The Nameless Assassins

Investigating the Hive

While I was mourning with the two gangs, Ash was launching our investigation of the Hive. Since his self-inflicted lightning hook injuries still hadn't healed completely, he opted to multitask and headed over to the Lampblacks' coal warehouse headquarters. As Sawbones smeared ointment over the electroplasmic burns, Ash polled the room at large.

"What do you think the Hive will do next?"

Danfield, the young Charterhall University medical student, was still new enough to the underworld that he held no opinion besides, "It's the Hive, I've heard of the Hive, I don't want to get involved with the Hive, and oh my gods I'm going to die!"

Sawbones and the rest of the Lampblack old guard, however, were livid with rage. While Pickett hadn't been, shall we say, the easiest person to interact with (even for laidback Sawbones), she'd been part of the gang since the very beginning. They absolutely could not accept her death at the hands of interlopers from other districts who refused to respect local rules of combat.

"Who knows what the Hive will do next?" seethed the doctor. Seizing a roll of bandages, he viciously ripped off a strip and wound it around Ash's bicep. "Djera Maha thinks she's above the law." (Well, in many respects, she was.) "She thinks she's above the rules."

"A little less tight, please," requested the patient. As Sawbones grunted and unwound the bandage, Ash asked, "The rules? Which rules?"

"The rules rules," Sawbones snapped, as if they shouldn't need explanation. "If you have a problem with someone, you kill them in a fair fight. You don't order a hit."

A gang member who had just come off duty slung her wet overcoat across a free examination table and snarled, "The Red Sashes never do anything like this." She hacked up a gob of mucus and spat it in the sawdust around the tables, whether to indicate her opinion of the Red Sashes or the Hive (or both) was unclear. Grudgingly, she admitted, "Mylera Klev knows how things are done."

"Yeah," seconded her patrol partner, who had followed her into the warehouse. "Someone needs to teach Djera Maha how we do things around here."

Hearing their voices, Henner happily abandoned all the paperwork that accompanied his new role and popped out of his office. He waved his arms and exclaimed, "But that's what happens! You cross the Hive, Djera Maha's nephews show up, and bam! You're out."

In response, the other Lampblacks growled and cursed, but no one denied it.

Just to make sure we didn't waste time assassinating the wrong people, Ash double-checked, "Do we know for sure they're the ones who did it?"

With a shrug, Sawbones slapped the last bandage in place. "They're always the ones who do it, right? You've heard the stories."

"Yes," said Ash drily. "Yes, I have."

We heard plenty more, too, when we visited a sampling of pubs across Silkshore and the Docks. Seemingly every scoundrel had their own favorite story about how their crewmate's childhood friend's cousin's spouse's sibling had personally witnessed Wayan and Kuwat Maha strolling up to a target in broad starlight and shooting them in the head.

That did not precisely inspire Ash's confidence in our decision to tangle with the Hive yet again.

More usefully, we also learned that apart from the Church of Ecstasy, the Hive maintained close ties with the Dagger Isles Consulate, thanks to Djera Maha's "island roots," as well as the Ministry of Preservation, the government agency that controlled shipping throughout the Imperium. Although we'd assumed that removing Skannon Vale had ended the Hive's plans to take over enough berthing capacity to dock a leviathan hunter, his death had only slowed them. According to the dockers, just a few more judicious purchases would close that loop.