Now that we’d dealt with personal concerns, we turned to researching one Thaddeus Strangford, retired leviathan hunter captain, emeritus admiral of the Imperial Navy, City Council member – and Ascendent. As his young cousin Arilyn had bragged, he was currently in Imperial City, advising the Immortal Emperor on the Iruvian invasion (or, more likely, securing an official decree that the aftermath of said invasion would involve stealing the spires). However, both Salia’s estimate and docker scuttlebutt suggested that he was due back any day now. So, in a frenzy of activity that boded ill for the example we were setting for the orphans, we now atoned for past procrastination.

An exhaustive Charterhall newspaper archive dive revealed that despite Strangford’s military and political achievements, he was still defined first and foremost by his leviathan hunter captaincy. He’d inherited the family ship, the Nightbreaker, long before he became an admiral or ascended (haha) to the City Council, and he still thought and acted like its captain. Although his son technically commanded the ship now, dear old daddy would commandeer it for use as his personal floating-bedroom-plus-pleasure-yacht during the off-season.

Apart from that, Lord Strangford was the proud possessor of a distinguished and only mildly atrocious war record (compared to Ronia Helker’s, anyway), as well as the head of the Doskvol First faction on the City Council. Journalists reported – breathlessly or indignantly, depending on the newspaper – that he prioritized city above Imperial or even Akorosian interests. His goal was to maintain Doskvol’s position as the center of the world, and the City Council’s hold over Doskvol. Minutes from public meetings indicated that not all his fellow City Council members approved: Lords Bowmore and Rowan and Lady Clelland consistently formed a voting block against him.

While our research provided an interesting window onto local politics, none of it helped with the actual assassination bit (apart from suggesting that prying Strangford off his beloved boat would require our signature creativity). However, what it did do was give us ideas for scapegoats.

“Why don’t we dress up as nobles, attend a Brightstone ball, and interview his rivals?” I proposed during one of our railcar common room conferences.

“Oooh!” Faith seconded me at once, surprising me for a split second – until she kept talking. “I can wear my most pretentious dress!”

Whatever that meant.

Affecting a snooty accent, Ash pronounced, “We can be out-of-town nobles who are annoyed by Strangford’s Doskvol-centric views, and why can’t the whole Imperium just work together?”

“Then we can come from another Akorosian city that’s jealous of Doskvol’s position. How about Whitehollow?”

From Sigmund’s accounts of balls and dinner parties, I’d gathered that nobility from Doskvol and the nearest city, Whitehollow, often intermarried, although the Whitehollow branches were always cadet lines. It was entirely plausible that these slightly resentful junior nobles might attend a Brightstone ball – and that absolutely no one here would recognize them.

“Sure,” agreed Ash.

“But then I’ll have to wear my second-most pretentious dress,” Faith pouted.

“You’ll live,” I informed her.

And she did.

At the party, we played the naïve bumpkins, accosted locals, raved about Doskvol’s magnificence, and earnestly declared, “We wish that we could all work together in the Imperium’s best interest! Wouldn’t that be amazing?”

Predictably, our hints that all Akorosian cities should be – shudder – equal didn’t meet with unalloyed enthusiasm, but after some hours, we finally wormed our way into the right circles. While Faith kept up the dewy-eyed façade for our audience, Ash and I ingratiated ourselves with Lady Clelland. From her, we learned that the Bowmores were the wealthiest family on the City Council, which probably made them the wealthiest family in the whole Imperium. However, they were still jealous of the Strangfords, who despite being less wealthy had always been more prestigious, “for historical reasons so ancient that no one even remembers them anymore,” Lady Clelland observed, “but they’ve perpetuated their reputation by maintaining a successful leviathan hunter and serving with distinction in the Unity War.” To the Bowmores’ disgust, the Strangfords continued to be the iconic Doskvolian family, the one that all the Whitehollowers wanted to marry into.

The Rowans, on the other hand, Lady Clelland dismissed as “ancient and hidebound, probably the least colorful of the leading families,” but she did concede that they admirably upheld tradition to maintain their tower in Six Towers. (They sent some poor, distant cousin to live out there.)

Interestingly, when it came to her own family, the lady turned cagey. Part of the reason was that her clan was smaller and less prominent than either of her allies’ – but perhaps the larger part was that unlike the other City Council families, the Clellands weren’t completely loyal to the Church. They went to Mass every week, of course, but we got the distinct impression, especially from her own daughter, that many of them harbored cult-y interests.

Afterwards, back in the comfort of the railcar, I remarked, “A Bowmore might make the best scapegoat.”

“Yes, I think so as well,” Ash agreed. “We need an upstart, though, because no one will believe that the whole family collectively decided to murder Strangford. It’s more likely that a particularly irritating social climber would secretly hire a crew of assassins on their own initiative, thinking of course that they would never get caught.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Faith, looking up from perusing all the dance partners’ names scribbled on her fan. “Are you talking about Timoth?”

“Timoth…Bowmore?” I asked, uncertain whether she’d been listening or daydreaming.

“Yes! My pet, the acolyte Arilyn, said that he’s a ‘boorish lout.’ He’s about her age, very brash, doesn’t think before he acts. Also – ” here she donned a dreamy expression, just to annoy us – “he’s the most wonderful waltzer.”

All his dancing skills weren’t going to save Timoth from us, though.

The day after the party, the Nightbreaker returned to port – and promptly confounded all expectations by dropping anchor right in the middle of North Hook Channel. Along with a crowd of confused dockers, we watched and waited, and watched and waited, and then watched and waited some more, but the ship just sat there. Sailors bustled about on deck, doing whatever sailors did, but no one came ashore. Eventually, Chief Helker of the Dockers’ Union took a supply tender out to the ship. The sailors let him on board, but then he vanished into the depths of the leviathan hunter and didn’t reappear for ages.

“That’s odd,” commented Ash. “Why wouldn’t they dock? Surely the officers would want to come ashore to celebrate, I don’t know, Church-y things, if nothing else.”

Since the Hive still maintained a heavy presence in the district, not to mention strong ties to the Dockers’ Union, we hurried back to Strathmill House to disguise ourselves as laborers before heading to a docker pub. By then, Chief Helker had returned and relayed orders from on high – and no one liked them. As we entered, one burly docker was yelling, “I have my guys working double shifts for the next three weeks. It’s ridiculous!”

“That ship is supposed to be in port,” another snapped, stabbing a thick, callused forefinger down onto the bar counter to emphasize his point. “We have agreements about how things work at this port!”

“The Nightbreaker don’t care. The Nightbreaker is just breakin’ all of ‘em,” a third docker grumbled, but I noted that she didn’t name the culprit himself.

Sliding onto a bar stool next to them, I asked anxiously, “Are they planning to head out again soon? But wouldn’t they have to resupply for that?”

At that, the dockers all growled. “They are resupplying. But the way they’re resupplying is that they’re making us send out hundreds of tiny little tenders!”

“What!” shouted Ash, slamming a mug of awful beer onto the counter next to us. “That’s outrageous! That’s a flagrant violation of every principle!”

“And union rules!” I added.

“What could they possibly gain from all of this?” he demanded, leaning forward intently.

Another docker, bolder (or maybe just drunker) than the rest, snarled, “Apparently, it is Lord Strangford’s orders. They’re going to stay in the channel until they sail. Whenever that is.” He waved his own mug and sloshed beer onto some of his neighbors, who were too angry at Strangford to care.

Feigning disgust, Ash hinted, “If they’re trying to hide something onboard, we’re obviously going to find out anyway. Rumors will get around. It’s a waste of everybody’s time.”

The dockers all agreed. “Time and everybody’s labor. Why can’t they just pull up to the dock like everybody else? But no, his lordship says….”

Behind me, another docker exploded into the bar, roaring, “They’re not even letting us onto the boat! They’re making us hand boxes up to the crew! It’s crazy!”

This unsatisfactory state of affairs continued for days. As the week wore on, the dockers grew angrier and angrier – were eventually joined by equally indignant knots of sailors from the Nightbreaker.

“We don’t know what’s going on either!” one burst out. “They’re not telling us anything! Except that we only get three days of shore leave, twelve at a time! Twelve! Do you know how many of us there are? Some people are going to have to wait months to get off the ship!”

“Well,” groused his docker drinking partner, “you’re in luck, because it’s gonna take us months to resupply the ship.”

I found the sheer quantity of communal grumbling unusual, since dockers and sailors normally didn’t mix, but both sides were convinced that this deviation from protocol was dumb and terrible and shouldn’t be happening. However, the crew was terrified of the officers, so they complained out of earshot of their superiors but obeyed, while the dockers didn’t exactly have a choice in the matter unless they stormed the ship.

How fortunate for them that we planned to remedy the situation ourselves.

Back in the railcar, Ash asked Faith and me, “What do we know about the spires? Do we have a timeline for their delivery?”

After thinking over Salia’s intel, I shook my head. “All we know is that they were planning to invade Iruvia, somehow remove the spires, load them onto Lady Clave’s ship – ” (given the ongoing court battle, good luck with that) – “and bring them here.”

Ash had drawn the same conclusion. “Could they be on board the Nightbreaker now?”

I had to squash my kneejerk reaction, an emphatic “Of course not!” because after all, just because I hadn’t heard anything didn’t mean that Dunvil’s cabal hadn’t already stolen the spires and suppressed the news.

But Grandfather would know, wouldn’t he? If the rest of him were literally in the city? I reached out to the corner of my mind where he always hovered now.

No, child, he reassured me at once, my colleagues are still at home.

“Grandfather says they aren’t,” I reported to my crewmates.

“That’s heartening,” proclaimed Ash, and turned to the other part-demon in the room. “Since we’ll probably need to get onboard the Nightbreaker, interrogating a sailor could be useful. Should we find ourselves an appropriate specimen, Faith?”

Our resident head torturer wavered for a moment, torn over the appropriate degree of ennui to feign. At last, she sighed, “As much as I enjoy wild conjecture, you two have insufficiently interesting imaginations to keep me entertained. Let’s go ask a primary source.”

After we trailed the sailors around for a while, Ash and I established that all of the high-ranking officers were still holed up on the Nightbreaker. The mid-level ones who did come ashore visited their families in Crow’s Foot, the nicer parts of the Docks, and, on rare occasions, the outskirts of Nightmarket. As for the crew, sailors who’d actually fought a leviathan hurried to see Tris the tattooist, then swaggered into seedy brothels to display their fresh badges of courage. Catcrawl Alley, Nyryx informed us, was very busy.

Out of friendship for Faith, though, she made time to drug a sailor for us.

While the man was in a contented, talkative state (and inclined to ramble on and on about all the women he’d slept with), Faith steered him around to the topic of this new shore leave policy, i.e. its obnoxiousness.

“It’s the worst!” he babbled. “The old master got a wild hair or something. The young master would never have done this. We got some message while we were in Imperial City and then we’ve been on lockdown ever since.”

Probably heard about Karth and Djera Maha, Ash and I signed at each other.

“Oooh!” Faith played the wide-eyed ingenue awed by all this insider knowledge. “Do go on!”

Lowering his voice, the sailor revealed, “If the officers hadn’t threatened to mutiny, we’d still be on the ship.” His voice grew more agitated. “They wouldn’t let us off, but we can’t – we’ve been on that ship for seven months! We have to get off the ship! Or we’ll all go crazy! Some of us already are, and it’ll only get worse!”

While Nyryx eyed him speculatively, Faith made sympathetic noises (a bit overdone, in my opinion, but her target audience wasn’t all that discerning), furrowed her brow, and asked, “What did you bring back? Was there anything unusual?”

“From the Void Sea?” he asked, incredulous. “No. Standard haul.” Waving his arms to illustrate their odyssey, he told her, “We went from the Void Sea to Doskvol for less than a day to pick up the old master – no one was even allowed off the ship – and then straight to Imperial City. It’s crazy! We haven’t even gone to Lockport to unload the leviathan blood!”

At that, Ash’s eyebrows went all the way up.

I was more interested in the obsessive lockdown part: It looked increasingly like we’d have to assassinate Strangford on his floating fortress, whose design, defenses, and modes of sabotage were a complete mystery to us.

So wasn’t it a good thing that one of my friends was a former leviathan hunter officer?

The thought of damaging a leviathan hunter, any leviathan hunter – even to save our homeland – made Mylera cringe.

“They’re too valuable!” she exclaimed. “I mean, you never let them get anywhere near naval battles. You wouldn’t even use them to defend your own isle if you’re attacked!”

Clearly she’d been doing some thinking of her own about the invasion.

“We’re not planning to destroy the Nightbreaker,” I assured her quickly. “We might not even scratch it. We just want to get a sense of our options.”

After giving me a long look to gauge my sincerity, she took a sip of coffee, braced herself, and admitted, “There are mechanical things that can go wrong.” (Yes, well, even I knew that.) Shifting into teacher mode to distance herself, she veered off on a historical tangent: “Actually, it used to be a lot worse when the leviathan hunters were coal powered, because the boilers could explode. But now they’ve all been converted to electroplasmic systems.” Another sip of coffee. “Certainly an electroplasmic overload would be a problem…. I don’t know if this will be useful, but most of the leviathan hunters have been in service for centuries. They’ve gradually gotten upgraded as technology improved, but the coal apparatus is probably still sitting there, unused.” With a wistful smile, she mused, “If you know where to look, you can probably even see the stubs of what used to be masts, although they would have chopped them down and built over them….”

“So antiquated,” was Ash’s dismissive comment.

Mylera snapped back to herself at once and shot him an offended glare.

Missing it, Ash said to Faith and me, “An electroplasmic overload is an option. None of us are tinkers, but that doesn’t make it impossible.”

Because planting a bomb in the marine chronometer for Lady Clave had gone so well?

Reluctantly, Mylera reminded us, “Also, the leviathan blood itself is volatile.”

With visions of fiery explosions dancing through his head, Ash chuckled. “Oh, then skipping Lockport was a big mistake. Such a big mistake.”

“That would be terrible,” I protested, before he committed us to blowing up a significant fraction of the raw fuel that powered the whole Imperium. “We need it.”

“Yes, that would be so tragic,” he agreed dreamily. “So much wasted blood, so much wasted money…I have some markets to investigate. How does one blow up leviathan blood?” he asked in Mylera’s direction.

She didn’t answer.

Undaunted, he asked in Faith’s direction, “Is there, I don’t know, some type of toxic demon that drinks leviathan blood that could maybe get lost and find itself on the ship and cause quite a kerfuffle?”

Our personal source of chaotic kerfuffles objected, “It may be best not to have the entire city declare war on our crew.”

That shattered Ash’s trance. “Such moderation, Faith! Are you okay?” He put a paternal hand on her forehead, feeling for a fever.

Batting him away, Faith inhaled deeply (I braced myself) and then spewed an entire paragraph at him in retaliation: “I believe that an explosion would be exquisitely extraordinary, but extenuating circumstances being what they are, we should expect that extra-proportionate measures will take more skin off our backs than mere exfoliation.”

It took Ash, Mylera, and me a couple minutes to parse all of that.

At the end, Ash concluded in a stunned sort of way, “Wow. It must be a bad idea if Faith feels the need to exercise restraint.” (Mylera hid her face in her coffee cup.) “Still, an accident could happen while Strangford is investigating an explosion. We don’t have to blow up the whole ship. We could just blow up the engine room – ”

“Or set off the alarm,” interjected Faith, who apparently felt the oddest attachment to leviathan hunters, “that indicates the ship is in danger of exploding.”

Ash amended her amendment, “But with enough of an actual threat that it will force the crew to evacuate.” Then he reconsidered. “Although that might cause a panic, and the admiral would want to be seen in the middle of a panic, and it’s a bad idea to murder an Ascendent when he’s surrounded by hundreds of people. It’s hard enough to do when he’s alone.”

“He won’t want to reveal his Ascendent nature, though,” I put in. After all, if demon hybrid-ness were acceptable in Doskvol, the Church wouldn’t go to such lengths to hide its ritual.

But Ash shook his head. “By the point that his life is in danger, hiding his nature will be a minor detail.”

I persisted, “Would it be enough to confuse the crew and prevent them from helping him?”

Ash shook his head again. “An admiral’s control is extreme.”

Still staring into her coffee, Mylera nodded briefly, so I gave up that tack.

“Regardless how we do this,” Ash declared, “I’d like to make it poetic. On my part, it’s almost religious that we make his end fitting.”

Since there were no opinions incoming from either Faith or Mylera, I said, “I think death itself is fitting. After all, Strangford became an Ascendent to defy death, and we’re taking that from him.”

“Fair, fair.” Despite the affirmative, Ash looked unconvinced. “But how would he least like to see his end come upon him?”

How was I supposed to know? “Faith?”

For a split second, the maybe-probably-Ascendent looked as baffled as we did. Then her grin snapped back in place. Gripping the arms of her chair and leaning forward, she proclaimed, “Exsanguination seems excellent! We can kill him, drain his blood, and add it to the leviathan blood stock! Or we can kill him with a leviathan harpoon and then use leviathan hunter tools to suck out his blood!” She smacked her lips in my direction. “But only if Isha gets some mint this time.”

By now, Mylera knew better than to try to interpret Faith’s asides, especially ones aimed at me. Instead, she steered us towards the option that would minimize damage to the Nightbreaker. “Ships carry hand-thrown harpoons, but they’re also equipped with ballistae.” Seeing our puzzled expressions, she explained, “They fire giant bolts that you can grapple the leviathan with. They’re normally fixed to point away from the deck, but I can teach you how to sabotage them so they rotate freely….”

And thus we had our plan.

The Nightbreaker should even remain in one piece at the end of it.