Hired Into Silence

The session opened with the party waking in their own usual places — Noname in the barracks — and each of them holding an invitation to the Unwritten Table. Nobody said what it was.

What the night and the day after turned out to be about was how quietly a question can be closed. By the end of it Maruk Grommarg's lantern was back in the party's hands with a working collar, and the one person in the city who had been trying to find out who built it had been given the best job in the building for stopping.

The invitations

The invitations arrived to each of them separately, wherever they had slept. Valentro tried to get Strider to tell him about the Unwritten Tablee, but he seemed to not know anything about it.

What the lantern shows

The party checked on Wylks Ottren. He had the lantern, and he showed them what he had found: it shows things how they were.

A day apart

Lotan told Car that he had been throwing rats into the water. Car left for the winery, turned up two rats, and carried them back to the Masquers' Sodality. Lotan stayed in and worked his own place.

Noname went to St. Viro's Respite and found it harder to get into than normal. The place was buzzing. She picked up that the stranger's name starts with Tol, and then she talked her healer into telling her some details about ther memory.

St. Viro's Respite, busier than it should be.

Valentro found Roxy and trained with her, and got thoroughly beaten for his trouble. Noname turned up afterwards and told them about therapy and what she had learned. Then everyone went to bed.

The dry deck

Lotan dreamed the dream he has had a hundred times, and this time the deck of the Fang of Barovia was dry.

He woke in the room above the Sorcerer of the Spirits, under his own ceiling, with Castle Ravenloft on the wall where he painted it. His hair was wet. On the beam over the bed, the coin was where he nailed it, and he could not remember why he nailed it there.

The cleared bench

The next day the party met in the Tiered Gardens and went on to Wylks' shop.

The shutters were open. The bench was not tidied but cleared — the glass laid out in its pattern gone, the nine crossed-through diagrams off the shutter, a square of unfaded wood on the wall where they had been pinned. Wylks was sitting down, which none of them had seen him do. He had washed and changed. A folded paper was squared on the bench with both his hands flat either side of it, and Maruk Grommarg's lantern lay beside it, reassembled, collar on.

The bench cleared, the lantern collared, the paper squared.

He was delighted, and he wanted the whole thing told in his order.

At first light he had pulled the hand-records: no match in four decades of samples. That should have been the end of it. Instead he went up a floor and asked a senior — cheerfully, by name, in a corridor, in front of two other journeymen — who in this Court grinds a mirror with the silver on the wrong side, and don't tell me nobody, because I'm holding one. Master Benedetta Sarre, forty years in the Court, was lovely about it and asked to see it. He said it wasn't his to show.

The next morning there was a woman at his bench before he got there, sitting on his stool with her hands in her lap, waiting. Certified. She didn't say from where and didn't need to. She told him his records request had been noticed upstairs, and said it like it was a compliment. Then she offered him the assessorship: the junior assessor's post at the Court, two years early, the thing he has wanted since he was fifteen, normally going to somebody with a decade on him. Certification authority. His own bench in the light. A stipend he read twice.

One condition, which he pointed out is not even a condition, only a rule that already exists and that he has been arguing is correct since he was an apprentice: an assessor does not investigate unregistered work. He reports it, and the Court handles it. "So I'm out of it. I'm all the way out of it and I got the best job in the building for stopping, and I have never once in my life been rewarded for anything." He signs the document.

Low Water

Afterwards the party went to Low Water and dropped off their questions — those of them who had questions to drop.

Where it left off

• Each of the party is holding an invitation to the Unwritten Table, and nobody has explained what it is. Strider was asked and the answer is not recorded.
• Maruk Grommarg's lantern is back with the party, reassembled with a working collar, and no longer under anyone's investigation. Four decades of Mirrorwright hand-records hold no match for the work.
• Noname has her healer's assessment.
• Wylks Ottren signed the assessorship paper and is no longer investigating the lantern.
• The party's questions are lodged at Low Water.