TIME June 18th, mid-morning LOCATION The Plaza, beyond the barbican, Chuza
BACKGROUND:
The stolen grimoire recovered, the Agents fled the Abandonment with a gang on their heels. A rooftop chase through Paraisopolis left several of the pursuing brigands dead or scattered behind them, but Crowe, Hawke and Raven broke free with the book intact, reaching the plaza and the barbican gate as dawn gave way to morning.
WHAT HAPPENED
Marlin was waiting on the far side of the barbican, pacing beside his idling carriage. He ferried the Agents straight back to Asquith’s museum, where the old mage took the news of the grimoire’s recovery with visible relief – tempered by the reminder that the book would have to sit under lock at the Section House for a few days yet, until the investigation closed out.
Asquith’s attention snagged on Raven’s new armour before the debrief was even finished. He circled her slowly, tracing the decorative chasing along the studded leather with one finger.
“Did you have to go deep undercover? The armour – I’m hoping it’s not standard issue. If it is, I can see the reason for the city’s unrest.” He caught himself, waving off the joke with a smile.
“Death to the unworthy! Strength in victory! Death to Heironeous and his onions -”
he dabbed at the leather with a handkerchief, “- minions. Ahh. I do love language. One small change in a character, a completely different meaning. So many conflicts have started on a mistranslation.”
Asquith
He squinted at the script worked into the armour’s edging – not decoration after all, he decided, but text. Something close to the Basilican hand used by the priests of Wee Jas, though rendered in a dialect he didn’t immediately place.
Marlin dropped them at the Section House before midday, and the Agents brought Brin up to speed, handing the grimoire over for safekeeping.
Brin’s mood was already good before they finished the report – the book back, the Agents in one piece, and, from the smell of them, a story worth hearing.
“Agents Crowe, Raven and Hawke. I seem to hear your names quite often these days. Please, join me in my office. I hear you had an eventful evening… Do tell.”
“I’ve got one thing to say. By Heironeous, have you been bathing in one of the canals?”
He crossed to open a window. “Excellent work, Agents. This is one of those little gems in the swamp of hostilities currently rising in Chuza. Excellent.”
Captain Brin
Brin’s good mood soured slightly once he got a proper look at the breastplate – a black, spiked gauntlet clutching a fistful of barbed arrows, worked plainly into the chest, hard to miss once you knew to look for it. The symbol of Hextor.
Heironeous’s half-brother and sworn enemy, by the faith’s own telling – Herald of Hell, Scourge of Battle, a god for soldiers who love war for its own sake rather than any cause behind it. Where Heironeous preaches chivalry and the defence of the weak, Hextor’s creed runs the other way entirely: strict hierarchy, blind obedience, and precious little patience for anyone who can’t enforce their own will on someone weaker. “Mercy is for the weak” isn’t just a saying among his clergy – it’s closer to doctrine. Priest had lived it right up to the end, in that church, with a bound woman who couldn’t fight back.
Brin suggested, diplomatically but firmly, that Raven refrain from wearing it around the Section House. As for a reward: Agents couldn’t accept money directly, he reminded them, but he’d see what he could arrange to mark a quick response and a job well done. Four days, he thought, to have something suitable made.
Hawke, meanwhile, said little. A cold, he assumed. Or something worse.
The next day the Agents cross-checked Master Barwhalle’s shipment inventory against what had actually arrived. Three line items were missing outright: Papyrus, and – flagged independently by Jenna and Raven – Slagma and Serpentine. A fourth, listed only as Dragon’s Spittle, proved harder to place at all.
Hawke walked the paperwork trail to the Mercantile building. The shipments had arrived, he confirmed – and had already been signed out again, cargo and all. His toothache, worsening for days, finally sent him to the infirmary instead. The acolyte on duty found nothing more sinister than a common cold.
Hawke found something else: a new molar, immaculate and unmarked by decay, sitting where an old one had been – a small cross etched into the enamel.
The morning papers carried the city’s usual weight – a fire with a fatality, a murder in the park, a riot put down before noon.
The next day Agent Sanchez reported in:
the tail on Thom had led straight to the Ship Inn, where he met regularly with Zhakarov.
Their next arranged meeting was three days out.
Agent Boosay barged into the debrief uninvited, suggesting – loudly – that the Kleet and Zhakarov investigation was better left to more skilled hands. Crowe and Raven heard him out and dismissed him just as loudly.
Crowe hauled the recovered kit back to the Section House, and the Agents collected their money and commission for the captured felons.
Another fire made the papers the next morning, alongside a riot and a suicide.
Hawke, still turning the numbers of the fires over in his head, pressed the investigation further and suggested the Agents pay a visit to the latest victim’s neighbour – a woman named Jess – who might know how to reach the husband.
By the next day’s papers, the fires had become a pattern too large to ignore – another blaze, protests spreading through the Karnath district, and word that lethal force had been sanctioned to put them down.
EXTRAS.
SYMBOL OF HEXTOR
A fist gripping six black arrows, radiating downward – worked into the chest of the masterwork studded leather Raven claimed from the thieves’ camp. Standard issue for whom, exactly, is a question the Section House would rather not answer out loud.
THE BASILICAN SCRIPT
The chasing along the armour’s edge, on closer inspection: lettering, not ornament. Asquith placed the hand as close kin to the script used in the Basilicas of Wee Jas – a skull wreathed in a sunburst is the goddess’s usual mark – though the dialect on the leather didn’t quite match anything in his library.
SLAGMA
Base coraman quicksilver – one of three line items missing from Barwhalle’s shipment.
SERPENTINE
Shastan black powder. Mixed dry into a rough, slow-burning powder – favoured for theatrics and fireworks over anything more lethal.
DRAGON’S SPITTLE
Ambergrease, or grey amber – a waxy, flammable secretion from the digestive tract of sperm whales. Foul and marine when fresh; with age it mellows into something sweeter, closer to rubbing alcohol. Perfumers prize it as a fixative, for whatever that’s worth to whoever’s buying it wholesale.
PENDANT OF PROTECTION +1
Brin’s promised reward, still four days from finished: a thin leather strap and a pendant gem, a miniature cedar tree cut through by two letters – A and C – worked into the stone. A deflection bonus, and Brin’s particular way of saying thank you without technically paying anyone.