Only then did he die.

By then, the pie man had found Ranald Lachlan. And Harmodius.

They might have paid him more attention if they hadn’t just had a tip about the attack of a trio of horned men in Aldgate Street. They ran, a dozen armoured guards at their backs and the filthy pie man trying to keep up. He caught them up at the ancient gate itself.

Three horned figures stood framed in the arch of the gate. They’d killed the guard, who lay at their feet.

Harmodius worked; the three horned men immolated inside shield bottles of worked ops and their spores burned with them.

But Harmodius missed the fourth and fifth, who were in the ramshackle house by the gate. Ranald caught the smaller—a rising cut from his scabbard far better executed than Lessa’s—and he used his hips and the horned man’s head rolled and bounced in the stone gutter. Spores poured out of the severed neck, a torrent of what should have been blood.

“Don’t breathe!” Harmodius roared. He cast; the last horned man unmade into a cloud of black spores, and the black cloud and the fire met. The spores burned with a sudden whoosh that left a vague smell of cooking mushrooms. A royal guardsman grabbed at his throat, choking; in a moment a black fleck appeared on his face.

The man shivered all over.

Ranald Lachlan stepped close like a lover and dug in his belt pouch, dropping his black-bloody sword in the street. He found the phial he wanted and pushed it between his man’s teeth, and the man’s rolling eyes focused and he swallowed.

Harmodius grabbed the man by the belt and cast, muttered an invocation that filled the air in letters of fire, and cast again.

He stumbled back, healed. And fainted.

He fell over the corpse of the pie man. The man’s face was already turning black. Lachlan caught his man’s arms and hauled him off, and Harmodius shielded the pie man’s still-warm corpse and burned it to ash, leaving a body-shaped patch of dried mud and ordure, backed hard, where the body had lain.

“What was he saying?” Lachlan said. “Poor bastard.”

“Plot to kill the queen,” Harmodius said.

“Ten a penny,” Lachlan said. “Fuck. Poor bastard.” He looked at Harmodius. “I need to wash.”

“I need to get out of here,” Harmodius said. He’d spent two days fighting the horned men; rushing from point to point, casting, healing, fighting. “This is all—”

“Vital?” Lachlan said bitterly. “I ken ye want to be up north.”

Harmodius was looking at the spot where the pie man had lain.

“This is all distraction,” he said.

The Cohocton—Bill Redmede

They moved quickly on moccasin-clad feet; no one had boots anymore. There was almost no light, but they were getting good at moving in low light and their handful of irks guided them expertly. Behind the Jacks and the foresters there were almost a hundred Alban militiamen, running softly with their crossbows on their shoulders. Ten days of near-constant combat had eroded the differences between veteran and novice. And behind them, a century of Moreans, all mountaineers.