I open my eyes to a sky as dark and ugly as a bruise.

My head: pulsing pain, rich and spiteful.

My mouth: dry, cotton-thick from a dreamless, restless sleep.

I start using my hands to work life into my bones, and grit out of my eyes. But I soon give up – my pale skin is too thickly caked with dirt and dust.

I shift my weight, muscles protesting, until I feel an unforgiving jab in my leg. Parting my long, tattered tunic, I reach for the source. My fingertips brush cool, smooth metal. I pull it into view and find a pistol, glinting like starlight and weighing like an unhappy consci­ence. Six pieces of dark, crystalline stone sit snug in the rotating chambers, and a single silver word is engraved in the barrel.

MARNE.

I glance about. I lie in a broad street, buildings leering down at me in idiot curiosity, each a uniform grey under veils of powdery dust, their vacant windows as black as gapped teeth. That’s when I first glimpse it.

The bell tower.

I stumble slowly to my feet, stuffing the pistol into the folds of my tunic. The bell tower looms at me, plaster-cracked, sun-bleached, but as imposing as a cliff-face.

I know this place. I know its gargoyles, the slouching sentries with weather-beaten faces and chipped shoulders. I know the friezes of carved skulls and hammers, and the tapering tower, with its single bell hanging proud of the masonry, a silhouette amid the violet clouds.

Every feature is inevitable; every line is in its place.

And yet, I have no memory of the tower.

I have no memory.

Of the tower.

Of the gun.

Of me.

‘My name,’ I blurt out. ‘My name!’

I put my hands to my head, burying my fingers in loose curls of hair. Breathing becomes frantic. Faster and faster. Panic, mounting in my breast like a growing flame. My knees give way and I drop to the ground as if in prayer. There I kneel, head in my palms, heart racing.

Slowly, with laborious care, I fight to ease my nerves. I bottle up the questions multiplying in my head and I slow my racing breath. And then, to be safe, I slap myself once or twice. The sting burns deep. I get up.

As a drowning man needs air, I need to move.

With only the wind and my shadow for company, my footsteps ring out a pattern on the flagstones, announcing my progress along the streets. Glimpses of motion watch me go – tell-tale flickers, suggestions of something more and something less than the drifting dust.

In time I spy a figure, some way ahead, walking towards a low pali­sade wall. I take a breath to call out. But the silence gives me pause. Instead, I break into a jog. My legs eat the distance gamely, while the figure makes no effort to hurry.

‘Hello,’ I venture, drawing closer. ‘Hello?’

The figure turns, revealing a haggard woman with a gaze as hard as granite. She sizes me up from under a frayed hat, and opens her cracked lips to ask, ‘Got any firewater on you?’ Her hand, I notice, rests on the pommel of a knife, tucked into her belt.

‘No, I don’t.’

She lets the hand drop. ‘Piss off, then.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To find a drink.’ She turns away and shuffles on down the street.

‘Who are you?’ I ask, keeping step with her.

Her pace falters, if only for a moment. ‘Don’t know.’

Without thinking, I take her arm. ‘You don’t know either?’

She recoils, flashing the pommel again, businesslike. ‘Try running that mouth some more.’

‘At least tell me where we are? Does this town even have a name?’

But she’s already moving on. The buildings around us taper off like an unfinished sentence as we approach the palisade wall. A simple abutment of raised earth and logs, as dry as stacked kindling. It stands without sentries. No weapons are piled along its length, waiting patiently. Only the dust stirs on the wall, spilling freely towards the town.

‘Where are you going, then?’ I ask her. ‘You can tell me that, surely?’

‘Like I said,’ she grunts. ‘To find some firewater.’

I follow her through a gap in the palisade.

Nothing awaits beyond. A grey and desiccated waste, riven with cracks and fissures, stretches far away. Only one feature breaks up the unremitting scheme of greys. A road – or the remains of one – ­charting a lonely, ochre path. It curves tentatively to the indigo horizon, as if unsure of itself.

Despite my irresistible ignorance, some obscure instinct breaks through and draws up a name for this wretched place, as easily as I draw my every passing breath.

Shyish.

The woman starts walking. But something tells me to hold my place.

Over my left shoulder I spy a statue, with a single stone hand outstretched in cold command. I beetle my brows. Like butter on a pan, the stone of the statue’s head has somehow melted, congealing like tear-tracks along its sculpted breastplate. Of the head itself – sparking and glowing with latent energy – a mere stump remains, from which a bottom jaw hangs low, as if in mute horror at its fate.

I glance to my right, finding an identical statue, and another beyond that. Each part of a perimeter line along the palisade wall. Each equally deformed. But still, I read the sculptor’s silent eloquence – the passions behind these half-wrecked things.

‘You should stay,’ I call out to the woman. ‘Come back.’

Her steps raise subtle ghosts of dust from the lonely road, heedless.

This time, I shout. ‘Come back!’

A shudder runs up my spine. Out there, in the barren dust, I had seen something. It had defied my focus. Like a mote drifting across the eye, or some half-remembered dream. Yet the after-image lingers. Of chains and bones, of fraying cloth and rusting steel – a shimmering, teasing impression, coming and going with the light. But terrible to look upon. That same instinct which named this place Shyish speaks to me again, now offering a name for these spectres.

Nighthaunt. Monsters which once were men and women.

The woman stops cold. She has seen them too. She turns and runs. The dust forms mad eddies and whorls about her feet as she sprints. Her tattered hat goes flying, and behind it I can see more of what follows. Grinning skulls and flourishing swords, half-hidden under aethereal cloaks, bound by lengths of rattling chains. Dead men made real again, dozens of them, shades and spectres together raising a greedy howl across the dust.

She goes down hard. A twisted ankle. Or sheer terror, taking her legs from underneath her. And before the woman can even rise again, the spectres are upon her like jackals on carrion. There is no blood. No struggle, even. Only a scream, snuffed out mid-cry.

Only a glimpse of her, under the phantoms’ touch, shrivelling, decaying. Only dust.

The spectres draw no closer, instead forming ranks, their empty eye sockets held at attention. Finally I hear their whispering chorus, hissing in a single refrain.

‘Let us in. Your bell is silent. Let us in.’

I look at the statues, their liquefied faces and fading energies, like candles burning their last. Glancing down, I find the pistol is out in my hand, held whilst I stood passive witness.

Guilt pangs in my gut. My instinct tells me that perhaps I could have saved the woman, provided I had conviction enough to try.

But then again, bullets have their own destinies. And I only have six of them.

The bell tower.

I came back to it. Was pulled back to it.

At the tower’s stout double door I grasp the iron handle, only to find it refuses to budge. Pressing my eye to the slim gap between the wood, I see only darkness.

‘Hello?’ I call through the gap. ‘Please, let me in!’

Silence. I step back, glance about in hesitation, then thrust my right leg at the doors, only to leave my leg numb and the wood as firm as ever.

‘You lost?’ asks a nearby voice. I pivot, as well as my leg allows, and find three men watching with bleak amusement. They’re as lean as vultures, eyes sharp and darting.

One steps closer, dark-skinned, taller and broader than the rest, with eyes as black and shallow as coal-soot. There’s a stylised knife tattooed along his forearm, and bulges in his waistcoat where an honest man has no cause for them. His speech has the curt, clipped style of someone with little patience and less vocabulary. A crate, I notice, is gripped in one hand; a ceramic bottle is clutched tight in the other.

‘You want something in there?’

‘That’s my business,’ I tell him. The man frowns.

‘That so?’

‘Do I know you?’

‘Name’s Dagger,’ he says, tapping his tattoo, the crate clinking in sympathy to the motion. ‘I bet you forgot yours, huh?’

I look to his fellows for any hint of a trick, searching their blank, guileless faces.

I ask them, ‘Have you all forgotten, too?’

Dagger laughs. ‘No one round here remembers nothing. But us three? Woke up and found each other on the street. Best we stick together.’

The other two raise an affirmative murmur.

‘Got something to drink?’ asks one of them, a man with watery blue eyes. ‘We’re parched.’

‘No. Sorry.’

Dagger shrugs, as if suddenly bored, and draws a long swig from his bottle.

‘Town’s dry as a bone. Except for all this liquor we got.’ He steps closer, dark eyes gleaming. ‘So you find something to drink? You come get me. For protection, see.’

The trio drift on down the street, without even a backward look.

I start to breathe easy again, and look for another entry into the tower, settling on a narrow window over the double door.

The tower’s plaster is cracked in places, revealing exposed brickwork beneath. Just enough such gaps allow me to shimmy upwards, as slow and awkward as a flightless bird. Fingertips and toe-tips buy me precious seconds of relief, buried among crumbling mortar and unsteady bricks. Finally, sweat beading my brow, I reach out and grab the lintel of the window, then swing my body weight across so that my feet are propped on the top of the double door.

There’s one last problem. The window refuses to open when I pull. I hang there a moment, cursing the absurdity of it all.

For want of any better ideas, I fumble for the pistol, take it by the barrel, and smash out the window pane. The shattering glass tinkles away, and despite the protest of my muscles, I take the time to crudely sweep the handle around the pane, knocking out any stubborn, sharp-toothed shards.

Only now do I put my gun away, lever myself up, and squeeze into the awkward opening. With shoulders and hips too wide for the gap, I swivel around, tearing my tunic, until gravity lends a friendly hand and I lurch head-first into the room inside. I hit the floor, glass shards spearing my shoulder blades. My bloody curses fill the space.

Only then do I note there is another man already in the room. But he pays no heed to my chaotic entry.

Not least because he is already dead.

The dead man had been fleshy in life. His hands were soft, his neck thickset with fat. His face – ponderous with jowls – sported too much forehead and too little chin. The former had been exacerbated by a hairline retreating like some vanquished army; the latter was camouflaged by a pointed goatee, but his jawline still looked as firm as fresh dough.

He had worn fine robes of white silk, now marred by burgundy stains from the lifeblood that had spilled from his neck wound. A knife-slash. Too shallow for a quick death. Deep enough for a slow, terminal bleed.

I grimace – not from the sight of the wound, but from that recurring instinct which even now guides my assessment, something as foreign as a stranger yet as familiar as my own voice. But now is no time for any idle curiosities. I have to focus on the body.

The blood itself is congealed. His limbs are at stiff attention, his fingers as rigid as steel rods. Strangest of all, the dead man lies at the centre of some chalk-drawn pattern, a circle of sorts, half-obscured by the pooled blood, and scuffed either by my own clumsy entry or some result of the man’s own death-throes.

Pulling the glass shards from my shoulders, I take a closer look around the room. Its single doorway is flanked by travelling cases, each filled with fine powders, pigments and other oddities. Waxy pools of exhausted candles dot the room, and the air still carries the faint touch of incense, a negligee veil over the growing stink of decay.

In one corner of the room dangles a lone, red-dyed rope. A cursory glance tells me it reaches through a narrow hole in the ceiling. All the way to the bell.

The bell…

I find myself reaching out to touch the well-worn rope. The coarse material has a faint familiarity, and my callused hands form an easy grip on it, almost of their own volition. My aching shoulders tense, ready to heave down with practised habit.

Just then I snap my head around, reverie broken, to the scraping noise at the room’s doorway. The latch jerks, and the door swings out on tired old hinges.

A woman is at the threshold, with a heart-shaped face under a mess of wayward, scarlet curls. Like the gemstone around her neck, her eyes shine green and large and lonely.

‘Who are you?’ she asks, making every effort to sound calm and collected. Perhaps she is.

‘I don’t know. How did you get in here?’

She says nothing, fixing me with those big green eyes. They studiously ignore the dead man.

‘Did you do that?’ I ask, and jerk my thumb at him.

‘No,’ she says, her tone insouciant. ‘Did you?’

‘See that blood?’ I nudge the body with my boot for emphasis. ‘It’s half-dried. I was too late to be the killer.’

‘So, you just happened to fall through a window onto a man who was already dead?’

‘Just as you happened to be in the same building as him, yes.’

‘Why are you here?’ She scowls. ‘Why climb up here and smash your way in?’

‘I don’t even know my own name. But I know this tower. Don’t ask me why, or how, but I knew it called to me more than anything else in this town. So I came hoping for something – anything – that could help me remember who I am. Don’t look so shocked – you don’t know your own name, either. No one in this town does. But we need to remember fast, because death awaits us outside the walls.’

‘Death?’ she asks, frowning.

‘We are surrounded by gheists. Nighthaunt. I watched as they caught a woman outside the walls. And like that’ – I click my fingers – ‘they drank her dry. For now, they’re waiting. What for, I don’t know. But if we can’t even recall our own names? We’ll never know how to survive.’

My eyes drift to the body at the centre of the chalk circle. Compulsion makes me lean over it.

‘Now what are you doing?’ she asks.

‘Making a guess,’ I explain, feeling the dead man’s robes. My fingertips find a pocket among the fabric. Within, I dig out a slim, metal keepsake box and a handkerchief, dirty with phlegm.

I let the handkerchief slip through my fingers.

‘What is it?’ she says, looking at the box in my palm.

A fine, silver thing, bearing a single word across its front.

MARNE.

I hesitate for a moment. But only for a moment. The pistol in my pocket – bearing that same name – remains undisturbed. Instead, I clear my throat.

‘Marne,’ I say at length. ‘His name was Marne. Or I suppose it was. The question here is who killed him?’

There is another, darker question, one I leave unspoken. Why do I have Marne’s gun?

‘Don’t ask me.’

I pivot to her, advancing so that she backs up to the door. ‘What are you keeping from me?’

‘Why should you care?’ Her back meets the door, tensing at its unyielding touch.

‘Can’t you see? He – Marne – is our clue to finding out what happened to us. To our memories. Not just that, he might be our only clue to getting them back.’

‘And how do you reckon that?’ she asks, stony-faced.

‘Because coincidences don’t come in twos. Because Marne was part of some arcane ritual just as someone cut his throat. Because we all lost our memories just around the same time. No, Marne was connected somehow. Playing in here with something we don’t understand.’

With that, I jab a finger into her collarbone.

‘And you? You’re hiding something. Talk.’

‘I don’t know anything.’

Without thought, I hurl the box against the wall, where it bursts into scattering silver shards. She stiffens, eyes locked on my outstretched arm – and the power I put behind the throw.

‘Don’t lie to me,’ I warn her. ‘I want my name back. I need it back.’

She nods. For the first time, I see a scar on her neck: a touch of pink against her pale flesh. Swallowing, she begins to talk.

‘I don’t know who he was. I don’t know what he did, or what happened to him. All I know is I woke up downstairs, and I came up here because I heard you climbing in. But you’re right. None of this was a coincidence. It can’t be. Because when I look at him’ – she jerks her chin towards Marne’s body – ‘I can see it.’

‘See what?’

‘The truth. Like a sort of magic. It hangs around that circle, around him, like some dim haze. He was up to something when he died.’

‘You can see it? Magic?’

She gives me a shrug, the kind that says not to ask how or why. I know the feeling.

‘All right,’ I say. ‘What else do you see in here?’

She glances around me. Through me. Green eyes hunting for clues I could never have seen. She points to the travelling cases by the door, and the candles around the room.

‘He used these to prepare the ceremony – he left imprints on them. But there’s something else. It’s like smoke in the wind, but it’s there. A trail, maybe.’

‘Where to?’

‘Wherever he came from, I think.’ She pauses, as if weighing up her thoughts. ‘Look,’ she says, ‘if this is what you want, I can take us along the trail, as far as it goes.’

Could she be lying? Could this ‘sight’ be some elaborate lie? Perhaps. But, feeling the pistol’s weight in my pocket, I know I can hardly talk.

‘Why help?’ I test her. ‘Just now you didn’t seem too keen.’

She gives me another laconic shrug. ‘You want your name back. And I want to keep away from those gheists you talked about. Either way, we both need our memories. And neither of us will get far if we stay in here.’

She halts, as if mid-thought, and then draws in a sharp breath.

‘You can call me Scarlet,’ she says, chin up.

‘Why Scarlet?’

‘It seemed right,’ she says, nodding to indicate her hair. ‘Besides, we only lost our memories – we can still make choices for ourselves.’

‘Scarlet,’ I say, letting my mouth get used to it, then offer her a hand.

‘Have you thought about giving yourself a name?’ she asks me as we shake. Her palm is warm and soft and small in mine.

‘Like I said, I already have one. We just need to get it back.’

As we go, I spare one last look around the chamber.

At the bell rope, still calling to me. At Marne’s body on the floorboards.

We leave the place unlocked, hoping never to return.

Passing through a courtyard, I stop and stare at a fallen thing. A monument, perhaps, leaning with drunken nonchalance on a base of rough-hewn rock. Its fine, long columns are crowned with stern warriors’ faces – but gouges and cracks cover every surface, as if some vandal had made it the victim of his obsessions.

Stepping closer, I note the earth underfoot is almost damp, as though a rain had fallen here. But now, only dust and dry sand stir across this broken monument.

‘An aqualith,’ I say aloud to no one in particular.

‘What?’ Scarlet asks beside me. ‘What did you say?’

‘Aqualith.’ I point to the wreck. ‘A water source for the settlement.’

‘How do you know that?’

I look her over, faintly surprised that she doesn’t share my hazy recognition. ‘I remember snatches. Fragments. Names. That’s all.’

‘Must be nice,’ she says, and carries on her way.

She has no idea how wrong she is. Standing there, all I can feel is I have lost some infinite thing; as if all I can do is grope for the last vestiges of a treasured dream, buried too deep.

I spare the aqualith one last glance, and then leave it to its final rest.

We stop in a side street, where a rise in the ground affords a view beyond the walls, into the wastes of Shyish.

‘Look,’ I tell her.

She follows my gaze to the barren lands that kiss the violet horizon.

‘So many…’ she says. The gheists’ numbers are growing, as if drawn by rumours of a feast.

I stick by her as we follow cobbled pathways and twisting turns among the dying town, lingering in shadows at the sound of ­another’s footsteps, or the hacking cough of a dry throat. Until we hear something – something with no business in this place – down an alley ahead: a rattling of chains, scraping over cobblestones. And the thick crackling of sudden hoarfrost.

And a voice, whispering a mindless repeat, as if to give itself solace.

‘The bell… The bell.’

I pull Scarlet into a doorway, sparing her a glance to stay silent. Peering around the doorframe, I make out a lambent blue glow, and then a visage of desiccated flesh – a wrinkled lip and sneering frown, half-hidden under a tattered mantle of mottled black.

A Nighthaunt.

I draw back, desperate lest the creature spots me. Without thought, my right hand grips the pistol in my pocket, pulling it out so that its reassuring weight is across my chest. Hoarfrost spreads across the stonework behind me, like a gathering shadow. Realisation dawns on her now – I can feel her pressed tight against me, quivering with stifled fear.

All I can do is extend my left hand, palm out, to beg for silence.

The rasping of chains grows stronger, closer, until the Nighthaunt drifts past our doorway. Rusted axe in hand. Close enough to touch.

Until it halts, as if piqued with curiosity.

In that endless moment, hate and spite thickens in my breast. It draws from my contempt, from my mute fury that I might die here, now, without even knowing my own name, without knowing how, or why, I came to be here. Without knowing who Marne had been.

Then, the Nighthaunt turns to face us.

It screams, its jaw lower than any living thing could mimic, sweeping its axe over its hood. Scarlet reels in physical shock. But the hate brewing in me drives the gun towards the creature.

The recoil deadens my palm, jolts my arm all the way back to the shoulder socket.

Gun-smoke blooms like a cloud. But through the grey-blue veil I can see the hole gaping in the Nighthaunt’s flank, widening and growing, like a tear in taut fabric. Its scream becomes a wail of pain – and the despair of an addict, denied his obsession. The axe falls from its grasp, and in seconds, the Nighthaunt itself collapses into a pile of steaming ectoplasm.

I let the gun rest at my side.

‘I thought you said they were staying beyond the walls,’ gasps Scarlet at last.

‘I did.’

‘Then how did it get here?’

‘Next time I’ll stop to ask.’

Silence, as she catches her breath. Then, she fixes me with a sudden stare. ‘And where the hell did you get that gun?’

‘Never mind,’ I say, stuffing it back into my pocket.

‘I saw the engraving on the barrel.’ She pulls closer, brows knitting with confusion and distrust. ‘Why do you have something with his name on it?’

‘I said never mind.’

She jabs my ribcage with a single pointed finger. ‘That wasn’t on his body, earlier. Where did you get it?’

‘I said, never mind. And if I didn’t have this thing, we’d both be dead right now.’

She pulls back, crosses her arms, her face dark with swirling thoughts.

‘The trail?’ I ask her.

‘Fading,’ Scarlet explains, uneasy. ‘We don’t have long.’

‘That’s the one,’ she declares at last, ‘the house at the end. That is where Marne lived.’

Marne had lived on a street of three-storey merchant’s houses. Better-kept than most, they stand tall and proud. But the town’s doom is apparent even here. Many of the houses are visibly ransacked – glass shattered, doors splintered.

‘Looters,’ I surmise, reaching for the pistol. Scarlet looks at me with wariness.

‘What are you planning?’

‘It’s for show.’

‘What if they’re past listening?’

‘We need to learn what Marne was up to. We need to get in there. Now.’

With that, I move towards the house. Its door leans at a broken angle, revealing a black, vacant expanse inside. The sounds of scavenging reach me from within. Heavy footfalls on creaking floorboards. Objects clattering, cast carelessly aside. But all falls silent when broken glass betrays my approach at the threshold. Backlit by the day outside, my shadow stretches into an exclamation mark along the floor. My eyes are too slow adjusting to the gloom, so I hear him before I see him.

‘You again.’

At last my vision obliges me a view of the man who called himself Dagger, watching me with sullen disdain. His crate of liquor bottles rests by his feet, empty. He holds a pewter mug in one hand, the other resting on a stout wooden barrel with possessive pride.

‘What are you doing here?’ I ask.

‘That’s my business,’ he says, swigging his mug. ‘You find anything in that tower?’

‘A dead man named Marne. A man whose house you’re now standing in.’

‘That so?’ He taps the barrel. ‘We drank all our liquor, but then I found this water. Guess I came off best.’

I let him see the gun, and ask him, ‘How did you know Marne? Did you kill him?’

Dagger tightens his jaw as he regards the weapon. ‘I never even went inside that tower.’

‘So you came here by fluke? You expect me to believe that?’

‘Gotta find private stashes somewhere.’

‘If that’s true, then get out. We need what’s in here.’

‘I took this.’ Dagger grips the barrel beside him. ‘It’s mine.’

I notice motion at the doorway behind me, Scarlet’s silhouette. Dagger looks her over.

‘Big man, now you’ve got a friend to impress.’

‘Last warning,’ I say, tightening my grip. ‘Get out.’

Dagger nods – the barest tip of the head, nearly lost in the shadows.

On my left. A fist, flashing in.

My jaw takes the impact, hard enough to loosen teeth. Only a fierce grip on my shoulder keeps me from reeling, pinning me for a second strike.

‘Teach him respect!’ Dagger laughs, a mere blur in my swimming vision. But I can see my attacker well enough. A big man with busy fists, readying his arm again.

Suddenly, he howls.

Over his shoulder I see Scarlet, sinking a knife into his back. Snarling, he turns and swings a clumsy backhand at her face, connecting with an ugly crunch. She hits the floorboards, hard.

The man faces me again – just as I swing the pistol into his jaw, metal striking bone. Without thought, my fingers clench the trigger.

As if by some sudden thunder-strike, his skull explodes. Blood and bone-shards fly free. The headless body slumps away.

That instant, Dagger slams into me. His body-blow crushes the air from my chest. Rams us into the wall. Shelves tumble free around us, a domestic avalanche. I blink – and see a wicked blade, hungry and lancing towards my chest. Desperate, I grab his plunging wrist. It holds, unsteady.

The glinting knife-tip hungers. His breath – thick with the stink of liquor – washes over me.

‘Bastard,’ he grunts, leaning in with his shoulders for one, final push. My grip wavers, and his blade bites into my shoulder. I scream from the lancing pain, robbing my strength. It’s all I can do to keep a grip about the gun’s handle.

Groaning, Scarlet stirs on the floor nearby, helpless. Triumph in his eyes, Dagger flashes his smile at me, with teeth as big as old tombstones.

Teeth…

I lean into the blade, its edge burning like fire. Enough to get my teeth on Dagger’s cheek.

And then I bite. Hard.

The copper tang of blood fills my mouth. The plaintive wail of his scream fills my ears. Dagger tries to break off. But my free hand grasps his waistcoat. Pulls him to me like a lover.

‘I’ll kill you!’ he howls, yanking at the blade in my shoulder. I scream from the pain through my teeth. Into his cheek. My grip on him falters.

But not before my finger clenches on the trigger.

Again the gun thunders. Dagger flies back, landing with a dead man’s carelessness, taking the barrel down with him. The water sloshes away in happy, carefree arcs, soaking his corpse.

At last I spit out warm flesh, and take in a lungful of shuddering breath.

I look around. Scarlet is on her feet, unsteady, eyes half-glazed as she stares at me with mute incomprehension, as if at someone transformed.

Maybe taking two lives in thirty seconds can do that to you.

Her gaze flickers past me. I follow it, finding the third member of Dagger’s crew. His watery blue eyes are quivering, taking in Dagger’s blood, blooming in the spilt water. He runs, sprinting deeper into the house until I hear the sound of a back door flying out on its hinges.

In the pregnant silence that follows, Scarlet asks, ‘Did you really have to kill them?’

‘Yes.’

Distrust is written across her face, all too easy to read.

‘Yes,’ she says, nursing her bruise with tender fingertips, ‘so long as you get what you want.’

By the light of a lone candle, Scarlet tears strips of linen from old sheets, and fills Dagger’s pewter mug with precious water from the last of the spilt barrel.

I watch her as she works – how a dimple forms in her chin, born of her concentration, how her eyes flicker in the poor light, one of them framed by her bruise.

As if reaching a cathartic conclusion, she exhales one long breath. She grips the handle of Dagger’s knife, still wedged firm in my shoulder. Though the blade missed anything more vital than my dignity, the pain of it is a pulsing, living intensity.

‘I’ll take it out now.’

‘Fine.’

‘It’ll hurt.’

‘Fine.’

Her first pull is searing, yet the blade refuses her.

She stops, breathes, and then strains again, bracing by planting a hand on my chest.

Now a third heave, each moment a private agony, until I scream and twist myself away from her – breaking the suction of the wound, tearing the knife from me with ecstatic relief.

Fresh blood stains my torn tunic a deeper shade of crimson, but she pulls the fabric aside. With careful measures of water – a thimble here, a thimble there – she cleans the deep cut, binding my shoulder with lengths of torn linen.

‘Where did you learn to do all this?’ I ask her, dizzy from the pain. She locks my gaze.

‘Where did you learn to use that?’ She points to the pistol, resting on a table beside us.

I wince at her tone – one of fear, of doubt.

At length, she refills the pewter mug from Dagger’s stash and we share our first drink together. The brackish, stale water is sweeter than wine, richer than perfume. We sit back, life coursing in our veins again.

‘In here,’ I explain, eager to change the topic, ‘we can finally get some answers, maybe. Figure out what Marne was doing in this town. Figure out who killed him. Even how we get our memory back.’

‘Maybe.’ She nods, finishing the last of the mug.

‘Anyway, thank you for your help in getting me here.’

‘Nothing to it.’

‘Thanks all the same. For knifing Dagger’s friend. I didn’t realise you were armed.’

She refuses to meet my gaze. ‘I could have said the same about you.’

I sigh inwardly at the strained silence that follows. Yet sitting there, all I can think of is Marne’s neck wound. A knife wound. Common enough, certainly. I caught one myself. Still, how many other knives could have been hidden away in that tower?

More than that, who else could have been there to use them? Other than her?

I put the thought aside.

‘Come on. Let’s see what we can find in this place.’

Marne’s home is a mausoleum to a doomed ambition, the round decay of a forgotten calling. The rooms are too wide, the ceilings too tall. From the shadows loom ready-made gibbets of dry-rotted beams, bound by rusted ironwork. Each step is a groan of despairing floorboards in the close, cloying air.

Whoever Marne had been, his wealth remains in evidence: big, fine furniture taken from a grander home, set down like a glimcrow’s haphazard hoard; gilded fineries; outsized paintings of vistas unlike the grey waste beyond the walls. Reminders of better places, better times.

We scour the place, going among the detritus of Dagger’s gang. Golden ornaments and crystal devices were all tossed aside in their hunt for a greater treasure – food and drink.

‘Seems they found his pantry.’ Scarlet hefts a hemp sack, half-full with black bread.

I look at her, expectant that her aetheric gift might still aid us. She shakes her head.

‘We keep looking, then,’ I say with a sigh.

At great length, on the uppermost floor, I come across a humble desk.

Hiding under a windowsill, with a view over the dying town, its varnish is worn, its wood sun-bleached, sharply contrasting the affected grandeur downstairs. The contrast arrests me in my hunt.

But soon I understand. This is Marne’s work-desk. Retained as a keepsake of an earlier time, before his rise to wealth, and, later, whatever had brought him here.

I heave its drawer with my good hand. Locked.

The butt of Marne’s gun fixes that. The soft wood warps by the locks as I strike them off.

‘What’s going on in here?’ Scarlet calls, emerging behind me.

‘Making entry,’ I explain, setting the gun on the desk.

Cradling my wounded arm, I open the drawer. Inside lies a leather-bound notebook. Matt-black, with gold lettering that matches the engraving on the gun before me.

MARNE.

‘Not one for subtlety,’ Scarlet muses, as I pick up the book and thumb its pages. ‘What is it?’

I stay silent, feeling my heart begin to race. She sidles closer, to see for herself.

‘A diary,’ I reply at last, hardly believing my eyes.

‘How can you tell?’

‘Take a look.’

So, this is Shyish, the most miserable realm of all. Sigmar’s teeth, it’s grim here – even the colours are paler.

I have a flyblown house in a one-horse town, only they killed the horse ages ago. Even the paltry amount I managed to bring from Hammerhal Aqsha is a fortune to the locals. How they gawp and stare.

Typical. The grift was just getting good. One day I’ll get a grift that’s good all the way up. For now, I’ll bide my time and suffer it. Better than some guild cellar in Cinderfall, coughing up teeth and losing kneecaps. The bastards can spit. They’ll never get me out here.

Meantime I fashioned a protection from the Nighthaunt outside. The guardian idols here were so few, and I didn’t get this far trusting such slim odds. One of my servants will keep it.

The servants themselves remain pliable, if lazy. But I must work. Continue my progress.

When I perfect my art, when I’m the one that chooses who forgets, I’ll roll the guilds up, easy. Because there are a million memories to steal, and a killing to be made.

It just has to be perfect, first.

Hours pass, leaning against Marne’s desk, until I look up and note the gathering dusk.

My stomach adds its complaint, the growling hunger pang filling the room. Scarlet hears it.

‘Still got that bread?’ I ask her. She raises the hemp sack by way of answer.

Together we share hunks of Marne’s black bread. My stomach fights at first, knotted tight as it is. But even that meagre food brings warmth back to my core, and energy to clear my mind.

‘How long he must have spent writing that thing,’ I muse, shoving away the book, ‘just to say nothing. Whatever he did, back in his “Hammerhal”, he made enemies there he wouldn’t dare face again. Not until he perfected his ceremony for stealing memories. But not a word on how he actually did it – and not a single clue of how to undo it.’

We sit in silence as the day’s last light dies a lingering death and a high, hazy moon emerges. Its violet glow is half-lost through the thick dust in the wind, but I shudder in the moment that the wind stills, the dust clears, revealing the moon as a skull-faced thing, leering and hungry.

I avert my gaze from the dread moon.

That instant, a cry of alarm echoes in the night, setting our nerves on edge. The cry echoes, repeats. Goes unanswered.

‘Another Nighthaunt?’ asks Scarlet, her voice low.

Soon enough we spy a gathering glow. Russet, orange, auburn tones, together fanning themselves into a single, towering flame, licking at the black of night. It stands brighter than a bonfire celebration, bleaker than a funeral pyre.

Though only a short distance away, we might as well have been watching from another world. The building burns quicker than lust, fiercer than scorned love, sending blossom-blooms of sparks and cinders to dance on the heat, revealing more and more of the town from the cover of the jealous night – including Marne’s tower.

‘Doesn’t it trouble you?’ she asks me abruptly. ‘What you did to those men?’

‘What? Why would that trouble me?’

‘You almost sound proud of what you did.’

‘Dagger stood between us and what we needed,’ I say. ‘It had to be done.’

‘And you’d do the same again? To anyone who gets in the way of what you want?’

‘I told you already that I want my name back. That I need it back. Can’t you see? Like this, I’m just dust out on the street, drifting nowhere. I’m no one. Just a shell.’

The atmosphere grows charged, like before a kiss or a killing. It makes everything stand out in hypersensitive detail, as if seeing with fresh eyes. How the shadows dance and fade behind the delicate lines of her chin and bruised cheek. How her deep green eyes shine too bright to say merely nothing – yet speak in a tongue I could never hope to learn. How her long white fingers curl and twist, as if around a lover’s palm. Or the handle of a blade.

‘It doesn’t have to be like that,’ she implores me. ‘Why should you want to be your old self? Why recall whatever mistakes landed us here, for who knows how long? Why relive all the pain and loss and humiliation that we’ve ever felt?’

‘Because that means betraying who we are. It means living a lie and calling it wisdom.’

‘We’re new people!’ She throws her arms wide. ‘New souls! Released from whoever we used to be. Whatever used to shackle us! Maybe for the first times in our lives, we’re free. Think about it. We need to kill who we were. Forget them, and accept who we’ve become. You’re a new person! You’re free to be whoever you want!’

I scowl, despite myself, despite the pull I find myself feeling towards her. ‘Free? Free, with all this?’ I sweep a hand over the town, with its blazing pyre and shabby, desolate buildings, all awaiting either sad, slow decay or a merciful death by fire. ‘Whatever it was before – whoever we were before – to just abandon it all?’ I shake my head again. ‘The only kind of future down that path is the kind that Dagger got.’

She pulls back, like I just slapped her.

‘Is that a threat?’ she asks, a hard edge in her voice, narrowing her eyes, tightening her jaw.

The sudden shattering of weakened crossbeams punctuates the heat of the moment, and the doomed building across the settlement shudders like a man breathing his last before folding upon itself in a geyser of shimmering gold sparks.

‘Why would you think that?’ I ask her. ‘Why would you ask such a thing?’

‘Because I trust one thing right now – my instinct,’ she says, voice husky. ‘And it tells me you aren’t honest. It tells me I can’t trust you. It tells me you’ll do whatever you have to. That anything that happens along the way is a fair price to pay.’

‘Maybe so,’ I growl, her words needling me. ‘But then ask yourself, what are you in all this? A coward, too afraid to face your own past?’

She makes no sign of hearing me. Just a frown that gathers like scar tissue.

‘Yeah,’ I say, nodding at her unspoken admission, ‘I thought so. For all that big talk about being a new person, you’re just a frightened child in the dark.’

Without a word, she stands and leaves the room, not even sparing a backward glance.

An idle, callous thought crosses my mind – she’d never dare run into the unfriendly night.

With that, sleep comes for me, suddenly impatient to stake its claim. It’s all I can do to prop myself in a corner of the room and wedge Marne’s pistol into the palm of my good hand. Oblivion never felt so good.

Sleep sweeps me up and holds me tight. And in that deep embrace, some fragment of my mind finds a release, like water forcing itself through a cranny of unforgiving rock; a hydraulic action through which memories reach me, drip-fed.

I recall the bell – tolling long, slow, sonorous – washing over me, like dust on the town wall. The reverberation filled me, made my marrow quake in sympathy, as my hands gripped the red-dyed rope for another heave. Thick sweat beaded my brow, soaked the small of my back. Driven by my shoulders, the world pealed again with the deep, coursing tenor of the bell. And again. And again. And again.

I recall her kiss was hungry, warm and wet. Her hips were flush against mine, hands frantic at my tunic. There wasn’t long. We knew it. We stifled laughter at our carnal clumsiness. Items tumbled off shelves in our eager rush to couple. Desperate, I tore her dress aside, all the while listening for any noise that wasn’t hers.

Later we lingered together. Flushed with sweat, our buzz fading and breath slowing, we traded gentle, wordless touches.

There wasn’t long. Because with him, it never was.

The sound of bottles, clinking. A door, slammed. There he was.

We sighed, and returned to our duties.

Sleep ends all too soon. And once again that miser, wakefulness, stifles my memories.

All it leaves me with is a stiff neck and a pit for a stomach. But the gun’s still in my hand and there’s still breath in my lungs. That has to count for something.

Even better, the bandages that Scarlet applied last night have held up well around my wound.

‘Biting the hand that heals,’ I mutter. ‘You idiot.’

Getting to my feet, I glance around for the matt-black diary with the narcissist engraving. Before sleep pulled me under, it had been down by the desk at the window. Except…

It’s gone. I pivot, crouch and scour from new angles, lest the diary is teasing me from elsewhere, or sleep has made me blind to the obvious. At last I give up.

‘Scarlet!’ I call out, taking the stairs down three at a time. ‘Where are you?’

Nothing. I race down to the ground floor, stumbling on the last step. The place is as I left it. Other than the furniture, piled by the front door, now pulled aside. Just enough to squeeze by.

She had dared to run into the unfriendly night, leaving the house empty – but for the prize fool with a hole in his shoulder and not a friend in the world. Worse, she took Marne’s diary. Even if it had yielded nothing on my first reading, I know I am surely doomed without it.

Using my good hand I claw the furniture aside in a cacophony of crashing wood, and dash out into the street. My heart is sinking like a stone. Unlike Scarlet, with her gift of seeing magic, an ordinary man – however desperate – still needs some clue, some lead to follow.

Yet all I have is the sound of my racing heart and a deserted street, thick with dust.

Dust.

I look down. Crouch to the earth, and laugh aloud. The dust is my ally, preserving as it does a set of fine, small footprints – all blessedly undisturbed. I hit the trail, winding and coursing through streets and alleys, past crooked, sagging homes and leaning walls, always glancing up to check my way, and glancing down to find the dust guiding me ever onwards.

It comes as no surprise to me when, sure enough, I find myself not far from Marne’s tower – looking down the gentle slope ending with the town’s palisade walls.

And there! A flash of deep red hair, disappearing through the gap in the wall I used before.

I run down that hill as fast as my legs can carry me, sprinting with the abandon of a man to whom nothing is left but the chase. The world blurs. Only the gap in the wall remains.

I reach it with burning legs and ragged lungs. She’s standing on the far side, turning to me, shock written across her face – and Marne’s matt-black diary snug in the crook of her arm.

‘The diary,’ I gasp at her, hand extended. ‘Give it to me.’

She takes a hesitant step away from me.

‘Take a look,’ I tell her, and jerk my chin to what awaits in the vast grey waste – our audience of unblinking Nighthaunt, countless thousands strong. All have turned to us in silent unison, voyeurs witness to our private confrontation.

‘Go on,’ I hiss. ‘Look at them and tell me your plan! You and your knife, against them all? You saw what Marne wrote – that he made some protection against these things.’ I wave to a nearby statue. ‘Because these idols? He said they were too weak to keep the Nighthaunt away. And if you take that diary we may never find what he created, let alone how to use it!’

She takes another step back.

‘And if you go, and take that diary? You’ll kill me. Just as sure as you’ll kill yourself out there. Only you don’t get to set my terms. You don’t get to make that choice for me!’

‘I won’t let you take it.’

‘If you destroy it,’ I growl, with a savage curtness in my voice that shocks even me, ‘then sure enough I’ll never get my memory back. Never get my name back. You can’t do that to me, Scarlet. I won’t let you do it.’

At this, she raises her knife, its tip glinting at me.

‘Don’t try anything,’ she warns me. ‘I meant what I said. I know I’m right to not trust you. Tell me,’ she barks, knife quivering in her grip, ‘why did you have his gun? Why did you try to keep it a secret from me? And why were you so eager to kill for his diary?’ She pauses, collecting herself, and gives an uneasy laugh.

‘Whatever you’re saying, Scarlet, just spit it out.’

‘I’m saying that you are Marne! That whoever we found back in that tower was someone else! That ever since you’ve just manipulated me to help you recover everything you needed so you can control me again!’

‘You’re wrong,’ I scoff, my heart hammering against my chest. ‘How can you think that?’

‘Because why else would you seek out his tower, his home, his possessions – or at least, those you didn’t already have on you? I’m amazed I didn’t see it sooner.’

‘That’s because there’s nothing to see!’ I snap, even as part of me asks if she could be right. ‘You might as well be looking at the stars and calling them diamonds!’

She shakes her head. ‘As I slept, a memory came back to me. Do you know what I saw last night? I saw the start of the ceremony you’re so desperate to learn about. And I saw myself in it – a woman controlled by the man who took and abused and destroyed all the pure things I had. And I heard a voice. Distant, like it was from another room. And it said that I would be the anchor of the spell. That only my death could undo its power.

‘So maybe that’s what you’ll do. Just kill me. Like you did those thugs. Maybe after you read some secret from this thing’ – she hefts the diary – ‘and find whatever you’ve been looking for.’

I glance to the Nighthaunt. Are they drawing closer, or simply looming larger in my mind? Either way, I know time is short.

‘You’re just scared. And I reckon it’s because of something else – something you’re still keeping secret. But I can guess what it is – that the man in the tower really was Marne, and that you killed him – and you saw it in your memories last night! And now you’re scared of what you did. Scared of who you really are, and what you’re capable of.’

What might have been a tear flashes on her cheek. There and gone again.

‘I’m not giving you this diary,’ she cries.

I draw the gun, desperate to be back inside the safety of the walls, however imaginary.

‘Give it to me,’ I tell her. ‘Before the Nighthaunt come for us. Now!’

I storm up to take it.

Her knife slashes my chest. And my bullet pierces hers.

The book tumbles into the dirt, just beyond her reach. She coughs crimson, clutching those long pale fingers to the neat red hole in her ribcage. I fall to my knees, gathering her up to cradle her in my lap. Blood – hers, mine – paints her face.

‘I’m sorry,’ I gasp, with idiot sincerity. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to.’

She fixes me with an unsteady gaze, as if even focusing is beyond her strength now. She snatches at the front of my tunic, pulls herself closer to me in some frantic push to speak.

‘You were right,’ she splutters, staining her teeth burgundy. She speaks in staccato stutters. ‘About one thing. I woke up beside him. In the tower. Knew I did it.’

Those green eyes shine one last message, still beyond my ken.

She shudders in my arms for the final time.

She was right about one thing at least.

The aetheric breaking of the spell that bound us returns my every memory; every fear and hope I had felt – all of it – rushing to me at once in a raging torrent, dragging me back to a life more colourful, louder, harsher, than I could have ever dreamed ­possible. And what a fearsome, dreadful thing it is, to relive a whole life in seconds.

Still, two things stand foremost in my inundated mind, like a river’s shores at flood tide.

I recall first how I gasped on my knees, nursing my gut after his knee stole my breath.

‘You imbecile!’ he bellowed, slurring. Another kick, hard stone rushing up to meet my face, and a red-dyed rope hanging in my peripheral vision. ‘I should have just pinned a note to you, and let the guilds have you! And to think, fool that I was, I made the effort to save you. I brought you through a realmgate, even! You can’t imagine what it cost me – to leave behind everything, to go into hiding, and with only you halfwits for company!’

He leaned down at me, with the sunken kind of eyes you find at the bottom of the third bottle. Close-up, his flaring nose was a spider web of veins, his breath acrid.

Marne, the fleshy man.

‘Once I perfect it,’ he said, with a gambler’s cold certainty, ‘perfect my art – my ceremony – I’ll take us back home. To the Twin-Tailed City. I just need you to join the ceremony again. To help iron it out. We’re almost there, now.’

He stumbled closer still, as if pulled by a red-dyed rope.

‘You do want to go home, don’t you?’ he asked.

I recall another time, when she leaned across and said to me, ‘Ask yourself, when did we get here?’

I frowned, and searched my mind, and drew a blank. ‘I don’t know.’

‘How did we get here?’

This one I knew. A bright, clear answer was easily to hand. ‘A realmgate. That’s what he said.’

She leaned in, her teeth gritted in quiet fury. ‘Not what he said. What do you remember?’

‘I… can’t.’

She dropped her voice an octave, as if the walls had ears. ‘Do you even know what this place is called?’

Another blank. Another slow, sickening realisation. Like a gift, slipping through your fingers. Like you couldn’t lay your fingers on something precious you had to hand only moments ago.

‘I can’t.’

‘Neither can I. Do you know why?’

‘Him,’ I growled. ‘He must have used us in his ceremony. Refined it. Perfected it. On us.’

She nodded. ‘We have to kill him,’ she said, low and conspirator­ial. ‘Tonight.’

I looked at her with pursed lips, furrowed brow. ‘Why tonight?’ I asked. There was no other question on my mind. No other doubt.

‘Tonight’s ceremony – he told me it would be his most ambitious yet. If we wait, we might never even remember talking about this. It’s now or never.’

I nodded, quite calm. I was with her. To the end.

‘I’ll get the pistol from the house,’ I said. ‘I’ll find where he stashed it. I just need time.’

‘Don’t be late,’ she said, and threw herself into my arms. She smelt of smoke and perfume, sweat and fear. I buried myself in her scarlet hair. I fumbled for the right words. Found none.

Instead, we parted like soldiers. A curt nod, then onwards to our mission.

Tears run down my face, unbidden, shameless and free. I hold her to me, shaking, sobbing. But slowly I look up in growing alarm. To the statues nearby, posted along the palisade. Each shudders in their place, as if crumbling from within. And, as one, they collapse.

I know all too well why they have fallen. The same aetheric waves that returned my memories have overwhelmed the already-weakened idols – they could no more withstand them than you could hold an ocean with a broom.

That instant, the Nighthaunt raise a single, shrilling cry. It’s the call of an army already certain of victory. They advance with a thousand rusted swords and axes held high.

Their interruption is obscene. Rage courses in my veins, thicker than blood, hotter than fire.

‘Leave us!’ I scream at the heedless dead. My tears spilling into the dust, I level the gun and fire twice into the Nighthaunt. Each shot finds lodging among undying men, evaporating them like steam in the sun, shrieking with despairing pain.

The gun clicks dry. I toss it at the dead, spinning end over end, and look down at her.

She is beyond loss, beyond fear.

I have to let her go.

I turn and run from the gheists. They cry out anew behind me, as if in twisted mirth at a coward’s retreat. Legs pumping, I spare a single glance behind me – they surge through and over the pali­sade wall, as reckless as half-starved hounds. Townsfolk begin to emerge into view around me, fleeing the onrush of the loathsome dead. Too slow. The gheists fall upon them with the glee of trueborn killers.

Muscles burning, tendons straining, I sprint onwards. My eyes are locked on Marne’s tower. Sweat and tears cloud my vision, but there is no mistaking it. I hit the doors, still unlocked from my last visit. They fly back on their hinges as I collide with them.

I ricochet off a wall. Get back on my feet. Hit the stairs.

Thighs screaming, I launch off every step, taking two or three or four at a leap. Hoarfrost is gathering about me on the staircase. Drawing in like a closing noose.

I dare not look back. A gheist is surely on my heels.

I barrel through the final door, into Marne’s resting place. I cross the chamber in three bounds. Clasp my hands about the red-dyed rope in the corner. And heave.

The tolling of the bell, long, slow, sonorous, washes over me.

As it does the gheist that has chased me into the chamber. A skeleton wraith, bound in chains, garbed in moth-bitten black cloth, it grasps a mottled farmer’s scythe in its hands, ready for one final swing.

Yet, it stops cold at the pealing of the bell. Drops its scythe. Drifts away from me.

And begins to howl, thrashing and jerking, as if to escape some unspeakable torment.

‘Sigmar damn you, gheist!’ I shout, and heave again. Another peal.

Marne’s diary had all but spelled it out for me. But only now, only armed with my memories, am I finally able to grasp the truth.

My task had been to ring the bell that Marne had crafted – and thereby ward off the dead.

The wraith begins to tear at itself in gibbering insanity, as if desperate to relieve itself of the pain caused by the bell, grasping at its jaw and eye sockets until it tears away bone in ugly chunks. At the third peal, whatever magic Marne had worked into the bell dissolves the gheist, thrashing and wailing as it goes, until all that remains is a hissing pool of ectoplasm.

I continue to ring. Again.

And again.

And again.

In time, I stagger back down the hill, through the ruins of the town.

Buildings are burning like tinderboxes after the chaos of the attack. Sad bundles of clothing dot the streets – the only remains of the living. Such gheists who did not escape are scattered about, too, reduced to congealed ectoplasm.

In the distance, the fleeing Nighthaunt screech their helpless rage.

And yet, all I taste is the charcoal of a bitter, hollow triumph. Of a void, yawning within me.

She is waiting for me where I left her. Quite still, as if sleeping. I set myself beside her and cradle her limp form. Tender enough to not wake her.

‘I remember now,’ I whisper, knowing full well she is beyond hearing. ‘I remember. Everything we set out to do. Every hope that drove us along the way when things grew hard. And I remember you. How you made me a better man. How little I deserved of you.’

There had been another life before this, when all before me was young and rich and ready. But that time will never bloom back to life. The loss cannot be redeemed into another try.

All that remains is the ochre road, stretching ahead from the nameless town.