Sea Hags: The Story So Far Part 3

Day 5: Port Rainoso

After the strange detour through the Sorrowful Havens, La Carnalis finally reached Port Rainoso. The city was already in the middle of its fall festival, and the sudden relief of dry land immediately gave way to the more complicated problem of what everyone had come there to do.

For Hedwig, Rainoso was supposed to be the best lead she had on the Hags of Hama. Atroya’s warnings on Descargar had not made the matter any simpler. There were women in Rainoso claiming the name of the Hags, but the claim sat uneasily beside everything Hedwig had learned about the old coven. These women had spies, agents, and political reach. What Hedwig wanted was the Deep Lore, or at least a path toward the truth of her own birth.

For the others, Rainoso opened several different fronts at once. Minfilia wanted information from Marquez, one of the men connected to the Parvèse household. Narmaya had to manage the danger of the full moon and the question of whether chaining herself aboard ship would be enough if her vampiric condition worsened. Pecorine wanted to help Minfilia, check on Narmaya and Father Levi, and keep her increasingly awkward relationship with Anton from falling apart under the weight of the crisis. Mystine had her eyes on the East Side, where rumors of the white drug and its effects were already spreading through the poorer streets.

The immediate center of all these threads was Rosemunda Parvèse, one of the Four Pillars of the East Side. She ran the Houses of Pleasures, controlled a wide swath of the city’s red-light economy, and had enough influence that even La Camaraderie had to treat her carefully. Rosemunda also seemed to know more than she should. When she made herself known to Hedwig and the others, she appeared to confirm that Hedwig had been the one behind the failed shipment that had begun to draw attention across the East Side.

That alone would have been a problem. Unfortunately, Rainoso was not generous enough to offer only one.

The Festival and the Watchers

The fall festival gave Hedwig a stage, a crowd, and a reason to keep several dangerous people in view at once. Rosemunda was there. So was Adelberto Leonidas, the monsignor whose interest in magic, necromancy, and the Hags of Hama made him impossible to ignore. Hedwig kept herself visible and useful, trying to watch both parties without making it too obvious that she was watching either of them.

Gigi Dupont came to pay her respects and greet Hedwig. Councilor Regis Langlois arrived in his rickshaw, drawing attention from the crowd. Hedwig wanted to speak with the councilors about the next step forward for Rainoso and about the possibility of a special dispensation of troops from the Apgarian military, the sort of exemption that could become necessary if the crisis on Raibon Island outgrew local control.

The festival also brought Ines into motion. Rosemunda had asked her to investigate Hedwig and her crew, and the Rozenmaiden’s presence at Dock 12 or 13 had not remained a secret. Ines met two women working as deckhands, Luna and Margaery, and worked her way toward the ship under the cover of ordinary festival business. She later found a tavern called Le Maison, bought the women drinks, and talked them into giving her a short tour of the boat.

That small infiltration mattered because everyone in Rainoso seemed to be measuring everyone else. The Parvèses watched La Camaraderie. La Camaraderie watched the Parvèses. Leonidas watched the threads that led toward Hama. The Reformists and their sympathizers seemed to be everywhere, but never quite in the open. Hedwig, meanwhile, asked Denise to keep recruiting women, because whatever the false Hags were doing, the answer would not be found by leaving the city’s women isolated and afraid.

The problem was that Hedwig’s public role and her private search were beginning to overlap. The more she acted like a leader, the more Rainoso treated her like one. That gave her leverage, but it also made her a target.

Calle Musica

Minfilia’s path led toward the Parvèse main house behind the family’s major branch on Calle Musica, a famous establishment where the great events of the Houses of Pleasures were held. Marquez knew enough to be useful. He described the guards around the house, the patrols, the two men at the gates, and the bodyguards who watched Rosemunda herself. He also confirmed that Rosemunda had a second-in-command, a Hermanian man named Zurich.

Zurich stood out: tall, blue-eyed or yellow-eyed depending on who caught him in what light, with light hair and a black jacket. Rumors around the house claimed that his tastes ran toward blood. Other rumors said Rosemunda enjoyed taking people’s virginity. In a city like Rainoso, it was often difficult to know which rumors were warnings and which were advertising.

The house itself was not merely guarded by men. Minfilia identified magic on the doors. The first impression was a silent alarm, but further inspection suggested something more elaborate. Two of the doors were magic items with effects that lasted a full day before being renewed. Someone was recasting the protections regularly. One ward killed tiny creatures, a useful defense against familiars and other small spies. Another was a third-level abjuration called a ward against undesirables. The walls also carried enchantments.

This told the group two things. First, Rosemunda had access to trained magical assistance, or at least to someone who could maintain expensive magical defenses. Second, whatever was hidden in the Parvèse house was important enough to protect from ordinary thieves, invisible scouts, and magical intrusion.

While Minfilia gathered this information, Pecorine brought Adam to her and healed him, using the occasion as an excuse to introduce him without making the gesture look like an operation. A vulture familiar, possibly connected to Leonidas, was seen watching events from above. The city’s pieces were moving closer together.

Warehouse 16

The next hard lead came through Marquez. Narmaya commanded him to bring her to the warehouse where the “products” were supposed to be delivered. The word was as ugly as it sounded. The cargo was not ordinary contraband, but children with special abilities.

Marquez brought Narmaya to Warehouse 16. Around thirty Parvèse men were present, along with signs that the operation was part of something larger than Rosemunda’s ordinary business. The trafficked children, the magical wards, the rumors of white drugs, and the Reformist presence were no longer separate problems. They were pieces of the same citywide rot.

Narmaya did not handle the matter delicately. She slaughtered the Parvèse men in the warehouse and rescued the children. Then she turned Marquez into her vampire spawn, binding him to her service before ordering him to bring Somme to the warehouse to manage the aftermath. After that, she returned to the ship and told Marquez to follow Somme’s commands.

It was the kind of decision that solved one problem by creating several more. The children were alive. The Parvèse operation had been broken. But the warehouse was now a crime scene that pointed to Narmaya, to Marquez’s betrayal, and potentially to the Rozenmaiden.

Minfilia entered that mess from the other side. Zurich had forced her into a , but she managed to trick him into signing it in a way that gave her some room to maneuver. She spent her last spell slot to briefly dispel the magical pen involved in the contract, buying herself a few precious seconds. Then she accompanied Zurich to Warehouse 16 to examine one of the bodies that had survived long enough to be questioned.

What they found was Narmaya’s aftermath. The bodies made it clear that one small girl, with help from the traitor Marquez, had done the work. Minfilia suggested that they leave the scene as quickly as possible. It was sensible advice, but by then the truth was already spreading through the people who mattered.

On the way back to the main house, Sensodyne appeared before Minfilia and Zurich, using her ability to move through the Ethereal Plane. She evaluated the situation at once: Minfilia was working with the Parvèses, but not freely, and the with Zurich had placed her in immediate danger. Sensodyne relayed what she saw to Pecorine and Anton, then decided to head to the ship alone.

Pecorine and Anton went to La Camaraderie’s headquarters and reported what they had seen outside the warehouse to Somme. That left Somme with a familiar sort of problem: a rescue that had succeeded, an enemy that would retaliate, and a crew whose members had once again made separate choices faster than anyone could coordinate them.

The East Side

Mystine’s work took her east, where the human cost of the white drug was easiest to see. She traveled alone and saw what the drug had done to people in Nana Clarita’s territory. The addicts were not abstractions or political leverage. They were people being hollowed out by someone else’s profit.

Nana Clarita mattered because she held a different kind of authority from Rosemunda. She was tied to the older communities of Raibon Island, and to stories about the true Hags of Hama that survived outside the educated circles that dismissed them as superstition. Mystine healed Clarita’s blindness and stayed to help clean her territory, offering her hands and magic to the work of stabilizing the streets.

That brought the search for Hama back to the people of the island itself. The false Hags had built their persona out of Raibonian lore. The Reformists had learned enough of the old stories to use them as a mask. But Nana Clarita and the people around her carried memories that had not been made for propaganda. If the Deep Lore was going to reenter the story, the East Side was one of the few places where anyone might still know how to speak of it without immediately turning it into a weapon.

Fractures

The day left the group scattered.

Hedwig remained at the festival, trying to keep Rosemunda and Leonidas occupied while maintaining a link with Somme. She planned to return to the bog afterward and help the Hags of Hama directly, but Rainoso kept producing emergencies before anyone could take the next step cleanly.

Narmaya returned to the ship and needed to speak with Father Levi about the warehouse, the children, and the possibility that the unknown vampire who had changed her might someday come for her. If that vampire had already begun building an army of creatures of the night, Narmaya believed she would need thralls of her own. More importantly, she believed that when the confrontation came, she had to be the one to destroy him.

Minfilia went back toward the Parvèse house with Zurich. Her plan was dangerous enough that even her allies had trouble reading it from the outside. She intended to speak with Rosemunda, warn her away from slavery and from dealings with the Reformist Church, and push her toward a meeting with the Four Pillars of the East Side. Gold, Minfilia meant to tell her, would not save her from what was coming. Magic might.

Pecorine had her own crisis. She wanted to find Sensodyne, tell her the truth, and ask forgiveness. She also needed to speak with Anton. Their flirtation had become too emotionally real to leave undefined, but not stable enough to withstand the stress around them. Pecorine offered to break things off if Anton wanted the freedom to admire other women without worrying about hurting her, but what she truly wanted was to be taken seriously and to make happy memories before the world could take them away.

Sensodyne, operating under the alias Nareena, had her own work: return to the warehouse, erase vampire marks and anything that could link the slaughter to Narmaya or the Rozenmaiden, investigate Minfilia’s plans without making herself known to Minfilia or Zurich, and then look into Benoit on Miller Street. If Pecorine was in danger through him, or if Rosemunda’s interest in the boy hid something worse, Sensodyne wanted to know before the next move was made.

By the end of it, Rainoso had stopped being a destination and become a battlefield. Not a clean one with banners and lines, but the sort that took place in warehouses, contracts, festivals, brothels, churches, taverns, and private conversations that no one else was supposed to hear.

The search for the Hags of Hama had finally reached the island where the old stories lived. The problem was that everyone else had reached for those stories too.