The Ledger in Daylight
After hiding in the rope store until first light, the party entered Marrow's Cliff's upper city, where carved timber houses, glazed windows, and guild halls displayed wealth the Lower City never had. Faro's ribs had needed the rest, but by morning he was ready to pose as a Kaldrek factor's agent with ore to move north. He walked into Varnhall Company's hall carrying blank manifest forms, while Ilsevir followed as his scribe and Kettra, Yenn, and Ossin waited by the chained fountain in the square. A Varnhall clerk brought Faro to a side office and fetched the ledger, giving Ilsevir just enough time to lay the ledgerhand glass over its pages. Beneath altered entries and uncut seals, they found the real record: people sent north in ones and twos, crates from Warden's Watch's vault dated eleven days earlier, and every northern consignment marked with the circle crossed by three lines. The same name stood against every line—Kindling Rite—and the entries showed that Varnhall Company had been its shipping arm for six years. When the clerk returned, saw the glass on the open ledger, and raised the alarm, Faro and Ilsevir fled with the evidence.
The Ring on the Cliff
Faro escaped through a side-office window with Ilsevir and the ledger close behind, though the two were separated twice in the tight upper-city lanes. Kettra and Yenn came in from the square to find them at the fountain, while Brask pulled Ossin away from two Varnhall men who had cornered him against a house front. One man went down under Brask's mace, and the other ran; Brask could only apologize when he found that Faro's earlier healing had left him unable to mend Ossin's split eyebrow. At the north end of the guild halls, the party broke onto bare clifftop rock and heather beneath a fast-approaching storm. Fifteen ash-wrapped figures stood around an unfinished thing of fused dead animals, frost, black stone, and four iron tags hammered into its skull. At their center stood Mother Ash, an old scarred woman in ash-gray and dark-red robes, and she greeted the party without surprise. Then Sister Raina came from the ring wearing the same colors, her iron watch sigil gone and the Kindling Rite's mark burned into her bare hand; after saying Aldous had died because she had not opened the gate quickly enough, she killed one of Mother Ash's own followers to clear the ground for the fight.
Rain on the Clifftop
The finished creature rose and smashed through Kettra's shield, leaving her on her back only twenty feet from the cliff edge. Yenn's arrows and Ilsevir's fire barely slowed it, but Ilsevir finally called on stored lightning, and the charge caught in the iron tags until the creature tore itself apart from within. Ossin dragged Kettra back from the drop by her belt, saving her while rain began to drive sideways across the rock. Raina held Brask and Yenn at bay with a warden's spear and the practiced knowledge of how a group tried to surround a single fighter. She put Brask down twice, but the Watcher's clasp spoiled the second killing thrust, as though the spear had gone wrong at the last instant. Yenn put an arrow through Raina's thigh at close range, yet Raina kept coming until Kettra killed her with the cinderline blade on wet stone where Raina lost her footing and Kettra did not. Faro's thrown knife missed Mother Ash, but Yenn's arrow struck her from forty feet away as she raised her hands, and the remaining ash-wrapped fighters broke and fled into the city.
The Voice Beneath
Mother Ash lay dying in the heather while Brask tried to save her, but she waved him away and spoke willingly instead. She said the Kindling Rite had never controlled the tagged creatures: the tags opened them to something beneath Hollowpeak that could take hold of what it touched. According to her, Warden's Watch's seal had never been a prison but a lid over a voice called the undersong, and the Rite had worked to open the mine, the wall, and the seal so that voice could be heard. When Brask asked what would happen if it was heard, she answered that everything would answer, then died content with what she believed was coming. The party left the clifftop in the rain carrying Raina's body, Mother Ash's body, and the stolen ledger. Among Mother Ash's possessions, Ilsevir found a thin blackened iron band scored with gray that could turn aside fire when worn; Faro named it the Ashbon Circlet, and the name stayed. They also recovered roughly thirty gold, four unstamped blank iron tags, and a small heavy coin that felt warm to the touch and bore an unfamiliar mark.