Loose Coins in the Bricks
Campton had no patience for first impressions.
The outer ring of the city — the Bricks, people called it, not affectionately — was the part of Campton that worked. Warehouses, tanneries, market stalls, and narrow passages that smelled of fish and old iron. The architecture was practical to the point of argument: every building doing its job, no interest in doing more. People moved through it at the speed of people who had somewhere to be and no reason to make eye contact.
The party arrived into the middle of this with their road-dirt and their weapons and the general air of adventurers who had been outside for a while. Nobody looked at them.
This was a mistake on nobody's part.
The Fleet Market announced itself in smell before it announced itself in sight — spices, dried meat, canvas, and beneath it all the particular sharpness of a place where a lot of money changed hands very quickly. The stalls ran for two blocks, dense and loud. Sellers who'd been at it since dawn had the practiced rhythm of people who'd long since stopped thinking about their pitch.
Cylia reached for her coin pouch at the second stall.
She found less than she'd left the road with.
The process of discovering this took approximately eight seconds. The process of accepting it took significantly less — Cylia was not, at her core, a person who lingered in the acceptance phase. She was already moving before the stall owner had finished looking confused, already scanning the market crowd with the focused attention of someone converting anger directly into momentum, already gone.
Elaazar and Arya watched her disappear into the bodies and noise of the Fleet Market.
Elaazar looked at Arya. Arya looked at Elaazar.
"We should think about this," Arya said.
They thought about it. They looked around. The market was full, loud, and indifferent. Whoever had lifted Cylia's purse was already elsewhere — probably several elsewheres by now, the coins distributed through hands that hadn't been there when it happened.
There was no sign of Cylia either.
"Warehouse," Elaazar said.
They went to the warehouse.
Warehouse 12 was in the High district, which meant it was clean and locked and labelled. The knock they gave was the one Jackie had told them to give. The door opened by a crack and then, after a moment of assessment, the rest of the way.
Harry was inside. So was Katya.
Harry was the kind of person who made a room feel slightly more organized simply by being in it — not through effort, but through the quiet gravity of someone accustomed to being the one who knew things. He looked at the two of them arriving without Cylia with the mild interest of a person who had worked with adventurers before and had therefore stopped being surprised by incomplete arrivals.
Katya stood near the wall with her arms crossed and the look of someone who had been waiting longer than she'd wanted to and was not bothering to pretend otherwise.
They sat down.
The goal — stated plainly, the way Harry stated most things — was the Temple of Mage-King Voss. Sareth Voss, who had built his own tomb, sealed himself inside, and distributed the key among his three heirs. Arya's amulet was part of that key. They'd known that since the fens. What they were still missing was the last piece — some component that would complete the mechanism and allow the tomb to be opened.
Regarding the stolen coins: Harry suggested Jackie might have better insight than anyone in the warehouse. She knew these streets, she knew this world. She could often be found at a tavern in the Bricks called The Wounded Rogue.
And Cylia — Harry, checking a mental note — Cylia would probably find her own way.
She did.
Cylia appeared at the warehouse door later that evening with the energy of someone who had covered a significant amount of ground very quickly and found nothing, and had arrived at a kind of furious equanimity about it. The coins were gone. The gang was gone. The Fleet Market was extremely uninterested in having witnessed anything.
The party was together again.
Coincidence, or something shaped like it: the Brickborn gang — that was the name, Harry mentioned it with recognition — had a visible outpost near the warehouses. Not subtle. The kind of presence that says we're here, what are you going to do about it. Harry and Katya had already been watching it. The outpost was also where they suspected the last piece of the key had ended up, passed through hands until it landed somewhere it was being kept without being understood.
The plan assembled itself the way plans do when everyone in the room already has the same idea and is mostly deciding when.
The plan was to be quiet about it.
It was a good plan. It had the structural advantage of being correct — the right approach, properly considered, accounting for the number of people inside and the layout of the space and the inadvisability of noise in a district full of warehouses where sound carried.
It lasted until approximately three minutes after entry, when something went wrong in the specific way that things go wrong when a plan requires everyone to execute it simultaneously and at least one person has a different interpretation of quiet.
They fought. The fight was not elegant. It was the kind of fight that happens in a cramped space against people who know the space better than you do, which means it was also the kind of fight that feels like it takes longer than it does. They won it by being more determined than graceful, which was, at this point, a pattern.
After the fight: a casket of bottled wines. Unremarkable. The kind of thing you find in a gang's storeroom and don't think twice about.
Arya thought twice about it.
She turned one bottle over and ran a finger along the inside of the label — it came off in a strip, the paper thicker than necessary. On the back, two lines of text, small and deliberately placed:
To find out more, meet with the Horned Goddess below the full moon's light.
She showed it to Elaazar. Elaazar showed it to Cylia. Nobody said anything for a moment, which was the appropriate response to finding a poem inside a wine label.
Back at the warehouse, Harry listened without interrupting. He set the bottle on the table and looked at it.
"The full moon is a few days from now," he said.
He also had theater tickets. A play — The Architect's Door — about the legend of King Voss, a city institution, the kind of thing Campton performed every season and the kind of thing that told you more about how a city understood itself than any formal history. He'd been planning to go.
"All of us," he said.
Katya looked like she had opinions about this that she was choosing not to share.
Outside, the city moved through its evening with the indifference of somewhere large enough not to need any of them. The full moon was a few days away. There was a Horned Goddess to find, a key piece somewhere in the dark, and a tomb that had been sealed for longer than anyone in the warehouse had been alive.
They had theater tickets.
Next episode: best clothes, a borrowed curtain call, and a figure with horns that might not be a costume.