The End of the Curses
Downtime ends, an alchemist is finally ready, and the ride north to the last of the three keeps goes through a village that is already on fire
TL;DR
Downtime closed out Haudh-Gwenn. Mikhail finished the work with Ashanti, repaired the fireball wand, and sat with Katalia, awake at last and holding the only account of what Beltran did inside the Color Stay. Koa rode north with Jaden and Hinta and found Ridh, his own village, burning, gnolls killing the last of it and the inn door spiked shut with two swords. He got the survivors out and turned his back on the mass camped east of it. At Wraithblade Keep the sword’s dead came out of the walls, and Aldo gave the Elder another week.
First seen
- The shadows of Wraithblade Keep: the sword’s dead, pale until they are hungry.
- The wyvern-stinger dagger: a blade of bone carved at Draazstone and kept behind a bar for years.
- The rough-cut orange gem: a fiery stone the party has carried since early on and never identified.
What changed
- Ashanti is ready, and the fireball wand is whole again and a fire focus besides.
- Ridh is burned off the grassland, and its survivors are walking south.
- Katalia is awake, and what Beltran did in the Color Stay is known.
- The attempt on the curses has slipped seven days, on Aldo’s call.
- Koa and Hinta are shut in the anvil room at Wraithblade Keep, with a soul-eating shadow loose outside it.
Left open
- What the mass camped east of Ridh is, and whether Orsugo is standing in it.
- What became of the man Beltran threw down the hole in the Color Stay floor.
- When Hinta is told about the Elder, and how much of it.
Synopsis
The days after the armies left went to preparation. What finished Ashanti’s burn was not chemistry but memory: translating her compounds into Mól terms reminded Mikhail that another room of the keep was where the Mól had cut gems. He sifted out the old runoff and crushed the flecks into a second enhancer. With that and the looted accelerant, she was ready. Mikhail repaired the broken wand as well, working it as a ten-minute performance for an audience of one, and it came back with three charges and a pressure that sharpened any fire spell cast beside it. Jaden was told she was coming north and told why, though nothing about the Elder; there was nothing they could give her against the sword, and Mikhail said so.
Katalia was awake for the third time since Beltran nearly killed her, and gave the only account of what happened inside the Color Stay. His face had not been only his; she saw other faces looking at her with something close to greed. She had not been first. He went for her employer, and threw him down the hole in the floor. Mikhail told her, because his integrity would not let him keep it, that Lady Grayeras had tried to stop him and had the blade turned on her for it, and then cast dream shield over her with one of the dream catchers Koa had made with Dwayne.
Koa rode north with Jaden and Hinta, and on the second afternoon there was far too much smoke ahead for a village with no foundry. Ridh was burning: the outlying farms fired well before the town to herd the people inward, bodies in the road killed by hand rather than by fire, and nobody fighting the flames. Three gnolls and their hyenas were taking their time over the last two townsfolk. Koa spurred Nightstorm and went in alone. He cut two of them down in a single pass rather than ride onto a braced spear, was bitten off the horse, and burned by a caster whose own hands were charred from the doing of it. He killed the last through the heart, the way he had killed Beltran.
Hinta pointed east, where there were no tents but a mass of them all the same, and both she and Jaden took it for Orsugo’s. Koa turned his back on it. Orsugo was a problem for another day and a problem for Idir now, where what they were working on was a problem for Idir forever. At the inn Jaden was fighting a gnoll alone and took a spear through the side, and Koa gave her his last healing potion without being asked. The door had been spiked shut from outside, two swords driven through the timbers with the handles snapped off, so the bar inside could not be lifted. He hammered the blades through and got it open on rolling smoke and far fewer people than he had hoped for, then went back in for one more.
He sent them south to Haudh-Gwenn with nothing but themselves. Brindle came to him with an arm charred through; they compared burns, and the old man gave him a dagger carved at Draazstone out of a wyvern’s stinger. Jaden turned south with the column, which had no army behind it.
Three days further north, Wraithblade Keep at sundown. Koa climbed the rusted water gate and dropped thirty feet into the river, and inside, shapes came out of the walls. Most were pale and their hands passed through him; one was dark, and took six points of his strength through the back while he worked the winch. He knew the face. Oshuun Karral had carried the Khopesh out of this keep to Beltran and been killed with it, which meant everyone the sword kills stays with it, and whoever holds it commands them. Koa reached for the blade before remembering it was in its box on a horse outside the gate. He ran for the church, whose woven electrum holds them out entirely, and found the Elder there, plainly better than he had been.
Two of the shapes were dangerous and one had already fed. Koa refused to feed the other on a horse, declined a forgotten gem the Elder turned up on him, and ran the length of the keep to get Hinta and the horses in while the Elder held a rebuke at the door, and shut themselves into the anvil room with rations and a bucket. Through the Elder, who carried speech between the keeps, they argued out the timetable: he could do his part on the day as planned and be left with nothing to give afterward. Aldo ruled it. They got one shot, and if a week improved the odds the Elder could have a week. Koa, with seven days in hand, decided to walk out and let the second shadow feed on him and heal the loss back.