Cold Comfort, Licking Flames

Three eggs go home, and from the air the valley's "curse" turns out to be a whole people; then something burns a ring across the dark and a book gives up what it was really written for

TL;DR

Al-Sāmiyah carried Koa and Aldo back across the valley, and from the air the gnolls turned out not to be a band but a tribe in the hundreds. The handover of her three eggs went badly and then went through: Mikhail spoke to her in G’lin so Rakhzan could watch her listen and reason. The gnolls hunted them home to the keep door. Then a ring of fire opened across the dark valley with a figure standing in the middle of it, and nobody could agree what it was. Before dawn Mikhail worked out what the book he had been carrying was written to hide.

First seen

Verex: the Ashen Orc, warlord of Clan Denshō
The ring of fire: a burning circle with a figure at its center
Telvanius: the enslaved Peren scholar who wrote thirty volumes

What changed

The eggs are back with Al-Sāmiyah, and the hobgoblins go home poorer.
The valley’s gnolls are a tribe: young, old and armed, in the hundreds.
The Encyclopædia is a cipher; this volume opens Mól alchemy.
The party leaves for the winter, the keep locked behind them.

Left open

Who stood at the center of the fire, and whether it was Orsugo.
Which three keeps can fall in the same hour, and who breaks the other two.
The twenty-nine volumes the party does not have.

Synopsis

They flew back over the valley on the great bird’s back (Koa sitting up with his arms out, Aldo gripping feathers) and got the first honest look at the gnoll camp. It is not a raiding band. It is a tribe: young, old and armed non-combatants together, in triple figures. Spears came up and a crossbow bolt went past, and she rolled out of it and dropped lower.

She came round the bend onto Mikhail’s group at speed, and three hobgoblins who had never seen a bird that size levelled crossbows at her; Mikhail shouted them down and one shot himself through the forearm in the confusion. Then she landed and reared, having lately seen a slaughtered kin and a smashed egg, and there was a bad minute while she decided about the people in front of her. Mikhail talked her out of it, and then settled the argument for good by speaking to her in G’lin. Rakhzan stood and watched her listen, and consider, and answer. Two eggs went under her. The third herder would not let go of his, holding out for the wyvern egg he had been half-promised, so Koa took the pack off him and Al-Sāmiyah snatched it up. With all three she flew home and stopped taking any interest in anyone.

Rakhzan called the venture a costly failure and a first step. There was talk of spring trade with Draazstone and of hunting the gnolls together. The old goat roads run only north and south, he said, and advised the southern one before winter shut it. He also passed on a rumor from the fire: Orsugo is said to be in these mountains, and the party has met his work. Koa told Yara he is Free Folk and means to bring them into this; she means to find them too, and warned him off two keeps she knows of.

They took the wide way round and it did not help. Fresh scout-prints, half an hour old; then the laughter behind them on the wind; then a running fight in the last two hundred feet, hyenas coming up the flanks while Aldo hauled the barbed door open and got both horses and the mule through it. The door was cranked shut on what was left, which broke off anyway, because something behind them had caught their attention.

From the balcony they watched a ring of fire burn across the dark valley, a figure at its center throwing spiraling bursts of flame and shapes gathered round to watch. Yara had a story for it: the Ashen Orc, Verex of Clan Denshō out of Kijinxi, who trapped a rival war-leader’s bound spirits inside a ring of sacred fire so they could not flee the body, then burnt and consumed them for their magic. That is the only ring of fire anyone tells stories about. She added that a Barren-Lands pyre takes many people many days to lay, so a ring that appears in an instant is not a pyre. Mikhail knew it from the other direction: it is pyrotechnics, the Congress art of shaping fire that already exists, but far stronger, and not Congress at all. They got no further than three readings: Orsugo, something opposing the curse, or a threat made for an audience. Yara said only that it screams Krelene.

Inside, her sense of such things found true evil and a smell of rot behind the sealed doors, and Mikhail talked her out of putting an axe to one. He spoke with the Elder again and heard his footsteps for the first time; the spirit was delighted about the eggs, could not recall what the blood-wine was for, and said plainly that the cursed ones cannot be released until the great curse breaks; open a door now and they suffer for nothing. Late, and privately, Koa turned Yara down, which he has never done, on account of Gwenivere Velmont.

Then Mikhail cracked the book. It is the Mól Encyclopædia, thirty volumes, written by Telvanius, a Peren taken as a slave who rose to be a trusted imperial historian, and who buried the empire’s weaknesses in code across the letters and pages of entries about flora and trade. The revolt was built out of this book. This volume opens Mól alchemy. In the morning they meant to lock the keep behind them, report to Elliot in Loshev, winter in Haudh-Gwenn, and go after the next two keeps: the bandit-held ruin under Haudh-Gwenn, and the Twisted Grove.