TIME June 20th, evening into the small hours LOCATION The Chandlery, then Cove Street, Chuza
BACKGROUND:
After quelling a riot outside the Watering Hole and pressing Jess’s grieving neighbour for anything she could recall about her missing husband, the Agents’ evening took a turn for the worse. A cry for help outside a Chandlery warehouse led them into an ambush laid by the Zhakarov Brotherhood – vipers, a rooftop sniper, and Saarkh herself, settling an old score over a friend Raven had killed. Crowe blew the second snake apart with a kemercannon blast; Raven disrupted Saarkh’s summoned flame and put her down with a well-placed strike before turning the sniper’s own dagger back on him. By the time the dust settled, Saarkh was alive but badly wounded – and stable enough, eventually, to talk.
WHAT HAPPENED
With Saarkh down, the Agents turned to the other body in the stock house – a dock worker, still and silent beside her. Hawke stepped out to clear his head and found a man lurking at the doorway: Karl, the Chandlery’s owner, back for a tin of pitch tar ahead of a fishing trip in the morning. He moved past them to smother what was left of the conjured flame, more rattled by the thought of a business-ending fire than by the bodies on his floor – and mentioned, almost in passing, that he’d clocked the sniper loitering outside when he locked up earlier that evening.
“I’m not sure what’s going on here but that could have been a nasty fire. Thank you, Agents. Do any of you fish? Looks like my trip’s off tomorrow now, cleaning this lot up, but I sure appreciate it. Real good fishing out on the Northern reefs – big pelagics, and quiet, on account of most fishermen giving it a wide berth for the currents. I know that place like the back of my hand.”
Karl, Chandlery owner
Crowe found a cart and donkey abandoned down the next alley, and between them they loaded up the two bodies – the viper and Saarkh – and set off for the Section House. They didn’t get far. Halfway there, the night split open with kemercannon fire and screaming.
The warehouse square was already a battlefield by the time they arrived – soldiers in black and red trim, mages in dark blue and gold, advancing on a building under a hail of spellfire and cannon shot. A ball of light arced through a window and the building went up. The smell of cigar smoke reached them before its owner did.
“Ahh, the dustmen have arrived. Come to see how it’s done, maybe pick up some tips. Stay back – wouldn’t want anyone injured in the crossfire.”
Boosay
He heard Hawke’s account of the ambush – the Zhakarov gang had struck first – without much visible reaction, then crouched over the cart to lift Saarkh’s head by the hair and confirm her for himself. “Well, well,” he said, almost fond. “I assume she came looking for you. Pity, if she doesn’t make it. Nice commission, though.”
One of the mages went down to crossbow fire mid-assault. Hawke crossed the square to stabilise her while the soldiers kept up their advance. When the building’s doors finally opened and a woman stumbled out with her hands raised, Boosay drew his cannon without a word and shot her dead where she stood.
“That was… unfortunate. NIL sympathiser, striking a superior.”
Boosay, cannon still raised
He leaned in close enough that only they could hear it.
“There’s a war coming…”
A soldier ran up to report the NIL defences overcome, and whatever had been in his voice a moment before was gone.
“Alpha team, move in and clear this mess up!”
He pulled his hat down, took another pull on the cigar, and was gone before anyone thought to ask him anything else – his parting words drifting back out of the dark.
“Be careful, Agents. Life on the street can be… rough… and dangerous… and short-lived…”
At the Section House, Saarkh and the dead viper were booked into evidence – Crowe held onto her dagger rather than log it. Raven and Hawke stopped by the infirmary; Raven was told to rest and drink water for whatever the poison had left behind. Weapons Sergeant Rhabbatt turned the confiscated dagger over in his hands and placed it at once: cold iron. Hawke, meanwhile, got Branson’s address off the duty sergeant, Bowlohr – and it turned out to be the same building where Jess had died.
Reports written, shift finished, the Agents met with Brin, who wanted the wharf attack case closed out – there were discrepancies between Sam’s report and Barwhalle’s over the seals that still needed accounting for. Crowe and Hawke pushed instead for a tail on Thom and on the Zhakarov gang – they were done absorbing attempts on their lives without pushing back. Brin agreed. The plan: catch Branson before he finished his shift the next day, and see where he led them.
They healed overnight and returned to duty. Hawke was himself again – the cough gone, his eyes back to normal – but the day brought word of another riot, and Kowalski, finishing his own shift, asking if anyone had seen Sanchez. He’d gone off to visit his sister; Kowalski had taken the ‘dipper’ back to be processed in his absence. Branson hadn’t shown for duty. Neither had Dew. His address turned up as Cove Street – the same direction Sanchez had been headed. The Agents didn’t like the coincidence and went to check it themselves.
A KemerLexi beacon was already sounding as they neared Cove Street. Raven and Crowe slipped into the shadows on instinct; Hawke, a beat too slow, didn’t quite manage it. The body slumped at the beacon was Sanchez – a bad hack wound at his shoulder and neck. Hawke’s healing strike stabilised him enough to walk, and to talk.
“I heard screams that suddenly stopped, so I took a look. The apothecary door was locked, so I tried the one round the side, up the stairs to the flat above. I knocked, and he opened it. Had a weird, vacant look in his eyes – looked familiar, somehow. Then he hit me with an axe or something. Knocked me halfway down the steps. He didn’t say a word. I think I blacked out.”
Sanchez
They sent Sanchez back to the Section House and went up themselves – a streak of blood leading to the apartment door at the top of a shadowed stairwell. Hawke knocked. No answer. Crowe picked the lock.
Inside: the smell of oil, and a boy standing at the far end of the hall. Raven checked the first door on the left – a bedroom, a dead dog on the bed, its skull cracked open and the brains removed. Hawke lit a sunrod in the kitchen and found a dead woman slumped at the table. Crowe crouched to talk to the boy, who asked, simply, if they were here to help his daddy. He led them – carefully, patiently – toward the bathroom, where Dew was waiting: hatchet in one hand, a lantern in the other, the room thick with the reek of oil.
Whatever was wrong with Dew, it wasn’t simple. Hawke checked the woman at the table while Tilly appeared in the doorway behind them – a kemercannon held out of sight behind her back. A boy’s voice called out from further inside, delighted rather than alarmed: “Hey Tilly, I thought I heard you. Nice mask. Come on in.” Nobody had time to ask what either of them was doing there before Dew brought the hatchet down on his own leg.
“He said you’d come. I can feel him – pulling my legs, my arms, my thoughts. I’m not going to do it. I’m not going there – to that place!”
Dew
“It’s coming again – nooo! I know what you fear. I know!”
Dew, swinging the lantern for the spilled oil
Crowe lunged for the lantern with a knife, missed the grab, and only succeeded in knocking it further into the oil – it burst over Dew and the hallway went up around them. Brad went down burning; Hawke and Tilly were singed catching the edge of it. Raven, cataloguing the drawings pinned across the bedroom wall, chose the window over the fire and dropped agilely to the street below. Hawke dragged Brad clear to the stairwell; Crowe, alight himself, threw himself down beside them to smother the flames. Tilly backed toward the far door on the landing.
A neighbour’s door opened onto the landing mid-chaos. “Hey Dew, I know you work shifts, but have some consideration – keep it down…” His voice trailed off as the smoke, the flames, and the eight-foot thing about to come through the ceiling caught up with what he was actually looking at.
“He’s here.”
Tilly
Something came through from above – a crash, glass, then a heavy thud on the landing between Brad and Tilly. The smell arrived before it fully did: wet fur, urine, and worse. Eight feet of it, wrapped in a stinking blanket, a canine snout pushing out from underneath with a jaw set slightly wrong and claws too long for the gnarled hands they grew from.
“What is your bidding, masters!!”
– from somewhere under the blanket, in a voice like grinding rock
The fire behind them flared as wind gusted through the broken window, and thunder cracked overhead – the storm finally breaking over Cove Street.
EXTRAS.
WORD ON THE STREET – June 20th
A meeting with Jimmy Gibbs turned up more heat than answers. The wharf deaths have unrest running high between locals and NIL immigrants across Section 18, and it’s spreading into the neighbouring Sections.
- The Cutters and the Zhakarov Brotherhood are reportedly using the unrest to their own advantage.
- A new faction of locals may be forming to take revenge on their own terms – calling themselves the ‘NIL Reapers’.
- Word is it’s already being used as cover for any Cutting-gloak with a grudge and a knife to settle a score.
COLD IRON DAGGER
Recovered from Saarkh, logged out of evidence rather than into it. Weapons Sergeant Rhabbatt confirmed the blade as cold iron on sight – not a common smith’s choice on Chuza’s streets, and not a cheap one either. Whoever armed Saarkh’s crew wasn’t improvising.