Damien dashed swiftly back down the corridor to the store room. Now that there were no guards in the way, and no one to throw the kill-switch that would set the monstrous servitors off, there was nothing in the way. But his instincts nagged at him as he went; the pieces of the puzzle unsorted and placed bothering him with their mystery.

Fools Guild reimagined as a cult to disrupt the city's religious institutions.
Morant Fel was trying to undermine House Gordon. Why? Probably to replace with a Zarus-friendly alternative.
Lawtons assassinating Morant Fel. Like Fools, religious instability expands.
Karlos stepping in to cover Fel's payments and expand Herald's animus against Gordons - and Church, and Jameses.
Karlos and Fools both poised to disrupt the solstice, creating panic and unrest.

Karlos and Lawtons in the Banker's pockets - How much chaos in this city is the Cobblepot's doing? Do the Fools work for the Penguin now, too? Everything stacked to cause a massive collapse of faith in institutions, an Imperial lockdown, and a new selection of governance - Cobblepot being the one to deliver stability by calling off the dogs. And how much of it, because the Dark Knights had buckled the Theives' Guild?

He stuffed the uniforms fit for each of them - or fit enough - into his haversack. At least the guard uniform was 'hooded halberdier' - Kate wouldn't stand out like a sore thumb quite so much as she typically did.

But the way the guards had said it - we work for shapeshifters - meant they weren't used to working for them. Had the Karlo's been subverted and their guards were just riding the interegnum out?... Or was the smuggling operation here beneath Karlo Keep not really Karlo's own operation? After all, nothing was warded to be disarmed by Basil Karlo. Within the circles within circles of the city's corruption, there was a symbiotic alliance here between the Karlos in the keep above - presumably the source of the dopplegangers - and these thugs below. This... private army for some blood magician. No wonder the prison had such extreme wards. An alliance with dopplegangers would be tenuous at the best of times, and the blood sorcerer, like his halberdiers, had to be wary of his patrons...

They had half the puzzle - but what they needed was to get one of these guys awake and frightened and shake some connective information out of him.

Back with Batwoman and Oracle, he passed them the heavy cloaks, and a spare halberd for Oracle to hold. But he paused when he looked at the smaller cloak he'd grabbed.

"Dammit. All of the guards are humans or half-orcs. My stature will give it away." He shucked off his haversack, and his belt with his obvious weapons. His compact theives tools, his discreetly hidden shuriken, and his small concealable items he kept in his gi; and the Rod of Ropes tucked inside his collar. The folded up portable hole he kept on him, compact enough; but the haversack had to wait out here. He tucked it into a corner of the corridor outside, and covered it with the cloak so it seemed to be just a rumpled pile.

The rest he said by their mental link:

<"I'll have to be a 'prisoner', atleast for some of it. Batwoman can just drag me in like she's beaten me unconcious - toss me on the floor in there like you mean it. I can take it. But I think Oracle's right - we'll need to come back and shut this place down hard once the bards are safe. This is some kind of unholy alliance between the Karlos, dopplegangers, and this blood sorcerer. People are getting vanished and replaced, and the genuine articles lobotomized and repurposed in dark ritual. It's not clear who holds the real power, but it can't be left to continue. For now though, all we can do is try to find out which, if any of the prisoners, are false.">

His eye twitched as he thought of the False Face society, and Lord "Two Face" Dent. Faces, masks, performances everywhere... But the task was at hand, and that needed focus.