Haudh-Gwenn resistance

The resistance in Haudh-Gwenn was not founded. It assembled itself, quarter by quarter, out of people who had run out of patience with Beltran Grayeras’s guard, and it took its name and its temper from three men who were not in the city at all.

The Valiant Few had fought the fires in the burned quarter and then left. Beltran had put a hit on them, the hit had failed, and when they did not come back the town settled on the explanation that they had died fighting him. That version spread, and it rallied people in a way nothing the three of them had actually done ever had. Baku, who read the town’s mood from the Chantry wards, put it flatly to Mikhail afterward: this time it had not been a departure, it had been a disappearance, and it lit a fire.

The Signs and the Sayings

It began as writing on walls. On the building Aldo had emptied during the fires somebody wrote let the ashes speak, in ash. On the wall beside the building Mikhail went into, in paint, support the few. The guard scrubbed them off and they went back up.

Then the memorials, small ones, mostly among the burned buildings and sometimes in whatever part of town the burned-out were living in now. They read the few who tried. They carried offerings to Krelene, since nobody wanted to be on the wrong side of fire, and asked healing of Isara. That Beltran had let the quarter burn was said openly beside them. That he had let it burn to cover meetings with Orsugo was whispered, and Baku, who had lost healers to Orsugo herself, did not believe a word of it; she took the two of them for separate evils working separately.

The countersign was the few fought, and the answer to it we remember. A second pair ran beside it: the Valiant Few tried to save us, answered with Beltran let the quarter burn, which is the same sentence with the grievance said out loud. Casper claimed to have coined it. Dwayne had heard people saying it four days before Casper said so. Aldo and Mikhail learned what it was worth on a night three guards took two silver a head off them for walking. A hobgoblin in a traveler’s cloak waved them into an alley, looked past them to see who was following, and asked whether they had been shaken down. He had trailed them the whole way in case it went badly, and under the cloak he had a wooden club with spikes driven through it. Luck favors the few, he said, but I was here in case you needed it. He gave his cause and not his name.

What It Was For

The visible half was mutual aid. Neighborhoods pooled what anyone could spare, a few slivers, a blanket, clothes nobody was using, and it went to whoever in the quarter was worst off. All of that was true, and all of it was also a front: the same collection supplied the people who meant to fight. Dwayne knew ambush tactics and coached them along without running anything. The guard did not keep identical hours from week to week, but they kept patterns, the same haunts and the same streets, and with enough warning a cell could be waiting on one.

Who ran it, Dwayne could not say. That was part of the whole thing, he said, and he offered to walk them there instead, which he did the following night, through a poor quarter, to Lady Talia Salahaudhi.

The Guard’s Answer

Two silver, for being on the street. No such tax stood on any book, and flyers went up around Haudh-Gwenn stating explicitly that there was no such thing as a walking tax, which everybody who had paid one understood for what it was. There was a curfew as well, called at dusk on some nights and in daylight on others, and it was never a curfew: it was cover for the tax.

The innkeeper in the hospital quarter had a theory about where the tax had come from, which was that the Valiant Few used to run their mouths about such a tax existing in Haudh-Gwenn, and the guard heard the idea and liked it. Whether one or two of them had been quietly charging it beforehand he could not say. That it had become general was not in doubt.

By that summer it had a cause behind it as well. There had been a run on the bank, withdrawals were frozen behind a council writ, and the guard’s pay had stopped with everything else, so the shakedowns were not orders coming down from Beltran but men finding their own arrangements. Shops shut early and stayed shut, shopkeepers moved in together for safety, and people disappeared. Criers were sent out to announce that nobody was disappearing and that there would be a formal investigation to establish as much. The council said nothing else at all. Anyone tall, or wearing too much fur, was taken for a gnoll spy, and Free Folk coming in off the road in pelts had things thrown at them and were run out of town.

Campaign Updates

The countersign outlasted the trust in it. When the riot came and the party crossed the city dressed as wealthy men, Mikhail caught the eyes of a crowd that had already decided to take them apart and gave them the few fought. Two or three answered we remember. It bought a pause, and then the crowd concluded that a well-dressed stranger with the right words reeked too much of a trick, and came on anyway.

It finished in the street outside the Color Stay. Resistance people had been brought in among the audience for the reveal, and the audience needed no persuading; by the time Beltran came out with his sword drawn they were singing at him. That, rather than the fighting, is what kept his guards out of it. He faced three.