"It's an ideal location to hide abducted," Latch added grimly, eyes on the shuttered windows.
"That's what you think this is?" Yvain asked, his tone flat but edged with doubt.
"It fits," Latch replied. "Fresh flesh sells at high rates in the undermarket. No one asks questions about where it comes from."
Yvain said nothing. The logic was sound, but his auguric instincts nagged at him like a splinter beneath the skin. This was no ordinary smuggling den. The vision had been too visceral, the sense of wrongness too strong. Something was festering inside this place, hidden behind its mask of ordinary brick and timber.
"We'll go in," Ivie cut in, her hand tightening on the strap across her chest. Her voice was brisk, decisive. "You keep watch." She was already moving toward the broad double doors.
Latch glanced at her, then at Yvain. "If there's anything inside, we'd better find it fast." He pressed his shoulder to the wood.
The tannery doors creaked under his weight, the sound long and reluctant, as though the building resisted their entry. When the gap opened, a draft rolled out, the air heavy with the tang of lime and tang.
Inside, darkness pressed close, swallowing the light that bled in through the doorframe. The vats and racks loomed as hulking silhouettes, their shapes distorted in the gloom.
Latch stepped forward, boots scraping against the floorboards slick with some unwholesome moisture. Ivie followed, her hand brushing the satchel of bombs at her side, her eyes narrowed and sharp.Yvain stayed at the threshold, letting the heavy doors swing shut behind the others. He pulled the collar of his inverness coat higher against the damp wind that curled through Rat's Nest Lane.
The street was alive in its squalid way. A hunched figure shuffled past with a basket of turnips that looked half-rotten, muttering to himself. Across the lane, a woman in patched skirts stirred a pot over an open brazier, the steam carrying the bitter smell of boiled bones. Two children darted between stacked barrels, barefoot, their laughter shrill and hollow, the kind that spoke more of hunger than joy.
Further down, a toothless old man played something that might once have been a fiddle, coaxing a wheeze of sound while his tin cup waited at his feet. Passersby ignored him, eyes downcast, hurrying as though afraid to be recognized.
Yvain watched it all with the dispassion. The slums of the undermarket lived by their own rules, and what passed for normal here was misery given form.
Yet even in this grim ordinariness, he felt the faint tug of unease. His augur's senses stretched outward like threads, brushing against the crowd. Nothing seemed overtly amiss, only the ordinary desperation of the poor.
He adjusted his stance, eyes fixed on the tannery door. The street behind him carried on as always, but Yvain knew to trust the silence gathering within.
Ten long minutes dragged by before a crash shattered the silence. Glass and timber splintered from within the tannery, followed by a chorus of guttural shrieks and Ivie's sharp voice shouting orders. Yvain spun toward the building just as a figure burst through an upper window. Latch hit the cobbles in a crouched roll, shards glittering around him like cruel confetti.
A heartbeat later, the double doors slammed open and Ivie barreled out, face streaked with sweat and soot. Without breaking stride, she tore one of her infernal spheres from her belt, lit the fuse, and lobbed it back into the shadows.
The detonation came like a thunderclap. Fire spat outward in a hungry bloom, rattling windows up and down the street. The ground trembled beneath Yvain's boots, and a hot gust scoured his face. Screams erupted as the few remaining passersby scattered into alleys and doorways. Within seconds, Rat's Nest Lane was deserted, a hollow shell of smoke and silence.
From the wreckage, another figure emerged. At first, Yvain thought it was simply a man staggering through the flames, clothes scorched but body intact. But then he saw the head. Not a head at all, but a bulbous knot of quivering flesh, black and wet, pulsing as if it breathed. Veins of oily light threaded across its surface, and shapes tried to press through from beneath. Some teeth, perhaps, or eyes that refused to form fully.
"What in the hells is that?!" Yvain shouted, the roar of fire almost stealing his words.
"A demon!" Ivie snapped back, drawing another sphere. "It's possessing Bret!"
As if to answer, the writhing crown of matter quivered and began to recede, collapsing inward like wax under flame. Slowly, impossibly, it reshaped into the ordinary contours of a human boy's face. A boy who matched the sketch Rook had drawn. His eyes fixed on them.
"You shouldn't have done that," Bret said, voice calm, almost tender. His tone cut against the chaos, the words more chilling than the explosion that still echoed through the lane.
Yvain felt annoyed. Once again, he had stumbled into the path of demons. Twice now, in two different cities, each worse than the last. This was no gibbering spawn like the beast in Yelich. This one was clever. Speaking through the boy's mouth with dreadful ease.
Ivie yanked another sphere from her bandolier and hurled it with a practiced flick. The fuse hissed, then burst against Bret's feet with a deafening crack. Fire and shrapnel flared, and the thing inside him shrieked, an unearthly sound that made the shutters on nearby homes slam closed as if in fear.
"We have to kill it," Latch muttered, his rapier whispering free of its sheath. His knuckles whitened around the hilt.
"Can we?" Ivie asked, and for once there was no brash confidence in her tone, only the naked edge of doubt.
"It hasn't completely taken him," Latch said, eyes narrowing.
Yvain knew the truth of that. Possession followed a terrible sequence, a ladder down into damnation. First came infestation, subtle disturbances on the edge of life. Then oppression, where the will bent under constant torment. Next was obsession, the breaking point when mind and soul began to fracture. And finally possession, when the host was nothing but a hollow vessel.
Bret hovered between the third and fourth rung. The entity had its claws deep, but his form still carried echoes of resistance. That made it both more dangerous and more fragile.
There were only two ways to end it. Destroy the vessel outright, snuffing out both boy and parasite in one strike, or banish the intruder by forcing its true name into the world. But true names were power, and power was never freely given. Only the conjurer who had beckoned the entity usually knew such a thing. In rare, accidental possessions, names were lost entirely, leaving only bloodshed as recourse. Unless, an augur could glimpse it, dragging a syllable of its essence from the hidden currents.
"Can you find out its true name?" Ivie demanded, glancing at Yvain, her hand trembling on her next fuse.
"I can try," Yvain said, his throat dry from the heat.
By now Bret had steadied himself, the last ripples of Ivie's blast settling. His eyes rolled unnaturally, black flooding the whites before snapping back to normal, as though the flesh itself was arguing over control. But he had heard them, every word.
The boy's lips curled into something that wasn't his smile. His gaze locked onto Yvain, the edges of it sharp as a blade. "So… a petty augur thinks he can unmake me," the voice was not Bret's at all, but a layered chorus, deep and sibilant, vibrating through the air like the toll of a hidden bell.
Bret's body convulsed, then launched forward with a speed no boy should have possessed. The black mass writhed across his neck and jaw as he lunged, teeth bared and hands clawed for Yvain's throat.
Latch moved without hesitation, darting between them. Steel hissed in the firelight as he drove his rapier to intercept, the clash of flesh against tempered metal ringing sharp. "We'll hold him!" he shouted, straining to keep the possessed boy at bay. "Be quick!"
Yvain thought to intervene, to draw from another well of his craft, but doing so would mean revealing too much of what he was.
No. Better to remain just an augur.
He reached into his coat and pulled free the pocket watch. Its tarnished brass glimmered in the fire's glow, warm from the heat of battle. Cupping it in both hands, Yvain closed his eyes and sank, letting his perception bleed outwards, into the object, into the faint resonance it still held of Bret. The din of the fight dimmed. The crack of steel, the shriek of the demon, Ivie's curses, all muffled, like he was slipping beneath water.
The watch was his vessel now, and through it, he would glimpse the truth that the entity carried within.