The porter's yard sat two streets up from the docks, behind a low stone wall and a wooden gate. Even past midnight, half the neighborhood stood pressed against the rope fence, whispering. Hana led them through.
The witness was an old net-mender named Genji. He sat on an upturned crate with a blanket over his shoulders that somebody had put there and he hadn't asked for. His hands were knotted with age, and he kept rubbing them.
"You're the ones from the capital," he said.
"We are," Noah said, and he crouched down so the old man wouldn't have to look up. "I'm Noah. They told me you saw it."
"I saw it." Genji rubbed his hands. "You'll want to know why I was awake. My hands ache before rain. They've done it for thirty years. I was sitting by my window, rubbing them warm, and Denzo came out of his door."
"Denzo. The porter?"
"Big man. He carried my nets down to the water every spring and never once took a coin for it." His eyes went to the gate. "He came out of his door in the middle of the night. No lamp. No coat. And he walked to the gate like a man walking in his sleep. Straight. Slow. He didn't stumble once."
"Did he call out? Say anything?"
"Nothing. That's the part I can't..."
"What did you see take him?" Noah asked gently.
"Lights first. Green lights, up on his roofline." He showed it with his hand, a slow swelling and fading. "And then the arms came over the wall by the gate. Long. Pale. They took him down gently." He stopped again.
"Go on," Noah said.
The old man looked up at him, and something in his face let go. "The lights never left the roof," he said. "The whole time the arms had him at the gate. I'll swear it on my wife's grave. The lights never moved."
On their way out, Noah's eye caught on a girl standing at the rope fence. The other onlookers were craning and murmuring. She was just watching, still, with her arms folded on the top rope. When he looked again, she was gone.
At first light, Izumi found the trail below the yard, drag-marks in the shore mud, and pale fibers snagged on a piling.
"It went this way," she said. "Heavy. And it wasn't in a hurry."
The trail died at the waterline, pointing west along the coast toward the sea-caves. The same caves where the lamplighter had been taken.
Noah opened his hand. Crimson mist gathered above his palm and took shape, a small insect with wings like two green leaves, its edges smoking faintly red. A leaf insect.
"The caves," he told it.
The little scout was gone until midday. When it returned, it didn't land, it circled once over their heads and flew off again westward, low and slow, waiting to be followed.
They followed it for an hour along the cliff tops, west of the city, to where the terraces ended and the shore below turned to bare black rock. The insect had settled on a ledge at the base of the cliffs, beside a shadowed opening, and it looked like nothing but a stray leaf blown against the stone.
Through Jin's lens, from the cliff top, they found what a week of searching hadn't: a cave mouth tucked above the waterline, half-hidden behind a fallen slab. The stone floor at its lip was worn smooth.
"We searched those caves," Xiao said. "Twice."
"Not this one," Ling said. "Nothing walks a floor that smooth twice a week. That's a door."
Back at the customs house, Jin took over the long table.
He unrolled a coil of line, thin, grey-white, soft as ribbon. "Silk," he said. "Mother sent it south with us. Nothing we know of can cut it. I've been sewing it into a net since we left Serica, and with the weights fitted, and the anchor line braided double, the load will spread across…"
"Jin," Ling said. "The plan."
"Right. Sorry." He lifted a light bamboo cross-frame onto the table beside the coil, four shallow cups seated at its corners and a single cord strung through the middle. "This throws it. The four corner-weights sit in the cups, I pull the cord, they all spring loose at once, and the net opens square in the air before it ever reaches the target. Beats flinging it by hand." He tapped the frame. "One catch, it'll only seat two nets at a time. The cups won't take a third. So we get two throws, and after that I'm loading by hand like a fisherman." He pinned the map with a teacup. "We can't fight it in the caves. It's their ground, it's dark, and it nearly killed four of you in there last time. So we don't go in. We bring it out."
"Out how?" Xiao asked.
"It hunts people who walk alone with a light at dusk," Xiangli said. He raised a hand. "I'm literally an eldritch holder who’s power is to light up."
The power of Xiangli's Eldritch heart was not meant for combat, it was classified as BRONZE TIER, its only power was to grant the owner the ability to light up, it made him useful for scouting parties and hunting squads, but nothing more.
"You don't have to," Noah said.
"I know." Xiangli shrugged. "Just sit somewhere with a good view."
"Alright, be careful," Noah responded. "And don't forget, we need to capture it alive."
So the plan was set, in the last hours of the afternoon, over the map: Jin and Hana on the boulder pile at the foot of the cliff, above the shore, with the sling-frame loaded and its two nets seated. Izumi below them, on the anchor line. Ling and Xiao among the boulders, ready. No lanterns, Xiangli was the lantern. And Noah in the middle of it, holding the one thing they'd all agreed on: nobody moves until the thing is fully out of the cave and fully onto the open shore.
The shore below the caves was a wide shelf of black rock and rock pools, laid bare by the falling tide. The pools held the last of the daylight in them, pale silver going grey, and they went dark one by one as the sun went down behind the headland. The cold came up out of the stone, patient, through boots and cloth and skin. Ribbons of kelp lay across the rock where the tide had left them, and every few steps a crab ticked away sideways into the dark. Far behind them, up on the terraces, the first festival lanterns were being lit, small and warm and very far away. Ahead there was only the cliff, and the black mouth of the cave, and the sea making a slow sound inside it, a long breath in, a long breath out.
Xiangli walked the waterline alone.
He glowed green-gold, and he walked slow, and he was whistling.
Beside Noah, in the shadow of the boulders, hung his second summon, a hornet the size of a lantern, wings whispering, edges smoking that same faint red. Its sting could numb a bull for an hour. It had exactly one job tonight.
The cave mouth breathed out, and the thing came with it.
It made no sound at all. It was taller than the one on the drying rack, the cap wider, the limbs longer, and it came out onto the open rock in that unhurried way the old man had described, and then it stopped, and stood, and down its chest the green nodes woke one by one.
Xiangli stopped whistling.
The thing did not charge. It glowed back at him. The green light swelled and faded, swelled and faded, slow as breathing, and Noah felt the pull of it at the edge of his own mind like a current around his ankles.
Not yet. It's not clear of the cave. Not yet.
To his left, boots scraped on stone.
Xiao had stepped out of cover. His face was empty and his eyes were green, and he was walking straight, slow, not stumbling once. Ling caught his arm and he kept walking anyway, dragging her with him across the rock like she weighed nothing.
"Xiangli!" Noah shouted.
Xiangli understood.
For half a heartbeat the whole shore turned white, a soundless flash. The green pulse shattered. Xiao sat down hard in a rock pool, gasping like a man pulled out of deep water.
The Lantern recoiled from the light, half-turned back toward its cave.
"Now," Noah said.
The hornet went out flat and low across the rock and put its sting into the seam of the thing's neck.
The effect was not dramatic. The Lantern's next step simply came down slowly, as if the air had turned to deep water, when the net dropped over it.
Jin pulled the cord. The four corner-weights sprang from their cups, the net opened square in the air and fell on top of the eldritch. The thing tore at the mesh with its sharpened limbs, and the silk did not care.
"Line!" Jin shouted from the rocks.
Izumi already had it. She took two turns of the anchor line around her forearms, and when the Lantern surged toward the water the line went taut and she went down to one knee and did not move. She held.
Ling came in from the side without a word and took a forelimb off at the second joint, one clean stroke, and called over her shoulder: "Left arm's done."
Xiao, back on his feet, furious about the rock pool, covered her with a hissing spray that blackened the fibers along its flank.
It went down wrapped, steaming, its cap bound against its chest, its remaining limbs cinched. Down, caught alive.
For a moment nobody moved. Then Jin laughed, because he couldn't help it. "It worked. It actually wor—"
The water behind them stood up.
It had been in the shallows the whole time. Low and black, a mass of driftwood and rope-kelp with a barnacle-crusted back, four-legged, and it came out of the sea all at once.
It took Hana was made the mistake of being the closest to the water.
It took her gently, folded her in through the lattice of its own chest, into a hollow cage of living black wood, and turned for the deep water.
Everything was wrong at once. The net was committed. Izumi was anchored to a beast that was still thrashing and could not let go. Ling was forty feet away. Xiao's spray was useless with Hana's body in the cage.
Noah ran.
He was in the water to his knees before he knew he'd moved, the scythe forming out of crimson mist in his hands. The beast was already past the first breakers. Through the weave of the cage he could see Hana's hand, gripping the black wood.
I'm not going to make it. I should have killed them, this capture plan was shallow, I could have easily killed both of those eldritch beasts, they are SILVER TIER at best.
Then, over the water, there was a song.
Thin and clear, a few notes, rising, a girl's voice, coming from nowhere and everywhere. Noah's first mad thought was that it was the festival chorus, drifted down the coast.
The Carrier stopped.
Mid-stride, hip-deep in the surf, stopped, the way a man stops when someone calls his name. The song rose, unhurried, and Noah felt the edge of it brush his own mind, the same slow pull the green light had put around his ankles, but sweeter, and not meant for him.
The beast turned around.
It waded back toward the shore. It stood in the shallows, and the lattice of its chest drew itself open, its own limbs pulling the cage apart, and it set Hana down into the knee-deep water as gently as it had taken her.
Noah reached her two strides later and hauled her up, and she gripped his arm hard enough to bruise. Behind them, the beast just stood there, swaying a little, like something listening.
"BIND IT!" Ling was roaring. "Whatever this is, it won't last, BIND IT!"
They wrapped it where it stood. Jin loosed the frame's second net over it, Izumi, freed at last from the first line, hauled the cinches home, Xiao seared its leg joints, and the beast let them do all of it, swaying, its attention somewhere else entirely.
The song ended.
The beast came back into itself and surged against the silk, once, with everything it had, and the silk held, and after that it lay still in the shallows, trussed, and the shore was just a shore again.
Noah turned.
On the rocks at the tide line, above the spray, a girl was standing. She was fair-skinned and slender, with delicate features, large, expressive eyes, a small nose, a calm, soft expression. Her hair was black, long, and perfectly straight, with blunt bangs cut evenly across her forehead, and she was dressed in a loose, oversized blue garment that draped casually over her frame. No one had seen her arrive. She stood as if she had been there the whole evening, watching them work. It was the same girl from the rope fence.
They all stared at once.
"Um," she said, barely louder than the waves. "Is... is everyone alright?"
For a moment, the only answer was the sea.
Hana let go of Noah's arm. She was soaked to the shoulders and shaking.
Noah waded out of the surf and stopped a few steps from the rocks, close enough to talk.
"That song," he said. "That was you?"
She pulled her sleeves down further. "Um. Yes? I'm, I'm sorry. Everyone was shouting, and it was swimming away with her, so I.." She ran out of words and pointed, helplessly, at the sea.
"You're apologizing," Xiangli said, "for the rescue."
"I, no. Yes. I don't know."
"What's your name?" Noah asked.
"...Mavis."
"Mavis. I'm Noah. That's Jin, Izumi, Xiangli…"
"How does it work?" Jin asked, and it was out of him before anyone could stop it. "The song, so is it the pitch? The words? Could you do it again? Could you do it to the other one? Do you have to see it, or—"
"Jin," Izumi said.
"…right. Sorry." A pause. "Can I ask later?"
"Maybe...?" Mavis said.
"You were at the porter's yard last night," Noah said.
Mavis froze. "...Am I in trouble?"
"No."
"I heard about the lights," she said. "The green lights on the roof. I wanted to, I don't know what I wanted."
"And you followed us out here."
"The whole city knows where you went," she said.
Xiao laughed before he could decide not to.
Ling had not put up her halberd. She stood over the trussed Carrier, looked at it for a long moment, then at the girl on the rocks, and then she turned away and started giving orders. "Xiao, a cart and oxen from the fish market, knock until they answer. Izumi, go with him. Nobody walks alone tonight." She glanced back once. "That includes her."
They dragged the two bound beasts up past the tide line, and then there was nothing to do but wait for the cart. The tide came back in behind them, filling the pools one by one, erasing the marks of the fight. Up on the terraces the festival lanterns burned in long warm rows, and Xiangli let himself glow, just a little, so nobody had to sit in the dark.
Mavis sat down at the very edge of his light, knees drawn up, and stayed.
When the cart came, she got up and followed them toward the city, keeping just inside the glow. Noah slowed his step until she caught up.