A Murder in Fire and FOG
Chapter 1

The shout of alarm from Point Busteen’s watchtower ended almost instantly, drifting across the water to the Pagan Lady, anchored offshore. Captain Azabeth Nomuri glanced down as sulfurous curses erupted from the T’stangen lord who stalked impatiently on the deck below her.

“Did he think this Judges-damned operation was going to be silent? Two guard towers and only one shout? He should be weeping with joy.”

Her first mate said nothing, just watched impassively as the mass of armed men on the Pagan Lady’s deck awaited the order to descend to the longboats.

The faintest golden gleam from Amastria’s largest moon was just above the horizon when a dim red light flickered across the calm water. One. Two. Three flashes and the muffled creak of oarlocks heralded the return of the small raiding party, on its way back to the Lady after silencing the city of Selmar’s southern watchtower.

“Mister Wanobe, signal Rasman that we’re ready to proceed.”

“Aye, Captain.” At his quiet order, a triangle of lights, two red and one blue, was hoisted on the foremast. Two minutes later, an answering triangle of two blue and one red appeared from the opposite side of the mouth of Shandrigan Bay.

She was certain the Rasman’s captain was enjoying the promise of plunder and the violence that would come with the night’s operation. She herself had no taste for it. But the deed was done, the contract signed, and she and her crew had to deliver the agreed-upon services or face the Guild’s wrath.

The men on deck, cutthroats all and not a one she’d ever hire aboard Pagan Lady, swarmed down the side of her ship into the waiting boats. As they did, the T’stangen lord stepped to the rail and swept his hands up and out. In moments, mist rose from the sea around the ship, thickened into a dense fog, and flowed down the harbor mouth toward the city.

The boats shoved off, the men laying to their muffled oars. More than one hundred and twenty men and another two hundred from the larger Rasman began racing across the water to the silent city.

Damn Rorqual, she swore to herself. I never should have let him talk me into this contract. This is uglier business than I knew, and now I’m stuck with it.

All she could do now was try to get her crew and her ship out of this mess alive.

###

Lady Melsera Ailenway swirled the dregs of her marimon tea as First Hour was being called. She knew Mistress Popewell wanted to close her shop for the night, but she lingered, reluctant to go home.

Home, Melsera snorted. After five months here in Selmar, the Chapterhouse was anything but home. An apartment in which she could rest after a day of dismissive stares and snide remarks from her fellow T’stangen, perhaps, but it was certainly not the warm and welcoming refuge she associated with the word “home.”

“Would milady like anything else?”

Mistress Popewell, a wizened sprite of a woman, stood by Melsera’s elbow, a nervous smile creasing her face. Melsera smiled back.

“No, thank you, Mistress Popewell, and I do apologize for staying to such a late hour.” She fished a gold queen from her pocket and laid it on the table. “To reimburse you for your time and my inconsiderate behavior.”

“Oh, thankee, milady. Thankee. I do hope we’ll see you again soon. Good night,” came the reply as Melsera stood and swept her thick velvet cloak about her shoulders and the hood over her thick red-gold hair. With a soft thump, the door behind her closed and the bolt thrown.

Vastrum, the Greater Moon, peeked over the roof of a nearby silversmith, her golden light softened by the fog. Melsera smiled, remembering nights atop the towers of Timberpass Keep watching the lovers’ dance between Vastrum and Samadrel, the Lesser Moon, with her father and her siblings.

But here in Selmar, on her first assignment? She snorted again, a most unladylike sound she knew her mother would have tutted, but it was deserved. She’d thrilled at the assignment, so different from life in the mountains. She supposed she was asking too much for her life now to be full of wonder, sharing experiences with and learning from older T’stangen, and exploring a city several times the size of her home and a seaport at that, but did it have to be so…so…isolating?

Heat flared in her.

It was infuriating, to be dismissed and ignored by the others. She’d more than proven her skills at the Academy and during her apprenticeship, but it was increasingly clear that Dominar Wranath and the others at the Chapterhouse didn’t care.

She gritted her teeth in frustration and set off up the hill. As she walked, she got a vague sense that not all was right about her. The city was quiet but for muted laughter and gittern music from a tavern or two off the side streets. Even those sounds became indistinct as the fog filled the streets in thickening waves. She was alone on the streets filled with a fog that felt odd.

She stopped, turned back, and looked down the street toward the now-hidden harbor. She closed her eyes, reached out with one hand, and felt the moisture on her skin, tasted it, smelled it, immersed herself in it and felt, faintly, the will of a T’stangen behind it. She was right! The fog was the creation of a Tidemaker, and the thick mist now obscured not just a nineteen-year-old woman walking home from a night out alone but also whatever else moved along Selmar’s streets.

Click.

Jingle.

A muffled grunt.

Hoarse, heavy breaths.

Running figures emerged from the mist.

Blades gleamed in the diffuse moonlight.

One shadowy figure crashed into the door of the silversmith and shouted in triumph. Other figures spread through the streets, shattering the night’s silence with the sounds of smashing timber and breaking glass.

Hearing a piercing scream from the teahouse, Melsera raced forward. Hands grasped at her, but she was too fast. A growl rose in her throat as she saw the door to Mistress Popewell’s shop splintered and ajar. Melsera plunged through the door to see Mistress Popewell gripped by a whippet-thin man who held a wicked, curved blade beneath her chin. A second man, heavily tattooed, tossed crockery aside until, with a cry of triumph, he raised a bag of coins in his hand.

“Found it! ‘Ere…whatchoo doing here, girly girl? Come ‘ere! You look like more fun than that old stick.” He ran forward, arms outstretched, eyes glinting in the lantern light.

Melsera said nothing as she moved as her father’s sword maestro had taught her. She slipped under the outstretched arms and drove the heel of her palm into the man’s nose. He clasped his face with a cry that became a groan of agony as her boot drove into his groin. Then she spun and kicked his legs out from under him before ending his moans of pain with a large pitcher smashed down on his head.

“Stop, or I’ll kill her, I swear to Beaucephan, I will!” shouted the second man.

Melsera rolled to her right, forcing the second man to turn his head to track her. As he did so, the blade slipped away from the old woman’s neck just a fraction. Melsera came up on one knee and flung her hand outward.

Needles of fire erupted from the lantern beside him and scorched his face, throat and bare arm. He screamed in pain and surprise. Mistress Popewell staggered away from her assailant and, with a surprising display of strength, seized a thick wooden bench and brought it crashing down on the back of the man’s head as he beat at the flames.

“Come on,” Melsera said, extending her hand to Mistress Popewell. “I’ll get you out and call for help.”

“How?”

“Like this,” Melsera said grimly, and without warning, a dense sheet of flame erupted from the cobbles, forming a bright, searing barrier between them and the men outside. The street and sky behind glowed a hellish red as the women fled up the hill away from the harbor.

###

Oskar Cassegian, formerly Captain of the Icespine’s Border Regiment, didn’t mind the office work that came with his new job. After twenty-five years of combat in the mountains, he was willing to put up with the paperwork in exchange for the relative comfort of life in the city. No more tromping from one mountain redoubt to another, battling raiding parties crossing the border, or leaving Megin and the girls for months at a time.

He’d accepted the transfer to Selmar, Regintine’s largest seaport, three months earlier with thanks, recognizing it for what it was, a reward for years of service. It came with a promotion to Major, the title of Commander of the Selmaran Watch, and a small homestead outside the city.

Not that I’m retired yet. His hand traced the scar that followed his jaw and then cut up toward his right eye. But I am looking forward to going home tomorrow. It will be pleasant to spend a day or two with Megin and the girls after the chaos of the High Protector’s Jubilee.

Cassegian looked up in surprise as the faint sound of the Harborside alarm bell drifted into his office. He stepped out onto his office’s balcony and heard echoes of the bell rolling up the hill and through the streets. He stared intently through the fog, seeking a sign of what triggered the alarm.

Then, a breath of air cleared the view to Market Row. Armed men surged through the streets from the harbor! He lost sight of them again as the fog rolled back over the street. Then, the blasts of Night Guard whistles cut through the mist from streets throughout the city and a sheet of fire briefly lit the night.

“To arms!” he bellowed, and moments later, he charged down the stairs as the Day Guard, roused from sleep in their barracks, poured out into the courtyard.

A runner stumbled through the garrison gates, holding his bloodstained side.

“Message from Captain Wearing, sir. Raiders. Two hundred and fifty. Maybe more. Hard to be sure in the fog.” He broke off suddenly, dropped to one knee, and clutched his wound. Waving off aid, he continued through clenched teeth, “One of ‘em stuck me on Market Row but the captain thinks they’re also on Gem Lane, Chandlers Row, even as far as High Nob.”

Cassegian nodded his thanks and beckoned to an orderly. “See to this man’s wound.”

Turning back to the assembled Day Guard, he called out orders, “Lieutenant Savell, take your men to Market Row. Lieutenant Trount, split your men between Gem Lane and Chandlers Row and work your way to the docks. Sergeant Jaskin, you and eight men are a flying squad operating out of the Auction Block with me. Corporal Maggin, send a runner to Lady Helmwave with my compliments. Request the aid of her guards, healers, and the T’stangen. Move it!” 

###

Melsera strode through the chaos. Raiders staggered through the streets laden with plunder, only to send it spilling to the ground as members of the Guards set upon them with sword and cudgel. The fog began to thin, leaving the stench of blood and bile, smoke and fear in the air.

A heavy hand grasped her shoulder and spun her about. A scarred face highlighted by a large silver ring through an even larger nose leaned in close. The reek of alcohol and rotten teeth was staggering.

“I like you, pretty lady. Let’s go play,” the face leered.

“No, thank you,” she said with a sweet smile, and the next instant, the man’s braided beard burst into flame. The man fled in terror and dropped a canvas bag that sent coins and gems spilling into the gutter.

She scrambled atop a pedestal and stood beside a stone statue of some unknown honoree. From this vantage, she gained a bit more visibility into the city. The night was filled with the sounds of combat – crashing swords, thrumming bowstrings, and a cacophonous sea of shouts and curses.

Suddenly she was shocked to realize that she alone of Selmar’s T’stangen was on the streets. She couldn’t sense any of the others using their Gifts to quell the violence and restore order. Even if Dominar Wranath, that withered old ass, didn’t want to leave the safety of his walls, any of the other three T’stangen could…no…should be out here in the city, helping!

She swore violently, swung back down to the street, and set off toward Gem Lane.

A short time later, she entered a small city square and encountered a knot of people gathered by a blazing building. She seized the sleeve of a burly gray-haired man.

“What’s the matter?”

“There’s a woman and three children in there!” he shouted. “Those bastards set it aflame after looting the shop!”

Melsera looked at the building. It groaned and shuddered as flames roared about it. There was no way to enter it without risking collapse. She needed to try it from out here.

“Stand back!” she commanded, and when no one responded, she stepped to the front of the group and shouted again. “Stand back and let me work. I’m from the Chapterhouse, and I need you to stand back for your safety!”

She faced the burning building and could now hear, over the roar of flames, the screams for help from within. Melsera ignored the cries of surprise from the crowds as she thrust her hands into the flames and concentrated on the conflagration. She felt the heat, but it was of no consequence as it swept around her fingers and wrists like water in a rushing mountain stream. Her senses spread throughout the fire. She felt everywhere that it licked at the wood and the rugs, burned the bed curtains, and roasted the vegetables to black char.

And then, she began to manipulate it in her mind. She soothed it, calmed it, reached out like a trainer quieting a fractious colt.

She grimaced as she sensed a corpse, cruelly burned, but she did not stop. The flames dimmed, the crackle subsided, and she sought out each remaining pocket of flame and heat and willed them to a cool slumber. At last, she let her hands fall to her side and opened her eyes. The building was a charred wreck but it still stood, and she could hear the sound of weeping from within. Melsera ground her teeth in frustration. Where was a Earthwright when she needed one, damn it? Wesconsavath could have shored up the house and created a ramp in moments to aid with the rescue.

She looked at the crowd.

“There’s at least one person dead on the ground floor but several people alive upstairs.”

“Thank you, milady,” whispered the gray-haired man. “Bless you.”

The crowd parted as she walked toward the center of the square and the common water pump. An occasional hand reached out, fingers brushed her cloak, and voices asked for her blessing or murmured thanks.

After a few heaves on the pump handle, she was rewarded with a gush of cold water. As she bent to splash water across her smoke-blackened face, an immense wave of power rolled over her. She staggered, then dropped to one knee. Another wave, then another rocked her.

What was that? she thought frantically. Is anyone in the Chapterhouse clumsy enough to do that? Then, even more terrifying, Is anyone in the Chapterhouse powerful enough to do that?

The sense of the unknown Gift suddenly shifted from those massive initial pulses to a steady thunder in her ears.

She rose and ran toward it.

###

Cassegian and the flying squad initially encountered only a few easily dispatched individual raiders. But as they moved farther into the city, Cassegian realized that Wearing’s initial estimate of as many as two hundred and fifty or three hundred raiders might not be far off the mark. Lieutenant Trount had reported surprising resistance in Gem Lane as the raiders fight back until they’d sacked and looted all that wasn’t nailed down.

A sooty and bloodstained corporal sprinted up and saluted.

“A warehouse north by the river blew up, Major. Took a mess of raiders with it.”
Cassegian swore violently. That had to be one of Macawber’s warehouses. The damn fool had been warned before about the dangers of grain dust in his buildings. The only saving grace was that the idiot’s lack of care had taken a few raiders with it.

“Anything else?”

“Yessir, Lieutenant Savell thinks a large group is heading back to the docks, coming from the southern warehouses by way of Mogtown.”

“Very well. Return to Savell. Tell him we’ll aim to intercept them in the vicinity of Agnes Alley.”

“Yessir,” snapped the corporal, and he limped off into the fog.

Cassegian tightened the makeshift bandage over a thin cutlass slash on his arm.

“Jaskin, we’re going to move out and try to cut off some of the raiders. I want crossbows at the ready when we get there.”

“Right, sir. We’re down by one, sir. Private Ashep is banged up pretty good, sir.” The sergeant paused and looked pointedly at Cassegian’s arm. “Beggin’ your pardon, but perhaps you should consider remaining here with him?”

Cassegian snorted. “I’ll be fine. Gather the men and let’s move out.”

Soon after, the seven remaining members of the flying squad crouched in the darkness. The major knelt alongside a water cask, trying to ignore the pale face of the dead whore lying nearby. The young woman’s black hair spilled out across the dirt and her head was twisted at an unnatural angle. As they’d prepared their ambush, he had taken a moment to pull her torn blue shift back down over her ravaged hips and legs, but there’d been no time to move her back inside. Not that she’d care anymore, he thought ruefully. Then the slapping of boots and bare feet in the darkness called him back to Agnes Alley.

“Dammit, Kenton,” he heard a raider swear. “Did you get us lost again?”

“Shut your gob, Zek. I know where we are. I used to drink at that tavern we just passed. A bit farther and we’re at the stairs leading to the boats.”

The voices grew louder, and figures emerged from the fog, at least twenty or more in this group.

He whistled, and crossbow bolts thrummed out. Two raiders went down as a bolt from one bow passed clean through the skull of one man and embedded itself in a second. A third man was thrown backward by another bolt’s impact.

Cassegian leaped forward with a shout, sword driving into the throat of the nearest target. His small band boiled out of their hiding places, screaming like madmen, swords seeking raiders’ throats and bellies. Silver goblets, coins, gemstones, and more clattered to the ground as the raiding party scrambled for their weapons.

Cassegian’s arm went numb as he parried a raider’s two-handed cutlass blow. He swept it away, lunged inside the raider’s guard, and drove his dagger deep into the man’s gut. Wrenching it up and out, he turned and thrust his sword into another raider’s side, catching the man unawares.

“Major!” The cry snapped Cassegian’s head around, but he stumbled, the bejeweled candlestick that betrayed his footing spinning off into the darkness. He saw an ax rise and then slash downward but before it struck home, a young guardsman crashed in the raider and pushed the man aside.

Then, Jaskin was by the guardsman’s side and both of their blades stabbed downward. The barrel-chested Sergeant grabbed Cassegian’s left arm and hauled him upright.

“You alright, sir?”

“Yes, Sergeant. Thank you.” Cassegian glanced around. “And thank you, private,” he said to the young man who had struck Cassegian’s attacker.

The last of the raiders fell with a cry, and Cassegian’s flying squad took a collective breath as the swift, brutal action ended.
Cassegian knelt to wipe his blades on a fallen raider’s breeches. As his six men stood over the bodies, a few worked to bandage their own wounds, but all were on their feet and ready to go.

“Let’s get to the docks.”

The thinning fog revealed longboats streaming away from the docks. But pursuit needed to wait. Several ships and buildings along the shoreline were ablaze, a parting gift from the raiders.

“Call the fire brigades! Roust everyone in the area. Get them down here now!” Cassegian bellowed. “Stop those fires from spreading!”

He turned toward a knot of his men.

“Where’s Lieutenant Savell?”

“Injured, sir,” replied a corporal. “Badly.”

“Right. Trount!”

“Sir!” The junior Day Guard lieutenant turned from a makeshift bucket brigade and hurried to his commander.

“Savell is injured, so it’s your show until I get back. I’m heading for the North Dockside Tower to make sure there are no more surprises in store.”

“Yes, sir,” replied the young man who turned away, gesturing to several sergeants nearby.

Next, Cassegian turned to his sergeant.

“Jaskin, take charge of the flying squad. Assist Lieutenant Trount and Captain Wearing as needed.”

As he started making his way toward the watchtower, Cassegian had a sense that someone was dogging his heels. Turning around, he recognized the young guardsman who had saved him the ax blow in Agnes Alley. “What are you doing, Private?”

The guardsman straightened and saluted. “Sergeant Jaskin ordered me to accompany you, sir, to act as your escort.”

“Did he now?”

The young man remained silent.

“Alright,” said the major. “What’s your name then?”

“Rospen, sir.”

“Very well, Private Rospen, let’s go.”

Upon reaching the sixty-foot-high tower, the two men stopped and stared. Climbing to the platforms would not be any fun at all any raiders remained.

Cassegian nodded. “Very well.” He took a step toward the door but came to a halt as Rospen stepped in front of him.

“Beggin’ your pardon, sir, but maybe I should be the first one in?”

“And why would that be, Private?” he asked.

Rospen swallowed hard before answering, “Because Sergeant Jaskin said he’d make sure I’d wish me mam had never whelped me if I let anything happen to you, sir, and that’s a quote.”

The major laughed. “Alright, if Sergeant Jaskin wishes to pull rank, I guess he’s earned the right. Up you go, private.”
With a nod and his blade drawn, Rospen entered the tower. Without pause, he scrambled up the stairs as Cassegian entered the ground floor.

“Mid-level looks clear, Major. I’m heading up.”

“I’m right behind you.”

A few moments later, the two men stood atop the tower, dismayed to discover two dead Selmarans. One appeared to have been taken by surprise, his throat slashed almost all the way through. The other, clothed in the uniform of a Night Constable, lay by the bell, hand outstretched. Cassegian gently closed their eyes.

“Did you know their names, Rospen?”

“Gammisson, sir, he was the tower guard. I think the constable is LaDell.”

Cassegian stood. The fog was burning off, revealing the destruction along the harbor. In the distance, he saw the raider longboats approaching the mouth of the harbor.

Then, peering through one of the tower’s heavy telescopes, he spotted two sleek vessels, outlined against the rising sun, as they sailed around the point and toward the longboats.

“Rospen, take a telescope and tell me if you can see make out any details on those ships.”

The pair stood silently, each man leaning out against the parapet to get a better view of the mysterious ships as they sailed into the sunrise.

“Damn,” Cassegian swore again under his breath. “Alright, Rospen, time to go.”