‘So… not rustlers then, captain,’ said Grange. Helena snorted, but her expression soured as she continued to read aloud from the reports.

‘Eighteen separate fights last night alone, four involving naked blades, two in the streets of High Drake no less. Six accounts of what has been euphemistically termed family disturbances and Sigmar knows how many more that went unreported. Old Posver has been spewing predictions of doom and damnation again in Fountains Square, so much so that the men have had to move him on three times in the past day alone. Krysthenna the bloody Lantern Bearer has been preaching her Shrine of the Last Days’ Warning nonsense again. She claims that “the signs are all there”, or some such nigh-heretical twaddle. Drunken and disorderly conduct, including from two of our own.’

‘Surely not, captain,’ said Grange, frowning.

‘Oh, it gets substantially more unpalatable,’ she said. ‘An elderly grandfather, snatched, presumably dragged through an open window, down in Rookswatch. The man’s daughter is understandably inconsolable and demanding something be done.’

‘One can hardly blame her,’ said Grange, his aristocratic features twisted into an expression of muted dismay.

‘No indeed,’ said Helena. ‘But for now, our highest priority must be these three reports,’ she brandished a fistful of parchment. ‘Three of our own, Grange. Two found dead, one not found at all. Watchman Second Class Ulswell, or what was left of her, found in an alleyway in Forges in what’s described as “a near skeletal state”. Watchman Third Class Phenswick, face-down in a dung heap behind a row of homes in Docksflow. He was found with eighteen separate stab-wounds in his back, neck and limbs, one ear missing, and what are described as “growths of a fungal nature” splitting his skin.’

Grange gave a disgusted grunt. ‘Clearly these are not normal attacks,’ he said, folding his arms in a defensive gesture that Helena thought betrayed his age. ‘Skeletal, fungal, these aren’t words you’d expect to read in such reports. Is there some kind of dark magic at work here, captain?’

‘No idea, Grange,’ said Helena. Grange was young, and he had been foisted upon her as a political appointment in exchange for the favour of the Grange family, one of Draconium’s largest self-made mercantile dynasties. It was a mercy, thought Helena, that he just happened to be an efficient and no-nonsense officer most of the time. Still, there were occasions when he looked at her as though expecting the answers to just fall out of her open mouth, and in those moments her lieutenant irritated Helena Morthan considerably.

‘You mentioned a third watchman, a disappearance?’ he asked.

‘Watchman Second Class Kench, vanished shortly after resolving a violent altercation in the Wayward King on Catchman’s Street,’ Helena read. ‘No one reports seeing Kench after he stepped out of the tavern’s door. It’s like he just,’ she snapped her fingers, ‘vanished.’