8 December, 847 IE – 1 January, 848 IE - Charterhall
The weeks following the carriage house were, by any honest measure, good ones.
With Mistress Ash’s quiet guidance, the crew had discovered what lay beneath their basement—another stratum of old city, far deeper than Charterhall’s current foundations, sealed and forgotten beneath Banner Road for longer than anyone could guess. Stone rooms. Barracks. Private quarters. Space enough to build a proper workshop. The Old Town Echoes dug in, cleared out, and rebuilt. Most of them had been sleeping on borrowed floors or open air before this. The new quarters changed that. Whatever the work ahead would ask of them, they would at least be meeting it rested.
A Reasonable Accounting
Locket arrived at the Ink & Anvil within hours of the message being sent—sidling into the private alcove behind the bar with the practiced ease of someone who had made a great many discreet entrances. Cam set Lancaster’s head on the table between them without ceremony, inside a bag that had seen better days.
Locket opened it with two fingers, considered what was inside, and set it back down. “Well,” they said, “that’s quite dramatic of you.”
Four coin changed hands. Locket was professionally unsurprised by the absence of Lancaster’s black book or his formulas—noting that the book had most likely found its way into the constabulary’s custody some time ago. What the crew kept to themselves—the bottled spirit, the encrypted notes, the conspiracy wall now stored carefully in the new workshop—remained their own affair. Locket didn’t ask. Some things were not part of the deal.
Before leaving, Locket offered two pieces of intelligence as a courtesy: Inspector Holt had recently taken up a new position at the Charterhall station and was proving resistant to the usual means of managing problematic lawmen—dismayingly so, in Locket’s word. And the Reclaimer’s Circle had drawn scrutiny for the university theft. Evidence had surfaced. Aldric Venn was described with a respect that came close to a warning: an old hand, decades in the business, not to be underestimated even when he was on the back foot.
Locket drained the rest of a drink, gave the bag one last look, and left without it.
Alistair Crowe
The Lancaster job had not resolved itself without complication. Word reached the crew that Alistair Crowe—the careful records clerk who had been slipping schedule discrepancies to Watcher for years—had been pulled from his office in irons by the Bluecoats, brought in for questioning about the Echoes’ whereabouts and activities.
Cam handled it quietly. A direct conversation with the constables holding him, a coin laid on a desk, and Crowe was back at his paperwork by evening, none the worse for wear. A fruit basket arrived for him not long after—the kind of gesture that did not acknowledge what had happened and did not need to.
The Work of a Month
With the war against the Reclaimer’s Circle still technically declared, the crew had limited time to recover between rounds of business. They spent what they had wisely.
Watcher walked the streets of Charterhall for days, moving through markets and taverns and the edges of other people’s conversations, planting doubts and quietly redirecting assumptions. The story of who had done what in the previous weeks grew muddier in his wake, and the constabulary’s interest drifted with it.
The counterfeit documents the crew had assembled—dated, certified, and convincingly weathered—had been waiting for the right moment. That moment, it turned out, was a warrant: Malus Thorne, the Reclaimer’s Circle’s chief enforcer and the man who had personally beaten Quellyn half to death when the war began, was arrested by the Charterhall constabulary for his alleged role in the university theft. The evidence was tidy enough to hold. Thorne was bound for Iron Hook prison for a month, at minimum.
The constabulary, satisfied that it had its man, closed the books on the university matter. The Echoes were no longer wanted. The Reclaimers—stripped of their enforcer, reeling from weeks of cascading misfortune—had lost a full tier of standing. The capable mid-tier organization that had declared war on the crew in autumn was something smaller now, more cautious, less capable of bringing force to bear.
By the time the city turned its calendar over to 848 IE, the Echoes were no longer the crew they had been in autumn. They had a home. They had a settled debt. And their enemies were weaker than they had been in years.
New Year’s Eve
The question of Aldric Venn had not resolved itself, and the temptation of the Reclaimers’ weakened state was difficult to ignore. On New Year’s Eve, with the city given over to celebration, Watcher and Eidolon went walking through Reclaimer turf to see what could be found.
They were excellent at not being noticed. Moving through the reveling crowds and the lamplight of another people’s festivities, they drew no attention whatsoever. Unfortunately, they also drew no intelligence. A night’s worth of careful observation through the streets around Reclaimer territory yielded nothing of value—no sign of Venn, no sense of where he lived or held court, no useful intelligence of any kind. They returned at dawn with bags of roasted mushrooms from a street cart and very little else.
Wormwood Bridge
Cam made a decision. If they could not find Venn through watching, perhaps he could be found another way. A message went out—neutral in tone, direct in intention. The war was not good for either side. The Old Town Echoes were willing to discuss terms.
The crew moved toward Reclaimer territory in the pre-dawn darkness of New Year’s morning, intent on passing along the message.
They did not make it far.
Near the Reclaimer’s turf, Cam put her fist up and the crew stopped. A shape in the shadows. A flicker of movement that didn’t match the wind. The crack of a shot confirmed what she had already understood: there were shooters positioned ahead, and not just one. The Reclaimers—weakened as they were—had people watching the approaches. They had been expected.
Boo called out “Parley!” into the dark with considerable optimism. Crow noted, from cover, that it wasn’t likely to help. Another shot answered the question.
Nyx produced a smoke bomb from somewhere in her coat and threw it. Cam fired her pistol toward the muzzle flash she’d spotted—not to hit, but to slow.
Crow pulled on the thread of awareness that Mistress Ash had granted the crew—the capacity to perceive the city as it existed in the older, quieter layer beneath the living streets—and found what he was looking for. The tailor shop beside them was old enough, and still enough, that it had become permeable in that particular way. There was a way through its walls that did not require a door.
He said so, and they moved.
Below
The crew went through the shop’s basement, down through a hatch so old it had long since stopped being anyone’s concern, and out into the drainage tunnels beneath Charterhall. In the dark below, they made their way toward an exit they knew.
Near the Wormwood Bridge approach, Cam and Eidolon scanned the tunnel mouth and spotted three figures posted at the bridge—at least one face that Cam recognized from a previous ambush in an alley that had also not gone according to plan. The bridge was being watched.
System Notes
- Workshop and Quarters upgrades installed. The crew’s lair now includes private quarters, a workshop, and expanded barracks space discovered in a deeper stratum beneath the Ink & Anvil basement.
- Received 4 coin from Locket for the Lancaster contract: 2 coin to the crew vault, 2 coin to Cam personally.
- Entanglement (Usual Suspects): Alistair Crowe picked up by the Bluecoats for questioning; released via a 1-coin bribe paid by Cam.
- Watcher reduced crew heat to 0 during downtime.
- Counterfeit documents framed Malus Thorne for the university theft. Thorne was arrested and sentenced to approximately one month in Iron Hook (until February 848 IE). Crew’s wanted level dropped to 0; the Reclaimer’s Circle absorbed all associated heat.
- The Reclaimer’s Circle has been downgraded from Tier 1 to Tier 0.
- All remaining crew members indulged vice during downtime.
- Crew XP: 1 XP (Ghost Echoes used effectively in the Wormwood Bridge escape). Individual XP: 1 XP each to Boo, Watcher, Eidolon, Nyx, Cam, Crow, and Freakshow.
- Active clocks: Nyx: Tissue Sustainer Research (7/12); On The Inspector’s Radar (1/6).
