An Oriati grenade blurred across her vision, trailing its throwing-rope, and in the colorless sketch of her periphery it struck a Masquerade marine in the chest. It stuck. The marine looked at it with expressionless masked awareness, and tried to fold himself up. A sharp crack and a punch of air that threw up ground dust all around, as if the skin of a sandy beach had jumped, rabbitlike. It made Baru blink. When she looked again, the marine’s chest rig had split, his armored chest stove in: beneath the rim of his mask a huge splinter of fragment had gone up through his chin and palate.

Baru fumbled around till she found a gutcord ladder and swung herself over into the well.

Down. Down quickly. She scrambled down wet echoing stone. Someone shadowed the light above her—Execarne, singing madly, “Oh, the women of the veldt are rough to the touch, they’ll grind your hands to flour, and the buckle on your belt will rust right shut, when the veldt wife turns her glower, but hark now lad just lie on your back, you do not know your power, she’s grown to a lass on the flat endless grass, no she’s never seen a tower—”

A crossbow grenade hit the rim of the well and tumbled past Baru. Somehow she could read the label before the grenade fell away and slapped into water far below.

DANGER RAPID ACTION

CHEMICAL SMOKE MECHANISM—PEPPERSEED FILLER

FOR FLUSHING AND DISPERSAL

“The ledge!” Execarne shouted, and his voice boomed off the walls, the ledge, the ledge edge edge! Baru kicked down and found a solid rocky step, tarred and sanded for footing. She put her weight on the stone, reached out for something to lean on, and fell through a heavy canvas curtain into the Morrow Ministry station.

She landed arms-first on a putrid corpse.

*   *   *

EXECARNE lit a slow-burning flare. White light sputtered out across raw stone corridor, chalked wall-signs, moldered fabric, and the festering dead flesh under Baru’s hands. She roared in disgust: the mask alone saved her from obscene stink, but her bare hands were in cold rot to the wrist.

“That shriveled little ballsack!” Execarne shook his fist at the corpse. “He was trying to climb into my well! The fucking gall of him!”

Baru leapt up wringing her hands in loathing and, seizing on the nearest clean cloth, wiped her hands on Execarne’s jacket. “Sorry,” she mumbled, when he stared at her. “Who the fuck is this?”

“Faham Execarne,” Faham Execarne said. He stripped off the jacket and draped it over the dead man’s head.

“What?”

From a purse on his belt “Execarne” produced a silver seal ringed in tiny chiseled codes. “I really am Morrow Ministry. I’m just not the exact Morrow Ministry agent you think I am. Come on. I’ll explain while we go.”