18 – 19 February, 848 IE — Brightstone & Charterhall
The open house was in full flood, and the Old Town Echoes were carrying it — trays of canapés and champagne flutes, borrowed uniforms, light pockets, because there had been no other way to come in. Lord Kilgrave held court in the study off the great hall with a town councillor and a handful of titans of industry. Around the hall the pedestals stood under their warded domes, the five interlocking rings at the centre where every arriving guest would see them first and the squat gold piece they had actually come for set back near a wall. Cam kept herself and Caleb near it and tried to be no one. Nyx had not moved from the portrait of Stefan Kilgrave in some time. Then the man at the front door raised his voice over the room — Inspector Edrin Holt, and guest, of the constabulary — and Holt came in with a young woman on his arm, nodded genteelly to the announcer, and began drifting along the pedestals without much interest in any of them. Freakshow chose that moment to carry a platter into the study, greet the assembled worthies, trip on nothing whatsoever, and empty the entire tray over the Mayor. Kilgrave took him by the scruff of the neck and handed him through a side door to Jeeves, who sighed, informed him that Anna-Maria would be hearing about this and his pay would be reflecting it, and flipped a hand at the corridor. Freakshow sauntered out defeated, back into the hall, where nobody who mattered had seen a thing.
Below the Kitchens
Crow and Nyx went down the back hall past the kitchens and the pantry, where the noise fell away to nothing, and Nyx’s picks had the cellar door open in a few seconds. The stairwell down was well appointed and grew cold as they descended. Wine cellar. Storage. Art on the walls, none of it screaming. And the workshop door — wider and taller than a door needs to be, a heavy lock in it, and wards cut into the lock and the frame and the stone all around, the work of someone who intended it to open for exactly one person. Days earlier Crow had gone down to Silkshore and bought a little vial off a man who guaranteed it would unwind anybody’s wards. He put on the crow mask, reached out, and cracked it. The runes came visible in the wood, held a moment, and faded out. Nyx got the bolt over, and it came with a heavy, audible clunk.
Inside: electroplasmic lamps, chalkboards, blueprints on every wall, three great workbenches under an array of tools neither of them could name, and shelf after shelf of finished devices and constructs — a sparkcraft workshop of the mechanical persuasion, and nothing at all like Nyx’s own. And in a small sitting area at the far end, a woman of about fifty in a plain, expensive wool dress, black hair streaked with grey, a leather belt of pouches at her waist, already halfway across the room because she had heard the bolt. Who the hell are you? — The assistant, Nyx said. The woman’s eyes went sideways and far away, checking the outer face of her own door, and found nothing there at all. Then she crushed something in her fist and threw it at the floor, and the room filled with a fog that was not smoke and stopped the eye dead.
Crow reached out into the ghost field, found the only other living thing in the room, and gathered a charge around her until she lit up blue in the murk. Without a prepared working to shape it the rest of the power went where it pleased: a dozen devices on the shelves began to spark, cells caught, and small fires opened up around the room. Nyx put a dart in her through the blowgun and saw her stumble — and then Crow felt a working let go, and she was simply not there.
The hand was easy. It sat shelved in a place of obvious honour, and the clockwork of it was the finest thing either of them had ever seen. Nyx filled her bag with sheaves of blueprints while Crow beat out fires, and when it became plain that no one was going to walk into that room and think it had not been robbed, they stopped trying to pretend otherwise. Nyx lit a burner, fed it loose papers and a few singed blueprints, and tipped it over onto the bench — so that whatever Kilgrave found missing, he would never be able to say what. Crow palmed a small gadget off a shelf for Boo, who had not been there to take her usual souvenir. Nyx locked the door again on her way out.
The Study
Holt had been examining the pedestals without passion and watching the study door, and when it finally emptied he excused himself from the woman he had arrived with, murmured something into a servant’s ear, drew a notepad and pencil out of his jacket, and went in. Boo had already poured out a vial of black ink; her shadow came alive and went under the door ahead of him.
Kilgrave did not let him speak first. Inspector Holt — seriously. Ingratiating yourself into my party is not going to change my answer. Holt looked wounded and innocent: purely a targeted opportunity, my lord; his cousin Vanessa had needed a date, they had met at the Canary Club across town, and he had seen Kilgrave standing alone and seen an opportunity to ask his question. Kilgrave began to say that he had absolutely no intention of anything, and Holt cut straight across him. He poisoned you, didn’t he. He poisoned you, and he asked you to do something before he would give you the antidote. What did he ask you to do?
Kilgrave’s mouth was open and his colour was rising when a woman of about fifty in a plain wool dress fell out of the ether into the middle of his study, sparks still crawling over her, and for one long moment all three of them were equally appalled.
Fire
Boo passed a quiet word to her people and began working Nyx’s sleeping draught into the drinks. There were thirty guests in that hall and a wall of hired muscle behind them who were not drinking. Kilgrave’s voice came ringing out of the study. Two guests went down at opposite ends of the room, then a third, and the Duskvol gentry closed around them with kerchiefs and smelling salts while the sharper bodyguards started moving in to extract their charges. Crow and Nyx came round the corner from the back hall looking somewhat dishevelled; a guest sniffed at Watcher’s shoulder and asked whether he still smoked. Nyx began screaming fire and directing people to leave in an orderly fashion. Watcher assisted with the unconscious in a manner calculated to help as little as possible. Kilgrave’s voice moved into the back hall, and two of his men ran through after it. The staff who were not the crew stood vapour-locked where they were.
Then Caleb said got it. Cam went in under the raised dome and made the exchange — the replica down, the gold piece into her pocket — and Caleb set the glass back, scattered a little dust, muttered over it, and left the ward sitting exactly as he had found it. Across the room Crow had been raising an alarm over a guest whose pulse, he announced, he could not find.
They came out separately. Cam sagged against Caleb’s arm, gasped about the smoke, and went out the front. Nyx walked a groggy nobleman to the carriages and simply kept walking. Eidolon, Watcher and Crow slipped into the madhouse of the kitchen and out the back. Boo’s shadow followed Kilgrave and his whisper and Jeeves down into the cellar, where the woman set about the fires and Kilgrave turned and stormed back up the stairs. And Boo, at the mouth of the kitchen passage, looked back. Holt was standing where he had stood all evening, looking at the pedestal where the swap had happened. Then he looked at her instead. Their eyes met, and his head tilted, very slightly. She ducked into the kitchen and was gone. Over the next several hours they drifted home by separate roads, out of Brightstone and back to Charterhall, shedding servants’ clothes as they went. Cam paid Caleb off at the door. By three in the morning they were all in the basement beneath the Ink & Anvil.
The Gazette
The front page, the following day: Violent Theft at Kilgrave Manor. A gang had come into the house among the hired servers, done an extraordinary amount of damage to Lord Kilgrave’s laboratory and his research, made off with years of his work, and poisoned a number of the city’s elite along the way. Crow scowled at it and observed that it had not been that violent. Then came the last line of it. Of the antiquities — Kilgrave’s true passion, the collection itself — exactly one piece had been stolen: the centrepiece of the evening, an artifact out of the ancient Americas, a brooch composed of five interlocking rings, taken in the chaos.
Every head in the room turned to Boo, and Boo shrugged. Cam pointed out that not one of them could have got through that ward without help, which left either another thief in the house or a lie in the newspaper. Boo’s first guess was that Kilgrave had worked something of his own under cover of theirs. Her second was Holt.
Her shadow had held together just long enough to see the woman from the cellar succumb to Nyx’s draught and drop to the floor, adding handsomely to the chaos. She had a name, and it was another Kilgrave: Zoria Kilgrave, Balon’s own sister and the whisper of his household — the dreadful woman his servants had complained about. She had seen Nyx’s face with nothing over it. She would remember them.
Mistress Ash was delighted beyond measure. She and Nyx spent the rest of the night with their heads together in a corner over the hand, and how it married itself to flesh.
What the Dead Man Said
Boo took a dark corner of the lair, laid sigils on the floor, set a hook, and let Cyril Lancaster out of his vial. He came up in a purplish-blue static that stood the hair on every head for three blocks and started straight in on the darkness that is coming and the march of feet. Crow put his mask on against the aura and helped her hold the man still long enough to make him answer a question.
Kilgrave. Yes. Balon. Not as clever as his father — not as clever at all. Clever enough, though. He had had him poisoned at the Serendipity Club, and sent the man’s own housemaid to carry the question and come back with the antidote. And the question had been a machine: a disruptor, something to break the electroplasmic flow between two dipole arrays. Kilgrave built it. Kilgrave delivered it. Kilgrave got his antidote and went back to his miserable life. All part of the plan to stop it from coming here and ending.
And then, unasked: we are the last. The five are the last bubbles of hope — lifeboats, on the dark sea of stars. The Duke and the Duchess. Queen Rat. Archangel Patrick. The Immortal Emperor. Barely holding it at bay, and doing it for eight hundred years — how much longer do you think they can do it? Boo asked him for the key to the cipher on his notes, and for a moment he came all the way up out of the fog and stared directly at her. Did she know he had served in the Skovlan war? Nasty. Very violent, very fierce people. He had had a great deal of time in those trenches to think something up. He tapped one ethereal temple. Then he was away again — a fish in the southern isles that eats itself, and stoats, and the inbreeding within a certain cohort of the Iruvian nobility — and there was nothing further in him. Boo put him back in the bottle.
It came to her afterward, on her way to bed, passing Nyx’s workbench. The desiccated rat was still wired into its battery, still walking its small circle, and a charge jumped off it and back into the thing that drove it: a matrixed array, and a disruption of the electroplasmic discharge across it. That is what the lightning barriers are. That is how the walls keep the dead out of the city. Nyx… Nyx allowed that there are other arrays in the world and that whatever Kilgrave built need not have been aimed at the barrier at all; that breaking a barrier would take a very great deal, and a thing that size would most likely open only a small gap. But scaled up, an entire section of the wall could be made to fail. Which would be, she said, fantastically bad. Boo went and found Watcher, who had been picking at the cipher, and told him where the key had been invented.
The Reckoning
Sister Beatrice was at the desk herself when they brought her Lancaster and the gold, and she was frankly delighted — she had begun to wonder whether they had forgotten all about her. Quite a bit of noise, yes. But it seemed their dear Balon was none the wiser, and she thanked them for it. The carriage house at Frazier Manor was theirs to use as much as they liked; she only reminded them, again, that the Dimmer Sisters do not actually own the place, and that somebody could always come along and put them out of it.
The blueprints out of Kilgrave’s cellar went to the Glasskeys, who paid very handsomely for a stack of inventions nobody had brought to market yet. Nyx kept the hand and the notes on the tissue interface and would take nothing else at all; she pressed a single blueprint on Crow, handed the rest to Cam for the crew, and said she felt she had failed them. The job got done, Cam said. It’s all in the past now. Crow looked at his blueprint, turned it on its side, turned it upside down, and sold it.
System Notes
- Score complete. Payoff 12 coin from the Glasskeys for Kilgrave’s unreleased designs — 10, plus 2 from the new Covert Drops claim (espionage/sabotage bonus). Nyx and Eidolon declined shares; 2 coin each to Cam, Crow, Boo, Watcher and Freakshow with overflow to stash, 1 extra to Crow for the blueprint Nyx gifted him, 1 to the crew pot.
- Rep 7 → 10 (+3), leaving the crew on the verge of moving from weak to strong hold. Heat 1 → 4 (base 2, +1 for a high-profile target; nobody was killed). Wanted holds at 0.
- 2 XP to every character present and 3 XP to the crew sheet. Advances taken: Nyx Tinker 2 → 3; Watcher gained Shadow; Eidolon gained Expertise.
- Covert Drops claim secured at Frazier Manor, the Dimmer Sisters’ price now paid in full. Legal title remains unresolved.
- Sparkcraft Tissue Interface acquired outright — an 8-segment invention project closed by theft rather than research. Nyx’s Tissue Sustainer Research holds at 9/12.
- On The Inspector’s Radar 2/6 → 3/6. Lancaster’s Conspiracy holds at 3/8; Lancaster’s Poison Research at 0/4.
- Flashback: Crow bought a commercial ward-untangling charm in Silkshore (1 stress, 1 coin from his own purse). Cam spent 2 stress for a second die on the swap and Crow 1 stress to assist; Crow spent 1 more assisting Boo’s binding of Lancaster; Boo spent 1 stress for the knockout draught.
- Boo failed her exit roll and Holt marked her leaving, having already fixed on the pedestal where the swap was made.
- Entanglement: Gang Trouble — Questioning. Fat Eddie was picked up by bluecoats and rolled badly on holding his tongue; the crew paid a 2 coin bribe out of the pot rather than take the heat, and the bluecoats dropped him at the Mortar and Pestle instead of the constabulary office. Crew coin 3 → 2 across the payoff and the bribe.
- Downtime deferred to next session. Options named: legal title to the carriage house, legal title to Number 16 Camden Street, the Aria, and Lancaster’s black book.
