Showdown
A gnome sets fire to his own inn, a Krelene festival draws three hundred people into the street, and the Valiant Few step out of the shadows in front of all of them
TL;DR
Loaded with Ashanti’s extracts, the party bribed its way into a watched Color Stay and found Voler Bria with a scheme: burn his own inn, fill the street with a fire-festival, and bait Beltran there with a conjured messenger and his own mother. He came early and angry, having seen through the fake. Outside, Mikhail turned three hundred strangers into a crowd, sang Mama’s Boy at him, and dropped the disguises. The Wraithblade was struck from his hand and shut away untouched, and Koa put a sword through his heart while the crowd cheered what it took for a play.
First seen
- The purple daze powder: a glittering sand that keeps a captive docile.
- The Krelene fire-festival: braziers, burnt burdens, and battles played out.
- “Mama’s Boy”: Mikhail’s song about a lord, his money, and his mother.
What changed
- Beltran Grayeras is dead, run through the heart in front of a festival crowd.
- The Wraithblade is out of his hands, shut in the slithering-pit cloak untouched.
- The Valiant Few are publicly alive, and have claimed the gutting of his network.
- The Grayeras are headless in Haudh-Gwenn. Alyphe outlives her son.
Left open
- Whether a contained blade can be made a destroyed one, and the curse with it.
- What Alyphe does now, and what was left standing inside the inn.
- Whether a crowd told it watched a play forgives being told otherwise.
Synopsis
Ashanti supplied the day’s extracts and a Mól draught of cat’s grace stretched, with a fizzing reagent, to cover all three. Then out through the keep’s tunnel to the river grate southeast of the ruins, where the bank was crowded with people who had fled the riot; Koa glowered at the nearest until they decided the hole was somebody’s stash.
The Color Stay was being watched, Beltran’s better men at the front door and his lesser ones at the back. Mikhail (a merchant again, with two bodyguards) haggled the back pair up to six silver, double on the way out. Inside, a watchman sat slack under a purplish glittering powder the guards kept sprinkling on him; the occupation, the bartender said, was about Venros, who had vanished and whom Beltran thought the inn knew something about.
Voler Bria appeared at Aldo’s elbow from behind his own veil, wearing nothing at all, and laid out the day. The party would step out of the shadows in public; he would set his own inn alight with conjured fire that is not quite fire, patrons cleared, and let Haudh-Gwenn draw the obvious conclusion about who burned it. He wants the council to pay for a remodel he feels owed.
To bring Beltran there in person and past thinking, they went at his pride: his competence, his money behind the Ten Lashes, his mother’s part in the plot. Bria would conjure a Whent, the lieutenant nobody had seen in a month, to carry the news, and send Katalia with a letter to bring Alyphe to the inn on a pretext. Short of powdered rubies, what he brought downstairs was faintly blue, its face set at angles a face does not take; from behind the veil the whole seam of it showed. It went to find him, and upstairs Bria worked a long while at magic Mikhail could not name: nothing taught at the Arcane Congress, and more of it than a man should hold.
Waiting, Aldo and Koa argued over the curse the Elder had put in Aldo’s hand. Koa would not have it used: death or a fair trial, and if the sentence were his, a dark room and time to think in it. Just because you have the power to do something terrible to a terrible person doesn’t mean you should. Aldo, who did not enjoy carrying the thing, agreed Beltran had earned killing. Mikhail’s nerves went back further than either, to a captain executing prisoners in front of him years ago.
Alyphe arrived, and Bria let an hour of pleasantries pass before mentioning that Whent had come back and gone to her son with the truth. Then the door opened and Beltran was in the room, the Wraithblade drawn and bloodied, wanting a private word with his mother. He had seen the light catch wrong on the messenger’s skin, and noticed that a warning and an invitation had arrived the same afternoon. The party went out and left Bria to it; what passed between mother and son afterwards was never written down.
Outside was the fire-festival Bria had arranged (two great braziers, a Krelene rite for burning off what you would rather not carry), with smoke beginning to climb off the inn behind it. Mikhail staged the sacking of Haudh-Gwenn: Aldo lit the braziers in the proper order and narrated with more confidence than knowledge, Koa beat a drum that carried across the district, and three hundred people came. Then Mama’s Boy (the lord’s incompetence, his slavers, his mother), running into the Valiant Few’s own theme as the disguises fell away and the crowd took up the chorus at Beltran walking out into it.
The crowd made the fight. Roused and delighted, it hedged his guards out of the square and left him the three of them. Koa struck the Wraithblade out of his grip, hilt to the wrist rather than a swing at the man, because Aldo had argued beforehand that getting the sword contained was worth more than the kill. Mikhail dropped on it with the slithering-pit cloak, scooped it up without touching it, then turned his back on Beltran entirely, which spoiled whatever his eyes do: too late, mama’s boy. Koa took the full weight of the man’s rage and did not break under it. Aldo came in at his flank and cracked the back of his head. Then Koa ran him through the heart, and Beltran Grayeras went down with the sword still in him while three hundred people cheered a performance. Take back your city, Aldo shouted at them.