# Chapter 1: The Antiquarian's Salt
Arthur Clay worked for the Merchant Guild of Oakhaven as a junior clerk, and his job was to audit the estates of the recently deceased and record what they owned, and the guild paid him a small flat rate per estate regardless of how long the work took, and he had been doing this for three years.
The estate he was sent to on a Tuesday morning belonged to a man named Mr. Morvath, and Morvath had been found dead in his home two days prior, and the cause of death had been recorded as natural causes by the district coroner, though the guild master had told Arthur privately that no one really knew, and Arthur had no particular reason to ask further.
The house was on the eastern side of the port district, close enough to the docks that the salt smell came through the walls, and the ceilings were low and the rooms were small, and everything in them was covered in a thin layer of coal dust because everything in Oakhaven was covered in coal dust.
Arthur let himself in with the guild master's key, set his satchel on the floor near the door, and took out his ledger and his ink bottle and his pen, and then he began to walk through the rooms and write down what was there.
The front room had a chair, a small table, two oil lamps, and a tin box containing a handful of coins and a broken watch, and Arthur wrote all of this down, and his fingers were already stained black from the ink before he had finished the first page. The kitchen had a cast iron pot, three clay cups, and a knife with a cracked handle, and he wrote that down too.
The basement was the last room, and getting to it required pulling open a heavy wooden hatch in the kitchen floor and taking a short ladder down into the dark, and Arthur took one of the oil lamps with him because the basement had no windows.
It was damp down there, and the floor was stone, and the smell was stronger, a wet mix of salt and old wood, and along the far wall there were crates stacked three high, and beside them were moldering ledgers tied in rotting string, and on a hook near the ladder there hung a collection of rusted iron keys on a single ring, and Arthur counted them and wrote down the number.
He opened the first crate and it had salted cod in it, packed tight, and the salt had dried into a hard white crust along the edges of the wood. He opened the second and it had more ledgers, water damaged and stuck together in thick blocks. He kept moving, writing as he went, and his lamp threw long shadows across the stone walls.
There was an iron safe near the center of the room, old and bolted to the floor, and Arthur checked it first by feel and found it locked, so he set it down in his notes as locked and moved on, and as he moved he stepped on a section of floor that gave slightly under his boot, and he stopped and looked down.
He crouched, pressed his palm flat against the stone, and it shifted, and when he lifted the edge he found it was not stone at all but a fitted panel cut to match the floor, and beneath it was a shallow space, and in that space was a single object wrapped in oilskin and tied with a strip of leather cord.
He lifted it out and set it on top of the safe to unwrap it, and inside the oilskin was a brass box roughly the size and shape of a thick ledger book, and it had small gears on the outside of it, and the gears were very fine, and the whole thing was heavier than it looked.
He turned it over to find the latch, and as he pressed at the side catch it sprang open faster than he expected and the edge of a jagged brass gear caught the knuckle of his right hand, and the cut was shallow but it bled quickly, and a line of blood ran down across his fingers and dripped directly onto the blank parchment page inside before he could pull his hand back.
The gears moved.
Arthur stepped back. He had not touched the gears and there was no spring mechanism he had seen and no winding key, but the gears were turning and the page inside the ledger was no longer blank because text was appearing on it, written in something dark and thin in a very precise and very small hand.
Arthur stood still and looked at the page.
The text read: *Sovereign Union initiated. Bloodline Ledger activated. Binding in progress. Primary consort acquired. Estimated proximity: 4.3 miles.*
He read it twice, then a third time, and it still said the same thing, and the text did not fade, and the gears did not stop, and the air in the basement was getting colder, noticeably colder, and Arthur could see his own breath now.
"Right," he said quietly, pressing his bleeding hand against his trousers, and he looked around as though someone might come in and explain this to him, but no one came in, and the room stayed empty, and the gears kept turning.
He stood there for a moment longer, and then he picked up his pen, because he was a clerk and writing things down was what he did, and he wrote in his own ledger: *One brass clockwork object of unknown function. Appears active. Handle with caution.*
The ghostly script on the open page continued spreading as he wrote, filling the parchment line by line with fine, crawling text, and the cold deepened further, and Arthur's lamp flickered once, twice, and then held.
Then the hatch above