The soldiers took a couple of steps into the street. They hadn’t seen their crouching ambushers yet.

“It’s like they wanted to be occupied,” said the one who had been speaking most recently. “It’s like...What the--?”

He had spotted them.

“NOW!” yelled Sagar.

Ryn sprang forwards and made for the nearest soldier. He gripped the hilt of his sword tight and drew it back, blade up, then slammed the pommel into the soldier’s helmet before he could react. It resounded like a clear bell.

“Ouch!” The soldier raised his hands to his helmet, but remained standing.

“Crap,” said Ryn.

The soldier drew his sword, then lunged.

Ryn managed to jump back out of the way. His pulse had begun to pound violently between his ears. Not again.

A black shape crashed into the soldier, sweeping his legs out from underneath him, then slammed another sword-pommel down onto the soldier’s helmet, much harder than Ryn had managed. The soldier lay still on his back. Vish leapt away as quickly as he had arrived.

Someone was shouting in surprise.

Ryn turned. Two other soldiers lay unconscious at Sagar’s feet. Vish dispatched another one, swiftly sliding his sword into the visor of the man’s helmet, who went down with a muffled scream and clutched at his face.

Nuthea’s not going to be happy about that.

Elrann had her whip coiled around the arm of the final soldier. Whatever she had been trying to do hadn’t worked, and he had managed to draw his sword. The two of them stood frozen for a moment, sizing each other up, connected by Elrann’s whip.

The soldier swept his helmeted head from side to side, taking them all in.

He drew in a breath, like he was about to shout for help.

Ryn, Vish and Sagar all rushed him.

Ryn got to him first, and this time he hit the soldier so hard with the pommel of his sword on the front of his helmet that the man went down at once. Apparently Ryn had warmed up now, and lost his battle shyness.

All the soldiers were down now.

“Quickly,” said Sagar. “We got unlucky. That was noisier than it should have been. We’ve got to strip them of their armour quickly, before anyone notices what’s happened.”

They got to work straight away, looking around anxiously as they did to see if anyone had spotted them. Nobody seemed to have, yet—at least they heard no cries of alarm and saw nobody else in the street for the moment.

Ryn followed Sagar and Cid’s instructions and knelt down next to the soldier he had just knocked out, unfastened the man’s chestplate and leg-guards, and stripped him of his gauntlets. He then set about putting all of these pieces of armour on himself, over the top of his clothes. Lastly he slid off the soldier’s helmet. He almost gasped when underneath he found the smooth face of a young man with a shaved head, not much older than himself. Ryn hoped that he had not done the boy any lasting damage.

He slipped the helmet on over his head. At first the metal was cold against his cheeks, but it fit snugly. The black bucket-like Imperial soldiers’ helmets all had a horizontal slit to see out of, which now became Ryn’s window on the world.

“You did not need to kill that one, Shadowfinger Vish,” Nuthea chided when the bountyhunter took the helmet off his soldier, revealing a bloody mess that used to be a face which made Ryn flinch and look away.

“I made a judgment, girl,” Vish said to her. “We needed to be quick, so I acted as efficiently as I could in the situation and dispatched the soldier in the quickest way available to me.”

“Hmph,” said Nuthea.

She had managed to wriggle into a breastplate, which from her grimace appeared to be quite uncomfortable, and she looked absolutely ridiculous with the hem of her once-white, torn, blood-stained dress poking out of the bottom of it.

“You’re going to need some trousers, princess,” said Sagar, barely stifling a laugh even in their highly dangerous situation.

Cid pulled some off a soldier and gave them to her. Once the trousers and the rest of her armour were on, and her dress tucked in, she looked much more like an Imperial, apart from the facts of her chestplate sticking out a bit more than normal, her feminine face and her long golden hair. But she bunched that up as best she could and shoved it inside a helmet, her lip curling in revulsion as she lowered that over her head.

“Urgh, it smells in here,” said Nuthea.

The illusion was more or less complete. Still, hopefully nobody would look too closely at her...

Elrann was having similar difficulties. “Where am I meant to put all of this?” she complained as she took things one by one out of the pockets and insides of her engineer’s overalls and placed them on the ground. Her two pistols. Her whip. A spanner. A wrench. A screwdriver. She seemed to have all manner of things stuffed down there--almost as many items as Cid kept in his healer’s satchel, which he was simply able to sling over a shoulder as usual over the top of his armour.

“Here,” said Cid, pointing at one of the fallen soldiers. “Look. This one has a leather utility belt with some pouches on it. He must be some sort of Imperial engineer himself. You can use it.”

“Ah, thanks pops,” said Elrann, bending down to take the belt from the soldier and inspecting the contents of its pockets. “Hey, there’s some good tools in here! I could use some of these! And some of mine need replacing.” She set about filling the belt with her stuff and the items from the soldier that she wanted.

“Come on, woman,” hissed Sagar, “we haven’t got all night.”

Once she was done and had strapped the belt around her waist she stood up, and they all surveyed each other, six ragamuffin travelers now disguised as Imperial soldiers. With the helmets on, they just about passed as them.

Ryn twisted his torso from side to side, testing out the feel of the armour. His head rocked back in surprise. “It’s so light,” he said.

“Flimsy too,” confirmed Cid. “It’s made of alphite—very plentiful in the Morekemian mountains. Alphite is light, cheap and easy to pierce. The Empire don’t exactly kit their soldiers out with the finest equipment, or even train them that well. The Emperor takes more of a ‘quantity over quality’ approach to warfare--”

“Enough yammering,” said Sagar, who had rolled up his pirates’ coat and stashed it in his pack. “We don’t have time for economics lectures now. We need to get going.”

“What do we do with them?” said Ryn, nodding towards the floored soldiers, five of them knocked out, one dead at Vish’s hand.

“Drag them into a dark corner,” said Sagar, “and hope they wake up later rather than sooner.” He gave Nuthea a passive-aggressive glance.

Together they dragged the soldiers’ limp bodies further into the alley and hid them in a particularly shadowed corner behind a wooden bench. One of the still-alive soldiers started to murmur something, but Sagar hit him again, and the murmuring stopped. As far as they could tell, nobody had seen or heard them.

“When these guys wake up again, they’ll raise the alarm…” said Sagar, sounding regretful that they hadn’t killed more of the soldiers.

“By that time we will be gone,” said Nuthea. “It’s worth it for a clear conscience.”

Sagar tutted. “Come on, then,” he said. “We better get out of here before they do wake up.”

The six of them moved off as quickly as they could, not running, as that could attract attention, but walking briskly through the darkness of the sleeping city, trying to look like a group of Imperial soldiers out on patrol. They headed north, as that was where Sirra’s main train station was found, finding their way bit by bit from landmarks and key streets that those of them who had been here before remembered.

Elrann knew the city best, having lived here the longest, but Sagar, Cid and even Nuthea all seemed to know or remember parts of it too. Ryn guessed that just left him and Vish. But for all he knew, the Shadowfinger had been here before as well, he just wasn’t letting on—not that he ever let on about all that much anyway. Ryn supposed he was the least well-traveled of their whole group. Naïve greenhorn pussywillow farmboy, ran Sagar’s and Elrann’s words in his mind.

“Stop!” said Sagar when they finally sighted the station, still quite a long way off, as they approached it from the south-west along one of the smaller streets that ran like veins to this focal hub.

Sirra Main Station was a big, rectangular building with a series of pointed roofs and a massive clock-face built into the wall above its many-doored main entrance. It was built out of the same white-grey stone as many of the other old or important buildings in Sirra, but Ryn could see that it was extremely grubby in the light from the streetlamps that lit this sector of the city. And there were soldiers streaming in and out of it.

There were more soldiers going in than out, but there was still a steady stream going in both directions—though thankfully the ones leaving the station were all heading off down a different street from the one their party was approaching by, the main road that led due south away from the station.

“Well this makes things harder,” said Elrann. “How are we going to sneak onto a train with all these bucketheads around?”

“Why are there so many of them?” asked Ryn.

“I don’t know, pup,” said Sagar. “But I’m going to find out. You guys wait here and make sure nobody sees you. I’ll be back in a bit.”

And before anyone could protest, he walked off towards the station.

“He’s very brave,” said Nuthea.

Ryn bit his cheek.

Elrann snorted. “Very stupid, if you ask me.”

They kept watching Sagar as he strode towards the station. Soon they lost him amidst the stream and he was just another helmeted, black-armoured soldier walking among the crowds. They waited in the street, staying out of sight, eyes fixed on the stream, nobody saying anything else.

After about ten minutes, from the clock on the front of the station, Ryn knew they were all thinking the same thing. What if he’s been caught? What if he’s not coming back? Ryn also wondered, What if he’s decided to turn us all over to the Empire for gold?

But that wouldn’t make sense. Sagar had a price on his own head as well, and he seemed too enamoured by the prospect of the rewards Nuthea had offered him for transporting her, and possibly by Nuthea herself…

Mother. Father. Hometown. Find Vorr. Kill Vorr. Stay with Nuthea.

There it was, firm in Ryn’s mind as he watched the station intently, keenly aware of Nuthea’s presence next to him. He wasn’t sure if any of his goals were attainable. But damn him if he wasn’t going to try to attain them anyway, he decided.

If the others were all wondering if Sagar was going to come back, nobody voiced their concern, and the minutes went by, marked by the slow movement of the big black hand of Sirra Station’s clock, that crept up higher and higher towards the midnight hour. Apparently everyone was too tense to say anything. They just stood there, watching the soldiers streaming in and out of the station, poised and alert like taut bowstrings.

Then, at last, one of the soldiers emerging from the station entrance turned right out of the main stream and started to walk towards their position.

But was this him? With the soldier’s helmet still on, they couldn’t know for sure.

Ryn’s hand went to the hilt of the Imperial sword that now hung at his side.

“Relax!” called the soldier as soon as he was in earshot, but close enough not to be heard by anyone else. “It’s me! Don’t look so nervous!”

Ryn exhaled. Sagar drew closer. “I was right,” he said from inside his helmet. “They’re using Sirra as their transport hub to move troops around. This isn’t just an occupation of Imfis—this is a full-scale invasion of Dokan.”

“By the One…” said Nuthea.

“Well, poodoo,” said Elrann.

Neither Cid nor Vish said anything.

Ryn’s head was too foggy from grief and disorientation for him to register much of the significance of this. So what if the Empire were invading the whole of Dokan? He just wanted to kill General Vorr.

“I didn’t even have to ask anyone anything,” Sagar went on. “I just picked it up from walking round and listening. They’ve requisitioned the trains and they’re running them round the clock to send troops to the various Imfisi borders to prepare to invade the neighbouring nations.”

Ryn heard Nuthea take in a sharp breath.

“Then they’re also bringing some troops back into here to keep their grip on Imfis and perform various different tasks here as their base. It’s a major operation--”

“That’s all well and good,” interrupted Nuthea, “but what are we going to do now we’re here?”

“Calm it down, princess, I was getting to that. There’s a train that leaves tonight, soon, at midnight. All we need to do is sneak onto it, but with the amount that’s going on in there, that will be a piece of piss.”

“Where is it going?” asked Ryn.

“Manolia, of course,” said Sagar. “Or as close to the border as it will be able to get.”