Location: Canal Undercity, beneath the Lower Constant
Status: Semi-tolerated / Constantly Monitored / Frequently Bleeding
The Bloody Cog & Crimson Tankard squats where the city leaks into itself.
Built directly into a cracked canal junction, the tavern is half-submerged in black water and haemotechnical runoff. Brass pipes snake through its walls and ceiling like exposed veins, weeping condensation that drips steadily into open grates in the floor. The entire structure hums faintly with low-pressure flow, a sound patrons feel more than hear.
At the heart of the tavern stands the Cog—a massive, wall-mounted pressure regulator shaped like a grinning iron skull. Its eyes glow a dull red, brightening when tempers rise. Each time pressure spikes, the skull exhales a plume of pink steam through its teeth, fogging the room and muting violence just enough to keep it from becoming a massacre.
The bar itself is a slab of scarred black metal bolted directly into the floor, threaded with copper tubing that feeds alcohol from pressurized vats below. Gauges behind the counter measure proof, blood-content, and toxicity. Drinks are poured by turning valves, not lifting bottles.
Nothing here is free-poured.
Nothing here is safe.
The air is thick with steam, oil, sweat, and old blood. Lanterns powered by sputtering haemotechnical cells cast uneven light across the room, catching on brass fittings, steel-reinforced beams, and the wet sheen of the canal water that laps against the walls.
The floor slopes subtly toward a central drain clogged with hair, sawdust, and things no one asks about.
Music—if it can be called that—comes from a battered steam-organ bolted to the far wall, its pipes rattling whenever a pressure surge hits the canal lines. Sometimes it plays itself.
The Bloody Cog does not discriminate, but it remembers.
Regulars include:
Off-duty Iron Dusters, armor stripped down, weapons within reach
Relic runners fresh from the Arteries, pockets heavy or empty
Canal pirates who know which currents aren’t mapped
Stagehands’ Union members, grease-stained, exhausted, and angry—the people who keep the Grand Opera functioning but are never seen
Everyone here is armed.
Everyone here has bled.
No killing before the third steam vent.
After that, the Cog decides.
No drawing silver near the bar.
The pipes don’t like it.
If the skull’s eyes go bright, sit down or leave.
Pressure spikes mean something upstream has gone wrong.
Debts are remembered.
Sometimes by people. Sometimes by machinery.
Behind the tavern, sealed by a false boiler door, lies a cramped maintenance chamber used as a black-market exchange point. Relics, blood-stabilizers, false papers, and union messages pass through here, often paid for in silence rather than coin.
The Ascendancy knows this.
They allow it because the Bloody Cog absorbs violence that would otherwise spill into the streets.
It is a pressure-release valve—for people.
“You go there to disappear for a night.”
“If you wake up alive, you probably owe someone.”
“The Cog has seen worse than you.”