The washroom was a sparse, stone-floored room with a pump and a deep, stained copper basin. Lutz bolted the door behind him. The moment he was alone, the performance dropped away. The ragged breathing evened out. The pained limp straightened into a steady stance. Only the physical evidence of his ruse remained.
He peeled off the blood-soaked clothes, wincing only slightly as the fabric pulled at the drying wounds. He looked at his reflection in the sliver of mirror propped on a shelf. The face that stared back was pale, smeared with filth, but the eyes were calm, calculating, and utterly devoid of the trauma he had just portrayed. He looked like a painter who had just finished a particularly demanding masterpiece, assessing his own work.
He worked the pump handle, the gush of cold water a shocking, cleansing relief. He scrubbed the urchin's blood from his skin first, he didn't want to get some weird STD from this world.
Watching the pink-tinged water swirl down the drain. He was washing away the prop, the evidence of his deception. Then, he tended to his own, self-inflicted wounds. He cleaned them meticulously with water and a harsh, carbolic soap, the sting a sharp, clarifying sensation. They were, as intended, superficial. Annoyances that would be faint scars in a week. He had no bandages, so he let them air dry, the cool air a balm.
He scrubbed the blood from his clothes as best he could, leaving them to soak in the basin. The water turned a rusty brown. He would claim they were too damaged to wear again, another piece of the legend.
Standing there, shirtless in the cool, damp room, the adrenaline of the morning finally began to ebb. The silence was profound, broken only by the drip of water from the pump. He had passed the most dangerous test. Karl, the Pyromaniac with a Hunter's senses, had believed him. The final obstacle between him and the treasury had been neutralized through a vial of blood and a few inches of sliced skin.
He looked at his reflection again. The face was clean now, the sharp angles and pale skin stark in the gloom. The eyes were the same winter-sea grey, but they held a new depth, a chilling self-awareness. He had not just lied to the Vipers; he had mutilated his own body to make the lie believable. He had bought a child's blood like it was a pound of flour. The lines he was crossing were no longer just moral; they were existential. Andrei Hayes would have been horrified. Lutz Fischer simply noted the efficiency of the strategy.
The Vipers were reeling, their trust in him solidified by his "bravery." All that was left was to wait for the storm he had created to break.
The air in the financial district was different. It smelled of ink, polished wood, and the faint, cloying scent of fear masquerading as respectability. The Church of Steam's procession moved through these clean, quiet streets with the grim purpose of a surgeon entering an operating theater. At its center, a head taller than the men flanking her, was Deacon Reverie Noire.
She was a study in impossible perfection. Her hair, the color of deep wine or spilled blood, so elegant that it defied the harbor's damp breeze. Her features were so symmetrically proportioned they seemed less born and more engineered, a masterpiece of divine geometry. But it was her eyes that arrested attention—a deep, obscure purple, the shade of twilight or a freshly exposed amethyst geode, and they held a penetrating, analytical light that seemed to dissect the world around her into its constituent parts.
She listened as a junior investigator, a man named Althus whose fingers were still stained with ink from Lutz's forgeries, briefed her, his voice a nervous whisper.
"The intelligence is specific, Deacon. Aelius Portos. He operates this import-export firm as a front. The documents we intercepted indicate he's the primary accountant for the Vipers' weapons smuggling. He launders the coin through false invoices for Southern Continent spices that never arrive."
"The source?" Noire's voice was not loud, but it carried a resonant, melodic quality that seemed to silence the street around them. It was a voice that expected answers.
"The same as the others, Deacon. Anonymous. Dropped in a collection box by an unidentifiable proxy. The pattern is… concerningly consistent."
A faint, almost imperceptible smile touched Noire's lips. It did not reach her eyes. "A phantom handing us a map. The question of 'why' is secondary to the utility of the map itself. We will follow it to its end, and the phantom will have to reveal itself to claim its prize, wich we won't allow."
They stopped before a modest, two-story building with a discreet brass plaque: Portos & Co., Mercantile Ventures. It was the kind of place that screamed of quiet, ill-gotten gains. Two hulking brutes, who clearly had no business in the financial district, lounged by the door. Their eyes, dull with aggression, locked onto the Church contingent. Inside, through the glass, more rough-looking men could be seen, their hands hovering near concealed weapons.
The Church guards, well-drilled and tense, immediately unbuttoned the flaps of their holsters, hands resting on the butts of their revolvers. The metallic clicks echoed in the quiet street.
The Viper thugs sneered, pushing themselves off the wall. "Lost your way, cog-boys?" one of them growled, cracking his knuckles. "This is a private establishment. Piss off."
The lead guard opened his mouth to issue a standard challenge, but a single, raised hand from Reverie Noire froze the words in his throat. She did not look at him. Her amethyst gaze was fixed on the door, and the men behind it, as if she were already reading the blueprint of the imminent conflict.
She did not speak a command. She did not need to. The silence she imposed was more terrifying than any shout. She stepped forward, past her own guards, who watched with a mixture of awe and apprehension.
Her movements were economical, ritualistic. She lifted her hand in front of her and made a strange sign with her fingers, crossing them.
The thugs watched, confused and growing more aggressive. "What's this? Gonna read our fortunes, witch?"
Reverie Noire ignored them. She closed her eyes for a heartbeat, her perfect features settling into an expression of profound concentration. Then, her lips parted, and she spoke a single, sibilant word in the language of power and command.
"Ensnare."
The word, spoken in Hermes, did not echo. It was absorbed by the very fabric of reality, a key turning in a hidden lock.
It began with a sound—a deep, groaning tear, as of old wood splintering and earth being forced apart. The clean cobblestones at the thugs' feet cracked open. From the fissures, and from the very mortar between the bricks of the building itself, thick, woody vines studded with cruel, inch-long thorns erupted with violent speed. They were a dark, malevolent green, moving with a sentient, grasping hunger.
The two brutes at the door had no time to cry out. The vines wrapped around their legs, their torsos, their arms, coiling with the force of industrial pistons. Thorns dug deep into flesh, not to poison, but to anchor. One man managed to half-draw a knife before a thorny tendril snapped around his wrist with a sickening crunch of bone, pinning the weapon to his side.
This was only one of the many spells available to a Mystery Prier.
Inside, the scene was one of instant, chaotic immobilization. Vines burst from floorboards and punched through plaster walls, snaking around the other guards. A man reaching for a pistol found his hand trapped in a thorny cage, the gun crushed against his chest. Another, trying to flee, was yanked off his feet by an ankle, hoisted upside down, and wrapped like a fly in a spider's web. The air filled with grunts of pain and shocked, strangled cries, the sounds of struggle quickly smothered by the relentless growth. The pleasant office was transformed in a single breath into a carnivorous garden, a trap sprung by a single word.
The entire event, from the utterance of the word to the complete neutralization of eight armed men, took less than five seconds.
The Church guards stood frozen, their hands still on their revolvers, their faces pale. They had seen the Deacon work before, but the silent, effortless, and utterly overwhelming nature of her power never failed to terrify them.
Reverie Noire did not spare the entangled thugs a second glance. It was done. She stepped gracefully over a vine that was still twitching, its growth slowing, and entered the ransacked office. Her heels made no sound on the splintered floorboards. She moved with an unerring sense of direction, past overturned desks and scattered papers, towards a heavy oak door at the back, marked 'Private'.
She did not knock. She placed a hand on the brass doorknob, and the wood around it splintered, the lock mechanism shattering from within with a dry crack. The door swung open.
Cowering behind a large desk, in a room reeking of expensive cigar smoke and panic, was a portly, balding man in a waistcoat that was straining at its buttons. Aelius Portos. His face was the color of spoiled milk, and he was trembling so violently the ledger open before him rattled on the desk.
He looked up as the door exploded inward, and his eyes met the deep, obscure purple of Reverie Noire's gaze. All the blood seemed to drain from his face at once.
"Aelius Portos," she said, her voice still that same, resonant melody, devoid of malice, devoid of anger, devoid of anything but absolute, final authority. "You are under arrest for conspiracy, smuggling, and corruption of public trade. The Church of Steam is seizing all assets and records of this enterprise."
Portos opened his mouth, perhaps to protest, to offer a bribe, to beg. But no sound came out. The sheer, terrifying finality in her presence, the knowledge that the men outside had been subdued without a single shot fired, robbed him of all will. He simply sagged in his chair, a deflated balloon of a man, his empire of paper and lies collapsing around him in the space of a single, silent minute.
Reverie Noire turned to the guards who had tentatively followed her in. "Secure him. Inventory everything. Leave nothing unexamined."
As they moved to obey, she stood for a moment in the shattered doorway, her gaze sweeping over the thorn-filled ruin of the outer office. Her expression was unreadable, but in the depths of those amethyst eyes, a single, calculating thought crystallized.
The phantom gives us a surgeon's tools, she mused, and we perform the surgery with perfect precision. But a tool does not act without a hand to guide it. And when the operation is over, we shall see whose hand this truly is.
The operation was a success. The patient—the Harbor Vipers—was bleeding out. And the architect of it all was watching from the shadows, satisfied.