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Operation Heckler & Koch

2026-10-25T23:02:55Z

Edd: /* Calendar */

Operation Heckler & Koch

2026-10-25T23:02:20Z

Edd: /* Scribe Notes */

Operation Heckler & Koch

2026-10-22T00:32:12Z

Edd: /* Calendar */

Operation Heckler & Koch

2026-10-22T00:29:44Z

Edd: /* Scribe Notes */

Operation Heckler & Koch

2026-10-22T00:28:58Z

Edd: /* Scribe Notes */

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[[Category:Jim Arona]][[Category:Scribe Notes]][[Scribe_Notes#Winter_826_WK|Scribe Notes]] 

== Scribe Notes ==

''Black, also called Sir Archibald — Knight of the Void, noble of Alusia, in service to the Seagate Adventurers' Guild — writes.''

=== Chapter 1: A Chessboard, Not a Battlefield ===

''I have learned to distrust a commission that begins with a man asking whether one is from Alusia.''

===== The Company Assembled =====

''We were gathered at the Guild that morning without much notion of what we were gathered for, which is the usual way of it, and so we did what strangers do and made our introductions. Kel I have kept company with before, and needed no introduction, though she gave one anyway for the benefit of the others: an elf transformed into a drow and then wrapped in an illusion of an ordinary human woman, average in height, average in weight, entirely unmemorable. A dream weaver. She works upon the mind — illusions, silent speech between us, and a talent for persuasion that I would call binding if I were being honest and she were not listening. She told the room plainly that she does not fight. She stands at the back and directs.''

''Tulip I knew a little, and know better now. An earth mage, black-skinned with hair the colour of a lit fire, though we were shortly to hide all of that. She travels with animals and cares more for them than she does for most people, which is a defensible position. She let slip, in the way one lets slip a thing one wants noticed, that the Archangel Michael is presently displeased with her. She did not elaborate. I did not ask.''

''The other two were new to me. Dross is a human man of middle build, dusty, so nondescript that describing him is a labour — the only thing that catches the eye is a badly scarred left hand. He named himself a warlock of the homely sort: unborn children, crops, livestock. He said he is not much interested in killing people, though he does not mind hurting them where hurting is called for. He carries a familiar called Tabitha, plays music, and understands bureaucracy, which in my experience is the rarer of the two gifts. Jedburgh is not human, is somewhere in his late fifties, and is built like a brick outhouse without moving like one; he is faster and more agile than a man that size has any right to be. He carries a glaive and wears grey leather armour that he cheerfully calls an elephant's scrotum. He is a good ranger, a decent spy, and by his own admission an absolute crap namer.''

''For my own part I gave them Black, or Sir Archibald, whichever they preferred. Human enough to look at, six feet, well made, skin the colour of chocolate with an amber undertone beneath it — a souvenir of a drink I once took and very nearly did not survive. I told them I was a good-hearted little fellow, which is how I like to sell myself. Kel observed that I am very likely the only person who would describe me that way. She may be right. She usually is, and it is one of her less endearing habits.''

===== A Jimmy Comes Recruiting =====

''Then the recruiter arrived, and I recognised the breed at once. "This is a Jimmy, is it?" I said, and it was. He was not the Guild's man; he served a doctor, and he had come looking specifically for Alusians and specifically for those of us who could work magic, because where we were going magic is a rarity and the few who possess it are, as he put it, very odd and usually Nazis. The last such fellow he had heard of managed to blow himself up by standing too close to an airship, and took the airship with him. There would also be occultists who do peculiar things with rituals, and worse, the Transuranians — five-limbed, five-armed things with a five-sided torso and a head that can be made into a crown, and powerful minds.''

''The destination was a version of Reich: our own war-torn Earth of the middle years of that century, but a duplicate of it, thrown off by some recent meddling with time. Late in 1942, after Dunkirk, after the Battle of Britain. I have walked in a great many places and I still felt a small cold thing turn over in my chest at the phrase '''a duplicate of it'''. Planes are not supposed to breed.''

===== Spending the Advance =====

''The Guild set aside a purse for the five of us as a group and advanced us a portion of it up front to equip ourselves, which is the Guild's way of saying it expects a return. We spent most of the advance on the deepest enchantments Uzi would lay on us, since there would be nothing of the kind to buy on the far side. Kel and I paid for our own out of our own pockets, so the party's money stretched to three others.''

''I then spent a good deal more of my own than I was ever likely to see again. From Callas I took three draughts to thicken my hide to a troll's, and Jedburgh made the sound point that the troll draughts are worth their price because they can be cast at range and shared about. I brewed three philtres against mind-work myself; that sort of thing is my own trade and I would rather trust my own hand than another's. From the Bishop I took five restoratives and a pair of potions against a broken mind, and I laid in five waters of healing, and from Sebastian two sets of shadow wings, already bound and waiting only on a word. It came to rather more than my fifth share of the purse. It always does. I have long since made peace with being the one the others borrow from.''

''The rest of them shopped with more restraint. Dross bought himself a crystal of vision and an amulet of chalcedony, which keeps the undead from coming close and seemed a prudent purchase given who else is coming through to that plane. Tulip bought a luck amulet, which most of us have carried since our first season. Dross, Jedburgh and Tulip took waters of healing from Rommel. Wind walking and feather falling were bought from Ty, though I did not note who ended up holding what, and there was some idle talk of a carpet that renders a legal opinion on whether one has committed a crime — one goes to sleep on it and judges by the quality of one's rest. Killing a German soldier in a war, we established, is not a crime. It is very nearly the opposite of one.''

===== Dross Lays Out the Cards =====

''Before we left, Dross laid out the cards for us. The reading came clean and strong, which I have learned is not the same thing as good. He turned the Devil, and the Five of Swords, and the Star reversed, and then all four face cards of the sword suit together. He read it himself, and read it well: entanglement, a conflict from which nobody walks away a winner, a loss of clarity or of trust, and — his own phrase, and it has stayed with me — a chessboard rather than a battlefield. Mental conflict, manipulation, matters strategic and interpersonal rather than of the heart or the sword arm. I said that was what the potions against a broken mind were for. Kel said she would only control our minds with our consent. I said she would have that consent shortly after she had controlled our minds. She did not deny it.''

===== Departure, and Novodom =====

''We purified ourselves, and Kel put an illusion on the whole party to make us into average-looking humans. I habitually change my face where Nazis are involved. I would rather not be recognised on a plane where I have never yet been. Then Callas took us through the earth itself to Novodom, on the first Moonday of Vintage.''

''Novodom surprised me. It is a walled metropolis of the old style, thriving, well-fed, the people healthy, not one shambling corpse anywhere on its streets — I looked. But there are so many people packed inside those walls that magic runs thin there, and by daylight Dross found his craft dragging at him like a wet cloak. What amused me was the Jimmy. He counted the spellcasters in the crowd and grew genuinely alarmed. Where he comes from, one such person in a city would be a national emergency.''

''He took us to the Inn of Santa Maria, in the expensive quarter, which is not an inn at all but a hospitium kept by monks who charge like wounded bulls — the better, no doubt, to distribute alms to the poor. An acolyte led us up to our employer's suite: panelled in wood, oil lamps not yet lit because it was daylight, a series of rooms rather than a room.''

===== Dr Wormwood's Commission =====

''Dr Wormwood is a woman with dark hair wound into a bun and horn-rimmed spectacles, in a robe cut as a man's would be and a white coat over the top of it, and riding boots without buckle or lace that fit her perfectly well. She ordered tea, sat us down, and explained the shape of the thing.''

''The Germans and the undead both come out of a third plane. The undead came in vast swathes — walking corpses spreading plague, and greater things behind them that she declined to describe in detail. The Germans are not fighting that horde. They are running from it, and their invasion of the plane she calls Cataclysm Earth is a flight dressed up as a conquest. To buy themselves room they have made an alliance with the Transuranians, who are meddling with the passage of the undead into Cataclysm Earth and holding the door for a while.''

''I asked her directly whether she was certain the Nazis on Reich and those coming through into Cataclysm Earth were the same body of men. She admitted the difficulty: the shift in time may have made a copy, and a copy is a hard thing to be certain of from the outside. Her analysis of the temporal grain finds the duplicate of Reich well enough. What she cannot do is be there herself. That is what we are for.''

''The commission has two halves, and she was refreshingly candid about which is which. We are to rescue a British agent in the south of France and get them over the border into Spain, which is neutral, and whose ruler leans towards Berlin but whose treasury leans towards American money. Then, and this is the part that matters to her, we are to investigate a ruin in Spain not far from where the agent will be set down. She believes that ruin holds information about the interference with time — possibly measurements taken by Phoenician astrologers before the birth of Christ. The rescue is the story she has sold to British High Command to explain why they are being given an untraceable team from nowhere. The investigation is the reason she is paying for us.''

''Dross wanted to know which took priority if the two pulled apart. The answer was the investigation. I said that stopping the agent from handing over what they know would itself count as a rescue of a sort, and nobody argued the point, which is a bleak thing to be right about before one has even met the man.''

===== Six Through the Abyss =====

''Then came the arithmetic of the crossing. One does not walk more than six through the Abyss without attracting the sort of attention that ends adventures — it is not a hard wall, Jedburgh explained, so much as a threshold past which the local residents begin to take an interest. There were five of us. I said that Hordling would count, and was sorry to say it. Dross at once offered to banish Tabitha and call her back with a ritual on the far side, which solved his end of it neatly.''

''Mine was not so neat. We turned over the options with all the seriousness of men discussing an artillery placement: change Hordling into a mouse and cage him — no help, we were told, and he would sulk for a season; leave him with Arnulf, who can be trusted, though not to the extent of preventing what Hordling would do to an alchemist's laboratory left unattended; hire a troll to mind him. Tulip suggested we give whoever minded him some means of sending word if he broke loose. I told her that was a terrible idea, that they would be sending word every five minutes, and that it would be kinder to everyone if I simply came back afterwards and dealt with the consequences. Dr Wormwood, who had been listening to all of this with a rising expression, said before anybody could ask that we were not leaving him with her. I told her it had never been the plan. I knew she would not be keen.''

''It was Kel who unpicked it in the end. If neither Dr Wormwood nor the Jimmy counted against our number — and the Jimmy was only guiding us, not travelling as one of the party — then five of us and Hordling made six exactly, and we were within our limit. Hordling came with us after all. He looked, for the record, extremely pleased with himself, and I am fairly sure he understood every word of the debate.''

''Dr Wormwood offered us one more thing before we went: syringes of hers that put knowledge into a man, though not all at once. The stuff unfolds over weeks, so that one wakes up gradually knowing French, or German, or how to drive a motor vehicle. Kel asked whether she could put in geography as well as tongues, and she could. I already have a serviceable measure of the language we will need, so I asked after the driving instead, which struck me as the most useful of the lot. She could copy a weapon skill from a sample if one of us already had it; Tulip wanted the trident, and I told her I had some competence with the trident already and she was welcome to copy off me, but that I would take nothing for myself on that score. I can teach myself a weapon. It is the one thing I have never had to buy. Tulip then enquired whether anybody had the whip, on account of a balrog-tail whip she owns and cannot use, and I said the whip seemed to me a dishonourable weapon. Kel said she has no need of one. People do what she says. She whips minds, not bodies. I have decided not to think about that too closely.''

''We took a night at the hospitium, and Kel produced a cigarette case of remarkably fresh cigarettes and handed them round with a straight face, on the grounds that a relaxing smoke is good for the lungs. Jedburgh declined. Loudly.''

===== The Rune Portal and the Descent =====

''The rune portal stands a little outside the town, and it does not look like anything at all — a rock, with the runes hidden in the ground about it and gems set into the stone, every gem smeared thickly over with bound earth. Tulip spotted the earthwork at a glance. I said aloud that it was to stop people prying the stones out with crowbars, and observed that Dross could hardly have been expected to notice it, being so busy prying the stones out with a crowbar. He took it well.''

''We would have used the Pattern, which is faster, but somebody else had used it lately and it was still filling itself up again. So we touched the rock, and waited half an hour, and passed through.''

''I have gone through such portals often enough to know the price and still not to enjoy it. It empties a man. Whatever a body keeps in reserve against a long day, the crossing takes all of it, and one arrives on the other side hollowed out and heavy-limbed, wanting nothing so much as to sit down in the mist and not get up. The Astral obliged with the mist. It is a vague plane, features half-suggested, bushes and slopes fading out into grey at a hundred yards, and we walked an hour through it on legs that did not want to walk before we came to the edge and stood looking down into the Abyss.''

''A mile of climb, straight down. The Jimmy began to clamber. Dross woke his carpet instead, and the weaving took better than he had any right to expect — it held for hours beyond what he had promised us, and he ferried us down in stages. Jedburgh turned himself into an eagle and flew down under his own power, though everything he carried transformed along with him and was no use to him at all until he was a man again. Dross asked, of nowhere in particular, whether we ought to be watching our strength closely at this point, and then answered himself: perhaps we are in a peaceful place where nothing bad can happen. He is an optimist. In the Abyss.''

===== Moonlight Sleeping on a Midnight Lake =====

''We spent two or three days crossing it, and slowly the strength came back into us, since we were walking and not fighting. Then we came to a river a mile wide, and beside it stood a figure leaning on a staff, whose features were so utterly black that all one could make out was the profile, an outline cut from nothing.''

''I brought up my black sight and saw him properly, and then I was glad. "My lord," I said. "My lord indeed."''

''Moonlight Sleeping on a Midnight Lake is a demon lord, and I have the honour of his acquaintance. He had heard that we were bound for the recent manifestation of Reich, and it had occurred to him that he might come along and be of use — as an interested party, he was careful to say, not as an employer. I told him I understood entirely. I know how it is.''

''Tulip asked me who on earth this was, and I made a hash of it — I called him Midnight Sleeping on a Moonlit Lake, which is a different demon lord altogether, and I have always got the two of them mixed up. He corrected me with more patience than I deserved. Kel asked whether he could be trusted. Completely, I said, as much as one trusts anyone. He is one of the good guys, I think, and I am aware how that sentence looks written down. The party has met Jade Rain before, and if they could stomach her they can stomach him. He is married, and his wife is called de Winter, a fact I had to be reminded of in front of him, which was not my finest hour. According to her letters, he said, she is well. He was travelling. When one is a demon lord one must get out among one's people and show one's face.''

''Speaking of showing, he said, and reached into the staff itself and drew out a monkey-shaped demon about the size of a hobbit. Short Fuse. He is, we were told, a bit on the dangerous side, and he throws around a great deal of black powder. I asked whether he was the sort one fires and forgets. On reflection: fire, and do not forget, and run.''

''I had a couple of Mills and Boon novels about me, and I gave them to Moonlight for his wife. He was genuinely delighted. He said he could go home at last, after this. It cost me nothing and I would do it again; there is a great deal to be said for being the one person in the Abyss who remembers that a demon lord's wife likes a love story.''

''Then he struck his staff and three more staves peeled away from it and took up a triangle around us, and we walked on.''

===== The Staves Do the Work =====

''I should like to be able to write that we fought our way across the Abyss. We did not. Waves of demons came at us and tried to roll straight over the top of the party, and the staves simply mowed them down — dragon flame from one, some fury of unseen force from another, other kinds of devastation I could not name and did not much want to. It went on like that for days. What would have been the death of all five of us, three sticks of wood handled without hurry while their owner strolled beside us discussing his correspondence. I have been at this a long time and I still found it instructive to be reminded how far above me the ladder goes.''

''We collected what was left afterwards, at Moonlight's suggestion — the remains make excellent material for a working alchemist, and I am one. Dross asked whether the stuff would serve for sleeping dust or poison dust. The poison, we were told, works exactly as it should. The sleeping dust made this way still forces a man to resist it, but if he fails he sleeps for the barest fraction of the time he ought to, which is a very short nap indeed, and I would not stake a plan on it. Hordling was in his element. Anything poisonous went into him, and he burped his opinions at us so continuously that nobody could follow a word.''

''Tulip, meanwhile, tried to make friends with one of the demons attacking us. She leaned out and made the noises one makes at a cat. The creature regarded her with a flat and specific loathing, and did not come any closer, and did not attack either, and I decided the safest thing I could do was look elsewhere and claim to have seen nothing.''

''Ten days or so more, and another river, and this time Moonlight simply made a bridge out of nothing across it and we walked over. On the far side we came out at the new version of Reich.''

===== The Black Castle =====

''The approach is unlike any plane I have entered. There is one roadway, climbing the flank of a mountain — it does not feel like climbing, one only walks and arrives — and at the top of it stands a castle of black stone, walled and towered. It is not manned. Nothing lives inside it. There is no way onward except through it. I asked Moonlight what it was for and he said he did not know, that he had not been able to find out, and that investigating those fortifications is one of his own tasks. I have rarely found a thing more unsettling than a demon lord admitting he has not managed to work something out.''

''Before we went through, Kel got a description of the local dress out of the Jimmy, and it is a curious world we were walking into. The men wear high-waisted trousers with a crease ironed sharp enough to cut, grey or brown, blue if they work in the city; narrow ties; white or pale blue shirts; hats. The women wear hats almost always, often with a veil, and dresses to mid-calf with a jacket, colour-coordinated or deliberately clashing, but always thought about. Nobody except the very poorest wears anything casually. Kel put grey suits on all of us, and at Tulip's request dressed her as a man — she was not, she said, wearing that skirt thing. Jedburgh made the sensible observation that a uniform would be safer still, but we did not yet know what any uniform there looked like, so we agreed to sort that out once we were on the plane.''

===== Victoria Station, October 1942 =====

''Then through the castle, and into that plane's own Astral, and out — into a tunnel at Victoria Underground Station, London, walking up into the crowd like anyone else.''

''Moonlight took one look at the press of people, remarked that he had best go home before he frightened the locals, struck his staff on the ground, and was consumed in a burst of fire. Not one soul in that station noticed. A few of them stepped around the space where he had been without knowing why they had done it, and then closed up again over the gap and went on with their day.''

''A man in military uniform and a peaked cap was waiting: Captain Glendinning, whose English is the sort one can only acquire at Eton, all cut glass and clipped edges. Jedburgh could not follow a word of it. I could. He had been instructed, for some reason he did not understand, to give us the date, and so he did. Monday, the nineteenth of October, 1942.''

''He then indicated a specially secured military vehicle, which was a van in an advanced state of collapse, and invited us into the back of it. I offered to drive. I told him I had been practising. He was, he said, keen enough to be spared the job, but I did not have clearance, so into the back I went, having established for the record that whatever happened next was not my fault. The thing lurched off making a noise like a foundry, banging and reeking, and after less than five minutes he put us out at a railway station, told us to look for a brown train, and left. He was going to Burma to fight the Japanese. He said it the way another man might mention a change of lodgings.''

''The brown train came after about five minutes, one carriage, empty. It was one of ours who noticed that the men driving it were wearing blindfolds. Kel quietly opened her silent speech between the five of us after that, so that we could say what wanted saying without any of it reaching the air. There was a picnic hamper waiting in the compartment, wine and food, laid on for us by somebody who knew we were coming and would never be told who we were.''

===== Achnacarry =====

''Nine hours of that, arriving just before midnight. We knew our station because the sign had not been painted out, and carried no red diagonal band across the corner to mark it secret: Achnacarry.''

''An elderly Scot was waiting with a horse and a dog cart. His accent was thick enough that the others struggled with him and I heard him clear as a bell — it is one of the few advantages of having been about as long as I have. He is the house's dogsbody, and will run us to and from the station and fetch what we want from the village. Achnacarry lies on the western side of Scotland, it is the seat of Clan Cameron, and it is where the commandos come to be trained. Kel asked him who was in charge. He took a long breath and told her, with feeling, that he had no idea, that everyone seemed to be, and that when somebody told him to do a thing he did it.''

''I asked him for mercury. It is very nearly the only thing I want from that village and I want a great deal of it. He said mercury comes in thermometers, which I know, and which is a tedious way to get at it. Then it turned out there is not a single thermometer in the whole of Achnacarry. Not one. Worth a try. Never mind — I shall find something.''

''The house took us in through the front door. The butler is called Macavity, Scots as well but far more cultured and perfectly clear to everyone, and he told us the admiral had asked that we refresh ourselves first and that he would wait until we were ready. Footmen took us up — one room for the women, one for the men — unpacked our gear, and ran baths. After a fortnight in the Abyss I will confess that the bath did as much for my morale as the enchantments did for my hide.''

===== Admiral Rollins and Operation Torch =====

''The library has an enormous wooden globe in it, a yard across, and a conference table ringed with green velvet chairs, and Admiral Rollins sitting at it in dress uniform with a brandy at his elbow. He has the face of a basset hound, the saddest-looking man I have met in a long while. I read his insignia while he was pouring us drinks, and found a decoration on it that had been added very recently — not a promotion, an honour. A man who has just been given an honour and looks like that has usually been given it for something he would rather not have done.''

''It was the very early morning of the twentieth by then. He laid it out for us plainly.''

''In the coming weeks the Allies will begin an operation in North Africa to drive the Germans and Italians out of it — Operation Torch. It is to be seen as an American affair, first because they want the American public brought fully into the war, and second because although there are British units in the area it is important that they are not seen to deliver the win. There is dissension to be discouraged. I have served princes long enough to recognise the shape of that reasoning and I did not much like hearing it in a war this size.''

''The difficulty is that one of their most productive escape lines — Heckler — is believed compromised. A whole sweep of the lines have suddenly been rolled up: one in Belgium, one in the north of France, one in Brittany. Jedburgh asked whether it was internal or external, and Rollins said there must be a double agent; too many have gone at once for anything else. Heckler is still running, and has survived longest only because the agent who runs it is extremely paranoid. Not, as Jedburgh observed, without reason. Not a bad way to be, I said, and meant it.''

''Heckler runs out of Lyon, which is also where the Gestapo have their headquarters, and there is a new man of theirs called Klaus Barbie who is presently in Switzerland and expected to take charge of that area soon. Our task is to get the leader of that line out before it is rolled up. Going into Lyon ourselves would draw more attention than we could survive.''

''Their escape route runs over the Pyrenees to a small coastal town, where a farmhouse and a landing field have been hired through another agent, and from which an aeroplane can lift the man out. Crossing the mountains, Rollins said, is a cakewalk. Moving him from Perpignan to that coast is not. Going by sea is out: the Germans expect a build-up of shipping across the Atlantic and have put submarines and warships all along that coast, Gibraltar to Malta, so anything on the water is liable to be stopped.''

===== No Way Down but Out of the Aeroplane =====

''Which brings us to how we get in. There is to be training here first, and then they mean to fly us down and fling us out of the aeroplane.''

''"That sounds like fun," I said, and Rollins did not smile.''

''They cannot land us. As one approaches Perpignan one comes into range of naval gunnery and anti-aircraft barrages, and the place is thick with fighter craft. They will give us parachutes if we want them, but their honest estimate is that we are dead the moment the canopy opens — a man under a chute is a sitting duck, and Dross corrected him: a falling duck. The aeroplane is to be a Vickers Wellesley, which Jedburgh named before Rollins could, and which is a Barnes Wallis design. They looked for a German aircraft with the range and could not find one, and in any case they would rather like the pilot back.''

''Dross asked whether it might be better to fly ourselves over the mountains and go through one of the passes, and asked for a terrain map. They produced photographic topographical maps of the Pyrenees, clear enough for anyone who has flown to read at a glance, and Tulip made the sound point that we should plan a route overland as a fallback even if we intend to fly. Kel suggested painting the underside of Dross's carpet black. Dross said it is a lovely embroidered thing and he is not painting the bottom of it black, and only relented on the promise of a replacement.''

''There was another carpet spoken of at some point — rhomboid rather than square, decorated round the edge, a tapestry really, with an eagle worked into it in blue. It must keep moving or it drops out of the sky, though it can be slowed almost to a hover. It is not Dross's. I did not establish whose it is, and I have written it down here precisely because I did not.''

===== The Final Five =====

''I should record, out of order, a thing that happened before we ever went down to the library. Dross had used his ring after his bath, wanting a private moment, and Short Fuse appeared to him. The creature spoke with great care, choosing his words like a man reciting something he has been made to memorise — almost, Dross said, as though somebody else's words were in his mouth. The message was this: the last of the goetic demons, the seventy-second, is involved in this affair, and he is one of five, and the five are a cabal who call themselves the Final Five. Dross passed it to the rest of us and it went down about as well as one would expect. Kel said we ought to ask for a rise in our fee, and I agreed and named a figure that would have made the Guild swallow its tongue. Jedburgh went looking up which of the seventy-two the last one is. Dross observed that there are five of them and five of us, and that this was almost too tidy. I said the tidy ones should be running for the hills.''

===== Two Weeks, If We Get Them =====

''Over the following days various people came to brief us on various things. One of those who came for Jedburgh was a woman with dusky skin and quite extraordinary beauty: the Princess Noor Inayat Khan, here at Achnacarry for commando training, and here for the second time. She speaks French as a native and German besides, and by all accounts she is a formidable radio operator. She gave Jedburgh an object that had been brought to her by a Hindu mystic, who told her that whoever held it would know who to give it to. It is of no use to anyone at present, so far as we can tell. She also told us that if we ever have to come out overland, we can find safety for a short while at Seine, in Paris.''

''There are two weeks set aside for training before any of this begins in earnest, and they may not be two weeks we get to keep — the moment the information they are waiting on arrives, we go, whether we are finished or not.''

''Which leaves us with one problem, and Kel put it as plainly as it can be put: between now and the day they fling us out of that aeroplane, we had better work out how to get from the aeroplane to the ground without dying. Jedburgh says he can carry everybody. Dross intends to use his carpet, and it depends on how well the weaving takes. For my own part I can step out of the thing and come to the ground without hurting myself, which the others found harder to believe than I expected.''

''I keep coming back to those cards. A chessboard, not a battlefield. Mental conflict and manipulation rather than the honest kind. All four swords, and the Star reversed.''

''I have crossed the Abyss with a demon lord at my shoulder and watched three walking sticks kill more things than I could count. And what waits for us is a paranoid man in Lyon, a traitor somewhere in a chain of frightened people, and a fall out of an aeroplane onto a coast bristling with guns.''

''I find I would rather have the demons.''

----

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==== OOC Details ====

===== Items Acquired =====

'''Kel:'''
* Waybread (unpriced)
* Potion of Restore Sanity (unpriced)
* Ranger syringe (rank 4) (unpriced)
* Revivification syringe (unpriced)

'''Black:'''
* Waybread (unpriced)
* Potion of Restore Sanity (unpriced)
* Trollskin potion R9 — 1125 sp
* Mind Shield potion R9 (unpriced)
* Restorative R10 — 200 sp
* Waters of Healing R10 — 400 sp
* Shadow Wings R6 (invested) — 600 sp
* Mills & Boon books (unpriced)
* Revivification syringe (unpriced)

'''Dross:'''
* Waybread (unpriced)
* Potion of Restore Sanity (unpriced)
* Mouse skin (skin change) (unpriced)
* Owl skin (skin change) (unpriced)
* Eel skin (skin change) (unpriced)
* Crystal of Vision — 1000 sp
* Chalcedony amulet (undead ward) — 4800 sp
* Waters of Healing — 400 sp
* Revivification syringe (unpriced)

'''Jedburgh:'''
* Waybread (unpriced)
* Potion of Restore Sanity (unpriced)
* Waters of Healing — 400 sp
* Revivification syringe (unpriced)

'''Tulip:'''
* Waybread (unpriced)
* Potion of Restore Sanity (unpriced)
* Luck Amulet — 2400 sp
* Waters of Healing — 400 sp
* Revivification syringe (unpriced)

'''Party (shared resources):'''
* Waybread (unpriced)
* Wind Walk (unpriced)
* Feather Fall (unpriced)
* Driving syringe (unpriced)
* French language syringe (unpriced)
* German language syringe (unpriced)
* English language syringe (unpriced)

'''Balance brought forward:''' 0 sp
'''Received this session:''' 40,000 sp
'''Spent this session:''' 37,500 sp
'''Balance carried forward:''' 2,500 sp

===== Session Summary =====

The party — [[#s1-the-company-assembled|Kel, Tulip, Dross, Jedburgh and Black]] — was [[#s1-a-jimmy-comes-recruiting|recruited at the Seagate Guild]] by an agent of Dr Wormwood for a mission to Reich, a temporally duplicated version of wartime Earth in late 1942. They [[#s1-spending-the-advance|spent the Guild's advance and a good deal of their own money]] on enchantments and consumables, and [[#s1-dross-lays-out-the-cards|Dross's card reading]] turned up the Devil, the Five of Swords, the Star reversed and all four face cards of the sword suit — a chessboard rather than a battlefield. Callas then took them through the earth to [[#s1-departure-and-novodom|Novodom]] on 3 Vintage, where [[#s1-dr-wormwoods-commission|Dr Wormwood laid out the commission]]: the Germans are fleeing an undead horde into Cataclysm Earth with Transuranian help, and the real objective is a Phoenician-era ruin in Spain rather than the British agent they are ostensibly rescuing. [[#s1-six-through-the-abyss|Keeping the crossing party to six]] took some argument before Hordling was allowed to come, and Wormwood supplied syringes that impart language, geography, driving and copied weapon skills over several weeks.

[[#s1-the-rune-portal-and-the-descent|The rune portal outside Novodom]] put them into the Astral and then over the edge into the Abyss, a mile of climb down. At the first river they met [[#s1-moonlight-sleeping-on-a-midnight-lake|the demon lord Moonlight Sleeping on a Midnight Lake]], who joined them as an interested party and lent them Short Fuse; for the rest of the fortnight-long crossing [[#s1-the-staves-do-the-work|his staves destroyed every demon wave]] without the party fighting, and Black harvested the remains for alchemy. They left the Abyss through [[#s1-the-black-castle|an unmanned castle of black stone]] that Moonlight admitted he had not been able to explain, and emerged at [[#s1-victoria-station-october-1942|Victoria Underground Station in London on 19 October 1942]]. A train north brought them to [[#s1-achnacarry|Achnacarry House in Scotland]], where [[#s1-admiral-rollins-and-operation-torch|Admiral Rollins briefed them]] on Operation Torch and on the compromised Heckler escape line running out of Gestapo-held Lyon. [[#s1-no-way-down-but-out-of-the-aeroplane|The insertion plan has no landing]] — a Vickers Wellesley is to fly them near Perpignan and put them out over a coast thick with anti-aircraft fire. Short Fuse separately delivered a warning that [[#s1-the-final-five|the seventy-second goetic demon is involved]] and belongs to a cabal calling itself the Final Five. The session ended with [[#s1-two-weeks-if-we-get-them|two weeks of commando training beginning]] at Achnacarry, a first briefing from Princess Noor Inayat Khan, and the party still without a survivable way to get from the aeroplane to the ground.

===== Chronological Timeline =====

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date !! Event
|-
| Day 1 (5 Oct) || Guild commission; Novodom; Wormwood's briefing
|-
| Day 2 (6 Oct) || Rune Portal; descent into the Abyss
|-
| Day 3 (7 Oct) || Abyss crossing
|-
| Day 4 (8 Oct) || Abyss crossing
|-
| Day 5 (9 Oct) || Moonlight Sleeping joins at the river
|-
| Day 6 (10 Oct) || Demon waves; remains harvested
|-
| Day 7 (11 Oct) || Demon waves; remains harvested
|-
| Day 8 (12 Oct) || Demon waves; remains harvested
|-
| Day 9 (13 Oct) || Demon waves; remains harvested
|-
| Day 10 (14 Oct) || Demon waves; remains harvested
|-
| Day 11 (15 Oct) || Demon waves; remains harvested
|-
| Day 12 (16 Oct) || Demon waves; remains harvested
|-
| Day 13 (17 Oct) || Demon waves; remains harvested
|-
| Day 14 (18 Oct) || Demon waves; remains harvested
|-
| Day 15 (Mon 19 Oct) || Force Bridge; Reich; London; train north
|-
| Day 16 (20 Oct) || Admiral Rollins briefs; training begins
|}
|}

----

=== Chapter 2: A Family of Sorts ===

''I have been given the better part of a fortnight in which to become somebody else, and an invitation to a shooting party, and I could not have told you at the outset which of the two would prove harder on me.''

===== A Thousand Miles from Ben Nevis =====

''Two days into our stay at Achnacarry, I had established the things that matter. Where the kitchen is. Who keeps the kettle. How many cups of tea a man may ask for in a morning before the cook begins to look at him sideways. The answer is a good deal more than one would expect, which tells you something about the house, and something about how thoroughly everybody there has stopped being surprised by anything.''

''Dross went back to Short Fuse to see whether anything further could be shaken out of him concerning the seventy-second and his tidy little cabal, and came away with nothing but the shape of the arrangement. Moonlight reaches him when Moonlight chooses to, and pours in whatever Moonlight means him to have, and until that happens again the creature knows precisely as much as we do. He is open enough with Dross and does not mind a word of it being carried to the rest of us. He will simply not begin a conversation with anybody else. I cannot fault him. If I were a monkey-shaped demon full of black powder, loose in a castle crawling with commandos, I would keep my own counsel as well.''

''Jedburgh did the geography for us. We are somewhere in the north-west of Scotland, near enough to Ben Nevis, and where we are going is a thousand miles from here, give or take. Perpignan is not a metropolis, but it is a city, and — this was news to me, and I ought to have asked sooner — it does not lie in the Reich proper at all, but in that part of France the Germans have left standing under its own government, which is a polite fiction and no more. That does not make it safe. There is a German presence, there is a prison of theirs, and the man who heads the secret police there is due to be replaced by one Klaus Barbie. We were given that name in London, attached to Lyon. Either the fellow is to have both, or somebody's information is wrong, and I have not decided which, and I do not much like either answer.''

===== The Guns of a Very Strange Little Man =====

''It was Macavity who raised the shoot. He said that while we were with them we might care to take part, and that it would come round on the Saturday after next. I said yes before I had thought about it, which is not like me, but the words ''out on Corniger'' had already arranged themselves in my head and there was no dislodging them. I have been in castles and briefing rooms and the back of a collapsing van for a fortnight. A man wants a horse under him.''

''I should record, since I keep failing to settle it, that I have heard Macavity called the butler and I have heard him called the ghillie, and I have given up deciding between them. He does both. He runs the shoot the way he runs the house, which is to say entirely, and with a Scots accent that I can follow perfectly and the others cannot follow at all.''

''He showed us the guns. They are enormous double-barrelled things, old — the youngest of them more than fifty years — and kept in a state of preservation that borders on devotion. The bore is wide enough to look down and see daylight at the far end, and what comes out of it is not shot at all but a single solid slug, a splinter of cadmium wrapped about in lead. I asked to handle one and did, and turned it over with a maker's eye, and took measurements and made notes, because I would very much like to know how the thing is put together before I have to trust my life to somebody else firing it near me. They are too heavy to be worked twice in a hurry, which is why every shooter is given a man whose whole trade is loading, and a pair of guns to swap between. Jedburgh has the shoulders for it, and enough of the knack for heavy weapons of that sort. I do not, and said so, and was not sorry to say it. I have never used a ranged weapon in earnest in my life and I did not propose to start.''

''I asked where they are made. There is a man down in London who makes these things for him, and Macavity described this man as strange, and then as quite odd, and then, in the tone of one closing a subject, as having unusual tastes. I observed that he would have to have some odd predilections, and that this seems to be the way of these things. Nobody argued. Kel said there was nothing wrong with a live-fire exercise provided one had interrogated the prisoners first. She said it perfectly pleasantly. Everybody heard it and nobody looked at her.''

''I worked out, standing there with the thing broken open over my arm, what a slug like that would do to a man, and then I worked out what it would do to me, which is a different sum entirely. The shell of force I carry would swallow the whole of such a blow and leave me with nothing worse than the noise of it. I remember thinking that this was a comfortable arrangement. I ought to have distrusted the thought. Comfortable arrangements are how one ends the day with an antler in one's elbow.''

===== Cogs in the Spine =====

''Dr Wormwood's syringes came out that evening, since we had none of us got any younger and the stuff takes weeks to unfold. Dross needed French and did not want it, which is a combination I have some sympathy with. He said the things looked horrid. They are horrid. There is a grinding noise as the cogs turn over and drive the material down into the spine, and it is that, rather than the needle, that undoes a man.''

''I offered to help. I said we could hold him down and do it for him. I said, further, that he might care to look at something interesting over there while I stabbed him in the back. Dross replied with great dignity that he did not require that particular sort of help. Jedburgh, who is a better man than I am, offered instead to take the pain out of it, and got a long sideways look from me for his trouble. In the end it was Kel who managed it: she caught his eye and held it and pushed her own needle in at the same moment, so that he had somebody to watch instead of something to feel, and when it was over she produced that cigarette case of hers and offered him one on the grounds that it would strengthen his lungs. She has been saying that since the Abyss. She will go on saying it. Dross took the cigarette.''

===== A Family of Sorts =====

''Kel put it to us that we needed cover identities and that we needed them settled before anybody started training, and she was right, and it turned into the pleasantest hour I have spent since we arrived. She is a skilled tailor, which is a real trade and will bear inspection, and she proposed to sit that underneath a farmer's wife. Jedburgh suggested a local doctor for himself, which suits a man of his age and manner. Dross offered himself as an itinerant musician composing odes to the glory of the Reich — he was being funny, and then discovered that it works, because such men exist and are tolerated. He was on the point of adding that he might be a gypsy when he thought better of it out loud. In that country, in this year, it would be a short life.''

''That left me. I said we would go with vintner, since it fits the farming theme, and since it is one of the few honest trades I actually possess. I can talk about wine for as long as anybody cares to listen and a good deal longer.''

''Then somebody said we needed a reason for four such people to be moving about together, and the answer was obvious: a family. Kel and Jedburgh married — Jedburgh observed he was old for a first wife and would have to be a second husband, or she a second wife, and Kel began congratulating him, and I asked why she was congratulating him when she was the one marrying him. We will be given papers, with the fiddling details left blank for us to fill in when we know them.''

''Kel also wants German uniforms — the real cut of them, learned properly, so that she can lay the image of one over any of us at need. She has worn that particular disguise before and enjoyed it more than is entirely healthy. She asked me to put a real uniform on so that she could take it off me, so to speak, and study the thing until she had it exactly. I agreed. It is a small enough service and I would rather she practised on me than got it wrong on a checkpoint.''

===== What the Terrier Carries =====

''The problem of the papers took longer. We will be carrying spares — the sort of documents that will hang a man if he is searched with them on him and save him if he can produce them later. I said Hordling could put them in his pockets, and then said, in fairness, that I could not guarantee they would still be there when we came to ask for them back. Dross's answer was better than mine: give them to Tabitha and send her home, where nobody can search her at all, and call her back when they are wanted. Nobody could think of a reason a German policeman would search a terrier, but then nobody could think of a reason he would not. She has other work in hand besides — Dross has her making sleep dust, which we may want badly and which nobody else has the patience for. I suggested that if Hordling were to carry anything, Kel put a picture of an ordinary dog over him first. We did not need it in the end, and I record it here only because it remains the plan if the terrier is unavailable.''

''Weapons were settled on the same principle. Nothing English, because anything English found on us hangs the man who supplied it as well as us. So: Lugers, Mausers, and the machine pistol the Germans themselves call a Schmeisser. Jedburgh went through several other notions before he was told, gently, that they had not been invented yet. There was a certain amount of unbecoming admiration around the table for German equipment — their grenades carry more powder and throw further than ours, apparently — until Kel observed that they had all the best gear and lost anyway.''

''They also produced a concealed sword for Kel, on the grounds that the house has nobody good enough to use it. It is a rapier at about two-thirds the usual length, very quick, made for a lady, and built for the specific purpose of getting inside the reach of a longer blade — no use at all pressed right up against a man, but murderous at that one distance. It is disguised as a parasol. She took it before he had finished describing it.''

''She asked whether we could have code phrases for the resistance and was told we would be given them before they put us out of the aeroplane. She asked where our agent is and was told nobody knows, because he is still moving. That is the second time I have heard a man described as too paranoid to be found, and been asked to find him.''

===== The Days Between =====

''Then we had days to spend and spent them.''

''Jedburgh gave a full week of his to weapons and did nothing else with it. He turned over whether to push his naming further and decided against it — he has no name close enough to the top of its ladder to be worth the effort, though he can banish a thing well enough already, and he asked Kel whether there were particular counterspells she wanted him carrying. She said she did not know what we were going to meet, which is the honest answer and no help at all.''

''I took the offer of training in small blades and came away with the short sword. It is not a weapon I had ever bothered with — I have always been able to pick a thing up and swing it — but a short blade goes places a lance and a mace do not, and where we are going, most of the places worth going are indoors.''

''Kel drilled us. She is a military scientist of high standing and she spent her days teaching us her commands until we knew them without having to think, which is the only way they are any use. She had us practise the silent speech until everyone was easy with it, including the trick of pushing an image across rather than words. She got maps of Perpignan and studied them, and then — this is the part I liked — she wrote a poem about the city, because she is a courtier of high rank and can, and then set the poem into her memory by another art entirely, so that she now carries the streets and the numbers of that place perfectly and can recite them off a verse. I have known a great many clever people. That is one of the cleverer things I have watched done.''

''Dross learned to drive, which the house paid for in dented motor cars, and Kel sat in the passenger seat abusing him in German the entire time. She maintains that this is the correct language for the purpose. He ground the gears and took it in good part and said it was tremendously helpful, and I think he half meant it.''

''We also settled how we get to the shoot and, more to the point, how we get out of an aeroplane. Jedburgh will simply be an eagle. Dross has the carpet, and the murmuration will lift three. I can fly, one way or another, and if it comes to it I can fall a very long way and land hard and get up again, which the others still do not entirely believe. I did put myself forward as a passenger service and then had to withdraw the offer, because Corniger will not carry anybody who is not a virgin — he has the fixed opinion that he is a unicorn and there is no arguing him out of it. I asked the question straight out. The answers were not encouraging. Kel said it was a very personal question and then answered it anyway, and that was that. I can give nobody a lift.''

===== The Shape of the Shoot =====

''The shoot works like this. There is a loch running north from the castle. At the far end of it, eleven miles up, is a place called Morrigan, and that is where the guns stand, out on the top of a hill with no cover worth the name. When the quarry turn and run south down the lie of the land they come to a waterfall and an old bridge over a pool the locals call the Witch Pool, and a second party lies concealed underneath that bridge and takes them out of the air as they pass. Every shooter has his loader and his pair of guns and a couple of pikemen at his back.''

''Dross asked whether it would not make more sense for all of us to go to one place rather than split at this very early juncture, and he was right, and the answer settled itself: Morrigan, because unless something confronts them at Morrigan they may not turn south at all, and then the party under the bridge sits in the wet for a morning with nothing to shoot. Kel said we would all go to Morrigan. So we did.''

''We were advised to wear as much armour as we could get away with, and Jedburgh asked whether he was expected to dress in tweeds, which was not answered. And we were given the rule of the thing, which is a single rule and admits of no exceptions: you only fire if you can see blue sky behind what you are firing at. Every year, we were told, there are accidents. It is why they are a clan and not a family.''

===== Grinding the Gears to Morrigan =====

''On the morning of the shoot — the last Saturday of October, and cold with it — Dross drove us up. The road runs above the shore, sometimes forty or fifty feet above the water and sometimes level with it, and he ground the gears the whole way while Kel swore at him steadily in German, and I sat in the back and thought that I have arrived at battles in worse company.''

''We left the car at Morrigan and walked up to the top of the hill, and I saw at once what they had meant about the exposure. There is nothing up there. You stand on the skyline and wait for something to come at you out of the north.''

''It was only then that we asked what we were shooting. They are called Perytons. They are stags crossed with birds, if you can hold that picture in your head, and they are not game in any sense I recognise — they are man-killers, and what they take is the heart. And they have this about them, which I have not been able to put down since: their shadows do not match them. A Peryton's shadow shows the shape of the person it is about to eat. I would have said I was past being unsettled by anything with wings. I would have been wrong.''

''Kel dealt with the exposure. She laid a false stretch of ground across the top of the hill, wide enough to take the whole party and good for most of a day once it was down, and everyone stepped inside it and vanished from the world. Everyone except me. Somebody has to be visible or the things fly straight past and nothing turns them, so I stayed out in the open on Corniger, and Macavity and his commandos stayed out with theirs. Kel offered me the observation, as I took up my position, that I should not stand too near Macavity, who becomes a complete lunatic the moment he starts pulling a trigger. Before we went out, Tulip put the strength of stone into our arms and an armour of earth over us, and she is very good at both, and I was glad of them within the hour.''

''Then they fed us, which was the most civilised part of the day. A piping breakfast — beef soup with pepper and vodka in it, devilled kidneys, everything hot and everything designed to keep a man alive on a hilltop in a Highland October. There would be two flights, and we were to have the first of them done by a quarter to ten so that there would be time for morning tea before the second. That, I think, is my favourite sentence anyone has said to me on this plane.''

===== Out of the North =====

''They came just before the quarter hour, out of the sky from the north, and they came far faster than anything had prepared me for. Two ranks of them, barely five feet apart across and twenty feet one above the other, dropping down the sky in a line.''

''Macavity opened it. He had told us it would be a Sten and it was in fact a Bren, set up on its bipod, and he lay flat on his belly and put a burst straight up into them to pull their attention onto himself while his three commandos stood over him with their pikes ready. It worked. It worked far better than he can have wanted. One of them he crippled outright and opened up so badly that it fell out of the flight and did not get up again.''

''The rest came down on top of him. Three of them together, and they went at him with everything they had, and he was on his back on the grass in a matter of seconds with one of them standing over him spraying blood in the cold air. He was not moving. The commandos closed over the top of him and dragged him back out of it, and that was the last useful thing Macavity did that morning, and I have not been able to decide since whether he is a brave man or simply had no idea at all what he was inviting us to.''

===== The Charge =====

''Jedburgh had the gun ready and used it, and put a slug into one of them at the chest, which did not kill it but took the speed out of it, and after that it was only a matter of catching it.''

''I did what I came to do. I put Corniger at the line of them and charged down it with the lance, and it is a very long time since I have had the chance to do that properly against something that deserved it. I killed one outright on the way through — the lance went in and it simply stopped being alive — and touched several others in passing as we went by. It is a good horse. It is an extremely good horse.''

''Then they came for me, all of them, which was the plan and was not therefore any less unpleasant. Corniger got us out from under the first pass by mincing sideways at exactly the right instant, which is a piece of schooling I paid a great deal for and have never regretted. The rest got through. The shell of force around me took the first of it and held. The second smashed my helmet in and rang my skull like a bell, and I lost the better part of a moment to it. And one of them struck at the second head I carry, the Abzazu head, and it went out like a candle and stayed out for the rest of the fight. I do not care to describe how that feels. It is not pain exactly. It is more as though a room in the house had gone dark with somebody still in it.''

''So I did the sensible thing, which I ought to have done before the charge and did not because I wanted the charge. Corniger has a shoe I have been saving — the shoe of the herd — and I set it going, and where there had been one of us there were suddenly seven, mount and rider all together, all of us in the same place doing the same things at once. And I drew the void up around myself over the top of it. After that they were welcome to try.''

===== Seven of Me =====

''What followed I can only set down in pieces, because that is how I have it.''

''Tulip could not lift one of the shoot guns — they want a strength she has not got, and I have seen her carry an injured goat further than I would have, so I mean that as no reflection on her. She drew the pistol she had been issued instead and fired it into them steadily all morning, and every one of those small holes told in the end.''

''Dross tried to put a fear into one of them and the working simply would not take; I saw his face when it failed. He set himself and did it again and the second one went in like a knife, and the Peryton it landed on broke out of the fight and went south as hard as it could fly. Somebody thought to ask where it was headed. Morocco, apparently. I said it was off to Spain then, and laughed, and then stopped laughing, because so are we.''

''Kel worked from inside her false ground and did more damage than any gun on that hill. She reaches straight into their minds, and against a dream weaver a beast's stubbornness counts for nothing at all; she simply took them out of themselves one after another, and they came down out of the sky asleep.''

''Jedburgh charged one on foot with the glaive and killed it, which he should not have been able to do, because their hides turn a cutting edge — he hit it so hard that the resistance stopped mattering. And then one of them caught him properly. It gored his off arm and ruined it, and the blow was heavy enough that he should have gone down senseless and did not, because he is made the way he is made. His glaive is braided to his wrist and so he did not lose it either. He told me afterwards, quite cheerfully, that the arm will be two months mending.''

''And then it was my turn again, and this is the part I keep going back over. Three of them landed on me at once and struck through everything — one drove an antler into the joint of my elbow so hard that the tip snapped off inside, and another opened my arm along its length, and I saw it happen, and I felt nothing whatever. Because it was not my elbow. Kel called out that there were seven of me, and she was right; the blows had gone into copies, and I watched myself gored twice over from four feet away and then watched the pieces of myself come apart and go out. Two of them at once. It is an unwholesome thing to see even when it saves your life, and it did save my life. Kel said to Dross, not at all quietly, that I am a good deal harder to kill than the rest of them, being an immortal sort of character, and that any of them would have died several times over standing where I was standing. She meant it kindly. I did not enjoy hearing it as much as I ought to have.''

''Tulip got to Macavity while all this was going on. He had gone far enough over the edge that another few moments would have finished him, and she brought him back and held him there, and he did not die. Later she reached hands of earth up out of the ground and took hold of them where they flew.''

''I did what I could with what I had left. I put the void on one of them with everything I could give it, which is the whole of a man's attention and leaves nothing over, and the thing barely noticed. That was humbling. So I went back to Indigo and hit them with the mace until they stopped, which is less elegant and worked considerably better.''

===== A Bag of Eleven =====

''At the end of it there were two still up and neither of them was going to last, and Kel and Dross put them down before I could get to them with the mace, which was probably kinder to everybody.''

''One got away — the one Dross frightened, still going south. Eleven for the bag.''

''Then they gave us food, because it was that sort of morning: venison rolls and game pie, on a hilltop, in the wind, with the dead laid out below us and more work promised later in the day. And it was put to us that the day had been remarkably successful, and I asked what they meant by remarkably. They mean that nobody died. Normally, it seems, this is done by weight of numbers — enough guns on the hill that the flight breaks and turns and runs down to the bridge, and there is the occasional death in a year, and everyone accepts it as the price. Eleven taken and nobody killed is not how the shoot usually goes. I said aloud that Macavity had rather underestimated these things, and nobody contradicted me.''

''There is a harvest in them, which I had not expected. The beasts carry iron in their bodies, and their antlers are shot through with their own blood, and that blood is magical. Worked properly at the castle forge — forty hours of it, which somebody will have to stand and do — the antlers can be cut at the branchings and set into a breastplate across the shoulders, and what you get out of it is armour that turns magic as well as steel. Eleven sets is exactly enough for two: one cut small, for an elf, and one for the rest of us. Kel said the house would surely do that much for their favourite commandos. The feathers were a poorer return. Only one bird in the eleven had a cape in it, but that one will be worth having — light, and it will take a blow for you, and there is something else in it besides that nobody has yet named.''

''I took the hearts. I did not explain why and nobody asked, which is one of the things I like about this party.''

''The last word of the day was Jedburgh's arm. Two months, he says, and he says it as though it were a spot of rain. It does mean that when they put us out over that coast he will not be able to do it hanging under a canopy, which he pointed out himself, and then added that it does not matter because he can still fly, and that it is nevertheless a complete pig.''

''I have a fortnight, less what we have already spent, and a man in the south of France who cannot be found, and a traitor somewhere in a line of frightened people, and now a horse who thinks he is a unicorn, a dented motor car, and eleven sets of antlers waiting on a forge.''

''It was, all things considered, a good shoot.''

''---''

----

{| class="wikitable"
|-
|

==== OOC Details ====

===== Items Acquired =====

'''Kel:'''
* Concealed small sword (unpriced)
* Forged identity papers (unpriced)

'''Party (shared resources):'''
* Peryton antlers (unpriced)
* Peryton feathers (cape-grade) (unpriced)

'''Black:'''
* Peryton hearts (unpriced)
* Forged identity papers (unpriced)

'''Dross:'''
* Forged identity papers (unpriced)

'''Jedburgh:'''
* Forged identity papers (unpriced)

'''Balance brought forward:''' 2,500 sp
'''Balance carried forward:''' 2,500 sp

===== Session Summary =====

Two days into the party's stay at Achnacarry, Short Fuse confirmed he could add nothing about the seventy-second demon until Moonlight next contacts him, and [[#s2-a-thousand-miles-from-ben-nevis|the destination was filled in]]: Perpignan, roughly a thousand miles south, in Vichy France rather than the Reich proper, with a German presence, a Nazi prison, and Klaus Barbie due to take over the secret police there. Macavity invited the party to the estate's annual shoot on the Saturday after next and [[#s2-the-guns-of-a-very-strange-little-man|showed them the shoot's guns]] — enormous double-barrelled pieces firing a cadmium-and-lead slug, supplied by an odd little man in London. Through the training period the party [[#s2-cogs-in-the-spine|took Dr Wormwood's knowledge syringes]], Dross taking French with Kel steadying him; [[#s2-a-family-of-sorts|settled cover identities as a family]], Kel a tailor and farmer's wife married to Jedburgh's local doctor, Black a vintner, Dross an itinerant musician; and [[#s2-what-the-terrier-carries|worked out how to carry their spare papers and what to carry them with]], sending Tabitha home with the documents where she cannot be searched, choosing German small arms over traceable English ones, and accepting a concealed rapier for Kel. [[#s2-the-days-between|The remaining days]] went on Jedburgh's weapons training, Black's new short sword, Kel's drilling of the party in her commands and her memorised poem of Perpignan's streets, Dross's driving lessons, and a plan for getting out of the aeroplane.

[[#s2-the-shape-of-the-shoot|The shoot was laid out]] as a drive from Morrigan, eleven miles up the loch, toward a concealed second party at the Witch Pool bridge, with one absolute rule: fire only at blue sky. The party chose to stand together at Morrigan and [[#s2-grinding-the-gears-to-morrigan|drove up on the last Saturday of October]], learning only there that the quarry were Perytons — man-killers that eat hearts and cast the shadow of whoever they are about to take — before Kel hid the party under illusory ground and Black stayed visible to turn the flight. [[#s2-out-of-the-north|The first wave came out of the north]] far faster than expected, and Macavity was mauled unconscious moments after opening fire. [[#s2-the-charge|Black charged the line on Corniger]] and killed one outright before the flight turned on him, smashing his helmet and knocking out his Abzazu head, at which point Corniger's shoe [[#s2-seven-of-me|put seven Blacks on the hill]] while Kel, Dross, Jedburgh and Tulip broke the rest of the flight; three grievous strikes landed on Black's copies rather than on him, and Tulip pulled Macavity back from dying. [[#s2-a-bag-of-eleven|Eleven were taken and nobody was killed]], which is not how the shoot usually goes. The party remain at Achnacarry with the rest of the training fortnight ahead of them, eleven sets of antlers awaiting forty hours at the castle forge, one cape's worth of feathers, and Jedburgh's arm two months from mending before the drop near Perpignan.

===== Chronological Timeline =====

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date !! Event
|-
| Day 18 (22 Oct) || Two days into the Achnacarry stay: Short Fuse can add nothing about the seventy-second until Moonlight next contacts him; the destination is confirmed as Perpignan in Vichy France; Macavity invites the party to the shoot and shows them its guns.
|-
| Day 19 (23 Oct) || Dr Wormwood's language syringes taken, Dross's French steadied by Kel; cover identities agreed as a family — Kel a tailor and farmer's wife married to Jedburgh's doctor, Black a vintner, Dross an itinerant musician.
|-
| Day 20 (24 Oct) || Spare documents sent home with Tabitha, who cannot be searched, and set to making sleep dust; German weapons chosen over traceable English ones; Kel issued a concealed parasol-rapier.
|-
| Days 21–26 (25–30 Oct) || The training period: Jedburgh a full week on weapons, Black on the short sword, Kel drilling the party in her commands and memorising a poem of Perpignan's streets, Dross learning to drive; the insertion plan settled.
|-
| Day 27 (Sat 31 Oct) || The shoot at Morrigan. Kel's illusory terrain hides the party while Black stays visible to turn the flight; Macavity is mauled unconscious and stabilised by Tulip; eleven Perytons taken, one escaping south, and no deaths. Antlers, feathers and hearts harvested; Jedburgh's arm crippled for two months.
|}
|}

----

=== Chapter 3: Some Things Are Gone When They Are Gone ===

''They feed you at eleven o'clock on that hill, and every single thing they hand you is made so that a man can eat it with one hand. I have thought about that a good deal since.''

===== Elevenses =====

''When the first flight was finished I went round and asked what everyone had. Jedburgh had a ruined arm and had had it since before breakfast — the wicked cut he took the last time, still open, still useless. He could not lift the big gun and he could not fight, which he pointed out was the entire reason he had come. Kel said her casting hand was spent. Reaching into a thing's head and turning it inside out takes something out of you that food will not put back, and she had done it a great many times in a short morning. I asked whether anyone carried anything for the deep hurts — the sort that do not simply close over — and nobody did. I do, as it happens. It was not the moment for it.''

''I had come out of it without a mark. I record that plainly because of what follows, and because I remember standing there in the wind feeling rather pleased with myself.''

''The break was to be an hour and a half, two if we wanted it, and Tulip spent all of it working. She is a very good healer, quick and unfussy, and she went along the line putting people back together one small mending at a time. Macavity took a great deal of it — he had been very nearly killed and had gone in and out of the world twice already that day — and Jedburgh took what he could use. She asked whether I wanted any. I said no.''

''Then they fed us, and I have to say the food is the part of this arrangement I understand best. Beef and pastry and things kept hot, raspberry with vodka poured through it, cream horns swimming in custard. Somebody explained to me at length, and with real feeling, that the whole tradition of the mid-morning break is built around food a man can hold in one fist — pasties and game pies and meat sealed under aspic — so that the other hand is free for a cup, or a bottle, or a gun. It is a sensible way to build a meal. I enjoyed the lecture more than I have enjoyed anything else on this plane.''

===== Affairs of the Heart =====

''Before we went back out I handed round amulets. I carry a number of a particular kind — a small thing worn over the heart and woken with a drop of your own blood, which does nothing at all until the moment your body gives out, and then pours healing into you once and burns itself to nothing doing it. One use. One life. I gave them to Tulip, to Jedburgh, to Dross and to Kel, which left me with a couple of dozen still in hand, so nobody need feel they had taken my last.''

''Dross asked what the thing was called. I told him. He said it was aptly named, which it is.''

''I did not explain why I was doing it while we stood there, and I will explain it here instead. I watched Macavity go down under three of them in the space of a breath, and I watched Tulip haul him back from wherever he had got to, and it occurred to me while we were eating that the next one to go down might well be somewhere she could not reach. I would rather spend a trinket than stand over a friend afterwards working out what I might have done.''

===== Baiting the Trap =====

''Jedburgh raised traps first — he is a ranger of sorts and it is the obvious question — and it came apart twice over. He could not have set them one-armed, and the rest of us could have, and none of it would have mattered because the things never touch the ground until they are already on top of you. Binding animals was the next idea and the best one, because he is very strong at it, and it was no use either: whatever a Peryton is, it is not an animal in the sense the working means. Earth is no good against a thing in the air. Tulip has fiercer workings in her somewhere but had not brought them out that morning.''

''Kel proposed we do what had worked before and let Macavity and his men stand out front and take the charge. I said what I thought of that — he had been all but killed by a single pass — and what we settled on instead was better. Kel laid down four illusions, a line of soldiers standing with weapons levelled, the sort of thing a stooping animal cannot resist. She wanted straw men underneath so there would be something solid to strike; there was nobody at the house with the hands or the hours to make them, so our line was made of nothing whatever, and stood there looking dangerous.''

''Jedburgh's contribution was the good one. Get them lined up on the false soldiers and put lightning straight down the row, because whatever else they are, they do not shrug off magic. He gave Tulip a bolt of her own to hold. Then there was a long, careful business of standing everyone in the right place, since the lightning runs a fixed length and does not care whose spine is at the end of it, and the two of them shifted about the slope until they were sure they could kill only Perytons with it. Dross said he would hold a fear ready and drop it on anything that came for me. I said I would hold my charge until after the lightning went, which is not how I like to fight, and was right.''

''Dross also wanted to know whether their antlers count as silver or as magic, because Tabitha cannot be hurt by anything else and he was working out whether she could be of use. We decided they probably do count, being magical creatures, and that he had better assume the worse of it. She stayed out of it and made coffee instead, which was of more use to me personally.''

===== Too Good to Be True =====

''They came in out of the high air with a great space between the ranks, and they came far faster than the first flight had — dropping the whole way, so that they were moving quicker than anything I am used to standing still for.''

''Then everything worked at once, which almost never happens.''

''Dross's fear went into one of them and it broke off the line and fled, unable to say what it was afraid of, only that the hilltop had something on it. Kel reached into two more and they simply stopped being awake and fell out of the sky. The lightning went down the row of false soldiers exactly as Jedburgh had drawn it and caught both of the ones lined up on them, and neither could hold the air afterwards; one came down so badly that it lay there stunned in the grass. Macavity swung the Bren round — his commandos had the sense to be somewhere else this time — and put another down. And I put Corniger at the one nearest me and rode it down with the lance, and it stopped being alive with no fuss at all.''

''Kel said we had killed them all. Dross pointed out that one of them was only sleeping. It was, in fairness, resting very deeply.''

===== Sharp Antlered Doom! =====

''The next flight put us right. Then the one after that.''

''They came in low over the false soldiers and somebody said to look at the grass, and I looked. Every shadow coming up that hill was mine. Not four shadows of stags with wings — four of me, striding along underneath them at exactly their speed. I knew about this. I had been told about it and had written it down and thought myself unmoved by it. It is a different thing to see your own outline laid out on the ground four times over by creatures who are still eight hundred feet away and have already decided.''

''Tulip had the worst of what came after. One of them came down on her where she stood and did three separate pieces of ruin to her in a single pass — opened her chest, crippled the arm, laid her leg open — and she went out of her senses and stayed nearly emptied for the rest of it. She has almost nothing to spare at the best of times. It was very close.''

''Jedburgh was standing underneath one when it came apart in the air and was drenched from head to boots in its blood. He observed that there are worse things, which there are, and he would know. Macavity meanwhile put a shot up through one of them from behind and took its foreleg off at the wrist, and there followed a short argument on the hill about whether a bullet running the length of a creature's great artery counts as a shot through the heart. I found I did not much care for the discussion. These things eat hearts. They pull them out of men on the wing. But you cannot mind that and enjoy the other, so I said nothing and let them argue.''

===== Shorthanded =====

''Three of them came onto me at once and four blows came through.''

''The first opened my chest — a bad one, deep, the kind that takes something out of a man besides blood. The shell of force I carry swallowed the next one whole and I did not feel it at all. The third got past the shell and did more of the same. And the fourth took my left hand off at the wrist.''

''I saw it go. That is the part I keep returning to. There was no moment of not knowing; I watched my own hand leave my arm and land in the grass, and my first coherent thought was not about the hand at all. It was that this has now happened to me twice in two days in almost the same way — that they come through the shell and then the harm is real — and that I have to work out how to stop it, because I cannot go on being told by these creatures which parts of me I am permitted to keep. I said as much out loud. Nobody argued.''

''I have a vial for this. Sardonyx, and it does the deep injuries first, then the ordinary wounds, then the weariness, and the whole of it must be drunk at once. I turned it over in my mind while the fight went on around me and came to the answer I already knew. It will close a wound and it will mend a crushed thing. It will not put a hand back onto an arm any more than it would put an eye back into a head. Some things are gone when they are gone.''

===== Cleanup =====

''So I dropped the shield and went on with my right.''

''Everything is harder that way, and I mean everything — the reach is wrong, the weight is wrong, the horse expects your weight to sit somewhere it no longer does. I still hit them. I hit one hard enough to end it, one-handed, off-side and bleeding, and I record that here out of pure vanity because there is nobody else I can tell.''

''I asked Tulip to pick my hand up for me. She could not; she was senseless in the grass with her chest open. Kel got it instead and kept it out of the dirt, which was all I wanted — I held it against the stump for a while afterwards, on the chance. There is a woman who could put it back. She has the craft for it and she is weeks away and on another world entirely, and by the time she could be reached the thing in my hand would be no use to anybody.''

''Kel finished the last of them. She reached in and it went out like a lamp, with smoke coming off one wing as it dropped. Three flights of four came at us in all that day, twelve altogether, and two of them broke and ran south down the lie of the land — toward the bridge and the pool, where the second party had been lying in the wet since dawn with nothing whatever to shoot at. I hope they enjoyed themselves. Ten accounted for on our hill.''

===== An Even Trade =====

''They drove us back down to the castle and we went through what had come off the beasts. None of it is magical. We are going to have it looked at properly anyway, because none of it being magical is exactly the sort of thing a man says confidently right up until he is wrong; Dross can do that quickly and Jedburgh talked about learning the trick himself so the two of them could get through it in an afternoon.''

''There is a breastplate to be made from the antlers, and it was mine by right of having killed a fair share of them, and it is no use to me at all — I already wear metal, and one does not layer such things. Kel said give it to Jedburgh, who fights in the front and has nothing so good, and that was the right answer.''

''And there was an iron leg. I do not entirely know what to say about the iron leg. Nobody else in this party keeps a mount, so it was mine by default, and Corniger took an immediate and unmistakable interest in it, and it is now fitted to him. He is delighted. He has an extra hoof and I have one hand fewer, and if he has noticed the arithmetic of that he has been too polite to say so.''

===== Fittings All Round =====

''The house retains a tailor, a brisk sort of woman, and we spent a pleasant hour spending her time for her.''

''Dross took the fencing cape — feather-lined, or fur, and it wants making up properly. It is worth having: it hangs exactly across the angles where a man holding a blade out in front of him is open, and it turns a little of what comes in there. Jedburgh made the point that mattered more. We are going out of an aeroplane before long, and whatever height they put us out at, it will be cold, and none of us owns a coat worth the name. So: greatcoats. Three days apiece, one seamstress, one garment at a time, and she cannot be in two places while she does it.''

''Kel wanted a fascinator, which I had to have described to me — a very small hat, worn at night, made of almost nothing, the sort of confection that announces a woman's standing before she has said a word. That is the difficulty with it. You may not wear one unless you are gentry or better, and Kel is not certain her invented past will bear the weight, and in any case it wants a milliner rather than a seamstress; Edinburgh, apparently, if not London.''

''So Kel went and asked the commander whether he could simply buy her a minor title, which I thought was magnificent, and was told that such things are the King's to give and nobody else's. Jedburgh proposed she become a Scottish widow instead, and then, warming to it, the Black Widow of McMurdo, and then an order of the Empire, which he assured her is the more usual route and takes rather longer. Kel asked whether marrying into gentry and then divorcing would answer. Jedburgh reminded her what year this is, and what happened the last time a divorce was placed near the throne of this country, and the subject was allowed to lapse.''

===== The Spoils of War =====

''I drank the vial on the hill and it did what it could. The chest wound went, and the lesser damage with it, and the whole of it emptied into me in one swallow, and my wrist ended the day exactly as it had begun the afternoon.''

''That left Tulip. Her injuries came to precisely what a full dose of the vial will carry — the great wound to the chest and the crippled arm together, no more and no less — which is the kind of luck I have learned to be suspicious of. The trouble is that the vial was now empty, and filling it is not a matter of pouring something in. You put your own life into it, a measure at a time, and it holds what you gave it until somebody drinks. I mend faster than most men, faster by some way, and even so I could not fill it in a day or in five.''

''It took fifteen. Fifteen days of giving it a little and getting it back and giving it again, at the end of which she drank it and stood up whole. Kel offered to have a herbalist's draught made to hurry my end of it along; I did not need one. Jedburgh had hurt left over too, and we looked at it and decided to leave it alone — it is weakness and nothing more, no lasting harm in it, and it will go by itself in three weeks if he lets it. He was quite cheerful about that. He is quite cheerful about most of it, which I have decided is either courage or a want of imagination and is probably both.''

===== Nothing Could Possibly Go Wrong =====

''Fifteen quiet days is also, conveniently, time to build a hand.''

''I have been an armourer a very long while and a mechanician for rather less, and between the two of them I can make almost anything that has joints in it. The question is what to make it out of. The elegant answer — and I want it on record that I thought of it while still bleeding — is substance with no form wrapped around form with no substance, which would be beautiful and would work and which I do not yet know how to build. The practical answer is quicksilver, which I have wanted since the day I arrived on this plane and which the whole of this country appears not to contain a single flask of.''

''Dross suggested dynamite. Then, having thought about it more carefully, plastic explosive. It was pointed out to him that whoever stands next to me would have views on this, and he agreed that it might be improved by also setting fire to it, and I said that nothing could possibly go wrong. Jedburgh offered me something of his to fasten on in the meantime and I turned it down; the grown ones are weak, and there are other reasons.''

''I would like to have it done before we go. A man can charge with a lance one-handed. He cannot shake hands, or hold a glass and a cigarette at the same time, or eat politely in company that watches which hand you use — and where we are going, being remembered is how you die.''

===== Ultima Thule =====

''The last of it came to us as intelligence, and it is the part I keep turning over.''

''A man from the Ahnenerbe was seen speaking with Klaus Barbie, who has the Gestapo. The sighting came from an informant they call Gex, dated the last day of October, and reached us the day after through the decrypts, out of the ground between France and Switzerland not far from Geneva. So the ancestral-heritage people and the secret police are talking to one another on the very ground we are shortly to be dropped onto, which is not a coincidence I am prepared to enjoy.''

''I was given a great deal of background on what the Ahnenerbe are. Not all of them are lunatics, which surprised me — a good number are genuine scholars who were seconded into it and now spend their lives being consulted by lunatics. The Germans are the finest Sumerologists alive and much of that talent has been poured into hunting an origin for the Aryan people somewhere in the north of the world, by way of ancient Persia, whose name is the same word. Sievers runs it and is a manager rather than a scholar; the thing above him is somebody's pet project, and the man whose pet it is believes it will father a rebirth of the whole race. They sent an expedition to Tibet to look for the mystics and found nothing. They sent another to the far south, three years ago, and found nothing there either. And they have spent an enormous quantity of money looking for Ultima Thule in the frozen north, poking about islands inside the Arctic circle, hunting for a paradise in the ice and for whatever is left of Coeus — a Titan of the cold north, and of intellect, on the grounds that cold sheds a light of its own.''

''What I found most useful was the plainest part of it. Our side does not want the thing because we believe in it. Our side wants it because the Germans will move heaven and earth to have it, and the surest way to stop them is to be standing on it first. That is not a crusade. That is a race, and races are lost.''

''I put it to them that if there is a real thing under all this, it might be the northern celestial pillar — and that a pillar is a way off this plane, which would explain rather a lot about what the enemy actually wants. Dross asked whether that might be why they came here at all. Nobody answered either of us, and I noticed that nobody answered.''

''Meanwhile the war goes on being the war. The Germans have convinced themselves a very large American convoy is being assembled to run supplies into Malta, and they are pulling their submarines into the Mediterranean to sit at the narrows and wait for it. Our people know this because they have been reading the enemy's sea traffic since May. And in about a fortnight they put us out of an aeroplane over France, somewhere between two and six hundred feet, which is low enough that the coats may prove unnecessary and low enough that there is no second attempt.''

''Eleven days on this world. Three flights of monsters in a single day, three sets of coats on order, and a left hand in a cloth somewhere that I have not yet been able to make myself throw away.''

''I would like the new one finished before we jump.''

----

{| class="wikitable"
|-
|

==== OOC Details ====

===== Items Acquired =====

'''Tulip:'''
* Second Chance amulet (unpriced)

'''Jedburgh:'''
* Second Chance amulet (unpriced)
* Peryton-antler breastplate (unpriced)

'''Dross:'''
* Second Chance amulet (unpriced)

'''Kel:'''
* Second Chance amulet (unpriced)

'''Corniger:'''
* Iron leg (prosthetic) (unpriced)

'''Party (shared resources):'''
* Sleeping dust (unpriced)

'''Balance brought forward:''' 2,500 sp
'''Balance carried forward:''' 2,500 sp

===== Session Summary =====

The first Peryton flight over, the party took [[#s3-elevenses|an hour and a half of elevenses on the hill]] while Tulip mended the worst of the injured, and Black [[#s3-affairs-of-the-heart|handed round Second Chance amulets]] to Tulip, Jedburgh, Dross and Kel before they went back out. Traps and animal-binding were ruled out, and [[#s3-baiting-the-trap|the plan they settled on instead]] was Kel's line of illusory soldiers with Jedburgh's lightning laid straight down the row, which [[#s3-too-good-to-be-true|broke the second flight almost without a fight]]. The third and fourth flights went far worse: [[#s3-sharp-antlered-doom|Tulip was ruined in a single pass]], and three Perytons converged on Black and [[#s3-shorthanded|took his left hand off at the wrist]]. He [[#s3-cleanup|fought on right-handed]] to the end of it — ten of the day's twelve accounted for, two escaped south.

Back at the castle the party searched the beasts' gear, found nothing magical, gave the antler breastplate to Jedburgh and [[#s3-an-even-trade|fitted a recovered iron leg to Corniger]], then [[#s3-fittings-all-round|put a long afternoon of orders through the house tailor]] — a fencing cape, greatcoats against the cold of the coming jump, and a fascinator Kel may not have the standing to wear. Black drank his Sardonyx vial on the hill for his own chest wound, then [[#s3-the-spoils-of-war|spent fifteen days bleeding it full again]] so that Tulip could drink it and stand up whole, and used the same fortnight [[#s3-nothing-could-possibly-go-wrong|designing a replacement hand]] he has no quicksilver to build. The session closed on [[#s3-ultima-thule|intelligence out of the French–Swiss border country]]: an Ahnenerbe man seen with Klaus Barbie of the Gestapo, a long briefing on the German search for Ultima Thule and the Titan Coeus, and confirmation that the party drops into France in roughly a fortnight.

===== Chronological Timeline =====

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date !! Event
|-
| Day 27 (31 Oct, late morning) || Elevenses break; Tulip heals Macavity and Jedburgh; Black unhurt
|-
| Day 27 (31 Oct, late morning) || Black distributes Second Chance amulets to Tulip, Jedburgh, Dross and Kel
|-
| Day 27 (31 Oct, late morning) || Tactics set: illusory soldier line plus lightning kill-line; traps and animal-binding ruled out
|-
| Day 27 (31 Oct, midday) || Second Peryton flight destroyed with no party injuries
|-
| Day 27 (31 Oct, midday) || Third and fourth flights; Tulip crippled and stunned; Black's left hand severed
|-
| Day 27 (31 Oct, afternoon) || Black fights on right-handed; ten Perytons accounted for, two escape south
|-
| Day 27 (31 Oct, afternoon) || Loot searched and found non-magical; iron leg fitted to Corniger; antler breastplate allocated to Jedburgh
|-
| Day 27 (31 Oct, afternoon) || Black drinks the Sardonyx vial; chest wound closed, severed wrist unchanged
|-
| Day 27 (31 Oct, afternoon) || Tabitha's six doses of sleeping dust confirmed finished
|-
| Day 27 (31 Oct, evening) || Commissions placed with the house tailor; Kel's minor-title enquiry refused
|-
| Day 28 (1 Nov) || Ahnenerbe/Klaus Barbie intelligence reaches the party via decrypt (sighting dated 31 Oct, received 1 Nov); Ultima Thule and Coeus briefing; Malta convoy and U-boat movements
|-
| Day 27 (31 Oct) onward || Black recharges the Sardonyx vial over the following days; designs a prosthetic hand; Jedburgh left to heal naturally
|-
| Some days later || Tulip drinks the recharged vial and recovers fully
|}
|}

----

=== Chapter 4: Static on the Line ===

''They gave us a week before they put us into France, and we spent it the way men do when they know it is the last week of its kind: arguing about monsters, reading other people's books, and making things with our hands. I have one hand. I spent the week on the other.''

===== Careful What You Call For =====

''It began, as these conversations usually do, with Tulip wanting a pet.''

''She asked whether she might take command of something Dross called up, and Dross — who can bring through creatures with enchantment already in them — offered to fetch one out for her to hold. Jedburgh pointed out, patiently, that we had already gone round this and settled that she could not. The difficulty is in what the things actually are. The beasts under discussion are not animals in any sense that matters. They think. They speak, and not in one tongue either but in several, and the working that bends a dumb beast to your will is simply not the working that holds a thing capable of arguing back. Tulip has the first sort and not the second, and she said so plainly enough.''

''"There's not much point in summoning one if you can't control it," she said. "It'll just rock on up and eat ya."''

''Dross agreed that it seemed unwise to call up something we could not hold, and there the matter rested — except that he went on to observe, with the air of a man who has thought about it before, that if we were surrounded by Germans and invisible at the time, a large unbound horror appearing in the middle of them might answer very well indeed. Kel liked that. Her whole position on the question was that the correct place for a monster is somebody else's problem. Tulip has not given up on the idea of a nightmare dog of her own. I make no prediction.''

===== A Face That Opens Doors =====

''Dross has been given a face that does a great deal of work for him, and it did some more of it that day.''

''The woman who keeps the house's collections is called Bethaniel. She took to him on sight — I watched it happen and there was nothing subtle about it — and within the quarter hour she was telling him there were books among the collections which might interest a man like him, and leading him off to see them. The rest of us followed, on the reasonable grounds that we had nothing better to do and that a library is a library.''

''It is an old one. Six or seven hundred years of things arriving and nothing ever leaving, which is my favourite kind of room. The weapons are mostly display and mostly enormous: claymores held in sets or fixed flat to the walls, the sort of blade that was made to be looked at by the fifth generation of a family and has been. But the small things are better. There are little daggers out of the Indian peninsula, very fine and very dainty, and kris blades with their waved edges, and a few curved things I could not place. There are semi-precious stones and there is ceramic from half the world. I have made weapons for a long time and I have made jewellery for longer, and I could have been left in that room for a fortnight without complaining once.''

''And there were scrolls. Bethaniel does not pretend to know much about witch-work herself; she knows only a little, and most of what she knows is local, a story that witches used the waters near here. It is a pleasant enough spot, apparently. People still travel a good distance to look at it.''

===== An Impolite Look =====

''There were three of them, and they were incantations. Dross had never encountered such a thing before. Kel had.''

''She explained it. An incantation is a second shape for a spell you already have — the same working turned to a different purpose, prepared in advance and held ready against the hour you want it. Preparing it takes about an hour. It lies inert until you know the underlying spell, so learning the one without the other buys you nothing, and the learning itself is not free: it costs a man a piece of the growth he would otherwise have put into himself. Tulip added the part I had not thought about, which is that once you have loaded a thing like that, some portion of your own strength stays tied up in it and is not available to you until you spend it. You get it back afterwards with food and rest, as you get anything back. But you must decide in the morning what you are going to want by evening, and that is a harder question than it sounds.''

''Jedburgh noted that they want matrices as well, which is true, and I said I could probably make him one if it came to that; I have worked gold a long while. Dross read further and found it takes something over a week of proper study before a man can make one for himself, which settles who is doing it.''

''The first of the three calls lightning down, and it wants fulminating gold as its catalyst. I knew what that was before it was explained and I let it be explained anyway, because I enjoyed watching the others' faces. It is what is left behind when you put gold through nitric acid and aqua regia and one or two other things, and the residue is so violently reactive that a shock will set it off, or a shake, or a spark, or nothing at all. If you look at it in an impolite way it is liable to go off. The accepted method of carrying it is to keep it under water in a sealed container, and put that container inside a box packed with something that will neither conduct nor hold a static charge, and then to walk very carefully. Dross wanted to know what happens if it goes up while he is carrying it, and whether the rest of us would go with it. We would. I said that it sounded like a win to me — worst case, you simply charge — and that risk near reward is the best kind of reward. What the lightning does when it arrives is not complicated. It kills.''

''The second is Hex, which is what has become of the old evil eye. It used to be a minor curse that hung on a man for days and made him worse at everything by a little; a fighting man would shrug and get on with it, and only a caster had real cause to worry. What it does now is meaner and more useful: you look at a man, and whatever natural resistance he has to being worked upon thins out under your eye, so that everything that comes after it bites deeper. The third was for speaking with animals, and with enchanted creatures, which after the morning's conversation seemed almost pointed.''

''I said the real value of the arrangement is variety — it hands you options we cannot easily come by otherwise — and Kel said, more practically, that it gives a caster a reason to bother with the dull spells nobody ever troubles to master. Dross wanted to know whether we could take the scrolls with us rather than read them where they stood, and was uneasy about it, having no wish to rob a library. He nearly asked the wrong woman. He had Bethaniel down in his head as the seamstress, which she is not; the seamstress is somebody else entirely, and Bethaniel is the archivist, and was told so. She was perfectly happy for us to have them. There are no witches here, she said. Nobody else can use them.''

===== Handiwork =====

''Then we settled how the week would go, and everyone had something.''

''Jedburgh has decided to be a healer, which surprises nobody who has watched how much of his own blood he mislays in an average afternoon. He put work into that, and a full week's labour into the winged helm, and the rest into drilling with his weapons. Kel spent days at the writing desk pursuing the business of a title, which she has not let go of since the commander told her such things are the King's to give — letters going out in several directions, and a philtre of Dross's making to help them land, and something else besides that I did not enquire into. She also began two workings and finished neither, and was sour about it. She drilled as well. Dross went deeper into his gem-making and his troll-skin, both of which are now well in hand, and made a start on the incantations.''

''I spent the week building the hand.''

''I have wanted to set that down since the third morning and have not known how. It is a difficult thing to make and it was a worse thing to make one-handed, which nobody warned me about and which I should have foreseen; every operation that wants a piece held while it is worked has to be solved twice, once for the work and once for the holding. I had neither the quicksilver I wanted nor the elegant answer I dreamed up while I was still bleeding, so it is a made thing of joints and pins like any other made thing, and the whole of it went through my remaining fingers a hundred times over. Somebody remarked that a healer's craft would be a handy thing for Jedburgh to have, and then apologised for the pun, and I said that it was quite handy for me as well. That was the closest I came all week to discussing it with anybody.''

''I will not write that it is finished. I will write that a week went into it, and that I would like it to serve.''

===== The Neighbours =====

''Tulip, meanwhile, wanted to know who else lives around here, and got two answers she did not expect.''

''The first are the Red Brothers, who turn out to be foxes — genuine foxes, remarkably red, entirely intelligent, and communists to a tail. They come mostly out of Poland. These ones speak English and Polish and a little Russian, and if you speak to them at all they will talk to you about the Marxist dialectic and the freedom of the workers and the coming end of capitalism, and they hold a certain book about a farm of animals to be holy doctrine. Jedburgh, who has read it, offered four legs good and two legs better and was not corrected. Tulip asked whether the vixens are treated as equals and got an answer with more in it than she expected: a vixen can drop four kits in a season, which makes her worth a great deal to a commune of them, and so they would very much rather she did not take risks — though nobody, apparently, says that out loud to a vixen who is bigger than they are.''

''This particular group got out of Poland with some Polish airmen and came here to liaise with the Russians. The Poles themselves know almost nothing about them, up to and including their prime minister. They are useful precisely because a fox carrying a message to another fox is not a man carrying a message to another man. There are more of them in England just now than there have any right to be. Tulip asked whether they wanted human minions to work for them, which is the sort of thing one is not supposed to say in front of the help, and was informed by our red friends that she had said the quiet part aloud.''

''The eagles are the ones to worry about. Golden eagles, and not to be trifled with under any circumstances — when they come at you they manifest two heads. Tulip said she had once had an eagle owl sit on her arm and could not get over how large the bird had been, and that a golden eagle must be larger still. She is right. They were hunted down hard in the last century for what they did to livestock, and in Switzerland they have a long and specific reputation for carrying off children of seven or so. I said it did not sound pleasant. That was the whole of my contribution and it remains my view.''

===== Borrowing a Face =====

''On the morning of the eighth the transmission came in, and the week stopped being a week.''

''Barbie has moved into Lyon. He is there in person and the search is being run under his own instruction, and what they are searching for is everyone connected with the Heckler Line — which is to say the network we are being sent to help, and shortly the people we are being sent to stand next to.''

''Kel asked whether we had a picture of him. We do, a photograph, black and white. She sat down with it at once and began learning to wear his face. A photograph takes her about half an hour to fix well enough to work from; a living man in front of her would take an hour, and a quarter of an hour of watching the man himself would give her something she could rely on. She is remarkably good at this and maintains that she is not a spy, which I have stopped arguing with.''

''I find I keep turning it over. The man is in Lyon tearing that network apart by the roots, and one of my companions spent the morning practising being him.''

===== Brandy and Cigars =====

''By the afternoon we knew that Operation Torch had gone in on the Mauretanian coast — Casablanca, Oran, Algiers, all three — and that the fighting had properly begun. What follows from that is the part that concerns us. Free France is Free France no longer; it is under German military occupation from that day, and the SOE spent the afternoon trying to work out where their people are and which of them are still doing what they were doing last week.''

''At nine we were given a second transmission, over brandy and cigars, which I record because the contrast struck me at the time. They have no record of Barbie leaving Gex. Gex, I now understand, is a town on the border between France and Switzerland — I had taken it for a man's name, and had written it down as a man's name, and was wrong. He got from there to Lyon without travelling in any manner that could be observed. He did not fly, which nobody believes; he went by private car, which everybody does.''

''He certainly did not go by train, because the resistance has its people inside the trains, and they would have had him. Those people watch and do nothing else. They are not to help escapers, they are not to interfere, they are not to be spent on anything short of desperation, because knowing what the Germans are moving and where is worth more than any single life they could pull off a platform. It is a cold arithmetic and I cannot fault it.''

''Then we were told to have an early night, and we did, and I was in bed before eleven.''

===== The Last Train Out =====

''The same transmission carried Diane's last message, and it came to us garbled, because she had no time to make it clean.''

''She had been in Lyon destroying every scrap of documentation the line held there, and it made her late getting out. She hurt her stump doing it — she was struggling badly by the end, and could not say so directly, and what she did say went astray. The radio operator took it to mean she was being harassed by some foreign agent, and helpfully suggested that the man be killed. She had no time to stand there correcting him. She said never mind, and went.''

''I said, when this was read to us, that they are a waste of time. I stand by it. There is a woman with one leg burning papers in a city with the Gestapo closing on her, and the answer that comes back down the wire is an offer to murder a stranger neither party can name.''

''The Gestapo came to the brothel she had been working out of — which is, on reflection, exactly where I would put a wireless set — and she had already gone, and had made certain the equipment went with her, because if it had been found the women there would have been taken in her place. That cost her time she did not have. She made the eleven o'clock train out of Lyon, the last one, bound for Perpignan and due in at about half past six in the morning.''

===== Whoever He Is =====

''There was a flap on in the morning.''

''She did not arrive. Not at half past six, not after, and nobody can say where between Lyon and Perpignan she stopped being on that train. Hubert has not made contact either — Hubert being the man who was to meet her, and who is the man with the map, and therefore the man who is to take us over the mountains into Spain. He was to have made himself known that night and did not. The standing arrangement holds regardless: the Place de la République in Perpignan, from half past ten in the morning until half past four in the afternoon, which is the usual way of these things and depends entirely on nobody having thought to watch him.''

''They gave us her photograph over breakfast. A woman in her late thirties or early forties, in a brown suit — brown skirt, brown jacket, a rather lacy blouse, and a black tie of the kind cowboys wear. I looked at it for a while. It is a face you would not turn round for in the street, which I assume is the point of her.''

''And then the last word they had, which was this: that Cuthbert is causing her trouble, and that he has to be killed, whoever he is. Nobody knows who he is. Jedburgh asked whether the name might be spelled another way entirely, and was told that nobody knows that either. Tulip said it sounded like a man's name but might as easily be a pet name for something, and that you cannot tell. Jedburgh said, correctly, that it is a codename, and codenames are chosen precisely so that people like us cannot tell.''

''I will put down what I think and let the record embarrass me later if it wants to. We have been handed two things out of the same wire on the same night. One is that her leg has been giving her serious trouble. The other is that a man nobody can identify is giving her serious trouble and must be killed. I do not say they are the same trouble. I say that the last time somebody misread that woman's words, the answer that came back was also an offer to kill a man who did not exist, and that nobody in that room has apparently noticed the pattern.''

===== The Quiet Ones =====

''Jedburgh knew who she was before they finished telling us. The limping lady, he said. Virginia Hall. Tulip had it too — the one with the wooden leg — and it turned out she was right down to the detail.''

''She is American, and with the SOE, which is not the usual arrangement, and by every account she is the best of them. What I found most instructive was her method of recruiting. The men who came forward to join a secret resistance were, overwhelmingly, the men who most wanted to be seen joining a secret resistance: the ones who could be relied upon to explain their important work at length in a public house. She would not have them. She took the ones who could keep their mouths shut, which is a much smaller field and a much better one.''

''There is a story about a French cell leader who was dropped in by parachute and immediately took her aside to tell her that if she had any difficulties she should come to him, as he knew his business. She nodded and thanked him and agreed. Then she went straight to her radio operator and made certain that not one of her people ever went near the man again. He was, apparently, a complete clown. And she got men out of Gestapo prisons — actually out, more than once — which was afterwards abandoned as a general policy because of what it cost in the people spent doing it. Not because it could not be done. Because she was the only one who could do it.''

''Her own side never made proper use of her. That is the part that irritates me, and it is not a new complaint about anybody's government.''

===== A Busy Last Ten Minutes =====

''They are putting us into a Wellington. It is a bomber, and it has been chosen for its range rather than for any other quality it possesses; the range is enormous and the speed is poor. Dross asked how long the flight would be and Jedburgh worked it through out loud — two hours from London to Ibiza in something modern, so from Scotland at a couple of hundred miles an hour you are talking about a good deal more than that. A thousand miles at something over two hundred an hour comes out at four and a half hours. The day starts at five, we board at about half past, and we are over Perpignan by a quarter past nine.''

''In broad daylight. Jedburgh observed that this would be exciting. It would.''

''Which is why we are not staying in the aeroplane. There is an airfield at Salt Reef a few miles outside Perpignan, and what sits on it is a hundred miles an hour faster than a Wellington, and the arithmetic of that needs no further explanation. Dross proposed that we leave early — ten miles out, or twenty — and go the rest of the way on his carpet, unseen. Kel and Tabitha can lay concealment across the whole party for something like half an hour between them; the carpet will hold for three and a half hours, which is more than enough. Dross said he would rather be on an invisible carpet than inside that thing when the fighters come up, and he is right. I said I looked forward to seeing how well it worked out, and asked what could possibly go wrong.''

''There is a nuisance in the working. The carpet keeps the pace you set it at the moment you call it up, and if it ever stops keeping that pace, it stops being a carpet. You cannot slow to a hover and step off. You must hold your speed and your concentration all the way down and end the thing deliberately in the last moments, or it ends itself for you. Which also means it cannot be called up inside the aeroplane and ridden out through the door at leisure — you go out first and it catches you afterwards, and you had better not dawdle in the doorway.''

''I said I would simply jump. Kel allowed that we might fall for a while, and thought that would be fine. I said we would stop eventually. Jedburgh said that yes, of course we would stop eventually — that is what the ground is for.''

===== A Clear Day for It =====

''The word first thing was that it would be an appalling day, and I said what one says, which is: of course it would. Kel thought it was to our advantage. More cover for us, she said, and she was right, and I said so and added the other half of it, which is that cover does not know whose side it is on. If they cannot see us coming, we cannot see them coming.''

''Then it turned out to be nothing of the kind. It is a clear day. There is cloud high up and nothing under it, and the only trouble with it is the wind, which is blowing hard enough to have a name — a broussard, they call it here, a windstorm well out of its season. The same system runs down over the Mediterranean and turns to rain as it goes, and North Africa has been getting sudden downpours out of it all week, which apparently did not inconvenience the landings in Morocco in the slightest.''

''So: a fine, hard, bright morning, a bomber warming up, and rations packed. Two people we need are missing and a third is a name nobody can spell. Somewhere south of us a woman with one leg is either on a train, or off it, or worse, and we are four and a half hours and a long fall away from finding out which.''

''A week's work sits in my kit where a hand should be. I should like the chance to shake somebody's with it.''

----

{| class="wikitable"
|-
|

==== OOC Details ====

===== Items Acquired =====

'''Party (shared resources):'''

'''Balance brought forward:''' 2,500 sp
'''Balance carried forward:''' 2,500 sp

===== Session Summary =====

The party had a week at Achnacarry Castle before deployment into France. It opened with [[#s4-careful-what-you-call-for|an argument over whether Tulip could hold a summoned creature capable of arguing back]], and then [[#s4-a-face-that-opens-doors|Dross's rapport with Bethaniel, the castle's archivist]], opened her six- or seven-hundred-year-old library and its collection to them. Among the scrolls were three incantations — call lightning, hex, and speech with animals — and [[#s4-an-impolite-look|Kel explained what an incantation is and what it costs to prepare]], Bethaniel giving the scrolls away outright since no local caster could use them. The week itself went on [[#s4-handiwork|training and craft, with Black building his prosthetic hand one-handed]], while Tulip's questions about the district turned up [[#s4-the-neighbours|the communist Red Brothers and the two-headed golden eagles]].

On the morning of 8 November an Ultra transmission reported that Klaus Barbie had moved into Lyon and was personally directing the hunt for everyone connected with the Heckler Line; [[#s4-borrowing-a-face|Kel set about learning to wear his face from a photograph]]. That afternoon Operation Torch landed at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers, putting Free France under German military occupation, and [[#s4-brandy-and-cigars|a second transmission that evening]] established that Barbie had reached Lyon from Gex by private car, unseen by the resistance's people on the trains. The same transmission carried [[#s4-the-last-train-out|Diane's last, garbled message]]: delayed destroying the line's documentation in Lyon, injured, she caught the eleven o'clock train for Perpignan. [[#s4-whoever-he-is|She never arrived, and Hubert — the guide who holds the map over the Pyrenees — made no contact either]], leaving the party with a rendezvous in the Place de la République, a photograph, and an order to kill an unidentified man codenamed Cuthbert; [[#s4-the-quiet-ones|Diane herself was recognised as Virginia Hall]]. The party then departed [[#s4-a-busy-last-ten-minutes|by Wellington bomber, intending to leave it early on Dross's carpet under concealment]] to avoid the fighters based at Salt Reef, flying out [[#s4-a-clear-day-for-it|into a windy but unexpectedly clear morning]].

===== Chronological Timeline =====

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date !! Event
| Day 29 || Debate over controlling summoned intelligent creatures; Dross wins over Bethaniel, who opens the castle library
|-
| Day 29 || Three incantation scrolls examined (Call Lightning, Hex, speech with animals); Bethaniel gives them to the party
|-
| Day 29 || Downtime work allocated; Tulip learns of the Red Brothers and the golden eagles
|-
| Day 29 → 34 || Week of training and craft; Black builds his replacement hand
|-
| Day 35 (morning) || Ultra transmission: Barbie in Lyon, personally directing the search for the Heckler Line
|-
| Day 35 (morning) || Kel begins learning Barbie's face from a black-and-white photograph
|-
| Day 35 (afternoon) || Operation Torch lands at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers; Free France placed under German occupation
|-
| Day 35 (evening) || Second transmission: Barbie's untracked move from Gex; Diane's garbled last message; she boards the 11pm train
|-
| Day 36 (morning) || Diane fails to arrive at Perpignan; Hubert makes no contact; briefing, Diane's photograph, and the order on Cuthbert
|-
| Day 36 (morning) || Departure by Wellington in windy but clear weather; carpet approach planned for the final miles
|}
|}

----

=== Chapter 5: The Far Side of the Room ===

''There is a knack to falling that I picked up in the Garden of Eden, and this was the first morning it ever earned its keep.''

===== Look for the Crater =====

''The last hour at Achnacarry went on paperwork and poison, which is about the usual proportion.''

''Kel was still pursuing her title, and Dross had found her a better story to hang it on: that she is of the Hungarian gentry — the middling sort of landholder who fills the offices and drives the nationalist movements — and that she seeks recognition so that she may be of more use against the Germans. It has the great merit that nobody in London can check it and every reason to want it to be true. Then he laced the letters with a philtre of his own making, for the warmth and the good feeling it leaves behind, so that whichever clerk opens them will be fond of her before he has read a line. I observed that the Foreign Office will end up handling their post with tongs. Nobody disagreed. She also filled her cigarette case, French and by all accounts unpleasant, which turned out to matter more than the letters did.''

''The rest of it was the workings. Dross had prepared his skin-changes days before — they keep for weeks, which is the whole point of them — and would set them on us in the air, one for himself, one for Kel, one for Tulip, and one for Tabitha. Jedburgh needed nobody's help; he can take the eagle himself. Tulip had her own workings laid in beforehand, one of them a thing that gives her back what casting on the rest of us costs her, which is the only reason she is willing to cast on the rest of us at all. Kel had her phantom armour, and before anyone changed shape she laid mind speech over the party so that we could talk without beaks. Dross had Tabitha set a finding on me as well, since I would be out of earshot of everybody the moment I left the aeroplane, and Tabitha can find a man a good long way off.''

''I told them I would not be needing wings. I intended to jump out and fall into the ground, and I was not planning to fly anywhere. This was not received as well as I had hoped. Tulip wanted to know whether I would take harm from hitting the earth, and I said that for some of us that part is optional. Jedburgh asked whether it was one of those thousand-year skills, and whether it was what David used to teach when he fell off buildings. I said I had been to the Garden of Eden and come away with a thing, and that the thing is a matter of inertia — mine goes to nothing at the moment of arrival and comes back to me a few breaths later. Kel said it was a good trick, and then said that finding me afterwards would be simple enough: they need only look for the crater.''

===== A Story for the Pilots =====

''We went in a Wellington under Captain Glendinning, with a co-pilot who could take her if anything happened to him, and no guns aboard at all.''

''They had stripped her of everything that slowed her and filled the bomb bay with extra tanks, because what was wanted was range and speed and nothing else. I said we had probably barely enough fuel to reach the place, which shows how little I know about aeroplanes; fuel was never the difficulty. We left at half past eight and ran her flat out the whole way, and the whole way took four hours. It is a wretched machine to be a passenger in when it is going at its best.''

''We crossed at a great height and came down toward a cloud layer that sat very low, and the wind was the real trouble — a hard gale off the sea, with the Mediterranean grey on our left hand as we ran south. Glendinning's people expected worse of it further down. I was told, with some relish, that the man who intended to fall into the ground would have less bother from wind than the birds would, and that is how it proved. It is winter here, and overcast, and no part of the day was bright.''

''At thirty miles out we went. Kel had one last question before she changed, which was whether an owl may keep hold of a cigarette, and the answer, delivered by the slipstream, was no. It was a valiant attempt. From the air we could see a column of military lorries running south on the main road, forty or fifty of them, moving faster than we were and pulling in at the airfield in the northern suburb at Rivesaltes; and, a little after, a small open touring car coming out of the same place with a pair of Gestapo motorcyclists running ahead of it. I meant to jump half a minute behind the others so as to be on the ground before them, and was told, patiently, that half a minute at our speed would put me down somewhere near Narbonne. I revised my ambitions and took the farmland between Rivesaltes and the airfield instead. Kel observed that the pilots would dine out on this for years: the commandos they carried into France, none of them wearing a parachute, all of whom jumped.''

===== Passed Over =====

''I came down in a field about a mile short of the road and did not leave a crater, which I record in the interests of accuracy.''

''You hit, and you stop, and for a few seconds you are a very heavy thing that the world has not yet decided how to move again, and then it gives you back your weight and you get up. I was dressed as what I have been dressed as since Scotland — a vintner, a farmer of some kind — which in practice means a tatty linen shirt with the buttons torn off, a felt hat, and straw poking out of everything. It is a good disguise for this country because it is not a disguise. Half the men on that road were wearing it honestly.''

''The walk to the road took twenty minutes and the road itself took two hours. There was almost no motor traffic; petrol is rationed and the bicycles have inherited the country. I had one moment on the verge where a man in my position might easily have been noticed, and I was not, and I have been fortunate for a very long time and see no advantage in enquiring too closely into it. I did think about riding, and thought better of it. Corniger stands out.''

''Half an hour along, the lorries came up behind me and went past and turned off east toward the aerodrome, and beyond them I could see fighters drawn up on the runway being inspected by a man in a uniform so well cut it must have been made for him by hand. He wore a monocle, which in that army is not an affectation but a statement of birth; a baron at the least, and possibly a good deal more. While I was watching him the little open touring car came out and drove past me on the road, motorcyclists ahead of it, and the man in the back was Wolfram Sievers. He did not look up. He was reading a file and he looked extremely busy, and neither he nor his escort spared a glance for a farmer walking south in the mud. I thought briefly about asking him for a lift, and then thought about what would follow, and carried on walking.''

===== The Man We Came to Meet =====

''The others had come down among the trees on the boulevard beside the Parc Saint-Vincennes, which is close enough to the middle of the city to be convenient and green enough to be private, and nobody had looked up as a party of owls went over with an eagle in attendance.''

''They changed back, laid their counterspells across one another, and then Kel handed her dreadful French cigarettes round and Dross kept her company out of politeness. Tabitha kept a thread on me the whole time and could tell them I was coming, slowly, on foot, which was the only accurate report anybody had of me for two hours. Meanwhile they established two things. The first was where the Place de la République actually is — two miles or so on foot from where they had landed, which is nothing. The second was the name of the man we were to meet there. Scotland had given him to us as Hubert. He was called Gilbert. Nobody has yet explained to me how the name of the only man in France who can take us over the mountains came to be written down wrong, and I have stopped expecting an explanation.''

''They walked out to meet me and we joined up about ninety minutes later, short of the bridges, and I gave them everything I had seen: the lorries, the airfield, the fighters, the fine uniform with the monocle, and Sievers reading his papers on the road to Perpignan. Then we went in together, because the square holds an open market and people arrive at it in groups, and a group is invisible in a way that five careful individuals are not.''

''It was crawling with Gestapo when we got there and there were several people dead on the ground, shot to pieces. The French who had not run had been corralled into corners of the square and were having their papers gone through one at a time, and nobody at all was moving toward the middle. I did not wait to learn any more than that. I took the party out of it quickly, which I would do again.''

''Kel saw more than I did on the way out, and what she saw was Gilbert. He was dead in the square with an ambulance attending him, which was an act of theatre and not of medicine, and men were going through his belongings while he lay there. From the way they were working over him he had been dead twenty minutes, perhaps half an hour. We had come four hours by air and two by foot to keep an appointment, and we had missed him by about the length of a decent lunch.''

===== Club Colours =====

''While the rest of us were leaving, Jedburgh's attention had been caught by the ties.''

''Men of that trade wear black or dark grey, sometimes brown, and if a tie has any colour in it at all it means something: a school, a regiment, a club, some society you are meant to notice without asking. There were five men in the square in black suits and white shirts wearing ties of no ordinary kind, standing about the Gestapo but not quite of them, and Jedburgh looked at them properly from where he stood, which was a long way off across the square and cost him most of what he might have learned. He got three of the five. They were men, all of them, with nothing borrowed and nothing hidden underneath — ordinary short-lived human beings, which was the last comfortable thing about them.''

''The greatest working any of the three had at his command was the summoning of demonic kings. I asked to have that repeated, because I could not hear it properly the first time, and Kel repeated it: demonic kings, which makes that man the finest summoner in the square and, since it is the sort of thing they reach for first, an occultist beyond question. Useful to know. Not comfortable.''

''Jedburgh asked one more thing, which was whether anything had been done to them with Vril, and the answer was yes, and recently — within the month. To learn more than that would take a proper divination, standing much closer, taking an hour, and any of the five might have felt it happening. Jedburgh's view was that he would rather do that work once their bodies had cooled, and that these are exactly the sort of men to be carrying a death curse for whoever kills them. Kel put it more briefly. There is a large group of very dangerous people here, she said, and we should be somewhere else.''

===== The Opera This Season =====

''We went, and Kel got us out of it without a single one of them looking at us twice.''

''She has a whole young woman of good family that she keeps for occasions like this, and she brought her out entire: shocked, distressed, sickened by the killing, only just arrived in this beautiful city, and here to see her brother married. A gendarme came over to take her details and to be of assistance, and got the full performance — the charm, the grace, the little catch in the voice — and was so moved that he undertook to help her find somewhere to stay, patted the back of her hand, mentioned that the opera this season is Turandot should she care for that sort of thing, and slipped her his card.''

''Kel thanked him beautifully. What she was thinking about him at the time came down the mind speech to the rest of us, and it was not beautiful at all, and none of us disagreed with a word of it. He is a Frenchman standing in a French square, with French dead on the cobbles behind him, handing his card to a pretty stranger.''

''Nobody wanted to go any closer to the men in the ties, either in person or in conversation. We put distance between us and the square and looked for somewhere to sit.''

===== Standing Vigil =====

''There are cafés everywhere in that city, and we took one of the good ones, a few hundred feet south of the Courts of Justice — civil buildings, no soldiers — with the Hôtel Aragon not far off if we needed it.''

''The question was how we were to know when the Germans had finished with the square. I said one can generally feel the tension come out of a street, which is true and also useless. Dross had a better answer, which was Tabitha. She sat where she could watch, too far off to speak to us mind to mind, and came back on her own four feet at about half past three to say that they had gone, that they had taken Gilbert's body with them, and that before they went they had performed a ritual of some kind over the place where he fell. She could not tell us what it was. She could tell us that something is still there.''

''I did not much like that and I like it less now that I have written it down. They shot a man in a public square in the middle of the afternoon, and then, in front of an audience of corralled civilians, they did magic over the stain.''

''We went back in ones and twos a little later, in no hurry, on the principle that men who have just cleared a place watch it hardest in the first hour. Kel went first. The market was gone, the shops around the square were shut, the whole block was empty — and standing over the corner where he died were three Feldgendarmerie, with a heavy chalk outline drawn thick on the ground at their feet. Dross wondered whether we might watch the site from a distance through his crystal instead of standing in the open, and then abandoned the idea himself: the seeing lasts a fraction of the time it takes to set up, and the work we needed to cover was an hour long. Which left the plain shape of the problem, and I said it out loud so that everyone could look at it. Men do not put a guard on a patch of ground they intend to forget about. Either we get in there without anybody knowing, or the guard goes away.''

===== The Changing of the Guard =====

''Everything after that was assembled out of other people's ideas, which is how the good plans usually arrive.''

''Dross could work unseen — the concealment lasts long enough for five minutes in, half an hour of ritual, and five minutes out, with nothing to spare — but sitting a man down invisible to lay out tarot cards a few feet from three armed policemen is asking a great deal of everybody's nerve. Kel suggested illusion instead: dress us as their own military police and simply tell them we had been sent to replace them. Then Tulip, who prefers a simple plan to a clever one, put the last piece in. Do not replace them at all. Have a superior officer turn up and send them somewhere else. Kel said that was genius, and it was; the two ideas together made one that could actually be walked through the middle of an occupied city.''

''We waited for the change of the guard, which came in due course and rather casually, three men strolling in to relieve three men who then went off to find a pub. Kel put the uniforms of the German military police over us — she has studied their ranks and their tailoring, and she made herself the senior man, which is the sort of thing she does without blinking — and Jedburgh and I stood where we were told to stand. Jedburgh had already picked the destination: the hospital, which is on the far side of the river, three kilometres as the crow goes and four or five by the bridges. Then Kel, in a voice I had not heard her use before, pointed and gave orders and began to berate them, and they turned north and went, in step, at exactly the pace men keep when a senior officer may still be watching.''

''I have been on both sides of that particular transaction over a long life and it never stops being funny. They are Germans. They like to be told.''

===== I Don't Know, I'm Dead =====

''Dross went in behind us, unseen, and knelt on the chalk, and asked Gilbert five short questions. He did not need the body. He needed the place where the man fell, which the Germans had helpfully marked out for him in white.''

''The first useful answer was that we had been wrong about him from the beginning. He was not our contact. He was never supposed to meet us at all — his work is bringing people out of France over the mountains into Spain, whoever they are, and the meeting in the square was never ours. It was hers. Diane is the name Virginia Hall goes by, and she was to come down on the last train out of Lyon and be in Perpignan by a quarter past six in the morning, and Gilbert was to take her over. We were supposed to find her and bring her to him. Instead she did not arrive, and he waited in a public square all morning for a woman who never came, and by two in the afternoon somebody had shot him for it.''

''When Dross asked him how we might reach her now, the answer that came back was that he did not know, on the grounds that he was dead. I have had worse conversations with the living.''

''Jedburgh had spent that same hour on the residue of the Germans' own working, and came away with what it was and with a name. A summoning had been done there — not of some minor thing but of marquises of hell — and he caught the name one of them is called by, though not the deeper name that would give a man any purchase on it. Samigina, Marquis of Lost Souls. That is all we have of it, and I said so at the time: there was nothing in it we could use except the name. But it was done over the place where a man of the escape lines had just been killed, by people who wear the wrong ties, and I would rather have that written down than not.''

===== Legwork =====

''So we came back to the only question that matters, which is where she is.''

''Dross tried a finding on her and it gave us nothing worth having; his reach is long but it is not unlimited, and wherever she is, she is not inside it. We fell back on reasoning, which is not evidence and I will not pretend it is. She is careful, she is experienced, and she has been warned more than once about the trains. If she smelled the danger she got off early, somewhere on the long road between Lyon and here — Rivesaltes is only the last stop before Narbonne on the way down — and she came the rest of the way by some other means, or she has not come at all.''

''Dross proposed, in all seriousness, that we put a finding on Cuthbert. This is where I learned that Cuthbert is her leg. Not a man, not an enemy agent, not a codename for anything hostile at all — the wooden leg she walks on, which she has named, as a person names a thing they have to live with. Scotland gave us Cuthbert as somebody who was causing her trouble and had to be killed, and Scotland was reading a woman's complaint about her own stump and offering to murder it. Dross argued that a thing with a name might have a true one. I said that seemed entirely reasonable to me. We were not permitted to try it.''

''What worked was ordinary tradecraft. Every spy has fieldcraft — it is the first thing they give you and the last thing that saves you — and Jedburgh and I both worked it through, having had the run of the city for a few hours by then. A woman in her position, arriving in Perpignan alone, does not go to a good hotel; the good ones are careful about who sleeps in them and they keep lists. She goes to a modest place close to the square where she was to be met. That narrowed it a very long way, and Jedburgh knew the rest: the Hôtel de la Loge, which is a safe house on the O'Leary line and has been quietly moving people toward Spain for a year.''

===== Eating Well =====

''We put our disguises away outside and went in as ourselves, handed over our ration books like honest citizens, and took rooms for the night.''

''Somewhere in the walking and the falling and the impersonation of German policemen, it had escaped my notice that we are carrying a suitcase with a quarter of a million francs in it. I said that this was most unusual; I am accustomed to scraping together enough for coffee. Apparently it is standard for this work — Hall herself went into Lyon the first time with a great deal more than most men see in a lifetime — and Tulip, sensibly, had us break it up and sew it away about our persons rather than leave it all sitting in one case in one room in one hotel.''

''Then we ate, and I am obliged to report that we ate extremely well. It is Provençal cooking, and the coast is not thirty miles away, and there is a good deal of fish arriving in that kitchen that has never troubled a ration book. There was bouillabaisse. It cost us a sum that would appal any local family and did not trouble us in the slightest, which is its own small indecency, and I enjoyed every mouthful of it and intend to go on enjoying the memory.''

''Jedburgh saw her first, or at the same moment I did; the others never picked her out at all. She looks nothing like the photograph. The photograph is a woman in a brown suit with a lacy blouse and a black cowboy's tie, and what was sitting across that dining room was a middle-aged farmer's wife, rustic, dressed much as we are dressed but rather better at it, eating her dinner quietly and troubling nobody. Beside her chair was one of those enormous soft bags that older women carry their knitting in. I said it was big enough for a decent handgun. I was corrected: it is big enough for a submachine gun.''

===== Dropping the Name =====

''And there we sat, in the same room as the woman we crossed a thousand miles to find, entirely unable to think of a way to say good evening to her.''

''Consider it from her side. Her contact was shot dead in a public square this afternoon, which means somebody knew where he would be and when. From that, exactly one conclusion is available to her: she is blown. So a stranger who walks up to her table tonight is not a friend. He is proof. Dross suggested mind speech, and I said no — imagine a voice arriving inside your skull, at dinner, in an occupied country, when you have no acquaintance with magic whatever. It does not matter whether she works out it is sorcery. What matters is that she stops believing her own head, in the same minute that she stops believing she is safe, with a bag beside her chair. She would do the safest thing available to her, and she would do it first, and I would not blame her for a second of it.''

''Dross wondered whether Tabitha might go over and be charming, which at least has the merit that Tabitha would probably survive it. Tulip asked whether London had given us a recognition phrase, which was the right question and has the wrong answer: they gave us nothing. Kel proposed dropping the name Diane into a conversation nearby, loudly enough to carry, and Dross refined it into something with no threat in it at all — two travellers at the next table remarking what a shame it is that Diane is not here to enjoy this restaurant. She hears her own name, spoken with affection, by people who are not looking at her and are not coming any closer. I do not hate it.''

''My own suggestion was worse and I record it honestly, because a journal that only keeps the good ideas is a work of fiction. I proposed putting an illusion of Gilbert on one of us and letting her see a dead man walk in. It was pointed out to me that she may well have watched him die.''

''So we finished our dinner and went up, and she finished hers and went up, and neither party said a word to the other. She is on the far side of a dining room and she may as well be on the far side of the Pyrenees. Tomorrow one of us has to find a way to say her name to her without getting shot for it, and I have not yet thought of one I would want written on my headstone.''

----

{| class="wikitable"
|-
|

==== OOC Details ====

===== Items Acquired =====

'''Kel:'''
* Suitcase of operational funds (250,000 francs) (unpriced)

'''Black:'''
* Suitcase of operational funds (250,000 francs) (unpriced)

'''Dross:'''
* Suitcase of operational funds (250,000 francs) (unpriced)

'''Jedburgh:'''
* Suitcase of operational funds (250,000 francs) (unpriced)

'''Tulip:'''
* Suitcase of operational funds (250,000 francs) (unpriced)

'''Balance brought forward:''' 2,500 sp
'''Balance carried forward:''' 2,500 sp

===== Session Summary =====

The party's last hour at Achnacarry went on [[#s5-look-for-the-crater|Kel's title letters and the final workings]], with Black declining a bird shape in favour of a free-fall landing, before [[#s5-a-story-for-the-pilots|a four-hour flight south in a stripped Wellington]] and a bail-out thirty miles short of Perpignan. [[#s5-passed-over|Black came down alone in farmland and walked two hours into the city]], passing a German lorry convoy, a monocled senior officer inspecting fighters at the Rivesaltes airfield, and Wolfram Sievers reading a file in an open touring car. The rest [[#s5-the-man-we-came-to-meet|landed in the Parc Saint-Vincennes and established that their contact's real name was Gilbert, not Hubert]]; reunited, they reached the Place de la République to find it full of Gestapo and Gilbert dead on the cobbles, killed perhaps half an hour before they arrived. [[#s5-club-colours|Jedburgh read three of five oddly-tied men standing apart from the Gestapo]] — all human, all recently subjected to a Vril working, the greatest of them a summoner of demonic kings — and [[#s5-the-opera-this-season|Kel talked the party clear of the square as a distressed young woman of good family]].

From [[#s5-standing-vigil|a café near the Courts of Justice they waited out the afternoon on Tabitha's reports]], returning to find a chalk outline guarded by three Feldgendarmerie and something left behind by a ritual the Germans had performed over the death site. [[#s5-the-changing-of-the-guard|An illusion of German military police, and orders to march to a hospital across the river, cleared the guards away]] long enough for [[#s5-i-dont-know-im-dead|Dross to question Gilbert's shade while Jedburgh named Samigina, Marquis of Lost Souls, out of the residue]]: Gilbert was never the party's contact but Diane's guide over the mountains, and she never came off the last train from Lyon. A finding on her failed, [[#s5-legwork|Cuthbert proved to be the name of her wooden leg rather than a man to be killed, and tradecraft pointed at the Hôtel de la Loge]], a safe house on the O'Leary escape line. The party took rooms there, [[#s5-eating-well|broke up the suitcase of francs among themselves and dined extremely well]], and Black and Jedburgh alone picked Diane out of the dining room in the disguise of a middle-aged farmer's wife. The session ends with the party [[#s5-dropping-the-name|still arguing over how to say her name to her without being shot for it]], no contact made and no plan agreed.

===== Chronological Timeline =====

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date !! Event
|-
| Day 36 (morning) || Final preparations at Achnacarry; Kel's title letters sent; forms and workings set; Black elects to free-fall
|-
| Day 36 (morning) || Departure at half past eight by Wellington under Captain Glendinning; four-hour flight south in a gale
|-
| Day 36 (midday) || Bail-out thirty miles north of Perpignan; lorry convoy and Sievers's touring car spotted from the air
|-
| Day 36 (midday) || Black lands in farmland near Rivesaltes and walks two hours toward the city; monocled officer at the airfield; Sievers passes him on the road
|-
| Day 36 (early afternoon) || Rest of the party lands at the Parc Saint-Vincennes; contact's name corrected from Hubert to Gilbert
|-
| Day 36 (early afternoon) || Party reunites on the road and enters the Place de la République; Gestapo in occupation, Gilbert dead in the square
|-
| Day 36 (afternoon) || Jedburgh assesses the five tie-wearing men; Kel deflects a gendarme and the party withdraws
|-
| Day 36 (afternoon) || Waiting at a café near the Courts of Justice; Tabitha reports at half past three that the square is clear but something lingers
|-
| Day 36 (afternoon) || Return to the square: chalk outline at the death site, guarded by three Feldgendarmerie
|-
| Day 36 (early evening) || Illusion diversion at the shift-change; the real guards are ordered to the hospital across the river
|-
| Day 36 (early evening) || Dross questions Gilbert's shade; Jedburgh names Samigina, Marquis of Lost Souls, from the ritual residue
|-
| Day 36 (early evening) || Finding on Diane fails; Cuthbert identified as her wooden leg; the Hôtel de la Loge deduced as her likely refuge
|-
| Day 36 (evening) || Party checks in, distributes the operational francs, and dines; Black and Jedburgh spot Diane in disguise
|-
| Day 36 (evening) || Debate over how to approach her; session ends with no contact made
|}
|}

----

=== Chapter 6: The Conan Bacterium ===

''It is an unsettling thing to watch a woman kill herself over a conversation that nobody has had yet.''

===== The Rehearsal =====

''We spent the first part of dinner arguing about how to say good evening to her, which is not a problem I would have expected to find difficult.''

''Three ways were on the table. The first was to take her: sleep dust in the face, a prepared skin held against her for half a minute, and the next thing she knows she is a mouse in somebody's pocket and then she is in Spain. The second was a code word spoken where she could hear it, which leaves the next move to her. The third was to speak into her mind. I said what I had said the night before and will go on saying: you do not put a frightened person in a position where the only thing she can be certain of is that she has been found. Give her enough to decide with, and let her decide. I also pointed out that if her line has been rolled up then whoever rolled it up has her code name too, and a code name that the enemy already knows is not a friendly greeting, it is bait.''

''I was outvoted. Tulip thought the mind speech would frighten her and came round to the code word; everybody else liked the mind speech, and Dross was confident that a woman of her profession would take it in her stride. Kel, to her great credit, would not simply run it. She said she could look a little way down the road before we set foot on it, wrote out the message she meant to send — greetings, we hope Cuthbert is treating you well, we are an occult unit out of London sent to bring you over into Spain, here is a word you may check with London if you doubt us — and then bent over her soup and worked the thing quietly enough that nobody at the neighbouring tables looked up.''

''It goes beautifully. That is the part I keep returning to. Every step of it works: the message is clear, the code word is good, she has every reason to believe us. And then, at the moment we touch her mind, she excuses herself from dinner, goes upstairs, and blows her brains out.''

''I record without pride that I looked smug. Kel told me that as the whole thing went to pieces and the Germans hauled us away, I could console myself with having said so, and that this was not helping. She was right about that too. We took the mind speech off the table and went back to the code word, and I sat there for a while with a mouthful of very good fish, thinking about how narrow the door had been and how nearly we had all walked through it. Dross, meanwhile, had gone off to the bathroom and spent a minute preparing a mouse skin, in case matters ended up there anyway. He has a talent for quiet preparation while the rest of us talk.''

===== Between Courses =====

''The other thing about a code word is that you must say it out loud, in a room, in front of everybody in it. So before we said anything, Kel went and had a look at everybody in it.''

''It is a small dining room, forty feet by twenty at most, and it held something over a dozen minds. Getting into them was not easy. This country gives very little back to anyone working here — the workings come dear and land badly — and she was turned aside once, and once had the thing come apart in her hands so that she had to snuff it out and start again. What I saw from across the table was a woman stirring her soup, putting pepper in it, taking a slurp, and staring into the bowl as though it had insulted her. She got there in the end. She always does; it simply costs her more than she lets on.''

''Four of the guests in that room work for the same escape line as this house does. They were talking quietly among themselves, the way people do once the dining room has closed, and none of them was a German taking notes. That was the answer I wanted and I was glad to have it. Better still: they know Diane. They know her as a quiet local woman with a cough who does not say very much and keeps to herself. Not as the American, not as the woman who took over the line, not as anyone worth mentioning. Her cover was holding in the one room where it mattered most.''

''What they were actually worried about was the camp. There is an internment camp out here as well as the airfield, and it holds something like two thousand people — Jews, Gypsies, communists. Jedburgh supplied the word the occupiers use for them, which I will not repeat with any affection. The four of them were turning over whether anything could be run against the place, and sharing what they knew, and getting nowhere, because there is nowhere for four hotel guests to get. Kel passed all of it to the rest of us mind to mind. I said, out loud and in the hearing of my own conscience, that it is not what we came here to do. That remains true and it is not much of an answer.''

===== Making Her Acquaintance =====

''Kel wanted to bump into her in the hallway and murmur the word as she passed. I did not want us within ten feet of her.''

''The point of a signal is that it costs the receiver nothing to ignore. If a stranger blocks her in a corridor, she has been cornered by a stranger, and everything after that is a question of how fast her hand moves. So we said it at our own table, loudly, to each other, with her nearer the door than we were and nothing at all between her and it. The frame was mine — what a pity your cousin could not come, what was his name, the one with the bad leg — and Dross supplied the rest of him, a Cuthbert from Piccadilly, because London is the one thing in that sentence she cannot mistake for coincidence. So I said it. It is a shame about his sore leg. It kept him from making the journey.''

''She heard it. She sat there for a while working through what it could be and arrived, quite visibly, at the only conclusion available: that somebody in this room is trying to reach her without frightening her. Then she looked up and caught my eye, and held it for about as long as good manners allow, and collected her things and left the dining room with one glance back over her shoulder.''

''I gave her twenty or thirty seconds and excused myself, at which point it occurred to me that I had no idea which room was hers. Kel had thought of that before I had. She had put her listening on the woman before she stood up and was riding along behind her eyes as she climbed the stairs and let herself in, and the number arrived in my head as an image, which is the only traffic that goes that way; my mind does not speak back.''

''I knocked. The door opened a crack and then wide enough to let me in, and what was behind it was a middle-aged woman holding the largest revolver I have seen indoors. Not an automatic — a revolver, of the kind a man wears on his hip in the American west, and it looked absurd and entirely serviceable in her hand. I said, good to meet you, Diane. My name is Archibald. Then I told her that the man she had come here to meet had been killed by the Germans. She had already known it, and it had already knocked the wind out of her, and she stood there and took it a second time without putting the gun down. He had been a friend of hers.''

===== Something Going Around =====

''Then she gave me the thing she had been carrying alone, and I would rather she had not, because I have not been able to put it down since.''

''On her way south she shared a train with Wolfram Sievers. She did not know the whole of who he is; she knew enough to sit still and listen, and what she overheard was that he has plans for the people held at the camp here. Most of the internees are being moved west, to another camp — Gurs — in a convoy of trucks. But a small contingent is being taken somewhere else entirely, up into the mountains to a place called Saint-Marcel, and they are almost all women.''

''That mapped onto intelligence she had taken before her line was betrayed. There is work being done up there that started from the papers of a bacteriologist named Robert Koch, whose own life was spent identifying strains of disease and telling one from another. What has been built on top of him is something they call the Conan Bacterium. As she understands it, it records the signature of life itself — the pattern a body is copied from — and it repairs damage done to that pattern. Kel called it super healing. I said it sounded like a zombie virus to me, and Diane said, without any pleasure at all, that it has every hallmark of a death plague.''

''I have made worse jokes in my life than the ones I made next, but not many, and I will set them down because a journal that keeps only the creditable remarks is a novel. I observed that a plague which brings the dead back to work would put every slaver on the continent out of business, and Kel observed that it makes for a cheaper workforce, and that this is simply capitalism, and I said they would be prisoners with jobs. We were laughing at a table in an occupied country about a thing being done to two thousand people ten miles up the road. I do not think the laughter was contempt. It is what you do when the alternative is to sit still and feel the size of it.''

===== Not a Good Trait in This Game =====

''What she could not work out, and what she kept coming back to, was how they had found Gilbert at all.''

''He was not the usual sort. The Maquis is full of men who cannot resist telling a woman in a bar what they did last week, and he was not one of them — an old man, past sixty, a farm labourer, still very active and utterly uninterested in being admired. There was nothing about him to notice. Yet somebody put him in a square with a bullet in him, at a time and place that only a handful of people knew.''

''The pressure on her has been extraordinary. They have posters out with no photograph on them, because nobody has one, only a written description, and the thing on the description is the limp. They call her the Limper. And the screws came down hard the moment the Allies went into North Africa: the Germans answered Torch by moving into Vichy France and occupying the whole of it, precisely so they could take resistance work apart at their leisure, being uncertain what was coming next and paranoid about all of it.''

''So she knows she was betrayed. She does not know by whom, and cannot rule out that it was somebody in this very line, in this very hotel. But she has a suspicion, and she gave it to me. There is a priest, based until recently in a parish north-east of Paris, famous for preaching against the Germans from his own pulpit and for being warmly pro-Ally, who has made it his business to meet everybody in the movement and talk with them and know them. Too curious, she said. Too nosy, I said, which is not a good trait in this game. Perhaps he is only a brave man with an unfortunate manner. I said that it is best to assume otherwise until proven, and she did not argue with me.''

===== Not a Vampire =====

''I offered to have her meet the rest of the team, so that I could stop being a relay, and had got most of the way through the sentence before remembering that I had just watched her shoot herself over exactly this.''

''So we warned her first, which we should have done from the beginning and which is the whole of what I had been arguing at dinner. I explained that one of my people can speak mind to mind, that she makes a net of it that we all sit inside, that nothing is read out of you that you do not send, and that she is not a vampire. We have made sure of that. Kel pointed out that Diane has seen her walking about in daylight; Dross wanted to know whether we had ever properly tested her against crosses and garlic, and I said that in this country you could hardly test anyone against garlic, since it is in everything, including the fish stew.''

''Then Kel made the working a second time and offered her the link, and she took it. I could not feel what Kel felt, but Kel told us: the woman is badly frightened and living right on the edge of herself, and what frightens her most is not the camp but what is being done to the people out of it. Kel put herself into the link and gave a name and a face, and Dross did the same, and glad to meet you, and we hope to be of some assistance. And afterwards we learned the thing that shut the argument for good. The reason the vision ended the way it did was that a voice arriving in her skull, unannounced, in this country, in this month, would have meant to her that she had been contacted by a vampire — and she would rather have finished it herself than find out what one wanted with her.''

===== Papers in Order =====

''Saint-Marcel is a very long way from Perpignan. I looked at Jedburgh's map for some time and could get nothing consistent out of it — two hundred here, four hundred there — and the honest answer is something over four hundred kilometres, north-east and a great deal of it uphill.''

''The convoy will take three days over it. Their trucks run on wood alcohol rather than petrol and are down a third of their power for it, so they will crawl along at not much better than walking pace until they reach the Rhône valley, and then they must climb. A train does it in eight hours. A train also puts you through a checkpoint at every station and a change at Lyon, which is the one city on the route where people know Diane's face. Dross asked about the carpet, and the answer to that was standing outside the window making the shutters bang.''

''So: the train, first class, and buy every seat in the compartment so that there is nobody in it but us. Six people travelling together in a private compartment are not a resistance cell; they are a professional party of some kind, doctors going to a conference, businessmen with an appointment. London had sent us blank travel papers and Jedburgh, who can forge, filled them out along with the ration cards. Diane found that genuinely shocking, and Dross apologised for us charmingly — you must forgive us, these things seem more ordinary to us than they should.''

''Then we chose what to be, and the sensible rule is to claim only what you could actually do if somebody asked. Kel is a skilled tailor, so we became a fashion concern. I can pass as a technician: I have the mechanician's trade and the alchemist's, which between them will survive any conversation about a refinery. This turned out to be better luck than I deserved, because Saint-Marcel has a hydroelectric station running off a waterfall and a strategic reserve attached to it — chlorine, cobalt, and sodium metal — and I would like it recorded that I was extremely pleased about the sodium.''

''Jedburgh is an armourer and a weaponsmith and can therefore be a metallurgist, which suits the cobalt; there is a proper reason to want cobalt alloys, since steel goes brittle in real cold and cobalt simply does not, and men who intend to fight in mountains think about such things. Jedburgh's own view of his cover story was that he is not very good at that. Tulip is a farmer and a gardener and knows animals, and the region is famous for its market gardens, so she needed no invention at all. And I would be the man from the office who makes sure the technicians do what they are supposed to, which Kel described as the annoying paperwork guy, and which is not, I think, wholly a joke about the disguise.''

''Diane was the difficulty. She is too old to pass as anyone's sweetheart, her French and German are fluent but carry an accent she has never been able to lose, and the limp is the one thing on every poster in the south. So we made her old — Tulip's aunt, come along on the trip because somebody insisted, shuffling and disagreeable and best not spoken to. The accent we solved by giving her a stroke, so that she understands everything said around her and is not expected to answer. I offered a wart or two. I was overruled on the warts.''

===== First Class =====

''The gale came in properly overnight and by morning nobody in Perpignan was going to work, because you could not walk down a street without leaning into it.''

''It was the best thing that happened to us all week. The machines the Germans would send to look at a stretch of countryside where somebody might have come down out of the sky are nimble in the air and treacherous on the ground, and a crosswind on landing turns one over. Nothing flew. I said we had planned it well, which was a lie of the most satisfying kind. It also meant the carpet stayed rolled up, and I had no regrets about that at all.''

''We watched the trucks go west toward Camp Gurs the next morning, and then we went to the station. Kel put the illusions on us before we walked in, and it cost her; she came out the other side wrung dry and needing a restorative before she was any use to anybody, and Tulip was little better after laying stone in our bones for the day. I raised the idea of getting Diane a wheelchair, which would have hidden the leg entirely, and I still think it was a good one.''

''The compartment was ours and the journey took most of the day. There is no shortage of cigarettes in France and every one of them is poisonous, but the ones going round that carriage were a species of their own — very dark, heavy with something called Latakia, giving off a thick black smoke that smells precisely like burning boot leather. You could feel it settling on the inside of your chest like bitumen. I offered, as a courtesy, to clear it out of their lungs with a sphere of dark, and was told that this would waste the entire point of the exercise: they were armouring themselves, and nothing bacterial was getting in past that. Jedburgh opened the window.''

''We came into Lyon about eight in the evening. Diane chose where we would sleep — somewhere perfectly ordinary with no connection whatever to any safe house of hers — and what she chose was the Hotel San Filippo, which is a good deal grander than she made it sound. Jedburgh's forged ration cards were accepted without a glance. After the little place in Perpignan it felt like a different war.''

===== Cheap at the Price =====

''That evening she saw him in the street. The priest. The one she had told me about in her room the night before, walking about Lyon on his own with no more caution than a man going to buy a newspaper.''

''Kel's ritual for taking a mind properly takes an hour with the subject in the room the whole time, which rules out doing it anywhere he might be missed. So the shape of it was obvious enough: get him somewhere private, put him down, make him a mouse, carry him home, and let Kel do her work behind a locked door. I said at the outset that we were not taking death off the table with this one. I want that written down as having been said before we caught him and not after.''

''Kel had a look inside his head first, and he could not keep her out. He was expecting to be offered drugs. He is a good-looking man of middle years in a gabardine raincoat, a dark suit and a fedora, and he has not worn anything priestly for a year — chiefly, it emerges, because he has been conducting affairs with two women at the same time and the collar was becoming awkward. Dross put a suggestion on him, which did not take the first time and did the second. Jedburgh's contribution was that a venal man alone in a strange city, with two mistresses at home, will follow money and he will follow women, and that we should offer both. So we did, and he came, and we walked him into a shabby little bar to discuss something profitable.''

''Then Dross produced a sachet of something quite wonderful that he really ought to try, and he opened it and took a good deep sniff of it, and that was the end of the evening for him. He went into a mouse skin and a mouse into an empty box of Vesta matches, and we walked out with him in a pocket. He woke somewhere on the way and went berserk in there, for all the good it did him.''

===== Taking His Confession =====

''We put every lamp in the room behind us so that he would see nothing but light, on the principle that a man who has been questioned by us may one day be questioned about us, and there is no sense in handing over five faces.''

''The ritual took its hour. Kel drew it out far past the length it needed, which wears a man down past the point of holding anything back, and at the end of it he loved her better than anyone he has ever met and would have told her his mother's sins. She put him on the mind speech so we could all hear.''

''He has met Virginia Hall. He knows her face — that is the sharp end of it, and Diane needed to hear it from us. He saw her in a street in Lyon and does not know where she sleeps. He got his introduction to her through somebody the Gestapo had already rolled up in Paris, after selling a different group entirely: a cell run by a man named Germain Thion, whom he betrayed wholesale. She found him too curious, exactly as her instinct told her, and burned her documents. He has never stopped looking for her since.''

''Jedburgh asked whether he had been in contact with Barbie or with Sievers. Barbie, yes — he knows Klaus Barbie personally and has been working with him quite openly, walking into Gestapo headquarters in daylight without so much as a change of coat, and Barbie's people work out of the Hotel Terminus beside the railway station in Lyon. That is worth more than everything else he said. Sievers, no. The name means nothing to him. If you sat him down and explained the Ahnenerbe and what is being done in the mountains, he would laugh at you. Dross pointed out that as a mouse he would only squeak.''

''He was never part of any counter-insurgency apparatus. He is a nobody who found a seam and worked it: a priest's history, a priest's welcome, and a good face, and people told him things, and he sold every one of them to the Germans for money. Not for a cause. Not out of hatred. There is no remorse in him anywhere; I looked. His name is Robert Alesch, and he was famous in his own parish for preaching against the Nazis.''

===== A Small Death =====

''Dross wanted to make him forget the whole evening and leave him a mouse until we could find someone willing to unmake him. Kel would have let him go on the street the morning we left.''

''I said no, and I said why. A man who has spent an hour inside a room with us is evidence, whatever he remembers of it. Their side has occultists too — we have seen them work a square in Perpignan over a dead man — and there is more than one way to ask a question of a person who does not wish to answer. Get rid of him and there is nothing left for them. Jedburgh made the necessary correction, which is that death alone does not close the door: if they know where he died they can still reach him. Then he said plainly that he wanted him dead, which I respect more than a long argument.''

''Dross was the one who fought it, and he was right to. He got there himself in the end: that this man will produce more death and more suffering if he lives, and that the price of preventing it falls on us and nobody else, and that we should not pretend otherwise or take any comfort from it. Kel, who is not sentimental, offered to sit him down for an hour and look into his eyes and fix his morals for him. He declined.''

''So we killed him in the shape we had caught him in. Held by the tail over a sphere of dark and dropped into it, and there is nothing left — no body, no grave, no place, nothing for anyone to raise or to question or to bury. The world is made smaller by the size of one mouse. I have killed a great many things in a very long life and I do not usually make a note of it. I have made a note of this one because it was decided at a table, in a warm room, by five people who had eaten well, and because I was the first to say it out loud, and I would say it again, and none of that is the same as it having been easy.''

===== Uphill =====

''We caught the connecting train the next morning and it took most of the day, chiefly because it climbs.''

''Saint-Marcel, when we finally reached it, is a hamlet of some eight hundred people in the Alps, with Mont Blanc within twenty miles of it. Not farm country — the ground is too vertical for that, though there are farms clinging on where they can. It is an industrial place set down in the mountains, orchards with houses attached, and one great works that does not belong to any of it. It is the end of autumn down on the coast; up here it is bitterly cold, and the weather in these mountains is famous for turning savage without notice.''

''We took rooms at a small regional hotel, still disguised, and counted our advantage. The convoy left after we did, is smaller than the one going west — ten trucks perhaps — and has three days of bad roads and worse gradients in front of it. We have a day in hand, possibly more. It is the first time on this whole business that we have arrived anywhere before the thing we came to meet.''

===== Very Dangerous Fun =====

''Kel put the mind speech on Jedburgh and he went up as an eagle and spent an hour looking down at it, which is a great deal more than a man on foot could have learned in a week.''

''The waterfall drives the hydroelectric station, and the station is smaller than I had pictured — nothing like a great dam holding back a valley, just a modest thing hung off a cataract. But it makes a great deal of current, and current is the whole point: everything they do there wants electricity in quantity. They refine cobalt with it. They strip chlorine out of salt with it, and they have been selling the chlorine to Germany since before the war. And what is left when you take the chlorine off is sodium metal, which they keep in the warehouses under oil, because sodium and water are not on speaking terms. I remarked that this would be very dangerous fun. Kel remarked that it is the kind of mistake a man only makes once.''

''There is a rail spur running into the plant itself. Ore comes up from Morocco by train and the products go out the same way. From the air, the arrangement is unmistakable: a scatter of little holdings with fruit trees round them, and then this one enormous building, off on its own, away from the houses — which is exactly where you put a thing you do not want the neighbours to see, and exactly where the biological work must be. You want it secured, and it is already secured, and the power is already there. Everything about the place answers itself.''

''It is guarded by Italian Alpine infantry.''

===== Who Cares Who Wins =====

''That last fact turns out to cut both ways, and the pleasant half came first.''

''This zone is administered by a man named Maurizio Lazzaro di Castiglione, whose writ runs over Savoy and Grenoble and the country around, and he is notable for the one thing that matters here: he has not handed anybody over. Not Jews, not Gypsies, not refugees of any kind. His administration simply declines the requests when they come, and the effect is that this stretch of the Alps is very nearly a safe place, in a way nothing on the coast has been for a year. Kel observed that the world is not, then, a complete piece of shit. I observed that this one does not need a matchbox.''

''The unpleasant half is that these are veteran troops, mountain troops, and they are on the wrong end of any clever idea involving uniforms. Kel's instinct is sound in general — Germans follow the chain of command, and a sufficiently senior officer can walk in anywhere — but it does not work on men who are not German. Jedburgh offered us the official motto of the Italian army: who cares who wins. It got the laugh it deserved and did not help.''

''We had two blunter options in front of us. Take a guard, empty his head of everything useful, and walk in on what he knows. Or put holes in the works with spheres of dark until the whole thing goes into the river, which would certainly stop the electrolysis and would certainly kill whatever is in there, including the women being driven up the road towards it. Diane cut across all of it. What she wants, and she says it is more important than anything else we might do here, is to know what is actually being done inside that building. She is right. And we do not have to understand the research ourselves to carry it — Jedburgh named the man for that, who can divine over a thing and knows healing besides, and later on a sample of everything goes to the doctor. Our job is to get it.''

''So: reconnaissance first, and properly. Jedburgh goes up again to mark out the places worth watching, and we set the crystals of vision on them and learn the compound's habits before we ever set foot in it. Then we go in at night, unseen, because in daylight that place is full of soldiers and in darkness it is only full of guards. It will be a wretchedly cold night's work at this altitude and I find I am looking forward to it.''

''Kel said, as we were breaking up, that it was worth acknowledging I had been right about the mind speech. Dross agreed, at some length and with more enthusiasm than the point required. I said I had been right twice, actually, and let the second one go unnamed, because a man who collects his debts too eagerly is not invited to dinner. I would trade both of them for a day's head start we have not yet earned. The trucks are somewhere south of us in the dark, climbing.''

----

{| class="wikitable"
|-
|

==== OOC Details ====

===== Items Acquired =====

'''Party (shared resources):'''

'''Balance brought forward:''' 2,500 sp
'''Balance carried forward:''' 2,500 sp

===== Session Summary =====

At dinner in the Perpignan hotel the party [[#s6-the-rehearsal|argued over how to make first contact with Diane]], and Kel's preview of the mind-speech option showed her shooting herself, which took it off the table. [[#s6-between-courses|A telepathic sweep of the dining room]] found four guests of the same escape line, no German observers and Diane's cover intact, along with worried talk of an internment camp holding some two thousand people. A coded remark about a cousin named Cuthbert from Piccadilly brought her to Black's door, [[#s6-making-her-acquaintance|where she opened it holding an enormous revolver]]. She had shared a train south with Wolfram Sievers and [[#s6-something-going-around|carried word of the Conan Bacterium]], research grown out of Robert Koch's papers that records and repairs the pattern of a living body, and which she believes has every hallmark of a death plague; a small, almost entirely female contingent of internees is being taken to Saint-Marcel rather than west to Camp Gurs with the rest. She could not explain [[#s6-not-a-good-trait-in-this-game|how the Germans found Gilbert]], dated the crackdown on her network to the German occupation of Vichy France after Operation Torch, and named a suspect: an anti-Nazi priest from a parish near Paris who makes it his business to know everyone. Warned in advance this time that Kel is [[#s6-not-a-vampire|not a vampire]], Diane accepted the mind-speech link, and the party settled [[#s6-papers-in-order|the route, the forged travel papers and the cover stories]] — a fashion and refining concern, with Diane disguised as Tulip's elderly, stroke-stricken aunt.

[[#s6-first-class|A gale grounded German reconnaissance aircraft]] and the party took a bought-out first-class compartment north, reaching Lyon and the Hotel San Filippo in the evening. Diane spotted her priest in the street; [[#s6-cheap-at-the-price|he was lured with money and women, drugged, and pocketed as a mouse]], and [[#s6-taking-his-confession|an hour's ritual behind a locked door]] gave up his name — Robert Alesch — along with the facts that he can identify Virginia Hall by sight, works openly with Klaus Barbie out of the Hotel Terminus in Lyon, betrayed Germain Thion's Paris cell before her, and has never heard of Sievers or the Ahnenerbe. [[#s6-a-small-death|The party killed him in mouse form over a sphere of dark]], leaving no remains for enemy occultists to question. [[#s6-uphill|A connecting train climbed all the following day to Saint-Marcel]], an Alpine hamlet of eight hundred people, which the party reached a day ahead of the convoy. [[#s6-very-dangerous-fun|Jedburgh's flight over the valley]] mapped the hydroelectric station, the cobalt and chlorine works, the sodium warehouses and one isolated building where the biological work must be. The zone is administered by Maurizio Lazzaro di Castiglione, who surrenders nobody, and the plant is guarded by Italian Alpine infantry on whom no German-uniform trick will work; [[#s6-who-cares-who-wins|the session ends with the party planning night reconnaissance]] with crystals of vision before attempting entry.

===== Chronological Timeline =====

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date !! Event
|-
| Day 36 (evening) || Dinner at the Perpignan hotel; contact methods debated; the mind-speech option previewed and abandoned
|-
| Day 36 (evening) || Telepathic sweep of the dining room; four escape-line guests identified; camp chatter and the Camp Gurs / Saint-Marcel split overheard
|-
| Day 36 (evening) || Coded "Cuthbert from Piccadilly" signal given at table; Diane leaves; Black follows to her room
|-
| Day 36 (night) || Diane reports Sievers on the train and the Conan Bacterium research derived from Robert Koch
|-
| Day 36 (night) || Gilbert's betrayal discussed; Operation Torch and the occupation of Vichy France; a priest near Paris named as suspect
|-
| Day 36 (night) || Diane warned about the mind speech and brought into the party's link
|-
| Day 36 (night) || Route to Saint-Marcel agreed; forged papers, cover stories and disguises settled
|-
| Day 36 ? Day 37 || Gale rises overnight; German reconnaissance aircraft grounded; the flying carpet ruled out
|-
| Day 37 || Storm holds Perpignan indoors; final preparations for the journey
|-
| Day 38 (morning) || Internee convoy departs west for Camp Gurs; party boards the train north under illusion
|-
| Day 38 (evening) || Arrival in Lyon; rooms taken at the Hotel San Filippo on forged ration cards
|-
| Day 38 (night) || Diane spots the priest; he is lured, drugged, turned into a mouse and carried back
|-
| Day 38 (night) || Ritual interrogation: Robert Alesch named; Virginia Hall, Klaus Barbie at the Hotel Terminus, Germain Thion; no knowledge of Sievers
|-
| Day 38 (night) || The party debates his fate and kills him in mouse form
|-
| Day 39 (morning ? afternoon) || Connecting train climbs to Saint-Marcel; hamlet reached ahead of the convoy
|-
| Day 39 (afternoon) || Aerial reconnaissance of the hydroelectric station, the refining works and the isolated building
|-
| Day 39 (evening) || Italian administration under Castiglione noted; infiltration options weighed; night reconnaissance planned
|}
|}

----

=== Chapter 7: Early Days ===

''There is a graveyard across the road from the works, and every grave in it is eighteen inches long.''

===== Excused Service =====

''The first thing to correct is a mistake I made in these pages already: the plant is not in Saint-Marcel. It is at Pomblière, a couple of miles up the valley, which is a separate place with fewer than five hundred people in it, two churches, a station and a school so small that the older children ride down to Saint-Marcel for their lessons. We are lodged in the one; the thing we came for is in the other.''

''The works is guarded by Italian Alpine troops, and they are the wrong sort of enemy to have. Not the green boys the Germans have been turning out on three months' training, who are dangerous chiefly to themselves — these are veterans, mountain men, and they know exactly what they are doing. There are something like two hundred of them on the plant, a man at every door and gate, and only ever four to eight of them moving about the ground at any one time. They are not quartered inside; they come in from outside, and apart from a couple of unfortunates who sleep on the premises, no officer of theirs is on the site after dark. They give the German field police a very wide berth. Their commandant, we are told, has no wish to be compromised by peculiar goings-on, by which he means the Nazis, and I would shake his hand if the circumstances were different.''

''We settled on going in by daylight, which sits oddly until you think about it: at night the place is nothing but guards, and in the day it is full of workmen with somewhere to be. Diane stayed behind in Saint-Marcel and did not come up to Pomblière at all. She would have insisted on it if we had not. There is no photograph of her on any poster in France, but there is a description on every one of them, and the description is the leg.''

''So Kel made her a new face, and made it properly — bound down so that it will hold for days rather than falling off in the middle of a street. Kel's own suggestion was a middle-aged countrywoman; Diane's, when asked, was that she should be a man, and Diane was right, because it solves the leg. A man of that age walking about an Alpine village with a lump of wood below the knee is not a woman in disguise. He is the local cripple, and the wood is the reason he is not in the army with everybody else's sons. Nobody looks twice at a man who has already given a leg.''

===== The Nearest Thing to a Thief =====

''The obvious way into a compound is to walk in unseen, and I learned two things about that which I did not know and should have.''

''The first is that the working does not defeat everybody. Anyone born with the sight can see straight through it, at any degree of talent whatever — a man who has never used it for anything in his life and does not know what it is worth will still see five people strolling past his gate. It is uncommon. It is not so uncommon that I want to gamble a life on it. The second is worse and more foolish, and I ought to have thought of it myself: unseen or not, a man still throws a shadow, and there is snow on the ground here. In daylight one may not be spotted and one's shadow certainly will be.''

''The wire is barbed and razor both, and it carries signs with lightning bolts on them. I said what I have always found to be true, that those signs are usually a bluff — the sign is cheaper than the current, and the sign is what keeps people off. I also said it in the tone of a man who does not intend to test it personally. Cutting was raised and dismissed as too loud a thing to leave behind us. Tunnelling was raised. Jedburgh observed, correctly, that we have no thief.''

''We have the next best thing, which is me. There is a knack in the axe I carry that lets me find hidden ways and hidden openings, and find a trap and take it out again, as well as a man who has spent his life doing it. It does not pick locks. It has never picked a lock and it is not going to start, and I said so before anybody could get their hopes up.''

''What we settled on in the end was Kel's working that simply keeps a man from being noticed at all, which lasts a little over an hour and makes even a clumsy man very hard to catch sight of. Tulip has an incantation that will lay a lesser sort of blending over the whole party at once, so that if the first thing lapses we can at least stand still and be missed. She put earth on our skins and stone in our bones besides. Kel prepared faces of the Italian guards to fall back on if we were seen. And we ran the mind speech through the lot of us, since the working hides you from the eye and not from the ear, and five people whispering to one another in a chlorine plant would not last long.''

''I had one idea of my own, which was to reach into the head of whichever man in that place knows what is being done there and simply take it. It was pointed out to me that this means opening one's mind to a great many minds one cannot vouch for, in a country where the other side keeps occultists too, and that some of them have unpleasant things waiting behind the door for anyone who knocks. I withdrew the suggestion. I would rather be talked out of a thing beforehand than proved wrong afterwards.''

''Then came the question of who goes in, and the answer was one man rather than five, because five of anything is five chances to be seen. Kel looked round the table for somebody tough enough to survive being caught and named me, and I said I was happy to do it, and had about four seconds of feeling useful before somebody observed that Jedburgh can wear another shape altogether and would therefore not merely be unseen but able to be seen and dismissed. Kel thanked him warmly for volunteering. He had not said anything.''

===== Made in a Hurry =====

''We walked up the regional road out of Saint-Marcel with the wire on our left, and came to the guard post, which is a hut and a painted arm across the roadway and half a dozen men, and we went past all six of them and under the arm, and not one of them lifted his head. It is a strange feeling. You are not hiding. You are walking up a public road in daylight past men whose entire employment is to notice people, and they do not notice.''

''Ten feet beyond the gate, on the other side of the road, there is a door into the cemetery — a door only by courtesy, a plank lashed to the palings of a fence that would not keep out a determined goat. It is not a real graveyard. It has no chapel, no wall, no gate worth the name, no caretaker. The French have a phrase for a thing thrown together in haste, and that is what the map calls it.''

''The mounds are eighteen inches long and about ten across. There are crosses on them and there is not a name on any cross.''

''My first thought was animals, and I said so, and heard how thin it sounded while I was still saying it. Men do bury a dog they were fond of. They do not lay out a fenced plot with rows of crosses for cats, on ground belonging to a chemical works, in a country at war. The graves are shallow besides — two feet, no more, and that in frozen ground where a proper grave would take a day and a strong back. Whoever put them there was not thinking about the dead. It is the kind of burial you use when you are hiding something, and nobody at that fence argued the point.''

===== Not Without Gloves =====

''Those of us who can see past the surface of a thing looked at the graves, and every one of us who could see it saw the same thing, which was a very faint blue light coming up out of the dirt.''

''Tulip saw nothing at all, which annoyed her considerably, and Dross saw nothing either, being a hundred miles from here and no use to us this week. The rest of us stood there staring at what Tulip had to take on trust. It was not a wash of light lying over the mounds. It was individual grains in the soil, each one glowing on its own, scattered through the earth like a field of stars, and faint — but unmistakably blue, in broad daylight, which is not a thing daylight allows.''

''Jedburgh asked whether it was that particular blue that comes off certain poisons of the modern kind, and named it, and it seems that it was. My own guess had been cobalt, since the plant refines the stuff a hundred yards away, but the alloy they make is stable and stable metal does not shine through soil. Tulip said that the hospitals use a cobalt that does, when it is the right sort. Kel said the simplest reading was that something horribly contaminated had been put in the ground here. Then Jedburgh knelt and read one of the graves properly, and came up with the answer that it held a small piece of something lethal — and that it might well be magical into the bargain, which no honest poison has any business being.''

''Kel's verdict was that we should not dig it up without very large gloves. Mine was that we should not dig it up at all today. It is precisely the sort of discovery that will swallow an afternoon and get the whole party caught, and there will be time for it afterwards, and if there is not, then we shall have had bigger troubles than a hole in the ground. So we left the little crosses where they were, and I have thought about them a great deal since.''

===== Not So Keen on the Place =====

''Jedburgh went over the fence and through the works, and sent us what he saw a picture at a time, and I sat behind a picket fence in the cold and was taken on a tour of the most alarming factory I have ever inhabited at second hand.''

''The first building next to the graveyard is the chlorine store, and you do not need to see it to know it; the smell reaches the fence. Past it there is an alley about fifteen feet across and a ramp going up, and the branch to one side leads into another chlorine depository, and the branch to the other into the sodium store. That one has its doors propped wide open in the middle of winter, and now I understand why. There are men whose whole job is to sweep the snow away from the doorway and keep the floor dry inside, and there are buckets of sand and shovels standing about everywhere, and the men handling it wear no protection at all — because the thing that will kill them is not the metal, it is water, and the last thing you want in there is a sealed damp room. Four metric tons of it, sitting on pallets in square buckets like so many crucibles. I remarked to no one in particular that I was no longer keen on the place, and I meant it, and I was also delighted, which is a combination I have long since stopped apologising for.''

''Beyond that the loading yard and the forklifts and the rail spur where they back the wagons past the entrance; then a transformer the size of a cottage; then the administration buildings with clerks beavering away inside at whatever it is clerks do in an occupied country, and a canteen beside them, because at five degrees at noon nobody eats out of doors. Opposite the offices is the hall where they pull the salt apart with electricity. A dozen men in oilskin and thick glass masks, every one of them covered to the throat, and most of them not at their work at all but standing near the doors — so that when it goes wrong they will be first out. One or two braver or more junior souls were at the big machine in the middle, peering into the dials. Further along, a substation where one man sits watch, and what he sits watch beside is four tons of chlorine liquefied under pressure. Everybody's favourite posting, I am sure.''

''Then a ton of indigo crystals stored where you would not expect them, kept simply because the stuff is valuable and an order might come; the crushing shop, where they break the ore and where the noise is such that a man could shout in there all day and never be heard outside; the salt coming in; the railway going out; and a bridge running north-west across the tracks and up towards the dam. Soldiers at every point where a man might go in or come out, and Jedburgh walking between them with an hour's grace and nobody's eye on him.''

===== A Thriving Concern =====

''Jedburgh is the only one of us who can look at an installation and read it the way a man reads a page, and when he had walked the whole of it he gave us the verdict, and the verdict was the last thing any of us wanted.''

''It is a factory. Not a front, not a shell with something else inside it — a genuine, prosperous, hard-working chemical works, turning out chlorine by the thousand tons and holding metallic sodium in the same order of quantity, taking in cobalt ore up from Morocco once a week and shipping the products out every second or third day. Everything in it is exactly what it appears to be and is exactly where it ought to be.''

''And there is nowhere in it to put two hundred people. No wing that is locked, no floor that is not accounted for, no cells, no chains, no manacles, no barracks that could hold them, no cave mouth, no stair going down. Kel asked, with the particular flatness she reserves for these occasions, where the secret laboratory was — the one with the prisoners in it and the plague being brewed on them. There is not one. Jedburgh spent the whole of his hour looking and found no trace of it.''

''I had been so pleased with myself the night before, picking out the one big building standing apart from the houses and declaring that this is precisely where you put the thing you do not want the neighbours to see. The thing they do not want the neighbours to see is chlorine. Everything about the place answers itself, and every answer is the dull one.''

===== Heraldry =====

''Since we had run out of factory, I suggested the line running up to the power station, and Jedburgh took his other shape and went to look. The changing costs him dearly — it burns through a man's reserves at a rate he cannot keep up all day — and he does not do it for the pleasure of the view.''

''The station is smaller than I had pictured even after reducing my picture once already. It sits on the cataract above the works and it feeds the plant and the little community around it and nothing else at all; it is not tied into the country's grid. There is nothing up there to hide two hundred women in either.''

''What there was, twelve miles off, was an eagle.''

''He put it at twelve miles and closed to five to be sure of it, and at five miles he was certain of two things. It is black — properly black, not the brown that people call black at a distance. And it has two heads, set out from one another like the blades of an opened pair of shears.''

''I have seen that device on a shield often enough. I had not expected to be told it was overhead and alive. I asked how far off it was and got twelve miles, and observed that this was twelve miles too close. There was some talk of whether it was thinking or merely being a bird — Jedburgh judged from the way it held its wings that it was flying like a bird and not like a person wearing one — but birds are systematic when they hunt, and this one was not hunting. It was going round and round over one patch of ground, south of Mont Blanc.''

''We have met two-headed birds before, when we were talking about the condors. We have met worse: I can recall a place where the men had the heads of birds of prey. I said as much, and nobody found it reassuring, which was not the intention.''

===== The Circuit Breaker =====

''Tulip was carrying the crystal of vision — Dross bought it from Uzi a long while ago and Tulip has had the keeping of it — and since Jedburgh was the only one of us who knew where to point the thing, Jedburgh used it.''

''He set the view a mile above the ground over the middle of the eagle's circuit and looked straight down, and what was standing there was a woman.''

''I use the word because he was certain of it and so, afterwards, was the divining. She is enormously large. Taller than any man and far broader, bulky in a way that is not fat and is not a dwarf's thickness either — short of a hill giant, but not by as much as one would like. She was simply out on her mountain, alone, doing whatever such a thing does with an afternoon.''

''Twice he had to hold his nerve and twice he held it. The third time something in him slipped, and the horror of the thing came back up the line at him — across twelve miles of air, out of the mountain, through a piece of polished stone, and into the man holding it. The crystal burst in his hands. It took what was meant for him, the way a fuse takes a current, and he walked away with his strength still in his body and a palmful of grit.''

''I said we do not like really dangerous things. It got the laugh it deserved. She never noticed him; we asked, and the answer was that she would have had to be looking for him, and she was not. That is the only comfort available and I have been chewing it ever since, because the plain fact is that a man a mile up in the air and twelve miles away was very nearly struck down by the sight of her face.''

''Jedburgh spent the next hour divining over what was left of the crystal. It was slow going — it is not ordinary magic and it did not want to be read — but he got there. The thing that reached him was not a working she cast, not a curse, not a summons. It was simply her face. A mountain hag, and the mountains are all around us.''

===== The Opening Move =====

''Kel put it plainly while Jedburgh was still picking crystal out of his palm: either that creature has nothing whatever to do with why we are here, or they are giving the people to her.''

''And then a thing was said that turned the whole business round, and I record it because I had been carrying the error about in my head for days and never once examined it. We had all been assuming — every one of us, and I would have sworn to it — that there has been a steady flow of prisoners up to this plant for months, and that we had arrived in the middle of an established atrocity. There has not been. Nothing has come up here at all. When they emptied the camp at Rivesaltes, some seventeen hundred went north to Gurs, and this two hundred is the first and only party sent this way, and they are not even here yet: eight to ten trucks, still the better part of a day and a half out on bad roads, guarded not by Italians but by German soldiers with their three months of training behind them.''

''Kel said it: they are not continuing something here, they are going to start something. Or finish one, I said, because it works either way and I would rather have both possibilities on the table than the comfortable one. But the shape of it is clear enough. We are not late. We are early, which is not a position I have often occupied, and it also means that whatever is in those eighteen-inch graves went into the ground before any of this began, and belongs to some other question entirely.''

===== A Particular Age Range =====

''Kel can see a little way down a road before we set foot on it — not to spy out what is there, but to be shown what follows if we choose a particular course. She had not used it in days, and she proposed to spend it on this: what do we see if we are standing at the convoy's stop for the night, watching?''

''What she saw was orderly and unremarkable and made my skin crawl. The trucks are driven into covered warehouses and the doors are shut behind them. Food is passed out. Nobody is let down. They will not be walked about, or counted, or split up — they will spend the night in the trucks they spent the day in.''

''And every one of them is a woman.''

''Jedburgh asked whether they were of any particular age range. They are young. All of them young, all of them of an age to bear children, out of a camp that held every kind of person there is — men, old people, children — and somebody stood at that gate and picked out two hundred women of exactly that description and put them in trucks and sent them into the Alps.''

''Kel said it felt like a hag thing, and I do not think any of us needed the sentence finished. I said perhaps they are making more hags. Tulip said perhaps they only want the babies. There was laughter of the kind we have made a good deal of lately, and it did not last, and I will not set down the worst of what was said because it was not funny even at the time. What I did say, and stand by, is that we do not need more hags running about the world.''

''We have no evidence. I want that admitted plainly: we have found nothing in that plant, nothing in that valley, and nothing on paper that ties the woman on the mountain to the trucks on the road. What we have is that we have looked everywhere else and found nothing at all, and that somebody selected two hundred wombs and is driving them towards a place with a hag standing twelve miles off it, and that the two-headed bird patrolling the ground in between is almost certainly hers. That is circumstantial, and it is strong.''

===== Going in Blind =====

''So I said I was of a mind to use the time we have left to deal with the hag, and rather to my surprise nobody talked me out of it. Kel was already leaning the same way. Tulip is not keen — she would prefer to learn more about the ground first, and she is probably right and agreed anyway. Jedburgh thinks it will be exciting. We have something under thirty hours before the trucks reach Pomblière, and there will be no thirty hours like them again.''

''Then we found out what we are proposing to walk up to.''

''Looking at her face takes the strength straight out of a man's body — enough to put most men on the ground where they stand. Hold your nerve against it and it still leaves you weak as a child, and it does not come back quickly. A mirror is no answer: ordinary glass is as likely as not to shatter in your hand, and only a mirror made for the purpose, of the sort ground for looking at gorgons, can be relied upon, and we do not have one. There is no counterspell. What there is, is a tincture of aconite and passionflower, and I knew that, and named it, and then had to admit in front of everybody that I do not have the formula. It is a herbalist's preparation and I am an alchemist, which is precisely the sort of distinction that sounds like an excuse and is not one. It has been on my list for a very long time. It will be higher on it tomorrow.''

''What followed was a quarter of an hour of increasingly desperate ingenuity. Fight in the dark. Put a sack over her head — and keep it there, which is the whole of the difficulty. Lay an illusion of a blank face over hers, except that requires somebody to get close enough to touch her, and if you are close enough to touch her you have already looked at her. Blind ourselves outright, which was proposed as a joke and then examined seriously for slightly too long. My own contribution, and the one I still think best, is a bandage over the eyes wound so that a man sees shapes and no detail at all — enough to fight by, not enough to see a face. Kel has scrolls made up of a phantasm that might take her out of our heads altogether if we can spot her at a distance. Tulip will put stone in our bones beforehand, so that a man who has the strength stripped out of him does not simply fold up on the mountainside. And we went through the remnants we carry: Mirage, which is more for places than people; Silhouette, which might serve; and Facade, which I think is the most promising of the three.''

''Tulip asked whether the thing works on animals, and whether Corniger would be affected. Nobody knew. Kel's view was that he is so strong it would hardly signify. My view is that he has had to look at me every day for years and has never once complained, so I do not expect an ugly woman on a hillside to trouble him.''

''There was a great deal of volunteering of other people to go first. I said I would go last. Kel said it sounds as though we are doing the dangerous thing next time, and said it with real pleasure, and that is what I shall lie awake on: somewhere south-west of us the trucks are grinding up a valley road with two hundred women shut inside them, and somewhere north-east of us a very large woman is walking about her mountain with an eagle turning overhead, and we have decided to go and meet the second one first.''

----

{| class="wikitable"
|-
|

==== OOC Details ====

===== Items Acquired =====

'''Party (shared resources):'''
* Crystal of Vision — (unverified — ledger unchecked for this session)

'''Balance brought forward:''' 2,500 sp
'''Balance carried forward:''' 2,500 sp

===== Session Summary =====

The party spent the day scouting the chemical works at Pomblière, a couple of miles up the valley from their lodgings, [[#s7-excused-service|leaving Diane behind in Saint-Marcel under a new disguise as a middle-aged man]] because her wooden leg appears on every wanted poster. Having [[#s7-the-nearest-thing-to-a-thief|weighed the ways past two hundred Italian Alpine veterans]] and settled on concealment plus a single man inside, they walked past the boom gate unnoticed and found [[#s7-made-in-a-hurry|a makeshift cemetery of unnamed graves eighteen inches long]], the soil of which [[#s7-not-without-gloves|glows faintly blue and holds a small piece of something lethal and possibly magical]]. They left it undug. Jedburgh's [[#s7-not-so-keen-on-the-place|walk through the plant]] and his [[#s7-a-thriving-concern|professional assessment of it]] found a genuine, thriving chlorine and sodium works with nowhere at all to hold two hundred prisoners and no hidden laboratory anywhere in it.

Scouting further out in eagle form, Jedburgh sighted [[#s7-heraldry|a two-headed black eagle circling twelve miles off, south of Mont Blanc]], and scrying beneath its circuit found an enormous woman whose face [[#s7-the-circuit-breaker|burst the party's Crystal of Vision]] rather than striking him down; divining over the fragments named her a mountain hag. The party then learned that no prisoners have ever been sent up to this plant before — [[#s7-the-opening-move|the two hundred women on the road are the first]], still the better part of a day and a half out — and a look ahead at the convoy's overnight stop confirmed [[#s7-a-particular-age-range|that every internee is a young woman of child-bearing age]]. Holding this as circumstantial but strong, and with under thirty hours before the trucks arrive, the party is at Saint-Marcel and has [[#s7-going-in-blind|resolved to go after the hag first]], lacking the herbalist's tincture that would guard against her visage and improvising blindfolds, illusions and stone-hardening in its place.

===== Chronological Timeline =====

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date !! Event
| Day 40 || Pomblière plant infiltrated and walked end to end — a working factory, no hidden laboratory; scrying identifies a mountain hag (Crystal of Vision destroyed); convoy of ~200 young women a day and a half out
|}
|}

----

=== Chapter 8: A Pleasant Stroll in the Woods ===

''Four Death cards came off the deck before the one that answered us, and every one of us decided on the instant that they were about her rather than about us.''

===== Careful What We Asked For =====

''Dross is back with us, and so are his cards, and I had forgotten how much of an evening it costs to use them properly. The reading answers one question and one only, so we spent the better part of an hour arguing about what that question should be, which is not wasted time, though it feels like it while you are doing it.''

''Kel wanted to lock down the simple thing first — whether the prisoners are being brought to the hag at all — on the grounds that a yes settles what we do next. Jedburgh argued against a question that can be answered yes or no, and he was right: ask *how* and even a vague answer gives you something to stand on, whereas a yes gives you nothing you did not already suspect. Tulip wanted to ask what the women are for, or what the babies are for, and to hold that in reserve as a second question shaped by the first. Dross said he could try again in half an hour if it failed, which settled the risk of spending the attempt badly.''

''When Dross read the wording back to us he had put the word *here* in it — the Nazis' plan for the women prisoners being transferred here — and I stopped him, because we do not actually know that they are coming here. That was the whole of my contribution and I am glad I made it. Jedburgh thought the intent behind the words strong enough to carry without it. So we cut the word and let it stand as the plan for the women prisoners being transferred, and Dross held the particular moment in his mind and began.''

''He had warned us that reading forward is hard work, close to a coin's toss by daylight, and that the empty country we are in helps him and darkness would help him more. The first attempt failed, and failed by a hair — he said so himself with the sour precision of a man who has just watched a near thing go the wrong way, and observed that had it been full night it would have carried. He gathered the cards up, waited, and laid them again.''

''The second time it came out. Four Death cards in succession, which drew a certain amount of comment around the fire, most of it Jedburgh announcing that he was leaving. I said what everybody wanted said, that they were obviously about her and not about us, and I said it in the voice of a man who believes it. Then came the card that was the actual answer: the Star, and the Star reversed.''

===== From One Vessel to the Other =====

''The Star is a kneeling woman with two vessels in her hands, pouring water out of the one into the other. Upright it means hope, renewal, the good quiet things. Reversed it means the absence of all of them — hopelessness, despair, faithlessness. Dross recited both faces of it aloud for our benefit, being the only one of us who knows the cards, and then asked the cards what the reversal meant against the question he had put.''

''It means she is in it. Not adjacent to it, not coincidental to it — in it. It has to do with potions. And it has to do with something reproductively perverse, which is very probably the reason the business calls for a hag in the first place.''

''I have written that sentence down plainly because I want it plain. We went into this evening with two hundred young women on a road and a very large woman on a mountain and nothing whatever tying the one to the other except that we had looked everywhere else. We came out of it with the tie made.''

''The rest was speculation and we all knew it while we were doing it. One of the stars on the card is Uranus, which is a planet, and which was a sky-lord who ruled before the Titans — that is what the name means. Kel took the view that this is where the transuranian things come from, the next order of evil above anything we normally deal with, and wondered whether they are pouring something transuranian into the women, one vessel into the other. I said that seemed to me a little bit literal. Jedburgh said whatever comes from that quarter is not compatible with living flesh in any case. My own guess was uglier and no better founded: that she is making flesh pots, and that they are breeding soldiers. Dross's was uglier still, that she prepares the unborn thing elsewhere and then puts it perversely into the woman.''

''None of that is knowledge. What is knowledge is that she is part of it, and I said the only thing that followed from it, which is that none of the speculation changes the fact that she has to die.''

===== The Harder Thing to Replace =====

''We got the numbers straight afterwards, and they are worse than I had them. Ten trucks are coming from the Rivesaltes camp to Saint-Marcel. Some forty went the other way, by way of Camp de Gurs, and there is a place called Moûtiers not far from us that keeps coming into the reckoning. Jedburgh worked the escort out from the trucks — a driver and a couple of guards to each, call it five men a truck — and Kel put the total at forty to fifty men.''

''That killed the rescue as an opening move, and killed it on arithmetic rather than on nerve. Kel would need an hour's hold over that many minds to walk two hundred women out from under their guns, and an hour is not a thing anybody is going to give her. Tulip said it first: take the hag out, if we can, and take her out first.''

''I made the case and Jedburgh finished it. Free the women and they will simply do the same thing again next month, because in a population of fifty millions across occupied France and Germany and the Netherlands, two hundred young women of the right age are nothing at all to find. There is one of her. Whatever access these people have to such a creature, it is not the sort of thing one advertises for. She is the harder thing to replace by an enormous margin, and Dross added the other half of it, which is that she is also the less innocent.''

''So it is the hag first and the women afterwards, and I have written that down too, because I want to be able to look at it later. Two hundred people are going to spend the next two days in the backs of those trucks while we walk in the opposite direction, and the reasoning that sends us the opposite way is sound, and I do not much like being the man who finds it sound.''

===== Don't Ask Me How =====

''What we know of hags, we learned around that same fire. They are hybrids, a twisting-together of two bloodlines, and the commonest first half is human. Annis hags carry fae blood and the blood of hell's creatures both. The sea kind are crossed with something that lives underwater. There exists, somewhere in the world, precisely one hag that is pleasant company, and it is not this one, and the mountain sort are horrid without exception. They keep covens, which is a word I would rather not have heard, since it means the thing we call up may not arrive alone. The Germans have a name of their own for the mountain kind. I did not catch it well enough to set it down.''

''Then we went carefully over what her face does, because we had it wrong and wrong in a way that mattered. Holding your nerve against it still costs you something, and holding once is not the end of it — you must go on holding, and holding, and sooner or later a man fails. But the failure only takes what has not been taken already. The whole toll is the same whether you fight it or not; fighting it merely spreads the payment out and buys you the time in between. I asked whether the toll came round again every time she is looked at, and it does not. It is once. Once is quite enough: a man emptied out entirely folds up where he stands, though a man with any scrap of himself left can still work magic, which matters a great deal to three of us.''

''What followed was another quarter of an hour of ingenuity, better informed than the last lot and not much more encouraging. A silhouette laid over her keeps the face away but will not let you send most workings at her — only the kind that go for the mind rather than the body, and those require you to be looking at her face, which is the difficulty entire. Dross asked about looking through a familiar's eyes and was told that both of them take it, and refused at once to spend Tabitha that way. Somebody raised a window of coloured glass, and somebody else rose-tinted spectacles, which got the laugh it was fishing for. Darkness would want to be far deeper than any of us can make; I suggested shaping it so that it begins six feet up and only her head is in it, which nobody dismissed outright. Petrification would be ideal and not one of us has it. A counterspell will be laid on because there is no cost to it. And fighting blind costs a man most of his accuracy, which is a poor trade when you are hitting something between seven and eight feet tall.''

''Dross, who is constitutionally reluctant, floated the idea that she might be the nice kind of hag, duped into the work, and that we might talk her out of it. I said that we do not negotiate, and Jedburgh said we do not negotiate with terrorists, and I invited Dross to go and try it and report back. Somebody then asked which of us wanted to negotiate with her, and which of us wanted to be pregnant, and the evening went where evenings go. Kel suggested inviting her to tea. There was a good deal about the Misunderstood Hags Rehabilitation Society, and a great deal more about the Virgin Archibald and what the immaculate conception would do to the calendar, and I have been called worse. My own summary of the plan, offered in all seriousness, was that we need to kill her without being hit by the thing that takes your strength away, which is really very simple. Don't ask me how. Dross said it was a fantastic plan and he wished he had thought of it.''

===== Inviting Her to Tea =====

''I had been assuming we would have to go and find her, and had got as far as proposing that we spend a day up in the mountains at a safe distance, watching, and hope to catch sight of her. Then Dross asked, in the flat way he asks these things, whether a hag counts as an enchanted creature.''

''She does. And Dross can call an enchanted creature to him.''

''Kel's face, when this landed, was a thing worth the journey. The terms are these: we must be within six miles of her, and the night and the empty country both favour the calling. She does not appear out of the air — she comes under her own power, walking or flying, which means she arrives in under ten minutes and might arrive in one, and means also that she arrives from a direction we can guess. She arrives uncontrolled, which is to say furious and free. And her kind keep company, so she may not come alone.''

''It turns the whole business round. We do not have to find her, and we do not have to fight her where she chooses. We pick the ground, we prepare it at leisure, and then we send for her. Kel said it in five words — build a fighting point and dump wards all round it — and that has been the plan ever since.''

''I did suggest one refinement of my own, which was that what I really wanted was a few German soldiers, gagged and staked out around the perimeter as an early warning, so that when they collapsed we would know she had arrived. I was reminded that the soldiers available locally are Italian. That is precisely why I said German. Tulip observed that the Italians here are not the worst of them, having drawn a line at the genuinely evil work, and Kel observed that they are nonetheless part of the Axis, and the matter was left where it lay.''

''Then Kel opened her kit and shared it out. Two scrolls of phantasm each to Dross and Tulip, and instruction in how to use them. Four waters of strength, the good ones, one each to Jedburgh, Dross, Kel herself and me — on the sound principle that the fighters and Dross will need the strength most, Dross because the drain will leave him with almost nothing and he intends to go on casting from flat on his back regardless. Jedburgh carries four lesser ones of his own besides, one of which he will make as strong as it will go, and one of which goes to Tulip. Kel offered me the strongest on the grounds that I have to get close enough to hit her; I said I am strong enough already and that Jedburgh needs it more, and that is where it went.''

===== Casting Aspersions =====

''We left about five in the afternoon. Night falls here at twenty minutes to six, which is nonsense, and it is nonsense because the occupiers have put the whole country onto their own clocks — so it was pitch dark within twenty minutes of our leaving, and such lamps as the village has would not come on for another forty. It made no difference to us. Most of us can see in the dark after one fashion or another, though Tulip cannot, and mine reaches furthest: something under sixty yards, which is a long way for that sort of sight and which I have never had cause to measure before.''

''It comes at a price I had never thought about. Blackness leaks out of my eyes when I use it. Anybody with a witch's sight or a night-seeing of their own can see it plainly, and every one of my companions can, and none of them had mentioned it until now. Tulip announced that the rest of them are not evil and do not have blackness dripping out of their eyes. I said she was casting aspersions. Kel said one should not judge a man by his college, which from a mind mage is quite something. I pointed out that at least I have not got tentacles, tentacles being Tyndalos's affair and not mine, and we went on into the mountains.''

''They are hard going. A third of the pace you would make on a road, the climb pulling the strength out of you by the hour, and the cold taking its own separate share on top of that, which the heavy furs blunt and do not stop. It is sub-zero up there and it is windy.''

===== The Wrong Time of Year =====

''Jedburgh took the shape of a brown bear for the march, having the knack of such things, and it was perhaps four minutes before we discovered what is wrong with being a brown bear in November.''

''The beast is meant to be hibernating. Before it does, it must lay on an enormous weight of fat, and the thing inside it that tells an animal when it has eaten enough simply stops working — it needs ninety pounds of food a day and it cannot be satisfied. Jedburgh's bear had not been packing any of that away. So it arrived hungry, and the hunger came on it almost at once, and it became so hungry that it could do nothing else at all except try to eat something, and the nearest somethings were us. I said, helpfully, that perhaps he ought not to be a bear. It was a little late.''

''It went for Dross, who apparently smells particularly appetising. He backed off, and could not outpace it, and so set himself to keeping it at arm's length instead, and got one good clean thrust in with Heartdrinker as it came. Then it had him. It opened him up through heavy furs and took very nearly everything he had; a few moments more and it would have had the rest.''

''I went in and got hold of it. I am the stronger of us by a little, and a little was enough — I could hold it so that it could not swing properly and Dross could hit it as he pleased. Then it turned round and tried to have me instead, and could not reach me at all, not once, not in all the time I had my arms round it. That was the only pleasant part of the evening. I had no control over the animal whatever. I simply had hold of it, and holding was all there was.''

''The rest of it went badly. Kel threw a working at its mind, twice, and it slid off both times — Jedburgh's own resistance answering for the bear, which struck her as deeply unfair and cost her two of her prepared workings and the money they were worth. Tulip laid a troll's hide over Dross, and he got himself loose and out of reach. And what finished it, in the end, was Tabitha. Dross's familiar, a small quiet creature who had been trotting along at the back of the column all evening, put the bear to sleep for six hours, and the fight was over.''

''Afterwards Kel put her hands on Dross and took the hurt out of him, which is the cheapest way we have of mending people, and Tulip laid the troll's hide over Jedburgh too so that he would be a little less torn about when he woke. Kel wanted to leave illusions of the four of us lying dead in a ring around him for when he came round. It was put to her that this was the sort of prank a party is remembered for and not in a good way, and nobody woke him, and we sat in the snow until he came out of it on his own. He got up wrung out and thoroughly disgusted with himself: the better part of a year's work put into that shape, he said, and he should have gone for a dog. November, we all agreed, is the wrong month to be a bear.''

===== A White Line in the Dark =====

''We went north and west from there and struck a ridgeline that rises steeply and runs away north-west, cutting straight across the line we wanted. You can follow it in the dark because there is snow on its caps and the moon comes off the snow, a white line drawn across black country, and it takes you — if you stay on it — to within four miles of the place we saw her standing.''

''It was eight hours of walking, near enough, counting the hours the bear cost us. Dross carried Tabitha the whole of the last stretch, tucked under one arm like a lady's handbag dog, which provoked Jedburgh into some remarks about a fallen wolf being carried about by his primate, and about evolution, and about the general disgrace of it. Tabitha, who had just saved the lot of us, looked winsome and wagged her tail.''

''We stopped and made camp at two in the morning. Somewhere in there the day turned over, and there was a muddle about what date it actually is, which I settled by counting backwards: we saw her yesterday, and that makes today the eleventh of November. Which gives us two and a half days before the trucks arrive, and not the thirty hours I had been carrying around in my head since yesterday evening. I should be glad of it. I find instead that I distrust any reprieve that arrives by arithmetic, and that I would rather have had the number wrong in the other direction.''

===== Twice Over the Camp =====

''Between Jedburgh and Tulip and Kel there is a good deal more woodcraft in this party than I had properly appreciated, and last night it was the most useful thing any of us had brought. Jedburgh put walls of stone up and tunnelled into the slope behind them, and the earth he shifts stays shifted; Tulip set smoking magma underneath to warm the place, which is an outrageous way to heat a bivouac and works beautifully; and between the stone and the heat and the dark spheres we had something out of the wind and above freezing by the small hours. Tulip has the herbalism to make a proper meal and a restorative tea out of what we carry, and a man can only take so much of that in a day before his body stops believing it, so we ate properly and slept. The country up here is scrubby pine under snow, which hides a camp well enough if the camp is not stupid about it.''

''Kel hid it properly all the same, laying a stretch of illusionary ground five-and-forty feet across over the whole of it, so that from outside there is nothing there at all. Then she spent her look ahead on the night we were about to sleep through — she can see something under half a day forward, no further, and she had not used it since yesterday.''

''What she saw was nothing. Nothing at all, except a moon shadow that crossed over our campsite. Something passed between us and the moon, and was seen only as the shadow of itself, and it did it twice.''

''Tulip put the obvious thing into words, which is that we had already established that eagles do not fly at night. So it is something else. We have no notion what, and no means of finding out, and I lay in a stone hut with magma under the floor listening to the wind and thinking about a shadow passing over us twice in a night, on a mountain four miles from a thing whose face burst a crystal at twelve miles.''

===== Laying the Table =====

''We spent today building the trap, and it is an elegant one.''

''Kel has laid a lattice of wards around the camp, each one a circle of ground some thirty feet across, each one waiting on a single condition: the hag enters it. Hers are transmutations — if she cannot throw the working off she becomes a fish, an enormous tuna flapping about on a mountainside in November, and we kill her at our leisure. Dross laid a second kind between them, wards that simply hurt what walks into them, which is less spectacular and rather more reliable; a thing that is being hurt strikes worse and finds it hard to concentrate on its own magic. Each of them could only ward their own workings, and no piece of ground will hold more than one ward, so the two kinds had to be fitted together like a chequerboard, with Kel pushing small circles into every gap so that whatever line the creature takes she must cross several of them before she reaches anybody.''

''The whole thing is possible because laying a ward is slow, deliberate work rather than a strain on the one laying it — an hour's careful effort apiece, and nothing taken out of them beyond the time it takes. Dross was frankly disbelieving when he heard it and checked twice. We have hours. We laid them all day.''

''Dross set his down beginning on the north-west side, that being the direction she will most likely come from, and worked inward from there. Seven of his took. One would not, and he left it at seven rather than push his luck, and I cannot say I blamed him. Jedburgh went round afterwards and hid our tracks, all the scuffing and trampling of a day's casting, and observed while he was doing it that it is not as though the hag will not know. Kel's answer was that there is no downside to hiding them, which is true and is not quite the same as saying it will help.''

''The rest of the battle order is set. Jedburgh will take her with sword and shield rather than with anything longer — he loses a little of his reach and gains a great deal of protection, and against her that is the right trade. Tulip will throw up walls of stone to funnel her, open at one end, with smoking magma laid underneath the floor of it, and she need never look at the creature to do any of it since she only needs to see the ground. Kel will sit at the back dropping phantasms on her and wearing her down. Tulip has also put her raven up during the daylight hours with orders to watch the sky and warn her if the two-headed eagle comes over.''

===== Birds Would Fall Out of the Sky =====

''My own part I asked to be arranged specially. I want a patch of the illusionary ground laid off to one side of the camp, where Corniger and I can stand unseen and out of the way, so that when she walks in I can come at her from outside the ring at a gallop instead of trying to get a charge going inside our own camp. A charge wants room. Kel is drawing it all onto the sketch of the ground we have and will have the whole arrangement marked up for us.''

''I also asked, rather pleased with myself, that we contrive some sort of blinkers for Corniger so that he cannot see her face. This turns out to be unnecessary and the reason is worth setting down: the thing her face does cannot touch what is not human. If it could, birds would be dropping out of the sky over that mountain, and Kel pointed out that there would be a trail of dead and dying animals behind her wherever she walked, which there is not.''

''So Corniger goes in with his eyes open, and I am relieved, and I have also had to listen to a good deal about how he will probably find her attractive. He has looked at me every day for years without complaint. I dare say he can manage one hag.''

===== A Stream You Could Jump =====

''There is a stream running past the camp. It is shallow — you would wade it rather than swim it, six feet at the deepest of its curves and mostly half that, and at its narrowest it is ten feet across and a man could jump it without much thinking about it. It comes down off these slopes and into the cataract, and the cataract is what turns the dam at Pomblière and lights the chlorine works and everything around it.''

''A very great deal of water stands above a very great many people in this valley, and I noted where it stands, and I am going to leave that noted and say nothing further about it.''

''We ran out of daylight before we ran out of preparations, which is the usual way of it, and so the calling waits. Kel will finish marking the ward map; Tulip will pick the exact lines of her walls once she has walked the ground properly; Dross has one more circle he means to lay if he can make it take. And then, when the light goes, we send for her. Dross has offered to work a blessing on the unborn child and a draught of virility into the bargain, since the party has decided that my contribution to this operation is to be an immaculate conception, and Kel says she looks forward to my virgin birth next week.''

''They can have their joke. What we are actually proposing to do is reach out into the mountains and politely ask a thing to walk into our camp — a thing that nearly struck a man down through twelve miles of air and a lump of polished stone, a thing that is in some manner we do not understand connected to two hundred women on a road, a thing that may bring its sisters — and then stand inside a ring we drew ourselves and wait for it to arrive. It will take under ten minutes to come. It may take one. And something crossed the moon above this camp twice last night, and no one has any idea what it was.''

----

{| class="wikitable"
|-
|

==== OOC Details ====

===== Items Acquired =====

'''Party (shared resources):'''

'''Balance brought forward:''' 2,500 sp
'''Balance carried forward:''' 2,500 sp

===== Session Summary =====

With Dross back at the fire, the party spent the evening [[#s8-careful-what-we-asked-for|settling the exact wording of a tarot question]] about the hag's part in the Nazi plan for the transferred women. The second reading answered with four Death cards and [[#s8-from-one-vessel-to-the-other|the Star reversed]]: she is directly involved, potions are in it, and the purpose is something reproductively perverse. Firmer convoy numbers — ten trucks from Rivesaltes to Saint-Marcel, roughly forty more by way of Camp de Gurs, and an estimated forty to fifty escorts — killed the rescue as an opening move, and the party committed to [[#s8-the-harder-thing-to-replace|killing the hag first and freeing the women afterwards]], on the reasoning that two hundred women are far easier for the enemy to replace than one hag. A long review of [[#s8-dont-ask-me-how|hag lore and of what her face does]] turned up no reliable defence, until Dross established that a hag counts as an enchanted creature and can therefore be summoned — which turned the plan into [[#s8-inviting-her-to-tea|sending for her onto ground of their own choosing]], with Kel sharing out Phantasm scrolls and Waters of Strength before the march.

The party left about five in the afternoon into [[#s8-casting-aspersions|full dark and hard mountain going]], and four minutes out Jedburgh's brown bear shape [[#s8-the-wrong-time-of-year|went berserk with pre-hibernation hunger]] and badly mauled Dross before Tabitha ended the fight by sleeping the bear for six hours. Roughly eight hours' walking along [[#s8-a-white-line-in-the-dark|a snow-capped ridgeline]] brought them to camp at two in the morning, within four miles of the hag's last sighting; Black's own count settled the date as 11 November 1942, leaving two and a half days before the trucks arrive. A hidden bivouac was built, and Kel's look ahead over the coming night showed only [[#s8-twice-over-the-camp|a moon shadow crossing the campsite twice]], unexplained. The following day went entirely on [[#s8-laying-the-table|laying a chequerboard of wards around the camp]] and setting the battle order, with Black asking for [[#s8-birds-would-fall-out-of-the-sky|a concealed charge position for himself and Corniger]] and learning that the hag's visage cannot affect a horse. The session ends with the party still at the warded camp above the Pomblière valley, [[#s8-a-stream-you-could-jump|a jumpable stream and the cataract that drives the dam noted and left alone]], waiting on nightfall to summon her.

===== Chronological Timeline =====

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date !! Event
| Day 40 || Tarot confirms the hag's involvement; hag-first decision locked; kit distributed; night march into the mountains, interrupted by Jedburgh's berserk bear form
|-
| Day 41 || Camp four miles from the hag; date settled as 11 November 1942; warded ambush ground and battle order prepared; session ends before the summoning
|}
|}

----

=== Chapter 9: Mountainous Ruin ===

''She was on the mountain with us for rather less time than it takes to boil a kettle, and she never spoke one word, and on her way out she very nearly buried the five of us under the whole north slope.''

===== Dutch Courage =====

''The last of the arguing was about counterspells, and it went the way these things go: two minutes of actual disagreement and twenty of everybody agreeing at length. Jedburgh is a Namer, and the point of a Namer is that he can hold the party's protections himself and change which of them are running as the fight changes shape. If Kel or Dross lays a protection on a man, that man is stuck wearing it until somebody gets round to stripping it off him. So Jedburgh took them all, and he was right to.''

''Dross wanted more of it — a working laid down over the ground during the fight, and another, and another, everywhere she might stand. I said what I thought of that, which is that it costs too much of the time we were not going to have, and that it gets in the way of the screaming and crying. Kel said the same thing in fewer words. We settled on two of the Wiccan protections running at once over the lot of us, which put our resistance to her magic higher than I have ever carried into a fight, and we left it there.''

''Out of that came the only comfort any of us had going in. If she threw fire at us and even one of us set himself squarely against it as it came, the weight of all that resistance would come off her own effort, and the likeliest outcome was that she blew herself up with it. I resolved to spend the fight bracing against everything she did and hitting nothing at all, which is not how I usually earn my keep.''

''Jedburgh raised the bear again and was told again, patiently, that it is November. Tulip turned one of the knobs on that staff of hers and put out an iron rhinoceros — a black metal thing four times the size of a horse, which will carry half a ton, understands anything said to it, and has no name, since she means to take votes on one after the fighting. The fire snake came out of the same staff, thirty-odd feet of it, and was judged to have no business on a mountainside in November until somebody worked out that it could ride on the rhinoceros and keep warm. There is apparently a classical precedent for a serpent being carried by an eagle. This was a rhinoceros, and I let it go.''

''Then Kel put a suggestion into all our heads not to look at the creature's face, which she admitted might help and might not, and which cost us a great deal of our accuracy in exchange for not being emptied out where we stood. Kel's instruction to the fighters was to stare at her chest instead. I observed that one would want the central one, obviously, for targeting. We drank the waters of strength — mine did almost nothing, and nor did anybody else's, and I have never seen five people so uniformly cheated by a draught — and Jedburgh worked a banishment over himself that he said was as strong as anything he has ever managed. After that there was nothing left to do but send for her.''

===== A Prompt Reply =====

''Kel had been busy all afternoon and the ground showed it. She had put a crowd of motionless illusions out in the open where anything arriving would see them first: brave adventurers, standing about on a mountainside in the dark with no cover whatever, which is exactly the sort of thing a hag would expect of us. She made a second Kel besides, visible and walking about and entirely hollow, and then took herself out of sight altogether. The rest of us lay under her false ground with our thoughts strung together so we could talk without a sound, and I had Corniger beside me off to the side of the camp with a clear run at whatever came in.''

''Dross asked whether everybody was ready. Nobody said no, which is not the same thing. He held the particular creature in his mind and called her, and it took on the first attempt, and then there was only the question of how long she would take to come.''

''She would be with us in a little over two minutes.''

''There was a pause while everyone did the same arithmetic. Two minutes is not enough time to gather sisters, or to fetch whatever a thing like that keeps for company. I said as much aloud — that it might be quick enough that she could not bring support with her — and Dross said yes, and neither of us said the other half of it, which is that two minutes is also not enough time for us to change our minds.''

===== Talk of the Weather =====

''She came into sight about fifty yards out. Bluish-grey, in ordinary old woman's clothes, which is somehow worse than the alternative. I kept my eyes deliberately off her face and found I had been looking entirely the wrong way in any case, and was glad of it.''

''Dross heard it before any of us saw anything: thunder, a long way up and getting nearer. She had begun the work before she ever reached us. Kel named it — a storm calling, worked as an incantation rather than as a spell, which is why none of us placed it at once — and Dross knew the thing because he has read the book it comes out of. He never learned it, because it wants fulminating gold and he had neither the gold nor the time. Kel pointed out, cheerfully, that if we survived the next few minutes there would be some gold on the corpse.''

''The storm did not need her attention after that. It simply came on, building the whole time we fought, and when it arrived it would put lightning down on us every few seconds and splash the rest across everything standing nearby. I said it was unfair, lightning against armoured people. I said it because it is true and because somebody has to say something at that point. Then she started down the slope towards us and the conversation ended.''

===== Clearing the Table =====

''The mountain did not slow her at all. Ground that would have had me on hands and knees she crossed at the pace of a man walking a lawn, and she preferred to come at us cornerwise for reasons that were hers and not ours, and she covered a great deal more of the hillside in each stride than the eye said she should. Jedburgh muttered something about the stride of a hill giant. It was about right.''

''Jedburgh went first and went for her outright — a working laid over the ground where she stood, to close her magic down before she could use any of it. He asked whether he might draw on the mountains themselves to press it, on the grounds that he was casting on a mountain, while standing on a mountain, in the mountains, and he was allowed it. It made no difference. The thing failed by a hair and he sat there with nothing to show for it, and after that our protection against her was whatever we had brought with us.''

''Then she answered, and she answered with one working, and it was tripled. Every phantasm we had put out — Kel's, Dross's, Tulip's, all the labour of two scrolls and a good deal of preparation — was gone in the one breath. Kel worked out afterwards what that single breath had carried across the whole of that ground, and it was enough to have killed any one of us outright several times over. Whether it was hellfire or the Wiccan way of unmaking phantasms nobody could say for certain, and it hardly mattered. Jedburgh said that is what happens when you take a fighter to a magic fight. I said something less useful. Only the static illusions came through it, and they came through only because they had been standing too far out for her to reach, which was luck and not foresight.''

===== Whistling =====

''So I did the other thing, which was to make myself worth looking at.''

''I took Corniger out from under Kel's false ground and up onto the open slope, well inside the range of whatever she had thrown at the phantasms, and did my best to look unobtrusive and unthreatening, which on a great winged horse with six illusory copies of himself and of me strung out alongside is a tall order. I believe I whistled. Kel told me not to charge — that if I came at her she would simply stand off and keep throwing — and she was right, and it is a poor sort of fighting where the best thing you can do is stand about being visible.''

''She did not take it. She moved a few paces, quite unhurried, and sank into the stone of the mountainside and was gone.''

''That was the moment the fight turned, though none of us knew it at the time; we only knew she had taken away everything we could aim at. What we did with it was this. Tulip put seven hands of earth up out of the ground all round the place she had gone in, and over the top of it, leaving one gap for Corniger and one for the rhinoceros, so that whichever way she surfaced something would take hold of her. Dross prepared his own silencing working over the same patch and held it there, hidden, where she could not see it and had no reason to look for it. And I brought up a dark sphere and held it.''

''I wanted to put it into the rock about seven feet behind where her face had last been, so that the only direction left to her was forward, into the rhinoceros. I was told, reasonably enough, that the thing goes where I send it in a straight line from me and cannot be curled round behind anybody, and that all I was really aiming at was the last place I had seen her. So I aimed at the last place I had seen her, and waited, and did not release it.''

===== Heads You Lose =====

''She moved a short way inside the stone. She had no way of knowing what we had laid over the ground she was moving under, and no reason to come up in one place rather than another, and it came down to nothing better than a coin's toss.''

''She surfaced inside Dross's working.''

''I have thought about that a good deal since. Everything we did that night was careful, and the careful things bought us the chance for one stupid piece of luck to happen, and then it happened. She had a spell prepared and ready and the moment she came up she knew she could not let it go, and she abandoned it. In the same breath Kel's phantasm reached her and hurt her — a small hurt, by her standards — and because it worked on what she believed rather than on her body, what she actually experienced was a kitten pulling her knitting apart. That is the only part of the evening I would want to see again.''

''She was going to have to step out of the stone to do anything at all. She never got the chance. I had been holding my moment, waiting for it to be worth something, and I spent it then, and put the dark sphere into her while she was still inside the rock. She had one chance to shrug it off and she did not take it.''

''It took her head. All of it, and everything she was wearing on it, which by the reckoning of those of us who had been hoping to loot her was a serious loss. I said it was a price I was willing to pay. She was dead before the stone had finished closing round her, and her body stayed where it was, sunk in the rock, which meant that anything we wanted off her would have to be chipped out.''

===== The Measure of Her =====

''We had the corpse, and the thing that had been in her hand, and between what Kel and Dross know of her kind and what the body itself told us, we put together what we had actually been fighting. I set it down here because I want to be able to look at it when I am next feeling pleased with myself.''

''The object in her hand was a talisman, and it let her work earth magic at a mastery none of us can touch — that was the melting into stone, and that was the tremors. She had two colleges behind her besides. Her body weighed what four strong men weigh and was that much stronger, dense the whole way through, and she had claws and knew how to use them, and a grip that crushes; if she had ever closed with any of us it would not have been a fight, it would have been an accident. She had an unseeing ready to drop over herself the moment she came out of the rock, and if she had got it off I do not believe we would have found her again before the storm arrived. And she was proof against any working that moves a thing, or reshapes it, or puts it on its back.''

''Which means Tulip's seven hands of earth would never have held her for a heartbeat. They would have stood round her like a wall of armour and made her harder to hit. We had spent our best restraint building her a redoubt.''

''She also knew, at every moment, exactly where every one of us was standing, because in mountains her kind feel anything that moves on the ground within a mile. All our concealment, all Kel's false ground, the tracks Jedburgh scuffed out yesterday afternoon — none of it hid us. It only hid which of the shapes on that hillside were worth her attention, and that, it turns out, was enough. The one of us she could not feel was the one in the air, and the one in the air is the one who killed her.''

''Nobody took a scratch. Given the rest of it, that is not a victory so much as a reprieve.''

===== Her Last Word =====

''Tulip got over to the rock and chipped her out of it — slow going, because there was a great deal of her and she was heavy as ore — and she had barely disgorged the body when the mountain above us let go.''

''The old woman had shaken the snow loose on her way down. She must have done it as she came, before she was ever in sight of us, and it had been working itself up the whole time we were busy with her, and it arrived as a wall of ice and snow coming off the slope to the north with the noise of a train. So she had the last word after all, and she had it without saying anything.''

''Jedburgh took the eagle and went straight up, and was clear before the rest of us had finished thinking about it. I went the same way on Corniger, who is fast enough for anything short of what was coming and got us above it comfortably. Everybody else piled into Tulip's tunnel, and she put the iron rhinoceros in the mouth of it like a cork, and the whole lot went under.''

''They were under something on the order of thirty-odd feet of snow and ice. Nobody was hurt, which I did not expect and am grateful for, and the rhinoceros set about shifting it, and the estimate was a couple of hours.''

===== Nothing to Worry About =====

''There is a particular kind of idiot cheerfulness that comes over me after a fight I expected to lose. I had a good long look round the whole mountainside from up in the air, saw nothing of any kind, and told the buried remainder of the party that there was nothing whatever to worry about and that they should all be perfectly comfortable. Kel, from under thirty feet of snow, replied that she has a sense for when something is wrong, and that it was going off, and that she would be keeping a watch with her mind while we dug regardless of my opinion. I let her have it. She has been right before, and I had just told five people that everything was fine while standing over a headless corpse in an avalanche field.''

''Within a minute or two of my saying it, Corniger saw the two-headed eagle.''

''It was going north, away from us and going hard. Dross said the obvious thing — that the creature is enchanted, and that enchanted things can be called — and asked whether he should. Nobody objected. He worked it, and the bird was seven miles out, and his reach falls a mile short of that. It felt him anyway. It knew perfectly well that something had been laid on it, and it dropped out of the sky to the ground and stayed there.''

''So now it knows. Tulip thinks it may be loose of whatever was holding it, with the old woman dead, and says so hopefully; that is a guess and I have written it down as one. My own guess is that it was running from the storm, which is at least a reason a bird would have. Either way it is seven miles north of us, it is aware of us, and it is the second thing this week to go over our heads and away without explaining itself.''

===== The Long Way Out =====

''Then there was nothing to do but wait for a metal rhinoceros to shovel us out, and men who have just survived something invariably fill that sort of hour with schemes. Jedburgh offered his flaming glaive to cut a passage. Somebody proposed putting smoking magma under the ice, until it was pointed out that the steam would cook everybody in the tunnel. Transmutation was raised and abandoned. I offered to dig with the ebon hand, and Tulip asked the only sensible question, which was where exactly I proposed to put the snow. The rhinoceros kept working. It took about two hours, and would have taken about two hours whatever any of us did.''

''It was somewhere in there that Jedburgh mentioned, in the tone of a man remembering he has a spare coat, that he has people. He came by them out of a book he took from the Library of Leng, which is a sentence I have learned to let pass without comment. There is a Frenchman called Pierre who is a demolitions man and speaks the language as a native, and there is an American — one of the native peoples, a Navajo he thinks — who is a Marxist and an assassin, in that order or the reverse. Jedburgh can change places with them. He has never done it, and he raised it now chiefly because he was thinking how pleasant it would be to have a quantity of gelignite and a man who knows what to do with it, which is a fair description of our next problem as well as our present one.''

''I made a note to ask more about this when we are not buried.''

===== The Name of the Dog =====

''We got out, and while I was still above the slope on Corniger a young man came up out of the valley to look at the avalanche.''

''He had a rucksack and an alpenstock and proper cold weather clothing, and an enormous St Bernard trotting beside him, and he picked his way about the edge of the slide in the manner of a man who has seen a few of them. Then he looked up and saw a man sitting on a flying horse, and did what anybody would do, which is stop dead. I waved at him in a friendly fashion. Jedburgh sat motionless on a branch in his eagle shape, being, I am told, unusually poor at pretending to be an eagle.''

''He spoke passable English with an accent I could not place, and I told him I had been out for a night ride because I could not sleep, and had got lost, and had come to see the avalanche in case anybody needed digging out. He observed that there is a war on and that I was on the other side of it. I said that was more or less so, and that it hardly signified up here, and he let it go, because at bottom he wanted to talk to somebody.''

''So: about twenty-three, Swiss, out of the university five years with a degree in chemical engineering he never wanted, which was chosen for him. Lesser aristocracy, one of those old families that keeps its rank without much money attached. He works for a bank somewhere near the border and is stationed at the valley as its man on the spot, watching the factory's finances. He hates it. What he actually cares about is mountains — he has been up to look at Mont Blanc, he is keen on the Eiger and knows perfectly well what the Eiger does to people, and he follows Mallory and wants the Himalayas more than he wants anything. He was on his way north to a great cross that stands above the valley when the mountain came down and turned him aside.''

''I have all of that. I do not have his name. I never asked for it and he never gave it, and I came away from twenty minutes of talk knowing that his dog is called Schwaefel and is a red and white St Bernard, which is apparently an unfashionable colour. I have his dog's name and not his. That is the sort of interview I conduct.''

===== Friendly Advice =====

''I tried the lie first, because I wanted to know what he knew. I told him there was a rumour in the town that the people up at the dam were doing some sort of research — biology, disease, that kind of thing — and watched him. There is no such rumour. I invented it standing there. He said good God, and meant it, and had plainly never heard anything of the sort, and I am now reasonably confident that whatever is being done at the Usine de Pomblière is not being done where its banker can see it.''

''What he gave me instead was better, and he gave it away without being asked, because it had been bothering him for months. The factory never asks the bank for money. It has income from somewhere and will not say where. Every other concern he has ever dealt with is scrabbling for finance and spending it as carefully as it can; this one, when it needs a sum, simply has it. His own words were that the money just magically appears, and that he had lately started to wonder about it.''

''I told him not to wonder. I said it in the voice I keep for this, which is quiet and pleasant and not pleasant at all: that given what I have seen and heard of the organisation those people work for, asking too many questions may mean he never sees his family again, and that he would do better to look the other way and do his job. Just my friendly advice. He went rather quiet.''

''I had already made a mess of the other approach. I had told him he seemed the sort of young man built for adventure, that I could find a use for his skills, and that the career I had in mind was a long one — hundreds of years, I said, and possibly thousands, which I had entirely neglected to mention at the outset. He turned it down on account of his family; his parents would be destroyed, and he has obligations, and he will not be the one who breaks the line. He said all this kindly, in the way one humours a madman on a mountain, and I am in no doubt whatever that he thinks I am completely off the planet. Jedburgh observed afterwards that this is our best protection: the man cannot report a flying horse and an Englishman offering him immortality without being locked up, and he knows it.''

''I gave him a bottle of claret for the walk down. He is no drunkard, but he is twenty-three and it was cold, and he took it, and something about that transaction pleased me more than it should have. He can very likely get us inside the factory if we ask him. He is going down to Moûtiers to report the avalanche, and I said we might pop by tomorrow, and tomorrow is where we have left it.''

''He went off down the slope with his dog, looking for anyone the mountain might have caught, and I sat and watched him go. We have left a great deal behind us up here. There is a headless thing in the snow with a hole through where her face was. There is a chequerboard of wards standing on empty ground, waiting for something to walk into them, and Dross is convinced they will still be sitting there at the end of time; Kel says wards do not go away. And the storm she called is still building somewhere above all of it and coming on, and it does not care in the least that she is dead.''

----

{| class="wikitable"
|-
|

==== OOC Details ====

===== Items Acquired =====

'''Kel:'''
* Hag's blackthorn talisman (unpriced)

'''Black:'''
* Hag's blackthorn talisman (unpriced)
* Bottle of claret (unpriced)

'''Dross:'''
* Hag's blackthorn talisman (unpriced)

'''Jedburgh:'''
* Hag's blackthorn talisman (unpriced)

'''Tulip:'''
* Hag's blackthorn talisman (unpriced)

'''Balance brought forward:''' 2,500 sp
'''Balance carried forward:''' 2,500 sp

===== Session Summary =====

The party spent the last of its preparation time on the mountain [[#s9-dutch-courage|settling counterspell doctrine and deploying Tulip's iron rhino golem]], then [[#s9-a-prompt-reply|hid under Kel's illusory terrain behind a screen of decoys while Dross summoned the Mountain Hag]] — who answered in a little over two minutes. [[#s9-talk-of-the-weather|She arrived roughly fifty yards out, already calling a storm]] through an incantation none of them could counter, [[#s9-clearing-the-table|crossed the mountainside unimpeded, shrugged off Jedburgh's counterspell and wiped out every phantasm the party had raised with one tripled working]]. With nothing left to aim at, [[#s9-whistling|Black rode out on Corniger as visible bait; she ignored him and melted into the stone]], and the party boxed the spot in with hands of earth, a hidden counterspell and a readied dark sphere. [[#s9-heads-you-lose|She surfaced by pure chance inside Dross's counterspell and Black killed her in the rock]], taking her head and everything worn on it.

[[#s9-the-measure-of-her|The body and the talisman in her hand revealed how badly the fight could have gone]] — mountain hags are immune to exactly the restraint Tulip had prepared, and sense every creature moving on the ground for a mile. [[#s9-her-last-word|The earth tremors she cast on her approach then brought an avalanche down on the camp]]; Jedburgh flew clear as an eagle, Black on Corniger, and the rest sheltered in Tulip's tunnel under roughly thirty-six feet of snow. During the dig-out [[#s9-nothing-to-worry-about|Black's cheerful all-clear was contradicted by Kel's danger sense, and Corniger spotted the two-headed eagle fleeing north beyond Dross's summoning reach]], while [[#s9-the-long-way-out|the two hours of shovelling produced a string of discarded schemes and the first mention of Jedburgh's Hugh Team]]. At the surface [[#s9-the-name-of-the-dog|a young Swiss mountaineer and his St Bernard came up to inspect the slide]], and [[#s9-friendly-advice|gave away that the Usine de Pomblière never asks its bank for money]] — after which Black warned him off wondering about it, failed to recruit him, and gave him a bottle of claret. The party remains at the buried camp site with the hag's storm still building overhead; a visit to the factory contact in Moûtiers is planned for the following day.

===== Chronological Timeline =====

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date !! Event
| Day 42 || Mountain Hag summoned and slain at the warded camp; her talisman looted; her avalanche buries the party, who dig out and meet a Swiss bank liaison at the slide
|}
|}

----

=== Chapter 10: Revelations ===

''It is a peculiar sort of day that begins with an old woman's handbag and ends with the exact coordinates of six places where people are killed for a living.''

===== Off the Scent =====

''The first question of the morning was how to find where she had come from, since killing the thing had bought us nothing at all if we could not find the hole it lived in. Jedburgh offered to fly about and look, and admitted in the same breath that it was unreliable; Kel suggested, without much enthusiasm, calling up another one and asking it. Tulip said the obvious thing, which is that the creature had walked here, and things that walk leave a trail.''

''The avalanche had not wiped it out — she came down on us from the north-east, and nobody has ever brought a mountainside down behind his own back — and she had never troubled to conceal her passage. But she had that habit of cutting hard across the diagonal every so often, over ground that should have slowed her and did not, and between the terrain and the zig-zagging any tracker was working at a disadvantage before he started.''

''Tulip is the best of us at it, once her spell and her companion Sienna are counted in. She worked at it a good while and led the whole party a pleasant stroll over a great deal of empty mountainside to nothing whatever. Dross observed that we had been promised a witch's cottage and given a walk.''

===== Her Effects =====

''Then somebody pointed out that we had never properly gone through her, which tells you something about the state we were all in the previous night.''

''She had a blackthorn stick in her hand — a wand in hers, being eight feet of old woman, and a walking stick in mine — and it is the talisman she died holding. Round her neck was the necklace I broke myself, carrying the usual amulets one expects on a practitioner and one that was not usual at all, a stone of a vague pinkish-purple none of us could place. Two rings, gold and blue metal, neither of which will go on a human or elvish finger without a talented jeweller first; I offered my own training as a goldsmith and it was accepted with less enthusiasm than I thought it deserved. A ruined shawl, a red leather reticule, and boots of black metal so enormous that we spent some time failing to think of anybody who might wear them.''

''Jedburgh took the quick reading of each rather than the long one. The gold ring is defensive; the blue enhances some natural process, and which process he could not say and nobody has said since, so I leave it written down as unfinished business. The boots are dimensional — not running unimpeded over broken ground, as I first guessed, but the other thing: she covered more mountainside in a stride cut cornerwise than she had any business covering. That explains the zig-zag, and does not make me feel better about it.''

''The reticule is the best of it, holding seven complete changes of clothing in a rigid red tube no longer than a forearm. What was in it was worse: three skins, folded, each with its clothes — a girl of nine with little red shoes and a red hooded coat, a schoolmistress in a grey business suit, an older man got up as a farmer. They are oil-treated and reusable, and the right magic laid on the wearer renders one inert without destroying it, so a wearer can be stripped out of the disguise and the disguise kept. Everybody said how appalling it was, and everybody then made quite sure we were taking them. I observed that one must dress appropriately for the occasion and got the look I had earned. There was a tarot deck besides, seventy-eight cards that ought not to be magical and are, in an ivory case whose only trick is to let the deck be made ready in a single motion; Dross kept the lot to read himself.''

''Last, her womb was among the remains, and it was not empty. The child in it is near term, alive, and will sleep a century if nobody wakes it; and hags have been known to throw such a thing into an enemy at need, after which it rends its way out through the stomach of whoever received it. It is fully loaded and sits on a hair trigger. There followed a silence while everybody worked out that somebody would have to carry it. The Hordling declined absolutely — he was not going to be pregnant if it went off, he was not going to eat it, and there are limits. So I took it, and spent something of my own on making certain it stays asleep. I am aware of how this reads.''

===== Uphill Work =====

''Dross thought it worth another try at calling the two-headed eagle, since we had learned the night before that the creature can feel him reaching for it, and Kel put an illusion over us while he worked — advertising ourselves twice in two days on an open mountainside being poor practice. He held it two minutes and nothing came. The bird is beyond his reach, wherever it has gone, and he spent a great deal of himself to find that out; he was grey afterwards and short with people, which is not like him.''

''Then Jedburgh tried the trail himself, by night, with the moon in its first quarter and light enough to read ground by, and he failed too. There was talk of his learning a dog's shape, a dog's nose being the thing that would settle it, and it came to nothing, since the shapes take a year apiece.''

''So we asked her. Dross can put questions to the dead and the dead do not get much say in it, but he gets five short answers and no more, so we spent longer composing the questions than the ritual took. I held up the proceedings for some minutes arguing whether a hag counts as a person for the purposes of the first one, which I maintain was a fair point and which the rest of the party maintains I would have died defending. How many others in your coven: none. Where is your base: uphill. What landmark is nearest: La Croix de l'Alpe. What protects it: concealment. And what do you do for the Nazis: breeder reactors.''

''That last sat badly with everybody. Kel asked, a little later, where the breeding women were meant to fit into it, and I said what I believe to be the truth, which is that the two hundred coming up the valley tomorrow are the answer to that question, and that the same word has been doing two jobs all along.''

===== Dead Ground =====

''La Croix de l'Alpe is a great cross standing on a small peak north-east of us, above the Isère, in a place they call the hill of beautiful shadows. It is two thousand feet above where we stood and three hours of climbing for men on foot, and we are not men on foot. We went up a little after nine, in the dark, Dross taking us slowly over the forest while Kel cast her mind ahead to see what was living down there. What she found was an absence: a patch of ground north of the cross, up a cleft between two bare eroded chunks of mountain, where no animal hangs about at all in country that ought to be thick with them. An absence is a better mark than a presence, and she was entitled to be pleased with herself.''

''We put down and walked up to it. Part of the rock and packed earth had crumbled away, and in the stone were the imprints of enormous fingers and enormous boots, and no doubt at all that this was where she had come out — a long serpentine crack, twelve feet from wall to wall and some seventy feet of floor, running back into the mountain. Jedburgh went at it in the traditional manner with a ten-foot pole, which looks ridiculous and has kept more people alive than valour has. No trips or traps anywhere in it, which ought to have been reassuring and was not, because a careless woman is the only kind who leaves her front path unguarded.''

''Kel settled it. She looked ahead at herself walking into the ravine — she narrated the whole performance, the stupid human wandering in and pottering about looking for a door — and what she saw was the cleft shaking, snow coming off the walls, stone coming down, and herself dead at the bottom of it. She reported this cheerfully. I have never got used to that. So not a trap but a ward, laid over the whole approach and triggered by weight on the ground; we were not killed on arrival only because we came in over the top of it through the air, and that worked only because it had never occurred to whoever laid it that anybody would arrive other than walking. A clever precaution is only clever against the thing it imagines.''

''The warded ground was far too large to be smothered piecemeal, so it had to be unmade rather than held down, and that is Jedburgh's trade. He went at it as a ritual, an hour of steady work with rather better than a fair chance at the end of it, while the rest of us sat in the cold. Tulip made tea, which is not a small thing; some of what the day had taken out of us came back with it. Then Kel looked ahead a second time and saw no ward at all, which is the only proof one gets of that sort of work. Tulip tried the ground inside the ravine while we were about it, and failed. Three times in one day, and I have stopped making remarks about it, partly out of charity and mostly because nobody had asked me to try.''

===== The Tradesman's Entrance =====

''They asked me then, since among the things my kit does for me are a thief's eyes, and I found it in short order: a crack in what looks exactly like one of the blocks of granite that lie about these mountains in quantity, open, not even a door, and invisible unless you know what you are looking for. No traps on it either, and I checked twice, being the one going in first.''

''It was draped with a tarpaulin, and the tarpaulin is the most interesting thing we found all night. It is canvas. It is not magical in any degree. It is an alpine camouflage sheet made by the Italian Army. Jedburgh shrugged and said such things are two a penny in wartime, and he is right, and he is also missing the point, which is that it did not come from Alusia. Somebody in this world, with quartermasters and requisition forms, was supplying an eight-foot hag in a hole in a mountain.''

''Inside it is immaculate. Not tidy for a monster — tidy. It is an office: a hag-sized scribe's desk shaped straight out of the granite of the room, dip pens and ink laid out on it, the desk of a person who writes longhand all day and cares about the angle of the work. Filing cabinets, three drawers apiece. Behind a curtain a bedroom with a stone bed and a leather-strap mattress, a kitchen, and an alchemical laboratory facing south and open to the air. The whole of it tunnelled and bound out of the earth rather than cut, temporary work — she meant to move on — and beautiful. I picked the cabinet, which took some doing. Inside, papers, all German, all handwritten in the hand of the country and the period, which looks nothing like the way we write. I speak German. I cannot read a word of it.''

''Tulip went through the laboratory stores. Most of the poisons are mineral, got out of ores, which fits everything else we know of her; one animal venom could be rendered down for a blade by anybody with reason enough to handle it; one is slow and agonising, with no cure short of a great healer working weeks at it; and there are samples of a metal that glows blue and harms a man simply by being near him. I suggested somebody show the Hordling which of them were poisonous. He had already worked it out and was eating them. It was, from his point of view, a birthday.''

''Then I went through the workroom as an alchemist, and to get anything out of it at all I spent a great deal of the good fortune I hoard for emergencies — enough that I do not expect chance to hand me another useful thing in that place for a fortnight. It bought two things. The pinkish stone off her necklace has a little pitchblende in it and flares in air where that blue-metal sort of decay is happening, which parts of her workroom obligingly provided; a poor detector, since by the time you see the glow you have had the dose, and I am keeping it anyway. And it bought the mews: a stable at the back, open to the sky, thirty-five feet by twenty, two troughs the size of a horse's set seven feet up on opposite walls. What went into them was sheep, and what else went into them was described to us as slow children, and I set that down without comment because I do not trust myself to make one. Among the giant pole arms stacked nearby there is a lance. A lance means she rode; troughs set that far apart mean the thing she rode had two heads. We have been chasing a two-headed eagle for two days and I am fairly sure it is not an eagle and never was. Tulip said she would like one as a pet.''

===== Mishandled =====

''There were maps in the office, which is what we actually came away with: one in German, one in something close enough to German that I could tell it was not German and get no further, and two or three others, of which one is local and French. Tulip said we should roll them up and take the lot and find somebody to read them, and that was plainly right. The cabinet was the harder question, and Kel settled it — we would take the whole thing. Papers lifted out of a filing cabinet stop being filed, and a great deal of what such a haul is worth lies in the order somebody else put it in. So it went out bodily, to be lashed under the carpet. I have carried filing cabinets before. They are unbalanced, ungainly things, and you cannot see your feet past them.''

''I struck it against the rock wall on the way out through the ravine and it came apart in my hands, and the whole contents of it went out across the gorge in the dark. Kel did not say anything. She looked at me with her disappointed face, which is worse, and told Dross there would be no treats. Everyone went scrambling after paper in a cold wind, and everyone but Tulip got a decent share of it back; she came up empty and looked as sick about it as I felt. We have most of it, out of order, some of it wet, some pages gone and some of what is left illegible. I proposed a story in which the cabinet proved too cumbersome and the papers were moved to a haversack and jiggled about in transit. Nobody believed a word of it, and I would like it on the record that it was not deliberate.''

''It was around ten when we came down, the hour when only fools and radio operators are awake. Jedburgh raised going to Julien instead, the man seeming the sort to open his door at any hour to anyone turning up with schnapps. I said no: we have intelligence that needs reading, Diane can begin reading it tonight, and calling on the Swiss banker again is a risk that buys us nothing.''

===== The Shape of It =====

''Diane let us in and took the whole miserable armful without complaint. She has French, German, English and Italian, and under any other circumstances would have had it sorted by dawn. As it was she made slow, bad work of it, and none of the fault was hers. I do not think she said anything about how it came to be in that condition. She did not need to.''

''The map that was nearly German is Polish. She read the names off it: Che?mno, Be??ec, Sobibór, Majdanek, Treblinka and Auschwitz. Those are not work camps, and she made the distinction: in a work camp a great many people die and it happens incidentally, whereas these are places built for the killing of people already marked to be killed, and the killing is done the way a factory does a thing. Auschwitz began as the other kind and was converted this year. I asked what the significance was of the map being in Polish and was told, reasonably, that they are all in Poland, and that the real question is why our old woman in the Alps had them written down at all.''

''Every one of them but Majdanek has an arrow drawn beside it and a set of coordinates given to four places of decimals. Jedburgh said the word before I did: six points is a hexagon, or a six-pointed star. Dross said the thing none of us wanted said first, which is that death in those quantities may be the point rather than the consequence — that the count is sacrificial, and the arrangement is there to raise power or to call something. I asked whether they are building a summoning circle out of camps and got no answer, because there is not one to be had. Majdanek has no arrow and no coordinates, which may mean it is unfinished, or not yet in use, or nothing at all. We have no astrologer. I am going to learn astrology.''

''The French map is a different shape and may be a worse one: a chain of marks, each about sixteen miles from the last, beginning at a place called Tarascon — there are two towns of that name, which will need sorting out — and running up the country to finish near Moûtiers. Jedburgh's reading is that it is a chain of stepping points, sixteen miles at a stride, a point teleport or an earth door repeated the length of France. The last mark on it is the lair we had just robbed. The next one back is about ten miles further west, down in the Tarentaise valley below us, and we have never been there, and nobody has any idea what is sitting in it.''

===== A Proper Introduction =====

''While Diane worked we all helped with the sorting, and it was Tulip and I who put our hands on the same sheet at the same moment. There was a photograph clipped to it, and the photograph was the pleasant young man from the avalanche.''

''His name is Heinrich von Kleist. He is a member of the SS, seconded to the Ahnenerbe on a project to defeat the Russian war effort at Stalingrad, and his actual work — the thing he goes down the valley to do — is to coordinate with the Usine de Pomblière on the production of cobalt sixty breeders. So the hag's last word and the banker's day job are the same sentence read from two ends. Kel said he had seemed such a nice man. Tulip said, with feeling, that we could have interrogated him and would now know everything. And I sat there thinking that I came off that mountain with his dog's name and not his, and that it has taken a stolen filing cabinet and a woman reading German at midnight to make the introduction I failed to make myself. Diane knew the family at once: an old Prussian house, military almost to a man, and he is certainly noble, which I also failed to notice. Several of that family, this one among them, have given indications of supporting the Allied effort, some of them mixed up in Operation Spark. It is not nothing, and it is not much, and I am not inclined to gamble the party on it.''

''The worse realisation came a moment later. He did not only see me on my flying horse; he saw all of us coming up out of a hole in the snow behind an iron rhinoceros four times the size of a horse, which is not a thing a trained intelligence officer forgets to put in his report. Somewhere in this town a key is being worked frantically at this very moment. So the disguises go — mine is a vintner, adequate yesterday and worth nothing now, and Corniger is a permanent giveaway — and Kel will change the lot of us. Diane should move too, because being right about this sort of thing after the fact is no use to anybody. I also gave that man a bottle of my claret. Kel has written in her notes that Black gives wine to Nazis, Tulip amended it to SS officers, and the pair of them will be insufferable for a month. I intend to make him a very dead man at the earliest convenient opportunity.''

''The rest of the night went on plans, without much profit. Jedburgh's instinct was to blow the dam, which was mine too, and the dam turns out to be too small to be worth it; Kel's suggestion that I put the dark sphere through it would achieve little beyond some water leaking out faster than it does now. The factory is another matter, full of sodium and chlorine, and a man could do it over very badly with proper demolition gear — which is a description of Jedburgh's Frenchman Pierre and a quantity of gelignite, and I notice this is the second night running that the same answer has presented itself. I asked after the researcher Diane once mentioned, the one working on the RNA business, because I have had it in my head that it is a precursor to the zombie virus and would like to be wrong; the work is essentially already done.''

''Then the convoy, which arrives tomorrow: ten trucks, some fifty guards, two hundred women. My assumption had been that this was Diane's territory rather than ours, and it is wrong — the underground networks move half a dozen people at a time and consider it a busy month. Jedburgh asked, in the tone of a man who has just thought of something awful, whether we could skin-change the lot of them into mice. Dross will prepare the skins in advance, Tulip can call mice out of the countryside and Vixen will fetch them, Kel suggested binding cats and terriers besides; the bottleneck is the skinning, ten or fifteen an hour for a practised hand, which makes it days of work whichever way it is cut. Portugal will serve for a destination, Spain calling itself neutral and being nothing of the kind. Dross spent part of it wistfully: there is a working that would turn the whole convoy into mice at a stroke, it costs sixty thousand in silver merely to learn, and he has never had that much money in one place in his life.''

''One last thing before I sleep. We have the measure of the blackthorn stick at last: a talisman keyed to fire, carrying a selection of fire workings ready in it — putting fires out, heating, warding a man against burning, and others besides — with the bearer choosing which, and how many it will hold depending on how practised he already is in that art. It can be used in the hand at close quarters, where it hits like a club and burns at the same time. It travels about under its own power. And it has, I am reliably informed, the personality of a football hooligan.''

''So: near midnight on the thirteenth, in a resistance woman's rooms in an occupied town, with a sheaf of wet German paperwork, a map of six death camps arranged in a hexagon, a second map showing a chain of doorways running the length of France with an unvisited one ten miles west of here, and the name and photograph of a man I gave wine to. Somewhere below us a key is still tapping. Tomorrow two hundred women arrive under guard and we have a plan involving mice. And I am carrying, in a bag, a sleeping child in a hag's womb with a hair trigger on it, because the alternative was leaving it on a mountain, and because I was the one who took her head off and it seemed to me that made it mine.''

----

{| class="wikitable"
|-
|

==== OOC Details ====

===== Items Acquired =====

'''Kel:'''
* Pitchblende radiation-detector amulet (unpriced)
* Hag's gold ring (unpriced)
* Hag's blue metal ring (unpriced)
* Hag's dimensional boots (unpriced)
* Red leather reticule with witch skins (unpriced)
* Captured documents and maps from the hag's lair (unpriced)

'''Black:'''
* Pitchblende radiation-detector amulet (unpriced)
* Hag's gold ring (unpriced)
* Hag's blue metal ring (unpriced)
* Hag's dimensional boots (unpriced)
* Red leather reticule with witch skins (unpriced)
* Hag's womb (near-term foetus) (unpriced)
* Captured documents and maps from the hag's lair (unpriced)

'''Dross:'''
* Pitchblende radiation-detector amulet (unpriced)
* Hag's gold ring (unpriced)
* Hag's blue metal ring (unpriced)
* Hag's dimensional boots (unpriced)
* Red leather reticule with witch skins (unpriced)
* Hag's tarot deck and ivory case (unpriced)
* Captured documents and maps from the hag's lair (unpriced)

'''Jedburgh:'''
* Pitchblende radiation-detector amulet (unpriced)
* Hag's gold ring (unpriced)
* Hag's blue metal ring (unpriced)
* Hag's dimensional boots (unpriced)
* Red leather reticule with witch skins (unpriced)
* Captured documents and maps from the hag's lair (unpriced)

'''Tulip:'''
* Pitchblende radiation-detector amulet (unpriced)
* Hag's gold ring (unpriced)
* Hag's blue metal ring (unpriced)
* Hag's dimensional boots (unpriced)
* Red leather reticule with witch skins (unpriced)
* Captured documents and maps from the hag's lair (unpriced)

'''Party (shared resources):'''
* Hag's womb with near-term foetus (unverified — not in registry)
* Captured documents and maps (unverified — not in registry)

'''Balance brought forward:''' 2,500 sp
'''Balance carried forward:''' 2,500 sp

===== Session Summary =====

The party spent the day hunting the dead hag's lair above Pomblière. Tracking her back-trail [[#s10-off-the-scent|came to nothing]], so they [[#s10-her-effects|went through her corpse instead]] — talisman, rings, dimensional boots, a reticule of reusable witch skins, and a living near-term foetus that Black agreed to carry. After [[#s10-uphill-work|a failed summons and a second failed night's tracking]], Dross put questions to the corpse itself, which named La Croix de l'Alpe, concealment, and breeder reactors. Flying up after dark, the party found [[#s10-dead-ground|a lifeless patch of ground and a ward that would have killed anyone who walked in]], unmade it, and [[#s10-the-tradesmans-entrance|entered a tidy office-lair draped with an Italian Army tarpaulin]]: filing cabinets, an alchemical laboratory of mineral poisons, and a mews built for a two-headed mount.

Black [[#s10-mishandled|broke the looted filing cabinet against the ravine wall]], scattering the papers, and the damaged haul went to Diane at Moûtiers. She read out [[#s10-the-shape-of-it|a Polish map of six death camps arranged as a hexagon and a French map of a sixteen-mile stepping chain running the length of the country]], and then [[#s10-a-proper-introduction|identified the pleasant Swiss banker of the previous session as Heinrich von Kleist of the SS]], seconded to the Ahnenerbe and coordinating cobalt-60 breeder work at the Usine de Pomblière. The party ends the night in Moûtiers, planning disguise changes against the alarm von Kleist has certainly raised, with a convoy of two hundred women due the following day and an untested plan to skin-change them into mice.

===== Chronological Timeline =====

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date !! Event
| Day 43 || Hag's corpse looted and questioned; her lair located at La Croix de l'Alpe, its approach ward dissipated and its office and laboratory stripped; the filing cabinet shattered on the way out and its papers partly lost; the haul carried to Diane at Moûtiers, revealing the six death camps, the stepping chain across France, and Julien de Watermeyer's true identity as Heinrich von Kleist; disguise changes and the convoy rescue plan debated overnight
|}
|}

----

=== Chapter 11: Hide and Seek ===

''We spent a night building a rescue for two hundred women, and by the time it was finished they were forty miles from where we had agreed to meet them.''

===== Neutral Ground =====

''The last thing argued before anyone slept was Switzerland, and it died the way most of my good ideas die, which is slowly and in front of witnesses. The border is a day's drive if one has trucks and papers, and we have neither in any quantity. More to the point the Swiss are a people under arms to the last clerk, nervous of giving the Axis the slightest pretext, and every crossing a vehicle can reach will have men at it. Two hundred women in the back of a truck is not a thing that survives a conversation at a barrier.''

''I proposed stopping short of Saint-Julien and taking them across the farmland at night, between patrols, which I have done myself with one person and twice with two. It does not scale. Dross raised the mountains instead, on the reasonable theory that what is harder to walk is also less guarded, and Tulip suggested going on foot and swinging east to Annemasse. All of it founders on the same arithmetic: the roads mean patrols, and off the roads there is nothing between us and the border but mountain, in November, with two hundred women who have been in trucks for a week.''

''So we came back to mice. Rabbits were put up as sturdier and dismissed on bulk; somebody said sheep, which cannot be driven anywhere they do not wish to go, and somebody said goats, which can, and neither answers the problem of two hundred of them in open country. Birds were worse — a woman given wings does not thereby acquire the knowledge of what to do with them, and panic at altitude is permanent. Panic as a mouse is merely loud.''

''The transport I did settle. Not a jewellery box, as was suggested, but metal, because a metal box survives being dropped, kicked, or sat upon by a soldier, and a wooden one does not. A lined compartment apiece, cotton wool, and enough of it that nothing inside is in contact with anything but wool when the thing is handled roughly. Then we went up to the hotel, which is not the hotel we were in two nights ago, and began.''

===== Piecework =====

''It took the whole night, and it was the most tedious work I have ever watched anybody do. Tulip called mice out of the countryside, eight to a calling and an hour for each, and did it over and over until there were something near two hundred of them. The skinning went round the party, ten minutes a mouse for a practised hand, and nobody's hands were practised by the end. I offered to help and my offer was accepted, which tells you how the night was going. I also proposed finding the town's rat-catcher and buying his stock outright, and was informed that nobody walks into an exterminator in the morning and asks whether he has any spare.''

''Dross had the real labour. Two hundred skins to be made into the thing a woman can wear, and a good forty more attempts beyond that for the ones that would not take. He worked in blocks of ten, and at the end of each block he had nothing left in him and had to drink. Fourteen of the restoratives came out of the hag's own laboratory; Kel gave up eight of hers, which buy back a man's capacity to work at the price of doing him an injury while they do it; and five were mine. By about the third hour he was grey, and shortly after that he was passing blood, and I asked whether he was all right in a tone he did not care for. He protested the whole way through, and I told him we were hearing a great many excuses, and he kept casting.''

''Twice the working turned on him. The first should have left him deaf, and he held against it — which, as I observed at the time, has made no detectable difference to whether he hears anybody. The second simply emptied him where he sat, and there was another potion and another hour. Tulip closed up the damage the drinks were doing when she could. By the small hours there were mice in one room and skins in another, and we had the whole apparatus of the rescue laid out on a hotel floor, waiting for the women. Jedburgh had gone to bed at a sensible hour, since he was flying at dawn, and I have rarely resented a man more for being right.''

===== Weather Permitting =====

''The fourteenth came and the convoy did not. There is nothing sinister in it: the valley had wind and thunderstorms, and this is country that gets lightning badly enough to put the electricity out, and the sort of truck column that is moving women does not travel at night and does not travel at all when the road is being thrown about. They will have stopped in some town and taken over a church. What it meant for us was that we had an ambush point and nothing to ambush, and a day to find out where two hundred people had got to.''

''Kel's answer was better than waiting, which was my instinct and the wrong one. She can look at a stretch of the day that has not yet happened, and she chose to look at Jedburgh's flight — to watch the reconnaissance before he flew it, and know the shape of the day by eight in the morning. It is an unnerving way to plan and I have stopped objecting to it.''

''What she saw first was nothing. Jedburgh went up, swept half a circle eight miles out from Moûtiers, and found no column on any road coming up to us. She can only redirect the vision's attention so many times before it runs out, and she asked where to look next. I said backtrack the road rather than stare harder at one place, on the grounds that a place we have already looked at will not improve and the road behind them might. We backtracked down to La Chambre and found nothing there either.''

''Backtracking further found something: a small lake, thirty-odd miles out as a bird flies, fed by a cascade perhaps thirty feet high and distinctive enough to steer by, and a dozen trucks drawn up on the metalled road beside it.''

''That was worth a real look, so Kel borrowed Jedburgh's crystal and put the viewpoint five hundred feet above the lake as it stood at that hour. A dozen trucks, covered. Sixteen minutes of watching produced one rabbit. I asked whether they were the same as the ones we had seen carrying women, and from that height the colour and the general shape were near enough; they were also, on a better look, Citroëns, which is to say civilian, which is to say almost certainly not ours. Kel tried to set the view lower and nearer, to see into the backs of them, and the thing arrived inside an engine block. Any further attempts want ambergris, and we have exactly two pieces between us, Jedburgh's and Tulip's, and no prospect of buying more in a mountain town in wartime.''

===== Siphoned Off =====

''So Jedburgh went himself, as an eagle, and the first useful thing he saw he saw before he had gone a mile: a truck pulling out of the Usine de Pomblière behind him and heading away from Moûtiers, uphill, into the roads. He kept his course, which I would not have done and which turned out to be correct twice over.''

''The lake took him an hour. The cascade was where the vision had put it. He came down and found the trucks sitting with nobody near them, waited, and in due course the owners of the business appeared with jerry cans and lengths of rubber tube and went up into the backs of the trucks. They siphoned off fuel, passed the cans down, took a decent share and not all of it, and drove away a little lighter than they came. There is a war on; a man who empties a tank is hanged, and a man who takes a quarter of it is a nuisance nobody reports. It is a local trade in stolen petrol and it is nothing whatever to do with us. The place is called Oz, which I record only because it is the sort of name one does not expect to meet in the Isère.''

''Having wasted a morning on it, he did not fly home in a straight line. He went back along the road the Pomblière truck had taken, tracking it from the air, on the theory that anything leaving that plant is our business whether or not it is carrying anybody.''

===== Taking the Waters =====

''The road ran fifty miles by vehicle, and he caught the truck at the end of it as it came into a town called Le Bourget-du-Lac. It is old — medieval, properly so, the streets no more than eight feet across, which is why the truck had been slowing for the last mile. It pulled up outside a building of three storeys, commercial rather than industrial, no display windows, with people going in and out at a thin midday rate and most of them young. He put down two roofs away and read it as well as a man can who has no French, which is to say he committed the sign to memory to be read to us later.''

''From above, the building has skylights, and under the skylights there is water. It is a bath-house, the internal sort, and he could see people swimming in it. He remarked that it looked inviting. Then he worked round and saw the rest of the room.''

''There are something like two hundred women in there, standing about the baths. There are something like fifty men in SS uniform guarding them. And there are men and women in white coats attending them, who are not local, who did not come from wherever the guards came from, and who certainly did not come from wherever the women came from. Jedburgh's reading of them was doctors with no bedside manner, and bureaucrats; what he could not put a word to was that whatever he was looking at did not sit right — something in the bearing of them at odds with being ordinary people. Tulip offered Transuranians. It is a guess and I set it down as a guess, but it is the first guess anybody has made that I did not immediately want to improve on.''

''So we have found them, and we have found them in the wrong place. Everything we had said put them at Saint-Marcel and the plant; what led us here was a truck leaving that plant, and what the plant is to this bath-house — a stop on the way, or a supplier, or something I have not thought of — nobody can yet say. The women are at Le Bourget-du-Lac. That will do for today.''

''Jedburgh turned for home, and as he came in over Moûtiers he saw seven black Daimlers converging on our hotel from seven different roads.''

===== Against the Wall =====

''He got in at an upstairs window, which is apparently a thing eagles do often enough that nobody remarks on it, and told us. Diane needed one look and gave us the word: Gestapo. Then she sat down and strapped her leg on, without hurry and without a word of complaint, and I will carry that picture about with me for some time.''

''Kel set the silent speech between our heads and put her unnoticing over the lot of us, and we went out of that hotel while the cars were still closing. It very nearly worked. Something gave us away as we moved off — I still do not know what — and five of the seven turned after us.''

''We took a lane between two buildings, too narrow for a motor car to follow, and it was a dead end: brick, eight feet of it, no door. One of the cars came across the mouth of the gap and the men got out of it in their coats and hats and came down after us with submachine guns, which is not a weapon one brings to ask questions.''

''What saved us was three things done in the right order. Kel threw an illusory wall across the lane in front of us, so that what the men came to was the blank end of an alley. Tulip raised a real wall of her own behind the illusion, so that if any of them put out a hand he would feel brick where brick appeared to be. And behind both of those, where nobody could see or hear it, I set the dark sphere to work on the back wall and let it eat a hole big enough to walk through. It took half a minute; they stood about for twice as long on the other side of a wall that was not there, and found nothing to shoot. Kel's last casting turned on her while she was holding all of it together, and she held. Jedburgh took eagle shape and went up to watch the street rather than stay in the trap with us, which was sense; he could have gone the other way and become a bear, and one eaten Gestapo man would certainly have changed the tone of the afternoon.''

''Dross wanted the carpet and had it ready. I said no. A flying carpet over a French town at midday is not an escape, it is an announcement.''

===== Nobody Looks Up =====

''On the far side of the wall we came out at the back of a works that builds dinghies, with men at their benches inside it and a road beyond. A Daimler came down that road while we were still between the buildings, so we went round the corner and Tulip laid her blending over the ground we stood on: stay perfectly still and you are very difficult to see, move and you are a man standing in an alley.''

''Then a workman came out for a smoke, twenty feet away, swearing steadily in what turned out to be Albanian and waving his hands in the manner of his country. Dross and Kel both went for him and Dross got there first: there is nothing interesting here, and what you want is a long quiet smoke on your pipe. The poor devil stood there a moment, decided there was something wrong with his tobacco, tapped it out and went back inside. Dross has been complaining ever since that he should have made him give up smoking altogether while he had him. I had said I would see to the man myself if the pair of them missed, and it would have been a great deal louder.''

''The car went past. Windows opened above us and nobody looked down. The forest was too far and the farmland between us and it too open to cross in daylight, so I suggested the other thing: change the faces Kel had given us, break up, and go into the square separately. We took coffee at separate tables — only coffee, since anything that must be bought with a ration coupon means producing paper. Daimlers came in and out of the square all the while we sat there. Then a truck arrived with two platoons in it, and they began working the town door by door.''

''I asked whether we were going out as owls or trying something cleverer, and nobody had anything cleverer. Dross had three skins ready and half a dozen unenchanted, so he went into the lavatory of the café and made up the rest while Tulip stood at the door and turned people away. Kel put an illusion over the square so that anyone who happened to see owls leaving a town at midday would think nothing whatever of it. We went out over their heads, and not one man in that square looked up. Jedburgh went with us as an eagle.''

''They had found us, it turns out, by telephone: ringing round the hotels and asking whether anybody new had come to town. Moving lodgings the night before is the only reason they did not have us at breakfast. Next time we take a room, the proprietor gets hypnotised the moment we are through the door, and told that if anyone asks whether there is anybody new, there is not.''

===== Flown South =====

''We came back together at La Croix de Feissons, which is a known high point above the valley and a different cross entirely from the one we robbed on the mountain; I mention it because I confused the two myself for a moment and would rather not do it again in front of anybody. Diane came with us. From there it is thirty-odd miles to Le Bourget-du-Lac, about an hour in the air, and we flew it.''

''Jedburgh raised his team's true name on the way — the individual one, not the common form, and he does have it, but only barely. The thing is not a word. It is the length of a book, and a man cannot simply be handed such a name and use it; he has to live with it a while first. So it goes on the list of things we own and cannot yet do.''

''For the baths themselves, the plan is thin and will have to do: get near enough to take a proper reading of the white coats when a door opens or a window is left ajar, and find out what it is about them that Jedburgh could see and not name.''

''The last argument of the day was about birds, because two hundred mice will get the women out of a building and will not get them out of France. Dross noticed there is an Isle of Swans on the lake here and thought we might take swan skins off it, which would have been elegant; the swans went south a fortnight ago, it being November. Just as well. A swan needs a long clear run to get into the air, and a duck does not — the wing against the weight is better — and a duck can put down on open water, which matters a great deal when two hundred people who have never flown must land somewhere soft. I am not yet sure how one explains any of this to them.''

''So: two hundred mice in a box, two hundred skins beside them, a town behind us that is being searched door to door, and the women themselves in a bath-house forty miles from where we spent a night preparing to meet them. We arrived over the lake as the light went. Tomorrow we find out what the men in white coats are.''

----

{| class="wikitable"
|-
|

==== OOC Details ====

===== Items Acquired =====

'''Party (shared resources):'''
* ~200 enchanted mouse skins (rescue stock, narrative-only) — (unverified — ledger unchecked for this session)
* Owl skins (narrative-only) — (unverified — ledger unchecked for this session)

'''Balance brought forward:''' 2,500 sp
'''Balance carried forward:''' 2,500 sp

===== Session Summary =====

The party shelved [[#s11-neutral-ground|a plan to drive two hundred rescued women across the Swiss border]] as unworkable and committed instead to carrying them out as mice, then spent the whole night [[#s11-piecework|summoning the mice and enchanting the skins]] at their new Moûtiers hotel. The convoy never arrived — [[#s11-weather-permitting|storms had stopped it on the road]] — so Kel previewed Jedburgh's reconnaissance before he flew it and steered him toward a lake thirty-odd miles out, which [[#s11-siphoned-off|turned out to be a petrol-smuggling racket]] rather than the convoy. Following a truck out of the Usine de Pomblière instead, Jedburgh found [[#s11-taking-the-waters|the women held in a thermal bath-house at Le Bourget-du-Lac]], guarded by roughly fifty SS and attended by white-coated figures Tulip guesses are Transuranians.

Flying home he spotted seven Gestapo Daimlers closing on the hotel. The party evacuated and [[#s11-against-the-wall|escaped a dead-end alley]] behind a layered illusion while Black bored a hole through the back wall, then [[#s11-nobody-looks-up|waited out the door-to-door search over coffee in the town square and left as owls]]. They regrouped at La Croix de Feissons and [[#s11-flown-south|flew on to Le Bourget-du-Lac]], arriving at dusk. Next session takes up the baths themselves and the question of what the white coats are.

===== Chronological Timeline =====

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date !! Event
| Day 44 || Swiss border plan shelved; the mice-and-skins rescue kit built overnight at Moûtiers; the convoy fails to arrive, delayed by storms; a lake near Oz is ruled out as fuel smugglers, and a truck tracked from the Usine de Pomblière leads to two hundred women held under SS guard in a bath-house at Le Bourget-du-Lac; the Gestapo raid the party's hotel, the party escapes Moûtiers as owls, regroups at La Croix de Feissons and flies on to Le Bourget-du-Lac by dusk
|}
|}

----

=== Chapter 12: Friendly Fire ===

''We came to Le Bourget-du-Lac to look at a bath-house, and spent most of the night looking at each other instead.''

===== No Love Lost =====

''The building holds two hundred and fifty women and about fifty men with rifles, and the first thing we did was agree, at length, not to walk in through the front door. Kel put the door-kicking up herself only to knock it down again — too much dying, and none of it ours to spend. She liked better the idea of taking one of the white-coated attendants off the street and going through his mind at leisure, and that was shelved too, since we had no notion of when any of them came out or by what road.''

''What we did gain was the lie of the ground, which in this valley is political rather than physical. This is the Italian zone, and there is next to no army in it worth the name, because the Italians cannot abide the Gestapo and are not much fonder of the Wehrmacht, who have turned up uninvited and behave as though the place were theirs. It is not a cordial rivalry. There is no love lost anywhere in it. Better still, the Germans' own secret services make a habit of selling one another: if the Gestapo find a man informing for military intelligence, they will first try to buy him, and when that fails they will whisper his name to the locals and let the river carry him away. I have seen armies lose wars for less.''

''Tulip wanted more watching done before we moved, and I said what I always say and am always half wrong about — that one always needs more intelligence, and the chief trouble with more intelligence is that it buys you worse decisions, or none at all, while you stand about admiring how much you know. We settled it the cheap way. One man goes inside and looks, and the rest of us sit down to dinner near enough to hear him think.''

===== Within Earshot =====

''Jedburgh called up Pierre, who speaks French as his own tongue and German besides, took his education at Strasbourg, and comes from the far north-east, so his accent is strange here but not suspicious. Kel laid a German uniform over him out of nothing. She would have made him a man of some rank; I said he was better off not being anybody's superior, since a grand officer in a provincial bath-house invites conversation and a dull one does not. Let him wander, look, and come out. The baths are a public house of their sort — the guards do not stand in the doorway turning people away, they simply have the place so full of women that there is nowhere for a swimmer to put himself.''

''We took a table at an Italian restaurant close by, which is a tolerable place to be seen in when the Germans are unpopular, and sat inside the reach of Kel's silent speech. Pierre brought back three things. The treatment is being sold to the women as an experiment in medicine, for mothers near their time who may be carrying polio. The guards are entirely ordinary men, and German, not Italian — which tells us whose errand this is. And the five technicians are wrong. Pierre could not say how, which is exactly what Jedburgh could not say when he first looked down through the skylights, and that agreement between two men who never met in the building is worth more to me than either of them being certain.''

''A little after eight the last of them was done with. The technicians went into a gymnasium with the officer in charge, and only the officer came out. Kel took that for portals and said so. I do not believe it. A thing that can move two hundred people is being spent at Stalingrad, not on a provincial swimming pool, and I would be very surprised if anyone opened one here to save five men a walk. What it means is that we do not know how the white coats leave, and we did not learn it tonight.''

===== Taking Them Down a Peg =====

''Kel spent the wait looking over the restaurant's ornaments, which is her idea of rest, and found a pair of silk stockings on a display stand: blue, with gold brocade worked into them, plainly made by hand. The waiter said they come from a convent of Sisters of St. Joseph — the nearest house is at Chambéry — and that the sisters make them and sell them as a premium article. A quarter of a thousand hours of a nun's life goes into one pair. They were asking two hundred and fifty francs, which is theft the other way about. I said we were obviously going to haggle. Kel said we were obviously not, and bought them out of the suitcase, which still holds a quarter of a million francs and will not notice.''

''Their virtue, as she read it off them, is not that they raise the wearer. They lower everyone else. Bring the room down to your level, which is a cheap way to be the best-born person in it — impoverished nobility, and all the more imperious for it. One does not wear such a thing in front of a monarch, or a chief of gendarmes, who takes a dim view professionally. The sisters' work can be ordered through the Cistercian abbey in the region, and Jedburgh observed, correctly, that an abbey is one of the few buildings hereabouts where two hundred people could be housed, and spent some while enjoying what the arrival of two hundred scantily dressed young women would do to the monks' discipline.''

''Dross did the useful work. He called three owls out of the dark and skinned them, which took him the better part of an hour, since an owl carries none of the fat a duck does and the skin is finer. I asked for a few more than we thought we needed, on the reasoning that if the women are driven away from here in the night, one of us ought to be able to go up and follow, and a spare skin is lighter to carry than a regret. We put our defences back on while we had the leisure — the stone in the limbs, the earth over the skin, the rest of it — since none of it lasts a night. Jedburgh let his team go, which he was going to have to do anyway for his change of name, and remarked that in our present business more men is more trouble than fewer.''

===== Not the Bus We Waited For =====

''We went out about ten into a dry, overcast, freezing night. There is a road in front of the baths kept for the trolley-buses alone, because the town is afraid of the wires coming down across ordinary traffic, and across the footpath from it a bus stop, some fifty yards from the doors. That is where we settled to wait for whatever came to collect the women.''

''Kel put a false wall across an alley nearby as a place to run into. I have no objection to a bolt-hole and said only that a wall one cannot see through is a poor thing to watch a street from, and that we had Tulip's blending, which she had had time to lay again while the owls were being skinned, and which makes a man standing perfectly still very nearly nothing at all. So we stood perfectly still.''

''What arrived was not a bus. A dark blue touring car came up and stopped outside the doors — a long thing, glazed over the passengers and open above the driver, and plainly built to outrun anything else on a French road, which in this country and this year is an extraordinary statement to make about oneself. The chauffeur wore a grey uniform, a cap, and goggles the size of an airman's. He came round and opened the rear door, and the woman who got out of it was tall, dressed in blue, with a small hat and a black veil across her face and a little blue velvet purse on a strap at her left wrist. She walked to the doors as though she had built them. He did not go in with her. He stayed on the pavement and began to look at the street.''

===== Something Going Round =====

''Kel reached for the woman's mind and the working turned back on her and did nothing whatever. That by itself is a piece of intelligence — I have watched Kel open heads that were being guarded by people who were paid to guard them — but we had no leisure to admire it, because she took the chauffeur instead. His surface thoughts were all she could have, and they were enough. He is paranoid past the point of illness, and it is catching.''

''It came down the silent speech we were all sitting inside, which is the obvious thing in hindsight and occurred to nobody at the time. Jedburgh went first. Kel went a moment after. Tulip held, and Dross held, and so did I — I will say in my own defence that a mind convinced the whole world is arranged against it is not a novelty to me, and I may have said as much aloud, which did not help.''

''What it did to Jedburgh was walk him round behind Kel with his hand-and-a-half sword out. Tulip saw him draw and asked whether anyone else found it odd, and the honest answer is that no, with us it is not especially odd. He struck her from behind and very nearly finished her; she kept her feet and her wits and she should not have. I got between them, swearing at him in the only German I have any real command of, which is the swearing, and told him to stop, for whatever that was worth against a man who had decided we were all Nazis. Tulip shoved in from the other side and gave him nothing to hit. Dross was readying something to put a fright into him. None of it was needed in the end: Kel let go a stroke of mind she keeps stored in a ring, and he went down where he stood, and in the moment of it striking she could feel that something had been at his mind already — a trap laid in it. He was still protesting it was not him as he fell. Bloody mind-magers, he said.''

''Fifty yards off, the chauffeur finished examining his street. He had been at it five full minutes, walking it out with a measured tread of the kind they teach at Prussian military academies between the beatings, the sort of pace by which a man can tell you how far he has gone and how long it took him. He did not notice a maniac with a great sword, four people wrestling in a bus stop, or anything else. He went inside after his mistress and shut the door.''

===== For His Own Good =====

''We tied Jedburgh, gagged him, and I carried him out of there. The only cover within reach is a park they call the Belvedere, three-quarters of a mile off — a small curated forest with paved walks through it and a fountain to Our Lady, and houses close enough that one simply keeps to the shrubbery. Kel was put back together on the way, which took more than one working and left her white.''

''Dross brought his cards out. On Jedburgh they said contact with an insane mind, and a sickness of the mind that travels, and that it had travelled by our own link. Then he laid them on Kel and found the same thing in her — not the madness that parts a man from the world, but the raging kind, where everything is against you and your head obligingly manufactures the conspiracies to prove it. He said he would read himself last, which was cover, and then he announced that the dog needed walking and asked whether I would come along to see he came to no harm. Out among the trees he told me plainly: Kel has it too, and she is dangerous.''

''I said nothing to the others, and I will not pretend that was an oversight. I wanted to know what had been put into Jedburgh's head and by whom, and Kel was the only one of us able to find out, and I sat where I could take hold of her if she turned. I record it because it is what I did, and I would rather have it written down than tidied away. Tulip laid her reading on Jedburgh meanwhile and found nothing holding him — no one's creature, merely sick.''

''Then we cured him, which was ugly. Sweet reason was out of the question and hypnotism will not touch a hostile man. We had a brain serum, and getting it into him meant Tabitha putting him to sleep — she managed it, for all his boasted hardness against such things — and then Tulip, who is a healer and good enough for this at least, working his throat so the stuff went down rather than into his lungs. It is grey, it is mostly fat, and it has things floating in it. She had a mint leaf ready for when he woke. He woke himself again, complaining about the taste and asking for a drink, and Dross's cards said the trap in him had been eased and was being cleared away. That is the one unambiguously good thing we did all night.''

===== Her Best Friend =====

''Kel had been working the whole hour we spent on that. Bound and gagged on the ground, Jedburgh was awake for most of it, and he knew precisely what she was doing, and he could do nothing but listen to it. None of us stopped her. I did not stop her, knowing what I knew. Tulip did not stop her because she did not know, which is a kinder reason.''

''It closed. He is her servant now, obedient, for three weeks; he may fight it afresh at each day's turning, and there is little else in the world that will shift it. He threw everything he had left into the first attempt, and the binding held, and after that there was nothing to do but watch a proud man grind the caps off his back teeth while calling her his best friend and asking why on earth he would object.''

''It was then, far too late, that we remembered the Bishop gave each of us a restorative against unreason at the very outset of this business, and that not one of us had thought to write it down. Kel took hers and came back to herself, and was mortified, and said so. She asked Jedburgh's pardon for the sword. Then she stood behind me — sensibly — and tried to unpick her own working, and could not. A binding of that kind cannot be handed back by the one who made it; it is not hers to release. So he stays bound, and every minute of it adds to the pile.''

''Tulip told her flatly that she does not forgive her either, and that controlling one's own people crosses a line that oughtn't be crossed. She is right in the way that principles are right. For my part I have no objection to anything that happened tonight. Sometimes it is necessary, we found out what we needed to know, and everybody is still breathing, including the man who tried to take Kel's head off. I am aware that this makes me poor company for the two of them at present.''

===== Through the Roof =====

''We went back to the baths because the car would tell us something either way, and the car was still at the kerb with its hubcaps on and the chauffeur nowhere in the street. Over the heated pool the roof is orange tile carried on plain panes of glass; the windows do not open and the louvres certainly will not in this weather. I offered to take a pane out with the dark sphere — on an overcast night nobody would notice the hole until morning — and Jedburgh asked whether the glass could be transmuted instead, and we agreed to look before we started cutting holes in things.''

''Tulip went up. Sixty feet of vertical wall, under her blending, and she was over the parapet like a rat up a drainpipe. What she saw from above: the woman still talking, at length and quite at her ease, to the officer in charge of the women, her chauffeur standing against the wall a few paces behind her. A long holder in her hand — what we had taken for cigarettes across fifty yards of road are thin cigars, and they smell bitterly strong. And on the floor of the bath-house, two hundred and fifty women sitting down, because there is nowhere else to sit, with the guards propped against the walls around them as bored as the women are wretched.''

''Two lessons were said out loud and both are worth the keeping. Never leave the silent speech open between us while one of us is going into a stranger's head — the link is a road and it carries traffic in both directions. And next time, set a ward against this sort of working before we start, and let the whole party stand inside it, rather than find out afterwards what we have invited in.''

''So we end the night where we began it: outside, in the cold, looking at a building we cannot enter, with the women still in it. We are down one man's goodwill and one woman's dignity, and we are up the knowledge that the veiled woman cannot be read, that her driver is a loaded weapon pointed at anyone who tries, and that she has spent the best part of an hour giving instructions to the officer who holds two hundred and fifty prisoners. Whatever she came to say, she has not finished saying it. We are still watching.''

----

{| class="wikitable"
|-
|

==== OOC Details ====

===== Items Acquired =====

'''Kel:'''
* Masterwork silk stockings (unpriced)
* Reason Restorative (unpriced)

'''Party (shared resources):'''
* Brain serum (unpriced)

'''Jedburgh:'''
* Equilibrium remnants (unpriced)

'''Balance brought forward:''' 2,500 sp
'''Balance carried forward:''' 2,500 sp

===== Session Summary =====

The party spent the night of 14 November outside the baths at Le Bourget-du-Lac, where roughly two hundred and fifty women are held under guard. [[#s12-no-love-lost|Ruling out a frontal assault]], they sent Jedburgh's agent Pierre inside in an illusory German uniform and [[#s12-within-earshot|listened in from a restaurant across the road]], learning the cover story (experimental prenatal polio treatment), that the guards are German rather than Italian, and that the five technicians are abnormal in some way nobody can name; how the technicians leave the building remains unknown. While they waited, [[#s12-taking-them-down-a-peg|Kel bought a pair of Sisters of St. Joseph masterwork silk stockings]] and Dross summoned and skinned three owls, and shortly after ten the party took up a concealed position at a bus stop, where [[#s12-not-the-bus-we-waited-for|a dark blue touring car delivered a veiled woman and her chauffeur]] instead of the expected transport.

Kel's attempt to read the woman failed outright, and reading the chauffeur instead [[#s12-something-going-round|carried his contagious paranoia into the party along their own mind-speech link]], infecting Jedburgh and then Kel. Jedburgh struck Kel from behind with his sword and nearly killed her before she knocked him unconscious, after which the party withdrew to the Belvedere park, [[#s12-for-his-own-good|where Dross's divinations diagnosed them both and Tulip forced a brain serum down the sleeping Jedburgh to cure him]]. Kel, still infected, had spent that same hour [[#s12-her-best-friend|binding Jedburgh as her obedient servant for three weeks]] — a working she could not undo once the Bishop's restorative had cured her, leaving both Jedburgh and Tulip unforgiving. The session ends with the party back at the baths and [[#s12-through-the-roof|Tulip on the glass roof, watching the veiled woman give lengthy instructions to the officer in charge]] while the captives sit on the floor below; her business there is plainly unfinished, and the party is still watching.

===== Chronological Timeline =====

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date !! Event
| Day 44 || Frontal assault on the Le Bourget-du-Lac baths ruled out; Pierre's disguised recce yields the prenatal-polio cover story, German guards and abnormal technicians; masterwork silk stockings bought; owls skinned and defences refreshed; a veiled woman and her chauffeur arrive by car; the chauffeur's contagious paranoia crosses the party's mind-speech link and infects Jedburgh and Kel; Jedburgh nearly kills Kel before being subdued, withdrawn to the Belvedere park and cured; Kel binds Jedburgh as her servant for three weeks and cannot release him; Tulip's rooftop watch confirms the women still held and the veiled woman still conferring
|}
|}

----

=== Chapter 13: Deliverance ===

''We came for the woman in the veil and left with her prisoners instead, which is not at all the trade we set out to make, and a better one.''

===== Short of Breath =====

''Tulip had gone up the wall again while the rest of us held the dark below, and when the woman came out of the baths at last she read her from above the door. The others had talked themselves into a vampire over the past day — the veil, the car, the hour she keeps — and the reading put an end to it. She is no vampire. She is a living woman, short-lived as any of us, though whatever runs in her burns brighter than it does in ordinary people; not so bright as it would in an elf, but well above the common run.''

''I asked that we spend the one question that comes with such a reading on the thing that mattered — not what she is, which we could guess, but what she can do. The answer was worse than a vampire would have been. Her particular gift is to take the air itself from around a man, to make a hollow where he stands so that he cannot breathe, and drowns on dry land with his lungs full of nothing. I have no counter to that written down anywhere.''

===== A Closed Order =====

''The chauffeur brought the car round and she got into it, and it went off east out of the town at the sort of speed the thing was plainly built for. Kel sent a phantasm after it to hold its direction while it was still in sight, and Dross set a location working on it besides, so that we had two threads on the same quarry and need not trust either alone. They agreed, which is the whole point of casting a thing twice.''

''The car ran east a half-mile or a mile and then stopped, and she got out and walked the rest herself. The building she walked to we had seen before: the Cistercian abbey we found weeks ago, three storeys of old stone behind twenty feet of ivied wall, with a single door to the road. A monk in a full habit opened it and let her in alone. That is not how a closed order keeps its door. They do not admit lone women in veils at eleven at night, and the fact that this one does tells its own tale. The chauffeur stayed with the car and watched the dark to the east, the way he had watched the street outside the baths, as though he expected something to come out of it.''

''We came up quiet behind, and I looked the place over and said what I had said about the baths — that walking into the middle of an abbey is no better an idea than walking into the middle of anything else full of people who want you gone.''

===== Loaded =====

''Kel put her sight forward on the one plan we had any heart for, which was to take the car. I coveted it; I will set that down in writing, since I said it aloud at the time. Her intimation of what would come of the attempt put the matter to rest. The car is a gun. A pair of heavy machine guns sit folded over the front wheels and come out as it drives, enough lead in a breath or two to chew through a wall of stone and most of what stood behind it, and a mortar rises out of the back to finish whatever the guns began. A finer motor-car I never wanted, and it would have killed every one of us before we touched the door-handle. We let it go.''

''The same seeing gave us two gifts worth more than the car. Trucks would come out of the back of the abbey and go down towards the baths — the transport we had waited all the night before to see. And the woman's conference with her monks would run about a quarter of an hour, no more. Dross said the plain thing: that we should give the woman up and spend the quarter hour we had been handed on the women in the baths, who were the whole reason we had come. I agreed, and was glad to. Chasing the veil had already cost us a night and a man's good temper. We turned our backs on her and went to take her prisoners off her.''

===== Leading Them Astray =====

''The plan was Kel's in its bones. She would lay a face and a uniform over me, and I would walk up to the convoy as its rightful master and simply tell the soldiers what to do, which is a thing soldiers are built to accept from a man with the right collar. She would have made me SS. Jedburgh said no man with my accent could pass for SS and live, and that I had better be Italian — Alpine troops, a mountain officer up from the south — so that whatever came out of my mouth could be put down to a foreigner's bad German rather than a spy's. So I went as an Italian, with a heavy accent I leaned on like a crutch.''

''We came back the way we could not have walked in the time: Dross's carpet in the air, with Jedburgh riding it as an eagle, since an eagle is blind at night and had no business flying itself, and I on Corniger, who does not mind the dark. We came down near the baths just as the trucks drew up, and I walked out into the lamplight in my borrowed uniform, and the lead driver snapped to and saluted before he had thought about it, which is the whole trick of it. There was muttering among the soldiers — an Italian giving orders where they had expected none — but muttering is not mutiny, and they loaded the women aboard, a score to a truck, and did as they were told.''

''Once the column was moving I took it off its road. Not towards the abbey, where the car and its guns were, but down a side-turning into a narrow residential street, a dozen feet wide and no more than a long stone's throw from end to end, with the houses shut up dark on either side. A good place to be the only one who knows what is about to happen.''

===== A Thorough Inspection =====

''We gave them a reason to get down out of the trucks and stand together, which was the one thing we needed of them. Word went up the column that there might be a bomb under one of the trucks — sabotage, the sort of thing that happens to German transport in France every week — and Kel laid an illusion of a cluster of grenades under the chassis, there to be found by anyone who looked. Tulip put it about that every man was to form up for inspection while the thing was dealt with, and some fifty of them did, standing in a ring in the middle of the street as ordered, waiting to be looked over.''

''Then Tulip raised a wall of stone around them, a ring of it ten feet high, closing them in where they stood. Four men fell outside it by pure chance, on the wrong side of the line when it rose, and saw the wall come up and bolted. We took those four one at a time. Jedburgh, still an eagle, had a glaive and used it, which is a strange thing to watch and worse to be on the end of. Tulip's python ran one down and had the breath out of him. The last got a rifle up and fired at me before I reached him; the shot struck the unseen shield I keep about myself and bounced off it into the dark without troubling me at all, and I had the leisure to be grateful for the ritual that puts it there before I closed the distance and finished him with the mace. Damned rifles.''

''The men inside the ring were a harder, simpler problem. Tulip filled the ring with smoking magma — fire out of the ground, death in it — and Kel pushed back any man who tried to climb the wall, so that the whole fifty went into it together. It killed them, and it took the bodies as well, which spared us the digging. I thought about pitching a flask of Greek fire in after them to be certain, and decided against it; there is no making a thing more burnt than that was. I set Hordling to the few remains the magma had not yet reached.''

''The drivers I would not touch until I knew what they were, and they were not soldiers: Frenchmen, unarmed, driving for the Germans because a man must eat, not because he loves them. We spared them and kept them with us. The gunfire had been heard and the gendarmes were coming, but a dozen-foot street in the small hours gives a man time, and by the time any law reached the place there was nothing in it to find but a patch of scorched stone that nobody would ever explain.''

===== Carrying =====

''We took the trucks and the women out to a stretch of wood by the lake, a well-kept forest around one of those modern glass-and-concrete houses with tennis courts and a swimming pool, a school of some sort by the look of it, far enough from the town and close enough to the trees to do our work unseen. The work was to turn near two hundred women into mice and carry them out of France in a truck with no frightened women left in it to be seen.''

''Before that, Kel laid hands on them — a healer's touch, reading the body rather than the mind — and found the same thing in every one of them. Every woman we had taken out of that place is with child. Tulip wanted to read their auras for more and could not; a healer can tell you the mother is carrying but cannot read the thing she carries, not without cutting, and none of us would do that. We had already begun to say the word nobody wanted to say. The mountain hag we killed weeks ago has her hand in this somewhere, and a hag of that kind does not always stay dead.''

''The changing went a few at a time, Dross doing the bulk of it with the enchanted skins we had made up over the past weeks — a woman into a mouse and a mouse into a pocket. It did not take on all of them. Near seventy of the women would not be changed; the working slid off them, and those we had still to carry as women, which meant more skins, which meant more hours of Dross's hands, a thing he said aloud and often.''

===== Loose Ends =====

''Dross reminded me, as we were leaving, that we had left Diane behind in the Belvedere park the night before and never gone back for her. We went back, and found her where we had left her, no worse for the night, and took her up with the rest.''

''The road out ran past Chambéry, which Jedburgh and I both knew for the convent town — the Sisters of St. Joseph, who make the silk stockings Kel bought at the restaurant, and men's stockings besides, a thing I had not known until it came up. There was a moment's talk of stopping. We had a truck with seventy women in it and no business drawing a nun's eye, and we went on past.''

''We holed up at last at Bourg-en-Bresse, which is as near to Geneva as one can sit and still be in France, and the nearness matters: the closer a thing is to the Swiss line the harder it becomes to say with any certainty whose side of a border it was ever on. We split the women and the trucks into two parties and sent them off by different roads, on the sound principle that half a disaster found is better than the whole of it.''

===== The Hag's Legacy =====

''The days after were spent on the two unfinished things: the rest of the changing, and learning what we had actually rescued.''

''The changing nearly broke Dross before it was done. The first working he tried at Bourg-en-Bresse turned on him — the place is poor in the stuff a mage draws on, and poorer still at night, so that a casting which should have cost him little cost him everything at once and knocked him senseless where he sat. We had the hag's own restoratives out of her loot, strong things, and poured them into him and the others to keep the hands working, and the work went on.''

''The learning was worse. Jedburgh set his divinations on the women and on the hag's belongings both. The women are not carrying children. Each of them has a thing growing in her — a cobolt, the seeing named it, though I would not swear the name means to me what it meant to the voice that gave it — early yet, a bare knot of flesh, months from whatever it is meant to become, and already certain to kill the woman who carries it when its time comes. That is what the baths were for. That is what the veiled woman came to the abbey to arrange, a quarter hour at a time. We took two hundred of them out of that place, and every one is still under sentence, and I do not yet know a single thing we can do about it. The hag is behind it, as we feared, and the hag may be knitting herself back together somewhere even now.''

''Her loot at least was good, once Jedburgh had read it: armour cut from her own skin, a scarf with a working in it, an extract of wolfsbane, a ring and a rack of spells and a stone with a very ugly name, and the restoratives that had kept Dross upright. And there was her heart, still pulsing, which is the sort of thing one learns not to be surprised by in this line of work. The virtue in it could only be had by drinking it straight from the ventricle, and only three of us managed that and kept it down — Tulip, Kel, and myself. It left each of us a little harder to kill than before, and each with one gift besides. Tulip's they found grown about with ivy, of all things, and Kel's the same. Mine was a sense I had not had the day before: I can catch now what a thing is off the air of it, read it by its fumes the way I used to have to read it by eye. In a business where I have just learned that a motor-car can cut me in half and the air itself can be taken out of my chest, I will take any new way of knowing what is in a room before I walk into it.''

----

{| class="wikitable"
|-
|

==== OOC Details ====

===== Items Acquired =====

'''Tulip:'''
* Hag heart blood (unpriced)

'''Black:'''
* Hag heart blood (unpriced)

'''Kel:'''
* Hag heart blood (unpriced)

'''Balance brought forward:''' 2,500 sp
'''Balance carried forward:''' 2,500 sp

===== Session Summary =====

We set out from the baths to follow the veiled woman and ended the week having given her up and carried off her prisoners instead. [[#s13-short-of-breath|Tulip's reading of her aura]] proved her no vampire but a living woman who can pull the air from a man's lungs, and we [[#s13-a-closed-order|tracked her car east to a Cistercian abbey]] that keeps its door in a way no closed order should. A precognition [[#s13-loaded|showed the car to be a rolling gun-nest]] and handed us a better prize — a quarter-hour's warning and the convoy's route — so we turned to the women in the baths. Kel [[#s13-leading-them-astray|dressed me as an Italian officer to take the convoy by word alone]], and once it was moving I [[#s13-a-thorough-inspection|drew it into a narrow street]] where a staged bomb-inspection let Tulip wall the guards in and burn them, while we spared the French drivers. At a lakeside wood we [[#s13-carrying|began turning the rescued women into mice for the road]] and found every one of them with child; [[#s13-loose-ends|we recovered Diane, passed Chambéry, and holed up at Bourg-en-Bresse]] near the Swiss line. There [[#s13-the-hags-legacy|the downtime taught us the worst of it]]: the women carry lethal "cobolt" growths, the Mountain Hag is behind it and may be regenerating, and three of us drank her heart blood for what it gave.

===== Chronological Timeline =====

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date !! Event
| Day 44 || Read the veiled woman's aura — human, not vampire, able to pull the air from a man's lungs; tracked her car east to the Cistercian abbey; foresaw the car's hidden guns and dropped the ambush; took the German convoy by disguise and destroyed its guards in a walled side street; spared the French drivers
|-
| Day 44 ? Day 45 || Moved the rescued women to a lakeside wood and began changing them to mice; found every one pregnant; recovered Diane from the Belvedere park; passed Chambéry without stopping
|-
| Day 45 || Reached Bourg-en-Bresse and split the convoy; through the following downtime finished the changing despite a near-fatal backfire, divined the pregnancies as lethal "cobolt" growths and read the Hag's loot, and three of us drank her heart blood
|}
|}

== Scribe Notes ==

''Black, also called Sir Archibald — Knight of the Void, noble of Alusia, in service to the Seagate Adventurers' Guild — writes.''

=== Chapter 1: A Chessboard, Not a Battlefield ===

''I have learned to distrust a commission that begins with a man asking whether one is from Alusia.''

===== The Company Assembled =====

''We were gathered at the Guild that morning without much notion of what we were gathered for, which is the usual way of it, and so we did what strangers do and made our introductions. Kel I have kept company with before, and needed no introduction, though she gave one anyway for the benefit of the others: an elf transformed into a drow and then wrapped in an illusion of an ordinary human woman, average in height, average in weight, entirely unmemorable. A dream weaver. She works upon the mind — illusions, silent speech between us, and a talent for persuasion that I would call binding if I were being honest and she were not listening. She told the room plainly that she does not fight. She stands at the back and directs.''

''Tulip I knew a little, and know better now. An earth mage, black-skinned with hair the colour of a lit fire, though we were shortly to hide all of that. She travels with animals and cares more for them than she does for most people, which is a defensible position. She let slip, in the way one lets slip a thing one wants noticed, that the Archangel Michael is presently displeased with her. She did not elaborate. I did not ask.''

''The other two were new to me. Dross is a human man of middle build, dusty, so nondescript that describing him is a labour — the only thing that catches the eye is a badly scarred left hand. He named himself a warlock of the homely sort: unborn children, crops, livestock. He said he is not much interested in killing people, though he does not mind hurting them where hurting is called for. He carries a familiar called Tabitha, plays music, and understands bureaucracy, which in my experience is the rarer of the two gifts. Jedburgh is not human, is somewhere in his late fifties, and is built like a brick outhouse without moving like one; he is faster and more agile than a man that size has any right to be. He carries a glaive and wears grey leather armour that he cheerfully calls an elephant's scrotum. He is a good ranger, a decent spy, and by his own admission an absolute crap namer.''

''For my own part I gave them Black, or Sir Archibald, whichever they preferred. Human enough to look at, six feet, well made, skin the colour of chocolate with an amber undertone beneath it — a souvenir of a drink I once took and very nearly did not survive. I told them I was a good-hearted little fellow, which is how I like to sell myself. Kel observed that I am very likely the only person who would describe me that way. She may be right. She usually is, and it is one of her less endearing habits.''

===== A Jimmy Comes Recruiting =====

''Then the recruiter arrived, and I recognised the breed at once. "This is a Jimmy, is it?" I said, and it was. He was not the Guild's man; he served a doctor, and he had come looking specifically for Alusians and specifically for those of us who could work magic, because where we were going magic is a rarity and the few who possess it are, as he put it, very odd and usually Nazis. The last such fellow he had heard of managed to blow himself up by standing too close to an airship, and took the airship with him. There would also be occultists who do peculiar things with rituals, and worse, the Transuranians — five-limbed, five-armed things with a five-sided torso and a head that can be made into a crown, and powerful minds.''

''The destination was a version of Reich: our own war-torn Earth of the middle years of that century, but a duplicate of it, thrown off by some recent meddling with time. Late in 1942, after Dunkirk, after the Battle of Britain. I have walked in a great many places and I still felt a small cold thing turn over in my chest at the phrase '''a duplicate of it'''. Planes are not supposed to breed.''

===== Spending the Advance =====

''The Guild set aside a purse for the five of us as a group and advanced us a portion of it up front to equip ourselves, which is the Guild's way of saying it expects a return. We spent most of the advance on the deepest enchantments Uzi would lay on us, since there would be nothing of the kind to buy on the far side. Kel and I paid for our own out of our own pockets, so the party's money stretched to three others.''

''I then spent a good deal more of my own than I was ever likely to see again. From Callas I took three draughts to thicken my hide to a troll's, and Jedburgh made the sound point that the troll draughts are worth their price because they can be cast at range and shared about. I brewed three philtres against mind-work myself; that sort of thing is my own trade and I would rather trust my own hand than another's. From the Bishop I took five restoratives and a pair of potions against a broken mind, and I laid in five waters of healing, and from Sebastian two sets of shadow wings, already bound and waiting only on a word. It came to rather more than my fifth share of the purse. It always does. I have long since made peace with being the one the others borrow from.''

''The rest of them shopped with more restraint. Dross bought himself a crystal of vision and an amulet of chalcedony, which keeps the undead from coming close and seemed a prudent purchase given who else is coming through to that plane. Tulip bought a luck amulet, which most of us have carried since our first season. Dross, Jedburgh and Tulip took waters of healing from Rommel. Wind walking and feather falling were bought from Ty, though I did not note who ended up holding what, and there was some idle talk of a carpet that renders a legal opinion on whether one has committed a crime — one goes to sleep on it and judges by the quality of one's rest. Killing a German soldier in a war, we established, is not a crime. It is very nearly the opposite of one.''

===== Dross Lays Out the Cards =====

''Before we left, Dross laid out the cards for us. The reading came clean and strong, which I have learned is not the same thing as good. He turned the Devil, and the Five of Swords, and the Star reversed, and then all four face cards of the sword suit together. He read it himself, and read it well: entanglement, a conflict from which nobody walks away a winner, a loss of clarity or of trust, and — his own phrase, and it has stayed with me — a chessboard rather than a battlefield. Mental conflict, manipulation, matters strategic and interpersonal rather than of the heart or the sword arm. I said that was what the potions against a broken mind were for. Kel said she would only control our minds with our consent. I said she would have that consent shortly after she had controlled our minds. She did not deny it.''

===== Departure, and Novodom =====

''We purified ourselves, and Kel put an illusion on the whole party to make us into average-looking humans. I habitually change my face where Nazis are involved. I would rather not be recognised on a plane where I have never yet been. Then Callas took us through the earth itself to Novodom, on the first Moonday of Vintage.''

''Novodom surprised me. It is a walled metropolis of the old style, thriving, well-fed, the people healthy, not one shambling corpse anywhere on its streets — I looked. But there are so many people packed inside those walls that magic runs thin there, and by daylight Dross found his craft dragging at him like a wet cloak. What amused me was the Jimmy. He counted the spellcasters in the crowd and grew genuinely alarmed. Where he comes from, one such person in a city would be a national emergency.''

''He took us to the Inn of Santa Maria, in the expensive quarter, which is not an inn at all but a hospitium kept by monks who charge like wounded bulls — the better, no doubt, to distribute alms to the poor. An acolyte led us up to our employer's suite: panelled in wood, oil lamps not yet lit because it was daylight, a series of rooms rather than a room.''

===== Dr Wormwood's Commission =====

''Dr Wormwood is a woman with dark hair wound into a bun and horn-rimmed spectacles, in a robe cut as a man's would be and a white coat over the top of it, and riding boots without buckle or lace that fit her perfectly well. She ordered tea, sat us down, and explained the shape of the thing.''

''The Germans and the undead both come out of a third plane. The undead came in vast swathes — walking corpses spreading plague, and greater things behind them that she declined to describe in detail. The Germans are not fighting that horde. They are running from it, and their invasion of the plane she calls Cataclysm Earth is a flight dressed up as a conquest. To buy themselves room they have made an alliance with the Transuranians, who are meddling with the passage of the undead into Cataclysm Earth and holding the door for a while.''

''I asked her directly whether she was certain the Nazis on Reich and those coming through into Cataclysm Earth were the same body of men. She admitted the difficulty: the shift in time may have made a copy, and a copy is a hard thing to be certain of from the outside. Her analysis of the temporal grain finds the duplicate of Reich well enough. What she cannot do is be there herself. That is what we are for.''

''The commission has two halves, and she was refreshingly candid about which is which. We are to rescue a British agent in the south of France and get them over the border into Spain, which is neutral, and whose ruler leans towards Berlin but whose treasury leans towards American money. Then, and this is the part that matters to her, we are to investigate a ruin in Spain not far from where the agent will be set down. She believes that ruin holds information about the interference with time — possibly measurements taken by Phoenician astrologers before the birth of Christ. The rescue is the story she has sold to British High Command to explain why they are being given an untraceable team from nowhere. The investigation is the reason she is paying for us.''

''Dross wanted to know which took priority if the two pulled apart. The answer was the investigation. I said that stopping the agent from handing over what they know would itself count as a rescue of a sort, and nobody argued the point, which is a bleak thing to be right about before one has even met the man.''

===== Six Through the Abyss =====

''Then came the arithmetic of the crossing. One does not walk more than six through the Abyss without attracting the sort of attention that ends adventures — it is not a hard wall, Jedburgh explained, so much as a threshold past which the local residents begin to take an interest. There were five of us. I said that Hordling would count, and was sorry to say it. Dross at once offered to banish Tabitha and call her back with a ritual on the far side, which solved his end of it neatly.''

''Mine was not so neat. We turned over the options with all the seriousness of men discussing an artillery placement: change Hordling into a mouse and cage him — no help, we were told, and he would sulk for a season; leave him with Arnulf, who can be trusted, though not to the extent of preventing what Hordling would do to an alchemist's laboratory left unattended; hire a troll to mind him. Tulip suggested we give whoever minded him some means of sending word if he broke loose. I told her that was a terrible idea, that they would be sending word every five minutes, and that it would be kinder to everyone if I simply came back afterwards and dealt with the consequences. Dr Wormwood, who had been listening to all of this with a rising expression, said before anybody could ask that we were not leaving him with her. I told her it had never been the plan. I knew she would not be keen.''

''It was Kel who unpicked it in the end. If neither Dr Wormwood nor the Jimmy counted against our number — and the Jimmy was only guiding us, not travelling as one of the party — then five of us and Hordling made six exactly, and we were within our limit. Hordling came with us after all. He looked, for the record, extremely pleased with himself, and I am fairly sure he understood every word of the debate.''

''Dr Wormwood offered us one more thing before we went: syringes of hers that put knowledge into a man, though not all at once. The stuff unfolds over weeks, so that one wakes up gradually knowing French, or German, or how to drive a motor vehicle. Kel asked whether she could put in geography as well as tongues, and she could. I already have a serviceable measure of the language we will need, so I asked after the driving instead, which struck me as the most useful of the lot. She could copy a weapon skill from a sample if one of us already had it; Tulip wanted the trident, and I told her I had some competence with the trident already and she was welcome to copy off me, but that I would take nothing for myself on that score. I can teach myself a weapon. It is the one thing I have never had to buy. Tulip then enquired whether anybody had the whip, on account of a balrog-tail whip she owns and cannot use, and I said the whip seemed to me a dishonourable weapon. Kel said she has no need of one. People do what she says. She whips minds, not bodies. I have decided not to think about that too closely.''

''We took a night at the hospitium, and Kel produced a cigarette case of remarkably fresh cigarettes and handed them round with a straight face, on the grounds that a relaxing smoke is good for the lungs. Jedburgh declined. Loudly.''

===== The Rune Portal and the Descent =====

''The rune portal stands a little outside the town, and it does not look like anything at all — a rock, with the runes hidden in the ground about it and gems set into the stone, every gem smeared thickly over with bound earth. Tulip spotted the earthwork at a glance. I said aloud that it was to stop people prying the stones out with crowbars, and observed that Dross could hardly have been expected to notice it, being so busy prying the stones out with a crowbar. He took it well.''

''We would have used the Pattern, which is faster, but somebody else had used it lately and it was still filling itself up again. So we touched the rock, and waited half an hour, and passed through.''

''I have gone through such portals often enough to know the price and still not to enjoy it. It empties a man. Whatever a body keeps in reserve against a long day, the crossing takes all of it, and one arrives on the other side hollowed out and heavy-limbed, wanting nothing so much as to sit down in the mist and not get up. The Astral obliged with the mist. It is a vague plane, features half-suggested, bushes and slopes fading out into grey at a hundred yards, and we walked an hour through it on legs that did not want to walk before we came to the edge and stood looking down into the Abyss.''

''A mile of climb, straight down. The Jimmy began to clamber. Dross woke his carpet instead, and the weaving took better than he had any right to expect — it held for hours beyond what he had promised us, and he ferried us down in stages. Jedburgh turned himself into an eagle and flew down under his own power, though everything he carried transformed along with him and was no use to him at all until he was a man again. Dross asked, of nowhere in particular, whether we ought to be watching our strength closely at this point, and then answered himself: perhaps we are in a peaceful place where nothing bad can happen. He is an optimist. In the Abyss.''

===== Moonlight Sleeping on a Midnight Lake =====

''We spent two or three days crossing it, and slowly the strength came back into us, since we were walking and not fighting. Then we came to a river a mile wide, and beside it stood a figure leaning on a staff, whose features were so utterly black that all one could make out was the profile, an outline cut from nothing.''

''I brought up my black sight and saw him properly, and then I was glad. "My lord," I said. "My lord indeed."''

''Moonlight Sleeping on a Midnight Lake is a demon lord, and I have the honour of his acquaintance. He had heard that we were bound for the recent manifestation of Reich, and it had occurred to him that he might come along and be of use — as an interested party, he was careful to say, not as an employer. I told him I understood entirely. I know how it is.''

''Tulip asked me who on earth this was, and I made a hash of it — I called him Midnight Sleeping on a Moonlit Lake, which is a different demon lord altogether, and I have always got the two of them mixed up. He corrected me with more patience than I deserved. Kel asked whether he could be trusted. Completely, I said, as much as one trusts anyone. He is one of the good guys, I think, and I am aware how that sentence looks written down. The party has met Jade Rain before, and if they could stomach her they can stomach him. He is married, and his wife is called de Winter, a fact I had to be reminded of in front of him, which was not my finest hour. According to her letters, he said, she is well. He was travelling. When one is a demon lord one must get out among one's people and show one's face.''

''Speaking of showing, he said, and reached into the staff itself and drew out a monkey-shaped demon about the size of a hobbit. Short Fuse. He is, we were told, a bit on the dangerous side, and he throws around a great deal of black powder. I asked whether he was the sort one fires and forgets. On reflection: fire, and do not forget, and run.''

''I had a couple of Mills and Boon novels about me, and I gave them to Moonlight for his wife. He was genuinely delighted. He said he could go home at last, after this. It cost me nothing and I would do it again; there is a great deal to be said for being the one person in the Abyss who remembers that a demon lord's wife likes a love story.''

''Then he struck his staff and three more staves peeled away from it and took up a triangle around us, and we walked on.''

===== The Staves Do the Work =====

''I should like to be able to write that we fought our way across the Abyss. We did not. Waves of demons came at us and tried to roll straight over the top of the party, and the staves simply mowed them down — dragon flame from one, some fury of unseen force from another, other kinds of devastation I could not name and did not much want to. It went on like that for days. What would have been the death of all five of us, three sticks of wood handled without hurry while their owner strolled beside us discussing his correspondence. I have been at this a long time and I still found it instructive to be reminded how far above me the ladder goes.''

''We collected what was left afterwards, at Moonlight's suggestion — the remains make excellent material for a working alchemist, and I am one. Dross asked whether the stuff would serve for sleeping dust or poison dust. The poison, we were told, works exactly as it should. The sleeping dust made this way still forces a man to resist it, but if he fails he sleeps for the barest fraction of the time he ought to, which is a very short nap indeed, and I would not stake a plan on it. Hordling was in his element. Anything poisonous went into him, and he burped his opinions at us so continuously that nobody could follow a word.''

''Tulip, meanwhile, tried to make friends with one of the demons attacking us. She leaned out and made the noises one makes at a cat. The creature regarded her with a flat and specific loathing, and did not come any closer, and did not attack either, and I decided the safest thing I could do was look elsewhere and claim to have seen nothing.''

''Ten days or so more, and another river, and this time Moonlight simply made a bridge out of nothing across it and we walked over. On the far side we came out at the new version of Reich.''

===== The Black Castle =====

''The approach is unlike any plane I have entered. There is one roadway, climbing the flank of a mountain — it does not feel like climbing, one only walks and arrives — and at the top of it stands a castle of black stone, walled and towered. It is not manned. Nothing lives inside it. There is no way onward except through it. I asked Moonlight what it was for and he said he did not know, that he had not been able to find out, and that investigating those fortifications is one of his own tasks. I have rarely found a thing more unsettling than a demon lord admitting he has not managed to work something out.''

''Before we went through, Kel got a description of the local dress out of the Jimmy, and it is a curious world we were walking into. The men wear high-waisted trousers with a crease ironed sharp enough to cut, grey or brown, blue if they work in the city; narrow ties; white or pale blue shirts; hats. The women wear hats almost always, often with a veil, and dresses to mid-calf with a jacket, colour-coordinated or deliberately clashing, but always thought about. Nobody except the very poorest wears anything casually. Kel put grey suits on all of us, and at Tulip's request dressed her as a man — she was not, she said, wearing that skirt thing. Jedburgh made the sensible observation that a uniform would be safer still, but we did not yet know what any uniform there looked like, so we agreed to sort that out once we were on the plane.''

===== Victoria Station, October 1942 =====

''Then through the castle, and into that plane's own Astral, and out — into a tunnel at Victoria Underground Station, London, walking up into the crowd like anyone else.''

''Moonlight took one look at the press of people, remarked that he had best go home before he frightened the locals, struck his staff on the ground, and was consumed in a burst of fire. Not one soul in that station noticed. A few of them stepped around the space where he had been without knowing why they had done it, and then closed up again over the gap and went on with their day.''

''A man in military uniform and a peaked cap was waiting: Captain Glendinning, whose English is the sort one can only acquire at Eton, all cut glass and clipped edges. Jedburgh could not follow a word of it. I could. He had been instructed, for some reason he did not understand, to give us the date, and so he did. Monday, the nineteenth of October, 1942.''

''He then indicated a specially secured military vehicle, which was a van in an advanced state of collapse, and invited us into the back of it. I offered to drive. I told him I had been practising. He was, he said, keen enough to be spared the job, but I did not have clearance, so into the back I went, having established for the record that whatever happened next was not my fault. The thing lurched off making a noise like a foundry, banging and reeking, and after less than five minutes he put us out at a railway station, told us to look for a brown train, and left. He was going to Burma to fight the Japanese. He said it the way another man might mention a change of lodgings.''

''The brown train came after about five minutes, one carriage, empty. It was one of ours who noticed that the men driving it were wearing blindfolds. Kel quietly opened her silent speech between the five of us after that, so that we could say what wanted saying without any of it reaching the air. There was a picnic hamper waiting in the compartment, wine and food, laid on for us by somebody who knew we were coming and would never be told who we were.''

===== Achnacarry =====

''Nine hours of that, arriving just before midnight. We knew our station because the sign had not been painted out, and carried no red diagonal band across the corner to mark it secret: Achnacarry.''

''An elderly Scot was waiting with a horse and a dog cart. His accent was thick enough that the others struggled with him and I heard him clear as a bell — it is one of the few advantages of having been about as long as I have. He is the house's dogsbody, and will run us to and from the station and fetch what we want from the village. Achnacarry lies on the western side of Scotland, it is the seat of Clan Cameron, and it is where the commandos come to be trained. Kel asked him who was in charge. He took a long breath and told her, with feeling, that he had no idea, that everyone seemed to be, and that when somebody told him to do a thing he did it.''

''I asked him for mercury. It is very nearly the only thing I want from that village and I want a great deal of it. He said mercury comes in thermometers, which I know, and which is a tedious way to get at it. Then it turned out there is not a single thermometer in the whole of Achnacarry. Not one. Worth a try. Never mind — I shall find something.''

''The house took us in through the front door. The butler is called Macavity, Scots as well but far more cultured and perfectly clear to everyone, and he told us the admiral had asked that we refresh ourselves first and that he would wait until we were ready. Footmen took us up — one room for the women, one for the men — unpacked our gear, and ran baths. After a fortnight in the Abyss I will confess that the bath did as much for my morale as the enchantments did for my hide.''

===== Admiral Rollins and Operation Torch =====

''The library has an enormous wooden globe in it, a yard across, and a conference table ringed with green velvet chairs, and Admiral Rollins sitting at it in dress uniform with a brandy at his elbow. He has the face of a basset hound, the saddest-looking man I have met in a long while. I read his insignia while he was pouring us drinks, and found a decoration on it that had been added very recently — not a promotion, an honour. A man who has just been given an honour and looks like that has usually been given it for something he would rather not have done.''

''It was the very early morning of the twentieth by then. He laid it out for us plainly.''

''In the coming weeks the Allies will begin an operation in North Africa to drive the Germans and Italians out of it — Operation Torch. It is to be seen as an American affair, first because they want the American public brought fully into the war, and second because although there are British units in the area it is important that they are not seen to deliver the win. There is dissension to be discouraged. I have served princes long enough to recognise the shape of that reasoning and I did not much like hearing it in a war this size.''

''The difficulty is that one of their most productive escape lines — Heckler — is believed compromised. A whole sweep of the lines have suddenly been rolled up: one in Belgium, one in the north of France, one in Brittany. Jedburgh asked whether it was internal or external, and Rollins said there must be a double agent; too many have gone at once for anything else. Heckler is still running, and has survived longest only because the agent who runs it is extremely paranoid. Not, as Jedburgh observed, without reason. Not a bad way to be, I said, and meant it.''

''Heckler runs out of Lyon, which is also where the Gestapo have their headquarters, and there is a new man of theirs called Klaus Barbie who is presently in Switzerland and expected to take charge of that area soon. Our task is to get the leader of that line out before it is rolled up. Going into Lyon ourselves would draw more attention than we could survive.''

''Their escape route runs over the Pyrenees to a small coastal town, where a farmhouse and a landing field have been hired through another agent, and from which an aeroplane can lift the man out. Crossing the mountains, Rollins said, is a cakewalk. Moving him from Perpignan to that coast is not. Going by sea is out: the Germans expect a build-up of shipping across the Atlantic and have put submarines and warships all along that coast, Gibraltar to Malta, so anything on the water is liable to be stopped.''

===== No Way Down but Out of the Aeroplane =====

''Which brings us to how we get in. There is to be training here first, and then they mean to fly us down and fling us out of the aeroplane.''

''"That sounds like fun," I said, and Rollins did not smile.''

''They cannot land us. As one approaches Perpignan one comes into range of naval gunnery and anti-aircraft barrages, and the place is thick with fighter craft. They will give us parachutes if we want them, but their honest estimate is that we are dead the moment the canopy opens — a man under a chute is a sitting duck, and Dross corrected him: a falling duck. The aeroplane is to be a Vickers Wellesley, which Jedburgh named before Rollins could, and which is a Barnes Wallis design. They looked for a German aircraft with the range and could not find one, and in any case they would rather like the pilot back.''

''Dross asked whether it might be better to fly ourselves over the mountains and go through one of the passes, and asked for a terrain map. They produced photographic topographical maps of the Pyrenees, clear enough for anyone who has flown to read at a glance, and Tulip made the sound point that we should plan a route overland as a fallback even if we intend to fly. Kel suggested painting the underside of Dross's carpet black. Dross said it is a lovely embroidered thing and he is not painting the bottom of it black, and only relented on the promise of a replacement.''

''There was another carpet spoken of at some point — rhomboid rather than square, decorated round the edge, a tapestry really, with an eagle worked into it in blue. It must keep moving or it drops out of the sky, though it can be slowed almost to a hover. It is not Dross's. I did not establish whose it is, and I have written it down here precisely because I did not.''

===== The Final Five =====

''I should record, out of order, a thing that happened before we ever went down to the library. Dross had used his ring after his bath, wanting a private moment, and Short Fuse appeared to him. The creature spoke with great care, choosing his words like a man reciting something he has been made to memorise — almost, Dross said, as though somebody else's words were in his mouth. The message was this: the last of the goetic demons, the seventy-second, is involved in this affair, and he is one of five, and the five are a cabal who call themselves the Final Five. Dross passed it to the rest of us and it went down about as well as one would expect. Kel said we ought to ask for a rise in our fee, and I agreed and named a figure that would have made the Guild swallow its tongue. Jedburgh went looking up which of the seventy-two the last one is. Dross observed that there are five of them and five of us, and that this was almost too tidy. I said the tidy ones should be running for the hills.''

===== Two Weeks, If We Get Them =====

''Over the following days various people came to brief us on various things. One of those who came for Jedburgh was a woman with dusky skin and quite extraordinary beauty: the Princess Noor Inayat Khan, here at Achnacarry for commando training, and here for the second time. She speaks French as a native and German besides, and by all accounts she is a formidable radio operator. She gave Jedburgh an object that had been brought to her by a Hindu mystic, who told her that whoever held it would know who to give it to. It is of no use to anyone at present, so far as we can tell. She also told us that if we ever have to come out overland, we can find safety for a short while at Seine, in Paris.''

''There are two weeks set aside for training before any of this begins in earnest, and they may not be two weeks we get to keep — the moment the information they are waiting on arrives, we go, whether we are finished or not.''

''Which leaves us with one problem, and Kel put it as plainly as it can be put: between now and the day they fling us out of that aeroplane, we had better work out how to get from the aeroplane to the ground without dying. Jedburgh says he can carry everybody. Dross intends to use his carpet, and it depends on how well the weaving takes. For my own part I can step out of the thing and come to the ground without hurting myself, which the others found harder to believe than I expected.''

''I keep coming back to those cards. A chessboard, not a battlefield. Mental conflict and manipulation rather than the honest kind. All four swords, and the Star reversed.''

''I have crossed the Abyss with a demon lord at my shoulder and watched three walking sticks kill more things than I could count. And what waits for us is a paranoid man in Lyon, a traitor somewhere in a chain of frightened people, and a fall out of an aeroplane onto a coast bristling with guns.''

''I find I would rather have the demons.''

----

{| class="wikitable"
|-
|

==== OOC Details ====

===== Items Acquired =====

'''Kel:'''
* Waybread (unpriced)
* Potion of Restore Sanity (unpriced)
* Ranger syringe (rank 4) (unpriced)
* Revivification syringe (unpriced)

'''Black:'''
* Waybread (unpriced)
* Potion of Restore Sanity (unpriced)
* Trollskin potion R9 — 1125 sp
* Mind Shield potion R9 (unpriced)
* Restorative R10 — 200 sp
* Waters of Healing R10 — 400 sp
* Shadow Wings R6 (invested) — 600 sp
* Mills & Boon books (unpriced)
* Revivification syringe (unpriced)

'''Dross:'''
* Waybread (unpriced)
* Potion of Restore Sanity (unpriced)
* Mouse skin (skin change) (unpriced)
* Owl skin (skin change) (unpriced)
* Eel skin (skin change) (unpriced)
* Crystal of Vision — 1000 sp
* Chalcedony amulet (undead ward) — 4800 sp
* Waters of Healing — 400 sp
* Revivification syringe (unpriced)

'''Jedburgh:'''
* Waybread (unpriced)
* Potion of Restore Sanity (unpriced)
* Waters of Healing — 400 sp
* Revivification syringe (unpriced)

'''Tulip:'''
* Waybread (unpriced)
* Potion of Restore Sanity (unpriced)
* Luck Amulet — 2400 sp
* Waters of Healing — 400 sp
* Revivification syringe (unpriced)

'''Party (shared resources):'''
* Waybread (unpriced)
* Wind Walk (unpriced)
* Feather Fall (unpriced)
* Driving syringe (unpriced)
* French language syringe (unpriced)
* German language syringe (unpriced)
* English language syringe (unpriced)

'''Balance brought forward:''' 0 sp
'''Received this session:''' 40,000 sp
'''Spent this session:''' 37,500 sp
'''Balance carried forward:''' 2,500 sp

===== Session Summary =====

The party — [[#s1-the-company-assembled|Kel, Tulip, Dross, Jedburgh and Black]] — was [[#s1-a-jimmy-comes-recruiting|recruited at the Seagate Guild]] by an agent of Dr Wormwood for a mission to Reich, a temporally duplicated version of wartime Earth in late 1942. They [[#s1-spending-the-advance|spent the Guild's advance and a good deal of their own money]] on enchantments and consumables, and [[#s1-dross-lays-out-the-cards|Dross's card reading]] turned up the Devil, the Five of Swords, the Star reversed and all four face cards of the sword suit — a chessboard rather than a battlefield. Callas then took them through the earth to [[#s1-departure-and-novodom|Novodom]] on 3 Vintage, where [[#s1-dr-wormwoods-commission|Dr Wormwood laid out the commission]]: the Germans are fleeing an undead horde into Cataclysm Earth with Transuranian help, and the real objective is a Phoenician-era ruin in Spain rather than the British agent they are ostensibly rescuing. [[#s1-six-through-the-abyss|Keeping the crossing party to six]] took some argument before Hordling was allowed to come, and Wormwood supplied syringes that impart language, geography, driving and copied weapon skills over several weeks.

[[#s1-the-rune-portal-and-the-descent|The rune portal outside Novodom]] put them into the Astral and then over the edge into the Abyss, a mile of climb down. At the first river they met [[#s1-moonlight-sleeping-on-a-midnight-lake|the demon lord Moonlight Sleeping on a Midnight Lake]], who joined them as an interested party and lent them Short Fuse; for the rest of the fortnight-long crossing [[#s1-the-staves-do-the-work|his staves destroyed every demon wave]] without the party fighting, and Black harvested the remains for alchemy. They left the Abyss through [[#s1-the-black-castle|an unmanned castle of black stone]] that Moonlight admitted he had not been able to explain, and emerged at [[#s1-victoria-station-october-1942|Victoria Underground Station in London on 19 October 1942]]. A train north brought them to [[#s1-achnacarry|Achnacarry House in Scotland]], where [[#s1-admiral-rollins-and-operation-torch|Admiral Rollins briefed them]] on Operation Torch and on the compromised Heckler escape line running out of Gestapo-held Lyon. [[#s1-no-way-down-but-out-of-the-aeroplane|The insertion plan has no landing]] — a Vickers Wellesley is to fly them near Perpignan and put them out over a coast thick with anti-aircraft fire. Short Fuse separately delivered a warning that [[#s1-the-final-five|the seventy-second goetic demon is involved]] and belongs to a cabal calling itself the Final Five. The session ended with [[#s1-two-weeks-if-we-get-them|two weeks of commando training beginning]] at Achnacarry, a first briefing from Princess Noor Inayat Khan, and the party still without a survivable way to get from the aeroplane to the ground.

===== Chronological Timeline =====

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date !! Event
|-
| Day 1 (5 Oct) || Guild commission; Novodom; Wormwood's briefing
|-
| Day 2 (6 Oct) || Rune Portal; descent into the Abyss
|-
| Day 3 (7 Oct) || Abyss crossing
|-
| Day 4 (8 Oct) || Abyss crossing
|-
| Day 5 (9 Oct) || Moonlight Sleeping joins at the river
|-
| Day 6 (10 Oct) || Demon waves; remains harvested
|-
| Day 7 (11 Oct) || Demon waves; remains harvested
|-
| Day 8 (12 Oct) || Demon waves; remains harvested
|-
| Day 9 (13 Oct) || Demon waves; remains harvested
|-
| Day 10 (14 Oct) || Demon waves; remains harvested
|-
| Day 11 (15 Oct) || Demon waves; remains harvested
|-
| Day 12 (16 Oct) || Demon waves; remains harvested
|-
| Day 13 (17 Oct) || Demon waves; remains harvested
|-
| Day 14 (18 Oct) || Demon waves; remains harvested
|-
| Day 15 (Mon 19 Oct) || Force Bridge; Reich; London; train north
|-
| Day 16 (20 Oct) || Admiral Rollins briefs; training begins
|}
|}

----

=== Chapter 2: A Family of Sorts ===

''I have been given the better part of a fortnight in which to become somebody else, and an invitation to a shooting party, and I could not have told you at the outset which of the two would prove harder on me.''

===== A Thousand Miles from Ben Nevis =====

''Two days into our stay at Achnacarry, I had established the things that matter. Where the kitchen is. Who keeps the kettle. How many cups of tea a man may ask for in a morning before the cook begins to look at him sideways. The answer is a good deal more than one would expect, which tells you something about the house, and something about how thoroughly everybody there has stopped being surprised by anything.''

''Dross went back to Short Fuse to see whether anything further could be shaken out of him concerning the seventy-second and his tidy little cabal, and came away with nothing but the shape of the arrangement. Moonlight reaches him when Moonlight chooses to, and pours in whatever Moonlight means him to have, and until that happens again the creature knows precisely as much as we do. He is open enough with Dross and does not mind a word of it being carried to the rest of us. He will simply not begin a conversation with anybody else. I cannot fault him. If I were a monkey-shaped demon full of black powder, loose in a castle crawling with commandos, I would keep my own counsel as well.''

''Jedburgh did the geography for us. We are somewhere in the north-west of Scotland, near enough to Ben Nevis, and where we are going is a thousand miles from here, give or take. Perpignan is not a metropolis, but it is a city, and — this was news to me, and I ought to have asked sooner — it does not lie in the Reich proper at all, but in that part of France the Germans have left standing under its own government, which is a polite fiction and no more. That does not make it safe. There is a German presence, there is a prison of theirs, and the man who heads the secret police there is due to be replaced by one Klaus Barbie. We were given that name in London, attached to Lyon. Either the fellow is to have both, or somebody's information is wrong, and I have not decided which, and I do not much like either answer.''

===== The Guns of a Very Strange Little Man =====

''It was Macavity who raised the shoot. He said that while we were with them we might care to take part, and that it would come round on the Saturday after next. I said yes before I had thought about it, which is not like me, but the words ''out on Corniger'' had already arranged themselves in my head and there was no dislodging them. I have been in castles and briefing rooms and the back of a collapsing van for a fortnight. A man wants a horse under him.''

''I should record, since I keep failing to settle it, that I have heard Macavity called the butler and I have heard him called the ghillie, and I have given up deciding between them. He does both. He runs the shoot the way he runs the house, which is to say entirely, and with a Scots accent that I can follow perfectly and the others cannot follow at all.''

''He showed us the guns. They are enormous double-barrelled things, old — the youngest of them more than fifty years — and kept in a state of preservation that borders on devotion. The bore is wide enough to look down and see daylight at the far end, and what comes out of it is not shot at all but a single solid slug, a splinter of cadmium wrapped about in lead. I asked to handle one and did, and turned it over with a maker's eye, and took measurements and made notes, because I would very much like to know how the thing is put together before I have to trust my life to somebody else firing it near me. They are too heavy to be worked twice in a hurry, which is why every shooter is given a man whose whole trade is loading, and a pair of guns to swap between. Jedburgh has the shoulders for it, and enough of the knack for heavy weapons of that sort. I do not, and said so, and was not sorry to say it. I have never used a ranged weapon in earnest in my life and I did not propose to start.''

''I asked where they are made. There is a man down in London who makes these things for him, and Macavity described this man as strange, and then as quite odd, and then, in the tone of one closing a subject, as having unusual tastes. I observed that he would have to have some odd predilections, and that this seems to be the way of these things. Nobody argued. Kel said there was nothing wrong with a live-fire exercise provided one had interrogated the prisoners first. She said it perfectly pleasantly. Everybody heard it and nobody looked at her.''

''I worked out, standing there with the thing broken open over my arm, what a slug like that would do to a man, and then I worked out what it would do to me, which is a different sum entirely. The shell of force I carry would swallow the whole of such a blow and leave me with nothing worse than the noise of it. I remember thinking that this was a comfortable arrangement. I ought to have distrusted the thought. Comfortable arrangements are how one ends the day with an antler in one's elbow.''

===== Cogs in the Spine =====

''Dr Wormwood's syringes came out that evening, since we had none of us got any younger and the stuff takes weeks to unfold. Dross needed French and did not want it, which is a combination I have some sympathy with. He said the things looked horrid. They are horrid. There is a grinding noise as the cogs turn over and drive the material down into the spine, and it is that, rather than the needle, that undoes a man.''

''I offered to help. I said we could hold him down and do it for him. I said, further, that he might care to look at something interesting over there while I stabbed him in the back. Dross replied with great dignity that he did not require that particular sort of help. Jedburgh, who is a better man than I am, offered instead to take the pain out of it, and got a long sideways look from me for his trouble. In the end it was Kel who managed it: she caught his eye and held it and pushed her own needle in at the same moment, so that he had somebody to watch instead of something to feel, and when it was over she produced that cigarette case of hers and offered him one on the grounds that it would strengthen his lungs. She has been saying that since the Abyss. She will go on saying it. Dross took the cigarette.''

===== A Family of Sorts =====

''Kel put it to us that we needed cover identities and that we needed them settled before anybody started training, and she was right, and it turned into the pleasantest hour I have spent since we arrived. She is a skilled tailor, which is a real trade and will bear inspection, and she proposed to sit that underneath a farmer's wife. Jedburgh suggested a local doctor for himself, which suits a man of his age and manner. Dross offered himself as an itinerant musician composing odes to the glory of the Reich — he was being funny, and then discovered that it works, because such men exist and are tolerated. He was on the point of adding that he might be a gypsy when he thought better of it out loud. In that country, in this year, it would be a short life.''

''That left me. I said we would go with vintner, since it fits the farming theme, and since it is one of the few honest trades I actually possess. I can talk about wine for as long as anybody cares to listen and a good deal longer.''

''Then somebody said we needed a reason for four such people to be moving about together, and the answer was obvious: a family. Kel and Jedburgh married — Jedburgh observed he was old for a first wife and would have to be a second husband, or she a second wife, and Kel began congratulating him, and I asked why she was congratulating him when she was the one marrying him. We will be given papers, with the fiddling details left blank for us to fill in when we know them.''

''Kel also wants German uniforms — the real cut of them, learned properly, so that she can lay the image of one over any of us at need. She has worn that particular disguise before and enjoyed it more than is entirely healthy. She asked me to put a real uniform on so that she could take it off me, so to speak, and study the thing until she had it exactly. I agreed. It is a small enough service and I would rather she practised on me than got it wrong on a checkpoint.''

===== What the Terrier Carries =====

''The problem of the papers took longer. We will be carrying spares — the sort of documents that will hang a man if he is searched with them on him and save him if he can produce them later. I said Hordling could put them in his pockets, and then said, in fairness, that I could not guarantee they would still be there when we came to ask for them back. Dross's answer was better than mine: give them to Tabitha and send her home, where nobody can search her at all, and call her back when they are wanted. Nobody could think of a reason a German policeman would search a terrier, but then nobody could think of a reason he would not. She has other work in hand besides — Dross has her making sleep dust, which we may want badly and which nobody else has the patience for. I suggested that if Hordling were to carry anything, Kel put a picture of an ordinary dog over him first. We did not need it in the end, and I record it here only because it remains the plan if the terrier is unavailable.''

''Weapons were settled on the same principle. Nothing English, because anything English found on us hangs the man who supplied it as well as us. So: Lugers, Mausers, and the machine pistol the Germans themselves call a Schmeisser. Jedburgh went through several other notions before he was told, gently, that they had not been invented yet. There was a certain amount of unbecoming admiration around the table for German equipment — their grenades carry more powder and throw further than ours, apparently — until Kel observed that they had all the best gear and lost anyway.''

''They also produced a concealed sword for Kel, on the grounds that the house has nobody good enough to use it. It is a rapier at about two-thirds the usual length, very quick, made for a lady, and built for the specific purpose of getting inside the reach of a longer blade — no use at all pressed right up against a man, but murderous at that one distance. It is disguised as a parasol. She took it before he had finished describing it.''

''She asked whether we could have code phrases for the resistance and was told we would be given them before they put us out of the aeroplane. She asked where our agent is and was told nobody knows, because he is still moving. That is the second time I have heard a man described as too paranoid to be found, and been asked to find him.''

===== The Days Between =====

''Then we had days to spend and spent them.''

''Jedburgh gave a full week of his to weapons and did nothing else with it. He turned over whether to push his naming further and decided against it — he has no name close enough to the top of its ladder to be worth the effort, though he can banish a thing well enough already, and he asked Kel whether there were particular counterspells she wanted him carrying. She said she did not know what we were going to meet, which is the honest answer and no help at all.''

''I took the offer of training in small blades and came away with the short sword. It is not a weapon I had ever bothered with — I have always been able to pick a thing up and swing it — but a short blade goes places a lance and a mace do not, and where we are going, most of the places worth going are indoors.''

''Kel drilled us. She is a military scientist of high standing and she spent her days teaching us her commands until we knew them without having to think, which is the only way they are any use. She had us practise the silent speech until everyone was easy with it, including the trick of pushing an image across rather than words. She got maps of Perpignan and studied them, and then — this is the part I liked — she wrote a poem about the city, because she is a courtier of high rank and can, and then set the poem into her memory by another art entirely, so that she now carries the streets and the numbers of that place perfectly and can recite them off a verse. I have known a great many clever people. That is one of the cleverer things I have watched done.''

''Dross learned to drive, which the house paid for in dented motor cars, and Kel sat in the passenger seat abusing him in German the entire time. She maintains that this is the correct language for the purpose. He ground the gears and took it in good part and said it was tremendously helpful, and I think he half meant it.''

''We also settled how we get to the shoot and, more to the point, how we get out of an aeroplane. Jedburgh will simply be an eagle. Dross has the carpet, and the murmuration will lift three. I can fly, one way or another, and if it comes to it I can fall a very long way and land hard and get up again, which the others still do not entirely believe. I did put myself forward as a passenger service and then had to withdraw the offer, because Corniger will not carry anybody who is not a virgin — he has the fixed opinion that he is a unicorn and there is no arguing him out of it. I asked the question straight out. The answers were not encouraging. Kel said it was a very personal question and then answered it anyway, and that was that. I can give nobody a lift.''

===== The Shape of the Shoot =====

''The shoot works like this. There is a loch running north from the castle. At the far end of it, eleven miles up, is a place called Morrigan, and that is where the guns stand, out on the top of a hill with no cover worth the name. When the quarry turn and run south down the lie of the land they come to a waterfall and an old bridge over a pool the locals call the Witch Pool, and a second party lies concealed underneath that bridge and takes them out of the air as they pass. Every shooter has his loader and his pair of guns and a couple of pikemen at his back.''

''Dross asked whether it would not make more sense for all of us to go to one place rather than split at this very early juncture, and he was right, and the answer settled itself: Morrigan, because unless something confronts them at Morrigan they may not turn south at all, and then the party under the bridge sits in the wet for a morning with nothing to shoot. Kel said we would all go to Morrigan. So we did.''

''We were advised to wear as much armour as we could get away with, and Jedburgh asked whether he was expected to dress in tweeds, which was not answered. And we were given the rule of the thing, which is a single rule and admits of no exceptions: you only fire if you can see blue sky behind what you are firing at. Every year, we were told, there are accidents. It is why they are a clan and not a family.''

===== Grinding the Gears to Morrigan =====

''On the morning of the shoot — the last Saturday of October, and cold with it — Dross drove us up. The road runs above the shore, sometimes forty or fifty feet above the water and sometimes level with it, and he ground the gears the whole way while Kel swore at him steadily in German, and I sat in the back and thought that I have arrived at battles in worse company.''

''We left the car at Morrigan and walked up to the top of the hill, and I saw at once what they had meant about the exposure. There is nothing up there. You stand on the skyline and wait for something to come at you out of the north.''

''It was only then that we asked what we were shooting. They are called Perytons. They are stags crossed with birds, if you can hold that picture in your head, and they are not game in any sense I recognise — they are man-killers, and what they take is the heart. And they have this about them, which I have not been able to put down since: their shadows do not match them. A Peryton's shadow shows the shape of the person it is about to eat. I would have said I was past being unsettled by anything with wings. I would have been wrong.''

''Kel dealt with the exposure. She laid a false stretch of ground across the top of the hill, wide enough to take the whole party and good for most of a day once it was down, and everyone stepped inside it and vanished from the world. Everyone except me. Somebody has to be visible or the things fly straight past and nothing turns them, so I stayed out in the open on Corniger, and Macavity and his commandos stayed out with theirs. Kel offered me the observation, as I took up my position, that I should not stand too near Macavity, who becomes a complete lunatic the moment he starts pulling a trigger. Before we went out, Tulip put the strength of stone into our arms and an armour of earth over us, and she is very good at both, and I was glad of them within the hour.''

''Then they fed us, which was the most civilised part of the day. A piping breakfast — beef soup with pepper and vodka in it, devilled kidneys, everything hot and everything designed to keep a man alive on a hilltop in a Highland October. There would be two flights, and we were to have the first of them done by a quarter to ten so that there would be time for morning tea before the second. That, I think, is my favourite sentence anyone has said to me on this plane.''

===== Out of the North =====

''They came just before the quarter hour, out of the sky from the north, and they came far faster than anything had prepared me for. Two ranks of them, barely five feet apart across and twenty feet one above the other, dropping down the sky in a line.''

''Macavity opened it. He had told us it would be a Sten and it was in fact a Bren, set up on its bipod, and he lay flat on his belly and put a burst straight up into them to pull their attention onto himself while his three commandos stood over him with their pikes ready. It worked. It worked far better than he can have wanted. One of them he crippled outright and opened up so badly that it fell out of the flight and did not get up again.''

''The rest came down on top of him. Three of them together, and they went at him with everything they had, and he was on his back on the grass in a matter of seconds with one of them standing over him spraying blood in the cold air. He was not moving. The commandos closed over the top of him and dragged him back out of it, and that was the last useful thing Macavity did that morning, and I have not been able to decide since whether he is a brave man or simply had no idea at all what he was inviting us to.''

===== The Charge =====

''Jedburgh had the gun ready and used it, and put a slug into one of them at the chest, which did not kill it but took the speed out of it, and after that it was only a matter of catching it.''

''I did what I came to do. I put Corniger at the line of them and charged down it with the lance, and it is a very long time since I have had the chance to do that properly against something that deserved it. I killed one outright on the way through — the lance went in and it simply stopped being alive — and touched several others in passing as we went by. It is a good horse. It is an extremely good horse.''

''Then they came for me, all of them, which was the plan and was not therefore any less unpleasant. Corniger got us out from under the first pass by mincing sideways at exactly the right instant, which is a piece of schooling I paid a great deal for and have never regretted. The rest got through. The shell of force around me took the first of it and held. The second smashed my helmet in and rang my skull like a bell, and I lost the better part of a moment to it. And one of them struck at the second head I carry, the Abzazu head, and it went out like a candle and stayed out for the rest of the fight. I do not care to describe how that feels. It is not pain exactly. It is more as though a room in the house had gone dark with somebody still in it.''

''So I did the sensible thing, which I ought to have done before the charge and did not because I wanted the charge. Corniger has a shoe I have been saving — the shoe of the herd — and I set it going, and where there had been one of us there were suddenly seven, mount and rider all together, all of us in the same place doing the same things at once. And I drew the void up around myself over the top of it. After that they were welcome to try.''

===== Seven of Me =====

''What followed I can only set down in pieces, because that is how I have it.''

''Tulip could not lift one of the shoot guns — they want a strength she has not got, and I have seen her carry an injured goat further than I would have, so I mean that as no reflection on her. She drew the pistol she had been issued instead and fired it into them steadily all morning, and every one of those small holes told in the end.''

''Dross tried to put a fear into one of them and the working simply would not take; I saw his face when it failed. He set himself and did it again and the second one went in like a knife, and the Peryton it landed on broke out of the fight and went south as hard as it could fly. Somebody thought to ask where it was headed. Morocco, apparently. I said it was off to Spain then, and laughed, and then stopped laughing, because so are we.''

''Kel worked from inside her false ground and did more damage than any gun on that hill. She reaches straight into their minds, and against a dream weaver a beast's stubbornness counts for nothing at all; she simply took them out of themselves one after another, and they came down out of the sky asleep.''

''Jedburgh charged one on foot with the glaive and killed it, which he should not have been able to do, because their hides turn a cutting edge — he hit it so hard that the resistance stopped mattering. And then one of them caught him properly. It gored his off arm and ruined it, and the blow was heavy enough that he should have gone down senseless and did not, because he is made the way he is made. His glaive is braided to his wrist and so he did not lose it either. He told me afterwards, quite cheerfully, that the arm will be two months mending.''

''And then it was my turn again, and this is the part I keep going back over. Three of them landed on me at once and struck through everything — one drove an antler into the joint of my elbow so hard that the tip snapped off inside, and another opened my arm along its length, and I saw it happen, and I felt nothing whatever. Because it was not my elbow. Kel called out that there were seven of me, and she was right; the blows had gone into copies, and I watched myself gored twice over from four feet away and then watched the pieces of myself come apart and go out. Two of them at once. It is an unwholesome thing to see even when it saves your life, and it did save my life. Kel said to Dross, not at all quietly, that I am a good deal harder to kill than the rest of them, being an immortal sort of character, and that any of them would have died several times over standing where I was standing. She meant it kindly. I did not enjoy hearing it as much as I ought to have.''

''Tulip got to Macavity while all this was going on. He had gone far enough over the edge that another few moments would have finished him, and she brought him back and held him there, and he did not die. Later she reached hands of earth up out of the ground and took hold of them where they flew.''

''I did what I could with what I had left. I put the void on one of them with everything I could give it, which is the whole of a man's attention and leaves nothing over, and the thing barely noticed. That was humbling. So I went back to Indigo and hit them with the mace until they stopped, which is less elegant and worked considerably better.''

===== A Bag of Eleven =====

''At the end of it there were two still up and neither of them was going to last, and Kel and Dross put them down before I could get to them with the mace, which was probably kinder to everybody.''

''One got away — the one Dross frightened, still going south. Eleven for the bag.''

''Then they gave us food, because it was that sort of morning: venison rolls and game pie, on a hilltop, in the wind, with the dead laid out below us and more work promised later in the day. And it was put to us that the day had been remarkably successful, and I asked what they meant by remarkably. They mean that nobody died. Normally, it seems, this is done by weight of numbers — enough guns on the hill that the flight breaks and turns and runs down to the bridge, and there is the occasional death in a year, and everyone accepts it as the price. Eleven taken and nobody killed is not how the shoot usually goes. I said aloud that Macavity had rather underestimated these things, and nobody contradicted me.''

''There is a harvest in them, which I had not expected. The beasts carry iron in their bodies, and their antlers are shot through with their own blood, and that blood is magical. Worked properly at the castle forge — forty hours of it, which somebody will have to stand and do — the antlers can be cut at the branchings and set into a breastplate across the shoulders, and what you get out of it is armour that turns magic as well as steel. Eleven sets is exactly enough for two: one cut small, for an elf, and one for the rest of us. Kel said the house would surely do that much for their favourite commandos. The feathers were a poorer return. Only one bird in the eleven had a cape in it, but that one will be worth having — light, and it will take a blow for you, and there is something else in it besides that nobody has yet named.''

''I took the hearts. I did not explain why and nobody asked, which is one of the things I like about this party.''

''The last word of the day was Jedburgh's arm. Two months, he says, and he says it as though it were a spot of rain. It does mean that when they put us out over that coast he will not be able to do it hanging under a canopy, which he pointed out himself, and then added that it does not matter because he can still fly, and that it is nevertheless a complete pig.''

''I have a fortnight, less what we have already spent, and a man in the south of France who cannot be found, and a traitor somewhere in a line of frightened people, and now a horse who thinks he is a unicorn, a dented motor car, and eleven sets of antlers waiting on a forge.''

''It was, all things considered, a good shoot.''

''---''

----

{| class="wikitable"
|-
|

==== OOC Details ====

===== Items Acquired =====

'''Kel:'''
* Concealed small sword (unpriced)
* Forged identity papers (unpriced)

'''Party (shared resources):'''
* Peryton antlers (unpriced)
* Peryton feathers (cape-grade) (unpriced)

'''Black:'''
* Peryton hearts (unpriced)
* Forged identity papers (unpriced)

'''Dross:'''
* Forged identity papers (unpriced)

'''Jedburgh:'''
* Forged identity papers (unpriced)

'''Balance brought forward:''' 2,500 sp
'''Balance carried forward:''' 2,500 sp

===== Session Summary =====

Two days into the party's stay at Achnacarry, Short Fuse confirmed he could add nothing about the seventy-second demon until Moonlight next contacts him, and [[#s2-a-thousand-miles-from-ben-nevis|the destination was filled in]]: Perpignan, roughly a thousand miles south, in Vichy France rather than the Reich proper, with a German presence, a Nazi prison, and Klaus Barbie due to take over the secret police there. Macavity invited the party to the estate's annual shoot on the Saturday after next and [[#s2-the-guns-of-a-very-strange-little-man|showed them the shoot's guns]] — enormous double-barrelled pieces firing a cadmium-and-lead slug, supplied by an odd little man in London. Through the training period the party [[#s2-cogs-in-the-spine|took Dr Wormwood's knowledge syringes]], Dross taking French with Kel steadying him; [[#s2-a-family-of-sorts|settled cover identities as a family]], Kel a tailor and farmer's wife married to Jedburgh's local doctor, Black a vintner, Dross an itinerant musician; and [[#s2-what-the-terrier-carries|worked out how to carry their spare papers and what to carry them with]], sending Tabitha home with the documents where she cannot be searched, choosing German small arms over traceable English ones, and accepting a concealed rapier for Kel. [[#s2-the-days-between|The remaining days]] went on Jedburgh's weapons training, Black's new short sword, Kel's drilling of the party in her commands and her memorised poem of Perpignan's streets, Dross's driving lessons, and a plan for getting out of the aeroplane.

[[#s2-the-shape-of-the-shoot|The shoot was laid out]] as a drive from Morrigan, eleven miles up the loch, toward a concealed second party at the Witch Pool bridge, with one absolute rule: fire only at blue sky. The party chose to stand together at Morrigan and [[#s2-grinding-the-gears-to-morrigan|drove up on the last Saturday of October]], learning only there that the quarry were Perytons — man-killers that eat hearts and cast the shadow of whoever they are about to take — before Kel hid the party under illusory ground and Black stayed visible to turn the flight. [[#s2-out-of-the-north|The first wave came out of the north]] far faster than expected, and Macavity was mauled unconscious moments after opening fire. [[#s2-the-charge|Black charged the line on Corniger]] and killed one outright before the flight turned on him, smashing his helmet and knocking out his Abzazu head, at which point Corniger's shoe [[#s2-seven-of-me|put seven Blacks on the hill]] while Kel, Dross, Jedburgh and Tulip broke the rest of the flight; three grievous strikes landed on Black's copies rather than on him, and Tulip pulled Macavity back from dying. [[#s2-a-bag-of-eleven|Eleven were taken and nobody was killed]], which is not how the shoot usually goes. The party remain at Achnacarry with the rest of the training fortnight ahead of them, eleven sets of antlers awaiting forty hours at the castle forge, one cape's worth of feathers, and Jedburgh's arm two months from mending before the drop near Perpignan.

===== Chronological Timeline =====

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date !! Event
|-
| Day 18 (22 Oct) || Two days into the Achnacarry stay: Short Fuse can add nothing about the seventy-second until Moonlight next contacts him; the destination is confirmed as Perpignan in Vichy France; Macavity invites the party to the shoot and shows them its guns.
|-
| Day 19 (23 Oct) || Dr Wormwood's language syringes taken, Dross's French steadied by Kel; cover identities agreed as a family — Kel a tailor and farmer's wife married to Jedburgh's doctor, Black a vintner, Dross an itinerant musician.
|-
| Day 20 (24 Oct) || Spare documents sent home with Tabitha, who cannot be searched, and set to making sleep dust; German weapons chosen over traceable English ones; Kel issued a concealed parasol-rapier.
|-
| Days 21–26 (25–30 Oct) || The training period: Jedburgh a full week on weapons, Black on the short sword, Kel drilling the party in her commands and memorising a poem of Perpignan's streets, Dross learning to drive; the insertion plan settled.
|-
| Day 27 (Sat 31 Oct) || The shoot at Morrigan. Kel's illusory terrain hides the party while Black stays visible to turn the flight; Macavity is mauled unconscious and stabilised by Tulip; eleven Perytons taken, one escaping south, and no deaths. Antlers, feathers and hearts harvested; Jedburgh's arm crippled for two months.
|}
|}

----

=== Chapter 3: Some Things Are Gone When They Are Gone ===

''They feed you at eleven o'clock on that hill, and every single thing they hand you is made so that a man can eat it with one hand. I have thought about that a good deal since.''

===== Elevenses =====

''When the first flight was finished I went round and asked what everyone had. Jedburgh had a ruined arm and had had it since before breakfast — the wicked cut he took the last time, still open, still useless. He could not lift the big gun and he could not fight, which he pointed out was the entire reason he had come. Kel said her casting hand was spent. Reaching into a thing's head and turning it inside out takes something out of you that food will not put back, and she had done it a great many times in a short morning. I asked whether anyone carried anything for the deep hurts — the sort that do not simply close over — and nobody did. I do, as it happens. It was not the moment for it.''

''I had come out of it without a mark. I record that plainly because of what follows, and because I remember standing there in the wind feeling rather pleased with myself.''

''The break was to be an hour and a half, two if we wanted it, and Tulip spent all of it working. She is a very good healer, quick and unfussy, and she went along the line putting people back together one small mending at a time. Macavity took a great deal of it — he had been very nearly killed and had gone in and out of the world twice already that day — and Jedburgh took what he could use. She asked whether I wanted any. I said no.''

''Then they fed us, and I have to say the food is the part of this arrangement I understand best. Beef and pastry and things kept hot, raspberry with vodka poured through it, cream horns swimming in custard. Somebody explained to me at length, and with real feeling, that the whole tradition of the mid-morning break is built around food a man can hold in one fist — pasties and game pies and meat sealed under aspic — so that the other hand is free for a cup, or a bottle, or a gun. It is a sensible way to build a meal. I enjoyed the lecture more than I have enjoyed anything else on this plane.''

===== Affairs of the Heart =====

''Before we went back out I handed round amulets. I carry a number of a particular kind — a small thing worn over the heart and woken with a drop of your own blood, which does nothing at all until the moment your body gives out, and then pours healing into you once and burns itself to nothing doing it. One use. One life. I gave them to Tulip, to Jedburgh, to Dross and to Kel, which left me with a couple of dozen still in hand, so nobody need feel they had taken my last.''

''Dross asked what the thing was called. I told him. He said it was aptly named, which it is.''

''I did not explain why I was doing it while we stood there, and I will explain it here instead. I watched Macavity go down under three of them in the space of a breath, and I watched Tulip haul him back from wherever he had got to, and it occurred to me while we were eating that the next one to go down might well be somewhere she could not reach. I would rather spend a trinket than stand over a friend afterwards working out what I might have done.''

===== Baiting the Trap =====

''Jedburgh raised traps first — he is a ranger of sorts and it is the obvious question — and it came apart twice over. He could not have set them one-armed, and the rest of us could have, and none of it would have mattered because the things never touch the ground until they are already on top of you. Binding animals was the next idea and the best one, because he is very strong at it, and it was no use either: whatever a Peryton is, it is not an animal in the sense the working means. Earth is no good against a thing in the air. Tulip has fiercer workings in her somewhere but had not brought them out that morning.''

''Kel proposed we do what had worked before and let Macavity and his men stand out front and take the charge. I said what I thought of that — he had been all but killed by a single pass — and what we settled on instead was better. Kel laid down four illusions, a line of soldiers standing with weapons levelled, the sort of thing a stooping animal cannot resist. She wanted straw men underneath so there would be something solid to strike; there was nobody at the house with the hands or the hours to make them, so our line was made of nothing whatever, and stood there looking dangerous.''

''Jedburgh's contribution was the good one. Get them lined up on the false soldiers and put lightning straight down the row, because whatever else they are, they do not shrug off magic. He gave Tulip a bolt of her own to hold. Then there was a long, careful business of standing everyone in the right place, since the lightning runs a fixed length and does not care whose spine is at the end of it, and the two of them shifted about the slope until they were sure they could kill only Perytons with it. Dross said he would hold a fear ready and drop it on anything that came for me. I said I would hold my charge until after the lightning went, which is not how I like to fight, and was right.''

''Dross also wanted to know whether their antlers count as silver or as magic, because Tabitha cannot be hurt by anything else and he was working out whether she could be of use. We decided they probably do count, being magical creatures, and that he had better assume the worse of it. She stayed out of it and made coffee instead, which was of more use to me personally.''

===== Too Good to Be True =====

''They came in out of the high air with a great space between the ranks, and they came far faster than the first flight had — dropping the whole way, so that they were moving quicker than anything I am used to standing still for.''

''Then everything worked at once, which almost never happens.''

''Dross's fear went into one of them and it broke off the line and fled, unable to say what it was afraid of, only that the hilltop had something on it. Kel reached into two more and they simply stopped being awake and fell out of the sky. The lightning went down the row of false soldiers exactly as Jedburgh had drawn it and caught both of the ones lined up on them, and neither could hold the air afterwards; one came down so badly that it lay there stunned in the grass. Macavity swung the Bren round — his commandos had the sense to be somewhere else this time — and put another down. And I put Corniger at the one nearest me and rode it down with the lance, and it stopped being alive with no fuss at all.''

''Kel said we had killed them all. Dross pointed out that one of them was only sleeping. It was, in fairness, resting very deeply.''

===== Sharp Antlered Doom! =====

''The next flight put us right. Then the one after that.''

''They came in low over the false soldiers and somebody said to look at the grass, and I looked. Every shadow coming up that hill was mine. Not four shadows of stags with wings — four of me, striding along underneath them at exactly their speed. I knew about this. I had been told about it and had written it down and thought myself unmoved by it. It is a different thing to see your own outline laid out on the ground four times over by creatures who are still eight hundred feet away and have already decided.''

''Tulip had the worst of what came after. One of them came down on her where she stood and did three separate pieces of ruin to her in a single pass — opened her chest, crippled the arm, laid her leg open — and she went out of her senses and stayed nearly emptied for the rest of it. She has almost nothing to spare at the best of times. It was very close.''

''Jedburgh was standing underneath one when it came apart in the air and was drenched from head to boots in its blood. He observed that there are worse things, which there are, and he would know. Macavity meanwhile put a shot up through one of them from behind and took its foreleg off at the wrist, and there followed a short argument on the hill about whether a bullet running the length of a creature's great artery counts as a shot through the heart. I found I did not much care for the discussion. These things eat hearts. They pull them out of men on the wing. But you cannot mind that and enjoy the other, so I said nothing and let them argue.''

===== Shorthanded =====

''Three of them came onto me at once and four blows came through.''

''The first opened my chest — a bad one, deep, the kind that takes something out of a man besides blood. The shell of force I carry swallowed the next one whole and I did not feel it at all. The third got past the shell and did more of the same. And the fourth took my left hand off at the wrist.''

''I saw it go. That is the part I keep returning to. There was no moment of not knowing; I watched my own hand leave my arm and land in the grass, and my first coherent thought was not about the hand at all. It was that this has now happened to me twice in two days in almost the same way — that they come through the shell and then the harm is real — and that I have to work out how to stop it, because I cannot go on being told by these creatures which parts of me I am permitted to keep. I said as much out loud. Nobody argued.''

''I have a vial for this. Sardonyx, and it does the deep injuries first, then the ordinary wounds, then the weariness, and the whole of it must be drunk at once. I turned it over in my mind while the fight went on around me and came to the answer I already knew. It will close a wound and it will mend a crushed thing. It will not put a hand back onto an arm any more than it would put an eye back into a head. Some things are gone when they are gone.''

===== Cleanup =====

''So I dropped the shield and went on with my right.''

''Everything is harder that way, and I mean everything — the reach is wrong, the weight is wrong, the horse expects your weight to sit somewhere it no longer does. I still hit them. I hit one hard enough to end it, one-handed, off-side and bleeding, and I record that here out of pure vanity because there is nobody else I can tell.''

''I asked Tulip to pick my hand up for me. She could not; she was senseless in the grass with her chest open. Kel got it instead and kept it out of the dirt, which was all I wanted — I held it against the stump for a while afterwards, on the chance. There is a woman who could put it back. She has the craft for it and she is weeks away and on another world entirely, and by the time she could be reached the thing in my hand would be no use to anybody.''

''Kel finished the last of them. She reached in and it went out like a lamp, with smoke coming off one wing as it dropped. Three flights of four came at us in all that day, twelve altogether, and two of them broke and ran south down the lie of the land — toward the bridge and the pool, where the second party had been lying in the wet since dawn with nothing whatever to shoot at. I hope they enjoyed themselves. Ten accounted for on our hill.''

===== An Even Trade =====

''They drove us back down to the castle and we went through what had come off the beasts. None of it is magical. We are going to have it looked at properly anyway, because none of it being magical is exactly the sort of thing a man says confidently right up until he is wrong; Dross can do that quickly and Jedburgh talked about learning the trick himself so the two of them could get through it in an afternoon.''

''There is a breastplate to be made from the antlers, and it was mine by right of having killed a fair share of them, and it is no use to me at all — I already wear metal, and one does not layer such things. Kel said give it to Jedburgh, who fights in the front and has nothing so good, and that was the right answer.''

''And there was an iron leg. I do not entirely know what to say about the iron leg. Nobody else in this party keeps a mount, so it was mine by default, and Corniger took an immediate and unmistakable interest in it, and it is now fitted to him. He is delighted. He has an extra hoof and I have one hand fewer, and if he has noticed the arithmetic of that he has been too polite to say so.''

===== Fittings All Round =====

''The house retains a tailor, a brisk sort of woman, and we spent a pleasant hour spending her time for her.''

''Dross took the fencing cape — feather-lined, or fur, and it wants making up properly. It is worth having: it hangs exactly across the angles where a man holding a blade out in front of him is open, and it turns a little of what comes in there. Jedburgh made the point that mattered more. We are going out of an aeroplane before long, and whatever height they put us out at, it will be cold, and none of us owns a coat worth the name. So: greatcoats. Three days apiece, one seamstress, one garment at a time, and she cannot be in two places while she does it.''

''Kel wanted a fascinator, which I had to have described to me — a very small hat, worn at night, made of almost nothing, the sort of confection that announces a woman's standing before she has said a word. That is the difficulty with it. You may not wear one unless you are gentry or better, and Kel is not certain her invented past will bear the weight, and in any case it wants a milliner rather than a seamstress; Edinburgh, apparently, if not London.''

''So Kel went and asked the commander whether he could simply buy her a minor title, which I thought was magnificent, and was told that such things are the King's to give and nobody else's. Jedburgh proposed she become a Scottish widow instead, and then, warming to it, the Black Widow of McMurdo, and then an order of the Empire, which he assured her is the more usual route and takes rather longer. Kel asked whether marrying into gentry and then divorcing would answer. Jedburgh reminded her what year this is, and what happened the last time a divorce was placed near the throne of this country, and the subject was allowed to lapse.''

===== The Spoils of War =====

''I drank the vial on the hill and it did what it could. The chest wound went, and the lesser damage with it, and the whole of it emptied into me in one swallow, and my wrist ended the day exactly as it had begun the afternoon.''

''That left Tulip. Her injuries came to precisely what a full dose of the vial will carry — the great wound to the chest and the crippled arm together, no more and no less — which is the kind of luck I have learned to be suspicious of. The trouble is that the vial was now empty, and filling it is not a matter of pouring something in. You put your own life into it, a measure at a time, and it holds what you gave it until somebody drinks. I mend faster than most men, faster by some way, and even so I could not fill it in a day or in five.''

''It took fifteen. Fifteen days of giving it a little and getting it back and giving it again, at the end of which she drank it and stood up whole. Kel offered to have a herbalist's draught made to hurry my end of it along; I did not need one. Jedburgh had hurt left over too, and we looked at it and decided to leave it alone — it is weakness and nothing more, no lasting harm in it, and it will go by itself in three weeks if he lets it. He was quite cheerful about that. He is quite cheerful about most of it, which I have decided is either courage or a want of imagination and is probably both.''

===== Nothing Could Possibly Go Wrong =====

''Fifteen quiet days is also, conveniently, time to build a hand.''

''I have been an armourer a very long while and a mechanician for rather less, and between the two of them I can make almost anything that has joints in it. The question is what to make it out of. The elegant answer — and I want it on record that I thought of it while still bleeding — is substance with no form wrapped around form with no substance, which would be beautiful and would work and which I do not yet know how to build. The practical answer is quicksilver, which I have wanted since the day I arrived on this plane and which the whole of this country appears not to contain a single flask of.''

''Dross suggested dynamite. Then, having thought about it more carefully, plastic explosive. It was pointed out to him that whoever stands next to me would have views on this, and he agreed that it might be improved by also setting fire to it, and I said that nothing could possibly go wrong. Jedburgh offered me something of his to fasten on in the meantime and I turned it down; the grown ones are weak, and there are other reasons.''

''I would like to have it done before we go. A man can charge with a lance one-handed. He cannot shake hands, or hold a glass and a cigarette at the same time, or eat politely in company that watches which hand you use — and where we are going, being remembered is how you die.''

===== Ultima Thule =====

''The last of it came to us as intelligence, and it is the part I keep turning over.''

''A man from the Ahnenerbe was seen speaking with Klaus Barbie, who has the Gestapo. The sighting came from an informant they call Gex, dated the last day of October, and reached us the day after through the decrypts, out of the ground between France and Switzerland not far from Geneva. So the ancestral-heritage people and the secret police are talking to one another on the very ground we are shortly to be dropped onto, which is not a coincidence I am prepared to enjoy.''

''I was given a great deal of background on what the Ahnenerbe are. Not all of them are lunatics, which surprised me — a good number are genuine scholars who were seconded into it and now spend their lives being consulted by lunatics. The Germans are the finest Sumerologists alive and much of that talent has been poured into hunting an origin for the Aryan people somewhere in the north of the world, by way of ancient Persia, whose name is the same word. Sievers runs it and is a manager rather than a scholar; the thing above him is somebody's pet project, and the man whose pet it is believes it will father a rebirth of the whole race. They sent an expedition to Tibet to look for the mystics and found nothing. They sent another to the far south, three years ago, and found nothing there either. And they have spent an enormous quantity of money looking for Ultima Thule in the frozen north, poking about islands inside the Arctic circle, hunting for a paradise in the ice and for whatever is left of Coeus — a Titan of the cold north, and of intellect, on the grounds that cold sheds a light of its own.''

''What I found most useful was the plainest part of it. Our side does not want the thing because we believe in it. Our side wants it because the Germans will move heaven and earth to have it, and the surest way to stop them is to be standing on it first. That is not a crusade. That is a race, and races are lost.''

''I put it to them that if there is a real thing under all this, it might be the northern celestial pillar — and that a pillar is a way off this plane, which would explain rather a lot about what the enemy actually wants. Dross asked whether that might be why they came here at all. Nobody answered either of us, and I noticed that nobody answered.''

''Meanwhile the war goes on being the war. The Germans have convinced themselves a very large American convoy is being assembled to run supplies into Malta, and they are pulling their submarines into the Mediterranean to sit at the narrows and wait for it. Our people know this because they have been reading the enemy's sea traffic since May. And in about a fortnight they put us out of an aeroplane over France, somewhere between two and six hundred feet, which is low enough that the coats may prove unnecessary and low enough that there is no second attempt.''

''Eleven days on this world. Three flights of monsters in a single day, three sets of coats on order, and a left hand in a cloth somewhere that I have not yet been able to make myself throw away.''

''I would like the new one finished before we jump.''

----

{| class="wikitable"
|-
|

==== OOC Details ====

===== Items Acquired =====

'''Tulip:'''
* Second Chance amulet (unpriced)

'''Jedburgh:'''
* Second Chance amulet (unpriced)
* Peryton-antler breastplate (unpriced)

'''Dross:'''
* Second Chance amulet (unpriced)

'''Kel:'''
* Second Chance amulet (unpriced)

'''Corniger:'''
* Iron leg (prosthetic) (unpriced)

'''Party (shared resources):'''
* Sleeping dust (unpriced)

'''Balance brought forward:''' 2,500 sp
'''Balance carried forward:''' 2,500 sp

===== Session Summary =====

The first Peryton flight over, the party took [[#s3-elevenses|an hour and a half of elevenses on the hill]] while Tulip mended the worst of the injured, and Black [[#s3-affairs-of-the-heart|handed round Second Chance amulets]] to Tulip, Jedburgh, Dross and Kel before they went back out. Traps and animal-binding were ruled out, and [[#s3-baiting-the-trap|the plan they settled on instead]] was Kel's line of illusory soldiers with Jedburgh's lightning laid straight down the row, which [[#s3-too-good-to-be-true|broke the second flight almost without a fight]]. The third and fourth flights went far worse: [[#s3-sharp-antlered-doom|Tulip was ruined in a single pass]], and three Perytons converged on Black and [[#s3-shorthanded|took his left hand off at the wrist]]. He [[#s3-cleanup|fought on right-handed]] to the end of it — ten of the day's twelve accounted for, two escaped south.

Back at the castle the party searched the beasts' gear, found nothing magical, gave the antler breastplate to Jedburgh and [[#s3-an-even-trade|fitted a recovered iron leg to Corniger]], then [[#s3-fittings-all-round|put a long afternoon of orders through the house tailor]] — a fencing cape, greatcoats against the cold of the coming jump, and a fascinator Kel may not have the standing to wear. Black drank his Sardonyx vial on the hill for his own chest wound, then [[#s3-the-spoils-of-war|spent fifteen days bleeding it full again]] so that Tulip could drink it and stand up whole, and used the same fortnight [[#s3-nothing-could-possibly-go-wrong|designing a replacement hand]] he has no quicksilver to build. The session closed on [[#s3-ultima-thule|intelligence out of the French–Swiss border country]]: an Ahnenerbe man seen with Klaus Barbie of the Gestapo, a long briefing on the German search for Ultima Thule and the Titan Coeus, and confirmation that the party drops into France in roughly a fortnight.

===== Chronological Timeline =====

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date !! Event
|-
| Day 27 (31 Oct, late morning) || Elevenses break; Tulip heals Macavity and Jedburgh; Black unhurt
|-
| Day 27 (31 Oct, late morning) || Black distributes Second Chance amulets to Tulip, Jedburgh, Dross and Kel
|-
| Day 27 (31 Oct, late morning) || Tactics set: illusory soldier line plus lightning kill-line; traps and animal-binding ruled out
|-
| Day 27 (31 Oct, midday) || Second Peryton flight destroyed with no party injuries
|-
| Day 27 (31 Oct, midday) || Third and fourth flights; Tulip crippled and stunned; Black's left hand severed
|-
| Day 27 (31 Oct, afternoon) || Black fights on right-handed; ten Perytons accounted for, two escape south
|-
| Day 27 (31 Oct, afternoon) || Loot searched and found non-magical; iron leg fitted to Corniger; antler breastplate allocated to Jedburgh
|-
| Day 27 (31 Oct, afternoon) || Black drinks the Sardonyx vial; chest wound closed, severed wrist unchanged
|-
| Day 27 (31 Oct, afternoon) || Tabitha's six doses of sleeping dust confirmed finished
|-
| Day 27 (31 Oct, evening) || Commissions placed with the house tailor; Kel's minor-title enquiry refused
|-
| Day 28 (1 Nov) || Ahnenerbe/Klaus Barbie intelligence reaches the party via decrypt (sighting dated 31 Oct, received 1 Nov); Ultima Thule and Coeus briefing; Malta convoy and U-boat movements
|-
| Day 27 (31 Oct) onward || Black recharges the Sardonyx vial over the following days; designs a prosthetic hand; Jedburgh left to heal naturally
|-
| Some days later || Tulip drinks the recharged vial and recovers fully
|}
|}

----

=== Chapter 4: Static on the Line ===

''They gave us a week before they put us into France, and we spent it the way men do when they know it is the last week of its kind: arguing about monsters, reading other people's books, and making things with our hands. I have one hand. I spent the week on the other.''

===== Careful What You Call For =====

''It began, as these conversations usually do, with Tulip wanting a pet.''

''She asked whether she might take command of something Dross called up, and Dross — who can bring through creatures with enchantment already in them — offered to fetch one out for her to hold. Jedburgh pointed out, patiently, that we had already gone round this and settled that she could not. The difficulty is in what the things actually are. The beasts under discussion are not animals in any sense that matters. They think. They speak, and not in one tongue either but in several, and the working that bends a dumb beast to your will is simply not the working that holds a thing capable of arguing back. Tulip has the first sort and not the second, and she said so plainly enough.''

''"There's not much point in summoning one if you can't control it," she said. "It'll just rock on up and eat ya."''

''Dross agreed that it seemed unwise to call up something we could not hold, and there the matter rested — except that he went on to observe, with the air of a man who has thought about it before, that if we were surrounded by Germans and invisible at the time, a large unbound horror appearing in the middle of them might answer very well indeed. Kel liked that. Her whole position on the question was that the correct place for a monster is somebody else's problem. Tulip has not given up on the idea of a nightmare dog of her own. I make no prediction.''

===== A Face That Opens Doors =====

''Dross has been given a face that does a great deal of work for him, and it did some more of it that day.''

''The woman who keeps the house's collections is called Bethaniel. She took to him on sight — I watched it happen and there was nothing subtle about it — and within the quarter hour she was telling him there were books among the collections which might interest a man like him, and leading him off to see them. The rest of us followed, on the reasonable grounds that we had nothing better to do and that a library is a library.''

''It is an old one. Six or seven hundred years of things arriving and nothing ever leaving, which is my favourite kind of room. The weapons are mostly display and mostly enormous: claymores held in sets or fixed flat to the walls, the sort of blade that was made to be looked at by the fifth generation of a family and has been. But the small things are better. There are little daggers out of the Indian peninsula, very fine and very dainty, and kris blades with their waved edges, and a few curved things I could not place. There are semi-precious stones and there is ceramic from half the world. I have made weapons for a long time and I have made jewellery for longer, and I could have been left in that room for a fortnight without complaining once.''

''And there were scrolls. Bethaniel does not pretend to know much about witch-work herself; she knows only a little, and most of what she knows is local, a story that witches used the waters near here. It is a pleasant enough spot, apparently. People still travel a good distance to look at it.''

===== An Impolite Look =====

''There were three of them, and they were incantations. Dross had never encountered such a thing before. Kel had.''

''She explained it. An incantation is a second shape for a spell you already have — the same working turned to a different purpose, prepared in advance and held ready against the hour you want it. Preparing it takes about an hour. It lies inert until you know the underlying spell, so learning the one without the other buys you nothing, and the learning itself is not free: it costs a man a piece of the growth he would otherwise have put into himself. Tulip added the part I had not thought about, which is that once you have loaded a thing like that, some portion of your own strength stays tied up in it and is not available to you until you spend it. You get it back afterwards with food and rest, as you get anything back. But you must decide in the morning what you are going to want by evening, and that is a harder question than it sounds.''

''Jedburgh noted that they want matrices as well, which is true, and I said I could probably make him one if it came to that; I have worked gold a long while. Dross read further and found it takes something over a week of proper study before a man can make one for himself, which settles who is doing it.''

''The first of the three calls lightning down, and it wants fulminating gold as its catalyst. I knew what that was before it was explained and I let it be explained anyway, because I enjoyed watching the others' faces. It is what is left behind when you put gold through nitric acid and aqua regia and one or two other things, and the residue is so violently reactive that a shock will set it off, or a shake, or a spark, or nothing at all. If you look at it in an impolite way it is liable to go off. The accepted method of carrying it is to keep it under water in a sealed container, and put that container inside a box packed with something that will neither conduct nor hold a static charge, and then to walk very carefully. Dross wanted to know what happens if it goes up while he is carrying it, and whether the rest of us would go with it. We would. I said that it sounded like a win to me — worst case, you simply charge — and that risk near reward is the best kind of reward. What the lightning does when it arrives is not complicated. It kills.''

''The second is Hex, which is what has become of the old evil eye. It used to be a minor curse that hung on a man for days and made him worse at everything by a little; a fighting man would shrug and get on with it, and only a caster had real cause to worry. What it does now is meaner and more useful: you look at a man, and whatever natural resistance he has to being worked upon thins out under your eye, so that everything that comes after it bites deeper. The third was for speaking with animals, and with enchanted creatures, which after the morning's conversation seemed almost pointed.''

''I said the real value of the arrangement is variety — it hands you options we cannot easily come by otherwise — and Kel said, more practically, that it gives a caster a reason to bother with the dull spells nobody ever troubles to master. Dross wanted to know whether we could take the scrolls with us rather than read them where they stood, and was uneasy about it, having no wish to rob a library. He nearly asked the wrong woman. He had Bethaniel down in his head as the seamstress, which she is not; the seamstress is somebody else entirely, and Bethaniel is the archivist, and was told so. She was perfectly happy for us to have them. There are no witches here, she said. Nobody else can use them.''

===== Handiwork =====

''Then we settled how the week would go, and everyone had something.''

''Jedburgh has decided to be a healer, which surprises nobody who has watched how much of his own blood he mislays in an average afternoon. He put work into that, and a full week's labour into the winged helm, and the rest into drilling with his weapons. Kel spent days at the writing desk pursuing the business of a title, which she has not let go of since the commander told her such things are the King's to give — letters going out in several directions, and a philtre of Dross's making to help them land, and something else besides that I did not enquire into. She also began two workings and finished neither, and was sour about it. She drilled as well. Dross went deeper into his gem-making and his troll-skin, both of which are now well in hand, and made a start on the incantations.''

''I spent the week building the hand.''

''I have wanted to set that down since the third morning and have not known how. It is a difficult thing to make and it was a worse thing to make one-handed, which nobody warned me about and which I should have foreseen; every operation that wants a piece held while it is worked has to be solved twice, once for the work and once for the holding. I had neither the quicksilver I wanted nor the elegant answer I dreamed up while I was still bleeding, so it is a made thing of joints and pins like any other made thing, and the whole of it went through my remaining fingers a hundred times over. Somebody remarked that a healer's craft would be a handy thing for Jedburgh to have, and then apologised for the pun, and I said that it was quite handy for me as well. That was the closest I came all week to discussing it with anybody.''

''I will not write that it is finished. I will write that a week went into it, and that I would like it to serve.''

===== The Neighbours =====

''Tulip, meanwhile, wanted to know who else lives around here, and got two answers she did not expect.''

''The first are the Red Brothers, who turn out to be foxes — genuine foxes, remarkably red, entirely intelligent, and communists to a tail. They come mostly out of Poland. These ones speak English and Polish and a little Russian, and if you speak to them at all they will talk to you about the Marxist dialectic and the freedom of the workers and the coming end of capitalism, and they hold a certain book about a farm of animals to be holy doctrine. Jedburgh, who has read it, offered four legs good and two legs better and was not corrected. Tulip asked whether the vixens are treated as equals and got an answer with more in it than she expected: a vixen can drop four kits in a season, which makes her worth a great deal to a commune of them, and so they would very much rather she did not take risks — though nobody, apparently, says that out loud to a vixen who is bigger than they are.''

''This particular group got out of Poland with some Polish airmen and came here to liaise with the Russians. The Poles themselves know almost nothing about them, up to and including their prime minister. They are useful precisely because a fox carrying a message to another fox is not a man carrying a message to another man. There are more of them in England just now than there have any right to be. Tulip asked whether they wanted human minions to work for them, which is the sort of thing one is not supposed to say in front of the help, and was informed by our red friends that she had said the quiet part aloud.''

''The eagles are the ones to worry about. Golden eagles, and not to be trifled with under any circumstances — when they come at you they manifest two heads. Tulip said she had once had an eagle owl sit on her arm and could not get over how large the bird had been, and that a golden eagle must be larger still. She is right. They were hunted down hard in the last century for what they did to livestock, and in Switzerland they have a long and specific reputation for carrying off children of seven or so. I said it did not sound pleasant. That was the whole of my contribution and it remains my view.''

===== Borrowing a Face =====

''On the morning of the eighth the transmission came in, and the week stopped being a week.''

''Barbie has moved into Lyon. He is there in person and the search is being run under his own instruction, and what they are searching for is everyone connected with the Heckler Line — which is to say the network we are being sent to help, and shortly the people we are being sent to stand next to.''

''Kel asked whether we had a picture of him. We do, a photograph, black and white. She sat down with it at once and began learning to wear his face. A photograph takes her about half an hour to fix well enough to work from; a living man in front of her would take an hour, and a quarter of an hour of watching the man himself would give her something she could rely on. She is remarkably good at this and maintains that she is not a spy, which I have stopped arguing with.''

''I find I keep turning it over. The man is in Lyon tearing that network apart by the roots, and one of my companions spent the morning practising being him.''

===== Brandy and Cigars =====

''By the afternoon we knew that Operation Torch had gone in on the Mauretanian coast — Casablanca, Oran, Algiers, all three — and that the fighting had properly begun. What follows from that is the part that concerns us. Free France is Free France no longer; it is under German military occupation from that day, and the SOE spent the afternoon trying to work out where their people are and which of them are still doing what they were doing last week.''

''At nine we were given a second transmission, over brandy and cigars, which I record because the contrast struck me at the time. They have no record of Barbie leaving Gex. Gex, I now understand, is a town on the border between France and Switzerland — I had taken it for a man's name, and had written it down as a man's name, and was wrong. He got from there to Lyon without travelling in any manner that could be observed. He did not fly, which nobody believes; he went by private car, which everybody does.''

''He certainly did not go by train, because the resistance has its people inside the trains, and they would have had him. Those people watch and do nothing else. They are not to help escapers, they are not to interfere, they are not to be spent on anything short of desperation, because knowing what the Germans are moving and where is worth more than any single life they could pull off a platform. It is a cold arithmetic and I cannot fault it.''

''Then we were told to have an early night, and we did, and I was in bed before eleven.''

===== The Last Train Out =====

''The same transmission carried Diane's last message, and it came to us garbled, because she had no time to make it clean.''

''She had been in Lyon destroying every scrap of documentation the line held there, and it made her late getting out. She hurt her stump doing it — she was struggling badly by the end, and could not say so directly, and what she did say went astray. The radio operator took it to mean she was being harassed by some foreign agent, and helpfully suggested that the man be killed. She had no time to stand there correcting him. She said never mind, and went.''

''I said, when this was read to us, that they are a waste of time. I stand by it. There is a woman with one leg burning papers in a city with the Gestapo closing on her, and the answer that comes back down the wire is an offer to murder a stranger neither party can name.''

''The Gestapo came to the brothel she had been working out of — which is, on reflection, exactly where I would put a wireless set — and she had already gone, and had made certain the equipment went with her, because if it had been found the women there would have been taken in her place. That cost her time she did not have. She made the eleven o'clock train out of Lyon, the last one, bound for Perpignan and due in at about half past six in the morning.''

===== Whoever He Is =====

''There was a flap on in the morning.''

''She did not arrive. Not at half past six, not after, and nobody can say where between Lyon and Perpignan she stopped being on that train. Hubert has not made contact either — Hubert being the man who was to meet her, and who is the man with the map, and therefore the man who is to take us over the mountains into Spain. He was to have made himself known that night and did not. The standing arrangement holds regardless: the Place de la République in Perpignan, from half past ten in the morning until half past four in the afternoon, which is the usual way of these things and depends entirely on nobody having thought to watch him.''

''They gave us her photograph over breakfast. A woman in her late thirties or early forties, in a brown suit — brown skirt, brown jacket, a rather lacy blouse, and a black tie of the kind cowboys wear. I looked at it for a while. It is a face you would not turn round for in the street, which I assume is the point of her.''

''And then the last word they had, which was this: that Cuthbert is causing her trouble, and that he has to be killed, whoever he is. Nobody knows who he is. Jedburgh asked whether the name might be spelled another way entirely, and was told that nobody knows that either. Tulip said it sounded like a man's name but might as easily be a pet name for something, and that you cannot tell. Jedburgh said, correctly, that it is a codename, and codenames are chosen precisely so that people like us cannot tell.''

''I will put down what I think and let the record embarrass me later if it wants to. We have been handed two things out of the same wire on the same night. One is that her leg has been giving her serious trouble. The other is that a man nobody can identify is giving her serious trouble and must be killed. I do not say they are the same trouble. I say that the last time somebody misread that woman's words, the answer that came back was also an offer to kill a man who did not exist, and that nobody in that room has apparently noticed the pattern.''

===== The Quiet Ones =====

''Jedburgh knew who she was before they finished telling us. The limping lady, he said. Virginia Hall. Tulip had it too — the one with the wooden leg — and it turned out she was right down to the detail.''

''She is American, and with the SOE, which is not the usual arrangement, and by every account she is the best of them. What I found most instructive was her method of recruiting. The men who came forward to join a secret resistance were, overwhelmingly, the men who most wanted to be seen joining a secret resistance: the ones who could be relied upon to explain their important work at length in a public house. She would not have them. She took the ones who could keep their mouths shut, which is a much smaller field and a much better one.''

''There is a story about a French cell leader who was dropped in by parachute and immediately took her aside to tell her that if she had any difficulties she should come to him, as he knew his business. She nodded and thanked him and agreed. Then she went straight to her radio operator and made certain that not one of her people ever went near the man again. He was, apparently, a complete clown. And she got men out of Gestapo prisons — actually out, more than once — which was afterwards abandoned as a general policy because of what it cost in the people spent doing it. Not because it could not be done. Because she was the only one who could do it.''

''Her own side never made proper use of her. That is the part that irritates me, and it is not a new complaint about anybody's government.''

===== A Busy Last Ten Minutes =====

''They are putting us into a Wellington. It is a bomber, and it has been chosen for its range rather than for any other quality it possesses; the range is enormous and the speed is poor. Dross asked how long the flight would be and Jedburgh worked it through out loud — two hours from London to Ibiza in something modern, so from Scotland at a couple of hundred miles an hour you are talking about a good deal more than that. A thousand miles at something over two hundred an hour comes out at four and a half hours. The day starts at five, we board at about half past, and we are over Perpignan by a quarter past nine.''

''In broad daylight. Jedburgh observed that this would be exciting. It would.''

''Which is why we are not staying in the aeroplane. There is an airfield at Salt Reef a few miles outside Perpignan, and what sits on it is a hundred miles an hour faster than a Wellington, and the arithmetic of that needs no further explanation. Dross proposed that we leave early — ten miles out, or twenty — and go the rest of the way on his carpet, unseen. Kel and Tabitha can lay concealment across the whole party for something like half an hour between them; the carpet will hold for three and a half hours, which is more than enough. Dross said he would rather be on an invisible carpet than inside that thing when the fighters come up, and he is right. I said I looked forward to seeing how well it worked out, and asked what could possibly go wrong.''

''There is a nuisance in the working. The carpet keeps the pace you set it at the moment you call it up, and if it ever stops keeping that pace, it stops being a carpet. You cannot slow to a hover and step off. You must hold your speed and your concentration all the way down and end the thing deliberately in the last moments, or it ends itself for you. Which also means it cannot be called up inside the aeroplane and ridden out through the door at leisure — you go out first and it catches you afterwards, and you had better not dawdle in the doorway.''

''I said I would simply jump. Kel allowed that we might fall for a while, and thought that would be fine. I said we would stop eventually. Jedburgh said that yes, of course we would stop eventually — that is what the ground is for.''

===== A Clear Day for It =====

''The word first thing was that it would be an appalling day, and I said what one says, which is: of course it would. Kel thought it was to our advantage. More cover for us, she said, and she was right, and I said so and added the other half of it, which is that cover does not know whose side it is on. If they cannot see us coming, we cannot see them coming.''

''Then it turned out to be nothing of the kind. It is a clear day. There is cloud high up and nothing under it, and the only trouble with it is the wind, which is blowing hard enough to have a name — a broussard, they call it here, a windstorm well out of its season. The same system runs down over the Mediterranean and turns to rain as it goes, and North Africa has been getting sudden downpours out of it all week, which apparently did not inconvenience the landings in Morocco in the slightest.''

''So: a fine, hard, bright morning, a bomber warming up, and rations packed. Two people we need are missing and a third is a name nobody can spell. Somewhere south of us a woman with one leg is either on a train, or off it, or worse, and we are four and a half hours and a long fall away from finding out which.''

''A week's work sits in my kit where a hand should be. I should like the chance to shake somebody's with it.''

----

{| class="wikitable"
|-
|

==== OOC Details ====

===== Items Acquired =====

'''Party (shared resources):'''

'''Balance brought forward:''' 2,500 sp
'''Balance carried forward:''' 2,500 sp

===== Session Summary =====

The party had a week at Achnacarry Castle before deployment into France. It opened with [[#s4-careful-what-you-call-for|an argument over whether Tulip could hold a summoned creature capable of arguing back]], and then [[#s4-a-face-that-opens-doors|Dross's rapport with Bethaniel, the castle's archivist]], opened her six- or seven-hundred-year-old library and its collection to them. Among the scrolls were three incantations — call lightning, hex, and speech with animals — and [[#s4-an-impolite-look|Kel explained what an incantation is and what it costs to prepare]], Bethaniel giving the scrolls away outright since no local caster could use them. The week itself went on [[#s4-handiwork|training and craft, with Black building his prosthetic hand one-handed]], while Tulip's questions about the district turned up [[#s4-the-neighbours|the communist Red Brothers and the two-headed golden eagles]].

On the morning of 8 November an Ultra transmission reported that Klaus Barbie had moved into Lyon and was personally directing the hunt for everyone connected with the Heckler Line; [[#s4-borrowing-a-face|Kel set about learning to wear his face from a photograph]]. That afternoon Operation Torch landed at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers, putting Free France under German military occupation, and [[#s4-brandy-and-cigars|a second transmission that evening]] established that Barbie had reached Lyon from Gex by private car, unseen by the resistance's people on the trains. The same transmission carried [[#s4-the-last-train-out|Diane's last, garbled message]]: delayed destroying the line's documentation in Lyon, injured, she caught the eleven o'clock train for Perpignan. [[#s4-whoever-he-is|She never arrived, and Hubert — the guide who holds the map over the Pyrenees — made no contact either]], leaving the party with a rendezvous in the Place de la République, a photograph, and an order to kill an unidentified man codenamed Cuthbert; [[#s4-the-quiet-ones|Diane herself was recognised as Virginia Hall]]. The party then departed [[#s4-a-busy-last-ten-minutes|by Wellington bomber, intending to leave it early on Dross's carpet under concealment]] to avoid the fighters based at Salt Reef, flying out [[#s4-a-clear-day-for-it|into a windy but unexpectedly clear morning]].

===== Chronological Timeline =====

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date !! Event
| Day 29 || Debate over controlling summoned intelligent creatures; Dross wins over Bethaniel, who opens the castle library
|-
| Day 29 || Three incantation scrolls examined (Call Lightning, Hex, speech with animals); Bethaniel gives them to the party
|-
| Day 29 || Downtime work allocated; Tulip learns of the Red Brothers and the golden eagles
|-
| Day 29 → 34 || Week of training and craft; Black builds his replacement hand
|-
| Day 35 (morning) || Ultra transmission: Barbie in Lyon, personally directing the search for the Heckler Line
|-
| Day 35 (morning) || Kel begins learning Barbie's face from a black-and-white photograph
|-
| Day 35 (afternoon) || Operation Torch lands at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers; Free France placed under German occupation
|-
| Day 35 (evening) || Second transmission: Barbie's untracked move from Gex; Diane's garbled last message; she boards the 11pm train
|-
| Day 36 (morning) || Diane fails to arrive at Perpignan; Hubert makes no contact; briefing, Diane's photograph, and the order on Cuthbert
|-
| Day 36 (morning) || Departure by Wellington in windy but clear weather; carpet approach planned for the final miles
|}
|}

----

=== Chapter 5: The Far Side of the Room ===

''There is a knack to falling that I picked up in the Garden of Eden, and this was the first morning it ever earned its keep.''

===== Look for the Crater =====

''The last hour at Achnacarry went on paperwork and poison, which is about the usual proportion.''

''Kel was still pursuing her title, and Dross had found her a better story to hang it on: that she is of the Hungarian gentry — the middling sort of landholder who fills the offices and drives the nationalist movements — and that she seeks recognition so that she may be of more use against the Germans. It has the great merit that nobody in London can check it and every reason to want it to be true. Then he laced the letters with a philtre of his own making, for the warmth and the good feeling it leaves behind, so that whichever clerk opens them will be fond of her before he has read a line. I observed that the Foreign Office will end up handling their post with tongs. Nobody disagreed. She also filled her cigarette case, French and by all accounts unpleasant, which turned out to matter more than the letters did.''

''The rest of it was the workings. Dross had prepared his skin-changes days before — they keep for weeks, which is the whole point of them — and would set them on us in the air, one for himself, one for Kel, one for Tulip, and one for Tabitha. Jedburgh needed nobody's help; he can take the eagle himself. Tulip had her own workings laid in beforehand, one of them a thing that gives her back what casting on the rest of us costs her, which is the only reason she is willing to cast on the rest of us at all. Kel had her phantom armour, and before anyone changed shape she laid mind speech over the party so that we could talk without beaks. Dross had Tabitha set a finding on me as well, since I would be out of earshot of everybody the moment I left the aeroplane, and Tabitha can find a man a good long way off.''

''I told them I would not be needing wings. I intended to jump out and fall into the ground, and I was not planning to fly anywhere. This was not received as well as I had hoped. Tulip wanted to know whether I would take harm from hitting the earth, and I said that for some of us that part is optional. Jedburgh asked whether it was one of those thousand-year skills, and whether it was what David used to teach when he fell off buildings. I said I had been to the Garden of Eden and come away with a thing, and that the thing is a matter of inertia — mine goes to nothing at the moment of arrival and comes back to me a few breaths later. Kel said it was a good trick, and then said that finding me afterwards would be simple enough: they need only look for the crater.''

===== A Story for the Pilots =====

''We went in a Wellington under Captain Glendinning, with a co-pilot who could take her if anything happened to him, and no guns aboard at all.''

''They had stripped her of everything that slowed her and filled the bomb bay with extra tanks, because what was wanted was range and speed and nothing else. I said we had probably barely enough fuel to reach the place, which shows how little I know about aeroplanes; fuel was never the difficulty. We left at half past eight and ran her flat out the whole way, and the whole way took four hours. It is a wretched machine to be a passenger in when it is going at its best.''

''We crossed at a great height and came down toward a cloud layer that sat very low, and the wind was the real trouble — a hard gale off the sea, with the Mediterranean grey on our left hand as we ran south. Glendinning's people expected worse of it further down. I was told, with some relish, that the man who intended to fall into the ground would have less bother from wind than the birds would, and that is how it proved. It is winter here, and overcast, and no part of the day was bright.''

''At thirty miles out we went. Kel had one last question before she changed, which was whether an owl may keep hold of a cigarette, and the answer, delivered by the slipstream, was no. It was a valiant attempt. From the air we could see a column of military lorries running south on the main road, forty or fifty of them, moving faster than we were and pulling in at the airfield in the northern suburb at Rivesaltes; and, a little after, a small open touring car coming out of the same place with a pair of Gestapo motorcyclists running ahead of it. I meant to jump half a minute behind the others so as to be on the ground before them, and was told, patiently, that half a minute at our speed would put me down somewhere near Narbonne. I revised my ambitions and took the farmland between Rivesaltes and the airfield instead. Kel observed that the pilots would dine out on this for years: the commandos they carried into France, none of them wearing a parachute, all of whom jumped.''

===== Passed Over =====

''I came down in a field about a mile short of the road and did not leave a crater, which I record in the interests of accuracy.''

''You hit, and you stop, and for a few seconds you are a very heavy thing that the world has not yet decided how to move again, and then it gives you back your weight and you get up. I was dressed as what I have been dressed as since Scotland — a vintner, a farmer of some kind — which in practice means a tatty linen shirt with the buttons torn off, a felt hat, and straw poking out of everything. It is a good disguise for this country because it is not a disguise. Half the men on that road were wearing it honestly.''

''The walk to the road took twenty minutes and the road itself took two hours. There was almost no motor traffic; petrol is rationed and the bicycles have inherited the country. I had one moment on the verge where a man in my position might easily have been noticed, and I was not, and I have been fortunate for a very long time and see no advantage in enquiring too closely into it. I did think about riding, and thought better of it. Corniger stands out.''

''Half an hour along, the lorries came up behind me and went past and turned off east toward the aerodrome, and beyond them I could see fighters drawn up on the runway being inspected by a man in a uniform so well cut it must have been made for him by hand. He wore a monocle, which in that army is not an affectation but a statement of birth; a baron at the least, and possibly a good deal more. While I was watching him the little open touring car came out and drove past me on the road, motorcyclists ahead of it, and the man in the back was Wolfram Sievers. He did not look up. He was reading a file and he looked extremely busy, and neither he nor his escort spared a glance for a farmer walking south in the mud. I thought briefly about asking him for a lift, and then thought about what would follow, and carried on walking.''

===== The Man We Came to Meet =====

''The others had come down among the trees on the boulevard beside the Parc Saint-Vincennes, which is close enough to the middle of the city to be convenient and green enough to be private, and nobody had looked up as a party of owls went over with an eagle in attendance.''

''They changed back, laid their counterspells across one another, and then Kel handed her dreadful French cigarettes round and Dross kept her company out of politeness. Tabitha kept a thread on me the whole time and could tell them I was coming, slowly, on foot, which was the only accurate report anybody had of me for two hours. Meanwhile they established two things. The first was where the Place de la République actually is — two miles or so on foot from where they had landed, which is nothing. The second was the name of the man we were to meet there. Scotland had given him to us as Hubert. He was called Gilbert. Nobody has yet explained to me how the name of the only man in France who can take us over the mountains came to be written down wrong, and I have stopped expecting an explanation.''

''They walked out to meet me and we joined up about ninety minutes later, short of the bridges, and I gave them everything I had seen: the lorries, the airfield, the fighters, the fine uniform with the monocle, and Sievers reading his papers on the road to Perpignan. Then we went in together, because the square holds an open market and people arrive at it in groups, and a group is invisible in a way that five careful individuals are not.''

''It was crawling with Gestapo when we got there and there were several people dead on the ground, shot to pieces. The French who had not run had been corralled into corners of the square and were having their papers gone through one at a time, and nobody at all was moving toward the middle. I did not wait to learn any more than that. I took the party out of it quickly, which I would do again.''

''Kel saw more than I did on the way out, and what she saw was Gilbert. He was dead in the square with an ambulance attending him, which was an act of theatre and not of medicine, and men were going through his belongings while he lay there. From the way they were working over him he had been dead twenty minutes, perhaps half an hour. We had come four hours by air and two by foot to keep an appointment, and we had missed him by about the length of a decent lunch.''

===== Club Colours =====

''While the rest of us were leaving, Jedburgh's attention had been caught by the ties.''

''Men of that trade wear black or dark grey, sometimes brown, and if a tie has any colour in it at all it means something: a school, a regiment, a club, some society you are meant to notice without asking. There were five men in the square in black suits and white shirts wearing ties of no ordinary kind, standing about the Gestapo but not quite of them, and Jedburgh looked at them properly from where he stood, which was a long way off across the square and cost him most of what he might have learned. He got three of the five. They were men, all of them, with nothing borrowed and nothing hidden underneath — ordinary short-lived human beings, which was the last comfortable thing about them.''

''The greatest working any of the three had at his command was the summoning of demonic kings. I asked to have that repeated, because I could not hear it properly the first time, and Kel repeated it: demonic kings, which makes that man the finest summoner in the square and, since it is the sort of thing they reach for first, an occultist beyond question. Useful to know. Not comfortable.''

''Jedburgh asked one more thing, which was whether anything had been done to them with Vril, and the answer was yes, and recently — within the month. To learn more than that would take a proper divination, standing much closer, taking an hour, and any of the five might have felt it happening. Jedburgh's view was that he would rather do that work once their bodies had cooled, and that these are exactly the sort of men to be carrying a death curse for whoever kills them. Kel put it more briefly. There is a large group of very dangerous people here, she said, and we should be somewhere else.''

===== The Opera This Season =====

''We went, and Kel got us out of it without a single one of them looking at us twice.''

''She has a whole young woman of good family that she keeps for occasions like this, and she brought her out entire: shocked, distressed, sickened by the killing, only just arrived in this beautiful city, and here to see her brother married. A gendarme came over to take her details and to be of assistance, and got the full performance — the charm, the grace, the little catch in the voice — and was so moved that he undertook to help her find somewhere to stay, patted the back of her hand, mentioned that the opera this season is Turandot should she care for that sort of thing, and slipped her his card.''

''Kel thanked him beautifully. What she was thinking about him at the time came down the mind speech to the rest of us, and it was not beautiful at all, and none of us disagreed with a word of it. He is a Frenchman standing in a French square, with French dead on the cobbles behind him, handing his card to a pretty stranger.''

''Nobody wanted to go any closer to the men in the ties, either in person or in conversation. We put distance between us and the square and looked for somewhere to sit.''

===== Standing Vigil =====

''There are cafés everywhere in that city, and we took one of the good ones, a few hundred feet south of the Courts of Justice — civil buildings, no soldiers — with the Hôtel Aragon not far off if we needed it.''

''The question was how we were to know when the Germans had finished with the square. I said one can generally feel the tension come out of a street, which is true and also useless. Dross had a better answer, which was Tabitha. She sat where she could watch, too far off to speak to us mind to mind, and came back on her own four feet at about half past three to say that they had gone, that they had taken Gilbert's body with them, and that before they went they had performed a ritual of some kind over the place where he fell. She could not tell us what it was. She could tell us that something is still there.''

''I did not much like that and I like it less now that I have written it down. They shot a man in a public square in the middle of the afternoon, and then, in front of an audience of corralled civilians, they did magic over the stain.''

''We went back in ones and twos a little later, in no hurry, on the principle that men who have just cleared a place watch it hardest in the first hour. Kel went first. The market was gone, the shops around the square were shut, the whole block was empty — and standing over the corner where he died were three Feldgendarmerie, with a heavy chalk outline drawn thick on the ground at their feet. Dross wondered whether we might watch the site from a distance through his crystal instead of standing in the open, and then abandoned the idea himself: the seeing lasts a fraction of the time it takes to set up, and the work we needed to cover was an hour long. Which left the plain shape of the problem, and I said it out loud so that everyone could look at it. Men do not put a guard on a patch of ground they intend to forget about. Either we get in there without anybody knowing, or the guard goes away.''

===== The Changing of the Guard =====

''Everything after that was assembled out of other people's ideas, which is how the good plans usually arrive.''

''Dross could work unseen — the concealment lasts long enough for five minutes in, half an hour of ritual, and five minutes out, with nothing to spare — but sitting a man down invisible to lay out tarot cards a few feet from three armed policemen is asking a great deal of everybody's nerve. Kel suggested illusion instead: dress us as their own military police and simply tell them we had been sent to replace them. Then Tulip, who prefers a simple plan to a clever one, put the last piece in. Do not replace them at all. Have a superior officer turn up and send them somewhere else. Kel said that was genius, and it was; the two ideas together made one that could actually be walked through the middle of an occupied city.''

''We waited for the change of the guard, which came in due course and rather casually, three men strolling in to relieve three men who then went off to find a pub. Kel put the uniforms of the German military police over us — she has studied their ranks and their tailoring, and she made herself the senior man, which is the sort of thing she does without blinking — and Jedburgh and I stood where we were told to stand. Jedburgh had already picked the destination: the hospital, which is on the far side of the river, three kilometres as the crow goes and four or five by the bridges. Then Kel, in a voice I had not heard her use before, pointed and gave orders and began to berate them, and they turned north and went, in step, at exactly the pace men keep when a senior officer may still be watching.''

''I have been on both sides of that particular transaction over a long life and it never stops being funny. They are Germans. They like to be told.''

===== I Don't Know, I'm Dead =====

''Dross went in behind us, unseen, and knelt on the chalk, and asked Gilbert five short questions. He did not need the body. He needed the place where the man fell, which the Germans had helpfully marked out for him in white.''

''The first useful answer was that we had been wrong about him from the beginning. He was not our contact. He was never supposed to meet us at all — his work is bringing people out of France over the mountains into Spain, whoever they are, and the meeting in the square was never ours. It was hers. Diane is the name Virginia Hall goes by, and she was to come down on the last train out of Lyon and be in Perpignan by a quarter past six in the morning, and Gilbert was to take her over. We were supposed to find her and bring her to him. Instead she did not arrive, and he waited in a public square all morning for a woman who never came, and by two in the afternoon somebody had shot him for it.''

''When Dross asked him how we might reach her now, the answer that came back was that he did not know, on the grounds that he was dead. I have had worse conversations with the living.''

''Jedburgh had spent that same hour on the residue of the Germans' own working, and came away with what it was and with a name. A summoning had been done there — not of some minor thing but of marquises of hell — and he caught the name one of them is called by, though not the deeper name that would give a man any purchase on it. Samigina, Marquis of Lost Souls. That is all we have of it, and I said so at the time: there was nothing in it we could use except the name. But it was done over the place where a man of the escape lines had just been killed, by people who wear the wrong ties, and I would rather have that written down than not.''

===== Legwork =====

''So we came back to the only question that matters, which is where she is.''

''Dross tried a finding on her and it gave us nothing worth having; his reach is long but it is not unlimited, and wherever she is, she is not inside it. We fell back on reasoning, which is not evidence and I will not pretend it is. She is careful, she is experienced, and she has been warned more than once about the trains. If she smelled the danger she got off early, somewhere on the long road between Lyon and here — Rivesaltes is only the last stop before Narbonne on the way down — and she came the rest of the way by some other means, or she has not come at all.''

''Dross proposed, in all seriousness, that we put a finding on Cuthbert. This is where I learned that Cuthbert is her leg. Not a man, not an enemy agent, not a codename for anything hostile at all — the wooden leg she walks on, which she has named, as a person names a thing they have to live with. Scotland gave us Cuthbert as somebody who was causing her trouble and had to be killed, and Scotland was reading a woman's complaint about her own stump and offering to murder it. Dross argued that a thing with a name might have a true one. I said that seemed entirely reasonable to me. We were not permitted to try it.''

''What worked was ordinary tradecraft. Every spy has fieldcraft — it is the first thing they give you and the last thing that saves you — and Jedburgh and I both worked it through, having had the run of the city for a few hours by then. A woman in her position, arriving in Perpignan alone, does not go to a good hotel; the good ones are careful about who sleeps in them and they keep lists. She goes to a modest place close to the square where she was to be met. That narrowed it a very long way, and Jedburgh knew the rest: the Hôtel de la Loge, which is a safe house on the O'Leary line and has been quietly moving people toward Spain for a year.''

===== Eating Well =====

''We put our disguises away outside and went in as ourselves, handed over our ration books like honest citizens, and took rooms for the night.''

''Somewhere in the walking and the falling and the impersonation of German policemen, it had escaped my notice that we are carrying a suitcase with a quarter of a million francs in it. I said that this was most unusual; I am accustomed to scraping together enough for coffee. Apparently it is standard for this work — Hall herself went into Lyon the first time with a great deal more than most men see in a lifetime — and Tulip, sensibly, had us break it up and sew it away about our persons rather than leave it all sitting in one case in one room in one hotel.''

''Then we ate, and I am obliged to report that we ate extremely well. It is Provençal cooking, and the coast is not thirty miles away, and there is a good deal of fish arriving in that kitchen that has never troubled a ration book. There was bouillabaisse. It cost us a sum that would appal any local family and did not trouble us in the slightest, which is its own small indecency, and I enjoyed every mouthful of it and intend to go on enjoying the memory.''

''Jedburgh saw her first, or at the same moment I did; the others never picked her out at all. She looks nothing like the photograph. The photograph is a woman in a brown suit with a lacy blouse and a black cowboy's tie, and what was sitting across that dining room was a middle-aged farmer's wife, rustic, dressed much as we are dressed but rather better at it, eating her dinner quietly and troubling nobody. Beside her chair was one of those enormous soft bags that older women carry their knitting in. I said it was big enough for a decent handgun. I was corrected: it is big enough for a submachine gun.''

===== Dropping the Name =====

''And there we sat, in the same room as the woman we crossed a thousand miles to find, entirely unable to think of a way to say good evening to her.''

''Consider it from her side. Her contact was shot dead in a public square this afternoon, which means somebody knew where he would be and when. From that, exactly one conclusion is available to her: she is blown. So a stranger who walks up to her table tonight is not a friend. He is proof. Dross suggested mind speech, and I said no — imagine a voice arriving inside your skull, at dinner, in an occupied country, when you have no acquaintance with magic whatever. It does not matter whether she works out it is sorcery. What matters is that she stops believing her own head, in the same minute that she stops believing she is safe, with a bag beside her chair. She would do the safest thing available to her, and she would do it first, and I would not blame her for a second of it.''

''Dross wondered whether Tabitha might go over and be charming, which at least has the merit that Tabitha would probably survive it. Tulip asked whether London had given us a recognition phrase, which was the right question and has the wrong answer: they gave us nothing. Kel proposed dropping the name Diane into a conversation nearby, loudly enough to carry, and Dross refined it into something with no threat in it at all — two travellers at the next table remarking what a shame it is that Diane is not here to enjoy this restaurant. She hears her own name, spoken with affection, by people who are not looking at her and are not coming any closer. I do not hate it.''

''My own suggestion was worse and I record it honestly, because a journal that only keeps the good ideas is a work of fiction. I proposed putting an illusion of Gilbert on one of us and letting her see a dead man walk in. It was pointed out to me that she may well have watched him die.''

''So we finished our dinner and went up, and she finished hers and went up, and neither party said a word to the other. She is on the far side of a dining room and she may as well be on the far side of the Pyrenees. Tomorrow one of us has to find a way to say her name to her without getting shot for it, and I have not yet thought of one I would want written on my headstone.''

----

{| class="wikitable"
|-
|

==== OOC Details ====

===== Items Acquired =====

'''Kel:'''
* Suitcase of operational funds (250,000 francs) (unpriced)

'''Black:'''
* Suitcase of operational funds (250,000 francs) (unpriced)

'''Dross:'''
* Suitcase of operational funds (250,000 francs) (unpriced)

'''Jedburgh:'''
* Suitcase of operational funds (250,000 francs) (unpriced)

'''Tulip:'''
* Suitcase of operational funds (250,000 francs) (unpriced)

'''Balance brought forward:''' 2,500 sp
'''Balance carried forward:''' 2,500 sp

===== Session Summary =====

The party's last hour at Achnacarry went on [[#s5-look-for-the-crater|Kel's title letters and the final workings]], with Black declining a bird shape in favour of a free-fall landing, before [[#s5-a-story-for-the-pilots|a four-hour flight south in a stripped Wellington]] and a bail-out thirty miles short of Perpignan. [[#s5-passed-over|Black came down alone in farmland and walked two hours into the city]], passing a German lorry convoy, a monocled senior officer inspecting fighters at the Rivesaltes airfield, and Wolfram Sievers reading a file in an open touring car. The rest [[#s5-the-man-we-came-to-meet|landed in the Parc Saint-Vincennes and established that their contact's real name was Gilbert, not Hubert]]; reunited, they reached the Place de la République to find it full of Gestapo and Gilbert dead on the cobbles, killed perhaps half an hour before they arrived. [[#s5-club-colours|Jedburgh read three of five oddly-tied men standing apart from the Gestapo]] — all human, all recently subjected to a Vril working, the greatest of them a summoner of demonic kings — and [[#s5-the-opera-this-season|Kel talked the party clear of the square as a distressed young woman of good family]].

From [[#s5-standing-vigil|a café near the Courts of Justice they waited out the afternoon on Tabitha's reports]], returning to find a chalk outline guarded by three Feldgendarmerie and something left behind by a ritual the Germans had performed over the death site. [[#s5-the-changing-of-the-guard|An illusion of German military police, and orders to march to a hospital across the river, cleared the guards away]] long enough for [[#s5-i-dont-know-im-dead|Dross to question Gilbert's shade while Jedburgh named Samigina, Marquis of Lost Souls, out of the residue]]: Gilbert was never the party's contact but Diane's guide over the mountains, and she never came off the last train from Lyon. A finding on her failed, [[#s5-legwork|Cuthbert proved to be the name of her wooden leg rather than a man to be killed, and tradecraft pointed at the Hôtel de la Loge]], a safe house on the O'Leary escape line. The party took rooms there, [[#s5-eating-well|broke up the suitcase of francs among themselves and dined extremely well]], and Black and Jedburgh alone picked Diane out of the dining room in the disguise of a middle-aged farmer's wife. The session ends with the party [[#s5-dropping-the-name|still arguing over how to say her name to her without being shot for it]], no contact made and no plan agreed.

===== Chronological Timeline =====

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date !! Event
|-
| Day 36 (morning) || Final preparations at Achnacarry; Kel's title letters sent; forms and workings set; Black elects to free-fall
|-
| Day 36 (morning) || Departure at half past eight by Wellington under Captain Glendinning; four-hour flight south in a gale
|-
| Day 36 (midday) || Bail-out thirty miles north of Perpignan; lorry convoy and Sievers's touring car spotted from the air
|-
| Day 36 (midday) || Black lands in farmland near Rivesaltes and walks two hours toward the city; monocled officer at the airfield; Sievers passes him on the road
|-
| Day 36 (early afternoon) || Rest of the party lands at the Parc Saint-Vincennes; contact's name corrected from Hubert to Gilbert
|-
| Day 36 (early afternoon) || Party reunites on the road and enters the Place de la République; Gestapo in occupation, Gilbert dead in the square
|-
| Day 36 (afternoon) || Jedburgh assesses the five tie-wearing men; Kel deflects a gendarme and the party withdraws
|-
| Day 36 (afternoon) || Waiting at a café near the Courts of Justice; Tabitha reports at half past three that the square is clear but something lingers
|-
| Day 36 (afternoon) || Return to the square: chalk outline at the death site, guarded by three Feldgendarmerie
|-
| Day 36 (early evening) || Illusion diversion at the shift-change; the real guards are ordered to the hospital across the river
|-
| Day 36 (early evening) || Dross questions Gilbert's shade; Jedburgh names Samigina, Marquis of Lost Souls, from the ritual residue
|-
| Day 36 (early evening) || Finding on Diane fails; Cuthbert identified as her wooden leg; the Hôtel de la Loge deduced as her likely refuge
|-
| Day 36 (evening) || Party checks in, distributes the operational francs, and dines; Black and Jedburgh spot Diane in disguise
|-
| Day 36 (evening) || Debate over how to approach her; session ends with no contact made
|}
|}

----

=== Chapter 6: The Conan Bacterium ===

''It is an unsettling thing to watch a woman kill herself over a conversation that nobody has had yet.''

===== The Rehearsal =====

''We spent the first part of dinner arguing about how to say good evening to her, which is not a problem I would have expected to find difficult.''

''Three ways were on the table. The first was to take her: sleep dust in the face, a prepared skin held against her for half a minute, and the next thing she knows she is a mouse in somebody's pocket and then she is in Spain. The second was a code word spoken where she could hear it, which leaves the next move to her. The third was to speak into her mind. I said what I had said the night before and will go on saying: you do not put a frightened person in a position where the only thing she can be certain of is that she has been found. Give her enough to decide with, and let her decide. I also pointed out that if her line has been rolled up then whoever rolled it up has her code name too, and a code name that the enemy already knows is not a friendly greeting, it is bait.''

''I was outvoted. Tulip thought the mind speech would frighten her and came round to the code word; everybody else liked the mind speech, and Dross was confident that a woman of her profession would take it in her stride. Kel, to her great credit, would not simply run it. She said she could look a little way down the road before we set foot on it, wrote out the message she meant to send — greetings, we hope Cuthbert is treating you well, we are an occult unit out of London sent to bring you over into Spain, here is a word you may check with London if you doubt us — and then bent over her soup and worked the thing quietly enough that nobody at the neighbouring tables looked up.''

''It goes beautifully. That is the part I keep returning to. Every step of it works: the message is clear, the code word is good, she has every reason to believe us. And then, at the moment we touch her mind, she excuses herself from dinner, goes upstairs, and blows her brains out.''

''I record without pride that I looked smug. Kel told me that as the whole thing went to pieces and the Germans hauled us away, I could console myself with having said so, and that this was not helping. She was right about that too. We took the mind speech off the table and went back to the code word, and I sat there for a while with a mouthful of very good fish, thinking about how narrow the door had been and how nearly we had all walked through it. Dross, meanwhile, had gone off to the bathroom and spent a minute preparing a mouse skin, in case matters ended up there anyway. He has a talent for quiet preparation while the rest of us talk.''

===== Between Courses =====

''The other thing about a code word is that you must say it out loud, in a room, in front of everybody in it. So before we said anything, Kel went and had a look at everybody in it.''

''It is a small dining room, forty feet by twenty at most, and it held something over a dozen minds. Getting into them was not easy. This country gives very little back to anyone working here — the workings come dear and land badly — and she was turned aside once, and once had the thing come apart in her hands so that she had to snuff it out and start again. What I saw from across the table was a woman stirring her soup, putting pepper in it, taking a slurp, and staring into the bowl as though it had insulted her. She got there in the end. She always does; it simply costs her more than she lets on.''

''Four of the guests in that room work for the same escape line as this house does. They were talking quietly among themselves, the way people do once the dining room has closed, and none of them was a German taking notes. That was the answer I wanted and I was glad to have it. Better still: they know Diane. They know her as a quiet local woman with a cough who does not say very much and keeps to herself. Not as the American, not as the woman who took over the line, not as anyone worth mentioning. Her cover was holding in the one room where it mattered most.''

''What they were actually worried about was the camp. There is an internment camp out here as well as the airfield, and it holds something like two thousand people — Jews, Gypsies, communists. Jedburgh supplied the word the occupiers use for them, which I will not repeat with any affection. The four of them were turning over whether anything could be run against the place, and sharing what they knew, and getting nowhere, because there is nowhere for four hotel guests to get. Kel passed all of it to the rest of us mind to mind. I said, out loud and in the hearing of my own conscience, that it is not what we came here to do. That remains true and it is not much of an answer.''

===== Making Her Acquaintance =====

''Kel wanted to bump into her in the hallway and murmur the word as she passed. I did not want us within ten feet of her.''

''The point of a signal is that it costs the receiver nothing to ignore. If a stranger blocks her in a corridor, she has been cornered by a stranger, and everything after that is a question of how fast her hand moves. So we said it at our own table, loudly, to each other, with her nearer the door than we were and nothing at all between her and it. The frame was mine — what a pity your cousin could not come, what was his name, the one with the bad leg — and Dross supplied the rest of him, a Cuthbert from Piccadilly, because London is the one thing in that sentence she cannot mistake for coincidence. So I said it. It is a shame about his sore leg. It kept him from making the journey.''

''She heard it. She sat there for a while working through what it could be and arrived, quite visibly, at the only conclusion available: that somebody in this room is trying to reach her without frightening her. Then she looked up and caught my eye, and held it for about as long as good manners allow, and collected her things and left the dining room with one glance back over her shoulder.''

''I gave her twenty or thirty seconds and excused myself, at which point it occurred to me that I had no idea which room was hers. Kel had thought of that before I had. She had put her listening on the woman before she stood up and was riding along behind her eyes as she climbed the stairs and let herself in, and the number arrived in my head as an image, which is the only traffic that goes that way; my mind does not speak back.''

''I knocked. The door opened a crack and then wide enough to let me in, and what was behind it was a middle-aged woman holding the largest revolver I have seen indoors. Not an automatic — a revolver, of the kind a man wears on his hip in the American west, and it looked absurd and entirely serviceable in her hand. I said, good to meet you, Diane. My name is Archibald. Then I told her that the man she had come here to meet had been killed by the Germans. She had already known it, and it had already knocked the wind out of her, and she stood there and took it a second time without putting the gun down. He had been a friend of hers.''

===== Something Going Around =====

''Then she gave me the thing she had been carrying alone, and I would rather she had not, because I have not been able to put it down since.''

''On her way south she shared a train with Wolfram Sievers. She did not know the whole of who he is; she knew enough to sit still and listen, and what she overheard was that he has plans for the people held at the camp here. Most of the internees are being moved west, to another camp — Gurs — in a convoy of trucks. But a small contingent is being taken somewhere else entirely, up into the mountains to a place called Saint-Marcel, and they are almost all women.''

''That mapped onto intelligence she had taken before her line was betrayed. There is work being done up there that started from the papers of a bacteriologist named Robert Koch, whose own life was spent identifying strains of disease and telling one from another. What has been built on top of him is something they call the Conan Bacterium. As she understands it, it records the signature of life itself — the pattern a body is copied from — and it repairs damage done to that pattern. Kel called it super healing. I said it sounded like a zombie virus to me, and Diane said, without any pleasure at all, that it has every hallmark of a death plague.''

''I have made worse jokes in my life than the ones I made next, but not many, and I will set them down because a journal that keeps only the creditable remarks is a novel. I observed that a plague which brings the dead back to work would put every slaver on the continent out of business, and Kel observed that it makes for a cheaper workforce, and that this is simply capitalism, and I said they would be prisoners with jobs. We were laughing at a table in an occupied country about a thing being done to two thousand people ten miles up the road. I do not think the laughter was contempt. It is what you do when the alternative is to sit still and feel the size of it.''

===== Not a Good Trait in This Game =====

''What she could not work out, and what she kept coming back to, was how they had found Gilbert at all.''

''He was not the usual sort. The Maquis is full of men who cannot resist telling a woman in a bar what they did last week, and he was not one of them — an old man, past sixty, a farm labourer, still very active and utterly uninterested in being admired. There was nothing about him to notice. Yet somebody put him in a square with a bullet in him, at a time and place that only a handful of people knew.''

''The pressure on her has been extraordinary. They have posters out with no photograph on them, because nobody has one, only a written description, and the thing on the description is the limp. They call her the Limper. And the screws came down hard the moment the Allies went into North Africa: the Germans answered Torch by moving into Vichy France and occupying the whole of it, precisely so they could take resistance work apart at their leisure, being uncertain what was coming next and paranoid about all of it.''

''So she knows she was betrayed. She does not know by whom, and cannot rule out that it was somebody in this very line, in this very hotel. But she has a suspicion, and she gave it to me. There is a priest, based until recently in a parish north-east of Paris, famous for preaching against the Germans from his own pulpit and for being warmly pro-Ally, who has made it his business to meet everybody in the movement and talk with them and know them. Too curious, she said. Too nosy, I said, which is not a good trait in this game. Perhaps he is only a brave man with an unfortunate manner. I said that it is best to assume otherwise until proven, and she did not argue with me.''

===== Not a Vampire =====

''I offered to have her meet the rest of the team, so that I could stop being a relay, and had got most of the way through the sentence before remembering that I had just watched her shoot herself over exactly this.''

''So we warned her first, which we should have done from the beginning and which is the whole of what I had been arguing at dinner. I explained that one of my people can speak mind to mind, that she makes a net of it that we all sit inside, that nothing is read out of you that you do not send, and that she is not a vampire. We have made sure of that. Kel pointed out that Diane has seen her walking about in daylight; Dross wanted to know whether we had ever properly tested her against crosses and garlic, and I said that in this country you could hardly test anyone against garlic, since it is in everything, including the fish stew.''

''Then Kel made the working a second time and offered her the link, and she took it. I could not feel what Kel felt, but Kel told us: the woman is badly frightened and living right on the edge of herself, and what frightens her most is not the camp but what is being done to the people out of it. Kel put herself into the link and gave a name and a face, and Dross did the same, and glad to meet you, and we hope to be of some assistance. And afterwards we learned the thing that shut the argument for good. The reason the vision ended the way it did was that a voice arriving in her skull, unannounced, in this country, in this month, would have meant to her that she had been contacted by a vampire — and she would rather have finished it herself than find out what one wanted with her.''

===== Papers in Order =====

''Saint-Marcel is a very long way from Perpignan. I looked at Jedburgh's map for some time and could get nothing consistent out of it — two hundred here, four hundred there — and the honest answer is something over four hundred kilometres, north-east and a great deal of it uphill.''

''The convoy will take three days over it. Their trucks run on wood alcohol rather than petrol and are down a third of their power for it, so they will crawl along at not much better than walking pace until they reach the Rhône valley, and then they must climb. A train does it in eight hours. A train also puts you through a checkpoint at every station and a change at Lyon, which is the one city on the route where people know Diane's face. Dross asked about the carpet, and the answer to that was standing outside the window making the shutters bang.''

''So: the train, first class, and buy every seat in the compartment so that there is nobody in it but us. Six people travelling together in a private compartment are not a resistance cell; they are a professional party of some kind, doctors going to a conference, businessmen with an appointment. London had sent us blank travel papers and Jedburgh, who can forge, filled them out along with the ration cards. Diane found that genuinely shocking, and Dross apologised for us charmingly — you must forgive us, these things seem more ordinary to us than they should.''

''Then we chose what to be, and the sensible rule is to claim only what you could actually do if somebody asked. Kel is a skilled tailor, so we became a fashion concern. I can pass as a technician: I have the mechanician's trade and the alchemist's, which between them will survive any conversation about a refinery. This turned out to be better luck than I deserved, because Saint-Marcel has a hydroelectric station running off a waterfall and a strategic reserve attached to it — chlorine, cobalt, and sodium metal — and I would like it recorded that I was extremely pleased about the sodium.''

''Jedburgh is an armourer and a weaponsmith and can therefore be a metallurgist, which suits the cobalt; there is a proper reason to want cobalt alloys, since steel goes brittle in real cold and cobalt simply does not, and men who intend to fight in mountains think about such things. Jedburgh's own view of his cover story was that he is not very good at that. Tulip is a farmer and a gardener and knows animals, and the region is famous for its market gardens, so she needed no invention at all. And I would be the man from the office who makes sure the technicians do what they are supposed to, which Kel described as the annoying paperwork guy, and which is not, I think, wholly a joke about the disguise.''

''Diane was the difficulty. She is too old to pass as anyone's sweetheart, her French and German are fluent but carry an accent she has never been able to lose, and the limp is the one thing on every poster in the south. So we made her old — Tulip's aunt, come along on the trip because somebody insisted, shuffling and disagreeable and best not spoken to. The accent we solved by giving her a stroke, so that she understands everything said around her and is not expected to answer. I offered a wart or two. I was overruled on the warts.''

===== First Class =====

''The gale came in properly overnight and by morning nobody in Perpignan was going to work, because you could not walk down a street without leaning into it.''

''It was the best thing that happened to us all week. The machines the Germans would send to look at a stretch of countryside where somebody might have come down out of the sky are nimble in the air and treacherous on the ground, and a crosswind on landing turns one over. Nothing flew. I said we had planned it well, which was a lie of the most satisfying kind. It also meant the carpet stayed rolled up, and I had no regrets about that at all.''

''We watched the trucks go west toward Camp Gurs the next morning, and then we went to the station. Kel put the illusions on us before we walked in, and it cost her; she came out the other side wrung dry and needing a restorative before she was any use to anybody, and Tulip was little better after laying stone in our bones for the day. I raised the idea of getting Diane a wheelchair, which would have hidden the leg entirely, and I still think it was a good one.''

''The compartment was ours and the journey took most of the day. There is no shortage of cigarettes in France and every one of them is poisonous, but the ones going round that carriage were a species of their own — very dark, heavy with something called Latakia, giving off a thick black smoke that smells precisely like burning boot leather. You could feel it settling on the inside of your chest like bitumen. I offered, as a courtesy, to clear it out of their lungs with a sphere of dark, and was told that this would waste the entire point of the exercise: they were armouring themselves, and nothing bacterial was getting in past that. Jedburgh opened the window.''

''We came into Lyon about eight in the evening. Diane chose where we would sleep — somewhere perfectly ordinary with no connection whatever to any safe house of hers — and what she chose was the Hotel San Filippo, which is a good deal grander than she made it sound. Jedburgh's forged ration cards were accepted without a glance. After the little place in Perpignan it felt like a different war.''

===== Cheap at the Price =====

''That evening she saw him in the street. The priest. The one she had told me about in her room the night before, walking about Lyon on his own with no more caution than a man going to buy a newspaper.''

''Kel's ritual for taking a mind properly takes an hour with the subject in the room the whole time, which rules out doing it anywhere he might be missed. So the shape of it was obvious enough: get him somewhere private, put him down, make him a mouse, carry him home, and let Kel do her work behind a locked door. I said at the outset that we were not taking death off the table with this one. I want that written down as having been said before we caught him and not after.''

''Kel had a look inside his head first, and he could not keep her out. He was expecting to be offered drugs. He is a good-looking man of middle years in a gabardine raincoat, a dark suit and a fedora, and he has not worn anything priestly for a year — chiefly, it emerges, because he has been conducting affairs with two women at the same time and the collar was becoming awkward. Dross put a suggestion on him, which did not take the first time and did the second. Jedburgh's contribution was that a venal man alone in a strange city, with two mistresses at home, will follow money and he will follow women, and that we should offer both. So we did, and he came, and we walked him into a shabby little bar to discuss something profitable.''

''Then Dross produced a sachet of something quite wonderful that he really ought to try, and he opened it and took a good deep sniff of it, and that was the end of the evening for him. He went into a mouse skin and a mouse into an empty box of Vesta matches, and we walked out with him in a pocket. He woke somewhere on the way and went berserk in there, for all the good it did him.''

===== Taking His Confession =====

''We put every lamp in the room behind us so that he would see nothing but light, on the principle that a man who has been questioned by us may one day be questioned about us, and there is no sense in handing over five faces.''

''The ritual took its hour. Kel drew it out far past the length it needed, which wears a man down past the point of holding anything back, and at the end of it he loved her better than anyone he has ever met and would have told her his mother's sins. She put him on the mind speech so we could all hear.''

''He has met Virginia Hall. He knows her face — that is the sharp end of it, and Diane needed to hear it from us. He saw her in a street in Lyon and does not know where she sleeps. He got his introduction to her through somebody the Gestapo had already rolled up in Paris, after selling a different group entirely: a cell run by a man named Germain Thion, whom he betrayed wholesale. She found him too curious, exactly as her instinct told her, and burned her documents. He has never stopped looking for her since.''

''Jedburgh asked whether he had been in contact with Barbie or with Sievers. Barbie, yes — he knows Klaus Barbie personally and has been working with him quite openly, walking into Gestapo headquarters in daylight without so much as a change of coat, and Barbie's people work out of the Hotel Terminus beside the railway station in Lyon. That is worth more than everything else he said. Sievers, no. The name means nothing to him. If you sat him down and explained the Ahnenerbe and what is being done in the mountains, he would laugh at you. Dross pointed out that as a mouse he would only squeak.''

''He was never part of any counter-insurgency apparatus. He is a nobody who found a seam and worked it: a priest's history, a priest's welcome, and a good face, and people told him things, and he sold every one of them to the Germans for money. Not for a cause. Not out of hatred. There is no remorse in him anywhere; I looked. His name is Robert Alesch, and he was famous in his own parish for preaching against the Nazis.''

===== A Small Death =====

''Dross wanted to make him forget the whole evening and leave him a mouse until we could find someone willing to unmake him. Kel would have let him go on the street the morning we left.''

''I said no, and I said why. A man who has spent an hour inside a room with us is evidence, whatever he remembers of it. Their side has occultists too — we have seen them work a square in Perpignan over a dead man — and there is more than one way to ask a question of a person who does not wish to answer. Get rid of him and there is nothing left for them. Jedburgh made the necessary correction, which is that death alone does not close the door: if they know where he died they can still reach him. Then he said plainly that he wanted him dead, which I respect more than a long argument.''

''Dross was the one who fought it, and he was right to. He got there himself in the end: that this man will produce more death and more suffering if he lives, and that the price of preventing it falls on us and nobody else, and that we should not pretend otherwise or take any comfort from it. Kel, who is not sentimental, offered to sit him down for an hour and look into his eyes and fix his morals for him. He declined.''

''So we killed him in the shape we had caught him in. Held by the tail over a sphere of dark and dropped into it, and there is nothing left — no body, no grave, no place, nothing for anyone to raise or to question or to bury. The world is made smaller by the size of one mouse. I have killed a great many things in a very long life and I do not usually make a note of it. I have made a note of this one because it was decided at a table, in a warm room, by five people who had eaten well, and because I was the first to say it out loud, and I would say it again, and none of that is the same as it having been easy.''

===== Uphill =====

''We caught the connecting train the next morning and it took most of the day, chiefly because it climbs.''

''Saint-Marcel, when we finally reached it, is a hamlet of some eight hundred people in the Alps, with Mont Blanc within twenty miles of it. Not farm country — the ground is too vertical for that, though there are farms clinging on where they can. It is an industrial place set down in the mountains, orchards with houses attached, and one great works that does not belong to any of it. It is the end of autumn down on the coast; up here it is bitterly cold, and the weather in these mountains is famous for turning savage without notice.''

''We took rooms at a small regional hotel, still disguised, and counted our advantage. The convoy left after we did, is smaller than the one going west — ten trucks perhaps — and has three days of bad roads and worse gradients in front of it. We have a day in hand, possibly more. It is the first time on this whole business that we have arrived anywhere before the thing we came to meet.''

===== Very Dangerous Fun =====

''Kel put the mind speech on Jedburgh and he went up as an eagle and spent an hour looking down at it, which is a great deal more than a man on foot could have learned in a week.''

''The waterfall drives the hydroelectric station, and the station is smaller than I had pictured — nothing like a great dam holding back a valley, just a modest thing hung off a cataract. But it makes a great deal of current, and current is the whole point: everything they do there wants electricity in quantity. They refine cobalt with it. They strip chlorine out of salt with it, and they have been selling the chlorine to Germany since before the war. And what is left when you take the chlorine off is sodium metal, which they keep in the warehouses under oil, because sodium and water are not on speaking terms. I remarked that this would be very dangerous fun. Kel remarked that it is the kind of mistake a man only makes once.''

''There is a rail spur running into the plant itself. Ore comes up from Morocco by train and the products go out the same way. From the air, the arrangement is unmistakable: a scatter of little holdings with fruit trees round them, and then this one enormous building, off on its own, away from the houses — which is exactly where you put a thing you do not want the neighbours to see, and exactly where the biological work must be. You want it secured, and it is already secured, and the power is already there. Everything about the place answers itself.''

''It is guarded by Italian Alpine infantry.''

===== Who Cares Who Wins =====

''That last fact turns out to cut both ways, and the pleasant half came first.''

''This zone is administered by a man named Maurizio Lazzaro di Castiglione, whose writ runs over Savoy and Grenoble and the country around, and he is notable for the one thing that matters here: he has not handed anybody over. Not Jews, not Gypsies, not refugees of any kind. His administration simply declines the requests when they come, and the effect is that this stretch of the Alps is very nearly a safe place, in a way nothing on the coast has been for a year. Kel observed that the world is not, then, a complete piece of shit. I observed that this one does not need a matchbox.''

''The unpleasant half is that these are veteran troops, mountain troops, and they are on the wrong end of any clever idea involving uniforms. Kel's instinct is sound in general — Germans follow the chain of command, and a sufficiently senior officer can walk in anywhere — but it does not work on men who are not German. Jedburgh offered us the official motto of the Italian army: who cares who wins. It got the laugh it deserved and did not help.''

''We had two blunter options in front of us. Take a guard, empty his head of everything useful, and walk in on what he knows. Or put holes in the works with spheres of dark until the whole thing goes into the river, which would certainly stop the electrolysis and would certainly kill whatever is in there, including the women being driven up the road towards it. Diane cut across all of it. What she wants, and she says it is more important than anything else we might do here, is to know what is actually being done inside that building. She is right. And we do not have to understand the research ourselves to carry it — Jedburgh named the man for that, who can divine over a thing and knows healing besides, and later on a sample of everything goes to the doctor. Our job is to get it.''

''So: reconnaissance first, and properly. Jedburgh goes up again to mark out the places worth watching, and we set the crystals of vision on them and learn the compound's habits before we ever set foot in it. Then we go in at night, unseen, because in daylight that place is full of soldiers and in darkness it is only full of guards. It will be a wretchedly cold night's work at this altitude and I find I am looking forward to it.''

''Kel said, as we were breaking up, that it was worth acknowledging I had been right about the mind speech. Dross agreed, at some length and with more enthusiasm than the point required. I said I had been right twice, actually, and let the second one go unnamed, because a man who collects his debts too eagerly is not invited to dinner. I would trade both of them for a day's head start we have not yet earned. The trucks are somewhere south of us in the dark, climbing.''

----

{| class="wikitable"
|-
|

==== OOC Details ====

===== Items Acquired =====

'''Party (shared resources):'''

'''Balance brought forward:''' 2,500 sp
'''Balance carried forward:''' 2,500 sp

===== Session Summary =====

At dinner in the Perpignan hotel the party [[#s6-the-rehearsal|argued over how to make first contact with Diane]], and Kel's preview of the mind-speech option showed her shooting herself, which took it off the table. [[#s6-between-courses|A telepathic sweep of the dining room]] found four guests of the same escape line, no German observers and Diane's cover intact, along with worried talk of an internment camp holding some two thousand people. A coded remark about a cousin named Cuthbert from Piccadilly brought her to Black's door, [[#s6-making-her-acquaintance|where she opened it holding an enormous revolver]]. She had shared a train south with Wolfram Sievers and [[#s6-something-going-around|carried word of the Conan Bacterium]], research grown out of Robert Koch's papers that records and repairs the pattern of a living body, and which she believes has every hallmark of a death plague; a small, almost entirely female contingent of internees is being taken to Saint-Marcel rather than west to Camp Gurs with the rest. She could not explain [[#s6-not-a-good-trait-in-this-game|how the Germans found Gilbert]], dated the crackdown on her network to the German occupation of Vichy France after Operation Torch, and named a suspect: an anti-Nazi priest from a parish near Paris who makes it his business to know everyone. Warned in advance this time that Kel is [[#s6-not-a-vampire|not a vampire]], Diane accepted the mind-speech link, and the party settled [[#s6-papers-in-order|the route, the forged travel papers and the cover stories]] — a fashion and refining concern, with Diane disguised as Tulip's elderly, stroke-stricken aunt.

[[#s6-first-class|A gale grounded German reconnaissance aircraft]] and the party took a bought-out first-class compartment north, reaching Lyon and the Hotel San Filippo in the evening. Diane spotted her priest in the street; [[#s6-cheap-at-the-price|he was lured with money and women, drugged, and pocketed as a mouse]], and [[#s6-taking-his-confession|an hour's ritual behind a locked door]] gave up his name — Robert Alesch — along with the facts that he can identify Virginia Hall by sight, works openly with Klaus Barbie out of the Hotel Terminus in Lyon, betrayed Germain Thion's Paris cell before her, and has never heard of Sievers or the Ahnenerbe. [[#s6-a-small-death|The party killed him in mouse form over a sphere of dark]], leaving no remains for enemy occultists to question. [[#s6-uphill|A connecting train climbed all the following day to Saint-Marcel]], an Alpine hamlet of eight hundred people, which the party reached a day ahead of the convoy. [[#s6-very-dangerous-fun|Jedburgh's flight over the valley]] mapped the hydroelectric station, the cobalt and chlorine works, the sodium warehouses and one isolated building where the biological work must be. The zone is administered by Maurizio Lazzaro di Castiglione, who surrenders nobody, and the plant is guarded by Italian Alpine infantry on whom no German-uniform trick will work; [[#s6-who-cares-who-wins|the session ends with the party planning night reconnaissance]] with crystals of vision before attempting entry.

===== Chronological Timeline =====

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date !! Event
|-
| Day 36 (evening) || Dinner at the Perpignan hotel; contact methods debated; the mind-speech option previewed and abandoned
|-
| Day 36 (evening) || Telepathic sweep of the dining room; four escape-line guests identified; camp chatter and the Camp Gurs / Saint-Marcel split overheard
|-
| Day 36 (evening) || Coded "Cuthbert from Piccadilly" signal given at table; Diane leaves; Black follows to her room
|-
| Day 36 (night) || Diane reports Sievers on the train and the Conan Bacterium research derived from Robert Koch
|-
| Day 36 (night) || Gilbert's betrayal discussed; Operation Torch and the occupation of Vichy France; a priest near Paris named as suspect
|-
| Day 36 (night) || Diane warned about the mind speech and brought into the party's link
|-
| Day 36 (night) || Route to Saint-Marcel agreed; forged papers, cover stories and disguises settled
|-
| Day 36 ? Day 37 || Gale rises overnight; German reconnaissance aircraft grounded; the flying carpet ruled out
|-
| Day 37 || Storm holds Perpignan indoors; final preparations for the journey
|-
| Day 38 (morning) || Internee convoy departs west for Camp Gurs; party boards the train north under illusion
|-
| Day 38 (evening) || Arrival in Lyon; rooms taken at the Hotel San Filippo on forged ration cards
|-
| Day 38 (night) || Diane spots the priest; he is lured, drugged, turned into a mouse and carried back
|-
| Day 38 (night) || Ritual interrogation: Robert Alesch named; Virginia Hall, Klaus Barbie at the Hotel Terminus, Germain Thion; no knowledge of Sievers
|-
| Day 38 (night) || The party debates his fate and kills him in mouse form
|-
| Day 39 (morning ? afternoon) || Connecting train climbs to Saint-Marcel; hamlet reached ahead of the convoy
|-
| Day 39 (afternoon) || Aerial reconnaissance of the hydroelectric station, the refining works and the isolated building
|-
| Day 39 (evening) || Italian administration under Castiglione noted; infiltration options weighed; night reconnaissance planned
|}
|}

----

=== Chapter 7: Early Days ===

''There is a graveyard across the road from the works, and every grave in it is eighteen inches long.''

===== Excused Service =====

''The first thing to correct is a mistake I made in these pages already: the plant is not in Saint-Marcel. It is at Pomblière, a couple of miles up the valley, which is a separate place with fewer than five hundred people in it, two churches, a station and a school so small that the older children ride down to Saint-Marcel for their lessons. We are lodged in the one; the thing we came for is in the other.''

''The works is guarded by Italian Alpine troops, and they are the wrong sort of enemy to have. Not the green boys the Germans have been turning out on three months' training, who are dangerous chiefly to themselves — these are veterans, mountain men, and they know exactly what they are doing. There are something like two hundred of them on the plant, a man at every door and gate, and only ever four to eight of them moving about the ground at any one time. They are not quartered inside; they come in from outside, and apart from a couple of unfortunates who sleep on the premises, no officer of theirs is on the site after dark. They give the German field police a very wide berth. Their commandant, we are told, has no wish to be compromised by peculiar goings-on, by which he means the Nazis, and I would shake his hand if the circumstances were different.''

''We settled on going in by daylight, which sits oddly until you think about it: at night the place is nothing but guards, and in the day it is full of workmen with somewhere to be. Diane stayed behind in Saint-Marcel and did not come up to Pomblière at all. She would have insisted on it if we had not. There is no photograph of her on any poster in France, but there is a description on every one of them, and the description is the leg.''

''So Kel made her a new face, and made it properly — bound down so that it will hold for days rather than falling off in the middle of a street. Kel's own suggestion was a middle-aged countrywoman; Diane's, when asked, was that she should be a man, and Diane was right, because it solves the leg. A man of that age walking about an Alpine village with a lump of wood below the knee is not a woman in disguise. He is the local cripple, and the wood is the reason he is not in the army with everybody else's sons. Nobody looks twice at a man who has already given a leg.''

===== The Nearest Thing to a Thief =====

''The obvious way into a compound is to walk in unseen, and I learned two things about that which I did not know and should have.''

''The first is that the working does not defeat everybody. Anyone born with the sight can see straight through it, at any degree of talent whatever — a man who has never used it for anything in his life and does not know what it is worth will still see five people strolling past his gate. It is uncommon. It is not so uncommon that I want to gamble a life on it. The second is worse and more foolish, and I ought to have thought of it myself: unseen or not, a man still throws a shadow, and there is snow on the ground here. In daylight one may not be spotted and one's shadow certainly will be.''

''The wire is barbed and razor both, and it carries signs with lightning bolts on them. I said what I have always found to be true, that those signs are usually a bluff — the sign is cheaper than the current, and the sign is what keeps people off. I also said it in the tone of a man who does not intend to test it personally. Cutting was raised and dismissed as too loud a thing to leave behind us. Tunnelling was raised. Jedburgh observed, correctly, that we have no thief.''

''We have the next best thing, which is me. There is a knack in the axe I carry that lets me find hidden ways and hidden openings, and find a trap and take it out again, as well as a man who has spent his life doing it. It does not pick locks. It has never picked a lock and it is not going to start, and I said so before anybody could get their hopes up.''

''What we settled on in the end was Kel's working that simply keeps a man from being noticed at all, which lasts a little over an hour and makes even a clumsy man very hard to catch sight of. Tulip has an incantation that will lay a lesser sort of blending over the whole party at once, so that if the first thing lapses we can at least stand still and be missed. She put earth on our skins and stone in our bones besides. Kel prepared faces of the Italian guards to fall back on if we were seen. And we ran the mind speech through the lot of us, since the working hides you from the eye and not from the ear, and five people whispering to one another in a chlorine plant would not last long.''

''I had one idea of my own, which was to reach into the head of whichever man in that place knows what is being done there and simply take it. It was pointed out to me that this means opening one's mind to a great many minds one cannot vouch for, in a country where the other side keeps occultists too, and that some of them have unpleasant things waiting behind the door for anyone who knocks. I withdrew the suggestion. I would rather be talked out of a thing beforehand than proved wrong afterwards.''

''Then came the question of who goes in, and the answer was one man rather than five, because five of anything is five chances to be seen. Kel looked round the table for somebody tough enough to survive being caught and named me, and I said I was happy to do it, and had about four seconds of feeling useful before somebody observed that Jedburgh can wear another shape altogether and would therefore not merely be unseen but able to be seen and dismissed. Kel thanked him warmly for volunteering. He had not said anything.''

===== Made in a Hurry =====

''We walked up the regional road out of Saint-Marcel with the wire on our left, and came to the guard post, which is a hut and a painted arm across the roadway and half a dozen men, and we went past all six of them and under the arm, and not one of them lifted his head. It is a strange feeling. You are not hiding. You are walking up a public road in daylight past men whose entire employment is to notice people, and they do not notice.''

''Ten feet beyond the gate, on the other side of the road, there is a door into the cemetery — a door only by courtesy, a plank lashed to the palings of a fence that would not keep out a determined goat. It is not a real graveyard. It has no chapel, no wall, no gate worth the name, no caretaker. The French have a phrase for a thing thrown together in haste, and that is what the map calls it.''

''The mounds are eighteen inches long and about ten across. There are crosses on them and there is not a name on any cross.''

''My first thought was animals, and I said so, and heard how thin it sounded while I was still saying it. Men do bury a dog they were fond of. They do not lay out a fenced plot with rows of crosses for cats, on ground belonging to a chemical works, in a country at war. The graves are shallow besides — two feet, no more, and that in frozen ground where a proper grave would take a day and a strong back. Whoever put them there was not thinking about the dead. It is the kind of burial you use when you are hiding something, and nobody at that fence argued the point.''

===== Not Without Gloves =====

''Those of us who can see past the surface of a thing looked at the graves, and every one of us who could see it saw the same thing, which was a very faint blue light coming up out of the dirt.''

''Tulip saw nothing at all, which annoyed her considerably, and Dross saw nothing either, being a hundred miles from here and no use to us this week. The rest of us stood there staring at what Tulip had to take on trust. It was not a wash of light lying over the mounds. It was individual grains in the soil, each one glowing on its own, scattered through the earth like a field of stars, and faint — but unmistakably blue, in broad daylight, which is not a thing daylight allows.''

''Jedburgh asked whether it was that particular blue that comes off certain poisons of the modern kind, and named it, and it seems that it was. My own guess had been cobalt, since the plant refines the stuff a hundred yards away, but the alloy they make is stable and stable metal does not shine through soil. Tulip said that the hospitals use a cobalt that does, when it is the right sort. Kel said the simplest reading was that something horribly contaminated had been put in the ground here. Then Jedburgh knelt and read one of the graves properly, and came up with the answer that it held a small piece of something lethal — and that it might well be magical into the bargain, which no honest poison has any business being.''

''Kel's verdict was that we should not dig it up without very large gloves. Mine was that we should not dig it up at all today. It is precisely the sort of discovery that will swallow an afternoon and get the whole party caught, and there will be time for it afterwards, and if there is not, then we shall have had bigger troubles than a hole in the ground. So we left the little crosses where they were, and I have thought about them a great deal since.''

===== Not So Keen on the Place =====

''Jedburgh went over the fence and through the works, and sent us what he saw a picture at a time, and I sat behind a picket fence in the cold and was taken on a tour of the most alarming factory I have ever inhabited at second hand.''

''The first building next to the graveyard is the chlorine store, and you do not need to see it to know it; the smell reaches the fence. Past it there is an alley about fifteen feet across and a ramp going up, and the branch to one side leads into another chlorine depository, and the branch to the other into the sodium store. That one has its doors propped wide open in the middle of winter, and now I understand why. There are men whose whole job is to sweep the snow away from the doorway and keep the floor dry inside, and there are buckets of sand and shovels standing about everywhere, and the men handling it wear no protection at all — because the thing that will kill them is not the metal, it is water, and the last thing you want in there is a sealed damp room. Four metric tons of it, sitting on pallets in square buckets like so many crucibles. I remarked to no one in particular that I was no longer keen on the place, and I meant it, and I was also delighted, which is a combination I have long since stopped apologising for.''

''Beyond that the loading yard and the forklifts and the rail spur where they back the wagons past the entrance; then a transformer the size of a cottage; then the administration buildings with clerks beavering away inside at whatever it is clerks do in an occupied country, and a canteen beside them, because at five degrees at noon nobody eats out of doors. Opposite the offices is the hall where they pull the salt apart with electricity. A dozen men in oilskin and thick glass masks, every one of them covered to the throat, and most of them not at their work at all but standing near the doors — so that when it goes wrong they will be first out. One or two braver or more junior souls were at the big machine in the middle, peering into the dials. Further along, a substation where one man sits watch, and what he sits watch beside is four tons of chlorine liquefied under pressure. Everybody's favourite posting, I am sure.''

''Then a ton of indigo crystals stored where you would not expect them, kept simply because the stuff is valuable and an order might come; the crushing shop, where they break the ore and where the noise is such that a man could shout in there all day and never be heard outside; the salt coming in; the railway going out; and a bridge running north-west across the tracks and up towards the dam. Soldiers at every point where a man might go in or come out, and Jedburgh walking between them with an hour's grace and nobody's eye on him.''

===== A Thriving Concern =====

''Jedburgh is the only one of us who can look at an installation and read it the way a man reads a page, and when he had walked the whole of it he gave us the verdict, and the verdict was the last thing any of us wanted.''

''It is a factory. Not a front, not a shell with something else inside it — a genuine, prosperous, hard-working chemical works, turning out chlorine by the thousand tons and holding metallic sodium in the same order of quantity, taking in cobalt ore up from Morocco once a week and shipping the products out every second or third day. Everything in it is exactly what it appears to be and is exactly where it ought to be.''

''And there is nowhere in it to put two hundred people. No wing that is locked, no floor that is not accounted for, no cells, no chains, no manacles, no barracks that could hold them, no cave mouth, no stair going down. Kel asked, with the particular flatness she reserves for these occasions, where the secret laboratory was — the one with the prisoners in it and the plague being brewed on them. There is not one. Jedburgh spent the whole of his hour looking and found no trace of it.''

''I had been so pleased with myself the night before, picking out the one big building standing apart from the houses and declaring that this is precisely where you put the thing you do not want the neighbours to see. The thing they do not want the neighbours to see is chlorine. Everything about the place answers itself, and every answer is the dull one.''

===== Heraldry =====

''Since we had run out of factory, I suggested the line running up to the power station, and Jedburgh took his other shape and went to look. The changing costs him dearly — it burns through a man's reserves at a rate he cannot keep up all day — and he does not do it for the pleasure of the view.''

''The station is smaller than I had pictured even after reducing my picture once already. It sits on the cataract above the works and it feeds the plant and the little community around it and nothing else at all; it is not tied into the country's grid. There is nothing up there to hide two hundred women in either.''

''What there was, twelve miles off, was an eagle.''

''He put it at twelve miles and closed to five to be sure of it, and at five miles he was certain of two things. It is black — properly black, not the brown that people call black at a distance. And it has two heads, set out from one another like the blades of an opened pair of shears.''

''I have seen that device on a shield often enough. I had not expected to be told it was overhead and alive. I asked how far off it was and got twelve miles, and observed that this was twelve miles too close. There was some talk of whether it was thinking or merely being a bird — Jedburgh judged from the way it held its wings that it was flying like a bird and not like a person wearing one — but birds are systematic when they hunt, and this one was not hunting. It was going round and round over one patch of ground, south of Mont Blanc.''

''We have met two-headed birds before, when we were talking about the condors. We have met worse: I can recall a place where the men had the heads of birds of prey. I said as much, and nobody found it reassuring, which was not the intention.''

===== The Circuit Breaker =====

''Tulip was carrying the crystal of vision — Dross bought it from Uzi a long while ago and Tulip has had the keeping of it — and since Jedburgh was the only one of us who knew where to point the thing, Jedburgh used it.''

''He set the view a mile above the ground over the middle of the eagle's circuit and looked straight down, and what was standing there was a woman.''

''I use the word because he was certain of it and so, afterwards, was the divining. She is enormously large. Taller than any man and far broader, bulky in a way that is not fat and is not a dwarf's thickness either — short of a hill giant, but not by as much as one would like. She was simply out on her mountain, alone, doing whatever such a thing does with an afternoon.''

''Twice he had to hold his nerve and twice he held it. The third time something in him slipped, and the horror of the thing came back up the line at him — across twelve miles of air, out of the mountain, through a piece of polished stone, and into the man holding it. The crystal burst in his hands. It took what was meant for him, the way a fuse takes a current, and he walked away with his strength still in his body and a palmful of grit.''

''I said we do not like really dangerous things. It got the laugh it deserved. She never noticed him; we asked, and the answer was that she would have had to be looking for him, and she was not. That is the only comfort available and I have been chewing it ever since, because the plain fact is that a man a mile up in the air and twelve miles away was very nearly struck down by the sight of her face.''

''Jedburgh spent the next hour divining over what was left of the crystal. It was slow going — it is not ordinary magic and it did not want to be read — but he got there. The thing that reached him was not a working she cast, not a curse, not a summons. It was simply her face. A mountain hag, and the mountains are all around us.''

===== The Opening Move =====

''Kel put it plainly while Jedburgh was still picking crystal out of his palm: either that creature has nothing whatever to do with why we are here, or they are giving the people to her.''

''And then a thing was said that turned the whole business round, and I record it because I had been carrying the error about in my head for days and never once examined it. We had all been assuming — every one of us, and I would have sworn to it — that there has been a steady flow of prisoners up to this plant for months, and that we had arrived in the middle of an established atrocity. There has not been. Nothing has come up here at all. When they emptied the camp at Rivesaltes, some seventeen hundred went north to Gurs, and this two hundred is the first and only party sent this way, and they are not even here yet: eight to ten trucks, still the better part of a day and a half out on bad roads, guarded not by Italians but by German soldiers with their three months of training behind them.''

''Kel said it: they are not continuing something here, they are going to start something. Or finish one, I said, because it works either way and I would rather have both possibilities on the table than the comfortable one. But the shape of it is clear enough. We are not late. We are early, which is not a position I have often occupied, and it also means that whatever is in those eighteen-inch graves went into the ground before any of this began, and belongs to some other question entirely.''

===== A Particular Age Range =====

''Kel can see a little way down a road before we set foot on it — not to spy out what is there, but to be shown what follows if we choose a particular course. She had not used it in days, and she proposed to spend it on this: what do we see if we are standing at the convoy's stop for the night, watching?''

''What she saw was orderly and unremarkable and made my skin crawl. The trucks are driven into covered warehouses and the doors are shut behind them. Food is passed out. Nobody is let down. They will not be walked about, or counted, or split up — they will spend the night in the trucks they spent the day in.''

''And every one of them is a woman.''

''Jedburgh asked whether they were of any particular age range. They are young. All of them young, all of them of an age to bear children, out of a camp that held every kind of person there is — men, old people, children — and somebody stood at that gate and picked out two hundred women of exactly that description and put them in trucks and sent them into the Alps.''

''Kel said it felt like a hag thing, and I do not think any of us needed the sentence finished. I said perhaps they are making more hags. Tulip said perhaps they only want the babies. There was laughter of the kind we have made a good deal of lately, and it did not last, and I will not set down the worst of what was said because it was not funny even at the time. What I did say, and stand by, is that we do not need more hags running about the world.''

''We have no evidence. I want that admitted plainly: we have found nothing in that plant, nothing in that valley, and nothing on paper that ties the woman on the mountain to the trucks on the road. What we have is that we have looked everywhere else and found nothing at all, and that somebody selected two hundred wombs and is driving them towards a place with a hag standing twelve miles off it, and that the two-headed bird patrolling the ground in between is almost certainly hers. That is circumstantial, and it is strong.''

===== Going in Blind =====

''So I said I was of a mind to use the time we have left to deal with the hag, and rather to my surprise nobody talked me out of it. Kel was already leaning the same way. Tulip is not keen — she would prefer to learn more about the ground first, and she is probably right and agreed anyway. Jedburgh thinks it will be exciting. We have something under thirty hours before the trucks reach Pomblière, and there will be no thirty hours like them again.''

''Then we found out what we are proposing to walk up to.''

''Looking at her face takes the strength straight out of a man's body — enough to put most men on the ground where they stand. Hold your nerve against it and it still leaves you weak as a child, and it does not come back quickly. A mirror is no answer: ordinary glass is as likely as not to shatter in your hand, and only a mirror made for the purpose, of the sort ground for looking at gorgons, can be relied upon, and we do not have one. There is no counterspell. What there is, is a tincture of aconite and passionflower, and I knew that, and named it, and then had to admit in front of everybody that I do not have the formula. It is a herbalist's preparation and I am an alchemist, which is precisely the sort of distinction that sounds like an excuse and is not one. It has been on my list for a very long time. It will be higher on it tomorrow.''

''What followed was a quarter of an hour of increasingly desperate ingenuity. Fight in the dark. Put a sack over her head — and keep it there, which is the whole of the difficulty. Lay an illusion of a blank face over hers, except that requires somebody to get close enough to touch her, and if you are close enough to touch her you have already looked at her. Blind ourselves outright, which was proposed as a joke and then examined seriously for slightly too long. My own contribution, and the one I still think best, is a bandage over the eyes wound so that a man sees shapes and no detail at all — enough to fight by, not enough to see a face. Kel has scrolls made up of a phantasm that might take her out of our heads altogether if we can spot her at a distance. Tulip will put stone in our bones beforehand, so that a man who has the strength stripped out of him does not simply fold up on the mountainside. And we went through the remnants we carry: Mirage, which is more for places than people; Silhouette, which might serve; and Facade, which I think is the most promising of the three.''

''Tulip asked whether the thing works on animals, and whether Corniger would be affected. Nobody knew. Kel's view was that he is so strong it would hardly signify. My view is that he has had to look at me every day for years and has never once complained, so I do not expect an ugly woman on a hillside to trouble him.''

''There was a great deal of volunteering of other people to go first. I said I would go last. Kel said it sounds as though we are doing the dangerous thing next time, and said it with real pleasure, and that is what I shall lie awake on: somewhere south-west of us the trucks are grinding up a valley road with two hundred women shut inside them, and somewhere north-east of us a very large woman is walking about her mountain with an eagle turning overhead, and we have decided to go and meet the second one first.''

----

{| class="wikitable"
|-
|

==== OOC Details ====

===== Items Acquired =====

'''Party (shared resources):'''
* Crystal of Vision — (unverified — ledger unchecked for this session)

'''Balance brought forward:''' 2,500 sp
'''Balance carried forward:''' 2,500 sp

===== Session Summary =====

The party spent the day scouting the chemical works at Pomblière, a couple of miles up the valley from their lodgings, [[#s7-excused-service|leaving Diane behind in Saint-Marcel under a new disguise as a middle-aged man]] because her wooden leg appears on every wanted poster. Having [[#s7-the-nearest-thing-to-a-thief|weighed the ways past two hundred Italian Alpine veterans]] and settled on concealment plus a single man inside, they walked past the boom gate unnoticed and found [[#s7-made-in-a-hurry|a makeshift cemetery of unnamed graves eighteen inches long]], the soil of which [[#s7-not-without-gloves|glows faintly blue and holds a small piece of something lethal and possibly magical]]. They left it undug. Jedburgh's [[#s7-not-so-keen-on-the-place|walk through the plant]] and his [[#s7-a-thriving-concern|professional assessment of it]] found a genuine, thriving chlorine and sodium works with nowhere at all to hold two hundred prisoners and no hidden laboratory anywhere in it.

Scouting further out in eagle form, Jedburgh sighted [[#s7-heraldry|a two-headed black eagle circling twelve miles off, south of Mont Blanc]], and scrying beneath its circuit found an enormous woman whose face [[#s7-the-circuit-breaker|burst the party's Crystal of Vision]] rather than striking him down; divining over the fragments named her a mountain hag. The party then learned that no prisoners have ever been sent up to this plant before — [[#s7-the-opening-move|the two hundred women on the road are the first]], still the better part of a day and a half out — and a look ahead at the convoy's overnight stop confirmed [[#s7-a-particular-age-range|that every internee is a young woman of child-bearing age]]. Holding this as circumstantial but strong, and with under thirty hours before the trucks arrive, the party is at Saint-Marcel and has [[#s7-going-in-blind|resolved to go after the hag first]], lacking the herbalist's tincture that would guard against her visage and improvising blindfolds, illusions and stone-hardening in its place.

===== Chronological Timeline =====

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date !! Event
| Day 40 || Pomblière plant infiltrated and walked end to end — a working factory, no hidden laboratory; scrying identifies a mountain hag (Crystal of Vision destroyed); convoy of ~200 young women a day and a half out
|}
|}

----

=== Chapter 8: A Pleasant Stroll in the Woods ===

''Four Death cards came off the deck before the one that answered us, and every one of us decided on the instant that they were about her rather than about us.''

===== Careful What We Asked For =====

''Dross is back with us, and so are his cards, and I had forgotten how much of an evening it costs to use them properly. The reading answers one question and one only, so we spent the better part of an hour arguing about what that question should be, which is not wasted time, though it feels like it while you are doing it.''

''Kel wanted to lock down the simple thing first — whether the prisoners are being brought to the hag at all — on the grounds that a yes settles what we do next. Jedburgh argued against a question that can be answered yes or no, and he was right: ask *how* and even a vague answer gives you something to stand on, whereas a yes gives you nothing you did not already suspect. Tulip wanted to ask what the women are for, or what the babies are for, and to hold that in reserve as a second question shaped by the first. Dross said he could try again in half an hour if it failed, which settled the risk of spending the attempt badly.''

''When Dross read the wording back to us he had put the word *here* in it — the Nazis' plan for the women prisoners being transferred here — and I stopped him, because we do not actually know that they are coming here. That was the whole of my contribution and I am glad I made it. Jedburgh thought the intent behind the words strong enough to carry without it. So we cut the word and let it stand as the plan for the women prisoners being transferred, and Dross held the particular moment in his mind and began.''

''He had warned us that reading forward is hard work, close to a coin's toss by daylight, and that the empty country we are in helps him and darkness would help him more. The first attempt failed, and failed by a hair — he said so himself with the sour precision of a man who has just watched a near thing go the wrong way, and observed that had it been full night it would have carried. He gathered the cards up, waited, and laid them again.''

''The second time it came out. Four Death cards in succession, which drew a certain amount of comment around the fire, most of it Jedburgh announcing that he was leaving. I said what everybody wanted said, that they were obviously about her and not about us, and I said it in the voice of a man who believes it. Then came the card that was the actual answer: the Star, and the Star reversed.''

===== From One Vessel to the Other =====

''The Star is a kneeling woman with two vessels in her hands, pouring water out of the one into the other. Upright it means hope, renewal, the good quiet things. Reversed it means the absence of all of them — hopelessness, despair, faithlessness. Dross recited both faces of it aloud for our benefit, being the only one of us who knows the cards, and then asked the cards what the reversal meant against the question he had put.''

''It means she is in it. Not adjacent to it, not coincidental to it — in it. It has to do with potions. And it has to do with something reproductively perverse, which is very probably the reason the business calls for a hag in the first place.''

''I have written that sentence down plainly because I want it plain. We went into this evening with two hundred young women on a road and a very large woman on a mountain and nothing whatever tying the one to the other except that we had looked everywhere else. We came out of it with the tie made.''

''The rest was speculation and we all knew it while we were doing it. One of the stars on the card is Uranus, which is a planet, and which was a sky-lord who ruled before the Titans — that is what the name means. Kel took the view that this is where the transuranian things come from, the next order of evil above anything we normally deal with, and wondered whether they are pouring something transuranian into the women, one vessel into the other. I said that seemed to me a little bit literal. Jedburgh said whatever comes from that quarter is not compatible with living flesh in any case. My own guess was uglier and no better founded: that she is making flesh pots, and that they are breeding soldiers. Dross's was uglier still, that she prepares the unborn thing elsewhere and then puts it perversely into the woman.''

''None of that is knowledge. What is knowledge is that she is part of it, and I said the only thing that followed from it, which is that none of the speculation changes the fact that she has to die.''

===== The Harder Thing to Replace =====

''We got the numbers straight afterwards, and they are worse than I had them. Ten trucks are coming from the Rivesaltes camp to Saint-Marcel. Some forty went the other way, by way of Camp de Gurs, and there is a place called Moûtiers not far from us that keeps coming into the reckoning. Jedburgh worked the escort out from the trucks — a driver and a couple of guards to each, call it five men a truck — and Kel put the total at forty to fifty men.''

''That killed the rescue as an opening move, and killed it on arithmetic rather than on nerve. Kel would need an hour's hold over that many minds to walk two hundred women out from under their guns, and an hour is not a thing anybody is going to give her. Tulip said it first: take the hag out, if we can, and take her out first.''

''I made the case and Jedburgh finished it. Free the women and they will simply do the same thing again next month, because in a population of fifty millions across occupied France and Germany and the Netherlands, two hundred young women of the right age are nothing at all to find. There is one of her. Whatever access these people have to such a creature, it is not the sort of thing one advertises for. She is the harder thing to replace by an enormous margin, and Dross added the other half of it, which is that she is also the less innocent.''

''So it is the hag first and the women afterwards, and I have written that down too, because I want to be able to look at it later. Two hundred people are going to spend the next two days in the backs of those trucks while we walk in the opposite direction, and the reasoning that sends us the opposite way is sound, and I do not much like being the man who finds it sound.''

===== Don't Ask Me How =====

''What we know of hags, we learned around that same fire. They are hybrids, a twisting-together of two bloodlines, and the commonest first half is human. Annis hags carry fae blood and the blood of hell's creatures both. The sea kind are crossed with something that lives underwater. There exists, somewhere in the world, precisely one hag that is pleasant company, and it is not this one, and the mountain sort are horrid without exception. They keep covens, which is a word I would rather not have heard, since it means the thing we call up may not arrive alone. The Germans have a name of their own for the mountain kind. I did not catch it well enough to set it down.''

''Then we went carefully over what her face does, because we had it wrong and wrong in a way that mattered. Holding your nerve against it still costs you something, and holding once is not the end of it — you must go on holding, and holding, and sooner or later a man fails. But the failure only takes what has not been taken already. The whole toll is the same whether you fight it or not; fighting it merely spreads the payment out and buys you the time in between. I asked whether the toll came round again every time she is looked at, and it does not. It is once. Once is quite enough: a man emptied out entirely folds up where he stands, though a man with any scrap of himself left can still work magic, which matters a great deal to three of us.''

''What followed was another quarter of an hour of ingenuity, better informed than the last lot and not much more encouraging. A silhouette laid over her keeps the face away but will not let you send most workings at her — only the kind that go for the mind rather than the body, and those require you to be looking at her face, which is the difficulty entire. Dross asked about looking through a familiar's eyes and was told that both of them take it, and refused at once to spend Tabitha that way. Somebody raised a window of coloured glass, and somebody else rose-tinted spectacles, which got the laugh it was fishing for. Darkness would want to be far deeper than any of us can make; I suggested shaping it so that it begins six feet up and only her head is in it, which nobody dismissed outright. Petrification would be ideal and not one of us has it. A counterspell will be laid on because there is no cost to it. And fighting blind costs a man most of his accuracy, which is a poor trade when you are hitting something between seven and eight feet tall.''

''Dross, who is constitutionally reluctant, floated the idea that she might be the nice kind of hag, duped into the work, and that we might talk her out of it. I said that we do not negotiate, and Jedburgh said we do not negotiate with terrorists, and I invited Dross to go and try it and report back. Somebody then asked which of us wanted to negotiate with her, and which of us wanted to be pregnant, and the evening went where evenings go. Kel suggested inviting her to tea. There was a good deal about the Misunderstood Hags Rehabilitation Society, and a great deal more about the Virgin Archibald and what the immaculate conception would do to the calendar, and I have been called worse. My own summary of the plan, offered in all seriousness, was that we need to kill her without being hit by the thing that takes your strength away, which is really very simple. Don't ask me how. Dross said it was a fantastic plan and he wished he had thought of it.''

===== Inviting Her to Tea =====

''I had been assuming we would have to go and find her, and had got as far as proposing that we spend a day up in the mountains at a safe distance, watching, and hope to catch sight of her. Then Dross asked, in the flat way he asks these things, whether a hag counts as an enchanted creature.''

''She does. And Dross can call an enchanted creature to him.''

''Kel's face, when this landed, was a thing worth the journey. The terms are these: we must be within six miles of her, and the night and the empty country both favour the calling. She does not appear out of the air — she comes under her own power, walking or flying, which means she arrives in under ten minutes and might arrive in one, and means also that she arrives from a direction we can guess. She arrives uncontrolled, which is to say furious and free. And her kind keep company, so she may not come alone.''

''It turns the whole business round. We do not have to find her, and we do not have to fight her where she chooses. We pick the ground, we prepare it at leisure, and then we send for her. Kel said it in five words — build a fighting point and dump wards all round it — and that has been the plan ever since.''

''I did suggest one refinement of my own, which was that what I really wanted was a few German soldiers, gagged and staked out around the perimeter as an early warning, so that when they collapsed we would know she had arrived. I was reminded that the soldiers available locally are Italian. That is precisely why I said German. Tulip observed that the Italians here are not the worst of them, having drawn a line at the genuinely evil work, and Kel observed that they are nonetheless part of the Axis, and the matter was left where it lay.''

''Then Kel opened her kit and shared it out. Two scrolls of phantasm each to Dross and Tulip, and instruction in how to use them. Four waters of strength, the good ones, one each to Jedburgh, Dross, Kel herself and me — on the sound principle that the fighters and Dross will need the strength most, Dross because the drain will leave him with almost nothing and he intends to go on casting from flat on his back regardless. Jedburgh carries four lesser ones of his own besides, one of which he will make as strong as it will go, and one of which goes to Tulip. Kel offered me the strongest on the grounds that I have to get close enough to hit her; I said I am strong enough already and that Jedburgh needs it more, and that is where it went.''

===== Casting Aspersions =====

''We left about five in the afternoon. Night falls here at twenty minutes to six, which is nonsense, and it is nonsense because the occupiers have put the whole country onto their own clocks — so it was pitch dark within twenty minutes of our leaving, and such lamps as the village has would not come on for another forty. It made no difference to us. Most of us can see in the dark after one fashion or another, though Tulip cannot, and mine reaches furthest: something under sixty yards, which is a long way for that sort of sight and which I have never had cause to measure before.''

''It comes at a price I had never thought about. Blackness leaks out of my eyes when I use it. Anybody with a witch's sight or a night-seeing of their own can see it plainly, and every one of my companions can, and none of them had mentioned it until now. Tulip announced that the rest of them are not evil and do not have blackness dripping out of their eyes. I said she was casting aspersions. Kel said one should not judge a man by his college, which from a mind mage is quite something. I pointed out that at least I have not got tentacles, tentacles being Tyndalos's affair and not mine, and we went on into the mountains.''

''They are hard going. A third of the pace you would make on a road, the climb pulling the strength out of you by the hour, and the cold taking its own separate share on top of that, which the heavy furs blunt and do not stop. It is sub-zero up there and it is windy.''

===== The Wrong Time of Year =====

''Jedburgh took the shape of a brown bear for the march, having the knack of such things, and it was perhaps four minutes before we discovered what is wrong with being a brown bear in November.''

''The beast is meant to be hibernating. Before it does, it must lay on an enormous weight of fat, and the thing inside it that tells an animal when it has eaten enough simply stops working — it needs ninety pounds of food a day and it cannot be satisfied. Jedburgh's bear had not been packing any of that away. So it arrived hungry, and the hunger came on it almost at once, and it became so hungry that it could do nothing else at all except try to eat something, and the nearest somethings were us. I said, helpfully, that perhaps he ought not to be a bear. It was a little late.''

''It went for Dross, who apparently smells particularly appetising. He backed off, and could not outpace it, and so set himself to keeping it at arm's length instead, and got one good clean thrust in with Heartdrinker as it came. Then it had him. It opened him up through heavy furs and took very nearly everything he had; a few moments more and it would have had the rest.''

''I went in and got hold of it. I am the stronger of us by a little, and a little was enough — I could hold it so that it could not swing properly and Dross could hit it as he pleased. Then it turned round and tried to have me instead, and could not reach me at all, not once, not in all the time I had my arms round it. That was the only pleasant part of the evening. I had no control over the animal whatever. I simply had hold of it, and holding was all there was.''

''The rest of it went badly. Kel threw a working at its mind, twice, and it slid off both times — Jedburgh's own resistance answering for the bear, which struck her as deeply unfair and cost her two of her prepared workings and the money they were worth. Tulip laid a troll's hide over Dross, and he got himself loose and out of reach. And what finished it, in the end, was Tabitha. Dross's familiar, a small quiet creature who had been trotting along at the back of the column all evening, put the bear to sleep for six hours, and the fight was over.''

''Afterwards Kel put her hands on Dross and took the hurt out of him, which is the cheapest way we have of mending people, and Tulip laid the troll's hide over Jedburgh too so that he would be a little less torn about when he woke. Kel wanted to leave illusions of the four of us lying dead in a ring around him for when he came round. It was put to her that this was the sort of prank a party is remembered for and not in a good way, and nobody woke him, and we sat in the snow until he came out of it on his own. He got up wrung out and thoroughly disgusted with himself: the better part of a year's work put into that shape, he said, and he should have gone for a dog. November, we all agreed, is the wrong month to be a bear.''

===== A White Line in the Dark =====

''We went north and west from there and struck a ridgeline that rises steeply and runs away north-west, cutting straight across the line we wanted. You can follow it in the dark because there is snow on its caps and the moon comes off the snow, a white line drawn across black country, and it takes you — if you stay on it — to within four miles of the place we saw her standing.''

''It was eight hours of walking, near enough, counting the hours the bear cost us. Dross carried Tabitha the whole of the last stretch, tucked under one arm like a lady's handbag dog, which provoked Jedburgh into some remarks about a fallen wolf being carried about by his primate, and about evolution, and about the general disgrace of it. Tabitha, who had just saved the lot of us, looked winsome and wagged her tail.''

''We stopped and made camp at two in the morning. Somewhere in there the day turned over, and there was a muddle about what date it actually is, which I settled by counting backwards: we saw her yesterday, and that makes today the eleventh of November. Which gives us two and a half days before the trucks arrive, and not the thirty hours I had been carrying around in my head since yesterday evening. I should be glad of it. I find instead that I distrust any reprieve that arrives by arithmetic, and that I would rather have had the number wrong in the other direction.''

===== Twice Over the Camp =====

''Between Jedburgh and Tulip and Kel there is a good deal more woodcraft in this party than I had properly appreciated, and last night it was the most useful thing any of us had brought. Jedburgh put walls of stone up and tunnelled into the slope behind them, and the earth he shifts stays shifted; Tulip set smoking magma underneath to warm the place, which is an outrageous way to heat a bivouac and works beautifully; and between the stone and the heat and the dark spheres we had something out of the wind and above freezing by the small hours. Tulip has the herbalism to make a proper meal and a restorative tea out of what we carry, and a man can only take so much of that in a day before his body stops believing it, so we ate properly and slept. The country up here is scrubby pine under snow, which hides a camp well enough if the camp is not stupid about it.''

''Kel hid it properly all the same, laying a stretch of illusionary ground five-and-forty feet across over the whole of it, so that from outside there is nothing there at all. Then she spent her look ahead on the night we were about to sleep through — she can see something under half a day forward, no further, and she had not used it since yesterday.''

''What she saw was nothing. Nothing at all, except a moon shadow that crossed over our campsite. Something passed between us and the moon, and was seen only as the shadow of itself, and it did it twice.''

''Tulip put the obvious thing into words, which is that we had already established that eagles do not fly at night. So it is something else. We have no notion what, and no means of finding out, and I lay in a stone hut with magma under the floor listening to the wind and thinking about a shadow passing over us twice in a night, on a mountain four miles from a thing whose face burst a crystal at twelve miles.''

===== Laying the Table =====

''We spent today building the trap, and it is an elegant one.''

''Kel has laid a lattice of wards around the camp, each one a circle of ground some thirty feet across, each one waiting on a single condition: the hag enters it. Hers are transmutations — if she cannot throw the working off she becomes a fish, an enormous tuna flapping about on a mountainside in November, and we kill her at our leisure. Dross laid a second kind between them, wards that simply hurt what walks into them, which is less spectacular and rather more reliable; a thing that is being hurt strikes worse and finds it hard to concentrate on its own magic. Each of them could only ward their own workings, and no piece of ground will hold more than one ward, so the two kinds had to be fitted together like a chequerboard, with Kel pushing small circles into every gap so that whatever line the creature takes she must cross several of them before she reaches anybody.''

''The whole thing is possible because laying a ward is slow, deliberate work rather than a strain on the one laying it — an hour's careful effort apiece, and nothing taken out of them beyond the time it takes. Dross was frankly disbelieving when he heard it and checked twice. We have hours. We laid them all day.''

''Dross set his down beginning on the north-west side, that being the direction she will most likely come from, and worked inward from there. Seven of his took. One would not, and he left it at seven rather than push his luck, and I cannot say I blamed him. Jedburgh went round afterwards and hid our tracks, all the scuffing and trampling of a day's casting, and observed while he was doing it that it is not as though the hag will not know. Kel's answer was that there is no downside to hiding them, which is true and is not quite the same as saying it will help.''

''The rest of the battle order is set. Jedburgh will take her with sword and shield rather than with anything longer — he loses a little of his reach and gains a great deal of protection, and against her that is the right trade. Tulip will throw up walls of stone to funnel her, open at one end, with smoking magma laid underneath the floor of it, and she need never look at the creature to do any of it since she only needs to see the ground. Kel will sit at the back dropping phantasms on her and wearing her down. Tulip has also put her raven up during the daylight hours with orders to watch the sky and warn her if the two-headed eagle comes over.''

===== Birds Would Fall Out of the Sky =====

''My own part I asked to be arranged specially. I want a patch of the illusionary ground laid off to one side of the camp, where Corniger and I can stand unseen and out of the way, so that when she walks in I can come at her from outside the ring at a gallop instead of trying to get a charge going inside our own camp. A charge wants room. Kel is drawing it all onto the sketch of the ground we have and will have the whole arrangement marked up for us.''

''I also asked, rather pleased with myself, that we contrive some sort of blinkers for Corniger so that he cannot see her face. This turns out to be unnecessary and the reason is worth setting down: the thing her face does cannot touch what is not human. If it could, birds would be dropping out of the sky over that mountain, and Kel pointed out that there would be a trail of dead and dying animals behind her wherever she walked, which there is not.''

''So Corniger goes in with his eyes open, and I am relieved, and I have also had to listen to a good deal about how he will probably find her attractive. He has looked at me every day for years without complaint. I dare say he can manage one hag.''

===== A Stream You Could Jump =====

''There is a stream running past the camp. It is shallow — you would wade it rather than swim it, six feet at the deepest of its curves and mostly half that, and at its narrowest it is ten feet across and a man could jump it without much thinking about it. It comes down off these slopes and into the cataract, and the cataract is what turns the dam at Pomblière and lights the chlorine works and everything around it.''

''A very great deal of water stands above a very great many people in this valley, and I noted where it stands, and I am going to leave that noted and say nothing further about it.''

''We ran out of daylight before we ran out of preparations, which is the usual way of it, and so the calling waits. Kel will finish marking the ward map; Tulip will pick the exact lines of her walls once she has walked the ground properly; Dross has one more circle he means to lay if he can make it take. And then, when the light goes, we send for her. Dross has offered to work a blessing on the unborn child and a draught of virility into the bargain, since the party has decided that my contribution to this operation is to be an immaculate conception, and Kel says she looks forward to my virgin birth next week.''

''They can have their joke. What we are actually proposing to do is reach out into the mountains and politely ask a thing to walk into our camp — a thing that nearly struck a man down through twelve miles of air and a lump of polished stone, a thing that is in some manner we do not understand connected to two hundred women on a road, a thing that may bring its sisters — and then stand inside a ring we drew ourselves and wait for it to arrive. It will take under ten minutes to come. It may take one. And something crossed the moon above this camp twice last night, and no one has any idea what it was.''

----

{| class="wikitable"
|-
|

==== OOC Details ====

===== Items Acquired =====

'''Party (shared resources):'''

'''Balance brought forward:''' 2,500 sp
'''Balance carried forward:''' 2,500 sp

===== Session Summary =====

With Dross back at the fire, the party spent the evening [[#s8-careful-what-we-asked-for|settling the exact wording of a tarot question]] about the hag's part in the Nazi plan for the transferred women. The second reading answered with four Death cards and [[#s8-from-one-vessel-to-the-other|the Star reversed]]: she is directly involved, potions are in it, and the purpose is something reproductively perverse. Firmer convoy numbers — ten trucks from Rivesaltes to Saint-Marcel, roughly forty more by way of Camp de Gurs, and an estimated forty to fifty escorts — killed the rescue as an opening move, and the party committed to [[#s8-the-harder-thing-to-replace|killing the hag first and freeing the women afterwards]], on the reasoning that two hundred women are far easier for the enemy to replace than one hag. A long review of [[#s8-dont-ask-me-how|hag lore and of what her face does]] turned up no reliable defence, until Dross established that a hag counts as an enchanted creature and can therefore be summoned — which turned the plan into [[#s8-inviting-her-to-tea|sending for her onto ground of their own choosing]], with Kel sharing out Phantasm scrolls and Waters of Strength before the march.

The party left about five in the afternoon into [[#s8-casting-aspersions|full dark and hard mountain going]], and four minutes out Jedburgh's brown bear shape [[#s8-the-wrong-time-of-year|went berserk with pre-hibernation hunger]] and badly mauled Dross before Tabitha ended the fight by sleeping the bear for six hours. Roughly eight hours' walking along [[#s8-a-white-line-in-the-dark|a snow-capped ridgeline]] brought them to camp at two in the morning, within four miles of the hag's last sighting; Black's own count settled the date as 11 November 1942, leaving two and a half days before the trucks arrive. A hidden bivouac was built, and Kel's look ahead over the coming night showed only [[#s8-twice-over-the-camp|a moon shadow crossing the campsite twice]], unexplained. The following day went entirely on [[#s8-laying-the-table|laying a chequerboard of wards around the camp]] and setting the battle order, with Black asking for [[#s8-birds-would-fall-out-of-the-sky|a concealed charge position for himself and Corniger]] and learning that the hag's visage cannot affect a horse. The session ends with the party still at the warded camp above the Pomblière valley, [[#s8-a-stream-you-could-jump|a jumpable stream and the cataract that drives the dam noted and left alone]], waiting on nightfall to summon her.

===== Chronological Timeline =====

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date !! Event
| Day 40 || Tarot confirms the hag's involvement; hag-first decision locked; kit distributed; night march into the mountains, interrupted by Jedburgh's berserk bear form
|-
| Day 41 || Camp four miles from the hag; date settled as 11 November 1942; warded ambush ground and battle order prepared; session ends before the summoning
|}
|}

----

=== Chapter 9: Mountainous Ruin ===

''She was on the mountain with us for rather less time than it takes to boil a kettle, and she never spoke one word, and on her way out she very nearly buried the five of us under the whole north slope.''

===== Dutch Courage =====

''The last of the arguing was about counterspells, and it went the way these things go: two minutes of actual disagreement and twenty of everybody agreeing at length. Jedburgh is a Namer, and the point of a Namer is that he can hold the party's protections himself and change which of them are running as the fight changes shape. If Kel or Dross lays a protection on a man, that man is stuck wearing it until somebody gets round to stripping it off him. So Jedburgh took them all, and he was right to.''

''Dross wanted more of it — a working laid down over the ground during the fight, and another, and another, everywhere she might stand. I said what I thought of that, which is that it costs too much of the time we were not going to have, and that it gets in the way of the screaming and crying. Kel said the same thing in fewer words. We settled on two of the Wiccan protections running at once over the lot of us, which put our resistance to her magic higher than I have ever carried into a fight, and we left it there.''

''Out of that came the only comfort any of us had going in. If she threw fire at us and even one of us set himself squarely against it as it came, the weight of all that resistance would come off her own effort, and the likeliest outcome was that she blew herself up with it. I resolved to spend the fight bracing against everything she did and hitting nothing at all, which is not how I usually earn my keep.''

''Jedburgh raised the bear again and was told again, patiently, that it is November. Tulip turned one of the knobs on that staff of hers and put out an iron rhinoceros — a black metal thing four times the size of a horse, which will carry half a ton, understands anything said to it, and has no name, since she means to take votes on one after the fighting. The fire snake came out of the same staff, thirty-odd feet of it, and was judged to have no business on a mountainside in November until somebody worked out that it could ride on the rhinoceros and keep warm. There is apparently a classical precedent for a serpent being carried by an eagle. This was a rhinoceros, and I let it go.''

''Then Kel put a suggestion into all our heads not to look at the creature's face, which she admitted might help and might not, and which cost us a great deal of our accuracy in exchange for not being emptied out where we stood. Kel's instruction to the fighters was to stare at her chest instead. I observed that one would want the central one, obviously, for targeting. We drank the waters of strength — mine did almost nothing, and nor did anybody else's, and I have never seen five people so uniformly cheated by a draught — and Jedburgh worked a banishment over himself that he said was as strong as anything he has ever managed. After that there was nothing left to do but send for her.''

===== A Prompt Reply =====

''Kel had been busy all afternoon and the ground showed it. She had put a crowd of motionless illusions out in the open where anything arriving would see them first: brave adventurers, standing about on a mountainside in the dark with no cover whatever, which is exactly the sort of thing a hag would expect of us. She made a second Kel besides, visible and walking about and entirely hollow, and then took herself out of sight altogether. The rest of us lay under her false ground with our thoughts strung together so we could talk without a sound, and I had Corniger beside me off to the side of the camp with a clear run at whatever came in.''

''Dross asked whether everybody was ready. Nobody said no, which is not the same thing. He held the particular creature in his mind and called her, and it took on the first attempt, and then there was only the question of how long she would take to come.''

''She would be with us in a little over two minutes.''

''There was a pause while everyone did the same arithmetic. Two minutes is not enough time to gather sisters, or to fetch whatever a thing like that keeps for company. I said as much aloud — that it might be quick enough that she could not bring support with her — and Dross said yes, and neither of us said the other half of it, which is that two minutes is also not enough time for us to change our minds.''

===== Talk of the Weather =====

''She came into sight about fifty yards out. Bluish-grey, in ordinary old woman's clothes, which is somehow worse than the alternative. I kept my eyes deliberately off her face and found I had been looking entirely the wrong way in any case, and was glad of it.''

''Dross heard it before any of us saw anything: thunder, a long way up and getting nearer. She had begun the work before she ever reached us. Kel named it — a storm calling, worked as an incantation rather than as a spell, which is why none of us placed it at once — and Dross knew the thing because he has read the book it comes out of. He never learned it, because it wants fulminating gold and he had neither the gold nor the time. Kel pointed out, cheerfully, that if we survived the next few minutes there would be some gold on the corpse.''

''The storm did not need her attention after that. It simply came on, building the whole time we fought, and when it arrived it would put lightning down on us every few seconds and splash the rest across everything standing nearby. I said it was unfair, lightning against armoured people. I said it because it is true and because somebody has to say something at that point. Then she started down the slope towards us and the conversation ended.''

===== Clearing the Table =====

''The mountain did not slow her at all. Ground that would have had me on hands and knees she crossed at the pace of a man walking a lawn, and she preferred to come at us cornerwise for reasons that were hers and not ours, and she covered a great deal more of the hillside in each stride than the eye said she should. Jedburgh muttered something about the stride of a hill giant. It was about right.''

''Jedburgh went first and went for her outright — a working laid over the ground where she stood, to close her magic down before she could use any of it. He asked whether he might draw on the mountains themselves to press it, on the grounds that he was casting on a mountain, while standing on a mountain, in the mountains, and he was allowed it. It made no difference. The thing failed by a hair and he sat there with nothing to show for it, and after that our protection against her was whatever we had brought with us.''

''Then she answered, and she answered with one working, and it was tripled. Every phantasm we had put out — Kel's, Dross's, Tulip's, all the labour of two scrolls and a good deal of preparation — was gone in the one breath. Kel worked out afterwards what that single breath had carried across the whole of that ground, and it was enough to have killed any one of us outright several times over. Whether it was hellfire or the Wiccan way of unmaking phantasms nobody could say for certain, and it hardly mattered. Jedburgh said that is what happens when you take a fighter to a magic fight. I said something less useful. Only the static illusions came through it, and they came through only because they had been standing too far out for her to reach, which was luck and not foresight.''

===== Whistling =====

''So I did the other thing, which was to make myself worth looking at.''

''I took Corniger out from under Kel's false ground and up onto the open slope, well inside the range of whatever she had thrown at the phantasms, and did my best to look unobtrusive and unthreatening, which on a great winged horse with six illusory copies of himself and of me strung out alongside is a tall order. I believe I whistled. Kel told me not to charge — that if I came at her she would simply stand off and keep throwing — and she was right, and it is a poor sort of fighting where the best thing you can do is stand about being visible.''

''She did not take it. She moved a few paces, quite unhurried, and sank into the stone of the mountainside and was gone.''

''That was the moment the fight turned, though none of us knew it at the time; we only knew she had taken away everything we could aim at. What we did with it was this. Tulip put seven hands of earth up out of the ground all round the place she had gone in, and over the top of it, leaving one gap for Corniger and one for the rhinoceros, so that whichever way she surfaced something would take hold of her. Dross prepared his own silencing working over the same patch and held it there, hidden, where she could not see it and had no reason to look for it. And I brought up a dark sphere and held it.''

''I wanted to put it into the rock about seven feet behind where her face had last been, so that the only direction left to her was forward, into the rhinoceros. I was told, reasonably enough, that the thing goes where I send it in a straight line from me and cannot be curled round behind anybody, and that all I was really aiming at was the last place I had seen her. So I aimed at the last place I had seen her, and waited, and did not release it.''

===== Heads You Lose =====

''She moved a short way inside the stone. She had no way of knowing what we had laid over the ground she was moving under, and no reason to come up in one place rather than another, and it came down to nothing better than a coin's toss.''

''She surfaced inside Dross's working.''

''I have thought about that a good deal since. Everything we did that night was careful, and the careful things bought us the chance for one stupid piece of luck to happen, and then it happened. She had a spell prepared and ready and the moment she came up she knew she could not let it go, and she abandoned it. In the same breath Kel's phantasm reached her and hurt her — a small hurt, by her standards — and because it worked on what she believed rather than on her body, what she actually experienced was a kitten pulling her knitting apart. That is the only part of the evening I would want to see again.''

''She was going to have to step out of the stone to do anything at all. She never got the chance. I had been holding my moment, waiting for it to be worth something, and I spent it then, and put the dark sphere into her while she was still inside the rock. She had one chance to shrug it off and she did not take it.''

''It took her head. All of it, and everything she was wearing on it, which by the reckoning of those of us who had been hoping to loot her was a serious loss. I said it was a price I was willing to pay. She was dead before the stone had finished closing round her, and her body stayed where it was, sunk in the rock, which meant that anything we wanted off her would have to be chipped out.''

===== The Measure of Her =====

''We had the corpse, and the thing that had been in her hand, and between what Kel and Dross know of her kind and what the body itself told us, we put together what we had actually been fighting. I set it down here because I want to be able to look at it when I am next feeling pleased with myself.''

''The object in her hand was a talisman, and it let her work earth magic at a mastery none of us can touch — that was the melting into stone, and that was the tremors. She had two colleges behind her besides. Her body weighed what four strong men weigh and was that much stronger, dense the whole way through, and she had claws and knew how to use them, and a grip that crushes; if she had ever closed with any of us it would not have been a fight, it would have been an accident. She had an unseeing ready to drop over herself the moment she came out of the rock, and if she had got it off I do not believe we would have found her again before the storm arrived. And she was proof against any working that moves a thing, or reshapes it, or puts it on its back.''

''Which means Tulip's seven hands of earth would never have held her for a heartbeat. They would have stood round her like a wall of armour and made her harder to hit. We had spent our best restraint building her a redoubt.''

''She also knew, at every moment, exactly where every one of us was standing, because in mountains her kind feel anything that moves on the ground within a mile. All our concealment, all Kel's false ground, the tracks Jedburgh scuffed out yesterday afternoon — none of it hid us. It only hid which of the shapes on that hillside were worth her attention, and that, it turns out, was enough. The one of us she could not feel was the one in the air, and the one in the air is the one who killed her.''

''Nobody took a scratch. Given the rest of it, that is not a victory so much as a reprieve.''

===== Her Last Word =====

''Tulip got over to the rock and chipped her out of it — slow going, because there was a great deal of her and she was heavy as ore — and she had barely disgorged the body when the mountain above us let go.''

''The old woman had shaken the snow loose on her way down. She must have done it as she came, before she was ever in sight of us, and it had been working itself up the whole time we were busy with her, and it arrived as a wall of ice and snow coming off the slope to the north with the noise of a train. So she had the last word after all, and she had it without saying anything.''

''Jedburgh took the eagle and went straight up, and was clear before the rest of us had finished thinking about it. I went the same way on Corniger, who is fast enough for anything short of what was coming and got us above it comfortably. Everybody else piled into Tulip's tunnel, and she put the iron rhinoceros in the mouth of it like a cork, and the whole lot went under.''

''They were under something on the order of thirty-odd feet of snow and ice. Nobody was hurt, which I did not expect and am grateful for, and the rhinoceros set about shifting it, and the estimate was a couple of hours.''

===== Nothing to Worry About =====

''There is a particular kind of idiot cheerfulness that comes over me after a fight I expected to lose. I had a good long look round the whole mountainside from up in the air, saw nothing of any kind, and told the buried remainder of the party that there was nothing whatever to worry about and that they should all be perfectly comfortable. Kel, from under thirty feet of snow, replied that she has a sense for when something is wrong, and that it was going off, and that she would be keeping a watch with her mind while we dug regardless of my opinion. I let her have it. She has been right before, and I had just told five people that everything was fine while standing over a headless corpse in an avalanche field.''

''Within a minute or two of my saying it, Corniger saw the two-headed eagle.''

''It was going north, away from us and going hard. Dross said the obvious thing — that the creature is enchanted, and that enchanted things can be called — and asked whether he should. Nobody objected. He worked it, and the bird was seven miles out, and his reach falls a mile short of that. It felt him anyway. It knew perfectly well that something had been laid on it, and it dropped out of the sky to the ground and stayed there.''

''So now it knows. Tulip thinks it may be loose of whatever was holding it, with the old woman dead, and says so hopefully; that is a guess and I have written it down as one. My own guess is that it was running from the storm, which is at least a reason a bird would have. Either way it is seven miles north of us, it is aware of us, and it is the second thing this week to go over our heads and away without explaining itself.''

===== The Long Way Out =====

''Then there was nothing to do but wait for a metal rhinoceros to shovel us out, and men who have just survived something invariably fill that sort of hour with schemes. Jedburgh offered his flaming glaive to cut a passage. Somebody proposed putting smoking magma under the ice, until it was pointed out that the steam would cook everybody in the tunnel. Transmutation was raised and abandoned. I offered to dig with the ebon hand, and Tulip asked the only sensible question, which was where exactly I proposed to put the snow. The rhinoceros kept working. It took about two hours, and would have taken about two hours whatever any of us did.''

''It was somewhere in there that Jedburgh mentioned, in the tone of a man remembering he has a spare coat, that he has people. He came by them out of a book he took from the Library of Leng, which is a sentence I have learned to let pass without comment. There is a Frenchman called Pierre who is a demolitions man and speaks the language as a native, and there is an American — one of the native peoples, a Navajo he thinks — who is a Marxist and an assassin, in that order or the reverse. Jedburgh can change places with them. He has never done it, and he raised it now chiefly because he was thinking how pleasant it would be to have a quantity of gelignite and a man who knows what to do with it, which is a fair description of our next problem as well as our present one.''

''I made a note to ask more about this when we are not buried.''

===== The Name of the Dog =====

''We got out, and while I was still above the slope on Corniger a young man came up out of the valley to look at the avalanche.''

''He had a rucksack and an alpenstock and proper cold weather clothing, and an enormous St Bernard trotting beside him, and he picked his way about the edge of the slide in the manner of a man who has seen a few of them. Then he looked up and saw a man sitting on a flying horse, and did what anybody would do, which is stop dead. I waved at him in a friendly fashion. Jedburgh sat motionless on a branch in his eagle shape, being, I am told, unusually poor at pretending to be an eagle.''

''He spoke passable English with an accent I could not place, and I told him I had been out for a night ride because I could not sleep, and had got lost, and had come to see the avalanche in case anybody needed digging out. He observed that there is a war on and that I was on the other side of it. I said that was more or less so, and that it hardly signified up here, and he let it go, because at bottom he wanted to talk to somebody.''

''So: about twenty-three, Swiss, out of the university five years with a degree in chemical engineering he never wanted, which was chosen for him. Lesser aristocracy, one of those old families that keeps its rank without much money attached. He works for a bank somewhere near the border and is stationed at the valley as its man on the spot, watching the factory's finances. He hates it. What he actually cares about is mountains — he has been up to look at Mont Blanc, he is keen on the Eiger and knows perfectly well what the Eiger does to people, and he follows Mallory and wants the Himalayas more than he wants anything. He was on his way north to a great cross that stands above the valley when the mountain came down and turned him aside.''

''I have all of that. I do not have his name. I never asked for it and he never gave it, and I came away from twenty minutes of talk knowing that his dog is called Schwaefel and is a red and white St Bernard, which is apparently an unfashionable colour. I have his dog's name and not his. That is the sort of interview I conduct.''

===== Friendly Advice =====

''I tried the lie first, because I wanted to know what he knew. I told him there was a rumour in the town that the people up at the dam were doing some sort of research — biology, disease, that kind of thing — and watched him. There is no such rumour. I invented it standing there. He said good God, and meant it, and had plainly never heard anything of the sort, and I am now reasonably confident that whatever is being done at the Usine de Pomblière is not being done where its banker can see it.''

''What he gave me instead was better, and he gave it away without being asked, because it had been bothering him for months. The factory never asks the bank for money. It has income from somewhere and will not say where. Every other concern he has ever dealt with is scrabbling for finance and spending it as carefully as it can; this one, when it needs a sum, simply has it. His own words were that the money just magically appears, and that he had lately started to wonder about it.''

''I told him not to wonder. I said it in the voice I keep for this, which is quiet and pleasant and not pleasant at all: that given what I have seen and heard of the organisation those people work for, asking too many questions may mean he never sees his family again, and that he would do better to look the other way and do his job. Just my friendly advice. He went rather quiet.''

''I had already made a mess of the other approach. I had told him he seemed the sort of young man built for adventure, that I could find a use for his skills, and that the career I had in mind was a long one — hundreds of years, I said, and possibly thousands, which I had entirely neglected to mention at the outset. He turned it down on account of his family; his parents would be destroyed, and he has obligations, and he will not be the one who breaks the line. He said all this kindly, in the way one humours a madman on a mountain, and I am in no doubt whatever that he thinks I am completely off the planet. Jedburgh observed afterwards that this is our best protection: the man cannot report a flying horse and an Englishman offering him immortality without being locked up, and he knows it.''

''I gave him a bottle of claret for the walk down. He is no drunkard, but he is twenty-three and it was cold, and he took it, and something about that transaction pleased me more than it should have. He can very likely get us inside the factory if we ask him. He is going down to Moûtiers to report the avalanche, and I said we might pop by tomorrow, and tomorrow is where we have left it.''

''He went off down the slope with his dog, looking for anyone the mountain might have caught, and I sat and watched him go. We have left a great deal behind us up here. There is a headless thing in the snow with a hole through where her face was. There is a chequerboard of wards standing on empty ground, waiting for something to walk into them, and Dross is convinced they will still be sitting there at the end of time; Kel says wards do not go away. And the storm she called is still building somewhere above all of it and coming on, and it does not care in the least that she is dead.''

----

{| class="wikitable"
|-
|

==== OOC Details ====

===== Items Acquired =====

'''Kel:'''
* Hag's blackthorn talisman (unpriced)

'''Black:'''
* Hag's blackthorn talisman (unpriced)
* Bottle of claret (unpriced)

'''Dross:'''
* Hag's blackthorn talisman (unpriced)

'''Jedburgh:'''
* Hag's blackthorn talisman (unpriced)

'''Tulip:'''
* Hag's blackthorn talisman (unpriced)

'''Balance brought forward:''' 2,500 sp
'''Balance carried forward:''' 2,500 sp

===== Session Summary =====

The party spent the last of its preparation time on the mountain [[#s9-dutch-courage|settling counterspell doctrine and deploying Tulip's iron rhino golem]], then [[#s9-a-prompt-reply|hid under Kel's illusory terrain behind a screen of decoys while Dross summoned the Mountain Hag]] — who answered in a little over two minutes. [[#s9-talk-of-the-weather|She arrived roughly fifty yards out, already calling a storm]] through an incantation none of them could counter, [[#s9-clearing-the-table|crossed the mountainside unimpeded, shrugged off Jedburgh's counterspell and wiped out every phantasm the party had raised with one tripled working]]. With nothing left to aim at, [[#s9-whistling|Black rode out on Corniger as visible bait; she ignored him and melted into the stone]], and the party boxed the spot in with hands of earth, a hidden counterspell and a readied dark sphere. [[#s9-heads-you-lose|She surfaced by pure chance inside Dross's counterspell and Black killed her in the rock]], taking her head and everything worn on it.

[[#s9-the-measure-of-her|The body and the talisman in her hand revealed how badly the fight could have gone]] — mountain hags are immune to exactly the restraint Tulip had prepared, and sense every creature moving on the ground for a mile. [[#s9-her-last-word|The earth tremors she cast on her approach then brought an avalanche down on the camp]]; Jedburgh flew clear as an eagle, Black on Corniger, and the rest sheltered in Tulip's tunnel under roughly thirty-six feet of snow. During the dig-out [[#s9-nothing-to-worry-about|Black's cheerful all-clear was contradicted by Kel's danger sense, and Corniger spotted the two-headed eagle fleeing north beyond Dross's summoning reach]], while [[#s9-the-long-way-out|the two hours of shovelling produced a string of discarded schemes and the first mention of Jedburgh's Hugh Team]]. At the surface [[#s9-the-name-of-the-dog|a young Swiss mountaineer and his St Bernard came up to inspect the slide]], and [[#s9-friendly-advice|gave away that the Usine de Pomblière never asks its bank for money]] — after which Black warned him off wondering about it, failed to recruit him, and gave him a bottle of claret. The party remains at the buried camp site with the hag's storm still building overhead; a visit to the factory contact in Moûtiers is planned for the following day.

===== Chronological Timeline =====

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date !! Event
| Day 42 || Mountain Hag summoned and slain at the warded camp; her talisman looted; her avalanche buries the party, who dig out and meet a Swiss bank liaison at the slide
|}
|}

----

=== Chapter 10: Revelations ===

''It is a peculiar sort of day that begins with an old woman's handbag and ends with the exact coordinates of six places where people are killed for a living.''

===== Off the Scent =====

''The first question of the morning was how to find where she had come from, since killing the thing had bought us nothing at all if we could not find the hole it lived in. Jedburgh offered to fly about and look, and admitted in the same breath that it was unreliable; Kel suggested, without much enthusiasm, calling up another one and asking it. Tulip said the obvious thing, which is that the creature had walked here, and things that walk leave a trail.''

''The avalanche had not wiped it out — she came down on us from the north-east, and nobody has ever brought a mountainside down behind his own back — and she had never troubled to conceal her passage. But she had that habit of cutting hard across the diagonal every so often, over ground that should have slowed her and did not, and between the terrain and the zig-zagging any tracker was working at a disadvantage before he started.''

''Tulip is the best of us at it, once her spell and her companion Sienna are counted in. She worked at it a good while and led the whole party a pleasant stroll over a great deal of empty mountainside to nothing whatever. Dross observed that we had been promised a witch's cottage and given a walk.''

===== Her Effects =====

''Then somebody pointed out that we had never properly gone through her, which tells you something about the state we were all in the previous night.''

''She had a blackthorn stick in her hand — a wand in hers, being eight feet of old woman, and a walking stick in mine — and it is the talisman she died holding. Round her neck was the necklace I broke myself, carrying the usual amulets one expects on a practitioner and one that was not usual at all, a stone of a vague pinkish-purple none of us could place. Two rings, gold and blue metal, neither of which will go on a human or elvish finger without a talented jeweller first; I offered my own training as a goldsmith and it was accepted with less enthusiasm than I thought it deserved. A ruined shawl, a red leather reticule, and boots of black metal so enormous that we spent some time failing to think of anybody who might wear them.''

''Jedburgh took the quick reading of each rather than the long one. The gold ring is defensive; the blue enhances some natural process, and which process he could not say and nobody has said since, so I leave it written down as unfinished business. The boots are dimensional — not running unimpeded over broken ground, as I first guessed, but the other thing: she covered more mountainside in a stride cut cornerwise than she had any business covering. That explains the zig-zag, and does not make me feel better about it.''

''The reticule is the best of it, holding seven complete changes of clothing in a rigid red tube no longer than a forearm. What was in it was worse: three skins, folded, each with its clothes — a girl of nine with little red shoes and a red hooded coat, a schoolmistress in a grey business suit, an older man got up as a farmer. They are oil-treated and reusable, and the right magic laid on the wearer renders one inert without destroying it, so a wearer can be stripped out of the disguise and the disguise kept. Everybody said how appalling it was, and everybody then made quite sure we were taking them. I observed that one must dress appropriately for the occasion and got the look I had earned. There was a tarot deck besides, seventy-eight cards that ought not to be magical and are, in an ivory case whose only trick is to let the deck be made ready in a single motion; Dross kept the lot to read himself.''

''Last, her womb was among the remains, and it was not empty. The child in it is near term, alive, and will sleep a century if nobody wakes it; and hags have been known to throw such a thing into an enemy at need, after which it rends its way out through the stomach of whoever received it. It is fully loaded and sits on a hair trigger. There followed a silence while everybody worked out that somebody would have to carry it. The Hordling declined absolutely — he was not going to be pregnant if it went off, he was not going to eat it, and there are limits. So I took it, and spent something of my own on making certain it stays asleep. I am aware of how this reads.''

===== Uphill Work =====

''Dross thought it worth another try at calling the two-headed eagle, since we had learned the night before that the creature can feel him reaching for it, and Kel put an illusion over us while he worked — advertising ourselves twice in two days on an open mountainside being poor practice. He held it two minutes and nothing came. The bird is beyond his reach, wherever it has gone, and he spent a great deal of himself to find that out; he was grey afterwards and short with people, which is not like him.''

''Then Jedburgh tried the trail himself, by night, with the moon in its first quarter and light enough to read ground by, and he failed too. There was talk of his learning a dog's shape, a dog's nose being the thing that would settle it, and it came to nothing, since the shapes take a year apiece.''

''So we asked her. Dross can put questions to the dead and the dead do not get much say in it, but he gets five short answers and no more, so we spent longer composing the questions than the ritual took. I held up the proceedings for some minutes arguing whether a hag counts as a person for the purposes of the first one, which I maintain was a fair point and which the rest of the party maintains I would have died defending. How many others in your coven: none. Where is your base: uphill. What landmark is nearest: La Croix de l'Alpe. What protects it: concealment. And what do you do for the Nazis: breeder reactors.''

''That last sat badly with everybody. Kel asked, a little later, where the breeding women were meant to fit into it, and I said what I believe to be the truth, which is that the two hundred coming up the valley tomorrow are the answer to that question, and that the same word has been doing two jobs all along.''

===== Dead Ground =====

''La Croix de l'Alpe is a great cross standing on a small peak north-east of us, above the Isère, in a place they call the hill of beautiful shadows. It is two thousand feet above where we stood and three hours of climbing for men on foot, and we are not men on foot. We went up a little after nine, in the dark, Dross taking us slowly over the forest while Kel cast her mind ahead to see what was living down there. What she found was an absence: a patch of ground north of the cross, up a cleft between two bare eroded chunks of mountain, where no animal hangs about at all in country that ought to be thick with them. An absence is a better mark than a presence, and she was entitled to be pleased with herself.''

''We put down and walked up to it. Part of the rock and packed earth had crumbled away, and in the stone were the imprints of enormous fingers and enormous boots, and no doubt at all that this was where she had come out — a long serpentine crack, twelve feet from wall to wall and some seventy feet of floor, running back into the mountain. Jedburgh went at it in the traditional manner with a ten-foot pole, which looks ridiculous and has kept more people alive than valour has. No trips or traps anywhere in it, which ought to have been reassuring and was not, because a careless woman is the only kind who leaves her front path unguarded.''

''Kel settled it. She looked ahead at herself walking into the ravine — she narrated the whole performance, the stupid human wandering in and pottering about looking for a door — and what she saw was the cleft shaking, snow coming off the walls, stone coming down, and herself dead at the bottom of it. She reported this cheerfully. I have never got used to that. So not a trap but a ward, laid over the whole approach and triggered by weight on the ground; we were not killed on arrival only because we came in over the top of it through the air, and that worked only because it had never occurred to whoever laid it that anybody would arrive other than walking. A clever precaution is only clever against the thing it imagines.''

''The warded ground was far too large to be smothered piecemeal, so it had to be unmade rather than held down, and that is Jedburgh's trade. He went at it as a ritual, an hour of steady work with rather better than a fair chance at the end of it, while the rest of us sat in the cold. Tulip made tea, which is not a small thing; some of what the day had taken out of us came back with it. Then Kel looked ahead a second time and saw no ward at all, which is the only proof one gets of that sort of work. Tulip tried the ground inside the ravine while we were about it, and failed. Three times in one day, and I have stopped making remarks about it, partly out of charity and mostly because nobody had asked me to try.''

===== The Tradesman's Entrance =====

''They asked me then, since among the things my kit does for me are a thief's eyes, and I found it in short order: a crack in what looks exactly like one of the blocks of granite that lie about these mountains in quantity, open, not even a door, and invisible unless you know what you are looking for. No traps on it either, and I checked twice, being the one going in first.''

''It was draped with a tarpaulin, and the tarpaulin is the most interesting thing we found all night. It is canvas. It is not magical in any degree. It is an alpine camouflage sheet made by the Italian Army. Jedburgh shrugged and said such things are two a penny in wartime, and he is right, and he is also missing the point, which is that it did not come from Alusia. Somebody in this world, with quartermasters and requisition forms, was supplying an eight-foot hag in a hole in a mountain.''

''Inside it is immaculate. Not tidy for a monster — tidy. It is an office: a hag-sized scribe's desk shaped straight out of the granite of the room, dip pens and ink laid out on it, the desk of a person who writes longhand all day and cares about the angle of the work. Filing cabinets, three drawers apiece. Behind a curtain a bedroom with a stone bed and a leather-strap mattress, a kitchen, and an alchemical laboratory facing south and open to the air. The whole of it tunnelled and bound out of the earth rather than cut, temporary work — she meant to move on — and beautiful. I picked the cabinet, which took some doing. Inside, papers, all German, all handwritten in the hand of the country and the period, which looks nothing like the way we write. I speak German. I cannot read a word of it.''

''Tulip went through the laboratory stores. Most of the poisons are mineral, got out of ores, which fits everything else we know of her; one animal venom could be rendered down for a blade by anybody with reason enough to handle it; one is slow and agonising, with no cure short of a great healer working weeks at it; and there are samples of a metal that glows blue and harms a man simply by being near him. I suggested somebody show the Hordling which of them were poisonous. He had already worked it out and was eating them. It was, from his point of view, a birthday.''

''Then I went through the workroom as an alchemist, and to get anything out of it at all I spent a great deal of the good fortune I hoard for emergencies — enough that I do not expect chance to hand me another useful thing in that place for a fortnight. It bought two things. The pinkish stone off her necklace has a little pitchblende in it and flares in air where that blue-metal sort of decay is happening, which parts of her workroom obligingly provided; a poor detector, since by the time you see the glow you have had the dose, and I am keeping it anyway. And it bought the mews: a stable at the back, open to the sky, thirty-five feet by twenty, two troughs the size of a horse's set seven feet up on opposite walls. What went into them was sheep, and what else went into them was described to us as slow children, and I set that down without comment because I do not trust myself to make one. Among the giant pole arms stacked nearby there is a lance. A lance means she rode; troughs set that far apart mean the thing she rode had two heads. We have been chasing a two-headed eagle for two days and I am fairly sure it is not an eagle and never was. Tulip said she would like one as a pet.''

===== Mishandled =====

''There were maps in the office, which is what we actually came away with: one in German, one in something close enough to German that I could tell it was not German and get no further, and two or three others, of which one is local and French. Tulip said we should roll them up and take the lot and find somebody to read them, and that was plainly right. The cabinet was the harder question, and Kel settled it — we would take the whole thing. Papers lifted out of a filing cabinet stop being filed, and a great deal of what such a haul is worth lies in the order somebody else put it in. So it went out bodily, to be lashed under the carpet. I have carried filing cabinets before. They are unbalanced, ungainly things, and you cannot see your feet past them.''

''I struck it against the rock wall on the way out through the ravine and it came apart in my hands, and the whole contents of it went out across the gorge in the dark. Kel did not say anything. She looked at me with her disappointed face, which is worse, and told Dross there would be no treats. Everyone went scrambling after paper in a cold wind, and everyone but Tulip got a decent share of it back; she came up empty and looked as sick about it as I felt. We have most of it, out of order, some of it wet, some pages gone and some of what is left illegible. I proposed a story in which the cabinet proved too cumbersome and the papers were moved to a haversack and jiggled about in transit. Nobody believed a word of it, and I would like it on the record that it was not deliberate.''

''It was around ten when we came down, the hour when only fools and radio operators are awake. Jedburgh raised going to Julien instead, the man seeming the sort to open his door at any hour to anyone turning up with schnapps. I said no: we have intelligence that needs reading, Diane can begin reading it tonight, and calling on the Swiss banker again is a risk that buys us nothing.''

===== The Shape of It =====

''Diane let us in and took the whole miserable armful without complaint. She has French, German, English and Italian, and under any other circumstances would have had it sorted by dawn. As it was she made slow, bad work of it, and none of the fault was hers. I do not think she said anything about how it came to be in that condition. She did not need to.''

''The map that was nearly German is Polish. She read the names off it: Che?mno, Be??ec, Sobibór, Majdanek, Treblinka and Auschwitz. Those are not work camps, and she made the distinction: in a work camp a great many people die and it happens incidentally, whereas these are places built for the killing of people already marked to be killed, and the killing is done the way a factory does a thing. Auschwitz began as the other kind and was converted this year. I asked what the significance was of the map being in Polish and was told, reasonably, that they are all in Poland, and that the real question is why our old woman in the Alps had them written down at all.''

''Every one of them but Majdanek has an arrow drawn beside it and a set of coordinates given to four places of decimals. Jedburgh said the word before I did: six points is a hexagon, or a six-pointed star. Dross said the thing none of us wanted said first, which is that death in those quantities may be the point rather than the consequence — that the count is sacrificial, and the arrangement is there to raise power or to call something. I asked whether they are building a summoning circle out of camps and got no answer, because there is not one to be had. Majdanek has no arrow and no coordinates, which may mean it is unfinished, or not yet in use, or nothing at all. We have no astrologer. I am going to learn astrology.''

''The French map is a different shape and may be a worse one: a chain of marks, each about sixteen miles from the last, beginning at a place called Tarascon — there are two towns of that name, which will need sorting out — and running up the country to finish near Moûtiers. Jedburgh's reading is that it is a chain of stepping points, sixteen miles at a stride, a point teleport or an earth door repeated the length of France. The last mark on it is the lair we had just robbed. The next one back is about ten miles further west, down in the Tarentaise valley below us, and we have never been there, and nobody has any idea what is sitting in it.''

===== A Proper Introduction =====

''While Diane worked we all helped with the sorting, and it was Tulip and I who put our hands on the same sheet at the same moment. There was a photograph clipped to it, and the photograph was the pleasant young man from the avalanche.''

''His name is Heinrich von Kleist. He is a member of the SS, seconded to the Ahnenerbe on a project to defeat the Russian war effort at Stalingrad, and his actual work — the thing he goes down the valley to do — is to coordinate with the Usine de Pomblière on the production of cobalt sixty breeders. So the hag's last word and the banker's day job are the same sentence read from two ends. Kel said he had seemed such a nice man. Tulip said, with feeling, that we could have interrogated him and would now know everything. And I sat there thinking that I came off that mountain with his dog's name and not his, and that it has taken a stolen filing cabinet and a woman reading German at midnight to make the introduction I failed to make myself. Diane knew the family at once: an old Prussian house, military almost to a man, and he is certainly noble, which I also failed to notice. Several of that family, this one among them, have given indications of supporting the Allied effort, some of them mixed up in Operation Spark. It is not nothing, and it is not much, and I am not inclined to gamble the party on it.''

''The worse realisation came a moment later. He did not only see me on my flying horse; he saw all of us coming up out of a hole in the snow behind an iron rhinoceros four times the size of a horse, which is not a thing a trained intelligence officer forgets to put in his report. Somewhere in this town a key is being worked frantically at this very moment. So the disguises go — mine is a vintner, adequate yesterday and worth nothing now, and Corniger is a permanent giveaway — and Kel will change the lot of us. Diane should move too, because being right about this sort of thing after the fact is no use to anybody. I also gave that man a bottle of my claret. Kel has written in her notes that Black gives wine to Nazis, Tulip amended it to SS officers, and the pair of them will be insufferable for a month. I intend to make him a very dead man at the earliest convenient opportunity.''

''The rest of the night went on plans, without much profit. Jedburgh's instinct was to blow the dam, which was mine too, and the dam turns out to be too small to be worth it; Kel's suggestion that I put the dark sphere through it would achieve little beyond some water leaking out faster than it does now. The factory is another matter, full of sodium and chlorine, and a man could do it over very badly with proper demolition gear — which is a description of Jedburgh's Frenchman Pierre and a quantity of gelignite, and I notice this is the second night running that the same answer has presented itself. I asked after the researcher Diane once mentioned, the one working on the RNA business, because I have had it in my head that it is a precursor to the zombie virus and would like to be wrong; the work is essentially already done.''

''Then the convoy, which arrives tomorrow: ten trucks, some fifty guards, two hundred women. My assumption had been that this was Diane's territory rather than ours, and it is wrong — the underground networks move half a dozen people at a time and consider it a busy month. Jedburgh asked, in the tone of a man who has just thought of something awful, whether we could skin-change the lot of them into mice. Dross will prepare the skins in advance, Tulip can call mice out of the countryside and Vixen will fetch them, Kel suggested binding cats and terriers besides; the bottleneck is the skinning, ten or fifteen an hour for a practised hand, which makes it days of work whichever way it is cut. Portugal will serve for a destination, Spain calling itself neutral and being nothing of the kind. Dross spent part of it wistfully: there is a working that would turn the whole convoy into mice at a stroke, it costs sixty thousand in silver merely to learn, and he has never had that much money in one place in his life.''

''One last thing before I sleep. We have the measure of the blackthorn stick at last: a talisman keyed to fire, carrying a selection of fire workings ready in it — putting fires out, heating, warding a man against burning, and others besides — with the bearer choosing which, and how many it will hold depending on how practised he already is in that art. It can be used in the hand at close quarters, where it hits like a club and burns at the same time. It travels about under its own power. And it has, I am reliably informed, the personality of a football hooligan.''

''So: near midnight on the thirteenth, in a resistance woman's rooms in an occupied town, with a sheaf of wet German paperwork, a map of six death camps arranged in a hexagon, a second map showing a chain of doorways running the length of France with an unvisited one ten miles west of here, and the name and photograph of a man I gave wine to. Somewhere below us a key is still tapping. Tomorrow two hundred women arrive under guard and we have a plan involving mice. And I am carrying, in a bag, a sleeping child in a hag's womb with a hair trigger on it, because the alternative was leaving it on a mountain, and because I was the one who took her head off and it seemed to me that made it mine.''

----

{| class="wikitable"
|-
|

==== OOC Details ====

===== Items Acquired =====

'''Kel:'''
* Pitchblende radiation-detector amulet (unpriced)
* Hag's gold ring (unpriced)
* Hag's blue metal ring (unpriced)
* Hag's dimensional boots (unpriced)
* Red leather reticule with witch skins (unpriced)
* Captured documents and maps from the hag's lair (unpriced)

'''Black:'''
* Pitchblende radiation-detector amulet (unpriced)
* Hag's gold ring (unpriced)
* Hag's blue metal ring (unpriced)
* Hag's dimensional boots (unpriced)
* Red leather reticule with witch skins (unpriced)
* Hag's womb (near-term foetus) (unpriced)
* Captured documents and maps from the hag's lair (unpriced)

'''Dross:'''
* Pitchblende radiation-detector amulet (unpriced)
* Hag's gold ring (unpriced)
* Hag's blue metal ring (unpriced)
* Hag's dimensional boots (unpriced)
* Red leather reticule with witch skins (unpriced)
* Hag's tarot deck and ivory case (unpriced)
* Captured documents and maps from the hag's lair (unpriced)

'''Jedburgh:'''
* Pitchblende radiation-detector amulet (unpriced)
* Hag's gold ring (unpriced)
* Hag's blue metal ring (unpriced)
* Hag's dimensional boots (unpriced)
* Red leather reticule with witch skins (unpriced)
* Captured documents and maps from the hag's lair (unpriced)

'''Tulip:'''
* Pitchblende radiation-detector amulet (unpriced)
* Hag's gold ring (unpriced)
* Hag's blue metal ring (unpriced)
* Hag's dimensional boots (unpriced)
* Red leather reticule with witch skins (unpriced)
* Captured documents and maps from the hag's lair (unpriced)

'''Party (shared resources):'''
* Hag's womb with near-term foetus (unverified — not in registry)
* Captured documents and maps (unverified — not in registry)

'''Balance brought forward:''' 2,500 sp
'''Balance carried forward:''' 2,500 sp

===== Session Summary =====

The party spent the day hunting the dead hag's lair above Pomblière. Tracking her back-trail [[#s10-off-the-scent|came to nothing]], so they [[#s10-her-effects|went through her corpse instead]] — talisman, rings, dimensional boots, a reticule of reusable witch skins, and a living near-term foetus that Black agreed to carry. After [[#s10-uphill-work|a failed summons and a second failed night's tracking]], Dross put questions to the corpse itself, which named La Croix de l'Alpe, concealment, and breeder reactors. Flying up after dark, the party found [[#s10-dead-ground|a lifeless patch of ground and a ward that would have killed anyone who walked in]], unmade it, and [[#s10-the-tradesmans-entrance|entered a tidy office-lair draped with an Italian Army tarpaulin]]: filing cabinets, an alchemical laboratory of mineral poisons, and a mews built for a two-headed mount.

Black [[#s10-mishandled|broke the looted filing cabinet against the ravine wall]], scattering the papers, and the damaged haul went to Diane at Moûtiers. She read out [[#s10-the-shape-of-it|a Polish map of six death camps arranged as a hexagon and a French map of a sixteen-mile stepping chain running the length of the country]], and then [[#s10-a-proper-introduction|identified the pleasant Swiss banker of the previous session as Heinrich von Kleist of the SS]], seconded to the Ahnenerbe and coordinating cobalt-60 breeder work at the Usine de Pomblière. The party ends the night in Moûtiers, planning disguise changes against the alarm von Kleist has certainly raised, with a convoy of two hundred women due the following day and an untested plan to skin-change them into mice.

===== Chronological Timeline =====

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date !! Event
| Day 43 || Hag's corpse looted and questioned; her lair located at La Croix de l'Alpe, its approach ward dissipated and its office and laboratory stripped; the filing cabinet shattered on the way out and its papers partly lost; the haul carried to Diane at Moûtiers, revealing the six death camps, the stepping chain across France, and Julien de Watermeyer's true identity as Heinrich von Kleist; disguise changes and the convoy rescue plan debated overnight
|}
|}

----

=== Chapter 11: Hide and Seek ===

''We spent a night building a rescue for two hundred women, and by the time it was finished they were forty miles from where we had agreed to meet them.''

===== Neutral Ground =====

''The last thing argued before anyone slept was Switzerland, and it died the way most of my good ideas die, which is slowly and in front of witnesses. The border is a day's drive if one has trucks and papers, and we have neither in any quantity. More to the point the Swiss are a people under arms to the last clerk, nervous of giving the Axis the slightest pretext, and every crossing a vehicle can reach will have men at it. Two hundred women in the back of a truck is not a thing that survives a conversation at a barrier.''

''I proposed stopping short of Saint-Julien and taking them across the farmland at night, between patrols, which I have done myself with one person and twice with two. It does not scale. Dross raised the mountains instead, on the reasonable theory that what is harder to walk is also less guarded, and Tulip suggested going on foot and swinging east to Annemasse. All of it founders on the same arithmetic: the roads mean patrols, and off the roads there is nothing between us and the border but mountain, in November, with two hundred women who have been in trucks for a week.''

''So we came back to mice. Rabbits were put up as sturdier and dismissed on bulk; somebody said sheep, which cannot be driven anywhere they do not wish to go, and somebody said goats, which can, and neither answers the problem of two hundred of them in open country. Birds were worse — a woman given wings does not thereby acquire the knowledge of what to do with them, and panic at altitude is permanent. Panic as a mouse is merely loud.''

''The transport I did settle. Not a jewellery box, as was suggested, but metal, because a metal box survives being dropped, kicked, or sat upon by a soldier, and a wooden one does not. A lined compartment apiece, cotton wool, and enough of it that nothing inside is in contact with anything but wool when the thing is handled roughly. Then we went up to the hotel, which is not the hotel we were in two nights ago, and began.''

===== Piecework =====

''It took the whole night, and it was the most tedious work I have ever watched anybody do. Tulip called mice out of the countryside, eight to a calling and an hour for each, and did it over and over until there were something near two hundred of them. The skinning went round the party, ten minutes a mouse for a practised hand, and nobody's hands were practised by the end. I offered to help and my offer was accepted, which tells you how the night was going. I also proposed finding the town's rat-catcher and buying his stock outright, and was informed that nobody walks into an exterminator in the morning and asks whether he has any spare.''

''Dross had the real labour. Two hundred skins to be made into the thing a woman can wear, and a good forty more attempts beyond that for the ones that would not take. He worked in blocks of ten, and at the end of each block he had nothing left in him and had to drink. Fourteen of the restoratives came out of the hag's own laboratory; Kel gave up eight of hers, which buy back a man's capacity to work at the price of doing him an injury while they do it; and five were mine. By about the third hour he was grey, and shortly after that he was passing blood, and I asked whether he was all right in a tone he did not care for. He protested the whole way through, and I told him we were hearing a great many excuses, and he kept casting.''

''Twice the working turned on him. The first should have left him deaf, and he held against it — which, as I observed at the time, has made no detectable difference to whether he hears anybody. The second simply emptied him where he sat, and there was another potion and another hour. Tulip closed up the damage the drinks were doing when she could. By the small hours there were mice in one room and skins in another, and we had the whole apparatus of the rescue laid out on a hotel floor, waiting for the women. Jedburgh had gone to bed at a sensible hour, since he was flying at dawn, and I have rarely resented a man more for being right.''

===== Weather Permitting =====

''The fourteenth came and the convoy did not. There is nothing sinister in it: the valley had wind and thunderstorms, and this is country that gets lightning badly enough to put the electricity out, and the sort of truck column that is moving women does not travel at night and does not travel at all when the road is being thrown about. They will have stopped in some town and taken over a church. What it meant for us was that we had an ambush point and nothing to ambush, and a day to find out where two hundred people had got to.''

''Kel's answer was better than waiting, which was my instinct and the wrong one. She can look at a stretch of the day that has not yet happened, and she chose to look at Jedburgh's flight — to watch the reconnaissance before he flew it, and know the shape of the day by eight in the morning. It is an unnerving way to plan and I have stopped objecting to it.''

''What she saw first was nothing. Jedburgh went up, swept half a circle eight miles out from Moûtiers, and found no column on any road coming up to us. She can only redirect the vision's attention so many times before it runs out, and she asked where to look next. I said backtrack the road rather than stare harder at one place, on the grounds that a place we have already looked at will not improve and the road behind them might. We backtracked down to La Chambre and found nothing there either.''

''Backtracking further found something: a small lake, thirty-odd miles out as a bird flies, fed by a cascade perhaps thirty feet high and distinctive enough to steer by, and a dozen trucks drawn up on the metalled road beside it.''

''That was worth a real look, so Kel borrowed Jedburgh's crystal and put the viewpoint five hundred feet above the lake as it stood at that hour. A dozen trucks, covered. Sixteen minutes of watching produced one rabbit. I asked whether they were the same as the ones we had seen carrying women, and from that height the colour and the general shape were near enough; they were also, on a better look, Citroëns, which is to say civilian, which is to say almost certainly not ours. Kel tried to set the view lower and nearer, to see into the backs of them, and the thing arrived inside an engine block. Any further attempts want ambergris, and we have exactly two pieces between us, Jedburgh's and Tulip's, and no prospect of buying more in a mountain town in wartime.''

===== Siphoned Off =====

''So Jedburgh went himself, as an eagle, and the first useful thing he saw he saw before he had gone a mile: a truck pulling out of the Usine de Pomblière behind him and heading away from Moûtiers, uphill, into the roads. He kept his course, which I would not have done and which turned out to be correct twice over.''

''The lake took him an hour. The cascade was where the vision had put it. He came down and found the trucks sitting with nobody near them, waited, and in due course the owners of the business appeared with jerry cans and lengths of rubber tube and went up into the backs of the trucks. They siphoned off fuel, passed the cans down, took a decent share and not all of it, and drove away a little lighter than they came. There is a war on; a man who empties a tank is hanged, and a man who takes a quarter of it is a nuisance nobody reports. It is a local trade in stolen petrol and it is nothing whatever to do with us. The place is called Oz, which I record only because it is the sort of name one does not expect to meet in the Isère.''

''Having wasted a morning on it, he did not fly home in a straight line. He went back along the road the Pomblière truck had taken, tracking it from the air, on the theory that anything leaving that plant is our business whether or not it is carrying anybody.''

===== Taking the Waters =====

''The road ran fifty miles by vehicle, and he caught the truck at the end of it as it came into a town called Le Bourget-du-Lac. It is old — medieval, properly so, the streets no more than eight feet across, which is why the truck had been slowing for the last mile. It pulled up outside a building of three storeys, commercial rather than industrial, no display windows, with people going in and out at a thin midday rate and most of them young. He put down two roofs away and read it as well as a man can who has no French, which is to say he committed the sign to memory to be read to us later.''

''From above, the building has skylights, and under the skylights there is water. It is a bath-house, the internal sort, and he could see people swimming in it. He remarked that it looked inviting. Then he worked round and saw the rest of the room.''

''There are something like two hundred women in there, standing about the baths. There are something like fifty men in SS uniform guarding them. And there are men and women in white coats attending them, who are not local, who did not come from wherever the guards came from, and who certainly did not come from wherever the women came from. Jedburgh's reading of them was doctors with no bedside manner, and bureaucrats; what he could not put a word to was that whatever he was looking at did not sit right — something in the bearing of them at odds with being ordinary people. Tulip offered Transuranians. It is a guess and I set it down as a guess, but it is the first guess anybody has made that I did not immediately want to improve on.''

''So we have found them, and we have found them in the wrong place. Everything we had said put them at Saint-Marcel and the plant; what led us here was a truck leaving that plant, and what the plant is to this bath-house — a stop on the way, or a supplier, or something I have not thought of — nobody can yet say. The women are at Le Bourget-du-Lac. That will do for today.''

''Jedburgh turned for home, and as he came in over Moûtiers he saw seven black Daimlers converging on our hotel from seven different roads.''

===== Against the Wall =====

''He got in at an upstairs window, which is apparently a thing eagles do often enough that nobody remarks on it, and told us. Diane needed one look and gave us the word: Gestapo. Then she sat down and strapped her leg on, without hurry and without a word of complaint, and I will carry that picture about with me for some time.''

''Kel set the silent speech between our heads and put her unnoticing over the lot of us, and we went out of that hotel while the cars were still closing. It very nearly worked. Something gave us away as we moved off — I still do not know what — and five of the seven turned after us.''

''We took a lane between two buildings, too narrow for a motor car to follow, and it was a dead end: brick, eight feet of it, no door. One of the cars came across the mouth of the gap and the men got out of it in their coats and hats and came down after us with submachine guns, which is not a weapon one brings to ask questions.''

''What saved us was three things done in the right order. Kel threw an illusory wall across the lane in front of us, so that what the men came to was the blank end of an alley. Tulip raised a real wall of her own behind the illusion, so that if any of them put out a hand he would feel brick where brick appeared to be. And behind both of those, where nobody could see or hear it, I set the dark sphere to work on the back wall and let it eat a hole big enough to walk through. It took half a minute; they stood about for twice as long on the other side of a wall that was not there, and found nothing to shoot. Kel's last casting turned on her while she was holding all of it together, and she held. Jedburgh took eagle shape and went up to watch the street rather than stay in the trap with us, which was sense; he could have gone the other way and become a bear, and one eaten Gestapo man would certainly have changed the tone of the afternoon.''

''Dross wanted the carpet and had it ready. I said no. A flying carpet over a French town at midday is not an escape, it is an announcement.''

===== Nobody Looks Up =====

''On the far side of the wall we came out at the back of a works that builds dinghies, with men at their benches inside it and a road beyond. A Daimler came down that road while we were still between the buildings, so we went round the corner and Tulip laid her blending over the ground we stood on: stay perfectly still and you are very difficult to see, move and you are a man standing in an alley.''

''Then a workman came out for a smoke, twenty feet away, swearing steadily in what turned out to be Albanian and waving his hands in the manner of his country. Dross and Kel both went for him and Dross got there first: there is nothing interesting here, and what you want is a long quiet smoke on your pipe. The poor devil stood there a moment, decided there was something wrong with his tobacco, tapped it out and went back inside. Dross has been complaining ever since that he should have made him give up smoking altogether while he had him. I had said I would see to the man myself if the pair of them missed, and it would have been a great deal louder.''

''The car went past. Windows opened above us and nobody looked down. The forest was too far and the farmland between us and it too open to cross in daylight, so I suggested the other thing: change the faces Kel had given us, break up, and go into the square separately. We took coffee at separate tables — only coffee, since anything that must be bought with a ration coupon means producing paper. Daimlers came in and out of the square all the while we sat there. Then a truck arrived with two platoons in it, and they began working the town door by door.''

''I asked whether we were going out as owls or trying something cleverer, and nobody had anything cleverer. Dross had three skins ready and half a dozen unenchanted, so he went into the lavatory of the café and made up the rest while Tulip stood at the door and turned people away. Kel put an illusion over the square so that anyone who happened to see owls leaving a town at midday would think nothing whatever of it. We went out over their heads, and not one man in that square looked up. Jedburgh went with us as an eagle.''

''They had found us, it turns out, by telephone: ringing round the hotels and asking whether anybody new had come to town. Moving lodgings the night before is the only reason they did not have us at breakfast. Next time we take a room, the proprietor gets hypnotised the moment we are through the door, and told that if anyone asks whether there is anybody new, there is not.''

===== Flown South =====

''We came back together at La Croix de Feissons, which is a known high point above the valley and a different cross entirely from the one we robbed on the mountain; I mention it because I confused the two myself for a moment and would rather not do it again in front of anybody. Diane came with us. From there it is thirty-odd miles to Le Bourget-du-Lac, about an hour in the air, and we flew it.''

''Jedburgh raised his team's true name on the way — the individual one, not the common form, and he does have it, but only barely. The thing is not a word. It is the length of a book, and a man cannot simply be handed such a name and use it; he has to live with it a while first. So it goes on the list of things we own and cannot yet do.''

''For the baths themselves, the plan is thin and will have to do: get near enough to take a proper reading of the white coats when a door opens or a window is left ajar, and find out what it is about them that Jedburgh could see and not name.''

''The last argument of the day was about birds, because two hundred mice will get the women out of a building and will not get them out of France. Dross noticed there is an Isle of Swans on the lake here and thought we might take swan skins off it, which would have been elegant; the swans went south a fortnight ago, it being November. Just as well. A swan needs a long clear run to get into the air, and a duck does not — the wing against the weight is better — and a duck can put down on open water, which matters a great deal when two hundred people who have never flown must land somewhere soft. I am not yet sure how one explains any of this to them.''

''So: two hundred mice in a box, two hundred skins beside them, a town behind us that is being searched door to door, and the women themselves in a bath-house forty miles from where we spent a night preparing to meet them. We arrived over the lake as the light went. Tomorrow we find out what the men in white coats are.''

----

{| class="wikitable"
|-
|

==== OOC Details ====

===== Items Acquired =====

'''Party (shared resources):'''
* ~200 enchanted mouse skins (rescue stock, narrative-only) — (unverified — ledger unchecked for this session)
* Owl skins (narrative-only) — (unverified — ledger unchecked for this session)

'''Balance brought forward:''' 2,500 sp
'''Balance carried forward:''' 2,500 sp

===== Session Summary =====

The party shelved [[#s11-neutral-ground|a plan to drive two hundred rescued women across the Swiss border]] as unworkable and committed instead to carrying them out as mice, then spent the whole night [[#s11-piecework|summoning the mice and enchanting the skins]] at their new Moûtiers hotel. The convoy never arrived — [[#s11-weather-permitting|storms had stopped it on the road]] — so Kel previewed Jedburgh's reconnaissance before he flew it and steered him toward a lake thirty-odd miles out, which [[#s11-siphoned-off|turned out to be a petrol-smuggling racket]] rather than the convoy. Following a truck out of the Usine de Pomblière instead, Jedburgh found [[#s11-taking-the-waters|the women held in a thermal bath-house at Le Bourget-du-Lac]], guarded by roughly fifty SS and attended by white-coated figures Tulip guesses are Transuranians.

Flying home he spotted seven Gestapo Daimlers closing on the hotel. The party evacuated and [[#s11-against-the-wall|escaped a dead-end alley]] behind a layered illusion while Black bored a hole through the back wall, then [[#s11-nobody-looks-up|waited out the door-to-door search over coffee in the town square and left as owls]]. They regrouped at La Croix de Feissons and [[#s11-flown-south|flew on to Le Bourget-du-Lac]], arriving at dusk. Next session takes up the baths themselves and the question of what the white coats are.

===== Chronological Timeline =====

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Date !! Event
| Day 44 || Swiss border plan shelved; the mice-and-skins rescue kit built overnight at Moûtiers; the convoy fails to arrive, delayed by storms; a lake near Oz is ruled out as fuel smugglers, and a truck tracked from the Usine de Pomblière leads to two hundred women held under SS guard in a bath-house at Le Bourget-du-Lac; the Gestapo raid the party's hotel, the party escapes Moûtiers as owls, regroups at La Croix de Feissons and flies on to Le Bourget-du-Lac by dusk
|}
|}

== Buffs & Mil Sci ==
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table.buffs th.mg { text-align: left; width: 20%; }
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table.buffs th.rk { width: 5%; }
table.buffs td.rk { }
table.buffs th.ef { text-align: left; width: 41%; }
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</css>
=== Buffs ===
====Long Term (assumed always on)====
{| class="buffs" |
!class="mg" | Magic (caster)
!class="rk" | Rk
!class="ef" | Effects
!class="du" | Duration
!Title="Black" | Bk
!Title="Jedburgh" | Jd
!Title="Kel" | Kl
!Title="Tulip" | Tp
!Title="TBA" | TBA
!Title="TBA" | TBA
!Title="TBA" | TBA
|-
|-
|class="mg" | Tulip
|class="rk" | 11
|class="ef" | Strength of Stones +11 EN or ST
|class="du" | 12 hrs
| 
| 
| 
|  x
| 
| 
| 
|-
|class="mg" | Tulip
|class="rk" | 7
|class="ef" | Converse with animals (Bear, Raven, Fox)
|class="du" | 24 hrs
| 
| 
| 
|  x
| 
| 
| 
|}

====Self Only====
{| class="buffs" |
|-
!class="mg" | Magic (caster)
!class="rk" | Rk
!class="ef" | Effects
!class="du" | Duration
!Title="Black" | Bk
!Title="Jedburgh" | Jd
!Title="Kel" | Kl
!Title="Tulip" | Tp
!Title="Black" | Bk
!Title="Jedburgh" | JB
!Title="Dross" | Dr
|-
|class="mg" | TBA (TBA)
|class="rk" |
|class="ef" |
|class="du" |
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
|-
|class="mg" | TBA (TBA)
|class="rk" |
|class="ef" |
|class="du" |
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
|-
|class="mg" | TBA (TBA)
|class="rk" |
|class="ef" |
|class="du" |
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
|-
|class="mg" | TBA (TBA)
|class="rk" |
|class="ef" |
|class="du" |
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
|-
|class="mg" | TBA (TBA)
|class="rk" |
|class="ef" |
|class="du" |
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
|-
|class="mg" | TBA (TBA)
|class="rk" |
|class="ef" |
|class="du" |
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
|}

====Short Term (cast when needed)====
{| class="buffs" |
|-
!class="mg" | Magic (caster)
!class="rk" | Rk
!class="ef" | Effects
!class="du" | Dur
!Title="Black" | Bk
!Title="Jedburgh" | Jd
!Title="Kel" | Kl
!Title="Tulip" | Tp
!Title="TBA" | TBA
!Title="TBA" | TBA
!Title="TBA" | TBA
|-
|class="mg" | Tulip
|class="rk" | 11
|class="ef" | Armour of Earth +24%
|class="du" | 6hrs
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
|-
|class="mg" | Tulip
|class="rk" | 7
|class="ef" | area of effect Blending
|class="du" | 7hrs
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
|-
|class="mg" | TBA (TBA)
|class="rk" |
|class="ef" |
|class="du" |
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
|-
|class="mg" | TBA (TBA)
|class="rk" |
|class="ef" |
|class="du" |
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
|}

====Cast by minions and retainers====
{| class="buffs" |
|-
!class="mg" | Magic (caster)
!class="rk" | Rk
!class="ef" | Effects
!class="du" | Dur
!class="lo" | Location
!Title="TBA" | TBA
!Title="TBA" | TBA
!Title="TBA" | TBA
!Title="TBA" | TBA
!Title="TBA" | TBA
!Title="TBA" | TBA
!Title="TBA" | TBA
|-
|class="mg" | TBA (TBA )
|class="rk" |
|class="ef" |
|class="du" |
!class="lo" |
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
|-
|class="mg" | TBA (TBA )
|class="rk" |
|class="ef" |
|class="du" |
!class="lo" |
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
|-
|class="mg" | TBA (TBA )
|class="rk" |
|class="ef" |
|class="du" |
!class="lo" |
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
|-
|class="mg" | TBA (TBA )
|class="rk" |
|class="ef" |
|class="du" |
!class="lo" |
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
|-
|class="mg" | TBA (TBA )
|class="rk" |
|class="ef" |
|class="du" |
!class="lo" |
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
|}

====Senses and other stuff====
{| class="buffs" |
|-
!class="mg" | TBA
!class="rk" | Rk
!class="ef" | Effects
!class="du" | Dur
!Title="Black" | Bk
!Title="Jedburgh" | Jd
!Title="Kel" | Kl
!Title="Tulip" | Tp
!Title="TBA" | TBA
!Title="TBA" | TBA
!Title="TBA" | TBA
|-
|class="mg" |Sense Danger (%)
|class="rk" |
|class="ef" |
|class="du" |
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
|-
|class="mg" | Detect Ambush (%)
|class="rk" |
|class="ef" | Ranger (-5/rank of opposition)
|class="du" |
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
|-
|class="mg" | TBA
|class="rk" |
|class="ef" |
|class="du" |
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
|-
|class="mg" | See Invis (Rk)
|class="rk" |
|class="ef" | Effective rank for seeing invisible
|class="du" |
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
|-
|class="mg" | Stealth (%)
|class="rk" |
|class="ef" | Standard / Ranger Outdoors
|class="du" |
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
|}

====Animal (and other) Companions====
{| class="companions" |
{| class="companions" |
! Animal
! Base key stats
! Always on
! Effects
|-
|align="center" | Bear (Tu)
|align="center" | 22PC 39PS 15MD 14AG 6TMR 9WP -MA 34EN 38FT
|align="center" | animal growth, armour earth, strength stones, blending, greater on resistance, in combat: enchanted fang
|align="center" | bind animal, in-card, natural weapons are magical weapons of cold +5dmg, enchanted fang +3dmg, greater on resistance
|-
|align="center" | Massive Python (Tu)
|align="center" | 18PC 50PS -MD 12AG 9TMR 16WP -MA 30EN 35FT
|align="center" | slithering 450, climbing 200
|align="center" | magical staff
|-
|align="center" | War dog Sabrina (Tu)
|align="center" | 24PC 11PS 19MD 20AG 8TMR 21WP 18EN 33FT
|align="center" | armour earth, strength stones, blending
|align="center" | vanilla bound animal, in card
|-
|align="center" | Raven (Tu)
|align="center" | 18PC 3PS 23MD 22AG 12TMR 22WP 10EN 24FT
|align="center" | blending, greater on resistance
|align="center" | vanilla bound animal, in card
|-
|align="center" | Midsummer Vixen (Tu)
|align="center" | 12PC 5PS 19MD 24AG 6TMR 7EN 12FT 8MA
|align="center" | special ritually bound, blending, greater on resistance
|align="center" | petit mort self, firelight and pyrotechnics from her tail
|-
|}

=== Misc ===
; Greater Enchantment
: (TBA ) rank ??

; Enhance Enchantment
: (TBA ) rank ??:, ?? seconds

; Remove Curse
: (TBA ) MA ??

; Herbalist Lunch/Broth
: ?? rk ?, Meal ? FT or Broth ? FT

===Loot===
====Consumables====
=====Draughts=====
======Rank 8 Draught of Healing Sleep======
This draught will cause the drinker to fall into a healing sleep that will heal Fatigue or Endurance damage at the rate of 1 Endurance per hour of sleep or an additional 4 Fatigue per hour. Repairing lost Endurance is prioritised, and no Fatigue is recovered. 
The sleeper can be woken at any time but must sleep at least 4 hours to receive any benefit at all. 
It will also accelerate the rate of healing time of 1 Specific Grievous injury. Divide the normal rate by 8. A deep sword cut that would normally take 20 days to heal would heal in 3 days if they have received at least 8 hours of sleep at the time of taking it. 
This healing will repair damage to muscles, ligaments, tendons and skin. 

=====Potions=====
======Potion of Reason Restored x 5======
This potion will restore the imbiber’s reason if they succeed in a roll of 4 x MA. The potion weighs ½ lb and is considered Rank 20 with an MA of 30. The imbiber will glow brightly while their sanity is repaired. 
If the contents are poured into a grenade, it may be thrown at a hex, where will burst, shedding Rank 20 light in an area 25 ft across. Any creature that is considered an Aberration (e.g. Calimari) may be forced out of the current mundane plane, or slain. An entity who is insane but not an Aberration will be rendered catatonic.

======Rank 10 Restorative x 11 ======
This potion weighs 4 oz. The Endurance of whoever drinks it is reduced by 12 and their Fatigue is restored by 24. This may Stun.
======Rank 10 Soul Shroud======
This vial weighs 4 oz. Whoever drinks it creates a shroud around their mind and soul for 21 hours. Aside from preventing their thoughts from being detected or read, the Adept always appears unpacted to those that can determine such things. This spell does not prevent the Adept’s presence or emotions from being detected, but their mind will simply not appear to be there when an attempt is made to “read” it. 
The Adept’s Resistance versus abilities that Charm, Compel, Bind or Control is increased by 30 but does not block ESP or Empathy. The Adept can receive Mind Speech at their choice.
======Rank 6 Potion of Solar Protection======
This vial weighs 4 oz. Whoever drinks it gains +8 to the chance of resisting magical, light-based attacks for 70 minutes. This includes Flash of Light, Wall of Starlight, Bolt of Starfire, Web of Light, Solar Flare and Whitefire. They will also become fully protected from damage caused by non-magical light (E.g. sunburn, snow-blindness), with the exception that it will not protect Greater Undead from sunlight. The protection also allows vision in a Rank 20 Light Spell and reduces damage from any light or solar based attack by 1.
======Rank 16 Love Philtre======
This philtre weighs 4 oz and will cause the imbiber to fall in love with the first entity upon whom he or she sets eyes after drinking it (regardless of species or sex). The effects of the substance will last for 17 weeks, unless dispelled by the casting of the General Knowledge Counterspell of the College
of Witchcraft by the creator of the Love Philtre, or by the successful use of the Curse Removal Ritual, in which case it is a Minor Curse. 

======Rank 16 Potion of Fertility======
This potion weighs 4 oz and increases the chances of conception by 85%. The effects last for 7 days, unless dispelled by the General Knowledge Counterspell of the College of Witchcraft by the creator of the Potion or a Ritual of Remove Curse is employed, in which case it is considered a Minor Curse

======Rank 16 Restorative Potion======
This potion weighs 4 oz and when imbibed, subtracts 18 from Endurance and repairs 36 lost Fatigue. The Fatigue so restored may have
been lost through damage or tiredness, including spell casting. 
This Endurance loss may Stun . 

=====Demijohn of Hydrachloric Acid=====
This glass demijohn is 2/3rds full and weighs 17 lbs 3 oz. It contains 9 gallons and 3 pints of an acid derived from a hydra steeped in chlorine for at least a year then decanted into the container on a leap day.
=====Distillation of Wolfsbane=====
This phial contains a transparent, pale violet concoction that, when sniffed, numbs the nose. It is a concentrated extraction of wolfsbane and may be used in an Alchemical operation.

=====Remnants=====
{| class="wikitable" style="width:100%;"
|-
! style="text-align:left;" | '''Remnants'''
! style="text-align:center;" | Number
! style="text-align:left;" | '''Remnants'''
! style="text-align:center;" | Number
! style="text-align:left;" | '''Remnants'''
! style="text-align:center;" | Number
! style="text-align:left;" | '''Remnants'''
! style="text-align:center;" | Number
|-

| style="text-align:left;" | Afterglow [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 5
| style="text-align:left;" | Anchor [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 6
| style="text-align:left;" | Apple [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 5
| style="text-align:left;" | Book [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 10
|-

| style="text-align:left;" | Bridge [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 7
| style="text-align:left;" | Castle [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 2
| style="text-align:left;" | Chaos [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 10
| style="text-align:left;" | City [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 7
|-

| style="text-align:left;" | Confusion [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 5
| style="text-align:left;" | Dog [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 5
| style="text-align:left;" | Drum [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 5
| style="text-align:left;" | Eagle [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 11
|-

| style="text-align:left;" | Echo [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 6
| style="text-align:left;" | Engine [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 9
| style="text-align:left;" | Equilibrium [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 5
| style="text-align:left;" | Euphoria [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 15
|-

| style="text-align:left;" | Facade [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 11
| style="text-align:left;" | Feather [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 6
| style="text-align:left;" | Footprint [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 5
| style="text-align:left;" | Forest [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 11
|-

| style="text-align:left;" | Garden [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 7
| style="text-align:left;" | Glimmer [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 10
| style="text-align:left;" | Helm [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 7
| style="text-align:left;" | House [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 7
|-

| style="text-align:left;" | Island [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 13
| style="text-align:left;" | Kite [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 6
| style="text-align:left;" | Lemon [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 13
| style="text-align:left;" | Mirage [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 7
|-

| style="text-align:left;" | Mountain [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 2
| style="text-align:left;" | Needle [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 13
| style="text-align:left;" | Ocean [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 7
| style="text-align:left;" | Panic [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 5
|-

| style="text-align:left;" | Queen [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 15
| style="text-align:left;" | Resonance [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 3
| style="text-align:left;" | River [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 5
| style="text-align:left;" | Serenity [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 18
|-

| style="text-align:left;" | Silhouette [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 10
| style="text-align:left;" | Sleep [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 6
| style="text-align:left;" | Solitude [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 7
| style="text-align:left;" | Stagnation [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 7
|-

| style="text-align:left;" | Star [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 5
| style="text-align:left;" | Train [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 5
| style="text-align:left;" | Vestige [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 14
| style="text-align:left;" | Window [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]
| style="text-align:center;" | 11
|}

=====Syringes=====
======Syrinx of Ranger======
This syrinx is a brass and glass monstrosity of needles, ampoules and cogs that weighs 9oz. When it is driven into the victims neck, requiring four dwarven fingers of high octane dragonspirits, the genetic memories of the target organise information so that exposure to Ranger Skill use acts as training time. It does not obviate the Experience cost, but if the Skill is used regularly while on adventure, then this counts as all or part of their training time.
The victims genetic memories fade into quiescence after four weeks.

======Syrinx of Driving Automata======
This syrinx is a brass and glass monstrosity of needles, ampoules and cogs that weighs 9oz. When it is driven into the victims neck, requiring four dwarven fingers of high octane dragonspirits, the genetic memories of the target organise information so that exposure to Driving Automata Skill use acts as training time. It does not obviate the Experience cost, but if the Skill is used regularly while on adventure, then this counts as all or part of their training time.
The victims genetic memories fade into quiescence after four weeks.

======Syrinx of Reich English======
This syrinx is a brass and glass monstrosity of needles, ampoules and cogs that weighs 9oz. When it is driven into the victims neck, requiring four dwarven fingers of high octane dragonspirits, the genetic memories of the target organise information so that exposure to Reich English use acts as training time. It does not obviate the Experience cost, but if the Skill is used regularly while on adventure, then this counts as all or part of their training time.
The victims genetic memories fade into quiescence after four weeks.
======Syrinx of Reich French======
This syrinx is a brass and glass monstrosity of needles, ampoules and cogs that weighs 9oz. When it is driven into the victims neck, requiring four dwarven fingers of high octane dragonspirits, the genetic memories of the target organise information so that exposure to Reich French use acts as training time. It does not obviate the Experience cost, but if the Skill is used regularly while on adventure, then this counts as all or part of their training time.
The victims genetic memories fade into quiescence after four weeks.
======Syrinx of Reich German======
This syrinx is a brass and glass monstrosity of needles, ampoules and cogs that weighs 9oz. When it is driven into the victims neck, requiring four dwarven fingers of high octane dragonspirits, the genetic memories of the target organise information so that exposure to Reich German use acts as training time. It does not obviate the Experience cost, but if the Skill is used regularly while on adventure, then this counts as all or part of their training time.
The victims genetic memories fade into quiescence after four weeks.

=====Pergamente=====
======Pergament Ein======
Translated at 20:00
To a Lutum of the Atomic Womb (potion the colour and consistency of pus)
;Either:
'''Tincture of Winkulus''' 
This test tube contains a pale green, transparent liquor. When it is poured into a Lutum of the Atomic Womb and a drop of blood added, the fluids will curdle, forming a cheeky and irrepressible wink called Äugle which will serve as a familiar for whoever donated the blood.
;Or:
'''Tincture of Shofur''' 
This test tube contains a dark, murky green liquor. When it is poured into a Lutum of the Atomic Womb and a drop of blood added, the fluids will curdle, forming a reserved and polite manservant called Pâkka in dark green livery with brass buttons who is unseeable to everyone except whoever donated the blood, and whom they will attend as a familiar

======Pergament Zwei======
Translated at 22:00 
Eight hours after this scroll is opened, it will crumble to grey dust. 
'''Rolle der Disziplin und geistigen Stärke''' 
Whoever reads from this scroll for 4 hours may advance their FT by 1 per Adventure or Season, whichever is least. 
This ability is permanent, persists through death and there is no upper limit to which their FT value can ascend.

======Pergament Drei======
Translated at 00:00 
A stylus of enchanted ice is dipped into the dried blood of an unbaptised child, the indicated sigils and glyphs must be drawn onto a square metre of copper foil, then exposed to the North Wind by midnight. 
'''Die Zeit des fahlen Lichts''' 
If this is used in Autumn or Spring, a month will pass in a single day. If it is used in Winter, then, a season will pass. It has no effect in Summer. 
The volume affected is an ethereal hemisphere with a base diameter of 60 feet.

======Pergament Vier======
Translated at 02:00 
'''Ein Adelsbrief or ein Adelspatent''' 
Whoever reads this scroll will become the ''Margrave'' or ''Magravine von Dorn und Rosen''. The land holdings have been lost with the fall of the Holy Roman Empire. The title, however, remains. 
On the fist encounter, they are addressed as ''Herr Margrave'' (Lord Margrave) or ''Frau Margravine'' (Lady Margravine), and subsequently ''Euer Gnaden'' (your Grace), ''Margrave'' or ''Margravine''. Note that unlike British nobility, ''Sir'' or ''Madam'' are not used subsequently. 
They are styled ''der Hochgeborern'' (the Highborn Lord)'', der Margrave von Dorn und Rosen'' or ''die Hochgeborene'' (the Highborn Lady)'', die Margravine von Dorn und Rosen.''

======Pergament Funf======
Translated at 04:00 
'''Der sechste Punkt''' 
Whoever reads this parchment may raise one of their Primary Statistics by a sixth point at the normal Experience cost. 
This may exceed racial maximums.

====Armour====
=====Antlered Breastplate=====
This breastplate is made from the antlers of perytons sliced into long, scale-like sections about 3 inches long, 1 inch wide and 1/4 of an inch thick, sewn into its hide with its own sinews. It weighs 8lbs and may be worn over a gambeson or leather armour, but not exotic, scale or other metal armours. Sections of the antlers sweep out and up from the shoulder so that if the wearer Receives a Charge (which is a Reflex Action in response to being targeted by a Dive or Charge), they add an extra rollup D10 to their damage if their counterstrike is successful. 
If the wearer takes damage that ends in 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 or 8, they may increase their Protection versus A, B or C Class damage by 4. This effect does not stack with other armour features triggered by damage rolls (e.g., +2 Protection on an 8, 9, or 0). Apply only the single highest Protection bonus for that roll. In the event that the wearer receives any of the following Specific Grievous injuries, they roll a D10 and any result of an 8 or higher means that the injury is ignored entirely.
{| class="wikitable"
! style="text-align: center; width: 5%;" | Roll
! style="text-align: left;" | Injury
|-

| style="text-align: center;" | 11
| style="text-align: left;" | Your aorta is severed and you are quite dead. Rest assured your companions will do their best to console your widow(er).
|-

| style="text-align: center;" | 12
| style="text-align: left;" | A stomach puncture. Nasty. You suffer 3 Damage Points immediately from Endurance and lose 2 from your TMR until fully recovered, which will take two months. Also, you are automatically stunned for the next pulse (if you aren’t already), after which you may recover. Add 20 to the chance to be infected.
|-

| style="text-align: center;" | 14 - 18
| style="text-align: left;" | Tsk, tsk. A wound of the solid viscera. Usually fatal. Take 3 Damage Points to Endurance immediately and 1 per pulse thereafter until the bleeding is stopped by a Healer of Rank 2 or above or you die. Add 30 to the chance of infection.
|-

| style="text-align: center;" | 21 - 25
| style="text-align: left;" | A chest wound. Take 2 Damage Points to Endurance immediately and reduce your TMR by 1 until recovered (about 2 months). Look on the bright side, though. Your attacker’s weapon is caught in your rib cage and has been wrenched from their grasp.
|-

| style="text-align: center;" | 37 - 40
| style="text-align: left;" | You have been eviscerated! Take 4 Damage Points immediately from Endurance and 1 point per pulse from Fatigue thereafter (Endurance when Fatigue is exhausted) until you are unconscious. Increase your chance of infection by 40.
|}

In response to a magical attack that they are aware of, the wearer may increase their Magic Resistance by 7 (except for magic that affects the personality) and ignore the first 7 points of Spell Damage per Pulse for the next minute. This is a Reflex Action. 
While this effect is in place, the wearer will be attended by a low mana zone one hex across doubling their Fatigue costs for Casting non-Racial Magic and reducing Cast Chances by 7.

=====Feathered Opera Gloves=====
A Rank 8+ Glover can use the brood patch, down and secondary feathers of a peryton to fashion opera gloves for a lady of quality (Impoverished Gentry or higher) and will charge 5 tsg for their work. The gloves will cover the hands and arms near to their shoulders in pale aquamarine leather the texture of fine kid, the outer seam adorned with secondary feathers in blue, green and red. Completed, the will weigh 7 oz in total. 
The gloves reduce the Force of weather for the wearer by 2 (but cannot modify winds of Force 9 or higher) and they reduce penalties to their Flying Skill by 10. 
In addition, if the wearer should receive A, B or C Class damage that ends in 6, 7 or 8, then their Protection is increased by 4.

=====Stockings of the Sisters of St. Joseeph=====
These stockings are made by the Sisters of St. Joseph in Chambery from finely spun angora and silk, and are made for an individual whose Social Rank is at least Impoverished Gentry. It must be embroidered with gold thread and should feature such things as a family crest or tartan. 
The stockings will cost 10 tsg per pair, the profits being used to support the children they hide from the Nazis. Haggling will lead to sourceless rumours about the buyer’s morality and likely pact-relationship with the Seventh Plane. 
The temperature of the wearer’s feet never fall below 97° F and are magically kept dry. This does not always make the wearer more comfortable. It does prevent hypothermia in any terrestrial environment, but can have consequences. 
A man's stocking reaches past the swell of the calf muscle, and if they receive A, B or C Class damage that ends in 3 or 4, then their Protection is increased by 4. 
A woman's stocking reaches to mid-thigh, and if they receive A, B or C Class damage that ends in 3, 4, 5 or 6, then their Protection is increased by 2. 

====Hag Skin Cloak====
Three and three quarter square yards of pale skin with veins of grey marbling has been stripped from the corpse of a mountain hag and prepared for use but not tanned. It may be made into a single cloak or top coat for a humanoid entity of size 4, 5 or 6, or two such pieces of apparel for humanoids of size 3 or less. Its weight factor is 1. 
The skin must be immersed in as much of the first urine of a she-bear upon rising from her Winter torpor as will fill a stoneware tavern pitcher. The pitcher must be exposed to the sky each night yet protected from the sun otherwise, the operation begun at noon on a Monday and concluded at dusk on the coming Saturday. 
Decant the urine from the pitcher and dilute to 1 part in 20, thus to pour over tillable soil before the Spring planting. The crop will grow as if richly manured, nor shall any verminous creature approach it until Winter at the earliest. 
The hide must be washed in a copper bath with lions feet no later than midnight on Saturday until Monday at noon. Draw it through a mangle with bronze rollers until it is only damp and gently dry it in darkness until midnight on Wednesday. Then, must the fat of a penguin that rules kingdoms be rendered in which a pail of red wood ants have been drowned. The hide, ants and fat must be churned from sunrise on Thursday until after the first hour of darkness on Sunday and kept to a scalding heat. 
Hang the hide on an armour rack until no later than Tuesday morning, drawing it through the mangle again to squeeze out the fat. The hide need not feel dry but should feel only slightly greasy. Return to the armour rack and leave until Thursday noon. 
The hide will require the arts of a Rank 8+ Leatherworker, Tailor or Seamstress. The cloak will take them five days and they will charge 5 tsg for it. The top coat will take them eleven days and they will charge 9 tsg. 
If an attempt to haggle is made for any of these materials or processes, the magic fails. 
To benefit from its special magic, the wearer must sacrifice a point of Endurance to it, which can be bought back in the usual way. 
In either form, it holds a reserve of 25 DP. Once these are depleted, it is just clothing, although obviously still magical. Once a day, before they sleep, the wearer can allow it to drink 2 points of their Endurance to restore 1 DP to its reserve. The loss to Endurance maybe Healed back by any means. 
A top coat can be worn over any armour except plate or plate mail. A cloak can be worn over any armour unless excluded by the DM, but does not automatically protect against damage from the wearer’s front hexes,. If, however, the wearer holds a fold of the cloak in their off hand, they may deflect a frontal attack with a veronica. Percentiles are rolled to which is added twice the wearer’s MD, and if the result is 100 or more, the cloak intercepts as much A, B or C Class damage as its reserve allows. 
It does not work versus spell damage except for that which arises from Diamond Javelins, Earth Hammer, Ice Bolt, Ice Projectiles or the like. Nor does it protect against hits directly to EN or Specific Grievous Injuries. 
It will not take a dye, but once completed, it will be pale grey in colour with marbling in darker shades. Against a mountainous, snowy or icy background, the wearer's Stealth is increased by 10. 
Where other protections exists, this is considered the outermost ''clothing layer'', with auras being depleted first, then this, unless specified otherwise. 

====Feathered Fascinator====
A Rank 8+ Milliner can use these feathers to create a green, teal and blue confection for a lady of quality (Impoverished Gentry or higher) and will charge 5 tsg for their work. Completed, it will weigh 4 oz. 
When it is worn, it enhances PB by 2 to a maximum of 23. If it is worn with a veil, then it does not, but makes the wearer mysterious and alluring. 
In addition, if the wearer should receive A, B or C Class damage that ends in 0, then their Protection is increased by 3. This effect does not stack with other armour features triggered by damage rolls (e.g., +2 Protection on an 8, 9, or 0). Apply only the single highest Protection bonus for that roll.

====Feather-Lined Fencing Cape====
A Rank 8+ Tailor can use these feathers to line a fencing cape and will charge 5 tsg for their work. It is worn in place of a cloak or coat over the primary shoulder and weighs 9 oz. 
If the wearer wields an A Class one handed melee weapon, they may deliver a Lunge, which can be delivered against a target within 2 hexes without penalty. The damage of the attack is increased by 3, and, once used, cools down for 3 Pulses. 
In addition, if the wearer should receive A, B or C Class damage that ends in 8 or 9, then their Protection is increased by 3. This effect does not stack with other armour features triggered by damage rolls (e.g., +2 Protection on an 8, 9, or 0). Apply only the single highest Protection bonus for that roll.

====Feather-Lined Greatcoat====
A Rank 8+ Tailor can use these feathers to line a greatcoat that looks like a bespoke uniform for a member of the Gestapo, and will charge 5 tsg for their work. Completed, the coat will weigh 2 lbs. 
It will increase the Gauge for the wearer by 3 and reduce cold damage by 3 per attack. 

====Weapons====
=====Heartdrinker Maingauche=====
This maingauche is made, entirely, from the antler of a peryton, and does not impair magic. It weighs 10 oz, has a base Strike Chance of 53, inflicts 1 rollup D10+3 A Class damage and may be wielded in Melee or Close. 
Against a humanoid, if the damage rolled ends in 8, a Specific Grievous injury is rolled for. If the result is 20 or less, then this injury is inflicted: 
''Your opponent’s aorta is severed and they are quite dead.'' 
It is also an enhanced Amulet of Luck , and if worked upon by a Shaper, Talismonger or Wiccan for three days, then it will add 2 to MR and 3 to Defence while it is worn. This will stack with one other Amulet of Luck. 
The effect of the Amulet will terminate on the occasion of the next seasonal festival, unless it is worked upon by a Shaper, Talismonger or Wiccan for three days.

=====Peryton Parasol=====
This parasol has a green, teal and blue canopy and weighs 1/2 lb. The shaft is the colour of aged ivory, has been forged from a single peryton antler, tempered in sassenach heart blood, and the handle curved into a delicate crook suitable for the hand of one who identifies as a lady whose Social Rank is at least Impoverished Gentry. 
When flourished by a Courtesan, it will attract the attention of gently born men over the age of fourteen. 
The canopy does not close as a parasol usually does. Instead, it morphs inside the shaft, and the parasol can be wielded as a small sword, requiring PS 10 and MD 15. It is advanced as if it were a Rapier, except that the base Strike Chance is 53% and inflicts 1 rollup D10 + 1 A Class damage. In addition to the bonuses that arise out of Rank, the wielder increases damage by 1 or every 5 points of MD in excess of 15, excess PS is ignored.

=====Antlered Gauntlet=====
This gauntlet requires peryton antlers that are crimson in colour which must be twined about it, increasing its weight by 3 lbs. It is advanced as a Cestus, has a base Strike Chance of 53% and inflicts 1 rollup D10 & 1 rollup D5 A Class damage. For every 10 points of PS in excess of 17, an additional rollup D5 is added. When the damage code is 1 rollup D10 & 4 rollup D5, then a D10 is rolled and any result greater than 9 means the gauntlet has been destroyed, although the damage is still inflicted. For every rollup D5 greater than 5, then 1 is added to the result on the breakage D10. 
Whenever a Strike is made with the gauntlet, the wielder rolls percentile dice twice and chooses the best roll.

=====Peryton Dancing Shoes=====
A Rank 8+ Cordwainer can use the leather and antlers of a peryton to fashion shoes for a lady of quality (Impoverished Gentry or higher), and will charge 5 tsg for their work. The shoes will cover the feet and ankles, the leather forming a T strap across the lady’s instep, and a secure heel cup. The toe box is fine, pointed and woven from slender withes of peryton antler to form a firm and protective point. Heels are carved from antlers, as well, and are two inches high. 
The wearer increases the number of Ranks they have in Dance by 1 while wearing these shoes, if they have any Rank in Courtesan. 
If they already have learnt Dance, then they may deliver a whirling kick with the shoes. A sharpened plate of peryton antler slides forward from beneath the toe box. The wearer uses their Rank in dagger, has a base Strike Chance of 47%, inflicts 1 rollup D10 + 1 A Class damage, and may be wielded in Melee or Close. 
In addition, if the wearer should receive A, B or C Class damage that ends in 1 or 2, then their Protection is increased by 4.

====Miscellany====
=====The Murmuration of Starlings=====
This heavily-knotted woollen wall hanging has been woven in the shape of a rhombus that is 3 feet long by 9 feet wide and weighs 9 lbs 11 oz. The background is blue and hundreds of tiny starlings are picked out in an iridescent, metallic, dark green thread. The starlings give the appearance of moving on their own. 
It is a legal target for the Instilling Flight spell, increasing the Base Chance by 10. The Warlock can increase the area of the carpet at the time of Casting up to a maximum of 5 feet 11 inches long and 17 feet 9 inches wide, so long as the ratio is maintained. 
At 3 ft x 9 ft, the textile would be too small for anyone else other than the Warlock. At 5 ft 11 in x 17 ft 9 in, the textile has sufficient area to hold 18 sizes of humanoids with comfort. 
The Warlock can dynamically increase or decrease the speed of flight up to its maximum, but must move at least 1 TMR of airspeed or they will plummet.
When the spell is Rank 10 or higher, and the Professional Skill Navigator is known, then a starling can be drawn from the textile and given a course. This reduces the level flight speed to half (+ 5% per Rank in Navigator), but obviating any need for the Warlock to maintain concentration. Indeed, they may even sleep if they trust their flight plans to a starling made out of wool.

=====Spectral Leg of Peryton=====
This left hind leg is particularly fleet. It may be attached to a mount, becoming a spectral part of their body, increasing TMR by 1, movement rate by 50 yards per minute and Magic Resistance by 7. The hoof may be shod, although it is entirely ethereal in nature.
=====The Stick of Black Tom Weir=====
This gnarled and twisted stick has a bronze ferrule, is made from a yard of blackthorn and weighs 2 lbs. It takes no harm from fire, magical or otherwise, although it can be set on fire.
If a point of Endurance is sacrificed to it, then:
* While the stick is in their hand, the wielder need not Prepare an Igniting Flammables or Pyrogenesis spell, although they must still pay its FT cost.
* The stick may be targetted with Igniting Flammables or Pyrogenesis which will manifest as a Firelight spell of the same Rank. If Invisibility is Cast upon the stick, then the Firelight may only be seen by those whose Witchsight, Wizardsight or Enhanced Vision is at least equal in Rank (to the Invisibility spell)
* The stick requires PS of 8 and MD of 12 to wield it. The Strike Chance versus an adjacent opponent is 47 (+ wielder’s MA and Rank in the spell). When the Strike Check is successful, 2 rollup D10 are rolled. The first D10 represents C Class damage, the second represents Fire damage. At Rank 10 another rollup D10 of Fire damage is added, and a final rollup D10 at Rank 20. If the wielder rolls 15% of their modified Strike Chance, the C Class damage is applied directly to Endurance. If they roll 5% of their modified Strike Chance, then they check the Specific Grievous Injury table for C Class weapons. Fire damage does not inflict damage directly to Endurance or Specific Grievous Injuries, nor does it Double or Triple.
* The wielder may manifest a Wall of Fire when they Cast a Wall of Thorns spell, and vice versa.
At the seasonal festival, the wielder chooses a number of spells from this list:
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;"
|-
|'''Spell''' || '''#'''
|-
|style= "text-align: left;"| Extinguish Fires||
|-
|style="text-align: left;"| Fireproofing||
|-
|style="text-align: left;"| Increase Temperature||
|-
|style="text-align: left;"| Slow Fire||
|-
|style="text-align: left;"| Smoke Creation||
|-
|style="text-align: left;"| GK Fire Counterspell||
|-
|style="text-align: left;"| SK Fire Counterspell||
|-
|style="text-align: left;"| Fire Armour|| 0/1
|-
|style="text-align: left;"| Cleansing Flame||0/1
|-
|style="text-align: left;"| Fire Arc|| 0/1
|}
The number of spells held and their Rank is the same as the wielder's Rank in Igniting Flammables or Pyrogenesis. All spells dissipate at the end of a season. 
If the stick is not intelligent, then it is opinionated and obnoxious. There is no social sin which it will not encourage and no indelicacy it will not utter.

=====Horn Card Case & Deck=====
This tongue and groove box of carved ram’s horn is 5 inches by 2 inches by 1 inch holds the 78 cards of a tarot deck, and weighs 7 oz. The magical property of the box is to Prepare the deck when the reader wishes to use it so that they do not have to. 
It has two functions: 
# When looking at a surface, object or entity that is no further distant than 10 feet, they may consult the deck to gain some notion of its nature, purpose, history or fate. This is treated as Divining Aspects. It is resolved as if the reader were using the Detect Aura Talent, although no aura is detected, nor can one be evaluated. 
# The reader may use the deck to perform an Ancient Divination when Divining Enchantment. However, this costs 1 PC when the attempt is successful. 
One point of PC is restored after a night’s sleep.

=====Portable Athanor=====
This tower of brick weighs 67 lbs, has a base diameter of 19 inches and rises to 2 feet. The bricks are not mortared but are, instead, designed to lock into specific places. 
The central tower is made from an alloy of mithril and Valinorian gold. The chimney is marked with glyphs that appear to be runes. 
It is not magical in nature, but when it is set up, allows an Alchemist to perform their usual operations.

=====Armageddon Rock=====
This tetrahedron of swirling shades of green is carved from malachite, has edges 6 inches long and weighs 3 lbs 10 oz, each vertex being capped with glyph covered bronze. An Adept of the College of Earth Magic can bind it by sacrificing a point of Endurance to it. This may be bought back in the usual way. 
;Earthen Reserve
On the occasion of binding it, the Adept may buy 1 Spell Point, costing 2,500 Experience. This may be used in the place of FT to Cast magic of the College of Earth Magic, only. 
While the tetrahedron holds at least 1 Spell Point , then the Adept is considered in contact with the earth, even if floating in the depths of space. 
Spell Points do not recover on their own. Instead, the Adept must hold the rock and spend 2 FT for each Spell Point, the entire process taking an hour. 
The Spell Point reserve of the rock may be increased by1 at the end of an adventure, but no more than once per season. 
;Slings & Stones
Six smaller rocks of the same appearance will manifest from it and float around the Adept they are bound to. They have a mass of 9 2/3rds of an oz each, a base Strike Chance of 57% and inflict 1 rollup D10 + 1 rollup D5 damage. 
If the sum of the damage roll is even, then it inflicts A Class damage or Possible Specific Grievous injuries, otherwise, it is C Class. 
The wielder may throw as many of these smaller rocks as they have Ranks in the weapon skill each Pulse. Once all six have been thrown, this function is lost until the next dawn. 
;Summoning Focus
The Adept may summon a single entity from the Felines, Great Land Mammals, Riding Animals, Reptiles, Snakes or Insects & Spiders categories when using the Ritual of Summoning Animals. 
From Rank 10 to 20, the Adept may summon a swarm of vermin, (crawling insects, spiders, frogs, toads, scorpions and the like. The swarm is large is enough and dense enough to cover the square of the Rank in square feet, but will spread out to cover an area twice that over a few Pulses. The swarm need not be of one type of creature unless the Adept so specifies, but cannot be other than vermin. 
The swarm is relatively harmless, although disturbing. Anyone inside the area suffers a penalty to Concentration, Cast and Strike Chances equal to the Rank of the Ritual unless they love vermin. 
If, however, a venomous swarm is summoned, then the area is halved. Living entities inside the area suffers 1 rollup D5 venom damage each Pulse, 2 rollup D5 at Rank 15 and 3 rollup D5 at Rank 20 until they escape. 
Vermin do not respond to shouts, but on the other hand, they will follow simple instructions, requiring a Pass Action from the Adept. If a single kind of vermin has been summoned and communicated with by means of the Converse with Animal spell, then the Adept can instruct them with a Free Act or Pass Action. 

=====Annis Boots=====
These dark brown boots fit a humanoid of size 8, and weigh 6lbs 7 oz. If the wearer walks in a zig-zag pattern within the ambit of their TMR, they leave no discernable track, except at each vertex. If they travel overland NE, NW, SE or SW, then they increase their movement rate by the square root of 2, adding 1 for every 3 points of TMR they use. 

=====Red Leather Reticule=====
This leather hand bag is made from red leather, has a strap and weighs 4 lbs. It is a rigid tube 9 inches long and 3 inches in diameter. It can hold up to seven changes of clothing, only one of which can be a set of armour. The contents do not contribute to the wearer’s Encumbrance. 
In the hands of a woman, it may be wielded as a flail with a base Strike Chance of 53% and inflicts 1 rollup D10+ 1 rollup D5 C Class damage. 

=====Witch Skins=====
These skins have been enchanted with the Skin Change spell, and further treated by special oils. Once the skin has been counterspelled, the wearer and skin are returned to their original forms.
The wearer of this form can only use wearable itemry which are not sized, e.g. necklaces, earrings, brooches or the like. Itemry which must be fitted can only be worn if the wearer and the skin are of the same size like armour, rings and most clothing. The DM will make the ultimate determination of what may be carried across the forms.
======Käppchen======
;Description:
Käppchen is a 10 year old girl who stands 4 ft 6in, with dark brown hair and brown eyes. She is pretty, with high colour and a light dusting of freckles across her cheeks. He face is round and she has an engaging smile which she can deploy as a Pass Action. 
She wears a red velvet hoodie, a blue and yellow check skirt, dark woolen hose and red Maryjane shoes.
{{BeastStats | 8 | 12 | 18 | Wearer's | 8| Wearer's | Wearer's | Wearer's| 16 |6|Wearer's }}
*Bear in mind that earrings or any piercing on a 10 year old girl in a European culture will draw substantial attention.

======Frau Trüdl======
;Description:
Frau Trüdl is middle aged with black hair streaked with grey which she wear's in a migraine-inducing bun. She is a large-bodied woman, 5ft 10in tall, weighs 147 lbs and issurprisingly strong She is quick of hand and eye. 
She wears a pale grey business suit, horn-rimmed glasses, heavy denier beige stockings and low-heeled black leather shoes.
{{BeastStats | 18 | 18 | 15 | Wearer's | 23| Wearer's | Wearer's | Wearer's| 9 |5|Wearer's }}

======Gert Schlanger======
;Description:
Gert is a spare man in his sixties, balding with tufts of white hair near his ears. He appears 5ft 6in tall, but he stoops, so is probably taller. He wears a light-coloured soft hat, a heavy woollen shirt which was once brown, heavy dungarees, braces and workman’s boots.
{{BeastStats | 16 | 15 | 12 | Wearer's | 14| Wearer's | Wearer's | Wearer's| 11 |4|Wearer's }}

==== Jewellery====
=====Unremarkable Gem=====
This pale pink, vaguely hexagonal stone is transparent, uncut and unremarkable. It weighs 1 1/2 carats. Once cleaned and polished, it can be made into an Amulet of the Lightness of Being by a Shaper, Talismonger or Wiccan.
======Amulet of the Lightness of Being======
This amulet improves the wearer’s Endurance by 2 which may exceed racial maximums, reduces penalties to AG by 2 and may be used to store the light of sunrise on Midsummer’s Day. This may be released as a Free Act, and fills the wearer’s megahex for four Pulses, then fades. 
It can only be recharged at noon of the next Midsummer's Day 
If the wearer succeeds in a 1 x PC check, they will notice if they are being subjected to alpha particles.

=====Ruby Crown of Tethering=====
This splinter of a Great Ruby has been carved into a ring from which five claws rise. If it is attached to a rod, then it will behave like a mace. If it is attached to a mace, it will increase damage by 1 and Strike Chance by 7. 
In addition, the crown will fly up to 25 feet, trailing a crimson tether, to attack an opponent as if they were adjacent to the wielder. The wielder may attempt to Entangle an opponent by this means. 
They may also use it as a climbing aid, the wielder subtracting 17 from the result of the Climbing Check. The teeth of the crown can latch securely onto stone or wood but not iron, bronze or steel, the tether will support a weight of 450 lbs and may be used as a swing line.

=====Ring of Protection=====
This plain greengold ring weighs 2oz. Its magic will only be effective if it is worn on the ring finger of the right hand. The wearer subtracts 10 from the die roll whenever they attempt to resist magic, making it more likely that they will succeed. It does not increase Magic Resistance. 
In addition, it surrounds the wearer with 11 pentagonal planes of protection that float around them on all sides a foot distant. Each pentagon is inscribed with magical glyphs along the edges. A pentagon will appear and protect the wearer so that the first 7 points of A, B or C Class damage points the wearer takes per pulse are ignored. It does not work versus spell damage except for that which arises from Diamond Javelins, Earth Hammer, Ice Bolt, Ice Projectiles or the like. Nor does it protect against hits directly to EN or Specific Grievous Injuries. 
Where a similar protection exists, the outermost is depleted first, which, unless specified otherwise, this magic is likely to be, given that it is an aura. 

=====Ring of Annis Steel=====
This dark blue, metallic ring is made from the skin of a Black Annis. It weighs 2 oz and must be worn on the middle finger of the right hand for its magic to be effective. 
If damage is inflicted by the bearer’s right hand or a weapon held in it, and the resulting damage ends in a 1 or 2, then the wound is infected. 
If the bearer is the target of an Annis’ womb attack, then they gain a bonus to their Magic Resistance of +20. If, for some reason, no Resistance Check is allowed, then a roll of 20 or less on percentiles will, however, void it. 
It has an unusually high frictional coefficient with respect to alpha particles, which will make the bearer’s finger warm when exposed to such things.

====Spell Racks====
===== Cat’s Cradle=====
This yard long golden thread has a silver core and weighs 4 oz. Spell matrices may be added to this thread by tying knots into it, which will hold the Adept’s Incantations depending on what resources they have committed to it. 
In addition, if the Adept loops the thread and plays Cat’s Cradle as a part of their Ritual of Purification, then while duration persists, they increase their MD by 1 and each Pulse, spell damage is ablatively reduced according to the following schedule:
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;"
|-
|'''Rank''' || '''Ablative Spell Armour'''
|-
|| 0 - 5|| 1
|-
|| 6 - 10|| 2
|-
|| 11 - 14|| 3
|-
|| 15 - 17|| 4
|-
|| 18 or 19|| 5
|-
|| 20|| 6
|}
This ablative protection is applied after all others have been used, and resets at the beginning of the next Pulse.

=====Mountain Scarf=====
This woollen scarf is 6 feet 2 inches long and 1 foot 1 inch wide, weighing 9lbs 11oz. It is a tartan with broad stripes of dark red and forest green, with thin cross-lines of dark blue. 
• The scarf magically renders the wearer’s ensemble dowdy and out of style. Their social rank will appear 1 less, with the exception of Greater Nobility, whose social rank is reduced by 2.
• If the wearer is proximate to the Astral Plane, they may use the scarf to cover their face, spend 1 FT to see into the Astral plane for 3 Pulses and for a distance of 40 feet. 
• It is a spell rack.

====Abilities====
=====Talents=====
======Detecting Fumes======
''Range:'' 10 feet + 10 / Rank 
''Experience Multiple:'' 100 
''Effects:'' Bearing in mind that fumes travel in still air at about 1 hex per Pulse. Wind speed and bearing have an important impact on their spread, so the working of this Talent also helps Black determine these factors. He may determine the presence of fumes and vapours and has a chance equal to his modified Perception (+ 3 / Rank) and determining approximately which direction it came from and how long it took to get to him so long as it is within range. 
If he shares a hex with a spoor, he can attempt to identify it and later, use the Talent to recognise the source. 
The Talent requires a Magical Pass Action, and involves sniffing the air. If the Adept’s sense of smell is compromised for whatever reason, then this Talent may not be used. 
It may only be attempted once per set of scents. When new ones are introduced, however, Black may attempt this Talent again. In addition, he may use it to interrogate an object that he shares a hex with. The answer to a Detect Fumes question will consist of a single concept or "bit" of information, and be largely Alchemical or Herbal in nature. 
If the information sought is not intrinsic to the scent of the object, Black will receive no answer. If he achieves a double or triple effect, he may ask two or three questions respectively. 
Only one attempt at Detecting Fumes may be made per object, although a subsequent Check may be required to identify a scent that has become concealed by others. 
An individual object will change over time, however, and a fresh attempt may be made when its composition has changed sufficiently to class it as “new”. If a scent has been Detected and is not otherwise obfuscated, the same information will be available without a Cast Check.

=====Blessings=====
======The Gift of the Mountain======
Black has drunk of the heartblood of a Mountain Hag and gained 1 point of Endurance, which has also increased its maximum value and 1 point of Natural Armour.

=====Afflictions=====
======The Curse of the Ivy-Shrouded Womb======
Kel has drunk of the heartblood of a Mountain Hag. Although she gained 1 point of Endurance which has also increased its maximum value, ivy grows through the walls of her womb making her infertile with respect to humanoids. Well, mammals. Or reptiles. 
While Dryads see her as a sister, creatures like Ents and Huorns may see her as unusually attractive and a potential partner, some going so far as to provide gifts of rich loam in the hopes of winning her attentions, Beating them off with a stick might not be the most productive strategy for dissuading their affections 
She gains a bonus of 10 to any endeavour involving the Artisan Skill: Gardening, and in addition, her Rank in this is added as a bonus to any endeavour involving Herbalism.

=====Incantations=====
======Hex – Evil Eye======
Range: Self 
Duration: 30 minutes (+30 minutes / Rank) 
Resist: None 
Target: Entity 
Effects: When the Adept casts this Incantation, a third eye appears on their forehead, which is normally invisible but is able to be seen by Witchsight and similar effects. 
While it is in effect, all spells they cast on others are resisted at a penalty of Rank unless the target is wearing an Amulet of Elder Flowers. 
Cost: 2,000 Experience 
Constraints: Unracks the spell, reduces FT value by 2

======Converse with Animals – Speaking to Enchanted Creatures======
Range: 15 ft (+ 15 ft / Rank) 
Duration: 10 minutes (+10 minutes / Rank) 
Resist: None 
Target: Entity 
Effects: When the Adept casts this Incantation, they gain the ability to speak and understand the language of all magical creatures. One casting will allow communication with any fantastical creature, but will not allow the Adept to comprehend fantastical creatures talking amongst themselves or to other people affected by this spell. 
Cost: 750 Experience 
Constraints: Unracks the spell

======Storm Calling – Call Lightning======
Range: 60 ft (+ 20 ft / Rank) 
Duration: Special 
Resist: Passive 
Target: Sky, entity, object or surface 
Effects: When the Adept casts this Incantation, they summon a storm front anywhere in sight. The Adept identifies a spot on the ground within range of the Incantation. The storm will travel towards it and stop over that point, whereupon it will begin a downpour (snow, rain, hail, sleet, or whatever else that the GM feels the clouds may contain). Generally a storm front can be seen for 20 to 30 miles. 
If no front can be seen, the spell may still be cast, but the Base Chance is reduced by 20. The storm front will take [D10 × 3] - 10 / Rank minutes, minimum 1 minute, to arrive. 
The storm lasts for 30 minutes (+10 minutes per Rank). While duration persists and the Adept is covered by the weather, they may point at a target within range, make a Cast Check requiring a Magical Fire Action and call down a stroke of lightning according to the schedule below: 
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;"
|-
|'''Rank''' || '''Storm Pool'''
|-
|| 0 - 5|| 1
|-
|| 6 - 10|| 2
|-
|| 11 - 14|| 3
|-
|| 15 - 17|| 4
|-
|| 18 or 19|| 5
|-
|| 20|| 6
|}
This will inflict 1 rollup D10 (+1 rollup D10 for every 10 Ranks) + 2 per Rank Lightning damage in the hex of the target, half that if they Resist. The stroke propagates across a megahex, extends 10 feet high (+3 feet per Rank) and inflicts half the damage of the central stroke. This may also be Resisted for half damage.
Once the stroke has been called, the ability enters cooldown and the next stroke may not be drawn forth for at least 3 Pulses. 
Once the duration has expired or the Storm Pool exhausted, the weather will weaken and return to normal over five minutes. 
This Incantation requires a phial of Fulminating Gold as a reagent, which will weigh 1 oz and cost 8 gs & sixpence. The phial must be filled with water and carried in a small box full of sawdust to transport it safely, then carefully dried at the destination. 
If such a phial detonates on a person, three Specific Grievous injuries are rolled for, and all applied. 
Cost: 2750 Experience 
Constraints: Unracks the spell, reagent: phial of Fulminating Gold, reduces FT value by 2 

======Summon Enchanted Creatures – Familiar Transference======
''Range:'' 1 mile (+1 mile per Rank) 
''Duration:'' Immediate 
''Target:'' Self 
''Effects:'' The Adept instantly transports themself to the location of their familiar if they are within range. The spell automatically fails if they are carrying more than 15 lbs + 5 lbs per Rank. 
''Cost:'' 3500 Experience 
''Constraints:'' Unracks the spell, reduces FT value by 2 

======Converse with Plants – The Barber’s Reeds======
''Range:'' Touch 
''Duration:'' 1 day (+1 / Rank) 
''Target:'' Reeds 
''Resistance:'' None 
''Effects:'' By means of this Incantation, the Adept targets up to a hex of reeds and gives them a simple message. The reeds will pass it to a gentle breeze who will pass it to another patch of reeds and so on. The message will travel at 10 miles per hour until it arrives at its destination, but storms will prevent any further travel until the weather is more clement. 
'' Cost:'' 750 Experience 
'' Constraints:'' Unracks the spell 

======Summoning Enchanted Creatures - Summon Redcap======
''Range:'' Works if the Fae Realm is dimensionally proximate 
''Duration:'' 1 minute (+15 seconds / Rank) 
''Target:'' Redcap 
''Resistance:'' None 
''Effects:'' This Incantation summons a small, wizened man once a day (unless another Summon Redcap is known). He is about 3 1/2 feet tall with a hunched back and wrinkled, leathery skin. However, his mouth is full of sharp, jagged teeth and his lips are pulled into a perpetual sneer. He is a homicidal maniac. 
Redcaps have a movement rate of 250 yards per minute. 
{{BeastStats | 19+RR | 16 | 20 | 14 | 19+RR | 22+Rank | 19 | 12+RR| 7 |6|Hide absorbs RR damage}}
;''Descritption:''
The Redcap will appear in the Pulse following a successful Cast Check, wearing a dark grey doublet spattered with old bloodstains, heavy woollen hose, with boots made of dark blue iron. He will be holding a sickle-like blade similar to a falchion.
Redcaps have a Racial Rank (RR) which is 1 for every prime equal to or less than the spell’s Rank (2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, and 19). Their FT value, however, is increased by the Rank of the Incantation. 
* He can pursue an opponent at his full TMR and deliver a kick with his boots, suffering a penalty of 10 to the Strike Chance. On the other hand, he will generally benefit from a rear attack. If the target is successfully struck, they take 1 rollup D10 + 1 C Class damage, modified by the Redcap's PS and Unarmed Combat Rank. They may avoid this by rolling 3 x AG, penalised by the Redcap's PS, failure indicating they take the damage and fall prone.
* He can make 3 attacks with the sickle blade against 1, 2 or 3 adjacent opponents.
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;"
|-
|style = "text-align: left"|'''Weapon''' || '''BC''' || '''DM''' || '''Class''' || '''Use''' || '''Rank'''
|-
|style = "text-align: left"| Sickle Blade|| 57% || [D + 4] || B || M ||0 + RR
|-
|style = "text-align: left"|Unarmed || 2*AG+(PS-15, min 0) % || [D10 - 3] || C || MC ||0 + RR
|-
|style = "text-align: left"|Iron Boots || 2*AG+(PS-15, min 0) % || [D10! + 1] || C || MC ||0 + RR
|}
He has no Rank with Stealth, but can see blood being pumped around a body to a range of 12 hexes. He can speak Common at Rank 4, and a Fey language at Rank 8, of which he is a native speaker. 
Racking this Incantation requires 3 of the Adept’s Endurance, which can be Healed naturally or magically once this tiny horror has been summoned. 
A Redcap will only serve if he is promised heartlood from one of his recently slain. If this promise is not kept, the next time he is summoned, the Cast Chance is halved and he will refuse any service until he is fed the heartblood of the recently slain, whereupon he will immediately return to his plane of origin. He will refuse another summons until 2 Tuesdays have passed. 
If a backfire occurs, then one is checked for, applied, '' and '' the little monster will attempt to kill and eat the heart of its summoner. 
'' Cost:'' 3,000 Experience 
'' Constraints:'' Unracks the spell, reduces EN by 3.

======Protection Against Were-Creatures - Lesser Circle of Protection======
''Range:'' Self 
''Duration:'' 30 minutes (+30 minutes per Rank) 
''Target:'' Entity 
''Resistance:'' None 
''Effects:'' Whenever the Adept is struck, this incantation creates a faintly shining green circle about a foot distant from their body. This ablatively reduces A, B or C Class damage until the circle collapses. It offers 1 point of ablative Damage Reduction for every non-prime Rank in the spell. Those Ranks are: 0, 1, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, and 20. 
The circle resets in the Military Scientist phase of combat. 
If the Adept has more than one ablative protection of this kind, then the outermost one is reduced first. 
''Cost:'' 5,000 Experience 
''Constraints:'' Unracks the spell, reduces FT by 2 

======Mind Cloak/Mind Shield - Circle of Iron Will======
''Range:'' Self 
''Duration:'' 20 minutes (+20 minutes per Rank) 
''Target:'' Entity 
''Resistance:'' None 
''Effects:'' This Incantation cloaks their mind so that their thoughts cannot be detected or “read”, e.g. by Telepathy or other mind reading talents, spells or rituals and their Resistance versus Mental Attack is increased by 10 (+ 2 / Rank). 
This effect extends to cover the megahex they are at the centre of. The Incantation does not block ESP or Empathy. 
Those within the volume of effect can cast Mind Speech as normal, or choose to decline Mind Speech from an external source. Magic that gives a higher bonus does not stack. Instead, it overwrites this effect. 
'' Cost:'' 5,000 Experience 
'' Constraints:'' Unracks the spell, reduces FT by 2. 

======Windwhistle - Love-Laden Breeze======
''Range:'' 10 feet (+ 10 feet / Rank) 
''Duration:'' Special 
''Target:'' Entity 
''Resistance:'' Passive 
''Effects:'' This Incantation requires a Love Philtre into which is poured a little blood (costing 1 Endurance) from the seducer. This can be healed back, magically or otherwise. 
The Adept calls forth a faint breeze which has a TMR of 1 (+1 for every 10 Ranks), which will carry the Love Philtre’s effluvium to a target within range. If the victim fails their Magic Resistance check, they fall in love with their seducer for 2 hours (+30 minutes / Rank of the Philtre). 
'' Cost:'' 1,500 Experience 
'' Constraints:'' Unracks the spell, reagent: Love Philtre, reduces FT by 1. 

======Virility – Enhanced Virility======
''Duration:''Special 
''Effects:'' This Incantation is cast over a male entity and greatly increases virility so that their first female sexual partner within 2 hours (+1 per Rank) has their chance of conceiving increased by 5 (+ 5 per Rank). 
The Adept can increase or decrease any one characteristic of the conceived by 1 (+ 1 per 3 or fraction Ranks) upon birth 
A child may receive Enhanced Virility and Blessing or Curse on Unborn Child, but magic of higher Rank overwrites modifications to the same characteristic. 
If conception occurs, the magic binds to the unborn child and may only be dissipated if Curse Removal is successful while the mother is still pregnant. 
'' Cost:'' 750 Experience 
'' Constraints:'' Unracks the spell, reduces FT by 1.

======Trollskin – Suspended Animation======
''Range:'' Touch 
''Duration:'' 2 hours (+3 hours for every even Rank) 
''Target:'' Entity 
''Resistance:'' None 
''Effects:'' This Incantation does not heal. Instead, the patient loses consciousness while the spell suspends the progress of diseases and poisons for the duration. 
Life functions continue, and at the DM’s discretion, may breakdown the factors causing the patient’s compromised health. 
; Juliet Poultice (requires Rank 4 Herbalism)
As much wolf’s foot moss as will fit into two hands of a girl of 10 should be left under the open sky to dry from Friday to Sunday after the next Monday, whereupon it will wither, turn sere and be much reduced. Wrap it in sheets of oilskin dressed in the juice of the olive, tying it with as much tightness as the braids of a girl of ten. This is all that need be done for it will keep without corruption. 
Buy from a respectable vintner a cup of brandy that is worth at least 7 gold shillings by the pint and haggle not lest the magic fail. 
When calamity befalls, apply the moss to the patient’s skin and douse with the brandy, but avoid an open flame, for this preparation loves fire (inflicting 3 rollup D10 fire damage if the brandy is of sufficient quality to be useful as a reagent and the concoction catches on fire). 
The moss is very thirsty, becoming unto a paste after but a small drink. Then, if it be known to you, Cast of the Trollskin spell and stand back, wonders to behold. 
:'' Wolf’s foot moss is an uncommon plant that grows in damp, rough environments, from sea level up to 20,000 feet. It likes flinty soil over which water flows. It is frost resistant and needs little attention so long as its needs are met.'' 
'' Cost:'' 1,500 Experience 
'' Constraints:'' Unracks the spell, reagent: Juliet Poultice, reduces FT by 1.

=====Summon Enchanted Creatures – Party Trick =====
''Range:'' 1 mile (+1 mile per Rank) 
''Duration:'' Immediate 
''Target:'' Door or portal 
''Resistance:'' Automatically successful 
''Effects:'' The Adept casts this spell on a door, doorway or portal. If one does not exist, then they must draw the outline of a door upon a wall or vertical surface, but this reduces the Cast Chance by 20. If the spell is successful, then, at the end of the Pulse they will arrive by the door in order of height, tallest first. The number of entities the Adept can summon is indicated by the following schedule:
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;"
|-
|'''Rank''' || '''Entities'''
|-
|| 0 - 5|| 1
|-
|| 6 - 10|| 2
|-
|| 11 - 14|| 3
|-
|| 15 - 17|| 4
|-
|| 18 or 19|| 5
|-
|| 20|| 6
|}
The Adept must have a material link that connects them to those they target (a lock of hair, nail clippings, blood etc.). 
The Incantation fails if any of the entities has an Encumbrance Penalty greater than 2 to Agility, any entity out of range will be excluded from it, and any target may decline the summons. 
''Cost:''5000 Experience 
''Constraints:'' Unracks the spell, reduces FT value by 4 

====True Names====
=====Name of the Wheel of Fire=====
The Individual True Name of this unique entity is ''Jagat Chakra''. There are only 21 Ranks available. In other words, every Rank this Name is raised by one reduces the maximum Rank that the name can be advanced by anyone else. 
If the Spell of Name Change is known, and their Rank in the Generic True Name ''Wheel of Fire'' is Ranked to 10 or higher, then they may assume this shape:
======Shape of The Wheel of Fire======
The Namer rises about a foot above the ground, encircled by a vertically aligned ring of barely visible white and blue flames. The Namer gains a Flywheel pool holding 1 Moment (+1 for every 5 Ranks in the Generic True Name). Momenti convert 1:1 to hexes, and can be added to TMR in any direction. Movement that terminates with them unattached to the ground is generally followed by aggressive acceleration toward the nearest surface below them. 
The pool refreshes 1 Moment at a time at the beginning of the Pulse. 
If the Namer is not in combat, they may increase their movement rate over five minutes to 30 mph (+1 mph / Rank). They gain a bonus of twice the Rank of the Generic True Name to any acrobatic or speed based manoeuvre with the wheel. 
Their Defence is increased by 2 (+3 for every even Rank in the Generic True Name). 
At Rank 20, they may perform an additional Defensive Withdraw, Retreat or Non-Magical Pass Action except when Stunned. The actions are resolved consecutively, in either order. The figure’s total movement may not exceed their TMR.

======The Battle Form======
The Namer may take a Pass Action and assume a Battle Form, their equipment also growing to match them. This changes the duration of the spell from Concentration Max: 30 minutes (+30 minutes / Rank) to a standard duration of 1 minute (+ 1 minute / Rank) (not requiring Concentration), so must be Counterspelled to end it before duration expires. 
Based on their Rank in the Individual True Name, the change increases their 
: Size to 9, a 2 hex creature @ Rank 15, 3 @ Rank 20
: PS by 7 (+ 1 for every even Rank)
: EN by 8 (+ 1 for every even Rank)
: TMR by 1 (+ 1 @ Rank 10 & 20)
: Reduces each application of damage by 1 (+1 @ Rank 10 & 20)
Bonuses to PS and EN from Strength of Stone or Waters of Strength and the like do not stack, instead, the greatest effect applies. 
They gain a pool which holds 1 (+1 @ Rank 10 & 20) Fireheals. Fireheal causes the Namer's wounds to burst into flame, curing 1 (+1 for every 5 Ranks in this Individual True Name) DP so long as healing occurs within a minute of receiving it. It requires a Pass Action, and at Rank 20, either a Pass Action or a Free Act but not both. 
At Rank 10 in the Individual True Name and for each Rank thereafter, the Namer can take a Free Act to ignite with white and blue flames which inflict 1 point of magical fire damage to anything within 5 feet of them (so 10 magical fire damage @ Rank 20).

=====The Name of the Hugh Team=====
This is the Individual True Name of a gestalt entity. There are only 21 Ranks available. Every Rank this Name is raised by one reduces the maximum Rank that the name can be advanced by anyone else. 

If the Namer’s Rank in the Generic True Name Jedburgh Team is Ranked to 10 or higher, and he knows the Individual True Name Hugh Team, he may form the gestalt. 

'''The Gestalt''' 
'''Hugh''' 
The Namer does not change in any way, but his identity becomes ‘Code Name: Hugh’. Spells that Locate or Scry will not be able to find him unless their Rank is higher than this GTN. 

In addition, the Team can speak with each other in the Namer Tongue which, otherwise, only members of that college can use. 

{| class="wikitable" style="float: right; margin-right: 20px; width: 75%; border-collapse: collapse; text-align: left; vertical-align: top;"
! style="background-color:#1e293b; color:white; text-align:center; width: 10%;" | GTN Rank
! style="background-color:#1e293b; color:white; text-align:center; width: 10%;" | Jedburgh Rank
! style="background-color:#0f172a; color:white; text-align:center; width: 10%;" | Mechanician
! style="background-color:#3b82f6; color:white; text-align:center; width: 45%;" | Combat & Profile
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''0'''
| style="text-align:center;" | '''0'''
| Brickmaking & laying

| rowspan="8" |
'''Languages:'''
* French: 8L (Native)
* German: 8L (Native)
* Hebrew: 5L (Liturgical)
* English: 4L (Accented & halting)
 
'''Adventuring Skills:'''
* '''Stealth:''' 3 × AG + (5 / Jedburgh Rank)
* '''Climbing:''' 4 × MD + (8 / Jedburgh Rank)
* '''Swimming:''' PS + AG + EN + (10 / Jedburgh Rank)
* '''Driving:''' (PC + MD)/2 + (8 / Jedburgh Rank)
 
'''Weapon Skills:''' Unarmed Combat, Pistol
 
'''Primary Firearm: Astra 400'''
* ''Weight:'' 2 lbs 4 oz | ''Base Skill:'' 25%
* ''Damage:'' 2 SG + D10! | ''Magazine:'' 8 rounds
* ''Range:'' 8 hexes
* ''Special:'' If the result is not greater than 83, then it inflicts a rollup D10 to EN + 2 Specific Grievous injuries. Shield defence is ignored.
 
'''Special Notes:'''
* Demolitions expert.
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''1'''
| style="text-align:center;" | '''1'''
| Architecture
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''4'''
| style="text-align:center;" | '''2'''
| Traps
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''7'''
| style="text-align:center;" | '''3'''
| Explosives
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''10'''
| style="text-align:center;" | '''4'''
| Bridges
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''13'''
| style="text-align:center;" | '''5'''
| Chronometers
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''16'''
| style="text-align:center;" | '''6'''
| Fortifications
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''19'''
| style="text-align:center;" | '''7'''
| Namer’s choice
|}
'''Pierre Villon (Roger Salomon Gisburger)''' 
{{BeastStats | 14 | 23 | 15 | 6 | 17| 20 | 18 | 16 |12|5|None }}

Pierre is a slender man of around forty with clever hands and receding, dark brown hair. He stands 5ft 9in and weighs 135 lbs. He is myopic, wears horn-rimmed glasses, and continuously smokes Russian cigarettes. He has a distinct, bird-like aspect, being quick and decisive in his movements. 
Born and raised in a Jewish community in Alsace, he naturally grew up bilingual in French and German. During his youth, he also learned liturgical Hebrew; while it possessed little practical use outside the synagogue at the time, it would serve him crucially in later years to ferret out Gestapo agents attempting to pass themselves off as Jewish refugees. 
Never particularly devout, Pierre had become entirely secular by the time he graduated from the Lycée de Colmar. He spent three years studying architecture at Strasbourg University, where he was first introduced - and subsequently committed to - communism. During the Spanish Civil War, he used his architectural and analytical mind to write scathing political polemics against fascism. 
By the time World War II was officially declared, he was already deeply embedded in active, clandestine resistance. His physical designs and structural traps heavily reflect the minimalist, functional influences of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus movement. 

'''Dibikad (Kad) Pontiac''' 
{| class="wikitable" style="float: right; margin-right: 20px; width: 75%; border-collapse: collapse; text-align: left; vertical-align: top;"
! style="background-color:#1e293b; color:white; text-align:center; width: 10%;" | GTN Rank
! style="background-color:#1e293b; color:white; text-align:center; width: 10%;" | Jedburgh Rank
! style="background-color:#10b981; color:white; text-align:center; width: 55%;" | Combat & Profile
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''0'''
| style="text-align:center;" | '''0'''

| rowspan="8" |
'''Languages:'''
* Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe): 8LL (Literate in Fiero and Syllabics)
* French: 4L (Canadian accent)
* English: 8L (Canadian accent)
 
'''Adventuring Skills:'''
* '''Stealth:''' 3 × AG + (5 / Jedburgh Rank)
* '''Climbing:''' 4 × MD + (8 / Jedburgh Rank)
* '''Swimming:''' PS + AG + EN + (10 / Jedburgh Rank)
 
'''Radio & Communications Operations:'''
* Highly skilled radio operator possessing a distinctive fist.
* Reliable transmission speed of 20 words per minute.
* 'Code Talk to London' if a two-way audio connection is available.
 
'''Weapon Skills:'''
* Unarmed Combat
* Tomahawk: 2 lbs | 45% | D10 + 3 | B | 8 hexes | RMC
* Garotte: 1 lb | 30% | D10 + 3 | - | P | C
* Composite Bow: 8 lbs | 55% | D10 + 4 | A | 225 hexes | 24 arrows
 
'''Winchester 1897 (Sawn-Off Shotgun)'''
* ''Weight:'' 5 lbs 8 oz | ''Base Skill:'' 50%
* ''Damage:'' 4 SG + D5! | ''Magazine:'' 8 rounds | ''Range:'' 7 hexes
* ''Special Rules:''
**Hexes 0–3: Pellets spread ~1 inch per yard, inflicting 1 rollup D5 to EN + 4 Specific Grievous injuries. Shield defence does not apply.
**Hexes 4–7: Strike Chance is halved; inflicts 1 SG only.
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''1'''
| style="text-align:center;" | '''1'''
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''4'''
| style="text-align:center;" | '''2'''
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''7'''
| style="text-align:center;" | '''3'''
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''10'''
| style="text-align:center;" | '''4'''
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''13'''
| style="text-align:center;" | '''5'''
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''16'''
| style="text-align:center;" | '''6'''
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''19'''
| style="text-align:center;" | '''7'''
|}

{{BeastStats | 22 | 16 | 18 | 8 | 23| 21 | 19 | 18| 18 |6|None }}
Kad was born in 1916 on Manitoulin Island, Lake Huron, into the Anishinaabe culture of the Odawa people. He grew up when the Canadian government actively prohibited the spiritual and cultural practices of his people, forcing their traditions completely underground. 

At the age of six, Kad was abducted by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and interned at the Spanish Indian Residential Jesuit School in Ontario. The school stripped him of his traditional clothing, took his name, and strictly forbade him from speaking his language. 
Defying the strict doctrine of the Jesuit, Kad managed to escape in the summer of his tenth year, fleeing all the way back to Manitoulin Island. Though the RCMP were waiting to recapture him at his family home, his arrival was safely intercepted by an elder, Reed That Whispers, who guided him deep into the safety of the northern forests. 

Kad lived as a fugitive in the wilderness for several years, maintaining cautious contact with neighboring First Nations communities. By the age of sixteen, he crossed the border into the United States, attending Neche High School in North Dakota. 
Following his schooling, he enlisted in the US Army, where his exceptional wilderness survival skills were quickly recognized. He was seconded to the Signal Corps for a year before being quietly, unofficially separated from his unit for special duties. 

Kad holds deep resentment and zero allegiance toward the Allies or white society at large due to a lifetime of systemic persecution. Conversely, his hatred of the Nazis is visceral, deep, and relentless. 
On an individual basis, he remains open to cooperation with white people but would never actively seek them out were it not for the immediate necessity of the war effort. 

Kad is a highly skilled radio operator possessing a distinctive "fist". He can reliably key at 20 words per minute. If a stable, two-way audio signal can be established, he can Code Talk to London. 

The Team’s level of skill is determined by Jedburgh Rank, which is a function of the GTN. Weapon Skills (aside from Dibikad’s Rank with Tomahawk) do not exceed the maximum, and firearms are treated as Crossbows (except they only need to be reloaded when their magazine is exhausted). 

When the Team is summoned for the first time in a season, all of their ammunition is filled. If reloads prove necessary subsequently, the Namer will have to provide them. 

The entire Team adds the Rank of the GTN to their Defence but this is overwritten by spells that give more. Their passive Magic Resistance is similarly increased but not their active Magic Resistance. 

'''Hugh Team''' 
The Team operates at a very high level of efficiency, communicating largely through body language, a few key words, signs and glances. It is not telepathic in nature, but reflects extensive training in life-threatening circumstances and abiding trust raised to a supernatural level. Code Name: Hugh’s initiative is increased by 1 for every even Rank of the ITN and he may Rally the Team with a Free Act. 

If the Rank of the ITN is 1 or higher, then Code Name: Hugh always knows if Pierre or Kad have died. 

'''Command Economy''' 
Code Name: Hugh can direct a member of the team with a Pass Action. When the ITN is Rank 10, he can direct a member with a Free Act or a Pass Action but not both in the same Pulse. At Rank 20, he can direct one with a Free Act and the other with a Pass Action in the same Pulse. 
Pierre and Kad act at least 10 steps further down the initiative ladder than Code Name: Hugh but this penalty is reduced by 1 for every four Ranks in the ITN. 
'''Wireless Signals''' 
The team can send messages to each other at a cost of 1 FT. The target must be visible and within hearing distance to receive a message if the ITN Rank is less than 6. 
From Rank 6 to 10, they need only be visible. 
From Rank 11 to 16, they need not be visible but must be where the sender believes them to be, otherwise the attempt automatically fails. 
From Rank 16–19, Code Name: Hugh may broadcast to either Pierre or Kad but not both, and need not know where they are for the same FT cost as if he were Casting the Name Change spell. 
At Rank 20, Code Name: Hugh can broadcast a message to Pierre and Kad simultaneously for the same FT cost as if he were Casting the Name Change spell.
{| class="wikitable" style="width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; text-align: left; vertical-align: top;"
! style="background-color:#1e293b; color:white; text-align:center; width: 10%;" | ITN Rank
! style="background-color:#1e293b; color:white; text-align:center; width: 12%;" | CN: H Initiative Bonus
! style="background-color:#1e293b; color:white; text-align:center; width: 15%;" | Team Initiative Lag
! style="background-color:#0f172a; color:white; text-align:center; width: 23%;" | Command Economy
! style="background-color:#10b981; color:white; text-align:center; width: 40%;" | Wireless Signals
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''0–1'''
| style="text-align:center;" | +0
| style="text-align:center;" rowspan="2" | -10 steps
| rowspan="5" | Direct 1 team member per Pulse (Pass Action), Rally Team (Free Act)
| rowspan="3" | Target must be visible and within hearing distance. (Cost: 1 FT)
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''2–3'''
| style="text-align:center;" | +1
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''4–5'''
| style="text-align:center;" | +2
| style="text-align:center;" rowspan="2" | -9 steps
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''6–7'''
| style="text-align:center;" | +3
| rowspan="3" | Target must be visible (hearing range no longer required). (Cost: 1 FT)
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''8–9'''
| style="text-align:center;" | +4
| style="text-align:center;" rowspan="3" | -8 steps
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''10'''
| style="text-align:center;" rowspan="2" | +5
| rowspan="6" | Direct 1 team member per Pulse (Pass Action or Free Act).
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''11'''
| rowspan="3" | Target hidden; succeeds only if target is exactly where sender believes them to be. (Cost: 1 FT)
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''12–13'''
| style="text-align:center;" | +6
| style="text-align:center;" rowspan="2" | -7 steps
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''14–15'''
| style="text-align:center;" | +7
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''16–17'''
| style="text-align:center;" | +8
| style="text-align:center;" rowspan="2" | -6 steps
| rowspan="2" | Broadcast to Pierre or Kad. Location unknown. (Cost: Name Change FT equivalent)
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''18–19'''
| style="text-align:center;" | +9
|-

| style="text-align:center;" | '''20'''
| style="text-align:center;" | +10
| style="text-align:center;" | -5 steps
| Direct one with a Free Act and the other with a Pass Action in the same Pulse.
| Broadcast to both simultaneously. Location unknown. (Cost: Name Change FT equivalent)
|}
'''Translocation''' 
By taking a Pass Action to Cast the Name Change Spell and spending as much FT, Code Name: Hugh may translocate to either Kad or Pierre or swap places with them if they are within the range indicated in the table:
{| class="wikitable" style="width: 30%; border-collapse: collapse; text-align: center;"
! style="background-color:#1e293b; color:white; width: 8%;" | ITN Rank
! style="background-color:#0f172a; color:white; width: 10%;" | Translocation Range
! style="background-color:#3b82f6; color:white; width: 12%;" | Castle Range
((Rank x Rank)× 10) ft
|-
| '''1''' || 20 ft || 10 ft
|-
| '''2''' || 80 ft || 40 ft
|-
| '''3''' || 180 ft || 90 ft
|-
| '''4''' || 320 ft || 160 ft
|-
| '''5''' || 500 ft || 250 ft
|-
| '''6''' || 720 ft || 360 ft
|-
| '''7''' || 980 ft || 490 ft
|-
| '''8''' || 1,280 ft || 640 ft
|-
| '''9''' || 1,620 ft || 810 ft
|-
| style="background-color: #f8fafc;" | '''10''' || style="background-color: #f8fafc; font-weight: bold;" | 1 mile 720 ft || style="background-color: #f8fafc;" | 1,000 ft
|-
| '''11''' || 1 mile 1,980 ft || 1,210 ft
|-
| '''12''' || 1 mile 3,360 ft || 1,440 ft
|-
| '''13''' || 1 mile 4,860 ft || 1,690 ft
|-
| '''14''' || 2 miles 1,200 ft || 1,960 ft
|-
| '''15''' || 2 miles 2,940 ft || 2,250 ft
|-
| '''16''' || 2 miles 4,800 ft || 2,560 ft
|-
| '''17''' || 3 miles 1,500 ft || 2,890 ft
|-
| '''18''' || 3 miles 3,600 ft || 3,240 ft
|-
| '''19''' || 4 miles 540 ft || 3,610 ft
|-
| '''20''' || '''10 miles''' || 4,000 ft
|}
'''Equipment''' 
Both Kad and Pierre have equipment which is soul bound to them, and always manifest as noted above. They may be assigned other equipment which will persist across subsequent Castings of the Name Change spell, but Pierre can only carry a total of 25 lbs, while Kad can carry up to 55. Lost or destroyed equipment can be replaced, and, once instantiated, they can be given even more, with appropriate adjustments to their Encumbrance.

====Allies====

=== Watch Order ===
<css>
table.watches th, table.watches td { text-align: center; }
table.watches th { width: 3em; }
</css>
{| class="watches" |
|-
! 1 !! 2 !! 3 !! 4 !! 5 !! 6 !! 7 !! 8 !! 9 !! 10 !! 11 !! 12
|-
| colspan="2" | 1
| colspan="2" | 2
| colspan="2" | 3
| colspan="2" | 4
| colspan="2" | 5
| colspan="2" | 6
|}

=== Marching Order ===
{| width="90%"
!colspan="3" align="center"| Skirmish Formations (Front)
|-
|align="center"| ''Default''
 
|align="center"| ''Double File''
 
|align="center"| ''Single File''
??? 
??? 
??? 
??? 
??? 
??? 
|}

==Calendar==


{| cellspacing=1 width="100%" border=0 class="Season" id="Autumn"
! colspan=15 | <h1>Autumn</h1>
|-
| class="calMoon" |
! colspan=2 | Moonday
! colspan=2 | Duesday
! colspan=2 | W'ansday
! colspan=2 | Th'rsday
! colspan=2 | Frysday
! colspan=2 | Reapsday
! colspan=2 | Sunday
|-
| class="calMoon" | [[Image:moon1.jpg]]
| colspan=14 | [[Lugnasad]]
|-
! colspan=15 | [[Vintage]] (6)
|-
| colspan=11 height=54px |  
| class=day | 1 ||  
| class=day | 2 ||  
|-
| class="calMoon" height=54px | [[Image:moon2.jpg]]
| class=day | 3 || '''5 Oct 1942''' — Guild commission; Novodom; Wormwood's briefing
| class=day | 4 || '''6 Oct 1942''' — Rune Portal; descent into the Abyss
| class=day | 5 || '''7 Oct 1942''' — Abyss crossing
| class=day | 6 || '''8 Oct 1942''' — Abyss crossing
| class=day | 7 || '''9 Oct 1942''' — Moonlight Sleeping joins at the river
| class=day | 8 || '''10 Oct 1942''' — Demon waves; remains harvested
| class=day | 9 || '''11 Oct 1942''' — Demon waves; remains harvested
|-
| class="calMoon" height=54px | [[Image:moon3.jpg]]
| class=day | 10 || '''12 Oct 1942''' — Demon waves; remains harvested
| class=day | 11 || '''13 Oct 1942''' — Demon waves; remains harvested
| class=day | 12 || '''14 Oct 1942''' — Demon waves; remains harvested
| class=day | 13 || '''15 Oct 1942''' — Demon waves; remains harvested
| class=day | 14 || '''16 Oct 1942''' — Demon waves; remains harvested
| class=day | 15 || '''17 Oct 1942''' — Demon waves; remains harvested
| class=day | 16 || '''18 Oct 1942''' — Demon waves; remains harvested
|-
| class="calMoon" height=54px | [[Image:moon0.jpg]]
| class=day | 17 || Blood Moon (Hunter's Moon) '''Mon 19 Oct 1942''' — Force Bridge; Reich; London; train north
| class=day | 18 || '''20 Oct 1942''' — Admiral Rollins briefs; training begins
| class=day | 19 || '''21 Oct 1942'''
| class=day | 20 || '''22 Oct 1942''' — Perpignan briefing; shoot guns shown
| class=day | 21 || '''23 Oct 1942''' — Syringes; cover identities agreed
| class=day | 22 || '''24 Oct 1942''' — Papers to Tabitha; weapons chosen
| class=day | 23 || '''25 Oct 1942''' — Weapons training; Kel drills party
|-
| class="calMoon" height=54px | [[Image:moon1.jpg]]
| class=day | 24 || '''26 Oct 1942''' — Training; Dross learns to drive
| class=day | 25 || '''27 Oct 1942''' — Training
| class=day | 26 || '''28 Oct 1942''' — Training
| class=day | 27 || '''29 Oct 1942''' — Training
| class=day | 28 || '''30 Oct 1942''' — Training; insertion plan settled
| class=day | 29 || '''Sat 31 Oct 1942''' — Shoot at Morrigan; eleven Perytons
| class=day | 30 || Beerfest '''1 Nov 1942''' — Ahnenerbe/Klaus Barbie intel arrives via decrypt
|}
{| cellspacing=1 width="100%" border=0 class="Season" id="Winter"
! colspan=15 | <h1>Winter</h1>
|-
| class="calMoon" |
! colspan=2 | Moonday
! colspan=2 | Duesday
! colspan=2 | W'ansday
! colspan=2 | Th'rsday
! colspan=2 | Frysday
! colspan=2 | Reapsday
! colspan=2 | Sunday
|-
| class="calMoon" | [[Image:moon2.jpg]]
| colspan=14 | [[Samhain]]
|-
! colspan=15 | [[Frost]] (7)
|-
! colspan=3 height=54px |  
| class=day | 1 || Guild Meeting Training at Achnacarry
| class=day | 2 || Training at Achnacarry
| class=day | 3 || Training at Achnacarry
| class=day | 4 || Training at Achnacarry
| class=day | 5 || Training at Achnacarry
| class=day | 6 || Torch lands; Barbie reaches Lyon
|-
| class="calMoon" height=54px | [[Image:moon3.jpg]]
| class=day | 7 || Diane missing; party departs
| class=day | 8 ||  
| class=day | 9 || Priest Alesch captured and killed in Lyon
| class=day | 10 || Reach Saint-Marcel; recon the facility
| class=day | 11 || Pomblière scouted; mountain hag found
| class=day | 12 || Warded ambush camp; 11 Nov 1942
| class=day | 13 || Hag slain; avalanche; 12 Nov 1942
|-
| class="calMoon" height=54px | [[Image:moon0.jpg]]
| class=day | 14 || Hag's lair looted; von Kleist unmasked
| class=day | 15 || Gestapo raid; women found at Bourget-du-Lac
| class=day | 16 ||  
| class=day | 17 ||  
| class=day | 18 ||  
| class=day | 19 ||  
| class=day | 20 ||  
|-
| class="calMoon" height=54px | [[Image:moon1.jpg]]
| class=day | 21 ||  
| class=day | 22 ||  
| class=day | 23 ||  
| class=day | 24 ||  
| class=day | 25 ||  
| class=day | 26 ||  
| class=day | 27 ||  
|-
| class="calMoon" height=54px | [[Image:moon2.jpg]]
| class=day | 28 ||  
| class=day | 29 ||  
| class=day | 30 ||  
| colspan=8 |  
|}

==Appendices==