2/13/17: Edited lore note.

"Are these all the records you have?" I said, paging through a rather short folio Diebner had given me.

"I'm afraid so, Herr Duquesne."

"There can't be more than 1,000 names here. Granted, I was unconscious for most of the uprising, but the dead must number at least three times that."

"As you say, my lord. I was here. I assure you, we have used every diligence in preparing this list. A lot of bodies were burned, and people are still filtering in to report the dead."

"They had better, by the Lady. If they don't, they're going suffer when tax time comes. You will keep me informed of this, of course."

"Yes, my lord. On what basis?"

"Every hundred names, send out a messenger."

"Yes, my lord."

"I see you've placed certain marks next to certain names. What do they mean?"

"It's a cross-reference to the recovered property."

"Excellent. I assume it's too much to hope that you've conclusively identified the owners of any Chaotic or tainted artifacts?"

"Conclusively? No. But we have tentatively identified certain possessors of tainted artifacts. Those people have a purple mark next to their names."

"Good. And I don't suppose any of these people or their families are still alive?"

"I doubt it, lord."

"Do you keep execution records here, too?"

"We keep copies of some records, mostly notable people. The full records would be at the Grand Chapterhouse."

I rolled my eyes. "Of course they are."

"Is that a problem?"

I sighed briefly, "No. Can you get me a copy of your records?"

"Right here," Diebner said, digging for a few moments in a stack of folios.

It was only one page, with six names. Gustaf von Trotta, a Knight of the Empire. Bernd Schiller, a deacon of Sigmar's church. Paul Gerhardt, a prominent merchant. Karl Siegel, a poet. Martin von Wilpert, Freiherr Mittelmeer, and his wife Aleksandra.

"What about their families?"

"I think most of them are still alive, though I doubt they're enjoying imprisonment and inquisition. Generally, these people were too important for their families to be executed on the spot. I suspect they have attorneys," Diebner said, wincing.

"Good. Who's handling the inquisition at Schiller's church?"

"Hellinger, I believe."

"Well, that's something." Albert Hellinger was a competent officer and was even capable of reasoning. "I assume that Gerhardt's inventory was seized?"

"Yes, it's under impound in his warehouse."

"Do you have an address?"

"Yes," he said, and indicated the folio, "If I may?" he asked. I handed him the page, and he produced a fountain pen from somewhere in his robe, and bent over to scribble the warehouse's address below the list.

"Thanks. I know where the rest of these people lurked," I said, tucking the page into my brigandine coat. "Here's what I need: I need you to create a separate list with all the names and addresses of everyone tentatively identified as the owner of a Chaotic artifact, plus a short description of the item, two copies. I need another copy of the list of high-profile traitors as well, plus identifying information. Then, I need you to make two copies of the full list of names. Send one to the Municipal Archive, assuming it didn't burn down, and have the archivists get me addresses on all 1,000 or so of them. There's a tavern on the Platz, the Gull and Noose. I'm going there for breakfast. Bring me the second copy of the full list and the other documents there. Also, have the archivists send their work there."

"Yes, my lord. But it does seem like rather a lot of work, doesn't it?"

"In my business, there are no shortcuts."

"As you say, my lord."

A few minutes later, I was walking out of the Greifensburg. The Gull and Noose was quite nearby, but the walk was harder than I expected. As I walked, my magical healing protested, and I suffered random shooting pains all over my body, though nothing stopped working, and I wasn't bleeding, as far as I could tell. I gritted my teeth through the pain, and ignored it.

When I walked through the Gull's swinging doors, I was hit by a blast of hot, moist air. The Gull was a contradiction. It sat hardly a kilometer from the Todbringer and Bildhofen palaces, but it was a firmly middle-class establishment, not like the palatial establishments crowding the Duke's plaza. I suspected that its location had something to do with it. The Gull was tucked into what was perhaps the only cranny left in the palace district, a corner of road sandwiched between a high-end butcher shop and a notary. It had a very small and nondescript façade, though it was much larger inside than it appeared to be, and it did not betray itself as a tavern. Even its sign, a gull with wings spread and a noose thrown loosely about its neck, had no words on it. I also suspected that its clientele had something to do with its survival. The Gull was mainly frequented by managerial functionaries in the service of the various great houses that perched on the hill, and I supposed that those magnates thought it convenient for their important servants to have somewhere to drink within summoning distance.

The Gull was not overly busy when I arrived, it being an off hour, for which I was grateful. As genteel as the clientele could be, they were often overly obsequious and polite, and always wanted to bend your ear to some subject or another. The combination quickly grated on the nerves, or at least my nerves.

I sat down at a table with a sigh that I hoped wasn't too noticeable and waited a moment for the girl, who bustled up with a menu. "Could you send Hansie over, dear?" I asked her, and she smiled. As she left, I said to her back, "Lager, too, if you please." She turned her head to acknowledge my order, and kept walking.

I browsed the menu for a few seconds. It was not extensive, but the fare was good. I was just about to decide, when Hans Bloch, the appropriately-named proprietor of the Gull, sat down across from me, the bench creaking slightly under his huge bulk, made bulkier by his thick leather apron. He carried two tankards of lager, one of which he set down in front of me. "Erich! Good to see you again. Been a while. I was starting to worry," he said, extending his hand across the table, which I shook.

"Your fears were not unfounded, my friend. I took a wound or two in the uprising," I said, groaning slightly and taking a swig of the lager. I'd have preferred wine, but it was better than nothing.

"Are you going to die in my pub? Don't die in my pub. Customers don't like it."

"I'm not going to die, at least not until the job is done. Then I'll give it some thought. Listen, Hansie," I said, lowering my voice a little. "I'm going to tell you something that I need not to enter the rumor mill. Understand?"

"I do," Hans said. Like most successful tavern owners, Bloch was a rumormonger par excellence, but was one of the few worth trusting to keep his mouth shut when asked, and a damn good conduit for dis- and misinformation.

"I'm not sure the taint has been expunged," I said, suppressing a grimace as pain shot through my chest.

Bloch took a moment to process this. "Okay, so does that mean you're doing your thing?"

"It does, and I need help. Kalbach's not giving me much rope on this one, and my only support is a partner who is not only utterly inexperienced but also a spy."

"Where is he?"

"I sent him off on an errand that should take a while."

At this point, Duquesne omitted the rest of that comment to Bloch, which went something like, "And cause a nice little ruckus that should distract some people whose attention I'd rather avoid."

"Cute," Bloch said, and grew suddenly somber. "I heard about what happened to your people. I'm sorry about Fritz. You okay?"

My lips tightened. "I'm fine."

"You don't seem very fine. I saw you come in. You can barely walk, and you've been gritting your teeth since I sat down."

"That's pain, which you know is an old friend of mine."

"Don't give me shit. Fritz was your best friend."

Personally, I thought 'best friend' was a bit of an overstatement. Fritz was the man you wanted watching your back, and we'd watched each other's for a couple of decades. Didn't mean we were particularly close. Or so it had seemed. "Yeah, and he's dead and I don't really want to talk about it."

"Fair," Bloch said, raising his hands placatingly.

"Anyway, I'm going to make sure that they all get their due. Fritz, the murdered innocents and the guilty living. All of them."

"You always do."

I grimaced again, this time not from pain. "Not always."

"So, where's Lenz?" Bloch asked, his face relaxing as he changed the subject. "He's usually hanging around on these sorts of shady jobs."

"Lenz, I presume, is at his office sucking his clients' blood, as usual. I'm going round his house after end of business."

"You really shouldn't pull him into these things. He's got a profession and a family."

"That's his problem, not mine. And Lenz is an adult. He can do what he wants."

Bloch gave me a skeptical look, "Lenz would follow you anywhere."

"And I have not the first clue why," which was a pointless but reflexive lie. I considered trailing off, but decided to double down, "Am I particularly charismatic? If so, I'd really like to know because I seem to have been unable to make any friends in this damned empire except him and, maybe, you. Quite the reverse, in fact. I've made more enemies than I'm used to having without a mercenary company at my back."

"Oh, poor you. And you know that's not what I'm talking about."

"You make it seem like my saving him from the pyre with a ream of exonerating evidence and a dozen witnesses was a bad thing. If he wants to be grateful, I'm not going to get in his way. And I love his kids like they were my own. I'd never let anything happen to their papa."

Bloch's expression didn't change. "Oh, fuck off," I said, finally, exasperated. "I'm not abusing his gratitude."

"If you say so," Bloch said. Before I could object further, he continued, "So what did you need my help with?"

"I'm investigating the taint. I think the cult still exists, and you've got the best rumors in the city."

"Do you have a theory?"

"I just started on this case a few hours ago. Any kind of theorizing would be baseless speculation, but I will tell you that my first instinct was that the cult launched the uprising because someone got too close to discovering them, and couldn't be dealt with before revealing it. That uprising, while loud and scary, fizzled in the Guntherplatz, a mile from the inner gate. Nowhere near success. It was a poorly planned and poorly executed botch. But now, after a day or so of repression, everyone thinks the cult's dead."

"Risky."

"Damned risky, no doubt. And, as I said, that was just my first instinct. So: do you know anything that would tend to corroborate that?"

"Well, the chatter definitely increased in the days before the riot."

"I remember you mentioned that. I was skeptical it because there weren't any other warning signs."

"And I agreed with you. I'll look through my notes. See if I can turn up some names. You should eat. On the house," Bloch said, rising.

"Yeah, and how much are you going to gouge me for the information?"

"Depends how good it is."

I chuckled under my breath, and gave my order to the serving girl. A few minutes later, my breakfast came and I set to eating.

After about half an hour, Bloch reemerged from his office. His expression, as usual, was unreadable. Bloch was a dangerous card player, and didn't even have to cheat like I usually did.

"Sho?" I asked, around a mouthful of egg. "Anyfing?"

Bloch hesitated for a second, which wasn't like him. I swallowed and sat up, and asked, "Well, out with it, man."

"The day before the uprising, a big shipment came into the docks for a Paul Gerhard. You know him?"

"I know of him, and he's actually one of my suspects. Go on."

"It wasn't a low-profile thing. Everyone knew about Gerhard's shipment, goods from Ind and Cathay that everyone was eager to get rich off. Spice, silk, ivory, textiles, curved swords, some kind of magical iron, all kinds of stuff."

"It was cover?"

"Possibly. For what, I don't know."

"What makes you think it was cover?"

"Obviously, the shipment came in on a barge, but it came off the Le Esprit," pronouncing it as eh-sprit, which made me wince, "which calls itself a Bretonnian, but it's is probably Tilean. No matter, it has ties to Sartosan pirates. The rumor was that Le Esprit had taken on extra cargo in Sartosa on its way to Marienburg."

"That's a pretty big detour for a ship bringing perishables from half the world away."

"And Sartosa may not be ruled by Norscans anymore, but that place is a rathive of traitors and mutants."

"That's still thin as hell, Hans."

"But why go to Sartosa? Sartosa doesn't make trade goods. It makes pirates."

"It's changed a lot over the last twenty years. And it's a big transshipment point in its own right, including for goods from Araby. Any Arabyan goods in the shipment?"

"Not that I know of."

"Any non-Indian or Cathayan goods?"

"Probably."

"Doesn't change the fact that we don't know for sure it went to Sartosa. And you're forgetting that contraband could have made its way onto the barge in Marienburg. Much closer to Norsca and the Wastes. Which doesn't help us, because we can't prove it."

"So then what are you going to do?"

"I'm going to investigate. Anything else?"

"Yeah. People were surprised at how quickly the barge was offloaded, I recall. And, when the offloading was finished, the barge didn't float like it was empty. Also, no one got a good look inside the barge. Gerhard used all his own people, and bunch of cranes built on the spot."

"So you're saying that the contraband might have been a large cargo?"

"Maybe."

"All of that could be explained by ordinary smuggling, hoping to avoid customs and taxes."

"Oh, I'm sure he is a smuggler. Aren't all merchants? But isn't that a great excuse? 'Oh, my lord, those tainted items aren't mine. I'm an honest smuggler. Obviously, one of my people is the culprit, who used my smuggling to sneak in traitorous cargo.'"

"It's a nice tale, but not evidence."

"Maybe, but any other witch hunter would be building the pyre by now."

"We've had this exact discussion before. And, anyway, Gerhard already burned."

"Well, stop poking holes my work then. You only come to me for leads, anyway."

"That is true. Where did the barge go after the offloading?"

"Probably out of the city, to Marienburg."

"Damn. What I wouldn't give to be a wizard. Could just pop over to Marienburg in the blink of an eye."

"I don't think that's how magic works."

"Nobody knows how magic works. That's the definition of magic."

Bloch chuckled. He had always found my university degree and philosophical inclination faintly ridiculous, a sentiment broadly shared among the lower classes of the Empire. In his case, though, it was probably more of a guise than a genuine belief. His vocabulary seemed more limited than mine, but he always understood me. The obvious conclusion, then, was that Bloch was a sandbagging prick. Normally, that would have worried me. But Bloch was on my side, or at least it seemed like he was. "Anyway," he said, "you don't need to. I have friends in other cities. They could poke around."

"And how much is that going to cost me?"

"I'll itemize it for you. How does that sound?" Bloch said, dripping sarcasm, and letting slip one of those big words he wasn't supposed to know.

"You'd better. Anything else you found back there?"

"A few scraps, maybe a few good-looking ones, but they're even thinner than what I just gave you. I need to follow up."

"That's fine. I'm going to have my hands full with the barge and my initial list of suspects anyway. Let's talk price."

"Sounds like you need a lot of help. So I'll make it easy, if not cheap. Give me a Hammer, and at the end I'll pay you back whatever I don't earn or pay out. And you can eat here free for life."

My mouth dropped open, and I stared silently at Bloch for ten whole seconds. "Oh, free, he says," I said, mocking Bloch openly. "Be serious! A Hammer? Where in the hell am I going to get that kind of cash?" A Hammer, as they were colloquially known, was the largest denomination of Imperial currency. It was a small, octagonal coin made of meteoric iron, what the Dwarfs call Gromril. A single one was worth 1,076 gold crowns, or almost 700,000 pfennigs, and more than most knights would earn in a lifetime.

"You don't have to give me a gromril coin. You can pay me in gold."

"Oh, thanks. As if I have that much gold."

"You know someone who does."

"You hypocrite. You just accused me of abusing his generosity. Now you want him to cough up a damned Hammer to you?"

Bloch shrugged. "He's your friend, not mine. And this is business. Besides, Lenz can afford it." I sighed. It was true. Lenz was an attorney, and damned good at his job, which I respected. He was highly in demand not just in Carroburg, but across the Old World. He had presented cases to several of the great lords of men and Dwarfs. Why he lived in such a relative backwater, I never found out.

"He'd do it, too," I said, considering the idea more seriously.

"Just to be clear, I don't actually want a gromril coin. Fucking useless, that'd be. I actually prefer silver."

"Ha-ha," I said, mockingly again. "Fine. For a Hammer, you're going to give me a lot of help. I'm waiting here for a cart full of documents from the archives in the Burg. There are three lists I need you to set your people to. One is a list of six important traitors, including Gerhard. Another is a list of people tentatively identified as having owned a chaotic artifact. The last is a grand list of all the dead, currently about 1,000 names. I'm getting the archivists down in the Municipal Archives on the public records, but I need canvassing. A lot of canvassing. You're also going to make inquiries in every river port on the Reik. And you're going to have your little urchins scour the docklands here for that barge.

"Make sure to plan accordingly. Some of this work might be dangerous. I trust you to select the right people for the job and make them aware of the risk. Also, I need any people you put on this not to fuck up my investigation. No messes."

"Okay," Bloch said, looking less confident than I'd hoped. If the bastard wanted a Hammer, I was going to get every pfennig's worth. If that meant stretching the man's resources, so much the better.

"Tell your people to avoid fights, and to keep this quiet."

"Have you ever seen a horde of guttersnipes?"

"No."

"Yes, you have."

I took his meaning, and chuckled. "Good. But I mean it. I want no watch involvement, no witch hunters, no city government, no blood in the streets, and no press."

Bloch looked more skeptical still. "I'll be honest, Erich, this is probably going to get out. What if the cult finds out?"

"Let them. It's the public I want kept in the dark. I want the traitors to know I'm coming. Hopefully, they'll panic. When people panic, they lash out and make mistakes. And when they do, I'll be there. And then I'll cut their dicks off and watch them bleed to death."

Bloch's face whitened a little "Gods. Really?"

"Maybe one or two. The rest I'll just round up and burn."

"Fucking hunters," Bloch said, rising from the table. I waved him down.

"One last thing. Since you made me feel guilty about the way I treat Lenz, you're also going to provide bodyguards to keep his wife and kids safe."

"Sigmar, do you ever stop asking? I'm going to want a second Hammer before long," he said, rising. But he didn't say no.

I returned to my breakfast, but as Bloch walked away, I raised my head, "Oh, and I'm staying here for 'free,' too."

He didn't turn around, but shouted over his shoulder an exasperated "Fine!"

About half an hour later, a few porters walked into the Gull with boxes of documents. I took a copy of the list with the names and addresses of people who might have owned Chaotic artifacts, and I entrusted the rest to Bloch.

"So," he said, "where are you going first?"

"I'm heading to the Gunthersplatz. Before I do anything else, I need a clear idea of where the riot started. And put those documents away. Hunters'll probably show up here at some point, looking for me."

"I'm offended," he said, with mock outrage. "I'll send a boy for you if I find anything good."

"Bon. See you tonight," I said. I turned on my heel and departed the establishment.

'Lore' note: Regarding currency, I made up my own currency structure for this fic. I know that there exists a possibly canon imperial currency, but it's boring and corresponds exactly to the pre-decimal pound sterling. So, in this fic: 20 copper pfennigs = 1 silver mark; 32 silver marks = 1 gold crown (for 640 pfennigs to the crown). 1,076 gold crowns = 1 gromril Hammer. Other denominations include: schilling = 10 pfennigs; florin = 2 marks; thaler = 4 marks; pfund = 8 marks; gulden = 16 marks; talent = 2 crowns. A typical yearly wage for a peasant would be 3-6 crowns. For a skilled craftsman, 10-20 crowns. Master craftsman, 20-60. Knight, 30-200. Professional (doctor, lawyer, accountant, etc.), 40-100 crowns. Professional State or Imperial soldier: 8-25 crowns, depending on seniority. Witch Hunters: 15-60 crowns, depending on seniority and prior rank.