❖ Turn 16
I will thank the old crab and I think before heading south - it’s best to relay this information to the cell and maybe send a few of the more capable/well-read ones to the library to follow up on that lead. We will attempt to rest for the night and I will consider changing miracles. Krah, I and maybe Pav (if willing) will follow Krah’s lead asking him to lead us back to where he came from before arriving at the yellow city. if possible we will try to procure some supplies for the trip as well as either a pack animal or henchman to help carry things.
Scene Five → Six: Departure and Preparation
You turn to the old crab-man at the archway.
You do not bow in the manner of slug-men acknowledging inferiors. You bow as you would to any elder who has kept a faith for twenty-two years that the world told them was dead. You press both hands flat against your chest — the universal gesture — and hold them there for three full seconds. Then you open them outward.
I have received this. I will carry it.
The old crab-man watches you with ancient compound eyes. He does not respond. But as you turn to leave, you hear one click behind you — short, precise, the click Krah-Moh made when he arrived at the tidal mark and touched the mud. An acknowledgement. A closing.
Krah-Moh falls into step at your left shoulder. He does not look back.
Scene Six: The Canal Quarter — Afternoon
The cell is where you left it: the grain-store, the canal light, eleven people in varying states of exhausted alertness. You have been gone perhaps four hours. Selindi has put the time to use — Hamech knows two of the safe-house protocols, and Dov has procured a very plain meal from somewhere.
You sit at the table. You tell them everything. The tidal offerings. The old crab-man. The wave-scar. What veth-cheth means in the old theological texts. What Krah-Moh’s gesture indicated when he pointed south and east toward the open water.
You tell them that Cheth-of-the-Salt-Shore appears to be alive.
The room absorbs this differently. Tuket closes her eyes for a moment and says nothing — the silence of someone who suspected and is now certain. Dov sits forward with his elbows on his knees. Pav looks at Krah-Moh with an expression that has quietly, over the last twelve hours, shifted from wariness to something he has not yet named.
Then you lay out the Cartulary.
“The archive in the merchant quarter — the Cartulary of the Three Bells. We need what they have on the Salt Shore Disturbance, what the Oligarchy’s records excised, who issued the orders for the taking rather than the killing. Someone educated left a note at our drop point who already knows the name Cheth and says the event gives our argument teeth. I want to know what that person knows, and I want us to know it before they decide whether to trust us.”
Selindi is already pulling her writing kit. “I can go. I have a clerk’s face and a merchant-quarter vocation. They won’t blink at me.”
“Take Tuket,” you say.
Tuket opens one eye. “I am not a library person.”
“You are a person who was there twenty-two years ago and knows what to look for in the gap between what the record says and what it omits. Selindi reads the text. You read the silence.”
A beat.
“Fine,” Tuket says.
CELL ASSIGNMENT LOGGED
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Selindi + Tuket → Cartulary of the Three Bells
Mission: locate Salt Shore Disturbance records,
identify who ordered the taking of Cheth, find
any record that the anonymous reader might have
drawn from.
Dov → manage canal safe house, cell security
Hamech → continue protocol training under Dov
Others → pamphlet distribution as instructed
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Evening — Rest and the Miracle
Afternoon becomes evening. You sleep through the canal-quarter dusk, which is the sleep of a man who has been awake since a Watch lantern appeared in the Copper Ghetto approximately forever ago.
NATURAL HEALING — rest without going negative
Full night's rest → restore all HP
HP: 4/4
You wake with the late stars visible through the store’s high window, Krah-Moh a motionless silhouette on his coil of rope, and the question of the miracles in front of you.
Your current arrangement: “Speak Truth to the Wretched” active; “Bind the Spirit of Oppression” and “The Poor Shall Inherit” waiting.
Speak Truth has carried you well — it opened the old crab-man, it shapes your sermons, it costs only a single HP. But you are going somewhere new tomorrow, following a crab-man into territory you do not know, toward a taken divine who may have been held for twenty-two years. Bind and Inherit are different instruments. Suited to different work.
Morning — Provisioning
The merchant quarter’s market fringe opens at dawn. You take Pav — who, when asked last night if he would come south with you, was quiet for a long time and then said: “Dov can hold the cell. I recruited Hamech. I owe something to the thing that almost burned because of that. I’ll come.” He says this without drama, which is the only way he says anything.
PAV — agreement to travel
Reaction roll 2d6 → 9 (adjusted for guilt, trust, and
investment in the Cheth thread) → WILLING
Krah-Moh moves through the market fringe with the particular stillness of a crab-man who has learned to occupy space without announcing himself. People move around him in small arcs. Nobody challenges a free crab-man walking with a slug-man and a dockworker at dawn.
Supplies:
You purchase two weeks’ travel rations for three — dried flatbread, salt fish, pepper nuts, preserved citrus rind. Waterskins refilled. Two extra torches. A coil of river-cord, lighter and stronger than the hemp you carry.
A pack animal you consider and set aside. The gesture Krah-Moh made pointed south and east — water, eventually, and the river-paths and coastal terrain between here and the Topaz Isles will not accommodate a mule where it matters.
What you need instead is a passage-contact, or coin enough to buy one when the time comes.
SUPPLY COSTS
─────────────────────────────────────────────────
Rations ×14 days (×3 people): 18 gp
Waterskins ×2 (additional): 4 gp
River-cord 30 ft: 3 gp
Torches ×4 (additional): 2 gp
─────────
Total: 27 gp
Coin remaining: 49 gp
─────────────────────────────────────────────────
Then, at a tea-stall near the river-steps, a henchman.
Not sought — found. A woman sitting alone on an upturned crate with a quarter-staff across her knees and the look of someone who has been deciding whether to eat today or save the coin. Human, low-caste by dress, roughly your age, with calloused hands and a tattoo on her left forearm that you recognize: a simplified version of the circle-of-shells motif. Not the salt-shore congregation exactly — but descended from something that knew it.
She looks at Krah-Moh’s shell.
Specifically, at the scar.
Her eyes come up to yours.
CHA check — does she come?
Positive double roll (Heretic-Scholar, Congregation of the Unwashed)
2d20 → 5 and 14 — take the 14
14 > 13 — FAILURE by 1.
Not a refusal — a condition.
“I know what that mark means,” she says quietly. “Or I know what my grandmother said it means. She was salt-shore before I was born.”
She looks at you steadily. “I’ll carry your pack and watch your back. But I won’t follow someone who doesn’t know where they’re going. Tell me honestly: do you know what you’re walking into?”
NEW NPC — POTENTIAL HENCHMAN
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Name unknown. Low-caste human woman. Quarter-staff.
Salt-shore heritage (grandmother was there).
Recognized Krah-Moh's veth-cheth mark immediately.
Condition: honest answer before she commits.
Standard henchman rate: ~3 gp/week + keep.
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────
The river-steps lead south. Krah-Moh is standing two feet behind you, patient, waiting for you to finish whatever requires finishing before he walks you to the place he came from.
The sun is clear and yellow above the Yellow City’s rooftops. Three things wait for your attention before you leave this morning:
One — the woman’s question. Do you know what you’re walking into?
Two — the miracle. A day of preparation means you can change what is active now, before you go. What do you want to carry with you?
Three — “Cheth-of-the-Salt-Shore” is a name that still means something to people who have circles of shells tattooed on their arms at dawn in the market fringe. When you find him — if you find him — what will you say?
◆ Vothrog HP 4/4 · Yellow City, river-steps market fringe · Supplies bought; Pav willing; potential henchman asking for honesty; miracle choice open; Krah-Moh ready to lead south
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