Read Part One Here.
Inspector Benjamin de Winter stands in the middle of his basement, looking up at the perfect hole cut into the ceiling, a path directly into what had been, until this evening, his secure vault. He crouches down and lifts the gate on the box at his feet. Matte black objects, each a handful, dart out and skitter across the basement floor.
De Winter’s cybernetic optical implant begins feeding him the data accrued by his MICE (Mobile Investigative Cybernetic Equipment). When a complete scan of the basement is done, they all swarm back into their box. Not a single trace of biomatter was left behind. Whoever did this was clever.
De Winter thinks for a moment. Jennah. The servant who was home. He’s already making plans to bring them into the station for an enhanced interrogation.
Omar parted ways with the crew once they reached the southern edge of the Brightstone district. They continue to Nightmarket while Omar, statue in hand, meanders through the maze of streets, avoiding Bluecoat patrols to the Docks. Around four in the morning, his contact appears. They wordlessly exchange the statue for coins (4 total). Omar goes back to crash in bed in the back of the specerijen.
The next day, while chowing down at a Skovlan food stall, the crew is approached by members of the Fog Hounds who see them as rivals to their smuggling ring. That’s how Omar likes it. He’d rather anyone who knows about The Silent Hand see them that way. If it became widespread that they were reclaiming cultural artifacts, he suspects the response would be even nastier. A brief scuffle with the Fog Hounds sends their rivals running home, tails tucked between their legs, vowing to do more damage.
The Hounds are not nearly as scary as Master Vreen, the woman who runs the Races in Nightmarket. The Hounds serve her to some degree, but they are not officially on her books. Anyone in the district owes Vreen a cut of their scores, and because she has a special hatred for Sklovans, the Quiet Hand knows half this Score is meant to be hers. There’s time, though, and so they decide to wait until they absolutely have to pay her.
(4-clock started)
Omar breaks away for a few hours, visiting his favorite powder dealer, Avrick, in Barrowcleft. He’s led to a free mattress and handed the vial he paid for. A couple good snorts and the Sklovan’s head floats back to the pillow. He watches the ceiling melt away into an expanse of stars and worlds. Massive shapes move in the dark void background, using the celestial forms as hiding places. He overindulges and is MIA for an entire day.
Nahid is feeling deeply stressed out from wrestling with Arkeveron during the Score. The demon is always just under the surface, like a shark waiting for its moment to strike. The plump occultist makes her way by tram to Silkshore. She takes her time, thinking that if she doesn’t make a B-line to The Red Lamp, she won’t look so desperate. Madame Tesslyn is happy to see Nahid, one of her favorite customers. Bystrik pushes his way through the curtains to the back, smiles when he sees Nahid, and gestures for her to follow him back. She overindulges, and it isn’t until the next day she realizes how the demon took control at one point. Thankfully, it didn’t hurt Bystrik, but she worries about the day she completely loses control.
Selima uses her Downtime to pull off a task that might help her get closer to membership in The Hive. She’s been quite flirtatious with Mira, a sailor who helps The Hive with its smuggling operations. Selima starts probing for info on what might make Mira happy. The sailor responds that she’s wanted a guest pass to check out Synn, an exclusive pleasure club. This seems slightly above Selima’s ability, but she takes on the task. She watches the exterior of the club for a few nights and notices one man who seems to have a new lover on his arm each time. Following him home in the early morning hours allows Selima to jump him. He has about a dozen non-traceable guest passes in his jacket, something he uses to entice these young people into coming to Synn. Selima takes half of them, and Mira promises she’ll put in a good word with The Hive.
Hafiz follows up on a lead that there is a military archive in Charterhall where you can sort military deployments during the Unity War by region. It takes a couple of days, but the sharpshooter finds a list from Sadaqahl and studies each photograph. Then he finds the face he remembers seeing as a teenager while he hid. It is the face of the man who murdered his father in cold blood, Narcus Coleburn, residing in Silkshore.
Back at the specerijen, Hafiz asks Selima if she will accompany him to Silkshore. He claims it’s because he’s heard about this great little tavern but wants to go with someone. She doesn’t buy it but comes along anyway, hoping to keep the old man out of trouble. Shortly after arriving in the neighborhood, Selima knows this is something more as they are staking out a tenement building. They post up at a bodega across the street, sipping rancid coffee. Hafiz can’t keep his eyes off the building, and about an hour in, an elderly man exits. He’s tall, broad-shouldered, and looking relatively healthy for an old-timer, likely due to some excellent cyberjoints from the Veterans Bureau.
Selima doesn’t ask anything but follows Hafiz as he tracks the man. They end up at a seedy bar near The Spark Grounds. The old man meets up with a table of other old men. Based on their ages, Selima assumes they were part of the first wave of soldiers deployed during the Unity War. Hafiz listens in on their conversation using a cheap earworm and learns that Narcus Coleburn served in the Unity War and was deployed in Sadaqahl. Now he’s one of the Sallies – Salamanders – the firefighters of Doskvol. He’s one of the chiefs, in fact. The Sallies aren’t much different than the Bluecoats in how they treat the public; dogs trained to think their loyalty to the masters puts them above the riff-raff.
Hafiz begins to think of how to stage a fire.
Augus – just a single name and nothing else – debuted his revamped hedge maze garden three months ago. The slim Iruvian, sporting a garish powdered wig, approached his friends only after they had assembled in the garden of his Brightstone estate, guided there by the house servants. Augus never separated his lips, only allowing a slightly bemused smile to adorn his face, cheeks rouged and eyes framed in black. His career as an artist had not gone how he’d expected. The liberal spending of coin had been the best avenue to climb the ranks of Doskvol’s art world.
He pulled a sheet revealing the tangle of bronze limbs – arms & legs, posed so that they looked like a human octopus clamoring for some object hanging overhead. Augus’ surprising fact about his new piece, he prided himself on the shock value of his work, was that each limb was an actual Sklovan body part recovered from the Battle of Qasser – which lent the piece its name “The Qasserian Marathon.” Some guests clapped hesitantly; others had to sit momentarily to comprehend what Augus had just shared with them. He went into greater detail about the bronzing process and how carefully it was to be performed to preserve the details of the limbs. No one in attendance pushed back on Augus. They smiled politely, ate the hors d’oeuvres, chatted, and slowly meandered out.
Nahid came to Omar while going over blueprints to Augus’ property. She’d been in deep study of her own, combing through her esoteric volumes for some solution to this demon problem. A potential solution had been uncovered. Channeling possession was an act in which the possessed could have the inhabiting spirit removed by forcing it into the corpse of a freshly dead person. So this is what Nahid needed: a body dead within the hour to pour the demon into. Hafiz starts chatting about how you can set a strategic fire to draw the Sallies out, and Omar has to ask more: why is his fellow crew member wanting to know this. The Spider’s mind goes to work, weaving a plan that will catch multiple things with a single piece of bait.
The plan is one of Deception – Omar knows that Augus has left town for his annual Yule holiday to The Dagger Isles. The Quiet Hand will intentionally set fire to Augus’ estate; this will be done on a night that Narcus Coleburn is on call and draw out the Sallies. Hafiz can get revenge, and Nahid will have her fresh corpse to help rid her of the demon.
A Critical roll helps out tremendously. The estate is entirely empty, all the servants sent home until Augus returns. Everyone finds good vantage points along the block to watch the property, and Omar passes by, chucking over three bottles with unique solutions that burst into glorious orange & blue flame when exposed to the air. Within minutes, the front of the house is consumed in fire, and the distant sound of the Sallies’ tanker can be heard growing louder by the second. The Sallies arrive, six of them pouring out of the vehicle. The secured gate in front proves no challenge for them, as one slaps an override on the security panel, and a second later, the latches release, and the gate swings open.
While the Sallies rush in to deal with the fire, Omar makes his first move with Selima to sneak onto the property unnoticed. They seem clear until one Sallie jogs around the corner to fetch a piece of equipment from the tanker. Selima whips her blade out and circles the now alert firefighter, brandishing a nightstick used to break windows. In the scuffle, Selima sprains her ankle but opens up her rival’s airways with the blade.
The fire must have been more intense than Omar anticipated because more Sallies are coming to see why their colleague has yet to return with the needed equipment. Hafiz emerges from the shadows as the two Sallies head towards Omar, who checks Selima’s ankle to ensure the damage isn’t more severe. Hafiz’s adrenaline is running too high and his throwing knives miss both targets, drawing their attention and ire to the sharpshooter.
Nahid, nearby but still in the shadows, focuses her mind, attuning herself to the spirits that wander this street. She discovers Phin, a vendor run down by some resident’s vehicle years ago. No charges were filed as Phin was unregistered. Nahid imbues the spirit’s fury with her magic and points it at the Sallies moving toward Hafiz. Phin speeds across the street, like a fog swirling around one of the firefighters; they pour into his mouth, nose, and ears, and then – an explosion of viscera, Phin howling towards the moon as they rise from the falling corpse. The other Sallie turns tail and runs back towards his comrades.
Selima knows the others will arrive within seconds and grabs her rage vial, plugging it into the receiver implanted on her right wrist. The green fluid exits the bottle directly into her bloodstream. Veins pop on her neck and arms. Red lines spider web across her eyes. In her frenzy, she slices and dices every Sallie she can get her hand on. Without being able to stop, she splits open the throat of Narcus Coleburn as the fire consumes Augus’ large manor home. Nahid cries out; the clock is ticking now, and she has only one hour to perform the ritual.
Omar walks around the house, scaling the garden wall and spraining his wrist. At the garden’s center, he finds The Qasserian Marathon and cuts it loose from the ropes holding it suspended above the garden. He barely makes it over the wall again as the flames reach the garden, quickly swallowing up the shrubbery and flowers. He finds the crew out front, Selima’s eyes still bulging with rage, her chest rising and falling like waves at high tide; slung over her shoulder is the corpse of Narcus sealed in the bio bag they brought to carry him away. Nahid looks frantic and urges them to return to the designated spot they’d chosen for the ritual. Hafiz seems distant; his body is there and moving, his mind lost in a fog.
They reach the rundown building on the outskirts of The Docks. Nahid sets around spreading the ashes & salt for the circle. Selima drops Narcus’ body in the center, unzipping the biobag. Hafiz stands to the side, nervously biting his thumb, eyeing the dead Narcus out of the corner of his eye. Omar collapses, the bronzed limbs secured in the cargo container inside the tiny van.
The words are recited. The scent in the air changes from the stale mildew rot of the building’s husk to a bittersweet one; Omar can’t help but think of the juicy citrus fruit from back home. A faint mist exits through Nahid’s mouth, pouring into Narcus’s slackened one. The body jolts, and then nothing. Nahid exits the circle, and Hafiz finally moves and speaks. He walks towards the circle, “Is he…?” The sharpshooter’s boot disrupts the circle. A chill whips through the space. Narcus sits up, smiling, teeth sharpened as something writhes and moves beneath the dead body’s skin. He roars and leaps with inhuman agility into the rotted structure hanging above the crew. They hear him skitter, the shattering of a window pane…and he’s gone.
Omar realizes their trouble has just begun.
The end…for now
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