25 January – 2 February, 848 IE — Charterhall & Crow’s Foot
The parish had gone quiet, and that was the trouble. Cam and most of the others were away on business of their own — a war leaves a great deal undone behind it — and those left in the basement beneath the Ink & Anvil found themselves with a week to fill and a name that had grown far too loud to carry comfortably. Watcher put it plainly: their brand was not one that belonged on the front page of the news sheets. So they spent the week making themselves smaller. Freakshow worked the story that the Echoes had been framed by the very men they were accused of putting down — patsies, nothing more — and nobody bit. Crow took the same errand to the Mortar and Pestle, where he tried to plant the notion that Malus Thorne, sour and idle behind Ironhook’s walls, had been the one to send the bad beer, and the room simply did not care for it. Nyx fared better, quietly, in her own way; and Watcher went out and came back holding something a bluecoat of the district would very much prefer stayed private. By week’s end the Echoes were nearly out of the gossip altogether. It cost them along the way. Crow was stopped by constables who wanted to know a great many things, and talked his way clear with an air of wounded innocence and a quantity of coin — gentlemen, I’m sure this is all a misunderstanding. Watcher went too far down his own rabbit hole, walking the old streets and haunts and cataloguing them until he had drifted somewhere he had no business being, and the tangle of it ended with Fat Eddie hauled in by bluecoats working their way through every former Reclaimer they could find, asking who had killed Venn. Watcher paid out of his own pocket to get him back.
Crow had one errand of his own. Since the night his luck ran so unnaturally hot that Gabbart told him not to come back, the table had been shut to him, and a man who cannot get to his cards is a man with too much time. So he went and found Gabbart and asked, plainly, what it would take. Gabbart was owed five coin by a fellow called Duke and had never cared for the collecting end of the business. Bring it in, and the door would open again.
What They Knew of Thorne
They also spent the week learning their man. Before the Reclaimer’s Circle he had been small time — a sap-and-alley reputation, nothing that would fill a page. Venn had been the thinker of the pair; Thorne was the puncher, the kicker, the occasional stabber, and it had never much occurred to him to be anything else. There was an old rumor that he kept a woman somewhere in the city, and an equally old habit of beating anyone who said so out loud. The crew put word out in the places where such things travel and bought themselves a friendly set of eyes for the week — Morty, a Shiv, who knew the ground and asked no questions about why they wanted it — on the reasoning that a man walking out of prison has to walk somewhere.
Out of Ironhook
Mid-morning on the first of February came in dim and blustery, snow blowing in thin skirls across the yard, and the gates of Ironhook opened long enough for a warden to give Malus Thorne an unceremonious nudge into the street. He pulled his coat around him and started walking. Watcher went after him and stayed with him the whole day, and Thorne never once looked back — no doubling, no doorways, no interest at all in whether the city was watching him. He walked out of Barrowcleft, through Dunslough, over the river into Coalridge, where he stopped at a street cart famous for a particular grilled lizard and mushroom sandwich and ate one with unhurried pleasure. Then up the main road into Charterhall and straight to the Mortar and Pestle, where he went in and, half an hour later, came out visibly furious. From there into Crow’s Foot, and a tenement so far down the ladder it had no name — a flophouse with working girls out front and four stories of sagging brick above them. Hours went by. Watcher shifted his position twice, waited, and was finally rewarded with a silhouette on the top floor: Thorne in a room to himself, settling in like a man who had been there before, and a woman with him. The lamp went out and did not come on again. It was a few blocks, no more, from where the Shivs hold court.
Watcher was still being debriefed near midnight when Fat Eddie came in with the other half of the day. Thorne had gone into the Mortar and Pestle that afternoon and laid hands on Gabby, who keeps the bar there, over Venn — the man had been in a black temper about it, and left the place in no better one. Eddie thought the tavern sat near one of Thorne’s old haunts. It seems to be a habit with him, Crow observed: shopkeepers, and his fists, and no third idea. He said he would add it to the list of Thorne’s sins.
The Fourth Floor
They went that night. Across to Crow’s Foot on foot, then the tunnels, then up out of an alley two streets off and over the rooftops — the same shape of thing they had done at Camden Street, and it went just as smoothly. The roof door gave way to Nyx’s picks without complaint, and the stairs let them out into one long hallway: an open dormitory of pallets down one side, private rooms down the other, and a man in the Crows’ colors pacing the length of it a little after midnight. The building stood on Crows ground, and the Echoes had no appetite whatever for making enemies of a gang that size over a man neither of them cared about. So Freakshow stumbled out into the hall, magnificently drunk and loudly aggrieved that people were trying to sleep, and while the man’s attention was fixed on him Nyx put a dart through the doorway that shattered harmlessly against the wall behind his head. Crow felt out a way around — there were four walls between him and the far end of the corridor, and no time to go through them. So when the man took Freakshow’s arm to walk him downstairs, Freakshow met him with a fistful of purple trance powder full in the face. He coughed, sneezed glitter, sat down against the wall, found a water stain on the ceiling, and gave the rest of his night to it. Freakshow, who had breathed a fair share of his own handful, spent the remainder of the job in the company of purple elephants.
Thorne’s door was locked. Nyx had it open almost silently, onto a dark room and the sound of two people sleeping. They had thought of this hours earlier, sitting over the plan, when Crow had looked up and said they should simply do what had worked at Venn’s house — so every one of them had a mask. Nyx pitched a vial into the room and shut the door on the hiss of it, and they waited out a full minute in the hallway while nobody came and the man at the far end kept faith with his ceiling. Then in, under the green wash of algae lamps: the room reeking of sweat and drink, Thorne insensible on the bed, the woman beside him no more wakeful. They bound him, gagged him, and got him out — a great slab of a man, dead weight, up the stairs and over the roofs and down into the alley on rigging lines — and were into the tunnels and gone without a sound behind them.
A Place Where the Bells Don’t Ring
The trouble was where to put him. The crew hold a good deal of ground now and not one foot of it is safe for this. Number 16 is not theirs yet, and a corner of the sewers is not an interrogation. So they wrapped him in a blanket, and the Reclaimed helped bundle the whole ungainly parcel into a cart, and they hauled him the width of the city to the carriage house in Six Towers — the one property they know of where a man may die without the spirit bells ever ringing for him. The Dimmer Sisters have not been paid for it. The job the crew owe them still stands undone, and taking the liberty of their ground as a place to keep a prisoner is a debt laid neatly on top of a debt. But by the small hours of the second of February, Malus Thorne was theirs, in a room no one in the city can see into.
System Notes
- Heat cleared from 7 to 0 over the downtime. Nyx’s and Watcher’s efforts landed fully (a quiet fix, and leverage collected on a bluecoat/witness); Freakshow’s and Crow’s rumor-seeding both failed. Rep holds at 7. No wanted level.
- Entanglement: Interrogation. Crow was picked up by the Bluecoats and paid 3 coin to walk away (4 → 1 coin).
- Watcher overindulged his vice. In place of Lost, the GM substituted a second entanglement roll — Gang Trouble — resolving as Fat Eddie being arrested during Bluecoat questioning of former Reclaimers. Watcher paid 1 coin from his own pocket to spring him (4 → 3 coin).
- Downtime activities: gather information on Thorne (Nyx exceptional, Freakshow standard, Crow nothing), Acquire Asset for a local informant — Morty, a Shiv, tier 2, a temporary asset only and not a standing contact — training, and vice.
- Crow’s route back to Gabbart’s table: collect the 5 coin owed to Gabbart by a man named Duke.
- Flashback purchased for gas masks (1 stress, Crow) — the same play used at Venn’s house. Freakshow took reduced effect for the remainder of the job after catching his own trance powder. Group prowl to haul Thorne out succeeded with one failure; Watcher took 1 stress as leader.
- 2 XP to every character present, and 2 XP to the crew. No payoff — the job produced nothing to divide.
- In-world date advanced from 25 January to the small hours of 2 February, 848 IE.
- Malus Thorne is held prisoner at Lancaster’s Carriage House. The Dimmer Sisters’ job remains undone, and using the property may cost standing with them.
