❖ Turn 6
ask Pav to come with me and Krah to the teahouse, descreetly, the goal will be to see if we can spot hamech before the constable does and safely extricate him back to the safe-house.
Scene Three: Vellum Lane — First Light
Selindi reads your face before you say anything. She nods once, sits back down, and begins methodically moving the clay cups away from the edge of the table.
Pav is already pulling on his jacket.
You look at Krah-Moh. The problem announces itself: a free crab-man with work-scars and no collar in the spice-factor district at dawn is its own kind of trouble. But you did not come this far tonight by leaving people.
You catch Krah-Moh’s eyes and mime a set of claws tucking close to a body — small, quiet, stay back. Then you point at Pav, at yourself, at the door. We go first. You follow. He watches the mime with what you’ve learned to read as patience, then dips his head — barely a centimeter, but deliberate.
Three of you slip out into the amber morning.
Vellum Lane is twenty minutes north and east, cutting through the warrens behind the spice-factor warehouses. You move at a purpose-walker’s pace — not running, which draws eyes, but not browsing either. The city is waking around you in layers: first the cockroach-herders with their long switches, then the factor clerks in twos and threes, then the cart traffic beginning to thicken at the junction stones.
TIMING — Do you reach the Amber Moth before Uvaris?
d6 fortune roll → 4
You're ahead of him. Barely.
The Amber Moth announces itself by smell before the sign — cardamom and burnt sugar and the particular char of cheap brazier-tea. It is a narrow shophouse, its front open to the lane on two hinged panels, six low tables visible from outside. A fat yellow lamp still burns over the counter even though the sun has climbed above the warehouse rooftops.
┌────────────────────────────────┐
│ AMBER MOTH TEA HOUSE │
│ ┌──┐ ┌──┐ ┌──┐ │
│ │ │ │ │ │ │ ← tables │
│ └──┘ └──┘ └──┘ │
│ ┌──┐ ┌──┐ ┌──┐ │
│ │ │ │ │ │ │ │
│ └──┘ └──┘ └──┘ │
│ [COUNTER] [BACK] │
└──────────────┬─────────────────┘
│ open front
═══════════════╪════════════════
VELLUM LANE
Hamech is at the far-left back table. Pav sees him a half-second before you do — a slight hitch in his step, quickly controlled. Hamech is hunched over a cup, both hands wrapped around it, staring at the table surface. He looks like a man who spent the last two hours trying to disappear into a clay vessel. He has not been arrested. He has not, apparently, moved.
There are four other customers. None of them are Uvaris.
“He’s here,” Pav breathes. “He’s fine. We can just—”
Then the fat yellow lamp over the counter catches something at the edge of Vellum Lane. A shadow, regular and unhurried. The particular cadence of a man who walks the same route every morning.
WIS check — spot Uvaris's approach before he reaches the door
WIS 15 → roll 1d20 → 8
8 ≤ 15 — SUCCESS Quality: 8
You see him. Constable Uvaris is perhaps forty feet down the lane — a broad man in Watch gray, off-duty by his jacket but with the lamp still on his belt from the night shift, walking with the comfortable certainty of a man headed toward his tea. He has not looked toward the Amber Moth yet. He is finishing a conversation with a cart-driver at the lane’s junction.
Thirty seconds. Maybe forty.
Krah-Moh has pressed himself into the shadow of the warehouse wall across the lane without being told. He, too, has seen the Watch gray.
Hamech has not looked up.
The tea-house keeper at the counter is watching you the way keepers watch people who haven’t sat down yet.
CLOCK
────────────────────────────────────
Uvaris: ~35 seconds from the door
Hamech: far table, head down, unaware
Pav: at your shoulder, waiting
Krah-Moh: across the lane, in shadow
Keeper: watching you from the counter
────────────────────────────────────
Pav could go in alone — he knows Hamech, and two dockworkers leaving together draws far less attention than a slug-man in plain robes extracting someone. But that means trusting Pav to move Hamech now, without you, and Pav’s hands are doing something uncertain at his sides.
Or you walk in yourself — authority, speed, the fiction of a slug-man collecting his errand-boy — and you have Hamech out the side before Uvaris clears the door.
Or something else. The world is not yet closed.
What do you do?
◆ Vothrog HP 4/4 · Vellum Lane, outside the Amber Moth · Hamech inside, unaware; Uvaris 35 seconds out; clock is running
← Turn 05 · ↑ All turns · Turn 07 →