Post by Sire Halfblack on Nov 23, 2014 19:04:10 GMT
Harvest IM 1013
Peat gave off warmth but it wasn’t quite as cheering as a good fire. But it was cold, and if Selgard could chance to make his body less so then just as he rarely steeled himself not to taste good food he was this night sat with two others about their fire. There were actually two fires very finely divided, for only a short distance away, grumpy and not happy at the company, a dwarf muttered to himself and occasionally threw a stone at his donkey. Dug was a prospector and he hadn’t become a prospector to enjoy the company; indeed to suffer any company, but Garlik had arrived having seen the glow and Dug had carefully pushed the peat into two separate heaps in order that he could pretend Garlik wasn’t there. Or Selgard, who had arrived with Garlik having met the man at a crossroads a mile back shortly before nightfall. It said it all Selgard thought, that the prospector burned mud. Mud was more valuable than gold in many places out here. Prospectors didn’t really care for what they found – it was just an excuse to live away from others.
“Of course, all sorts. Why, time on your hands?”
Selgard assured Garlik that he was a very busy man. Garlik didn’t believe that for a moment. It was pretty clear to Garlik that Selgard was actually exactly the sort to kill a man for a handful of used hundreds. He had suggested as much to Selgard, who had insisted he only did anything of the sort if god told him to. Or when pressed, when paid to do so. But for a higher cause, which only made Garlik grin more broadly still. “Thing is,” said Garlik, “the thing is, is why is that in the Empire all you heroes do is go around killing anyone with initiative?”
“We don’t,” protested Selgard. “Otherwise we’d never go to Eartholme at all.”
“Gah,” Garlik scoffed, “you lot spend your time finding out what might be different, what might change anything, and then kill it. You’re obsessed, it’s like all myth and legend stops with you lot. When was the last time you and your mob stopped looking at stuff to stop and tried to do something you’ve thought of yourselves?”
“We do that all the time.”
“So what are you doing here...”
“Not telling,” said Selgard with a faint sniff. “Although if you do know of any potential problems out here in the rural lands?” he asked again.
Garlik burst into laughter to the glowering sneer of Dug. The dwarf turned his back on the pair of them. “Ahhhhh, I knew it! Potential problems! What happened to those being adventure?” Garlik wanted to know. “You mean, is there anything I can stab up once I get all my mates together?”
“We... well, okay, we do stab them, but only because it’s a cultural thing. And we pray very hard and my god tells me I was right to.”
“Your god around here?”
Selgard hoped not. He didn’t live in Deci for Talthar priests to find him whenever they wanted. They’d eat him out of house and home. He said, “So you don’t know anything then?”
Garlik shrugged, actually he did.
*
They had been called to the Spire. Actually in some cases escorted. The Lords Majius Talath and Davian stood by the doors without actually preventing anyone from leaving. Gathered beneath the many pointed crown on the wall the nobles of Deci waited for what was to come. They had been expecting this of course, some had even convinced themselves that this day would never would. The men in tight hose and heavy tunics, the women in flaring skirts and sculpted bodice, all still wore their best which meant black, exquisitely tailored, and with little adornment.
King Troy the Faceless watched them all. At his side, shorter and with a determined look upon her face was Queen Berina. Some there knew that earlier in the year she had spent some weeks in Keys but otherwise her movements had been less well known.
In truth Troy was unsure if he was happy or not. Having sought the advice of his wife he was now bound to honour it. He had spoken at length about the need to find one worthy, or perhaps someone amongst the blood that might be asked if...
...But no. He was damn well the King and he would absolutely act like one. And to her mind it had been about time. Troy was not so weak as to shoot a glance at Berina but he felt something hard and staring and frankly it was Maisel or him. And when it came to Deci and if such questions were ever asked it was never going to be him.
“Laisel Hail, step forward...” this from Talath, who stood behind the gathering therefore had a position of authority in Deci.
Earl Hail’s glance at Troy turned positively poisonous.
“Laisel Hail,” this from within the silver mask of the King, “You are called here to answer to charges of...” he coughed, “being a stuck up pregnant dog that has, it has been strongly suggested, been inferring in certain circles, that Queen Berina looks fat?”
Laisel if nothing else was a Deci noble to her shrivelled heart and pointed chin. She said nothing, showed no expression.
“I warn you Majius,” this from her uncle.
“Silence,” roared Davian. “The King has yet to stop being the King!”
Everywhere across the hall dozens of men and women relaxed ever so slightly.
“It displeases the King,” said Troy in the third person, as Berina had instructed, “For such lies to be told. Does anyone here deny that Queen Berina is the palest? That she looks positively sickly, yet is possessed of that alluring beauty that only the true Blood of Deci may claim? Or that the King has the finest leg, a stomach like a washboard, and the figure of a sculpted god”
They didn’t deny it. They didn’t anything it. Strictly speaking the Great Alg was a god, sort of, and there was probably a statue to him in Alguz. And there were doubtless industrial washboards in Deci. They didn’t know. Actually, most didn’t know what a washboard was. They didn’t actually care one way or the other; it wasn’t them that was getting it. Troy didn’t do this sort of thing very often, or even much at all, so once in a rare while it was sort of expected. He couldn’t act in such a way to Earl Hail so he was clearly being irritating with a slur on his House.
Splendid.
“Liasel Hail, you will go from this place to Bildteve and there will serve as the ambassador of the city to a Prince. Marriage is such a funny word and means many things. In this instance it means marriage,” he refrained from adding ‘pregnant dog’ as his wife had wanted. “Now toodle along, there’s a good girl.”
*
It was very nice cake and the very best tea. The first because he was the big cheese in Cheapside and there were always people leaving little gifts for him and the second because he had an excellent source amongst the beggars. You could say what you liked about the Kallah of Deci; but you couldn’t beat the tea. Came with the City Spirit, Sire Berry supposed. And thinking the last he quickly raised his hat respectfully before returning to the princess.
Ma Berry was better at this sort of thing. Trundleberry was a goblin more skilled than almost anyone that walked beneath the skies of Primus but when all was said and done he was a goblin whose mates were rats and they all hung out together in a dagger shop. They didn’t tend to talk to little girls much, because people would just assume the absolute worst about them. And that wouldn’t do because Sire Berry had a very decent reputation in Cheapside and he’d lose a Halfblack down a big hole before he let that get tarnished.
“Go on, dear,” Ma Berry was a witch. She normally cackled, brewed mischief, and cursed the great and mighty. But somewhere not so very deep she was still an old lady, and a lot of old ladies were turned into grandmothers by certain children.
Children like the princess. Who having burst into tears days ago was only just stopping now as she ate cake iced snotty with her blubbing.
She wasn’t a rat, she certainly wasn’t a goblin. Her name was Miz and though she’d always wanted to be a princess she hadn’t liked being one at all. She had grown up on a farm in the badlands, one of the ash farms that seemed to a hut on stilts with nets that caught at the ash and dirt clouds that blew about the more remote parts of the countryside to filter out good earth to sell, and sometimes even what else had been caught in the clouds. But ever since the silver roads had been laid by the great golden god her family, never wealthy, had become destitute. That was how Ma Berry put it (‘poor as dog piss’ wasn’t seemly for girls when Ma Berry had come over all grandmotherly).
“Did yer get caught by mean and nasty goblins?” Sire Berry wanted to know. He tried to smile warmly but he knew it was all teeth and tusks from the sort of mouth that could close over a big skull. He patted his coat and found some butter candies he couldn’t remember having been there. She took one and sucked for some time before able to continue.
No, her family had been forced to wander but there wasn’t a way to live and so her papa had sold her to the goblins. They had wanted a princess, because goblins without a princess were just a big bag of bitter nothings, and there used be a princess; they were all pretty sure of that at least. Trundleberry being a city goblin didn’t know much about that. He had exchanged being hungry, stupid, and dead for things like shoes. But the tribe had to have a princess so that it was a proper tribe like all goblins used to be, and so she had been their princess. They hadn’t actually been horrid to her, but she had lived in a dark cave. Sometimes they came and gave her rocks, she didn’t know why.
Sire Berry nodded, stood up, and seeing he was only getting in the way sloped off to fetch the lads for a night at the tavern.
*
“Opportunities, Master...”
It was never a bright day in Deci but the lamps were burning high which was near enough to matter. Here in their latest rooms they stood high above much of the Invisible, although therefore slap in the thick of the poison smog and so the view was one turned inward, “Sneertwice?”
“Opportunities,” the scribe chided his employer. “There is no trouble on the way, only further opportunity that you have as yet failed to make use of.”
Anath brightened, although also a little chastened. The grull was about confidence and merchants had a duty to be so also. After all the grull only meant anything if people believed it did, and in way it was far more real than hope or prayer or anything the gods might try to usurp the grull with as common currency. An egg was an egg but a grull was forever. Anath stood and bowed his head slightly to his favourite, “My apologies Sneertwice, I was forgetting myself. War destroys, Merchants make. Glory was tomorrow’s campfire story but an institution has fireplaces. So then, to work!”
*
The King was in the sort of mood that only came after pleasing the Queen very much. He sat at a desk made from the varnished face of an ent with scrolls spread about him held down with inkwells, knives, and small bottles of treacly poison. He hummed to himself. There were quite a lot of scrolls and he was a King so he’d never get through them all. He persevered until by the sound it was three screams-a-clock.
“Well,” he looked up from his work, “The box?”
Yeral Jade had a tiny shop in the King’s Bazaar. Since it was the King’s Bazaar the bazaar came where the King happened to be. There wasn’t a great deal of trade to be had, but what there was tended to be princely in the purse. Jade explained the general purpose of the box before adding, “And if opened anywhere but here then it will also if that fails devour the soul of an innocent.”
Troy nodded, “And if it is opened here?”
“Then the same thing, King Faceless, just that it will do it on an empty stomach.”
*
The Guilds had a number of Masters once typically beyond the third tier, where before such a degree thay had but one and he the authority there. The miners having so many guilds had many masters, and the nature of what they did so often related to greed they had a number of Sires too. One of whom was not Carad Born. “That’s getting on for four years ago now,” he sighed at the memory. He had had such plans, such ideas. But the Guild didn’t much like new ideas - they liked mining and counting, and counting miners, of which there were many. Not that all of them actually mined so much as worked the hundred-and-one jobs that weren’t directly to do with being underground – of which ninety-six were in the city. The bigger the guild the more layers of tradition it had and more hide-bound it became. The more of a guild there was the better they liked it to stay the same. Carad Born was still a Guildsman but he was a long way now from even Master status.
“Maybe I can have a word?” offered Jander.
“Oh golden hell, no – it’s bad enough now,” Born shook his head fiercely. Jander was new and shining and did magic and primal nonsense. As a quasi-deity they were fine with him. As a faith he was absolutely the very chap. Walking around and having opinions was something quite different altogether, “That and your fortress of miscreants, black-ballers, and backsliders that you have. Take it from me they absolutely revere you as long as they don’t have to see you. They have priests you know that could, despite you being... a bit... pointy-headed... commune and discern answers to their questions.”
That must be useful, Jander thought. He had a few questions of his own and wondered if he get a priest to find out the answers from him some time. But what he said was, “I don’t remember them doing that?”
“Well, no. They don’t actually do it. This is Deci. It’s generally a bad idea to draw the attention of a god. It might be Argoth.”
“I’m not sure Argoth is actually...”
Born hushed Jander; Argoth might hear. To change the subject he dragged from a tube great rolls of half scribbled plans, often on the same sheet of parchment. He pointed to this and that, “Using water,” he said, “you know, for mines.”
Jander wasn’t convinced, “Generally we try and get the water out of the mines.”
“Seed ore,” Born was not to be put off. “It grows as we all know, and...”
Jander coughed loudly, thumping the table with his hand. Some things were for Guild only - or Forgeholm, and speaking of which...
*
Nial Rath was not a man that had been well born to the House. His father, a second cousin to the last Lord, had been an idiot too closely bred in his ancestry but even an idiot can sire a child, and in his case with some of the thin Blood from Ickybiggle. His mother had died with that city and with his father drooling into his chins of a day and his mother ill-regarded despite it being the House Lord’s will to get some fresh blood into that particular line he was not a man liable to be named heir. That was a shame because Nial Rath was nothing like his father at all.
Not well supported Nial had been forced into trade, and for a gentleman in Deci there was but one, and in which he had risen swiftly in the Guild because ill-aspected as he might be in the House then in the Guilds his blood was golden. Not many people knew about Nial’s blood and line, though it was hardly a secret as the Guild made much of it.
*
There was a banner twice the size of the guildhall doors and growing by the minute. It was not a banner to wave, no one could have done that, but to drape over something very big – like a... guildhall, just as an example.
There was very little light in the hall and most of it was where sat in the middle of the flag (whilst about them others stitched cloaks and surcoats together) a number of smaller guildsmen were painting. They were painting a terrified face being yanked from the neck by enormous hands. The guildsmen were small, their hands were big.
“Yer heard den?” said the Black Hat.
The problem was not how to get their support; it was how to stop them taking matters into their own hands. And they had very big hands. The Throttlers were gobbal mad and there wasn’t even a team yet. They weren’t going to be part of a team (or not most of them at least). They were going to be a big bag full of nasty amongst the mob. Because where gobbal was concerned it was the mob that mattered.
Oh, of course the play was what they came to watch, mostly. But every decision, every validation, every goblin gotten into whatever hole or house it had to be – it was the mob’s view that counted. Sire Berry appreciated that. He had been a fair old ball in his time but that had been amateur gobbal, a kick about, a bit of fun. He had even then had plans whilst being the ball, but there was a definite sense in here that things were going to get a lot more important.
Well, as important as they could get considering that only Sellaville so far looked likely to field a team. That was on the one hand a shame because it might get a bit... well, samey. Then on the other not so perhaps because Ma Berry had had a dream, and in that dream Primus had been watching gobbal.
Final Dawn matches looked like they might get to be... important.
Sire Berry saw a bin full of scarves and another of enormous, cheaply made hats. They were all, of course, black. Sire Berry hoped Anath was paying attention else come match day being Halfblack was going to get him half a kicking.
*
They often had business in the Spire. The guards there in their serpent cast armour straightened a little as they left but did not look at them. Sisters, they might have been as old as the city for they walked slowly, bent, but without assistance. Thin as a knife for threading mail they paused at the statue - the statue that faced the Spire. Their puckered mouths tightened yet further. There was rarely a crowd outside the Spire and this day was no different yet when they moved away people did not move out of their path so much as they had never intended to be in it at all.
*
Barrels of nails half empty, rope in coils and crates of hooks and pulleys, mattocks and a hundred other practical things stood in heaps about the Thorns. Felled trees were being trimmed by the line staked out for the wall where those with shovels dug down and heaped up. Davian stood where he could see down into the saw pit where two big lads at either end worked planks from the logs and it looked to be hot, hard and filthy work. The area being enclosed where they all lived was a bustle. Noisy with chatter, orders and a lot of singing brought up a Majius Davian was glad he had never had to do such toil but they all seemed remarkably happy at it. The work was being done at the right time since already the treetops were showing the first of the frost. Nothing was wasted. The trimmings went to woodpiles; the branches were cut for kindling. Flints sieved from the dug ground were piled in sacks away from the work. It was not a warm day but few more above the waist than a shirt, and that if only for modesty. He had tried to help three times but been refused – he was the lord, it wouldn’t have been right.
Yesterday he had spoken to Grudamagh and today he would do the same. He had brought gifts, for the dragon had a very poor sort of hoard and to Davian’s mind as that increased so would... he rubbed his chin, the Deci nobility did not marry the land like they did elsewhere but he thought something of the same might be applied where there was a dragon, and a lord, and a hoard.
Traders had been and gone from the arrangement Davian had made in the city, not carters he had noted. And there were peddlers here and there having sniffed out that there was a market this month here for bits of ribbon, for razors, boot heels and all the little things they carried and which made life that little better for the likes of the commoners here. And it did them best to have a few grulls to spend on such things themselves rather than as some gift in a box from the lord. And one of those peddlers wanted to speak with Davian, so he went to where the man waited to talk as they walked to a dragon.
*
To move the logs they used logs, because wheels were an end product and they didn’t want to run foul of some Guild to whom the making of such might be holy. Besides which, why pay someone for an end product made from the raw material that you had already supplied? Logically the laws of nature should have meant that the trunks moved slowly, but nature didn’t really have any laws and in any case not many were around in the badlands of Deci liable to enforce them.
Each trimmed trunk was a good two-spell lengths long and broad as Jander’s outstretched arms as he discovered when with his boots scrambling for purchase sparks flew from his iron trimmed heels as he brought the whole noisy load to a halt. Heads appeared above, a dozen at least before vanishing again to have a good talk about what they’d seen. There was no saying what might have pursued them from... well, the place where trees came from. Given the gold and the ears and the sword the stout figure of Jander might well have been it.
One head reappeared; it had a bandage on it. They had had a bad time since jacking the wood. Rangers so incensed at those wanting the wood had fired at them with long, thin shafts of it. A lot of them had died, or been left up a tree whilst Bogwipe had led the survivors away. Not without a little profit mind you since they... well, they weren’t artisans. “We’re not artisans,” he said loudly.
“What are you then?” Jander wanted to know.
More whispers, “Thieves? Killers! Aye, so... watch it.”
Jander understood Guilds and knew what they did to artisans, and especially in Deci. Being a thief or a murderer carried much less risk on being punished than working a craft without the orderly traditions of the Empire. Or Deci here, which was of course a part of the Empire.
Bogwipe jumped down. He moved away for the stacked logs so that Jander followed him. When the colossal load once more started to rumble by with what certainly looked to be suspiciously... well, not artisan talent. Artisans worked with their hands. They made buildings that didn’t fall down if the city stopped paying them. No wonder the Guilds hated them. Bogwipe drew a sword.
Jander took it off him, threw it in the air so that it spun and with Bogwipe staring at it in horror the Sunstar kicked him in the stomach. The logs were twenty yards away now and accelerating to a quick walk. If Jander left it a day or two he’d never catch them. Bogwipe however did, or rather his sword, though bent double it had been quite the trick.
“Look mate, those are my lads, my mates, and you and your elf ranger tricks aren’t going to get by me.”
“They will,” said Jander who took the sword back again. It was a dreadful thing so he returned it only after a quick polish. “I think,” after a reasonable pause, “that you and I should have a little chat.”
*
The first flake of the snow settled on sailcloth and the slate of roofs. Cloaks and crocks of broth were fetched up the green wood of ladders to those that stood watching outwards from the new wall. Wood was piled against the walls of the huts and cottages so that by morning it would be hidden. It was the last night of harvest well to the north of Deci and goats had been slaughtered, both as offering to the old, wild gods of tree and mountain and to fill pot and platter. Birch wine and spirit were cracked open to celebrate as the people now snug and together sang their songs and raised a cup to lord and dragon.
By Alan Morgan