DIRTY CASH (MONEY TALKS)

When In Doubt

Beneath the great museum on Giltspur Street lay vaults of stone, cold as tombs and twice as silent. They housed the spoils of empire, relics pried from graves and temples far from London’s soot. The curator, Jonathan Blythe, called himself an archivist, though the whispers among porters and cataloguers called him something closer to a thief.

On that night, Blythe sat in his private office, tallying donations. Candles guttered upon shelves stacked with reliquaries, carved idols, and bones. He smiled to himself as he counted. “The past is a ledger,” he said aloud, “and I am its keeper.”

Yet even as he spoke, the air in the vault shifted. The guards at the stair swore later that the rain above had grown louder, a drumming that sank into the stones until the vault itself seemed to breathe.

Blythe rose, lantern in hand, and walked among his collection. The shadows lengthened beyond what the flame should allow. He paused before a display of bones taken from a burial mound in the north. They had been arranged into neat patterns for the benefit of scholars, labeled with tidy script. Tonight they moved. Vertebrae twisted upon themselves, ribs aligned into the shape of a cage that was not human.

The curator stepped back, lantern shaking. He whispered, “Who goes there?”

Silence answered. Silence, heavy as the depths of a crypt.

Then the dust shifted. Upon the shelves where artifacts rested, armored gauntlet-prints appeared in the powder. Not hands of flesh, but shapes too vast, too perfect, the impressions of crenellations and battlements pressed into mortal space.

The idols toppled. They struck the floor in order, as though placed. The shelves emptied themselves, returning relics to nothingness, leaving behind absence more solid than any stone. A single plaque remained fixed upon the wall, the words etched with precision: What was taken remembers the hand.

Blythe turned, heart hammering. He saw then a shape that had not been there before. At the end of the vault’s corridor stood a figure, armor gleaming like wet stone, visor catching no light. The sword hung low, its point resting against the flagstones.

He dropped to his knees. “Mercy,” he whispered.

The lantern extinguished. The silence grew complete.

When the porters found him at dawn, Blythe was seated at his desk, eyes open, lips parted as if mid-lecture. His skull had been turned to face a glass case that stood empty. In his lap lay an iron key tied with black thread. The sigil cut into it was deeper than any before, the metal warped around it like wax.

The vault itself was ruined. Pedestals stood bare. Labels hung in the air as if awaiting objects that would never return. The dust bore the prints of towers and walls, as though a fortress had walked among them.

That night, the city spoke of Grathok as an archivist. Not of men, but of truths. That he came not to kill but to reorder, to take what had been stolen and return it to the ledger of absence. The beggars called it justice. The merchants spat the name like a curse. The constables swore they would abandon their watch if ever they were posted to the museum again.

And in the taverns, whispers began to rise. If Grathok collected the corrupt and the stolen, then how long until his keys turned upon the doors of those who merely watched?

Chapter IX: The Archivist of Bones

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