Operation Heckler & Koch

Scribe Notes

Summary

Adventure:Operation: Heckler & Koch

GM: Jim Arona
Season: Winter 826 WK
Night: Sunday
Online: Discord
Level: Mediumish

Party

• Black - A knight of House Douglas - played by Ed Douglas
• Kel - A dream-weaver elf - played by Terry Spencer
• Tulip - An earth mage and animal keeper - played by Trish
• Jedburgh - Triune Namer - played by Ross Alexander
• Dross - A human New Age occultist - played by Klaude

Time on adventure

1 Frost 826 WK to ??? 826 WK

Employer

Rear Admiral Rolland, CB

Mission

Operation: Heckler & Koch involves a period of training in the wintry north, insertion into Provence, a rescue and desperate exfiltration to Sant Marti d'Empuries, and such investigation as the party is capable if they are not dead.

Pay

The knowledge that you have made the world a better place.

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 — Kel, Tulip, Dross, Jedburgh and Black — was 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 spent the Guild's advance and a good deal of their own money on enchantments and consumables, and 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 Novodom on 3 Vintage, where 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. 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. 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 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 his staves destroyed every demon wave without the party fighting, and Black harvested the remains for alchemy. They left the Abyss through an unmanned castle of black stone that Moonlight admitted he had not been able to explain, and emerged at Victoria Underground Station in London on 19 October 1942. A train north brought them to Achnacarry House in Scotland, where Admiral Rollins briefed them on Operation Torch and on the compromised Heckler escape line running out of Gestapo-held Lyon. 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 the seventy-second goetic demon is involved and belongs to a cabal calling itself the Final Five. The session ended with 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 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

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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.

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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 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 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 took Dr Wormwood's knowledge syringes, Dross taking French with Kel steadying him; 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 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. 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. 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 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. The first wave came out of the north far faster than expected, and Macavity was mauled unconscious moments after opening fire. 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 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. 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 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.

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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 woman named Bethaniel Darcy, 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.

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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 an hour and a half of elevenses on the hill while Tulip mended the worst of the injured, and Black handed round Second Chance amulets to Tulip, Jedburgh, Dross and Kel before they went back out. Traps and animal-binding were ruled out, and the plan they settled on instead was Kel's line of illusory soldiers with Jedburgh's lightning laid straight down the row, which broke the second flight almost without a fight. The third and fourth flights went far worse: Tulip was ruined in a single pass, and three Perytons converged on Black and took his left hand off at the wrist. He 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 fitted a recovered iron leg to Corniger, then put a long afternoon of orders through the house tailor, Bethaniel Darcy — 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 spent fifteen days bleeding it full again so that Tulip could drink it and stand up whole, and used the same fortnight designing a replacement hand he has no quicksilver to build. The session closed on 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 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 Bethaniel Darcy; 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) ? Day 42 (15 Nov) Black recharges the Sardonyx vial; designs a prosthetic hand; Jedburgh left to heal naturally Day 42 (15 Nov) Tulip drinks the recharged vial and recovers fully

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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.

---

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 an argument over whether Tulip could hold a summoned creature capable of arguing back, and then 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 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 training and craft, with Black building his prosthetic hand one-handed, while Tulip's questions about the district turned up 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; 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 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 Diane's last, garbled message: delayed destroying the line's documentation in Lyon, injured, she caught the eleven o'clock train for Perpignan. 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; Diane herself was recognised as Virginia Hall. The party then departed by Wellington bomber, intending to leave it early on Dross's carpet under concealment to avoid the fighters based at Salt Reef, flying out into a windy but unexpectedly clear morning. Chronological Timeline 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

Buffs & Mil Sci

Buffs

Long Term (assumed always on)

Magic (caster)	Rk	Effects	Duration	Bk	Jd	Kl	Tp	TBA	TBA	TBA
Tulip	11	Strength of Stones +11 EN or ST	12 hrs				x
Tulip	7	Converse with animals (Bear, Raven, Fox)	24 hrs				x

Self Only

Magic (caster)	Rk	Effects	Duration	Bk	Jd	Kl	Tp	Bk	JB	Dr
TBA (TBA)
TBA (TBA)
TBA (TBA)
TBA (TBA)
TBA (TBA)
TBA (TBA)

Short Term (cast when needed)

Magic (caster)	Rk	Effects	Dur	Bk	Jd	Kl	Tp	TBA	TBA	TBA
Tulip	11	Armour of Earth +24%	6hrs
Tulip	7	area of effect Blending	7hrs
TBA (TBA)
TBA (TBA)

Cast by minions and retainers

Magic (caster)	Rk	Effects	Dur	Location	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA	TBA
TBA (TBA )
TBA (TBA )
TBA (TBA )
TBA (TBA )
TBA (TBA )

Senses and other stuff

TBA	Rk	Effects	Dur	Bk	Jd	Kl	Tp	TBA	TBA	TBA
Sense Danger (%)
Detect Ambush (%)		Ranger (-5/rank of opposition)
TBA
See Invis (Rk)		Effective rank for seeing invisible
Stealth (%)		Standard / Ranger Outdoors

Animal (and other) Companions

Animal	Base key stats	Always on	Effects
Bear (Tu)	22PC 39PS 15MD 14AG 6TMR 9WP -MA 34EN 38FT	animal growth, armour earth, strength stones, blending, greater on resistance, in combat: enchanted fang	bind animal, in-card, natural weapons are magical weapons of cold +5dmg, enchanted fang +3dmg, greater on resistance
Massive Python (Tu)	18PC 50PS -MD 12AG 9TMR 16WP -MA 30EN 35FT	slithering 450, climbing 200	magical staff
War dog Sabrina (Tu)	24PC 11PS 19MD 20AG 8TMR 21WP 18EN 33FT	armour earth, strength stones, blending	vanilla bound animal, in card
Raven (Tu)	18PC 3PS 23MD 22AG 12TMR 22WP 10EN 24FT	blending, greater on resistance	vanilla bound animal, in card
Midsummer Vixen (Tu)	12PC 5PS 19MD 24AG 6TMR 7EN 12FT 8MA	special ritually bound, blending, greater on resistance	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

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.

Remnants

Remnants	Number	Remnants	Number	Remnants	Number	Remnants	Number
Afterglow [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	5	Anchor [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	6	Apple [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	5	Book [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	10
Bridge [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	7	Castle [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	2	Chaos [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	10	City [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	7
Confusion [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	5	Dog [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	5	Drum [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	5	Eagle [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	11
Echo [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	6	Engine [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	9	Equilibrium [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	5	Euphoria [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	15
Facade [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	11	Feather [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	6	Footprint [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	5	Forest [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	11
Garden [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	7	Glimmer [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	10	Helm [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	7	House [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	7
Island [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	13	Kite [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	6	Lemon [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	13	Mirage [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	7
Mountain [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	2	Needle [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	13	Ocean [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	7	Panic [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	5
Queen [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	15	Resonance [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	3	River [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	5	Serenity [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	18
Silhouette [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	10	Sleep [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	6	Solitude [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	7	Stagnation [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	7
Star [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	5	Train [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	5	Vestige [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	14	Window [Bk:0, Dr:0, Jd:0, Kl:0, Tp:0]	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.

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.

Roll	Injury
11	Your aorta is severed and you are quite dead. Rest assured your companions will do their best to console your widow(er).
12	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.
14 - 18	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.
21 - 25	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.
37 - 40	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.
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.

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.

Abilities

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:

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

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).

Watch Order

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12
1		2		3		4		5		6

Marching Order

Skirmish Formations (Front)
Default	Double File	Single File ??? ??? ??? ??? ??? ???

Calendar

Autumn
	Moonday		Duesday		W'ansday		Th'rsday		Frysday		Reapsday		Sunday
	Lugnasad
Vintage (6)
											1		2
	3	5 Oct 1942 — Guild commission; Novodom; Wormwood's briefing	4	6 Oct 1942 — Rune Portal; descent into the Abyss	5	7 Oct 1942 — Abyss crossing	6	8 Oct 1942 — Abyss crossing	7	9 Oct 1942 — Moonlight Sleeping joins at the river	8	10 Oct 1942 — Demon waves; remains harvested	9	11 Oct 1942 — Demon waves; remains harvested
	10	12 Oct 1942 — Demon waves; remains harvested	11	13 Oct 1942 — Demon waves; remains harvested	12	14 Oct 1942 — Demon waves; remains harvested	13	15 Oct 1942 — Demon waves; remains harvested	14	16 Oct 1942 — Demon waves; remains harvested	15	17 Oct 1942 — Demon waves; remains harvested	16	18 Oct 1942 — Demon waves; remains harvested
	17	Blood Moon (Hunter's Moon) Mon 19 Oct 1942 — Force Bridge; Reich; London; train north	18	20 Oct 1942 — Admiral Rollins briefs; training begins	19	21 Oct 1942	20	22 Oct 1942 — Perpignan briefing; shoot guns shown	21	23 Oct 1942 — Syringes; cover identities agreed	22	24 Oct 1942 — Papers to Tabitha; weapons chosen	23	25 Oct 1942 — Weapons training; Kel drills party
	24	26 Oct 1942 — Training; Dross learns to drive	25	27 Oct 1942 — Training	26	28 Oct 1942 — Training	27	29 Oct 1942 — Training	28	30 Oct 1942 — Training; insertion plan settled	29	Sat 31 Oct 1942 — Shoot at Morrigan; eleven Perytons	30	Beerfest 1 Nov 1942 — Ahnenerbe/Klaus Barbie intel arrives via decrypt

Winter
	Moonday		Duesday		W'ansday		Th'rsday		Frysday		Reapsday		Sunday
	Samhain
Frost (7)
			1	Guild Meeting	2		3		4		5		6
	7		8		9		10		11		12		13	15 Nov 1942 — Tulip drinks the recharged vial; recovers fully
	14		15		16		17		18		19		20
	21		22		23		24		25		26		27
	28		29		30