Lord Baltimore emerges from the tannery, and breathes in deep. The large, circular nostrils of his pug nose remain redolant with the odors of the tannery, and it will cling to the bristles of his fur for some time.
He does not look around for the gnome, but instead smiles at the human constabulary leaning against a wall awaiting his return. "We may continue," Lord Baltimore smiles, as if all these footsoldiers wanted was to serve as his escort.
Lord Baltimore strolls towards the city gate. At one point a woman screamed at the sight of him -- these things do happen, and they cannot be helped -- but the incident was a minor one, and was soon forgotten.
At the city gate, it is Lord Baltimore's turn to wait. He is led outside the city gate where he finds a stick and begins absentmindedly sketching images in the dust. The guards are not to be seen, and Lord Baltimore wonders if perhaps there won't be an escort through the valley after all. Still, he can wait, and as he waits he begins to sing.
You won't have heard a hobgoblin sing before, I expect, unless you have met one in battle. When they fight, they often chant their orders to each other in a metrical recitative, part of an oral tradition that spans back centuries, but which translates awkwardly into Common, and has a limited vocabulary. It is a mixture of growls and incomprehensible words to the human ear, and can terrify those who hear it, leaving any survivors with a lingering memory. Raw recruits who survive an encounter of goblinoids often find themselves marching in step to a half-remembered tune of their enemy.
This is not how Lord Baltimore sang, though to a trained ear it is clear that he is familiar with the hobgoblin oral tradition of Battlesong, in fact he is a master. The song he sings now though uses the same deep resonances but is in Common, fully comprehensible and disarming in its melodic simplicity. His syncopation mirrors the skip of the heart of the song's heroine as she first sees her true love; his modulation pounds in the chest of his listeners as her heart breaks when he betrays her; the barked growls, which betray the singer's origins, echo with the emptiness she feels as she wanders the shore, turning in to the waves, and continuing to walk.