Leaving the Altdorf sewers was like being reborn, if birth occurred within a womb of cold sewage and rats as large as cats. Geneviève emerged from a drain opening onto the Reik, beneath a rotting pier in the tanners' district. It was the darkest hour before dawn, that moment when the city seems to hold its breath before coughing away the night mist. She let herself drop into the river water to wash off the worst of the filth. The water was freezing, thick with industrial waste, but it was better than the crust of feces and blood covering her armor.
As she scrubbed the metal with a handful of river sand, she heard the bells change rhythm. They were no longer the frantic alarm of an invasion. They were slow, solemn tolls. DONG. DONG. DONG. The signal for the Martial Curfew. The city gates had been sealed. No one in, no one out. The Reiksguard was beginning a house-to-house manhunt.
Geneviève stepped out of the water, shivering. The adrenaline of the fight in the crypt was fading, replaced by a leaden exhaustion and a dull ache in her wounded shoulder and side. She wrapped herself in her wet cloak, which now weighed like a stone, and set off toward the ruined temple of Taal where she had left Duraz. Every shadow seemed to hide a crossbow. Every sound of hooves on the cobblestones made her flatten herself against the damp walls. She was no longer a paladin. She was prey.
She reached the clandestine stable just as the eastern sky turned iron grey. Gunter the Mute was awake. He was sharpening a butcher knife on a stone, sitting on a bale of hay. When he saw Geneviève enter—a giant, dripping figure smelling of the river and death—he didn't blink. He looked at the fresh blood trickling from an armor joint on her thigh (a cut Geneviève didn't even remember receiving).
"Close the door," Gunter said, his voice raspy like someone who had screamed too much in his youth. Geneviève pushed the rotting gate shut, locking out the city and its sirens. Duraz, in his stall, whinnied low, sensing his mistress's scent. Geneviève went straight to the horse, leaning her forehead against the animal's warm muzzle. "I'm here, my friend. I'm here."
Gunter stood up and threw her a clean rag and a bucket of water. "They found the Prince," the man said, without looking at her, returning to sharpening the knife. "They say he's alive. They say a metal demon killed the cultists and tried to kidnap the heir."
Geneviève stopped with the rag in mid-air. "A demon?"
"That's what the criers say. 'A faceless giant in black armor, wielding a sword of enchanted fire.' They've put a bounty on your head, stranger. A thousand Gold Crowns. Enough to buy this entire district and the souls of everyone living in it."
Geneviève looked at Gunter. The man had a wooden leg and only one eye. He had every reason to sell her out. She reached for the pouch at her belt. She had only a few coins left. "I don't have a thousand crowns, Gunter."
The man spat on the ground. "I don't want them. The Emperor's gold brings bad luck. And I've seen how you treat that horse. A demon would have eaten the beast, not brushed it." He stood up and moved toward a trapdoor hidden under the hay. "You can't stay up here. The guards will check the stables within the hour. There's a cellar below. An old crypt of Taal's priests. Hide there with the beast. And don't make a sound, even if you hear them torturing me."
Geneviève nodded, moved by the unexpected solidarity of the slums. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me. If they find you, I'll say you forced me with sorcery. I'm a survivor, not a hero."
The cellar was small, dry, and smelled of old apples. Geneviève led Duraz down the reinforced wooden ramp with difficulty. Once down in the dark, she finally allowed herself to collapse. She removed her helmet. Then her gloves. Then, with winces of pain, she unhooked her breastplates and greaves. She remained in her tunic and leather breeches, sitting against the stone wall. Her body was a map of purple bruises and superficial cuts. But the wound under her armpit—the one inflicted by the Gatherer's dagger in the woods—worried her. The skin around the cut was grey, cold to the touch. There was no infection; there was... absence. As if life in that spot had been erased. Shadow Venom.
Geneviève closed her eyes. She had to meditate. Not to pray, but to purify herself. She visualized the Lake. The crystalline water. She imagined the water flowing through her, washing away the grey. It was difficult. The city above her pressed down with its aura of corruption and fear. Altdorf was a constant background noise that disturbed her connection with the Lady. She had to fight for every drop of healing power, breaking into a cold sweat, trembling in the dark while Duraz watched her worriedly.
She spent two days in the cellar. Two days during which she heard, through the floorboards, the heavy boots of the Reiksguard entering the stable, overturning hay, questioning Gunter. The man played the part of the grumpy, ignorant old cripple well. The guards left, convinced there was nothing there but manure and misery.
On the third night, Geneviève decided it was time to move. She couldn't leave through the gates. She couldn't take a ship (the port was blocked). But there was another way. A way that only the desperate or the mad took. The River Reik flowed through the city, exiting north toward Marienburg, but also east, toward Talabheim. The chains blocking the river were underwater. But the ships of the Dwarf Engineers had reinforced hulls and special permits.
She went back up to the stable. Gunter was sleeping. Geneviève left another gold coin on the table—her last—and took a jar of black axle grease. She began to smear it over her Gromril armor. She covered the runes, covered the shine of the dwarven silver. She transformed her splendid armor into a mass of dull black metal that looked like low-quality wrought iron. She tore a piece of tarpaulin and wrapped it around Vesper's Light, making the hilt unrecognizable. She cut her wet hair with her dagger—short, irregular, like a stable boy or a soldier shaved for lice. She smeared her face with soot and grease.
When she was finished, Geneviève the Paladin was gone. There was only a big, ugly, dirty mercenary.
She woke Duraz. "No more nobility, my friend," she whispered. "Now we are just two shadows."
She stepped out into the misty night. She headed toward the industrial docks, where the forges of the School of Engineers worked day and night. There, moored under a steam crane, was a dwarven armored barge, the Hammer of Grungni. They were loading crates of cannons bound east, toward the border with Sylvania, where the vampire counts were stirring. The dwarf captain, a stone of granite with a red beard braided into two forks, was yelling at a human who had dropped a crate.
Geneviève approached. She walked hunched over, hiding her true height and the grace of her movements. "Looking for hands?" she asked, with the raspy voice she had perfected.
The dwarf turned. He sized her up. He saw the blackened armor, the (fake) bastard sword at her side, and the muscle mass. "Looking for guards who don't shit themselves when they see a zombie," the dwarf replied. "Pay is five shillings a day and board. The horse pays half your ration. We leave in an hour. No questions, no names. If you die, we throw you overboard."
Geneviève spat on the ground, imitating the manners of the soldiers of fortune she had seen in taverns. "Deal."
She climbed the metal ramp that rang under her heavy boots. The steam barge puffed black smoke. As the Hammer of Grungni pulled away from the pier, passing under the chains raised for the imperial pass, Geneviève looked back toward the Cathedral. The Grand Master had fled. But she had his scent now. The scent of the void and ozone. The hunt was moving east. Toward the lands where the dead walk and the sun is but a faded memory. Geneviève was going to Sylvania. And this time, she wouldn't bring the light to save. She would bring it to burn.
The Hammer of Grungni did not sail; it punched the current. It was an armored steam barge, an ugly parallelepiped of black iron and rivets, driven by a gigantic rear paddle wheel that churned the Reik's water with a deafening rhythm: THUMP-SPLASH, THUMP-SPLASH. Below deck, the heat was infernal. Geneviève, bare-chested except for the linen wraps covering her breasts and her leather trousers, shoveled coal into the boiler furnace. Her body, covered in soot and sweat, glistened in the firelight. The muscles of her back and arms strained like steel cables as she lifted shovelfuls of anthracite that would have broken the backs of two normal men.
"More, Long-one!" yelled Brokk, the dwarf stoker, a being as wide as he was tall with a singed beard. "Pressure's dropping! You want us to stall in the middle of the current?"
Geneviève didn't answer. She grunted and threw more coal. She had accepted the hardest job on board for two reasons. First, it kept her away from prying eyes on deck. Second, the brutal toil helped silence the Grail, consuming that divine energy that might otherwise risk leaking out as visible light. Here, in the dark and smoke, she was just another machine.
After three days of sailing, the landscape changed. They left the Great Reik to enter the River Stir, the tributary that marked the natural border between the province of Stirland and cursed Sylvania. The water changed color. From muddy brown, it became black, oily. The trees on the banks were no longer green oaks, but skeletal weeping willows, their branches brushing the water like the fingers of the drowned. The mist became permanent, a grey blanket that muffled sounds and hid the sun.
Captain Gorim Ironfist came down into the engine room, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. "Get upstairs, mercenary," he ordered Geneviève, who was putting back on her tunic and grease-blackened chainmail. "We're in the Dead Waters. I need sharp eyes and strong arms on deck. My boys need to man the cannons."
Geneviève went up. The outside air was freezing and tasted of wet earth and decay. Duraz was tied at the bow, covered by a heavy blanket. The dwarven horse had its ears flattened and was baring its teeth at the water. Geneviève stood beside him, resting her hand on a double-bitted axe (a common weapon she had taken from the ship's armory so as not to use the sacred sword).
"What are we looking for, Captain?" she asked, in the raspy voice she used for her character.
"Floating logs that aren't logs," Gorim replied, lighting a pipe. "And things that swim on their backs."
It wasn't a loud attack. It was a dull thud against the metallic hull. Then another. As if logs were hitting the barge. Geneviève leaned over the railing. In the mist, she saw pale, swollen hands clutching the hull rivets. They weren't pirates. They were corpses. Dozens of them. Water-bloated bodies with bluish skin peeling away in shreds, dressed in rags from different eras: imperial uniforms from a hundred years ago, peasant clothes, rotted noble robes. River Zombies.
"TO STARBOARD! THE DEAD!" Geneviève shouted.
The dwarves reacted with military discipline. The riflemen lined up along the edge, firing sharp volleys. The heads of the dead exploded like rotten melons, but they kept climbing—a wave of cold flesh that felt neither pain nor fear. A zombie hauled itself onto the deck right in front of Geneviève. It was huge, perhaps a blacksmith in life, with an iron hook embedded in its shoulder. It tried to grab her.
Geneviève used no elegant techniques. She brought down the axe. THUNK. The heavy blade split the monster's skull down to the jaw. Geneviève kicked the creature's chest to free the weapon and threw it back into the water.
"Defend the wheel!" Gorim yelled. "If they get jammed in the blades, we're dead in the water!"
Too late. A group of corpses had thrown themselves voluntarily into the blades of the rear paddle wheel. A screech of tortured metal was heard. The steam engine coughed. The wheel jammed, clogged with bone and flesh. The barge stopped, drifting toward the south bank. The bank of Sylvania.
From the thicket on the shore, rusted arrows began to rain onto the deck. Skeleton archers. "We're under fire!" Brokk cursed, reloading his arquebus. "Someone has to go down and clear the wheel!"
No dwarf could do it. The water was deep and their armor would sink them. And swimming among zombies was suicide. Geneviève looked at the black water boiling with undead. She knew that if she used the Light, she would disintegrate the entire horde in a second. But the dwarves would see. And dwarves do not forget. She had to use brute force.
"Cover me!" she shouted to Gorim. Geneviève dropped the axe. She took a long iron bar used for moving barrels. She tied a rope around her waist and gave it to Brokk. "Hold me, or I'm coming to find you from hell." She jumped.
Not into the open water, but directly onto the carcass of the stalled paddle wheel. It was slippery with algae and black blood. Below her, dead arms reached up to grab her boots. Geneviève planted her feet on the metal spokes. She shoved the iron bar between the blades and the "plug" of jammed corpses. "HRAAAAGH!" she screamed, releasing all the muscular power of her enhanced body. The veins in her neck bulged. Her blackened armor creaked. It was not human strength. It was the strength of a giant compressed into a woman's body. The mass of compressed bodies gave way with a disgusting sound of bones snapping en masse. The wheel lurched.
"Engines! Now!" Geneviève yelled, clutching a spoke as the wheel began to turn. The steam engine roared back to life. The blades hit the water, grinding the remains of the zombies and pushing the barge away from the deadly shore. Brokk pulled the rope, hauling Geneviève onto the deck just as a skeletal arrow bounced off her spaulder.
The Hammer of Grungni regained speed, leaving the ambush in the mist behind. On deck, the dwarves looked at Geneviève. She was covered in black slime from head to toe, panting, but unharmed. Gorim approached. He looked at the iron bar Geneviève still held in her hand. It was bent. A solid iron bar, three fingers thick, bent by the force of manual leverage.
The dwarf Captain looked up into Geneviève's grey eyes beneath the soot. "No 'mercenary' has that strength, girl," Gorim said in a low voice, so the others wouldn't hear. "I've seen River Trolls struggle to bend that metal."
Geneviève held his gaze. "Fear gives strength, Captain."
Gorim snorted, not believing her for a second. But he was a pragmatic dwarf. She had saved his ship. "Maybe. Or maybe you're something I don't want to know." He handed her a dented metal flask. "Bugman's XXXXXX. Cleans the stomach and the conscience. Drink. You've earned it."
Geneviève drank. The liquid burned like lava, but it took the taste of death out of her mouth. She looked south. The mist was thinning slightly. Ahead of them, on the desolate banks, the first ruins of Sylvania appeared. Black castles perched on impossible peaks, villages without lights. "Thank you, Captain," Geneviève said, returning the flask. "How far to Vragala?"
"Two hours," the dwarf replied, somberly. "And pray your business there is brief. In Sylvania, the living are just unwelcome guests who have stayed too long."
Vragala was not a city; it was a fortified scar. Located on the north bank of the Stir, it was the last imperial outpost before the void. A cluster of grey stone houses surrounded by a palisade of sharpened logs, decorated with the heads of wolves and, it was said, vampires beheaded centuries before.
The Hammer of Grungni docked only to unload coal and take on water (the river water there was undrinkable). Geneviève disembarked with Duraz. "Be well, Iron-Breaker," Gorim greeted her, using a dwarven honorific. "If you come back alive, look for my barge. I'll take you back for free."
"I won't be back soon, Gorim. But thank you."
The barge pulled away, leaving her alone on the windy pier. Vragala was desolate. People walked with their heads down, huddling in coarse wool cloaks. No one looked anyone in the face. Here, curiosity killed. Geneviève needed information. Had the Grand Master of the Grey Circle passed through here? Had he crossed the border?
She entered the village's only inn. Inside, silence fell like a cleaver. Geneviève sat at the counter, ordering beer and bread. The innkeeper, a man with a purple birthmark covering half his face, served her the beer with a trembling hand. "I'm looking for passage across the river," Geneviève said in a low voice. "Toward the interior."
The innkeeper turned pale. "No one goes to the interior. Only the mad and the dead."
"And the black coaches," added a voice from the darkest corner of the room.
Geneviève turned. Sitting at a table was an elderly woman, wrapped in colorful but tattered shawls, with dozens of gold and copper bracelets on her wrists. A Strigany. The Strigany were the nomads of these lands, often accused of serving the Vampires, but in reality just people trying to survive between two fires.
Geneviève approached the old woman's table. "What do you know about black coaches, grandmother?"
The woman laughed, showing gold teeth and black gums. She took her gloved hand, feeling the metal. "You are heavy, knight. Heavy with iron and heavy with destiny. Do you seek the Faceless Man?"
Geneviève stiffened. "What do you call him?"
"The Faceless Man. The Silver Mask. He passed three nights ago. Not on the river. On the old road. He had an escort of things that didn't breathe. He paid the toll to the Baron of the border with coins that screamed." The old woman looked her in the eyes, her milky irises seeming to see beyond the helmet. "He goes to Castle Drakenhof. But not to serve the Von Carsteins. He goes to wake something older."
Drakenhof. The stronghold of the Vampire Counts. If the Grey Circle was going there, it meant either an alliance or a civil war between monsters. "How can I follow him without being seen by the bats?"
The Strigany smiled. "You cannot hide from the bats, fool. They smell blood. But you can travel with those who are already cursed. My caravan leaves tonight. We cross the Forest of Hunger. If you protect us from the werewolves, we'll take you to the Siegfriedhof turn-off. From there, you're on your own."
Geneviève accepted. She went out into the courtyard where the Strigany were preparing their colorful wagons, painted with protective symbols: garlic, wild roses, and the symbol of Morr, god of death. Duraz was tied behind the last wagon. Geneviève climbed onto the box beside the old woman, whose name was Madame Katerina.
As the caravan left Vragala and crossed the old stone bridge marking the border with Sylvania, the sky turned definitively black. It was not night; it was the permanent shadow of the land of the vampires. The vegetation died. The trees became twisted, black, devoid of leaves. The air filled with whispers. Geneviève felt the Grail inside her react. Not with fear, but with anger. She had entered the territory of the Ancient Enemy. Here, her Light was not just a weapon. It was a beacon that would attract every monster within twenty leagues. She had to grit her teeth and concentrate to stifle the aura, turning herself into a spiritual black hole.
"Welcome to Sylvania, knight," croaked Madame Katerina, lighting an opium pipe. "Here the dead walk fast, and the living walk on tiptoe. Do not sleep. If you sleep, you will dream. And dreams here have teeth."
The caravan creaked into the dark, headed toward the heart of the eternal night. Geneviève looked at the horizon. Far away, purple lightning illuminated the spires of a distant castle. The Grand Master was there. And Geneviève was coming to break the other half of his mask.