Surviving the poisoning wasn’t the hard part. Tesseract had survived poisonings before. The fluids that his mask injected into his skin were designed to bolster his immunity and his natural, and unnatural, defences -mainly against the rotting disease that cursed him, but also, as a happy side effect, any other diseases, afflictions and poisons he happened to encounter on his travels. So the poisoning hadn’t really troubled him for more than a few minutes.

The being buried alive part, however, was more of a reason to worry.

He had made a small air pocket for himself, giving him a little more time to shake off the poison’s effects. When the feeling returned to his limbs, he tried to heave himself up, but the weight of the earth was just too much. The hole was, at the most, one and a half metres deep. That meant that all he had to do was stand up and he’d be out.

Standing up, however, was not as easy as it had once been.

His fingers scrabbled at the dirt, digging upwards slowly. He managed to get them reasonably far up, before realising that all he had achieved was to put himself in an even more uncomfortable position.

He lifted his body, straining against the weight, and kicked his legs. Loose earth shifted beneath him as he moved his right knee slowly. Moving the second one was more difficult, but he managed it. Now both knees were beneath him, his face was still pressed to the bottom of the grave, and his arms were somewhere above. If he died down here and was dug up in hundreds of years’ time, he had a feeling the archaeologists would be puzzling over what exactly he had been doing upon his ridiculous death.

Tesseract took a deep breath, the last of the oxygen, and raised his head. His legs were burning, his back muscles screaming at him, and he felt like every tendon in his neck was about to snap. He pushed upwards, forcing his body straighter, his hands clawing at the freezing dirt. The fingers of his left hand suddenly felt no resistance. He pulled himself up, his right hand breaking through now, and then he felt air on his scalp, and all at once his head was free.

He gasped, sucking in air through his mask and blinking the dirt away from his eyes. His vision was blurry, but he was relatively sure he was alone. The way his luck had been going lately, he wouldn’t have been at all surprised to find Ceryen and Graft standing here, still arguing.

A little more effort was required to climb out of the grave, and then Tesseract sprawled on the sodden grass, his vision clearing as he looked up at a sky so grey it could have been made from slate. He was just thankful to be looking up at any kind of sky at all. Slate grey, he decided, was a particularly beautiful shade of grey.

He got to his feet. There was cold clay in his clothes, down his back, down his trousers, in his mask. He brushed off what he could, shook out what he was able, but there was no denying the fact that it still felt like he had just crawled out of his own grave.

He looked down the hill, at the town and the lake and the Sanctuary. He didn’t take it personally. He was a hired killer, after all. It would be pretty hypocritical to take a murder attempt personally, after everything he’d done. But that was no reason to let them live.

Graft, from what he could remember from his files, lived just off Roarhaven’s main street. Tesseract found him in a small house, freshly emerged from the shower, and killed him while he begged for his life.

Ceryen worked directly for the Torment, though, so she would have returned to the Sanctuary. Tesseract entered without being seen. Everyone was too busy setting it up for business to bother guarding the entrance. After fifteen minutes of sneaking around, he heard the Torment’s voice, and followed it through the long corridors.

He peered round a corner, saw the Torment and three other Children of the Spider – Madam Mist, a young woman called Portia and a young man called Syc. Ceryen trailed behind at a respectful distance. The Spider people were talking among themselves.

Tesseract had encountered Portia before, but had only heard stories about Mist, and had only ever seen a blurred photograph of Syc. He didn’t know much about them though, and that made him uneasy.

The Torment led his brethren through a heavy set of double doors, and gestured at Ceryen, dismissing her. She bowed, waited until the doors were shut, and walked towards Tesseract. He stepped back into the shadows to watch her pass, then followed. When they were far enough out of earshot, he made himself known by reaching down and tapping her leg. She screeched as it bent back on itself and she crumpled to the ground.

“Hello, Ceryen,” Tesseract said, walking around so she could see him.

“My leg!” she cried. He had never worked out why some people liked to name the parts of them that had broken. “Please don’t kill me!” He knew what was coming next. Tales of woe and then begging, interspersed with logic and reason. “The Torment ordered it! I was following orders! Please don’t kill me! I have a family!”

“And yet I’m going to kill you anyway.”

She lunged at him, but he reached down, and caved in her head with a touch.

“You are not an easy man to kill.”

Slowly, Tesseract turned to face the Torment, who stood with Madam Mist at his side. He heard movement behind him, and didn’t have to glance back to know that Portia and Syc were closing in to trap him.

“You shouldn’t have tried to cheat me,” Tesseract said. “I would have returned home and we would never have crossed paths again. Instead, we are where we are. You understand, I cannot let you live.”

“You speak as though you hold the upper hand. There are four of us.”

“Being outnumbered means very little to me. You will still die one by one.”

The Torment vomited blackness that splashed to the ground and became spiders, as big as rats. Tesseract kicked one away from him, stomped on another, and backed away as thousands of smaller spiders, tiny spiders, spilled towards him like water. They flowed from the folds of Madam Mist’s long dress, scrambling over her body, in and out of her clothes, crawling up her neck and disappearing behind her veil.

He heard blades being unsheathed, and spun to dodge the first swipe of Syc’s twin daggers. He tried to grab him, but Syc was fast, faster than anyone Tesseract had ever seen. The blades flashed again and Tesseract stumbled. He stepped on a mass of spiders and they crunched beneath him.

One of the big spiders scuttled up his leg, digging its talons in as it came. Tesseract snarled and looked down. Syc was young and inexperienced and unimaginative, and he took the bait. When he sprang, Tesseract caught him and hurled him into the wall. Syc kept him at bay by vomiting, like the Torment had. The inky blackness coalesced, formed spiders, not as big as the Torment’s, but definitely getting there. Tesseract backed away again. Too many damn spiders.

Portia came for him. Like Syc, she had a way to go in her studies, but the fact that she wasn’t able to complete the full transformation to spider made her look even more fearsome. She had grown to twice her size, with black armour covering her chest and back. Four extra arms sprouted from her elongated torso, each tipped with claws, but it was Portia’s face that was the most terrifying. Her fine-boned features had disappeared, replaced by a mouth that was a gaping hole, filled with fangs that dripped venom. Eight black eyes were grouped around her head.

Tesseract dodged as she attacked. Spiders were crawling all over him. Their poison was in his system and making him clumsy. He should have run when he’d had the chance. He looked up to see Syc plunging a dagger at his chest.

He blocked, fingers closing around Syc’s wrist. The bones there broke and Tesseract took the dagger and slammed an elbow into Syc’s face. He kicked him and the younger man went down, falling on thousands of spiders. Tesseract used him as a springboard to leap on to Portia. He held on as she tried to dislodge him, then slipped the dagger between her armour plates. He dropped to the ground as she reared back, shrieking.

Something flitted to her face, and clung there. Something black. Tesseract turned, saw Anton Shudder striding through the corridor, Remnants swirling around him.

One of those foul black things crawled into Syc’s mouth, and the young man gagged and choked. Barely aware of the Torment and Mist already fleeing, Tesseract knew it was too late for him to make his escape. So he leaped forward, to Shudder, kicking him to drive him back. Shudder smiled, and reached for him, and Tesseract seized his arm and broke the bones.

Shudder hissed in pain and stepped back. “You’ve damaged me,” he said.

Then the Remnant darted out of his mouth, to Tesseract’s mask, and for a moment Tesseract couldn’t see anything. It squirmed in through the eyeholes and he felt it cold on his face, sliding down. He glimpsed another Remnant attaching itself to Shudder’s unconscious form – waste not, want not – and then he fell to his knees. The Remnant found his mouth, and Tesseract gagged as it forced its way in.