TIME June 30th, past midnight LOCATION The wharf gates, Chuza
BACKGROUND:
The Sunset Ray’s hostages came home, but Hawke didn’t.
Krusha – newly assigned to the Section House in the days since – picked up where the roster now had a gap, standing watch with Crowe and Raven as they left the wharf meeting close to midnight.
WHAT HAPPENED
Raven handed Krusha a medallion – Hawke’s, a gift from Asquith – as they made for the gates. Krusha smelled the threat before anyone saw it: a knot of humanoids shambling up off the last berth, wet rags and torn flesh catching the moonlight, moving on a line of soldiers holding formation at the gate. Beyond the soldiers, torchlight and movement – a crowd, and not a calm one.
The Agents came up on the shamblers from behind. Crowe broke the quiet first with a kemercannon shot; Krusha called on KemerLexi’s power and burned out seven of the ten outright; Raven cut down what was left. Nobody took so much as a scratch – though both Raven and Crowe landed blows that should have been outright fatal on a living target and watched the things keep coming anyway, right up until they finally stopped.
They warned the gate guard about more of the same behind them, confirmed the successful rescue from the Sunset Ray, and pushed on toward the Port Inn and the Section House – and Krusha’s own bed, for once. On the city side of the gate, two knots of citizens were already shouting past each other – one side demanding the release of NIL prisoners held without cause, the other baying for the hostage-takers’ blood. Neither seemed inclined to notice the corpses being cleared behind them.
Breakfast at the Port Inn came with a visitor. Pitr flagged Crowe and Raven down to say someone was asking for them; Raven turned down the stranger’s offer of his table and had him seated at theirs instead. He wouldn’t give his own name – “it’s who I represent that is important” – but cracked walnuts between his fingers as he talked, unhurried, working up to the point.
“Sooo, cutting to the chase, ahem. Mr Zhakarov is going to dismiss the prior misunderstandings. Unusual, but here, as they say, is where we are. It would, however, be good ‘community service’ to give an ‘Arm’ back – to balance things. I’m sure Mr Zhakarov would be very appreciative.”
Zhakarov’s emissary, over breakfast
He came bearing a repeating crossbow and a case of bolts along with his meal – the murder weapon from the Ship Inn, offered up freely. Zhakarov, it turned out, considered their intervention against his own would-be assassins worth calling the ledger even, and was prepared to let their previous meddling in his business go. One favour, in return: if the opportunity arose to release Marek, he’d appreciate it. Raven made the Agents’ position clear – not unless Zhakarov turned himself in first.
The crossbow went into evidence at the Section House, where Bowlohr had better news: Mikey was finally awake. They set up an interview room and called in Krusha. Facing the rope for his part in the assassination attempt, Mikey took the deal Raven offered and started talking – insinuating that the Captain himself had a hand in arranging the hit. Raven didn’t buy it outright, so Krusha laid a Zone of Truth over the room. Mikey’s answers held up anyway.
Nobody had a good way to bring up the possibility of Brin arranging an assassination to Brin’s own people, so they didn’t, exactly. Kowalski and Sanchez met them at the House – Kowalski nursing a toothache, Sanchez simply relieved to still have his head attached after his own encounter with Dew’s axe. They asked after Hawke. Raven told them plainly, and the anger that followed was immediate and loud enough that Brin himself had to step in to settle it – a ceremony was set for the next day, and Brin asked, pointedly, that nobody discuss Hawke’s death openly in the meantime, for fear of copycat violence or giving the wrong people something to rally around.
Sam, separately, wanted to know if there was any progress on her stolen corpses. Brin didn’t have much to offer.
“I’ve put out some feelers, but if it was the Dranathess that took them, I fear they’ll draw blanks. If that’s the case, I’m going straight to Boosay. I’m sure he’s beh… he’ll have some information.”
Brin
Sam mentioned in passing that Corpse Fishers had just delivered a six-year-old boy’s body up out of the bay. Krusha warned her to keep an eye out for anything walking back out of that morgue on its own.
Krusha put some ad hoc dentistry to use on Kowalski’s aching molars in the meantime – nothing more sinister than ordinary tooth decay, as it turned out, whatever Hawke’s own black-marked false tooth might have suggested was possible.
Reports filed, Crowe and Raven were called into Brin’s office and rewarded with rings, courtesy of the House, for the Sunset Ray operation. Krusha was formally enlisted into the Flying Squad’s ranks. Once the symbol on the dog-beast’s cloak had been confirmed, Brin’s mood shifted – he told them, plainly worried, that if he was right about what it meant, there was real carnage still to come. A meeting with Asquith was arranged on the spot; Marlin collected them and drove them to the museum.
Before any of that, though, Brin needed to be sure of what they’d actually seen. When they confirmed the symbol, something in his manner shifted – he started talking before he seemed to have decided to.
Thirty-three years ago, he told them, the Sections of Chuza had been plagued by a wave of murders and disappearances – dozens, maybe hundreds, over a few months, with no pattern beyond a grim tendency toward people nobody with influence would miss. He’d been young himself then, hungry to make a name, and had volunteered to go down into the tunnels beneath the old city after whatever was responsible.
“We were out of our depth. We didn’t know the surroundings, or what we were fighting. There were things down there… not human… they seemed to just be feeding on us. I was lucky – I only lost a leg.” He tapped his calf, just below the knee. “Young Skinny Johnson went after the beast that did it – some huge, deformed, cat-faced thing. I can still hear him, calm as anything, running off down the tunnel after it. ‘Give me back his leg!’ Never saw Skinny again.”
Captain Brin
The symbol had marked every one of the things they’d fought down there – tattooed into skin, worked into cloth, scratched into the tunnel walls. It was where Brin had first met Asquith, brought in by the commissioner as someone with the right kind of friends for the problem. Brin hadn’t approved of his methods even then. But the killings had dropped off, and Asquith had left him with a line he’d never forgotten.
“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born, and the day you find out why.”
Asquith
This will happen again, Asquith had told him, in fifty years – and they’d be ready. Whatever had gone wrong this time, it had woken them early.
At the museum, with Brin’s clearance formally given, Asquith stopped hedging.
“My name is Akatha C’Dartris – Tol Kerrate Knight, Guardian of the Tree, sworn to the King. I was born just over nine hundred years ago. If I can assist you through life or in death, then I will.”
Asquith
The rest came out in pieces, and none of it flattered the official histories.
The Cataclysm, by Asquith’s account, was no natural disaster – it was the aftermath of scholars of the Art reaching for knowledge too far from home and finding something on the other side of a doorway that answered back. What came through was never fully driven out again; it enslaved the very mages who’d summoned it, and the scar it left on the land is the bay Chuza is built around – a wound torn into the earth by something “plucked from the sky and hurled down” as a demonstration of what the invaders could do.
The Children of the Eye, Asquith said, were among their creations – hybrids bred for labour, left behind when their masters withdrew, surfacing ever since on a fifty-year cycle nobody has fully explained. Thirty-three years ago, his Order lured a horde of them into a cavern beneath old Paraisopolis and brought the roof down on the lot – the district known today, for exactly that reason, as the Abandonment.
It didn’t stay civil for long. Brin pushed back on the cost of that operation – prisoners used as bait, the youngest found to draw the creatures in more reliably than anyone wanted to say aloud – and Asquith didn’t take the criticism quietly.
“I recall that it was you who asked us for help. That when we stood in front of the Commissioner, it was you who said ‘whatever it takes.’ Those children were on borrowed time regardless – how many urchins starve, or are crushed under wagon wheels, or have their heads broken in by men with money and rank? At least they had a few decent meals, and a few days’ peace, before the end.”
Asquith
“That’s enough. I’ve lived with that every waking day. Using children as bait doesn’t sit well on my conscience, and it never will. I can’t change the past. But maybe we can protect the ones still to come.”
Captain Brin
Neither man seemed to want the argument more than he wanted it over. Asquith apologised, in his own roundabout way, and Brin let it go rather than push further. What was plain, once the two of them had talked themselves out, was that Asquith intended to leave for Tol Kerria at once to consult what remained of his Order – down to three, by his own account, and scattered further still: one missing in Kalitzim, another chasing an expedition into the ruins at Borthanza.
EXTRAS.
OPEN THREADS
- Asquith is not what he has always appeared to be – a nine-hundred-year-old Tol Kerrate Knight, by his own account, sitting on a history of Chuza the Section House has kept quiet since the Cataclysm.
- Zhakarov considers the ledger even and wants Marek released. Raven’s answer stands: not unless he turns himself in.
- Did Brin have a hand in arranging the hit on Zhakarov? Mikey says so, and a Zone of Truth didn’t catch him lying.
- The dog-beast’s cloak symbol is confirmed – and it has Brin badly worried about what comes next.
- A six-year-old boy’s body, delivered by Corpse Fishers from the bay – cause and connection, if any, unconfirmed.
REVIVAL PADDLES
Experimental Section House kit: a leather satchel, tanglefoot-bag sized, holding a wooden box and a handled rod. Set the satchel down clear of water and any Agent, take the rod, turn the dial to on, and touch the subject – a surge of electricity revives them as though freshly stabilised, with a little healing besides. One shot only; the satchel burns itself out in a burst of flame and sparks the moment it’s used. Experimental enough that there’s a real chance the surge does as much harm as good – though it still stabilises the patient either way.