Sleeve pressed over his face, he crept around the pit’s edge, trying to keep low and out of sight should anyone still be standing. Somewhere beyond, the peasants’ collectives still battled, their shouts and insults now punctuated by coughs and wheezing. He thought he saw Rennic through the flames, heard him roar over the fire’s crackle and hiss.

‘Spider! Spider you prick, time to repay the ferryman!’

Rennic was there. He was nearby. Chel tried to call out but his voice was cracked, smoke filling his lungs. He bent to cough, then hurled himself aside as a great dark figure loomed out of the flames, sweeping a bladed spear before it.

‘Rennic! It’s me!’

The big man swung around, then cocked his head. His hair hung in sweaty clumps before his eyes, the panels of his armour gleamed glossy with firelight and blood. He looked both elated and very, very angry.

‘Little man, what the fuck are you doing down there?’

Chel pushed himself upright, staying hunched against the pressing fumes. ‘Looking for you! We need to get out of here, this whole place is going up!’

Rennic began to shake his head, but Chel stabbed a finger back toward the stairs.

‘Forget that fucker, if the stairs go, we’re all dying down here. We get out, you can always finish him later.’ Chel paused to hack out a ragged cough. ‘You’ll do no good by dying.’

The big man snarled, the glaive twitching in his hands, but nodded.

‘Lead the way.’

The stairway was already thick with smoke. The fire had reached the upper gantry, and was eating its way along toward the top stair. Rennic still paused at the foot, swinging around to scream one final insult at Spider, but Chel dragged him onward. The stairs smouldered beneath their feet, steam rising as they cracked and blistered in the heat, the lowest steps already blackening.

They made it to the top before the stairway burst into flames behind them, a rushing whoosh that sent the smoking air into ripples. Chel kept his streaming eyes fixed on the oval of dark night ahead, of fresh starlit sky, impossibly black in the midst of the blazing light on all sides.

Rennic stopped again. He returned to the smoking railing and leant over into the conflagration below.

‘Spider!’ he called, his voice carrying over the roaring mass. ‘Hey, Spider, you ghastly fuck!’

Impossibly, a figure was down there, still standing in the midst of the inferno. Spider stood in a pocket of baking stone, knives in his hands, corpses at his feet, dark eyes darting around the gantries, looking for escape.

‘Fuck you, Beaky! I’ll see you in hells!’

‘Not if I see you first.’

Chel screamed for Rennic to follow, and at last he turned from the blaze and they fled into the cool embrace of night.

***