After spending even a short amount of time among his subordinates, Kappsi concluded that Illando was the sane one. That thought did nothing to assuage her growing anxiety at working alongside the enforcers, though, now that the initial shock of their discovery had begun to fade. She found herself under the watchful eyes of predators, creatures who only a few months ago had almost ripped Wildhearth apart in some kind of obscene civil war.

She didn't know the details; didn't want to know. The less time she could spend around wolfkin the better. That was motivation enough for her, Skoppa and Haarm, to work hard. The sooner they could find information for Illando, the sooner they could get out of here.

The small concession they'd been able to extract was to work from familiar surroundings. An old dockyard storehouse in Whaveloda was quickly transformed by an avalanche of bark-paper rolls, etched copper sheeting and printed atlases of the city dating more than thirty years into the city's past – long before Kappsi and her brothers set a paw into the world. In one corner they piled a veritable hoard of disused barge-gear, and in the other Haarm took on the unenviable task of wrestling with the workshop's antique computing rig.

"Bloody tides'n'fire," he cursed, thwacking the dull-metal exterior with a clenched paw. "I've seen garbage trawlers run faster than this heap."

"It ain't gonna get faster if you break it," she cautioned him, looking up from the pages of one of the newer atlases.

"Oh, aye? Well maybe one of you two should have a go, eh?"

"Oh, no y' don't," Skoppa chuckled. "You're the one that went and got all smart-up as a dock administrator. You know the systems better than we do."

"And a fat lot of good it's doin' me now."

"Just get it working," the wolfkin, Farler, growled. "You're wasting time. Illando brought you here to do one thing. If you can't do it then you're just getting in our way."

So much for trust, Kappsi thought grimly. It was an unwelcome reminder that none of them could make a move without being under the watchful eyes of Farler and Gensher. Illando made it abundantly clear that they would be helping, whether they liked it or not. It didn't seem like these enforcers trusted anyone or anything, and weren't about to risk the otterkin sharing what they knew about the Savage Fire cult.

She cast a surly glance over her shoulder at the wolfkin, before returning her attention to the map. Gensher scared her, but he was simple – a brute who killed what he was told to kill. Farler was more difficult to stick down. While Gensher seemed content to sulk by the door, the older enforcer prowled around the place, always peering over shoulders and asking questions. His surveillance made her more uneasy than ever.

"Remind me again why we couldn't have dragged some of Bronco's dogs out here to babysit?" Gensher droned.

"Because Illando said so," Farler replied, shooting his companion a wry smile. "Why, big plans tonight?"

The bigger enforcer scowled. "Just think there are better things I could be doing."

"You wanna leave, I ain't gonna stop you," Skoppa grunted as he shuffled around a selection of copper etchings on the table in front of him.

"C'mon, Farler," Gensher continued, ignoring him. "Whaveloda's not the bloody outers. We could leave a squad of watchies here and go do something useful."

"I suppose." Farler smirked, drumming his claws on the metal of the door frame. It made an unpleasant tinkling scrape.

"If we could trust the damned watchguards d'you really think we'd being out in this mess ourselves?!" Kappsi barked suddenly, slamming her paw down flat on the table as she twisted to look at him. "By the Fire, I thought the wolves were smarter than that, eh?"

"Keep a civil tongue in your head," he snapped back.

"Oh, I'm plenty civil, but if you think the guard's gonna help you deal with these freaks, you've got another thing comin'!"

"You think so?"

"I know so."

Farler's eyes narrowed. "And how is that, exactly?"

"Kappsi, steady," Haarm tried to interject, but she ignored him, the stress of the past few days churning up out of her like an overflowing drain.

"We went to the watchguards when Brickle got snatched," she growled, holding Farler's gaze. "I saw one of them with that bloody triangle tattooed right on his flaming spine. Can y' join the dots there, mate? That cult's got people everywhere. You don't wanna be here, then go, but you're not sending somebody down here who might gut me from behind, just cos you're too lazy to do what your boss tells you!"

The enforcer's muzzled twitched and his lips drew back slowly in the hint of a snarl. His teeth glinted for a moment, vicious white. To her surprise, Gensher let out a short, snuffling laugh, his fearsome jaws splitting in a grin.

"How bout that, a backbone," he chuckled. "Maybe you can help."

Farler hurled him a weary look. "So now you want to stick around?"

"Might surprise us. Illando'd probably have our hides if we took our eyes off them."

"Peace, let's just... get this done," Kappsi sighed, swivelling away from the wolfkin and fixing her eyes to the maps again. Haarm turned reluctantly back to the reluctant computer, and Skoppa lowered his head to the etched prints. She saw the muscles in his shoulders unwind. The tension in the room simmered down a few notches, enough for her to refocus her mind.

Find the cult, then get out of this.

It sounded nice and simple in her head.

In reality, there was an awful lot of Wildhearth to search. Even zeroing in on the underdocks and outer districts they found themselves buried by a deluge of maps of varying quality. It appeared that someone in the Conclave's survey department took their job very seriously indeed.

Several false starts left her frustrated as she combed through a mind-numbing selection of architectural drawings, dockyard safety reports, construction site plans and canal engineering reports, looking for anything out of the ordinary. At the other table Skoppa trawled the copper etchings, the sheets beaten thin and printed with construction prints for dockyards, canals, factories and pack-houses.

Meanwhile, Haarm wrestled with his uncooperative machine and the haphazard databases of Wildhearth's port authorities. In theory the Conclave had a whole port division who were supposed to keep on top of this stuff, but in reality every district and docker ran things a little differently.

They found a few things worth checking, but none of them quite felt right in her gut. Illando had shared the information about the disappearances of kin throughout Wildhearth's outskirts – a revelation she frankly could have gone without today – and none of the positions seemed to fit. It couldn't be somewhere central, but somehow also needed to be well connected to the rest of the city. It was an oxymoron.

At least it felt that way, until she stumbled across what at first seemed like a very dull dock survey report. An unremarkable beige folder stuffed with documents, it was just about held shut by a worn, twine clasp, but when she emptied its contents out over the table in front of her she immediately noticed something different.

She leaned forward, her nose almost touching the table as she skimmed her eyes across the sheets of bark-paper. After a couple of minutes' scrutiny she shoved everything that hadn't come from that folder into an ungainly piled on the floor, and laid the contents out fully.

"Skoppa!" she blurted. "Skop, come take a look at this!"

He scrubbed a paw over his eyes. "Y'got somethin', eh?" Standing up, he lolled his neck from side to side, extracting a crack before he loped across the room to look over her shoulder. "A'right, what am I lookin' at?"

"Found these in a dock survey file." Kappsi gestured to the display she'd created. "Survey was a couple of years ago, but I reckon these are still sharp. See here?"

The pictures she indicated formed a mix of reasonably well-defined captures coupled with detailed sketches and notes scrawled in spidery writing. Several of the images showed dried-up canal beds that formed long, ominous canyons through the city. Where once water had flowed up to raised embankments there now only remained sheer drops, and on the plateaued foundations around them abandoned buildings clung to a precarious existence.

A thoughtful frown split Skoppa's brow as he leaned in closer, nodding slowly as he let his eyes wander over the pictures.

"Sure be a fine place to get up to no good," he confirmed. "If the canals got re-routed and the trams don't run, you ain't gonna have anyone bumblin' over your crazy lecture time."

"That's what I reckoned."

"Aye. So where exactly is this?"

"Err, it was Dream-Drom... Kappsi flicked the folder over, glancing at the cover. "Drambower. According to these it just on the edge of the west spiral."

"Never heard of it."

"Me neither."

"I reckon that's a good sign," Haarm put in from across the room. His claws clacked on the computing rig's heavy keys, and after a few seconds of fizzling the screen flickered and changed. "Got a hit in the port records here. About half the district got uprooted about... ten years back? Not enough traffic through the canals, so they shunted everybody out to the bigger docks. Accordin' to this it was meant to get resurveyed last year to see if they could do somethin' out there but..." He hesitated; glanced awkwardly back at Farler and Gensher. "Well, folk had a lot goin' on last year didn't they?"

"Ain't that the bloody truth." A thoughtful smile split Skoppa's face. "I reckon you might be onto somethin' here, lil sis."

"Why there?" Farler said, trudging over to join them.

Kappsi shrugged. "It's where I'd go."

"I'm listening."

"This place – Drambower – if these canals were runnin' it'd be a good fit to link up with your snatch sites, wouldn't it?"

Farler leaned closer, his musk making her squirm with discomfort. His eyes flicked from the photos to the map, some unseen calculation forming inside his skull. After a moment his snout dipped in a tentative nod.

"Maybe," he said. "But the canals aren't running. Nor are the tram-carriers. Nobody lives there."

Skoppa looked at him. "Y' don't think that makes it a good spot to hide-out?"

"To hide? Of course. Not to run an operation like the one we've been tracking."

"And just cos the canals ain't runnin', doesn't mean you couldn't use them," Kappsi said.

"I thought they blocked those canals off after draining them?" Gensher rumbled from his position by the door.

"Aye, they're meant to," she explained, sparing him a brief glance. "But if you know what you're doin' you could get around that. Plenty of sluiceways, drainage channels and old maintenance-ways you could use to get about. Wouldn't exactly call it safe, but y'could walk these canals if you had to and if y' were smart and careful about the channels you busted open, you could avoid a flood-in and get around the blocks."

"You'd need somebody who knows their waterways, right enough," Haarm said.

Kappsi nodded. "And we already know they got themselves a barge-master on the payroll."

"That pirate we trailed to the meeting?"

"Seems like someone who knows his way around the canals."

"Peace'n'Fire, y'might well be onto these mongrels."

"Don't sound so surprised, eh?"

"Alright, alright." Farler raised a paw to silence them. "So you're saying it's possible for them to be here, but where exactly? That's a lot of ground to cover."

"The main canals all converged here," Kappsi said, tracing one of the larger sketches with one claw. While initially the layout looked like a grid, the channels bent towards one part of the district where they eventually formed a clustering lattice, at its epicentre was a large building. She dragged a photo of the structure in question from the spread of documents and handed it to Farler. "Old fisheries factory. Would've been the main stop for every barge cutting through Drambower when it was runnin'."

"That thing still standing?" Haarm put in doubtfully. "That survey you're eyein' is a few years cold, Kappsi."

"Could you get more up to date maps?" Farler asked.

She shrugged. "I dunno. Maybe you're buddies in the Conclave have somethin' tucked away in a file somewhere."

"Hold yer tails, we should check in with Old Glaw." Haarm slapped his paws together. "That bloody hoarder's probably got plenty of prints of his own. Might catch something that the official surveys missed."

Skoppa nodded sagely. "Aye, if anybody can tell us more about that spot it'll be him. Won't come cheap though."

"Then y'know what to do," Kappsi put in. "Better make sure you dredge up enough clams to get him through the month if you wanna get hold of his private stash."

"Who in the bloody Fire is 'Glaw'?" Gensher interrupted.

"Administrator, runs our shifts at the docks. He's been there forever; always has his claws stuck into what's going on in the districts. He should be able to give us some up-to-date maps."

"Aye," Skoppa agreed. "We can tell right quick if this is worth checking out or not, eh?"

"Gensher, go with them," Farler grunted after a moment.

Skoppa looked at him askance. "Steady, mate. Glaw's not gonna give us a bloody thing with this great lump lurking around."

"This is not a request."

"I can be harder to spot than you think," Gensher said, and no-one in the room missed the undertow of menace in his voice. He straightened up from his position lounging against the door, flexing his powerful neck muscles to loosen up. "Maybe keep that in mind if either of you think about makin' a run for it, eh?"

"Fangs, you lot must be great at parties, eh?" Haarm muttered. He rose from the computer chair, looking over to her. "You gonna be alright here, sis?"

"I'll be fine." Kappsi shot Gensher a cheeky grin. "I reckon we're all startin' to get along, eh?"

"Like a forest on fire," Farler chuckled grimly. "Go. I've got no reason to harm any of you – just can't have anyone running off. Illando's a stickler for following orders."

"If you say so." Haarm gave the enforcer a dubious glance, before heading for the door with Skoppa close behind. The brothers slunk out of the safehouse with Gensher looming in their wake, and the heavy metal of the door thudded shut behind them.

*

An hour dragged by, alone with Farler. He mostly just paced, not paying a whole lot of attention to her outwardly, but Kappsi knew the corners of his eyes would be on her. In some ways she felt trapped, but in others she knew she needed to be here. If she really wanted to get Brickle free of that damnable cult, she would need allies. The wolfkin enforcers could hardly be called friends, but they were certainly good to have at your back in a fight.

She sighed and rubbed her neck. Life had gotten awfully complicated all of a sudden.

"Don't suppose you folks keep something a little stronger than muskbrew in this place?" she asked, shattering the silence that had descended on them.

"If we did, I couldn't say." Farler smiled slyly. "But if you want to fix yourself something, kitchen's just through there." He inclined his head to a narrow doorway on the far side of the room.

Kappsi eyed him for a couple of seconds, but apparently he was serious. Under his watchful gaze, she stood up and strode across into the kitchen area of the enforcer safehouse. It wasn't much – a small metal rectangle with a table, chairs and a muskbrewer, but tucked in the back corner was a cold-locker. She slunk towards it, not quite believing that the wolfkin would give her this level of leeway.

When Kappsi opened the locker, however, she found several bottles of spiced ale, their brown glass exteriors frosted. Extracting two, she twisted the caps off, sending them tinkling onto the metal floor before she turned back.

She found Farler standing in the doorway. Plastering a fresh, bright smile onto her face, she handed him one of the ales.

"Cheers," she said, taking a gulp from hers. The spice burned pleasantly, the ice-cold liquid shuddering through her windpipe. Already she felt her nerves easing after the last, manic cascade of events.

"Cheers." Farler raised his ale to her.

But he didn't move.

He just stood there, blocking the way.

Kappsi felt the fur on her spine prickle, her tail swishing. She cleared her throat nervously and moved to step around the enforcer, but before she could get through the door Farler snapped out an arm, barring her path. She jerked back with a sharp intake of breath, finding the searching eyes of the wolfkin boring into her skull. Her shoulders tensed, and instinct readied her body to spring. Scared as she was, one-on-one she was willing to take her chances if it came to that.

"What are doing?" she asked, fighting to keep her voice calm.

"You know, you need to be careful, girl," Farler replied. He sounded calm; even took a leisurely sip from his ale as though she wasn't there.

"I'm plenty careful." Kappsi eased back a little, her own bottle clutched tight in one paw.

"I mean here. I mean with everyone who's been touched by this... mess." Farler's expression darkened. "It's not just the watchguards you have to worry about."

She took another backward step and another gulp of ale. Her nerves tightened again with a vengeance. "We're just here to help you find those creeps. The rest is your problem."

"It's everyone's problem, Kappsi."

He hadn't used her name before. It felt like he'd just thrown a bucket of ice water over her face and for a moment her words deserted her. They didn't desert him, though.

"We can't trust the watchguards, you said so yourself," Farler said, his voice lowering to a gruff whisper. "But it's worse than that. The Conclave, your friend Glaw, your brothers – even other enforcers – we can't trust anyone, not completely."

Kappsi cocked her head to one side. "What exactly are you divin' for?"

"If you're right, if the cult is using that place to hide, you need to be very careful who you tell. That's the real reason Illando has me watching you."

"You and your bloodthirsty pal."

"I'm aware."

"Oh." She swallowed hard as the implication slammed home. "You don't trust him?"

"I don't know." Farler cast a wary glance back over his shoulder. "But I've seen enough not to put him above suspicion." His eyes snapped back onto her. "You understand what I'm telling you?"

"Yeah, I get it." Kappsi could feel her head spinning. There was only so much crazy she could absorb right now. She just wanted to save her friend. This cult, the city, the enforcers, the watchguards – it could all go to the Fire as far as she was concerned.

But on some level she knew exactly what he was saying. Brickle had joined the Savage Fire, someway, somehow. If that could happen, who knew how many of their agents could be floating around in Wildhearth's population as they spoke? How many could she have passed in the street? How many might she have spoken to and not realised?

Before either of them could say anything else, the silence was shattered by Gensher's return. The door banged open, and herding Skoppa and Haarm ahead of him, the other enforcer came stomping into the dock office with all the subtly of a landslide. She tried not to react, exhaling sharply, attempting to refocus her mind onto the task at hand.

Farler's face remained stony and he dropped his arm, stepping out of her path as though nothing had happened.