In the gardens of the city square, there was an enormous glass bell, as clear as crystal. Intricate designs ringed its lip like a breath of frost on a windowsill. Unlike the other twelve, the Pax Bell never rang. Or maybe it always rang. In place of a tongue, a pendulum swayed, its teardrop-point drawing designs in the square of red sand beneath the bell.

And always, always, there was a fine crystalline sound in the air, a sweet and sonorous hum. The bell sung for peace, and it always had. As long as Caltern was safe its music would fill the air of the gardens, with their rows of tall slim cypress and their stately rows of hedges bursting with flowers. In the middle of all Caltern’s turmoil, the gardens were an ornamental square of peaceful green, with a clear lake where a moss-drenched bridge crossed over the blue waters. A faint wind rippled mazes of tiny waves across the mirror surface.

And slowly, the sound of harmony faded. Even the birds seemed to pause, unsure now, lacking the bell’s accompaniment to their trills and twitters.

The Pax Bell had gone silent.

Suffi came to upside down, a throbbing star of pain pulsing out waves of nausea from the side of her head. Her face was pressed against rough burlap, every needle of light that stabbed through the rough fabric an agony to her sore, sensitive eyes. Something twitched, caught in the bag beside her. She twisted her way around to see what; it was one of her bird-golems, its wings bent and broken.

Within the sack, she could barely peer through the gaps in the burlap, seeing the dark of a carriage cabin. It fit with the way the world was trembling and bucking- the wheels going over the lumps in the road. No doubt they were taking a stolen carriage from the partygoers. That was what she’d do.

But the gates would be blocked as soon as Kedlin found a mage who could broadcast the order. No, they’d already have been sealed as soon as the Usurper’s Bell rang. There would be no smuggling her out of Caltern.

Was there no plan for a ransom? Did they intend to kill her?

Reaching for her boot dagger, she found it missing. Checking for the long pin she kept fixed in her pants leg, she saw it was still there, shining and sharp, the length of two fingers. A good thrust and it would go through an eye.

She curled it into her hand, a last resort and a protective talisman. No matter what happened she’d go down fighting.

Beside her, she heard her brother. His crying was distinctive; sob, a snort to keep his nose from overrunning, a breaking little whimper and then it started all over again.

Safe to say she’d been a poor big sister since she knew the sound that well.

She held on, listening to the rattle of the carriage wheels, Krait’s whining, the dim talk of their captors; the latter she strained to hear over the first two but it was nothing, just juvenile giggling over how this maid had bled, how this guard had gone pale with fear when they’d run him through. The first thing she’d learned about killing was how it brought out the cruel, petty child in people. The brute exercise of power was primal and stupid.

And yet she did love to shape blades on her forge, to make a tool for that dumbest, most blood-drunk act. They were beautiful things; no shape save the wheel had been refined and perfected to that same degree, given so much thought, so many iterations.

She knew them all; the slender estoc for piercing armor and the broad blade for cleaving flesh, the dueling blade so whip-thin it could bend, the parrying dagger with its clever trap for enemy swords.

In a way the best moments Suffi’s life had been devoted to violence, but she had never killed anything herself. Somehow the thought of it made her drip with cold sweat.

The carriage was rolling to a halt. No way of knowing how many minutes had ticked by. She was hoisted, seized like a sack of potatoes, and a knife came tearing through the burlap, sawing her free. She came up and shoved the pin into the first eye she saw.

And it was simple. Her hands didn’t tremble. They almost seemed to know what to do.

The man was leaning over, squatting down to cut the sack open. She squirmed through the hole, and before he could react to the glimmer of steel in her fingers she caught him behind the head with her two-fingered hand and driven the pin home with the good one.

An expression of shock froze rigid and then slackened. She snatched the knife up as it fell from his fingers and turned, counting seven men, seven more than she could hope to fight off.

But they didn’t draw their swords and end her. They didn’t stuff her into the sack again. They just laughed. Big, croaking heaves of laughter, and applause, clapping their hands together, amused by her. Like it didn’t even matter.

And she supposed it didn’t.

What was one less to share the ransom with, or one less witness to her murder. What had she done but swept an inconvenience away for them? What was the life she’d taken worth?

To them, nothing.

But her hands were starting to shake.

For a moment a hysteric laugh threatened to slip past her lips, and then she remembered Krait. His sack lay beside hers, shivering, and she split it open and hauled him out by the hair like a butterfly being roughly shucked from the cocoon.

The men paced around her, like wild dogs cornering a rabbit.

The body was dissolving. The skin was turning into layers of ash, feather-fine, and crumbling inwards, a hole opening up above his heart and spreading outwards across his chest. Exposed within was a gleaming chunk of stone that glowed with cracks of angry orange-red hue between crags of blackened char.

“Suffi, what’s going on? Who are these men?” He whispered, his voice hoarse with crying. He clung to her arm as she turned to them.

“You’ll be the Men of Ash then. Isn’t that right?” The last words left her lips sounding like a demand, but not a strong one, not an order- a desperate plea. She sounded weak. Suffi fought to control the next words that left her lips. “I thought you want nothing anymore, so what do you want with me?”

There it was. Strength. Command. Almost a growl. The way she’d learned to speak to underlings so they’d respect and fear her.

But the men just laughed again, and she saw the eighth one, hidden away in the gloom. Giggling like a lunatic. He sat perched on a barrel, curled up upon himself. In his long ragged cloak he looked like a common beggar. His face was leprous, missing features, huge scars bending the natural shape of the flesh in wicked ways. There was no nose.

“We’ve come to free you.” He spoke, and his voice was beautiful, a silken string of syllables coming from a mouth full of rotten stumps, from lips bent this way and that by the silver lines of scars. “You have the right heart for it, I think. You have a devil in you.”

“I don’t feel very free.” She spat back.

“It hurts a little, I won’t lie.” The man continued. “But once it’s done you’ll understand. Or you’ll die. It goes one way or the other, but it’s like I said, Suffi, you have a devil in you.”

“Him, though.” One of the underlings nodded to Krait, trying to hide behind Suffi with her dagger as if she could do anything to save him. “Wouldn’t be so sure about him.”

They tittered, a pack of hyenas.

“You leave him alone. He’s not part of your plan, he’s just my stupid little brother. You don’t need him.”

“Oh, but he’s Attuned. To the Dungeon beneath our feet. And that’s very precious and dear to our plan.” The leader sung, and snapped his fingers. “You’ll understand. There’s no point in talking to you while you’re like this.”

They came for her. She slashed at their hands, stabbing at them, drew blood- nothing stopped them. They twisted her arms behind her back and shoved her to her knees. The man came out from the darkness, revealing the damage went beyond his face, that his entire body was mottled and red with shiny burned flesh.

He held a sword she’d never seen before, a sword made of smoke.

“May your ancestors abandon you.” She cursed.

“Oh they have, they have.” The man said, and laughed as he swung the blade down through her throat.

It passed through the flesh without cutting anything but the soul within.

And suddenly she didn’t care. It didn’t matter to her that her brother was next, seized by their rough hands and hauled forward to face the smoke blade. That he was crying, yelling, looking desperately to her as she remained knelt, still, barely breathing.

That the blade was rising, rising, falling...

In the gardens, people gathered around the bell, drawn by the deafening silence. Waiting and hoping that the song would return.

Before their horrified eyes, a single note rang out-

And the Pax Bell cracked in half.