The trip to Port Varrick was a downward journey, both in a physical and a figurative sense. We left the high, clean air of the Ashworth mountains behind and traveled for days through rolling hills that slowly turned into the marshy, foggy coastal plains. The smell of pine changed to the sharp, salty smell of decay and the smell of low tide. The air felt heavier and slower, and the clear, crisp Aether of the mountains was replaced by a humid, chaotic soup of conflicting energies that made my Rhythmic Sense feel confused and unfocused.
Garrick looked better on the outside because of Seraphina's hard work, but he still moved with a little stiffness. The Void poison had left a deeper mark on him than he wanted to admit. Rolan stayed quiet, his grief always in his eyes, but now it was focused on being alert. Seraphina spent a lot of the trip in the small, strong carriage we had bought, taking care of her precious Silverwood cutting and meditating. She often furrowed her brow in concentration as she tried to find her way through the strange, turbulent Aether of the lowlands.
Port Varrick didn't look like a proud, noble city on the horizon. Through the swirling sea fog, it slowly, and with great reluctance, revealed itself as a sprawling, low-lying stain on the coastline. There were soot-stained warehouses, crooked jetties leaning dangerously over black water, leaning tenements packed together, and a skeletal forest of creaking ship masts disappearing into the gray mist. There were no bright white walls or proud flags flying here. The city had sold its soul to the highest bidder a long time ago. It thrived in the murky space between kingdoms, loyal only to the sound of coins.
The moment we passed through the unguarded, open archway that served as a gate – flanked by bored-looking mercenaries in mismatched armor who didn't even glance our way – the sensory overload was a physical blow. The roar of a thousand different voices in a dozen different languages, none of them the crisp, formal tones of the capital or the blunt, honest speech of the West. The cacophony of hammers on steel from the sprawling shipyards, the cries of exotic birds and unseen creatures from covered merchant stalls, the slap of water against rotting piers. The air itself was thick, almost unbreathable, a disgusting miasma of fish, tar, unwashed bodies, cheap spiced liquor, coal smoke, and something faintly sweet and rotten, a smell of decay that seemed to emanate from the very cobblestones beneath our feet. It felt like a living, breathing monster of a city, vast and indifferent, and it felt like it was trying to swallow us whole.
My Rhythmic Sense, usually a tool of clarity, was a jangled, discordant mess. The ambient Aether was so thick with conflicting signatures – the raw desperation of the beggars lining the gutters, the cold arrogance of the wealthy merchants carried in sedan chairs by sweating servants, the sharp, dangerous edges of the countless mercenaries and thieves sizing us up from shadowed doorways – that trying to find a single, clear note was like trying to hear a flute solo in the middle of a rockslide. But beneath it all, stronger here than in the mountains, I could feel it. A low-level, pervasive hum of the Void's wrongness. It wasn't concentrated, like the Acolytes' signatures. It was diluted, insidious, woven into the very fabric of the city's underbelly like a chronic, festering disease, thriving in the shadows and the misery.
Seraphina, riding beside me now on a hired mare, looked pale, her hand resting protectively over the satchel containing the Silverwood cutting. "The air," she whispered, her voice barely audible over the din. "It feels… sick. Stagnant. Like a wound that refuses to heal." Her Life Sense was clearly being assaulted by the city's pervasive corruption.
We bypassed the opulent, garish inns of the Merchant's Quarter, their gilded facades feeling obscene against the backdrop of the surrounding squalor. We followed a set of complex, memorized directions provided by my father's network, navigating through a maze of narrow, winding streets, deeper into the warehouse district near the old docks. Our destination was a discreet, heavily fortified boarding house tucked away on a cobbled side street, almost hidden behind stacks of empty barrels. 'The Grey Anchor'. Its sign was simple, unadorned wood. Its door was thick oak reinforced with iron bands.
The proprietor was a man named Kael, the retired Ashworth guardsman our agent had mentioned. He was old now, his face a roadmap of scars, one arm missing below the elbow, but his eyes were sharp, missing nothing, and the grip of his remaining hand was like weathered iron when he clasped my forearm in the traditional Ashworth greeting. He recognized the subtle wolf's head clasp I wore, the only outward sign of my true allegiance. He asked no questions, simply showed us to a suite of sparse but clean, defensible rooms on the upper floor, assuring us his establishment valued discretion above all else. Within the thick stone walls of The Grey Anchor, with Kael's silent, watchful presence guarding the entrance below, we finally felt a small measure of security, a tiny island of Ashworth loyalty in a sea of treachery.
That evening, gathered in the relative quiet of our common room, the true weight of our task settled upon us. We were four wolves in a city of a hundred thousand sharks, rats, and serpents. A direct approach, asking openly for the Unseen Blade, was suicide. We needed a key, a way into the city's hidden networks without revealing our hand.
"We are not here as warriors," I said, looking each of them in the eye: Garrick's steady resolve, Rolan's grim determination, and Seraphina's quiet fear. "We are here as whispers. We don't pull out our swords unless our lives depend on it. We don't wear the Ashworth wolf. From now on, we are both scholars and merchants looking for rare herbs. "Our only goal is information."
I then laid out the first, crucial part of my plan, the ace gleaned from the pages of a book no one else had read. "Port Varrick has a thousand ears," I explained, "but only one true brain, according to the tales. A clandestine organization of information brokers. The 'Silent Hand'. They trade in secrets. Nothing of consequence happens here without their knowledge. They are utterly amoral, loyal only to gold and their own secrecy."
Garrick frowned. "And how do we find this… secret society of gossips?"
"We don't," I replied, letting a slow, calculated smile touch my lips. "We let them find us. The novel… the research I conducted… mentioned a specific access point. A front." I leaned forward, lowering my voice. "An antiquarian bookshop in the Scholar's Quarter. 'Faded Tomes'. Owned by an old, seemingly harmless man. But if you ask for a specific, non-existent book, using a precise code phrase, you are granted an audience."
The room was silent. Garrick looked skeptical. Rolan looked nervous. Seraphina looked outright terrified at the prospect of willingly walking into the heart of the city's deepest, most dangerous secret.
"What is this code phrase, my lord?" Rolan asked, his hand instinctively resting on the dagger at his belt.
I met his gaze, the words feeling strange and potent, a key to a lock from another world. "The book is 'The Mariner's Lament'. And the phrase," I whispered, the words seeming to hang heavy in the stale air, "is 'Does the shadow still drink the tide?'"