Chapter 27: The Endangered Expedition¶
Prologue — Spoken by the Pentarch of Rune¶
Step no further into this chronicle without first marking what is owed to it.
We came into Pharast (Mar) of 4711 AR with a wound at our back and rumor on every wind. The hermit’s troll-dogs were dead in their cave — a small mercy paid for in fur and fang — and somewhere westward, in country we had not yet measured, a thing that calls itself Hargulka was sending teeth into our villages. The borders of our nation are still drawn in soft chalk. The trolls know it. So, I suspect, does whatever sits on its throne in the Narlmarches.
The council met. The ledgers were opened. The angle of every decision was traced and re-traced. From Reason, fire; from fire, justice. The geometry of a young nation is unforgiving — every line drawn now will hold for a hundred years, or it will not hold at all. There is a kind of wrath that builds rather than burns. Xin understood this. I am learning it slowly, as a man learns a language by speaking it badly.
What follows is the record of one such month, and the day that came after. A king who was not. An ancestor that was less. A wolf nearly lost. The trolls remain. The shape of the answer is sharpening.
— Dravyn, Pentarch of Rune
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
I. The Twelfth Month¶
Stormfire Reach, 1st of Pharast (Mar), 4711 AR
River fog rolled off the Tuskwater and laid itself in the bowl of Stormfire Reach like a held breath. The capital had grown unevenly through the long winter — half-finished foundations beside finished homes, scaffolding cooling beside hearths newly lit — and the morning damp clung to all of it without preference. Banners hung wet from the rafters of the council chamber. Inside, beneath the painted timbers, the Pentarchy convened for what every Pentarch at the table knew was the twelfth month of Athanor’s reckoning. The charter had been sworn very nearly a year earlier, in Gozran (Apr) of 4710 AR. The kingdom was about to come of age.
They had earned the moment in mud and ledger ink. Two settlements had risen from frontier camps to chartered towns. Roads now stitched together marches that, only seasons earlier, had been wilderness. A bridge stood at Nettles Crossing where there had once been only a treacherous ford. The Thorn River ran swollen with snowmelt past piers that had not existed a year ago, and the harvest in the granary at Stormfire Reach was now an accounting matter rather than a prayer.
But the room did not feel triumphant. It felt sharpened. The previous month had ended in a lot of rubble at Wyrmwatch — a building project mishandled, a collapsed frame that had been impossible to dignify in the reports. The settlement had also crossed a threshold of its own and was no longer fairly classed as a secondary territory; Perry corrected the registry mid-meeting, his quill moving across the page with the deliberation of a man who disliked errors more than he disliked finding them. The kingdom’s consumption was paid out of the treasury. The Stormflames had spoken well of their leaders that month, and a fresh note of fame entered the rolls. The disorder of the dump-heap that had sprouted around the Wyrmwatch rubble bothered the settlers there enough that he could feel it in the room — a low, grumbling current he intended to flatten before the month was out.
Valerie, the Pentarchy’s Chief of Staff, set down a stack of correspondence at the head of the table and stepped back to her place along the wall. The Pentarchs took their seats: Dravyn at the long end with the runic schema half-traced before him; Perry to his right, his ledger already open; Elroy occupying half a bench by virtue of shoulder breadth; Grotdor beside him, hands folded, scars catching the lamplight; Rust at the far end, Dog curled at his feet. Linzi and Harrim were present in their respective offices. The doors closed. The work of the month began.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
II. The Long Work of Pharast¶
Stormfire Reach, Olegton, and Wyrmwatch — Pharast (Mar), 4711 AR
Rust opened the working session by quietly committing his attention to Harrim’s preaching schedule. The dwarf Viceroy, whose sermons on Groetus’s coming silence had a peculiar way of soothing the desperate while gently unsettling the comfortable, had been struggling with attendance through the cold months. Rust simply made himself available — questions answered, hymn-book references checked, the small administrative kindnesses that let a preacher do his work without thinking about anything else. The result, by week’s end, was the kind of sermon Harrim delivered when nothing else stood in his way. Three weeks running, the meeting-house at Stormfire Reach overflowed. The chapbooks circulated. Perry, doing the math at the head of the table after the first reports came in, allowed himself a small nod. The dump-heap mood had dissipated entirely. The kingdom’s settlers were, once again, at zero grievance with their council.
Grotdor took up the engineering ledger. The empty lot in Wyrmwatch — the very lot whose previous attempt had collapsed into rubble — was to be raised again into housing. His first reading of the foreman’s draft sent him into a long silence; the joists were off-square, the load-bearing math conservative to the point of waste, and the framing plan had been, in his blunt assessment, written by men who had not held a hammer in a decade. The Pentarchy spent a portion of its goodwill with the foreman’s guild to compel a redraft. The second attempt was clean. Houses rose where rubble had been — entire blocks of timber-frame dwellings climbing along the Wyrmwatch waterfront, smoke threading up from new chimneys by the third week of the month. Settlers who had spent the winter in canvas moved into walls.
Perry turned next to commerce. Timber-buyers had come up from Olegton through the early Pharast (Mar) thaw, and the negotiations went better than they had any right to. “Curious,” he murmured, not without satisfaction, when the contracts came back signed; “the trade winds are with us today.” Four full lengths of fine lumber were secured at a sensible cost, and the merchants threw in two more lengths besides as a courtesy he immediately suspected meant they were getting the better end of the deal long-term. He filed the suspicion under things to revisit and accepted the timber.
Grotdor moved straight to Olegton’s stockyard. The framing went up with a precision that drew the foreman’s small grunt of respect — beams seating cleanly, the lap-joints true, the work crew not so much directed as recognized. Half the rope and lumber set aside for the project came back to the storehouse unused; the foreman, who had budgeted for waste, scratched his head and started a fresh ledger of his own. The stockyard would not be finished within Pharast (Mar), but its bones were sound, and the savings entered the kingdom’s reserves.
Linzi, the Emissary, had spent the previous month redrafting the proposal for Stormfire Reach’s publicity office — an idea that had foundered in committee on a procedural snag no one had quite been able to articulate. This time the proposal moved. A press, a clerk’s desk, a shelf of foolscap and ink — modest by the measure of older nations, a small revolution by the measure of one not yet a year old. Chapbooks of council decisions would now reach the public reliably, and rumours would no longer have a clear head start on facts.
Perry’s next concern was the Wyrmwatch rubble lot — the humiliating reminder of the previous month’s collapse. His first conversation with the demolition crew was unsatisfactory; the foreman wanted to scavenge timber that was no longer trustworthy, and Perry’s polite insistence on a full clear-out was met with the slow resentment of a man being told he could not have what he had already decided was his. A modest expenditure of the Pentarchy’s standing, a sharper-toned second meeting, and the lot was cleared. Wyrmwatch was, at last, ready for whatever would come next.
Region work followed. Rust claimed a march into Athanoran territory with such confidence that the surveyors’ chalk-lines came back faster than the runners could carry them — Fort Serenko, a defensible promontory long noted on the kingdom’s maps as worth incorporating, now formally part of the realm. The structural feature locked into the kingdom’s holdings on the spot, a refuge against the day someone would need to garrison there. Dravyn followed by claiming the moon radish patch east of Olegton, the same hillside the party had walked through months earlier in the memorable company of kobolds slipping over their own harvest. Svetlana would have her moon radish stew on the house from here on. The march joined the kingdom without protest.
Then Dravyn did the work he had been waiting all month to do. He rode out personally with a survey crew to establish a lumber camp in the new forest march, runes traced over the worksite charter with a precision the foreman afterwards described — and Dravyn pretended not to overhear — as “unsettlingly tidy.” The wards seated themselves in the bedrock with an audible click. The crew arrived to find the forest unexpectedly generous; the first cuts yielded boards with grain so true that the lumber-master forgot, briefly, to scowl. The next month’s harvest from that site would come in double.
Grotdor stepped to the trade-desk and moved four lengths of ore through Olegton’s mercantile channels; the contract came back firm, four extra resource dice promised to the kingdom’s next month. Elroy then pushed for the watchtower at Stormfire Reach. He set the project in motion with theatrical roll of sleeves — “BY THE BEARDS of my fathers, defense is not our strong suit YET,” he boomed, to no one’s surprise — but defense was, in fact, not his strong suit, and the work crew came back at the close of the month with the foundation laid and the tower itself half-built, scaffolds wrapped against the spring rain. The work would resume next month. He took the slow result without complaint.
Rust closed his last act of the month on a Trade-guild campaign against the criminal underbelly that had begun to nibble at Olegton’s ledgers — fair weights inspected, honest contracts publicly arbitrated, a smuggling ring whose first cell was rolled up at the docks with the cooperation of an honest merchant who had been losing barrels for a year. One full notch of crime was struck from the rolls.
Dravyn called upon the spellcasters of the Collegia for a supernatural solution against whatever surprise the month might still produce, and the runic schema he laid down for them came together with the kind of precision he had not allowed himself to expect — a stored arcane contingency banked against the rest of the turn’s work. Elroy seized a third action of his own and stood up to recruit. The Stormflames answered him in numbers that surprised even him. By the time he had inspected the new musters and named them — “the Athanor Home Guard, First Regiment,” he pronounced, in a tone that hovered between roll-call and christening — a unit of dependable infantry stood drilled and garrisoned at the capital. Athanor had teeth in the field for the first time in its young life.
Linzi turned her remaining hours to the kingdom’s decaying eastern road, which had begun the month with potholes deepening into outright hazards. Her intrigue-networks among the engineering trades produced a result the foreman’s union later described as “unsporting” — two full points of decay struck from the rolls, and the road’s lingering penalty reduced besides. The wagons coming in from Varnhold rolled smooth again.
Elroy, who had begun the month as General and somehow still ended it with energy to spare, took a fishing rod down to the Tuskwater and stayed out past dusk. He came back with a creel full enough to feed the regiment he had just recruited. The kitchen at the barracks, which had been preparing to negotiate hard for an extra grain allocation, received instead a wagonload of fresh lake-trout and the General’s magnificent beard reeking of brine. Finally, with the books not yet closed and a few hours still to spend, Valerie attempted a reading of omens for the month ahead. The first try came back clouded — the bones unhelpful, the smoke pattern wrong — and the Pentarchy spent a final measure of its standing on a clean retry. This time the readings sharpened: whatever the kingdom’s fortune held next, it would be met with eyes a little better adjusted to the dark.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
III. The Trail Sharpened, and the Threshold Crossed¶
Stormfire Reach, late Pharast (Mar) – 1st of Gozran (Apr), 4711 AR
The first omen-check of Pharast came up dry. The kingdom’s own ill-luck, for once, stayed at bay. But the troll-warnings that had haunted Athanor since the previous autumn were no longer an ambient anxiety — they were a standing concern in the war-room. Elroy stepped to the table to answer them as General.
What followed went into the regimental histories as the moment the troll-king ceased to be a rumour. The General’s scouts not only rebuffed the raiding war-bands at Athanor’s borders that month — they tracked the survivors on their retreat, mapping the route march by march back toward whatever lair Hargulka claimed. The location was no longer a notional pin on a chart. Westward, into the Narlmarches, the route climbed: forested hills giving way to elevated ground, a hard line bending toward a place the Pentarchy now had cause to designate by code rather than guess. Dravyn, watching the runners come in, offered to spend the banked arcane solution as a backup against any error in the work. The General waved him off. The work needed no second draft.
Glory to Athanor. The phrase had been a wry private joke between the Pentarchs in the kingdom’s first months, half-toast and half-incantation. It became, over the course of Pharast, something closer to a calendar event. By the end of the month — the kingdom’s books closed, the milestones tallied, the threshold crossed — Athanor entered its fifth level. An ability boost across the kingdom’s civic capacity. A reduction in its vulnerability to misfortune. A new tier of structures unlocking on the build-list: temples, the dedicated quarters of an organised intelligence service, stone walls thick enough to hold a siege. Twelve months from the charter that had been sworn at Oleg’s in Gozran (Apr) of 4710 AR, the experiment in collective rule had become an institution capable of being inherited.
Dravyn, who had watched the chamber empty after the final tally with the closest he came to a smile, traced a single line across the corner of the council ledger — geometry, he privately judged, that would now hold. He closed the book.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
IV. Across the Tuskwater¶
The Cannibal Hermit’s Cave to the Southern Lake — 1st of Gozran (Apr), 4711 AR
The field party had ended the previous expedition inside the cannibal hermit’s cave, the last troll-dog cooling in the firelight, the corpse of the hermit and the bloated dogs burning in the cleared yard outside. The Pentarchy’s council-month closed at home; the party’s long rest in the wilds came in the cave, sheltered behind walls of dripstone, the cold lake mist filtering in through the entrance. Dravyn’s book reopened in the morning to find his spells re-seated. Perry’s wounds knitted under a fresh-shaped bandage. Rust’s slots refilled. Even Grotdor, whose internal gate ran hottest when he most needed it cool, came up the next morning steady and stretched. The horses, staked at the treeline, had not moved.
Dawn over the Tuskwater on the first day of Gozran (Apr) broke the kind of clean that frontier folk remembered for years. A low alpine fog rolled across blue water; the eastern reaches caught the first light and turned silver. Somewhere to the south an elk called and then was answered. The party shouldered packs and moved out of the cave at last, leaving the smouldering yard behind them, turning south along the lakeshore toward unexplored country.
Where the Tuskwater thickened and the southern shore broke into headlands and inlets, the wagon and horses were going to have to wait. The water was too wide and too cold to ford, and there were no bridges this far down. The party would have to cross another way.
The discovery, when it came, was Grotdor’s. A flat plume of smoke threading up from the middle distance, an island in the lake that had not been on any of the kingdom’s charts. The party climbed a hill that gave them height and stayed there an hour, then two, watching. The island was small and natural, ringed by a wooden palisade twenty feet high. Dome-huts of clay and thatch. Smoke from clean fires. A leather-flap drawbridge over the channel. Elroy’s eyes, sharper than most after a year of patrol-riding, caught the movement first — two pairs of palisade-gates parting, four humanoid figures slipping into the lake with the unhurried grace of swimmers who knew the bottom. Reptilian. Tailed. Finned. Crude harpoons and blowguns and hand-axes, all hand-crafted, all of natural materials.
“Lizardfolk,” Elroy said at once. Perry attempted to extend the picture — a measured frown, the start of a hypothesis on iruxi village structures — but his concentration broke before he could land it. He stared at the middle distance for a long moment, then conceded the point with the patience of a man explaining gravity to a falling man. “The evidence,” he sighed, “suggests I am presently unequipped.” Even his time-traveler’s training at Lepidstadt had given him absolutely nothing useful on the iruxi. He set the deficiency aside as a future research project.
To reach the island, they needed a craft. Perry shouldered the survival problem and produced a result that bordered on the providential — within an afternoon’s patient bushcraft, he located a half-rotted log already most of the way to being a raft, and with Grotdor’s help, lash and vine and salvaged rope made of it a functional craft that would carry the five of them. Dog rode at Rust’s feet. The horses they staked on the bank. The party paddled out through the shallows toward the iruxi village.
The four scouts who had dived earlier surfaced again midway across, harpoons raised, blowguns at the ready. Their Common was broken but clear.
“Outsiders, what are you doing here? Explain yourselves.”
— An iruxi scout
Elroy planted himself at the prow and spoke, for him, gently. They were the leaders of the neighbouring kingdom of Stormfire Reach, he said; they would like to meet their neighbours in hopes of establishing good relations. His diplomacy landed clean. The scouts’ tails relaxed slightly. Two of them paused near the boat, eyes bobbing crocodile-low above the waterline. The other two splashed back toward the gate to fetch the king.
Then one of the remaining scouts asked, in a voice that hung oddly in the morning air, whether the party had seen any evil spirits.
The party exchanged a glance. Grotdor allowed that they had, in fact, met a screaming tree not long ago. Elroy added that they had met a number of fey, some friendly and some not. The scout pressed forward, voice low. An evil spirit, he said, had recently invaded their village. King Vesket — their leader — was not himself. He had grown cruel, demanding, insistent on human hunts that the rest of the people had no stomach for. The scout believed the king to be possessed. His eyes drifted east, where through the mist the party could now just make out a distant silhouette: a broken lighthouse or fallen tower, ninety-degree angles of ruined stone in the haze. Candlemere Island, the scout whispered. It is haunted.
“That’s not something we want near our kingdom,” Elroy said, quietly for once. “Or yours.” The remaining scouts emerged, dripping. The audience had been granted. The party was led inside.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
V. The Court of King Vesket¶
The Iruxi Village, central Tuskwater — early evening, 1st of Gozran (Apr), 4711 AR
The interior of the palisade was overgrown — nettles and creeping branches, the smell of roasting fish and wood-smoke, leather flaps creaking in the breeze. Iruxi eyes peered down from hut-openings. A pair of guards slunk up behind the party with hands rubbed together, voices oily, promising that yes, yes, the good king would love to meet them, please let us take you there. The party followed without argument and noted, as they walked, that the village was larger than it had looked from the lake — eight or ten huts in the inner ring, a kitchen-pit smoking under leather, a stockyard of caged fish along the south wall.
At the centre of it all rose a fifteen-foot dome of dried mud crowned with bones at erratic angles. The leather flap parted. The smell hit first — incense, roasting meat, and something feral underneath. Two enormous caiman, alligators the size of ponies, flanked a fire on either side, their tails flicking, their slit eyes fixed on the visitors with the unblinking interest of cold things considering warm things. And on the dais sat King Vesket, large and green-skinned, his neck snapping audibly as he rolled his head and licked his teeth.
“Outsiders, outsiders, you are the ones, yes — who have come from the north to conquer our Stolen Lands.”
— King Vesket
Elroy stepped forward, hammer-sigil glinting at his collar. Not to conquer, he said; to settle. The kingdom of Athanor was not in the iruxi’s sights. He would hope, he said, that the two peoples could negotiate an agreement under which the killing of humans stopped. The king’s tongue flicked across his teeth. He spoke of ancestors who whispered to him. He asked whether the General’s ancestors spoke back.
Rust, voice gentle, answered for the table. Something talked to him, he said. He did not know whether they were his ancestors, but he heard voices in his head. The king’s smile widened, all teeth. Yes, the king said, that was what an ancestor did. His own ancestor had warned him of the smooth-skins coming, of trees being cut and waters being poisoned. He could offer terms. He would speak to his ancestor. If the ancestor agreed to spare the humans, peace. If the ancestor demanded sacrifice — as it always did — the slaughter would continue. There would, the king allowed, also need to be babies. Quite a number of babies. Rust’s expression flattened. “Easy now,” he said. “I don’t think I can give you a baby.” The king allowed that he could not, but explained — gesturing north into the smoke where a row of female iruxi watched the visitors with neon-yellow eyes — that his harem most certainly could.
Rust, very confused, asked how one talked to this ancestor. The king’s answer was instructive. The ancestor lived in its own house, he said, and gestured the party outside the throne-hut and toward a smaller dome with no smoke rising from it. The party followed. The leather flap of the smaller hut creaked open. Inside, on a small unadorned fire, hovered a glowing, necromantic-green reptilian skull, smoke wreathing its jaw. It addressed them in a sibilant, accented voice. It asked them to establish diplomatic relations. It expressed great enthusiasm for the trade of fish and clay and lumber in exchange for — let us say — a few human lives per month. Come on. How valuable were they really?
Perry’s eyes narrowed. He asked, with deliberate quiet, whether he might recall what he knew. The voice of the skull purred its assent. Perry’s training in occult matters — the long, slow training of a man who had outlived his original century — measured every wrong note: the wrong angle of the smoke, the wrong cadence of the voice, the wrong colour of the fire. He turned slightly to Elroy and whispered, voice dry as sand.
“That thing is a will-o’-wisp. It’s not a freaking spirit.”
— Perry Marlowe, to Elroy
A trickster undead. A predator of fear and paranoia, with a particular love for watching the creatures it had deceived tear each other apart. It had no listed weakness. It had pretended to be the iruxi king’s ancestor for three or four moons, pressing him toward human hunts and toward an alliance with a troll king who had been making overtures to the village. It would have to be destroyed.
Elroy, in keeping with his nature, did not attempt subtlety. He drew himself up and asked the skull directly — voice low, threatening, the kind of menace he reserved for the rare occasions when his theatre served a point — where it really came from. The skull warbled, its voice quavering with theatrical false-alarm. “King Vesket! King Vesket! These people are assassins! They wish to exorcise me! Protect me, grandson!” Outside the hut, the lizard king’s footsteps quickened.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
VI. The Spirit of Stisshak¶
The Ancestor’s Hut — minutes later
The wisp moved first. Its sickly green glow snuffed out in the smoke; the skull became a faint distortion in the air, then nothing. From outside the hut, the king’s footfalls broke into a run.
Grotdor held his ground, deferring his action to let Elroy set the line. The General drew breath and called on the keen scent he had cultivated all winter — the ozone-stink of the wisp was unmistakable in the smoke. He pointed, voice booming. “BY THE BEARDS of my fathers — THERE, to the north — I’VE GOT THIS!” His shield came up. Shielding taunt rang against vambrace, drawing the wisp’s attention to him and away from the others. Grotdor stepped in behind him. Heat rippled at his hands; he set his gate, drew a kinetic edge across the moment, and laid a lash of cold across the wisp’s position. Blind as the smoke made him, the strike found its mark. Cold met undead. The wisp shuddered visibly in the air, its outline rimed in frost. Grotdor followed with a draw — extracting electrical force from the wisp itself and seating it into his own kinetic aura. A third element, drawn out of his enemy and worn now as his own.
Dravyn raised a scroll and tore it. A colourless flare meant to dazzle the invisible burst across the hut. The wisp slipped the burst entirely, its reflexes monstrous. Worse: Elroy, standing inside the area of effect, caught the flare full-face, his vision wavering. The wizard winced minutely. “The angle did not belong to me there.”
And then King Vesket struck. The king’s trident had already been moving when the visitors entered the hut, the appetite already half-engaged. He had not chosen the wolf — the wolf had simply been the easiest reach. The blade carved through Dog’s ribs in a single brutal arc, the wound opening so cleanly that the wolf’s body folded like wet paper around the haft. The trident wrenched free with a wet sound. The king, still hungry, bit down. Dog’s flank gave under teeth. The wolf collapsed to zero — the king was already lowering his head to feed.
Rust’s face broke. “Easy now — easy, dog — no, no — I’ve got you—” There would be time, the Pentarchs would later argue, to deal with the king. Now was the work of saving the body that had already fallen.
Perry, who had been moving since the wisp went dark, moved faster. A shift of his own time bought him an extra stride. A quick stretch of alchemy produced a small glass elixir which he downed in one — the world clarified around him, the smoke parting into resolvable shapes. His investigator’s eye assessed the wisp’s angles and edges with a clarity that bordered on the surgical. Infernis, the small repeating crossbow at his hip, came up and answered with a bolt of crimson lightning. The shot was perfect — exactly where Perry had meant it, exactly as deep as he had intended. The skull’s forehead cracked along a line of green ectoplasm; the wound did not close. A persistent bleed locked into the wisp’s essence.
Rust, recovering himself, set the line. A whispered prayer settled around the party like a benediction — each blade a fraction surer, each step a fraction lighter. He drew force out of the air and shaped it into a translucent barrier before himself.
Round two. The wisp, furious now, lashed electricity from its empty sockets — a shock attack that took Elroy across the chest. The General staggered but held, the smell of singed beard in the air. The wisp went dark again, only Hidden this time, its glow flickering in the smoke. And then, with the worst cruelty of the fight, it fed on Dog’s mortal terror — leeching healing from the wolf’s dying body, its glow reigniting in horrible reflection. The recovery check on its bleed failed. The wisp was still wounded. It was simply, also, wickedly creative.
Elroy, vision wavering from Dravyn’s earlier flare, did not let the dazzle stop him. “BY THE BEARDS — I know where you ARE!” He waded forward and swung wide. The longsword bit cleanly into the skull’s outline. He followed with another shielding taunt, banging shield-rim against vambrace. “YOU’RE A LIAR! YOU’RE NOT THE ANCESTOR!”
Grotdor, behind him, exhaled through smoke. “Show his ancestors a skill set they’d envy,” he said, very evenly, and unleashed a thirty-foot wave of fire. The cone of flame washed forward, catching both wisp and king. The wisp slipped most of the heat — its reflexes were not failing it — but the king, slower, absorbed a respectable bite of fire. Persistent flame began to lick along his scaled flank. Grotdor’s aura sputtered and went dark; the gate was offline until he could revitalise it. He stayed where he was. “Don’t kill the king,” Elroy warned over his shoulder. “It won’t kill him,” Grotdor answered. “Heat answers.”
Dravyn moved through the smoke at his own pace. The runes on the glaive’s haft were lit now, a soft pulse against the dim. “Step no further.” The strike came down with the clean inevitability of a closing geometry — sixteen points of slashing through the wisp’s green haze. He followed with a careful burst of arid magic, calibrated to a ten-foot circle so as to catch the wisp without immolating the hut itself. The king saved cleanly; the wisp failed. Persistent fire bloomed across both targets, layered over the existing bleed. The wisp’s own bleed-recovery failed again.
The king, smoking now under the persistent flame, bellowed and bolted for the leather flap. He spent his actions striding outside and tearing the flap aside, his voice rising in a tongue the party could not all follow. “Kill the wizard! Alert the kingdom! I must be avenged! Do not let them survive! Do not let them leave the island!”
Perry, moving with the kind of economy that came from being short on actions, sized the wisp up and activated the wooden circlet at his brow — the small artefact he had once described as resembling Renly Baratheon’s crown. The wisp’s position pinned itself in his field of view, off-balance to his next ranged strike. He loaded acid ammunition into Infernis. The bolt sang. The hit was clean. Twenty-two points of piercing and acid drove the skull to within a breath of zero. Persistent acid stuck. The wisp wheezed. “You know my weakness,” it managed, in a voice that no longer sounded sibilant or wise.
Rust shaped three cold-iron needles from a coil at his belt and sent them in a tight group at the green haze. The first volley wide-missed in the smoke. He drew a breath and reshaped his throw. The second flight took the skull at exactly the angle the first had missed.
The needles pinned the wisp’s jaw upward against the top of its mandible — its mouth wired shut like some horrific taxidermy. It collapsed to the ground in a steaming pile of bone, and then flared up like phosphorus, leaving only a black, dark stain in the sand. The Spirit of Stisshak was destroyed.
Outside the hut, four iruxi warriors converged with weapons drawn. The work of the fight was not done.
The tempo tightened. King Vesket moved sluggishly, the fire still licking at his flank. Elroy stepped out of the hut and attempted to demoralise the warriors with the considerable weight of his voice, only to learn — as the words bounced off four uncomprehending stares — that the warriors spoke only Draconic and Iruxi. He adjusted on the fly. He turned, instead, directly to the king, and pivoted his diplomacy from intimidation to truth. “That wasn’t your ancestor, Vesket. That was a will-o’-wisp trying to trick you.” His first attempt wavered. He committed to a second; it landed steady but unconvincing. The king’s enormous eyes flickered with doubt, but Elroy was bloody-handed and mid-fight, and the king was not yet persuaded.
Perry, who had spent his time at Lepidstadt absorbing every language he could pin down, spoke up in iruxi. “Your king was possessed by an evil spirit.” The warriors’ stride hesitated. Two voices, in two languages, were now saying the same thing.
Grotdor made the move that sealed it. Two strides took him down the slope to the wounded king’s side. His third action shaped a touch of water-magic — a blessing of the living sea, cool blue-green light that knit eleven points of damage closed and salved the fire still licking at the king’s flank. “Heat answers,” the kineticist said, very evenly. “But so does the sea.” He looked the king in the eye. “I am trying to explain the same thing my friend is. Listen to him.”
The iruxi warriors came at Grotdor anyway, spears jabbing, tails whipping; one strike landed for a respectable jab in his side, but a tail-whip arrived so loose he literally vaulted it, his acrobat’s training carrying him cleanly over and clear. He looked at the warriors with the patience of a man assessing a tool. “These are commoners,” he observed. “Angry ones, but commoners.”
Dravyn stepped from the hut, glaive lowered, his draconic features unmistakable. He spoke in Draconic. The runes on his glaive had stopped pulsing now; what remained was simply a wizard speaking the truth in a language the king understood. The hero-pointed second attempt landed. The plus-two of Grotdor’s healing carried it home.
“Fools. You’ve been deceived. That’s not your grandpapa.”
— Dravyn, Pentarch of Rune
He pointed to the smouldering ash where the wisp had fallen. The king’s enormous eyes went glossier still. He lifted one webbed hand. His voice, when he found it, was lower and more uncertain than it had been all evening.
“Stop your fighting.”
— King Vesket
The warriors broke their stances at once. The spears lowered. Combat came to a close.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
VII. The Map Sharpens¶
The Iruxi Village, evening — 1st of Gozran (Apr), 4711 AR
Dog was breathing. That was the first thing Rust knew, kneeling over the wolf in the dirt of the ancestor’s hut, and it was the only thing he needed to know for a long minute. The persistent fire still licked along the king’s flank, though, and Elroy — never the type to leave a problem unsolved when it stood three feet away coughing — produced a water-skin and offered to pour water down the king’s throat. Grotdor offered a more elegant alternative: the lake was right there. He bent a controlled volume of clean Tuskwater up from the shallows and into a vessel, and the king drank it down in a long shuddering swallow, his eyes squeezing shut against the relief. The fire went out.
Vesket sagged forward on the heels of his hands and coughed, his voice clearer now without the wisp’s whisper in his ear.
He spoke as a man waking from a long nightmare. The voice that had pretended to be his ancestor had appeared three or four moons before, around — he was hazy on the timing — around the time, the party gathered, when the Stag Lord had fallen. Ever since, it had pressed him toward escalating cruelty: more human hunts, harder demands, the talk of harems and babies that he could not now remember endorsing with anything like sincerity. It had also urged him, the king said, toward an alliance with a troll king named Hargulka. He understood now that the alliance had not been his own idea. He was, the king added, somewhat cooler on it. He asked the party, slowly, whether they had heard of this Hargulka.
They had. Elroy admitted that the troll-king was giving the kingdom of Athanor a great deal of trouble. The king nodded. Hargulka had sent envoys recently, offering an alliance. Perhaps, the king said carefully, this had not been such a good idea. If Hargulka were to die, it might be better to be on the winning side. Elroy, magnificent beard quivering with restrained mirth, told the king that yes — yes, the Stormfire Reclaimers intended to be the winners.
Vesket told them what he knew. Hargulka’s stronghold lay to the west, in the forest, atop a mountain or a large hill or some great rock he had never been to himself. Somewhere in the Narlmarches. The intelligence aligned exactly with the route the kingdom’s scouts had mapped at the end of Pharast (Mar); Perry, doing the geometry in his head, allowed himself another small nod. Two roads converging on the same forest hill. The shape of the answer was, indeed, sharpening.
The king offered terms. No more killing of smooth-skins; the iruxi would send envoys. Trade groundwork — fish and clay outbound from the village, gifts and trinkets inbound from Athanor — would be drafted up in the coming weeks. The party agreed. Vesket, recovered enough to be himself again, dismissed them with the regal flick of a hand and a string of insults so warmly delivered that Elroy laughed aloud. The General returned in kind.
“I’m glad we could come to a peaceful resolution, you cold-blooded, scale-skinned fish-eater.”
— Elroy Jenkins
The king’s tongue flicked. He spat on the General’s words and exhaled over his breath and gave him, last of all, a beady wink.
They left the village in the last grey of evening. Rust carried Dog at his shoulder — the wolf would mend; a measure of healing on the walk to the raft was already steadying his breathing. The Tuskwater lay flat and silver under the rising fog. Behind them, on the small island, the lights of the iruxi village burned a little more honestly than they had at midday. Beyond the village to the east, the broken silhouette of Candlemere Island stood unlit in the haze, its ninety-degree angles black against the deeper black of the sky. The party noted it. They left it for another day.
They turned the raft for the mainland. The trolls remained — west, in the Narlmarches, on rising ground a scout’s map could now reach. The wisp was ash on the floor of a hut on an island that, until that morning, had not been on any chart of Athanor’s. The kingdom was a year old. The furnace was lit. The heat was rising. And somewhere westward, on a hill or a mountain or some great rock the party had not yet seen, the troll-king who called himself Hargulka was about to discover that the Stormfire Reclaimers had drawn a clean line on a map and meant to follow it home.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕