The atmosphere in the hall had changed markedly. Where moments before the Cult of Wine had been celebrating the first recorded coming of their revered deity, now there was just a hall of disappointed gangsters, staring at a bunch of intruders, standing in a pile of liquid waste. They regarded Lydia with mixed emotions. Some were angry and affronted, as if they had been duped, others were confused, even sympathetic. The large majority just looked disappointed and hurt, as if this were the basest and cruelest betrayal.

Screamer’s cousin had a discernably, ‘Great, here we go again’, look.

“Hold up, guys, we can still fix this. Come on Lydia, back the god goes,” Vish said, pointing at the contents of Lydia’s stomach encouragingly.

“I’m afraid that the god has made his intentions quite clear. The divine no longer wishes to associate with this sullied body, and has clearly returned to the aether. Is that not so?” Tinto demanded agreement of the priest.

With pursed lips, the priest nodded sullenly, “It would appear that Wine has left the Old Vineyard, residence of Tinto, and home to worshippers of the most righteous of gods.”

“Well then,” Tinto said with an exaggerated sigh, “it seems these good folk are nothing more than good old-fashioned trespassers. Guards, if you would be so kind,” he gestured for their removal.

It was a divisive move. A few of the guards were spoiling for a fight, and didn’t really seem to care who that fight was with, but most of the others closing the circle around the mercenaries just seemed to be complying out of fear. This latter bunch would probably much rather continue the festivities. Without a good reason to ignore Tinto, though, they obeyed. It was not wise to piss off the king of pissheads.

“Woah, woah, hold on a moment!” Gabriel said, and was surprised when people actually listened, “An aether god doesn’t just leave a body, they form a permanent bond, making their hosts immortal. No aether god in the history of forever has ever just upped and left a living host.”

The guards heads swiveled on their shoulders to look at Tinto and the priest.

“What aether god cannot handle the realm of their affinity? It is clear that this woman has no tolerance for Wine,” the priest gestured at Lydia’s reservoir of purple-chunked shame.

The guards looked back at Gabriel.

“The aether gods promote the balance and harmony of nature. If Lightning were always to strike, or Fire were always to burn, then there would be total carnage. This, this,” Gabriel wrinkled his nose as he got a little closer to the puddle than he would have liked, “this is a sign of harmony. This is a sign of the god’s wisdom.”

Gabriel briefly wondered what had gone so wrong in his life that he was now championing a puddle of puke.

The guards looked back at the priest. He was wavering.

“A clever ruse, and pretty words,” Tinto responded when the priest failed to, “but Wine would have no weakness for wine, any more than Fire would for flame. The god has clearly fled. Do you think it impossible? Do you question the limits of the great and powerful aether-born?”

The guards looked back at Gabriel. There were still a lot who were yet to throw their hats into the ring.

“Um,” Gabriel was aware of sweat on his top lip, “Oh! Ah, the fact remains that if you truly respect Wine as an aether god, then you must respect the laws of the gods. No true god could ever leave Lydia’s body. That is,” he snorted, “unless she were killed or something.”

Vish clucked his tongue, “Oh, buddy, and you were doing so well.”

“What did I do?”

Dark humour was staining Tinto’s features, “So then, we agree that the god has shown intolerance for this host, and she has failed her god by demonstrating a weakness to wine. Yet, as you say, the wine god must surely still be trapped within, for a god bonds for life,” he raised his hand like the starter at a dog track, “It falls to us then to free our god from the confines of this inadequate host. Kill the woman.”

“Ah,” Gabriel said, “Crap.”

The guards closest to Lydia were circling her, crouched low, ready to pounce. It was a bit of unnecessary theatrics, to be honest; Lydia was barely managing to stay upright.

“This does feel like a backwards step, not going to lie,” Vish observed.

There were eight men surrounding Lydia, with cudgels, rods and staves in hand. They were ready to strike.

“For the one true god!” someone shouted at the top of their lungs.

Perhaps not all that surprising for a room where even the soberest present were three bottles of wine deep, but this rallying cry very quickly got misinterpreted. Some took this to mean that they should rescue the god, as Tinto had suggested, while others decided, spur of the moment, that this was the signal to protect Lydia, host of the one true god. These were confusing times to be a member of a fanatical group of professional drunks.

The long and short of it was, everyone found someone to hit.

Four of the eight hemming Lydia in were ambushed from behind by her remaining supporters. The assailants were clumsily bludgeoned or grappled out of the picture. One of the attackers had a change of heart, and decided to stab his best mate, Ted. The other two were propping up the team a bit more, and went ahead with the charge. Of these two, the first slipped in the puddle of vomit and did a clean 180, bashing his head on the floor and falling unconscious. The second was swatted away with a metallic ‘thwack’, when Lydia backhanded him into the obituaries.

Tinto buried his face in his hands. It was a gesture Gabriel was very familiar with.

The Wine Merchants and cultists took to fighting as eagerly as they took to drinking, throwing themselves bodily into the fray. One could easily imagine how Tinto had spread his influence across the Eastern bank with a host of carnage loving boors at his back, and one could just as easily imagine how difficult it was to manage that territory once he’d gained it. What started out as a pretty clear battle between two sides, descended into an absolute farce. People soon forgot why they were fighting in the first place, and just found someone to wail on. It became a competition of wealth, only the currency was punches, and you weren’t splashing cash, you were splashing blood.

The mercenaries had been left pretty much untouched. In the game of hit or be hit, it seemed the best thing to do was to look completely unthreatening, which was something they were really very good at.

“Gabriel, I think I’d like to leave now,” Figo said as he backstepped away from a flying corpse.

“Not a terrible idea,” Gabriel agreed.

They sidled towards the door, guiding Lydia ahead of them.

“Uh, Gabe,” Vish was pointing at Screamer’s cousin, standing stoically where he had been deposited.

“Oh, shit, yeah,” Gabriel approached the shackled man, ducking a frisbeed plate as he did, “Afternoon, uh, Screamer’s cousin?”

“Is it not obvious?” the man replied in rich, throaty tones.

Gabriel soured, “Long story. Anyway, congratulations, you’re being rescued.”

“Is that what this is?” Screamer’s cousin was looking down his nose at the mayhem unravelling around him.

Gabriel watched with the prisoner as two men used a third as a battering ram to break through a table that had been converted into one side of a small fort. He gave an apologetic shrug.

“I’d like to say this lacks our usual finesse, but I’d be lying to your face,” Gabriel admitted, “Ready to go?”

“Just let me pack my things.”

“Oh, uh, really?”

“Of course I’m ready to go, you numbskull,” Screamer’s cousin said, disgust more in his expression than his voice.

Gabriel thought about leaving him there, he really did, but Tinto surging towards them, with a retinue of his personal guards, wrenched Gabriel from that particular daydream.

“We’ve got company, guys. Go, go, go. Now!” Gabriel was ushering them back into the corridor.

Moving a drunk Lydia was like steering a ship with a spoon for a rudder and forks for oars. Religious views in the room had shifted more than the giant warrior woman had, but that probably wasn’t a fair comparison.

“Come on, Lydia,” Figo coaxed, as firmly as he was capable of.

“Now, Figo, now. We need her out now,” Gabriel was saying through the side of his mouth, dodging a stray goblet.

“I’m trying, I’m trying!”

Screamer’s cousin made for the exit, muttering something along the lines of, “To hell with this”. It was too late, though; they were cut off.

Three men blocked the escape, and others on the sideline had taken notice of them once more.

Most alarmingly, Tinto had reached them.

“I commend you,” the Wine Merchant said, a thumb tucked in on either side of his waistcoat, “few people have irritated me quite as much as you have.”

“That’s kind of our thing,” Gabriel said forlornly.

“No matter, soon you will be dead. Then I shall drink, and forget any of this nonsense ever happened. The last memory of your escapades will come sometime in the early hours of tomorrow morning, when I shall stop and wonder whose skull I’m sipping from.”

Tinto’s men laughed menacingly. Apart from Ted, his laugh was a sad little gurgle.

“Oh! I know this one!”

“Shut up, Vish,” Gabriel seethed.

“Relax, relax. The cavalry is on its way,” Vish was pointing behind Tinto, where the priest had gathered a cluster of the devout.

“That just looks like more trouble,” Gabriel sighed.

The mind-mapper tapped his head, “Trust me.”

For want of better options, Gabriel decided to do just that.

“Master Tinto, I’m afraid we must intervene. Just now I supped from the chosen chalice and felt that we had made a mistake,” the priest explained, “the god does live in this woman, and it is our duty to serve her. We must make amends for our transgressions.”

Tinto rolled his eyes, “What was your name again?”

The priest puffed out his chest, “Brother Aulis, initiate into the Wine Merchant’s at the age of ten, chosen to serve the god of Wine… last week.”

Tinto was nodding as if he suddenly remembered, “Right, right. Well, Brother Aulis,” he drew his sword and stabbed the priest in the stomach, “I’ll be taking back what’s mine, now, thank you.”

The priest looked offended, nay, downright affronted. How dare this pretender go ahead and murder him. Him! A man of the cloth. In broad daylight. In front of his god and her followers. The bloody audacity.

Then he died.

“Now, if we’re about done with the interruptions,” Tinto started to say, before he was hit around the head with a chair.

The priest’s loyalists were screaming. Their rage had a completely different quality to the comparatively playful brawling that had taken place beforehand. Heresy had been performed, and they met it with righteous fury. This was when the real weapons came out.

Fisticuffs progressed into swordfights. Cudgels were swapped with maces. The knocked out became the eviscerated. It was brutal. Ted had really been ahead of the trend.

“Oh, gods,” Gabriel bemoaned, “How’s it coming, Figo?”

Gabriel was waving his sword in Tinto’s direction, keeping the smug bastard just out of stabbing range. Tinto didn’t care, he had all the time in the world.

“Um, it’s different,” the archer called from behind.

“Different better?”

“Uh… no. No, not better.”

Gabriel risked a quick glance over his shoulder to see what the archer meant, which almost earned him a pierced lung. Lydia was active once again, but she had missed the brief somewhat. Something about all the killing going on around her had triggered a primal instinct, and Lydia had taken up arm to do her bit of beheading and disemboweling. She was carving a path into the crowd, not away from it. A pity as well, she was doing a bloody good job of clearing a route, it was just in the wrong direction. She was sweeping her sword like a reaper swinging his scythe, cutting down people as easily as corn. Figo was stalking behind, picking off anyone who went for her exposed back, shooting them at pointblank range and apologizing to their bodies after the fact.

“Unless you think your warrior can kill of us, I’d say your days are numbered,” Tinto jeered.

Gabriel considered this, “I mean, there’s a reasonable chance she can.”

“But will you be alive to see it?” Tinto said, making a playful lunge which Gabriel jumped half a mile from.

There was laughter in Tinto’s eyes. Gabriel had a pretty good idea that as soon as he stopped being amusing, he’d be dead. It was time for a new game plan.

“You there. Yes, you!” Gabriel was gesturing to a group of the faithful, “Protect your god! Get her out of here!”

Sometimes all you have to do is give people a bit of direction. The gang of four tore a way towards Lydia, killing six of their former comrades mercilessly as they went. When they got to Lydia, they formed a square around her, ushering her slowly and carefully towards the door. Lydia was pretty confused. Figo had a bit of a task stopping Lydia from killing the reinforcements, but she eventually complied.

Bling had dealt with the men by the door, but more kept emerging to replace them. The Wine faithful fought with more fervour, but they were outnumbered, and Tinto was slowly but surely winning the day.

“Any bright ideas?” Gabriel asked the others as he ducked a lazy swipe from Tinto, “Figo? Vish?”

“Yeah, bud?” Vish replied in the casual tones of someone who was not currently being stabbed at.

“Ideas, plans, distractions. Come on, Vish, something!” Gabriel started saying and finished squealing, as Tinto made a few more feints.

“Bit busy guarding Screamer’s cousin,” the mind-mapper yawned. He actually bloody yawned.

Vish was resting his arm on the shoulder of the very annoyed looking gentleman in question. Neither one of them had budged much. Screamer’s cousin probably figured he would just be recaptured anyway, and Vish just didn’t see the point in moving away from a perfectly good human shield.

“I do not want to get killed by someone with wine stains on his lapel!” Gabriel cried.

Tinto paused to find the offending blemish. He sucked at the fabric like it was an amuse bouche. He muttered something that sounded to Gabriel like, “Mm, Merlot”.

Then something odd happened.

Tinto’s eyes widened. He let go of his collar as if it had scalded him, and back away from everything and nothing, almost slipping on the vomit patch as he did.

At first, Gabriel thought he had been poisoned, that the wine he’d spilt had been spiked. Then, Gabriel saw that others were reacting similarly. Across the room, men had dropped their swords and clubs and were hugging themselves, covering their eyes, or whimpering. It was as if they were all having a collective hallucination.

It took Gabriel a while to figure out what it was, but, when he did, it felt enormous, oppressive, and almost insurmountable. It was dread. He could feel it now. It was an intense, overwhelming sensation of pure, unfiltered dread.

Instinctively, Gabriel knew the cause. His mind-mapping friend had his eyes closed, and was straining hard. Vish wasn’t pushing a soul in its entirety, he was pushing a facet of it. He was broadcasting his own dread and fear, amplifying it for the whole villa to receive. Anyone ‘listening’ was experiencing his dread firsthand, as if it were their own, and it was crumbling them. The difference was, Gabriel and the mercenaries, bar Lydia, still had most of their faculties. They could identify the intruding emotion, even ignore it to some extent. To the drunkards, living entirely in the moment and subject only to their primary senses, this feeling was everything.

There was their opening.

Gabriel gathered up the others and pushed them towards the door, urging them out as fast as they would go. Lydia was hard to manage, and it was disconcerting to see the seasoned veteran in such a panicked and scared state, but she was finally moving. Convincing distraught woman to flee was actually pretty easy, it was getting her to stay with the pack that was hard. She ran from a feeling she couldn’t comprehend.

They pounded through the corridors at speed, half dragging Screamer’s cousin with them.

“How long will that last?” Gabriel asked between panting breaths.

“Don’t know, never done it to people before, they’re normally too aware,” Vish confessed.

“What was that?” Figo asked.

“Eh, just like a loud emotion, really. We used it to flush scorpions out of our tents,” Vish somehow shrugged whilst running.

“That feeling was in you? I had no idea you lived with such fear,” Figo said pitiously.

“Oh, uh, no. Well, not exactly,” Vish gave a sideways glance, “I imagined I’d made a jump and accidentally found myself locked in Gabriel’s body.”

“Given that you just saved our backsides, I’m going to let that one slide,” the captain said grudgingly.

“I can hear them coming,” Figo said after a few moments.

“Looks like our grace period is over.”

They made it out into the courtyard, where they were surprised to find that it was still late afternoon. The light made them recoil, but they pushed through the unpleasantness.

They passed several purple tunics on the steps and on the streets outside, but the clueless drunks didn’t think anything strange about a cluster of misfits dragging a shackled man out of their HQ, at least not until Tinto emerged shortly behind, ordering them to give chase.

“Where are we going?” Figo asked, as they rounded yet another corner. The purple tunics were catching up.

“Away!” was all Gabriel could think to say.

They reached the edge of the district, where it met the Malin and blended with the Waterfront. They were dismayed to find that Tinto had not given up when they reached the edge of his territory. Gabriel wasn’t really sure why he would, now that he thought about it.

Tinto followed them through the busy trading district, knocking porters and packers aside, and bumbling through stacks of crates. He was determined, but he was also still extremely drunk.

Gabriel stopped at the first bridge they reached. Running was pointless, and he didn’t think he had much more of it left in him anyway.

“I think,” he announced to the flagging mercenaries, “we’re going to have to jump.”

“In there?” Vish asked, pointing at the river below.

“Might I remind you that some of us are shackled?” Screamer’s cousin pointed out.

“If we can make the rafts then we might have a chance of losing them downstream,” Gabriel said, giving very few shits about what actually happened to Screamer’s cousin at this particular point in time.

“Maybe, or maybe they’ll just follow and butcher us the first chance they get,” Vish countered.

“Also a possibility. Any better ideas? No? Right then,” Gabriel and the others positioned themselves at the railing, “On the count of three. One.”

“Two,” Figo took up the count.

“You pillocks going for a dunk?” a familiar voice called.

Nail-puller was swanning towards them, a dozen or so of Screamer’s enforcers at her back.

“Oh, you know, nice warm day like this,” Gabriel said, awash with relief.

“You lot are weird. How’s it Vicus?” she bobbed a head towards Screamer’s cousin.

“Nail-puller, always a pleasure,” Vicus responded wryly.

Tinto and his band caught up to them, spreading across the bridge like a spill. He was even redder than before.

“I suggest you get out of here and mind your own business, street rat,” Tinto said without preamble.

Nail-puller chewed a bit of loose skin from her thumb and spat it into the river, “You really expect us to leave a member of the boss’s family to yous lots? We’re taking him home.”

“This man was caught spying. He is to pay for his crimes,” Tinto seethed.

“Prove it.”

Tinto gestured at the shackles with his sword, “There’s your proof there! This man was a rightful captive of mine, until you sent these buffoons to break him out.”

“Never seen this lot in my life,” Nail-puller shrugged, “Not ours.”

Tinto was boiling with rage, “Screamer sent this-”

“Screamer sent? You accusing the boss of something here? That’s a big claim. The kind of claim that ends in war,” She had a hand on her knife belt, and her men had half drawn.

Even with rage roiling inside him, Tinto had enough presence of mind to spot a trap when he saw one, “Of course we assume this man and his,” he scowled, “friends, were acting independently. I am sure that Screamer would not breach our codes. They will face justice, and there will be no need for our two factions to discuss the matter any further.”

Nail-puller scratched the back of her head, dislodging some lice, “Yeah, that’s all well and good, but, you see, I can’t exactly go back to the boss now and tell him that I saw his cousin, on neutral turf, mind, hanging out with some chums, and then just let you take him away against his will. I can’t say that now, can I?”

Tinto was grinding his teeth so hard that it looked like his jaw might snap, “Then I suggest you don’t tell him anything.”

“Lie to the boss? Nobody lies to the boss,” Nail-puller shivered a bit at the very thought of it, as did Tinto, actually.

The tension was rising. Once again, Tinto seemed to be sizing up his odds. He had more men, but his men were also liberally socially lubricated. Nail-puller’s men were amped up, ready, and sober. Even on a good day there would have been a disparity. Screamer’s thugs didn’t just like to brawl, they liked to kill. That was their drug.

Still, even with the odds fairly unfavourable, and the guarantee of a gang war if he were seen to be the aggressor, Tinto looked like he’d just been pushed far enough to go for it. His sword was gently stabbing at the air, and he licked his lips like he was about to savour a fine vintage.

“Tinto? Tinto is that you?” someone called from the riverbank.

It was another voice Gabriel recognized.