Escaping from the High Alpha's chamber turned out to be the easy part.

With a combat poultice lashed roughly around her wound, Cephia led them at a lopsided run down from the upper levels, only to find that the Conclave had descended into complete chaos. Once the seat of civilisation, rationality and control, the place had become a battlefield.

There were bodies everywhere, and closer inspection of some of them laid bare the treachery that had driven a knife into Wildhearth's heart. Cephia's lips twisted in a bitter snarl as she saw designates, technicians and even some guards who had shed chunks of their clothing to reveal their true allegiance. Savage Fire tattoos and crimson-painted teeth marked out the traitors in their midst.

"How?" Anvaal murmured in disbelief. "How could this happen?"

Cephia shook her head, still trying to grasp this all herself. She stepped gingerly over the bodies, moving as fast as she dared, her ears pricking up at the distant sound of combat still raging in the halls.

"It doesn't really matter now, does it?" she replied grimly.

"We should get to a howl-wire, ma'am," Cinder cut in, her voice tight with pain. She was still being supported by Tayge as she shuffled along. "Gotta... gotta tell the others what's happened."

"You need to get to a medicary."

"What, this?" The quillkin forced a grin across her face. "This little twig won't slow me down."

"Always knew you were a few hairs short 'o sane," Tayge chuckled. "Sounds like we've still got some folks puttin' up a fight. Think we should lend 'em a paw?"

Cephia looked to Anvaal and Hezif. "I suggest you stay behind us, Designates. I think we're going to be fighting our way out of here. Tayge, you and Cinder hang back."

"Just get this damn thing out of me!" Cinder hissed. "I've still got one good arm."

Tayge sighed and looked to Cephia. "I ain't a medicary, boss, but I know my way around a bolt-wound. Want me to have a go at it?"

"Peace, no! We need a proper medicary!"

"Y'really think we're gonna have the option with the whole bloody Conclave goin' up in flames?" Tayge eased his fellow guard down into a sitting position then straightened up, indicating the passage ahead with a nod. "We're gonna need every body we can muster if we wanna get through this mess."

Cephia flexed her claws uneasily, meeting the foxkin's gaze. Behind her the clatter of combat still echoed. They couldn't afford to wait around. Strangling the grip of her truncheon, she cursed under her breath and relented.

"Fine. Fine. Do it."

"Yes, ma'am." Tayge whipped a quick salute her way before dropping down on his haunches at Cinder's side. "Do y'trust me?"

"You really want me to answer that?"

"Aw, careful now, you'll hurt my feelings."

Cinder gritted her teeth and slapped him with her good paw. "Just get on with it."

Tayge shrugged and took a deep breath, his mischievous demeanour evaporating as he wrapped one paw around the bolt sticking just out from under her right collarbone. He planted his other paw against her chest and braced.

"Ready?"

"Ready."

Tayge didn't wait around. With one, strong tug he pulled the bolt out. Cinder loosed a strangled howl of pain, her back arching and the tendons in her neck snapping taut as she tried not to move. Blood leaked from the wound across her armour, before Tayge stuffed a combat poultice against it, plugging the hole. The smell of fresh blood mingled with the herbs and oils, and Cinder bit back another scream, tears streaming down her face.

Eventually, with a cascade of colourful curses and a lot of effort, she staggered upright, her shoulder tightly bound. Tayge looked her up and down with a critical eye, then turned to Cephia.

"A'right, boss, that's about as good as it's getting."

"You ready?" she said, addressing the quillkin.

Cinder nodded, shaking her truncheon in the air.

"Then let's go."

Paws battered the floor behind her as Cephia set off towards the sounds of battle. Tracing back towards the main elevator, it wasn't long before they found the source of the noise – another guard pack locked in mortal combat with at least a dozen Savage Fire cultists.

Where in the Fire had they all come from?

Cephia could barely believe what she was seeing. The Conclave was supposed to be the most secure place in the city, but it looked like a veritable army had infiltrated the place. Then Senessara's face flickered in her mind. Traitors. She had to remember, the Savage Fire cult was not acting alone.

She didn't speak, not wanting to immediately betray their presence. Instead, Cephia made a chopping motion with her free paw and sprinted towards the fight. The others spread out behind her in a rough arrowhead formation, with Nassavick and his security officers hanging further back.

A volley of bolts slammed into the cultists, and several of them went down in an instant. They milled in confusion for a moment, and by the time they turned to face the new threat, Cephia was on them. She crushed her truncheon into the chest of one cultist hard enough to break his ribs and belted another across the face with the back of her paw. Tayge slid in past her, running another foe through with his dagger, while Roave sent another spasming to the ground.

Their vicious charge scattered the cultists, leaving dead bodies behind, along with a bloodied and battered guard pack. From within those armoured bodies a tall, regal deerkin emerged. Short, stubby antlers marked her out as a female, just barely visible in her dishevelled red headfur. Her formal designate robe was scuffed and torn, but she was alive.

"Anvaal?!" she exclaimed.

"Merwe – thank the Peace." He detached himself from the group, embracing her.

"Anvaal! What is happening?!" Merwe shook her head in disbelief, gesturing to their surroundings. "I was in my office when one of these lunatics tried to kill me! If it weren't for my guards..." The rest of the words failed her.

"I'm afraid it is." Anvaal gripped her shoulders, trying to steady his comrade. "We've been betrayed. There are Designates who helped these barbarians infiltrate the Conclave."

"I was on my way to see the High Alpha. I had my suspicions – Indikkara's murder, the graffiti-,"

"The High Alpha is dead," Cephia cut in. "And we don't have time to explain everything that's been happening. Do you know who these people are?"

"I heard rumours... some kind of cult." Merwe swallowed hard. "Peace and Fire, this cannot be happening!"

"Have you been able to contact anyone else?"

"I... no, no. I tried, but I couldn't get through."

"They must've cut the internal net," one of Merwe's guards said. "Tried three different howl-wire sets on the way up here and they were all dead."

"Bloody Fires," Cinder groaned. "Only one place they could've done that."

"Urban Pack Net," Cephia confirmed. "We need to secure that room and get the howl-wire network back up and running if we want to coordinate any kind of response." She inclined her head respectfully to Merwe. "Designate, I think you should come with us. I've a feeling we're going to need all the help we can get."

*

Their descent into the Conclave proper was a descent into madness. Gulfs of eerie quiet were punctuated by short, violent skirmishes with bands of cultists. They lost one of Nassavick's guards when two groups of enemies attacked from both sides. Many of her own people now sported cuts, scrapes and bruises from the fighting, but she knew their task had just barely begun.

At the tip of their spear, she snapped the neck of another cult fighter who'd been too slow to withdraw after their latest clash. The body thumped to the bloodied floor, and she swallowed a steadying breath, trying to get her bearings again.

They'd picked up a few more stragglers along the way – stunned guards and baffled designates all trying to figure out just what was happening. With those survivors came brutal stories of cold-blooded murder. The Savage Fire were hunting down any loyalist designates and killing them on the spot.

"What do you think?" Nassavick rumbled, moving up alongside her. "Do we continue directly?"

"It's the fastest way," Cephia replied.

"Maybe. But I get the distinct impression we're being herded."

"I think you're probably right."

"So?"

She considered that. The Urban Pack-Net was on the second level of the security tower. Moving directly along the connecting passage from the same level of the main tower would be the quickest, but she knew their enemies would be massed, waiting for them. The cult knew the importance of the Pack-Net.

"We'll come at them sideways – avoid the direct walkways and head to the lower level. There's an emergency stairwell at the rear of the main guard quarters." Flexing her neck from side to side, she clapped him on the shoulder. "I think this qualifies as an emergency, eh? C'mon, let's move."

She led them down three more levels and emerged at the bottom level of the security tower – still suspended a dozen floors up and jutting out sideways from the Conclave's baroque structure. But beyond the entrance to the main guard quarters a fresh melee was raging, and she recognised some of the combatants this time.

Bolting for the entrance, she called out, "Sharder!"

"Peace'n'bloody Fire, where've you been?!" The quillkin guard-leader paused long enough to blast a foe backwards with her truncheon then twisted to face them. Blood flowed liberally from a slash in her left arm, and part of her armour had been scorched.

Cephia didn't need to give any orders. She rushed through the doors to aid the beleaguered guards of Sharder's detail, burying one foe with a bolt through the temple before battering her way into the fight with her truncheon. Somewhere along the way she swept up a short, hook-bladed scythe from a dead cultist, using the weapon to open the throat of another enemy. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Anvaal go ploughing into the fray, lowering his head and impaling a cultist on his formidable antlers.

She trusted Nassavick to keep an eye on the designate, instead focusing on her comrades. Blood spattered across her armour as she hacked her way through the cult warriors, scythe in one hand and shock-truncheon in the other. Cephia paused briefly when a figure in crimson guard livery barred her path, but when the vulkin screamed an oath and charged, her fighting instincts exploded to the fore again.

Ducking the barnstorming swing of the traitor-guard's truncheon, she dropped low to one knee and swung the scythe around behind his left, slicing open his calf. The vulkin dropped with a strangled howl, but he spun around on one knee with frightening speed as she moved to finish him. It caught her off guard and the blade in his free paw slashed up, opening the left side of her face, even as she jammed her crackling truncheon into his ribs.

She let out a screech of pain, closing her eyes and jerking her head away sharply as the vulkin fell. Red hot agony scorched from just past her jaw, across her cheek and up across one of her ears where the keen metal had cut her. She tasted blood; the vision of her left eye blurred with crimson, but she had no choice but to keep going.

Blinking furiously, Cephia leapt upright with renewed fury, bludgeoning her way onward until she reached Sharder, just as a hulking beaverkin was about to bring a dock mallet down on her skull. She chopped the scythe down hard into the junction between the cultist's shoulder and neck, burying the blade there.

The beaverkin toppled to the side, revealing Sharder lying flat on her back.

Calm descended on them abruptly. Groans of the dying petered out into nothing. Most of Sharder's guard-pack lay among them and Cephia tried to block the stink from her nostrils, closing her eyes and trying to blot out the agony pulsing across her face. Then she leaned down, reaching a paw out to her comrade.

"Good timing, ma'am." Sharder winced, accepting Cephia's grip and allowing herself to be pulled upright. "Not long after you set off in the elevators this whole bloody place went to the Fire. We've been trying to get up to the Pack-Net but these buggers are everywhere!"

"A lotta inside help," Tayge grunted. "Seems y'can't trust anybody these days."

"That's the bloody truth, right enough." She muttered as she examined their company. "Where's Boel?"

"He didn't make it."

"Peace and bloody Fire."

"What about Fern?" Cephia asked, touching a ginger paw to her cheek.

Sharder shrugged. "I dunno, ma'am. Last I saw her people were securing the lobby, but with everything that's happening... Peace, who knows?"

"We can deal with that later," Anvaal spoke up, kicking his way through cultist bodies with wrath on his face. "You said we needed the Pack-Net to coordinate our response, Guard-Leader. Might I suggest we hurry up and get there?!"

"Alright, alright." She shot the deerkin a warning look, before turning back to Sharder. "You still up for this?"

"I am if you are."

"Then join the party."

She was beginning to feel uncomfortably like a refugee in her own backyard. Cephia led them on, through the wreckage of the guard quarters to the narrow stairwell at the rear leading upward. Seldom used, it was little more than a glorified fire escape, but it would serve them well now.

Her force spilled out onto the second level of the security stack, into white-walled corridors punctuated with massive crystal windows. Those white walls were scarred and smeared with blood now – the battle seemed to have infected the entire building.

She marched them onward, spitting blood as it flowed down across the corner of her mouth, looping around to the rear checkpoint of the Urban Pack-Net headquarters, and at the guard post there she found fresh signs of battle. Three dead guards lay there, truncheons still sheathed. Betrayed before they could fight.

"Ah, piss!" Roave spat, dropping to one knee to examine the corpses. "Mongrels beat us to it."

Her teeth snapped tight in frustration and she looked up. The door behind the bodies was a wreck, almost blasted clean off its hinges by an explosive charge, but when she peered through the aperture saw dark shapes churning around in the room beyond. A stray bolt cracked off the checkpoint's armourglass window, jolting her into action.

"Our people are still in there," she barked, launching forward. "C'mon!"

In a powerful leap, she cleared the smoking wreckage of the doorway and hit the solid metal floor plates on the far side. Rolling to her feet, Cephia scampered forward to make space for the others, and tried to make sense of the mayhem unfolding in front of her.

The Urban Pack-Net was a massive low-ceilinged room carpeted with bulky computing rigs; big steel casings squatting on thick-legged desks. Normally it was the efficient nucleus of guard operations, but right now it was was a ruin, filled with smoke, shattered glass, smashed computers, blood stains and sparking wires.

Guards fought guards; robed figures piled into the melee screaming in their strange, ear-warping language. She twisted and shot at the closest one, catching them with a bolt in the lower back. Tayge was the first through the door after her, with Sharder close on his tail. They started to spread out, when a thunderous roar wrenched Cephia's attention up towards the room's raised command dais.

She looked up, just in time to see Senior Guard-Leader Kremmet punch a cultist so hard that his burly wolfkin assailant went flying off the edge, crashing over a guard rail and landing in a limp heap on the ground below.

Cephia's eyes widened in amazement. Surrounded by enemies and with the bodies of his guards strewn at his footpaws, the old bearkin was riddled with bloody wounds, but battled gamely on. Bellows of defiance rattled the rafters as he laid about left and right, his big, blunt claws doing as much damage as any blade.

So he wasn't a traitor, just a prejudiced fool swallowed up in this mess.

"The dais," Cephia yelled, launching herself into the crush. "Get him out of there!"

She stooped, picking up one of the broken computing rig cases as she moved. The heavy steel casing made for a fearsome projectile when she strained her whole body and hurled it into an onrushing trio of cultists. It smashed the leader back into one of his comrades, his chest caved in. A bolt whipped over her shoulder and killed the third.

Combatants grappled ahead of her, crashing through machines, falling onto live wires, scorching and electrocuting themselves. The air stank of blood and charred fur, the whole space echoing with screams and roars. She'd fought before, but never in her life had she experienced this level of utter savagery. Wildhearth was supposed to be beyond such things.

The past had not been willing to fade away so easily, it seemed.

With Tayge, Roave and Sharder at her back, she forced herself onward, drawing on reserves of strength and adrenaline to ram her way through the cultists. She killed quickly and without mercy, bloodying her teeth and claws as she went, ripping out throats, gouging out eyes, battering with hunks of debris and stabbing with stolen blades. With the arrival of reinforcements, the cult members began bleeding away, suddenly outnumbered, but somehow that didn't make her feel much better.

She reached the dais, watching with a mix of awe and horror as Kremmet brought both paws down in a crushing hammer blow on top of an onrushing enemy's skull. The cultist's neck collapsed like paper under the tremendous force of the blow, but not before he swung his axe into Kremmet's flank.

The bearkin staggered back as his foe fell dead, tugging the axe-head loose and tossing it aside. He tottered unsteadily, and collapsed back against one of the computing desks.

"Kremmet. Kremmet!"

"Peace, I can hear you," the bearkin groaned, sliding down into a sitting position against the table, clutching his side with one paw. He looked past her, seeing the last few cultists scurrying out of the chamber to regroup with their fellows.

"Are you alright?" she asked, knowing how stupid the question was but unable to stop herself.

"No." He gritted his teeth. Blood leaked out. His voice was a bitter rattle. "Report, Guard-Leader."

Cephia swallowed hard, lowering herself down alongside him. "High Alpha Oslarra is dead. The cultists are trying to take over the Conclave. They've been aided from within – by designates, our guards, some technical staff. I can't say how deep it goes."

"Deep enough." Kremmet shifted with a gurgle of pain. "We need to restore the howl-net ... communicate with those guards in the Conclave still fighting."

"Yes, sir. That's why we came here."

"Good. Find..." He broke off, coughing for a moment, before clearing his throat. "Korryn, are you alive?"

"Present, sir." A female foxkin clad in the metal-blue overalls of a Conclave technician limped onto the dais, a heavy, blood-stained wrench hanging in one paw.

"Tell her... tell her-," Kremmet's words dissolved in another fit of guttural coughing.

"Report," Cephia said quickly. "What's the damage?"

Korryn snorted and made a vague gesture to their surroundings. "Apocalyptic."

"We just need communications. Can you restore the howl-wire so we can call out of here?"

"They blew the main comm lines before they swept in here." The foxkin had a helpless look on her face. "It's fixable – there's more than enough emergency gear up here, but most of my team are dead. I could fix it, but on my own it would take too long."

"How long? How long do you need? Minutes, hours?"

She grimaced. "At least a day."

The words crawled gloomily out across the air like smog.

Cephia looked around her. All things considered, it was a pitiful force to pit against the chaos; maybe twenty Conclave security officers, half a dozen shell-shocked designates and Nassavick's dwindling group of guards. Many of them were wounded, some badly. They were running out of bolts for their armbows. A grim cloud had settled over the kin she'd brought into this gauntlet. Her gaze shifted towards the main entrance of the Urban Pack-Net. A hollow feeling settled in her stomach, when she saw a mass of silhouettes darkening the passage beyond.

"Somehow," she said softly, "I don't think we've got that kind of time."