The walk back to the warehouse took him through the merchant quarter, a necessary detour to avoid the patrols that had increased near the docks since the Gray Sharks' eradication. The streets here were cleaner, the buildings better maintained, the people carrying themselves with the self-satisfied air of those who believed their coin insulated them from the city's darker currents.
Lutz was halfway down Konstanz Street when a voice called out behind him.
"Excuse me, young man—a moment of your time?"
The accent was Feysac, but cultured, the kind that came from education rather than birth. Lutz turned, his hand instinctively checking the position of his concealed knife before his conscious mind caught up.
The man approaching was in his mid-forties, wearing a dark gray coat marked with the subtle brass cogwheel pin of the Church of Steam and Machinery. Not a priest—the pin was too small, the coat too practical. An administrator, perhaps. An inspector. His face was unremarkable: thinning brown hair, wire-rimmed spectacles, a neatly trimmed beard going gray at the edges. The kind of man who disappeared in a crowd, which probably served him well in his work.
"I apologize for the intrusion," the man continued, offering a polite smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. "I'm looking for the offices of the Harbor Customs Authority, and I seem to have taken a wrong turn. My Feysac is serviceable, but the street signs..." He gestured vaguely at the confusion of alleys.
Lutz's mind raced through the calculation in the span of a heartbeat. Church official. Lost. Asking directions from a random young man. It should have been innocuous.
Except the man was carrying a leather document case under his arm, and as he shifted his weight, the case tilted. Just for a second, Lutz caught a glimpse of the papers inside through the slightly open flap.
Shipping manifests. Lists of names. And at the top of one page, in neat administrative script: Harbor Vipers - Known Associates.
The world came into sharp focus. This wasn't random. This was a hunter who'd mistaken a wolf for a sheep.
"Of course," Lutz said, his Feysac flawless, adopting the helpful tone of a local tradesman. "The Customs Authority moved last year. Easy mistake. You're actually quite close—just two streets over." He pointed east, toward the legitimate government offices.
The man's posture relaxed slightly. "Ah, thank you. I'm Matthias Brenner, assistant inspector for the Church's trade compliance office." He extended a hand, which Lutz shook firmly. The man's grip was soft but persistent, the handshake of someone accustomed to paperwork rather than labor. "And you are?"
"Henrik Moss," Lutz lied smoothly, pulling a name from the warehouse—the old Viper who'd given him advice during his first meal. "I work as a translator for some of the foreign merchants. Always happy to help a lost traveler."
"A translator?" Brenner's eyes lit up with professional interest. "Then perhaps you can assist me with something else. I don't suppose you read Intisian?"
"I do, actually," Lutz said, committing to the role. Backing out now would seem suspicious.
Brenner's smile widened, genuine this time. "What fortune. I've been struggling with some shipping documents—the handwriting is atrocious, and my Intisian is purely academic." He pulled a folded paper from his coat pocket, not from the case. Smart. Keep the sensitive material hidden. "This is just a routine customs form, but I can't make out this merchant's name. Would you mind?"
Lutz took the paper. It was, as claimed, a simple customs declaration for a shipment of Intisian wine. The handwriting was indeed terrible, the merchant's signature an illegible scrawl. But Lutz's eyes weren't on the signature—they were scanning the margins, looking for anything else Brenner might be testing him with.
Nothing. It was genuinely just a wine shipment.
"Dubois," Lutz said, sounding out the signature. "Marcel Dubois, if I'm reading this correctly. The flourish on the 'M' is misleading."
"Dubois! Of course." Brenner took the paper back, making a note in a small ledger he produced from his pocket. His movements were precise, methodical. "You have a good eye. Are you often in this district? I may have more translation work in the coming weeks."
The offer hung in the air, innocuous and deadly. This was how it started—a helpful local, a convenient contact. Then more questions, more documents, until the helpful local had inadvertently mapped out an entire criminal network.
"Occasionally," Lutz said, keeping his tone neutral. "My work takes me all over the harbor. But I could check in with the Customs Authority office if you'd like to leave word."
"That would be excellent," Brenner said. He handed Lutz a small card with his name and office location printed in neat type. "Ask for me directly. There's a small fee, of course, for professional services."
Lutz pocketed the card. "I'll do that. The office is straight down this street, then left at the fountain. You can't miss it."
"Thank you, Mr. Moss. You've been most helpful." Brenner tipped his head politely and turned to go, then paused. "Oh, one more thing—have you heard anything about disturbances in the dock district? Gang violence? The Church is concerned about the safety of legitimate merchants."
The question was casual, almost an afterthought. Which meant it was the real reason for the conversation.
"Nothing specific," Lutz said, injecting a note of concern into his voice. "Though I heard the Gray Sharks—one of the local gangs—had some internal troubles recently. Fell apart, from what the dock workers say. But that's just rumor."
"Gray Sharks," Brenner repeated, making another note. "I'll look into that. Thank you again."
He walked away, his gait unhurried, his document case held carefully under his arm. Lutz watched him go, waiting until the man turned the corner before allowing his shoulders to relax.
The encounter replayed in his mind as he continued toward the warehouse, his route now more circuitous, ensuring he wasn't followed.
Matthias Brenner. Church of Steam and Machinery. Trade compliance. The titles were bureaucratic camouflage for what the man actually was: an investigator. And he was investigating the Harbor Vipers.
The implications cascaded through Lutz's thoughts with cold clarity.
The Church of Steam was expanding its influence in Feysac, filling the spiritual and political vacuum left by the God of Combat's death. That expansion meant consolidating power, which meant eliminating obstacles. Criminal organizations that disrupted trade, skimmed profits, and operated outside Church control were exactly the kind of obstacles bureaucrats like Brenner were tasked with cataloging and eliminating.
The Gray Sharks deflection had been the right move. It gave Brenner something to investigate—a genuine gang that had genuinely collapsed—while drawing attention away from the Vipers' current operations. With any luck, Brenner would spend weeks chasing the ghosts of Boris and his crew, interviewing witnesses who'd describe impossible violence without understanding what they'd seen.
But Brenner wouldn't stop there. Men like him didn't work on single leads. He'd be cross-referencing shipping records, looking for patterns, following money trails. Eventually, those trails would lead back to the Baron. And when they did, someone would have to clean up the problem.
The thought sat in his stomach like a stone. Brenner wasn't Silvia—wasn't even a criminal. He was exactly what Andrei Hayes had once admired: someone trying to impose order on chaos, using intellect and persistence instead of violence. The kind of person the academic in him would have wanted to become.
Unless I can keep redirecting him. Feed him enough scraps to keep him busy without getting close enough to matter. Use him.
The calculation was cold, pragmatic, and entirely in keeping with what he'd become. Brenner was a resource, like the mysterious man at 47 Eisner Lane, like the Whispering Market, like every other piece of this city's hidden machinery. He just had to be managed correctly.
But a small, stubborn part of him—the part that still flinched at the phantom warmth of blood—whispered a different thought: Or you could warn him. Tell him to leave the harbor before he uncovers something that gets him killed.
Lutz dismissed the thought as quickly as it formed. Warnings required trust, and trust required revelation. There was no version of that conversation that didn't end with him exposed, captured, or dead. Sentiment was a luxury he'd paid for in full in a dark storage room.
No, Brenner would remain what he was: a useful distraction, a potential asset, and eventually—if the Baron willed it—another name on a list of casualties in a war the inspector didn't even know he was fighting.
The warehouse loomed ahead, its familiar silhouette dark against the evening sky. Lutz adjusted his collar, schooled his features into the expression of routine competence the Vipers expected, and stepped back into the world where men like Brenner were simply problems waiting to be solved.
But he kept the card in his pocket.
Just in case.
The following morning, the warehouse felt more like a prison than ever. The high ceiling, once a vast space that promised anonymity, now felt like the lid of a box he was trapped inside. The Candle Devourer Core, hidden under the floorboards, seemed to pulse with a silent, taunting energy.
His duties were a mind-numbing return to the mundane. Karl had him inventorying a shipment of "salvaged" textiles—water-damaged silks and moth-eaten wool that stank of the sea and would be sold to second-rate tailors in the Salt-Weep. It was tedious work, counting and categorizing, his hands growing rough from the coarse fabric. It was a stark, brutal reminder that for all his grand ambitions and bloody initiations, he was still just a cog in the Baron's grimy machine. A slightly more privileged cog, perhaps, but a cog nonetheless.
The frustration was a slow burn. Every ledger entry, every tally of subpar goods, felt like a step away from the path to power. He needed to move, to act, not count other people's stolen rags.
During the midday lull, when the others were drinking cheap beer and playing cards with greasy dice, Lutz slipped away. He found Henrik where he often did: in a relatively quiet corner near the forge, meticulously repairing a leather harness. The old man's movements were slow, precise, and economical, each stitch a testament to a lifetime of making broken things functional again.
Lutz leaned against a stack of crates, watching in silence for a moment. The rhythmic push and pull of the needle was oddly soothing.
"The fog last night was thick enough to chew," Lutz said, his voice casual. "Makes the whole port feel… closed in."
Henrik didn't look up, but a deep grunt rumbled in his chest. "Thick fog hides more than just ships, boy. Always has. Good for some business. Bad for others." He pulled the waxed thread taut. "You have the look of a man who saw something in it he wishes he hadn't. Or can't afford."
Lutz barked a short, humorless laugh. "Is it that obvious?"
"To those who know how to look," Henrik said, finally setting the harness down and fixing Lutz with his one good eye. The other, a milky, ruined orb, seemed to stare right through him. "You've got a new stillness to you. The kind a man gets when he's staring at a mountain he has to climb, but has no rope. It's the look of a price too high."
Lutz felt a strange urge to confess, to spill the entire story of the Whispering Market, the core, the impossible cost of the mosquito. But caution, honed by weeks in the viper's nest, held his tongue. Instead, he asked, "You've seen a lot of prices paid, haven't you, Henrik?"
The old man's gaze grew distant, focused on some memory only he could see. "Aye. I've seen men pay in coin, in blood, in pieces of their soul." He picked up a whetstone and began to slowly, methodically sharpen a skinning knife. The shhhhk-shhhhk sound was a grim counterpoint to his words. "I wasn't always mending harnesses in this damp shithole. I had a life. A good one. A wife."
He fell silent for a long moment, the only sound the scraping of stone on steel. "Annelise. Her name was Annelise. Hair like wheat in the summer sun, and a laugh that could make you forget the world was a hard place." The whetstone stilled. "I was a ship's carpenter on a Feysac merchantman. Good, honest work. We were saving. Had a little plot of land picked out north of the city, near the pine woods. She wanted to keep bees."
The shhhhk-shhhhk started again, slower now. "We took one last contract, a long run to the Southern Archipelago. The pay was double. Enough to build the house. Enough for the bees." His voice, usually so gravelly and firm, grew thin. "Pirates. Not the romantic kind. Scum from Bansy. They swarmed us at dawn. I fought. Took a cutlass blow to the face for my trouble." He tapped his milky eye. "Woke up in the hold of their ship, chained to the rest of the survivors. They sold us in a Bansy port to a mine operator. A year. I was in that hell for a year, breathing rock dust, watching men cough themselves to death."
Lutz found he was holding his breath. This wasn't a story of adventure; it was a story of a life dismantled, piece by piece.
"When I finally got out—a cave-in that killed half the guards, pure chaos—it took me another six months to work my way back to Feysac. I was a ghost. Skin and bones, half-blind. But I had her name in my head. Annelise. It was the only thing that kept me going." Henrik's hand, holding the knife, trembled slightly. "I went to the room we'd rented. A different family was there. I found our landlord. He… he told me. A fever, he said. Took half the street that winter. She'd been gone for eight months. He'd sold our things to cover the back rent."
The old man looked down at the sharp blade in his hand, his shoulders slumping. "The money from that last voyage was gone, of course. The land was gone. She was gone. Everything I'd worked for, everything I'd suffered for… it was all just… gone. I stood there on that street, and I had nothing. Not even a grave to visit. She's in a pauper's field somewhere. I don't even know where."
He set the knife and whetstone down with a final, deliberate click. "The Baron found me a week later, drinking myself to death in a gutter. He offered me a purpose, he said. A place. This." He gestured around the grimy warehouse, his one good eye sweeping over the shadows and stolen goods. "This is my plot of land now. These are my bees. It's not a life, boy. It's what you do when your life is already over. You just wait for the machinery to finally grind to a stop."
Lutz stared, the old man's loss a physical weight in the air between them. It was a different, deeper horror than the storage room. That was a sharp, immediate atrocity. Henrik's was a slow, soul-crushing erosion—not by ice and sea, but by cruel, random chance and the relentless passage of time. It was a warning more profound than any about violence: a warning about hope itself.
"The path I'm on…" Lutz started, his voice barely a whisper.
Henrik's good eye focused on him, and for a moment, there was a flicker of something that wasn't quite pity, but a grim, shared understanding. "Is it a path, or is it a cliff?" he asked, his voice rough with remembered pain. "I've heard whispers. Of men who gain power only to lose themselves. Who become something that forgets what it's like to love someone, to have a future that isn't just about the next score, the next fight." He looked pointedly at Lutz, his gaze boring into him. "Before you pay a price, boy, make sure you know what you're trading. I traded my future for a chest of coins that sank. I traded my face for a life that was stolen from me anyway. Some things… once they're gone, no amount of power can ever bring them back. You just become a sharper, harder version of the ghost you already are."
He turned back to his leatherwork, picking up the needle once more. The conversation was over. The lesson, carved from the bones of a dead man's dreams, had been delivered.
Lutz walked away, the image of a woman with hair like summer wheat and a laugh that could light up a room now haunting him alongside the memory of Silvia's blood. Two different kinds of loss. Two different condemnations of this world. The path forward was the only one he had, but Henrik's story had lined it with graves. He had to find a way to steal the next step, before the weight of the cost buried him alive.