'You strangled your last wife with her nightcap, I believe.'

'That was a personal matter.'

'And then you took a red-hot poker to your children.'

'They were disobedient. Besides, your hands are hardly clean, my friend Quex.'

'I don't deny that,' purred the suave murderer, 'but I have never killed without being paid for it.'

'I say we should trap the Beast ourselves,' a third, gruff-voiced, assassin said.

'What?' spluttered Ettore. 'Us, help the Dock Watch?'

'They've been poking around too much since the Beast started killing tarts. They're not catching him, but they are harassing us. When was the last time old Dickon actually caught anyone?'

Nobody knew.

'Well, he pulled in Fagnar Brisz today and a couple of coppers roughed up Schatten.'

'That's terrible. They'll be refusing bribes next.'

'Brisz is an animal,' said Quex, 'little better than the Beast. His use of the bandsaw on the Widow von Praunheim was simply unnecessary and distasteful.'

'Well, Quex, if the Beast keeps it up, you can debate etiquette with Brisz in Mundsen Keep.'

'The Beast is an amateur, gentlemen, and amateurs always get caught. Or disappear without trace.'

'I say good luck to him and let's have another drink.'

'A fine idea, my man.'

A hand clamped down over Ch'ing's shoulder and he twisted, his hands up, ready to defend himself.

He favoured the crane-style, arms out for balance, feet kicking like the lightning-fast pecks of the bird's deadly beak.

'Careful,' said a familiar voice. 'The corridor is narrow, you'll break your wrists.'

Ch'ing relaxed and bowed. In the darkness, Yefimovich's eyes glowed like hot coals.

'It is good to see you, my friend,' the High Priest of Tzeentch said. 'How long has it been since we first met?'

'More than thirty years. Not since Zhufbar.'

'Ah yes, a failure. I still regret it. We were out of favour after that.'

'Quite so.' The marks on Ch'ing's arms, where the daemon sting had appeared, still pained him.

'The man died, you know. In the north, on the Great Battlefield at the Top of the World.'

Ch'ing bowed in gratitude for the news. 'I'm pleased to learn of that.'

'And the vampire woman well, you must know of her subsequent history. She lives in this city.'

'Genevieve Dieudonne. Our personal business is not over. But she must wait for the while. After all, neither of us is getting any older.'

Yefimovich laughed. 'I have a room upstairs. Come on.'

They climbed to the first floor, in the pitch dark. Yefimovich glowed slightly, a red undertone to his skin.

'Where is your familiar?' Ch'ing asked.

'Respighi? Don't let him hear you call him a familiar. He thinks he's an acolyte. He is out in the fog somewhere, doing my work.'

'Give him my most pleasant wishes.'

'I'll be sure to.'

Inside the room, the agitator lit a lamp. He had a cot and a table, and more books than the palace library. There were many copies of his own seditious pamphlets, tied up in bundles: Sons of the Soil, Arise!, Casting Asunder the Chains, You and Your Betters and Come the Revolution.

Ch'ing picked up a book. It was new and neatly-bound, but had no title embossed on the spine.

'This is my most popular work,' Yefimovich said. 'It's called Beasts in Green Velvet. It is an analysis of the misdeeds of the ruling classes. It will inflame the peasantry of the Empire, with its stories of men, women and children trampled under the iron heel of privilege.'

The High Priest sounded pleased with himself. Ch'ing cast his eye over a few lines. The book was like a gazetteer of the first families of the Empire, with a list of their crimes down through the centuries. This page was about the Kreishmier family of Ferlangen. He had never heard of them, but they seemed to be a long line of petty tyrants, hanging, branding, torturing, raping, robbing and enslaving the local peasantry as the whim took them.

'AH cunning lies, I trust?'

'Oh no, that's the clever part. This is all true. These people allege that, as disciples of the proscribed cults, we serve evil. And yet, look at all their works and accomplishments'

Baron Otto Kreishmier, since deceased, had once hanged twenty-seven of his tenant farmers between sun-up and sun-down on the Feast of Mitterfruhl to collect on a wager with his sister.

Ch'ing set down the papers. 'Things are not ordered very differently in Cathay. The Monkey King sits in his Eternal Gardens boasting of his youthful exploits, while his ministers rob him blind and use the people as chattels. And, as you know, Kislev suffers under an absolute monarch.'

The High Priest's eyes grew. 'Yes, but only in the Empire are the people told they are free even as they are being wrapped in chains. Our kings and tsars do not claim to be anything other than tyrants. Karl-Franz is an elective ruler, and a precarious one at that. This will shake him a little'

Yefimovich tapped a pile of papers. The ink was still wet.

'Tomorrow, this pamphlet will be on the streets. The Empire is a tinderbox'

Yefimovich took his lower eyelids between his thumbs and forefingers.

'a tinderbox waiting for a flame.'

He pulled his skin and his face came off in one piece. It dangled, a dead mask.

Knowing what to expect, Ch'ing averted his gaze.

'That's better,' said the High Priest. 'Now my skin can breathe again.'

Ch'ing turned around and looked into the true face of his comrade in Chaos.

Yefimovich was thoroughly human in his features, but they were as transparent as moulded glass. Under his face-shaped bubble of skin raged an eternal fire. Ch'ing could see the lines of his skull, but rather than being covered with flesh and muscle they were clothed in forever-burning fire. No heat came from him, but the flames still writhed.

'You know, there are people in this city who think I am a fire-breather.'

VII.

She woke up and instantly forgot her dream but her heart still beat at ramming speed and the terror was still upon her. She shivered in her own sweat. The echo of her cry was still dying in the small, stone-walled cell.

Rosanna sat up, the last blanket falling away from her. She had been writhing in her sleep and almost all the bedclothes had been thrown off her cot.

Outside the slit window of her cell, where the moons should have been, was a wedge of grey. A night-candle burned on her writing desk, casting a small pool of light upon the piles of books jumbled there. She always needed a flame in the dark. It was her last connection with childhood.

She hugged herself, until the trembling subsided.

Sometimes, she was gripped with raptures in the night. But mostly, her dreams were terrible. It was a part of the gift to which she could never become used.

As always when the horror was squirted directly into her mind, she wished she had been born fat, stupid and normal like her sisters. She would have married a hunter or a woodcutter, and dropped five children by now. The only thing to disturb her nights would have been her husband's snoring.

She disentangled herself from the last of the blankets and walked across the tiny cellthe flagstones were shockingly cold under her bare feetto the stand where there was a basin of fresh water.

Although not a cleric or a novice, she was still under the strict regime of the Temple. There was no mirror for her vanity. Just now, she was grateful for the absence. She did not think she could look into her own face without remembering too much She slipped her hands into the cold water and was fully awake. Her heartrate had slowed to normal. She splashed water on her face and rubbed away the sweat and sleep.

parts of her dream came back to her She pressed her fists against her eyes, trying to keep the dream away.

she was running through the fog and there was someonesomethingcoming after her. She could hear its rasping breath and fancied the clatter of its claws on cobbles. The smell of dead fish was all around her. She was running on wooden boards now, desperate to get to the end of a quay. A ladder stood out in the fog. If she reached it, she might be safe She knelt, letting the dream that was not a dream come back.

she climbed down quickly, her long skirts caught and tore on some neglected nail. Looking up, she could see the silhouette on the lip of the jetty, its eyes shining. Green velvet. Sharp teeth. Claws. It was unmistakably the Beast. Her face still stung from the rakemarks. She was afraid, but not just for herself Rosanna was confused. As so often in her intuitive visions, identities were scrambled. She could not make out any names. The girl she was dreaming she was worked in a hostel called the Wayfarer's Rest and had brothers called Jochim and Gustav, but her own name did not swim in her head with these other scraps. The thing that followed her had the faces of many men she had known, but Rosanna could not sort out which was the real aspect of the Beast and which the confused overlay of memories. There was a name uppermost in the girl's mind as she ran. Wolf. Wolf was the girl's lover. But the face that went with the name was mixed up with the dark blur of the Beast. The scryer tried to separate the two, and could not. There was an idealized Wolf, but she guessed he existed only in the girl's imagination: this noble, handsome, kindly face resembled that of the Baron Johann von Mecklenberg. That was another layer, prompting her to wonder just what the elector's interest in these crimes was. In the girl's mind, Wolfs face was constantly changing.

the Beast caught her, and her body was opened Rosanna fought the dream. Despite her duty to learn, she kicked against the vision. She did not want to know any more, but the momentum was too great. She was forced to dream through until the end, until the complete darkness descended.

after an eternity of pain, she died.

The dream shut off and Rosanna was herself again, the other girl gone from her mind as if she had never been there.

Rosanna did not believe in any of the gods. Not even Sigmar. No gods could allow such things.

The dead girl had known her attacker and yet not been sure of his identity. Like the others, she had died in a state of panic and confusion. The rustle of velvet was as strong with this girl as it had been with Margarethe Ruttmann. Green velvet.

Reliving the dream had made her void her bladder. She took off her wet nightdress and washed herself thoroughly, as if trying to wipe away any trace of her contact with the dead girl.

It was quiet outside. Beyond the fog, the sun would be rising soon. The work of the day would begin.

Rosanna returned to her cot and pulled the blankets over herself. She curled up small and wrapped the bedclothes tight around her, like a prickly cocoon.

What she had dreamed had happened. And it had happened tonight, probably at exactly the moment she first dreamed it. This murder was distinct from the seven others.

Somewhere out there, undiscovered, was an eighth corpse.

PART THREE.

DUEL.

I.

As the bells of the Temple of Sigmar sounded the hour of seven, the sun rose over Altdorf. The city, however, remained in the dark under its blanket of fog.

The lamplighters stayed in their beds late, knowing that they would not be needed to extinguish the city's street-torches until the fog lifted. Later, the Imperial Militia would kindle the traditional fogfire in Konigsplatz and, across the river, the Temple would open its refectory for those stranded away from their homes by the weather.

Along the city's miles of riverfront, lanterns would be strung to guide the ferrymen and the barges. The business of trade must continue, even if the fog slowed the riverboats and barges to a crawl.

Meanwhile, with the tax collectors blundering about in the murk, the influx of contraband into the city would increase tenfold. With harvest produce just due to flow into the docks, some rapid and illegal profits would be made and the Fish would make thankful offerings to Manann, God of the Seas, for sending the fog and enabling them to circumvent the revenue men.

At the palace, a victory procession arranged in honour of the heroes of the Empire who had recently defended Averland from the goblin hordes was quietly cancelled. Karl-Franz did not care much for the fog and had a superstitious dread of venturing out into it. His great-grandfather, Matthias IV, had gone out among his people in the fog, using the gloom as a disguise so he might learn their true feelings about their Emperor, and had disappeared without a trace. Even a century later, white-bearded vagrants were turning up regularly, claiming to be the rightful Emperor.

The fog having descended the evening before, a notice had gone up in the barracks across the square from the palace and a platoon of the Imperial Militia had been routinely seconded to the city watch to help out with the extra duties required. Later, this traditional measurepracticed in every fogwould be the cause of controversy and confusion, and not a little spilled blood.

The fog spilled over the high walls of the city, but tended to dissipate into thin streamers of mist in the surrounding forests. The city was a bowl, cupping the thick grey and brown broth to itself. The fog came off the Reik and the Talabec, shrouding at first the docks and the waterfront. But by this morning it had spread to every quarter.

The fog affected everyone, from the Emperor in his palace and the Grand Theogonist in the Temple to the boatmen and workmen of the docks, the students and professors of the University, the gamblers and harlots of the Street of a Hundred Taverns, the Hooks and the Fish and a dozen other lesser factions, the toll-keepers of the bridges, the merchants of the north-eastern business quarter, the beggars and paupers of the East End, the staunch servants of the Law and the furtive worshippers of the Dark Powers, and the actors and artists of Temple Street. Some hated the damp, clinging curtain that permeated everything; but some loved the fog, and ventured out in search of the possibilities it offered.

It was a good time for crime and a better one for intrigue.

Schygulla, the dock manager, was an old Hook and Per Buttgereit's cousin was with the Fish. So, without ever having been involved in either faction, the apprentice was caught up in their pointless, continuing struggle.

He had wanted to be a student, but he couldn't master his letters. His father had told him that 'apprenticeship is a wonderful opportunity,' and signed him up for five years of shit work on the docks at a minimum rate of pay. His father, at forty-eight, was still apprenticed to Lilienthal the stonemason. He still talked about the opportunities that would open up to him when he finished his training, just in time to drop dead from a heart attack after thirty-five years of hefting huge blocks of granite and making pots of tea.

Buttgereit was supposed to turn up at the Beloved of Manann dock before everyone else and get the kettle boiling. Then, he was to wait for Schygulla to think of something crappy for him to do. Usually, it was scraping something off something, or sorting out the good fish due to go on sale across the river in the Marketplatz from the bad fish due for a fast turnover into soup in the East End. Today, of course, it was stringing lanterns underneath the docks. If a task involved going where the smell was worst, Schygulla always assigned Buttgereit.

The lanternsslow-burning candles surrounded by polished reflectors in tin cageswere easy to break and any damage would have to come out of his apprentice's wage. He had carried them carefully down to the end of the dock and was having to take them down two at a time.