The moon loomed large in the sky over the Arraxas Armoury as a tiny figure scaled up the sheer stone walls. Like a lizard she scrambled, climbing hook in each hand digging into the worn mortar and pulling her higher. Once, her hook slipped and she was left hanging by a single thin strip of metal halfway up the fifty-foot walls. If she fell, she wasn’t sure if she’d even know when she hit the ground. She wasn’t sure if that made her feel better or not. She dug the hook back into another handhold and pulled herself up.
As she came closer to the top, she heard voices and froze. She was completely vulnerable here. If a guard heard her and happened to look down, it would be a moment’s work to knock her off the wall and onto the hard cobblestones below.
She breathed slowly, shifted slightly. The soft mortar was starting to crumble under her hooks. It wasn’t meant to stand up to this kind of treatment. The guards were grumbling about the Inquestor working them harder than they were used to. They were right above her.
She was going to have to move. The hook in her left hand was now scraping along bare stone, and its twin was taking more weight to compensate. She gritted her teeth and dug the left hook into a new crevice between stone blocks, right as one of the guards let out a phlegmy cough. She held her breath as he claimed that roof patrol duty was making him sick, and listened to the sound of two metal-capped pairs of boots proceeding along the wall.
Whisper pulled herself up and rolled over the battlement, landing soundlessly on the wooden floor in her soft-soled black shoes. She was wearing a hooded cloak the colour of night over a multi-layered outfit that was festooned with pouches and pockets. A dull metal chain was wound around her shoulder, partially wrapped in soft material. She glanced up and down the wall, orienting herself. It didn’t take long to decide that her best bet was to go in the opposite direction to her friends the sickly guards. She stowed her climbing hooks on her belt and padded off towards the entrance.

Entering the Armoury, Whisper lowered her hood. The hallways were much different at night, lit only sporadically by yellow bulbs like the one that had flickered overhead in the Vault. She proceeded, listening carefully at every junction for any early warning of an approaching patrol.
“Did you hear something?” asked one guard to another. “Sort of a whooshing sound.” He raised his torch curiously, and Whisper held her breath very tight to avoid blowing the flame. She was clutching to a ceiling boss that depicted a violent clash between the Church and the Armoury. The Armoury side appeared to be calling down lightning from the heavens. In customary Armoury style, the rendering of the effects on living flesh was very graphic. Instructive, the Novice might have put it.
“Keep looking,” he said, lowering the torch. In the dim light, Whisper looked like nothing but an unusally deep shadow.
When the guards had passed she dropped to the floor. “Hey!” she heard, further up the hallway. “Some idiota left the door open! We’re gonna catch our death in here if this keeps up. I’ll give him a piece of my mind!”
She heard the door she had come in by slam. No matter. She wasn’t leaving that way. She crept onwards. She should be safe for a few minutes now, assuming she didn’t cross another patrol route.
First point of order was to find the vault. Then she could make her way to the Workshop, and she’d be home free. That meant going down several floors. A few patrol routes.
The first few floors were easy – a single flight of stairs knocked three off in quick succession. But for security reasons, no flight went straight through the building. She had to scramble more than once into shadows, under desks, dig her hooks into the ceiling beams, to avoid the attentions of patrolling guards. She seemed to be encountering them more often than she had the day before.
They weren’t any cleverer, though.

From the vault she took a sideways route through a series of study rooms that were connected by dimly-lit stone passageways lined with strange books for some kind of illicit research. What constituted illicit research in a place like this, Whisper didn’t want to think. The route brought her out very close to the hallway in front of the Black Workshop. She ducked back into an alcove as a lone guard tramped by, torch raised. After he passed, she should have a few minutes to cross the handstones. She slipped out of the alcove behind him and stayed close. She wanted to maximise her time advantage.
When they passed the hallway in front of the Black Workshop, she broke off and glanced up and down. All seemed clear. She tested the old bookshelf mounted to the wall with her hand. As she had thought, it seemed sturdy enough to hold her weight, at least for a little while. She pulled her hooks from her belt, and dug one into the hard wood of the shelf.
She made quick work of it, and before long she was halfway across the long hallway. It seemed almost to stretch out further and further each time she looked. A creak caught her ear as she went up a level, noticing the stones seeming to become agitated, as if they could sense her presence even from here. The wood was complaining. The shelf was starting to move. Tilt. She had come too high. It was going to fall. She cursed, looked frantically for something to hold onto. There! A dull, empty chandelier, long stripped of use by the light-by-command-bulbs. She kicked off from the shelf, splintering it and sending books scattering into the waiting clutches of the handstones, and her hook snagged the decorative metal loops of the chandelier.
Now free of her additional weight, the shelf ponderously righted itself. But Whisper had made a mark. Now the sands were slipping out of the glass. To make matters worse, she had been unable to pull one of her hooks out of the shelf in time. She swung from the chandelier, disengaging her remaining hook and flying through the space to the end of the hallway, where a long hanging banner let her slide gracefully to the floor. She looked at the carnage before her and sighed. What a shame. Then again, it wasn’t like those books were getting read where they were.

The door to the Black Workshop was locked, but it yielded to a little pressure from Whisper’s lockpicks and thunked open without too much persuading. Much like the hallway, the fabled Workshop itself was depressingly ordinary, with the exception being the fantastical devices on display. Too dangerous to be developed openly. A set of mechanical wings, fully unfurled like a majestic giant bat, caught her eye. Whisper looked at them with wonder, until she noticed a sheet of paper pinned to the straps of the clockwork unit: NOVICE TESTING ONLY. She shuddered. Not her way out then. She kept looking through the seemingly endless series of rooms and chambers. A water pump that could drill into the desert sand and extract water from below the earth. An enormous machine that resembled an eyeball. The uses of some of these was beyond her. At last, she found it – A black leather case that said, in small brass letters, THE WAR-MACHINE.
Something Whisper had taken to be another inanimate machine suddenly stood up. It was as broad as two men, armoured in a bizarre parody of a Church Knight, complete with massive emblazoned cup across the chest. It had no weapon, but something told Whisper it would be as devastating as any weapon if she happened to find herself clasped in the thing’s giant fists.
The automaton drew itself up and brought its fists down on the War-Machine and Whisper. When it raised them, though, there was no sign of either. It looked around, just in time to see Whisper running through the door.
Behind Whisper, the doorway burst open as the automaton came after her, forcing its way through the narrow space. She led it, War-Machine clutched in hand, all the way back to the exit. It was locked, had locked itself behind her. She didn’t have time to pick that lock again. Her only option was to fight. She pulled her pinpoint-sharp stiletto dagger from her belt.
Again the giant thing brought its colossal fist down, and again Whisper nimbly dodged. Sliding the case with the War-Machine under a worktable, she rolled close to the thing and thrust her dagger under the rivet of one of the great plates of steel that covered it. The rivet pinged off, the panel fell loose, and Whisper was overcome with revulsion for what she saw underneath. For the giant was no automaton at all, but a heaving thing of scarred red flesh that spilled out of the opened corner, blood streaming from the wound. As she looked in horror, the red flesh seemed to blacken and rot, as if exposure to the air was corroding it after its imprisonment. A thick stench filled the air, like the back of an abbatoir.
The bleeding stopped quickly, and the awful giant swung for her again. She barely avoided the great metal-shrouded fist this time, and ducked in close. This time she pulled her hook from her belt and dug that into the creature’s armour. She rose into the air as another rivet flew across the room and spilled more degrading flesh from the silvery armour, grabbing the end of the chain that wrapped around her body and swinging it hard. Around and around she went, back and forth, tightening the chain’s grip all the while, until the chain ran out and she dropped onto the thing’s broad back and thrust again with the stiletto, puncturing its armour and binding the thing’s arms.
The creature, that had been silent, let out a pained, pitiful roar of frustration as it struggled. Whisper pulled the War-Machine case from under the table and went to the door, slipping her lockpicks from their pouch.