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Barnaby Wick

Barnaby has opened enough sealed rooms to know the smell of one: fat, salt, and something underneath that has stopped pretending to be either. The thing on guard between us and the slab is the room's whole stock gone wrong — and the searcher's reflex takes him before the thief's does. Sword low, short grip, the same careful strike he'd use to spring the lid off a crate of adulterated wax: enough to see what's inside before the owner arrives. "Mind the jars," he says, not looking away from it. "Half this room is worth more than the serpents' silver."

DM

Barnaby’s short sword parts the guard’s greasy hide, but the cautious cut is shallow. It jerks awake on the bench, leaking dark slime and shrilling in alarm. (1 damage; 2/3 HP.)

Barnaby Wick

The point goes in — an eighteen, clean by any measure in a stockroom — and it goes in *wrong*. No resistance of meat, no scrape of bone: the blade slides through it the way a skewer goes through a settled crock of tallow, and comes back glistening, trailing a thread of the smell. One cut's worth of the thing sags loose and does not fall. Clings, rather, like a ledger line somebody doesn't want read. Barnaby wipes the flat of the sword across his boot. His mouth has gone tight, and it isn't the stink. "It's stock," he says. "Someone made this. Jarred it. *Paid* for it — that's what a guard is, someone paid for a guard." He shifts his weight, blade up now. "Edda, Prue — don't let it touch the shelving. Silas, stay behind me."

DM

Barnaby’s warning carries across the benches, but his attack is already spent. Edda still has the initiative; the gloop has not acted.

Edda Motts

The thing on the bench is shrieking, and everyone else is still deciding whose problem it is. Edda decided the moment it made noise. That is the whole of the beadle's office: one loud thing, a room full of stock that must not be broken, and men standing about weighing whose fault it will be. Fourteen years of guildhall drunks have taught her the shape of the work. She steps past Barnaby's flank and plants herself square between the guard and the rest of them — shield up, feet set, Silas behind her where his three hit points can afford to be — and brings the sword around in the same short, deliberate stroke she has used twice before on men who put a hand on her staff. Not anger. Procedure. "Jars stay whole," she says. "It doesn't."

gloop guard falls.

Edda Motts

One stroke, and the shrieking stops. The bench-thing folds in on itself like a wet bag and goes still, leaking into the seams of the stone. Edda wipes the flat of the blade on the thing's own hide — no sense ruining good wax-stock with it — and looks once around the room, checking jars the way she'd check a storeroom after a drunk. Intact. Intact. Cracked, but that was before. "Right," she says, and it is the same voice she calls the roll in. "Nobody touch the slab yet."

DM

Edda’s sword shears through the wounded guard. It collapses across the workbench and lies still, its alarm cut short. The party is unharmed; the room’s four workbenches and closed drawers remain undisturbed. Combat ends.