7th Sea · Session of 8 November 2025

The Meat Below the Cross Tower

In which the rats are helpful, the dead are given rather than taken, the Cardinal preaches on shadows, and everyone's clothes are burned by morning.

Midnight in San Cristóbal. Kharkov hauls the sewer grating aside with a clang that echoes all the way down into the dark — so whatever is down there knows we are coming. Down the ladder: rot, sewage, and mould in one sweet, sickly breath. Yvette descends in her nightgown. Grigori goes barefoot, which turns out to be the only sensible footwear. Otto has been sent to bed, and will have opinions later.

The Descent

Grigori kneels in the filth — "children of Ussura, come to me now" — and a rat trots up, cocks its head, and tells him which way the shapes went. Ahead: four, maybe seven shambling figures in rotting clothes, eyes reflecting like an animal's, whispering to one another before slipping down a side tunnel and forcing everyone into the water.

At a T-junction where the stench turns unholy, two of them come out of the water. Diego's pistol flash gives everyone their first good look — grey skin over pushing bones, pointed ears, crooked white teeth — before the thing drops. But the fight goes strangely: Henryk's saber sinks two inches into rubbery flesh and stops. Kharkov's cleaver takes an arm clean off and nothing bleeds. They are shockingly strong, worse-smelling inside than out — and the only thing they truly fear is the light. Diego is dragged into the water and bitten before driving them off with his lamp; Grigori charges the rest with a raised lantern, preaching at full volume, and they give ground.

The Parley

Then one of them speaks. Yvette catches it — Old Théan, the old tongue — screams the fight to a halt, and interprets while the rest of the party stands dripping:

"He fell. The shiny one came first." · "We do not take the dead. We are given them." · "The shiny one said: the meat waits below the cross tower."

Asked to point out this shiny one, the alpha points at Diego — not at his clothes, at his ornate saber. Somebody with a beautiful sword was at the scene before Father Aldana's body ever hit the water, and has a standing arrangement to feed the dead of San Cristóbal to the things below it. Axel, flatly: "These guys are body disposal."

The Mask

On the way out, a glint on the far ledge: a mud-stained masquerade mask, and beneath it a skeletal arm — not decomposed, eaten, the bite marks a match for the fresh one in Diego's forearm. Washed clean, the mask is unmistakable: the Porté messenger who boarded the ship a week ago to deliver the Cardinal's invitation. Somebody is closing loose ends. At the suite, Otto in his nightshirt: "A little late-night grave-robbing, huh?"

The Mass

Morning brings a royal courier and red wax: Cardinal Verdugo invites his brave new friends to a Mass of Thanksgiving in their honour. The cathedral is magnificent and wrong — hundreds of red candles, crimson-clad guards lining every wall, obedience with the texture of fear. The homily is about justice: quiet, methodical, inevitable. "The light is patient. The light is kind. But it casts a shadow all the same — and what hides within that shadow shall not remain hidden forever."

Then the offering. A priest hands Axel a large silver goblet — the blood of Theus — and Axel drinks, and goes grey, sweating, swaying, in front of three hundred people. "My friend, you do not look well." A long night, he says. Nobody in the party looks at anybody. Grigori, when his turn comes, pretends to sip.

The Gallows

After the blessing, Verdugo walks the party to the plaza — where three of the six captured assassins hang from wooden frames, tortured, mouths gagged in crimson, HERETIC burned into their chests. One man's eyes lie on the ground beneath him. The next man's ears. The third's tongue. "They spoke. One always speaks, given time — but the truth is rarely the reward… There wasn't mercy. There was justice. And I learned a great deal." All six are dead.

And standing before the corpses, unheard by all but one, Rupret finally talks about himself:

"I have danced with the enemy before time was wrought. Before this planet cooled. Before he touched it with his finger and it grew green. I danced with him. I loved him. He betrayed us by loving your kind more than us. He didn't give us a choice, Grigori."

Grigori tells him he had a choice. Rupret points at the Cardinal — "that's all you are, a slave" — and at the hanged men: "and this is what freedom looks like." Otto, meanwhile, pulls Axel aside with the only sane advice anyone gives all day: "There are hundreds of swords in Eisen. That could be you hanging up there. You should leave this place immediately."

The Leaping Sprite

Back at the suite, Ilsa delivers a note slid under the door during Mass: "Schattenbruch. El Duende Saltarín. Mediodía." The Leaping Sprite, at noon. The party goes early, in merchant clothes, and meets a very small man in a very large red fez who slaps Otto on the thigh, pours two cups of sake, and drinks both himself. Kodai's terms are simple: "You talk yellow lady. You get sword. No weapon. No big guy. No bear." He leads them through the alleys to a door, is lifted up to shout through its viewing slot, and delivers them into a room where eight blunderbusses are already levelled.