Aftermath Pt 3 · Aurôrum

A morning of confessions under the keep, a dead man made to answer questions, and an order written in a hand that can no longer write

TL;DR

Across a city with no law left in it, the party reached the keep to find the ooze pulsing and Ashanti stalled for want of pearl ash. Nancáro stopped keeping things back: a thing that feeds on sleeping minds lies under Haudh-Gwenn, held down for years by the Slumbering Queen and by a second presence now gone, and it is waking. This keep’s curse, he admitted, has fired five times, four of them his own guided failures. Koa sealed the Wraithblade away, the Elder pulled Beltran’s shade out of it for questioning, and the party forged his hand to stall his own army.

First seen

Pearl ash: purified potash, and the one thing standing between Ashanti and a destroyed ooze.
The ranks of the blade: every master the Wraithblade has had joins it when he dies.
Khudan: a bugbear archer out of the Barren Lands, hired to hunt the party.

What changed

The Wraithblade is shut in the lead-lined box, and stayed shut.
Something beneath the city is awake and feeding, and both things that held it down are gone.
Beltran’s army has orders in his own hand to mass outside the city and wait three days.
The Valiant Few are off the battlefield and hunting six hired killers inside it.

Left open

Whether a day of pulsing has spoiled the chemistry Ashanti already tested.
Whether the forged letter buys three days or half of one.
What became of Voler Bria, and whether losing him is what let the thing wake.

Synopsis

Morning found Haudh-Gwenn with no law in it at all. At the keep’s river entrance seven organized men were working the swollen refugee camp for protection money; Aldo put a blunt bolt into the one jogging to cut off a family before anybody else had moved, and the rest scattered. Another hour went on talking the camp northwest, out of the path of Leon Yaegar’s incoming army.

Inside, the ooze in the entry tunnel had begun to pulse, and had been pulsing close to a day. Ashanti was boiling ash and getting nowhere: to drive her reaction hot and fast enough through the whole volume she needed pearl ash in bulk, and she named it as the thing most likely to hold up the entire curse-breaking. She feared as well that a day of pulsing had changed the stuff out from under everything she had tested.

Then Nancáro peeled himself off the wall, withered from two days poured into the crystal, and stopped keeping things back. Something powerful lies dormant beneath the city and is waking, lately faster. He had never raised it because a second presence he could not perceive clearly had been holding it down, and that presence is gone; Aldo put the burned Color Stay and Voler Bria’s unnameable magic forward as the check that failed, which fit the timing. Asked about the nightmares that began when the Slumbering Queen was taken, the Elder named the thing: a being that lives between this world and the world of the sleeping mind, and feeds on it. It had come for what is stored under the keep, not for the people.

Aldo pressed him, named the evasion to his face, and would not be moved off it, and the rest came out. This keep’s curse has fired five times: the original fall, and four companies who tried to break the Idiran curses under his own guidance and failed. Three lost it on timing, which this party has already solved. The fourth had the timing and split to separate places, and the sword’s curse took one of them.

Aldo gave back the conditional curse the Elder had put in his hand and he had never used on Beltran, and the Elder drew the essence out of it and stood straighter. What he could offer was a month to be whole, a few days to be enough, and ruinous cost to himself. The pull must come from two points at once: Mikhail and Aldo from this keep, Koa and Hinta from Wraithblade Keep, four or five days’ ride north. Which meant two of them resisting the sword the whole way, with no help he could give.

Koa took the Wraithblade out of the cloak, shouting through what it put in him, and shut it in the lead-lined box. Then the Elder reached into empty air like a man catching a fly and held something. Every master the sword has had joins the ranks of the blade when he dies, and he offered them Beltran. The shade came up charcoal colored and already blurring, and answered: a hundred and fifty men under five commanders hired out of Peredhel, and the phrase he signed his orders with, surrendered only after the Elder tore a tenth of him away. Asked whether any part of him felt remorse he allowed half of one, said the city could starve, and gave one word for why: legacy.

Downstream, Mikhail caught enemy scouts hand-signalling about the garrison, which killed the ruse the party had been due to help stage there. So they wrote in Beltran’s hand instead, off his own letters, seal and all: mass outside the city, wait three days, then attack, signed with the phrase they had just taken from him. Aldo carried it down to five Dhel scouts dressed as a porter, met the rumor of Beltran’s death with “it’s a rumor, and a good one,” and turned his back and walked. Four bolts missed him.

At nightfall twelve soldiers held the south bridge under conflicting orders, so the party swam the river in front of them while the guards laid bets on which would drown. Across the water Leon took the war off their hands and handed them a different one. Beltran’s death left the enemy with nobody to negotiate with and nobody to remove, and he had also hired about half a dozen killers to work apart from his army, with bounties on the party’s heads that stay payable while the enemy believes he lives. The three of them were to keep out of the line, hold the city’s morale, and hunt those six. The one Leon knew by name was Khudan, a bugbear archer out of the Barren Lands, jailed several times and out again every time.