Aldo
A grifter wakes in Ravenhold with no memory of the night, someone else's relics in his coat, and a river heading south
TL;DR
He woke in a rented room in Ravenhold with a headache, one sock, and a stranger asleep beside him whose name he had never learned or had already lost. Dressing, he found things in his own coat he did not recognize: a curved ceremonial dagger, a heavy key of oddly milky iron, and a sheet of ancient script. He emptied the nightstand on his way out, slept through his stop on the river south, and washed up in Loshev, where he sold the parchment to a man who then hired him to go and find what it described. He ended the night in a cell.
Synopsis
The morning
Aldo is about thirty, out of Galderia, and makes his living convincing people he is somebody else. He came to consciousness in a dark rented room above a Ravenhold street with no memory of arriving, no memory of the woman beside him, and (for a moment that did not seem to trouble him) no memory of his own name. Mornings like that one were routine for him.
Around his neck was an iron chain hung with holy symbols, which he put on without thinking about it. It belongs to Derry the Deviant, a priest who hears confessions and is not a priest.
Dressing turned up things he could not account for. A thick key of a strange milky iron, too heavy for a door he could name. An S-curved dagger, ceremonial rather than useful. He could tell that much and no more about what rite it belonged to. A sheet of old parchment in a script he could not read, which he would later learn was Imperial Mól. None of it was his that he could remember. He took two rings and a handful of brass from the nightstand as well, on his way past the woman he could not name, and let himself out.
He wondered aloud later whether he had robbed a brewery. One of the rings is inscribed GM, which are also the letters branded on every ale barrel the Gluggmugs sell, and he kept the key back against a use he had not worked out yet.
The river
He caught a dawn boat and fell asleep so thoroughly that he passed Lvov by more than an hour before waking. The boat was bound south into Idir, a country he had never seen and knew almost nothing about beyond its reputation: a land of curses, of independent towns with no crown over them, of plains cats that kill travelers who go about in fewer than six.
On the water he was Billy, a sailor, which an innkeeper later wrote down as Bobby. Billy prays where it is useful: to Luhthar before a long passage, to Vroga Waruk against pirates, to Winifred Orenda for wisdom; and Billy banks in Haudh-Gwenn, where he meets a contact, which may be true.
Loshev
Loshev turned out to be about two thousand people and far grander than that number suggests: cobbled, well kept, carriages in the streets, a council that votes its own members in for life. It sits between the up-river peoples and Peredhel and takes a cut of everything that passes.
There he met Elliot: a writer, would-be dance-hall owner, funded by a benefactor to publish on the fallen Mól Empire, and a man who talks well and reads people badly. Aldo enjoyed him enormously. Elliot bought the parchment, read what Aldo could not, and told him what it referred to: an intact Mól ruin, sealed, somewhere in the mountains west of the town. The parchment calls it the resting Sun.
Then Elliot made an offer. Gather a crew, take a pony and gear and three moonies each, go west in the autumn, and come back able to say whether the place is real and whether it is still shut. Aldo would lead it.
He took the work, and then he took a drink, and then he got into a fight in a bar with a half-orc called Tony. The guard came. His gear and Elliot’s silver were still locked in his rented room when they put him in a cell to wait on the council’s judgment, which is where the night ended and where he still was in the morning.