Awakening in Loshev

Synopsis

Three people came to Loshev inside a single day for three unrelated reasons and left it the next morning under one warrant.

Mikhail came up the river road out of Forven with most of his belongings already taken off him. A laden cart overtook him and the man walking beside it armed an old crossbow rather than hear a word, so Mikhail gave way to the treeline. He camped at dusk, saw town lights north, and pushed on through the dark. Armed figures came out of it and proved to be Loshev guards. They lit a torch and showed him what he had nearly bedded down beside: a pool of blood where a wagon had been taken that day, the fourth such attack in two months. The patrol-leader put the hobgoblin guard Khed at his shoulder for the walk in.

Koa was already in town and already in mourning. He had hired on to guide the alchemical-goods merchant Phil Nye and had not brought him home. He had already settled the wagon, put the widow’s affairs straight and given the guard everything he knew of the attack. Philomena, sixteen and newly fatherless, found him at his table and tried to thank him and to pay him, and he would take neither, on the grounds that a man who fails his charge is owed nothing.

Aldo woke on the fourth morning of a stay in the holding cell, shaking and filthy, with the jailer Dan enjoying it. A half-orc named Tony, up on the same brawl and working his sentence off as a guard, hosed him down cold and shared a wineskin. His case was called that morning: disturbance of the peace, some violence, resisting arrest. He pleaded not guilty, and then dropped the drunk he had spent four days playing. Dan, he told the Council, had paid him to start that fight at the Prancing Prince; Dan met tattooed men off a Ravenhold ship at the docks, traded something with them and helped load a crate; Dan took protection money from an innkeeper. It was fluent, exact, and delivered by a man who had vomited on himself in the night, and the chamber did not know what to do with it.

Mikhail rose to corroborate the piece he could. In Forven he had met Cleven Gemsmith, a councilman’s son on Council business, and had warned him off the men with whip tattoos and Ravenhold in their voices; Cleven met them anyway and was not seen again. One of them gave his name as Captain Torr, wore a cat-o’-nine-tails on his arm, and had tried to talk Mikhail onto his caravan, the same man Mikhail had seen at the Forven docks with the warehouse owner Julius.

Aldo was found guilty of the disturbance alone (the resisting charge fell, since he had been unconscious for it), and sentencing was held over. Then Tariq laid out the road killings and asked the chamber to open its coffers and deputize a party to go into the eastern woods after the bandits. Gemsmith spoke for it and the rest went over like dominoes, waving away the old talk of beasts and fiends and Fey in those trees. In the recess Gemsmith took Mikhail aside and hired him privately, with his own coin rather than the town’s, to find his son; there was nothing against Dan a court would hear. Tariq took Koa on. Mikhail argued his own way in. Aldo’s sentence, over Tariq’s objection and on Gemsmith’s word and Rook’s, was the same errand. Koa sat in that chamber all day waiting to testify and was never called.

Terms were settled that evening at the Broken Shield: up to five bandits still living, a gold a head and another for each brought back breathing. In the morning Phil’s widow Phillipa brought Koa a flawless compass and two potions and told him, quietly, no mercy. Tariq brought provisions and, no horse being available, a donkey he had named Aldo. Aldo himself had not slept in his room; he collected a cache of proper gear from a third room at a better inn, sold on the guard shortsword Dan had handed him, and let Koa draw his own conclusions about how much of the drunk had ever been real.

They crossed Loshev’s ancient bridge south out of town (old, ill-kept, beautiful, and veined with the same dull gray metal that runs through the town hall by a method nobody in Loshev can explain), and turned east. Somewhere in the night’s drinking Mikhail had tried to explain the Idiran curses to the other two. Koa had crossed those woods coming in with Phil’s family and seen a fire that was not there and a column of soldiers who were not either. Aldo remained unsure whether he believed a word of it.