The morning began with the routine that had become Lutz's life: collections in the merchant quarter with a new partner named Otto, a taciturn man who communicated primarily through grunts and the efficient application of intimidation. Three shopkeepers, three payments. All went smoothly. The debts were manageable, the fear well-established. Lutz's role was minimal—just standing there in his increasingly respectable clothes, a reminder that the Vipers had operatives who could walk in both worlds.
By midday, he'd completed his quota by theft—a silver pocket watch from a drunk Loenish sailor, a handful of Shields from a merchant's unattended cashbox during a moment of distraction. The work was mechanical, joyless. Each successful lift was just another number in an invisible ledger, payment toward a potion he still couldn't complete.
He ate alone at his usual stew stall, the proprietor no longer bothering to make conversation. Lutz had become a fixture, a silent young man who paid in copper and left no mess. Anonymous.
The afternoon brought him back to the library, ostensibly to continue his study of the Gargas Island dialects. But his mind kept drifting to two puzzles: Matthias Brenner's investigation, and the man at 47 Eisner Lane.
He left the library earlier than usual, the Gargas grammar barely touched.
Eisner Lane looked different in the late afternoon light. The tree-lined street had an almost pleasant quality, the autumn leaves creating dappled shadows on the cobblestones. Children played with a ball further down the block, their laughter echoing off the narrow townhouses. It was the kind of place where people lived ordinary lives, worked ordinary jobs, and never suspected that something strange might be happening behind shuttered windows at number 47.
Lutz approached from the opposite end of the street this time, walking with the casual purpose of someone who belonged in the neighborhood. Just another resident returning home. He noted the details: the house still had its shutters closed, the small front garden was overgrown with weeds, a faint accumulation of mail visible through the slot in the door.
The mail was interesting. It suggested the man either didn't use the front entrance regularly, or didn't care about his correspondence. Both options pointed to someone whose focus lay elsewhere.
Lutz continued past the house, turned down the alley that ran behind the row of townhouses. This was riskier—alleys were for servants, deliverymen, and people with reasons to avoid front doors. But it was also where the real information lived.
The back of number 47 was as unremarkable as the front. A small yard, mostly dirt, separated the house from the alley. A wooden gate hung slightly askew on its hinges. The back windows were also shuttered, but these shutters were older, with gaps where the wood had warped.
He glanced up and down the alley. Empty. The children's laughter was a distant sound now, muffled by the houses. He had maybe five minutes before someone might wander past and wonder why a well-dressed young man was loitering behind someone's home.
He approached the gate, testing it gently. It swung open with a faint creak that made him wince. He froze, listening.
Nothing.
He stepped into the yard, moving carefully to avoid the scattered debris—a broken flowerpot, some rotted boards. The house loomed above him, silent and somehow oppressive despite the daylight. Up close, he could see the shutters on the ground floor had thin gaps where light might escape at night.
He crouched near the back door, his ear close to the warped wood.
For a long moment, there was only silence. Then—
A sound. Wet and organic, like something being dragged across stone. It was followed by a chittering noise, high-pitched and rapid, that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. It wasn't quite insectoid, wasn't quite mammalian. It existed in the uncanny valley between categories.
Lutz's hand went instinctively to his concealed knife. His training with Gerhart had taught him to trust his instincts, and every instinct was now screaming that he was hearing something wrong. Something that shouldn't exist.
Another sound joined the first—a bubbling, gurgling noise that suggested liquid moving through spaces it wasn't meant to occupy. And beneath it all, barely audible, a rhythmic tapping. Methodical. Deliberate. The sound of tools at work.
He shifted position, trying to peer through the gap in the shutters without exposing himself. The angle was wrong; he could only see darkness and the faint suggestion of movement. But the sounds continued, a symphony of wrongness that painted a picture in his mind: something alive and confined, something being worked on, and someone utterly absorbed in their task.
Creatures. He's working with creatures.
The chittering intensified, rising to a frantic pitch. The bubbling sound became a hiss. And then—
CRASH.
The sound was massive, immediate, the noise of something heavy and glass shattering against stone. It was followed by a man's voice, sharp with panic: "No! Back! Get back in the—"
The voice cut off into a strangled grunt.
Lutz was already moving, his body responding before his mind caught up. He scrambled backward out of the yard, his feet finding the alley cobblestones with desperate speed. Behind him, from inside the house, came a sound that made his blood freeze—a wet, tearing noise followed by a sustained, inhuman shriek that climbed octaves into registers that hurt to hear.
He didn't stop. He ran down the alley, turned onto the main street, forced himself to slow to a fast walk. His heart was a drum, his breath coming in sharp gasps. The children with the ball stared at him as he passed, their game forgotten. He managed a weak smile, a gesture that everything was fine, and kept moving.
He didn't stop until he was three streets away, ducked into the recessed doorway of a closed shop. He leaned against the cool stone, willing his racing heart to slow, listening for sounds of pursuit.
Nothing. The street remained quiet, its afternoon rhythm undisturbed.
Lutz's mind replayed the sounds, categorizing them with the clinical detachment that distance allowed. Something had broken containment. The man—the researcher, the amateur whatever-he-was—had lost control of whatever he'd been working on. Whether he'd regained it or been killed by it, Lutz had no way of knowing.
What he did know: 47 Eisner Lane was confirmed as a source of mystical creatures. Which meant it was also a potential source of ingredients. The Blood-Speckled Black Mosquito might not be there specifically, but the man clearly had access to exotic specimens. Or had, until whatever just happened.
The logical next step was to report this to Karl. It was exactly the kind of intelligence the Vipers valued.
But something held Lutz back. If he reported it, the situation would be out of his control, they might send rudel or someone who might destroy the place and its loot, or hide things that Lutz wasn't "supposed to know".
It was a calculated risk, keeping information from Karl. But it was also an exercise in his new nature—a Marauder didn't just take what was in front of him. He planned, he positioned, he waited for the moment when the prize could be taken completely, cleanly, without leaving anything valuable on the table.
Lutz pushed away from the doorway and resumed his walk toward the warehouse. His breathing had steadied. His hands no longer trembled. The fear had been real, visceral, proof that he wasn't completely deadened to the world's horrors.
But he'd controlled it. Channeled it. Used it to make a decision that served his goals.
Progress, he supposed. Of a sort.
The kind Silvia's ghost would never approve of.
The warehouse swallowed him back into its grimy embrace, the normalcy of the place a stark contrast to the sounds still echoing in his mind. He found Otto by the forge, meticulously cleaning his knuckle-dusters with an oiled rag. The big man looked up, his expression as impassive as a slab of granite.
Lutz didn't bother with preamble. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a single, heavy Gold Hammer, and placed it on the anvil beside Otto with a definitive clink.
Otto's eyes flicked from the coin to Lutz's face. He didn't speak, just raised a single, thick eyebrow in a question that was more threat than curiosity.
"An opportunity," Lutz said, his voice low. "A private one. Not for the ledgers. Tonight. I need a man who can handle unexpected problems. The pay is another Hammer when we're done, and a quarter of whatever else we find."
He was careful not to say split. A Marauder didn't split; he allocated. He was the architect of this venture, and Otto was the hired muscle. The terms had to reflect that hierarchy from the start.
Otto picked up the coin, biting it briefly before pocketing it. The advance was accepted. "What kind of problems?" he grunted.
"The kind that makes strange noises," Lutz said, keeping it vague. "A researcher's house. He's… acquired some unusual specimens. I believe he may have had an accident today. The place might be empty. Or it might not be."
A slow, grim smile spread across Otto's face. It wasn't a pleasant sight. "Breaking and entering. With possible complications. You're learning, Fischer." He nodded once. "I'm in. When?"
"Midnight. Meet me at the end of Eisner Lane. Come quiet, and come armed."
Otto gave a final, decisive grunt and returned to polishing his metal. The deal was struck. No questions about why Lutz wasn't taking this to Karl. No concerns about jurisdiction or Viper protocol. The pure, uncomplicated language of personal profit was one Otto understood perfectly.
That night, the fog returned, coiling through the streets of Indaw like a phantom river. It suited Lutz's mood perfectly. He moved through it like a part of it, a shadow detached from the waking world. He reached the rendezvous point early, his senses stretched taut, listening for the sounds of a city that had, for once, failed to quiet the screaming from within one of its houses.
Otto materialized from the gloom exactly at midnight, a hulking silhouette that moved with surprising quiet for his size. He carried a heavy, well-worn crowbar.
Without a word, Lutz led the way down Eisner Lane. The street was silent now, the children long gone to their beds, unaware of the nightmare that might be festering next door. Number 47 was a darker blot in the darkness, its shutters still tightly closed. No light leaked from within. No sound.
But the air carried a faint, new scent. Metallic. Coppery. Like old blood and ozone.
Lutz pointed to the back alley. Otto nodded, hefting his crowbar.
They slipped into the yard. The gate creaked again, the sound unnaturally loud in the dead silence. They froze, listening.
Nothing. No chittering. No bubbling. No screams.
Just the profound, waiting silence of a grave.
Lutz looked at Otto and nodded toward the back door. The time for observation was over. The time for acquisition had begun.
The back door was secured with a simple lock, weathered and weak. Otto made short, quiet work of it with his crowbar, the splintering of wood a sharp, guilty sound in the silent yard. The door swung inwards, revealing a deeper darkness that smelled of dust, chemicals, and that underlying, coppery tang.
Lutz drew his knife. Otto tightened his grip on the crowbar. They exchanged a look—a silent agreement that the rules of a simple burglary no longer applied—and stepped inside.
They found themselves in a kitchen, but it was clear no meal had been prepared here in a long time. Every surface was cluttered not with dishes, but with laboratory equipment: beakers clouded with residue, jars of unidentifiable powders, and stacks of notes weighed down by a petrified, half-eaten loaf of bread. Lutz picked up the top sheet. The handwriting was a frantic scrawl.
...subject 3 exhibits heightened aggression but tissue rejection is catastrophic. The chitinous plating refuses to bond, leading to systemic sepsis. Must refine the amalgam...
He dropped the note. It was another piece of the puzzle, but the full picture was still a nightmare blur.
They moved into a narrow hallway. More notes were pinned to the walls, covered in complex anatomical diagrams that fused insect and human physiology. One drawing depicted a human spine with a segmented, centipede-like creature woven through the vertebrae. Another showed a cross-section of a skull, with dozens of fine, thread-like legs burrowing into the brain matter.
"Madman," Otto muttered, his usual grunt softened by a note of genuine unease.
The first room off the hallway was a study, if it could be called that. Books on entomology, neurology, and obscure Feysac mysticism were piled on every surface, many lying open to illustrations of monstrous insects. On the desk, a journal lay open. Lutz's eyes skimmed the last entry, dated two days prior.
The Directive is clear. The fusion must be seamless, a true symphony of flesh and command. But the consciousness... it fights back. It screams. I can hear it even when the subject is silent. Perhaps the key is not to suppress the host, but to subvert it. To make the will of the parasite the host's own deepest desire. To make it want to obey.
The Mosquito project shows promise. The proboscis modification allows for direct extraction and injection of spiritual plasm, but the volatility... I nearly lost the west wing to the last containment breach. Must persevere. The Master's favor depends on it.
The Master. The words sent a chill down Lutz's spine. This wasn't just one madman's isolated project. There was a hierarchy, a purpose.
A soft, scraping sound came from deeper within the house.
They both froze. It wasn't the chaotic noise Lutz had heard earlier. This was slower. Deliberate. The sound of something dragging... or something moving with difficulty.
Otto nodded toward the door at the end of the hall, from which the sound seemed to originate. This was it. The laboratory.
Lutz pushed the door open slowly.
The smell that hit them was indescribable—a cocktail of formalin, spoiled meat, and that same metallic blood-ozone scent, now so thick it was cloying. The room was large, clearly a converted drawing-room. Shelves lined the walls, holding jars of floating specimens that made Lutz's stomach turn: things with too many legs, things with human-like eyes staring from insectoid heads, things that were just pulsating, unidentifiable masses of tissue.
In the center of the room, a man sat slumped on a stool, his back to them, bent over a workbench littered with surgical tools and shattered glass. He was perfectly still. The scraping sound had stopped.
"Hey," Otto said, his voice a low rumble. "You. Turn around."
The man didn't move.
Otto took a step forward, crowbar raised. "I said, turn around!"
Slowly, stiffly, the man began to obey. He swiveled on the stool, his movements jerky, unnatural. His face came into view.
Lutz's breath caught in his throat.
It was the man from the library. His eyes were open, but they were vacant, milky orbs that saw nothing. His mouth hung slack. But it was his head that held their horrified gaze.
Emerging from the man's scalp, just above his forehead, was the head and front segments of a centipede-like creature. It was thick, glossy, and black, its chitinous plates seeming to fuse seamlessly with the man's skin and skull. Dozens of tiny, articulated legs dug into the man's scalp like grotesque sutures, holding the creature firmly in place. The insectoid body vanished into the man's head, as if it had burrowed deep inside, making the human body its shell.
The creature's antennae twitched. The man's dead eyes remained fixed on nothing.
The centipede's head shifted slightly, and the man's arm lifted, his hand closing around a long, sharp scalpel from the bench.
Otto, for the first time since Lutz had known him, looked truly unnerved. "By the Baron's balls..." he breathed.
The man on the stool stood up, his movements a marionette's jerky imitation of life, the centipede a vile puppeteer rooted in his brain. The scalpel gleamed in the dim light.
The laboratory was no longer a place of discovery. It was a tomb, and they were locked inside with its tenant.