Nence moved unseen in the labyrinthine underbelly of Enelastoia’s flesh markets. His iridescent feathers, once vibrant, now dulled and unkempt beneath the crimson vestments of the Xenozygote Order. Even so, faint reflections of biolamplight played along his sleek plumage, a ghost of his former visage. He spoke no words—he had none to give. His mandibles clicked soundlessly, his delicate antenna shifting in subtle movements, communicating only to those who knew how to read a silent lexicon of gentle pulses and deft flicks. And here, in the stinking pens of the flesh trade, language mattered little. Only hunger, bartered biomass, and the Lord’s coin held sway.

  The zealots of the Xenozygote Order moved under Nence’s guidance, their eyes fever-bright with devotion, their hands heavy with bloodstained scrip. They came to purchase thralls: chain-bound fighters, gene-warped killers, monstrous brutes with war-touched augmentations—meat for the charnel house with minds tempered by the savagery of Acetyn’s underworld. The flesh brokers obliged them with glee, dragging forth specimens in chains, fetters, and half-grown exoskeletons not yet hardened. The zealots did not care for names. War demanded only bodies, and it was a war the zealots prepared for.

  And at the heart of this procurement stood Blacheaus Tem Etal.

  The Vat-Mother’s favoured Grafter, Blacheaus, was a thing of obscene artistry, a walking mosaic of limbs and flesh, grotesquely resplendent in his augmentation. Bulbous tissue formed hunchbacked curves over a skeletal scaffold, scuttling arms extending in unnatural directions, he stood as a mockery of form, heads layered atop heads, hands emerging from beneath sanguine cloth, each digit a surgeon’s blade or a butcher’s tool. He had sworn himself to the Vat-Mother once more, taken her oath into his many mouths, pledged to cleanse the corruption of the Lady Bhaeryn and her traitorous ilk.

  And so, with their war band gathered, the final bargains struck. With their thralls bound and bartered for, Nence and Blacheaus Tem Etal set forth from Enelastoia, departing into the roiling chaos of Acetyn’s depths. A tense quiet fell over their small war band as the City’s living corridors enveloped them. Down fleshy ramparts that pulsed with hidden circulation, through twisting tunnels that rewound upon themselves like serpent coils, they advanced. They traversed landscapes that defied reason, passageways that broke upon themselves in fractal recursion.

  The City breathed, it pulsed, it devoured. And so did Blacheaus.

  At first, it was unnoticed. A missing thrall, a deserter, an unfortunate soul lost in the dark. Then another. Then a squad of augmad-killers who had marched behind them only hours before. Blacheaus consumed them, piece by piece, his sprawling mass growing with each victim. Torsos bound together in a writhing mass, arms and legs repurposed into limbs that scuttled and pulsed with stolen strength. Faces—once hardened, defiant, now drawn in silent anguish—adorned the hunched carcass of his ever-growing body, a tapestry of the devoured.

  None objected. None dared.

  Nence saw it all, his antenna trembling in subdued horror, but he uttered no protest. He walked beside the butchered host, the last remnants of his company dwindling, knowing that there would be no force left at all in time—only Blacheaus, engorged and terrible, mighty and profane. And yet, he did not falter. He did not fear. He carried the phage knife for the Vat-Mother. He carried the blade that would pierce Lady Bhaeryn’s heart and avenge his beloved Ay.

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  And so he walked onward, through the ruinous dark, beside the monster that grew with every step. They pressed onward through corridors that defied Euclidean sense, up winding ramps heaved from metallic bone and hardened silicon.

  Days—or perhaps weeks—were lost. Time ceased to hold meaning. For all that time, Nence had trudged through the lightless depths of Acetyn, driven by purpose and stubborn exhaustion in equal measure. The journey had twisted itself into an endless spiral, an ascent through the City’s labyrinthine interior, each level of bonework and pulsing arterial passageways more confounding than the last. He had learned to navigate by instinct alone, guided by the soft tremors beneath his many feet, the shifting pressures of the air, and the faint tastes of pheromones left behind in the dim corridors.

  He wondered if Ay had felt just as lost on his final journey and then pushed that thought from his mind, refusing to dwell on it.

  They climbed. Higher and higher, through spiralling accessways that coiled upon themselves like vast oesophagal tracts and elevator shafts that groaned under the weight of their own forgotten machinery. The great bulks they traversed seemed to expand without reason, whole chambers lost in the endless shifting of the City’s ever-living structure. The heavens above—where they could be glimpsed—were slabs of bone, great ribs rising overhead like the bars of an impossible cage, or else shifting flesh masses that pulsed and shimmered with distant life. Acetyn was alive, restless, and never still.

  Blacheaus Tem Etal moved at the head of their shrinking procession, his mass swollen from the remains of those who had fallen behind. Nence did not need to count. He knew their numbers had dwindled to the barest few, the others claimed either by Acetyn’s caprice or by Blacheaus’ ever-consuming hunger.

  And so, soon, they were alone, alone with the endless climb, the ceaseless hunger, the unrelenting purpose that drove them toward the highest reaches, towards the Pate Gardens, where they would intercept Lady Bhaeryn’s crusade.

  To the end, then. Then the old order would be avenged, and his beloved’s shade would know peace. Nence had ceased trying to grasp any semblance of linear time in the roiling chaos of the ascent. But murder did not care for the passage of time. It simply was. Its time would come, counted or not.

  By the time they emerged into corridors streaked with soot and char, the City’s natural gloom turned acrid with the tang of battles gone by. They emerged into a slaughterhouse forgotten. The remnants of endless pyrrhic battles stretched out in the passages before them, layer upon layer of discarded wreckage, equipment abandoned when ammunition had run dry, weapons corroded or rotting where they had fallen from dying hands. The walls were thick with the scars of battle, burnt impact craters melted into the metal-and-flesh structure of Acetyn’s upper reaches. Here and there, where the City’s recycling drones had yet to arrive, bodies—or what was left of them—lay twisted and broken in unnatural repose.

  The air was thick and humid, the atmosphere heavy with the scent of old blood, of fire long since burned out, of mechanical exhalations that never ceased their slow churning through ventilation ducts vast enough to swallow battalions. And in the distance, somewhere beyond the next ruinous bulkhead, the echoes of something still lived. The battle had not ended. Not yet.

  Deeper inside the ruin, the echoes of living motion suggested some force still occupying these chambers. Nence did not slow his pace. Nor did Blacheaus. His monstrous body scraped against walls, too large for the tread of a band of freaks, leaving half-congealed residue in his wake, each massive limb or fused face swaying as though drunk on endless consumption. If they encountered anything living in the next darkness, he would devour that, too.

  Nence flicked his antenna. Despite the promise of a place in her court, perhaps, once this act was done, he would let the City take him as well.