Fighting from the Shadows
A week spent under other people's faces (a borrowed Chantry mask, a red wig, a cook) while a name the party has been chasing for a year turns up carved on the back of an idol
TL;DR
A week of hiding in plain sight. Koa prayed to the Martyr in the ruins and found, on the back of a beggars’ idol, the name Vëné (the woman from Aldo’s vision, the one the Elder speaks of), and Elliot later gave them the local belief that she is who the Martyr was before she was a god. Mikhail worked the streets in a borrowed Chantry mask, the alchemy volumes came in complete, and Gwenivere emptied her savings into the cause and agreed to disappear.
First seen
- Naevora: Beltran’s sister; frail, hidden since childhood, a name and no more
- Isara: Amulta’s goddess of healing, who holds the place the Martyr holds here
What changed
- The alchemy run is complete: ten more volumes of the Encyclopædia, the burned twenty-eight included.
- Vëné is named on the Martyr’s idols, and folk belief holds she was the Martyr once.
- Gwenivere is winding down the shop, and has given Koa two hundred gold.
- Whent sent the men at the inn and paid them himself.
- The green ooze is understood: a Mól catalyst and accelerant both.
Left open
- Where Vëné is said to be buried, and whether any of the folklore is true.
- Whether Orvayne will come to the meeting the bottle was sent to arrange.
- What ails Naevora Grayeras, and why the family has hidden her all her life.
Synopsis
They spent the week underground and in other people’s clothes. Aldo came in at dawn, having worked the taverns all night as a convincing drunk, spreading the party’s version of the night at the inn. Mikhail studied Gwen’s herbal tea and found most of it neutral, some of it correcting mild poisons, and a little of it rare: metamagic components grown only in Escaria, for sharpening cold magic. He still cannot name what she has.
Koa went out into the ruins and prayed, awkwardly, unpolished, entirely sincere. That he feels no more than a man for all of being called chosen; that he does not know how to free the souls in the ooze; that Gwen and this whole city are past what he can carry. Getting up from it, he noticed a shrine twenty feet off that the ruins’ poor had built out of scraps, crude idols to half a dozen gods. On the back of the Martyr’s, someone had carved Vëné.
Two more sightings followed. Aldo remembered Tony in Loshev using in the name of Vëné the way anyone uses an oath. And at an old permanent shrine in the town proper a small plain statue of the Martyr carried the same name on a plaque, and by candlelight Aldo confirmed the face was near enough the Peren woman from his midnight-milk vision. Elliot supplied what the locals say: Vëné is who the Martyr was before she became the Martyr, a folk hero of some seven hundred years ago and the fall of the Mól Empire, with a legend attached about where she lies buried. He does not believe a word of it. That set off an argument about whether any god was once a person (the same story is told of Lady Eravil), Koa holding to his faith, Aldo unimpressed, Mikhail only wanting to know.
Elsewhere in the week, Koa and Gwen had the conversation they had been avoiding. Her magic mends flesh from the inside, which necessarily teaches how to unmake it (the guard she silenced has a laryngitis that will last), and she is nobody’s damsel. He admitted telling the other two about her father, which he had done to get her a cure, and watched her face fall before she forgave him. They also saw the ooze-seller picking his way out of the keep-ruins, still harvesting, presumably selling to somebody else now she has stopped.
Mikhail talked his way into the Chantry hospital as a prospective initiate and came out with robes and a mask, which he wore around the city treating ordinary complaints and sending the serious cases in: cover that was also a genuine service. Koa went out as a redhead and Aldo as his Tazion persona, and found Elliot and Ashanti at an inn, where Elliot nearly stabbed a stranger before he heard Koa’s voice. Elliot had bought ten more Encyclopædia volumes off a collector, at cost and partly on credit and to Ashanti’s irritation: the whole alchemy run, the lost twenty-eight included. Both were pressed to leave the city.
At the sympathetic tavern they ordered the Valiant Brew, fumbled the exchange, and were taken down to the basement anyway. The barkeep confirmed Orvayne is still about and still the guard’s real second, on edge like everyone else, and that she could get him a message in a bottle (slowly, and not tonight). She also named who sent the men to the inn: the councilman Whent, who paid for it himself. They drafted a coded note proposing a meeting at the leatherworker’s shop, precisely because guards go there; the barkeep emptied a bottle of confiscated liquor to carry it, and sent them off with food for the refugees.
The rest was days of quiet work. Gwen was talked, gently and by all three, into lying low and winding the shop down rather than selling it; she arranged for the rent to keep being paid, and, expecting Beltran to be skimming a bank his family controls, emptied her savings out of it and put two sacks of a hundred gold each in Koa’s hands. Mikhail and Ashanti finished the alchemy: the Mól built recipes out of base components rather than ingredients, which makes them far more efficient than anything the Arcane Congress teaches, and the green goo is a rare thing that acts as both catalyst and accelerant. Aldo fed the city rumors about Beltran’s guard all week and came back with one name for all his digging: Naevora, Beltran’s sister, frail, kept out of sight since childhood, and nothing else. Casper, snooping, brought the smaller and better news: Whent is walking about with a black eye and a nose nearly broken. It was Mikhail’s boot, going out of the inn window.