Fanning the Flames

Synopsis

A week back, and still no captain of the guard at the meeting place, though the bottle at least had been collected. Mikhail began pulling at a thread (who holds the Haudh-Gwenn bank now the family that ran it has gone), and the innkeeper was talked into going south to help ration the stores rather than sit in the city being no use to anybody. Koa left before dawn with him, and with Elliot and Ashanti, whom the party had decided to put out of reach even though it cost them both men’s work, leaving two of the company in the city.

By mid-morning there was smoke: gnolls in Haudh-Gwenn in daylight, which had never happened before, in a poor quarter with no guard on it. What Aldo and Mikhail found was better equipped than anything out of the mountains before (repurposed leather, shields, short spears), and one carrying a dressed ornate spear and no shield. That one drew the smoke off its own weapon into its hand and threw it, a working Mikhail half-recognized from his Arcane Congress years. Each throw cost the thrower: its fur charring, its eyes burning redder.

Aldo took the rooftops. Mikhail, out in the open, put one down asleep, then took a pike in the ribs and came within a hair of dying; cornered, he got a second sleep off anyway, and the Martyr’s aid carried him through it. The fire-thrower broke and ran, and is loose in the city still.

What followed was worse than the fight. Aldo pulled two people from behind a shuttered window. Mikhail found a larger tenement barred shut and burning with a crowd inside, went in from the basement, and could not move them. They were past listening, and some took the sound coming up through the floor for Marg calling. He played to them until the panic broke, then walked them out and stayed till the last was clear. The Chantry and the guard came when it was over. Several dozen citizens were dead, and the streets began saying Orsugo himself had been there, though nobody could name a witness. Mikhail spent the evening at the hospital untreated (he was not dying and plenty were) and noticed the Slumbering Queen was not there. Baku told him the Chantry gives no help to a side, though its people can be hired.

At the Crack, Koa gave Leon the measure of how bad the city had become, and Leon agreed to send Dwayne east to watch Beltran’s army, gone to Ostrad again. Then Koa asked about the Martyr, and Leon, a Peredhel man who holds her close, already knew the Vëné story: a woman who helped in a battle seven hundred years ago and rose to divinity. So Koa gave him everything, the Elder and Aldo’s vision and the ooze and Gwen’s curse. Leon guessed the Elder might be an avatar or a chosen of the Martyr, martyred in her name, and cautioned that the thing is still undead. Nor would he let the arithmetic go: a god who fought seven hundred years ago is a young one to be so widely worshipped. Dwayne took the run east, and named possible wardens for the camp: Captain Jack of Harad, Picard of Veren and his protégé Hanza, and an old Ostrad captain named Margaret if she still lives.

Koa rode back into a city under a yellow haze that could be smelled for miles. The town largely holds the party meddling out-of-towners, and a new line is going about that Mikhail is Dhel and not to be trusted. Aldo’s answer was that Beltran had pulled the guards from the poor quarters after being warned, and that the Few defended a city whose guards were levying a walking tax.

Tyrsday evening, Orvayne came. They walked him down to the river and he talked like a man who had been waiting months. Beltran’s forces are not an apparatus but a scramble of grudges: no clean list of enemies, the party high on it, the whole thing chaotic. A third of the guard are old guardsmen loyal to Orvayne, which is why Beltran keeps him close and cannot replace him. Ostrad was taken by bloodshed because seizing market grain caused trouble at home and an army must eat, and the gnolls are burning those same farms. Whent is the current favorite of a rotating stable of councilor-puppets kept at each other’s throats, and can be walked into a trap whenever it is wanted. The four closest are Zarif, Rain, Davi Solt and Tazrih; the books are kept by Boras, an Amber Jewel of the Jewels of Erôth, hired and not necessarily loyal; the bank sits with Johanka Materai. And the Ten Lashes’ old tavern is left open on purpose, bait for a raid to sweep up everyone who drinks there. They resolved to warn it that night.