Morning came in sideways and grudging.
It knifed through the cracks in the granary shutters, bounced off dust motes, and landed right in Riona's bad shoulder like it had a grudge. The granary had been built to impress grain, not people; every board and beam knew exactly how much weight it was supposed to hold and had never forgotten the insult of being repurposed as "headquarters."
A draft prowled the place, nosing at bedrolls, hunting for the weakest ankles. Somewhere under the floor, the egg hummed to itself in a register no one admitted they could hear.
Up in the loft, Kel Joran had built a shrine to his bad ideas.
A tin, a chipped cup, a spoon gone soft on one edge, a coin with a square hole in the middle—each arranged with lopsided, deliberate care around an opalescent bead. The bead sat in the center of the clutter, a pinprick of prismatic not-quite-light, and tried very hard to look like an innocent marble and not a remote node for a sewer god's nervous system.
Kel looked at it the way other men looked at old love letters or loaded dice. Guilty, fascinated, absolutely planning to make worse decisions.
"This is not worship," he told it. His voice came out hoarser than he liked, scuffed by smoke and last night's shouting. "This is… risk management."
The bead said nothing. That was the worst part. If it had whispered, hissed, sung in the brine-brain's dry bureaucracy voice, he could have argued with it, justified keeping it. Silence left all the justification work to him.
He added a dented pewter button to the circle. Symmetry. The Devil in him—capital D, the contract in his bones—liked symmetry almost as much as it liked loopholes.
Bootsteps creaked on the stairs.
Kel flinched, hand snatching back from the bead. His palm tingled disagreeably, like he'd been hovering over a candle flame without quite committing.
"Joran?" Merrow called down the stairwell. "Are you—"
Merrow's head appeared in the hatchway: pale, tired, and wearing a face like a borrowed coat.
He froze.
For an instant, his expression went sideways. The lines of his jaw shifted, not into any other known race but into something more… diagrammatic. Features thinned, smoothed, almost vanished; his eyes went deep and flat, like wells you drop data in. Something mapped and indexed Kel's outline with startling speed: height, stance, heart-rate, emotional volatility, risk of tail lashing out—
"Hey," Kel said. "Eyes up here, census taker."
Merrow blinked. His face shuddered, as if a hand had reached out and dragged him back up from under. Cheeks filled. Nose remembered it was supposed to exist. His gaze came back with real depth to it, and a flinch of guilt.
"Apologies," he said, too formal. "Sometimes I—"
"Sort people," Kel said, helpfully. "Like inventory. Yeah, I noticed."
Merrow's mouth twitched, almost a smile, almost a grimace. "I'm… nervous," he admitted. "The… situation under the city. It feels familiar and I don't enjoy that."
"Love that for us," Kel muttered. "Anyway, you came up here because…?"
"Riona asked if you were awake. She is attempting to drink something that claims to be coffee." Merrow's gaze flicked to the bead shrine, lingered half a heartbeat too long. "And your… risk management is vibrating."
Kel glanced back. The bead was not vibrating. The air around it was.
He scooped it up, fast, tin and all, and dropped the whole stupid reliquary into his pocket. The bead ticked against the metal like a fingernail on a coffin lid.
"Then we should go save her from it," Kel said. "Before it unionizes her stomach lining."
He clapped Merrow on the shoulder as he passed. The contact anchored Merrow further; his outline firmed up like a sketch gone over in ink. Downstairs, the egg pulsed once in the dark below them, as if taking attendance.
Riona Vale met morning like it was another opponent that hadn't learned how to stay down.
The granary's main floor was an explosion of bedrolls, armor straps, weapon-cleaning cloths, a stray spoon, and one prayer disk that had migrated halfway under Branna's boot. Riona sat at the table they'd bullied into being a command desk, a tin mug of chicory-that-insisted-it-was-coffee cooling beside her, parchment laid out like an autopsy.
The letter to Elian's mother was three drafts deep and still not right.
Branna Kestrel—human, broad-shouldered, and wearing sleep like a feckless scarf—leaned over the table with a stub of pencil caught between callused fingers.
"We can't say 'he died messing about with a sewer god's brain,'" Branna said. "Even if it's true. It sounds like we let him sign up for some blessed carnival."
"We also can't lie," Riona said. The words came out sharper than she'd meant; slept-on bruises complained. "We can't write 'he died of perfectly understandable bureaucratic negligence' and hope she takes comfort from the phrase 'risk was within acceptable thresholds.'"
"I was thinking more 'he died a hero,'" Branna said. "No acceptable thresholds. No sewer god. He died helping us save the city."
Riona rubbed the bridge of her nose. Beyond the grimy window, Lindell shuffled to its feet. Dwarven masons tramped past in pairs, tools over their shoulders, talking in thick, rock-rolled Senecan. A halfling courier loped by, satchel bobbing. A dragonborn customs officer in Crown blue was already arguing with a human baker about flour weights, both of them gesturing like they meant to duel with ledgers.
Under all that human noise, the city infrastructure groaned. Drains gossiped in smells. Somewhere not far away, a sewer grate coughed and refused to swallow what was being fed to it.
Lindell lived on contracts. On forms. On the neat little illusion that if you wrote enough boxes and filled them with enough names and numbers, nothing could slip through the cracks.
Riona dipped her quill, then changed course and took a gulp of Chicory Attempts Coffee. The taste was vengeful.
"He died," she said, "doing more than anyone could reasonably ask. Protecting people who will never know they were in danger. Trying to fix something none of us—none of us—fully understood."
Branna's jaw worked. "You want to put that in the letter?"
"I want to put the truth in the letter," Riona said. "I'm just trying to find a version of the truth that doesn't put her on a cart to Lindell to kick my head in."
Branna huffed. "She'd have to get through me first."
"That is not the comfort you think it is."
Footsteps thudded on the stair; Kel and Merrow descended, Merrow very carefully wearing his face like a human and not like an illithid node in a borrowed overcoat. Tamsin Reed and Lyra Fogstep emerged from the side-storage that had become "sleeping nook" by virtue of having the least mold.
Lyra's hair had decided to be a bird's nest in open rebellion against combs. She squinted at the light as though it was a personal insult. Tamsin looked like she'd been awake half the night, which she had. The egg downstairs did not keep normal hours.
"You're all up earlier than I expected," Kel said. "Did the sewers start singing ballads about us?"
"Close," Riona said. She tapped the letter once, then set it aside as a problem to be lost to momentum. "We have a different chorus to deal with today."
She laid it out for them: the stink in the streets not shifting, the complaints piling up at the Stooped Giant, the fact that three wards worth of drains were running slow. The workers sent to clear Sump Seventeen six months ago. How some had come back wrong, and then the hatch had been sealed and stamped with the Guild's rubber-stamped blessing.
"And nobody went back," Branna said. "Because that's sane."
"Because that's protocol," Riona said.
Merrow twitched.
"Gnome protocol," she added, glancing at him. "Engineer protocol. Post-homeland doctrine."
He nodded, once. "If in doubt, seal it. Stabilize pressure. Return with proper equipment when you are certain you won't lose the whole system. That is… how they were taught. After the sky burned."
Branna frowned. "I thought that was just a story."
"Stories are how you give trauma to the next generation without killing them," Merrow said quietly. "Their homeland really did have a series of cascading failures in its mains and reactors. The details change every telling. The lesson doesn't: if something unseen is riding your pipes and your people start dreaming in straight lines, you seal first and mourn later."
"Which is all well and good until you're one of the people sealed in," Kel said.
Riona's jaw clenched. "We're not arguing they were kind. We are arguing they were afraid."
"So," Lyra said, "we go argue with the terrified engineers."
"Eventually," Riona said. "First we check our own hazard."
She looked at Tamsin and Lyra. "You two go down and check on our guest. Make sure the egg is still contained, the foundation isn't doing anything stupid, and the weird grate isn't weirder. Kel, Merrow: I want you at the Stooped Giant. Listen. Lose coin. Collect stories. Anyone who's had a dream they're not sure is theirs, I want to know about it. Branna and I will go see Orvene Pell and tell her exactly how much we like her sealed hatches."
"On a scale of one to prosecuted?" Kel asked.
"On a scale of one to 'the One's titles will not save you from a paladin audit,'" Riona said. "Move."
They moved. You didn't argue with that voice unless you were new, stupid, or on fire.
The steps down to the granary's lower level complained in three different languages. Tamsin could have named each board by creak and pitch. She rested a hand on the stone wall as they descended, feeling for the steady thrum of foundation.
The egg's song came up through her bones. Hungry. Patient. Old.
"I hate that it purrs," Lyra muttered behind her. "I hate that it knows we can hear it and purrs anyway."
"It's not purring," Tamsin said. "It's… checking the load-bearing capacity of reality."
"That is worse," Lyra said.
The basement, when they reached it, smelled of damp stone, dust, salt, and the faint metallic taste of wards. Runes chalked on the floor around the egg had smeared and been re-drawn three times already. Bundles of herbs hung in varying stages of despair from ceiling hooks. Someone—Kel, probably—had stuck a rude drawing of a dragon with a big red "NO" sign over it on one support post.
The egg sat in its circle, matte and black and too smooth, taking up more metaphysical space every day.
Tamsin stepped up to the chalk line and felt its song push at her, the way a tree's roots pushed at a foundation looking for cracks.
"Still in the circle," she murmured. "Still humming. Doesn't feel any bigger."
"That's what my last ex said," Lyra said automatically, then winced. "No, no, that one wasn't even good in my head. I rescind it."
Tamsin smiled despite herself. She walked the circle, checking chalk thickness, salt lines, the little iron nails hammered into the floor at compass points. The foundation stone under it all thrummed. Once, as she reached the far corner, she felt a pulse that did not come from the egg.
She stopped. Pressed her palm to the floor.
Under the egg's bassline was another vibration. Fainter, higher-pitched. Thready. It came from the direction of the wall with the floor grate.
"Feel that?" she asked.
Lyra crouched, hand flat on the stone. She closed her eyes. Her hair settled like a curtain around her face, hiding her expression.
"Yeah," she said slowly. "That's not egg. That's… plumbing."
Tamsin crossed to the corner.
The floor grate in question had always been a bit crooked. A heavy iron thing, big enough to lose a halfling in, with a lattice of rust-pitted bars and a lip of stone mortared unevenly around it. They'd mostly ignored it while worrying about the egg.
Now the stone around it was discolored. Dark, like old bruises. Fine cracks spidered out from the edges.
"You've shifted," Tamsin told it.
The grate grumbled.
It was not a word. It was the sound of metal that resented being moved, stone that did not like the stress, and something behind both of those that had opinions about being listened to.
Lyra took a cautious step back. "Please tell me that's just the natural spirit of civic neglect and not a new brain."
"Portion of both," Tamsin said. "The sewer's under more strain than it's supposed to be. I felt it last night. Like… the roots under the city have all been shoved to one side to make room for something else."
"Maybe we should… not have a grate directly under our cursed egg," Lyra said.
Tamsin put both hands on the iron and pushed.
The grate resisted like a stubborn mule. It complained in three distinct squeals, then heaved up out of its seat with a lurch. Water scent belched up—stale, sour, and annoyed. A faint hum followed, cut abruptly when the grate left the throat of stone.
Beneath, the opening dropped into darkness. The walls were brick, slick with old films. Tamsin's eyes adjusted enough to see a ledge a short distance down, then nothing.
Something moved in that nothing. A glint of metal, the quick, ratty shuffle of claws, the soft hiss of someone swearing in Drainslang.
A small head in a battered saucepan helmet popped up into view, followed by a narrow snout, bright yellow eyes, and a grin full of too many teeth.
"Hi," said the kobold. "Nice basement. Needs better ventilation."
Lyra squeaked and narrowly stopped herself from trying to stab him with the chalk.
The kobold hauled himself out of the grate with the easy familiarity of a creature who considered the sewer system his personal hallway. He wore a patchwork coat that had once been Guild blue and had since suffered a series of arguments with mildew, candle wax, and other people's laundry. A crude sigil had been painted on one sleeve: a circle with three lines, like a junction diagram, with a tiny skull where the overflow would be.
He tugged his helmet straight. It was dented in three places, each one probably a story. His tail flicked, flicked, flicked.
"Who," Lyra said, "the hell are you, and how did you get into our basement?"
The kobold drew himself up to his full, unimpressive height.
"Am Skrik," he said. "Drainpipe Clan. Sewer professionals." He swept an arm out, nearly smacking Lyra in the knee. "This all sewer. Everything under city is sewer. People on top just renting."
Tamsin pinched the bridge of her nose. "Of course the union rep arrives through our floor."
"Not union," Skrik said. "Yet."
Lyra folded her arms. "You can't just pop up through someone's grate and declare their home part of your workplace."
"Can," Skrik said. "Is. Sewer goes under. Sewer goes everywhere. Your basement is just fancy hat sewer is wearing."
He sniffed, nose wrinkling. His gaze cut to the egg.
"What that," he demanded.
"None of your business," Lyra said.
"Very much my business," Skrik said. "Living in sewer is my business. Sewer is singing wrong. Everything humming like hive of angry bees. We come listen, see why. So. What that."
"It's an egg," Tamsin said. "It's contained."
"For now," Lyra added.
Skrik padded closer to the chalk line. He didn't cross it. Whatever else he was, he was not stupid enough to step into a circle that smelled like old dragons and new law.
The egg's song shifted slightly toward him. The hair on Tamsin's arms rose.
Skrik cocked his head, eyes half-closed.
"Mm," he said. "Egg sings old. Strong. Hungry. But not same song as sewer." He spat to one side. "Good. We do not need two gods having argument through pipes."
"Who said it was a god?" Lyra said.
"Everything under city crazy tallfolk build on top wants to be god eventually," Skrik said. "If not watched."
He took a step back, tail curling.
"They call us pests," he said, apropos of nothing. "In papers. Guild forms say 'unauthorized occupants,' 'non-authorized modifications,' 'blockages.' City papers say 'infestation.' Watch posters say 'clear kobolds.' Clear means beat with sticks, chase with dogs. Sometimes clear means kill."
Lyra's throat tightened. "That's the Watch."
"That's the Crown," Tamsin said quietly.
Skrik nodded. "Engineers Guild not write 'kill kobolds' on their forms. They just not write 'kobolds' at all. On paper, we not exist. That is worse sometimes. At least if poster says 'kill,' we know they thinking about us."
He tapped the sigil on his sleeve.
"Drainpipe Clan exists," he said. "We fix sewer, we break sewer, is same work. Keep balance. Because Guild forget this is living thing, not just pipes on map. Right now sewer is angry. Singing wrong. Sending pieces of itself to chew on people. We do not like that."
Tamsin crouched until she was closer to his eye level.
"You've had people go missing," she said.
Skrik's fingers twitched. "Cousin Drips went to listen, no come back. Aunt Valve went, come back, no laugh, no complain, just hum in wrong rhythm. We throw rope, rope hum too. So we stop throwing rope."
Lyra shivered. The smoke-rope from earlier hissed in memory.
"Something down there," Skrik said. "Big. Wrong. Using roots, pipes, drains, all the little roads under the streets like veins. Guild say: 'We sealed Sump Seventeen, is fine, is contained.'" He spat again. It sizzled on the stone. "Contained my ass. Sewer all one body. You seal off part, pressure builds up and it complains somewhere else. Or blows."
"You came all the way up here to tell us this?" Lyra asked.
"Came up because sewer not supposed to talk in lyrics," Skrik said. "Your place hum same wrong way as Sump Seventeen. Smell like contract, old magic, and people who make bad decisions." He bared his teeth. "Thought: maybe you can help."
Tamsin exhaled. "You're not wrong."
Lyra sighed. "We were just talking about going to yell at the engineers."
Skrik perked up. "Good. I also want yell at engineers. They pretend they don't know we do half their work. They seal hatch with people still down there because paper tell them to. We go together, we shout at paper."
Tamsin stood, joints protesting. "Fine. But first, we make very clear ground rules for you being in this building."
"Like 'do not feed the egg,'" Lyra said.
"Why would anyone feed egg?" Skrik asked, genuinely baffled.
Lyra pointed at Kel's empty mug upstairs. "You haven't met Kel yet."
The Stooped Giant had never stooped. It lounged.
The tavern sat where three streets gave up and fell into each other, all angles and leaning timbers and a giant of a carved stone lintel that slouched over the door. The name came from the thing carved there: a giant's skeleton built into the city wall, hunched in permanent lookout. No one could agree if it had been a siege engine, a warning, or a leftover from someone's art phase.
At street level, the place drew a very specific kind of patron: people who worked hard, drank harder, and did not care if their boots left mud on the floor. Early morning found it already half-full.
Dwarven stonecutters in aprons dusted with powdered wall leaned against the bar, nursing last-night's decisions. Human dockhands whose job description was mostly "lifting heavy things and swearing about them" filled a table by the hearth. A halfling courier sat on a barrel, boots not touching the floor, counting coins with a frown like they'd been personally offended by arithmetic. A dragonborn merchant in a too-nice coat argued with a gnome in Guild blue about access fees, both of them talking in precise legalese that just barely didn't come to blows.
Kel Joran walked into this mess, breathed in smoke and spilled ale and stress, and felt more at home than he ever had in a chapel.
"Split up?" Merrow asked quietly at his shoulder.
"No," Kel said. "We're doing this together. You're my 'respectable' friend today."
Merrow blinked. "Ah."
Kel slid into the crowd the way he always did: a little too loud, a little too unlucky, very good at losing. He found a table with a couple of human stevedores and one dwarf with arms like stubborn tree trunks and set some coins down.
"Gentlemen," he said. "Devil for a hand?"
They looked at his horns, at his grin, at the coin.
"You any good?" the dwarf asked.
"Terrible," Kel said cheerfully. "You'll fleece me."
They dealt him in.
Losing, for Kel, was work. He lost like a prodigy: barely, convincingly, with just enough flashes of almost-winning to keep the table's interest while still playing the part of the man whose purse was getting lighter. Around him, the tavern's conversation flowed.
"…told the guild they had to send someone down," a woman at the bar was saying. Human, hair in a scarf, hands scarred from rope burns. "But does Orvene listen? No. She marks the form and locks the hatch."
"That's what she's for," her companion said. Half-elf, watch-issue boots cleaned of most grime. "That's what the badge is for. 'Post-Homeland Incident protocol,' isn't that how they put it? Something goes funny in the mains, you slam every door and pray."
"Easy to say when it isn't your boy behind the door," the woman snapped. "They sealed Seventeen with three crews still down there."
Kel's dice bounced, clattered, showed a losing spread. He swore colorfully in Infernal for the show of it. No one at the table cared; their attention had turned, like his, toward the bar.
Merrow ghosted closer, not touching, listening like a man who knew too well what it sounded like when something colonized minds in the dark.
"You heard about it?" the dwarf at Kel's table asked him, not looking away from the bar. "Sister's lad went down. City boy, half dwarf, half human. Used to sing filth in two languages while we loaded carts. Came back from Seventeen and just… stopped. Doesn't laugh. Doesn't bathe. Just sits in the yard, listening to the ground like it's going to read him a sermon."
Kel's stomach lurched. "How long ago?"
"Six months," the dwarf said. "Guild said sump was 'sealed and contained as per doctrine.' Asked if that doctrine brings my nephew back. They didn't answer."
At the bar, the rope-burned woman had not run out of anger.
"…doctrine," she said, spitting the word like gristle. "You know what that means, these days? Means the engineers are still scared of the sky burning over their heads, so they shut every door at the first weird hum and let the rest of us drown in our own sh—"
Someone shushed her, shooting a nervous glance at the gnome in Guild blue nursing a mug down the bar.
The gnome pretended not to hear. His shoulders had gone rigid. His thumb beat a fast, unconscious tattoo on the rim of his mug in the rhythm of someone doing mental calculations on structural load.
Kel felt Merrow at his back like a weather change. The ex-illithid was still, too still, head tilted.
"This pattern," Merrow murmured, voice low enough that only Kel heard. "Odd behavior in infrastructure. Workers altered. Dreams that aren't theirs. An entity teaching conduits to think. It is…"
"I know," Kel said softly. "Feels like the brain we just evicted from our friend's skull."
Merrow's hand twitched toward his pocket, stopped. He had no bead; Kel had them both now. The little tin in Kel's jacket pulsed once, a tiny, eager chime.
Kel put a hand over it, hard.
"Not here," he whispered.
Merrow nodded, jaw tight.
They lingered long enough to hear a little more. A halfling courier complaining about an alley in Ward Nine that smelled "like someone else's dreams" when it rained. A dwarven mason muttering that when the old homeland's sky had burned, they'd sealed doors there too, and yes, it had saved lives, but no one ever talked about the ones on the wrong side of the seals.
By the time Kel had bled enough coin to be considered a respectable loser, the air in the tavern had gone thick with resentment, fear, and sweat. That would have been enough for a normal morning.
Then the kobolds arrived.
Riona had expected to find the Stooped Giant in its usual state: half-rowdy, half-hungover, wholly uninterested in paladins. What she got was an argument that had metastasized into a brawl.
As she and Branna pushed through the door, a tankard sailed past Branna's ear and exploded against the wall. A dwarven mason and a human dockhand were nose to nose, shouting about blocked culverts. Three kobolds in mismatched armor darted between tables, throwing handfuls of some chalky dust at people's boots and cursing in Drainslang. Someone had overturned a table; someone else had tried to hide under it and been dragged back out.
At the center of it all, Kel was standing on a bench, hands up, trying to talk over the chaos.
"If everyone could—"
"You tax devil!" a kobold shrieked, jabbing a clawed finger at him. This one had copper wire bracelets and a belt made of old measuring tapes. "You spill whole barrel at Gate Twelve! Whole! We still smell it in overflow! Sewer gods furious!"
"I paid for that!" Kel shouted back. "And if the sewer has a ledger, it can take it up with the bar!"
Riona took one step into the fray and immediately had to duck a flying chair.
"On your right," Branna said. She stepped into the path of a halfling with a broken bottle, swatted the weapon out of their hand with the flat of her spear, and redirected their momentum into a stumble that ended in a seat rather than a shattered skull.
"Non-lethal," Riona reminded her.
"I know how to barfight, Vale," Branna said. "You're the one who keeps trying to talk to tables."
Riona blocked a wild swing from a half-orc dockhand with her shield and shoved him gently but firmly into a bench. "That table owed me answers."
A lantern hit the floor near the hearth.
It clanged, rolled, and came to rest in a spreading shimmer of spilled oil.
For a single horrible heartbeat, the entire tavern focused on that. Every breath hitched. The smell of fuel rose. The memory of the homeland disaster—secondhand, thirdhand, passed down via gnome and dwarf—shivered in the air.
Riona moved. She slammed her shield down, pinning the lantern and grinding glass and flame into the floorboards. Branna kicked a bench over in front of the spill, blocking it from reaching the hearth's scattered embers. Someone cursed as their drink went flying.
Riona straightened, breathing hard. Her bad shoulder sang with pain. She raised her voice.
"Decide right now," she shouted, "whether you want to argue or burn."
Silence fell like a hammer.
The half-orc stopped mid-swing. The dwarven mason froze with a stool half-raised. The kobolds froze mid-dust-throw. Even the bard—in the corner on a crate, halfway through an extremely unflattering song about engineers—choked off the rhyme.
Riona let the quiet breathe for three counts.
"Good," she said. "Now. Who started this, and how quickly can we make it about money instead of broken ribs?"
A familiar saucepan helmet popped up from behind a table like a crab from a rockpool.
"Was business meeting," Skrik said. "Turned into riot. Common mistake."
"Common for you," Kel muttered, jumping down from his bench.
Skrik scrambled up onto that bench in his place, coat flapping, sash askew. He cleared his throat, spat something unpleasant onto the floor, and jabbed a thumb toward Riona.
"This paladin is my ally," he announced. "Mostly. This devil is… maybe ally." He waggled his hand. "We are here to talk to engineers about sewer. Not fight. Save fighting for things with more teeth."
A dwarven patron, still breathing hard, snorted. "What in the One's many titles do kobolds want with engineers?"
"Recognition, hazard pay, snacks," Skrik said promptly. "Also to not die in stew when sump explodes."
Riona seized the offered pivot.
"We're going to the Guildhall," she said. "We're going to tell Orvene Pell that her sealed hatch is not a solution; it's a delay. We're going to suggest a better one. If that means some of you get to stop living knee-deep in other people's waste, all the better."
"And if it means the smell in here goes away," the barmaid added from behind the counter, "I'll put your god on the drinks board myself."
The kobolds muttered to one another. The human dockhands grumbled. The dwarves looked like they'd been handed a new kind of tool and weren't sure whether it was a hammer or a bomb.
Skrik hopped down.
"Come," he said. "Before engineers decide to seal three more hatches and 'regret the loss' in triplicate."
Riona nodded once to the room. "No more lanterns on the floor," she said. "No more hitting kobolds with chairs unless they unionize your pantry."
The tavern exhaled. Conversation resumed at a lower pitch, like a storm that had abruptly remembered it had other places to be. Kel gave the barmaid a two-finger salute and followed Riona, Branna, Merrow, and Skrik out into the street.
Behind them, the bard cautiously tried to pivot his song into a ballad about sewer subcontractors. It needed work.
The Planner's District had been designed by people who believed in right angles, regular intervals, and the moral superiority of storm drains that never clogged.
Streets ran neat and straight. Trees grew in strict lines where the Guild's old plans said they ought to. The buildings leaned only as much as the engineers had permitted and no more. Even the pigeons looked regulated.
The Guildhall fit here: a squat, solid structure of stone and brass and stubbornness, its facade carved with reliefs of bridges, gears, and aqueducts. A giant skeleton's ribs arched out of the city wall two towers down, but here that was just another piece of load-bearing decor.
Riona always felt a little too loud on these streets. Her armor creaked wrong. The wind made flukes of noise the planners hadn't accounted for. Today, she welcomed the discomfort.
"Head up," she told Skrik. "If you slouch, they'll step on you."
"Kobolds hard to step on," Skrik said. "We have practice."
Inside, the Guildhall smelled of ink, old paper, metal filings, and coffee so strong it could have stood trial for assault. Dwarves in work aprons and gnomes in Guild blue moved between desks; halfling clerks balanced ledgers on narrow shoulders. A wall near the entrance bore a bronze plaque etched with tiny names under the heading: THOSE WHO HELD THE LINE WHEN THE SKY BURNED.
No one looked at it as they walked past. Everyone's eyes slid off and away, like it was a sharp edge.
They were shown into the map room because there was nowhere else to have this kind of argument.
The map room was the Guild's heart. A circular table dominated the center, its surface an intricate relief of Lindell's underbelly: channels, sumps, culverts, drains, all in miniature. Colored pegs marked trouble spots. Lines of ink showed flow rates, reroutes, pressure points. It was a city's circulatory system laid bare.
Orvene Pell stood at the table with the posture of a woman held together by caffeine and fury. Gnome, grey-streaked dark hair twisted into a knot, Guild coat shrugged on over a shirt that had seen at least three spilled cups. Her eyes had that over-focused quality of someone who had not slept enough to be kind.
Mire, a watch captain built like a spear given legs, lounged against a support column, arms folded. Human, expression carved in "try me." Jothen, a too-young apprentice with ink smudges to his elbows, hovered near Orvene's elbow with a sheaf of papers and a haunted look.
Riona, who had faced down demons with prettier smiles, stepped forward.
"Engineer Pell," she said. "You sealed Sump Seventeen."
Orvene's eyes flicked over the group. Paladin, knight, devil, ex-illithid, necromancer, druid, kobold in a saucepan. Her mouth compressed into the thin line of a woman whose pie chart of problems had just grown a new, brightly colored wedge.
"You brought me outsiders with opinions," she said.
"Specialists," Kel offered. "Or itinerant disasters. Depends on the paperwork."
Orvene's gaze snagged on Skrik. On the patchwork coat, the sigil, the helmet. Something ugly and complicated crossed her face.
"You brought me an unlicensed underdweller," she said slowly. "Is this a threat or an insult?"
"Neither," Skrik said, before Riona could answer. "Is solution. Drainpipe Clan. Sewer professionals. We live in your mistakes."
A halfling clerk in the doorway sucked in a breath between their teeth. Mire's eyebrows made a lazy journey upward.
"We are not having this conversation with…" Orvene gestured, at a loss, "… a kobold."
"Funny," Riona said. "You're already having this conversation with what sealed your sump and what woke up down there. Skrik is just here to translate."
Orvene's jaw worked. She looked back down at the map like it owed her moral clarity.
"We followed protocol," she said. "Post-Homeland Incident protocol. Unknown contamination event in the mains, workers reporting hallucinations, physical symptoms, structural anomalies? You seal, stabilize, and return with proper shields and kit when you know you can open it without boiling a ward."
"Three crews still down there," Branna said.
Orvene's hand clenched around a brass peg. "Three crews down there, yes. You think I enjoyed stamping that closure? You think any of us—"
Her eyes flicked to the memorial plaque through the glass panel in the map room door.
"Our grandparents survived because when the sky burned over Trindle's Line, someone slammed every hatch that hummed wrong and did not open them until the rivers stopped boiling," she said. The words came out flat, drilled. "That's why there were any survivors to build Lindell's mains. I am not repeating that because a dock worker doesn't like the smell on his street."
"There's a difference," Merrow said quietly, "between sealing a reactor line and sealing a handful of workers into a psychic sump and walking away."
Orvene's head snapped up. "I did not walk away. I filed reports. I requested specialized investigation. I was told to 'contain as per doctrine and maintain service elsewhere.' So I did. You know what happens if a capital city loses its under-river mains, paladin? People die. A lot of them. Protocol isn't mercy. It's triage."
Mire shrugged. "We're here now. You wanted specialists. They killed something similar already. Let them go poke it with sticks before it climbs up the wrong drain and wears someone important like a hat."
Jothen flinched.
He had the look of a man who wanted to be anywhere else and yet was painfully present. Ink stained his fingers where he clutched his papers. His eyes had the faraway brightness of someone who'd been dreaming too vividly and too often.
"Apprentice Jothen," Merrow said, voice soft as a hook. "You have been… hearing things."
Jothen blanched. "I— I've just been tired."
"Tell them," Orvene said through her teeth. "If you faint on my floor, I'm marking you as a hazard."
Jothen swallowed.
"I… sometimes… hum," he said. "I don't remember starting. I just… realize I've been humming, and it's… the plan. The overflow plan for If-Seventeen-Fails. I drew it up. I don't remember drawing it. Woke up with ink on my arms and the map done. I looked at it and I thought 'that's clever,' and then I threw up."
Riona's fingers tightened on the rim of the table.
"Voices?" she asked.
Jothen hesitated. "… Not… voices. More like… pressure. Like I'm supposed to… keep things moving. Like I'm a valve. If I stop, something backs up and explodes. Nothing tells me that. I just… know it."
Merrow's eyes had gone very dark.
"May I look?" he asked.
Orvene stiffened. "At what?"
"At the parts of his mind that are not his," Merrow said. "I am very good at recognizing… invasive structures. It is what I was made for."
Mire pushed off the column. "Do we get him back after you're done spelunking?"
"You have my word," Merrow said. "On… the person I have chosen to be."
Jothen looked between them. Sweat beaded at his temples. He looked like a boy, suddenly, not an apprentice. Just someone who had drawn a plan he didn't remember and was terrified of what else he might do without his consent.
"Okay," he whispered. "If it gets this thing out of my head. Okay."
Merrow stepped closer. Kel moved with him, like orbit, fingers finding the tin in his pocket.
He cracked the lid a fraction. The bead inside chimed like a tuning fork struck in a deep, dry well. The air around the map table tightened.
Merrow closed his eyes.
When he went into Jothen's mind, he did it carefully. No full illithid dive, no tentacles (real or metaphorical). Just the gentlest extension of attention, like opening a door and leaning through to see what furniture had been rearranged.
Jothen's mind, as he touched it, looked like a desk in a small, tidy office. Papers stacked neatly. A drawer labeled "pipes," one labeled "flow," one labeled "song I am not humming." Another drawer, slammed shut and nailed, labeled "Homeland Stories."
Between the neat stacks lay other pages. Thin, slick, ink that had never seen a pen. They smelled of brine and rot and long meetings. They lay over Jothen's memories, heavy as wet towels.
"That," Merrow murmured aloud, "is not yours."
Something noticed him.
The map room blurred. For a heartbeat, Riona smelled helmet sweat and stale coffee from a hundred shifts in a hundred other rooms. She heard boots shuffling on grates. She tasted copper and algae and bureaucracy.
An attention turned. It thought in committees and votes and flowcharts eaten by mold. It regarded Merrow like an unexpected agenda item.
Oh, it said, without words. You.
It pushed.
Merrow staggered. Riona's hand shot out, steadying him. The bead in Kel's pocket rang once, sharply. The little opalescent thing on Merrow's mental desk vibrated, then vanished; Jothen's breath hitched.
"Absolutely not," Kel snapped.
He stepped between Merrow and Jothen like a very annoyed contract.
"Infernal Law, Section Nine," he said, in a voice that had made demons reconsider fine print. "Unlicensed occupation of municipal assets without proper documentation is a violation punishable by immediate eviction and forfeiture of all leverage."
The thing in the pipes paused, confused. It did not have a drawer for that kind of law.
Riona stepped up on the other side.
"This city," she said, "belongs to its people. Not to an unauthorized mind squatting in the infrastructure, and not to the Crown and its ledgers alone. You are here without consent. Show me one person, one worker, who freely, joyfully invited you in, and we'll talk."
She felt it search.
It flipped through the mental papers it had laid in Jothen. Through the humming in the dockworkers, the dreams in the kobolds, the pressure headaches in the masons. It looked for a signature line that wasn't forged.
It found none.
Riona bared her teeth.
"Then get out," she said. "This jurisdiction requires consent. You have none."
Consent, spoken like law, hit it like acid. The bead in Kel's pocket cracked with a soft, glassy sound. Jothen yelped; the air in the room popped, like ears clearing.
The invading structure recoiled. It shoved itself back through the pipes, down into the mains, leaving behind the psychic equivalent of skid marks.
Merrow caught the edge of the table and pulled himself fully back into his own skull. His face was chalk-pale and very much shaped like a person's.
"It is… offended," he said, breathless. "And retreating. Temporarily."
Kel snapped the tin shut. Something inside had become a smear of oil and grit.
Orvene stared at them all. Her knuckles had gone bone-white around the peg.
"This is exactly how the old disaster stories start," she said hoarsely. "Voices in the pipes. Workers drawing plans they don't remember. If the stories are right, three days later the river boiled."
"Then we're ahead of schedule," Riona said. "And we're not going to do what they did next."
"Seal everything and pray?" Orvene asked bitterly.
"Seal strategically," Riona said. "And send people in who know what they're looking at."
She nodded toward Skrik.
"Your system is already using kobolds as unofficial sensors," she said. "They live in the pipes. They feel the pressure shifts. They know when 'normal awful' becomes 'new awful.' Put them on the ledger. Pay them. Give them hazard gear. Let them tell you when the hum is wrong."
Orvene stared at Skrik as if seeing him for the first time outside the category of "hazard."
"You want me to… formalize… kobolds," she said slowly, "as… subcontractors."
"Yes," Skrik said. "With benefits. And snacks."
A halfling clerk made a strangled noise in the doorway, halfway between horror and delight.
"The original gnome project," Merrow said, softly enough that only Orvene and Riona really heard, "was to track every worker. Every hand on a valve. For fair rations and fair hazard pay. Universal worker dignity, I think the phrase was. Somewhere between there and here, someone moved kobolds off the worker ledger and into 'unlisted populations' because it was easier."
Orvene flinched as if slapped.
"That was above my pay grade," she said.
"And now it isn't," Riona said.
Mire, who had watched this whole exchange with the air of a woman at a moderately interesting play, shrugged.
"From a Watch perspective," she said, "if kobolds are on Guild forms instead of missing, it makes my job easier. 'Clear infestation' orders are a nightmare. 'Coordinate with subcontractors' is just annoying."
Jothen, still pale, lifted a trembling hand.
"Also," he said, "they're the only ones who can tell when the sewer is singing wrong. I… can't… I don't want to be the canary."
Orvene closed her eyes. When she opened them, some of the anger had drained out, leaving tiredness and fear.
"Fine," she said. "We do this your way. Drainpipe Clan as sewer subcontractors. Temporary access for you lot to Sump Seventeen under Guild writ. Hazard pay for anyone who steps within fifty feet of that hatch. And if the city survives this, we work out something more permanent."
Skrik's tail whipped like a happy flag.
"Union," he breathed. "With benefits. And snacks."
"Don't push it," Orvene said automatically.
They wrote a contract.
It was awkward and ugly, because revolutionary things usually are when they first meet paper. Branna insisted on hazard pay clauses; Mire insisted on liability boundaries; Kel slid in a detail about a particular public well in a poor ward remaining public, no matter what future "optimization" plans said. The halfling clerk had to invent a new line in the personnel register to write "KOBOLD: SUBCONTRACTOR" without the ink protesting.
When Orvene signed, her hand shook.
"Done," she said. "Jothen, you're not going down there. If something in that sump tries to write through anyone again, I want it to be someone who chose that. Not my apprentice who just wanted to make the pipes run on time."
Jothen nodded so fast he almost tipped over.
Riona took her copy of the writ, tucked it into her belt, and looked at Skrik.
"Show us your office," she said.
The hatch to Sump Seventeen sat in a small, paved square two streets off the Guildhall. It was labelled AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY in three languages on the metal plate, none of which included the word "kobold."
Skrik tapped the sign with a claw.
"This going to be so funny later," he said.
Mire had insisted on seeing them off. She stood with arms folded, assigning two Watch to keep the square clear. People craned necks from windows, curious. A dragonborn laundress on a balcony wrung out a sheet, eyeing the hatch like it might spit at her.
Riona unfolded the writ and read it aloud, because you didn't go into this kind of place without saying the names of the people who had reluctantly agreed to let you risk their infrastructure.
"Under the authority of the Engineering Guild of Lindell," she finished, "the undersigned grant temporary access to Sump Seventeen to Riona Vale and associates, including one kobold representative of Drainpipe Clan, for the purposes of hazard identification and elimination. Hazard pay scale appended."
"Don't die," Mire said. "If you make it back, we'll argue about jurisdiction all day."
"Looking forward to it," Riona said, and dropped into the dark.
The ladder was steel, cold and damp. The air grew thick with the smell of old water, stone, and a faint, off-key hum that hadn't been there when the sump was first built. Maintenance markings in Dwarven and Gnomish lined the shaft at intervals—dates, initials, little jokes. Three names had been etched and circled near the level that corresponded to Sump Seventeen.
Tamsin ran her fingers over them as she passed. "We'll try," she murmured to the ghosts.
The ladder opened onto a tunnel tall enough for a human to walk without stooping, brick and stone and iron. This was the sewers people imagined when they thought of sewers: wide central channel, raised walkways, rivulets trickling, the smell of several neighborhoods' business in the air.
"Welcome to Lindell's guts," Skrik said, with a little flourish. "Mind your feet. Some of this is load-bearing slime."
Tamsin's nose wrinkled. "The craftsmanship is good," she said. "Under the… everything else."
"Dwarf brick, gnome plans," Skrik said. "City sits on the best work people ever did. Then forgets it exists."
He led them along the main channel, pointing out features as if giving a tourists' tour of hell.
"Here is overflow that used to go gentle into Ward Nine," he said, gesturing at a side tunnel where water now slammed like a drunk in a doorway. "Now too fast. Angry. We blocked some. Guild yelled. We ignored."
He pointed at a narrower pipe that smelled faintly of cheap liquor. "Here smuggler route. Belongs to halflings with more optimism than sense. They not use it much since sewer started singing. Smart halflings."
They passed a carved relief in the wall, half-obscured by grime: dwarves and gnomes working together over plans for pipes and gears. Someone—large, probably human—had painted a crude crown on one of the gnomes.
"Original gnome project," Merrow murmured, nodding to it. "Every worker, every valve, every name. Before someone decided some hands were too awkward for the ledger."
The hum grew louder.
They turned into a narrower tunnel. Here, pale roots poked through the stone ceiling and walls, knotted like injured fingers. Their tips were blackened.
Tamsin stepped close, heart clenching.
"They've been used," she said.
"Everything thinks if you bully it long enough," Merrow said softly.
The roots shivered under her touch. She felt old pain, new orders forced through old pathways, a note of raw panic buried under compliance.
"I'll come back," she whispered. "If we survive. I'll try to untangle you."
The roots did not answer in words. A single leaf dropped from a crack far above, landing in the muck like a quiet thank you.
"Come," Skrik said. "Hole with teeth this way."
"Do we want the hole with teeth?" Branna asked.
"No," Skrik said. "But you should see it. For context."
The hole with teeth had once been a side tunnel. Now, its entrance had collapsed into a jagged maw, brick and mortar torn outward like something had chewed its way free. Rusted metal spikes jutted out, no longer part of any machine. The stone around the breach bulged, as if swollen.
"The sewer tried to grow a mouth and failed," Lyra said weakly.
"Cousin Drips went that way," Skrik said. "We throw rope. Rope scream. We stop throwing rope."
Branna swallowed. "We're taking the stairs?"
Skrik nodded vigorously. "Yes. Stairs were built by people who believed in maintenance. Mouth was built by something that believes in… chewing."
They found the maintenance stairwell. It had a door with the Guild's symbol stamped on it, edges crusted with rust. Riona unlocked it with the key Orvene had given them. For a heartbeat, everyone paused.
"You know," Kel said lightly, "in some stories, this is where we open the door and there's just boiling water and screams on the other side."
"In some stories," Riona said, "we close the door and leave people down there forever. I like our version better."
She hauled it open.
Cool, stale air breathed out. No screaming. Just the hum, louder now, threading through the stone like a headache that had learned to sing.
They descended.
Sump Seventeen was a cathedral built to water.
The chamber opened around them in a great circle, multiple channels feeding in from different directions, all converging on a central pool. Arched brickwork soared overhead, cross-bracing like the ribs of some great stone beast. Gnomish survey markers dotted the walls at intervals, neat metal plaques with tidy engraved numbers.
It was beautiful work. It had been built to withstand floods and siege and neglect.
The water in the central pool ruined it.
It was a dark, bruise-purple slurry, shot through with streaks of fungus the color of old bruises. It stank of rot, metal, and something that wasn't, strictly speaking, a smell—a sensation of stale thought and boredom laced with compulsion.
The hum became a tangible thing. It crawled along their nerves.
"Okay," Kel said softly. "I hate this."
"Good," Riona said. "Means you're still working."
The thing in the middle of the pool looked like the sewer had hired a nightmare as a manager.
An otyugh—a mass of rubbery flesh, eyes on stalks, tentacle-limbs tipped in claws—rose out of the sludge. Its hide was mottled with fungus and scabbed wounds. More importantly, its head was crowned in a clump of brain-fungus, pale and glistening, filaments running down into the water and out along channels, turning the whole sump into a nervous system.
It opened a mouth full of teeth and garbage and screamed into their minds.
Hungry, it said. Order. Flow. Will.
The scream hit Tamsin like a gale. She staggered, bracing one hand on the wall. Lyra's scar flared cold, sending a bolt of pain down her neck. Kel's pact wine burned hot in his veins, reacting to the intrusion.
Merrow straightened.
"Absolutely not," he said, aloud and in.
The otyugh's mind probed. It tasted Tamsin, found a forest. It pushed into root-maps and leaf-murmurs and paths that looped back on themselves. The forest pushed back, offended.
It tasted Lyra, found a bruise full of Hrast—a god, a scar, a chain of bad decisions and worse bargains. It spat her out like a bite of gristle that bit back.
Then it found Merrow.
Oh, it said again, with greater interest. You.
This time there was no committee voice, no bureaucratic tone. This was raw, naked will, dressed in whatever structure it could steal. It showed him a vision in fast sketches:
Lindell's pipes, neat and ordered under the city, running like veins. Every household a node. Every worker a sensor. A city where infrastructure reported straight to a central mind that never slept and never questioned.
We could be so efficient, it purred. No waste. No delay. No… dissent.
Merrow almost laughed.
In another life—not the one he'd been made for, but the one his makers had dreamed of—this would have been the easiest sell in the world. A city brain, humming along, everyone slotted into their proper flows.
Now, though, it felt like a familiar cage.
"This city," he said, "does not belong to you. You are a parasite chewing on someone else's work."
He took the thing's offered lines—the conduits, the channels, the tidy flowcharts—and twisted.
Stone groaned. Water leapt in confusion. The otyugh's scream stuttered.
Riona waded into the mental mess with law like a blade. Beside her, Kel wielded contracts as cudgels. Tamsin dragged roots into the dream, tangling the neat flows. Lyra threw in the memory of almost-calling Isolde and not doing it, that tiny act of refusal, as a seed of resistance.
The otyugh thrashed physically. Tentacles lashed at the narrow walkway where they stood. Branna planted herself at the front, spear braced, using the constricted space so she only had to fight one limb at a time.
"Stay on the stone!" she barked. "If you fall in, I am not pulling you out!"
Skrik, who had been plastered to the wall with eyes like coins, snapped into motion. He yanked a bundle from his satchel—a wadded, grey-green lichen tied with cord.
"Cover!" he squeaked.
Lyra, without thinking, snapped off a cantrip. Frost bloomed over the brick above them, making the stone sweat and the air crackle. The otyugh flinched from the sudden cold.
Skrik used the distraction to scamper along the wall, set his little feet, and sling the lichen bundle straight at the otyugh's fungus crown.
The bundle hit.
The lichen opened like a hungry mouth and started to eat.
Brain-fungus sizzled. The otyugh shrieked—audibly and otherwise. The network of filaments in the water convulsed. The hum in the pipes spiked into a shrill, painful whine.
Hungry, WILL, ORDER, it screamed, trying to hold onto its structure, trying to keep every channel under its control.
Merrow yanked. Tamsin pushed. Riona and Kel hammered it with "no" in different dialects. Lyra hissed a curse and flicked a spark into the lichen, feeding it heat. Skrik cackled with delighted terror.
The crown collapsed.
The otyugh shuddered, tentacles flailing once, twice, then sinking back into the filth. The fungus sizzled away, eaten to nothing. The filaments in the water snapped, one by one, sending shocks through the sump.
For one instant before the mind fully tore free, it lashed out.
A raw, ragged thought blasted through them: not words, just intent. WILL—
Then silence.
The hum died.
Their ears rang.
Everyone stood very still.
"So," Kel said, after a moment. "Did we win, or did we just convince it to relocate to somewhere with less lichen?"
Merrow closed his eyes, reaching out—carefully—for any lingering structures.
"It's… severed," he said. "The node, at least. The main… whatever it is… is still in the system. But this… tooth is gone."
"Node," Lyra said faintly. "Tooth. These metaphors are not helping my day."
Tamsin looked around. As the mental pressure faded, she could feel the sump itself sigh. The roots overhead relaxed fractionally. The stone stopped buzzing.
Something pricked her awareness.
"Merrow," she said. "There's still something. In the wall."
He frowned. Followed her gaze to a mortar line just above the waterline. He stepped close, squinting.
"There," he said.
Lyra, cursing under her breath, lay flat on her stomach, reaching down toward the spot. Her fingers brushed slime, brick, then something that wasn't either.
She pried it loose.
Another bead. Smaller than the one Kel kept, but the same opalescent, pearl-like sheen. It glowed faintly from within, like it remembered being connected.
"Absolutely not," Lyra said. "No more brain marbles."
Skrik backed away, hands up. "I not touching that. I only throw rocks at brains. I do not collect them."
Kel pulled out his tin, opened it. The bead inside was cracked, leaking a faint, oily iridescence.
"We can't leave it here," Riona said. "Someone else will find it. Or it'll grow legs."
"We could smash it," Tamsin suggested.
"We smashed the last one," Merrow said. "It crawled into another sump. Better to keep the pieces where we can watch them. And maybe use them to listen."
Lyra made a face, but passed him the bead. Kel dropped it into the tin with exaggerated reluctance.
The beads slammed together like teeth. The tin jerked in his hand.
"Rude," Kel told it, and snapped the lid shut. "You're on timeout."
They made their way back up through Lindell's guts, leaving Sump Seventeen gurgling and sullen but no longer singing. The ladder felt longer on the way out. The air grew clearer with every rung, the hum receding.
They emerged into daylight.
For a second, the brightness felt wrong. The street noise—vendors shouting, wheels rattling, someone arguing about taxes—seemed too loud, too careless, like a song that had skipped over its own discordant bridge.
On a balcony, the dragonborn laundress paused in her wringing. She sniffed. Her brow furrowed.
"Huh," she said. "Smells… less terrible."
No one else noticed.
Reporting back to Orvene and Mire took less time than the argument that had sent them down.
"Seventeen is clear of that particular thing," Riona said, dropping the key to the hatch on the map table.
"Destroyed," Merrow added. "We severed the node. The… central mind is still in the infrastructure, but its grip is weaker. It will… heal or re-route. But the workers it was using here should wake up… without it."
Jothen, hovering in the doorway like a man afraid to step into the same room as his own thoughts, swallowed. "So… I'm… me again?"
"For now," Merrow said gently. "We will teach you… exercises. To notice if something tries to slide papers onto your desk again."
Mire leaned her hips against a table. "We'll get a priest or two to look in on the affected workers," she said. "If they start humming maps again, I'll send for you to yell at their skulls."
Orvene's hand hovered over the map, fingers tracing routes they'd just disrupted.
"You killed… something in my sump," she said. "A thing that thought like a committee. Using my pipes."
"Yes," Riona said.
Orvene took a long, shuddering breath. "Good."
She looked at Skrik.
"And you," she said, carefully, "are now… officially… a subcontractor."
Skrik held up the copy of the contract the halfling clerk had pressed into his claws. It looked like it had been hugged already. Twice.
"Drainpipe Clan has paper," he said. "We exist in your books."
"In a very small font, on a line I had to add by hand," the clerk muttered, somewhere behind Orvene. "But yes."
Merrow's gaze flicked to the wall. The memorial plaque stared back.
"True communism was betrayed," he said absently. "Once. Maybe this is… patch notes."
Riona smirked. "Version one point zero," she said. "Bug fixes. Kobolds now render on the ledger."
They walked back through the poorer ward with the late afternoon sun tilting warm across uneven cobbles. People did what people always did: carried water, haggled, ignored miracles.
Kel veered toward a cracked public well. It had a little iron cage around it now, courtesy of a recent Crown initiative to "protect water assets." He'd slipped a clause into the kobold contract earlier about this well remaining public.
He rested his hand on the stone.
"You're safe for now," he murmured.
A half-orc woman with a bucket eyed him, then laughed.
"If you're blessing it, holy man," she said, "maybe bless my back while you're at it."
"I charge union rates," Kel said, straight-faced.
By the time they reached the granary, the sun was dragging a smear of rust across the horizon. The egg hummed below with the same steady hunger as that morning. The floor grate over the sewer throat cleared its throat, quietly. The house smelled of someone's attempt at stew, bread, and the indefinable spice of people who had all nearly died together and hadn't yet processed that they hadn't.
Supper was loud.
Skrik sat under the table in an oversized shirt that had once been Kel's, tail threading between chair legs, stuffing his face with bread and bragging about union negotiations to anyone who would listen.
"House rules," Riona said, pointing a spoon at him. "One: no sharpening knives on my armor. Two: no feeding the egg. Three: if the plumbing hums in a way you don't like, you wake me up, you don't try to make friends."
"Kobolds not stupid," Skrik said, through a mouthful. "We know not to sing with sewer anymore."
"Anymore," Lyra repeated.
"Anymore," Skrik confirmed primly.
After stew and arguments and someone nearly setting their sleeve on fire with a candle, Kel remembered the beads.
"Right," he said, as the others were drifting toward their bedrolls. "One last bit of bad judgment."
He set the little tin on the table and opened it.
There was no bead.
Just a smear of iridescent oil and a dusting of fine grit, glimmering faintly like sand that remembered being glass.
"So either they burned themselves out when we broke the node," Kel said, "or they teleported, and tomorrow our chamber pot will start singing."
"Don't," Lyra said. "Do not put that in the universe."
Riona studied the dust.
"Our remote listening devices have been disconnected," she said.
"Good," she added, to the universe in general.
Merrow fetched his journal. He wrote down everything he'd seen in the sump—how the mind had structured its flows, how it had thought about the city, how it had reacted to consent turned into a weapon. He wrote it as data, as reference, not as prophecy.
Riona made her nightly audit. She did not write it down; she said it.
"The sewers don't sing tonight," she said. "The boy at the Guildhall will sleep without humming blueprints. The kobolds have paper."
"Engineers have new headaches," Branna muttered, stripping armor buckles.
"That's a bonus," Riona said.
Deep under the city, something huge and patient noticed a missing node. It rifled through its network, found the dead branch, and sent a pulse through another sump, far from Lindell's walls.
Retaliate, it thought, in a voice like overflow.
On a high Guild pediment, a raven sat and watched the city lights. It tilted its head once, as if listening to something no one else could hear, then preened a ragged feather.
The egg below the granary shifted in its dream, flexed whatever passed for a claw inside the shell, and went back to plotting escape.
Lyra woke in the middle of the night with Isolde's name in her teeth.
The granary was dark, except for the faint glow of a coal in the hearth and the little blue-green halo that always hovered around Merrow when he slept wrong. The others breathed slow and heavy. Skrik snored like someone who'd spent his whole life learning how to make a small body sound like a whole chorus.
Lyra lay there and stared at the ceiling, at the cracked plaster and the faint shadows of roots beyond, and felt the familiar ache.
It would be so easy.
A few components. A whispered phrase. The smoke rope would come, coiling from the bowl. She could tug, ask just one more question, hear Isolde's voice catch in her throat. Hear whatever else was listening pretend to be her.
She sat up.
The granary felt… quieter. The hum from below was lower, more bass, less pressure headache. The sewer grate had stopped complaining. The city above was breathing easier.
She thought about the otyugh's crown. About Jothen, humming maps without meaning to. About the way that thing had reached out along any conduit it could, dragging wills into flows it liked.
"Not tonight," she whispered.
She lay back down, curling onto her side, hands tucked under her chin as if she could keep herself from reaching for chalk and bowls by pinning them to her own ribs.
By any reasonable metric, she did almost nothing.
She didn't raise the dead. She didn't save a ward. She didn't kill a god.
She just refused to open a door in her head and invite something else in.
For the sort of people they were, in the sort of city they lived in, it counted as a victory.