Black Tears
Session: 2025-02-26
Merle had been helping Mica. That was the piece Vath had been missing — not just the cloth note, not just the children. Mica's husband had gone out during the storm and the boat had gone with him. She still came back into town, still moved through the days. Merle had been the one keeping her upright.
He didn't know what to do with that except hold it.
He left Águila at the edge of town. The seahawk didn't like enclosed spaces, and Vath didn't see the point in forcing it.
They found him before they'd gone half a mile north. Face down in the wet sand, barely breathing. Cain went to a knee and put his hands to work.
He said it once: monsters. Coming and going. That was all.
The man was emaciated — not storm-starved but something that had taken weeks, something deliberate. His hands were salt-white. Vath looked at the face and thought of Mica, of the storm three weeks ago, of a boat that hadn't come back.
Stend Strongbow.
He didn't know the face. He knew the shape of it.
They fed him what they had. Water, then bread. Cain got more into him with a spell. He didn't fully wake. He said the name "Mica" once and then went somewhere else.
They carried him back.
She was at the edge of town before they reached it. Someone had seen them coming. Mica didn't speak — she moved forward and put both hands on his face and looked at Cain, and Cain told her what he knew, which wasn't much. She nodded.
He gave her the moment. He'd seen enough of those to know when to look away.
Boyd came out and stood in the doorway, watching.
They left Stend with her. The party turned north again.
He'd been thinking about Mirabelle on the walk back. She'd arrived at the right time to do something useful — that was the thing about useful arrivals, they were usually genuine and sometimes they weren't. The fishermen had been going out to sea. She'd been there, on that hill, converting that church. He didn't know if those two facts touched each other.
Probably not.
He kept that thought where it was. They were back at the shore. He stood at the waterline and looked north toward the mine.
The mine was half a day north, and it smelled like salt and decay from the entrance. Crudely built rails ran into the dark. Nine-foot ceilings. Crates and more crates, all salt, most intact.
He lit his way forward. Cain came up beside him. The others fell in behind.
The first body was in the west room, surrounded by pink salt crates.
An older man. Mid-fifties, maybe. Fine silk shirt — not what you wore to work a mine, not what you wore if you'd expected to die here. He'd been torn up by something with broad claws and a wide jaw. Thorough work. The wounds came from a creature that hadn't been in a hurry.
The eyes were gone.
Not a wound — removed. Taken deliberately, and the sockets left with dried black substance running down from each one, like the face had wept something dark and stopped partway through.
Belt pouch: a pink salt carving in the shape of a fish. Two potions of healing. A tin of lavender oil. Thirty gold and twelve silver. Someone who'd had things prepared, who'd been planning to go somewhere.
He didn't know who the man was. Zephyr had stopped in the doorway. He looked at the face for a moment, then stepped back.
The next room held two more.
Similar faces — brothers, maybe, or close enough to look it. Gear in near-new condition, less than two months of wear. They still had their eyes.
He read the wounds carefully. Bite marks. Long open tears across their backs — they'd been running when that happened. Missing fingernails; they'd been dragged. One foot eaten down to the ankle. Palms both slashed through the meat. And on the clothing, tangled in the folds: pirates beard, the seaweed you only found in deep water, nowhere near the shoreline.
He thought: they were alive for most of this.
Two waterproof backpacks in the corner. He went through them without ceremony. Fine dinner clothes. Well-made slippers. A pipe. A sealed packet of good tobacco. A pouch with thirty gold, thirty silver, thirty copper — someone's careful rounding. A soggy parchment, wax still on it.
He turned the seal over.
A fish. The same stamp he'd seen months ago in Vogler, pressed into the coat of a man who worked the fish trade.
Darrian Felwind's mark.
He sat back on his heels. Held that for a moment. Beau was at the far end of the room, watching without being asked to.
A locked hardwood case beside the packs — a foot and a half wide, four feet long, two heavy shackles. A stylized war pick folded alongside it, crow-headed, something written on the shaft he couldn't make out in the light. And tucked separately, a letter addressed to Lindsay and signed Ernesto.
Ernesto.
He looked back toward the first room.
Ern Lindsor. Ernesto. The man who'd run these mines for years, the man who'd disappeared a month ago, the man the nephews had come to Serenholme looking for. Fine silk shirt. Money ready for travel. A letter written and not sent.
He'd been trying to leave.
And the nephews had come north to the mine to find him, and found this instead.
He put the letter down.
The far room had four more. Simple clothes — fishermen, all of them. Same eyes: removed, same dried black running from the sockets, same expression frozen in whatever they'd last seen. Mouths open. Ankles and lower legs crushed — not by a fall. Gripped and crushed.
He counted. Seven bodies total. Pedro stood in the doorway behind him, doing his own count. None of them had gotten out.
Something moved.
Not in the crates. Below and behind them. A scraping sound, articulated — not something dragging, something built for the motion. Claws on stone, plural, more than one set.
He pulled the Moonbeam down.
Silver light opened in a wide circle and the first one came out of the dark at the edge of it — broad-bodied, low to the ground, crustacean plating over something that moved fast. Claws the width of a forearm. It hit the beam and recoiled and he held his concentration and swept the light across.
Another one came from the left. Beau cut between it and the crates. Cain's light came up from the right.
He called it again and held that too.
Two of them in the light and somewhere back in the dark he could hear more.
He hadn't remembered to pick up his darts.