The bolt sings at it leaves the track of the hand crossbow, a sweet and deadly tune swallowed promptly by the night all about them. But even in the dark, it finds its target - soft song ending with a distant punctuating thump.

The man in the church yard drops his lantern. It pops against some half buried irregular path, flares with a hot orange sunburst, and then gutters. The man falls too.

Quiet descends about then once more, save for a soft rasp as Fitcher draws another bolt from her hip canister. From where they lay side by side in the tall grass in the dell below the churchyard, the man's crumpled form is lost below the jagged shadows of headstones and the church yard fence. Click says the second bolt as it's set into place.

Fitcher looks to her companion. She smiles. "Ready to move? I doubt he'll have liked that."

And indeed, a dark shape is surging upright now above them--