Dan's Darkest Secrets II
The party walks its prisoners home to Loshev at night, and what comes out from under the jailer's sleeve turns a bandit hunt into something far worse
TL;DR
Walking their prisoners home, the party settled into the view that Dan had sent the bandits, and them, somewhere nobody was meant to come back from. Kithul healed them and went east alone toward an old keep whose whispers he did not like. In Loshev they woke the Constable, and by dawn Dan was in his own cell with his sleeve cut open and a single lash showing on the forearm. What he gave up under questioning was not smuggling. It was people: taken out of the mountains, shipped by river in crates, held in a cave outside Haudh-Gwenn and sold on south.
First seen
- Sasser: Loshev dock-guard; corrupt, but not one of them
- Nathan Fox: named, not met: the man who can make the Council sit sooner
- Deen: the smuggler who handed over the captives from Amulta
- The old keep north of Ridh: a ruin whose whispers sent Kithul east
What changed
- Dan is in the cell he used to keep, exposed by the lash on his arm, held for the Council’s judgment, alive only because Mikhail spent a potion on him after Leila put a bolt through him through the bars.
- It is a trade in people, not goods. Captain Torr’s ring runs about ten; the lashes count rank; the captain wears nine; and the ring puts its own men into town guards rather than recruiting them there.
- Captives are held in a cave outside Haudh-Gwenn and moved south toward Meshtes, which is very likely where Cleven Gemsmith is.
- Sasser is off the guard for taking Keif money. Kithul has gone east alone.
Left open
- Whether the Council will sit before the captives are sold on.
- Whom to trust in any river town’s guard, if the ring seats its own people in them.
- What Kithul hears at the keep north of Ridh.
Synopsis
The walk home was long enough to think, and what the three of them thought was this: the map that sent the bandits to those ruins had come from Dan, who had expected nobody who went there to come out, the crew he was warning included. Asked whether the place had been a hideout or a trap, Kithul said it could be both. They put it to the prisoners, partly to see the reaction and partly to stop Leila running, and she refused it furiously. Aldo worked the crack anyway, with the suggestion that Dan had been tidying loose ends and had another woman in the guard already, and left her doubting.
Kithul parted from them at dawn. The Whispers had turned him north and east toward an old keep above Ridh, whose voice he called sinister but not chaos, and he meant to walk its perimeter. He hears the Whispers in certain stone, he explained (not all of it, and it carries impressions), and the stone that carries them in Loshev is the ruins’ stone. Before he left he told them what the whip-lash forearm tattoo means: those are the people who take other people. He gave the party a long night’s healing and kept none of it for himself.
Two days brought them to the edge of the trees, and they pushed on through the dark to enter Loshev unnoticed. On the bridge a figure was waiting, which Mikhail recognized as Khed: the Constable had posted him to watch the crossing, though the watch rota traced back, further up, to Dan. Mikhail leveled with him, and Khed leveled back: a Loshev guard sword had turned up on display in a shop, and Tariq would have views about it. Leila chose that moment to bolt for the town. Koa shoved Aldo off the horse and rode her down; Aldo hit the road hard and his crossbow discharged into the dark somewhere near her, which nobody enjoyed. Koa told her not to make Aldo shoot her too, and she stopped, and was bound and brought back.
They woke Tariq at his own house with two prisoners in tow. He dressed the gash on Aldo’s head (Aldo drank the disinfectant and was no further use that night) and heard the case out: the map that led into a death trap, the runner sent to warn the crew, the lash on Samir’s forearm, and the near-certainty that Dan wore its match. Tariq admitted he had noticed one of his dock-guards being friendly with Dan and had nothing he could act on. He was unimpressed by the man of stone until Koa named Kithul, which turned out to be a name he had heard before. He moved that night.
Dan was asleep in the jail. Tariq asked him where Leila was and who had set the bridge watch, then had Leila brought down, at which point his improvisation about being cheated on collapsed. Asked to bare his forearm he stalled, so Koa held him and Tariq cut the sleeve open. One lash, matching the dead man’s. Khed arrived with the dock-guard Sasser, whom Dan immediately tried to name as the author of everything; upstairs she admitted taking Keif money to look the other way at the docks, and her forearm was clean. She surrendered her sword and her post and was dismissed with a warning.
Downstairs, while that was happening, Leila had got hold of a crossbow and put it through the bars. Koa’s shout did not stop her. The bolt dropped Dan to the edge of dying, and Mikhail spent the second of Phil’s family’s potions bringing him all the way back, for a witness, which Tariq afterwards called the right call and which Mikhail did not enjoy making.
The witness then talked. Two cut-stashes: a hollow post at the docks, and a mushroom log north of the bridge packed with Keif. The last consignment had been people out of Amulta, seized in the mountains and handed over by a man named Deen who works the western trails. The ring is Captain Torr and about ten others, ranked by the count of lashes, the captain at nine. It moves people by river in crates through warehouses paid not to ask and keeps them in a cave outside Haudh-Gwenn until they are sold to comfortable people and sent south along the Meshtes road. Dan had not been recruited in Loshev. He had been placed there.
Tariq’s difficulty was the Council: it would sit when it sat, and the man who could make it sit sooner was Nathan Fox. The party agreed to turn out both stashes by morning, and Tariq let the fenced sword go. The night ended in a tavern with Aldo drunk and playing a mocking song about the jailer, and half the room joining in.