❖ Turn 8
Introduce myself plainly and advise him to be more aware of his surroundings for his own safety and ours. Once back at the canal district, ill ask all assembled if any of them have heard of Ceth-of-the-Salt-Shore.
Scene Three → Four: Vellum Lane to Canal Quarter
You walk beside Hamech for a dozen paces before you speak. Your voice is low, flat, stripped of the sermon-cadence you use in meetings.
“My name is Vothrog. I am a slug-man who has concluded that the system which made me what I am is an abomination before the divine. That is all you need to know about me. What you need to know about yourself is that you nearly ended this cell tonight by going to ground in a place you’ve been going for years — a place, it turns out, that a Watch constable treats as his morning table.”
You let that land.
“The Watch does not need to be clever. It only needs you to be predictable. When things break apart, you do not go somewhere comfortable. You go somewhere new. You wait. You reach out through the protocols Selindi will teach you.” A pause. “You are not in trouble with me. You are alive. But you need to understand what almost happened.”
WIS check — does Hamech actually hear this, or does fear close him off?
WIS 15, positive double roll — Heretic-Scholar applies (teaching is the vocation)
2d20 → 6 and 12 — take the 12
12 ≤ 15 — SUCCESS Quality: 12
Hamech walks three more paces in silence. Then he says, very quietly: “I didn’t know about the constable.”
“Now you do.”
He nods. It is a different nod than the one people give when they want you to stop talking. It is the nod of a man filing something away where it will stay.
Scene Four: The Canal Quarter — Mid-Morning
The cell reassembles by the time you return. The six who scattered are filtering back in twos — Tuket, the old woman, arrives last, smelling of river mud and completely unbothered. The ulufo, whose name you’ve only ever heard as Pip, is already asleep in the corner on a coil of jute.
Eleven people and one crab-man in a room built for storage. It smells of grain and canal water and unwashed cloth and, faintly, of hope, which has its own smell — anxious and sharp.
You let them settle. Then you produce the folded paper from your robe.
“Someone left this at the drop point last night. Before the meeting. They write the High Tongue but they aren’t slug-men — the hand is learned, not born. They’ve read our pamphlets. They pointed me at a name.”
You look around the room.
“Cheth-of-the-Salt-Shore. Has anyone here heard it?”
KNOWLEDGE ROLL — who in the cell knows this name?
Roll 1d6 for each: Selindi (INT-adjacent, 4 languages), Tuket (old, Yellow City native), Dov (dockworker), Pav (dockworker), others
Selindi: d6 → 5 — she knows something
Tuket: d6 → 6 — she knows more
Dov: d6 → 2 — nothing
Pav: d6 → 1 — nothing
Others: d6 → 3 — nothing
The silence after the question is of two kinds. Most of it is blank — the silence of people who have never heard a name and have nothing to offer. Pav shrugs. The ulufo does not wake up.
But Selindi goes still in a particular way. Not surprised — more like a woman who has just seen a word she thought was in a dead language written on a living wall.
And Tuket, the old woman, sets down her cup.
They look at each other. Then Tuket looks at you, and her expression is complicated in ways you cannot immediately read — part recognition, part something older and heavier.
“Sit down,” Tuket says. She says it to the room, but she is looking at you. “Both of you sit down.”
She folds her hands around her empty cup.
“Cheth-of-the-Salt-Shore was not a place. It was a person. Or it was, once.” Her voice is the voice of someone who has been deciding for a long time whether to say this. “The salt-shore workers — the ones who render the sea-salt in the tidal flats south of Old Town — they had a god. Not a Brahmin god. Theirs. A crab-man god, or what they called a god. Cheth.”
Selindi speaks quietly into the pause: “The slug-men’s histories call it a labor insurrection. Twenty-something years ago. The salt-shore quarter. It was put down.”
“It wasn’t an insurrection,” Tuket says. She is not angry. She is simply correcting a fact. “It was a congregation. They prayed, and the slug-lords called that insurrection, and they put it down.”
A beat.
“Cheth died in it,” she says. “Or was taken. I don’t know which. I was young. But the salt-shore workers still leave offerings at the tidal mark on the dark of the moon. Cracked shells and yellow flowers. I have seen them.” She looks at you, level and direct. “Someone who knows that name wants you to find what happened to a crab-man divine who led a congregation that was destroyed before you were born. And they want you to find it for the same reason you wrote those pamphlets.”
The room is very quiet.
Krah-Moh, at the far wall, has not moved. But his compound eyes are on Tuket, and they have not left her face since she said the name.
THREADS UPDATED
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Cheth-of-the-Salt-Shore:
— crab-man holy figure / "god" of the tidal salt workers
— killed or taken in a labor congregation ~20 years ago
— slug-lord histories call it an insurrection
— offerings still left at the tidal mark; congregation
memory alive underground
— anonymous reader wants you to find what happened
— Krah-Moh clearly recognizes the name
Hamech: corrected, present, oriented to protocol
Uvaris: will remember a slug-man in plain robes on Vellum Lane
Cell: intact, 11 humans + Krah-Moh, canal quarter safe house
Pamphlets: 6 in circulation · 6 on your person
Coin: 76 gp · HP: 4/4
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Tuket is still watching you. The cell is still watching you. Krah-Moh has not looked away from the old woman.
The world has just handed you a thread that runs twenty years back and down into the tidal mud, and something at the other end of it is either dead or waiting.
What do you do?
◆ Vothrog HP 4/4 · Yellow City, Canal Quarter safe house · Cheth-of-the-Salt-Shore named; Tuket and Selindi know the shape of it; Krah-Moh is listening
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