The Low Road
A little after dawn, Brask, Faro, Ilsevir, Kettra, and Yenn broke camp at the fork and took the shore road toward Marrow's Cliff. Around the headland, the city rose in two crowded halves: weathered trading houses pressed along the waterline below, better-kept buildings high above, and eleven lift towers laboring between them. The chains could be heard across the harbor, though its residents seemed no longer to notice them. At the lower-city gate, Faro failed to reduce the two-copper toll and told a clerk that the group were hired muscle looking for work. The clerk recorded something other than Faro's explanation, and the party spent the morning asking guarded questions about the merchant concern that had risen so quickly. Most dockworkers sent them away, but the name Varnhall Company surfaced twice, always indirectly: it had gone from nothing to controlling leases on four of the eleven lift towers. By late afternoon, the party found Ossin among the manifest clerks on North Key.
Ossin's Manifests
Ossin would not speak on North Key, where he kept glancing toward the lift towers, and instead led them to a cook shop two streets away. With his back to the wall, he explained that he had worked the docks for eleven years and had spent two watching Varnhall cargo cease to make sense. Heavy crates arrived from the north as ore and hardware, traveled up to the company's warehouse at the upper-city edge, and never returned as anything accounted for. Other crates left under no manifest at all. Ossin had written Sister Raina because the wardens were the only people he knew who might care about northern traffic; she had replied twice, then stopped. He distrusted the Harbor Council as well, since Varnhall held four towers while three Varnhall men sat among the council. Most urgently, he told them that Tower Six's crews raised a platform two nights each week after the harbor chains had gone silent, and that its office kept a log of every run.
The Tower Six Log
That evening, the party acted on Ossin's lead despite his warning that the effort would be clumsy. Faro held Tower Six's night watchman at the front of the shed with an elaborate account of a debt, buying Kettra enough time to enter through the rear window. Ilsevir followed her inside with a lamp while the others waited outside. They found three unsigned runs each week for the previous two months, confirming that Tower Six had been operating beyond its stated business. Kettra forced a locked drawer and uncovered blank seals, a bundle of blank manifest forms, loose coin, and a brass-framed hand lens on a chain. Ilsevir determined that the lens exposed altered or forged portions of documents by showing the false work dark, and Faro named it the ledgerhand glass as they withdrew with the evidence.
The Quiet Ascent
Four Varnhall enforcers waited at the alley mouth, summoned by a watchman far less convinced by Faro's tale than Faro had believed. The alley allowed no flanking and little escape, so the fight was quick and close. Kettra dropped the first man with the flat of the cinderline blade rather than kill him, honoring Ossin's insistence that no one die in the Lower City. Brask broke another man's wrist, Yenn struck a third in the face with her bow when there was no room to shoot, and Faro took a cudgel hard in the ribs. The last enforcer fled, leaving Ossin convinced Varnhall would soon know exactly who had taken its records. Yenn argued for an immediate push into the upper city, while Brask wanted rest, until Ossin offered a concealed alternative: Tower Nine's small maintenance cradle, worked by hand and normally used for greasing chains. Before dawn, he brought them aboard in two cramped trips with their packs. Forty minutes later they stepped out behind an upper-city rope store, with the lit Varnhall warehouse only three hundred yards along the cliff edge.