Chapter 3: To Crownhold
The morning after the road fight, the six walk to Crownhold and split the city between them, looking for a temple no one has heard of.
Chapter 3: To Crownhold
The morning after the road fight, six strangers shared a single problem and no clear way through it. The boarman lay dead, his raiders with him, and the map they had taken pointed south toward the Ashlands — but the thing Dalfon had asked them to find, the temple bound to the green ring, was still nowhere. What they had was Squam's half-remembered lore of six temples raised in the wake of the Sundering, and a city on the horizon. It would have to do.
Squam was the first to set the bones of it down. His mentor Gerald had spoken, years ago, of six connected temples scattered across the Vale, and what Squam could piece together of their age and stonework placed them firmly after the Sundering rather than within the lost music of the Age of Song. One of those temples, Dalfon had told them, lay somewhere in or near Crownhold itself. Whether they would know it when they saw it was another matter, for Crownhold holds many temples, and none of the ordinary ones are what they sought.
Tar was already turning a different key. He knew Crownhold's lower city better than most, and he had names for what he knew — but the name that mattered most, Valerius Vane, was not a name to spend lightly. The Ledger settles his debts on his own terms, and Tar was not yet ready to owe him this. Two lesser contacts surfaced in Valerius's place: Vossard, a merchant who dealt in goods and in the quieter sort of information that travels alongside them; and Sister Quessarine, who tended a small temple of Nikros in one of the poorer quarters of the city. Alara, characteristically, declined to weight the choice. She pressed only that a choice be made.
They walked to Crownhold together, slept a night on the road, and reached the gates by midday. They agreed to meet at Vossard's shop in the central marketplace — the Three Roads, named both for the three highways out of the city and for the bargains that move along them — and then they split.
At the Guardhouse
Darian and Alara went to the guardhouse. The captain on duty — a man named Mattis Holfast, though he did not say so and they did not ask — was someone who had long ago decided this was the job, and the job was the job. He listened to Darian's account without theatre. The numbers and the symbol both registered. He had seen the mark before, carried into the city by travellers, and the Concordate upstairs had been jumpy about it for months. "The big guys upstairs," he said, "think there's something out there. Maybe this is it. Just sounds a bit like paranoia to me, but I've not been out there."
In twelve years on the gate he had not seen this consistency of report — six months of low, steady rumour, more talk than evidence, but enough talk that the Concordate was thickening the walls. He himself thought most of it was likely nothing. He noted, however, that some of the rumours bent back toward the Fingers, and that those who lived in the shadow of the Fingers, in his words, "get a bit weird." If they wanted to learn more, the Foaming Head down by the docks would serve. "I probably shouldn't say this," he added, "but…"
At the Office of the Concordate
Squam, meanwhile, went to the library — or rather to the office that stands between any reasonable scholar and it. The Great Library lies within the central complex of the Concordate, ringed by the older, bone-pale architecture of the Age of Song and by guards who do not welcome casual enquiry. The keeper of the door, a memonek named Vesarin, deflected him courteously toward one Cathrynna Veneresc — an upper-class official with the dry wit of someone who has spent years processing forms beneath her station, and chosen mockery as her revenge. "You'll have to fill out some forms," she told him, smiling thinly, "and then they can be reviewed, and maybe you'll be allowed to visit in time. Isn't it just delightful?"
She was prepared, in principle, to set Squam on a process measured in months. Squam, prompted by the voice in his head that he has come to think of as Gerald, offered a different name in answer: Vornathex Aldra'vhen. The name landed. Her manner shifted — not into warmth, but into attention. She still made him fill out the form. She also offered to see what could be done by tomorrow. Squam, by way of thanks, used a little quiet magic to help her with the rest of her paperwork, and only after he was gone did she realise it. He left her chasing a pen she had not started.
At the Temple of Nikros
Tar, Magmaw, and Barney went to the temple of Nikros. The small church was easy to find once they marked the symbol carved on its side — the same red sign the raiders had worn on the road. Within, Sister Quessarine received them without surprise: a composed high elf in late middle life, robed in dark grey and bronze, soft of voice, given to deliberate pauses. "Sometimes," she said, "to seek what there is to know about life requires seeking everything. Including death. Death is sacred, and beautiful."
She knew herself to be in a city where her god is unfashionable, and she spoke to all three of them — blood-marked, goblin, and devil — without flinching at any. Tar's questions about the raiders she answered honestly: she did not know them, had no part in them, and "the gods do not speak to us. We know their power. We all worship them in our different ways." She admitted that something had stirred in the threadlight, something she had been unable to read. Watching her closely, Tar caught beneath the composure a careful, disciplined interest in the possibility that war and death might be moving again in Nikros's name. She was too long in her service to welcome it openly.
When the talk turned to the temples — old, dating from just after the Sundering, six in number — something settled in her expression. She had heard of only one such temple, not six, but what she had heard fit. It was called, in the older accounts, the Temple of the Mind, a place said to touch the dream. She had always understood it to lie somewhere up in the Fingers, where the maps thin and most travellers stop going. She knew no more than that. She offered her prayers, her ear to the ground, and the unspoken understanding that they would be welcome back.
In leaving, Tar made an offering, and at his quiet insistence Magmaw made one too — rather larger than the goblin would have chosen on his own.
A Detour, and the Three Roads
The three turned then toward the central marketplace, but only Tar arrived when he meant to. Magmaw and Barney were drawn aside by a forge whose master — a dragonkin smith named Pemberforth Brandal'vhen — proved to be a man with an experimental streak and an appetite for heat he had not yet found a way to reach. Magmaw, who has views on heat, found in Pemberforth a willing audience for both his bragging and his real capability. They parted on the understanding that the goblin and the berserker could return for whatever Pemberforth made of the work; new weapons, if they were wanted.
Tar reached the Three Roads alone and put the time to use. Vossard greeted him as Vossard greets anyone — assuming business, interested in no other framing of the conversation. "As always," he said, "if you have the money or want the money, we can come to a deal." Tar laid out what he had. Vossard offered two roads in return. The first was the slower and the cheaper: he would put his fingers in the right places and surface what could be surfaced about the temples, paid in coin Tar could still scrape together. The second was more direct: an arrangement with one of Vossard's contacts inside the library to bring a specific book out for a limited time. That one would not be paid in coin. It would be paid in a favour, and the favour, Vossard implied without saying, would not be a clean one. Tar did not commit. Vossard, who is not a man easily hurried, agreed to wait.
The Foaming Head
Darian and Alara, by the captain's nudge, found the Foaming Head where it sits low against the docks, in a cut of stone the city has politely forgotten. The dwarf behind the bar — Dag Stiffpint, broad and one-eyed and the kind of host who tells you the rules of his establishment before he tells you his name — was glad of the company. "We only have two rules," he announced, before they had quite reached the bar. "The first rule is there are no rules. The second rule is don't damage the building. Seriously. Don't damage the building."
Within those, he saw most of what passed through his door, and was willing enough to speak of it. "I'm not going to rat someone out to you," he told them plainly. "But this is where you want to be if you want to hear things. What I do here, I'll tell you quite freely. That's why people come." The boarman they had killed, he said, went by Krojek, and was something of a name among the raiders. That he already knew of the killing was less a wonder than a measure of how quickly news moves through a place like the Foaming Head. He would not point out anyone in the room who wore the mark, but he confirmed that such people came and went. When Alara pressed for someone they might speak to, Dag offered a name: Karzhal Ashborn, an orc who took his Ashlands lineage seriously and was known to deal with the Wode folk. Not a raider himself, in Dag's reckoning. But adjacent. He could send word, if word was wanted.
While Dag talked, Darian was watching the room. Most of the patrons were doing what patrons of the Foaming Head do — pretending not to look at one another. One was doing it badly. A figure half-hidden behind a pillar in the opposite corner had been paying more attention than the room's etiquette allowed, and the small crystalline glint of riftborn eyes, caught for an instant as they turned away, was what gave them away. Darian filed it and did not act.
By Dusk
By the time evening drew down over Crownhold, the threads had begun to draw together. The captain had pointed to the Fingers. Sister Quessarine had pointed to the Fingers and given the temple a name. Squam had a foothold in the library for tomorrow. Tar had two offers from Vossard, neither of them free. Magmaw had a smith, Barney had the promise of a new edge, and Alara had the name of an orc who might know more of the people they had killed.
It was not yet a plan. But none of it pointed in different directions.