As he descended the stairs, he thought he could hear music or, at least, that dull, semi-audible thud of a deep bass note that seemed to growl its way up his legs to his chest and never get any further. At the foot, the dull bass was no louder. A heavy metal door blocked his way, with no handle on the outside and a covered slot at eye level.

He pulled the Browning from his pocket and tapped three times on the door with the butt end of the pistol grip, before slipping it away again.

In classic style the slit drew open. The space beyond was dark but ambient light gleamed off a yellow eye.

‘Whaddyu want?’ asked a Scouse accent with rocks in it.

‘I want to see the elf,’ he replied, stepping back from the door so his mark should be visible to whoever was inspecting him.

There was a long pause, then the slit slammed shut again and he was left standing in darkness, hands clenching and unclenching on the pistol.

Then, just as he thought it might be time to give up, the door swung open, outwards, forcing him to step back even further. He stood, staring into the gloom, the shape of two… people dimly visible in the gloom. He couldn’t see their faces, but he could make out the general form of them - tall guys, with several inches on him at both the tops of their heads and either shoulder.

‘You coming in or not?’ came a deep growl.

And with his eyes fixed on the threats before him, Butcher crossed the dark threshold.

As the door closed behind him, a dim light buzzed into reluctant light, illuminating a short and narrow corridor, mostly occupied by the same two bodies he had clocked from outside. Both looked like the guy he’d run down off Love Lane but, somehow, moreso. Grey skin. No noses to speak of. Thin, yellow eyes. Overgrown canines protruding from their mouths. And with their heads uncovered by hoods or masks, Butcher could also see their bald scalps and pointed ears. Their eyes fixed him with the hostility of a sergeant-major considering a row of junior officer cadets.

One of them gestures at him to raise his arms and Butcher lifted up, rolling his eyes.

‘You can see the glyph, right?’ he asked. ‘I’m part of this.’

‘Can see it,’ agreed the bigger one. ‘Don’t recognize it, though. This is not a human space.’

The other one lifted, first, the knife he’d taken from his target and, then, the Browning.

‘Huh,’ grunted the bigger one, looking at the knife. ‘Knife is passage.’

‘The pistol?’ asked Butcher in return.

‘You can have it back if you leave.’

‘If?’

‘Touch the elf and you won’t.’

The big one pushed at the door at the end of the corridor and Butcher was suddenly assaulted by sound: an overwhelming, pounding, visceral thumping that poured over him with the smell of sweat and bad beer and worse sex. The light was mostly red, with blue strobing punching him in the face as he squeezed past the bouncers into the room.

It was a bar, but rougher than the roughest shanty moonshine house he’d ever seen. Chairs of every description lined the walls - plastic school chairs, restaurant chairs, bar stools and several sofas that looked like they’d been rescued from a fly-tip. And almost all of them were occupied by figures of the same grey-skinned, fang-toothed look as the bouncers - especially the sofas, over which male and female versions lounged and fought. Tables were few but similarly diverse, with the middle of the space left clear for a crush of bouncing, head-nodding almost-dancing. And in every hand, a cup - or a glass, or a mug, or a Starbucks paper cup; the drink containers were as weirdly diverse as the chairs. And what they were drinking was being served by a hulking female on the far side of a plank laid across stacked pallets. And her method of serving was to simply dip whatever she was handed into a bucket in front of her and pass it back in return for whatever she was passed. Butcher saw notes, coins, a smartphone, a knife - all just in the time it took him to walk from the door to the plank.

As he walked, he saw that the morphology of the occupants wasn’t as uniform as he had first thought. As well as the hulking types, there were smaller ones - still grey and fanged, but shorter and skinnier. And whilst the big ones glanced at him once and then ignored him, the smaller ones followed him intently - almost hungrily - as he crossed the floor, stepping around the wildly dancing clientele.

At the plank, the female looked at him skeptically.

‘I’m looking for the elf,’ he said, loudly enough to just be heard over the deafening music.

‘Got a cup?’ she asked.

Taken aback Butcher shook his head.

‘Two quid deposit for a cup. Three quid for a drink,’ she yelled at him.

Butcher got the message. Want to talk? Got to drink.

‘What’s the drink?’

‘Orcbrew,’ she replied. ‘Take it or fucking leave.’

He pulled a fiver from his wallet and slid it across the wet plank. She snatched it up and stuffed it into her top. She was almost as tall as the males at the door, with a lot more hair, tied up and back. Her broad shoulders strained the white vest she was wearing, stretching it tight over an expansive bust, itself barely contained by a ragged and stained bra. Other than the grey skin, the yellow eyes, the fangs and the ears, she looked like a cover star for a women’s body-building magazine. Oh, and the gaping hole of a nose. That didn’t help much.

As he watched, she picked up a discarded grande coffee cup from the floor, eyeballed the inside, shrugged and then dipped it into the bucket before depositing it in front of him.

Looking down, Butcher could see that the drink looked more like soup than alcohol. He lifted it cautiously to his nose for a sniff and recoiled from the meaty, rancid smell. It was worse than cider! Butcher heard a cackle from behind him.

‘Drink up,’ said the bartender, with a grin.

Butcher would have been the first to admit he was intimidated. Pretending he wasn’t would have been stupid. But he was used to people trying to intimidate him and even used to them succeeding. He’d been intimidated into doing some stupid fucking shit in the Sergeants’ Mess at Stirling Lines when he’d still been a junior captain, barely through Ajax Selection. A weird drink with foul shit in it wasn’t even in the top ten.

He raised the glass and tipped it back.

He knew plenty of guys who could do that trick where they opened their throat or some bollocks and downed a pint in a single swallow. He couldn’t do that. So he took a deep draft, tried not to listen to the urgent messages his tongue was trying to send his brain and put the cup back down, wiping his mouth. The bartender was still watching him and he met her eyes as he picked it back up and took another swallow. Then another. Then he downed the dregs in one last pull and put the cup back down on the plank.

‘Good,’ he agreed, pulling a tenner from the wallet and passing it across to her. ‘I’ll have another.’

The bartender looked over his head and left and right. It was clear enough that other figures in the room had been paying attention and she was waiting for the nod, one way or another. Then, whatever message she’d been looking for was obviously received, because she relaxed, looked back at him and picked up the cup, dipping it back in the bucket and replacing it in front of him.

‘Think you’ll turn into an orc by dawn, now, human?’ she asked him, not smiling now.

‘I think that’s pretty fucking unlikely,’ he replied. ‘The elf. Where will I find her?’

She nodded over his left shoulder and he turned, seeing a door in the far corner, guarded by two more of her kind. She’d called them “orcs”. And that rang a bell for him from somewhere, but his brain was fuzzy with fatigue and alcohol, nanoids or not, and right now nothing was coming up, so he picked up the cup and made his way towards the door, trying not to stagger as he went.

‘No drinks,’ growled one of the guards at the door.

That was absolutely fine by Butcher who had zero intention of so much as touching the second helping to his lips. He handed the cup to the guard.

‘No problem, my son,’ he replied, ‘this one’s for you. Take a break. I’m sure you’ve earned it.’

The guard took the cup and placed it carefully on a table to his side that looked like it used to be part of a bedroom set.

‘You got ten minutes, then we come in and get you,’ said the guard. ‘Understood?’

‘Yep,’ agreed Butcher, trying really, really hard not to sway as he spoke. ‘Alles klar, boss. Ten minutes.’

The other guard pushed the door open and gestured him through.

Like at the way in, there was some sort of sound-proofed airlock. The door closed behind him, shutting out the noise and almost eliminating the reverberating thump of the bass, and leaving him in total darkness. But his questing fingers found the opposite wall and, with a gentle push, it swung open into a smaller, lighter space. The room beyond was lit with a clear, white light, like daylight. There were mattresses and cushions all over the floor, with pillows and blankets scattered around. These were occupied by half-dressed orcs and smaller orcs and, for a moment, Butcher thought he’d wandered into a sex orgy. But after a moment he realized that, for all their semi-nudity, the attention of the relaxing crowd was on the tiny raised stage on the other side of the room from him.

There, on the only stool in the room, sat a woman in an oversized hoodie and miniskirt, knees drawn up tight together, her diminutive frame hiding behind the body of an electric guitar. Her black hair hung across her thin face and her bare arms stuck out from the hoodie, sleeves rolled up to her elbows, to wrap stick-thin limbs around the guitar. Her skin was so white it was almost blue, and from the sides of her head thrust sharp-pointed ears like wings.

In front of her was a microphone stand and, as Butcher watched, she leaned forward, face emerging from behind her hair to reveal full lips at odds with her emaciated appearance that part, breathily, and pause for a moment before she began to sing.

Later, Butcher would struggle to remember the details of the first elfsong he ever heard, but it would haunt him for the rest of his life. For the first few notes she just sang, her voice as clear and pure in tone as a crystal bell, but with the warmth of life to fill it out. Then her long, pale fingers began to pluck at the strings of the guitar and the two voices drifted in harmony, soaring, falling, curving and swooping with all the grace of a bird in flight.

As he listened, Butcher felt it all fall away. His shitty alcohol buzz blurred away to nothing. His fatigue and stress dropped off him like snow from his shoulders. Even that gnawing, ever-present guilt he thought he had forgotten lay, for just a moment, bare before the penetrating majesty of the song before it shriveled up and vanished in smoke, a scrap of paper before the consuming fire.

The overwhelming sensations pulled his feet out from under him and he fell, wondering, to his knees, not even noticing the impact. But from the lower angle he could look up beneath her fringe and see past the fragility and emaciation of her form to perceive the impossible beauty of what she was. Her cheeks were impossibly angular. Her nose flowed into her face almost to the point of invisibility. Her eyes were huge and almond-shape, with large, round, green irises. But for all that she had physically been changed by whatever had happened to her, she was still, unmistakable, Cally Cuttler.

*

At the end of the song - and it was hard to know how long it had taken but, as the guards from outside were yet to come and pull him away, he assumed it had been less than the ten minutes he’d been given - Butcher felt an involuntary sigh of disappointment escape his lips: one that was echoed in the mouths of pretty much everyone else there. The sense of release eased and Butcher realized that he was still knackered and stressed and still felt the tender old wound of people dead at his hands. But, somehow, he still felt better - as if the awfulness of his life had been placed into the context of something bigger, better and more magnificent.

But he realized that a lot of the others were climbing lugubriously to their feet, off their cushions and mattresses and stumbling towards the door, one by one. The ten minutes was obviously nearly at its end and he had only half-finished his job. So he pulled himself to his feet and pushed against the tide of departing orcs to approach the elf-woman on the stage.

She had barely moved. Her head was lowered and her arms rested on the guitar as if she needed it to hold her up. As he approached, she showed no reaction.

‘Cally?’ he asks. ‘Cally Cuttler?’

That was enough to get her attention and she jerked up in shock, then seemed to recoil at the sight of him, standing up from the stool for the first time to take a step back. Butcher’s overall impression of her fragility, he realized, had been only partially correct. Although her limbs seemed unnaturally thin, like the body of an in-patient at an eating disorder clinic, there was a supple strength to her movements that he hadn’t been able to see when she was playing. She lifted the guitar up as a barrier between them, but the gesture was as much threat as it was ward. Above her head, he realized for the first time, was another mark. Like the orc marks, it was glitchy and unreadable to his eyes, but it was a pale, electric blue, and more spread out like a strange halo.

‘Do I know you?’ she asked, green eyes glaring at him between black locks.

‘No,’ he admitted. ‘My name’s Parsons. Your family hired me to find you.’

For a moment, he saw panic in her eyes.

‘Ron,’ he said, on a hunch. ‘Ron sent me.’

At that, she relaxed.

‘So he’s found out?’ he asked, face lighting up for the first time. ‘Ron’s worked out what Gordon did?’

Butcher was taken aback at that.

‘I don’t know,’ he told her, carefully, hands raised. ‘What did Gordon do?’

Now it was Cally’s turn to stare, head tilted, her perfect eyebrows furrowing in confusion as she gestured at the room, herself and the gradually departing orcs.

‘This,’ she said, simply. ‘All of it. Gordon did all this.’

*

Butcher sat in the corner of the bar, watching the energy of the dancing orcs gradually dissipate as four o’clock rolled in and they started to disperse to God knows where they hid themselves in the day. As things wound down, one of them swaggered over to him, pulled across a table from somewhere and sat opposite.

‘My pal over there thinks a marked human must be dangerous to our kind,’ he said. He was of the bigger type of orc, but skinnier than most and only a few inches over six feet. He was wearing a bright blue tracksuit and white trainers, both alarmingly stained. ‘He thinks you must be a Hunter.’

‘You say “hunter” like I ought to know what you mean,’ said Butcher, placing his cup on the table. He’d bought another drink, to be polite, but wasn’t about to risk actually drinking it.

‘But I say,’ went on the orc, ignoring him, ‘that humans are weak on their own. They are only a threat to us because we are few. And, mark or not, I could rip off your arms and cut off your head and there’s feck all you could do to stop me.’

‘Is that so?’

‘Col says I’m not to hurt you, though,’ said the orc, yellow eyes boring into Butcher’s. He’d seen the type before - all insecurity and fear hiding behind a crust of aggression and violence. ‘But he says we can arm wrestle.’

‘I don’t want to arm wrestle,’ replied Butcher.

Then another figure appeared behind the seated orc. It was the big bouncer from the front door: a massive, hulking figure who also happened to be holding Butcher’s pistol in his right hand.

‘Arm wrestle,’ said the bouncer.

‘I’m guessing you’re Col,’ said Butcher, nodding.

He stood up and pulled off his coat and jacket. Then he unbuttoned his sleeves and carefully rolled them up, checking his stats as he did so, pleased to note that they sprung up without him even needing to subvocalize. So, he thought, STR 6 ought to count as 7 thanks to his Duty. And although he was still working it out, he thought this would be a Feat of Strength, too, which would make him STR 8. If the orc were a normal human, Butcher would be pretty confident, right now. But he wasn’t. And Butcher had no idea if whatever was making their glitchy mark appear was also providing them with the same advances as he had.

He sat down and the pair of them locked hands. And, as Butcher took the strain, he felt his muscles come to life in a way he’d never seen before. He bicep tensed beneath his shirt sleeve, turning rigid as stone and the sensation flooded around his elbow, up his forearm and into his hand. And as he tightened his grip on the rough, grey paw of the hulking orc he saw the first sign of doubt creep into those yellow eyes.

‘Go,’ said Col.

Butcher felt the orc’s pressure on his hand build, from a confident easing of power to a harder and harder push against his resisting strength. Butcher had to fight back, and he had little doubt that the orc would have crushed him before the procedure. But now he had the nanoids on his side. He summoned his energy and started to push back.

Immediately, the orc started to give ground and Butcher glanced up at the impassive Col, looming over the table. He pushed further and the orc’s doubt turned to panic.

‘Holy shit, how are you doing that?’ he demanded.

In response, Butcher upped the pressure one last time and, in a single smooth motion, forced the orc’s wrist to the tabletop.

Victory secured, he released the other’s hand and sat back, looking up again at Col who was toying with his pistol.

The loser was shoved off his chair by the larger orc, who sat in his place and pushed the pistol across to him.

‘What the fuck are you?’ asked Col, laying the pistol down between them.

‘Just a soldier,’ said Butcher, rolling his sleeves down again..

‘You aren’t… what we were told to expect.’

‘I don’t know what you were told to expect,’ he replied, restraining himself from reaching for the pistol despite every part of him desperately wanting to. ‘But I’m not it. I don’t know what you are. I don’t where you came from or why you changed into… this. Orcs. I’m just here for Cally.’

‘She won’t leave.’

‘You’ll stop me?’ Butcher stood up to put his jacket and coat back on, checking his pockets reflexively for his wallet.

‘No,’ Col said again. ‘She won’t leave. If you can persuade her, we would be sad to lose the elfsong. But also happy that she’s no longer… here.’

He gestured at the space around them - filthy, stinking and wrecked as it was.

‘Stop trying to get rid of me again, Col,’ said Cally, appearing at his elbow, her guitar zipped up into a case dangling from one shoulder. She had a brightly-coloured bandana wrapped around her head, pressing and covering her enormous ears. ‘I’ve told you before: I won’t leave you guys. As long as there’s an orc in Liverpool, there’ll be an elf.’

Col looked at Butcher and shrugged. He pushed the pistol across the table to the soldier, who picked it up and slipped it into a pocket. He exchanged a nod with the orc bouncer.

‘Come on, then, Mister Parsons,’ said Cally, pulling a snood up over her face and her hood up over the whole ensemble. ‘Walk me home and I’ll tell you about Gordon Cuttler.’