The first warehouse was barrels — salted fish, mostly, stacked to the rafters in rows that left just enough room to walk sideways. Brennig walked them anyway, shoulders occasionally brushing the staves, and the owner kept pace behind him talking about import licenses and town registry filings and a personal friendship he claimed to maintain with someone in the town's administration. Brennig let him talk. Nervous people filled silence with things they hadn't meant to say, and it was always worth giving them the rope before you decided whether to use it.
He found things that were probably contraband based on how they were hidden, but that wasn't what he was here for, and he moved on.
The second warehouse was textiles. Brennig spent longer here — checked under the pallets, checked the gaps between the bolt stacks, crouched in the corners where the floor met the wall and ran two fingers along the join. The owner of this one was a woman in her sixties who stood in the doorway with her arms folded and watched without saying a word. He appreciated that. He found nothing and told her so, and she nodded like she'd expected as much and was only waiting for him to finish catching up.
Outside, a knight fell into step beside him. "Third one's at the end of the row. Grain storage, mostly. Owner's name is Pell."
"He know we're coming?"
"Word travels."
Brennig grunted. Of course it did.
The box was in his coat pocket, still wrapped in the cloth the merchant's wife had tied it in — fine linen, which he'd thought was excessive until he'd opened it and smelled what was inside. Good cigars. Better than good, actually, the kind with a draw that cost real money and came from somewhere warm. The woman had pressed them into his hands after Brennig spent twenty minutes in her late father's study, pulling up floorboards and checking behind loose stones until he found the cavity the old man had apparently told no one about before he died. There were worse ways to spend twenty minutes. He'd taken the box because refusing gifts made people uncomfortable. He'd been saving the first one since.
He took it out now, unwrapped the cloth, and held it up to check the construction in the grey morning light. Even colour from foot to foot, no soft spots in the leaf. He bit the end off, tucked it into the corner of his mouth, and didn't light it.
A knight behind him looked over at it but said nothing. Good lad.
"Denk," Brennig said.
Denk appeared at his shoulder. The corporal was still at the age where he appeared places rather than just being there, still burning through energy on wanting to be useful. "My lord."
"East side with one of them when we go in. You two — west." He kept walking. "Floor level, wall joins, anywhere the timber looks newer than it should. Don't announce what you're doing, just do it." He paused. "Pell's going to talk. Let him."
They hit the third warehouse just as the clouds came back in and the morning light went flat. Pell was waiting inside the door — fifties, soft through the middle, the kind of face that had probably been trustworthy once and was working hard to look it now. He came forward with his hand out.
"My lord, welcome — Aldous Pell, I operate this warehouse, eleven years, all current with the town registry—"
Brennig shook the hand and moved past him without stopping.
He worked the north wall while his knights spread out. Pell tracked Brennig specifically, staying close, which was its own kind of information — a man with nothing to hide watched the room, not the searcher.
"—primarily grain, as you can see, some dry goods in the rear, nothing of any military relevance I'm afraid, I imagine you've got more pressing concerns than a grain merchant's inventory—"
"Probably," Brennig said, crouching at a floor join near the north wall. Old heave, boards bowed outward from freeze. Nothing under it.
He moved to the centre of the floor and stood still for a moment, just looking. He'd been in enough buildings to know that a room with something to hide felt different from a room without — not dramatically, nothing you could point to, just a quality of the space that was slightly off. Like the building was holding its breath.
This one was holding its breath.
Pell was still talking. Brennig had stopped listening to the words and started listening to the rhythm — the pace of it, where it sped up, where it flattened. It sped up when Brennig moved toward the south wall.
He filed that and kept moving, working the east side first, giving nothing away. Denk looked up at him once from where he was crouched near a crate stack. Brennig shook his head slightly and Denk went back to the floor.
He'd done this a hundred times in a hundred buildings in cities that didn't have names in polite company. The patience wasn't something he'd learned — it had always been there, the ability to move slow when everything in the job said slow was right. He was good at this. He'd always been good at this, and standing in a grain warehouse with four knights at his back, he felt the ease of it settle in like an old coat he'd forgotten he still owned.
He crossed to the south wall.
The boards were the same age as the rest of the floor — same grey, same surface wear, the grain of the timber matching the planks on either side. Someone had taken real care with it. He'd known a carpenter in Liège who could match old timber well enough to fool a building inspector. Good man. Ended up in the river, which was the sort of thing that happened to good men in that line of work.
He straightened up and turned to look at Pell.
Pell was watching him. The smile had slipped about a quarter of the way and he was working to hold the rest of it up.
"You keep looking at the south wall," Brennig said.
Pell's face went through several things quickly. "I wasn't—"
"Four times since we came in. Five now." Brennig bit down on the cigar. "Denk."
Denk moved fast — both hands in Pell's collar, yanking the man sideways hard enough that his feet left the floor and he crashed into a crate stack, knocking two off the top. Pell hit the floor on one knee, face white, completely winded.
Brennig looked at Denk.
Denk held both hands up slightly. "I thought you wanted—"
"Hold him. Not throw him." He looked at Denk. "Sweet mother of god."
"Right." Denk reached down and got Pell upright by the arm, less aggressively. "Sorry."
Pell was breathing in short pulls, one hand braced on the crate, trying to get himself back. Brennig let him get most of the way there.
"Go," Brennig said to the nearest knight, without looking away from Pell. "Find Hale or the Count. Now, before we go any further. Tell them Lord Brennig's got something in the warehouse district and needs them at the third building on the east row." He paused. "Go fast."
The knight was already moving. The warehouse door banged behind him.
Brennig went to the south wall and crouched, running his fingers along the floor join at the base of the boards. He found the seam on the second pass — a hairline gap, almost nothing, running vertical where two boards met. He pressed, and a section of the wall gave inward a finger's width before catching on a latch.
"Denk. Come here and work this properly."
Denk put his palms flat against the boards, worked the latch up, and the section swung inward on a pivot — four feet wide, tight enough that a big man would have to turn sideways. The smell that came up through the opening was copper beneath old damp, something organic and rank, and Brennig had smelled that before in buildings in Antwerp where the wrong kind of people had been living long enough that the walls absorbed it.
Steps cut into the earth went down and turned left. Torchlight from somewhere below, low and orange.
Brennig stood and looked at Pell.
Pell wasn't holding the smile up anymore.
Brennig looked at Denk and gave him a short nod. Denk cracked his knuckles and stepped forward, and Brennig went to the opening and crouched at the top of the stairs while Denk worked over Pell behind him. It didn't take long the sounds he made were…familiar. Pell was more afraid of what was below than what was above, and Denk was persuasive enough to rearrange that priority.
When it went quiet, Brennig stood and walked back. Pell was on the floor against a crate, breathing wet, eyes on nothing.
"Where does the tunnel run?" Brennig said.
Pell's eyes cut to the opening. Brennig let him look.
"They already know we found it," Brennig said. "They heard the crate go over. Whatever arrangement you had — they don't need to honor it now." He held the unlit cigar between two fingers. "They can't help you. I can."
Pell broke in pieces rather than all at once — first his shoulders, then his breathing, then something that wasn't quite a word. "They said they'd leave my family alone if I just kept the door clear and didn't—" He stopped, swallowed hard. "There's maybe thirty of them. Maybe more. They came up through the sewers eight days ago and I didn't — I didn't know what to do, they were just there one morning, and the big one, the one with the—" His hand went to his own face, tracing something across his jaw. "It told me what would happen if I said anything."
"The tunnel," Brennig said.
"South. Toward the wall." His voice had gone thin and flat, a man emptying out. "There's a junction under the tannery two streets over. I don't know past that."
Brennig stood. He reached into his coat for the matches, struck one against the floor, and finally lit the cigar.
"Alright," he said, breathing out slowly. "We wait."
He looked at the two remaining knights. "Hold the entrance. Nothing comes up those stairs." Both moved to either side of the opening, swords out.
Behind him, Pell made a wet sound against the floor.
"Quiet," Brennig said. "You're done."