Fifteen Feet Down

The day after, Eslin took them deeper.

The Lord's Quarter was quieter than the Market District — the kind of quiet that comes from people who've learned to mind their business and do it consistently. Two large buildings anchored the Keep, the kind you don't mistake for anything friendly. They passed an inn Vath hadn't noticed before. He hadn't been this far in. To the right: the Brig. Eastern Shield Prison, Eslin called it. That was a lot of words for a building that did one job.

He told them about the Brass Dominion. Criminals. Smugglers. The kind of organization that makes itself comfortable in a city's soft spots — the abandoned places, the forgotten infrastructure, the routes nobody official bothers to map. Dead or alive, he said. Delicate situation. Those two things came paired more often than you'd expect.

The detail that stayed with Vath: Eslin had run into three of them before, out at sea. The Black Eel. Vath didn't ask what the Black Eel was, and nobody else did either, which might mean they knew, or might mean they'd learned that Eslin tells you what he thinks you need. He ran the Silverwatch the way a forest runs itself — everyone doing what they're supposed to, nobody needing to be told twice.

Tylsa, he said. They needed to find her.

Vath thought about the wink through the iron bars. The shortsword already in her hand when the door came off. Whoever had arranged that jailbreak had done it well — the coins, the masks, the arrow, the timing — and she'd walked out of it like she'd been rehearsing for years.

Finding her sounded like work.

---

A night's rest. Breakfast. Then they headed west of the Market District, out past the last of the regular stalls and into the part of a city that gets thinner the further in you go. Tents where there should be houses. Houses still standing because nobody had bothered to knock them down. The streets got quieter in a different way than the Lord's Quarter — less business, more absence.

Somebody shifted sod and grass away from a section of ground, and there it was: a manhole. They stood around it the way you do when a thing confirms what you already suspected. They went down. Fifteen feet, a slimy ladder, and the Market District disappeared above them.

The sewer was not what Vath expected. The stonework was good — the kind that gets built once and lasts longer than whoever commissioned it. Walkable stone underfoot. Small pipes fed in from elsewhere and branched off again, doing whatever they'd been doing down there for however long. Bridges spanned the channels here and there, though some were broken and others looked like they were deciding.

The torchlight moved across the walls. Someone cared about this place, once.

---

The rats found them before they found whatever they were looking for.

He had darts back then. It was his go-to — fast, quiet, less conspicuous than standing in a sewer and trying to pull fire out of the air. He threw a few. They connected. The rats didn't amount to much on their own, but rats in a sewer that size meant something had been living down there for a while, and living comfortably.

They kept going.

What they found next — the details of it had settled somewhere below where Vath could easily reach them, the way deep water holds things. He knew they weren't done. He knew they'd gone further in. But the smell and the dark and the way sound moves differently underground had run it all together into something he'd have to work to separate.

He could look for it, probably.

He just hadn't decided yet if it was worth the dredging.