Maskbound: The Ultimate Hunter

Dawn found Nilo trudging across the Market Ring with a baker’s tray, a constable’s whistle and a pigeon. Returning each stolen thing within a day was Magpie’s price, a rule the pigeon seemed to resent most.

The constable snatched his whistle back, squinting, “This is my whistle, but I have never owned a pigeon, so that one stays with you.”

“He’s the baker’s pigeon, apparently, I’m running a delivery service,” Nilo muttered.

The baker took the tray in both hands, now polished to a mirror shine, studying it with open suspicion. Behind them the constable blew his recovered whistle once, loudly, as if to prove the universe was in order.

“You stole it, you polished it, you brought it back, I do not understand this city,” the baker said, clutching the pigeon to a flour-dusted apron.

[ LEDGER ]

[Magpie: three returned]

[Balance: pin, gun pending]

‘Nearly clean. It will last until lunch.’

Zinnia waited at the fountain with her arms crossed, “You returned a pigeon, I want that noted as the most ridiculous sentence of my week.”

By the time the pigeon was home, the sun stood over Silk Row and the first needles were flashing.

Silk Row was a single crooked lane of tailor shops, each window crowded with headless dummies in gowns. Squad Nine stood in the middle of it like five crows at a wedding, ignored by every mannequin.

She unfolded a map across the fountain rim, “Thirty-one tailors work this lane, nine hold Guild contracts, each victim wore a different house.”

Ganzo cracked his knuckles, “Then we visit the nine first, Quartermaster, I will bring my appetite.”

Between shops Pipa clutched her new notebook like a talisman, flinching whenever a pigeon so much as landed. Without her drone she narrated to nobody in particular, which only made the mannequins look more genuinely worried.

“Chat is not here… I am speaking to a dummy in a wedding dress,” she whispered.

Ganzo ducked beneath the doorframe and promptly knocked over three mannequins, who toppled like very polite drunks at a wedding. He caught the last mannequin by the waist and apologized to it in a whisper loud enough to rattle windows.

“The Foxes’ atelier was built for people who do not knock things over,” Bruno said, wincing.

The Foxes’ atelier smelled of beeswax and ironed silk, its floor polished until Bruno checked his reflection twice. Behind the counter an old man in round glasses studied Pipa’s sandwich bag of silver dust like scripture.

“Maestro, can you tell us who spun this?” Zinnia asked.

The old tailor rolled the dust between two fingers, then went the color of candle wax. His hand shook as he reached for a drawer marked only with the single word Heron.

“Moonsilver thread, spun on the Heron looms before the sky opened, nobody has produced a spool in twenty years.”

Nilo leaned on the counter, “Then who is producing it now?”

“The Salt Heron Guild wove it in a hall that sank into the canals the winter the Rift tore open,” the old man whispered.

Pipa clutched her notebook, “Chat… of course the clue is underwater.”

“If you go near the third window of that hall, the water will—” he said.

Zinnia raised a hand, “We understand, Maestro, we will be careful.”

Bruno shrugged, “Every respectable clue ends underwater, it is practically a law of nature.”

At the Rhino tailor’s a woman with a cloth tape snapped it around Bruno’s chest before he entered. She turned on Nilo next, tape already flying, so he dove behind the nearest dummy before it landed.

“Nobody sizes me today, I have a strict policy,” he said, peeking out from a ball gown.

“Everyone is sized eventually, dear, even the ones who run,” the tailor said, smiling.

The thread left the same trail at every door, a sentence passed from needle to needle. Every tailor named the Heron Hall eventually, in the voice people keep for funerals they skipped.

Ganzo grumbled at the sky, “Nobody told me there would be a boat, I get seasick on a single pun.”

At the Vipers’ cloakmaker the door opened before anyone knocked, Venn leaning in the frame with her arms crossed.

“You are late, my quiet knife has already been through this shop twice,” Venn said.

“Your quietest knife has been sewing buttons onto Nilo’s coat,” Zinnia answered coolly.

Venn’s jaw twitched, “She does what she wants, I only sign the paperwork.”

“Does she have a name?” Ganzo asked.

“Several, none of them my business… the cloakmaker says a hundred yards of moonsilver sold last month to a customer who asked for a fitting and never took off his apron.”

“Then he wears the apron to every fitting,” he said slowly, “so the apron is the point.”

Venn tossed a coin to the cloakmaker, “Go home, all of you, the hall is a place that takes polite people first.”

“Then we shall be impolite, Captain Venn, it is my specialty,” Bruno said.

“That is the nicest thing you have ever said to me, Steelhorn, it sounds terrible.”

Silk Row ended at the Sunken Quarter, a district of canals so still that the sky lay flat on them. A flat boat waited at the steps with a ferryman asleep in the stern, his hat tipped over his face.

Zinnia gripped the rail with both hands, her fox tail scarf pulled tight around her neck, “It is a perfectly stable vessel, I am simply holding it in place.”

“You are scared of the canal,” Nilo said, grinning.

“I am not scared, I am sitting at an angle.”

“A Steelhorn ship once sank on a pond, we do not discuss it at table,” Bruno murmured.

“Chat… Zinnia is sitting at an angle,” Pipa whispered into her notebook.

“The hall lies beneath the third canal, so I must ask whether everyone can swim,” Zinnia said.

Nilo raised a hand, “I’m an excellent swimmer, practically a fish.”

Jingles squeaked from the rack, “He once drowned in a rain barrel, he floats like a wet sock.”

Zinnia opened her notebook against the boat rail and wrote a mark in the first column. Sixteen lies now, each one recorded in handwriting so neat it almost looked like a compliment.

“Sixteen,” she said, not looking up.

“That one was a technicality, I did survive the barrel.”

A text from Tilly lit his screen, the message long enough to qualify as a legal threat.

He skimmed it, “Interest on the pigeon accrues at noon, please return all ghost tailors to my stall for billing, pigeons carry a surcharge.”

A violet scarf end fluttered from the third bridge as the squad stepped down into the waiting boat. Nilo watched it for three long seconds, then pretended to study the water while the ferryman snored loudly.

‘She followed us here. Either she’s guarding me or she’s herding me.’

His phone buzzed with Tink’s name, the screen flickering as though the signal itself disliked the Sunken Quarter.

“Where are you standing right now, kid?”

“In a boat over a canal, near a very sad lantern, with seven masks and one bad feeling,” he said, standing up carefully.

“Do not go into the water until I get there, whatever it sings to you, whatever it—”

The line died in a hiss of static, leaving only the soft sound of weeping across the canal.

The ferryman woke with a snort, glanced once at the squad, then poled the boat out without asking questions. Everyone in the Sunken Quarter knew where the Heron Hall lay, yet nobody spoke of it above a whisper.

The ferryman lifted his hat, “Heron Hall, is it, that will be double, the water remembers who pays.”

“What does it do to the ones who don’t?” Nilo asked.

“It hums at them, son, for years and years.”

“Allow me to row, a Steelhorn can lift a boat,” Bruno offered, reaching for the pole.

“A Steelhorn can sink one, sit down.”

“Please sit, Bruno, the angle is already unpleasant for all of us,” Zinnia added faintly.

They glided under the second bridge, where lamps hung low over the water like fruit that nobody dared pick. Every reflection in the canal looked slightly wrong, the faces on the surface a half beat behind their owners.

“Chat… my reflection waved at me and I did not wave,” Pipa whispered, hugging her notebook.

Cadenza sang, “Darling, even my reflection is flirting with me, how provincial.”

Zilch’s voice came flat in his head, “Reflections cannot lie.”

“I fought beside a Heron once, a gentle girl with a fishing spear, she cried every time she won,” Ganzo said quietly.

“Every canal in the district is listening, Captain, I can feel it in my teeth,” Bruno said.

“Then let us give them something worth hearing,” the Captain rumbled.

Past the third bridge the roof of a great hall rose from the water like a whale’s back. Heron shaped windows glimmered below the surface, their colored glass still unbroken after twenty years of black water.

A low note rolled across the canal, a single sorrowful hum that made every ripple tremble in rhythm.

Jingles trembled in the rack, “I know that crying… it sounds like someone I used to laugh beside.”

“Sorrow lives here,” Zilch murmured.

‘The Weeper. Second of the twelve. Tink said a drowned hall, I figured he meant a metaphor.’

“Darling, the whole canal is weeping in B minor,” Cadenza whispered.

Nilo’s grin faded, the patter dropping out of his voice as he laid a hand over the bandolier. “Nobody shoots it, nobody shouts at it, it is crying for a reason.”

“Understood,” Ganzo said, lowering his hammer to the deck.

Zinnia’s grip on the rail loosened, “You said that as though you have done it before.”

“I have never done this before, that is exactly why I am saying it quietly.”

Beneath the boat a window lit in the water, then another, a line of lanterns waking one by one. The humming sharpened into a voice, a gentle voice weeping so softly that Nilo’s own eyes began to sting.