Duventar arrives in Lankhmar

Date : 19 Zepter 3022  

The Green Griffon: Duventar’s Arrival

Duventar Stovana arrived in the ring room three flights below The Green Griffon. The chamber was square, lead-lined, and quiet, its stone walls etched with travel-wards that pulsed at a slow, steady rate. Four guards held the interior post; four more waited beyond the door.   The ring itself was a sunk basalt dais inlaid with a tight lattice of pale metal. When it engaged, the lattice thrummed like a taut cable and a thin blue corona chased the seams. There was no heat—only a clean bite of ozone. Duventar stepped out upright, coat hem settling, and steadied against the brief dislocation transit always brought—as if teeth, eyes, and bones needed to agree again.   Chairs scraped back. The sergeant lifted a hand. “Papers.”   Duventar produced a folded Writ of Conveyance bearing The Golden Griffon seal and a thumb-length Traveler’s Charm of bronze. The sergeant touched the charm to a small ward-stone on his belt; the ward hummed once, the ring’s inlay answered in the same pitch, and a faint rune on the wall flared and faded—done in a blink, like a heartbeat being counted. No ledger, no names spoken aloud.   The door out was a slab of oaken heartwood faced in iron and sheathed in beaten lead. Seven recessed locks stepped up its edge to a two-key starwheel. A narrow strip of smoked quartz—set in a non-lead frame—let the outside team see in. Beside it, a fixed scrying lens (Orrin glass cut with a Surveyors’ Collegium wedge) sent a live shimmer to a small mirror on the landing. A brass speaking tube joined inner and outer posts; the sergeant breathed a single sharp note into it. Locks walked open in sequence, and the door rolled back on counterweights.   “Welcome to Lankhmar,” the sergeant said—in Lankhmarian—then gestured: “Stairs up. Left at the landing.” Trying to help, he added a line in the Northern Tongue and missed a vowel. “Left stairs, goat.” He’d meant “friend.” Duventar’s mouth twitched; the sergeant winced and waved him on.   He climbed.   The first basement smelled of yeast and soap. The second, faintly of boiled beef. By the time he reached the ground floor the Griffon’s scents had woven into the city’s: lamp oil, wet wool, cloves, a clean tang of scrubbed wood that fought bravely against all the rest.   The taproom was a long rectangle—forty by twenty-five—paneled in scuffed boards sanded smooth and resealed so often the knots showed like coins under water. Small mismatched tables crowded close. A nicked bar ran the right wall: brass rail, pewter mugs, a patched curtain over the kitchen pass. Seedy by address, clean by pride.   Patrons were Plaza stock: porters built like barrels, two dice-men rattling a lidded cup, a scribe with ink on his knuckles, a rat-catcher with one ferret asleep in each vest pocket. A scar-jawed woman watched the room without watching her cup.   Behind the bar stood Vellin—broad-shouldered, hair going iron gray—and Gyla, quick hands, quicker eyes. Gyla switched tongues the moment Duventar opened his mouth; her Northern Tongue was accented but steady, the kind used for trade on docks and in back rooms.   “You look a little ring-sick,” she said in Northern. “Beer first. Then something meaner.”   “Yes,” Duventar answered in the same tongue. “Beer. Then a shot.”   She slid a squat mug of house bitter and, after it, a bark-colored dram of barley-white. “1 Gold Rilk, 1 Silver Smerduk,” she said, Northern case endings a touch off but perfectly clear.   He paid in Tôpian crescents—silver ovals with a square hole. Gyla didn’t blink. She palmed them into a rag and let them vanish into a small box under the bar, quick and neat. Vellin watched the move and kept polishing.   Duventar drank, let the bitter bite set his feet under him, and listened. Lankhmarian rolled and clipped around him—hard Rs, short vowels, jokes that turned on endings he didn’t have. The foreignness wasn’t the faces; they looked like Manta’s own. It was the wrap of things: jackets cut closer, hair worn plain, gray wool, dull felt hats, boots blacked to a shine even on working feet. Less color. Fewer ornaments. Voices pitched lower, as if the rooms here had ears.   Before leaving, he slid a Sunmark to Gyla… the equivalent of a Gold Rilk in Lankhmar. Gyla tried to slide it back; he pressed it forward; she let it stay.   Outside: the alley’s breath, the city’s long exhale. The left turn ran a hundred feet to Glipekerio Street, where the cobbles remembered their mortar and wagons carved lazy grooves. He took east, found Beggars Boulevard at a corner that always smelled of nutmeg because a spice stall had once burned there, turned northwest until Festival Street threw its colored prayer papers across a tangle of wires like stolen flags. East to Wall Street, where the stone of the old city rose up like the side of a sleeping animal, then left, north, through the Tenderloin where meat came cheap and knives cheaper.   He did not hurry. He let the city walk him.   Was he followed? Of course. This was Lankhmar, and a man who came from under the earth into a discreet pub and walked out with purpose put ripples in the shallow places. A boy of ten with a runner’s calves and a beggar’s gaze fell in two corners back, flipped a coin, and sent it skittering ahead to mark a pace. A lamplighter with soot to his elbows watched his reflection in bottle glass and moved when he moved. Twice Duventar caught the gaze of an urchin and let his eyes slide past, a courtesy. Once he stopped at a stall and asked the price of candied ginger for too long; when he moved again, the lamplighter had traded places with a woman selling roasted chestnuts who didn’t sell a single chestnut while he was in view.   Behind him, farther than he might prefer, Terzak’s captain reached Lankhmar’s skin. He’d been given a direction, not a map: find The Green Griffon in the Plaza District—the one with the good floors and the quiet kitchen—and “fetch” Duventar. He had Sharrila’s scryed image fixed in his mind: a man in a sea-dark coat stepping into a tunnel of alley, a left turn into light. He asked questions with silver, and in this part of the city silver bought answers fast. But the Griffon’s staff were iron at the hinge; Vellin shrugged a professional shrug, Gyla invented a story about a sailor with freckles that even she didn’t believe, and Harl looked at the captain the way a black dog looks at thunder. The captain paid a paper boy instead, who pointed—wide, uncertain—toward Wall Street and ran off to buy honey bread.   So the captain followed a shadow of truth, not the truth, and lost a quarter hour to a parade of barrows on Beggars Boulevard and the holy stop-and-stare that Festival Street demanded when a fire eater took a breath and the world waited to see whether he would return it.   Duventar crossed into streets that became less about being seen and more about being missed. Craft Street took him east, swallowed him into a clutch of buildings that had forgotten their names and liked it that way. A cul-de-sac pressed up against the city wall. Beyond that wall, The Great Marsh breathed its sour-sweet, and the wind brought it through the stone like a rumor. The buildings here were drab by design—limners’ lofts, a shuttered weavers’ hall with a sign so faded it was only shape, a warehouse that had not had a cargo in it in years and paid its rent anyway.   A guard tower shouldered up from the wall above the cul-de-sac, an eye with a crossbow in it. It looked down without moving. A gull cried like a hinge.   Duventar paused at the end of the lane as if deciding between three identical doors. He adjusted his cuffs, the better to show empty hands. A window blinked. Somewhere a latch lifted and settled—once, twice—like a code.   Far back, the captain finally shook off the festival’s distraction, cursed softly, and lengthened his stride. He knew enough: that the Order he’d been told to distrust nested somewhere along this edge of the city, near the wall, behind faces that were not what they were. He did not know which door. He did not know that the gull’s cry had been the second token of the hour, and the tower’s eye had already marked him.   Duventar stepped forward into the cluster of unremarkable buildings, looking like a man who knew exactly where he was going and had never been here before.  

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The Captain’s Pursuit

The captain came through the ring with his jaw set and his kit tight.   Same room, same lead-lined walls, same pulse in the sigils. He presented his folded Writ and the bronze Traveler’s Charm without being asked. The sergeant touched stone to charm; the ring hummed in answer; the wall rune flickered and died. No names spoken.   “Welcome to Lankhmar,” the sergeant said in city talk.   “Thanks,” the captain answered in the same, rough from a winter on the North Docks. Gesture to the stairs. He went.   Yeast and soap on the first basement. Boiled beef on the second. Ground floor: lamp oil, wet wool, and the clean scrape of sand on plank.   He didn’t linger in the taproom. He read the place in three breaths: scuffed but scrubbed floorboards, small tables, pewter mugs, a patched kitchen curtain, a proprietor who looked like he’d split a log the long way if you asked him the wrong question. The woman behind the bar—quick eyes—paused just long enough to show she’d clocked him. He gave them both the nod that meant I’ll pay for information; got the professional blank that meant we sell drinks.   He slipped out into the alley.   Left to Glipekerio Street, east to Beggars Boulevard. The city was awake and unworried—porters shouldering crates, a knife-grinder pushing his bellows cart with one foot, laundry steam ghosting from a basement window. The captain kept a soldier’s pace: not hurrying, not slow, eyes up.   He hit Festival Street and the street hit back. Paper prayers ran on strings overhead, faded colors tugged by the wind. A fire eater had claimed the mouth of the lane and the crowd had congealed. He’d seen the trick before—man gives the street a spectacle, partner works the edges for purses—and he didn’t love becoming the edge. A ring of children pushed to the front, the kind that cannot be stepped on without starting a day’s trouble; two barrowmen argued over who owned the better right to the middle of the street; a string player hit a bright, saw-toothed reel that made people forget they were in each other’s way.   The fire eater tipped his head back and drank flame. The city held its breath to see whether he would return it.   The captain waited because the crowd left him no choice. He hated that he waited. He looked for Duventar—a tall man in a sea-dark coat, hair the color of old rope—above hats and shoulders and saw only faces, and hats, and shoulders. When the fire eater finally exhaled and the street remembered it was a street, the captain slid a Silver Smerduk into a paper boy’s hand and asked quick: “Man in a dark coat? Came through fast, kept left.”   The boy pointed with his whole arm toward Wall Street and took off at a sprint toward a honey-bread seller.   He pushed along Festival and out to Wall, found the stone of the old city looming like a cliff and the wind carrying the sour-sweet of the Marsh. He was fifteen minutes later than he wanted to be; that felt like losing even before he’d lost.   Another Smerduk bought him words from a lamplighter—soot to his elbows, eyes like a ferret. “Coat like that? Could be a dozen. One went north.” A chestnut woman claimed a man had asked the price of ginger and then moved on east. Both stories were likely true and entirely useless.   North into the Tenderloin. Butcher smell, quick hands, boys with knives learning to be men with knives. He watched for the easy tails—urchins that traded places at corners, shadows that forgot to be shorter than their owners—and saw none he could pin. If there had been a tail, it had peeled away where the city thinned.   He took Craft Street right and let Terzak’s briefing steer him: a cluster of unremarkable fronts against the wall, a tower looking down its nose, doors that didn’t mind being mistaken for each other. The cul-de-sac held still. The tower did not move. A gull cried once and the sound rolled off the stone like a hinge.   He stood at the mouth of the lane and knew two things with the surety of a soldier: Duventar had made it this far, and the trail was gone. The festival had taken the minutes that mattered.   He didn’t go in. Not today, not alone, not with the tower’s eye on him and three doors offering trouble behind polite faces. He crossed to a cart shed with a view of the yard and rented the loft with a Gold Rilk and a sentence in the kind of Lankhmarian that made landlords hopeful. The owner nodded, counted the coin twice with his thumb, and left a ladder where a ladder could be found.   From the loft, he watched as the light slid across the wall and the cul-de-sac made no sign of caring. Somewhere behind those doors a latch would lift twice when it needed to. Somewhere behind him the festival would be breathing smoke into evening.   He set his back to a beam, unpacked patience like a tool, and promised himself he would not lose the man twice.  

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Alexander’s Run

Alexander slipped through the casement and let the night take her.   Castle Thhesendarium fell away in blocks of pale stone and shadow; Manta Bay pushed cool air under her wings and held her steady. A small vellum scroll rode her left leg, tied with a single thread. No script showed—only a neat, pressed sigil set just off center, the kind The Order of Ix read like a clock. Left leg meant urgent, no stops.   She hadn’t flown this city before. What she had were Keesha’s landmarks, spoken low and once: the Griffin’s roof sign, a kitchen vent that smelled of onions and fat, a slit in the wall “wider than four fingers.” She let those cues do the steering. The Golden Griffon marked itself by a dull wash of gilt at its ridgepole and the square shoulders of its roof. She rode the warm seam along the tiles, dropped to the lee of the scullery, and slid through the wall slit where steam had kept the mortar soft.   The kitchen jolted at her arrival—pans talking on iron, steam popping at a lid. A cook ducked on reflex when her wings whispered past his ear. A flour-dusted porter saw the left-leg thread, set down a stack of bowls without looking away, and did what the house had trained for: he lowered a wicker dome over her—slats wide enough for air, close enough to keep out cats—then carried her downstairs at a careful walk.   The ring room was square, lead-lined, and quiet. Four guards inside. The basalt dais sat in the middle, its pale metal inlay dim as old bone. The porter halted just at the boundary line. The sergeant touched a belt ward-stone to the dome’s rim; the inlay answered with a single, tuned hum, and a small rune on the wall came up, blue, and died. No names said. No marks made. The sergeant put his mouth to the speaking tube and sent one sharp note along it. Locks shifted in the heavy door. The lattice woke.   Light rose from the seams, clean and cold. There was no heat—only a bite of ozone and metal, the smell that always follows a struck spark. The dome, the porter’s hands, Alexander herself—everything in the circle blurred and set again.   Different stone. Different air. Lamp oil. Wet wool. Scrubbing sand. The Green Griffon’s ring room matched the first in shape and fittings but not in faces. Four new guards. A different sergeant. He lifted the dome a finger’s width, saw the left-leg thread, and tipped it so she could hop free.   He tried a word in the Northern Tongue, vowels bent by Lankhmarian habits. “Fly safe, fr—” He caught himself before he reached the word that sounds like goat if you miss the vowel, and settled for an open hand toward a small vent cut knee-high in the stairwell. The slit was meant for letters and birds. Alexander folded her wings twice and went through.   The alley breathed cold. She climbed to roof height and picked out the line Keesha had set in her head: left to Glipekerio, east to Beggars, skim Festival where paper prayers drag on their strings, east to Wall, north up the Tenderloin, right to Craft, then the cul-de-sac that leans its shoulder on the city wall. She flew the seams where chimney heat meets night air; when a slate-backed hawk turned once over Festival Street, she flattened into the drift of prayer papers until the hawk’s eye slid past her as shadow.   Wall Street brought the old stones up close and The Great Marsh into her nose—sour-sweet through mortar joints. The Tenderloin was loud even at this hour: knives talking on wood, a dog giving two hard barks and deciding against a third. She cut right over Craft Street, dropped a little, and let her shape settle into the drab the buildings preferred.   The cul-de-sac held still. Three doors that wanted to be forgotten. A guard tower on the wall above them with an eye-slit that never blinked. Alexander didn’t cross open ground. She slid along the wall where the wind shaved the stones smooth, stepped into the lintel’s narrow shadow, and tapped the wood once, twice with her beak.   Air moved behind the frame. A sliver pulled back. Ink, wax, soap—and a dry herb note—came through. A fine black wire lay across the sill. She stepped onto it. The wire dipped and tightened; the sliver widened to the width of a hand.   The hand that came out was broad across the knuckles, ink-stained at the cuticles, steady in the way that makes animals hold still. It took her in, and the wood became wood again.   Sunnu stood in the lamplight.   He was Orc, ash-green skin warmed by the brazier’s low coal, tusks kept short and capped in dull brass. His hair was roped back with a strip of black cloth. He carried his width easily and kept his movements small, the way men do when they’ve broken things by accident before and don’t intend to again. His clothes were dark and plain; his hands were a scribe’s—nicked, inked, and sure.   The room ran to order. A brazier and a hanging chain with a clay weight. A long table with three stacks of papers squared to the edge, a steel-nib pen laid across a blotter, and a set of scales with empty pans. Shelves of unlabeled boxes. No window that admitted to being a window.   Sunnu did not try to touch her feathers. He saw the left-leg thread, nodded once, and set a shallow dish so it just touched her beak. Warm water, salted lightly. A single drop of fresh blood to set strength back in small muscles. She drank, quick and neat.   He turned the scroll under his thumb. The sigil sat where it should sit and at the angle it should set. He read it as men read time. The hinge of his jaw moved once. He pressed a nail under the wax, lifted it without cracking the vellum, and checked the inside corners for confirmation notches—two tiny cross-cuts made from opposite sides. Right piece, right sender.   He didn’t speak while he read. When he finished, he breathed out through his nose, reached for a square of thin vellum, and wrote three compact marks that looked like nothing at all until you knew where to look. The steel nib made a dry whisper on the page. He sealed the reply with a wafer of wax warmed at the brazier and tied it to Alexander’s right leg. Reply promised. He checked the knot twice, then a third time without making a show of it.   “Work well done,” he said in the Northern Tongue, vowels shaped around brass. Clear. Unhurried. “Same road back.”   He lifted a shelf on silent hinges and touched a stone. A second slit opened, cool air sliding through—wall, iron, a wet edge from the Marsh. Alexander went. Two beats to clear the sill. Four more to reach clean wind.   Lankhmar unrolled under her—dark roofs, the bright line of a late wagon, a patch of laughter that popped and was gone. She climbed to where the city became texture, set her beak south, and took the same path in reverse: Wall, Festival, Beggars, The Green Griffon’s vent slit. The ring crew worked without questions. The lattice thrummed; the seams ran blue; ozone bit the back of her throat.   Manta came back in smells and temperature—the kitchen heat first, then the softer air of the stair, then the broader warmth off the bay beyond the walls. The same porter lifted the wicker dome with the same careful hands and stepped away to give her room.   She took the outside air, climbed along the tower line, and angled for Castle Thhesendarium. The guest chamber in Terzak’s apartments faced the bay and kept its casement cracked for air; two of the Sisters of the Cloth tended a lamp there, and a ranger took his watch outside the door with his palm resting on the butt of his spear. Alexander cut once across the light, tapped the iron latch twice, and settled on the inner sill with the small seal tied neat against her right leg.  

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Keesha’s Escape

The evening bell had gone, and the guest chamber settled into its small sounds: lamp wick ticking as it burned down, the wall’s cool breath where mortar met casement, the guard outside shifting his grip on the spear because numb fingers lie. Two soft taps came at the latch. Alexander slipped through and lit on Keesha’s wrist.   Right leg—reply promised. Keesha slid the tiny vellum square from under the wax. Three compact sigils—each a sentence in a single mark—sat neat on the face. She read them in a breath:   Duventar reached Lankhmar. Negotiating for Mentaur’s release. Return at first chance. Do what you must.   She fed the vellum to the lamp cap, ground it to gray ash with a match head, and worked the smear into the soot with a fingertip. Alexander nipped the air near her knuckle—hello and goodbye in the same breath—and was gone on a wash of colder air from the slit.   They kept Keesha in house things: dark-blue linen tunic to the thigh, gray wool trousers, a braided cloth belt. No laces longer than a handspan. The slippers by the bed stayed where they were. Bare feet whisper better than leather.   She watched the room sharpen into a pattern. Sisters came with water and linens; each gave the brass tongue beside the latch a courteous flick so the door’s ward went slack for the few breaths it took to pass without ringing. Let it swing back and the door woke again. A bronze listening disk on the frame brightened when voices brushed it; for silence it stayed dull. The hinges took oil on a schedule—left hinge drank less than the right and never complained if you favored it.   She worked while she watched. She pared the tip of a bone hairpin into a tiny comb-tooth pick; clipped a sliver from a mop nail and smoothed it on the sill into a slender pick for lifting single pins; wrapped a thumb of candle wax in linen to smear on metal that liked to scrape or ring. She taught her breath to count the hall-guard’s steps without looking at him. A body learns a place the way fingers learn a lock.   Opportunity arrived in the small way such things always do. A new Sister came with a pitcher and folded cloths. Tap to the brass tongue; ward sleeping. Pitcher down, lamp checked, linens straight; all correct. She left carrying the empties and let the tongue hang drawn back. The ward stayed asleep without meaning to.   Keesha tested the air at the crack with her cheek—no bite, no bell—eased the inner bolt with the waxed linen so it wouldn’t rasp, opened the door the width of two fingers, listened once more, and went. She skimmed the hinge side of the jamb where men don’t look, slid past the bronze disk without a word for it to hear, and followed the corridor’s chill to the first turn.   The service stair dropped away behind the guest level. Someone had barred it since yesterday with an iron grille that ran floor to lintel, bars socketed into stone and locked with a new brass padlock still greasy from the shop. No climbing. She set the comb-tooth and the slim pick, laid a breath of pressure on the shackle, and let the pins talk—tiny clicks like beads finding their abacus. The shackle lifted without a ring; the waxed cloth stole the sound. She caught it with two fingers, swung the grille just wide enough, and slid through. The gate settled back into its hinges as if it had never moved.   One flight. Two. The air cooled and flattened; stairs throw your own steps back a heartbeat late. At the second landing she melted into the shadow where a statue had once stood and let a lantern pass—two rangers, quiet shoes, the flame turned low. “Hold. Hear that?” one said, turning the knob with his thumb. Light swelled, wandered, and moved on. Keesha waited for the count in her blood to finish, then ghosted down a turn behind them so stone and bend kept her invisible.   Half a level below the kitchens, an ironwood door with brass banding rubbed smooth by working hands. The same brass tongue slept beside the latch. A hair of silver wire lay across the lower jamb, so fine it could have been a spider’s line—ready to twitch a bell if the door lifted wrong. She laid a dab of wax on the latch to hush it, slid a thread of linen under the jamb to pin the wire slack, tapped the tongue with a knuckle to soften the ward, and worked the lock. The comb-tooth teased; the slim pick set pins one by one. The bolt went back like a drawer that had just been oiled.   Dry, orderly air lived inside. Shelves on three walls: canvas sacks tied neat; stout chests; flat trays, each with a small wax seal where a ghosted glyph slept. She hunted by weight and shape. A sack with the right clink and slump—buckles, rings, a belt. A long, narrow chest heavy where a hilt should be and light toward its tip—a scabbarded blade. A shallow tray that smelled of clove and wintergreen—her little bottles and brushes. She cracked two seals with a thumbnail—crumbled like old sugar when you didn’t use the key-hand—and worked quick. Tools, pouch, the Dragon’s Ring of Blinking wrapped in velvet. Black Silence, scabbard and belt, its throat cuffed in a clean square knot tied by a Sister who prided herself on being neat.   Her armor sat folded like cloth in a flat chest—Protector of the Dark—blackened elven chain that drank the light and made no more sound than a shirt. She pulled it on under the tunic; the links settled like water and vanished once she laced the sides. The platinum dagger slid into a back-of-belt sheath; the assassin’s garrote coiled flat in a pocket; Black Silence rode at her hip. The longsword—vorpal, double-locked, a silver thread laid under the lid—could wait for a cleaner night.   She slipped out, set the latch, and turned not toward the guest floors but toward the belly of the house—scullery, smokehouse, laundry yard—where doors grew more practical and less ceremonial. Her ring warmed against her finger, the tiny dragon-head in its setting catching the lamplight; she let the comfort sit there and didn’t push it yet.   The hazards started early.   At the end of the service hall a wine cart came out of a side door at the wrong speed, pushed by a boy too small for the job and steered by a steward who didn’t look up. She stepped into the deeper shadow of a hanging rack while the cart’s iron rim kissed the wall where her shoulder had been a breath before. The steward muttered about late lords and poor cellars; the boy whispered sorrys to the casks and went red to the ears. They were gone and the hall breathed again.   Two turns on, a bellhound padded out of a cross passage with a handler on a short leather lead—gray coat, broad head, a square muzzle bristling with whiskers that felt for what eyes miss. The beast’s nose went up; its ears pricked. Keesha flattened into the cool between two swinging sides of beef that hung from iron hooks in the meat locker’s doorway and let the cold creep under her skin. The dog pulled once toward the locker mouth, nostrils quivering, and the handler gave it two fingers of the ear and a soft “no” like he’d say to a child. “Nothing here,” he lied for both of them, and led it on.   A gallery opened on her right—paintings in gilt frames, polished floor, the wrong place for a night worker. Voices came before bodies: silk and perfume and laughter cut low out of politeness. Two ladies and a lord drifted through with a pair of Sisters holding lamps behind them. At their heel, speaking over a shoulder to the lord, moved Sharrila—clean profile, ash-dark hair, a book under one arm, sure of her right to the hallway. Keesha slid behind a rolling laundry screen and walked it with her fingers—three steps, four, five—so it moved as if a servant had set it in motion moments ago. The little procession swept past; the screen rocked once as a stray breeze caught the linen, then stood still again. Sharrila didn’t even glance.   The smell of soap and steam sharpened. Keesha took the last turn and came to the scullery arch: high brick, a row of basins, an outer postern set with iron bands and a single crossbar that dropped into wrought sockets. A night-lantern burned in a niche. Frost had fogged the bottom inch of the door’s iron; beyond it the yard lay dark and thinner with cold.   Two obstacles remained: the bar and a dozing porter on a stool by the wall, head tipped back, mouth open to the snore he kept swallowing. She weighed the bar—old iron, notched from years of hands, a heavy lift but a clean one if you knew how to take the weight close. She listened to the porter’s breath—three counts in, three out, a click at the back of the throat on the fourth—and set her timing to it.   On the exhale after the click, she slid the bar three inches to ease the bite out of the socket, held, let his next inhale cover the rest, and finished the lift under the lantern’s gentle hiss. The bar came up without a scrape. She carried it in close and rested one end on leather she’d laid on a shelf moments earlier, then nested the other end against her hip and set it down onto its hooks soundless.   The ring warmed again. She pressed its face to the wood, feeling the faint thrum in the grain, and eased the door. Cold came in, honest and simple. The yard beyond showed cobbles and a laundry line, a stack of broken crates, the deeper dark where the outer wall made a cut in the wind. Somewhere beyond that wall, the bay breathed.   She went out into the cold and pulled the door to with two fingers until the latch kissed home. The ring’s hum softened against her skin. She kept to the drift of shadow that the washhouse eaves made and angled for the corner where the wall met the ground in a seam.   Behind her, the house did not change its breathing. Ahead of her, the city waited.  

An Ultimatium