22nd October 2026

Part 2 of the Welcome to the Machine series

The Great Gig in the Sky

The road out of Silverpine came down into Hillsbrad in the evening, between hills that had been farms. Percy Spamchop had a letter in his sleeve for an apothecary at Tarren Mill, sent by Apothecary Renferrel at the Sepulcher, and the way to Tarren Mill was up the hill to the left.

His feet took the road to the right. It ran down towards the water, past fences and an old mill-race, and the walking did itself. That was odd, because he could not remember having walked it at all.

Mezzlos came two steps behind.

“This is not the way to the apothecary,” he said.

“No,” said Percy. “I only want to see the water.“

He saw it. From the last rise the harbour of Southshore lay open below him, masts and roofs and the first lamps coming on, and between him and it stood the guards on the road in. They saw a Forsaken in a red robe coming down out of the hills, and they did what the living do about that. He was dead on the verge in sight of the masts before he had decided what to say to them.

When he had his body back he went up the hill to the left, as he should have done in the first place, and Tarren Mill took him in. It was a town of his own kind. The Deathguard at the gate looked at him once and went back to watching the road. The graveyard was kept tidy, and somebody had left a spade standing in an open grave, ready, which Percy thought rather considerate.

Apothecary Lydon broke the seal on Renferrel’s letter and was pleased by what was in it, as far as Percy could tell. Lydon was a gloomy man who kept a frog on his bench and called it his assistant, and the only thing he took any pleasure in was the suffering of the living. Percy liked him at once.

“Most excellent,” said Lydon, to the letter, and then gave Percy a list of the bear tongues he would like next.

High Executor Darthalia gave him the farmers of Hillsbrad to kill, by name, and he entered them in the Journal under work offered. Then he went to look at the board where the warrants hung.

One was headed Dangerous! It wanted four people dead, all of them in hiding: a citizen, a miner, a farmer and, at the top, Clerk Horrace Whitesteed of Hillsbrad, for the murder of a Deathguard called Toma.

Percy knew the name.

He did not know the man, or why the name should belong to a clerk. It was simply there, written in a good clerk’s hand at the foot of a page he could not see, and he stood in front of the board like a man who hears his own name called in a crowded room and cannot find who called it.

“You know that one,” said Mezzlos.

“I know the name,” said Percy. “That is a different thing.“

He took the paper down, folded it in four, and put it in the back of the Journal, where he would not have to see it. He was not going to kill a clerk, and he preferred to leave the reason alone.

The warrant beside it, WANTED: Syndicate Personnel, was for the Syndicate, thieves living in the ruin of Durnholde Keep to the south-east: ten watchmen and ten rogues, by the authority of Lady Sylvanas, with proof to be brought back to the High Executor.

“This one has no names on it,” said Mezzlos.

“Then it is the one for me,” said Percy, and took that too.

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The Trial

Durnholde had been a great keep once. Its wall still stood the height of a house on every side, and inside it, among the fallen towers, the Syndicate kept their camp in the ruins of somebody else’s grandeur. Percy had slept in a good many places that were not his, and could hardly hold that against them.

He came in through the gate on the old cobbles, with Mezzlos two steps behind.

The watchmen came one at a time, which was civil of them. He took them with shadow, and with Life Drain, which was warm on the way in and which he had stopped apologising for, while Mezzlos stood in front of him and took the blows with the patience of a wall. Percy counted them into the Journal as they fell. At nine the rogues came out of the dark between the towers, two together, which was not civil at all, and he died on the cobbles with the count one short.

He walked back to his body and got into it, and called Mezzlos up again out of nothing. For a minute the two of them stood together in the yard by the old gallows, with the Syndicate lying in the grass about them.

“Nine,” said Mezzlos, who had been counting as well. “You said ten.“

“I am aware of what I said.“

He killed one rogue. The next one killed him, and Mezzlos with him. The voidwalker came apart where he stood, as he did when he was dismissed, though Percy had not dismissed him, and he was gone before Percy reached the ground.

A ghost cannot call a voidwalker. Percy tried, from habit, and the space two steps behind him stayed empty.

The world had gone grey. The keep was still there, and the gallows, and the wall, but the colour had gone out of all of it, and the dead Syndicate had gone with the colour. The Journal had come with him, which he had not expected of a book, and the pen still worked, which he expected even less. He stood on the gallows platform and wrote.

Durnholde Keep, on a fool’s errand. I feel the world closing in on me. I find myself at this hangman’s platform, and there is a coffin behind me. I wonder why I am drawn here.

Was I ever here in my life, before I was what I am? The place feels familiar.

It was the gallows that did it, or the wall, or the grey. Whitesteed. The name came back stronger than it had at the board, and this time it brought something with it: a sheet of good paper, a seal in red wax, a clerk’s signature at the foot, and above the signature a single word he could read, Stormwind. The rest would not come. But he knew, without any reason he could give, that whatever the letter had said was waiting for him in the south.

He walked out past the market stalls in the outer yard. They had been empty for years, carts with nothing in them, and he stood among them and wrote one more line.

I stand beside these abandoned stalls and feel the urge to travel south. In this form I can pass where, in my undead form, I am reviled.

He did not go back for his body. He went south.

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Last updated 23rd October 2026, 08:55