2 – 18 February, 848 IE — Six Towers & Brightstone
While the others were carrying a bound man over the rooftops of Crow’s Foot, the rest of the crew had been spending a quieter week. Nyx worked on Boo until the worst of the headache that had been sitting behind her eyes for weeks finally began to lift, and Boo spent the hours she had left pouring out black ink and sending her shadow off to walk the parish without her. Eidolon went looking for comfort and found rather too much of it; he surfaced some days later with a vague memory of a cigar, an intern, and very little else, and nothing whatsoever to show for the time. Cam was across the city in Silkshore, buying a man. His name — the only one he gave — was Caleb: pale, unnervingly young-looking for whatever age he actually was, and well enough known in the right circles that nobody needed to explain who he was. She hired him for the duration of one job, for the express purpose of taking apart Lord Kilgrave’s wards. She came home with him and was met at the door by the news that Malus Thorne was tied up in the carriage house.
A Debt Settled
Cam sat down heavily and pinched the bridge of her nose. You put Thorne… in the carriage house? Crow shrugged — it had seemed a good place, and no bells would ring there if he gutted the man. The Reclaimed were watching him in shifts and had shown no reluctance about it; Thorne, it turned out, had not been well loved even inside his own gang. The consensus was that the decision belonged to Cam, and Cam did not take long over it. He was too dangerous to leave breathing and owed them too much. Kill him, bottle him, and get their people off that ground before the job came due. Freakshow asked, mildly, whether Locket would be comfortable with it; Cam said they would not be telling Locket unless he asked, and that she would handle it if he did — but she also said, aloud and in front of everyone, that they would need to pare this sort of thing back afterward. This one was a special case.
Crow took Freakshow across the city and, in the end, settled for his hands — no blood to clean up, and quick. The guards stepped outside for a minute. That was the whole of it, and that was the end of Malus Thorne, who had walked out of Ironhook a fortnight after his war ended to find he had nothing to come back to. They hired a cart and brought the body home after dark, because Nyx had asked for it and because it seemed a waste to leave a perfectly sound one behind — eyes, teeth, hair, heart, every finger and toe. A day or two later the thing that had been Thorne pulled free of what was left of him in the basement beneath the Ink & Anvil, and Crow bottled it without difficulty.
What the Statue Knew
They were all in the lair, arguing about nothing in particular, when Mistress Ash spoke inside every one of their heads at once. She had not done so in months, and most of the room flinched. She said she might know something about this Kilgrave fellow — something that would be of particular interest to Miss Nyx.
Balon Kilgrave, she said, the present Lord Kilgrave, fancies himself a sparkwright, and is middling at best. His grandfather Stefan was another matter entirely: genuinely brilliant, and the author of a number of things the family has been quietly taking credit for ever since. Among them is a hand. A clockwork hand — a beautiful piece of machinery by any measure — fashioned for the Lady Kilgrave after she lost her own in an accident, and fitted with an interface between living tissue and sparkcraft so sophisticated that she could work it as though it were flesh. Ash had every reason to believe it was still in Balon Kilgrave’s possession, and every reason to believe Nyx would want it. She added one more thing before she went quiet: unless something had changed, the manor could not be entered from outside without help from within, and they would do well to think of another approach.
Nyx has a long and very aggressive list of things she must steal or invent before her work can go forward. This was one of them. From that moment she was rabid about Brightstone.
Brightstone
They went at it from every side they had. Crow spent his days with the news sheets and came back with the shape of the man: old money, several genuinely lucrative businesses scattered across the city — a mushroom farm, a law firm, a share in one of the leviathan hunters — no appetite at all for politics, and a serious, expensive interest in antiquities. Eidolon tried to watch the house and spent the afternoon standing behind a lamp post; somewhere in the middle of it a pair of bluecoats took an interest in several of them, shoved them around a little, and walked them out of the district, and Brightstone remembered their faces for it.
Cam took Boo and Caleb down into the sluiceways under the estate, and Caleb was impressed, which was not what anyone wanted to hear. Old work, he said. Exceptional. Anything passing through it — flesh or spirit — would raise a ruckus somewhere. More to the point, these wards had been maintained, and they were self-powering: a mix of blood and ectoplasm carried the whole thing, with no living whisper standing behind it to notice or respond. They were tied off. They could be unwound section by section, but whoever was listening would know it was happening, and they were old enough and expert enough that putting them back would cost a fortune and a great deal of time. Boo asked about weak seams and key runes and found none; she did establish that the alarm could be tripped deliberately, somewhere far from wherever the crew actually were, and filed that away. If the wards were this good in a sewer, Caleb added, they would be better on the walls and the doors and the ground itself.
It was Freakshow who found the door. He followed a young cook and a young butler of the Kilgrave household across the bridge into Six Towers to The Handmaiden, a watering hole where half the servants of Brightstone stop for a drink on the way home, and spent the evening being charming at them. The two were in a state, because in a fortnight — the eighteenth — Lord Kilgrave was throwing an open house. He does it once every couple of years: invites everyone he wishes to influence, brings his collection up out of the vault and sets it out on display, and spends the night pouring drink into people and making arrangements. The staff were run ragged over it. He was not worried about the artifacts, they said; he has that dreadful woman ward each piece after it comes out of the vault, and there was a story about a guest five years ago who reached out to touch one and died of it. Most of the guests bring their own security, so there would be a great deal of muscle in the house. And the household always takes on extra servers and cooks at the last minute — Jeeves, the head butler, hires them out of Anna-Maria’s, an outfit over in Brightstone that specializes in helping rich men throw parties.
The Help
The plan wrote itself from there, and they spent the fortnight building it. They would not try the front door. They would arrive at the servants’ entrance as the extra hands, with papers saying Anna-Maria’s had sent them — forged, since being genuinely hired would have meant convincing a woman with a reputation for integrity and her own stable of people. Freakshow turned up matching uniforms without difficulty. Crow saw to the papers. Cam took the Reclaimed out and collected the seven or eight servants the agency actually sent, tied them up, and stashed them somewhere comfortable enough for the night. Caleb spent the two weeks preparing tricks for getting through wards, since it seemed half the house had one on it.
Nyx, meanwhile, had come back with the blueprints for the entire building. The ground floor was all public rooms. The second floor held bedrooms, sitting rooms, smoking rooms. And in the basement, marked plainly, were a workshop — and a vault. Not a strongroom, not a cellar with a good lock: a vault, the kind with a vault door, built into the house when the house was built.
I wonder which room the hand would be in, Nyx said. Cam thought the vault, unless he was using the thing.
The Open House
On the eighteenth they walked up to the servants’ door in borrowed uniforms with Freakshow’s work on their faces, handed over their papers, and were shouted at to pick up a tray. It went perfectly. The kitchen was in uproar; carriages were lined up outside; men and women in very good clothes were arriving with slabs of hired muscle in tow. The food alone was disorienting — real goat, vegetables that had grown in soil, in a city where most of them live on algae and mushrooms and the occasional fish. They were handed trays of canapés and champagne flutes and pushed out into the house.
The formal dining room had been cleared for conversation, and the great table in the middle of it was spread with sparkcraft blueprints — inventions Balon Kilgrave was very probably taking credit for, and which had very probably been his grandfather’s. The great hall was the heart of it: a large circular room off the foyer with the stairs rising out of it, ringed with pedestals, each pedestal carrying a glass dome, each dome warded, and under each dome an artifact. Old things, mostly: tribal work from just after the Breaking, a few pieces older still, ivory and filigree and objects nobody could name. The one the Dimmer Sisters wanted — a squat, roundish gold thing, the twin of the replica in Cam’s bag — sat back near one of the walls, with a little tag beneath it attributing it to a people called the Cherokee and estimating it at a century older than the end of the world. The centerpiece, set where everyone would see it first on walking in, was something else: five interlocking rings, silver or platinum, the same device the crew keep finding in the wreckage of Cyril Lancaster’s life.
It did not take Boo and Crow long to notice the rest. Every portrait on the walls of that hall — the Kilgrave line, generation after generation going back hundreds of years — had a spirit bound inside it, and every one of them was raving. The further back the portrait, the worse the thing inside it. Boo went pale. Among them was Stefan Kilgrave, painted as a scientist with something sparking at his elbow, muttering to himself behind the varnish. Nyx found him and could not leave him. Are you my father? she whispered, and got nothing back but incoherence. She whispered to him about her mother, who had been a whore, and beautiful, and had served the upper class; she touched the frame; she told him to wait, that she would come back for him.
Lord Kilgrave himself was holding court in the study off the great hall, fire lit, a steady traffic of dignitaries in and out — and Mister Perkins had come with the crew and drifted straight in after him, fascinated. Cam murmured to Caleb, asking whether he could handle the ward on that particular dome. He looked at it for a long moment. Hurried work, he said, and an amateur’s — not only could he get through it, he could get through it without breaking it. He would just need a few moments when nobody was watching.
Crow collected Nyx and started her toward the back hallway that ran down to the workshop and the vault. Freakshow sidled into the parlour with a tray of snacks, ready to make whatever scene was required. And at the front door the announcer raised his voice over the room: Inspector Edrin Holt, and guest, of the constabulary.
System Notes
- Two downtime phases this session. In the first: Nyx healed Boo three segments (her psychic headache is nearly clear); Boo prepared a Shadow Self for later use (5 stress); Eidolon overindulged his vice and took Lost in place of the rolled consequence, forfeiting his second downtime action; Cam acquired Caleb — a Tier 3 Whisper, 2 coin spent to raise the asset, hired for the duration of one score — and trained Prowess.
- Malus Thorne was strangled at Lancaster’s Carriage House and his body carted back to the lair, where Nyx harvested it. His ghost broke free a day or two later and Crow bottled it (Attune, success). Not charged as a downtime action.
- Gathering information in Brightstone: Freakshow critical (the open house, the agency, the warding of the display pieces), Crow partial (Kilgrave’s holdings and habits), Eidolon failed, Boo failed on the wards; Caleb’s own roll succeeded and produced the full analysis. Heat 0 → 1 — bluecoats rousted several of the crew out of the district.
- Second downtime (2–18 February): Nyx acquired detailed blueprints of the manor (Tier 2); Freakshow acquired servants’ uniforms (Tier 0); Crow acquired forged Anna-Maria’s papers (failed roll, raised with 1 coin from the crew pot, 4 → 3 coin); Cam and the Reclaimed waylaid the genuine temp staff (Hunt, success); Caleb prepared ward-breaking work; Crow and Freakshow both trained Prowess; Boo prepared a second, short-duration Shadow Self (3 stress) and indulged vice for 2 stress.
- Engagement roll: 3d (bold/daring, exploits a weakness, allied aid) — success. The crew entered the servants’ door unchallenged.
- A fortune roll placed the target artifact on open display in the great hall rather than in the basement vault; a second fortune roll came up critical, giving Caleb a clean read on that dome’s ward — amateur work, and defeatable without destroying it.
- Nyx’s Tissue Sustainer Research clock advanced to 9/12. Lancaster’s Conspiracy holds at 3/8, On The Inspector’s Radar at 2/6, Lancaster’s Poison Research at 0/4. Crew stands at Tier 1, weak hold, rep 7, heat 1, wanted 0, 3 coin.
- In-world date advanced from 2 February to the evening of 18 February, 848 IE. The session ends mid-score, with Inspector Holt being announced at the door.
