Chapter 1: Leithe
It was a glorious morning; the sun was rolling happily above, suspended against a brilliant, blue and cloudless sky. Its flaming tendrils reached out hot in the air and their heat could be felt radiating even into the deepest and most obscure little allies in Darktown. The air was dry, hot and filled with little promises; promises granted by light and warmth and the power to re-illuminate vague nostalgia marked by childhood laughter and the times when you felt you were just a little bit extra-ordinary. Therefore that morning made people feel special, if for only for awhile, and so there were smiles to be seen all around Kirkwall – some white, some yellow, some black, some gummy – but all smiles none the less.
The smiling was not noticed only on the lips, but even in the arms and legs. They quickened, steps lightened, muscles bounced, lame feet straightened a little and crooked backs pained a little less. The slop girl managed to look a little pretty in all her filth, the surly dwarf who sold arms re-forged from old metals growled less as he waddled about his business and the guards even managed a slight nod as they patrolled past.
Of course these little subtleties went unseen by the majority of the rabble as they began their city lives for the day – but Leithe noticed. It was Leithe's job to notice all the little changes in the city; the characters, the sellers and buyers, the guards and the drunks, from beggarman to betterman she knew them all; where they worked, what they worked as, how they procured their wares, who they knew – and of those who they liked and disliked, who they loved, their daily movements, where and what they ate and at what time, where they made waste.
It was strange how a city, brimming and bustling with all manner of apparently independent, decision-making people could live so habitually that the city seemed like a giant automaton and the people its cogs, all turning with mechanical predictability. And once you had taken apart the machine and examined all the things that made it tick, you were quick to notice anything that had changed, however little; a speck of rust, a missing screw – Leithe noticed it all.
She had been scouting the dock area of Kirkwall for roughly one month now and had learned many things. Dressed in a humble blue shift with a worn grey scarf pulled tight around her head, she looked every bit another of the dockside miserables. Lowly, sea-stained and opportunistic she wandered the docks all day selling dried seaweed from a rough, hempen sack slung over a weary shoulder. She stank like a sea monster, her feet ached and her ass was red from the slaps she received from nearly ever sailor who drunkenly sauntered by; this was the life of a dockside castaway. And she was completely immersed in it.
In this way she was not Leithe, she was Flotsam and this was the name everyone knew her by. She was gruff, pushy and commonplace but smiley and loquacious when she needed be. She asked many questions and was asked many in return. When asked of her origin she spun a fiction of shipwrecks and orphans, though her tragedy received little sympathy from the disenfranchised docks folk, each with their own misgivings and hard living. She was just another little fish, flopping about in the salty swamp of the dockside trying to swim and simultaneously avoid predation which, in the docks, came in many forms.
The past few weeks saw the dockside even busier than usual what with the preparations for the Cammasham Ball well underway. Traditionally, the Ball was a celebration of the chilled, north-westernly Cammasham wind that swept over Kirkwall around mid-Summer; a cool kiss on a hot night. Now it was an excuse for Kirkwall's elite to indulge in an evening of frantic revelry. Government officials, wealthy merchants, bureaucrats, politicians and dozens of highborn families all congregated for a night of lavish auctioning, diamond encrusted debauchery and limitless hedonism.
Flotsam had flogged her wares close to the groups of men and women involved in the planning of the Ball and the opening ceremony which preceded it. A portly, bald-headed man named Claude was involved in overseeing the whole operation. His head was small and tanned, like a little nut. He had flaring nostrils and fleshy, wet lips and was invariably dripping with oily beads of sweat. As far as Flotsam could tell, all his underlings resented him as how you would the relentless pestilence of a fly buzzing in your ear you couldn't swat away. However through his hissy fits and screams, Flotsam collected a lot of gleaming little gens.
Apparently, a team of horse and carriages would escort all the Ball guests from Hightown, via a heavily guarded route, to the docks. Here they would cross a specially crafted suspension bridge a little way across the sea to Bessie – the huge merchant ship in which the Ball was to take place. Bessie herself was a gross and colossal mutation of naval engineering. A ship she was but rumours were she couldn't even sail anymore; her hull too bulky and over-decorated, her cabins too laden with every kind of arrogant and glittering opulence, her mast and deck carved into pieces of art, pretty and impractical.
She belonged to one of the more wealthy cotton merchants from Hightown. Initially he used it as a trading vessel but after it became less sea-worthy he would now occasionally only use it as a novelty kind of holiday home, floating idly in the bays around the docks and gallows of Kirkwall; a constant quell on the dreams of the undesirables who would occasionally cast a tired eye out to the waters and imagine up a different life.
Flotsam wandered around peddling her seaweed (actually her fake business had boomed since the Ball workers arrived, they always bought her crispy weed as a quick, salty snack) and made a mental note of all the tid-bits of information she gleaned. The day was long but her work really began when the sun tumbled behind the sea and gave way to the moon – mother of shadows. Then she made her way (a different route each day) to Lowtown to a particular crack in the wall or a disused loft or the shady corner of a knave's tavern or wherever the meeting place for that day had been decided. There she would cast off her guise as Flotsam, dockside scum, and become Leithe, trickster, thief and vassal of the Coterie.
She would switch her trade from weeds to words and report back everything she had learned from her day of surveillance. She was not the only Coterie agent undercover; there was an entire ream of pretenders and liars deployed to all parts of the city. And every night they would convene with some of the highest ranking Coterie advocates and together they continued to form a huge theoretical blueprint of how the evening of the Cammasham Ball was going to pan out. This was essential for their preparation and their planning. They were going to board that bitch Bessie and take from her one of the items being auctioned – one of the most precious and most dangerous relics ever to have had a home in Kirkwall. A relic seeped in blood magic and sealed in sorrow; the Dragon's Tooth.