Darren Craske - The Eleventh Plague

He raised his hand, like a schoolchild begging his teacher's attention.

'Um…excuse me!' he called, bobbing above the heads of the mass of guards. He took a step to the side in an attempt to distance himself from Quaint's group. 'I'm not with these people. My name is Godfrey Joyce. I'm one of you! Check with your superiors if you don't believe me. I work for Baron Remus!' One of the Consortium troops stepped forward and Joyce took him to be the man in charge. 'This is all some dreadful misunderstanding! If you would be so kind as to run along and tell the Baron of my arrival, we can sort this all out nice and peacefully, hmm?'

The head guard pulled back his dark red hood. Tattoos swirled from the sides of his face, across his cheeks and up to his eyes where the patterns merged in a pit of black ink. His eyeballs were buried somewhere within the darkness. From the grim look of distemper on his face, this man was not one to suffer fools gladly. He took another step nearer to Joyce, looking all around his face in uneasy close-up detail, and then took a brief sniff of the man.

'What is he doing?' asked Quaint, from the corner of his mouth.

'He looks to be…smelling him,' replied Faroud.

Quaint frowned. 'What the hell is he, a Labrador?'

Just then, the head guard clapped his hands three times. At this cue, his men grabbed Joyce roughly by the arms and steered him back into Quaint's pack.

'Didn't you hear what I just said? I'm not with them, I'm on your side!' he cried, as he was led roughly to stand next to Quaint and Faroud. 'This is intolerable. Do you know who I am?'

The head guard cuffed Joyce roughly across the face.

'I'd take that as a yes,' quipped Quaint.

Faroud exhaled, pondering their predicament. He was a leader of men, and not such a bad strategist himself if he was being honest, but this situation was impossible to escape from. With over twenty men at the front and more than twenty at their rear, the odds were definitely against them. It was lucky for Faroud that he was partnered with Cornelius Quaint – a man that paid no heed to the odds.

'Cover your ears,' said the conjuror.

'Cover my ears?' asked Faroud, with a glower. 'Why?'

'Because there's going to be a loud bang,' replied Quaint.

He broke free from his guards' grasp, and before anyone had a clue what he was doing – let alone tried to stop him from doing it – he lunged for one of the wall-mounted torches. He tore it from its housing on the wall and threw it down onto the ground directly behind him. With a cloud of black smoke, the torch sparked into a furious wall of fire six feet high.

All hell broke loose as the Consortium guards' tongueless mouths screamed silent cries of alarm. They pressed themselves against the tunnel's walls to avoid the ensuing inferno, watching mystified as the trail seemed to spring to life and sped off down the tunnel and into the distance.

'What now?' Faroud yelled.

'Now?' Quaint pulled out his timepiece and consulted it carefully. 'We duck.'

The explosion that followed took everyone by surprise – especially the large group of Consortium guards that were crowded into the tight space behind Quaint. The force ripped through the brigade and the guards were thrown in all directions, crushed against the walls, slammed up into the ceiling. A large, violent crack formed itself in the tunnel roof and clouds of choking dust rained down.

Using the confusion to his advantage, Quaint grabbed hold of Faroud's robes and wrenched him through the ensuing curtain of smoke, with the Aksak fumbling blindly for Kulfar and Nehmet. They stumbled forward, barging straight into Godfrey Joyce, who was standing dumbstruck watching the events unfold. The men tumbled into each other through the huge stone doors and into the main audience chamber. Once through, Quaint looked around and saw a huge wooden beam by the doors.

'Help me!' he yelled, pushing the doors closed, containing the smoke-filled tunnel on the other side. Kulfar and Nehmet lifted the beam and fitted it in place, barring the doors.

With the entire brigade of guards trapped on the other side, Quaint afforded himself a brief respite, and he slid his bulk down the wall onto his backside, coughing violently. Faroud and the rest were also panting heavily as they tried to empty their lungs of the acrid smoke. Their faces were covered in a thick layer of red, chalky dust. Through the heavy stone doors they heard the stomach-churning screams of men as the fire consumed them. With nowhere to run, they were helpless. If the fire did not speed their deaths, the acrid, choking smoke that swamped the tunnel surely would.

'What in Ra's name was that?' demanded Faroud, wiping dust from his eyes.

'Backup plan,' said Quaint, coughing a sticky brown mess into the palm of his hand. 'I thought there was a risk of the tunnel being used against us…so I left a trail of gunpowder as we entered…leading right back to a stack of explosive sticks that I'd stashed by the main entrance.'

'Quaint, you lunatic!' squawked Godfrey Joyce, joining the fray. 'You almost brought the whole bloody city down on our heads!'

'Almost…but then I would've missed the pleasure of doing this.' Quaint punched Joyce hard in the face and a trickle of dust-clad blood seeped from the man's nose.

Aksak Faroud glared at Quaint. 'Do you feel better now?'

'Much,' grinned Quaint, blowing on his sore knuckles.

'But he has a point,' said Faroud. 'You are a lunatic. By now the whole base will know we are here.'

'Quite so,' agreed Quaint. 'But at least we're free to start some serious trouble.'

An icy expression graced Aksak Faroud's face and he grasped at Quaint's robes.

'I would not exactly class our situation as "free", my friend.'

Quaint looked in the direction of Faroud's fixated eyes, and what he saw was not to his liking.

Standing upon a large, stone plinth behind them, with a fresh brigade of at least fifty armed Consortium troops surrounding her, was Lady Jocasta.

'I do hate it when guests turn up uninvited,' she said.

The Rekindled Flame

FEELING THE SHOCKWAVE of the explosion at the opposite end of the sanctorum, Madame Destine stood swiftly from her bed and then smiled.

'Cornelius,' she said.

Since Sir George had left her quarters, she had spent her time contemplating her renewed gifts of clairvoyance, wondering what she was going to do now that all the pieces of herself were back together. Everything was so much clearer – none more so than her present predicament. How was she supposed to ensure that her task was complete if she were imprisoned?

A mute Hades Consortium guard stood motionless at the doorway, although every now and again he would glare at her as if daring her to try to escape. She was a prisoner, unable to affect the winds that blew in her direction. She prayed that Cornelius would come for her, but the man was obviously busy causing his particular brand of trouble at that moment. He would sort everything out and restore order to the world. Cornelius always said that she could notice a single ray of sunshine in a rainstorm. Nevertheless, she looked over at the imposing figure of her guard, clad in his dark red robes, and surveyed her options: she could sit and wait for Cornelius to arrive, or she could grasp Fate with both hands and bend it to her will.

If only I could bend the will of my silent guard, she thought.

And then, as the words graced her mind, they triggered something of interest. She knew that she possessed a fine-tuned perception of the emotions of others, a one-way link that gave her access to their private thoughts and feelings…but what if that link was not solely one-way? Aloysius Bedford had said that she had no idea what she was capable of. If she were not to try, how would she know her limits?