❖ Turn 5
Read the paper - drink some tea, then surface from the other the last known wherabouts of hamech.
Scene Two: The Canal Quarter — Dawn
You take the paper from Selindi’s fingers.
It is folded twice, sealed with a smear of plain beeswax — no crest, no signet. The water-stain is old; this sat somewhere damp for at least a day before it reached the drop point. You break the seal.
The handwriting inside is not Common. It is the High Tongue — your tongue, the slug-men’s scholarly script — but written in a cramped, deliberate hand that suggests someone who learned it from books rather than from childhood. Educated. Not a slug-man. The message is short:
I have read three of your papers. The fourth came to me by accident. The argument is not wrong — only incomplete. You speak of the spark but not of the vessel it was taken from. There is a name you do not yet know: Cheth-of-the-Salt-Shore. Find what was done to that name and your argument will have teeth it currently lacks.
I do not sign this. You will understand why if you find what I am pointing at.
— a reader
No meeting point. No demand. Just a name and a direction.
You fold it twice and put it inside your robe against your chest. Cheth-of-the-Salt-Shore. It means nothing to you yet.
Pav refills your clay cup without being asked. The tea is thin — canal-quarter poor, steeped from leaves already used once — but it is hot, and the canal light is turning from grey to amber, and for a moment the four of you (and Krah-Moh, motionless on his coil of rope) simply breathe together in the small warmth of not being arrested.
Krah-Moh wraps both claws around the shell Pav gave him. The steam rises. He does not drink. He simply holds it.
“Hamech,” you say.
Selindi sets down her cup. She looks at Dov.
Dov speaks carefully. “He came with Pav. Pav knows him.”
Pav’s shoulders do something uncomfortable. “We worked the same unloading crew last season. He’s— he’s not bad. Just green. Nervous. When the lanterns appeared he went east, toward the spice-factor district.” A pause. “There is a tea house on Vellum Lane, near the factor warehouses. The Amber Moth. He goes there when he’s frightened. Has done for years — it’s where he waits out trouble.”
Selindi’s expression does not change, but something in it goes very still.
“What,” you say.
“The Amber Moth,” she says, “is where Constable Uvaris takes his morning tea. Every morning. Has done for years.”
A beat of silence.
“Uvaris runs the Watch detail for the spice-factor quarter,” she adds, as if you might not have followed. “He is not— he is not a bad man, in the ordinary sense. But he is thorough. And he knows faces.”
ROLL — Does Hamech make it through the night without being recognized?
d6 fortune roll (he's green, Uvaris is thorough, but it's pre-dawn):
→ 3
Middling. He made it through the night. But morning tea is coming.
Pav stares at the floor. “He doesn’t know about Uvaris. I didn’t— it never came up.”
Dawn is fully breaking now. The Amber Moth opens at first light.
CURRENT THREADS
────────────────────────────────────────────────
Hamech → Amber Moth, Vellum Lane; Constable
Uvaris takes morning tea there;
window closing with the sunrise
The Paper → "Cheth-of-the-Salt-Shore" — unknown;
an anonymous reader with High Tongue
literacy and something to reveal
Cell → intact; Krah-Moh present; 6 safe
in quarter houses
Pamphlets → 6 in circulation; 6 on your person
────────────────────────────────────────────────
COIN: 76 gp HP: 4/4
Pav is already on his feet, not quite looking at you, waiting to see if you send him or go yourself or do something else entirely.
What do you do?
◆ Vothrog HP 4/4 · Yellow City, Canal Quarter · Hamech at the Amber Moth; Uvaris arrives at first light; clock is moving
← Turn 04 · ↑ All turns · Turn 06 →