Paying the Cut

They stood on the wind-scoured clifftop above the Vex Caves with a dead arcanist's laboratory broken down and loaded on their backs — and one thing not on the pile: a brass throttle Aelion had wrenched from the Conduit Heart, seated back into the machine for a breath, and then thought better of and drawn out again. Below them the boat captain they had paid to wait weighed his oars and slipped out past hailing distance, wanting no part of whatever walked out of a place like that. So they took the coast road on foot, back to Saltmoor — up to the captains' tier they call the Crow's Nest, and down again to the wharves, where the business of turning salvage into coin was waiting.

They brought the haul to Octavian Drell's warehouse. His dwarven associate, a bookish and soft-spoken man named Bevin, went over every piece with careful hands and named his figure: twenty-four hundred gold. The throttle and the lens stayed off the table. Randy leaned on Drell to let the sale go quietly unreported; Drell did not budge, and explained instead what they had wandered into. In Saltmoor the Council of Six takes its Cut — a quarter to a half of any sale — and nobody moves goods here without paying it. He slid an old book of codes across the desk, and buried in it they turned up a clause with some teeth in it: First Finder's Rights, worth citing when they stood before the Council themselves.

And stand before them they did. They climbed to the Crow's Nest, a ring of captains' cabins raised from the bones of wrecked ships, and met Captain Mireval in the flesh for the first time — a peg leg, a pale scar dragged across one eye, five other weathered captains ranged at her table in a hall built into a shattered stern. Her crew opened at thirty-five percent. The party pushed, threatened to take their business elsewhere, and were given room to haggle; Randy, handed the floor, made a genuinely good case of it. It did not matter. The Cut held at thirty-five percent all the same — eight hundred and forty gold to the Council, a little over fifteen hundred kept. Somewhere in the back-and-forth Aelion produced the lens to sweeten the pitch, and Bevin all but lunged across the table for it, naming it on sight as a very rare Second Epoch artifact, a surveying instrument, before Mireval waved the tangent off as no business of the sale.

With coin in hand they spent some of it well. Randy bought a suit of splint mail; Aelion, a cloak of protection; Biz, in his particular way, relieved a Saltmoor apothecary of two healing draughts without troubling the proprietor for a price. Even so they walked out of the day still sitting on the better part of a thousand gold.

That evening, at the Rusted Mermaid, they put the lens in front of Bevin again — this time on purpose. He examined it closely and told them plainly what it was: one of the survey instruments of the Second Epoch, and, quietly enough that nobody else at the bar caught it, tied to the Technomicron, the dwarves' own sacred text, kept in the far city of Steamveil. Then he gave them something better than lore. About a month back, he said, an elven man with a darkened hand had passed through Saltmoor carrying a piece exactly like theirs, had paid Drell a fifty-percent markup to take it off his hands, and had offered nothing else about himself at all.

Come morning they went back to Drell's warehouse and stopped being polite. Randy put a boot through the furniture, and under the weight of it Drell broke. They told him what they already knew — that they had taken the Fixer, wrung Giovanna for what she had, and handed her over to Aristonia's guards — and he confirmed the rest: he had sold that second lens, and his high-value buyer was an eccentric, ancient elf with a blackened hand, wealthy enough that the Council of Six did not frighten him. It was the first real look any of them had had at the man called [V](/npcs/v.md). Pressed harder, Drell dashed off a message by ink-courier and arranged the thing they had been circling for two towns: a meeting, with V. himself, at the warehouse, the following morning. Then he learned what they had done with Giovanna, and went cold as a stone.

The night turned up more. A note out of Giovanna's own satchel, read out at last: two of six, the northern side is confirmed — retrieve the lens and bring it to the waypoint. Saltmoor, they gathered, sits northeast of wherever that note counts from. Six pieces; V. already holds one and is hunting the rest — the same set Aelion has been chasing since the pit. Bevin found them once more before the evening was out, and this time came to warn them off it: the man is learned past reckoning, rich past touching, and afraid of no one. He asked only to take a charcoal rubbing of the lens's runes for his own study, and they let him. He read the base of it easily enough, his own people's script — orthogonal directions — but flagged a second, more archaic hand worked between the lines that he could not yet read. Flint, for his part, caught a smaller thread from a shopkeeper: a peaceful druid circle, somewhere up the coast.

And so the night passed with the one question that actually mattered still open on the table — whether to walk into that warehouse carrying the real throttle and lens, a set of clever fakes, or nothing at all. They turned it over from every angle, and then from those same angles again, and settled nothing.

It was morning. Down at the wharves a warehouse was waiting, and so was the man called V.