Ebon Ink

Ebon Ink hired out research and exploration. It contracted named people for a job, filed the job under a short working name, and paid in scrip. The contract it called Grove-bound sent a band into the Twisted Grove to settle whether the place was a genuine post-Mól ruin. They mustered at Zatichsk and none of them came back.

Its hires carried its books. A contractor filled a ledger in across several jobs, turned it in, and was issued a fresh one, so a ledger in a man’s pack was a working document rather than a record of anything finished. The one recovered from a cache at Ridh had never been turned in. It is the Ebon Ledger, a separate thing from the outfit that issued it, and it holds every hire’s full name, what each was paid, and the jobs that came before. An earlier book off the same band had given only nicknames and working names; the ledger gives the men behind them. Beyond the plain entries it carries coded passages, and those were never broken.

The jobs on file show a trade wider than survey work. There was a merchant in Vala somebody wanted looked into. There was caravan sabotage on the road past Momly, which the inquiry answered with the name Rena “the Destroyer”. And there was Veric, an agent out of the Daelands who worked under several aliases and then vanished outright. That file closed unresolved, though the inquiry did turn up the calling symbol Veric had used for communications.

Who paid for Grove-bound was entered only as an undisclosed private sponsor. Beside it the dead contractor had penciled his own guess, possibly Arcane Congress, and a guess is all it was. No office, no principal and no living agent of Ebon Ink has ever been found.