They had two hours and the city smelled like a thing in pain: smoke mixed with wet rope, the metallic tang of coin that had been handled too much. Aminah spread the scraps of paper on the table like a surgeon laying out instruments. The manifest, the scrap from Rell, Mace's two names. The token—wrapped in oilcloth—sat under glass and looked small and obscene.
"Options," Klixin said. He didn't need to name them. Men like him spoke in practicality and then left the poetry to those who had time for it.
Hasb leaned his shoulder on the table and pinched the bridge of his nose. "We can try to seize the broker at the quay. We can burn the north hold. We can hand over a name."
"You keep repeating the useless one," Aminah said. Her voice had a clean edge. "We don't hand over names. Not like this."
Dzeko rubbed his jaw. "Then we bait. A public show that exposes the token as a fake. If the buyers see it's imitation, they won't want the ash. You pull the market away from them."
"And while we stage the market, a small team intercepts the exchange," Xazaz added. He liked direct action; his talk never tasted of committees.
"Who intercepts?" Klixin asked.
"Hasb takes a hand-picked team, moves like ghosts," Dzeko said. "Meren and Leto with evidence. I'll handle the broker and the merchant leads. Aminah—" his eyes found hers, "you handle the thread that ties Mace to whoever put up the Fulgur name."
Aminah's fingers drifted to the token under glass. It hummed a little in the way that dead things hum when they've been moved. She nodded. "We make it messy on paper. We take their market and make it stink. We move the bait and we pull the buyers into daylight. Then we close the net."
They moved like a city with a plan: men were sent to the north lane, others were given strict orders to make noise, Dzeko slipped into the docks' back corridors with coin and questions. Aminah wrote a single note and sealed it: to Klixin, to be delivered to the market elders. Public showing at dusk. Token on display. No mention of ash. Make people afraid of the trade, not the whistle-blowers.
Hasb gathered his team—three quick hands and two older fighters who'd earned their scars from work that left a rough kindness in them. He kissed Aminah on the brow like a soldier blessing a blade and left without ceremony.
The day slid. The market blunted its edge when the elders announced a display—a curious and harmless thing: a "study" of old tokens donated to the city for "preservation." People like spectacle; they also liked to feel smart. They came in clusters and Aminah watched them edge near the glass and mutter.
Dzeko had a man in a filthy cap buy a length of rope from a petty broker and then, at Dzeko's word, start yelling that the rope smelled like the kiln. The crowd grew. Voices rose. The kiln foreman came to argue and found himself faced with witnesses who now wanted their money back and their children safe. Small traders whispered nervousness into merchant ears.
At dusk the token was unveiled.
It was absurd in the light—polished, heavy, but wrong. Meren had a magnifying glass and stood like a public teacher, showing the crack, the wrong grain, the false varnish. The elders nodded like they were learning wisdom, but what the crowd took away was simpler: the token was a fake. Its power—whatever buyers thought it granted—lost half its luster in the public eye.
Men left with the taste of doubt in their mouths. Buyers delay when doubt smells like bad coin.
Behind that theater, Hasb and his team moved. They threaded through back alleys, across the north hold, to the sheds where the crates passed. Joss's name and Nina's face were on their tongues like a prayer. They found signs—nails pulled, a crate corner gouged, an odd set of footsteps leading toward the Old Gate. They followed prints into the mud and the mud led to a cart barely half-loaded, wheels slick with kiln residue.
They moved to silence the cart and found it empty but for a note pinned under a stone. Someone had been there before them—someone who wanted them to find it. The note was a single line:
Not here. Tonight. Third starboard.
Hasb swore and ripped the paper up. He kept the half that read "third starboard" and tossed the rest into his coat. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and started back, walking like a man who had just had a mirror smashed in his face.
Dzeko's gambling with petty brokers gave him small currency—names, slips, a scrap here and there. He came back with one thread that made the hair along Aminah's arms stand up: a letterhead used by a merchant-family in Moulm—one that sometimes did business quietly with a Fulgur house. It didn't mean a Fulgur sat on the Northstar's cabin list; it meant there was a ledger that could be traced.
Hours bled toward midnight. The city felt smaller, like a thing comprimised to a few tense rooms. Aminah tasted the stitches she'd made in the last days: cordon, token display, small arrests. Each stitch had pulled thread elsewhere. She had to close the loop now.
She sat in the dim room with Klixin, Xazaz and Dzeko, and spelled out the final moves: a decoy exchange at the Third Starboard dock—showing a false manifest and a token that Meren adulterated to look like the original but smell faintly of tar; a board-and-search team hidden in the crowd ready to surge; and a small strike team—Hasb's—slipping along the shadow side to secure the target.
"No open fighting," Klixin said. "Not with imperial eyes near. We create witnesses, not a war."
Aminah made a small, ugly sound. "And if the Empire arrests us?"
"Then we ask for a hearing," Xazaz said. "We make the widest noise—town elders, guild brothers, markets. We burn their desire for secrecy."
She nodded. It was a hope disguised as plan.
---
At eleven they moved. The decoy boat slid soft along the starboard slips. The city's watch was thinner; the Northstar still lay like a dark hinge on the water. Aminah's heart thudded not from fear but from the steady machine of too many people's lives pressed into a moment.
They waited.
Time is a pressure and people are soft under pressure. Men whistled, some drank, some pretended to tie knots. Then the lanterns on the Northstar blinked—first one, then another—like a slow answering of signals.
A shout from the quay and men pointed: a small launch with a white pennant approached. It wasn't the Northstar's heavy line—this was a private boat. The plank thudded. A figure in a dark cloak stepped down and walked toward the fold where the decoy lay waiting: a small wooden crate, a token wrapped in cloth.
They could have stopped there. A small figure, a private exchange, an opportunity to prove something. It might have been the buyer.
Then a curl of smoke rose past the Northstar's stern and a red flare arced into the sky—three beats—an answering note. The city's stomach flipped. That signal was not a private handshake. That signal was the one the Northstar had used before—an opening bell.
Men moved faster. The decoy's men froze. From the corner of the quay, where Aminah's team crouched, someone hissed: "There—another boat. Larger. A pennant with a simple sun."
The officer's launch had drawn back at dusk but now it pushed forward with a line of rowers, lanterns swinging. The sun pennant—imperial—cut the night.
Aminah's fingers tightened around the hilt in her coat. The plan had to fold to the new fact: the Empire was on the water in force. The decoy would be seen. The buyers would be cautious. And someone—someone with more power than Mace or Dalen—had decided tonight mattered enough to raise imperial banners.
A courier shoved through the small circle of captains then, breath ragged. He handed a paper to Aminah with hands that trembled like a man who'd been told to carry poison.
She slit it open.
The note was short, written in a hurried scrawl:
Third starboard is a decoy. The real exchange will be at the Prime Gate. Midnight. Bring a name for proof.
Her tongue went dry. The Prime Gate was the city's throat—public, visible, the place where the Prime Head's seal had to be noticed and the city could not be ignored.
Aminah read it again. Ink smudged where the courier had pressed too hard: **Prime Gate. Midnight.**
Behind her, Klixin's breath left in a sound like a bow snapping. "They've moved the field," he said. "They want us to play in public."
Dzeko swore softly. "They bait the city to choose—either open the gate and give them a stage, or we refuse and they brand us lawless."
Aminah's mind ran through the faces: Mace grinning over wet coin; the kiln woman at the hatch; the ride of the Northstar with imperial soldiers; the scrap Rell had clutched. Everything pointed like a finger to the same bad answer—the enemy wouldn't fight in private. They wanted a performance.
She looked at Hasb's list, then at the token, then at the names Mace had offered. Fatigue lined her face. She had one clean option left if she wanted to keep the city's spine intact and keep her hands clean. It was a choice that would cost her respect in some quarters and save it in others.
She looked at the men around the table—Klixin, Xazaz, Dzeko—saw the tightness that comes before a man decides to carry more than he can afford, and made the decision that unlucky captains make when the world forces a choice.
"Prime Gate," she said. "We go to the gate. We go public. We bring witnesses and elders. We refuse to hand names. We force them to show their hand."
Klixin's eyes narrowed. "You're asking to pick a fight under the city's nose."
"No," Aminah said. "I'm asking to let the city watch the choices made for it."
They readied horses, messengers, a list of every guild elder who might be trusted not to betray them. They sent runners to drum the market, to make sure the crowd would be there. The plan was dangerous—the sort of risk that might split them in half on the first shout—but Aminah liked one thing about danger: it showed who would stand with you.
She had a last private thing to do before they rode out. She took the token from the glass and unwrapped it. For a second she looked at its mimic face—the wrong grain, the tiny hairline crack like an eye—and thought about how easily the city trusted marks. She put the token in her palm and pressed the fracture with her nail until the wood gave a fraction more.
Then she wrapped it back and tucked it into her breast. She felt the weight of it and the weight of the decision. Public or private. Names or no names. A child for a ledger.
They moved.
As the group rode toward the Prime Gate with lanterns bobbing and the market's murmur rising behind them, a bell tolled innocently in the old quarter—three notes, soft. The sound was like a hand laid on a wound.
Aminah's horse picked up the pace. She couldn't know then what the knot in her chest already suspected: the choice to bring the city to the gate would make them visible, but it also made them vulnerable. People watched whose names were shouted in plazas.
They reached the wide arch of the Prime Gate just as the clock struck near midnight. A small crowd had gathered—more than they'd expected, fewer than they'd hoped. Lanterns burned like dull moons. The Northstar's dark hull creased the horizon.
Men at the gate—Mace included—stood in a line that looked civil and murderous. The kiln woman was there, token in hand, face like a ledger. A little beyond them, two imperial officers watched with civil faces that did not show impatience, only the confidence of men who had paper.
Mace lifted a hand as if to speak.
Aminah heard a sound then, a thin string of noise that traveled across the gate like a needle: a child's shout from the crowd, and then another voice—someone who'd ridden in a hurry and was out of breath. A courier pushed through, pale and mud-spattered, and handed a sealed scroll to the Prime Gate watchman.
He opened it. He read. His face turned a shade that had no right in it. He looked up and, for a second, the crowd saw his eyes flick past Mace and the kiln woman and land on Aminah. Then he coughed, as if to clear the business out of his throat, and he read the words aloud for everyone under the arch to hear.
The Prime Head writes: Any exchange with the name Fulgur is imperial business. Any who attempt to perform it in Qazkar will be arrested. By order of the court.
The words tumbled in the air like a net. The kiln woman's smile thinned to a line. Mace's fingers tightened on his cloak. Men in the crowd shifted; murmurs rose like a tide.
Aminah stood, horse breathing, the token against her ribs. The gate felt too small to bear what was coming. She had chosen to bring the city into the light.
Then, from the edge of the crowd, a single shout—not a citizen's cry but a serrated, deliberate bark—cut the murmur.
"Name! Two names! Now! Or we burn the lot!"
The shout came from a figure stepping out of the dark with a hood thrown back. A voice—one she recognized in the shape of a letter, not in person—said a single word that made the blood in her ears go loud:
"T. Fulgur."