DIRTY CASH (MONEY TALKS)

When In Doubt

London, 1782. The streets swelled with rain like veins brimming too close to the skin. A storm dragged its heavy cloak across the city, rattling shutters, drowning alleys, and turning the cobbled lanes of Bishopsgate into black mirrors. By candlelight and guttering lantern, the city’s wealthy fastened their doors against the night. They were accustomed to thieves, footpads, and cutpurses, but what weighed upon them now was different. It was heavier, a dread that had no coin purse or purse string to cut.

That morning, before the storm, the first key had appeared. A long iron shaft, pitted with age, dangled from a black thread tied in a meticulous knot upon the door of the shipping magnate Lord Ephraim Colgrave. By noon, word had spread. Keys had been found on the thresholds of others as well: a banker in Cheapside, a judge’s clerk in Temple, and a charitable priest whose benevolence carried the stink of unpaid rents and purchased absolution. Each key was marked with a sigil, faint and sharp, as if carved by a hand both ancient and impatient.

Servants whispered of a shadow moving between the rain, of a figure vast as a rampart whose presence bent gutters and chimneys. When asked what face they saw, they fell quiet. It was as if the word itself could not be brought to lips.

By dusk, Lord Colgrave had dismissed the rumors. His counting-house was a fortress of oak and iron, his ledgers stacked in neat towers, his guard a veteran of His Majesty’s navy. “Superstitious rot,” he called it, brandy warming his belly. The storm grew meaner. At the witching hour, the watchman swore the rain ceased in a single circle around the door, like a stage cleared for an audience unseen. He raised his lantern. The wick dimmed, as though ashamed.

Inside, Colgrave’s pen scratched across parchment. He revised his accounts, striking out columns of losses and transmuting debt into profit with a confident flourish. Yet the ink blurred, spreading like spilled silt. He cursed, leaned close, and found the grain of the page wet. The water was thick, dark, and smelled of river rot. His hand trembled.

From the shadows between rafters, something shifted. The watchman outside later insisted the ceiling bowed as though under great weight. Colgrave turned, his quill snapping. The air grew heavy, not thick with smoke but with a silence deeper than thunder.

The watchman’s shout went unanswered. He forced the door, lantern in hand. Inside, he found his master seated upright, spine unnaturally aligned, head tilted back as though in study. The man’s mouth was filled with Thames silt, packed as tightly as mortar between bricks. His eyes were wide, glassy, staring at the ledgers which now lay soaked, ink dissolved into black pools that mirrored nothing.

In the margins, written not in ink but in a residue like ash dissolved in rain, was a single word: Grathok.

By dawn, the tale had spread across the coffee houses and taverns. It was spoken by printers’ apprentices and drunkards alike. Some claimed Grathok was a hired blade, a mercenary turned specter. Others swore he was a revenant risen from the gutters, vengeance given form. A beggar at Moorfields swore he had seen him crouched atop Ludgate, armor gleaming like wet stone, sword angled like a lightning rod to the heavens. A washerwoman muttered that he was no man at all, but the city’s own conscience, risen from filth to collect its debts.

No one agreed except on one point. With the keys came death, and with death came a silence that even thunder dared not disturb.

That day, as the rain still clung to the eaves, men of standing checked their doors twice. Some hired more guards. Others prayed. But all watched the dripping thresholds, waiting to see if a black thread and iron weight would hang upon their own.


And beneath the storm, Grathok walked unseen, his mission beginning.

Chapter I: The Rain of Keys

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