Home to Haudh-Gwenn
Three errands in Haudh-Gwenn (a hide, a suit of armor and a woman), and by dawn the Valiant Few are sleeping in a ruin
TL;DR
They rode into Haudh-Gwenn for three errands and found a city with a lid on it. Beltran styles himself Lord Grayeras now, and has spent months seeding a story that the Valiant Few bred the western gnolls themselves in order to play the hero. Greg’s shop was burned for dealing with them. Casper was being dragged off over rent. By the small hours Mikhail had been hunted across three streets, Koa had killed a guard, and all of them were in the ruins.
First seen
- The innkeeper of the two-bath inn: a man with an arrangement he cannot keep
- The armorer’s apprentice: young, star-struck, and short one relative because of the slavers
What changed
- Beltran styles himself Lord Grayeras, and has split the city between his guard and the gangs.
- The Valiant Few are hunted here: five gold offered merely for where they sleep.
- Their armor is delivered, eight months after it was paid for.
- Gwenivere is paying protection money at her own door.
- Casper is on the payroll as their man in the city.
Left open
- Who burned Greg’s tannery, and what Greg suspects but will not say.
- What the armorer folded in among the armor, unseen in the dark.
- Whether Aldo’s counter-story spreads before the guard finds the ruins.
Synopsis
They left the Crack with orders behind them (the untrusted captives caged but fed, the recruits into training, Dwayne hunting and fletching), and came at the city from an odd angle to get in unnoticed, which did no good. The guard on the bridge marked them and kept turning to look. The three waved.
Greg the Tanner’s shop was half burned and crudely patched, and Greg had an arm in a sling and a flail in his hand before he recognized them. The fire was deliberate; he knows why and will not say; he thinks it happened because of them, and asked them to find who did it. Then he produced the work: the slithering-pit hide, tanned at last, an inky oil-slick thing that swallows a twenty-pound box and never changes weight, though the tanning cost most of its depth. It shouldn’t exist, he said, and admitted keeping a better-cured piece for himself. He warned them off taking it to their armorer, whose street has gone friendly with the guard.
The armorer was warm, delighted, and in a hurry. The suits had been ready a fortnight, but he would not put a customer into good leather unwashed, so an apprentice walked them to an inn to bathe at his expense; and Aldo’s armor was to go back to the shop separately, for oiling. Aldo declined to be parted from it, and the party began smelling the shape of the day. Then two guards dragged a beaten, manacled long-term guest through the room, and the guest was Casper: destitute, refused by every inn. Mikhail bought the guards’ patience a gold apiece, then settled the back rent and bought the charge away.
Casper’s news was worse than his condition. Beltran had marched east, taken Ostrad for its farms to feed a growing army, and gone back to break its resistance. The guard keeps to the rich streets; the rest is run by a rougher sort who are, near enough, the same men. He offered to enlist and spy from inside; instead they hired him as their fixer.
The innkeeper had been watching them all afternoon, and Mikhail simply asked. The guards are paying five gold for word of where the party sleeps and how long. Aldo answered with an hour of oratory (the slaves freed, the haven at Harad, the work found for Loshev), and pulled the man off the version of the Few he had been sold.
Koa went to Gwenivere’s shop with Aldo shadowing in a cook’s face, and found two guards inside taking their cut; Gwen has been paying them for weeks. Their reunion was brief and unguarded. Then he told her plainly that she is the easiest way anyone has to hurt him, and she refused to close the shop but did not fight him about leaving it.
The district went up an hour later. Guards fanned out hunting Mikhail; he went out of a window, kicked a hand off his collar, dodged a crossbow bolt that nearly killed a passer-by, and answered with a scream that left the crossbowman bleeding from the ears. Then a long chase down the wrong alley, roof tiles coming off the eaves and locals pointing him out, until he shook them and made the river. Koa and Gwen came back to find the innkeeper manacled and being asked where the party was staying. Gwen spoke one word that took the guard’s voice, Koa put him down without killing him, and when a second came through and opened Koa badly, Koa killed him rather than let her spend more of herself. She burned hot to the touch, then went bitterly cold once she had her medicine.
After dark Mikhail went back to the armorer alone, and was let in. Three suits, eight months late, his own trousers a size optimistic, and with them the truth of the day. Beltran was in the shop this week, and has spent months circulating the tale that the party brought the gnolls out of the western mountains, taught them fire, and set them on the towns so the Few could be seen to stop them. It is sticking. Packing the boxes, Mikhail noticed a folded piece of cloth slipped in among them, and did not open it in the dark. Aldo found him in the street with a whispered the ruins, the sock place, and spent the night planting the opposite story (guards extorting a shopkeeper, the Valiant Few stopping it), which will take a week to travel. By dawn they were all in the holding-cave with Gwen, Casper and the innkeeper, hunted in a city they had helped save.