“Prudens et Morsu Celer” – careful, and quick to bite – sums up Kerrick’s apothecary and chandlery rather better than its owner probably intended. Two floors of salves, potions and sea-wrighted goods by daylight; a considerably rougher business once the shutters came down.

FILE NOTES

The Agents forced their way in on a tip – glass breaking, a strange laugh, low voices – and found a Hammerskin debt-collection well underway. What the shop’s floor plan discreetly marks as a private ‘thug room’ turned out to be entirely accurate. Two Hammerskins died in the fight; Mo and Chuckles were taken alive, and Mo gave up a bigger name – McGinnan – rather than face the rope. Kellick, the proprietor, made it clear he couldn’t afford to press charges against the men who’d just been beaten in his own storeroom, for fear of what came next.

That wasn’t the only ambush the Chandlery has hosted. Earlier, a man stumbled out of the warehouse begging for help – a huge snake had his companion, he said – and the Agents walked straight into a set-up: thorn caltrops across the entrance, a hidden rooftop sniper, and a second summoned viper waiting behind the first. One of the two robed figures lying prone by the door turned out to be Saarkh, a high-ranking Zhakarov Brotherhood member with a personal grudge to settle.

“Agent Raven, you took away someone dear to me. It is time to pay for your sin.”

Saarkh, at the Chandlery

It went badly for her. A sneak-attack Kemercannon blast dropped Saarkh in a single shot before she could finish shaping the flaming blade she was casting toward Raven; the sniper on the roof lasted only a little longer. She was stabilised rather than left to die and taken in alive – wanted, by that point, for more than one Chuza Cutter death eyewitnesses had already pinned on snakebite.

STATUS: Filed under Locations. Open for business. Whether Kellick’s arrangement with the Hammerskins survived the raid is, as yet, unconfirmed.