A wave of shadows advanced through the Silk.

All around the throne of Wildhearth, conflict raged. Fires lit up the night, the lick of flames, the screams of kin and the clash of weapons engulfing the city. Brigades of watchguards fought to maintain order, chasing down small, suicidal groups of cultists who sold their lives to instil chaos in the city. Riots swept through swathes of the outer districts.

But Illando knew this night of madness could not sustain itself. It was like a violent flare in the dark, burning bright and hot at its zenith, but soon to collapse in on itself. While the number of Savage Fire followers had taken him by surprise, compared to the vast, seething masses of Wildhearth they were little more than a pinprick. Everything they were doing now was to draw attention from Kendris's true plan.

Everything beyond the Silk could be salvaged and rebuilt, but if Kendris seized the Conclave, Illando knew they would be dealing with something else entirely. If Wildhearth's government collapsed into the void, the city might well follow it.

And so, with a hundred battle-ready wolfkin enforcers at his back, Illando marched on the Conclave of Accord.

They advanced through the streets as subtly as lava flow. He chose a direct, deliberate route, letting the citizens of the city see how the enforcers dealt with threats to Wildhearth. Small groups of cultists scattered before them; any who were foolish enough to stand in their way were massacred without mercy.

Illando was long past taking prisoners. His club caved in the skull of another foe, leaving them to fall in a bloodied, broken mess. As they fell, he looked up to see the rising mass of the Conclave itself, tantalizingly close. Cephia was in there somewhere; he had to believe she was still alive, still in the fight. She would have made a fine enforcer if she'd ever wanted to, but she chose differently.

He ached to have her alongside him right now.

"Form up!" he barked, forcing himself to focus as he stepped over the corpse of the cultist. Other ragged figures lay dead in the street, torn up by claws and blades, or downed by armbow bolts.

Noelle moved up beside him, flicking blood from her longclaw dagger, her normally cheerful features now tight with anxiety. Even for her, the full scale of what Kendris was trying to do had been a lot to swallow. To his right Morta stalked into line, his pack spreading out along that flank. He could just make out Gensher's towering silhouette further along. Lykas's packs from the north spread out to form the opposite wing of their advance.

"Didn't wanna believe it," Noelle murmured, shaking her head grimly as she stared at the Conclave tower. Even from this distance he could see fires burning on some levels.

"We're still here," he grated. "So this isn't over."

"I'm right there with you."

"C'mon, let's put an end to this." Illando raised his club, adrenaline swelling in his blood. "Go!"

That single bark was all that was required. He chopped the club downward, and the enforcers raced out across the clearing. Dark armoured bodies spread out in the twilight, footpaws battering the slabwork as they sprinted. The wings of the advance opened out like the jaws of a great wraithbeast, slamming shut on the Conclave.

Only a small number of cultists remained outside the building, and they were obliterated by the wolfkin charge. Running at full speed, Illando almost tore the head off of one foe, catching them with a swing of his club as he ran by. In the immediate area around the main entrance dozens of designates, Conclave guards and civilian staff lay dead – taken by surprise in the first wave of the attack.

Screamed warnings were cut off; robed bodies quickly joined those they had murdered.

A pack of cultists began to cluster beyond the main door, trying to plug the gap and stop the wolfkin advance, but they might as well have tried to stop an avalanche with kindling. Illando led his soldiers in at full speed.

He'd been attacked, he'd been fooled, he'd been played with, he'd been misdirected, but now the games were over. In a handful of gruesome moments the enforcers showed why Kendris had been right to try and remove them from play.

Morta's pack followed him inside in a tight, fast-moving wedge, and they ripped through the cultists like a bulldozer. Half of them were slain where they stood, the rest fleeing for their lives in the face of the wolfkin assault.

Kicking a dead body out of his path, Illando stalked out into he entrance lobby, his eyes surveying a scene of fresh carnage. Here the battle had been more evenly matched, with a mess of cultists mixed in with dead guards. Broken weapons and armbow bolts littered the space, the air thick with the copper tang of blood.

"Sir?" Morta asked, moving up alongside him.

"Secure this place," Illando ordered, pointing at the entrances. "Now! Nobody else comes in our out."

"You said there was a coup, didn't you?" Lykas growled, turning over the body of one cultist with his footpaw, examining them disdainfully. "Well, they're not overthrowing the Conclave in the lobby. We better start climbing."

"If they're after the High Alpha and the designates, that's where they'll be goin'," Noelle agreed. "That's where Kendris is gonna be."

Illando bared his teeth. "Then up we go."

*

Cultists poured down the stairwells towards them like mudslides. Cephia braced herself against the barricade, baring her teeth. Her left eye was still bleary with red; the dagger blow had shattered some capillaries. She blinked, trying to focus.

"Anybody with an armbow," she barked. "If you've got a target, don't let me stop you. Fire at will!"

Her comrades needed no second bidding. Aiming through narrow gaps in the barricade, they began snapping off precious shots from their dwindling supply of bolts, and more followers of the Savage Fire began to fall. She'd lost count of how many she'd slain – the whole thing was a blaze of blood and screams in her mind right now, like a fever dream.

Bolts came whickering back at them, splintering wood and biting chunks out of the barricade, but the guards on the perimeter stood firm. The cultists spread out, moving away from the narrow stairs that made them easy targets and instead vaulting through the rows of seating, forming an encircling maw around Cephia's beleaguered group.

"Stand!" she screamed as the walls closed in around them. A defiant roar erupted up from her comrades, and as the Savage Fire warriors charged the barricade, they rose to meet them head on.

A quillkin attacker came leaping up at the barricade with a wild yell, swinging a blunt-headed mace. Cephia mounted the lower lip of the barricade, and with a single, powerful thrust, she speared him out of mid-air, driving the diamond blade through his neck. She twisted awkwardly, shaking the corpse from her weapon and pivoting back in time to catch a second with a blow from the spear-haft.

Cephia steadied herself, in time to see one of the administrative staff go flying back off the barricade with a bolt lodged in their sternum. She ducked down, narrowly avoiding the same fate, before rising again to skewer another attacker. A third went flying past her, trying to get at the designates in the centre of the ring, but Cinder was waiting for him. The injured guard lunged with textbook form, and blasted the attacker with the dwindling charge of her truncheon.

Two technicians leapt forward to finish the attacker off with wrenches.

For what felt like an age the braying, screeching cultists scrabbled and smashed at the makeshift fort, blades biting into wood, bolts pin-cushioning the last bulwark Cephia had to defend. The spear became slick with blood and difficult to hold, but she battled on. A few spaces along she saw Roave fall backwards into the protective ring, his jaws locked around the neck of another wolfkin in guard armour – the shoulder torn away to reveal the dual triangle of the Savage Fire beneath.

Loyalist and traitor fell, but only one got up again. Roave staggered to his feet, spitting blood and nursing several deep wounds. Growling with fury, he clambered back onto the barricade.

The initial surge was repulsed, leaving a ring of bodies around the dais, but Cephia didn't take much comfort in that. Still more of them were pouring down the stairs, and by the time cultists stopped piling in to the chamber it was almost half full.

At least five hundred bloodthirsty murders against her band of maybe fifty kin, many of whom weren't even soldiers. Brutal odds by anybody's standards.

There was nothing to do about it now. Readying herself for another charge, she helped Roave clamber back up into his position in the line, then flexed her neck from side to side. Something cracked, loud and obvious in the sudden quiet.

She lowered her spear.

"Hold!"

The word cut out brutally across the air. It was like something unleashed from an ancient vault, a coarse, grinding accent like nothing she'd ever heard before. It made her tail curl; her paws tighten around the spear haft.

To Cephia's amazement, like an animal straining against its leash, the mass of the Savage Fire followers stopped. She kept the diamond-tipped spear raised in both paws, shifting from target to target in the front ranks, ready to impale the first cultist foolish enough to challenge her. Seconds clawed their way by with excruciating slowness. Then the cultists started to back away.

They didn't go far, just edging a few meters away from the last line of defence the Conclave of Accord could muster. They sank down to take cover amongst the benches, almost sullen in their movements.

Cephia glanced left and right. On one side Tayge shrugged, taking the instant of respite to wipe blood from the blade of his dagger. On the other Roave bared gore-smeared teeth at their enemies, his eyes blazing with violent intent.

"Followers of the Conclave," the voice continued, calmer; softer. "Give me your eyes, and for a moment, your ears."

Every molecule of fur on Cephia's body prickled. Against the urges of every long-lost instinct surging inside her, she looked up to find the source of that sound. And she saw him, unmistakable as a flame in the night, standing atop one of the long staircases.

Kendris.

She knew it had to be him. He matched Illando's description, but she would have known anyway. She'd never seen another kin like him. His wild eyes roved across chamber, examining the small group of loyalists as though surveying a sacrifice.

"Easy," she growled softly. "Hold your ground."

The cult leader took a step forward. Adoring gazes rose to meet him from the fighters within the chamber. The felkin assassin prowled into view alongside him, her lips curled with disdain as she looked down on them. An axe-wielding wolfkin moved up to the other side, but her eyes flickered past them, to a black-armoured figure hovering just behind.

Her gut twisted when she peered closer, the cult leader momentarily forgotten. It was Farler. It had been a little while since she'd seen him face-to-face, but she knew it was him. Black enforcer armour marked him out. Her mind plunged back to simpler times. She remembered drinking alongside this wolfkin in the Mellit Haar bars; remembered seeing him laugh and joke with her mate like an old friend.

A veteran.

A traitor.

She trembled with the shock of it.

"You do not have to die here," Kendris shouted, dragging her attention back. He lowered his axe and gazed down on them with the imperious stare of a beast who considered himself a god. "I seek only a new order. I seek only to set you free. Only those who would stand in the way of a true beastkin will be slain."

"Beast's off his bloody meds, that's for sure," Tayge muttered through gritted teeth.

"Lay down your weapons," Kendris told them, spreading his arms wide. "Send out those who would oppose us and the rest of you can join me in a new dawn. Join us and embrace the Fire! This place has imposed its rules upon you. How many of you asked for this, yet you blindly serve it? How many of you know the blood that was spilt by those who profess to follow the Peace?

"Your city is not built on Peace, but on murder, and deep down you know it. This place and others like it? They have lied to you for centuries. They've tried to suppress what you really are, and for what? For your 'stamps', for your narcotics. For a barrel of lasher and a soft bed of pillows." Disgust dripped from his words and he let out a bitter laugh.

"You know in your hearts that I am speaking the truth. The world of Wildhearth – the world of this Conclave – is a lie. How many of you would really choose to die for it?" A slow smile crawled across Kendris's face as he slowly pointed down at them, the axe head aimed right at her, as though he'd picked her out to challenge out of every soul in the Conclave. For a moment nothing happened. Every atom in the chamber recoiled, as though sensing an explosion.

Then Cephia bared her teeth, placing a footpaw on the lower rung of the barricade and raising herself up into full view of the cultists. She didn't hesitate; didn't process that she was making a decision that would probably get them all killed. She didn't care. All she knew was that she hated the thing standing in front of her with a passion she didn't know she possessed.

"I would die for it!" she bellowed, her voice thundering out across the empty space. "By the Great Peace and the Savage Fire, I would die for it, here and now!"

"And I!" Anvaal shouted an instant later, muscling his way to the front rank of the defenders. The deerkin's waistcoat was torn to pieces, and he sported a dozen superficial wounds, but he was very much alive.

And his voice carried weight. Several of the kin closest to him echoed his words, closing in protectively around the designate with weapons raised.

"I will," Nassavick boomed, and his guards quickly took up the chant.

Tayge grinned. "Me too."

Behind her voices rose up, as violent as a wildfire. Guards, designates, technicians, administrators, all of them giving full vent to their defiance. She saw Kendris's face twitch with annoyance, though he did not look surprised. His eyes fixed on her, burning like hot coals of anger.

Her blood pounded in her veins. She met his gaze and pointed the spear at him.

"You want to see your new world?" Cephia roared. "Then come down here and claim it over my bloody, burning corpse!"