The Armory stood in a room made of familiar stone with walls of familiar rules and lit by torches in iron sconces burning with familiar fire. Behind them the black door onto space still yawned, and there might have been movement upon the skeleton.

"Seal it," she said, and grabbed one side of the heavy double doors. Vice helped her, and the rest of the Armory grabbed the other door, straining and shoving until the heavy, iron-banded wood met in the middle and closed away the starry void. Dagger dropped the steel crossbar in place and made a sound that might have been a sigh.

"We have to get out of here, boss," Powder said.

"Not until the job's done. Pitch, I think it might be time for another dose."

Pitch produced the vial and freshened it with a pinch from one of his pouches. "We'd better be quick about it, though. We don't have much more of this and after that we'll have to rely on our will. Which is its own problem."

"Why do you say that?"

"We've been experiencing this for however long now, aware of it and affected even though the drugs keep the worst of the tension at bay. When they wear off, there will be a cumulative effect. As long as we stay here under this," he indicated the vial, "we are essentially borrowing sanity."

"Borrowing sanity," Saber said, snorting hard, "I like that."

Powder gave him a friendly nudge. "Well, you would. You like borrowing things."

"Wives, husbands and money," Saber said cheerfully.

"At least he usually returns two of those," Dagger muttered.

"I think the word you're looking for, captain," Powder said, "it discard."

"Can we find something else to talk about?" Saber said, "like which way we go next?"

"Don't need to discuss that," Dagger said and pointed.

At the far side of the room from them was a brass cage with an open door. Inside was paneled in gleaming, polished wood and red velvet. There were brass buttons on a plaque. Dagger said and led the way into the cage.

The gate shut with a cheerful ding.

"Oh, fuck you," Saber muttered.

Dagger pushed one of the buttons and the wind rushed around them as they were abruptly plunged upwards, their stomachs drawing down ino their boots with the momentum. The tunnel they rushed through smelled of mold and dust, machine grease and brushed their faces with stale air. With a deafening screech, the cage halted and the Armory were thrown about its walls like marbles in a jar.

"I think we're stuck," Dagger said, fruitlessly pushing button after button. Some mechanism they couldn't see whined each time, and the cage buzzed and hummed with repressed effort. Saber looked up.

"Vice," he said, "give me a boost?"

The monk made a stirrup of his hands and Saber stepped into them and was lifted toward the ceiling where he drew a stout knife and pried at panel in the ceiling until it fell open with a bang and a shower of dust. Coughing, Saber grabbed the edge of the panel and hauled himself up and onto the roof of the cage.

"I think we have to climb," he called back down. "There are cables here. This cage must be lifted by pulleys... somewhere."

Dagger boosted up Powder and Pitch, and finally Vice. The others reached their hands down to give the monk something to grab until finally Dagger herself jumped up and grabbed the edge of the hatch and hauled herself outside. They were in a dark shaft, and several cables attached to a winch on the roof of the cage extended up, thrumming with holding its weight. Dagger grabbed hold of one, braced herself on another and began to climb. The rest followd her. Pitch struggled, and she and Vice took turns holding him up so he could take a break. But the climb still felt like it went on forever, and Pitch swigged desperately from a vial and paused, huffing to hold himself in place.

"Pitch?" Dagger asked in a worried tone.

"Don't mind me, boss. Just a little something extra. Not built for this sort of work. Can you hold me a moment or two longer?"

Vice climbed up alongside the alchemist on the second cable, and Dagger climbed down. They reach wrapped one arm around the panting, exhausted alchemist. Powder and Sable also twined their limbs around the cables and tried to rest as best they could.

"Saber, Powder, keep going," Dagger said. "See if there's a way out anywhere up there."

"Yes, captain," Powder said and led the way with Saber close behind. They climbed for dozens of more feet, their hands shaking. "Wait," Powder said and took a length of matchcord from her pocket and sparked it alight. Warm, red fire dashed itself against the dark walls of the shaftway. She held it in her teeth and they climbed on, Saber squinting and wincing as sparks fell from the makeshift flare and landed on his back and shoulders. Powder stopped after several more feet.

"Found it."

"What have you got?" Saber asked.

"Help me with this."

They reached their legs across to a narrow sill and the suggestion of a doorway in the shaft. Together they pried it open and slipped into a sparsely lit room full of tables and the smell of moldering paper. Somewhere water was dripping. Powder went to one of the tables, and saw coils of cables leading to a strange machine she'd never seen before and stretching away down one of the aisles between the tables. With a borrowed knife she cut the cables free and dragged their length in until she had two dozen feet of cable wrapped around her arm.

"What is it?" Saber asked.

"Some kind of rope."

"Look at the wires inside."

The cable was rubber coated, but inside was a tight bundle of metal filament.

"Electrical?"

"Could be. Will it hold him?" Saber asked.

"Give it a hard tug."

They grunted as they wrenched the cable betwee them, then headed back and secured on end to the edge of the doorway to the shaft and dropped the other down into the darkness. Powder looked at her guttering matchcord flare and sighed.

"I'll go," Saber said, taking the burning brand from her.

"Are you sure?"

"I'm good," the duelist said, his mouth set tight. Powder could see his hands were still shaking.

"Saber?"

"Yeah?"

"Don't fall."

"Powder!" Saber said with a tired grin. "I'm touched."

"Literally nobody is touching you."

Saber laughed and lowered himself down into the shaftway, sliding his way by fits and starts down the cable until he saw the lumpy shadows of the rest of the Armory below.

"Can we climb? Powder and I found a way out, and dropped a cable. We just need to climb up a few more feet."

"Go," Dagger said, "we'll follow."

"I'm fine," Pitch said, his face twitching and his jaw clenching.

"What did you take?" Saber asked him.

"A lot more than I should. Heart's pounding. I'll need to rest once we get up there, but I'll get up there."

"Stout fellow," Saber said and led the climb back up, hand over hand. They reached the dangling cable and wrapped it around Pitch's waist several times until he could hang comfortably.

"This is undigified," he said.

"A bit," Saber said. "You look like bait on a hook."

Pitch looked down into the shaftway as if there might be a fish eyeing his twitching legs with interest. "Saber," he muttered.

"Yeah, Pitch. I know. I'm an asshole."

Dagger and Vice went up ahead, with Saber huffing behind. When they reached the top, and Powder helped them to cross into the strange new room, Dagger and Vice pulled the dangling Pitch up hand-over-hand and hauled him across the threshold.

"This is not a place of our world," Vice said, looking around the room. He went to one of the tables, a neutral gray cube and picked up a device covered in buttons. Each had a letter of some alphabet on it. "Pitch, do you know this language? It looks like an accordion."

Pitch peered at it and shook his head. The ceiling was lit by glowing rectangles, many of which had gone dead and even more were flickering like fireflies. A layer of dust covered everything and under their feet was a rough gray carpet. They walked between the cubes. Each was identical. A box with a glass window that showed only darkness, and the device with the letters all over it. They came to a room with a large table, chairs arranged around it at intervals, each empty and covered in dust.

"This isn't wood," Powder nodded, rapping on the table with one knuckle. "What is it?"

"No idea," Pitch said, "not a natural material I'm familiar with."

Dagger was staring at the far end of the table. "Look," she said and went over to a white board held up on an easel. "Artists?"

Pitch stepped past her and stared at the drawings on the white surface. They were all rendered in a bright red. Calculations spiraled their way up the sides in a language he couldn't speak, but the pictures were clearer.

"It's the Citadel," Pitch said. "Look. Look at how the design repeats and overlaps."

Four towers were drawn on the white. Each a bit different and each arranged into floors and boxes. Each tower's layout was different, but the outside structure was the same. Scrawled notes crept up and down, with arrows pointing to different rooms inside the diagrams.

"What does it mean?" Dagger asked.

"This is a home of the gods," Vice said. "The ones who built the tower. We are staring at the plans of celestial entities."

"I'd argue the gods part," Pitch said, "No, Vice. Not becase it's not possible. But this many diagrams, I don't think it's about planning."

"What else could it be?" Vice countered.

"I'm not arguing with your logic, Vice. It might be sound. But have you ever seen notes or written plans among the Vigil's servants?"

"No," the monk admitted.

"No. Exactly. They think and it becomes so. This isn't a plan, it's a study, it's analysis. You don't take notes like these because you already understand something. You take them because you are trying to."

Dagger swept her hand through the dust on the table and looked at the gray furring on her palm. "Whatever it was, they gave up."

"That's possible," Pitch said.

"Do these notes indicate any direction or map, do you think?"

"They're too crude, and I can't understand the language. But they do suggest that the Citadel has a definite verticality."

"So?"

"So, it's a reasonably logical guess that as long as we continue to choose up when a direction presents itself, we could expect to reach the top."

"Any idea how far we have to go?"

-

"None at all, Dagger."

Dagger swore under her breath. "Lets see what these else these alchemists were hiding."

"They could also have been workers trying to implement some plan," Pitch said." Perhaps they met here to discuss what to do next."

The Armory left the room and continued along the low hall. In a tiny antechamber they found a vat and several dirty clay cups. Saber gave one a sniff and laughed.

"What?" Pitch asked.

"Coffee," Saber said. "They were drinking coffee." He opened the vat and sniffed the inside. "Very, very old coffee. There's mold in here."

"Humans, then," Dagger mused. "Pitch, what do you make of that?"

"As much as I can make of that," he said, pointing to a framed picture on the wall. The image was of a kitten clinging to a branch.

"The letters are the same as on the devices on the tables with all the buttons," Pitch said. "And the notes in the meeting room."

"Why a kitten?" Dagger asked.

"This place is fucking weird," Saber said.

"Come look at this," Powder shouted from outside the antechamber, and the Armory followed the sound of her voice to the end of the hall. She was standing before an opening in the wall, a rip in the fabric of the place with glittering, shifting edges that flashed colors of purple and yellow. On the other side was a set of stairs heading down gradually toward a circular platform lined with columns. The sky above it roiled with dirty gray clouds. In the distance something was moving fast between pillars of stone that continued up into the clouds and fell away below to an unfathomable darkness. On the platform stood a figure as tall as one of the pillars, but sitting in a dejected hunch. By it's side was a greatsword with a barbed tip.

"The stairs head down," Dagger noted. "Pitch, you said we should always go up."

"It's just a theory. In reality, I don't see another way out of here."

"Forward then," Dagger said stepped through the portal and onto the stairs. She glanced over her shoulder. The portal and the hall behind was gone. Behind her the stairs continued up for an uncountable distance and disappeared into the rushing clouds.

"Well," she said. "Fuck."

She walked down the stairs to what could only be described as an arena.

The Armory watch through the portal as Dagger glanced at them once, but with eyes on something distant, and then turned and descend the stairs.

"Where's she going?" Saber asked, and then tried to walk through the cosmic rip in the wall, but couldn't. The air in front of his face, and the view, were a moving painting for all that he could step into it.

"She's not waiting," Pitch said.

"Of course not," Vice rumbled. "she has seen something."

"We have to get to her," Powder said.

"Well," Pitch muttered, "we're not getting through this way.

They watched helplessly as Dagger descended the stairs, ever closer to the hunched figure in the arena who was rising and picking up its sword.

"Dagger!" Saber shouted, but she did not stop.

Then the view through the rip blurred, faded briefly to a wall like all the others in the room, and became a still window onto what might have been a broken town snarled in staircases. The rows and tilts of steps wrapped and twisted around each other, coiling about the buildings at impossible angles and in directions no living being could logically, or safely, walk.

"My turn," Vice said.

"Your turn?" Pitch said, "what do you mean your turn?"

"A test in every moment, Pitch," Vice intoned.

"What does that even mean?"

Vice stepped through the rip in reality as the alchemist's lunge failed to reach him. Pitch wasn't even sure he'd have been able to drag the monk so much as an inch.

"Fucking hell! Vice, you asshole!" Pitch yelled as he slammed against the now obdurate view and vainly tried to push through. Saber and Powder grabbed him for his own safety and they watched as Vice, just like Dagger, turned to look behind them at where they were without seeing them.

Vice stood among the stair-snarled town, its buildings rotten and breaking down under the weight of time, and saw no path behind him any longer, no strange room and no fellowship. He did not see Pitch and Saber fruitlessly batter the air with their fists, he did not see Powder's shoulder's slump. Vice walked out under a sky made of stairs. The platform he stood on was one of many he saw, suspended among the steps. He stood. He breathed deeply of the musty air that held not one hint of a living smell.

"A labyinth within another," he said. He sat down on the stone and crossed his legs. He closed his eyes, clasped his hands beneath his chin and wound his fingers together in shifting patterns until he found the one he wanted. The metal on his hands rasped.

*

Back in the strange and empty room, Pitch, Powder and Saber looked at each other and at Vice. The rip in the wall shifted again.

"I don't care what you see through this damn wall. Don't you two fucking move," Pitch grated between clenched teeth.

"We're here, Pitch," Saber said. "We're not going anywhere."

"Can you feel them?" Powder asked.

"It's faint," Saber said, but the tickle's there."

"The tickle?" She asked.

"That's what I call it."

"You would," Powder said.

"What do you call it?"

"The tug."

"Oh, and that's better?!"

Pitch rounded on the duelist and the gunhand. "Can you two stop fucking bantering for five seconds?"

The rip in the world was blurring again. The three watched and waited for the next scene that awaited them.

DAGGER

The air held no sound but the wind, and that rushed around Dagger as she descended the railless steps. It tugged her. It tricked at her ankles like a cat. She walked slowly and heavily as she could. Somewhere behind her, trapped in another aspect of the Citadel of Stairs, was her crew.

Alone.

Bereft.

She had to get back to them. But first...

The sky was a boil of clouds, and buildings crumbled in the distance. As she watched, one of them gave its structure up to time's force and fell, bits of its bricks shuddering one final time and dissolving into the black expanse below her boots. She walked the last few steps to the edge of the arena and stepped between two of the column and into the circle. The figure she'd seen seated in some forlorn mourn, had risen to its feet and held its greatsword in both hands in front of its chest, the sword's point spiking the bricks.

"You've returned. It has been so long," the figure rumbled in a dual voice.

"You know me?"

"The spirit of conflict is all, and rests slumbering in the breast of every visitor to this circle. I have waited and waited. And here you are. Again," the figure said.

"Uh huh," Dagger muttered. There were three more long steps between her and the arena floor. "So you have seen me before?"

"I have seen a thousand thousand like you."

"And what happened to them?"

"Fallen. As you will fall."

"No," Dagger said.

"No?"

"I don't have time for this."

"Time is all you have. Here we are the recipients of a squandered wealth of ages."

"If there's nothing to spend it on, any coin is worthless," Dagger said, still refusing to step into the arena. On the other side of the towering figure was another set of stairs that led up and vanished behind a column and a cracked obelisk of black stone. She wondered if the beleagured figure that barred her path was a god, or at least the offspring of one.

"A contemplative warrior."

"Are you a giant?"

"Are you a gnome?"

"Let me pass. I'm not here to fight. I need to find the rest of my crew."

"You are not here to fight? But you have come to the arena."

"Not by choice."

"Choice is dream that we never wake from, a single step in a staircase we cannot see until we have finished walking it."

"You sound like a friend of mine," Dagger said, wishing Vice was here to distract this melancholy philospher so that she could step up behind him and brain him with her hammer.

"Is he also wise man?"

"He also talks like he's unwinding a ball of yarn."

"Come, warrior. Fight with me. Spend your time. We can be, for some moments, as two reformed misers tossing their gold into the ocean."

Dagger looked around the suspended platform, took in the clouds and distant towers in a single glance. She wondered how much of it was real, and how much the Citadel's creation. Was she even still inside its walls? Or could she reach those places? She looked at the stairs on the other side of her giant adversary.

"No," Dagger said and walked around the edge of the arena, cutting the large man a wide berth.

"No?!"

"Nope," Dagger repeated as she walked.

"You can't refuse!"

"Seems like I can do just that."

"There are rules! I have waited a thousand years for a worthy opponent!"

"Not my problem."

"How will you ever know which of us is better?"

"Don't give a shit."

"If you turn your back on me, I'll strike you down," the giant said, hefting his great, hook-tipped sword. His knuckles cracked as he tightened his grip.

"Doubt it."

"You doubt my word?"

Dagger was halfway to the far stairs, and walking with the same bored, measured pace.

"Mate, you waited on this platform in full view of two sets of stairs for a thousand years."

"Yes."

"And you didn't leave?"

"I..."

"You just sat here that whole time? Waiting."

"Yes. For such is my purpose."

"So you like rules?"

"What?"

"You want to face a worthy oppponent. Not stab one in the back. Good luck with whoever shows up next."

"No! Face me!"

Dagger reached the far side of the arena, and the space between two columns which led to the stairs. "Maybe think about leaving? This place is falling apart."

Dagger turned and walked between the columns. Behind her came a crash and she looked over her shoulder. The giant had dropped its sword and sat back down with its face in its armored hands.

"I... I cannot," the giant mumbled into the cup of its fingers.

"I figured as much," Dagger said and walked down the stairs. When she'd descended the first few stairs, she stopped and sighed heavily, muttered "shit," and went back up and stepped into the arena.

"Hey," she said.

The giant lifted his face from his hands. "You've returned. You'll face me after all?"

"No."

"Why do you taunt me then? To defeat me would be kinder."

"Little dramatic. C'mon. Lets go."

"Go?"

"Yeah. You want to wait here forever? I'm gonna find a way out of here."

"And you would bring me with you?"

"That's the idea. C'mon. I don't have all day."

"I must stay. I have to guard the way."

"Says who?"

The giant was about to answer, and then paused and looked around.

"I cannot remember."

"Fuck 'em then. Lets go."

The giant got to his feet and grabbed his sword. He walked tentatively closer to Dagger, the massive weapon resting on his shoulder. "Are you... are you sure?"

"I'm sure waiting here's a raw deal."

Dagger turned back to the stairs and descended, the giant's heavy footsteps followed. When she's gotten to the fifth stair, she heard a thunderous ring of a falling metal. She spun, her hand going to the haft of the hammer. The giant was gone. In its place, on a patch of stone just past the pillars was a pile of empty armor. The giant's sword lay beside it, as Dagger watched the metal armor rusted over and began to flake away.

"Ah, shit," Dagger muttered.

Then she turned back and continued down the stairs.

VICE

Meditation brought no clarity.

The sky was a staircase, stone platforms were clouds. Vice saw other figures, little more than specks moving around the distant snarls of elevation and descent. They were too far away for his voice to carry to them. He did wonder why they all seemed to be running.

Vice stood and walked to a staircase.

"Pitch said always up, even separated, perhaps that it still true."

Vice set his foot upon the stairs and stepped up.

The world spun and inverted. Vice crouched and put one hand down to steady himself against the steps. He looked above him and saw the platform on which he'd landed. There was now no direction to go, but down. The physics of stepping backward onto the ceiling twisted his perspeption so thouroughly, as did the fear that he might fall up and into the sky, that he could only walk down. Or was it up? He reached another platform, and then another. He walked sideways, upside down and rightside up.

He stopped on the next platform.

"This is absurd," he muttered. On the platform was a single stone hut. Inside he found a table and one chair. On the table was a clay caraffe and a cup. The jug was full of the clearest water Vice had ever seen. He poured himself a cup.

"A moment of grace woven into the chaotic pattern of the world," he said, and sipped.

It was a delicate honey wine. It tasted like sunlight.

Vice went back outside the hut and looked into the distance past the uncountable stairs and platforms and mused as to where the light was coming from in this twisted place where stone steps covered the sky and the floor far below, where the singular law of direction seeemed to be that there was none. Then he heard steps. They were moving fast and getting closer. A tattered man with a panicked expression came sprinting down (up?) a set of stairs and dashed across the platform, past a surprised, drinking Vice, and then dashed up, or perhaps across, another set of stairs that carried him away from the platform.

"Wait!" Vice yelled after him.

"No!" The figure shouted back.

"Why are you running?"

"Why aren't you?"

Vice thought about that. It was an interesting question. He smiled. Why not run? Why stand still? There was much to ponder in this place, and he felt a bubble of gratitude rising within him at this chance to sit within a meditative labyrinth of this size. He felt happy. He looked down into the cup suspiciously.

"Uh oh," he said, and a giggle escaped his lips.

The suspicion turned to anger.

"I am drunk," he said to the empty platform. "From a single sip. Like a novice."

He clung to his anger, which was difficult when half of him seemed keen to dance with joy at the strangeness of this place. He flung the half-drunk cup over the side and it stopped for a second, and then shot to the left in a perfect straight line. He heard it shatter somewhere. Shaking his head violently to clear the moonbeams, he stared hard into the distance. There was an indistinct curtain there, a constant wave of hazy movement against the horizon. It looked as if it was raining the largest drops he'd ever seen. He continued to stare, eyes screwing down to a squint until he finally understood what he was seeing. It was not rain.

No.

Those were falling stones.

An entire platform shot up past his own, trailing a breaking staircase and a pair of screaming people who looked to Vice as they were standing upside down. He walked to the edge and watched as the platform continued to rush toward the sky, tearing through other staircases and shattering platforms as it did.

"It might be time to run," Vice whispered.

The labyrinth was crumbling.

There was a brief spike of panic within him, and he turned to look at the stairs branching from his platform. He wanted to run, but with a breath and an effort he calmed his pounding heart. He clasped his hands.

"I watch and observe, not panic. I run when I choose, I stand when I like. I do not move because of the world's random conspirings. Watcher in the Darkness, see my vigil. Action without purpose is pantomime. It is the scared piglit squealling in the unknown dark. I will not fill my final moments with screams and mindless dashing."

He sat down on the platform. He would watch with detachment as this world crumbled.

"If it is now, let it be now. Let me not wish for it to be later."

His heartbeat calmed. The aggressive joy of the strange liquor faded, replaced with clarity.

PITCH, POWDER AND SABER

"Now what, Pitch?" Saber demanded as the rift closed behind Vice as well, and they stood in the strange place of quiet machines.

"How should I know?"

"I definitely don't."

Pitch looked at Powder, but the sharpshooter could only shrug. "Do we go on without them?"

"Machines..." Pitch said under his breath. "This place is a mass of machines going quiet. It's all systems untended. If you leave an experiment untended, it can run wild and outcomes become unpredictable."

"What's that mean?" Saber asked.

"Look around," Pitch said. "Don't leave this room, don't walk through any strange doorways. Lets find whatever is powering this gate."

As he said this, the rift reformed onto what might have been an idyllic forest clearing. As they watched, the vegetation began to rot and the limpid pond at the center filled with scum and fallen leaves. Behind the canopy of degraded trunks were patches of stone that called the distance of the place a liar. As they watched a faun staggered from between the trees and approached the pond. Its tongue was portruding from its mouth with thirst. Before the faun could reach the pond, it keeled over and died. It decomposed at speed. Soon its fur fell away to reveal gangrenous muscle and pitted, corrupt bones.

"I hate it here," Saber said.

"Nobody's suggesting we stay," Powder said. "Search, you two. Lets find whatever's powering this."

They cast about the workspaces and narrow corridors, their steps curiously muted on the rough, hard carpet under their feet. They found room after room down each winding corridor, but they held nothing but more blank machines and dust. Then Saber found a locked door with a square of glass in the center. It was too opaque to see through, but when he pressed his ear to it, he heard a faint humming on the other side. Not a human voice in absent song, but a steady noise that reminded him of a factory's din.

"Pitch, Powder!" He called. "Over here."

He tried the knob, but the door was locked fast.

"Let me take a look, Saber," Pitch said and the duelist moved aside. Pitch knelt to stair into the lock. It was a tiny thing he'd never seen the like of, the opening little more than a slit in the metal. He knocked around the lockplate.

"It's not steel."

"Is that good?" Powder asked.

"Well, the door is metal," Pitch said. "maybe aluminum. Tin? I can't tell without testing it. "I could pick it, but I've never seen a lock like this before. I'm not sure I have a pick slender enough."

"There's something on the other side," Saber said.

"I know. I can hear it too. Machinery."

"Pitch, hand me your goggles," Powder said.

"What are you going to do?"

"You're being too intelligent about this."

"There's no such thing."

"Hand me your goggles and we'll find out."

The alchemist handed over his glass eye protection. They had leather cups around the eyes and the glass was fogged to dull whatever light the wearer might be staring at. Powder slid them over her eyes.

"How do you see in these things?"

"I don't wear them for fun, Powder."

Muttering under her breath, Powder took a small iron bomb from her belt and uncoiled some fuse. She considered the door and then the hall behind them. She cut a length of fuse and shoved one end into the bomb.

"Pitch, can you make me something sticky?"

"Putty or glue?"

"Glue. Fast setting."

Pitch produced a wood mixing bowl and set a piece of treegum in the center, adding liguid from a vial and a pinch of white powder. He stirred the mixture into an acrid smelling past and Powder coated one side of her bomb with it and stuck it to the door plate. She held it against the metal and counted. The bomb stuck fast, Powder herded Pitch and Saber ahead of her as she played out the thin fuse along the ground.

"Do we really need to take cover?" Saber said. "It's just a little bomb."

"Shrapnel," Powder said, and lit the fuse.

A few moments later they were entering the room and coughing, and Pitch was busily stamping out a few papers on the ground that had caught fire. They stared around them. If the deserted worktables and corridors of the strange colorless room behind them was a desert, this was an oasis. Every surface was stacked with paper, every paper was covered with typed words like those off a printing press and scrawled with handwritten notes in red and blue. Against one wall was a massive black glass window, just as dark as the other opaque little boxes in the other room. Beneath it was a table covered in buttons. Pitch was pouring over what notes hadn't burned.

"What is it?" Saber asked.

"I'd guess a control panel of some kind. I've seen buttons like that in factories, but I don't know what this substance is," Pitch said, knocking one knuckle against the table. Pitch ducked under the table and grabbed a pair of rubber bound cables.

"Those are like the thing I cut loose to use for a rope," Saber said.

"You cut something in here?" Pitch asked, his tone reproachful.

"We need a rope. For you. We could go back and you can dangle in the darkness, if you want."

"Fair enough," Pitch said and followed the cables along the sidewall to a cabinet under the far table. He opened the doors. Inside was a vivid red machine as bright the room was dull. The cable ran to it and on the machine was a single switch. Pitch sniffed at the machine.

"Don't know that scent," Pitch said. "It almost smells a bit like coal oil."

"What do you think it does?" Powder asked.

"Well, it's a fuel. So..."

Pitch flipped the switch and the machine sputtered into life, trundling happily in its cabinet home. Pitch watched it.

"It doesn't do anything," he muttered. "Did they like the vibration?"

"Uh, Pitch," Saber said, "turn around."

The glass window against the wall had lit up and on it was a scene like a moving painting or a tapestry. Pitch got up and peered into it, and then put his hand against the glass, but it was not a portal like the ones they'd lost Vice and Dagger through.

The glass showed a gold-hued forest glade. The grass, the trees, each leaf and even the pond at its center, were all a burnish hue of dull yellow. It was an exact copy of the rotting forest they'd just seen.

"Is that..." Saber asked.

"No," Pitch muttered, "it's brass."

On the screen a mechanical faun crept out from between the brass tree trunks, crossed the brass ground, which was etched to suggest individual blades of grass. The animal bent to mime at drinking from the brass pond. There was a key on the faun's back, sprouting like a fairy's wing. It turned very slowly, then paused and stuck. The faun stuttered, stopped and then began moving again when the key did. It turned from it's pantomime drink and left the way it had come.

"It's like a big version of some children's toy," Powder said.

"And it's winding down. Saber, stick your head out and tell me if that rip in the air's showing the same thing as the screen?"

"Why would it be?"

"Why wouldn't it be? Just do it."

Saber left the room and came back a moment later.

"Okay, that's weird."

"Same scene?"

"I could have walked through. Want me to go steal the faun?"

"What? No. Why?"

"Want me to shoot it?" Powder asked.

"What? Oh, for fuck's sake," Pitch said, noting their sly grins, "focus. We need to get Vice and Dagger back. And I think this is how."

Pitch pushed a button on the far left corner of the panel and the screen shifted again, this time showing a snow capped tower. The top had already partially collapsed, and as they watched another stone fell from it and then another, crashing down the side of the tower and falling into the abyss that surrounded it.

"Saber," Pitch said.

"I'm going," Saber said. "Same thing. I can see the tower."

Pitch pushed the last button again, and the brass glade reappeared. They watched the fawn totter back out to drink.

"It's the same scene again?" Power asked.

"No, I think it's just repeating itself," Pitch said. "Everything we've seen. This place is just a series of... Remember what the queen said about an experiment?"

"So?" Saber asked.

"At the academy students would leave. Sometimes with their experiments still running. It was a big place, not much oversight. But the students knew who'd left what. And sometimes we'd watch some experiment from some failed student continue to run way past schedule. Sometimes it worked."

"Worked?" Powder said.

"Sometimes the unintended consequences were better than the intended ones."

"Like what?"

"You know that tincture I give you all to keep you sharp?"

"Yeah."

"It's supposed to make you blind."

"Pitch, what the fuck? If you fucking blind me I'll..."

"You'll what? Shoot me? Relax. It's perfectly safe. Now. Anyway, sometimes an experiment on decay spawns a death golem. Other times, they just fell apart. Slowly. Like this place."

"So what are you saying?"

"I think whoever was running this place is either dead, or gone," Pitch said and pushed another button, and then another. And another. The screen flickered through scenes, some ordinary, some so strange that in the brief moment they were on the glass they burned themselves into the three mercenaries' brains.

"There!" Powder shouted.

Pitched went back to the last button he'd pressed.

In the glass was Dagger, walking slowly down a narrow staircase in the sky with her hammer over her shoulder like she was taking a country stroll. A cloudy sky surrounded her, and an abyss yawned beneath her feet. The clouds on the far side of her were rippling as if something was moving fast within them. Saber dashed out of the room.

"Dagger!" He shouted through the rift in the air. The narrow staircase was close enough for him to step onto it. Dagger stopped and turned to look back up. Then began to walk slowly toward the rift. Her pace was agonizing, almost aggressive in its leisure.

"Goddamit, hurry!" Saber shouted. "I don't know how long this will hold.

But Dagger would not speed up. She did make a gesture in front of her mouth, but it was too far for Saber to see what it was.

"Dagger!" Saber shouted again.

The clouds on the other side of dagger rippled. They bulged. And something burst out of them with a roar like thunder. Dagger glanced behind her and began to sprint up the stairs. The cloud beast unwound a black, serpentine body and one end opened up in a mouth of triplicate jaws lined with dull, grinding molars. It bore down on Dagger.

"Run!" Saber shouted.

"I am fucking running!" Dagger yelled back as the beast closed in.

"Powder!" Saber shouted behind him, "Rifle. Now. Big fucking bullet."

But Powder was already there. Saber saw the rifle barrel reach past and then rest on his shoulder. He stood tall and firm and closed his eyes. Behind Dagger, the cloud beast was closing in and its dull teeth were gnashing as it screamed. It shattered the staircase behind Dagger as it chased, and Powder's heart leapt in her throat as she expected them all to collapse. But they held.

Dagger ran. And ran.

Powder sighted down her rifle, took aim at the cloud beast's throat and fired. The bullet ripped past Dagger's shoulder as she leapt for the rift, and Saber, deafened by gunfire, opened his eyes and reached out to grab her as Powder's bullet ripped into the cloud beast's mouth and burst out one side. The creature snapped its jaws shut with a deafening crack and reared back in pain as Dagger reached Saber. She tackled him back into the room and away from the rift as the cloud beast was collecting itself to lunge again. A ripple blinked across the skin above its mouth as several obsidian eyes stared into the rift. It roared and lunged. A gust of wind that reeked of mold and dust blew into the room.

"Pitch!" Powder shouted. "Shut the fucking door!"

"It's not strictly a door!" Pitch called back.

"Fucking shut it, you pedantic twat!" Dagger yelled, still on top of the wheezing Saber.

The rift shifted just as the beast reached them. One moment they were faced by jaws, the next by the brass mechanical fawn going for yet another drink, but this time much slower and with a palsied step as the mechanisms within it slowly wound down.

"Where's Vice?" Dagger said as she rolled off of Saber, who made a theatrical gasp for air. "Oh, shut up," she muttered at him.

"He's next, captain," Powder said. "Pitch has a handle on the machine. What the fuck was that thing?"

"Didn't stop to ask its name," Dagger said.

"Why were you just strolling along if you knew it was there?" Saber said.

"It's nearly blind. Sound and quick movements draw it."

"So it didn't know you were there until I... oh," Saber said.

"Yeah," Dagger said, "oh."