A Contingent Occasion
Arboria
It had been the revised itineraries of the esquires of the Holy Lakes which had tipped the hand regarding the next move Ichirō would make as the latest drama in Shirekeep unfolded. As Commander of the Order of the Holy Lakes, the esquires assigned to the protection of Ichirō and his family were his to command as he saw fit, yet their movements, for purposes of administration, pay, and logistics, were routinely reported to the Hurmu Fyrð, whose Guards Corps furnished the aforementioned esquires. As such there was no preventing the office of the Secretary of State for Peace from having sight of the movement notices, and from there the matter was, within hours of first coming to the notice of a diligent secretary aspiring for advancement within the Coalition for Democratic Humanism, swiftly brought to the attention of the secretariat of the Council of Archons, and thence reported to the Hierophant, Felipe de Almagro, whose interest was duly piqued.
Marius Gallo, by then long accustomed to his comfortably furnished office within the headquarters of the Mirkdale Peninsula Development Authority, situated within a discrete compound situated upon the eponymous headland, had been startled out of a vaguely obscene reverie when the conspicuously red encrypted phone set he had been bestowed by his handlers began to trill incessantly. Hesitantly, seldom relishing being obliged to answer to those who were now in the position of acting as his benefactors, he picked up the receiver and tentatively uttered a greeting bereft of enthusiasm. On this occasion, however, after listening for a few brief moments, he was pleasantly surprised to find himself offering his fulsome consent to all that the voice down the other end of the line proposed. No sooner had he spoke in affirmation, than the caller had brusquely hung up. As was his habit after taking one of those calls, Marius found himself wandering across to the drinks cabinet situated in the corner of the room. However, on this occasion, as he ran his finger along a row of crystal decanters he realised that he was actually smiling.
Musica
The life of an "apostle" in the current era was a continuous blur of safe houses, dark side-alleys, moments of snatched conversation amongst circles of ever changing, necessarily fleeting, associates, and a regular vigil, awaiting the next chalked sigil on a wall that would indicate the direction to another dead-drop, such as the one which was guiding Naveed Rahmani now towards the edge of the Musica Naval Arsenal. The bins behind the gargantuan construction hall were always overflowing with refuse, collections occurring weeks late if at all. Naveed tried to mingle with the workers during shift change, working his way against the flow of exhausted shipbuilders of various professions he couldn't even begin to name in spite of having worked for years in the shadows to rile them up against the decadent nobility. In the guise of a scruffy, tired, and potentially lost, dockworker, he drifted over to a crumbling redbrick wall where the last chalk graffito pointed him towards a rusting metal container overfilled with empty paint pots and miscellaneous off-cuts of sheet metal. Come nightfall the bins would be swarmed with scavengers, no matter the efforts of the brutal and vindictive cudgellers retained by the port authorities to make up for the deficit in local law enforcement. His window of opportunity for collecting the package would be brief. Overhead a passing seagull called down its mockery of the scene carrying on below, and Naveed cursed it silently, just as he cursed everything on the days like this. Years and years, and it never ceased to feel like an indignity to be carrying on in this furtive manner. The time would come when all those who had denied and opposed his apostolic mission would be made to pay in full measure for all of these years. The harmonious society would come, but before the glorious day there would be a dreadful reckoning. For now, however, he was on his knees, rifling amongst paint pots, trying not to recoil in disgust as he realised, too late, that he had placed his hand into a discarded grease trap.
The code cylinder, its plastic wrapping caked in grease and oil so as to make it as unremarkable amongst the general filth, had been taped to the inside of the bin, beneath the top layer of assorted industrial detritus. After the briefest of furtive looks over his shoulder to reassure himself that he was not being observed, Naveed snatched up the small plastic coated cylinder and jammed it into his inside coat pocket, quietly cursing that he would need to get the inevitable grease stain somehow cleaned. The last laggards of the shift change were still filing out of construction hall and dawdling in small clumps of exhausted men heading towards the exit leading towards a dismal row of pubs, greasy cafes, and rundown denizen hostels that many of them would call home, and the bus station that would mark the next stage of the journey for those with a better life to go to. Without making it seem as though he were hurrying to depart the scene, Naveed caught up with one of aforementioned knots of men, and trailed in their wake, close enough as to seem in some way involved, but not so close as to attract the attention of those strangers whose thoughts were fixed upon the promise of scant consolation offered in a pint.
He had continued onto the bus station, both himself and the shipbuilders lost in the wave of sullen humanity trudging out of the dockyards. The bus he stepped onto, so ancient as to probably predate the Fracture, took him as far as La Fiesta, where row upon row of slum tenements did little to disguise the fact that, during the ancient days, this had been one of the most frequently burnt districts of the city. The constabulary seldom came out this far, and the Imperial Marshals never. It had become one of those forgotten and accursed places where the Humanist Vanguard had been able to establish a cadre and present itself as a bastion of order. It was perfect for Naveed's needs. A warren of rat nests into which he could disappear as and when he required.
His route back to his latest bolt hole had been by indirect and meandering stages. Turn, and turn, and turn again. Never go from point a to point b via the shortest route. At no point did he feel the burning tingle of eyes upon him, nor did he detect any surreptitious figure haunting his shadow. At no junction were any markers indicating a compromised location displayed. At length assuaged of doubts, he made the final turn towards the street which led towards the crumbling apartment above a pawnbrokers which he presently called home. It was an abode which he shared with cockroaches the size of mice and possessed of a temperament as foul as the soul-snatching demon fish of old legend.
As he entered his temporary abode and double bolted the door behind him, Naveed glanced about for any sign of obvious changes to how he had left the dust and mold suffused dump in the morning. Finding none, he made his way to the kitchen and fetched the disgusting package out of his coat pocket. Peeling away the disgusting grease-caked plastic wrapping to reveal the carbon cylinder covered in irregular indentations along his entire length, he rinsed down the cylinder and dried it with a piece of kitchen paper, taking especial care to ensure that each notch was clear of any grime, before setting it down upon the drying board. Going into the living room, he made his way across to the corner of the room and knelt down to fold back a faded piece of green carpet to expose the wooden flooring beneath. Having checked to ensure that the thin strand of black hair was where he had left it the night before, he lifted up a wooden panel and removed a palm sized reader with a small green screen, and a pair of copper prongs spaced sufficiently apart as to hold the cylinder he had just cleaned. Returning with the reader to the kitchen, he set the reader down on the dirty bar top beside the stove and went across to pick up the carbon cylinder which he brought back to the reader and placed down onto the copper prongs.
It was fiddly, having to retrieve the tuning key, a thin sliver of metal concealed within the heel of his left boot, and then slotting it into the side of the reader, causing the prongs to lower the cylinder onto the shallow turning grove in which it would be read - the onetime mission instruction appearing on the green screen as the cylinder completed its rotation upon the reader.
Later, as Naveed ground down the discarded hollow cylinder beneath his boot, he was left with one key question – where in all the hells was Engita?
