A new era will begin, with the daemon families ascendant. The Underworld will be brought fully to bear upon an unsuspecting world. The city above them will be the first settlement of the Great Below.

The drill is loud. A deafening rock-chewing buzz.

Smoke rises from the drills and from the rock as it burns. The smell stings the nose. It isn’t long before the entire chamber is lost to the haze. The chamber is home to two massive fans – meant to blow smoke out of the chamber so that workers can see – and Sorago thinks to plug them in, get them going.

He doesn’t have the chance.

It’s only when a gobbo runs by him screaming silently – a rock still sticking out of the creature’s misshapen head – that Sorago realizes something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

He turns.

Mookie Pearl walks among them.

It is so impossible that Sorago can almost not conceive of it. The man went to the deepest pits of the Great Below – broken and beaten – and now emerges here?

Sorago hisses and stands ready.

The thug barrels through the ranks of the goblins, one arm swinging useless at his side – his other hand smacks, punches, throws, twists gobbo heads like they’re bottle caps. A girl steps into the fray next to him, a rock in her hand. Bashing. The thick treacle of gobbo blood speckling her face like flecks of black pudding.

It’s her. It’s the man’s daughter.

The gutshot girl.

Doubly impossible. For a moment Sorago doubts everything: the plan, his own eyes, the very gods he cares little for. But then it all snaps forward; he has no time for doubt.

He has only time for killing.

The plan must be saved. The dynamite is in place.

Mookie Pearl and his daughter must die.

Don’t think about the dead men. That’s the thought running through Mookie’s head. Sandhogs of the 147 ½ lie scattered about, broken, destroyed – tough men, men far better than Mookie has ever been, men who deserve better than what they got down here in the dirt. A man a mile? This mile has been the bloodiest of them all.

He can’t think about them.

He can only think about what happens if he fails.

About his daughter. About what happens after.

Gobbos fall beneath his one fist, beneath his stomping boots, beneath his smashing head. Ahead, he sees a sledgehammer. Meant for breaking rock after a blast. He curls his foot under it, lifts it up in the air–

The hammer spins. He narrowly catches it in a meaty paw.

Then he sweeps the legs out from under three, four, five gobbos at a time. As they drop, squealing, trying to stand, he pops their heads like blisters.

Movement. Ahead. Then gone.

To his right–

Fast through the smoke.

Sorago, the Naga assassin.

A four-barreled pistol in one hand. A curved blade in the other.