The Burning Blood

The Burning Blood is Orsugo’s company. What has been seen of it is the fighting part: gnolls who carry fire, moving at night, and putting buildings alight with a gesture of the hand.

Nobody in Idir has a name for them. Asked in a tavern at Ridh what the band was called, the man behind the bar reached for Orsugo’s own title, Krelene’s Fury, guessed they might be the Furies after him, and said plainly that he did not know. The title belongs to the man and not to the company. Whatever the company calls itself has stayed inside it.

The earliest account of them as a body came out of a thorp on the lake road, from a villager who had spent the evening waiting for somebody to ask him: Orsugo commanded a band of men, of demon men, who followed him about and did his business, and who haunted the woods east of there. When the company was finally met with in the mountains, the demon men were gnolls.

How gnolls came to carry fire has one explanation on offer. Given the whole account of it in a Loshev tavern, one of the cloaked road-folk who practice the art said it still sounded like circle casting, and said what he meant by it. Symbols set in a circle will hold a thing in place; living people standing in the place of those symbols will amplify a caster’s power, throw it back at him, or carry it through them. Orsugo was never properly taught, and a man with no mentor and no elders gets good at one thing and perhaps two, and Orsugo’s one thing was fire. Nothing further came out of the man. He left the table as soon as he learned Mikhail had been schooled by the Arcane Congress.

Whatever the art is, it is paid for out of the caster. Some of the gnolls throw fire from bare hands, and the fur of those hands and wrists is charred before the casting starts, and the face contorts as the fire comes out of it in what may well be pain. The bartender at Ridh, who had his own arm burned by one of them, described the gnoll’s hands as spitting oil with a torch. It fits what Mikhail found seasons earlier cutting one of them open: a sigil carved into the palm, with fire-starting on the other end of it.

Campaign Updates

The raids belong to the gnolls who made them: Loshev burned in a single winter night, the fields at Ostrad burned around the army that had marched east for them, and Haudh-Gwenn was walked into in broad daylight, which had never been tried before.

The largest of them took Ridh off the map. The outlying farms and the fields went up first, which drove the people of the village inward the way the gnolls wanted them driven; then the crops and the buildings; and the ones who did not run were killed by hand rather than by fire and left in the road. What was left of the village was penned into the stone-walled inn, with two swords driven through the door timbers from outside and the handles snapped off, and the fires still going when Koa rode into it. East of the ashes sat a mass too large to be a raiding party and with no tents to it, and the two who saw it took it for the whole tribe and for Orsugo himself. Nobody went and looked, and nothing has confirmed it. The survivors were walked south to Haudh-Gwenn.

They followed. A hyena first, then two gnolls crouched beside it talking, and then three of them over the walls of Wraithblade Keep days further north, having tracked the party out of Ridh. They found the barricaded door beside the anvil room, worried at it until they knew where it gave, called another over to do the work, and burned it through. They were in the courtyard, and the keep was alight behind them, when the party left.

What the fighting did to the company is that it stopped being only gnolls. The healers the Chantry sent out to treat Beltran’s army after Ostrad heard whispers in the field, robbed their own order of its supplies and went over to Orsugo. They call themselves the Chantry of Purification now, under a Burning Duchess. The one who came back had robes burned into their flesh past saving.

That Beltran and Orsugo work the same side of the board is common talk in Haudh-Gwenn. It started with Aldo, who put the story into the streets himself to blacken Beltran, and had it handed back to him weeks later as intelligence. Baku doubts it.

The name has come to be worth something apart from the man. In a crowd waiting on a public execution, Aldo threw a thunderstone and shouted Orsugo into the noise behind it, and the crowd broke and moved. At Loshev the fires had pulled the town together rather than apart, which Tariq put down to there having been monsters to blame, a fire to fight, and people to be pulled out of it.