Meshtes

Meshtes is a large city in Peredhel, well south of Idir, and it is the greatest slave market on the continent. It sits in the north-eastern corner of Yovincia Province, the ground taken from Yovance and renamed to mock it. One account instead places Meshtes in Bardh, the western province that holds the university town of Durwyn, and the question was never put to anybody in a position to settle it.

The joke of the place is that Yovincia keeps the barest slavery laws Peredhel permits. No slave may be held there at all unless they can be proven to have been collected by In Ikhtar, and an owner who cannot produce that proof within two hours loses the slave and pays three times its value in fine. The greatest slave market on the continent stands inside those laws. What has grown around them is a trade in false paper, thriving in Meshtes itself, and a smuggling habit of old roads through Idir to the Yovincia border, where the guard was tripled and the tripled guard took bribes until inspection became a travel tax.

Nothing else about the city was ever written down in Idir. No street, no gate, no ward, no market, and not one resident named. The roads outside it are always a bit dangerous. It sends minstrels north and riff-raff with them, and a performer taken for a Meshtes man will argue the point. In Idir they say a man gets snatched up in the western mountains easier than he does in Meshtes.

And it burned. The song of the fire of Meshtes is a solid song, known to anyone with Krelene in their heart, about the city being set ablaze so many years ago.

Campaign Updates

The company has never gone south, and Meshtes has only ever been the far end of something. People taken out of Amulta in the mountains were shipped by river in crates through Loshev, held in a cave outside Haudh-Gwenn, and sold on down the Meshtes road to fancy folk nobody could name. Years of Alex Westwood’s correspondence ran through Haudh-Gwenn contacts to businessmen in Meshtes who buy people, and a paladin of the Order of the Broken Chain had named the same men. Ashtara Walnut laid out the whole run: buyers travel up from Meshtes, lodge at the inn in Westwood, make their purchases and go back down, and at the southern end the paperwork is cleaned. The Westwood land Beltran Grayeras bought off the dying councilman was meant for a new facility nearer Meshtes than the old one.

The northern end of that road is broken now. The southern end has never been touched, and not one of the men in the letters was ever named. One thread still runs that way: the bard who slipped Cazzik’s net is living at a university south of the city. The party’s own use of the place has been to borrow it. Aldo forged Meshtes merchant papers to dress a set of disguises, and in occupied Haudh-Gwenn the company gave Meshtes, and then the province, as where they were from. The guard took a moment with the answer, said yes, all right, and spat on the ground.