Gnolls

Gnolls are tall, covered in real fur, with an elongated face somewhere between a dog and a wolf. They walk on two legs, carry weapons, keep a language of their own, and hunt in packs alongside hyenas they have trained. They belong to warm country far to the north. Every gnoll anyone has met in Idir was standing somewhere gnolls do not live.

What They Are

They ambush, and they break off and withdraw when a fight turns against them, which makes them harder to be rid of than braver enemies. They move at night. They track, and they keep tracking: a party they had failed to kill on the Goat Trail was followed overnight across more than half a day’s road, and it is held of them elsewhere that a gnoll who has taken an interest in one person will work through that person’s whole family. Their first arms in the mountains were spears and slings, with heavy crossbows behind them. By the time they were raiding towns in Idir they wore repurposed leather and carried shields and short spears.

Amultan officers are drilled in their chaotic touch-and-go pack formations, though Amulta sits too far south ever to have fought them, and the doctrine that comes with the drill is that they are irredeemably violent: filthy, eaters of the young, takers of survivors. A stranger shouting across a mountainside put it more plainly, calling them slavers who eat the flesh and capture the rest. Set against all of that is one practical discovery, made by distillers on the outskirts of Loshev who were being burned out: gnoll fur takes fire readily. They torched one and the raid ended.

Gwenivere Velmont describes a rarer and larger kind, meaner than the common sort and carrying flail-like chained weapons rather than spear and hyena. She could not put a name to it, and nobody has confirmed one on a field since. There was one significantly larger gnoll in the valley pack, and it was never identified as anything in particular.

One breed has been examined at leisure, and only one: a charred, months-rotted corpse in a Loshev cellar. It had a narrower snout and a weaker sense of smell than northern gnolls, which makes it easier to hide a scent from, and an intentional sigil carved into its right palm that may be where the fire-starting comes from. A second intact body has been wanted ever since to confirm any of it.

The Tribe in the Valley

The curse of the Valley of Doom was a gnoll pack eating whoever came through the pass, and the pack proved to be a whole tribe in the hundreds, with young, old and armed non-combatants in it. It is still there. It was growing when the company left the mountains and may spill out of the valley in time. A hunt run jointly with Draazstone was floated once, and nothing came of it.

The Ones Who Carry Fire

The gnolls that came down on Idir are a different problem, and they arrived with Orsugo. They burned parts of Loshev in coordinated night arson, tall fur-clad figures setting buildings alight with a gesture of the hand. They came back over the winter for the outskirts. Forven had forewarning and headed them off. They burned the fields at Ostrad around the army that had marched east for the harvest, and that army fought them, took losses, and carried a sickness home out of the fight. Chantry healers sent after it to treat the wounded heard something in the camp, turned, stole supplies and left to join Orsugo instead.

Then they walked into Haudh-Gwenn in broad daylight, which they had never done, armored and shielded, one of them carrying an ornate dressed spear and no shield at all. That one drew the smoke off its own weapon into its hand and threw balls of fire, and the casting visibly charred its own flesh as it worked. It got away hurt and has not been found. Why they came at midday has been argued over in that city ever since, including in a story the company themselves put into the streets and later heard repeated back to them as news.

Beltran Grayeras made his own use of them. His account, published and repeated for months, was that the Valiant Few had bred the western gnolls themselves in order to be seen putting them down. Enough of Haudh-Gwenn believed it that the company’s name is worth less there than anywhere in Idir, and in the same streets a man tall enough or wearing enough fur can now expect to be taken for a spy.

What Is Not Settled

Whether the valley tribe and Orsugo’s fire-gnolls are one people has never been resolved. They have been named together from the beginning, because the arsonist seen at Loshev was read against the burning ring that had erupted over the valley not long before, and the two have been spoken of as one thing since. Against that stands the corpse in the cellar, a southern breed with a different snout and a carved hand, and a separate account of the whole business entirely: that Draazstone hired the raiders to sow enough desperation to force Loshev into a favorable trade. None of the three has been proved.

Nor has any gnoll ever been named. No leader, no chief, no envoy, no individual, and nothing they call themselves. The tables of languages give their tongue as Kutā. In the mountains it was only ever their own language, and the one word of it anybody reports hearing was a bark across a street that started a fight.