It was quiet.

  For the first time in what felt like days, Lowe was actually alone in his flat. The murmur of conversation, the clink of cups against saucers, the weight of far too many problems pressing down upon too few shoulders…

  Well, for now, all of it was gone. He’d given each of his friends something to run with - something he hoped they would be able to get done without drawing too much heat.

  He knew each and every one of them was more than capable of looking after themselves, but, well, he’d spent the last year as a lone wolf, precisely because - after what had happened - he had promised never to be the cause of putting people in harm’s way again. It felt pretty shitty that, the moment the Black Knight was back, he’d defaulted to the same old cavalier Lowe. Using people he was supposed to care about to help shovel him out of the shit.

  That they all seemed entirely happy to pitch in made it no less stressful. The last team he’d worked with had been pretty happy to get involved too . . .

  Mylaf had made him a cup of hot chocolate before she’d vanished to her room, as if she’d known he’d need something to keep his spirits up. He took a sip, and—

  [You Have Consumed 'Soothing Chocolate of Calm.']

  Effects: Warm Fuzzy Feeling (+40% Relaxation). Heartbeat of the Hearth (+10% Emotional Resilience). Blissful Composure (Immune to Stress Effects for 1 hour).

  Yeah. That would do it. Even as his mood began to shift to something more, if not content, then not as hyperventilating panicked, Lowe physically felt his shoulders slump as the tension drained out of them. As he, almost against his will, began to relax, he felt his mind drift away from the present, his awareness - Grid View bleeding open and across into his conscious mind - stretching backward. Backward—

  And suddenly, he was in an older version of this room. He instinctively knew it was from about eighteen months ago. From after the third - or was it the fourth - murder?

  The table he was sat at back then was even more cluttered, strewn with reports, coffee cups, and a half-eaten bag of fried dough sticks that had somehow become a permanent fixture in their department’s diet. What they would have done to have had access to Mylaf and her non-stop boosting snacks back then! The single enchanted light above them flickered on and off as the worn-out rune - he still hadn’t got around to changing it, had he? - struggled to keep up with yet another unofficial overtime shift.

  Rook was sitting opposite Lowe, face in what, of late, had become its perpetual frown. To his right, Arman—broad as a bear, with forearms like tree trunks—was leaning back in his chair, balancing it on two legs with an impressive disregard for gravity. Coda had his boots up on the table, flipping through a mound of witness statements, while Faulks—always the most focused of them—was twirling a pen between her fingers as she absentmindedly added notes to the crime scene sketches spread out all around them.

  And all of them—all of them—had their eyes on Lowe.

  "For fuck’s sake!" Arman said, wobbling alarmingly on his chair. "We need some cards on the table here, boss. You’ve got to share with us what you’re thinking about all this. You know we’ll be with you whatever way you want to play it, but it’s shitty the way you’re keeping us all in the dark."

  "What makes you believe I’m thinking anything? I might be just as stumped as the rest of you."

  "Because,” Faulks said, scribbling something out and drawing a few chest pieces in the margins, “you’re always two steps ahead of what you tell the rest of us. And it's fucking annoying."

  "Seriously, Jana," Coda said, swinging his feet to the floor and tossing his files back onto the pile. "You’ve had us running in circles for weeks now. We’ve got to change it up! We keep almost getting close to this bastard, and then he still manages to slip away. Every single time. You keep saying you’re right on the precipice of working something out, and yet, shockingly, none of us have seen it."

  "Look, it's not that I don't trust you—"

  "Don’t fucking kid a kidder," Arman said. "It’s obvious you don't! We all know you’ve been checking into our financials. You’ve not even been subtle about it. What? Do you think one of us is tipping the Black Knight off? Because, newsflash, there’s nothing to tell. We’ve got nothing. I haven’t even been able to leak anything juicy to the press, and you know how I like doing that."

  Rook lifted a placating hand. "Arman, cool it. It’s me that’s being looking into us all. And that’s just good sense, isn’t it? Don’t you want to know we’re all on the level? That we’re not taking backhanders? And trust me, considering the body count this fucker is racking up, the saddest thing I’ve had to do this week is trawl through everyone’s porn and booze expenses. You should all be very much ashamed. What Lowe means," he said, "is that the boss doesn't want to show his full hand until he's sure it's the right one to play. And—" He shot Lowe a knowing look. "—he also doesn't want Cenorth jumping in and booting us off the case when it becomes clear how little, in reality, we have. No one here wants to be taken off this, do they?"

  That earned a round of murmured agreement.

  They all knew the Commander in Cuckoo House was as much a political animal as he was an officer. And it was no secret that he’d let Lowe run with this case for far longer than any of them expected, especially considering how few proper leads they had. There’d already been more deaths than could be conveniently dismissed as just the way things are in Soar. They all suspected that it wouldn’t be long before the Celestial Temple would be getting involved, and then the case would be pried from their fingers faster than they could blink.

  None of them wanted that to happen. Lowe, especially, didn’t want to be pulled off this case. Which, yes, meant he was keeping the very few cards he had managed to scare up close to his chest.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  "Look," he said. "I’m sorry if anyone thinks I’m being a dick about things. But, I promise, I do think we’re closing in on him. However, if we’re not careful, the Mayor will toss this to the Temple Warders, and we all know we’ll be sidelined. And I don’t know about you lot, but I am not watching a bunch of shiny god-arse kissing bastards come in and snatch the case out from under us just as we’re about to get a break in things."

  "No argument from me on that score, boss,’ Faulks said. “But Cenorth’s going to pull the plug soon if we don’t show some progress. The Mayor’s had a higher tolerance for dead aristocrats than I think any of us expected, but there’s got to be a hard limit to how many of his mates he’s willing to never see again."

  "Fuck that,” Arman huffed. “Cenorth’s all bluster. Lowe’s got him properly wrapped around his finger. It won’t be him that tosses the case elsewhere. As far as the Commander is concerned, Lowe’s shit don’t stink."

  Lowe rolled his eyes at that. He was getting bored of the Golden Boy bullshit. "If that were true, this case wouldn’t have nearly gotten me strangled by one of his assets in a back alley last week."

  "Yeah, about that. We’ve all had a chat, and we agree that was your fault," Faulks said.

  "Is it my fault that an informant wanted to kill me?"

  "Yes," the group said in unison.

  Rook chuckled, shaking his head. "Alright, alright, enough bullying of poor Inspector Low. Back to the actual case—where do we stand? Let’s go around the table. Faulks? What do you have?"

  The dark-haired woman leaned forward, resting her elbows on Lowe’s table and disturbing one of the piles of dirty dishes. Arman caught each of them before they hit the dirt, moving ridiculously quickly. One of the benefits of a Speed-based Class "Sorry!” Faulks said. “Look, we know the Black Knight appears to act within a tight pattern and a regulated time-scale. It turns out he’s been targeting high-profile figures for months, but it took us a while to catch on. No harm, no foul. Unless you happened to be especially attached to rich wankers. However, we can see that there’s been nothing random about when he acts. We’re expecting his next performance in forty-eight bells, but we have no idea who will be the target. There has to be some connection between them all."

  Coda stretched, tossing a small stone in the air and catching it repeatedly. "I still say we just stake out all the guys and gals we’ve got flagged as the next likely targets and wait for him to show up. Then we kick his teeth in and call it a day."

  "Great plan," Arman deadpanned. "Nuanced. Very much within our wheelhouse."

  "Yeah?” Coda said. “Well, I save nuanced is for people with time to waste. We lose this case to the Temple and we’ll never hear the end of it."

  Faulks tapped a finger against the case files, nearly knocking them over again. She really was the clumsiest person in the whole of Soar, Lowe thought. "Look, we’ve come this far, we’re nearly there. We know his methods. We know he loves to leave messages. Cryptic shite. Like he wants us to figure something out."

  "Like he’s playing a game," Rook said.

  "Or testing us," Lowe added.

  "Well, we are very testable," Arman said.

  There was laughter, but it was strained. They were all running on fumes, and they all knew it. There had to be something they were missing. A puzzle piece that hadn’t clicked into place.

  Lowe knew that they’d talk for another few bells before dispersing. It would be the following morning that Rook would come to him with his epiphany about the next . . . event being a kidnapping. He’d cross-referenced all of the weird clues that had been left at the murder scene and thought he’d made sense of them. Of course, it didn’t help them overly much as they still had no idea who the target was going to be, but it had been a moonshot of a development on the case.

  Then, just as that memory began to fade, Coda said something.

  Something small.

  Something insignificant.

  But—

  "Wait!"

  Lowe’s mind snapped back to the present. He was back alone in his flat, with the warmth from the hot chocolate still lingering in his bones. However, his heartbeat was racing as if he’d just run a marathon. He tried to slow his breathing as he forced himself to replay the memory, dragging his focus back to that exact moment.

  Coda.

  He’d been smiling, tossing that stupid little stone in the air. Lowe and Rook had been deep in discussion, and Arman was just bending down to catch something else Faulks had inadvertently knocked off the table. No one was really listening to him as he chatted.

  "I mean, if you think about it," he'd said, "he’s obviously a psycho, but the Black Knight’s got style, you’ve got to give him that. All those little personal touches at the crime scene? The way he signs off in a way that is totally appropriate to the slaying? I tell you, he’s got a real eye for theatre. Remember the use of the enchanted red rope at the third scene? Fitting, right? Proper storybook villain shit."

  Lowe didn’t think he’d heard him at the time, Coda chatted so much shit it was easy for him to just become background noise—especially as yes, the bastard did have a sense of theatre, and yes, everything about his crimes had been deliberately performative. But—

  But.

  Red rope?

  That method by which the corpse of Marin Sahult had been suspended from his chandelier had been shocking, for sure. They’d had to wake a local Warlock to come and dispel whatever fucking Skill the Black Knight had used. But Coda hadn’t been on shift that night, had he? And, seeking to have something that wasn’t immediately public knowledge about the murder scenes, Lowe had deliberately withheld that detail from his report.

  Of course, he tried to reason, there had to be a million ways Coda might have picked the detail up.

  But. But. But.

  At the time, he’d just been distracted. Too focused on tracking patterns, on fighting with Cenorth, on keeping the case away from the Celestial Temple to properly pay attention. But now, sitting here in his quiet flat, feeling the last traces of Mylaf’s hot chocolate humming through his system—

  The description of the enchanted rope had been sealed behind every security clearance Cuckoo House had. There really was no way Coda should have known it was red.

  No way.

  How the fuck had he known?

  Lowe’s fist clenched against the table.

  The memory was slipping away again, details scattering like leaves on the wind, but that single line—those words—hung in his mind like a lead weight.

  What the fuck did I miss there? Lowe thought. Why was this memory coming back now?

  What was he supposed to be seeing? He was still struggling with it when his Sending Stone buzzed. He jolted at the sudden vibration, the sound cutting through the thick haze of thought. Lowe swiped it up, glancing at the glowing runes.

  Hel.

  He clicked the connection open, pressing it to his ear.

  "My place," she said.

  A pause.

  "Now."

  Welcome to the Dark Ages launched yesterday and is also on here up to Book 4

  Psyker Marine is up to Book 3 - this isn't on RR. Book 4 coming at the end of the month