“You daft?” Thomas pushed him and raised an open palm to slap him again. “I should ask the same of you! Look at what you done, now it’s all grimy!”

“Boys.”

The two men, hands now gripping each other’s tunic, immediately straightened at the voice. Mugs, blood stained and run down the front of his shirt from a shoulder wound that saw more movement than it needed, who limped and stepped carefully in the mud strewn with the obstacles of bodies, pointed at the object lying neglected next to them. “Pick it up.”

Thomas snatched it up and brushed the mud from its dull metal casing, with Jim twitching nervously at every stroke of the hand. He handed it to Mugs.

“Here ya go, bossman,” he said, coughing uncomfortably.

Mugs limped up to the carriage door and placed the bomb on the handle, carefully extending two arms out each side and twisting the top button until there was an audible, metal click.

There was a scuffling on the inside.

“I’d back up in there if I was you!” Jim hollered.

“You best do the same.” Mugs limped quickly away. This was a special device, something made using Artefacts, specific for the job. The instructions he was given were very clear: it would not harm anyone on the inside, but this design meant its user needed to stand very, very far away.

He counted under his breath. Ten seconds, he had been told. Mugs had just counted eight.

Nine.

A woman screamed from inside the carriage.

The sound of an explosion was short, but deafening. Mugs could feel his ears pop and depressurize from the shockwave. The device had torn the door to pieces, which were cast in the mud in an unnaturally small radius.

With an overcast and gloomy sky still drizzling rain, it was impossible to see the interior from the distance they all stood. Mugs approached it with cautious haste, a dagger in hand for any close-quarters surprise. That scream he had heard: it sounded like a woman’s.

Just before he and his crew reached the carriage Mugs was hit but a gust of wind accompanied by a low-pitched whine, both of which emanated from inside the carriage. He stumbled forward, droplets of rain having stung his face and his eyes, and rushed the door frame, wielding the dagger with an unsteady hand.

His heart sunk. No. Not this again.

The carriage interior was covered in blood. A woman in a royal white dress lay dead, lacerated as though by a barbed whip a thousand times over. Next to her body, carved into the side of the carriage was a perfectly circular opening to the outside. A cloaked figure—what seemed to be a man—disappeared through it, dropping to the road below.

Mugs swore, tearing around to the side and grabbing at the pistol in his boot. “Assassin! He’s escaping!” He brought it level but growled in frustration and threw it aside: he had forgotten to reload after the encounter with the cannibal. What a damn fool he was.

The others had finally taken notice as Mugs reach the escape hole, but they were far too late. In just a few short seconds the mystery man was already at least fifty paces away.

“Son of a bitch!” Mugs exclaimed. “He’s a Spark!”

“I got it!” Jim, without paying any heed to Mugs’ warning, snatched one of the fallen guard pistols in the mud, shaking the sludge from the trigger guard and the barrel, and he stumbled forward with an eager glee for the kill. Without hesitation, he pulled the trigger with an empty click, two seconds of silence courtesy of seemingly wet gunpowder, before the gun fired. Not only was the target far beyond lethal range but it was obvious immediately that he wasn’t hit.