The Inquestor came down the hallways of the Armoury like the wrath of God.
“Where is he?” came the imperious cry from her throat. “Inigo!”
The Proctor came out of a door up ahead, quite red-faced. “It’s gone,” he puffed.
“I know it’s gone. So is that damned thief! Your monster – all tied up!”
Inigo raised a tentative hand. “It’s the church’s monster, technically. Commissioned. Joint ownership, you know.” He flinched as the Inquestor’s staff came within inches of his head.
The Inquestor didn’t care who joint-owned the horrible thing in the Black Workshop. As far as she was concerned it was an affront unto all she held to be sacred. But if she was going to complain about the Church keeping secrets from itself, she would never finish. An infinite number of left hands fighting an infinite number of right hands, and all of them were coming off the same withered, ancient animal.
“The Whisper can’t have gone far,” she said. “Tell your men to search the city.”
“We can’t do that! We’re on thin ice with the Dona as it is. She won’t stand for that kind of overreach,” said the Proctor, wringing his hands.
“Perhaps she would prefer the Church conduct the investigation?” The Inquestor said coldly.

Silk’s hooves beat a heavy rhythm on the dirt road out to the south of Secoros. Whisper was laid low to the saddle, so that if you weren’t looking for her you could easily miss her in the great black horse’s mane. She scanned the horizon, looking for the house that would give her shelter…

She had left the Armoury by a window on the second story and landed with practiced ease, rolling to absorb the brunt of the impact. Pulling her cloak tight around her, she swept out of the clearing in the great jungle of the city before the guards could reach her and disappeared into the night.
First call was Anton’s workshop. She made her way up to the roof and dropped in the way she had left, from a hidden trapdoor under the chimney. The bespectacled engineer was already packing.
“Anton. Can you spare a moment to take a look at this thing?” she said. Anton turned as if he was standing on a spinning top from where he was busily arranging tools in a wooden crate stuffed with straw.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said, grabbing the leather case and opening it easily.
“It’s not locked,” Whisper said, half to herself in disbelief.
“It was in the most secure part of the most secure building within a hundred miles. Why would they lock it?” Anton said, enjoying himself immensely. He plucked the brass object within from a velvet housing. “Looks like they finished it, whatever it is.”
“I didn’t think the big man was after a half-completed tehnological curio,” Whisper said bitterly. “The last word in warfare. Any idea what it means?”
Anton frowned. “That doesn’t sound good. If I had some schematics, maybe I could make more of it. But it doesn’t sound like something I want to tinker with without knowing what I’m doing.”
“Agreed,” Whisper said.
The War-Machine was a small brass sphere, housed in a hollow cube made of thin tubing. An inscrutable arrangement of engraved lines and patterns whorled over the sphere’s surface. It was about the size of a closed fist.
“If I had to guess, I’d say these engravings represent a control scheme. The framework gives you access to the entire device without accidentally touching any of it. What’s inside the sphere I wouldn’t like to guess at.”
Whisper grabbed the case from him and turned it over in her hands.
“What are you looking for?” Anton asked.
Whisper said nothing, but pulled on a tab at one of the joints of the case. You could almost have missed it, and indeed Anton had. It slipped open easily, revealing a red-panelled compartment full of papers.
“Your plans,” she said.

Anton quickly flipped through the stack of papers, muttering to himself in increasingly concerned tones. The papers were covered with fine technical drawings, and he found himself using his magnifiying lens on nearly every page. Eventually, though, he turned to Whisper.
“It’s bad,” he said. Then he told her how bad. Whisper swore. “We can’t let this get out. The Armoury were right to keep it locked up.”
“But wrong to build it, so we don’t have to give them any credit. Listen, Anton,” Whisper said, and he recognised the careful expression that meant that she was formulating one of her plans. “Can you get a message to the Inquestor? I want you to tell her where I am tomorrow night.”
“Not to seem overconfident but, of course I can do that,” Anton said, a small smile picking up the corner of his mouth. “Where do you want to send her?”
“Just what I said. Tell her exactly where I’ll be.”

The little wooden shack stood sideways to the road that Whisper rode along. When she saw it, she pulled Silk over to the side and walked her up to the shack. This was where she would put things into action. If everything went to plan, nobody would go home empty-handed tonight.
Inside the shack was a table and one chair, as well as a simple straw bed. Whisper laid the War-Machine’s case carefully on the table and sat down on the bed, feeling the prickling ends of the straw on her hands. She had hours before the handover would come, and she didn’t know when the last time she had slept was. Just a little lie down wouldn’t hurt.

Hooves outside sent her sitting bolt upright. The light had taken on a decided purple cast since she had gone to sleep. It was time. She went to her pack and wrapped a black mask around her face, threw her cloak over herself.
“Inquestor?” she called. “Is that you?”
“The anonymous representative of the Whisper, I take it?” came the reply. Good. She believed the stories, at least enough to maintain appearances. Whisper was, well, whispered of as a tall, handsome man with a heroic jawline, always denoted by his winning smirk of defiance against tyranny. Though this night might well burn that layer of anonymity away at last.

The Inquestor stood proud outside the little shack in the blue twilight. It reminded her a little of the town she had grown up in, and she smiled. Happy reminiscences were something she had little time for, however. The slight figure stepped out of the shack. Her gait looked familiar to the Inquestor’s keen eyes, though she could not place where from.
“You really did come alone,” said the masked figure, almost surprised. “He said you would.”
“The War-Machine, please. I don’t have time for this,” said the Inquestor. “The Armoury is buzzing like a wasps’ nest.” There was considerable irritation in her voice. The figure nodded.
“I have it here. And in return, I go free. Those were Whisper’s terms.”
“They were,” the Inquestor said. She would never agree to such terms, but the Armoury were so desperate to have the machine back. Keeping them appeased was the prime purpose of her visit, so it fell naturally to her to make the pick up when the message had arrived, tied to a crossbow bolt, in the frame of her office door. She would be glad to be rid of them. The Church might be full of schemers, but at least they remembered to bathe.
“And how do I know you’ll keep them?”
“You’ll have to trust me,” said the Inquestor.
The masked woman cocked her head. “What if I give you something? Something you want.”
“All I want is to bring the degenerate they call the Whisper to justice!” said the Inquestor.
“Then let me give you him,” said the figure.
“Why would you do that?”
“He left me to face down an Inquestor by myself. You think I have any loyalty left for him?” the woman said, and the Inquestor realised where she had seen her before.
“Sister Silencio!” she said. “So you were his spy. I knew you weren’t on the level, but I assumed the Church was trying to trip me up.”
“That’s right. Whisper and Silencio. Would you believe it’s my real name?”
“Not for a second,” said the Inquestor. “But since you gave me a name, if you see him again, I want you to give him mine. Tell him Inquestor Vega won’t forget about him in a hurry.”
“I’ll pass it on,” said Silencio, and relayed to Inquestor Vega the location of a workshop which, when Vega returned to the city, she would find recently vacated and stripped of all evidence. “Give me the machine!” said Vega.
This was it. Whisper swung her arm back and hurled the case into the air, knowing that the Inquestor’s full attention would be on it, and sprinted for the hitching post round the back where Silk was tied up.

The Inquestor caught the case, of course, and rode as if possessed back to the Arraxas Armoury.
She slammed the case down on the Proctor’s desk triumphantly. The man’s eyes lit up. Eagerly he opened the case.
When he saw inside he made a strange little noise. He turned it around to show the Inquestor. Nestled in the place where the War-Machine should have been was a small blue stone. It seemed to glow faintly.
“It’s the ignition stone,” said Inigo. “The machine is useless without it.” He almost sounded proud now. “Wait!” he said suddenly, and opened the secret compartment. The thick sheaf of papers that fell out brought a frown to his face.
“Ah, yes. Of course. No doubt someone will find them again and build it anew.”
Vega shook her head. That devious Whisper and his assistant.
“Somehow I doubt that the Whisper would make things that easy for you, Proctor.”

Whisper rode away from the shack into the night, smiling to herself. The War-Machine hung from a rope, bouncing off the saddle with each of Silk’s mighty strides. Nobody would know the War-Machine was disarmed when she handed it over, not until they tried to use it. By then she’d be long gone. The only risk was that the Armoury hadn’t learned their lesson, that they tried to build a new one. But then, how would they do it when their plans were incomplete? The most crucial page of the schematics was nestled in her sleeve. As she rode, she whooped and tossed the single leaf of paper into the air. The weather would take it, or the wind, or the devil. Soon she would be free.

When Whisper was long since gone, a small green lizard came and looked at the paper for a while. Somewhere in its little lizard mind, it reached a conclusion, and began to eat.