Chapter 14 – Sheltie and Boxer

The wine was exceptional. That was the indignity of it: that a criminal establishment operating in what was either a pocket dimension or a particularly well-warded basement had a cellar, in the conventional sense of the word, that put the Imperial annual gala to shame. Eliza held the glass up to the gaslight. The vintage was a deep, arterial red, heavy-bodied, with the kind of legs that suggested it had been ageing since before her parents met.

One should expect nothing less, she thought, taking a slow sip and letting the rim clink against the porcelain chin of her half-mask, from an establishment that named itself the Cellar.

“You’re fidgeting, Boxer.”

The observation was delivered without looking. She didn’t need to look. The leather of the VIP booth had been creaking in a metronomic rhythm for the last three minutes, which meant her companion was either shifting his weight from cheek to cheek or attempting to burrow through the seat cushion via osmosis. Neither option reflected well on the Department.

Beside her, William, whose hastily acquired membership card identified him as “Boxer,” a name he had chosen under pressure and immediately regretted, flinched as though she’d flicked his ear.

“Sorry, Sheltie,” he said, deploying her alias. He tugged at the collar of his rented tuxedo, which was half a size too generous in the shoulders and appeared to be staging a slow, fabric-based assassination attempt on his windpipe. “It’s just… the energy in here. I’ve never seen anything like it. Half the people in this box are probably on the Watchlist. Shouldn’t we be, I don’t know, taking names? Making note of faces?”

“Put your notebook away, Boxer.”

“It’s just—”

“Away.”

The notebook disappeared into his jacket. Eliza took another sip. She really, profoundly did not want to be babysitting tonight.

“You are acting like a constable on his first foot patrol,” she said, her voice low enough to be swallowed by the ambient roar of the crowd below. “You blend in about as well as a hymn in a hurricane. Stop looking at people like you’re memorising their bone structure. Stop touching your collar. And for the love of all that is holy, stop bouncing.”

William went rigid. The bouncing stopped.

Eliza turned her attention back to the arena, though her mind was three conversations and twelve hours behind. The morning briefings had been ugly. Not the controlled, bureaucratic ugly of a case developing along expected lines, but the sprawling, many-headed ugly of something that had been growing in the dark and had only just breached the surface.

The bandit attack on the King’s Road had been the loud one: the smoking crater, the vaporised horses, the missing passengers. That was the one that tripped the detection grid and brought her and Thomas out in the rain to stare at a hole in the ground. She had dismissed it. There was no magical signature worth the name, just a faint trace of pyromancy she’d written off as a spark charm, and a meteorite theory from the Constabulary that was just plausible enough to close the file on.

But it wasn’t just one carriage. That was the part that had landed on her desk two hours before she’d walked into this basement. Three other carriages hit on the southern approach roads, same day. Two more near the river crossing. The Constabulary had taken their time connecting the incidents because each one looked different: a wheel failure here, a bridge washout there, a reported animal attack on the Millford road that left no carcass and no tracks. It was only when the missing-persons reports started arriving in clusters that someone with half a brain had pinned a map to a wall and drawn lines between the dots.

Six carriages. At least fourteen people unaccounted for. All on the same day.

If the Jackal’s crew was selling live cargo, the money trail would eventually pass through a place like this. The Cellar dealt in everything that couldn’t survive daylight, and human trafficking was simply another line item in the ledger of the damned. But so far, the grapevine was dry. No whispers of bulk orders. No rumours of ritual sacrifice. Just the usual commerce of vice, grinding along with the cheerful amorality of a market that had never pretended to have a conscience.

Thomas should be here. The thought arrived with the familiar tang of professional irritation that her partner seemed specifically designed to generate. There was a conspiracy metastasising in the bowels of Dunwick. It involved coordinated abductions, probable cult involvement, and an operational sophistication that went well beyond the Jackal’s usual smash-and-grab repertoire. And Thomas Bannerman, Senior Inspector, decorated field agent, the man who had once tracked a rogue necromancer through the sewers for eleven consecutive hours without a bathroom break, had clocked out early for family matters.

“Duty calls,” he’d told her yesterday, standing over the crater while the rain hammered the containment field she was burning mana to maintain. The grid doesn’t monitor itself, he’d said.

Apparently, the grid was perfectly capable of monitoring itself when there was a family dinner on the schedule. So much for the stoic professional who couldn’t spare five minutes to greet his sister at the gates.

Eliza swirled the wine. The irritation softened, reluctantly, into something closer to understanding.

Then again. She watched the red legs slide down the inside of the glass. That morning report would have rattled him. Fourteen people missing from the roads. Thomas had a sister travelling those same roads, on that same day, arriving at a city that was beginning to look less like a destination and more like a trap. The realisation must have hit him like a fist: the sheer proximity of the harvest to his own blood. If the world was showing signs of ending, Eliza supposed she could forgive the man for wanting to verify that his little sister was actually sitting at the dinner table and not in a burlap sack in someone’s cellar.

She took a longer sip than she’d intended.

Not this cellar, obviously. A different one. A worse one.

“But ma’am—Sheltie,” William corrected himself, the alias still sitting in his mouth like an ill-fitting denture. “Isn’t this technically illegal? Unsanctioned duelling? Unregulated gambling? We’re officers of the Crown. Shouldn’t we be—”

“Boxer.” Eliza set her glass down. “Look at the floor.”

He blinked. “The… the sand?”

“Not the sand. The walls. The wards.” She pointed a gloved finger at the perimeter of the Level 3 pit below them, where faint geometric patterns pulsed in the stonework at intervals too regular to be decorative. “What do you see?”

William leaned forward, squinting through the haze of cigar smoke. His brow furrowed, and for a moment the nervous rookie vanished, replaced by something more focused: the student who had graduated near the top of his Academy class, before the field had taught him that graduation meant nothing.

“Spatial,” he said slowly. “Trans-locational, if I’m reading the lattice right. The geometry is… wrong. The angles don’t resolve. It’s like looking at a staircase that goes up and down at the same time.”

“Very good.” Eliza picked her glass back up. “We walked down a flight of stairs, Boxer. One flight. Do you feel like we descended one flight?”

William opened his mouth. Closed it. His eyes moved to the vaulted ceiling high above them—far too high, impossibly high for a single storey’s descent—and then to the sprawling floor of the amphitheatre, which extended in every direction well beyond the footprint of the building they had entered from the street.

“No,” he admitted.

“No,” Eliza agreed. “Because we aren’t in Dunwick anymore. We might be in a pocket dimension. We might be in a spatially dilated basement beneath the Iron Ward. We might, for all I know, be sitting in a very comfortable chair on the dark side of the moon. The point is this: the Emperor’s writ stops at the door. Imperial jurisdiction does not extend to spaces that do not technically exist within the borders of the Empire.”

She gestured with her glass at the improbable cathedral around them.

“If you attempt to arrest someone down here, the House will not debate the legal nuances with you, Boxer. They will kill you. And the Department, being a bureaucracy before it is anything else, will bill your next of kin for the processing fee.” She took a sip. “We are guests. Behave accordingly.”

William’s mouth worked silently for a moment, cycling through what appeared to be several competing objections before settling on the only response available to a junior agent whose senior had just explained, calmly and over good wine, that they were beyond the reach of the law and entirely at the mercy of their hosts.

“Right,” he said faintly. “Guests.”

“Guests with eyes and ears,” Eliza amended. “Not badges.”

A roar from the crowd below swallowed whatever William might have said next. The gas-floods above the Level 3 pit flared to full intensity, bleaching the sand white, and the crowd surged against the cage bars like a tide hitting a breakwater.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Two men stepped onto the sand.

They were stripped to the waist, their torsos maps of scar tissue and old burns, the accumulated résumé of careers built on the willingness to bleed in front of an audience. The first was enormous. Not tall, though he was that, too, but wide. His skin had a faintly wet sheen, as though he were sweating water in a way that was not entirely natural.

The second was lean, ropy with the kind of muscle that suggested speed over power, and he moved with a restless, kinetic energy that made the air around him shimmer.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” The announcer’s voice erupted from somewhere above them, magically amplified to a volume that vibrated in Eliza’s sternum. “In the blue corner: the man who churns the seas, the colossus of the deep, give it up for… THE ICEBREAKER!”

The big man raised one hand. The crowd responded with a sound like a dam breaking.

“And in the red corner: the cyclone of the south, the gale that never dies… THE TURBINE!”

Eliza snorted into her wine. It was a small, undignified sound that she would deny producing if asked.

“The Turbine,” she repeated, tasting the word like something found on the bottom of a shoe. “And the Icebreaker. Lord above. Who writes this copy? Is there a committee?”

“I think they choose their own names,” William offered.

“That is somehow worse.”

The bell rang. It was a sharp, brassy note that cut the roar clean in half.

The Turbine didn’t wait for the echo.

The lean man detonated from his corner. There was no running start, no windup. A concussive bloom of compressed air erupted behind his heels and he launched, covering the distance between corners not with the gait of a sprinter but with the ballistic trajectory of a fired round. He banked mid-flight, his body tilting into the curvature of his own slipstream , and suddenly he was circling, orbiting the larger man at a speed that turned him into a blur of skin and motion.

William’s notebook was back in his hands. Eliza didn’t bother correcting him.

“How is he doing that?” William breathed, leaning so far forward his mask nearly touched the railing. “That propulsion. The g-forces alone should be snapping his tibias. His joints should be powder.”

“The mantle,” Eliza said, watching the blur with the detached interest of a woman who had seen better. “A pyromancer doesn’t cook inside their own fireball. A kinetic mage is insulated against their own output. The mana reinforces the vessel. At Tier 5, that reinforcement becomes substantial.”

“But the force is external once it leaves his—”

“Boxer.” Eliza held up a finger. “I am not teaching a physics seminar in an illegal fighting pit. Watch the fight.”

William shut his mouth. He watched the fight.