The Domini saga

Kynes turns the brass key in the crane house lock beneath the floorboards. Red light wells up through the seams, then the boards shift aside with a hard wooden groan.

A hidden cache lies below, packed with administrative tallies. The columns match the passage walls exactly, too precise to be ordinary bookkeeping.

On the floor, red script starts to bleed from the ledger pages, crawling toward the workers' boots like living ink.

The dock workers freeze as the shed's red glow deepens, and the ledger's script twists into the shape of a larger seal beneath the crane house.

Kynes keeps the stack down flat and rips the tying cord free. The red shimmer in the boards loses its grip, reduced to plain lantern glare on ink, wax, and damp wood.

No one answers with a spell. The ledger pages stay stubbornly ordinary, crowded with names, dates, dock tallies, and the magistrate’s seal pressed into the margin.

Kynes gathers the ledgers into a single bound packet, sliding a broker token and the loose tally slips into his hand before any dock worker can step in.

At the doorway, the workers shift back as if the cache itself has bitten them. One of the red-marked sheets twitches in Kynes’s grip, but the seal is already under his thumb and going still.

Bren moves beside him, watching the threshold and the men beyond it. The evidence is in Kynes’s hands now, and the red glow under the crane house door keeps pulsing like a warning.