The drovers were oblivious to the creatures. They were running for Hesiod’s walls but Vulkan realised grimly that they’d never make it.

Behind them the dusk-wraiths taunted and shrieked. Their bladed skiffs hovered above the plain, jagged silhouettes against the red of Hell-dawn. Though he was too far away to hear it, Vulkan saw one of the drovers cry out as he was pinioned by barbed nets before a half-naked warrior-witch impaled him on her spear. Others, tall, lithe creatures wearing segmented armour the colour of night, cast javelins from the backs of their machines as they revelled in the hunt.

When they were finished with the nomads and the villages, they would come to Hesiod.

Vulkan clenched his fists. Every Hell-dawn was the same. When the sky was shot red with blood, the shrieking would begin and the dusk-wraiths would come. No man should be hunted, not like that. No son or daughter of Nocturne should be made to suffer as the drovers would. Life was hard enough. Survival was hard enough.

“No more.”

Vulkan had seen what he needed to.

He leapt off the rock, landing in a crouch. N’bel ran to him, breathless with his efforts of rushing the weak and the vulnerable to safety.

“Come on. We must hide too.”

Vulkan’s face was stern as he rose to his feet and looked down on his father. “While we hide, others suffer.”

N’bel gasped a reply. “What choice do we have? We stay and we all die.”

“We can always fight.”

“What?” N’bel was nonplussed. “Against the dusk-wraiths?” He shook his head. “No, son, we would be butchered like those herds out on the plain. Come!” He seized Vulkan’s arm but was shrugged off.

“I will fight.”

All around them, the people of Hesiod were disappearing into secret alcoves and subterranean caves below the town. It would be the same across all of Nocturne. At Themis, Heliosa, Aethonian and the rest—the seven chief settlements of the planet would flee to their hollows in the earth and close their eyes to the nightmare. There they would stay while the dusk-wraiths ransacked and slaughtered, destroying everything they had fought and died to create.

“No. I’m pleading with you now. Hide like the rest of us.”

Vulkan walked away, headed for the forge.

N’bel called after him, “Where are you going? Vulkan!”

He went inside the forge without answering. When he emerged he had two stout smiting hammers slung over either shoulder.

“The blood of these people may not flow in my veins but I am still one of them, I am still of Nocturne. And I would see it tortured no more.”

Faced with the fury of his son’s righteous anger, N’bel’s despair turned to resolution. He hefted his spear.

“Then I won’t let you stand alone.”

To object or deny him would be to insult his father and Vulkan was not about to do that. Instead, he nodded and an unspoken understanding passed between them. Though they might not share the same blood, they would always be kin. Whatever was below the trap-door in the forge, it would not change that.

Together they walked to the middle of the square and stood facing Hesiod’s gates.

Beyond, the shrieking of the dusk-wraiths grew louder.

“I have never been prouder of you than I am right now, Vulkan.”

“When this is over, I want you to seal the trap-door shut. I never want to know what is down there.”

“I do not think we will get the chance, son,” N’bel turned to him, “but if we live through this, what about your origins? Don’t you want to know where you came from?”

Vulkan glanced down at the cracked, volcanic earth. “These are my origins. This is where I was born. It is all I need to know, father.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Vulkan saw Breughar. He carried his two-handed hammer across his brawny chest and the torcs knotted in his thick beard clanked as he moved. Until Vulkan had arrived in Hesiod, Breughar had been the largest and strongest man of the town. He’d accepted the change in status with a grace and nobility that Vulkan had never forgotten. The metal-shaper nodded to N’bel as he took up his place alongside them.

“You are the best of us,” he said to Vulkan. “I will set my shoulder to yours, kinsman.”

Breughar was not alone. Others were coming from their hiding places to stand in the square too.

“My shoulder to yours,” said Gorve, the plainskeeper.

“And mine,” added Rek’tar, hornmaster.

Soon there were over a hundred Nocturneans, men and women both, clutching spears, swords, their forge hammers and anything else that could be used as a weapon. They were a people united, and Vulkan was their foundation rock.

“We hide no more,” said Vulkan, and drew his hammers across his body. His gaze narrowed to a point fixed upon the gate. Like a blade held against the forge flame he fashioned his anger into a weapon he could wield. Too long had they been prey. Now they would rise…

Like a voice cut off abruptly at the source, the shrieking ceased.

Silence persisted for a moment, haunted by the distant mewling of mauled sauroch cattle or the pleas of dying drovers fallen just short of sanctuary.

It wasn’t long before their tormentors appeared.

Clad in shadows they moved with a perverted grace, scaling Hesiod’s border like slivers of night. Drenched in almost palpable cruelty the dusk-wraiths crouched on the summit of the wall cackling to one another, baring their teeth and flashing the silver of their savage blades in torturous promise. Leather-clad witches, their long hair festooned with razor edges, carrying serrated spears, wicked falchions and other sharp instruments Vulkan could only guess at the purpose of, were the first to cross the threshold.

With feline surety they landed on all fours, rolling up on two legs in a sinuous swaggering motion that suggested their incredible arrogance and sense of superiority. Their eyes were alive with lustful anticipation of the kill, and just the smallest mote of amusement at the defiance of the human cattle in front of them.

Their slow advance into the square was intended to make their prey quail. Beside him, Vulkan could feel the other warriors’ tension. He also saw the pack mentality in the dusk-wraiths’ formation. It put him in mind of the leonid, the alpha-hunters that stalked the Arridian plain. These creatures, these pale-skinned, androgynous things possessed none of the majesty of those great maned beasts.

Vulkan’s lips curled into a sneer, “Soul-shrived ghost-walkers; that is all you are.”

He stepped forwards.

“Return,” he bellowed. “Return to your ships and be gone. You will only find steel and death waiting for you here, and cattle no longer for your culling knives.”

One of the witches laughed. It was a chilling, evil sound. She said something to one of her kin in the barbed dialect of the dusk-wraiths and a lesser male snarled obediently. His eyes were tarry pits that narrowed as they settled on Vulkan. With a shrilling cry he raced at the Nocturnean who had dared to defy the slavers. He was fast, like a lightning-adder.

Vulkan told the others, “Stay back,” and rushed to meet the dusk-wraith. The creature held his jagged knives behind him, leading with the angular point of his jutting chin. He wore no battle-helm or mask, but a serpent tattoo was painted on the left side of his face.

The distance between the combatants closed in moments, and just before the clash the dusk-wraith shifted his line of attack and blurred around Vulkan’s flank intending to gut him from his blind side. But Vulkan had seen the feint coming. Unclouded by fear, his battle instincts were honed to a monomolecular edge that the slaver could not possibly have accounted for.