The docks at night were a different city.
Ebonbridge's heart beats in its markets, its cathedrals, its theaters. But its lungs—the things that kept the city breathing—were here: the warehouses stacked like grim organ pipes, the wharves and pilings groaning, the masts like forest canopies stripped bare. Fog clung low, painting lanterns into pale moons. The river made its secret cough beneath everything, as if in on a joke it refused to tell.
Seraphine D'Artois moved through it all without hesitation. Her oilskin coat snapped in the river breeze. Beneath the hem, the iron arm clicked and hissed softly. She did not conceal it tonight; she let it mark her, a brand of authority. Watchmen who might have hesitated at her seal stepped back at the sound alone. People here knew what a prosthesis like that meant: someone who had put a limb into a Rite and come out with something both less and more than flesh.
I trailed two paces behind, counting things because counting was the only way to keep fear in columns. Number of lanterns lit on the wharf: twenty-six. Number of barges moored: fourteen. Number of times Seraphine glanced back to check whether I kept up: zero.
The fog tasted metallic. My fingers twitched toward the Ledger, but I resisted. Better to keep its teeth sheathed until we needed them. I could already feel it restless in my coat, pages twitching like a horse that smells thunder.
"Tell me," Seraphine said suddenly, her voice carrying too well in the mist. "Why did it choose you?"
"Relics don't explain themselves."
"They do," she said. "If you know how to read them."
I grimaced. "Because I was closest when Aurelius fell. Because I was stupid enough to touch it. Because the Veil doesn't bother with consent."
She hummed at that—neither agreement nor disagreement. Just a note pinned in the air. "You've used it already. I can see it in your eyes."
"See what?"
"The way you keep looking at things as though you expect them to come apart into clauses."
She wasn't wrong. I'd caught myself staring at ropes, at the seams of barrels, at the lines of ink in broadsides—expecting to see numbers hanging like cobwebs. Expecting to see debts.
We turned a corner. The Watch had cordoned Dock Twelve with rope and lanterns. A crowd pressed against the barrier, faces pale, lips whispering rumors that grew teeth with every retelling.
"They say twenty men drowned on dry boards," someone hissed. "They say a mask stole their air."
"They say the Church will call it a blessing," another spat.
The Watch Captain looked like a man who had slept in his coat for too many years. Gaunt face, eyes sunk like coins in a well. He snapped to attention when Seraphine approached.
"Captain," she said.
"Inquisitor D'Artois." He eyed me with suspicion, then back to her. "And him?"
"Clerk," she said. "On probation."
"God help us," the Captain muttered.
I lifted my chin. "God is busy auditing saints."
That earned me a sharp glance from Seraphine, but she didn't contradict it.
"How many?" she asked.
"Seventeen down inside. Six more ran before we could stop them. They didn't get far." The Captain hesitated. "None dead. Yet. But they look…wrong."
"Show me," Seraphine said.
Inside the warehouse, the air changed. Cold, dry, metallic. The kind of air that has been stolen from someone else.
The dockhands lay sprawled between crates. Some twitched faintly, their lips a shade of blue that spoke of rivers and graves. Others clawed at the air as though trying to climb out of water no one else could see. Their eyes bulged, red veins burst by the pressure of nothing.
I swallowed bile. The sight was too close to last night. Too close to my own lungs seizing in the cathedral.
Seraphine crouched beside one. Her human hand brushed his forehead. "Not dead," she said. "Not alive. Permission withdrawn."
She looked at me. "Ledger."
I opened it. The pages trembled with eagerness. Words unfurled:
Entry 2:
Phenomenon: Withheld Breath, 23 souls.
Assessed Cost: Three beats each. Deferred.
Debtor: Masked.
Directive: Redline.
The world bled threads. Blue lines hovered over every chest, each tied upward to a knot hidden in shadow above the rafters. The knot pulsed like a fist clenching, stealing every inhalation.
"There," I whispered, pointing.
The rafters groaned. A shape crouched high, pale against shadow. Porcelain mask, mouth painted in a grin too wide to be human.
Casimir Rook.
He laughed, the sound drifting down like silk. "Ah, the Inquisition sends an iron arm…and ballast."
Seraphine rose, iron hand flexing. "Rook."
"D'Artois," he purred. "And the clerk who reads debts. What a performance this will be."
"You'll come down," Seraphine said. "Now."
Rook tilted his head. "But the audience just sat down."
The blue threads above the dockhands pulled tighter. Chests convulsed. A woman's lips parted in a silent scream.
"Release them!" I shouted.
Rook's mask turned toward me. "Oh, clerk. It isn't me who holds them. It's the bill they signed when they stepped into this place. Do you mean to pay it?"
The Ledger pulsed against my palm. Surcharge. Write-Off. Options, none free.
Seraphine didn't wait for words. Her iron arm snapped upward, pistons hissing, fingers curling into a fist. She leapt for the rafters.
Rook laughed again, and fell backward into the fog.
The Ledger wrote one final line before the night swallowed him:
Debtor Identified: Provisional. Pursue.
I looked at the dockhands gasping, at Seraphine climbing into shadow after a mask, and at the glowing blue knots of debt that threatened to choke the warehouse.
The Ledger's ink scrawled across my ribs, unseen by anyone else:
Deadline: Midnight.
And I knew the city would drown again before morning.
—End of Chapter 2—