Bad News for the Order of Hermes

The Silvergrey Sea

Part Two: Serious Business

Bad News for the Order of Hermes

* * *

“Sir?”

The Albedo looked up from his work. “Yes?”

Manfred, secretary to the Purifier of the Order of Hermes, sidled in through the barely open door, wearing his habitual expression of worried distraction. “Sorry to disturb you, sir.”

“What is it?” noticing the transparency clutched in the young man’s hand.

“I was scanning the reports from one of the outer sectors and I came across this. It’s a bit…odd. I thought you should see it.”

The Albedo reached out a hand.

It was a three-sentence report from a world called Noir.

He read it twice. “Are you sure this is accurate?” looking up at his assistant.

Manfred nodded. “I checked it three times. What could it mean?”

The Albedo decided not to stress his underling any further. “I’m sure it’s not as bad as it seems. I’ll check it out. Thank you, Manfred.”

Looking slightly relieved, the secretary bowed his way out, massive blue stone door closing tight with nary a whisper of sound.

After half an hour of digging, the Albedo realized the news was worse than it first appeared.

The report of a casualty of the Silvergrey Sea dying hours, rather than minutes, after exposure had been troublesome enough. Acquiring a good description of the ‘deceased’ and matching it to a carefully buried incident three centuries earlier elevated the bad news to legendary status. The reports of the demise of this ‘Drago,’ whose name appeared nowhere in the report, were almost certainly false.

And that was far from the worst of it.

The rogue group who called themselves the Meraculus Mercurius—purged from the Order long ago—had left a time bomb that might yet destroy its parent. The restless god trapped in the Silvergrey Sea had woken from its slumber and—if the Albedo’s reasoning was correct—had birthed the Man of Watr.

* * *

With Harry on his investigation offworld, Abram was free to make his inquiries without the irritatingly astute observations and pointed questions his friend was sure to ask.

Unfortunately, he could only do so much here on his own. His comrades in the Order knew his routine and were all far too inquisitive for comfort. That was only to be expected, of course. To a one, the members of the Order of Hermes were information pirates. Incautious curiosity was unavoidable.

The Hermetist Superior of Noir needed to dig into one of the many grey-bordering-on-black operations for which various cliques in the Order were infamous.

Infamous to the few who had access to its hidden history, anyway.

Abram knew about much of it because he was inordinately curious even for a Hermetist. He was also quite good at hiding his inquiries. People with his skillset usually ended up high in the Order. Abram’s long-term career goals included becoming an archivist at the Mother Lodge.  All the knowledge of the Thirty Aions at his fingertips. The thought kept him warm at night.

Abram Hermit needed a place to hide while seeming to do no more than his job. The best place was the Red Palazzo.

Abram wasn’t lying to Harry when he’d told him he had reported Drago dead. Not exactly. He had reported that the stranger who had washed up on the Noir docks of Silvergrey Sea had died but hadn’t mentioned a name.

Drago was just another client of his friend who was staying at the brothel, a guest of the P.I.

Abram had promised Tranker he’d look in on him occasionally. While there, Abram could take advantage of the excellent, and legally sketchy, anonymous Aion Web setup Madame Josie maintained for select clients to use. Hermetists were always amongst the select.

So it was that the Hermetist found himself being greeted by Madame in person as he stepped into the ornate foyer of the Red Palazzo.

She was looking resplendent as usual. To her inquiry about his presence, Abram had to disappoint; it was not a leisure visit, though he reassured her he’d be visiting his preferred whore, Angelique, at the end of the month. He inquired about Drago, to which she responded that he looked to be making himself at home, though he seemed restless.

“I promise to look in on him before I leave. In the meantime, could I use your AW?”

“But of course, Cherie.”

Five minutes later, the Hermetist was in a cubby, tiny though every bit as baroque as the rest of the building.

That included the terminal, which was all polished white brass and rare wood inlaid with gems and silver filigree. The screen looked to be made of sapphire.

To avoid the risk of eavesdropping, none of it was voice controlled. All commands were keyboard only, yet another quaint custom from a bygone age.

Abram had only been able to get one name while at the office before caution forced him to stop further inquiries: Rayne Hermit.

Abram knew her a little; they’d crossed paths in seminary. She’d made a name for herself in archives soon after her ordination, a feat for which he envied her. After that, the two had lost touch. She had since become involved in something very dark.

Abram used false credentials to access the central archive on Mercurius. He then began picking locks on backdoors, looking for deleted or never officially existing reports.

The news was grim. It seemed Rayne Hermit was digging, or better ‘diving’ , where it was worse than death to dive.

To judge by what he had been able to uncover thus far, she had evidently begun her descent into treason after finding the report he was just now reading.

It described an incident over three hundred years ago UT, involving the kidnapping of a young male from Hyborea. Officially, the case was never solved. This classified report told the real story. Some faction within the Order, name redacted, had thought to test an old theory about the substance of the Silvergrey Sea. A live subject was necessary. Despite being blacked out, Abram knew the name of that group to be the Meraculus Mercurius, the ‘Pure Mercury,’ just as he knew the victim to be the very Drago that Harry was trying to help.

The Hyborean had been the victim of a kind of alchemy the Order had outlawed, along with the M.M. thousands of years ago because of its cruelty to the innocent. The Order were thieves of knowledge but had not been thieves of lives in an exceptionally long time.

The Hermetists had ways of dissuading breaches of this sort that were more disturbing than the wildest rumours, yet these potent threats hadn’t stopped these Hermetists, who had revived the Meraculus Mercurius yet again.

The more Abram dug the less savory the whole thing appeared. The theory these Hermetists were testing was officially a discredited one. Abram had studied it and had easily disproven it himself. No one he knew gave it any credence because it was so easily disproved.

Why risk reviving it, unless…?

He kept mining.

Abram was sorry when he found the answer. He almost didn’t find it at all. For diligence’s sake, the Hermetist had looked where there was no reason to think he’d find anything. It was like checking with one’s grandmother when investigating serial murders. One did it just to eliminate the more obvious dead ends.

Occasionally, though, one finds out the ‘dead-end’ isn’t quite as dead as it should have been.

Grandma, how could you?

Abram uncovered evidence that the rumour frequently denied by the tutors of the initiates was true. That ‘disproved’ theory that was anything but. A key piece of information had been ‘mislaid.’ Once included, that damnéd theory was all too likely true.

Worse, the Hermetist found bits of data from redacted files that someone had sloppily tried to erase. Only one clear reference could he decipher: part of a paragraph mentioning the Templars together with Poseidon, the mythical god of the Silvergrey Sea. Abram recalled bedtime stories from his childhood about the birth of the Templars, put two and two together, and got an answer that made his heart stutter. “Rayne, what have you done?” Abram muttered under his breath.

What the hell was he going to do now?

Who could he trust?

More to the point, what could he actually do?

* * *

Abram almost forgot about Drago.

The Hermetist needed to let the Hyborean know of Harry’s progress and find out if he could ease the former’s restlessness.

He stopped by the lounge to ask Josie in which room Harry’s guest was. She told him and mentioned that he hadn’t been down yet today, not even for a meal. She was going to send one of the girls to check on him, but since he was going, anyway…

Abram knocked on the door to Drago’s room.

He waited and knocked again, identifying himself and asking if the Hyborean was all right.

When that failed to get a response, Abram summoned Josie to let him in. The Hermetist feared Drago had done himself an injury or had finally died from his exposure to the Silvergrey Sea.

It was worse, much worse.

He was gone, leaving behind the corpse of one of the Palazzo’s whores.

Some days, you just can’t win.

— Gideon Jagged
Innsmouth, September 2026

© Gideon Jagged
All Rights Reserved