Chapter 5: Trouble at Oleg's¶
| DATE Early Spring, 1 Pharast 4610 AR | |
|---|---|
Prologue - Perry¶
I prefer problems that sit still—mechanisms on a bench, formulae arranged like chess—yet the Stolen Lands insist upon problems that kick and bleed. Bandits levy their “taxes” with cudgels and smoke; good folk—hermits and traders—must learn to flinch at dawn. We cannot build a nation atop that kind of cowardice. Thus our arrangement at Bokken’s ford: a modest stage, a careful script, and one moral experiment—could cruelty, when confronted with plain alternatives, choose to be less cruel?
I watched them arrive as one studies a cracked retort: angle of approach, weight distribution, fault lines. Infernis rested across my sleeve; I tested trajectories in my head and, as ever, trusted the sum of observation and patience. When the moment turned hard, it turned quickly. A single bolt removed a variable. Lightning and fire simplified the rest. We preserved one man to question—useful, if he proves educable.
On the road north, a one-legged hunter mistook our mercy for villainy. We argued facts; he clung to certainty. I dislike killing the wrong problem, but sometimes human error wears a face and draws a bow.
Oleg’s palisade smelled of soup and honest work—the first place in days that resembled future. We showed our tokens of the Stag Lord’s reach and promised the Levetons something better than to flinch at dawn. Plans were drafted with stringencies and contingencies. When Happs Bydon swaggered in to collect, he found instead a test he could not pass. Accuracy and restraint, applied in sequence—that is how one begins a kingdom.
Chapter Five: Trouble at Oleg’s¶
Bokken’s Ford | 1 Pharast 4610 AR¶
Daylight lay flat and bright over the Rostland hinterlands, turning the slow water to a sheet of hammered tin. Wind brought the smell of wet earth and old smoke from Bokken’s hut; inside, the hermit shuffled and fretted, rehearsing his role in the coming scene.
Perry Marlowe crouched behind a tangle of brush near the ruined bridge, his gray duster blending with the weathered timbers. Infernis, his compact hand crossbow, rested loosely across his sleeve. He watched the track as he would watch a flawed piece of glassware—looking for where and how it would shatter. The weight shift of horses, the cadence of laughter, the way a man’s hand strayed to a cudgel: each was a data point to be stored and summed.
On the opposite bank, Dravyn loomed against the pale sky, a silhouette atop the gentle slope. His hood was up despite the mild day, the all-seeing eye on his breastplate half-hidden beneath the cloth yet faintly glimmering, as if watching of its own accord. Bright, almost glowing blue eyes measured distances, terrain, and the empty sky above—space enough for a storm to be called down. Gray scales at his brow caught what little light filtered under the hood.
Grotdor waited lower along the stream, half-shrouded by reeds and the ragged shadow of the collapsed bridge. Heat clung to him in a way that had nothing to do with the weather. His knuckles were already reddened, his cloak edges singed from practice; even still, he held himself with the rigid, brooding discipline drilled into him since childhood. Problems, in his experience, yielded to decisive application of fire.
Rust Freelox, all wiry limbs and restless movement, lay in the lee of a moss-slick boulder, close enough to sprint to anyone who fell. The holy symbol of Lamashtu at his throat glinted dully as he worried it between his fingers, eyes never leaving the ford. He had long since made peace with the paradox of channeling life through a goddess of monsters; what he had not reconciled was how often life needed to be preserved in the shadow of killing.
Elroy “Stonekin” Jenkins stood in plain sight.
He waited beside the ford with his shield slung casually and helmet unbuckled, the big, bearded human playing the part of a traveler taking his ease near the water. The dwarven braids of his beard were neat, his shield emblazoned with Torag’s hammer over a broken shield—a declaration of penance and protection both. Beneath the relaxed posture was a coiled readiness; he had been taught that honor was not proclamation, but where you chose to stand when blows began to fall.
From the south came the drum of hooves on packed earth.
Three riders appeared along the forest road, Thorn River bandits by their swagger and their piecemeal gear. One had a face smeared with bright paint in crude patterns; another wore twisted trinkets and leered at the hut with a practiced cruelty; the third carried himself with a rough, almost swaggering confidence, as if he believed his own story of heroism in a lawless land.
They reined in by Bokken’s yard. The hermit, pale and sweating, hobbled out to meet them with a sack of “taxes” in his shaking hands. The exchange began like any other: threats, mock fear, the rote rhythms of extortion.
Then Elroy stepped forward into their sightline, shield still low, and told them it was their lucky day—there were better prospects than shaking down hermits for the Stag Lord. The offer was simple: stand down, walk away, live to see a different kind of kingdom. The bandits listened just long enough to be offended. Their hands drifted to hilts; their mouths twisted around insults and promises of pain. The old script would not be rewritten.
The moment cracked.
From his cover, Perry let all his calculations collapse into a single choice. He picked the painted bandit as one might select the weakest link in a chain and raised Infernis. The atmospheric hiss of its mechanism was almost lost beneath the wind. He had already tested the trajectory in his head; his finger merely sealed the proof.
The bolt took the painted man cleanly, erasing him before he could even draw breath for a shout. He crumpled bonelessly into the dust, a variable removed.
Thunder answered the shot.
Dravyn’s voice slipped from terse syllables into a word of power, and a knotted filament of storm formed above the ford. Lightning lanced downward in a white-blue stroke, followed a heartbeat later by a booming crack that sent birds bursting from the nearby trees. The bandit tried to twist away, but the bolt caught him square, hurling him to the ground in a charred heap that steamed in the cool air.
Rust broke cover, scrambling along the bank. His first instinct was not to cut but to call; he shouted for the last bandit to surrender, informing him that they sought justice, not massacre. His voice carried oddly across the water, high and earnest amid the thunder’s fading echo.
Grotdor let the fire gate open.
Heat rippled from him, distorting the air as motes of ember-red spun into a faint aura. With a practiced thrust of his hands, he hurled a lance of elemental flame at the remaining bandit. Fire struck cloak and beard alike, turning coarse hairs to torch wicks and leather to crackling cinders. The man screamed and staggered, already half a bonfire in human shape.
Elroy strode into the ford, shield coming up at last, water foaming around his greaves. He cut off the most direct avenue of escape and commanded surrender in a voice honed for the parade ground and the battlefield both. The bandit, panicked and burning, bolted instead—splattering through the shallows in a frantic attempt to douse the flames and flee back down the road.
For a breath, no one else moved. Perry kept his next shot in check, unwilling to waste the one surviving source of information. Dravyn watched the treeline, wary of more riders breaking from the wood. Rust paced the water’s edge, hands ready with bandages or blessing. Then Grotdor’s patience snapped into action: he kicked off with a short Burning Jet, a gout of fire blasting behind him as it propelled him along the bank, cutting the fleeing man’s path and driving him back toward Elroy.
Steel settled the matter. Wading deeper, Elroy shifted his grip and brought the flat of his sword down across the bandit’s skull. The blow dropped the man into the ford; he went face-first into the muddy shallows, where the stream hissed and smoked as it quenched the remnants of Grotdor’s fire.
Silence fell, broken only by the gurgle of water and Bokken’s ragged breathing.
They hauled the unconscious survivor ashore, bound his wrists and ankles, and set Rust to making sure the man did not simply die in the mud. When he woke, groggy and bruised, he gave his name as Nedri—or something close enough that the party settled on it. A small cog in a larger mechanism of fear.
Searching the bodies turned up leather, cheap blades, and—more tellingly—amulets bearing the stag-skull emblem they had already seen among other bandits. The Stag Lord’s mark. Each token was another data point confirming a pattern: this was no loose gaggle of thugs, but an organized network, threats of extortion and terror radiating from some hidden camp in the Narlmarches.
They reassured Bokken that these particular collectors would not return. Perry cross-referenced the hermit’s tales with what they already knew of the Stag Lord; Grotdor took a moment to let his heat bleed harmlessly into the stream; Rust checked everyone’s wounds twice. When talk turned to what to do with their new prisoner, opinions diverged: some saw a tool, some a liability, some the seed of a citizen yet to be. In the end they agreed to bring Nedri north, bound and watched, but alive.
They left Bokken’s ford behind with a dead shakedown route in their wake and one uncertain guide in tow.
Road North - Justice and Misjudgment | 1 Pharast 4610 AR¶
North-northeast of the ford, the road narrowed to a rough track threading through the wooded hinterlands. Branches scraped overhead; patches of sunlight mottled the path; birdsong came and went like fickle commentary. Nedri rode tied to a mount, hands bound to the saddle horn, ankles cinched beneath the belly. He did not complain. He had done this ride before, from the other side.
The party’s argument moved quietly along with the clop of hooves.
Elroy spoke of what their future kingdom ought to be—a place that valued second chances over summary hangings, where men like Nedri might lay down their bows and take up spades, or radish farming, or anything that did not depend on fear. Others countered that Nedri had chosen his path; that no one had forced the stag-amulet around his neck. Even so, none of them called for his immediate death. They would see what he could be before passing final judgment.
The woods, meanwhile, watched back.
A lone hunter moved through the undergrowth parallel to their route, the worn leather of his gear whispering against brush. One leg ended in a well-made peg; he compensated with the easy balance of long habit. His composite shortbow was strung and kept close, a club and traps hanging at his belt like the tools of a self-sufficient life. He had seen too many slavers and bandits drag bound figures through these lands. Seeing Nedri tied and guarded, he made his assumption and committed to it.
He strode into the track, blocking their path, and in a hard, weather-cracked voice condemned them as slavers. He declared his intent to kill them and “free” the prisoner. Elroy and Rust tried to explain, to draw a distinction between a captive and chattel, between justice and cruelty. The hunter would not be moved. In his mind, they were merely another flavor of the same rot.
The Stolen Lands, indifferent as ever, bore silent witness as steel and spell answered where words failed.
Dravyn moved first. A brief, clipped incantation called down another Thunderstrike from the sky. Lightning and sound slammed into the hunter, who twisted aside just enough to avoid annihilation but still staggered under the blow. When Dravyn followed with a chilling, magical glare meant to sap the man’s will, the hunter met it with a flat, unimpressed sneer and muttered something about “traveling with a necromancer.”
Grotdor opened his fire gate with a thought; the air around him shimmered as he sent another burst of elemental flame searing into the hunter’s leathers, burning hair and hide alike. Then, propelled forward on another burning jet, he closed the distance under a waver of heat, more flame flickering at his fingertips.
Perry, measuring stance and armor and the fresh wounds already inflicted, devised his stratagem in an instant. He picked the point where the hunter’s guard sagged, the angle at which ribs were least protected. His bolt flew true, burying itself deep in the man’s side and drawing a harsh grunt. The hunter’s eyes went not to Grotdor’s fire, nor to Dravyn’s magic, but to Perry’s small, calculating form on the road. That, he decided, was the true threat.
“Death to slavers. Death to tyrants.” The words were less a battle cry than a verdict as he lifted his bow.
He drew a bead on Perry.
Elroy had been watching for exactly that choice. Years of training and one terrible childhood memory moved him faster than thought. He flung himself between the hunter and Perry, shield flaring as the arrow buried itself in steel and flesh. Pain bloomed under his ribs, but the halfling behind him was spared.
Rust scrambled for a better angle, torn between pouring healing into Elroy and ending the fight before another arrow found a mark. His life-tinged magic prickled at his fingertips, eager and ready.
Elroy, gritting his teeth against the pain, advanced with his shield high, giving the hunter one last, level chance to stand down. He made it clear he would rather not kill a man whose only sin, in this moment, was believing he’d found slavers. But the hunter had carved his worldview deep, and he would not scrape it clean.
The fight ground onward.
Dravyn and Grotdor kept up the pressure, electricity and fire hemming the hunter in, forcing him into poor footing and worse lines of fire. Perry reassessed and, realizing that another perfectly placed shot might finish the man then and there, lowered his weapon slightly and instead raised his voice, urging surrender. The hunter’s response was to mark him as prey, both in his stance and in the hard set of his jaw. His next arrow skittered off Elroy’s shield, the accumulated wounds beginning to drag on his aim.
Rust made his choice.
He shaped his Needle Darts from a bit of metal in his kit, the shards of life-charged power hovering for a heartbeat as he sighted along an invisible line. Then he loosed them. The darts streaked forward in a tight cluster, punching through leather and flesh in a stuttering barrage. The hunter jerked once, twice, then collapsed into the dirt before Rust could throttle the spell back to something merely crippling.
Stillness returned to the forest track.
Elroy lowered his shield and knelt beside the fallen man. A quick, practiced check confirmed what the angle of the hunter’s neck already suggested: there was no saving him. He bowed his head for a moment, lamenting the necessity but unable to pretend there had been another path once the man had committed to blood.
They took his gear—a well-kept composite shortbow, traps, padded armor, a sturdy club—tools of a life spent walking the edge between subsistence and vigilantism. Perry catalogued the items with automatic care, adding them to the growing list of goods to be traded at Oleg’s. Then they spent coin and effort patching each other up, the conversation circling back to law and mercy, to how easy it was to kill the wrong problem and how hard to undo it.
The road carried them north toward the trading post and toward the next inevitable confrontation with the Stag Lord’s shadow.
Oleg’s Trading Post¶
Oleg’s Trading Post rose from the rolling plain like a stubborn memory of better fortifications.
The old border fort’s square yard was ringed in new palisade logs, their tops still raw where bark had been stripped. Within, the compound smelled of hammering iron, horse sweat, and soup on the boil—an honest, lived-in scent after so many days of smoke and blood. Oleg and Svetlana Leveton moved through the place with the harried grace of people who worked too much with too little, but it was still the first place in days that felt like future rather than merely survival.
Inside the yard, they found stories.
Oleg, gruff, and Svetlana, warm but weary, told of months of “taxes” levied at dawn by bandits. Of a hooded bowman and a cruel axewoman who had led the earliest, most terrifying raids; of later visits by smaller, rotating crews who treated the post as guaranteed income. The pattern mirrored Bokken’s misery, just on a larger scale. When the party laid out the seized stag amulets and described the ambush at the ford, the Levetons’ eyes brightened with a hope they had been afraid to name. The newcomers pledged—plainly, without flourish—to end the shakedowns.
Justice, here, would have to be more than rhetoric.
They walked the walls with Oleg, took measure of the stout main gate with its heavy log, the stable and storehouse, the roof walkways offering lines of fire into the yard. Svetlana described the bandits’ pattern: riding in at dawn, shouting for Oleg to present payment, swaggering about the courtyard while threats and jokes flowed. Sometimes the hooded leader came; more often lately, only underlings. The camp had to be near—close enough for frequent raids, far enough that they felt secure.
Around a rough-hewn table in the main room, they drafted their answer.
Oleg and Svetlana would remain inside, beginning the “tribute” as usual. Elroy would sit openly in the courtyard, playing the harmless traveler until he was needed. Perry and Dravyn would take positions on the walkway, crossbow and spellbook ready to pour precision and power into the yard from above. Grotdor would wedge himself near the wagon and the gate mechanism, a small, manure-spattered figure ready to erupt into flame from an unexpected angle. Rust would lurk where he could reach anyone in need of healing while still maintaining sightlines for his own magic. They agreed on a simple code phrase—Saint Gilmorg—to trigger the ambush.
That night, as the post wound down, they practiced their positions and refined their plans. Nedri, secured and watched, found himself the subject of an odd kind of recruitment pitch. Elroy spoke of radish fields and a tavern where Nedri could spend his pay instead of his fear; the bandit listened with skeptical eyes, unaccustomed to anyone caring what he wanted from life beyond obedience.
Stars wheeled overhead. Watches were set. Dawn crept nearer.
Happs Bydon’s Raid | 2 Pharast 4610 AR¶
The morning broke pale and cold, mist clinging to the ground beyond the palisade. Hoofbeats rolled through that mist before the sun had cleared the horizon. Four riders approached: Happs Bydon, a smug archer in a hooded cloak, and four Thorn River bandits. They dismounted and swaggered into the courtyard, calling for Oleg and rattling off the usual threats.
Elroy lounged at the table, a stranger in the pattern.
Happs’ eyes narrowed at the unfamiliar faces—Elroy seated with deceptive ease, the small red-tinged kineticist near the wagon, the absent Oleg. Irritation sharpened to menace. He spat that this was none of their business; Grotdor replied that it absolutely was. The code phrase passed. The scene shifted.
Up on the walkway, Dravyn uncoiled from his feigned drowsiness and spoke a word that tasted of storm.
A crackling orb of lightning shot from his hand, arcing into the tight cluster of bandits. The Horizon Thundersphere detonated around the first bandit, electrocuting him so thoroughly that he dropped in a smoking heap before he had time to register that anything had gone wrong. The others caught the edge of it, muscles seizing and hair standing on end.
The second bandit, enraged, darted around the wagon toward Grotdor. His dagger bit into the small kineticist with a painful but shallow cut; a second slash scraped across the cloak instead of flesh. In his haste, he snatched up his bow and sent an arrow at Dravyn that went wild, clattering into the palisade. The fourth bandit tried shifting position and firing on the wizard as well, but his arrows thudded harmlessly into wood. Under pressure, their aim crumpled.
Grotdor grinned through the sting of his wound.
He shaped the ambient heat into a Tiny firebird, a flickering construct that wove through the air on a precise path. It threaded through Happs, second bandit, and third bandit in turn; all three failed to get clear, flinching as searing flames licked leather and skin. Before the second bandit could recover, Grotdor followed with a roaring blast of elemental fire that nearly cooked the man where he stood, leaving him tottering, blackened and smoking.
Elroy rose from his “casual” seat and stepped between the raiders and the door to Oleg’s quarters. Shield up, sword ready, he declared that their extortion ended here and now. Behind him, Svetlana and Oleg stayed out of sight, clutching each other in the dim safety of their room.
The first bandit remained very dead.
Happs, realizing belatedly that his usual victims had prepared a reception, loosed an arrow at Dravyn. The sudden movement of allies and the chaos of magic spoiled his aim; the shot failed to find a decisive mark. He began to maneuver, seeking cover and cursing the “heroes” who had spoiled his tidy payday. Rust, hidden near the gate, watched and waited, holding his power in reserve for when it could end the fight with minimal collateral damage. The third bandit slid into a more cautious position, torn between helping his leader and bolting for the gate.
Dravyn’s next gambit was subtler.
With the bandits destabilized, he traced illusions in the air that made the heavy front gate appear to slam down and jam in place. To anyone outside, the trading post now looked sealed; to those inside, the yard felt suddenly like a sprung trap. Panic flickered in the raiders’ eyes as they glanced toward what they thought was their only exit and saw it blocked.
The second bandit, stubborn and half-cooked, kept stabbing at Grotdor out of sheer spite, landing only glancing wounds. The fourth bandit shifted his aim to different targets, but his arrows continued to miss, nerves fraying. Grotdor answered with more bursts of fire, finally roasting the second bandit to the edge of death before turning smaller blasts into a harrying barrage along the illusory gate, punishing any bandit who tried to reach it. Elroy engaged Happs directly, his sword and shield working in practiced tandem to keep the bandit leader penned in the kill zone and away from horses or imagined escape routes.
Rust, biding his time, felt the battle tilt.
When Happs, bloodied and frantic, dropped his bow to lunge at Grotdor in a desperate attempt to shove him away from the gate, he overextended. The grab failed; his dagger swipe did nothing to change his fortune. In that instant of exposure, Rust stepped out of concealment and unleashed the Needle Darts he had been quietly preparing.
Dozens of shimmering needles of life magic streaked toward Happs, stitching through his body in brutal, cinematic slow motion. The bandit leader staggered, dropped to his knees under the force of each impact, and finally crashed to the dirt, riddled with spectral darts. The image hung in the air like an admonition: this is what happens when injustice overreaches.
Dravyn maintained the illusion of the shut gate a little longer, scanning for further threats. The third bandit, watching his leader die and the last of his comrades fall, made a final, panicked attack that failed to land. Grotdor answered with another elemental blast, nearly finishing him. Elroy held his defensive line near Oleg’s door, ready to catch any last desperate charge that might threaten the innocent.
Perry, who had spent much of the battle reading trajectories and tactics, moved at last.
He took in fourth bandit—now alone, shaking, and still stubborn enough to press an attack on Grotdor—and calculated the odds, confirmed the likely reactions, and fired. The bolt punched through the bandit’s ear and into his brain, dropping him into a heap of horse manure beside the wagon. The crack of skull against cart and the ignominious slump into filth were, in their way, as instructive as any sermon.
With the last bandit’s death, the courtyard fell quiet save for the crackle of dying embers and the nervous snorts of horses. The illusory gate still looked barred, but the heroes knew the way out was clear—for them, if not for those who had come to profit from fear.
Oleg and Svetlana emerged shaken but unharmed.
The work that followed was grisly but necessary. Bodies had to be moved or buried, pigs fed or spared, arms and armor stripped and sorted. Oleg, practical to the bone, suggested that pigs would take care of some of the remains if given the chance, but he warned them that until the Stag Lord’s wider operation was broken, more bandits would eventually come sniffing after vanished crews.
Perry catalogued the loot—leather armor, shortbows, daggers, Happs’ finer gear—before trading some of it back to Oleg along with earlier spoils like a bearskin. In return, the party acquired coin and supplies: a hooded lantern for Grotdor, the better to stalk enemies under cover of darkness; a snare kit that Elroy eyed with thoughts of future kill zones and traps along forest trails.
They took stock of themselves, too.
The day’s work—severing a shakedown route at Bokken’s ford, securing a prisoner in Nedri, surviving the deadly misjudgment of a one-legged hunter, and now defending Oleg’s Trading Post—had hardened them. They could feel the subtle shift in their own capabilities, the way instincts had sharpened and tactics had proven themselves. In the language of sages and rulebooks, they had advanced. In the language of the Stolen Lands, they had simply survived long enough to become more dangerous.
Oleg’s Trading Post stood now as more than a waypoint. It was a home base, a place where soup simmered and plans could be drawn, where a hermit might one day come to trade without fear and where a former bandit might learn to plant radishes instead of fear. Their reputation as principled defenders was beginning to crystallize. From here, the trail led south and west into the Narlmarches, toward the Thorn River bandits’ lairs and, beyond them, the stag-crowned shadow ruling these lands.
The Stolen Lands were still wild, still cruel—but at Bokken’s ford, on a lonely road, and inside a humble trading post, someone had finally said no and made it stick.