new short sword, Kel's drilling of the party in her commands and her memorised poem of Perpignan's streets, Dross's driving lessons, and a plan for getting out of the aeroplane. The shoot was laid out as a drive from Morrigan, eleven miles up the loch, toward a concealed second party at the Witch Pool bridge, with one absolute rule: fire only at blue sky. The party chose to stand together at Morrigan and drove up on the last Saturday of October, learning only there that the quarry were Perytons — man-killers that eat hearts and cast the shadow of whoever they are about to take — before Kel hid the party under illusory ground and Black stayed visible to turn the flight. The first wave came out of the north far faster than expected, and Macavity was mauled unconscious moments after opening fire. Black charged the line on Corniger and killed one outright before the flight turned on him, smashing his helmet and knocking out his Abzazu head, at which point Corniger's shoe put seven Blacks on the hill while Kel, Dross, Jedburgh and Tulip broke the rest of the flight; three grievous strikes landed on Black's copies rather than on him, and Tulip pulled Macavity back from dying. Eleven were taken and nobody was killed, which is not how the shoot usually goes. The party remain at Achnacarry with the rest of the training fortnight ahead of them, eleven sets of antlers awaiting forty hours at the castle forge, one cape's worth of feathers, and Jedburgh's arm two months from mending before the drop near Perpignan. Chronological Timeline Date Event Day 18 (22 Oct) Two days into the Achnacarry stay: Short Fuse can add nothing about the seventy-second until Moonlight next contacts him; the destination is confirmed as Perpignan in Vichy France; Macavity invites the party to the shoot and shows them its guns. Day 19 (23 Oct) Dr Wormwood's language syringes taken, Dross's French steadied by Kel; cover identities agreed as a family — Kel a tailor and farmer's wife married to Jedburgh's doctor, Black a vintner, Dross an itinerant musician. Day 20 (24 Oct) Spare documents sent home with Tabitha, who cannot be searched, and set to making sleep dust; German weapons chosen over traceable English ones; Kel issued a concealed parasol-rapier. Days 21–26 (25–30 Oct) The training period: Jedburgh a full week on weapons, Black on the short sword, Kel drilling the party in her commands and memorising a poem of Perpignan's streets, Dross learning to drive; the insertion plan settled. Day 27 (Sat 31 Oct) The shoot at Morrigan. Kel's illusory terrain hides the party while Black stays visible to turn the flight; Macavity is mauled unconscious and stabilised by Tulip; eleven Perytons taken, one escaping south, and no deaths. Antlers, feathers and hearts harvested; Jedburgh's arm crippled for two months.

Session 3: Some Things Are Gone When They Are Gone

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Items Acquired Tulip: Second Chance amulet (unpriced) Jedburgh: Second Chance amulet (unpriced) Peryton-antler breastplate (unpriced) Dross: Second Chance amulet (unpriced) Kel: Second Chance amulet (unpriced) Corniger: Iron leg (prosthetic) (unpriced) Party (shared resources): Sleeping dust (unpriced) Balance brought forward: 2,500 sp Balance carried forward: 2,500 sp Session Summary The first Peryton flight over, the party took an hour and a half of elevenses on the hill while Tulip mended the worst of the injured, and Black handed round Second Chance amulets to Tulip, Jedburgh, Dross and Kel before they went back out. Traps and animal-binding were ruled out, and the plan they settled on instead was Kel's line of illusory soldiers with Jedburgh's lightning laid straight down the row, which broke the second flight almost without a fight. The third and fourth flights went far worse: Tulip was ruined in a single pass, and three Perytons converged on Black and took his left hand off at the wrist. He fought on right-handed to the end of it — ten of the day's twelve accounted for, two escaped south. Back at the castle the party searched the beasts' gear, found nothing magical, gave the antler breastplate to Jedburgh and fitted a recovered iron leg to Corniger, then put a long afternoon of orders through the house tailor — a fencing cape, greatcoats against the cold of the coming jump, and a fascinator Kel may not have the standing to wear. Black drank his Sardonyx vial on the hill for his own chest wound, then spent fifteen days bleeding it full again so that Tulip could drink it and stand up whole, and used the same fortnight designing a replacement hand he has no quicksilver to build. The session closed on intelligence out of the French–Swiss border country: an Ahnenerbe man seen with Klaus Barbie of the Gestapo, a long briefing on the German search for Ultima Thule and the Titan Coeus, and confirmation that the party drops into France in roughly a fortnight. Chronological Timeline Date Event Day 27 (31 Oct, late morning) Elevenses break; Tulip heals Macavity and Jedburgh; Black unhurt Day 27 (31 Oct, late morning) Black distributes Second Chance amulets to Tulip, Jedburgh, Dross and Kel Day 27 (31 Oct, late morning) Tactics set: illusory soldier line plus lightning kill-line; traps and animal-binding ruled out Day 27 (31 Oct, midday) Second Peryton flight destroyed with no party injuries Day 27 (31 Oct, midday) Third and fourth flights; Tulip crippled and stunned; Black's left hand severed Day 27 (31 Oct, afternoon) Black fights on right-handed; ten Perytons accounted for, two escape south Day 27 (31 Oct, afternoon) Loot searched and found non-magical; iron leg fitted to Corniger; antler breastplate allocated to Jedburgh Day 27 (31 Oct, afternoon) Black drinks the Sardonyx vial; chest wound closed, severed wrist unchanged Day 27 (31 Oct, afternoon) Tabitha's six doses of sleeping dust confirmed finished Day 27 (31 Oct, evening) Commissions placed with the house tailor; Kel's minor-title enquiry refused Day 28 (1 Nov) Ahnenerbe/Klaus Barbie intelligence reaches the party via decrypt (sighting dated 31 Oct, received 1 Nov); Ultima Thule and Coeus briefing; Malta convoy and U-boat movements Day 27 (31 Oct) onward Black recharges the Sardonyx vial over the following days; designs a prosthetic hand; Jedburgh left to heal naturally Some days later Tulip drinks the recharged vial and recovers fully

Session 4: Static on the Line

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Items Acquired Party (shared resources): Balance brought forward: 2,500 sp Balance carried forward: 2,500 sp Session Summary The party had a week at Achnacarry Castle before deployment into France. It opened with an argument over whether Tulip could hold a summoned creature capable of arguing back, and then Dross's rapport with Bethaniel, the castle's archivist, opened her six- or seven-hundred-year-old library and its collection to them. Among the scrolls were three incantations — call lightning, hex, and speech with animals — and Kel explained what an incantation is and what it costs to prepare, Bethaniel giving the scrolls away outright since no local caster could use them. The week itself went on training and craft, with Black building his prosthetic hand one-handed, while Tulip's questions about the district turned up the communist Red Brothers and the two-headed golden eagles. On the morning of 8 November an Ultra transmission reported that Klaus Barbie had moved into Lyon and was personally directing the hunt for everyone connected with the Heckler Line; Kel set about learning to wear his face from a photograph. That afternoon Operation Torch landed at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers, putting Free France under German military occupation, and a second transmission that evening established that Barbie had reached Lyon from Gex by private car, unseen by the resistance's people on the trains. The same transmission carried Diana's last, garbled message: delayed destroying the line's documentation in Lyon, injured, she caught the eleven o'clock train for Perpignan. She never arrived, and Hubert — the guide who holds the map over the Pyrenees — made no contact either, leaving the party with a rendezvous in the Place de la République, a photograph, and an order to kill an unidentified man codenamed Cuthbert; Diana herself was recognised as Virginia Hall. The party then departed by Wellesley bomber, intending to leave it early on Dross's carpet under concealment to avoid the fighters based at Salt Reef, flying out into a windy but unexpectedly clear morning. Chronological Timeline Date Event Day 29 Debate over controlling summoned intelligent creatures; Dross wins over Bethaniel, who opens the castle library Day 29 Three incantation scrolls examined (Call Lightning, Hex, speech with animals); Bethaniel gives them to the party Day 29 Downtime work allocated; Tulip learns of the Red Brothers and the golden eagles Day 29 → 34 Week of training and craft; Black builds his replacement hand Day 35 (morning) Ultra transmission: Barbie in Lyon, personally directing the search for the Heckler Line Day 35 (morning) Kel begins learning Barbie's face from a black-and-white photograph Day 35 (afternoon) Operation Torch lands at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers; Free France placed under German occupation Day 35 (evening) Second transmission: Barbie's untracked move from Gex; Diana's garbled last message; she boards the 11pm train Day 36 (morning) Diana fails to arrive at Perpignan; Hubert makes no contact; briefing, Diana's photograph, and the order on Cuthbert Day 36 (morning) Departure by Wellesley in windy but clear weather; carpet approach planned for the final miles

Session 5: The Far Side of the Room

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Items Acquired Kel: Suitcase of operational funds (250,000 francs) (unpriced) Black: Suitcase of operational funds (250,000 francs) (unpriced) Dross: Suitcase of operational funds (250,000 francs) (unpriced) Jedburgh: Suitcase of operational funds (250,000 francs) (unpriced) Tulip: Suitcase of operational funds (250,000 francs) (unpriced) Balance brought forward: 2,500 sp Balance carried forward: 2,500 sp Session Summary The party's last hour at Achnacarry went on Kel's title letters and the final workings, with Black declining a bird shape in favour of a free-fall landing, before a four-hour flight south in a stripped Wellesley and a bail-out thirty miles short of Perpignan. Black came down alone in farmland and walked two hours into the city, passing a German lorry convoy, a monocled senior officer inspecting fighters at the Rivesaltes airfield, and Wolfram Sievers reading a file in an open touring car. The rest landed in the Parc Saint-Vincennes and established that their contact's real name was Gilbert, not Hubert; reunited, they reached the Place de la République to find it full of Gestapo and Gilbert dead on the cobbles, killed perhaps half an hour before they arrived. Jedburgh read three of five oddly-tied men standing apart from the Gestapo — all human, all recently subjected to a Vril working, the greatest of them a summoner of demonic kings — and Kel talked the party clear of the square as a distressed young woman of good family. From a café near the Courts of Justice they waited out the afternoon on Tabitha's reports, returning to find a chalk outline guarded by three Feldgendarmerie and something left behind by a ritual the Germans had performed over the death site. An illusion of German military police, and orders to march to a hospital across the river, cleared the guards away long enough for Dross to question Gilbert's shade while Jedburgh named Samigina, Marquis of Lost Souls, out of the residue: Gilbert was never the party's contact but Diana's guide over the mountains, and she never came off the last train from Lyon. A finding on her failed, Cuthbert proved to be the name of her wooden leg rather than a man to be killed, and tradecraft pointed at the Hôtel de la Loge, a safe house on the O'Leary escape line. The party took rooms there, broke up the suitcase of francs among themselves and dined extremely well, and Black and Jedburgh alone picked Diana out of the dining room in the disguise of a middle-aged farmer's wife. The session ends with the party still arguing over how to say her name to her without being shot for it, no contact made and no plan agreed. Chronological Timeline Date Event Day 36 (morning) Final preparations at Achnacarry; Kel's title letters sent; forms and workings set; Black elects to free-fall Day 36 (morning) Departure at half past eight by Wellesley under Captain Glendinning; four-hour flight south in a gale Day 36 (midday) Bail-out thirty miles north of Perpignan; lorry convoy and Sievers's touring car spotted from the air Day 36 (midday) Black lands in farmland near Rivesaltes and walks two hours toward the city; monocled officer at the airfield; Sievers passes him on the road Day 36 (early afternoon) Rest of the party lands at the Parc Saint-Vincennes; contact's name corrected from Hubert to Gilbert Day 36 (early afternoon) Party reunites on the road and enters the Place de la République; Gestapo in occupation, Gilbert dead in the square Day 36 (afternoon) Jedburgh assesses the five tie-wearing men; Kel deflects a gendarme and the party withdraws Day 36 (afternoon) Waiting at a café near the Courts of Justice; Tabitha reports at half past three that the square is clear but something lingers Day 36 (afternoon) Return to the square: chalk outline at the death site, guarded by three Feldgendarmerie Day 36 (early evening) Illusion diversion at the shift-change; the real guards are ordered to the hospital across the river Day 36 (early evening) Dross questions Gilbert's shade; Jedburgh names Samigina, Marquis of Lost Souls, from the ritual residue Day 36 (early evening) Finding on Diana fails; Cuthbert identified as her wooden leg; the Hôtel de la Loge deduced as her likely refuge Day 36 (evening) Party checks in, distributes the operational francs, and dines; Black and Jedburgh spot Diana in disguise Day 36 (evening) Debate over how to approach her; session ends with no contact made

Part 2: Over the Mountains

Chapter 13: Men of the Cloth

Something in the Trade

Saint-Marcel is a very long way from Perpignan: something over four hundred kilometres, north-east and a great deal of it uphill. The convoy, on wood alcohol and a third short of its power, will take three days over it. A train does it in eight hours, with a checkpoint at every station and a change at Lyon, the one city on the route where people know Diana's face. Dross asked about the carpet, and the answer was standing outside the window making the shutters bang.

So: the train, first class, every seat in the compartment bought. Six people in a private compartment are not a resistance cell; they are doctors going to a conference. London had sent blank travel papers, and Jedburgh, who can forge, filled them out with the ration cards. Diana found that genuinely shocking, and Dross apologised for us charmingly: these things seem more ordinary to us than they should.

We chose what to be on the rule that one claims only what one could do if asked. Kel is a skilled tailor, so we became a fashion concern. My mechanician's and alchemist's trades will survive any conversation about a refinery, which was better luck than I deserved: a couple of miles up the valley from Saint-Marcel, at Pomblière, there is a hydroelectric station off a waterfall with a strategic reserve of chlorine, cobalt and sodium metal. I would like it recorded that I was extremely pleased about the sodium. Jedburgh, an armourer, can be a metallurgist for the cobalt; his own view was that he is not very good at that. Tulip farms in a region famous for its market gardens and needed no invention. I would be the man from the office who makes the technicians do their jobs, which Kel called the annoying paperwork guy, and which is not, I think, wholly a joke about the disguise.

Diana was the difficulty: too old to pass as anyone's sweetheart, an accent she has never lost, and the limp on every poster in the south. So we made her old: Tulip's aunt, shuffling and disagreeable, and given a stroke so that she is not expected to answer. I offered a wart or two. I was overruled on the warts.

An Ill Wind

The gale came in properly overnight, and by morning nobody in Perpignan was going to work, because you could not walk down a street without leaning into it.

It was the best thing that happened to us all week. The German spotter planes are nimble in the air and a crosswind on landing turns one over. Nothing flew. I said we had planned it well, which was a lie of the most satisfying kind. It also kept the carpet rolled up, and I had no regrets about that.

We watched the trucks go west toward Camp Gurs the next morning, and then went to the station. Kel's illusions cost her; she came out wrung dry and needing a restorative, and Tulip was little better after laying stone in our bones. I raised a wheelchair for Diana, which would have hidden the leg entirely, and I still think it was a good idea.

The journey took most of the day. The cigarettes going round were heavy with Latakia and smelled precisely like burning boot leather. I offered to clear their lungs with a sphere of dark and was told this would waste the point: they were armouring themselves. Jedburgh opened the window.

We came into Lyon about eight. Diana chose a hotel with no connection to any safe house of hers, the San Filippo, a good deal grander than she made it sound. The forged ration cards were accepted without a glance. After the little place in Perpignan it felt like a different war.

A Pocket-Sized Priest

That evening she saw him in the street. The priest, the one she had told me about in her room the night before, walking about Lyon on his own with no more caution than a man going to buy a newspaper.

Kel's ritual for taking a mind properly needs an hour with the subject in the room the whole time, so the shape of it was obvious: get him somewhere private, put him down, make him a mouse, carry him home, and let Kel do her work behind a locked door. I said at the outset that we were not taking death off the table with this one. I want that written down as having been said before we caught him and not after.

Kel had a look inside his head first, and he could not keep her out. He was expecting to be offered drugs. He is a good-looking man of middle years in a gabardine raincoat and a fedora, and has worn nothing priestly for a year, chiefly because he has been conducting affairs with two women at once and the collar was becoming awkward. Dross's suggestion took at the second try. Jedburgh's view was that a venal man alone in a strange city will follow money and women, so we offered both, and walked him into a shabby little bar to discuss something profitable.

Then Dross produced a sachet of something quite wonderful that he really ought to try, and he took a good deep sniff of it, and that was the end of the evening for him. He went into a mouse skin and the mouse into an empty box of Vesta matches, and we walked out with him in a pocket. He woke somewhere on the way and went berserk in there, for all the good it did him.

Lights in His Eyes

We put every lamp in the room behind us so that he would see nothing but light, on the principle that a man who has been questioned by us may one day be questioned about us. The ritual took its hour, and Kel drew it out far past the length it needed, which wears a man down past the point of holding anything back. At the end of it he loved her better than anyone he has ever met and would have told her his mother's sins. She put him on the mind speech so we could all hear.

He has met Virginia Hall. He knows her face, and that is the sharp end of it; Diana needed to hear it from us. He saw her in a street in Lyon and does not know where she sleeps. He got his introduction to her through somebody the Gestapo had already rolled up in Paris, after selling a different group entirely: a cell run by a man named Germain Thion, whom he betrayed wholesale. She found him too curious, exactly as her instinct told her, and burned her documents. He has never stopped looking for her since.

Jedburgh asked whether he had been in contact with Barbie or with Sievers. Barbie, yes. He knows Klaus Barbie personally and walks into Gestapo headquarters in daylight without a change of coat; Barbie's people work out of the Hotel Terminus beside the station. That is worth more than everything else he said. Sievers means nothing to him. Explain the Ahnenerbe to him and he would laugh at you. Dross pointed out that as a mouse he would only squeak.

He is a nobody who found a seam and worked it: a priest's welcome and a good face, and people told him things, and he sold every one to the Germans for money. Not for a cause. Not out of hatred. There is no remorse in him anywhere; I looked. His name is Robert Alesch, and he was famous in his own parish for preaching against the Nazis.

Decided at a Table

Dross wanted to make him forget the whole evening and leave him a mouse until we could find someone willing to unmake him. Kel would have let him go on the street the morning we left.

I said no, and I said why. A man who has spent an hour in a room with us is evidence, whatever he remembers. Their side has occultists too, and we have seen them work a square in Perpignan over a dead man. Jedburgh made the correction that death alone does not close the door: if they know where he died they can still reach him. Then he said plainly that he wanted him dead, which I respect more than a long argument.

Dross fought it, and was right to. He got there himself in the end: this man will produce more death if he lives, the price of preventing it falls on us, and we should take no comfort from it. Kel, who is not sentimental, offered to sit him down for an hour, look into his eyes and fix his morals for him. He declined.

So we killed him in the shape we had caught him in: held by the tail over a sphere of dark and dropped into it. There is nothing left, no body, no grave, no place, nothing for anyone to raise or to question or to bury. The world is made smaller by the size of one mouse. I have killed a great many things in a very long life and I do not usually make a note of it. I have made a note of this one because it was decided at a table, in a warm room, by five people who had eaten well, and because I was the first to say it out loud, and I would say it again, and none of that is the same as its having been easy.

Chapter 14: Nothing to Hide

A Day in Hand

We caught the connecting train the next morning and it took most of the day, chiefly because it climbs.

Saint-Marcel is a hamlet of some eight hundred people in the Alps, with Mont Blanc within twenty miles. The ground is too vertical for farm country, though orchards cling on where they can, and up the valley at Pomblière is one great works that belongs to none of it. It is the end of autumn on the coast. Up here it is bitterly cold, and the weather is famous for turning savage without notice.

We took rooms at a small hotel, still disguised. The convoy, ten trucks perhaps, left after we did and has three days of bad roads in front of it. It is the first time on this whole business that we have arrived anywhere before the thing we came to meet.

Not on Speaking Terms

Kel put the mind speech on Jedburgh and he went up as an eagle for an hour, which taught us more than a week on foot. The station is a modest thing hung off a cataract, but it makes a great deal of current, and everything at Pomblière wants current. They refine cobalt with it and strip chlorine out of salt, and what is left is sodium metal, kept under oil, because sodium and water are not on speaking terms. I remarked that this would be very dangerous fun. Kel remarked that it is the kind of mistake a man only makes once.

A rail spur runs into the plant, ore up from Morocco and products out. From the air the arrangement looked unmistakable: little holdings with fruit trees, and one enormous building off on its own, which is exactly where you put a thing you do not want the neighbours to see. Everything about the place answered itself.

It is guarded by Italian Alpine infantry.

The Wrong Kind of Enemy

That cuts both ways, and the pleasant half came first. The zone is administered by Maurizio Lazzaro di Castiglione, whose writ runs over Savoy and Grenoble, and he has not handed anybody over: not Jews, not Gypsies, not refugees of any kind. His administration simply declines the requests, and this stretch of the Alps is very nearly a safe place. Kel observed that the world is not, then, a complete piece of shit. I observed that this one does not need a matchbox.

The unpleasant half is that these are veteran mountain troops, and a senior officer's uniform that walks a man in anywhere among Germans does nothing with men who are not German. Jedburgh offered us the official motto of the Italian army: who cares who wins. It got the laugh it deserved and did not help.

We had two blunter options: empty a guard's head and walk in on what he knows, or put holes in the works with spheres of dark until it went into the river, which would kill the women being driven up the road towards it as well. Diana cut across both. What she wants most is to know what is being done inside that building. She is right. Jedburgh named the man who can divine over it and knows healing, and a sample of everything goes to the doctor. Our job is to get it: reconnaissance first, crystals of vision on the places worth watching, then in at night, unseen.

Kel said, as we broke up, that I had been right about the mind speech. Dross agreed, at more length than the point required. I said I had been right twice, actually, and let the second go unnamed, because a man who collects his debts too eagerly is not invited to dinner. The trucks are somewhere south of us in the dark, climbing.

A Leg Already Given

Pomblière is a separate place from Saint-Marcel, fewer than five hundred people, two churches, a station and a school so small the older children ride down to Saint-Marcel for lessons. We are lodged in the one; the thing we came for is in the other. Its guards are not the green boys the Germans turn out on three months' training, who are dangerous chiefly to themselves, but veterans: something like two hundred on the plant, a man at every door and gate, four to eight moving about the ground at any time, and no officer on the site after dark. They give the German field police a wide berth. Their commandant, we are told, has no wish to be compromised by peculiar goings-on, by which he means the Nazis, and I would shake his hand if the circumstances were different.

We settled on daylight, which sits oddly until you think about it: at night the place is nothing but guards, and by day it is full of workmen with somewhere to be. Diana stayed behind in Saint-Marcel. There is no photograph of her on any poster in France, but there is a description on every one, and the description is the leg.

So Kel made her a new face, bound down to hold for days. Kel suggested a countrywoman; Diana said she should be a man, and Diana was right, because it solves the leg. A man of that age walking about an Alpine village with a lump of wood below the knee is not a woman in disguise. He is the local cripple, and the wood is the reason he is not in the army with everybody else's sons. Nobody looks twice at a man who has already given a leg.

Thanked for Volunteering

The obvious way into a compound is to walk in unseen, and I learned two things about that which I should have known. The working does not defeat anyone born with the sight, at any degree of talent whatever: a man who has never used the gift and does not know what it is worth will still see five people strolling past his gate. And unseen or not, a man still throws a shadow, and there is snow on the ground here.

The wire is barbed and razor both, with lightning-bolt signs on it. I said those signs are usually a bluff, the sign being cheaper than the current, in the tone of a man who does not intend to test it personally. Cutting was too loud; tunnelling was raised. Jedburgh observed that we have no thief. We have the next best thing, which is me: a knack in my axe finds hidden ways and traps as well as a man who has spent his life at it. It does not pick locks. It has never picked a lock and it is not going to start, and I said so before anybody could get their hopes up.

We settled on Kel's working that keeps a man from being noticed, good for a little over an hour; Tulip's lesser blending over the party, so that if the first lapses we can stand still and be missed; earth on our skins and stone in our bones; Italian guards' faces to fall back on; and the mind speech through us all. My own idea, to reach into the head of whichever man knows what is done there and simply take it, meant opening my mind to many I cannot vouch for, in a country where the other side keeps occultists. I withdrew it. I would rather be talked out of a thing beforehand than proved wrong afterwards.

Then came the question of who goes in, and the answer was one man rather than five, because five of anything is five chances to be seen. Kel looked round for somebody tough enough to survive being caught and named me, and I had about four seconds of feeling useful before somebody observed that Jedburgh can wear another shape altogether, and so could be seen and dismissed. Kel thanked him warmly for volunteering. He had not said anything.

Eighteen Inches

There is a graveyard across the road from the works, and every grave in it is eighteen inches long.

We walked up the road out of Saint-Marcel with the wire on our left to the guard post, a hut, a painted arm and half a dozen men, and went under the arm, and not one of them lifted his head. You are not hiding. You are walking up a public road in daylight past men whose entire employment is to notice people, and they do not notice.

Ten feet beyond the gate, across the road, a plank lashed to a fence that would not keep out a determined goat serves as the cemetery's door. No chapel, no wall, no caretaker; the map calls it by the French for a thing thrown together in haste. The mounds are eighteen inches long, with crosses and not a name on any of them. My first thought was animals, and I heard how thin it sounded while I was still saying it. Men do not lay out rows of crosses for cats on a chemical works in a country at war. The graves are shallow besides, two feet at most, in frozen ground: the burial you use when you are hiding something.

Those of us who can see past the surface of a thing all saw the same: a very faint blue light coming out of the dirt. Tulip saw nothing, which annoyed her considerably, and Dross was a hundred miles away. It was individual grains in the soil, each glowing on its own like a field of stars, unmistakably blue in daylight. Jedburgh asked whether it was the blue that comes off certain modern poisons, and it seems that it was. My guess had been cobalt, but their alloy is stable and does not shine through soil; Tulip said the hospitals use a cobalt that does. Then Jedburgh read one grave properly: a small piece of something lethal, possibly magical into the bargain, which no honest poison has any business being.

Kel's verdict was that we should not dig without very large gloves. Mine was that we should not dig at all today: it is the sort of discovery that swallows an afternoon and gets a party caught. So we left the little crosses where they were, and I have thought about them a great deal since.

A Tour at Second Hand

Jedburgh went over the fence and through the works and sent us what he saw a picture at a time, and I sat behind a picket fence in the cold and was taken on a tour of the most alarming factory I have ever inhabited at second hand.

The chlorine store beside the graveyard announces itself by smell. Up a ramp is the sodium store, doors propped wide open in the middle of winter, and now I understand why: men sweep the snow from the doorway and keep the floor dry, sand and shovels everywhere, because what will kill them is not the metal but water, and the last thing you want is a sealed damp room. Four metric tons of it, in square buckets like so many crucibles. I remarked to no one in particular that I was no longer keen on the place, and I meant it, and I was also delighted, which is a combination I have long since stopped apologising for.

Beyond that the rail spur, a transformer the size of a cottage, offices and a canteen, and the hall where they pull salt apart with electricity: a dozen men in oilskin and glass masks, most of them standing near the doors so as to be first out when it goes wrong, and one or two braver or more junior souls at the dials. Further along, one man sits watch beside four tons of chlorine liquefied under pressure. Everybody's favourite posting, I am sure. Indigo crystals, a crushing shop and a bridge towards the dam made up the rest, and Jedburgh walked between the soldiers with nobody's eye on him.

The Dull Answer

Jedburgh reads an installation the way a man reads a page, and his verdict was the last thing any of us wanted. It is a factory. Not a front, but a genuine, prosperous chemical works, chlorine by the thousand tons, cobalt ore from Morocco once a week. Everything in it is exactly what it appears to be.

And there is nowhere in it to put two hundred people. No locked wing, no cells, no barracks, no stair going down. Kel asked, with the flatness she reserves for these occasions, where the secret laboratory was, the one with the prisoners and the plague. There is not one.

I had been so pleased with myself, picking out the one big building standing apart and declaring it precisely where you put the thing you do not want the neighbours to see. The thing they do not want the neighbours to see is chlorine. Everything about the place answers itself, and every answer is the dull one.

Chapter 15: The Woman on the Mountain

A Bird off a Shield

Having run out of factory, I suggested the line up to the power station, and Jedburgh took his other shape and went to look. The station sits on the cataract above the works and feeds the plant and the little community and nothing else. There is nowhere up there to hide two hundred women either.

What there was, twelve miles off, was an eagle.

He closed to five miles to be sure of it. It is black, properly black, and it has two heads, set out from one another like the blades of an opened pair of shears. I have seen that device on a shield often enough. I had not expected it overhead and alive, and I observed that twelve miles was twelve miles too close. It flew like a bird and not like a person wearing one, but it was not hunting. It was going round and round over one patch of ground, south of Mont Blanc.

We have met two-headed birds before, among the condors. We have met worse: I recall a place where the men had the heads of birds of prey. I said as much, and nobody found it reassuring, which was not the intention.

Blown Like a Fuse

Tulip keeps the crystal of vision Dross bought from Uzi long ago, and Jedburgh, who knew where to point it, used it. He set the view a mile above the middle of the eagle's circuit and looked down, and standing there was a woman. She is enormously large: taller than any man and far broader, short of a hill giant but not by as much as one would like, simply out on her mountain, alone.

Twice he held his nerve. The third time something slipped, and the horror of her came back up the line at him, across twelve miles of air and into the man holding the stone. The crystal burst in his hands. It took what was meant for him, the way a fuse takes a current, and he walked away with his strength in his body and a palmful of grit.

I said we do not like really dangerous things. It got the laugh it deserved. She never noticed him, which is the only comfort available, and I have been chewing on how nearly a man twelve miles away was struck down by the sight of her face. Jedburgh spent an hour divining over the remains of the crystal and got there. It was not a working, not a curse. It was simply her face. A mountain hag, and the mountains are all around us.

Early for Once

Kel put it plainly: either that creature has nothing to do with why we are here, or they are giving the people to her.

Then came a thing that turned the business round, an error I had carried for days unexamined. We had all assumed a steady flow of prisoners to this plant for months. There has been nothing. When they emptied Rivesaltes, some seventeen hundred went to Gurs, and these two hundred are the first and only party sent this way, still a day and a half out on bad roads, guarded by German soldiers with three months of training behind them.

Kel said it: they are not continuing something here, they are going to start something. Or finish one, I said, because I would rather have both possibilities on the table than the comfortable one. We are early, which is not a position I have often occupied, and whatever is in those eighteen-inch graves went into the ground before any of this began.

Picked at the Gate

Kel can be shown what follows if we choose a particular course, and she spent it on this: what do we see standing at the convoy's stop for the night? What she saw was orderly and made my skin crawl. The trucks are driven into covered warehouses and the doors shut. Food is passed out. Nobody is let down, counted or split up.

And every one of them is a woman.

Jedburgh asked their age. They are young, all of an age to bear children, out of a camp that held every kind of person, and somebody stood at that gate and picked out two hundred of exactly that description. Kel said it felt like a hag thing. I said perhaps they are making more hags. Tulip said perhaps they only want the babies. The laughter did not last, and I will not set down the worst of what was said. What I did say, and stand by, is that we do not need more hags running about the world.

We have no evidence, and I admit it plainly. What we have is that we have looked everywhere else, that somebody selected two hundred wombs and is driving them towards a place with a hag standing twelve miles off it, and that the two-headed bird between is almost certainly hers. That is circumstantial, and it is strong.

Blindfold Measures

So I said I was of a mind to deal with the hag first, and to my surprise nobody talked me out of it. Kel was leaning the same way. Tulip would rather learn the ground first, is probably right, and agreed anyway. Jedburgh thinks it will be exciting. We have under thirty hours before the trucks reach Pomblière.

Looking at her face takes the strength out of a man's body, enough to put most men on the ground; hold your nerve and it still leaves you weak as a child. Ordinary glass may shatter in your hand; only a mirror ground for gorgons can be relied on, and we have none. There is no counterspell. There is a tincture of aconite and passionflower, and I named it, and then had to admit in front of everybody that I do not have the formula. It is a herbalist's preparation and I am an alchemist, which is precisely the sort of distinction that sounds like an excuse and is not one. It will be higher on my list tomorrow.

A quarter of an hour of desperate ingenuity followed: fight in the dark; a sack over her head; blind ourselves outright, proposed as a joke and examined seriously for slightly too long. My own, which I still think best, is a bandage wound so that a man sees shapes and no detail. Kel has scrolls of a phantasm that might take her out of our heads at a distance; Tulip will put stone in our bones so that a man stripped of strength does not fold up; and of our remnants, Facade is the most promising. Tulip asked whether Corniger would be affected. Nobody knew.

There was much volunteering of other people to go first. I said I would go last. Kel said, with real pleasure, that we are doing the dangerous thing next, and that is what I shall lie awake on: the trucks grinding up a valley road with two hundred women inside, a very large woman walking her mountain with an eagle overhead, and our decision to meet the second one first.

Four Deaths and a Star

Dross is back with us, and so are his cards. A reading answers one question only, so we spent the better part of an hour on the question. Jedburgh argued against yes or no: ask how, and even a vague answer gives you something to stand on. When Dross read the wording back he had put the word "here" in it, the women prisoners being transferred here, and I stopped him, because we do not actually know that they are coming here. That was the whole of my contribution and I am glad I made it.

Reading forward is close to a coin's toss by daylight. The first attempt failed by a hair, and he observed with sour precision that in full night it would have carried. He laid them again. Four Death cards came off the deck in succession, which drew some comment around the fire, most of it Jedburgh announcing that he was leaving, and every one of us decided on the instant that they were about her rather than about us. I said so in the voice of a man who believes it. Then came the answer: the Star, reversed.

The Star is a kneeling woman pouring water from one vessel into another. Upright it means hope; reversed, despair and faithlessness. Dross asked what the reversal meant against his question. It means she is in it. Not adjacent to it: in it. It has to do with potions, and with something reproductively perverse, which is very probably why the business calls for a hag at all. We went into the evening with two hundred women on a road and a woman on a mountain and nothing tying them together, and came out of it with the tie made.

The rest was speculation. Kel wondered, from the Uranus on the card, whether something transuranian is being poured into the women; I said that seemed a little bit literal. My guess was flesh pots breeding soldiers. Dross's was uglier: that she prepares the unborn thing elsewhere and puts it perversely into the woman. None of that is knowledge. What is knowledge is that she is part of it, and that she has to die.

By a Wide Margin

The numbers, once straight, are worse than I had them. Ten trucks are coming from Rivesaltes to Saint-Marcel; some forty went the other way, by Camp de Gurs; and a place called Moûtiers, not far from us, keeps coming into the reckoning. Kel put the escort at forty to fifty. That killed the rescue as an opening move, on arithmetic rather than nerve: Kel would need an hour's hold over that many minds, and nobody is going to give her an hour. Tulip said it first: take the hag out first.

I made the case and Jedburgh finished it. Free the women and they will do the same again next month, because in fifty millions across occupied France, Germany and the Netherlands, two hundred young women of the right age are nothing to find. There is one of her, and such a creature is not the sort of thing one advertises for. She is the harder thing to replace by an enormous margin, and Dross added that she is also the less innocent.

So it is the hag first, and I have written that down because I want to be able to look at it later. Two hundred people will spend the next two days in the backs of those trucks while we walk the other way, and the reasoning is sound, and I do not much like being the man who finds it sound.

Simple, Really

Hags are hybrids of two bloodlines, the commonest first half human. Somewhere there exists precisely one hag that is pleasant company, and it is not this one. They keep covens, which is a word I would rather not have heard, since the thing we call up may not arrive alone.

We had her face wrong in a way that mattered. Holding your nerve still costs you, and sooner or later a man fails, but the whole toll is the same whether you fight it or not; fighting merely spreads the payment out and buys time. And it is once. Once is quite enough: a man emptied out folds up where he stands, though a man with any scrap of himself left can still work magic, which matters a great deal to three of us.

A second round of ingenuity was better informed and not much more encouraging. A silhouette laid over her lets through only workings that need you looking at her face. Looking through a familiar's eyes, both of you take it, and Dross refused at once to spend Tabitha that way. Rose-tinted spectacles got the laugh they were fishing for. I suggested darkness that begins six feet up with only her head in it, and nobody dismissed that outright. Fighting blind is a poor trade against something seven or eight feet tall.

Dross floated the idea that she might be the nice kind of hag, duped, and could be talked out of it. I said that we do not negotiate, Jedburgh said not with terrorists, and I invited Dross to try it and report back. Kel suggested inviting her to tea, and the evening went by way of a Misunderstood Hags Rehabilitation Society. My own summary, offered in all seriousness, was that we need to kill her without being hit by the thing that takes your strength away, which is really very simple. Don't ask me how. Dross said it was a fantastic plan and he wished he had thought of it.

An Invitation She Cannot Refuse

I had assumed we would have to go and find her. Then Dross asked, in his flat way, whether a hag counts as an enchanted creature. She does, and Dross can call an enchanted creature to him. Kel's face, when this landed, was a thing worth the journey.

We must be within six miles of her, and night and empty country favour the calling. She comes under her own power, in under ten minutes and perhaps in one, uncontrolled, which is to say furious and free, and perhaps not alone. But we do not have to find her or fight her where she chooses. We pick the ground, prepare it at leisure, and send for her. Kel summed it up: build a fighting point and dump wards all round it.

I suggested a few German soldiers gagged and staked out round the perimeter as an early warning. I was reminded that the soldiers available locally are Italian. That is precisely why I said German. The matter was left where it lay.

Kel shared out her kit: two scrolls of phantasm each to Dross and Tulip, and waters of strength to the fighters and to Dross, who intends to go on casting from flat on his back regardless. Kel offered me the strongest. I said I am strong enough already and that Jedburgh needs it more, and that is where it went.

Chapter 16: Preparing the Ground

A Matter of College

We left about five in the afternoon. Night falls here at twenty to six, which is nonsense, and it is nonsense because the occupiers have put the country onto their own clocks. Most of us can see in the dark after one fashion or another, though Tulip cannot, and mine reaches furthest, something under sixty yards.

It comes at a price I had never thought about. Blackness leaks out of my eyes when I use it, plainly visible to every one of my companions, and none of them had mentioned it until now. Tulip announced that the rest of them are not evil and do not have blackness dripping out of their eyes. I said she was casting aspersions. Kel said one should not judge a man by his college, which from a mind mage is quite something. I pointed out that at least I have not got tentacles, tentacles being Tyndalos's affair and not mine, and we went on into the mountains, at a third of a road's pace, the climb and the sub-zero wind pulling the strength out of us by the hour.

The Wrong Month for a Bear

Jedburgh took the shape of a brown bear for the march, and it was perhaps four minutes before we discovered what is wrong with being a brown bear in November. The beast should be fattening for hibernation, and the thing that tells it it has eaten enough stops working. Jedburgh's bear had packed none of that away, so the hunger came on it at once, and the nearest somethings to eat were us. I said, helpfully, that perhaps he ought not to be a bear. It was a little late.

It went for Dross, who apparently smells particularly appetising. He got one clean thrust in with Heartdrinker, and then it had him, opening him up through heavy furs and taking very nearly everything he had. I went in and got hold of it. I am the stronger by a little, and a little was enough: I held it so that it could not swing properly while Dross hit it, and when it turned to have me instead it could not reach me once. That was the only pleasant part of the evening.

Kel's working slid off its mind twice, Jedburgh's own resistance answering for the bear, which struck her as deeply unfair. Tulip laid a troll's hide over Dross and he got loose. What finished it was Tabitha, Dross's small quiet familiar, who put the bear to sleep for six hours. Kel healed Dross, and wanted to leave illusions of the four of us lying dead round Jedburgh for when he came round; it was put to her that a party is remembered for that sort of prank, and not in a good way. He woke on his own, thoroughly disgusted with himself: the better part of a year's work in that shape, and he should have gone for a dog. November, we all agreed, is the wrong month to be a bear.

By the Snowline

We struck a ridgeline running north-west that you can follow in the dark, snow on its caps and the moon coming off it, a white line across black country, to within four miles of where we saw her. It was eight hours of walking, counting the bear. Dross carried Tabitha the last stretch tucked under one arm like a lady's handbag dog, which provoked Jedburgh into remarks about a fallen wolf carried about by his primate, and about evolution. Tabitha, who had just saved the lot of us, looked winsome and wagged her tail.

We made camp at two in the morning. There was a muddle about the date, which I settled by counting backwards: we saw her yesterday, so today is the eleventh of November. That gives us two and a half days before the trucks arrive, not the thirty hours I had been carrying in my head. I should be glad of it. I find instead that I distrust any reprieve that arrives by arithmetic.

A Shadow, Twice

Jedburgh put up walls of stone and tunnelled into the slope behind them; Tulip set smoking magma underneath, an outrageous way to heat a bivouac that works beautifully, and made a meal and a restorative tea. Kel hid it all under illusory ground five-and-forty feet across, and spent her look ahead on the night we were about to sleep through.

What she saw was nothing, except a moon shadow crossing our campsite, twice. Tulip put the obvious into words: eagles do not fly at night. So it is something else, and we have no means of finding out, and I lay in a stone hut with magma under the floor, listening to the wind, four miles from a thing whose face burst a crystal at twelve.

Fish Out of Water

We spent the next day building the trap, and it is an elegant one. Kel laid wards round the camp, each a circle some thirty feet across waiting on the hag entering it. Hers are transmutations: if she cannot throw the working off she becomes an enormous tuna flapping about on a mountainside in November, and we kill her at our leisure. Dross's wards between them simply hurt what walks in, less spectacular and rather more reliable, since a thing being hurt finds it hard to hold its own magic. The two kinds went down like a chequerboard, so that whatever line she takes she must cross several.

A ward takes an hour's labour and nothing else out of the one laying it, which Dross frankly disbelieved and checked twice. Seven of his took, starting on the north-west side where she will most likely come; one would not, and he left it at seven rather than push his luck. Jedburgh went round hiding the scuffing, observing that it is not as though the hag will not know.

Jedburgh will take her with sword and shield. Tulip will throw up walls of stone to funnel her, with magma under the floor, needing to see only the ground. Kel will sit at the back dropping phantasms on her. Tulip's raven watches the daylight sky for the two-headed eagle.

No Blinkers Needed

My own part I asked to have arranged specially: a patch of illusory ground off to one side, where Corniger and I can stand unseen, so that I can come at her from outside the ring at a gallop. A charge wants room.

I also asked, rather pleased with myself, for blinkers for Corniger. That answered Tulip's question: they are unnecessary, because what her face does cannot touch what is not human. If it could, birds would be dropping out of the sky over that mountain, and Kel pointed out that there would be a trail of dead animals wherever she walked, which there is not.

So Corniger goes in with his eyes open, and I am relieved, and I have also had to listen to a good deal about how he will probably find her attractive. He has looked at me every day for years without complaint. I dare say he can manage one hag.

Water Above the Valley

A stream runs past the camp, ten feet across at its narrowest, where a man could jump it. It comes down into the cataract, and the cataract turns the dam at Pomblière and lights the chlorine works. A very great deal of water stands above a very great many people in this valley, and I noted where it stands, and I am going to say nothing further about it.

We ran out of daylight before we ran out of preparations, and the calling waited on the dark. Dross offered to work a blessing on the unborn child and a draught of virility, the party having decided that my contribution is to be an immaculate conception, and Kel said she looks forward to my virgin birth next week. They can have their joke. What we are actually proposing is to ask a thing to walk into our camp, a thing tied in some way we do not understand to two hundred women on a road, that may bring its sisters, and then stand inside a ring we drew ourselves and wait for it.

Cheated by a Draught

The last argument was about counterspells: two minutes of disagreement and twenty of everybody agreeing at length. Jedburgh is a Namer and can hold the party's protections and change them as the fight changes, so he took them all, with two of the Wiccan protections running at once over us, our resistance to her magic higher than I have ever carried into a fight. If she threw fire and even one of us set himself squarely against it, the likeliest outcome was that she blew herself up with it. I resolved to spend the fight bracing against everything she did and hitting nothing at all, which is not how I usually earn my keep.

Jedburgh raised the bear again and was told again, patiently, that it is November. Tulip turned a knob on her staff and put out an iron rhinoceros, a black metal thing four times the size of a horse that carries half a ton, understands anything said to it, and has no name yet, since she means to take votes. Then the staff itself became a python, thirty-odd feet of it, judged to have no business on a mountainside in November until somebody worked out that it could ride on the rhinoceros and keep warm.

Kel put a suggestion into all our heads not to look at the creature's face, which cost us much of our aim in exchange for not being emptied where we stood. Her instruction to the fighters was to stare at her chest instead. I observed that one would want the central one, obviously, for targeting. We drank the waters of strength, and none of them did anything much, and I have never seen five people so uniformly cheated by a draught. Jedburgh worked a banishment over himself as strong as any he has managed. Then there was nothing left to do but send for her.

Chapter 17: The Toss of a Coin

Two Minutes' Notice

She was on the mountain with us for rather less time than it takes to boil a kettle, and she never spoke one word, and on her way out she very nearly buried the five of us under the whole north slope.

Kel had put a crowd of motionless illusions out in the open where anything arriving would see them first: brave adventurers standing about on a mountainside in the dark with no cover whatever, which is exactly what a hag would expect of us. She made a second Kel besides, walking about and entirely hollow, and took herself out of sight. The rest of us lay under her false ground with our thoughts strung together, and I had Corniger off to the side with a clear run at whatever came in.

Dross asked whether everybody was ready. Nobody said no, which is not the same thing. He called her, and it took on the first attempt. She would be with us in a little over two minutes. Two minutes is not enough time to gather sisters, and I said as much, and Dross said yes, and neither of us said the other half of it, which is that two minutes is also not enough time for us to change our minds.

Thunder Coming

She came into sight about fifty yards out. Bluish-grey, in ordinary old woman's clothes, which is somehow worse than the alternative. I kept my eyes off her face and found I had been looking the wrong way in any case, and was glad of it.

Dross heard it first: thunder, a long way up and getting nearer. She had begun before she reached us. Kel named it, a storm calling worked as an incantation, and Dross knew it from its book but never learned it, because it wants fulminating gold. Kel pointed out, cheerfully, that if we survived the next few minutes there would be some gold on the corpse.

The storm would build the whole time we fought, and when it arrived it would put lightning down on us every few seconds. I said it was unfair, lightning against armoured people, because it is true and because somebody has to say something at that point. Then she started down the slope and the conversation ended.

One Breath

Ground that would have had me on hands and knees she crossed at the pace of a man walking a lawn, covering more of the hillside in each stride than the eye said she should. Jedburgh muttered something about the stride of a hill giant. It was about right.

Jedburgh went first, with a working laid over her ground to close her magic down. He asked whether he might draw on the mountains to press it, on the grounds that he was casting on a mountain, while standing on a mountain, in the mountains, and he was allowed it. It made no difference. The thing failed by a hair, and after that our protection against her was whatever we had brought with us.

Then she answered with one working, tripled. Every phantasm we had put out, Kel's, Dross's, Tulip's, two scrolls and much preparation, was gone in the one breath, and Kel worked out afterwards that what that breath carried would have killed any one of us several times over. Jedburgh said that is what happens when you take a fighter to a magic fight. I said something less useful. Only the static illusions survived, because they stood too far out, which was luck and not foresight.

Worth Looking At

So I made myself worth looking at. I took Corniger out onto the open slope and did my best to look unthreatening, which on a great winged horse with six illusory copies of us both is a tall order. I believe I whistled. Kel told me not to charge, since she would simply stand off and keep throwing, and she was right, and it is a poor sort of fighting where the best you can do is stand about being visible.

She did not take it. She moved a few paces, unhurried, and sank into the stone of the mountainside and was gone.

That was when the fight turned, though none of us knew it. Tulip put seven hands of earth up all round and over the place she had gone in, leaving one gap for Corniger and one for the rhinoceros. Dross held his own silencing working over the same patch, hidden. And I brought up a dark sphere and held it. I wanted it in the rock seven feet behind her, so that her only way out was forward into the rhinoceros, and was told, reasonably, that it goes in a straight line from me. So I aimed at the last place I had seen her, and waited.

Heads You Lose

She moved a short way inside the stone. She had no way of knowing what we had laid over her, and no reason to come up in one place rather than another, and it came down to a coin's toss.

She surfaced inside Dross's working.

I have thought about that a good deal since. Everything we did that night was careful, and the careful things bought us the chance for one stupid piece of luck to happen, and then it happened. She had a spell ready, and the moment she came up she knew she could not let it go, and she abandoned it. In the same breath Kel's phantasm hurt her, a small hurt by her standards, and because it worked on what she believed, what she actually experienced was a kitten pulling her knitting apart. That is the only part of the evening I would want to see again.

She would have to step out of the stone to do anything. She never got the chance. I had been holding my moment, and I spent it then and put the dark sphere into her while she was still inside the rock. It took her head, all of it, and everything she was wearing on it, which by the reckoning of those of us who had been hoping to loot her was a serious loss. I said it was a price I was willing to pay. She was dead before the stone had finished closing round her.

Building Her a Redoubt

Between what Kel and Dross know of her kind and what the body told us, we put together what we had been fighting, and I set it down for when I am next feeling pleased with myself. The thing in her hand was a talisman giving her earth magic at a mastery none of us can touch: the melting into stone, the tremors. She had two colleges besides. Her body weighed what four strong men weigh, with claws and a grip that crushes; had she closed with any of us it would not have been a fight, it would have been an accident. She had an unseeing ready for when she came out of the rock. And she was proof against any working that moves a thing, reshapes it, or puts it on its back.

So Tulip's seven hands of earth would never have held her for a heartbeat. They would have stood round her like armour. We had spent our best restraint building her a redoubt.

She also knew where every one of us stood, because in mountains her kind feel anything that moves on the ground within a mile. Our concealment hid only which shapes were worth her attention, and that was enough. The one she could not feel was the one in the air, and the one in the air is the one who killed her. Nobody took a scratch. Given the rest of it, that is not a victory so much as a reprieve.

Under the Slide

Tulip chipped her out of the rock, slow going because she was heavy as ore, and had barely freed the body when the mountain above us let go. The old woman had shaken the snow loose on her way down, and it arrived off the north slope as a wall of ice with the noise of a train. So she had the last word after all, and had it without saying anything.

Jedburgh took the eagle and went straight up, and was clear before the rest of us had finished thinking about it. I went the same way on Corniger, who got us above it comfortably. Everybody else piled into Tulip's tunnel with the iron rhinoceros in its mouth like a cork, and the lot went under thirty-odd feet of snow and ice. Nobody was hurt, which I did not expect, and the rhinoceros set about shifting it.

All Perfectly Comfortable

There is a particular kind of idiot cheerfulness that comes over me after a fight I expected to lose. I looked round the mountainside from the air, saw nothing, and told the buried remainder of the party that there was nothing whatever to worry about and that they should all be perfectly comfortable. Kel, from under thirty feet of snow, replied that her sense for when something is wrong was going off, and that she would keep a watch regardless of my opinion. I let her have it. I had just told everyone all was well while standing over a headless corpse in an avalanche field.

Within a minute or two Corniger saw the two-headed eagle going north, hard. Dross said the obvious thing, that enchanted things can be called. The bird was seven miles out, a mile beyond his reach. It felt him anyway. It knew perfectly well that something had been laid on it, and it dropped out of the sky to the ground and stayed there.

So now it knows. Tulip hopes it may be loose of whatever held it, with the old woman dead; that is a guess. Mine is that it was running from the storm, which is at least a reason a bird would have. Either way it is the second thing this week to go over our heads and away without explaining itself.

A Spare Coat

Then there was nothing to do but wait for a metal rhinoceros to shovel us out, and men who have just survived something fill that hour with schemes: Jedburgh's flaming glaive, magma under the ice until somebody mentioned the steam, and my offer to dig with the ebon hand, met by Tulip asking where exactly I proposed to put the snow. It took about two hours, and would have taken about two hours whatever any of us did.

Somewhere in there Jedburgh mentioned, in the tone of a man remembering he has a spare coat, that he has people. He came by them out of a book he took from the Library of Leng, which is a sentence I have learned to let pass without comment. There is a Frenchman called Pierre, a demolitions man, and an American, a Navajo he thinks, who is a Marxist and an assassin, in that order or the reverse. Jedburgh can change places with them. He has never done it, and raised it chiefly because a quantity of gelignite and a man who knows what to do with it would be pleasant, which is a fair description of our next problem as well as our present one. I made a note to ask more about this when we are not buried.

Chapter 18: Breeder Reactors

His Dog's Name

We got out, and while I was still above the slope on Corniger a young man came up out of the valley to look at the avalanche, with a rucksack, an alpenstock and an enormous St Bernard, picking about the edge of the slide like a man who has seen a few. Then he looked up and saw a man sitting on a flying horse, and stopped dead. I waved at him in a friendly fashion. Jedburgh sat on a branch in his eagle shape, being, I am told, unusually poor at pretending to be an eagle.

He spoke passable English, and I told him I had been out for a night ride because I could not sleep, had got lost, and had come to see if anybody needed digging out. He observed that there is a war on and that I was on the other side of it. I said that hardly signified up here, and he let it go, because at bottom he wanted to talk to somebody.

So: about twenty-three, Swiss, lesser aristocracy, with a degree in chemical engineering he never wanted. He works for a bank near the border as its man in the valley, watching the factory's finances, and he hates it. What he cares about is mountains: the Eiger, though he knows what the Eiger does to people, and Mallory, and the Himalayas more than anything. He was on his way to a great cross above the valley when the mountain came down and turned him aside.

I have all of that. I do not have his name. I came away from twenty minutes of talk knowing that his dog is called Schwaefel and is a red and white St Bernard, which is apparently an unfashionable colour. I have his dog's name and not his. That is the sort of interview I conduct.

Money from Nowhere

I tried a lie first. I told him there was a rumour in the town that the people at the dam were doing research, biology, disease, and watched him. There is no such rumour; I invented it standing there. He said good God, and meant it, and I am reasonably confident that whatever is done at the Usine de Pomblière is not done where its banker can see it.

What he gave me instead was better, and unasked. The factory never asks the bank for money. When it needs a sum, it simply has it, from somewhere it will not name; the money, he said, just magically appears, and he had lately started to wonder about it. I told him not to wonder, in the voice I keep for this, quiet and pleasant and not pleasant at all: given what I have seen of the people they work for, too many questions may mean he never sees his family again. Just my friendly advice. He went rather quiet.

I had already made a mess of the other approach, telling him he seemed built for adventure and that the career I had in mind was a long one, hundreds of years, possibly thousands, which I had neglected to mention at the outset. He turned it down on account of his family, kindly, in the way one humours a madman on a mountain. Jedburgh observed that this is our best protection: nobody reports a flying horse and an Englishman offering immortality without being locked up. I gave him a bottle of claret for the walk down, and something about that transaction pleased me more than it should have. He is going down to Moûtiers to report the avalanche, and I said we might pop by tomorrow.

I watched him go. We leave a headless thing in the snow and a chequerboard of wards on empty ground, and the storm she called is still building above all of it, and does not care in the least that she is dead.

A Walk for Nothing

It is a peculiar sort of day that begins with an old woman's handbag and ends with the exact coordinates of six places where people are killed for a living. Killing her had bought us nothing if we could not find the hole she lived in, and things that walk leave a trail.

But she cut hard across the diagonal over ground that should have slowed her, and Tulip, the best of us at tracking once her spell and her companion Sienna are counted in, led the whole party a pleasant stroll over empty mountainside to nothing whatever. Dross observed that we had been promised a witch's cottage and given a walk.

Dressed for the Occasion

Then somebody pointed out that we had never properly gone through her. The blackthorn stick, a wand in her hand and a walking stick in mine, is the talisman she died holding. Round her neck was the necklace I broke, with the usual amulets and one stone of a vague pinkish-purple. Two rings, gold and blue metal, neither of which will go on a human finger without a jeweller first; I offered my training as a goldsmith and it was accepted with less enthusiasm than I thought it deserved. The gold ring reads as defensive and the blue as an enhancer of some natural process nobody has named. Her black metal boots are dimensional, which explains the zig-zag and does not make me feel better about it.

Her red leather reticule held worse: three skins, folded, each with its clothes, a girl of six in little red shoes and a red hooded coat, a schoolmistress in a grey suit, and an older man got up as a farmer, reusable, with a magic that strips the wearer out and keeps the disguise. Everybody said how appalling it was, and everybody then made quite sure we were taking them. I observed that one must dress appropriately for the occasion and got the look I had earned. There was a tarot deck besides, seventy-eight cards that ought not to be magical and are, which Dross kept.

Last, her womb was not empty. The child in it is near term, alive, and will sleep a century if nobody wakes it; and hags have been known to throw such a thing into an enemy, after which it rends its way out of whoever received it. There followed a silence while everybody worked out that somebody would have to carry it. The Hordling declined absolutely: he was not going to be pregnant if it went off, he was not going to eat it, and there are limits. So I took it, and made certain it stays asleep. I am aware of how this reads.

Five Short Answers

Dross tried to call the two-headed eagle again and nothing came; it is beyond his reach, and he was grey afterwards and short with people, which is not like him. Jedburgh tried the trail by a first-quarter moon and failed too.

So we asked her. Dross gets five short answers from the dead and no more, so we spent longer composing the questions than the ritual took. I held things up for some minutes arguing whether a hag counts as a person for the purposes of the first one, which I maintain was a fair point and which the rest of the party maintains I would have died defending. How many others in your coven: none. Where is your base: uphill. What landmark is nearest: La Croix de l'Alpe. What protects it: concealment. And what do you do for the Nazis: breeder reactors.

That last sat badly with everybody. Kel asked, a little later, where the breeding women were meant to fit into it, and I said what I believe to be the truth: that the two hundred coming up the valley are the answer to that question, and that the same word has been doing two jobs all along.

Over the Top

La Croix de l'Alpe is a great cross on a small peak north-east of us, above the Isère, in a place they call the hill of beautiful shadows, two thousand feet up, three hours of climbing for men on foot, and we are not men on foot. We went up a little after nine, in the dark, Dross taking us slowly over the forest while Kel cast her mind ahead. What she found was an absence: a cleft north of the cross between two bare eroded chunks of mountain, where no animal hangs about at all in country that ought to be thick with them. An absence is a better mark than a presence, and she was entitled to be pleased with herself.

In the crumbled rock were the imprints of enormous fingers and boots, and beyond them a long serpentine crack running back into the mountain. Jedburgh went at it with a ten-foot pole, which looks ridiculous and has kept more people alive than valour has. Kel looked ahead at herself walking into the ravine, narrating the stupid human pottering about looking for a door, and saw the cleft shake, stone come down, and herself dead at the bottom. She reported this cheerfully. I have never got used to that. A ward over the whole approach, triggered by weight on the ground, and we were alive only because we had come in through the air. A clever precaution is only clever against the thing it imagines.

It had to be unmade, which is Jedburgh's trade: an hour of steady ritual while the rest of us sat in the cold. Tulip made tea, which is not a small thing. Then Kel looked ahead again and saw no ward at all, which is the only proof one gets of that sort of work.

Through Proper Channels

My kit gives me a thief's eyes, and I found the way in short order: a crack in what looks exactly like one of the granite blocks that lie about these mountains, not even a door, invisible unless you know what you are looking for. It was draped with a tarpaulin, and the tarpaulin is the most interesting thing we found all night: plain canvas, an alpine camouflage sheet made by the Italian Army. Jedburgh said such things are two a penny in wartime, and he is right, and he is also missing the point. Somebody with quartermasters and requisition forms was supplying an eight-foot hag in a hole in a mountain.

Inside it is immaculate. Not tidy for a monster: tidy. It is an office, with a hag-sized scribe's desk shaped out of the granite and dip pens laid out on it, the desk of a person who writes longhand all day. Filing cabinets. Behind a curtain a stone bed, a kitchen, and an alchemical laboratory open to the air, all bound out of the earth rather than cut, and beautiful. I picked the cabinet. Inside, papers, all German, all handwritten in the hand of the country and the period. I speak German. I cannot read a word of it.

Tulip went through the laboratory stores: mineral poisons, one slow and agonising with no quick cure, and samples of a metal that glows blue and harms a man by being near him. I suggested somebody show the Hordling which of them were poisonous. He had already worked it out and was eating them. It was, from his point of view, a birthday.

Then I went through the workroom as an alchemist, and spent a great deal of the good fortune I hoard for emergencies. It bought two things. The pinkish stone has a little pitchblende in it and flares near that blue-metal decay, a poor detector, since by the time you see the glow you have had the dose, and I am keeping it anyway. And it bought the mews: a stable open to the sky, with two horse-sized troughs set seven feet up on opposite walls. What went into them was sheep, and what else went into them was described to us as slow children, and I set that down without comment because I do not trust myself to make one. Among the giant pole arms nearby there is a lance. A lance means she rode; troughs that far apart mean the thing she rode had two heads. I am fairly sure it is not an eagle and never was. Tulip said she would like one as a pet.

Out of Order

There were maps in the office: one in German, one in something close enough to German that I could tell it was not German and get no further, and two or three others, one local and French. Tulip said roll them up and take the lot, which was plainly right. Kel said take the whole cabinet, because much of what such a haul is worth lies in the order somebody else put it in. I have carried filing cabinets before. They are ungainly things, and you cannot see your feet past them.

I struck it against the rock wall on the way out and it came apart in my hands, and the contents went out across the gorge in the dark. Kel did not say anything. She looked at me with her disappointed face, which is worse, and told Dross there would be no treats. Everyone but Tulip got a decent share back from the cold wind; she came up empty and looked as sick about it as I felt. We have most of it, out of order, some wet, some gone. I proposed a story in which the papers were moved to a haversack and jiggled about in transit. Nobody believed a word of it, and I would like it on the record that it was not deliberate.

It was around ten when we came down, the hour when only fools and radio operators are awake. Jedburgh raised calling on the Swiss banker again, who seemed the sort to open his door at any hour to anyone with schnapps. I said no: Diana can begin reading tonight, and calling on him again buys us nothing. So we went down to Moûtiers, where we are lodged now, and to Diana.

Chapter 19: Night Work

Six Points of a Star

Diana let us in and took the whole miserable armful without complaint. She has French, German, English and Italian, and under any other circumstances would have had it sorted by dawn. As it was she made slow, bad work of it, and none of the fault was hers. I do not think she said anything about how it came to be in that condition. She did not need to.

The map that was nearly German is Polish. She read the names off it: Che?mno, Be??ec, Sobibór, Majdanek, Treblinka and Auschwitz. Those are not work camps, and she made the distinction. In a work camp a great many people die incidentally; these are built for killing people already marked to be killed, and the killing is done the way a factory does a thing. Auschwitz began as the other kind and was converted this year. I asked the significance of the map being in Polish and was told, reasonably, that they are all in Poland, and that the real question is why an old woman in the Alps had them written down at all.

Every one but Majdanek has an arrow beside it and coordinates to four places of decimals. Jedburgh said the word before I did: six points is a hexagon, or a six-pointed star. Dross said the thing none of us wanted said first, that death in those quantities may be the point rather than the consequence, sacrificial, arranged to raise power or call something. I asked whether they are building a summoning circle out of camps and got no answer, because there is not one to be had. Majdanek's blank may mean unfinished, or nothing at all. We have no astrologer. I am going to learn astrology.

Sixteen Miles at a Stride

The French map is a different shape and may be a worse one: a chain of marks, each about sixteen miles from the last, beginning at a place called Tarascon, and running up the country to finish near Moûtiers. There are two towns of that name, which will need sorting out.

Jedburgh's reading is that it is a chain of stepping points, sixteen miles at a stride, a point teleport or an earth door repeated the length of France. The last mark on it is the lair we had just robbed. The next one back is about ten miles further west, down in the Tarentaise valley below us, and we have never been there, and nobody has any idea what is sitting in it.

Wine for the SS

While Diana worked we all helped with the sorting, and it was Tulip and I who put our hands on the same sheet at the same moment. There was a photograph clipped to it, and the photograph was the pleasant young man from the avalanche.

His name is Heinrich von Kleist. He is a member of the SS, seconded to the Ahnenerbe on a project to defeat the Russian war effort at Stalingrad, and his actual work, the thing he goes down the valley to do, is to coordinate with the Usine de Pomblière on the production of cobalt sixty breeders. So the hag's last answer and the banker's day job are the same sentence read from two ends. Kel said he had seemed such a nice man. Tulip said, with feeling, that we could have interrogated him and would now know everything. And I sat thinking that it has taken a stolen filing cabinet and a woman reading German at midnight to make the introduction I failed to make myself. Diana knew the family: an old Prussian house, military almost to a man, and he is certainly noble, which I also failed to notice. Several of them, this one among them, have given indications of supporting the Allies, some mixed up in Operation Spark. It is not nothing, and it is not much, and I am not inclined to gamble the party on it.

The worse realisation came a moment later. He did not only see me on my flying horse. He saw all of us coming up out of a hole in the snow behind an iron rhinoceros four times the size of a horse, which is not a thing a trained intelligence officer forgets to put in his report. So the disguises go: mine, a vintner, is worth nothing now, Corniger is a permanent giveaway, and Kel will change the lot of us. Diana should move too, because being right about this sort of thing after the fact is no use to anybody.

I also gave that man a bottle of my claret. Kel has written in her notes that Black gives wine to Nazis, Tulip amended it to SS officers, and the pair of them will be insufferable for a month. I intend to make him a very dead man at the earliest convenient opportunity.

Mice, for Want of Better

The rest of the night went on plans. Jedburgh's instinct was to blow the dam, which was mine too, and the dam is too small to be worth it. The factory is another matter, full of sodium and chlorine, and a man could do it over very badly with Jedburgh's Frenchman Pierre and a quantity of gelignite; I notice this is the second night running that the same answer has presented itself. I asked after the researcher Diana once mentioned, on the RNA business, because I have it in my head that it is a precursor to the zombie virus and would like to be wrong. The work is essentially already done.

Then the convoy: ten trucks, some fifty guards, two hundred women. The underground networks move half a dozen people at a time and consider it a busy month. Jedburgh asked, in the tone of a man who has just thought of something awful, whether we could skin-change the lot of them into mice. Tulip can call mice and Vixen will fetch them; the bottleneck is the skinning. Portugal will serve for a destination, Spain calling itself neutral and being nothing of the kind. Dross spent a moment wistfully on a working that would turn the whole convoy into mice at a stroke, which costs more silver merely to learn than he has ever had in one place in his life.

And we have the measure of the blackthorn stick at last: a talisman keyed to fire, carrying a selection of fire workings ready in it, putting fires out, heating, warding a man against burning and others besides, with the bearer choosing which, and how many it will hold depending on how practised he already is in that art. In the hand it hits like a club and burns at the same time. It travels about under its own power. And it has, I am reliably informed, the personality of a football hooligan. I am also carrying, in a bag, a sleeping child in a hag's womb with a hair trigger on it, because the alternative was leaving it on a mountain, and because I was the one who took her head off and it seemed to me that made it mine.

The last thing argued before anyone slept was Switzerland, and it died the way most of my good ideas die, which is slowly and in front of witnesses. The Swiss are under arms to the last clerk and nervous of giving the Axis any pretext, and two hundred women in a truck do not survive a conversation at a barrier. My own idea, crossing the farmland short of Saint-Julien at night, I have done myself with one person and twice with two, and it does not scale. Dross's mountains and Tulip's walk to Annemasse founder on the same arithmetic: patrols on the roads, and off them nothing but mountain, in November.

So we came back to mice. Rabbits, sheep, goats and birds were put up and put down, birds worst of all, since a woman given wings does not thereby learn what to do with them, and panic at altitude is permanent. Panic as a mouse is merely loud. The transport I did settle: not a jewellery box, as was suggested, but metal, which survives being dropped, kicked or sat upon by a soldier, with a lined compartment apiece and enough cotton wool that nothing inside touches anything but wool. Then we went up to the hotel, which is not the hotel we were in two nights ago, and began.

Ten at a Time

It took the whole night, and it was the most tedious work I have ever watched anybody do. Tulip called mice out of the countryside, eight to a calling and an hour for each, over and over until there were something near two hundred of them. The skinning went round the party, ten minutes a mouse for a practised hand, and nobody's hands were practised by the end. I offered to help and my offer was accepted, which tells you how the night was going. I also proposed finding the town's rat-catcher and buying his stock outright, and was informed that nobody walks into an exterminator in the morning and asks whether he has any spare.

Dross had the real labour: two hundred skins to be made into the thing a woman can wear, and a good forty more attempts beyond that for the ones that would not take. He worked in blocks of ten, and at the end of each block he had nothing left in him and had to drink. Fourteen restoratives came out of the hag's laboratory; Kel gave up eight of hers, which do a man an injury while they work; and five were mine. By about the third hour he was grey, and shortly after that he was passing blood, and I asked whether he was all right in a tone he did not care for. He protested the whole way through, and I told him we were hearing a great many excuses, and he kept casting.

Twice the working turned on him. The first should have left him deaf, and he held against it, which, as I observed at the time, has made no detectable difference to whether he hears anybody. The second simply emptied him where he sat, and there was another potion and another hour. Tulip closed up the damage the drinks were doing when she could. By the small hours there were mice in one room and skins in another, and the whole apparatus of the rescue laid out on a hotel floor, waiting for the women. Jedburgh had gone to bed at a sensible hour, since he was flying at dawn, and I have rarely resented a man more for being right.

Chapter 20: The Wrong Address

Held Up by the Weather

The fourteenth came and the convoy did not. There is nothing sinister in it. The valley had thunderstorms bad enough to put the electricity out, and a truck column moving women does not travel when the road is being thrown about. What it meant for us was an ambush point with nothing to ambush, and a day to find out where two hundred people had got to.

Kel's answer was better than mine, which was to wait. She looked at Jedburgh's flight before he flew it, which is an unnerving way to plan and one I have stopped objecting to. Half a circle eight miles out from Moûtiers showed no column. I said backtrack the road rather than stare harder at one place. Down to La Chambre, nothing. Further back, a small lake fed by a thirty-foot cascade, and a dozen trucks drawn up on the road beside it.

Kel put Jedburgh's crystal five hundred feet above the lake. Sixteen minutes of watching produced one rabbit. The trucks were Citroëns, which is to say civilian, and when she set the view lower to see into them it arrived inside an engine block. Further attempts want ambergris, and we have two pieces and no prospect of buying more in a mountain town in wartime.

Somebody Else's Racket

So Jedburgh went himself, as an eagle, and before he had gone a mile he saw a truck pulling out of the Usine de Pomblière and heading uphill, away from Moûtiers. He kept his course, which I would not have done and which turned out to be correct twice over.

At the lake he waited, and in due course the owners of the business appeared with jerry cans and rubber tube, siphoned off a decent share of fuel and not all of it, and drove away. A man who empties a tank is hanged, and a man who takes a quarter of it is a nuisance nobody reports. A local trade in stolen petrol, nothing to do with us. The place is called Oz, which I record only because it is not a name one expects to meet in the Isère.

Having wasted a morning on it, he went back along the road the Pomblière truck had taken, on the theory that anything leaving that plant is our business.

In Hot Water

He caught the truck fifty road miles on, coming into Le Bourget-du-Lac, a properly medieval town with streets eight feet across. It pulled up outside a three-storey building with no display windows and young people going in and out. He put down two roofs away and committed the sign to memory, having no French. Under the building's skylights there is water: an indoor bath-house. He remarked that it looked inviting. Then he worked round and saw the rest of the room.

There are some two hundred women in there, standing about the baths, and something like fifty men in SS uniform guarding them. And there are men and women in white coats attending them, doctors with no bedside manner, and bureaucrats, who did not sit right in a way Jedburgh could not put a word to. Tulip offered Transuranians. It is a guess, but it is the first guess anybody has made that I did not immediately want to improve on.

So we have found them, in the wrong place. What the plant is to this bath-house nobody can yet say. Jedburgh turned for home, and as he came in over Moûtiers he saw seven black Daimlers converging on our hotel from seven different roads.

Up Against It

He got in at an upstairs window and told us. Diana needed one look and gave us the word: Gestapo. Then she sat down and strapped her leg on, without hurry and without a word of complaint, and I will carry that picture about with me for some time. Kel set the silent speech between our heads and put her unnoticing over the lot of us, and we went out of that hotel while the cars were still closing. It very nearly worked. Something gave us away as we moved off, and I still do not know what, and five of the seven turned after us.

We took a lane between two buildings, too narrow for a motor car to follow, and it was a dead end: eight feet of brick, no door. One of the cars came across the mouth of the gap and the men got out of it in their coats and hats and came down after us with submachine guns, which is not a weapon one brings to ask questions.

What saved us was three things done in the right order. Kel threw an illusory wall across the lane in front of us, so that what the men came to was the blank end of an alley. Tulip raised a real wall of her own behind the illusion, so that if any of them put out a hand he would feel brick where brick appeared to be. And behind both, where nobody could see or hear it, I set the dark sphere to work on the back wall and let it eat a hole big enough to walk through. It took half a minute. They stood about for twice as long on the other side of a wall that was not there, and found nothing to shoot. Kel's last casting turned on her while she was holding all of it together, and she held. Jedburgh went up as an eagle to watch the street, which was sense; he could have become a bear instead, and one eaten Gestapo man would certainly have changed the tone of the afternoon.

Dross wanted the carpet and had it ready. I said no. A flying carpet over a French town at midday is not an escape, it is an announcement.

Coffee at Separate Tables

On the far side of the wall we came out at the back of a works that builds dinghies. A Daimler came down the road beyond it, so we went round the corner and Tulip laid her blending over the ground we stood on. Then a workman came out for a smoke twenty feet away, swearing steadily in what turned out to be Albanian. Dross got to him before Kel did: there is nothing interesting here, and what you want is a long quiet smoke on your pipe. The poor devil decided there was something wrong with his tobacco, tapped it out and went back inside. Dross has complained ever since that he should have made him give up smoking altogether while he had him. I had said I would see to the man myself if the pair of them missed, and it would have been a great deal louder.

The car went past. Windows opened above us and nobody looked down. The farmland was too open to cross in daylight, so I suggested new faces from Kel and going into the square separately. We took coffee at separate tables, only coffee, since anything bought with a ration coupon means producing paper, while Daimlers came and went. Then a truck arrived with two platoons in it, and they began working the town door by door. I asked whether we were going out as owls or trying something cleverer, and nobody had anything cleverer. Dross made up the skins he lacked in the café lavatory while Tulip turned people away at the door, and Kel put an illusion over the square so that anyone who saw owls leaving at midday would think nothing of it. We went out over their heads, Jedburgh with us as an eagle, and not one man in that square looked up.

They had found us, it turns out, by telephone, ringing round the hotels and asking whether anybody new had come to town. Moving lodgings the night before is the only reason they did not have us at breakfast. Next time we take a room, the proprietor gets hypnotised the moment we are through the door, and told that if anyone asks whether there is anybody new, there is not.

Out of Season

We came back together at La Croix de Feissons, a different cross entirely from the one we robbed; I confused the two myself for a moment and would rather not do it again in front of anybody. Diana came with us. From there it is thirty-odd miles to Le Bourget-du-Lac, about an hour in the air. On the way Jedburgh raised his team's true name, which he has, but only barely: it is the length of a book.

For the baths the plan is thin and will have to do: get near enough to read the white coats when a door opens, and find out what Jedburgh could see and not name.

The last argument was about birds, because mice will get the women out of a building and not out of France. Dross noticed an Isle of Swans on the lake and thought of swan skins, which would have been elegant; the swans went south a fortnight ago. Just as well. A swan needs a long run to get into the air and a duck does not, and a duck can put down on open water, which matters when two hundred people who have never flown must land somewhere soft. I am not yet sure how one explains any of this to them. We arrived over the lake as the light went.

Chapter 21: Friendly Fire

A Rivalry of Services

We came to Le Bourget-du-Lac to look at a bath-house, and spent most of the night looking at each other instead. The building holds two hundred women and about fifty men with rifles, and we agreed, at length, not to walk in through the front door: too much dying, and none of it ours to spend. Taking a white coat off the street and going through his mind was shelved too, since we had no notion when any of them came out.

What we did gain was the lie of the ground, which in this valley is political. This is the Italian zone, and the Italians cannot abide the Gestapo and are not much fonder of the Wehrmacht, who behave as though the place were theirs. Better still, the Germans' secret services sell one another: if the Gestapo find a man informing for military intelligence, they try to buy him, and failing that whisper his name to the locals and let the river carry him away. I have seen armies lose wars for less.

Tulip wanted more watching first, and I said what I always say and am always half wrong about: the chief trouble with more intelligence is that it buys you worse decisions, or none at all, while you stand about admiring how much you know. We settled it the cheap way. One man goes inside, and the rest of us sit down to dinner near enough to hear him think.

Overheard at Dinner

Jedburgh called up Pierre, who speaks French as his own tongue and German besides, and Kel laid a German uniform over him. She would have given him rank; I said a grand officer in a provincial bath-house invites conversation and a dull one does not. The guards do not turn people away at the door. They simply have the place so full of women that there is nowhere for a swimmer to put himself.

We took a table at an Italian restaurant close by, inside the reach of Kel's silent speech. Pierre brought back three things. The treatment is sold to the women as medicine, for mothers near their time who may be carrying polio. The guards are ordinary men, and German, not Italian, which tells us whose errand this is. And the five technicians are wrong. Pierre could not say how, which is exactly what Jedburgh could not say through the skylights, and that agreement between two men who never met in the building is worth more to me than either of them being certain.

A little after eight the technicians went into a gymnasium with the officer in charge, and only the officer came out. Kel took that for portals. I do not believe it. A thing that can move two hundred people is being spent at Stalingrad, not on a provincial swimming pool. What it means is that we do not know how the white coats leave.

Bringing the Room Down

Kel found a pair of silk stockings on a display stand in the restaurant: blue, with gold brocade, plainly made by hand. The waiter said they come from the Sisters of St. Joseph, whose nearest house is at Chambéry, and that a quarter of a thousand hours of a nun's life goes into one pair. They were asking two hundred and fifty francs, which is theft the other way about. I said we were obviously going to haggle. Kel said we were obviously not, and bought them out of the suitcase, which still holds a quarter of a million francs and will not notice.

Their virtue is not that they raise the wearer. They bring the room down to your level, which is a cheap way to be the best-born person in it. The sisters' work can be ordered through the Cistercian abbey in the region, and Jedburgh observed that an abbey is one of the few buildings hereabouts that could house two hundred people, and enjoyed for some while what two hundred scantily dressed young women would do to the monks' discipline.

Dross did the useful work: he called three owls out of the dark and skinned them, and I asked for a few more than we needed, since if the women are driven away in the night one of us ought to be able to follow, and a spare skin is lighter to carry than a regret. We renewed the stone in our limbs and the earth on our skins. Jedburgh let his team go, remarking that in our present business more men is more trouble than fewer.

The Car That Came Instead

We went out about ten into a dry, freezing night. Across from the baths, some fifty yards from the doors, is a bus stop, and there we waited for whatever came to collect the women. Kel put a false wall across an alley as a bolt-hole. I said only that a wall one cannot see through is a poor thing to watch a street from, and that Tulip's blending makes a man standing perfectly still very nearly nothing at all. So we stood perfectly still.

What arrived was not a bus. A dark blue touring car stopped outside the doors, plainly built to outrun anything else on a French road, which in this country and this year is an extraordinary statement to make about oneself. The chauffeur wore a grey uniform and goggles the size of an airman's. The woman who got out was tall, in blue, with a small hat, a black veil and a blue velvet purse at her left wrist. She walked to the doors as though she had built them. He stayed on the pavement and began to look at the street.

Catching

Kel reached for the woman's mind and the working turned back and did nothing whatever. That is itself intelligence, since I have watched Kel open heads guarded by people paid to guard them, but she took the chauffeur instead. His surface thoughts were enough. He is paranoid past the point of illness, and it is catching.

It came down the silent speech we were all sitting inside, which is obvious in hindsight and occurred to nobody at the time. Jedburgh went first, Kel a moment after. Tulip held, and Dross, and so did I. I will say in my own defence that a mind convinced the whole world is arranged against it is not a novelty to me, and I may have said as much aloud, which did not help.

It walked Jedburgh round behind Kel with his hand-and-a-half sword out. Tulip asked whether anyone else found it odd, and the honest answer is that with us it is not especially odd. He struck her from behind and very nearly finished her. I got between them, swearing at him in the only German I have any real command of, which is the swearing, and Tulip shoved in from the other side. In the end Kel let go a stroke of mind she keeps stored in a ring, and he went down, and in the moment of it striking she felt that something had been at his mind already, a trap laid in it. He was still protesting it was not him as he fell. Bloody mind-magers, he said.

Fifty yards off, the chauffeur finished examining his street, at the measured tread they teach at Prussian military academies between the beatings. He did not notice a maniac with a great sword, four people wrestling in a bus stop, or anything else. He went inside after his mistress and shut the door.

The Taste of the Cure

We tied and gagged Jedburgh, and I carried him three-quarters of a mile to a park they call the Belvedere, a small curated forest with a fountain to Our Lady. Kel was put back together on the way, which left her white.

Dross's cards said Jedburgh had a sickness of the mind that travels, and that it had travelled by our own link. Laid on Kel, they found the same: the raging kind, where everything is against you and your head obligingly manufactures the conspiracies to prove it. Then Dross announced that the dog needed walking and asked whether I would come along. Out among the trees he told me plainly: Kel has it too, and she is dangerous.

I said nothing to the others, and I will not pretend that was an oversight. I wanted to know what had been put into Jedburgh's head and by whom, Kel was the only one able to find out, and I sat where I could take hold of her if she turned. I would rather have that written down than tidied away. Tulip's reading found nothing holding Jedburgh: no one's creature, merely sick.

Then we cured him, which was ugly. We had a brain serum, and getting it into him meant Tabitha putting him to sleep, for all his boasted hardness against such things, and Tulip working his throat so it went down rather than into his lungs. It is grey, mostly fat, with things floating in it. She had a mint leaf ready for when he woke. He woke complaining about the taste, and Dross's cards said the trap in him was being cleared away. That is the one unambiguously good thing we did all night.

Best of Friends

Kel had been working the whole hour. Bound on the ground, Jedburgh knew precisely what she was doing and could do nothing but listen. None of us stopped her. I did not, knowing what I knew. Tulip did not because she did not know, which is a kinder reason.

It closed. He is her servant now, for three weeks; he may fight it afresh at each day's turning. He threw everything he had into the first attempt, and the binding held, and after that there was nothing to do but watch a proud man grind the caps off his back teeth while calling her his best friend and asking why on earth he would object.

It was then, far too late, that we remembered the Bishop gave each of us a restorative against unreason at the outset, and not one of us had written it down. Kel took hers and came back to herself, mortified. She asked Jedburgh's pardon for the sword, and tried to unpick her own working, and could not; a binding of that kind cannot be handed back by the one who made it.

Tulip told her flatly that she does not forgive her, and that controlling one's own people crosses a line that oughtn't be crossed. She is right in the way that principles are right. For my part I have no objection to anything that happened that night. We found out what we needed to know, and everybody is still breathing, including the man who tried to take Kel's head off. I am aware that this makes me poor company for the two of them at present.

Up the Drainpipe

We went back to the baths, and the car was still at the kerb. Over the heated pool the roof is orange tile on panes of glass that do not open. I offered to take a pane out with the dark sphere, and we agreed to look before we started cutting holes in things. Tulip went up sixty feet of wall under her blending, over the parapet like a rat up a drainpipe.

She saw the woman still talking, at length and at her ease, to the officer in charge, her chauffeur against the wall behind her, a long holder of thin, bitter cigars in her hand. On the floor, two hundred women sitting because there is nowhere else to sit, the guards propped against the walls as bored as the women are wretched.

Two lessons are worth the keeping: never leave the silent speech open while one of us goes into a stranger's head, because the link carries traffic both ways; and next time, set a ward against this sort of working first and stand the party inside it. So we end the night outside in the cold, looking at a building we cannot enter, down one man's goodwill and one woman's dignity, and up the knowledge that the veiled woman cannot be read and has spent the best part of an hour instructing the officer who holds two hundred prisoners. Whatever she came to say, she has not finished saying it. We are still watching.

Chapter 22: Deliverance

Nothing to Breathe

We came for the woman in the veil and left with her prisoners instead, which is not at all the trade we set out to make, and a better one. When the woman came out of the baths at last, Tulip read her from above the door. The others had talked themselves into a vampire, the veil, the car, the hour she keeps, and the reading put an end to it. She is a living woman, short-lived as any of us, though whatever runs in her burns brighter than in ordinary people.

I asked that we spend the reading's one question not on what she is but on what she can do. The answer was worse than a vampire. Her gift is to take the air from around a man, so that he drowns on dry land with his lungs full of nothing. I have no counter to that written down anywhere.

After Hours

The car went off east at the speed it was plainly built for. Kel sent a phantasm after it and Dross a location working, two threads on the same quarry, and they agreed, which is the whole point of casting a thing twice.

It stopped within a mile, and she walked the rest to the Cistercian abbey we had found: three storeys of old stone behind twenty feet of ivied wall, with a single door to the road. A monk in full habit let her in alone. A closed order does not admit lone women in veils at eleven at night, and that this one does tells its own tale. The chauffeur stayed with the car and watched the dark to the east, as though he expected something to come out of it.

We came up quiet behind, and I said what I had said about the baths: walking into the middle of an abbey is no better an idea than walking into the middle of anything else full of people who want you gone.

Armed to the Wheels

Kel put her sight forward on the one plan we had any heart for, which was to take the car. I coveted it; I set that down, since I said it aloud at the time. The car is a gun. Heavy machine guns fold out over the front wheels, enough lead in a breath to chew through a stone wall, and a mortar rises out of the back. A finer motor-car I never wanted, and it would have killed every one of us before we touched the door-handle. We let it go.

The same seeing gave us two gifts worth more than the car. Trucks would come out of the back of the abbey and go down towards the baths, the transport we had waited for. And the woman's conference would run about a quarter of an hour. Dross said the plain thing: give the woman up and spend the quarter hour on the women in the baths, who were the whole reason we had come. I agreed, and was glad to. Chasing the veil had already cost us a night and a man's good temper.

Bad German

Kel would lay a face and a uniform over me, and I would walk up to the convoy and simply tell the soldiers what to do, which soldiers are built to accept from a man with the right collar. She would have made me SS. Jedburgh said no man with my accent could pass for SS and live, and that I had better be an Italian Alpine officer, so that my bad German could be put down to a foreigner rather than a spy. So I went as an Italian, with a heavy accent I leaned on like a crutch.

We came back on Dross's carpet, Jedburgh riding it as an eagle, since an eagle is blind at night, and I on Corniger. I walked out into the lamplight as the trucks drew up, and the lead driver snapped to and saluted before he had thought about it, which is the whole trick of it. There was muttering at an Italian giving orders, but muttering is not mutiny, and they loaded the women aboard, a score to a truck.

Once the column was moving I took it off its road, away from the abbey and its guns, down a side-turning into a residential street a dozen feet wide, the houses shut up dark on either side. A good place to be the only one who knows what is about to happen.

Formed Up for Inspection

Word went up the column that there might be a bomb under one of the trucks, the sort of thing that happens to German transport in France every week, and Kel laid an illusion of grenades under a chassis for anyone who looked. Tulip put it about that every man was to form up for inspection, and some fifty of them did, in a ring in the middle of the street. Then Tulip raised a ring of stone ten feet high around them.

Four men were outside it when it rose, and bolted. Jedburgh, still an eagle, had a glaive and used it, which is a strange thing to watch and worse to be on the end of. Tulip's staff became her python again and had the breath out of another. The last got a rifle up and fired at me; the shot struck the unseen shield I keep about myself and bounced into the dark, and I had the leisure to be grateful for it before I finished him with the mace. Damned rifles.

Tulip filled the ring with smoking magma, and Kel pushed back any man who tried to climb the wall. It killed them all, and took the bodies as well, which spared us the digging. I thought about pitching Greek fire in after them and decided there is no making a thing more burnt than that was. I set Hordling to the few remains. The drivers were not soldiers: Frenchmen, unarmed, driving for the Germans because a man must eat. We spared them and kept them with us. The gendarmes were coming, but by the time any law reached that street there was nothing to find but a patch of scorched stone that nobody would ever explain.

With Child

We took the trucks out to a well-kept wood by the lake around a modern glass-and-concrete house with tennis courts, a school of some sort, far enough from the town to do our work unseen: turning near two hundred women into mice.

First Kel laid a healer's hands on them, and found the same thing in every one. Every woman we had taken out of that place is with child. A healer cannot read what the mother carries without cutting, and none of us would do that. The mountain hag we killed three days ago has her hand in this somewhere, and a hag of that kind does not always stay dead.

The changing went a few at a time, Dross doing the bulk of it with the skins made up at Moûtiers: a woman into a mouse and a mouse into a pocket. Near seventy of the women would not take a skin; the working slid off them, which meant more skins and more hours of Dross's hands, a thing he said aloud and often.

Collected on the Way

Dross reminded me, as we were leaving, that we had left Diana in the Belvedere park the night before. We went back, found her no worse for the night, and took her up with the rest.

The road ran past Chambéry, the convent town of the Sisters of St. Joseph, who make the silk stockings Kel bought, and men's stockings besides, a thing I had not known. With a truck of seventy women and no business drawing a nun's eye, we went on past.

We holed up at Bourg-en-Bresse, as near to Geneva as one can sit and still be in France, which matters: the closer a thing is to the Swiss line, the harder it is to say whose side of a border it was ever on. The women had ridden in separate trucks, and we split them into two parties by different roads, on the principle that half a disaster found is better than the whole of it. Once every one of them was a mouse, carrying them together was no longer a problem.

Still Under Sentence

The changing nearly broke Dross. His first working at Bourg-en-Bresse turned on him, the place being poor in the stuff a mage draws on, and knocked him senseless where he sat. We poured the hag's own restoratives into him and the others to keep the hands working, and the work went on.

The learning was worse. Jedburgh set his divinations on the women and on the hag's belongings. The women are not carrying children. Each has a thing growing in her, a cobolt, the seeing named it, though I would not swear the name means to me what it meant to the voice that gave it: a bare knot of flesh, months from whatever it is meant to become, and certain to kill the woman who carries it when its time comes. That is what the baths were for. That is what the veiled woman came to the abbey to arrange. We took two hundred of them out of that place, and every one is still under sentence, and I do not yet know a single thing we can do about it. And the hag may be knitting herself back together somewhere even now.

Her loot at least was good: armour cut from her own skin, a scarf with a working in it, an extract of wolfsbane, a ring, a rack of spells and a stone with a very ugly name. And her heart, still pulsing, which is the sort of thing one learns not to be surprised by in this line of work. Its virtue could only be had by drinking it straight from the ventricle, and only Tulip, Kel and I managed that and kept it down. It left each of us a little harder to kill, and with one gift besides; Tulip's and Kel's came grown about with ivy, of all things. Mine is a sense I had not had the day before: I can catch what a thing is off the air of it, by its fumes, as I used to by eye. In a business where I have just learned that a motor-car can cut me in half and the air itself can be taken out of my chest, I will take any new way of knowing what is in a room before I walk into it.

Chapter 23: Stone Cold

Mice Do Not Travel

Near two hundred women, and the only way to carry them out of France alive was to turn every one of them to stone. We spent the first of our days at Bourg-en-Bresse on how to move two hundred mice across a country at war, after loose talk about whether I had room at the castle to house the women until whatever grows in them has run its course. Tired men say strange things to keep from thinking about the true shape of the problem.

The true shape was this. Living mice breathe, eat, foul their bedding and die of cold, and the only roads into Spain climb the Pyrenees, where the passes a truck could take are the passes the police watch. Fly over and the mice freeze; carry them under our coats and they announce themselves by their stink. Jedburgh asked why we did not fly out over the sea off Perpignan and come back in beyond the border, the first word all morning worth keeping. Hordling had a solution of the one-way sort he always has, and I would not hear it. Then Kel said she could turn them to stone and wake them whole at the far end, and the matter was settled. We would not wait the week the Sisters at Chambéry need to finish Kel's stockings.

I left a marker of my own near the convent, a thing only I can find, against the chance I have cause one day to return by a road no truck travels.

Three Kilos a Man

Turning two hundred women to stone is not a grand or a dreadful thing to watch. It is tedious, and it took three days. Kel worked through them in batches while I kept the tally, and we ground down the whole of the hag's restoratives keeping her upright. Twice the magic turned on her. Once it cost her the use of her nose and tongue for some days, which she shrugged off. Once it caught one of the women and left her trapped between flesh and stone, which none of us can undo, for that kind of mischance is a curse and not a spell. Another it dropped into a dead sleep instead; we tucked her in a pocket to wake on her own.

A good third would not be turned at all, and had first to be made mice again, with more of Dross's skins and more of his patient complaining, before Kel could try them again. A stubborn handful shrugged it off four times running. Dross had a spare eel skin when he was done, which I took off him for my own purposes.

When the last of them was stone we had something like fifteen kilos of statuary. Dross declared he would carry none of it, being built along feeble lines, and when Hordling was put forward as a beast of burden I said no on his behalf. He is mine, and he is not a pack mule. So the fifteen kilos went into five shares of three, and I carried Dross's along with my own, and left Dross and the Hordling their dignity.

Overtaken by Events

Somewhere past the middle of November we planned the road: drive most of it, fly only the last leg, wide of Lyon and down through Avignon, Montpellier and Narbonne. The mission notes gave us little: a Phoenician-era ruin in Spain to steer by, and a plane to lift us out of some small town on the eastern coast, its name never pinned down, with Portugal in reserve.

Then the real obstacle, a cruel one. The Germans have taken the southern zone outright, Operation Anton, done not four days past, and our French papers are now worth nothing, with every network in France after the new German ones. What we could do was drive openly to Narbonne, the nearest departmental seat, and have them reissued like honest people caught out by a change of regime. Jedburgh offered Pierre to front it, Pierre having French and German in his mouth where the rest of us have only an accent that would hang us.

Leaning on the Truck

We drove south from nine in the morning, the better part of five hundred kilometres. At a checkpoint of oil drums and a plank the guards asked our business, and Pierre gave it in his easy French, bound for Narbonne to see about new papers; a second stop passed the same way. Narbonne met us near five with a gale off the sea and a cold bitter beyond the season, the tail of some historic windstorm.

We took rooms at a hotel by the river. The others went up to their beds. I did not. A truck full of stone women is the most valuable thing any of us owns just now, so I passed the night leaning against it in the manner large men have, which does more to turn a curious passer-by aside than any lock would, with a thread of mind speech open to Kel. Nothing came of it. I counted a cold, dull night a fair trade for a morning with the cargo still ours.

Pierre had the papers made over the next day, German now, with no help from us at all. Kel had thought to whisper translations into his ear by mind speech, and I talked her out of it: a man who pauses and stares at nothing while a Nazi clerk addresses him is a man who ends up in a chair under a hot lamp.

No Vacancies

South past Perpignan then, down to Banyuls, stopping well short of the border; the crossing at Pique del Mar has a full detachment on it. Dross and I went to a farmhouse nearby, two men looking for honest work, to see whether a quiet way through could be found. A German soldier answered, asked coarsely what in hell we wanted, told us there was no work, and drew his pistol to underline it. I put my hands up and said we were going, and we went, round a bend and out of his sight, which was luck we did not earn.

We ran the truck into the scrub in the wooded hills above the town, where Dross had marked a naturist's beach well clear of the border fortifications as a place to take to the air. Kel's chariot would carry Tulip; Dross's carpet, got up as a wheeling flock of starlings, the rest, Diana among them; Jedburgh aloft as an eagle; a mile out over the water, south to a lighthouse, then inland. I was to go afoot, unseen and blending in besides, and I did observe, drily, that a man has blended into worse places than an empty nudist beach in the dark.

Weathered In

Before we lifted off, Kel and Dross both looked ahead, and what was coming was failure. The windstorm tore every attempt at flight to pieces, Dross's carpet worst of all, and would last five more days yet.

So Pierre drove the truck off hard toward Montpellier as a decoy while his borrowed shape held, to ditch it when the shape ran out, and the rest of us went to ground. Tulip made a hidden camp under an illusion, and we tunnelled into the hillside, summoned rabbits for the pot and heated stones. The cold is nothing to me, so I offered to lounge about in the altogether and frighten off any wanderer, which was not entirely a joke. Diana needs the warmth, though. The rest of them do.

Eyes Overhead

Four days into the wait Tulip went still and said we were being watched: no direction, only a crawling at the back of the neck. I drank the last draught I had that opens the second sight, and Dross looked with his own, and we both saw a scrying, the seam between the waking world and the astral pulled out of true some five hundred metres over our heads, keyed, I judged, to our faces or our names. The Nazis, plainly, or one of the devils they keep company with. We could not break it, so we would outrun it.

We swapped every illusion and name we wore and walked west unseen for the length of a working day, Diana and all, though Dross's concealment guttered like a bad candle the entire way. Behind us the scrying stayed where we had left it: anchored to a place, not hunting. We do not go back, I said, and said it again when someone wondered whether we might circle round. The further we run, the wider a net they must cast.

I gave Diana my cold-weather gear; it fits her ill, being cut for a far larger man, but it is better than the nothing she had. At a broad road alive with patrol vehicles I picked the moment and we crossed clean, and on the far side the ground showed a tank had gone through not a day before, or a bulldozer, and I would lay money on the tank. We stepped wide of the snow to leave no tracks, and came into high ground where the wind funnels between two ridges hard enough to lean on.

We will move under the ridgeline, cross only at dusk, and tunnel into a scrub-covered hillside behind a wall of stone warmed with fire from the rock. Diana's wooden leg, Cuthbert she calls it, will cost us dearly over this ground, so I have put it to her that she take a shape one of us can carry: the girl of six in the red hood, who can be slung over Jedburgh's shoulder and walk the last of it on her own light feet when she must. The storm is still blowing. We are not yet where we are going, and I have learned not to say where that is until we are standing in it.

Chapter 24: Special Delivery

Cork Country

Kel looked two hours ahead and saw us land in Spain without any fuss at all. We managed about five minutes of it.

I had chosen the cave myself, so the blame was mine if blame were going. Its mouth sits fifteen or twenty feet up a sheer southern slope, and the passage curls upward so the winter rain runs out rather than in. I would sooner not drown in my own billet. This is cork country, and the Maquis pay for a good share of their war by stripping the bark and selling it, very often to the Germans. I find I rather admire that.

The storm broke early, and by evening the question was not whether we could fly but where. Whatever had watched us from above was surely still interested, and if the weather had cleared for us, it had cleared for them. Kel wanted the old plan, out over the sea. I argued for straight over the hills: they are low here, the winds had dropped, and the border lay some fourteen kilometres due south. Over we would go.

No Straps

Kel's chariot is a gilded chaise longue drawn through the air by a winged horse of her own making, with brocade and tassels and no straps of any kind. Tulip asked about straps, and Kel said they would ruin the line of it. Tulip rode with her; Dross took his carpet, with Diana aboard and Jedburgh along as an eagle; I rode Corniger. I lent Dross one of my featherfall charms, since a man who means to sit on a carpet in a fight should have some answer to falling off it.

Whatever course Kel took, her vision showed us coming down at Sant Martí d'Empúries without anything happening on the way. Corniger went up smooth and certain. Kel's chariot did not. She is not, whatever she tells you, a gifted pilot over broken ground, and the chaise struck the hillside twice before it pulled clear. I told her it must be the death grip her passengers had on her.

A Future Falling In

We had been in the air perhaps five minutes, over a valley where several streams run together, when I felt it go. The quiet arrival Kel had seen simply came apart, like a wave falling in on itself. I rode close to each of the others and shouted the news. Dross understood at once: something was about to break it, very likely by attacking us. I dropped back to the rear with my shield ready and laid a working on my lance that makes it a bane to dragons. Jedburgh remarked on my level of paranoia. I prefer to call it planning.

It was Diana who saw them, though she has the poorest night eyes of any of us: moonlight on scales, a two-headed wyvern, and beside it on a huge hound a knight in the old Teutonic style with heater shield and lance. Diana cannot cry out, so she pointed until the rest of us saw. The hound was a monstrous red-and-white thing of the St Bernard sort, and we had met it when it was a great deal smaller and answered to Schwaefel. So had I met its master. Heinrich von Kleist had once accepted a bottle of claret from my own hand, and had come, I supposed, to tell me what he thought of the wine.

A Name Not Spoken

We came down among the cork oaks on the valley floor while they were still a couple of miles off. I stayed up, where I could meet them. The wyvern beat hard for height, which I read as a long stooping charge to come, and out-climbed Corniger with ease. Corniger wrapped us in false images, a trick that costs him dearly. Below, the others spent their two minutes well: phantasms sent out to meet the enemy, a stone shelter in which Tulip sealed Diana, snares of grasping growth, the iron rhinoceros and Tulip's staff become her python, and a valley full of Kel's motionless soldiers.

Dross used his ring to summon Short Fuse, who kept his distance and shouted from well off. He named the hound a Nessian war hound, bred in Nessus, the deepest of the hells; it breathes fire and whitefire and can wear the shape of an ordinary dog. Then he asked the question that had plainly brought him: had the earl made himself known to us? We had felt his presence once, in the square at Perpignan. Short Fuse would not say the name, and I told the others not to press him, since such a name said aloud draws its owner. His hints meant the seventy-second of the Goetia. He wanted very badly to leave, and I asked Dross to release him.

I drank my strongest draught of second sight and another to wall my mind, drew the dark about me, and watched for the earl creeping up. That was foolish. His kind do not creep. They arrive with legions.

Rules of the Lists

Von Kleist and his hound came at us before we expected them, in one leap, a bolt of fire across the valley, and landed among the others in a burst of heat. Then the hound vomited up a salamander, a fire elemental fifty feet long, which poured over the rhinoceros, the python and Tulip. The burning wrung her dry, and she turned herself to wind and was gone. Kel drew the pistol she keeps for killing Nazis and told me the elemental was the most dangerous thing on the field. She was right, so I charged it and sent Hordling after it. The ash of my lance went in deep.

Then von Kleist turned on me, and not with his lance. He drew a submachine gun. Corniger's images burst one after another until two rounds found the real thing and my field of force collapsed. Then he threw a burning axe, so that my guard against close blows was no help. A man who calls himself a knight and brings a submachine gun to the lists has already told you what he thinks of the rules. As it struck he called out a name, and Dross heard it plainly: Phlegethos, the river of fire in hell. The axe went past the flesh to the soul, and my wards took only some of it. I was badly hurt.

The hound's breath drove the rhinoceros and python back. Then the pair leapt across the sky in fire to where they had first come from, leaving the salamander to keep us busy. Von Kleist said, quite pleasantly, "My work here is done." Kel swore and shook her fist. He did not come back, which is the cleverer play: while he stays away, I must stay up with my lance couched, wounded and stripped of my images, holding my blow for a man who may never return to receive it. I noticed, too, that he did Kel no harm at all, and I do not believe that was an accident. I suspect he would like to talk to her, and that the rest of us would not survive the conversation.

Falling Anyway

He stood some five hundred feet off and well above us, with Schwaefel at his side, and the wyvern wheeled half a mile out in the dark. Kel and Jedburgh read his intent, and I could not fault them: he would watch, and the first of us to stray he would leap upon and kill. He is Prussian, and Prussians fight to win. Who am I to judge? Tulip re-formed herself somewhere safer, her python a staff again, and put the rhinoceros away. The salamander came at me with a wash of heat that seemed to bite and did not. Then Dross laid a terror on it so complete that it simply fainted where it lay. Across the slope von Kleist had his field glasses out.

Jedburgh saw it first: the wyvern had begun its dive, and in its talons hung two German bombs of fifty kilos apiece, perhaps eight seconds from us. I asked whether my dark sphere might catch one in the air. It might, in theory, as a man might catch a falling star in a teacup. Jedburgh crouched behind Tulip's wall of stone with his shield of chaos, Kel behind him; Dross and Tulip lay flat; Diana stayed sealed in the ground. I turned Corniger to face the dive, woke the blood amulet on my chest, and tried something new, a working of my own design that gathers a knight's whole momentum behind his lance, and flung us uphill at the falling beast. It was not a grievous wound, but it was enough. The wyvern died on my lance, and the bombs fell anyway.

They devastated the ground for a hundred feet about. The wall held. Diana and I were unharmed, and our static illusions stood on as though nothing had happened. The salamander was blown to nothing. Dross took a shard lodged in a rib, the kind of wound that wants two months and a better healer than any of us, and the charm he carried against death cracked and was gone. I told him I have a few more of those lying about. Tulip bled badly and bound it herself. At the far end of the ruin von Kleist stood making notes on a clipboard. German efficiency.

Of the wyvern, all four eyes had come through whole, crystalline, dark green, the width of my palm, fine stuff for crystals of vision. The heart was intact too.

Reading Clausewitz

Von Kleist sat on the ground in plain view, reading Clausewitz. Kel wondered whether he might answer a knightly challenge. He is of the Teutonic Order, but not a real knight, and I spat on the ground to say so. Jedburgh put it more plainly: the man used a machine gun on people. There was talk, too, that he had served on a submarine that machine-gunned hospital ships.

Dross proposed that everyone but me go unseen, so that I alone would be a target. Von Kleist himself is oddly easy to see at night, lit as though from within. I reminded the others that he sees souls, so illusions would not fool him. Jedburgh renewed his wards against fire, and I rode forward alone and visible on Corniger.

At about two hundred and fifty feet he unfolded a radio on Schwaefel's flank and spoke into it. I caught "Gräfin", a countess, and a phrase I took to mean that the British were heading somewhere. Then he cast a bow of fire across the sky and leapt away along it. Who his countess is, we do not know. Kel thought of the woman in the car, but that is guesswork.

Lights Left On

We took our chance at once, the others invisible on Dross's carpet, Diana in her witch skin as a girl of six, and the static illusions left standing. Von Kleist came down on a high field outside Tresserre, still shining for miles. Over Le Boulou, blacked out, a car tore along the highway far faster than any road deserves, and we veered away from it.

The invisibility gave us forty minutes and some twenty-two miles, well inside Spain. We came down on farmland near a long beach, short of Sant Martí d'Empúries. The Spaniards will look for us, I said, but they will not send us to a camp. None of us speaks Spanish, so Kel redid our disguises. She remarked that by rights we should not have survived the night.

A Sting in the Tail

A wyvern's heart must be drunk fresh, always at some risk. Dross, Jedburgh and I drank. Dross came away tougher and quicker on his feet, Jedburgh quicker than his kind has any right to be. I came away with a sharper gift for the arts, and a tail. It is prehensile and carries a sting, by the feel of it a great deal nastier than any scorpion's. I may season Hordling's food with it. Beyond that, a poisoned sting is a dishonourable weapon, and I shall not be using it.

We waited for dawn and slipped into the population under fresh illusions. That night Pierre raised England on his radio, Dross undid Diana's skin, and Captain Glendinning brought his Wellesley down on a farm field and flew her away. I wish her well. Klaus Barbie, whom we did not kill, is still out there.

England offered us rest. We declined. It is the twenty-seventh of November, 1942, and we will train here for three months and four days, and take the ruins from Spain. Sant Martí d'Empúries is a small seaside town whose little church began as a Phoenician building, and the ruins we want lie outside it. Franco fears any Allied stirring will hand Germany its excuse to invade, and his patrols walk the coast. So we tunnelled into a wooded hillside west of town under one of Kel's illusions. Cave dwellers again.

Session Notes

Session 6: The Conan Bacterium

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Items Acquired Party (shared resources): Balance brought forward: 2,500 sp Balance carried forward: 2,500 sp Session Summary At dinner in the Perpignan hotel the party argued over how to make first contact with Diana, and Kel's preview of the mind-speech option showed her shooting herself, which took it off the table. A telepathic sweep of the dining room found four guests of the same escape line, no German observers and Diana's cover intact, along with worried talk of an internment camp holding some two thousand people. A coded remark about a cousin named Cuthbert from Piccadilly brought her to Black's door, where she opened it holding an enormous revolver. She had shared a train south with Wolfram Sievers and carried word of the Conan Bacterium, research grown out of Robert Koch's papers that records and repairs the pattern of a living body, and which she believes has every hallmark of a death plague; a small, almost entirely female contingent of internees is being taken to Saint-Marcel rather than west to Camp Gurs with the rest. She could not explain how the Germans found Gilbert, dated the crackdown on her network to the German occupation of Vichy France after Operation Torch, and named a suspect: an anti-Nazi priest from a parish near Paris who makes it his business to know everyone. Warned in advance this time that Kel is not a vampire, Diana accepted the mind-speech link, and the party settled the route, the forged travel papers and the cover stories — a fashion and refining concern, with Diana disguised as Tulip's elderly, stroke-stricken aunt. A gale grounded German reconnaissance aircraft and the party took a bought-out first-class compartment north, reaching Lyon and the Hotel San Filippo in the evening. Diana spotted her priest in the street; he was lured with money and women, drugged, and pocketed as a mouse, and an hour's ritual behind a locked door gave up his name — Robert Alesch — along with the facts that he can identify Virginia Hall by sight, works openly with Klaus Barbie out of the Hotel Terminus in Lyon, betrayed Germain Thion's Paris cell before her, and has never heard of Sievers or the Ahnenerbe. The party killed him in mouse form over a sphere of dark, leaving no remains for enemy occultists to question. A connecting train climbed all the following day to Saint-Marcel, an Alpine hamlet of eight hundred people, which the party reached a day ahead of the convoy. Jedburgh's flight over the valley mapped the hydroelectric station, the cobalt and chlorine works, the sodium warehouses and one isolated building where the biological work must be. The zone is administered by Maurizio Lazzaro di Castiglione, who surrenders nobody, and the plant is guarded by Italian Alpine infantry on whom no German-uniform trick will work; the session ends with the party planning night reconnaissance with crystals of vision before attempting entry. Chronological Timeline Date Event Day 36 (evening) Dinner at the Perpignan hotel; contact methods debated; the mind-speech option previewed and abandoned Day 36 (evening) Telepathic sweep of the dining room; four escape-line guests identified; camp chatter and the Camp Gurs / Saint-Marcel split overheard Day 36 (evening) Coded "Cuthbert from Piccadilly" signal given at table; Diana leaves; Black follows to her room Day 36 (night) Diana reports Sievers on the train and the Conan Bacterium research derived from Robert Koch Day 36 (night) Gilbert's betrayal discussed; Operation Torch and the occupation of Vichy France; a priest near Paris named as suspect Day 36 (night) Diana warned about the mind speech and brought into the party's link Day 36 (night) Route to Saint-Marcel agreed; forged papers, cover stories and disguises settled Day 36 ? Day 37 Gale rises overnight; German reconnaissance aircraft grounded; the flying carpet ruled out Day 37 Storm holds Perpignan indoors; final preparations for the journey Day 38 (morning) Internee convoy departs west for Camp Gurs; party boards the train north under illusion Day 38 (evening) Arrival in Lyon; rooms taken at the Hotel San Filippo on forged ration cards Day 38 (night) Diana spots the priest; he is lured, drugged, turned into a mouse and carried back Day 38 (night) Ritual interrogation: Robert Alesch named; Virginia Hall, Klaus Barbie at the Hotel Terminus, Germain Thion; no knowledge of Sievers Day 38 (night) The party debates his fate and kills him in mouse form Day 39 (morning ? afternoon) Connecting train climbs to Saint-Marcel; hamlet reached ahead of the convoy Day 39 (afternoon) Aerial reconnaissance of the hydroelectric station, the refining works and the isolated building Day 39 (evening) Italian administration under Castiglione noted; infiltration options weighed; night reconnaissance planned

Session 7: Early Days

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Items Acquired Party (shared resources): Crystal of Vision — (unverified — ledger unchecked for this session) Balance brought forward: 2,500 sp Balance carried forward: 2,500 sp Session Summary The party spent the day scouting the chemical works at Pomblière, a couple of miles up the valley from their lodgings, leaving Diana behind in Saint-Marcel under a new disguise as a middle-aged man because her wooden leg appears on every wanted poster. Having weighed the ways past two hundred Italian Alpine veterans and settled on concealment plus a single man inside, they walked past the boom gate unnoticed and found a makeshift cemetery of unnamed graves eighteen inches long, the soil of which glows faintly blue and holds a small piece of something lethal and possibly magical. They left it undug. Jedburgh's walk through the plant and his professional assessment of it found a genuine, thriving chlorine and sodium works with nowhere at all to hold two hundred prisoners and no hidden laboratory anywhere in it. Scouting further out in eagle form, Jedburgh sighted a two-headed black eagle circling twelve miles off, south of Mont Blanc, and scrying beneath its circuit found an enormous woman whose face burst the party's Crystal of Vision rather than striking him down; divining over the fragments named her a mountain hag. The party then learned that no prisoners have ever been sent up to this plant before — the two hundred women on the road are the first, still the better part of a day and a half out — and a look ahead at the convoy's overnight stop confirmed that every internee is a young woman of child-bearing age. Holding this as circumstantial but strong, and with under thirty hours before the trucks arrive, the party is at Saint-Marcel and has resolved to go after the hag first, lacking the herbalist's tincture that would guard against her visage and improvising blindfolds, illusions and stone-hardening in its place. Chronological Timeline Date Event Day 40 Pomblière plant infiltrated and walked end to end — a working factory, no hidden laboratory; scrying identifies a mountain hag (Crystal of Vision destroyed); convoy of ~200 young women a day and a half out

Session 8: A Pleasant Stroll in the Woods

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Items Acquired Party (shared resources): Balance brought forward: 2,500 sp Balance carried forward: 2,500 sp Session Summary With Dross back at the fire, the party spent the evening settling the exact wording of a tarot question about the hag's part in the Nazi plan for the transferred women. The second reading answered with four Death cards and the Star reversed: she is directly involved, potions are in it, and the purpose is something reproductively perverse. Firmer convoy numbers — ten trucks from Rivesaltes to Saint-Marcel, roughly forty more by way of Camp de Gurs, and an estimated forty to fifty escorts — killed the rescue as an opening move, and the party committed to killing the hag first and freeing the women afterwards, on the reasoning that two hundred women are far easier for the enemy to replace than one hag. A long review of hag lore and of what her face does turned up no reliable defence, until Dross established that a hag counts as an enchanted creature and can therefore be summoned — which turned the plan into sending for her onto ground of their own choosing, with Kel sharing out Phantasm scrolls and Waters of Strength before the march. The party left about five in the afternoon into full dark and hard mountain going, and four minutes out Jedburgh's brown bear shape went berserk with pre-hibernation hunger and badly mauled Dross before Tabitha ended the fight by sleeping the bear for six hours. Roughly eight hours' walking along a snow-capped ridgeline brought them to camp at two in the morning, within four miles of the hag's last sighting; Black's own count settled the date as 11 November 1942, leaving two and a half days before the trucks arrive. A hidden bivouac was built, and Kel's look ahead over the coming night showed only a moon shadow crossing the campsite twice, unexplained. The following day went entirely on laying a chequerboard of wards around the camp and setting the battle order, with Black asking for a concealed charge position for himself and Corniger and learning that the hag's visage cannot affect a horse. The session ends with the party still at the warded camp above the Pomblière valley, a jumpable stream and the cataract that drives the dam noted and left alone, waiting on nightfall to summon her. Chronological Timeline Date Event Day 40 Tarot confirms the hag's involvement; hag-first decision locked; kit distributed; night march into the mountains, interrupted by Jedburgh's berserk bear form Day 41 Camp four miles from the hag; date settled as 11 November 1942; warded ambush ground and battle order prepared; session ends before the summoning

Session 9: Mountainous Ruin

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Items Acquired Kel: Hag's blackthorn talisman (unpriced) Black: Hag's blackthorn talisman (unpriced) Bottle of claret (unpriced) Dross: Hag's blackthorn talisman (unpriced) Jedburgh: Hag's blackthorn talisman (unpriced) Tulip: Hag's blackthorn talisman (unpriced) Balance brought forward: 2,500 sp Balance carried forward: 2,500 sp Session Summary The party spent the last of its preparation time on the mountain settling counterspell doctrine and deploying Tulip's iron rhino golem, then hid under Kel's illusory terrain behind a screen of decoys while Dross summoned the Mountain Hag — who answered in a little over two minutes. She arrived roughly fifty yards out, already calling a storm through an incantation none of them could counter, crossed the mountainside unimpeded, shrugged off Jedburgh's counterspell and wiped out every phantasm the party had raised with one tripled working. With nothing left to aim at, Black rode out on Corniger as visible bait; she ignored him and melted into the stone, and the party boxed the spot in with hands of earth, a hidden counterspell and a readied dark sphere. She surfaced by pure chance inside Dross's counterspell and Black killed her in the rock, taking her head and everything worn on it. The body and the talisman in her hand revealed how badly the fight could have gone — mountain hags are immune to exactly the restraint Tulip had prepared, and sense every creature moving on the ground for a mile. The earth tremors she cast on her approach then brought an avalanche down on the camp; Jedburgh flew clear as an eagle, Black on Corniger, and the rest sheltered in Tulip's tunnel under roughly thirty-six feet of snow. During the dig-out Black's cheerful all-clear was contradicted by Kel's danger sense, and Corniger spotted the two-headed eagle fleeing north beyond Dross's summoning reach, while the two hours of shovelling produced a string of discarded schemes and the first mention of Jedburgh's Hugh Team. At the surface a young Swiss mountaineer and his St Bernard came up to inspect the slide, and gave away that the Usine de Pomblière never asks its bank for money — after which Black warned him off wondering about it, failed to recruit him, and gave him a bottle of claret. The party remains at the buried camp site with the hag's storm still building overhead; a visit to the factory contact in Moûtiers is planned for the following day. Chronological Timeline Date Event Day 42 Mountain Hag summoned and slain at the warded camp; her talisman looted; her avalanche buries the party, who dig out and meet a Swiss bank liaison at the slide

Session 10: Revelations

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Items Acquired Kel: Pitchblende radiation-detector amulet (unpriced) Hag's gold ring (unpriced) Hag's blue metal ring (unpriced) Hag's dimensional boots (unpriced) Red leather reticule with witch skins (unpriced) Captured documents and maps from the hag's lair (unpriced) Black: Pitchblende radiation-detector amulet (unpriced) Hag's gold ring (unpriced) Hag's blue metal ring (unpriced) Hag's dimensional boots (unpriced) Red leather reticule with witch skins (unpriced) Hag's womb (near-term foetus) (unpriced) Captured documents and maps from the hag's lair (unpriced) Dross: Pitchblende radiation-detector amulet (unpriced) Hag's gold ring (unpriced) Hag's blue metal ring (unpriced) Hag's dimensional boots (unpriced) Red leather reticule with witch skins (unpriced) Hag's tarot deck and ivory case (unpriced) Captured documents and maps from the hag's lair (unpriced) Jedburgh: Pitchblende radiation-detector amulet (unpriced) Hag's gold ring (unpriced) Hag's blue metal ring (unpriced) Hag's dimensional boots (unpriced) Red leather reticule with witch skins (unpriced) Captured documents and maps from the hag's lair (unpriced) Tulip: Pitchblende radiation-detector amulet (unpriced) Hag's gold ring (unpriced) Hag's blue metal ring (unpriced) Hag's dimensional boots (unpriced) Red leather reticule with witch skins (unpriced) Captured documents and maps from the hag's lair (unpriced) Party (shared resources): Hag's womb with near-term foetus (unverified — not in registry) Captured documents and maps (unverified — not in registry) Balance brought forward: 2,500 sp Balance carried forward: 2,500 sp Session Summary The party spent the day hunting the dead hag's lair above Pomblière. Tracking her back-trail came to nothing, so they went through her corpse instead — talisman, rings, dimensional boots, a reticule of reusable witch skins, and a living near-term foetus that Black agreed to carry. After a failed summons and a second failed night's tracking, Dross put questions to the corpse itself, which named La Croix de l'Alpe, concealment, and breeder reactors. Flying up after dark, the party found a lifeless patch of ground and a ward that would have killed anyone who walked in, unmade it, and entered a tidy office-lair draped with an Italian Army tarpaulin: filing cabinets, an alchemical laboratory of mineral poisons, and a mews built for a two-headed mount. Black broke the looted filing cabinet against the ravine wall, scattering the papers, and the damaged haul went to Diana at Moûtiers. She read out a Polish map of six death camps arranged as a hexagon and a French map of a sixteen-mile stepping chain running the length of the country, and then identified the pleasant Swiss banker of the previous session as Heinrich von Kleist of the SS, seconded to the Ahnenerbe and coordinating cobalt-60 breeder work at the Usine de Pomblière. The party ends the night in Moûtiers, planning disguise changes against the alarm von Kleist has certainly raised, with a convoy of two hundred women due the following day and an untested plan to skin-change them into mice. Chronological Timeline Date Event Day 43 Hag's corpse looted and questioned; her lair located at La Croix de l'Alpe, its approach ward dissipated and its office and laboratory stripped; the filing cabinet shattered on the way out and its papers partly lost; the haul carried to Diana at Moûtiers, revealing the six death camps, the stepping chain across France, and Julien de Watermeyer's true identity as Heinrich von Kleist; disguise changes and the convoy rescue plan debated overnight

Session 11: Hide and Seek

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Items Acquired Party (shared resources): ~200 enchanted mouse skins (rescue stock, narrative-only) — (unverified — ledger unchecked for this session) Owl skins (narrative-only) — (unverified — ledger unchecked for this session) Balance brought forward: 2,500 sp Balance carried forward: 2,500 sp Session Summary The party shelved a plan to drive two hundred rescued women across the Swiss border as unworkable and committed instead to carrying them out as mice, then spent the whole night summoning the mice and enchanting the skins at their new Moûtiers hotel. The convoy never arrived — storms had stopped it on the road — so Kel previewed Jedburgh's reconnaissance before he flew it and steered him toward a lake thirty-odd miles out, which turned out to be a petrol-smuggling racket rather than the convoy. Following a truck out of the Usine de Pomblière instead, Jedburgh found the women held in a thermal bath-house at Le Bourget-du-Lac, guarded by roughly fifty SS and attended by white-coated figures Tulip guesses are Transuranians. Flying home he spotted seven Gestapo Daimlers closing on the hotel. The party evacuated and escaped a dead-end alley behind a layered illusion while Black bored a hole through the back wall, then waited out the door-to-door search over coffee in the town square and left as owls. They regrouped at La Croix de Feissons and flew on to Le Bourget-du-Lac, arriving at dusk. Next session takes up the baths themselves and the question of what the white coats are. Chronological Timeline Date Event Day 44 Swiss border plan shelved; the mice-and-skins rescue kit built overnight at Moûtiers; the convoy fails to arrive, delayed by storms; a lake near Oz is ruled out as fuel smugglers, and a truck tracked from the Usine de Pomblière leads to two hundred women held under SS guard in a bath-house at Le Bourget-du-Lac; the Gestapo raid the party's hotel, the party escapes Moûtiers as owls, regroups at La Croix de Feissons and flies on to Le Bourget-du-Lac by dusk

Session 12: Friendly Fire

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Items Acquired Kel: Masterwork silk stockings (unpriced) Reason Restorative (unpriced) Party (shared resources): Brain serum (unpriced) Jedburgh: Equilibrium remnants (unpriced) Balance brought forward: 2,500 sp Balance carried forward: 2,500 sp Session Summary The party spent the night of 14 November outside the baths at Le Bourget-du-Lac, where roughly two hundred and fifty women are held under guard. Ruling out a frontal assault, they sent Jedburgh's agent Pierre inside in an illusory German uniform and listened in from a restaurant across the road, learning the cover story (experimental prenatal polio treatment), that the guards are German rather than Italian, and that the five technicians are abnormal in some way nobody can name; how the technicians leave the building remains unknown. While they waited, Kel bought a pair of Sisters of St. Joseph masterwork silk stockings and Dross summoned and skinned three owls, and shortly after ten the party took up a concealed position at a bus stop, where a dark blue touring car delivered a veiled woman and her chauffeur instead of the expected transport. Kel's attempt to read the woman failed outright, and reading the chauffeur instead carried his contagious paranoia into the party along their own mind-speech link, infecting Jedburgh and then Kel. Jedburgh struck Kel from behind with his sword and nearly killed her before she knocked him unconscious, after which the party withdrew to the Belvedere park, where Dross's divinations diagnosed them both and Tulip forced a brain serum down the sleeping Jedburgh to cure him. Kel, still infected, had spent that same hour binding Jedburgh as her obedient servant for three weeks — a working she could not undo once the Bishop's restorative had cured her, leaving both Jedburgh and Tulip unforgiving. The session ends with the party back at the baths and Tulip on the glass roof, watching the veiled woman give lengthy instructions to the officer in charge while the captives sit on the floor below; her business there is plainly unfinished, and the party is still watching. Chronological Timeline Date Event Day 44 Frontal assault on the Le Bourget-du-Lac baths ruled out; Pierre's disguised recce yields the prenatal-polio cover story, German guards and abnormal technicians; masterwork silk stockings bought; owls skinned and defences refreshed; a veiled woman and her chauffeur arrive by car; the chauffeur's contagious paranoia crosses the party's mind-speech link and infects Jedburgh and Kel; Jedburgh nearly kills Kel before being subdued, withdrawn to the Belvedere park and cured; Kel binds Jedburgh as her servant for three weeks and cannot release him; Tulip's rooftop watch confirms the women still held and the veiled woman still conferring

Session 13: Deliverance

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Items Acquired Tulip: Hag heart blood (unpriced) Black: Hag heart blood (unpriced) Kel: Hag heart blood (unpriced) Balance brought forward: 2,500 sp Balance carried forward: 2,500 sp Session Summary We set out from the baths to follow the veiled woman and ended the week having given her up and carried off her prisoners instead. Tulip's reading of her aura proved her no vampire but a living woman who can pull the air from a man's lungs, and we tracked her car east to a Cistercian abbey that keeps its door in a way no closed order should. A precognition showed the car to be a rolling gun-nest and handed us a better prize — a quarter-hour's warning and the convoy's route — so we turned to the women in the baths. Kel dressed me as an Italian officer to take the convoy by word alone, and once it was moving I drew it into a narrow street where a staged bomb-inspection let Tulip wall the guards in and burn them, while we spared the French drivers. At a lakeside wood we began turning the rescued women into mice for the road and found every one of them with child; we recovered Diana, passed Chambéry, and holed up at Bourg-en-Bresse near the Swiss line. There the downtime taught us the worst of it: the women carry lethal "cobolt" growths, the Mountain Hag is behind it and may be regenerating, and three of us drank her heart blood for what it gave. Chronological Timeline Date Event Day 44 Read the veiled woman's aura — human, not vampire, able to pull the air from a man's lungs; tracked her car east to the Cistercian abbey; foresaw the car's hidden guns and dropped the ambush; took the German convoy by disguise and destroyed its guards in a walled side street; spared the French drivers Day 44 ? Day 45 Moved the rescued women to a lakeside wood and began changing them to mice; found every one pregnant; recovered Diana from the Belvedere park; passed Chambéry without stopping Day 45 Reached Bourg-en-Bresse and split the convoy; through the following downtime finished the changing despite a near-fatal backfire, divined the pregnancies as lethal "cobolt" growths and read the Hag's loot, and three of us drank her heart blood

Session 14: So near and yet so far

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Items Acquired Party (shared resources): Balance brought forward: 2,500 sp Balance carried forward: 2,500 sp Session Summary Holed up at Bourg-en-Bresse with nearly two hundred rescued women still carried as mice, the party worked out that the only way to move them into Spain alive was to petrify them, chose Kel's petrification over flight or Hordling's one-way help, and set off; Black left a Void-Walk marker near the Chambéry convent first. Kel turned the women to stone over three days — a tedious labour marred by backfires that cost one woman a half-changed curse, dropped another into sleep, and briefly robbed Kel of smell and taste — leaving about fifteen kilos of statuary the party split between them, Dross and Hordling excused. With the casting done, they planned the road and discovered that Operation Anton had voided their French papers, so the cover became an open drive to Narbonne to have them reissued, with Jedburgh's man Pierre to front it. The party drove south to Narbonne, bluffed two checkpoints, and Black guarded the truckload of stone women through the night while Pierre had the documents reissued as German the next day. Pushing on past Perpignan to Banyuls, Black and Dross were turned away at gunpoint from a border farmhouse, ruling out a crossing on foot, so they picked a secluded beach to fly from — but the historic windstorm wrecked every attempt at flight, forecast to blow five more days, so Pierre drove the truck off as a decoy and the rest went to ground in a hidden hillside camp. Four days into the wait a scrying was discovered anchored overhead; the party swapped identities, walked inland unseen, crossed a patrolled road behind a tank's tracks, and reached cold ridge country — still short of the border, still waiting out the storm, as the session ends. Chronological Timeline Date Event Day 46 Downtime at Bourg-en-Bresse; debate how to move two hundred mice to Spain; petrification chosen; Black leaves a Void-Walk marker near the convent Day 46 ? Day 48 Kel turns the women to stone over three days of casting; backfires leave one cursed and one sleeping; the load is split among the party Day 48 Route planned; Operation Anton voids the party's French papers; cover story set — drive to Narbonne for reissue Day 48 ? Day 49 Drive south to Narbonne through two checkpoints; Black guards the truck overnight; papers reissued as German Day 49 Coast road past Perpignan to Banyuls; turned away at gunpoint from a border farmhouse; flight-beach chosen; flight aborted by the windstorm Day 49 ? Day 53 Pierre drives the truck off as a decoy; party holes up in a hidden camp; on the fourth day a scrying is found overhead; the party swaps identities, walks inland unseen, crosses a patrolled road, and reaches cold ridge country, still mid-wait

Session 15: Corked

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Items Acquired Party (shared resources): Balance brought forward: 2,500 sp Balance carried forward: 2,500 sp Session Summary With the windstorm breaking early, the party weighed the clear weather at the tunnel camp in the cork-oak hills and chose, on Black's argument, to fly straight over the low hills into Spain rather than out over the sea. They set off just after midnight — Kel and Tulip in Kel's chariot, Dross, Diana and Jedburgh on the carpet, Black on Corniger — after Kel's look two hours ahead showed a quiet landing at Sant Martí d'Empúries and Kel's chariot bounced twice off the hillside on take-off. Five minutes out, Black felt that foreseen future collapse, and Diana spotted the cause: a two-headed wyvern and Heinrich von Kleist riding his hound, now grown into a monstrous war hound. The party landed on the valley floor while Black stayed aloft and the others used the two minutes of warning to prepare. Dross summoned Short Fuse, who named the Nessian war hound, hinted that the earl behind the Perpignan ritual is the seventy-second of the Goetia, and was released at his own request. Von Kleist struck before the party was ready: the hound vomited up a fire elemental that drained Tulip, who escaped as wind, and Black charged the elemental with his lance. Von Kleist then shot Black's mirror images away with a submachine gun and hit him with a soul-burning axe invoking Phlegethos. After the hound's fire drove Tulip's iron rhinoceros and python back, von Kleist leapt back out of reach and left the fire elemental and the wyvern behind. The session ends mid-fight: Black is wounded in the air and holding his charge against von Kleist's return, Tulip is scattered as wind, and Diana is sealed in stone. Chronological Timeline Date Event Day 53 The storm breaks early at the tunnel camp; the party chooses an overland flight into Spain; Kel foresees a quiet landing Day 54 Just after midnight, the party flies south; the foreseen future collapses; von Kleist attacks with his war hound and a wyvern; Short Fuse is summoned and released; a fire elemental scatters Tulip; Black is badly wounded; von Kleist withdraws out of reach and the fight is still unresolved

Session 16: Explosive Developments

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Items Acquired Black: Wyvern eyes (unpriced) Dross: Wyvern eyes (unpriced) Jedburgh: Wyvern eyes (unpriced) Kel: Wyvern eyes (unpriced) Tulip: Wyvern eyes (unpriced) Balance brought forward: 2,500 sp Balance carried forward: 2,500 sp Session Summary The fight in the pass north of Le Boulou resumed with von Kleist watching from the high ground while Dross's fear spell knocked the salamander senseless. Black killed the bomb-carrying wyvern with a new lance charge, but the bombs still fell; the salamander died in the blast, Dross took a chest wound and lost his Second Chance amulet, and Black recovered the wyvern's four eyes and its heart. The party ruled out a knightly challenge to von Kleist, who is not a real knight, and advanced with Black alone visible; von Kleist radioed someone he called the Gräfin and leapt away. The party then flew invisibly over the border into Spain, landing on farmland some eighteen miles short of Sant Martí d'Empúries. Black, Dross and Jedburgh drank from the wyvern's heart, and Black came away with a prehensile poisonous tail that he refuses to use. Diana was airlifted to England, and the party, declining rest there, went to ground in the wooded hills west of Sant Martí to train for three months and four days before taking on the Phoenician ruins. Chronological Timeline Date Event Day 54 Wyvern killed but its bombs devastate the pass; von Kleist withdraws; party flies invisibly into Spain; three drink the wyvern heart; Diana airlifted to England that evening; party digs in west of Sant Martí d'Empúries; training begins Day 55 ? Day 57 Training in normal time in the hills west of Sant Martí d'Empúries Day 58 1 December 1942, first day of winter (Jim's ruling): Pergament Drei gives the party 90 days of training in a single day

Buffs & Mil Sci

Buffs

Long Term (assumed always on)

Magic (caster)	Rk	Effects	Duration	Bk	Jd	Kl	Tp	TBA	TBA	TBA
Tulip	11	Strength of Stones +11 EN or ST	12 hrs				x
Tulip	7	Converse with animals (Bear, Raven, Fox)	24 hrs				x

Self Only

Magic (caster)	Rk	Effects	Duration	Bk	Jd	Kl	Tp	Bk	JB	Dr
TBA (TBA)
TBA (TBA)
TBA (TBA)
TBA (TBA)
TBA (TBA)
TBA (TBA)

Short Term (cast when needed)

Magic (caster)	Rk	Effects	Dur	Bk	Jd	Kl	Tp	TBA	TBA	TBA
Tulip	11	Armour of Earth +24%	6hrs
Tulip	7	area of effect Blending	7hrs
TBA (TBA)
TBA (TBA)

Cast by minions and retainers

Magic (caster)	Rk	Effects	Dur	Location	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA
TBA (TBA )
TBA (TBA )
TBA (TBA )
TBA (TBA )
TBA (TBA )

Senses and other stuff

TBA	Rk	Effects	Dur	Bk	Jd	Kl	Tp	TBA	TBA	TBA
Sense Danger (%)
Detect Ambush (%)		Ranger (-5/rank of opposition)
TBA
See Invis (Rk)		Effective rank for seeing invisible
Stealth (%)		Standard / Ranger Outdoors

Animal (and other) Companions

Animal	Base key stats	Always on	Effects
Bear (Tu)	22PC 39PS 15MD 14AG 6TMR 9WP -MA 34EN 38FT	animal growth, armour earth, strength stones, blending, greater on resistance, in combat: enchanted fang	bind animal, in-card, natural weapons are magical weapons of cold +5dmg, enchanted fang +3dmg, greater on resistance
Massive Python (Tu)	18PC 50PS -MD 12AG 9TMR 16WP -MA 30EN 35FT	slithering 450, climbing 200	magical staff
War dog Sabrina (Tu)	24PC 11PS 19MD 20AG 8TMR 21WP 18EN 33FT	armour earth, strength stones, blending	vanilla bound animal, in card
Raven (Tu)	18PC 3PS 23MD 22AG 12TMR 22WP 10EN 24FT	blending, greater on resistance	vanilla bound animal, in card
Midsummer Vixen (Tu)	12PC 5PS 19MD 24AG 6TMR 7EN 12FT 8MA	special ritually bound, blending, greater on resistance	petit mort self, firelight and pyrotechnics from her tail

Misc

Greater Enchantment

(TBA ) rank ??

Enhance Enchantment

(TBA ) rank ??:, ?? seconds

Remove Curse

(TBA ) MA ??

Herbalist Lunch/Broth

?? rk ?, Meal ? FT or Broth ? FT

Loot

Consumables

Rank 8 Draught of Healing Sleep

This draught will cause the drinker to fall into a healing sleep that will heal Fatigue or Endurance damage at the rate of 1 Endurance per hour of sleep or an additional 4 Fatigue per hour. Repairing lost Endurance is prioritised, and no Fatigue is recovered.
The sleeper can be woken at any time but must sleep at least 4 hours to receive any benefit at all.
It will also accelerate the rate of healing time of 1 Specific Grievous injury. Divide the normal rate by 8. A deep sword cut that would normally take 20 days to heal would heal in 3 days if they have received at least 8 hours of sleep at the time of taking it.
This healing will repair damage to muscles, ligaments, tendons and skin.

Potion of Reason Restored x 5

This potion will restore the imbiber’s reason if they succeed in a roll of 4 x MA. The potion weighs ½ lb and is considered Rank 20 with an MA of 30. The imbiber will glow brightly while their sanity is repaired. 
If the contents are poured into a grenade, it may be thrown at a hex, where will burst, shedding Rank 20 light in an area 25 ft across. Any creature that is considered an Aberration (e.g. Calimari) may be forced out of the current mundane plane, or slain. An entity who is insane but not an Aberration will be rendered catatonic.

Rank 10 Restorative x 11

This potion weighs 4 oz. The Endurance of whoever drinks it is reduced by 12 and their Fatigue is restored by 24. This may Stun.

Rank 10 Soul Shroud

This vial weighs 4 oz. Whoever drinks it creates a shroud around their mind and soul for 21 hours. Aside from preventing their thoughts from being detected or read, the Adept always appears unpacted to those that can determine such things. This spell does not prevent the Adept’s presence or emotions from being detected, but their mind will simply not appear to be there when an attempt is made to “read” it.
The Adept’s Resistance versus abilities that Charm, Compel, Bind or Control is increased by 30 but does not block ESP or Empathy. The Adept can receive Mind Speech at their choice.

Rank 6 Potion of Solar Protection

This vial weighs 4 oz. Whoever drinks it gains +8 to the chance of resisting magical, light-based attacks for 70 minutes. This includes Flash of Light, Wall of Starlight, Bolt of Starfire, Web of Light, Solar Flare and Whitefire. They will also become fully protected from damage caused by non-magical light (E.g. sunburn, snow-blindness), with the exception that it will not protect Greater Undead from sunlight. The protection also allows vision in a Rank 20 Light Spell and reduces damage from any light or solar based attack by 1.

Rank 16 Love Philtre

This philtre weighs 4 oz and will cause the imbiber to fall in love with the first entity upon whom he or she sets eyes after drinking it (regardless of species or sex). The effects of the substance will last for 17 weeks, unless dispelled by the casting of the General Knowledge Counterspell of the College of Witchcraft by the creator of the Love Philtre, or by the successful use of the Curse Removal Ritual, in which case it is a Minor Curse.

Rank 16 Potion of Fertility

This potion weighs 4 oz and increases the chances of conception by 85%. The effects last for 7 days, unless dispelled by the General Knowledge Counterspell of the College of Witchcraft by the creator of the Potion or a Ritual of Remove Curse is employed, in which case it is considered a Minor Curse

Rank 16 Restorative Potion

This potion weighs 4 oz and when imbibed, subtracts 18 from Endurance and repairs 36 lost Fatigue. The Fatigue so restored may have been lost through damage or tiredness, including spell casting.
This Endurance loss may Stun .

Demijohn of Hydrachloric Acid

This glass demijohn is 2/3rds full and weighs 17 lbs 3 oz. It contains 9 gallons and 3 pints of an acid derived from a hydra steeped in chlorine for at least a year then decanted into the container on a leap day.

Distillation of Wolfsbane

This phial contains a transparent, pale violet concoction that, when sniffed, numbs the nose. It is a concentrated extraction of wolfsbane and may be used in an Alchemical operation.

Remnants

Remnants	Number	Remnants	Number	Remnants	Number	Remnants	Number
Afterglow [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	5	Anchor [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	6	Apple [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	5	Book [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	10
Bridge [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	7	Castle [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	2	Chaos [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	10	City [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	7
Confusion [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	5	Dog [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	5	Drum [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	5	Eagle [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	11
Echo [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	6	Engine [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	9	Equilibrium [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	5	Euphoria [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	15
Facade [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	11	Feather [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	6	Footprint [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	5	Forest [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	11
Garden [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	7	Glimmer [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	10	Helm [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	7	House [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	7
Island [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	13	Kite [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	6	Lemon [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	13	Mirage [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	7
Mountain [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	2	Needle [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	13	Ocean [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	7	Panic [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	5
Queen [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	15	Resonance [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	3	River [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	5	Serenity [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	18
Silhouette [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	10	Sleep [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	6	Solitude [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	7	Stagnation [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	7
Star [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	5	Train [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	5	Vestige [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	14	Window [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	11

Syrinx of Ranger

This syrinx is a brass and glass monstrosity of needles, ampoules and cogs that weighs 9oz. When it is driven into the victims neck, requiring four dwarven fingers of high octane dragonspirits, the genetic memories of the target organise information so that exposure to Ranger Skill use acts as training time. It does not obviate the Experience cost, but if the Skill is used regularly while on adventure, then this counts as all or part of their training time. The victims genetic memories fade into quiescence after four weeks.

Syrinx of Driving Automata

This syrinx is a brass and glass monstrosity of needles, ampoules and cogs that weighs 9oz. When it is driven into the victims neck, requiring four dwarven fingers of high octane dragonspirits, the genetic memories of the target organise information so that exposure to Driving Automata Skill use acts as training time. It does not obviate the Experience cost, but if the Skill is used regularly while on adventure, then this counts as all or part of their training time. The victims genetic memories fade into quiescence after four weeks.

Syrinx of Reich English

This syrinx is a brass and glass monstrosity of needles, ampoules and cogs that weighs 9oz. When it is driven into the victims neck, requiring four dwarven fingers of high octane dragonspirits, the genetic memories of the target organise information so that exposure to Reich English use acts as training time. It does not obviate the Experience cost, but if the Skill is used regularly while on adventure, then this counts as all or part of their training time. The victims genetic memories fade into quiescence after four weeks.

Syrinx of Reich French

This syrinx is a brass and glass monstrosity of needles, ampoules and cogs that weighs 9oz. When it is driven into the victims neck, requiring four dwarven fingers of high octane dragonspirits, the genetic memories of the target organise information so that exposure to Reich French use acts as training time. It does not obviate the Experience cost, but if the Skill is used regularly while on adventure, then this counts as all or part of their training time. The victims genetic memories fade into quiescence after four weeks.

Syrinx of Reich German

This syrinx is a brass and glass monstrosity of needles, ampoules and cogs that weighs 9oz. When it is driven into the victims neck, requiring four dwarven fingers of high octane dragonspirits, the genetic memories of the target organise information so that exposure to Reich German use acts as training time. It does not obviate the Experience cost, but if the Skill is used regularly while on adventure, then this counts as all or part of their training time. The victims genetic memories fade into quiescence after four weeks.

Pergament Ein

Translated at 20:00 To a Lutum of the Atomic Womb (potion the colour and consistency of pus)

Either

Tincture of Winkulus
This test tube contains a pale green, transparent liquor. When it is poured into a Lutum of the Atomic Womb and a drop of blood added, the fluids will curdle, forming a cheeky and irrepressible wink called Äugle which will serve as a familiar for whoever donated the blood.

Or

Tincture of Shofur
This test tube contains a dark, murky green liquor. When it is poured into a Lutum of the Atomic Womb and a drop of blood added, the fluids will curdle, forming a reserved and polite manservant called Pâkka in dark green livery with brass buttons who is unseeable to everyone except whoever donated the blood, and whom they will attend as a familiar

Pergament Zwei

Translated at 22:00
Eight hours after this scroll is opened, it will crumble to grey dust.
Rolle der Disziplin und geistigen Stärke
Whoever reads from this scroll for 4 hours may advance their FT by 1 per Adventure or Season, whichever is least.
This ability is permanent, persists through death and there is no upper limit to which their FT value can ascend.

Pergament Drei

Translated at 00:00
A stylus of enchanted ice is dipped into the dried blood of an unbaptised child, the indicated sigils and glyphs must be drawn onto a square metre of copper foil, then exposed to the North Wind by midnight.
Die Zeit des fahlen Lichts
If this is used in Autumn or Spring, a month will pass in a single day. If it is used in Winter, then, a season will pass. It has no effect in Summer.
The volume affected is an ethereal hemisphere with a base diameter of 60 feet.

Pergament Vier

Translated at 02:00
Ein Adelsbrief or ein Adelspatent
Whoever reads this scroll will become the Margrave or Magravine von Dorn und Rosen. The land holdings have been lost with the fall of the Holy Roman Empire. The title, however, remains.
On the fist encounter, they are addressed as Herr Margrave (Lord Margrave) or Frau Margravine (Lady Margravine), and subsequently Euer Gnaden (your Grace), Margrave or Margravine. Note that unlike British nobility, Sir or Madam are not used subsequently.
They are styled der Hochgeborern (the Highborn Lord), der Margrave von Dorn und Rosen or die Hochgeborene (the Highborn Lady), die Margravine von Dorn und Rosen.

Pergament Funf

Translated at 04:00
Der sechste Punkt
Whoever reads this parchment may raise one of their Primary Statistics by a sixth point at the normal Experience cost.
This may exceed racial maximums.

Armour

Antlered Breastplate

This breastplate is made from the antlers of perytons sliced into long, scale-like sections about 3 inches long, 1 inch wide and 1/4 of an inch thick, sewn into its hide with its own sinews. It weighs 8lbs and may be worn over a gambeson or leather armour, but not exotic, scale or other metal armours. Sections of the antlers sweep out and up from the shoulder so that if the wearer Receives a Charge (which is a Reflex Action in response to being targeted by a Dive or Charge), they add an extra rollup D10 to their damage if their counterstrike is successful.
If the wearer takes damage that ends in 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 or 8, they may increase their Protection versus A, B or C Class damage by 4. This effect does not stack with other armour features triggered by damage rolls (e.g., +2 Protection on an 8, 9, or 0). Apply only the single highest Protection bonus for that roll. In the event that the wearer receives any of the following Specific Grievous injuries, they roll a D10 and any result of an 8 or higher means that the injury is ignored entirely.

Roll	Injury
11	Your aorta is severed and you are quite dead. Rest assured your companions will do their best to console your widow(er).
12	A stomach puncture. Nasty. You suffer 3 Damage Points immediately from Endurance and lose 2 from your TMR until fully recovered, which will take two months. Also, you are automatically stunned for the next pulse (if you aren’t already), after which you may recover. Add 20 to the chance to be infected.
14 - 18	Tsk, tsk. A wound of the solid viscera. Usually fatal. Take 3 Damage Points to Endurance immediately and 1 per pulse thereafter until the bleeding is stopped by a Healer of Rank 2 or above or you die. Add 30 to the chance of infection.
21 - 25	A chest wound. Take 2 Damage Points to Endurance immediately and reduce your TMR by 1 until recovered (about 2 months). Look on the bright side, though. Your attacker’s weapon is caught in your rib cage and has been wrenched from their grasp.
37 - 40	You have been eviscerated! Take 4 Damage Points immediately from Endurance and 1 point per pulse from Fatigue thereafter (Endurance when Fatigue is exhausted) until you are unconscious. Increase your chance of infection by 40.

In response to a magical attack that they are aware of, the wearer may increase their Magic Resistance by 7 (except for magic that affects the personality) and ignore the first 7 points of Spell Damage per Pulse for the next minute. This is a Reflex Action.
While this effect is in place, the wearer will be attended by a low mana zone one hex across doubling their Fatigue costs for Casting non-Racial Magic and reducing Cast Chances by 7.

Feathered Opera Gloves

A Rank 8+ Glover can use the brood patch, down and secondary feathers of a peryton to fashion opera gloves for a lady of quality (Impoverished Gentry or higher) and will charge 5 tsg for their work. The gloves will cover the hands and arms near to their shoulders in pale aquamarine leather the texture of fine kid, the outer seam adorned with secondary feathers in blue, green and red. Completed, the will weigh 7 oz in total.
The gloves reduce the Force of weather for the wearer by 2 (but cannot modify winds of Force 9 or higher) and they reduce penalties to their Flying Skill by 10.
In addition, if the wearer should receive A, B or C Class damage that ends in 6, 7 or 8, then their Protection is increased by 4.

Stockings of the Sisters of St. Joseeph

These stockings are made by the Sisters of St. Joseph in Chambery from finely spun angora and silk, and are made for an individual whose Social Rank is at least Impoverished Gentry. It must be embroidered with gold thread and should feature such things as a family crest or tartan.
The stockings will cost 10 tsg per pair, the profits being used to support the children they hide from the Nazis. Haggling will lead to sourceless rumours about the buyer’s morality and likely pact-relationship with the Seventh Plane.
The temperature of the wearer’s feet never fall below 97° F and are magically kept dry. This does not always make the wearer more comfortable. It does prevent hypothermia in any terrestrial environment, but can have consequences.
A man's stocking reaches past the swell of the calf muscle, and if they receive A, B or C Class damage that ends in 3 or 4, then their Protection is increased by 4.
A woman's stocking reaches to mid-thigh, and if they receive A, B or C Class damage that ends in 3, 4, 5 or 6, then their Protection is increased by 2.

Hag Skin Cloak

Three and three quarter square yards of pale skin with veins of grey marbling has been stripped from the corpse of a mountain hag and prepared for use but not tanned. It may be made into a single cloak or top coat for a humanoid entity of size 4, 5 or 6, or two such pieces of apparel for humanoids of size 3 or less. Its weight factor is 1.

The skin must be immersed in as much of the first urine of a she-bear upon rising from her Winter torpor as will fill a stoneware tavern pitcher. The pitcher must be exposed to the sky each night yet protected from the sun otherwise, the operation begun at noon on a Monday and concluded at dusk on the coming Saturday.

Decant the urine from the pitcher and dilute to 1 part in 20, thus to pour over tillable soil before the Spring planting. The crop will grow as if richly manured, nor shall any verminous creature approach it until Winter at the earliest.

The hide must be washed in a copper bath with lions feet no later than midnight on Saturday until Monday at noon. Draw it through a mangle with bronze rollers until it is only damp and gently dry it in darkness until midnight on Wednesday. Then, must the fat of a penguin that rules kingdoms be rendered in which a pail of red wood ants have been drowned. The hide, ants and fat must be churned from sunrise on Thursday until after the first hour of darkness on Sunday and kept to a scalding heat. 

Hang the hide on an armour rack until no later than Tuesday morning, drawing it through the mangle again to squeeze out the fat. The hide need not feel dry but should feel only slightly greasy. Return to the armour rack and leave until Thursday noon.

The hide will require the arts of a Rank 8+ Leatherworker, Tailor or Seamstress. The cloak will take them five days and they will charge 5 tsg for it. The top coat will take them eleven days and they will charge 9 tsg. 

If an attempt to haggle is made for any of these materials or processes, the magic fails.

To benefit from its special magic, the wearer must sacrifice a point of Endurance to it, which can be bought back in the usual way.
In either form, it holds a reserve of 25 DP. Once these are depleted, it is just clothing, although obviously still magical. Once a day, before they sleep, the wearer can allow it to drink 2 points of their Endurance to restore 1 DP to its reserve. The loss to Endurance maybe Healed back by any means.
A top coat can be worn over any armour except plate or plate mail. A cloak can be worn over any armour unless excluded by the DM, but does not automatically protect against damage from the wearer’s front hexes,. If, however, the wearer holds a fold of the cloak in their off hand, they may deflect a frontal attack with a veronica. Percentiles are rolled to which is added twice the wearer’s MD, and if the result is 100 or more, the cloak intercepts as much A, B or C Class damage as its reserve allows.
It does not work versus spell damage except for that which arises from Diamond Javelins, Earth Hammer, Ice Bolt, Ice Projectiles or the like. Nor does it protect against hits directly to EN or Specific Grievous Injuries.
It will not take a dye, but once completed, it will be pale grey in colour with marbling in darker shades. Against a mountainous, snowy or icy background, the wearer's Stealth is increased by 10.
Where other protections exists, this is considered the outermost clothing layer, with auras being depleted first, then this, unless specified otherwise.

Feathered Fascinator

A Rank 8+ Milliner can use these feathers to create a green, teal and blue confection for a lady of quality (Impoverished Gentry or higher) and will charge 5 tsg for their work. Completed, it will weigh 4 oz.
When it is worn, it enhances PB by 2 to a maximum of 23. If it is worn with a veil, then it does not, but makes the wearer mysterious and alluring.
In addition, if the wearer should receive A, B or C Class damage that ends in 0, then their Protection is increased by 3. This effect does not stack with other armour features triggered by damage rolls (e.g., +2 Protection on an 8, 9, or 0). Apply only the single highest Protection bonus for that roll.

Feather-Lined Fencing Cape

A Rank 8+ Tailor can use these feathers to line a fencing cape and will charge 5 tsg for their work. It is worn in place of a cloak or coat over the primary shoulder and weighs 9 oz.
If the wearer wields an A Class one handed melee weapon, they may deliver a Lunge, which can be delivered against a target within 2 hexes without penalty. The damage of the attack is increased by 3, and, once used, cools down for 3 Pulses.
In addition, if the wearer should receive A, B or C Class damage that ends in 8 or 9, then their Protection is increased by 3. This effect does not stack with other armour features triggered by damage rolls (e.g., +2 Protection on an 8, 9, or 0). Apply only the single highest Protection bonus for that roll.

Feather-Lined Greatcoat

A Rank 8+ Tailor can use these feathers to line a greatcoat that looks like a bespoke uniform for a member of the Gestapo, and will charge 5 tsg for their work. Completed, the coat will weigh 2 lbs.
It will increase the Gauge for the wearer by 3 and reduce cold damage by 3 per attack.

Weapons

Heartdrinker Maingauche

This maingauche is made, entirely, from the antler of a peryton, and does not impair magic. It weighs 10 oz, has a base Strike Chance of 53, inflicts 1 rollup D10+3 A Class damage and may be wielded in Melee or Close.
Against a humanoid, if the damage rolled ends in 8, a Specific Grievous injury is rolled for. If the result is 20 or less, then this injury is inflicted:
Your opponent’s aorta is severed and they are quite dead.
It is also an enhanced Amulet of Luck , and if worked upon by a Shaper, Talismonger or Wiccan for three days, then it will add 2 to MR and 3 to Defence while it is worn. This will stack with one other Amulet of Luck.
The effect of the Amulet will terminate on the occasion of the next seasonal festival, unless it is worked upon by a Shaper, Talismonger or Wiccan for three days.

Peryton Parasol

This parasol has a green, teal and blue canopy and weighs 1/2 lb. The shaft is the colour of aged ivory, has been forged from a single peryton antler, tempered in sassenach heart blood, and the handle curved into a delicate crook suitable for the hand of one who identifies as a lady whose Social Rank is at least Impoverished Gentry.
When flourished by a Courtesan, it will attract the attention of gently born men over the age of fourteen.
The canopy does not close as a parasol usually does. Instead, it morphs inside the shaft, and the parasol can be wielded as a small sword, requiring PS 10 and MD 15. It is advanced as if it were a Rapier, except that the base Strike Chance is 53% and inflicts 1 rollup D10 + 1 A Class damage. In addition to the bonuses that arise out of Rank, the wielder increases damage by 1 or every 5 points of MD in excess of 15, excess PS is ignored.

Antlered Gauntlet

This gauntlet requires peryton antlers that are crimson in colour which must be twined about it, increasing its weight by 3 lbs. It is advanced as a Cestus, has a base Strike Chance of 53% and inflicts 1 rollup D10 & 1 rollup D5 A Class damage. For every 10 points of PS in excess of 17, an additional rollup D5 is added. When the damage code is 1 rollup D10 & 4 rollup D5, then a D10 is rolled and any result greater than 9 means the gauntlet has been destroyed, although the damage is still inflicted. For every rollup D5 greater than 5, then 1 is added to the result on the breakage D10.
Whenever a Strike is made with the gauntlet, the wielder rolls percentile dice twice and chooses the best roll.

Peryton Dancing Shoes

A Rank 8+ Cordwainer can use the leather and antlers of a peryton to fashion shoes for a lady of quality (Impoverished Gentry or higher), and will charge 5 tsg for their work. The shoes will cover the feet and ankles, the leather forming a T strap across the lady’s instep, and a secure heel cup. The toe box is fine, pointed and woven from slender withes of peryton antler to form a firm and protective point. Heels are carved from antlers, as well, and are two inches high.
The wearer increases the number of Ranks they have in Dance by 1 while wearing these shoes, if they have any Rank in Courtesan.
If they already have learnt Dance, then they may deliver a whirling kick with the shoes. A sharpened plate of peryton antler slides forward from beneath the toe box. The wearer uses their Rank in dagger, has a base Strike Chance of 47%, inflicts 1 rollup D10 + 1 A Class damage, and may be wielded in Melee or Close.
In addition, if the wearer should receive A, B or C Class damage that ends in 1 or 2, then their Protection is increased by 4.

Miscellany

The Murmuration of Starlings

This heavily-knotted woollen wall hanging has been woven in the shape of a rhombus that is 3 feet long by 9 feet wide and weighs 9 lbs 11 oz. The background is blue and hundreds of tiny starlings are picked out in an iridescent, metallic, dark green thread. The starlings give the appearance of moving on their own.
It is a legal target for the Instilling Flight spell, increasing the Base Chance by 10. The Warlock can increase the area of the carpet at the time of Casting up to a maximum of 5 feet 11 inches long and 17 feet 9 inches wide, so long as the ratio is maintained.
At 3 ft x 9 ft, the textile would be too small for anyone else other than the Warlock. At 5 ft 11 in x 17 ft 9 in, the textile has sufficient area to hold 18 sizes of humanoids with comfort.
The Warlock can dynamically increase or decrease the speed of flight up to its maximum, but must move at least 1 TMR of airspeed or they will plummet. When the spell is Rank 10 or higher, and the Professional Skill Navigator is known, then a starling can be drawn from the textile and given a course. This reduces the level flight speed to half (+ 5% per Rank in Navigator), but obviating any need for the Warlock to maintain concentration. Indeed, they may even sleep if they trust their flight plans to a starling made out of wool.

Spectral Leg of Peryton

This left hind leg is particularly fleet. It may be attached to a mount, becoming a spectral part of their body, increasing TMR by 1, movement rate by 50 yards per minute and Magic Resistance by 7.
The hoof may be shod, although it is entirely ethereal in nature.

The Stick of Black Tom Weir

This gnarled and twisted stick has a bronze ferrule, is made from a yard of blackthorn and weighs 2 lbs. It takes no harm from fire, magical or otherwise, although it can be set on fire. If a point of Endurance is sacrificed to it, then:

• While the stick is in their hand, the wielder need not Prepare an Igniting Flammables or Pyrogenesis spell, although they must still pay its FT cost.
• The stick may be targetted with Igniting Flammables or Pyrogenesis which will manifest as a Firelight spell of the same Rank. If Invisibility is Cast upon the stick, then the Firelight may only be seen by those whose Witchsight, Wizardsight or Enhanced Vision is at least equal in Rank (to the Invisibility spell)
• The stick requires PS of 8 and MD of 12 to wield it. The Strike Chance versus an adjacent opponent is 47 (+ wielder’s MA and Rank in the spell). When the Strike Check is successful, 2 rollup D10 are rolled. The first D10 represents C Class damage, the second represents Fire damage. At Rank 10 another rollup D10 of Fire damage is added, and a final rollup D10 at Rank 20. If the wielder rolls 15% of their modified Strike Chance, the C Class damage is applied directly to Endurance. If they roll 5% of their modified Strike Chance, then they check the Specific Grievous Injury table for C Class weapons. Fire damage does not inflict damage directly to Endurance or Specific Grievous Injuries, nor does it Double or Triple.
• The wielder may manifest a Wall of Fire when they Cast a Wall of Thorns spell, and vice versa.

At the seasonal festival, the wielder chooses a number of spells from this list:

Spell	#
Extinguish Fires
Fireproofing
Increase Temperature
Slow Fire
Smoke Creation
GK Fire Counterspell
SK Fire Counterspell
Fire Armour	0/1
Cleansing Flame	0/1
Fire Arc	0/1

The number of spells held and their Rank is the same as the wielder's Rank in Igniting Flammables or Pyrogenesis. All spells dissipate at the end of a season.
If the stick is not intelligent, then it is opinionated and obnoxious. There is no social sin which it will not encourage and no indelicacy it will not utter.

Horn Card Case & Deck

This tongue and groove box of carved ram’s horn is 5 inches by 2 inches by 1 inch holds the 78 cards of a tarot deck, and weighs 7 oz. The magical property of the box is to Prepare the deck when the reader wishes to use it so that they do not have to.
It has two functions:

1. When looking at a surface, object or entity that is no further distant than 10 feet, they may consult the deck to gain some notion of its nature, purpose, history or fate. This is treated as Divining Aspects. It is resolved as if the reader were using the Detect Aura Talent, although no aura is detected, nor can one be evaluated.
   
2. The reader may use the deck to perform an Ancient Divination when Divining Enchantment. However, this costs 1 PC when the attempt is successful.
   

One point of PC is restored after a night’s sleep.

Portable Athanor

This tower of brick weighs 67 lbs, has a base diameter of 19 inches and rises to 2 feet. The bricks are not mortared but are, instead, designed to lock into specific places.
The central tower is made from an alloy of mithril and Valinorian gold. The chimney is marked with glyphs that appear to be runes.
It is not magical in nature, but when it is set up, allows an Alchemist to perform their usual operations.

Armageddon Rock

This tetrahedron of swirling shades of green is carved from malachite, has edges 6 inches long and weighs 3 lbs 10 oz, each vertex being capped with glyph covered bronze. An Adept of the College of Earth Magic can bind it by sacrificing a point of Endurance to it. This may be bought back in the usual way.

Earthen Reserve

On the occasion of binding it, the Adept may buy 1 Spell Point, costing 2,500 Experience. This may be used in the place of FT to Cast magic of the College of Earth Magic, only.
While the tetrahedron holds at least 1 Spell Point , then the Adept is considered in contact with the earth, even if floating in the depths of space.
Spell Points do not recover on their own. Instead, the Adept must hold the rock and spend 2 FT for each Spell Point, the entire process taking an hour.
The Spell Point reserve of the rock may be increased by1 at the end of an adventure, but no more than once per season.

Slings & Stones

Six smaller rocks of the same appearance will manifest from it and float around the Adept they are bound to. They have a mass of 9 2/3rds of an oz each, a base Strike Chance of 57% and inflict 1 rollup D10 + 1 rollup D5 damage.
If the sum of the damage roll is even, then it inflicts A Class damage or Possible Specific Grievous injuries, otherwise, it is C Class.
The wielder may throw as many of these smaller rocks as they have Ranks in the weapon skill each Pulse. Once all six have been thrown, this function is lost until the next dawn.

Summoning Focus

The Adept may summon a single entity from the Felines, Great Land Mammals, Riding Animals, Reptiles, Snakes or Insects & Spiders categories when using the Ritual of Summoning Animals.
From Rank 10 to 20, the Adept may summon a swarm of vermin, (crawling insects, spiders, frogs, toads, scorpions and the like. The swarm is large is enough and dense enough to cover the square of the Rank in square feet, but will spread out to cover an area twice that over a few Pulses. The swarm need not be of one type of creature unless the Adept so specifies, but cannot be other than vermin.
The swarm is relatively harmless, although disturbing. Anyone inside the area suffers a penalty to Concentration, Cast and Strike Chances equal to the Rank of the Ritual unless they love vermin.
If, however, a venomous swarm is summoned, then the area is halved. Living entities inside the area suffers 1 rollup D5 venom damage each Pulse, 2 rollup D5 at Rank 15 and 3 rollup D5 at Rank 20 until they escape.
Vermin do not respond to shouts, but on the other hand, they will follow simple instructions, requiring a Pass Action from the Adept. If a single kind of vermin has been summoned and communicated with by means of the Converse with Animal spell, then the Adept can instruct them with a Free Act or Pass Action.

Annis Boots

These dark brown boots fit a humanoid of size 8, and weigh 6lbs 7 oz. If the wearer walks in a zig-zag pattern within the ambit of their TMR, they leave no discernable track, except at each vertex. If they travel overland NE, NW, SE or SW, then they increase their movement rate by the square root of 2, adding 1 for every 3 points of TMR they use.

Red Leather Reticule

This leather hand bag is made from red leather, has a strap and weighs 4 lbs. It is a rigid tube 9 inches long and 3 inches in diameter. It can hold up to seven changes of clothing, only one of which can be a set of armour. The contents do not contribute to the wearer’s Encumbrance.
In the hands of a woman, it may be wielded as a flail with a base Strike Chance of 53% and inflicts 1 rollup D10+ 1 rollup D5 C Class damage.

Witch Skins

These skins have been enchanted with the Skin Change spell, and further treated by special oils. Once the skin has been counterspelled, the wearer and skin are returned to their original forms. The wearer of this form can only use wearable itemry which are not sized, e.g. necklaces, earrings, brooches or the like. Itemry which must be fitted can only be worn if the wearer and the skin are of the same size like armour, rings and most clothing. The DM will make the ultimate determination of what may be carried across the forms.

Käppchen

Description

Käppchen is a 10 year old girl who stands 4 ft 6in, with dark brown hair and brown eyes. She is pretty, with high colour and a light dusting of freckles across her cheeks. He face is round and she has an engaging smile which she can deploy as a Pass Action.
She wears a red velvet hoodie, a blue and yellow check skirt, dark woolen hose and red Maryjane shoes.

PS:	8	MD:	12	AG:	18	MA:	Wearer's	EN:	8	FT:	Wearer's
WP:	Wearer's	PC:	Wearer's	PB:	16	TMR:	6	NA:	Wearer's

• Bear in mind that earrings or any piercing on a 10 year old girl in a European culture will draw substantial attention.

Frau Trüdl

Description

Frau Trüdl is middle aged with black hair streaked with grey which she wear's in a migraine-inducing bun. She is a large-bodied woman, 5ft 10in tall, weighs 147 lbs and issurprisingly strong She is quick of hand and eye.
She wears a pale grey business suit, horn-rimmed glasses, heavy denier beige stockings and low-heeled black leather shoes.

PS:	18	MD:	18	AG:	15	MA:	Wearer's	EN:	23	FT:	Wearer's
WP:	Wearer's	PC:	Wearer's	PB:	9	TMR:	5	NA:	Wearer's

Gert Schlanger

Description

Gert is a spare man in his sixties, balding with tufts of white hair near his ears. He appears 5ft 6in tall, but he stoops, so is probably taller. He wears a light-coloured soft hat, a heavy woollen shirt which was once brown, heavy dungarees, braces and workman’s boots.

PS:	16	MD:	15	AG:	12	MA:	Wearer's	EN:	14	FT:	Wearer's
WP:	Wearer's	PC:	Wearer's	PB:	11	TMR:	4	NA:	Wearer's

Jewellery

Unremarkable Gem

This pale pink, vaguely hexagonal stone is transparent, uncut and unremarkable. It weighs 1 1/2 carats. Once cleaned and polished, it can be made into an Amulet of the Lightness of Being by a Shaper, Talismonger or Wiccan.

Amulet of the Lightness of Being

This amulet improves the wearer’s Endurance by 2 which may exceed racial maximums, reduces penalties to AG by 2 and may be used to store the light of sunrise on Midsummer’s Day. This may be released as a Free Act, and fills the wearer’s megahex for four Pulses, then fades.
It can only be recharged at noon of the next Midsummer's Day
If the wearer succeeds in a 1 x PC check, they will notice if they are being subjected to alpha particles.

Ruby Crown of Tethering

This splinter of a Great Ruby has been carved into a ring from which five claws rise. If it is attached to a rod, then it will behave like a mace. If it is attached to a mace, it will increase damage by 1 and Strike Chance by 7.
In addition, the crown will fly up to 25 feet, trailing a crimson tether, to attack an opponent as if they were adjacent to the wielder. The wielder may attempt to Entangle an opponent by this means.
They may also use it as a climbing aid, the wielder subtracting 17 from the result of the Climbing Check. The teeth of the crown can latch securely onto stone or wood but not iron, bronze or steel, the tether will support a weight of 450 lbs and may be used as a swing line.

Ring of Protection

This plain greengold ring weighs 2oz. Its magic will only be effective if it is worn on the ring finger of the right hand. The wearer subtracts 10 from the die roll whenever they attempt to resist magic, making it more likely that they will succeed. It does not increase Magic Resistance.
In addition, it surrounds the wearer with 11 pentagonal planes of protection that float around them on all sides a foot distant. Each pentagon is inscribed with magical glyphs along the edges. A pentagon will appear and protect the wearer so that the first 7 points of A, B or C Class damage points the wearer takes per pulse are ignored. It does not work versus spell damage except for that which arises from Diamond Javelins, Earth Hammer, Ice Bolt, Ice Projectiles or the like. Nor does it protect against hits directly to EN or Specific Grievous Injuries.
Where a similar protection exists, the outermost is depleted first, which, unless specified otherwise, this magic is likely to be, given that it is an aura.

Ring of Annis Steel

This dark blue, metallic ring is made from the skin of a Black Annis. It weighs 2 oz and must be worn on the middle finger of the right hand for its magic to be effective.
If damage is inflicted by the bearer’s right hand or a weapon held in it, and the resulting damage ends in a 1 or 2, then the wound is infected.
If the bearer is the target of an Annis’ womb attack, then they gain a bonus to their Magic Resistance of +20. If, for some reason, no Resistance Check is allowed, then a roll of 20 or less on percentiles will, however, void it.
It has an unusually high frictional coefficient with respect to alpha particles, which will make the bearer’s finger warm when exposed to such things.

Spell Racks

Cat’s Cradle

This yard long golden thread has a silver core and weighs 4 oz. Spell matrices may be added to this thread by tying knots into it, which will hold the Adept’s Incantations depending on what resources they have committed to it.
In addition, if the Adept loops the thread and plays Cat’s Cradle as a part of their Ritual of Purification, then while duration persists, they increase their MD by 1 and each Pulse, spell damage is ablatively reduced according to the following schedule:

Rank	Ablative Spell Armour
0 - 5	1
6 - 10	2
11 - 14	3
15 - 17	4
18 or 19	5
20	6

This ablative protection is applied after all others have been used, and resets at the beginning of the next Pulse.

Mountain Scarf

This woollen scarf is 6 feet 2 inches long and 1 foot 1 inch wide, weighing 9lbs 11oz. It is a tartan with broad stripes of dark red and forest green, with thin cross-lines of dark blue.

• The scarf magically renders the wearer’s ensemble dowdy and out of style. Their social rank will appear 1 less, with the exception of Greater Nobility, whose social rank is reduced by 2. 
• If the wearer is proximate to the Astral Plane, they may use the scarf to cover their face, spend 1 FT to see into the Astral plane for 3 Pulses and for a distance of 40 feet.

• It is a spell rack.

Abilities

Detecting Fumes

Range: 10 feet + 10 / Rank
Experience Multiple: 100
Effects: Bearing in mind that fumes travel in still air at about 1 hex per Pulse. Wind speed and bearing have an important impact on their spread, so the working of this Talent also helps Black determine these factors. He may determine the presence of fumes and vapours and has a chance equal to his modified Perception (+ 3 / Rank) and determining approximately which direction it came from and how long it took to get to him so long as it is within range.
If he shares a hex with a spoor, he can attempt to identify it and later, use the Talent to recognise the source.
The Talent requires a Magical Pass Action, and involves sniffing the air. If the Adept’s sense of smell is compromised for whatever reason, then this Talent may not be used.
It may only be attempted once per set of scents. When new ones are introduced, however, Black may attempt this Talent again. In addition, he may use it to interrogate an object that he shares a hex with. The answer to a Detect Fumes question will consist of a single concept or "bit" of information, and be largely Alchemical or Herbal in nature.
If the information sought is not intrinsic to the scent of the object, Black will receive no answer. If he achieves a double or triple effect, he may ask two or three questions respectively.
Only one attempt at Detecting Fumes may be made per object, although a subsequent Check may be required to identify a scent that has become concealed by others.
An individual object will change over time, however, and a fresh attempt may be made when its composition has changed sufficiently to class it as “new”. If a scent has been Detected and is not otherwise obfuscated, the same information will be available without a Cast Check.

The Gift of the Mountain

Black has drunk of the heartblood of a Mountain Hag and gained 1 point of Endurance, which has also increased its maximum value and 1 point of Natural Armour.

The Gift of the Chamois

Tulip has drunk of the heartblood of a Mountain Hag and gained 1 point of Endurance and 1 point of MA, which has also increase their maximum values. In addition, her reflexes have increased so that her Defence is increased by 7 and Initiative by 2.

The Sting of the Tatzelwurm

Black has drunk of the heartblood of a two-headed tatzelwurm and gained 1 MD which increases its maximum value, and a sting that emerges from the stump of his right hand as if spring-loaded. This is an Unarmed Combat attack that inflicts 1 rollup D10 + 1 A Class damage and 3 points of Penetration. It is a finesse weapon, so every 3 MD greater than 15 increases the damage by 1, but bonuses from PS are ignored.
If effective damage is done, then an envenomation target of 3 or better on a D10 must be rolled. success indicating the target has been poisoned and , the evenomation target increases by 1.
The toxin prevents all of the victim's sodium channels from closing and they behave as if they were being electrocuted, with death ensuing in 30 minutes to 1 hour. There is no antivenin for this, and neither does it respond to the Healer Ability to Neutralise Poison. Instead, the victim must be kept alive while they metabolise the toxin (Suspended Animation, Petit Mort or Hibernation but not Century Long Sleep), which will happen after the sun has risen three times.
If Black has used any of his venom, then on the next dawn, he rolls a D10 and recovers 1 dose if he rolls 7 or less, 2 if he rolls 3 or less.

The Curse of the Ivy-Shrouded Womb

Kel has drunk of the heartblood of a Mountain Hag. Although she gained 1 point of Endurance which has also increased its maximum value, ivy grows through the walls of her womb making her infertile with respect to humanoids. Well, mammals. Or reptiles.
While Dryads see her as a sister, creatures like Ents and Huorns may see her as unusually attractive and a potential partner, some going so far as to provide gifts of rich loam in the hopes of winning her attentions, Beating them off with a stick might not be the most productive strategy for dissuading their affections
She gains a bonus of 10 to any endeavour involving the Artisan Skill: Gardening, and in addition, her Rank in this is added as a bonus to any endeavour involving Herbalism.

Hex – Evil Eye

Range: Self
Duration: 30 minutes (+30 minutes / Rank)
Resist: None
Target: Entity
Effects: When the Adept casts this Incantation, a third eye appears on their forehead, which is normally invisible but is able to be seen by Witchsight and similar effects.
While it is in effect, all spells they cast on others are resisted at a penalty of Rank unless the target is wearing an Amulet of Elder Flowers.
Cost: 2,000 Experience
Constraints: Unracks the spell, reduces FT value by 2

Converse with Animals – Speaking to Enchanted Creatures

Range: 15 ft (+ 15 ft / Rank)
Duration: 10 minutes (+10 minutes / Rank)
Resist: None
Target: Entity
Effects: When the Adept casts this Incantation, they gain the ability to speak and understand the language of all magical creatures. One casting will allow communication with any fantastical creature, but will not allow the Adept to comprehend fantastical creatures talking amongst themselves or to other people affected by this spell.
Cost: 750 Experience
Constraints: Unracks the spell

Storm Calling – Call Lightning

Range: 60 ft (+ 20 ft / Rank)
Duration: Special
Resist: Passive
Target: Sky, entity, object or surface
Effects: When the Adept casts this Incantation, they summon a storm front anywhere in sight. The Adept identifies a spot on the ground within range of the Incantation. The storm will travel towards it and stop over that point, whereupon it will begin a downpour (snow, rain, hail, sleet, or whatever else that the GM feels the clouds may contain). Generally a storm front can be seen for 20 to 30 miles.
If no front can be seen, the spell may still be cast, but the Base Chance is reduced by 20. The storm front will take [D10 × 3] - 10 / Rank minutes, minimum 1 minute, to arrive.
The storm lasts for 30 minutes (+10 minutes per Rank). While duration persists and the Adept is covered by the weather, they may point at a target within range, make a Cast Check requiring a Magical Fire Action and call down a stroke of lightning according to the schedule below:

Rank	Storm Pool
0 - 5	1
6 - 10	2
11 - 14	3
15 - 17	4
18 or 19	5
20	6

This will inflict 1 rollup D10 (+1 rollup D10 for every 10 Ranks) + 2 per Rank Lightning damage in the hex of the target, half that if they Resist. The stroke propagates across a megahex, extends 10 feet high (+3 feet per Rank) and inflicts half the damage of the central stroke. This may also be Resisted for half damage. Once the stroke has been called, the ability enters cooldown and the next stroke may not be drawn forth for at least 3 Pulses.
Once the duration has expired or the Storm Pool exhausted, the weather will weaken and return to normal over five minutes.
This Incantation requires a phial of Fulminating Gold as a reagent, which will weigh 1 oz and cost 8 gs & sixpence. The phial must be filled with water and carried in a small box full of sawdust to transport it safely, then carefully dried at the destination.
If such a phial detonates on a person, three Specific Grievous injuries are rolled for, and all applied.
Cost: 2750 Experience
Constraints: Unracks the spell, reagent: phial of Fulminating Gold, reduces FT value by 2

Summon Enchanted Creatures – Familiar Transference

Range: 1 mile (+1 mile per Rank)
Duration: Immediate
Target: Self
Effects: The Adept instantly transports themself to the location of their familiar if they are within range. The spell automatically fails if they are carrying more than 15 lbs + 5 lbs per Rank.
Cost: 3500 Experience
Constraints: Unracks the spell, reduces FT value by 2

Converse with Plants – The Barber’s Reeds

Range: Touch
Duration: 1 day (+1 / Rank)
Target: Reeds
Resistance: None
Effects: By means of this Incantation, the Adept targets up to a hex of reeds and gives them a simple message. The reeds will pass it to a gentle breeze who will pass it to another patch of reeds and so on. The message will travel at 10 miles per hour until it arrives at its destination, but storms will prevent any further travel until the weather is more clement.
Cost: 750 Experience
Constraints: Unracks the spell

Summoning Enchanted Creatures - Summon Redcap

Range: Works if the Fae Realm is dimensionally proximate
Duration: 1 minute (+15 seconds / Rank)
Target: Redcap
Resistance: None
Effects: This Incantation summons a small, wizened man once a day (unless another Summon Redcap is known). He is about 3 1/2 feet tall with a hunched back and wrinkled, leathery skin. However, his mouth is full of sharp, jagged teeth and his lips are pulled into a perpetual sneer. He is a homicidal maniac.
Redcaps have a movement rate of 250 yards per minute.

PS:	19+RR	MD:	16	AG:	20	MA:	14	EN:	19+RR	FT:	22+Rank
WP:	19	PC:	12+RR	PB:	7	TMR:	6	NA:	Hide absorbs RR damage

Descritption:

The Redcap will appear in the Pulse following a successful Cast Check, wearing a dark grey doublet spattered with old bloodstains, heavy woollen hose, with boots made of dark blue iron. He will be holding a sickle-like blade similar to a falchion. Redcaps have a Racial Rank (RR) which is 1 for every prime equal to or less than the spell’s Rank (2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, and 19). Their FT value, however, is increased by the Rank of the Incantation.

• He can pursue an opponent at his full TMR and deliver a kick with his boots, suffering a penalty of 10 to the Strike Chance. On the other hand, he will generally benefit from a rear attack. If the target is successfully struck, they take 1 rollup D10 + 1 C Class damage, modified by the Redcap's PS and Unarmed Combat Rank. They may avoid this by rolling 3 x AG, penalised by the Redcap's PS, failure indicating they take the damage and fall prone.
• He can make 3 attacks with the sickle blade against 1, 2 or 3 adjacent opponents.

Weapon	BC	DM	Class	Use	Rank
Sickle Blade	57%	[D + 4]	B	M	0 + RR
Unarmed	2*AG+(PS-15, min 0) %	[D10 - 3]	C	MC	0 + RR
Iron Boots	2*AG+(PS-15, min 0) %	[D10! + 1]	C	MC	0 + RR

He has no Rank with Stealth, but can see blood being pumped around a body to a range of 12 hexes. He can speak Common at Rank 4, and a Fey language at Rank 8, of which he is a native speaker.
Racking this Incantation requires 3 of the Adept’s Endurance, which can be Healed naturally or magically once this tiny horror has been summoned.
A Redcap will only serve if he is promised heartlood from one of his recently slain. If this promise is not kept, the next time he is summoned, the Cast Chance is halved and he will refuse any service until he is fed the heartblood of the recently slain, whereupon he will immediately return to his plane of origin. He will refuse another summons until 2 Tuesdays have passed.
If a backfire occurs, then one is checked for, applied, and the little monster will attempt to kill and eat the heart of its summoner.
Cost: 3,000 Experience
Constraints: Unracks the spell, reduces EN by 3.

Protection Against Were-Creatures - Lesser Circle of Protection

Range: Self
Duration: 30 minutes (+30 minutes per Rank)
Target: Entity
Resistance: None
Effects: Whenever the Adept is struck, this incantation creates a faintly shining green circle about a foot distant from their body. This ablatively reduces A, B or C Class damage until the circle collapses. It offers 1 point of ablative Damage Reduction for every non-prime Rank in the spell. Those Ranks are: 0, 1, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, and 20.
The circle resets in the Military Scientist phase of combat.
If the Adept has more than one ablative protection of this kind, then the outermost one is reduced first.
Cost: 5,000 Experience
Constraints: Unracks the spell, reduces FT by 2

Mind Cloak/Mind Shield - Circle of Iron Will

Range: Self
Duration: 20 minutes (+20 minutes per Rank)
Target: Entity
Resistance: None
Effects: This Incantation cloaks their mind so that their thoughts cannot be detected or “read”, e.g. by Telepathy or other mind reading talents, spells or rituals and their Resistance versus Mental Attack is increased by 10 (+ 2 / Rank).
This effect extends to cover the megahex they are at the centre of. The Incantation does not block ESP or Empathy.
Those within the volume of effect can cast Mind Speech as normal, or choose to decline Mind Speech from an external source. Magic that gives a higher bonus does not stack. Instead, it overwrites this effect.
Cost: 5,000 Experience
Constraints: Unracks the spell, reduces FT by 2.

Windwhistle - Love-Laden Breeze

Range: 10 feet (+ 10 feet / Rank)
Duration: Special
Target: Entity
Resistance: Passive
Effects: This Incantation requires a Love Philtre into which is poured a little blood (costing 1 Endurance) from the seducer. This can be healed back, magically or otherwise.
The Adept calls forth a faint breeze which has a TMR of 1 (+1 for every 10 Ranks), which will carry the Love Philtre’s effluvium to a target within range. If the victim fails their Magic Resistance check, they fall in love with their seducer for 2 hours (+30 minutes / Rank of the Philtre).
Cost: 1,500 Experience
Constraints: Unracks the spell, reagent: Love Philtre, reduces FT by 1.

Virility – Enhanced Virility

Duration:Special
Effects: This Incantation is cast over a male entity and greatly increases virility so that their first female sexual partner within 2 hours (+1 per Rank) has their chance of conceiving increased by 5 (+ 5 per Rank).
The Adept can increase or decrease any one characteristic of the conceived by 1 (+ 1 per 3 or fraction Ranks) upon birth
A child may receive Enhanced Virility and Blessing or Curse on Unborn Child, but magic of higher Rank overwrites modifications to the same characteristic.
If conception occurs, the magic binds to the unborn child and may only be dissipated if Curse Removal is successful while the mother is still pregnant.
Cost: 750 Experience
Constraints: Unracks the spell, reduces FT by 1.

Trollskin – Suspended Animation

Range: Touch
Duration: 2 hours (+3 hours for every even Rank)
Target: Entity
Resistance: None
Effects: This Incantation does not heal. Instead, the patient loses consciousness while the spell suspends the progress of diseases and poisons for the duration.
Life functions continue, and at the DM’s discretion, may breakdown the factors causing the patient’s compromised health.

Juliet Poultice (requires Rank 4 Herbalism)

As much wolf’s foot moss as will fit into two hands of a girl of 10 should be left under the open sky to dry from Friday to Sunday after the next  Monday, whereupon it will wither, turn sere and be much reduced. Wrap it in sheets of oilskin dressed in the juice of the olive, tying it with as much tightness as the braids of a girl of ten. This is all that need be done for it will keep without corruption.

Buy from a respectable vintner a cup of brandy that is worth at least 7 gold shillings by the pint and haggle not lest the magic fail.

When calamity befalls, apply the moss to the patient’s skin and douse with the brandy, but avoid an open flame, for this preparation loves fire (inflicting 3 rollup D10 fire damage if the brandy is of sufficient quality to be useful as a reagent and the concoction catches on fire). 

The moss is very thirsty, becoming unto a paste after but a small drink. Then, if it be known to you, Cast of the Trollskin spell and stand back, wonders to behold.

Wolf’s foot moss is an uncommon plant that grows in damp, rough environments, from sea level up to 20,000 feet. It likes flinty soil over which water flows. It is frost resistant and needs little attention so long as its needs are met.

Cost: 1,500 Experience
Constraints: Unracks the spell, reagent: Juliet Poultice, reduces FT by 1.

Summon Enchanted Creatures – Party Trick

Range: 1 mile (+1 mile per Rank)
Duration: Immediate
Target: Door or portal
Resistance: Automatically successful
Effects: The Adept casts this spell on a door, doorway or portal. If one does not exist, then they must draw the outline of a door upon a wall or vertical surface, but this reduces the Cast Chance by 20. If the spell is successful, then, at the end of the Pulse they will arrive by the door in order of height, tallest first. The number of entities the Adept can summon is indicated by the following schedule:

Rank	Entities
0 - 5	1
6 - 10	2
11 - 14	3
15 - 17	4
18 or 19	5
20	6

The Adept must have a material link that connects them to those they target (a lock of hair, nail clippings, blood etc.).
The Incantation fails if any of the entities has an Encumbrance Penalty greater than 2 to Agility, any entity out of range will be excluded from it, and any target may decline the summons.
Cost:5000 Experience
Constraints: Unracks the spell, reduces FT value by 4

True Names

Name of the Wheel of Fire

The Individual True Name of this unique entity is Jagat Chakra. There are only 21 Ranks available. In other words, every Rank this Name is raised by one reduces the maximum Rank that the name can be advanced by anyone else.
If the Spell of Name Change is known, and their Rank in the Generic True Name Wheel of Fire is Ranked to 10 or higher, then they may assume this shape:

Shape of The Wheel of Fire

The Namer rises about a foot above the ground, encircled by a vertically aligned ring of barely visible white and blue flames. The Namer gains a Flywheel pool holding 1 Moment (+1 for every 5 Ranks in the Generic True Name). Momenti convert 1:1 to hexes, and can be added to TMR in any direction. Movement that terminates with them unattached to the ground is generally followed by aggressive acceleration toward the nearest surface below them.
The pool refreshes 1 Moment at a time at the beginning of the Pulse.
If the Namer is not in combat, they may increase their movement rate over five minutes to 30 mph (+1 mph / Rank). They gain a bonus of twice the Rank of the Generic True Name to any acrobatic or speed based manoeuvre with the wheel.
Their Defence is increased by 2 (+3 for every even Rank in the Generic True Name).
At Rank 20, they may perform an additional Defensive Withdraw, Retreat or Non-Magical Pass Action except when Stunned. The actions are resolved consecutively, in either order. The figure’s total movement may not exceed their TMR.

The Battle Form

The Namer may take a Pass Action and assume a Battle Form, their equipment also growing to match them. This changes the duration of the spell from Concentration Max: 30 minutes (+30 minutes / Rank) to a standard duration of 1 minute (+ 1 minute / Rank) (not requiring Concentration), so must be Counterspelled to end it before duration expires.
Based on their Rank in the Individual True Name, the change increases their

Size to 9, a 2 hex creature @ Rank 15, 3 @ Rank 20

PS by 7 (+ 1 for every even Rank)

EN by 8 (+ 1 for every even Rank)

TMR by 1 (+ 1 @ Rank 10 & 20)

Reduces each application of damage by 1 (+1 @ Rank 10 & 20)

Bonuses to PS and EN from Strength of Stone or Waters of Strength and the like do not stack, instead, the greatest effect applies.
They gain a pool which holds 1 (+1 @ Rank 10 & 20) Fireheals. Fireheal causes the Namer's wounds to burst into flame, curing 1 (+1 for every 5 Ranks in this Individual True Name) DP so long as healing occurs within a minute of receiving it. It requires a Pass Action, and at Rank 20, either a Pass Action or a Free Act but not both.
At Rank 10 in the Individual True Name and for each Rank thereafter, the Namer can take a Free Act to ignite with white and blue flames which inflict 1 point of magical fire damage to anything within 5 feet of them (so 10 magical fire damage @ Rank 20).

The Name of the Hugh Team

This is the Individual True Name of a gestalt entity. There are only 21 Ranks available. Every Rank this Name is raised by one reduces the maximum Rank that the name can be advanced by anyone else.

If the Namer’s Rank in the Generic True Name Jedburgh Team is Ranked to 10 or higher, and he knows the Individual True Name Hugh Team, he may form the gestalt.

The Gestalt
Hugh
The Namer does not change in any way, but his identity becomes ‘Code Name: Hugh’. Spells that Locate or Scry will not be able to find him unless their Rank is higher than this GTN.

In addition, the Team can speak with each other in the Namer Tongue which, otherwise, only members of that college can use.

GTN Rank	Jedburgh Rank	Mechanician	Combat & Profile
0	0	Brickmaking & laying	Languages: French: 8L (Native) German: 8L (Native) Hebrew: 5L (Liturgical) English: 4L (Accented & halting) Adventuring Skills: Stealth: 3 × AG + (5 / Jedburgh Rank) Climbing: 4 × MD + (8 / Jedburgh Rank) Swimming: PS + AG + EN + (10 / Jedburgh Rank) Driving: (PC + MD)/2 + (8 / Jedburgh Rank) Weapon Skills: Unarmed Combat, Pistol Primary Firearm: Astra 400 Weight: 2 lbs 4 oz | Base Skill: 25% Damage: 2 SG + D10! | Magazine: 8 rounds Range: 8 hexes Special: If the result is not greater than 83, then it inflicts a rollup D10 to EN + 2 Specific Grievous injuries. Shield defence is ignored. Special Notes: Demolitions expert.
1	1	Architecture
4	2	Traps
7	3	Explosives
10	4	Bridges
13	5	Chronometers
16	6	Fortifications
19	7	Namer’s choice

Pierre Villon (Roger Salomon Gisburger)

PS:	14	MD:	23	AG:	15	MA:	6	EN:	17	FT:	20
WP:	18	PC:	16	PB:	12	TMR:	5	NA:	None

Pierre is a slender man of around forty with clever hands and receding, dark brown hair. He stands 5ft 9in and weighs 135 lbs. He is myopic, wears horn-rimmed glasses, and continuously smokes Russian cigarettes. He has a distinct, bird-like aspect, being quick and decisive in his movements.
Born and raised in a Jewish community in Alsace, he naturally grew up bilingual in French and German. During his youth, he also learned liturgical Hebrew; while it possessed little practical use outside the synagogue at the time, it would serve him crucially in later years to ferret out Gestapo agents attempting to pass themselves off as Jewish refugees.
Never particularly devout, Pierre had become entirely secular by the time he graduated from the Lycée de Colmar. He spent three years studying architecture at Strasbourg University, where he was first introduced - and subsequently committed to - communism. During the Spanish Civil War, he used his architectural and analytical mind to write scathing political polemics against fascism.
By the time World War II was officially declared, he was already deeply embedded in active, clandestine resistance. His physical designs and structural traps heavily reflect the minimalist, functional influences of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus movement.

Dibikad (Kad) Pontiac

GTN Rank	Jedburgh Rank	Combat & Profile
0	0	Languages: Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe): 8LL (Literate in Fiero and Syllabics) French: 4L (Canadian accent) English: 8L (Canadian accent) Adventuring Skills: Stealth: 3 × AG + (5 / Jedburgh Rank) Climbing: 4 × MD + (8 / Jedburgh Rank) Swimming: PS + AG + EN + (10 / Jedburgh Rank) Radio & Communications Operations: Highly skilled radio operator possessing a distinctive fist. Reliable transmission speed of 20 words per minute. 'Code Talk to London' if a two-way audio connection is available. Weapon Skills: Unarmed Combat Tomahawk: 2 lbs | 45% | D10 + 3 | B | 8 hexes | RMC Garotte: 1 lb | 30% | D10 + 3 | - | P | C Composite Bow: 8 lbs | 55% | D10 + 4 | A | 225 hexes | 24 arrows Winchester 1897 (Sawn-Off Shotgun) Weight: 5 lbs 8 oz | Base Skill: 50% Damage: 4 SG + D5! | Magazine: 8 rounds | Range: 7 hexes Special Rules: Hexes 0–3: Pellets spread ~1 inch per yard, inflicting 1 rollup D5 to EN + 4 Specific Grievous injuries. Shield defence does not apply. Hexes 4–7: Strike Chance is halved; inflicts 1 SG only.
1	1
4	2
7	3
10	4
13	5
16	6
19	7

PS:	22	MD:	16	AG:	18	MA:	8	EN:	23	FT:	21
WP:	19	PC:	18	PB:	18	TMR:	6	NA:	None

Kad was born in 1916 on Manitoulin Island, Lake Huron, into the Anishinaabe culture of the Odawa people. He grew up when the Canadian government actively prohibited the spiritual and cultural practices of his people, forcing their traditions completely underground.

At the age of six, Kad was abducted by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and interned at the Spanish Indian Residential Jesuit School in Ontario. The school stripped him of his traditional clothing, took his name, and strictly forbade him from speaking his language.
Defying the strict doctrine of the Jesuit, Kad managed to escape in the summer of his tenth year, fleeing all the way back to Manitoulin Island. Though the RCMP were waiting to recapture him at his family home, his arrival was safely intercepted by an elder, Reed That Whispers, who guided him deep into the safety of the northern forests.

Kad lived as a fugitive in the wilderness for several years, maintaining cautious contact with neighboring First Nations communities. By the age of sixteen, he crossed the border into the United States, attending Neche High School in North Dakota.
Following his schooling, he enlisted in the US Army, where his exceptional wilderness survival skills were quickly recognized. He was seconded to the Signal Corps for a year before being quietly, unofficially separated from his unit for special duties.

Kad holds deep resentment and zero allegiance toward the Allies or white society at large due to a lifetime of systemic persecution. Conversely, his hatred of the Nazis is visceral, deep, and relentless.
On an individual basis, he remains open to cooperation with white people but would never actively seek them out were it not for the immediate necessity of the war effort.

Kad is a highly skilled radio operator possessing a distinctive "fist". He can reliably key at 20 words per minute. If a stable, two-way audio signal can be established, he can Code Talk to London.

The Team’s level of skill is determined by Jedburgh Rank, which is a function of the GTN. Weapon Skills (aside from Dibikad’s Rank with Tomahawk) do not exceed the maximum, and firearms are treated as Crossbows (except they only need to be reloaded when their magazine is exhausted).

When the Team is summoned for the first time in a season, all of their ammunition is filled. If reloads prove necessary subsequently, the Namer will have to provide them.

The entire Team adds the Rank of the GTN to their Defence but this is overwritten by spells that give more. Their passive Magic Resistance is similarly increased but not their active Magic Resistance.

Hugh Team
The Team operates at a very high level of efficiency, communicating largely through body language, a few key words, signs and glances. It is not telepathic in nature, but reflects extensive training in life-threatening circumstances and abiding trust raised to a supernatural level. Code Name: Hugh’s initiative is increased by 1 for every even Rank of the ITN and he may Rally the Team with a Free Act.

If the Rank of the ITN is 1 or higher, then Code Name: Hugh always knows if Pierre or Kad have died.

Command Economy
Code Name: Hugh can direct a member of the team with a Pass Action. When the ITN is Rank 10, he can direct a member with a Free Act or a Pass Action but not both in the same Pulse. At Rank 20, he can direct one with a Free Act and the other with a Pass Action in the same Pulse.
Pierre and Kad act at least 10 steps further down the initiative ladder than Code Name: Hugh but this penalty is reduced by 1 for every four Ranks in the ITN.
Wireless Signals
The team can send messages to each other at a cost of 1 FT. The target must be visible and within hearing distance to receive a message if the ITN Rank is less than 6.
From Rank 6 to 10, they need only be visible.
From Rank 11 to 16, they need not be visible but must be where the sender believes them to be, otherwise the attempt automatically fails.
From Rank 16–19, Code Name: Hugh may broadcast to either Pierre or Kad but not both, and need not know where they are for the same FT cost as if he were Casting the Name Change spell.
At Rank 20, Code Name: Hugh can broadcast a message to Pierre and Kad simultaneously for the same FT cost as if he were Casting the Name Change spell.

ITN Rank	CN: H Initiative Bonus	Team Initiative Lag	Command Economy	Wireless Signals
0–1	+0	-10 steps	Direct 1 team member per Pulse (Pass Action), Rally Team (Free Act)	Target must be visible and within hearing distance. (Cost: 1 FT)
2–3	+1
4–5	+2	-9 steps
6–7	+3			Target must be visible (hearing range no longer required). (Cost: 1 FT)
8–9	+4	-8 steps
10	+5		Direct 1 team member per Pulse (Pass Action or Free Act).
11				Target hidden; succeeds only if target is exactly where sender believes them to be. (Cost: 1 FT)
12–13	+6	-7 steps
14–15	+7
16–17	+8	-6 steps		Broadcast to Pierre or Kad. Location unknown. (Cost: Name Change FT equivalent)
18–19	+9
20	+10	-5 steps	Direct one with a Free Act and the other with a Pass Action in the same Pulse.	Broadcast to both simultaneously. Location unknown. (Cost: Name Change FT equivalent)

Translocation
By taking a Pass Action to Cast the Name Change Spell and spending as much FT, Code Name: Hugh may translocate to either Kad or Pierre or swap places with them if they are within the range indicated in the table:

ITN Rank	Translocation Range	Castle Range ((Rank x Rank)× 10) ft
1	20 ft	10 ft
2	80 ft	40 ft
3	180 ft	90 ft
4	320 ft	160 ft
5	500 ft	250 ft
6	720 ft	360 ft
7	980 ft	490 ft
8	1,280 ft	640 ft
9	1,620 ft	810 ft
10	1 mile 720 ft	1,000 ft
11	1 mile 1,980 ft	1,210 ft
12	1 mile 3,360 ft	1,440 ft
13	1 mile 4,860 ft	1,690 ft
14	2 miles 1,200 ft	1,960 ft
15	2 miles 2,940 ft	2,250 ft
16	2 miles 4,800 ft	2,560 ft
17	3 miles 1,500 ft	2,890 ft
18	3 miles 3,600 ft	3,240 ft
19	4 miles 540 ft	3,610 ft
20	10 miles	4,000 ft

Equipment
Both Kad and Pierre have equipment which is soul bound to them, and always manifest as noted above. They may be assigned other equipment which will persist across subsequent Castings of the Name Change spell, but Pierre can only carry a total of 25 lbs, while Kad can carry up to 55. Lost or destroyed equipment can be replaced, and, once instantiated, they can be given even more, with appropriate adjustments to their Encumbrance.

Watch Order

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12
1		2		3		4		5		6

Marching Order

Skirmish Formations (Front)
Default	Double File	Single File ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ???

Calendar

Autumn
	Moonday		Duesday		W'ansday		Th'rsday		Frysday		Reapsday		Sunday
	Lugnasad
Vintage (6)
											1		2
	3	5 Oct 1942 — Guild commission; Novodom; Wormwood's briefing	4	6 Oct 1942 — Rune Portal; descent into the Abyss	5	7 Oct 1942 — Abyss crossing	6	8 Oct 1942 — Abyss crossing	7	9 Oct 1942 — Moonlight Sleeping joins at the river	8	10 Oct 1942 — Demon waves; remains harvested	9	11 Oct 1942 — Demon waves; remains harvested
	10	12 Oct 1942 — Demon waves; remains harvested	11	13 Oct 1942 — Demon waves; remains harvested	12	14 Oct 1942 — Demon waves; remains harvested	13	15 Oct 1942 — Demon waves; remains harvested	14	16 Oct 1942 — Demon waves; remains harvested	15	17 Oct 1942 — Demon waves; remains harvested	16	18 Oct 1942 — Demon waves; remains harvested
	17	Blood Moon (Hunter's Moon) Mon 19 Oct 1942 — Force Bridge; Reich; London; train north	18	20 Oct 1942 — Admiral Rollins briefs; training begins	19	21 Oct 1942	20	22 Oct 1942 — Perpignan briefing; shoot guns shown	21	23 Oct 1942 — Syringes; cover identities agreed	22	24 Oct 1942 — Papers to Tabitha; weapons chosen	23	25 Oct 1942 — Weapons training; Kel drills party
	24	26 Oct 1942 — Training; Dross learns to drive	25	27 Oct 1942 — Training	26	28 Oct 1942 — Training	27	29 Oct 1942 — Training	28	30 Oct 1942 — Training; insertion plan settled	29	Sat 31 Oct 1942 — Shoot at Morrigan; eleven Perytons	30	Beerfest 1 Nov 1942 — Ahnenerbe/Klaus Barbie intel arrives via decrypt

Winter
	Moonday		Duesday		W'ansday		Th'rsday		Frysday		Reapsday		Sunday
	Samhain
Frost (7)
			1	Guild Meeting 3 Nov 1942 — Training at Achnacarry	2	4 Nov 1942 — Training at Achnacarry	3	5 Nov 1942 — Training at Achnacarry	4	6 Nov 1942 — Training at Achnacarry	5	7 Nov 1942 — Training at Achnacarry	6	8 Nov 1942 — Torch lands; Barbie reaches Lyon
	7	9 Nov 1942 — Diana missing; party departs	8	9 Nov 1942	9	9 Nov 1942 — Priest Alesch captured and killed in Lyon	10	10 Nov 1942 — Reach Saint-Marcel; recon the facility	11	10 Nov 1942 — Pomblière scouted; mountain hag found	12	11 Nov 1942 — Warded ambush camp	13	12 Nov 1942 — Hag slain; avalanche
	14	13 Nov 1942 — Hag's lair looted; von Kleist unmasked	15	14 Nov 1942 — Gestapo raid; women found at Bourget-du-Lac	16	15 Nov 1942 — Fled to Bourg-en-Bresse; cobolt pregnancies divined	17	16 Nov 1942 — Bourg-en-Bresse; petrifying the rescued women	18	17 Nov 1942 — Petrifying the women; remaking mouse-skins	19	18 Nov 1942 — Casting done; Operation Anton voids papers	20	19 Nov 1942 — Narbonne papers reissued; Banyuls; flight grounded
	21	20 Nov 1942 — Holed up; storm; decoy truck sent off	22	21 Nov 1942 — Waiting out the windstorm	23	22 Nov 1942 — Waiting out the windstorm	24	23 Nov 1942 — Scrying found overhead; flee inland	25	24 Nov 1942 — Von Kleist ambush over the Pyrenees	26	Training, Sant Martí hills	27	Training, Sant Martí hills
	28	Training, Sant Martí hills	29	Winter starts; Pergament Drei, 90 days	30