Season 4

TL;DR

Season four began with the company still in the business of sealed doors and ended with it running a war. A month of cipher-work in Loshev bought Mikhail a Mól ring its giver had misnamed; the road south bought an ambush paid for out of Haudh-Gwenn. At the Crack the war-council shelved the curse-keeps outright (Beltran first, the curse afterwards), and the Valiant Few went to live in the ruins of a city that had been taught to hate them. What they found there was that the two errands were one: the hooked sword hollowing out Beltran’s guard had come out of a curse-keep. The season ended a long way from that fight, at a grave in a town that is on no map.

First seen

• The Ring of Säv: a skeleton key to Mól work, handed over by a man who had it wrong
• Whent: the guardsman who paid for the ambush, and the first man found hollowed out
• The great clans: nine of them; the Empire rested on them, and seven hold a keep and a relic apiece
• Rheem: a Mól-era servant woman, awake seven centuries late
• Vigil and the Vigilites: a walled town on nobody’s map, keeping one grave
• The Iophanite: a messenger of the Martyr, and no part of it a face

What changed

• The curse-keeps are shelved. The company’s work is Beltran Grayeras, and the ground is Haudh-Gwenn.
• The Valiant Few are hunted where they were once thanked: five gold offered for word of where they sleep, and a story going round that they bred the western gnolls themselves in order to be seen stopping them.
• The Crack is an armed camp, drilled under Leon and Edrick, stocked out of Draazstone and fed for the season. Ostrad and Veren answered the call; Loshev declined it.
• The Empire has a shape: nine great clans, and a keep and a relic to each of the seven that are neither the emperor’s nor the least. The crown is Muharib’s; the hooked sword in Beltran’s hands is Clan Zarkhûn’s, and it is what hollows out the men who carry it.
• The Martyr has a mortal name and a grave: Vëné, under an obelisk in Vigil’s cemetery. And the Elder is her brother, Nancáro.
• Koa and Mikhail are sworn Friends of Vigil; Aldo refused, and stands outside what the other two may no longer tell him.
• Gwenivere has given up the shop, is carrying Koa’s child, and is failing faster than anyone the company can reach knows how to treat.

Left open

• How to take a cursed sword off a man without anyone touching it.
• What the Syndicate wants with the Ring of Säv, and why everyone recorded as having held it vanished or died asleep.
• Whether a company of three can be run with one of them outside the oath.
• What Gwen’s nightmare is made of, and how she is loosed from it.
• What runs beneath the obelisk, where the Mól filigree keeps going down.
• Why the Sword of Vigilance has chosen nobody since Octavia was buried.

Synopsis

The last of Loshev

The season opened with the party spent. Mikhail came back from the Twisted Grove with pneumonia and lay six days close to dying, while Aldo, determined not to catch it, built a feathered plague-doctor’s costume and gave Loshev a monster it is still talking about.

The month that followed was the last useful one the town had for them. Mikhail spent it at Torgun Kurvroc’s table breaking the Encyclopædia’s ciphers at five gold a volume. The parting gift at the end of it was a plain electrum ring Kurvroc called his family’s heirloom, and it is not. It is the Ring of Säv, a skeleton key to Mól work, lethal to everyone recorded as having held it. He took it and said nothing. Then the Birdman panic drove Kurvroc to burn his own books, the town voted itself a hunt, and the party rode south with Dwayne and steel enough to arm fifty men.

The company changes what it is for

The road got the whole of Dwayne’s story about the goblin keep out of him at last, and sixteen miles short of the Crack it produced archers in the trees, hired at two gold a head by a guardsman named Whent, on word from somebody who had watched the party leave.

That left eight prisoners at a base which could not feed them, could not release them without giving itself away, and would not execute them, because Leon refused. Five were talked round, and the interrogations put Beltran Grayeras behind the bounty past argument. Out of that week came a change of plans: the keeps could wait, Beltran could not. A company formed to open sealed doors in mountains would go to Haudh-Gwenn, build a name there, and take a man apart.

Hunted in the city they saved

They rode in to find a lid on the place. Beltran styles himself Lord now, and had spent months seeding a story that the Valiant Few bred the western gnolls themselves in order to be seen stopping them. It was sticking. Greg’s tannery had been burned for dealing with them, Gwenivere was paying protection at her own shop door, and within a day the guard was offering five gold for word of where the party slept. By dawn all three were underground.

The long middle of the season was worked from there under other people’s faces (a borrowed Chantry mask, a red wig, a cook), and the city was bought back a person at a time: Casper as their fixer, Orvayne talked down to the river with a third of the guard still his, a truce with the Silver Web paid for by a bolt through Mikhail’s thigh. Midway through, gnolls came into the city in daylight for the first time, one of them throwing fire; several dozen citizens burned, and the guards had been pulled off those quarters first. The reason came much later, from Katalia at the Color Stay: Beltran had set the fires himself, to meet Orsugo unobserved.

What was riding Beltran’s men

The city work turned up something nobody had gone looking for. Whent, taken alive in the sewers, would not stay down: magic slid off him, and Dwayne alone could see the specters circling him. At the mouth of the unfinished Westwood tunnel Yara burned them out of him with a Barren-Lands rite, and what he gave up when he woke was a hooked sword: taken out of Wraithblade Keep off a goblin by Oshuun Karral, and two months in Beltran’s hands.

The rest came the same fortnight, from the other direction. A green volume of the Encyclopædia gave up the Empire’s structure (nine great clans, seven of them holding a keep and a relic apiece), and with it that the crown Aldo had worn all year is Muharib’s Crown of Echoing Steel and the sword in Beltran’s hand Clan Zarkhûn’s Wraith Blade. And the growth cut out of Aldo’s back, crowned and fed a crystal of the soul-ooze, stood up as a translucent woman seven centuries late who gave her name as Rheem and named the cloaked figure that has walked the party through every keep: Nancáro, Vëné’s brother.

Gwenivere wound the shop down, gave her savings to the cause, and is failing: dosed for years, unknowing, with the soul-ooze in her own father’s tea remedy, watching her own aura go dim, and carrying Koa’s child.

The grave at Vigil

Praying in the ruins, Koa found Vëné carved on the back of a beggars’ idol of the Martyr, and the belief among the city’s poor is that Vëné is who the Martyr was before she was a god. So Mikhail spent a day in the merchant quarter as a pilgrim asking where the Martyr lies, and three Peren merchants with plate under their clothes took him seriously.

A night’s ride and a river ford later they came through the gate of a walled town on a lake that appears on no map: Vigil, whose people hold that sacrifice is freely chosen and never demanded, and who share nothing with an outsider they have not weighed. They were weighed for two days, and passed. Koa and Mikhail signed the oath and were named Friends of Vigil; Aldo would not be bound, and is now a man his companions may not tell what they learn.

In the graveyard a black obelisk stands on Mól-woven stone, its filigree carrying on down into something underneath that only Koa can see. It is Vëné’s grave. He went to it alone at midnight, prayed, and offered himself, and out of the stone came a wheel of metal wreathed in white fire, and talkative. The souls under Haudh-Gwenn were joined by alchemy and can be parted by it. Gwen is caught in a nightmare of her own making. The Elder is the Martyr’s own brother, cursed as she was and a part of the curse besides. And when his hardest hour comes, she will be beside him.