DIRTY CASH (MONEY TALKS)

When In Doubt

Private notes, not for submission to the Guilded Crown
Nathaniel Harrow, Inquiry-Agent

The sigil has grown upon me like a sickness. Each victim of these killings clutched a key, each key bore the same mark, and each time I attempt to trace its form, the lines betray me. At first glance it is nothing more than a cluster of angled cuts, but when the eye lingers, the cuts begin to suggest new shapes. The mind follows, then falters, as though it has been led to the edge of a cliff.

I attempted to sketch the sigil again this morning. I set my compass upon the paper, but the needle refused to meet its opposite. I pressed harder, and the tool bent. Brass does not bend easily, yet there it is upon my desk now, warped into a crescent. When I counted the angles, I found more than I had drawn. When I turned the paper over, I saw lines that I had not placed.

Dray was present and asked me why I stared so long at a simple mark. He said it looked no more strange than a mason’s rune. I told him to look closer. He did, then grew pale, and pushed the parchment away with a curse. “It feels like it wants to be remembered,” he muttered. That is exactly it. The sigil insists upon the mind.

I cannot sleep. When I close my eyes, I dream of corridors lined with locks. Keys dangle from the ceilings like iron fruit. Each lock carries the same sigil, yet when I try to fit a key, the wards twist. In the distance, there is always the sound of water. Not the river as we know it, but something older, a tide that erodes stone and time alike.

I visited the widow on Threadneedle Street, one of Father Ellory’s parishioners. She told me her window had spoken to her. “The rain spelled it out,” she whispered. I pressed her to say what the message was. She wept and shook her head. “It said my name, over and over, until it was not my name anymore.”

I begin to believe the victims were not chosen at random. Each lived behind a mask of virtue while hiding theft beneath. Colgrave stole wealth by ink, Ellory stole faith by coin, Rendell stole justice itself. Whoever Grathok may be, his killings are deliberate, each one a correction.

If this is true, then I must ask why I have been set to hunt him. The patron who funds me continues to send his envelopes, no seal, no hand to claim the deed. Each note inside bears only one instruction: Press forward. The last arrived damp, the paper smelling of reeds, as though it had been dredged from the riverbed.

I weighed the coin in my palm by lamplight. It felt heavier than it should, not in gold but in meaning. Why does it feel as though each piece of silver carries a debt of its own?

The constables murmur of Grathok as if he were a spirit. The beggars speak of him as a savior. The merchants call him a fiend. Each voice gives him shape, but none hold the truth. I must hold to reason. He is a man, he must be. Yet reason falters when I see what I have seen.

I know this: locks and keys bind this city. Every door, every prison, every ledger closed to prying eyes is secured by them. The sigil is no mere ornament. It is a statement. A lock that refuses to stay closed. A prison that chooses its warden.

If I fail, I suspect I will not be buried. I will be arranged, as the others were, set into a lesson for those who dare to look too closely.

Yet I cannot withdraw. Something in me leans toward the storm, not away. I feel as though the city itself has drawn me into the current. Perhaps that is what Grathok is: not a man, but the city’s will, given form in armor.

God help me, I am beginning to wonder if I have been hired not to destroy him, but to understand him.

Chapter VI: Memorandum — On the Geometry of the Sigil

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