Walking the streets of Secoros, you might have chanced across any number of priestesses of the Church of the Cup. They walked the roads of the kingdom day in and day out, in all weathers, at nigh on all hours, ambling from shopfront to shopfront, house to house, checking in on their communities. Every so often, one might happen to mention the quality or quantity of the tithes they were (or weren’t) getting, just as a gentle reminder, but by and large they were welcomed.
On that particular morning you would have encountered one priestess who, in contrast to the others, walked with purpose, faster than you ever saw one walk before. She had dark, intense eyes that nevertheless seemed to shine out of the shadows of her broad-brimmed hat, and yet she never spoke to anyone passing by. No “good morning”s, no “may he watch over you”s, and most unbelievably of all, no sideways remarks about the last time she had seen somebody at the tithe box.
The purposeful priestess bowed her head to the guards at the entrance to the Arraxas Armoury. They looked at each other; it was well within their right to refuse a priestess entry to the Armoury. However, it was technically the right of any priestess to pass wherever she pleased. They decided to err on the side of caution, given that upsetting the Church tended to result in dismissal via the sharp end of a pike, and waved her through. Inside the Armoury seemed almost pitch black, coming in from the harsh light of the outdoors.

After her eyes had adjusted, the priestess removed her hat, which hung from a black string around her back and circled her head like a black halo. She looked around imperiously.
Before long, one of the Armoury staff came scurrying over, a young man with an ill-fitting robe. A novice. “May I help you?” he said. The priestess looked at him witheringly. “Er, sister.”
“I am not your sister,” said she. “The church has certain interests in the Armoury’s vault. I have been sent to ensure their security.”
“Oh, you’re with the Inquestor,” said the Armoury man, sweat beading on his forehead. Whisper (for it was she) froze for a fraction of a fraction of a moment, almost imperceptible to the naked eye. An Inquestor? Here?
But if she left now, her chance would be gone forever. She nodded coldly.
“Indeed. The Mother-Inquestor is obviously too busy to oversee every detail of Armoury security. Consider me her representative, as she is the representative of the Church as a whole,” Whisper said, putting her best “holy” intonation on the words. The Armoury man, picking up the hem of his overlong, patchy robe, nodded and led her to a small, unimposing door.
As he led her down the vault-ceilinged hallway, the small man babbled about the history of the Armoury.
“These ceiling bosses,” he said, indicating the small circular sculptures set into the center of the criss-crossing stone archways of the roof, “depict great victories by the Armoury’s Magi-neers. There, you see! The combustion cannon, winning the battle of the Indigo Crossing. The fire of Sebastian, driving back the natives in the Bay Islands up in Galista. A thousand years of record.”
“Yes,” said Whisper, observing the gaudy depiction of the flesh melting from human bones with carefully-maintained apparent disinterest. “It’s very impressive. You can almost see them writhing in agony. Your sculptor is very skilled.” The Armoury man beamed.
“And of course, they’re still being made! There are miles of hallways in the Armoury, after all. Don’t have enough history for all of them yet. We’re working on it, though,” he said, chuckling.
“Oh, yes?” Whisper said in an oily voice.
“Oh, yes!” said the man. “Why, there’s a device under this very roof that- I shouldn’t say.”
“The kind of thing that will be remembered for a thousand years?”
“And more,” said the man, hushing his voice. “It doesn’t even have a proper name. How could it? The War-Machine. The definite article. The first and last word.”
“My goodness,” said Whisper. “It sounds very… portentous.”
The man nodded enthusiastically. “I saw it, once. When they were moving it to the Black Workshop.”
“The Black Workshop?” Whisper said, raising an eyebrow.
“Forget I told you that,” he said quickly. “There is no Black Workshop.”

The journey to the Vault passed in silence after that, the young man apparently too afraid of spilling any more to respond to any of Whisper’s queries. It was located in the center of the building, a floor above ground to prevent anyone tunnelling in. Not that they could tunnel in without a team of men and a year to do it, given the thickness of the stone and steel that enveloped the central safe-room. Whisper wondered at the scale of the thing. Of course, the whole Armoury was enormous. But this was more impressively big. The Armoury was so big it stopped being a thing and became part of the scenery.
“May I?” Whisper inquired. The man nodded, and made a move for one of the Vault’s guards. He whispered something in the guard’s ear, and the guard nodded, grinning. The big door of the Vault took some time to open fully. Inside were dozens, if not hundreds of smaller boxes, each one occupied with some relic or technomagical artefact of ancient import.
“Anointed saints…” said the young man, then bowed his head quickly, turning to Whisper and clasping his hands. “A thousand apologies, sister. I forgot myself.”
Whisper smiled. “You’re forgiven. It is quite a sight, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said the man, laughing with relief. “Yes! Quite a sight.” He raised a hand to help Whisper up the step to the door, and winked to the guard.
Cocky little shit, thought Whisper. As he prepared to ascend the step, she pulled on his arm and dragged him after her.

The young man pulled a lever, and a small glass bulb set into the ceiling illuminated gently.
“Light-by-command,” said Whisper admiringly. The door closed, and the soft light of the bulb was all that remained. “So,” she said, “which of these are the Church’s? Is there a directory, something I can double-check.”
The young man was slightly taken aback. “I thought you would know.”
“There are a lot of relics. I- The Church needs to know that you keep proper records.”
The young man paused. It had suddenly occured to him that he was now alone with a woman who could, in all possibility, not be from the church at all. He reached for one of the smaller metal trays. “It, ah, should be in here. Just let me get it.”
He grabbed the handhold on the tray. Whisper subtly shifted her balance, prepared for action. If the suspicious Armoury man wanted a fight, he’d have trouble on his hands. He pulled it open. It was too dark to see inside. He reached his free hand into the tray. Whisper tensed.
The directory was a large, thin book bound in brown leather. The crisp parchment within held nothing but long lists, barely itemised. Some things were crossed out, others circled. Along the columns from each one was a single-word “Origin”. Whisper looked through. There was a lot of Origin: Church.
“This looks in order,” she said, snapping the book closed. “What I’d really like to hear about is this Black Workshop you mentioned, though.” She came a little closer to the young man. “It’s very interesting to the church. And to me.”
In a lot of ways, men are similar to animals, Whisper had observed. This was not a new observation. What was, however, was the specific way she had identified. When dealing with men, what you said had a lot less to do with how they reacted than the way you said it. Thus, by adding just a little bit of breath to her voice, letting her eyelids drop, her lips part, she was able to imply one thing while saying another thing entirely. She had found that this effectively led to a mental logjam during which the man in question would essentially do anything you asked of him. It didn’t always work, but when it did it usually went spectacularly.
The Armoury man was displaying clear signs of the logjam now. “It’s, hm. It’s a secret place. For projects too dangerous to be worked on openly. They moved the War-Machine there when it started taking shape, when it became clear what it did.”
“They didn’t know what it did when they started building it?” Whisper asked. The man shook his head.
“This building, it’s very old. Sometimes plans disappear. Sometimes old ones get found. The War-Machine plans were in our library for saints know how long before anyone found them. Anyone who knew what it did was long dead.”

It was almost insultingly simple for Whisper to convince the Armoury man to show her the entrance of the Black Workshop. Act impressed enough and he would take her anywhere.
“I’m not sure, you know,” he said as he led her along a twisting route that took them through dead end after dead end. “Not sure you’re right about the Inquestor not having time to go over the security personally.”
“Are you questioning my authority?” said Whisper with a playful smirk.
“Not at all, sister. But this Inquestor, she’s a machine. She hardly seems to sleep. Here we are,” said the Armoury man. It was an unassuming door, painted black of course, with a brass knob in the centre. It was the same size and shape as any of the other thousands upon thousands of doors in the Armoury. It was at the end of a long hallway with a bare stone floor and tall bookcases on either side. There was a foreboding lack of apparent security in place.
“Amazing,” said Whisper. “Can I see?” She took a step forwards, and the Armoury man grabbed her.
“Stop!” he shouted, then looked around frantically, as if afraid some senior Brother was going to jump out from behind a pile of books and expel him immediately. Whisper fluttered her eyelashes. “But it looks so empty. What could possibly be so dangerous?”
The Armoury man laughed. “You want to see?” he asked. Whisper nodded. The Armoury man turned around, picked up the top book from a stack and glanced at the spine. “Sebastian de Borin. On The Momentum of Salamanders. No great loss,” he said, and tossed the tome, surprisingly heavy with amphibian knowledge, into the middle of the hallway before the Black Workshop.
Almost immediately something was wrong. The flagstones of the floor trembled, seeming to warp and bend suddenly around the hapless book. Then, with astonishing speed, strong hands emerged from the stones. First immediately around the book, then further and further afield until the entire hallway was carpeted by them, swaying faintly. The hands directly around the book snapped shut around it, opening it wide and cracking the binding. The Armoury man winced. The hands went on pulling, more moving in, tearing the book apart. It reminded Whisper of wild dogs with a piece of meat, everything else subsumed in the thrill of violence. Paper flew, leather binding torn to shreds, finely-embossed gold-leafed lettering strewn like confetti.
The Armoury man looked sick.
“You’re not going to cry over a book about lizards are you?” asked Whisper.
“No, just… I’m fine,” he said. “Can we go now?”
Whisper put on her best disappointed face and said “But you said you were going to show me the workshop.”
The Armoury man pointed. “You’re welcome to look,” he said resignedly.

The Inquestor and Proctor Inigo looked out over the rows of desks in the great library. Every one bore a tired-looking academic and a stack of heavy books. There must have been hundreds. Every now and then, one would close a book, pick it up, and deposit it in a tray beside the desk. This signalled one of the dozens of novices around the room to collect the book and leave another in its place.
“Even at this pace, the scope of the library is such that it would take us five hundred years to run out of books,” said Inigo.
“By which time most of these books will have disintegrated,” said the Inquestor. “Some would say the centralisation of knowledge by the Armoury reaches the level of obsession.”
Inigo shrugged. “Centralisation, concentration. Would the Church rather these books be in the hands of peasants who would use them for firelighters?”
“The Church has no opinion. I would prefer to see learning go free. Few have the strength to pledge a lifetime to the Armoury.”
She turned and pushed aside the big door that led into the hallway, and nearly walked into an Armoury novice and a junior priestess coming down it at some speed.
“Ah! Mother-Inquestor!” said the novice. “I was just showing your assistant around.”
“Assistant?” said the Inquestor. “I have no assistant.” She paused, and though her eyes were shielded from view by her hood, Whisper knew they were squarely trained on her. “Although… It is possible the Church has sent a novice to aid me, against my specific wishes. Is that so, Sister…?”
“Sister… Silencio,” said Whisper. “If Mother-Inquestor would rather I go…”
“Oh, by all means stay! I’m sure it will be highly educational,” said the Inquestor, and Whisper began to understand a little of the feeling of a fly stuck in a shuddering web of silk.
“Inquestor!” came a call from Inigo. “One of the Novices found something he thinks you should take a look at!”
The Inquestor nodded to Whisper. “Well, Sister Silencio. Lesson one: Your work is never finished,” she said with a sly smile.

Inigo held up the remains of a book’s leather binding. “Someone was testing the Handstones outside the workshop. You think it might be this Whisper?”
“A minute ago I might have told you that the Whisper would never be so overt, Proctor,” said the Inquestor. “Double your patrols. And, Proctor?”
“Yes, Inquestor?”
“The church hereby grants permission for you to release the Templar.”