The Brightstone estate of Lord Kilgrave — a large manor house with a carriage house of its own, set on fenced grounds that back directly onto a canal. Somewhere beneath it lies the vault holding the gold tribal artifact the Dimmer Sisters have contracted the Old Town Echoes to steal and replace.
Brightstone, where the very richest of Doskvol live, is a district of marble frontages, high walls and higher security, and it does not tolerate the wrong sort of person on its streets. It is also unusually shallow: unlike most of the city, which sits atop layer upon layer of buried older city, Brightstone has essentially always been what it is now, and there is very little beneath it. Its plumbing and stormworks are excellent and well kept.
- Scouted from below by the Old Town Echoes, who took the tunnels rather than risk being picked up on the street. The sewers reach the estate but not into it — the only opening in the property is the inlet where the house’s sewage flows in. More discouraging still, Crow found the boundary itself defended: in a sluiceway where rainwater runs off toward the canal, spells and rituals are carved deep into the stone all along the property line. The security is of a markedly higher quality than the crew are used to. Session 13
- The sluiceway wards read properly at last, by the hired whisper Caleb: old, expert work, and self-powering — a mix of blood and ectoplasm carries them, and no living whisper stands behind them. They are tied off rather than actively held, which means nothing on the far side can respond in the moment, but anything passing through them, flesh or spirit, will notify someone. They can be unwound in sections, and whoever is listening will know while it happens. Restoring them would be ruinously expensive and slow. The wards on the walls, doors and grounds above are presumed better still. The alarm can also be tripped deliberately, far from wherever the crew actually intend to be. Session 15
- Detailed blueprints of the house obtained by Nyx. The ground floor is public rooms — foyer, a large circular great hall with the main stairs rising out of it, a formal dining room off the kitchen, and a study. The second floor holds bedrooms, sitting rooms and smoking rooms. The basement holds a workshop and a true vault: a bank vault with a vault door, built into the house when the house was built. The stairs down run off a back hallway near the kitchen and dining room. Session 15
- The walls of the great hall are hung with portraits of the Kilgrave line going back hundreds of years, and every one of them has a spirit bound inside it. All of them are raving, and the older the portrait, the worse the thing in it. Stefan Kilgrave hangs among them, painted as a man of science. The paintings are spirit bottles in all but name — violate one and what is in it comes out. Session 15
- On display nights the great hall is ringed with pedestals, each carrying a warded glass dome over a single labelled artifact — tribal work from just after the Breaking, a few pieces older still, and objects nobody can name. The gold piece the Dimmer Sisters want sits back near one of the walls, tagged as the work of a people called the Cherokee and dated roughly a century before the end of the world. The centrepiece, placed where guests see it first on entering, is a device of five interlocking rings in silver or platinum — the same sigil the Old Town Echoes keep finding in Cyril Lancaster’s wake. Session 15
- Infiltrated on 18 February, 848 IE by the Old Town Echoes and Caleb, who walked in the servants’ door as hired staff on forged papers from Anna-Maria’s. Session 15