Shadowrat: Prologue – Arcadian Nights - A taster of a storyline for next year.     Fires burned across the skyline of Arcadia City, blacking out the night with acrid fumes that almost hid the smell of burning sewage and burning bodies. The once-beautiful jewel of Gawonda was scarred now, clinging to life like a leper on the edge of oblivion.     Arcadia City surrendered. The Mayor came alone, as instructed. At the edge of the flame-blackened civic square he dropped to his knees and crawled on all fours to the cracked and waterless fountain in the centre. That was where the King waited for him.     King Carew looked down at the desperate man who grovelled in the filth. “Well met, Lord Mayor,” he bade him. Less than a year ago this man had called him names, had tried to turn his dogs on him. The dogs were dead now, and eaten.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You win,” the Mayor told him, looking down. “We will pay your price.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Will you now?” The King looked over the ruined metropolis, sniffing the air. “And what price would that be?”     The men and women arrayed around the King snorted, enjoying the Mayor’s humiliation. This was always the best part.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What you asked for. When you came here. Three parts of our treasury and the choice of whatever goods took your fancy. Food to feed your Brotherhood for a year and a day. Magic enough to send you on your way. We’ll pay it.”     King Carew picked his nose and flicked it in the Mayor’s direction. “That was then,” he answered. “You’ve put us to a lot of trouble since then. Unpleasantness with your constabulary, and then with your soldiers. Rude words. Unkindnesses.” He sniffed. “Late payments accrue interest, Lord Mayor. Heavy interest.”     The Mayor looked at his burning city. “You’ve ruined us,” he accused the King. “You’ve looted and destroyed and killed, wrecked the fairest realm of the world. What more can you take from us?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Well, there’s always that fourth part of your treasury,” King Carew noted. “We’ll be needing that for starters. And we’ll be taking whatever moveables and valuables that happen to catch our eye in your fair city. And any fair citizens we happen to fancy too.” He snapped his fingers as if remembering something. “Oh, I’ll expect you to have your daughters delivered to me by sundown as well. You can have them back when I’m finished with them.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What?”     The King chuckled lewdly. “Sometimes sacrifices just have to be made, Lord Mayor. Otherwise we might just decide we like it so much here that we settle down.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You can’t…” the Mayor pleaded. “Please, I’m begging you…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Oh no. That’s my job, Lord Mayor. I can’t have you doing it without my permission. I usually have people’s ears lopped off and nailed to church doors if they beg without my warrant. Do you want your ears lopping off?”     All the fight was gone from the civic leader. The fires were out of control now. At least it was burning up the plague victims. Some of them were even dead before the flames took their houses. “All right. Everything you say. Take it all. We can’t fight you. We can’t stop you. Do what you’re going to do to us, take what you’re going to take, and go. Please, just go!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’ll be wanting the key to your Tower of Mysteries too, Lord Mayor,” the King told him. “I’m especially eager to see what can be scavenged from that mystical treasurehouse.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Nobody’s been in there since the old archmage died,” the Mayor warned him.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And that’s why I’m especially eager to go there,” King Carew answered. He scratched his armpit reflectively. “Magic’s what we need now, to feed the travelling wagons. So we can leave you.”     The Mayor recognised that his only hope was in abject submission. He fumbled with the chain of office around his neck and pushed it across the debris to the King. A gold key dangled from the chain.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Well that’s very generous of you, Lord Mayor,” the King told him. “God bless you, my lord.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Please… just go.”     The King chuckled, casting glances at his closest followers. “Well, I’ll certainly be going soon,” he agreed. “But there’s still one final thing I’ll be wanting from you, Lord Mayor. Something I’m urgently due. One last thing you owe me.”     A bleak shudder spasmed through the broken Mayor’s frame. “What?” he asked. “What now?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Why Lord Mayor, I’ll be requiring an apology.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“A… a what?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“An apology,” King Carew repeated. “For your city’s attitude in denying me and mine what we asked for. For your resistance to our will. For trying to deprive us of our livelihoods. For thinking you were better than us.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You came uninvited, thousands of you, with your impossible inhuman powers, demanding anything you coveted, unwilling to negotiate, unwilling to see sense…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“This doesn’t sound like a very good apology to me, Lord Mayor. Perhaps we should send your daughters back to you as amputees, do you think? It’s not as if they need all their limbs to play the public legers, is it?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m sorry,” sobbed the Mayor. “On behalf of Arcadia City, for ever resisting you or denying you or insulting you, I’m sorry. I humbly apologise for whatever we’ve done that was… that was so terrible that you’d do this to us!”     The King sniffed. “There now, that wasn’t so hard now, was it? Just be kissing my feet and licking the shit off my boots and we’ll call it a bargain.”     The Mayor shuffled through the mud on his belly to obey Carew. “You’re going then?” he pleaded. “Really going?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“In a week,” the King answered.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“A week?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Two at the most. We have preparations to make. Booty to gather. Loot to divide. Revenges to finish. The Sturdy Strolling Beggarly Brotherhood doesn’t like to leave a job half done. It’s bad business.”     The King’s retinue crowded round the fallen Mayor; the amputees, the diseased, the insane, the immoral, laughing and pawing and spitting and gloating. Their stench was unbearable. Their touch was worse.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You said you’d go. You said it…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“And so we shall, Lord Mayor, now the price is agreed. So we shall. On our terms, when we’ve magic enough for the long jump ahead of us.” The Beggar King twitched his ragged velvet gown from the Mayor’s desperate clutch. “After all, it’s a very long way to Parodiopolis.” *** Coming to a Parodyverse near you in 2008 *** Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2007 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2007 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.