Claws Are Deep
Session: 2024-06-12
The fight found its ending the way most fights do — not all at once, but in pieces.
Pedro went down first. Vath heard the bolt before he understood where it had come from, and then Pedro was on the ground and Cain was already moving. He said it the way you'd say of course:
"Get up buddy."
Not a hope. Not a plea. Just a fact that hadn't happened yet. He put his hands on Pedro and the fact happened.
Thaddeus cast something. Vath didn't catch what it was — only the result. The skeleton went still. The blue light in its chest held for a moment longer than expected, like it was deciding something. Then it dimmed and was gone.
So that's what they look like when they die.
Tylsa had been fighting. Vath had tracked her across the room without quite registering it, the way you track weather. When the skeleton dropped she looked at the room — at what the room had become — and she stopped.
No desperation in it. No fear. She looked at Vath, then at the others, and said: "Take me to Esselyn."
That was all.
A surrender that arrives with a specific demand is something else entirely. He filed it away and didn't push.
They searched the room before they left.
Sorel — the man with the crossbow, the man Pedro had punched — had a letter on him. Vath read it twice.
Sorel, find out what they know and then kill them. (Signed) C.
He folded it carefully. That's us. They hadn't been chasing the Brass Dominion through the sewer. The Brass Dominion had been watching them do it. Someone named C. had made a decision, and Sorel had been the instrument.
He pocketed the letter. Didn't say anything yet. There would be time.
Back up the ladder. Early evening. The city was still doing its business above them, indifferent, which felt mildly wrong in the way cities always do after a fight.
Five figures at the end of the alley. Vath counted them before his eyes adjusted to the light. Two broke from the group and walked toward the party.
Eslin. Plain clothes, no insignia, the same unhurried way of moving. Beside him: a woman in a hooded cloak, face half-shadowed, the bearing of someone accustomed to standing in places like this without being noticed.
Vath looked up. Silverwatch snipers on the rooflines.
He knew exactly when we were coming out.
Eslin said it plainly, the way he said most things: the claws of the enemy are deep. Another witness had turned up dead — hanged. A barbarian. Vath thought of the big man with the shield from that first day in the market, who had lit up gold and then disappeared into the screaming crowd. So that's where he ended up.
The woman with the hood was Ulyssa. A soldier. She was going to become Tylsa — not Tylsa, but the version of Tylsa that the Brass Dominion would see delivered to the brig. Lombar, a Silverwatch guard, would handle the delivery. A second guard would collect the real Tylsa when they got close to the prison and take her somewhere safer.
Clean, if it worked.
Eslin turned to Tylsa and said something quiet. Sorry for your loss. Vath didn't know what the loss was. He didn't ask — it wasn't his to ask.
The party's job: The Sunken Treasure. An inn, twenty-four hours east, half a mile out of the city. Be equipped for travel.
They were different coming out of that sewer than they'd been going in.
Not in any way Vath could have pointed to precisely. No new gear, no ceremony, nothing declared. Just a quiet settling. He noticed it in the way they moved through the alley — how their eyes were already on the rooflines before the snipers became relevant. How nobody asked what came next.
We've been in a fight. We walked out.
There was more of that ahead. He knew it. But knowing it the way he knew it now felt like it meant something different than it had before.
He checked his pack.
East.