Unknown Date
63: Blood up to here, and no change of clothes.
To Nevond Nevned, then, and away from Cur’ruth for possibly the last time. The Liberators are somber and quiet—their home of the last nine months has been destroyed, their bodies looted, and their attackers are unknown and at large.
The Dorrakan Irregular Light Infantry are Iuz’ most elite, most adaptable and most flexible fighting forces. Renowned throughout the Marklands for their daring and ability to project remarkable levels of force even while operating in small bands, the Irregulars are entrusted only with the most crucial military missions.
Like waiting for days to spring a scene-of-the-crime ambush on the Liberators of Tenh.
The first volley of arrows is fired without a word being spoken, or any noise betraying their position. The Liberators’ spellcasters are pelted with arrows, but Prisantha and Gwendolyn’s
stoneskin spells protect them from harm. That leaves only Jespo Crim as an eligible wizardly target, and the second volley is all aimed in his direction. Jespo is hit twice, then three more times, then once again as an insult, and the anemic conjurer slumps to the ground dead, before he even manages to look surprised.
Regda bellows a primal cry, and nocks an arrow to her own bow. She scans the battlefield and finds six archers visible from behind partial cover amongst the rubble of Cur’ruth. She shoots one in the stomach and crotch. “For Jespo!” she shouts.
One of the crouching orcs stands and points a gauntleted hand at her, and Regda is
held mid-cry. A second spellcaster emerges from behind cover, this one unarmored and adorned with the ritual fetishes of the Old One’s shamanic worship. This orc raises his hands in supplication, and
summons a massive demon-dog in the Liberator’s midst. The thing is the size of a pony, and has a mane of spiky razor-sharp bristles framing its snarling face. It seizes Prisantha in its mouth, and begins to worry her back and forth. While its teeth cannot penetrate her
stoneskin, it manages to distract and trouble her enough to prevent her from casting spells.
Heydricus quickly slides his feet and interposes himself between Pris and the beast, levering it off of her with the sharp edge of his sword. As the dog releases its hold to focus on this new enemy, Heydricus slices its fore-half into three parts with two strokes of his single double-edged sword. Destroyed, the howler fades into mist.
Prisantha rewards his chivalry by casting a quickened
mirror image followed by a
horrid wilting; the second spell sucks the moisture from all of the visible orcish archers and their sorcerer, provoking startled gasps and pig-like grunts from her foes. Dabus follows this with a
blade barrier that sends bright-red gobbets of green-skinned flesh flying into the air, and creates a whirling elipse of conjured steel that prevents the orcish skirmishers from advancing on the Liberator’s position. The shamanic summoner is killed outright, and if the flying heads are any indication, a pair of the archers die as well.
A thick and sonorous droning begins from the orcish position, and several of the characters are forced to fight off waves of a sudden drowsiness that accompanies the sound. A disgusting, ten-foot-long human-headed fly emerges from behind a partly-collapsed retaining wall, and begins making the flight across the battlefield in short hops, taking care to avoid the
blade barrier. Disturbingly long fore-limbs end at extra-jointed human hands, and it appears to be preparing a spell as it wings down toward the Liberators.
Gwendolyn is quicker, however, and she
holds the thing before it can realize its (no doubt) wicked intentions, and it crashes at Prisantha’s feet. Lucius begins a crouching, concealed jog through the rubble of the battlefield, making his way toward the armored caster. As he approaches, the fellow emerges from his cover,
summons another howler into the party’s ranks, and makes a circular gesture with his free hand. At this signal, the entire group of orcs (including a half-dozen hidden skirmishers) begin to scatter into all directions. Lucius fires a single arrow into the cleric’s leg, ensuring that he will run neither far, nor fast.
“You can bitch about that to Iuz when you see him next,“ Lucius mutters to himself, as he stalks the orc.
Pris, meanwhile, has lost interest in the fight, and begun to worry about her family and their safety. Her mind drifts to her grandparents, and then naturally, to Anon. “
Should I be surprised that I’m worried?” she wonders to herself. “
I am fond of Anon—after all, he was my first. ”
“
What? ” Heydricus thinks back over the
telepathic bond.
“
Shut the f-ck up, and fight, wizard! ” Lucius replies.
“
Did everyone hear that? ” Prisantha thinks, aghast. Gwendolyn pats her arm and shares a sorrowful nod.
Lucius can think very loudly, as it happens. “
What part of ‘shut the f-ck up’ don’t you understand—they’re escaping! ”
Heydricus simply must be imagining things . . . yes, imagining. He didn’t hear that. Battlefield hallucinations. Surely it happens all the time.
With this much more comfortable belief-poultice in place over the road-rash of reality, he leaps at the howler next to Gewndolyn and begins demolishing it with a massive display of overkill. He strikes the fading corpse of the thing enough times to ensure that the howler’s mother, its grandmother, and any of its grandmother’s bingo-buddies will all feel the pain.
Prisantha, blushing bright red from her follicles to her toenails, pretends to be suddenly startled by the
held chasmae next to her, and attempts to give it the coup-de-grace with her decorative waist-knife. The process is like cutting into an overdone roast with a sharpened twig, but she applies herself with a tenacity born of embarrassment; by the time Lucius, Heydricus, Gwendolyn and Dabus have killed the cleric and hunted down another quartet of fleeing orcs, Prisantha is up to her elbows in thick, demonic fly-juice, and is watching the struggling thing die. The chasmae is apparently not
summoned, as its corpse, and its blood remain material even after its wings stop their feeble buzzing.
Dabus places his hands on Jespo, and softly asks Tritherion to make clear to his soul the path back to his perfectly
healed and restored physical form. Redga watches this process with a sort of slack-jawed wonder, and afterwards shakes Dabus’ hand so hard his shoulder nearly dislocates.
Heydricus is busying himself with looting the orcish dead, and Gwendolyn is trying to restore her hair to some semblance of togetherness after her protracted
flying chase. Thus, Lucius is left alone with Prisantha, as he kneels down next to her in front of the dead chasme.
Lucius regards the gruesome scene with an admiring smile. “I think I was wrong about you, and I’m the type who admits things like that.” He puts a friendly arm around the enchantress. “You’ve got your sh-t together, I think, but you suck at knife-fighting. If you’re going to kill a helpless victim, you should think about using your knife in a butcher’s grip, like so. Matter of fact, that knife is worthless—take one of mine.”
Prisantha smiles back, vainly trying to put a stray lock of her hair in place with the back of a gore-stained hand. She accepts Lucius’ knife and his lesson with equal grace; perhaps it is true what they say in Baator—“Abyssal blood mends all quarrels.”
-----
The party finishes its search of Cur’ruth without further incident or discovery. They
teleport to the gates of Nevond Nevnend (the only part of it Prisantha has ever seen, in fact), prepared for the worst. What they find is that the town has reverted quickly to lawlessness in the absence of their Right and True Lord, and perhaps taking a page from their Bandit Kingdom’s neighbors, the largest gang in the city has moved in to the newly renovated Ducal Palace, and declared themselves In Charge.
Of course, amongst men like this, “In Charge” means, “Not Going To Share Any of the Food Stores.”
After the coup, a few uninspired and poorly-attended riots broke out, but in the end, the people of Nevond Nevnend didn’t have enough time under the rulership of Heydricus to shift their paradigm away from the horror of Iuzian rule. The overall attitude was, “Who’s the new guy? Isn’t that the old guy? You wanna break stuff? I dunno, do you?”
Unfortunately for Heydricus’ would-be successor, the Liberators do not share the populace’s apathetic point of view.
- Metagame note: It is self-evident in D&D that a 7th-level warrior with three 3rd-level sergeants and a score of 1st-level toughs fighting beside him should never try to fight seven player-characters of levels 12-18. But there it is: whoever is DMing for these bandits is an even bigger bastard than I am.
Heydricus kills the sh-t out of them.
That settled, Heydricus’ old servants emerge from their sanctuaries, and even Mialec is discovered to be alive and well, hiding within the sprawling palace grounds. Once restored to her rooms as the Ducal Steward, she gratefully fills the party in on a few facts—the date is Patchwall the 3rd, eleven days since their last living memory. Mialec says that it has only been five days since word of Heydricus’ death began to filter in from the first of the Cur’ruth Tenha to arrive in Nevond Nevnend.
Several Cur’rutha are summoned, and they relate the following story—the Liberators had scrambled out against a well-organized light infantry assault sometime around midnight on Goodmonth the 25th. The fighting was fierce, but brief, and after a cursory search revealed no further military force in the area, the population was ordered back to bed. An hour after that, the ceilings began to melt. Huge sections of the mines began to fill with roiling, bubbling mud, and the above-ground structures started to collapse.
Tired, confused, and without access to their best spells, the Liberators of Tenh scrambled out a second time to meet this new challenge, but never returned. One local saw Jespo ripped in half by “a gigantic floating eyeball, if’n you can believe that, sirs! I swear I weren’t drinkin’!”
Others say that Prisantha and Redga were seen kneeling placidly in front of a sweetly-singing woman while their companions were killed nearby.
Heydricus listens with only half of his attention. He is far more concerned with the well-being of his fledgling realm and the people he has pledged his protection to than he is with past events, no matter how relevant they might seem.
He takes Dabus with him, and marches to the town square, intending to give an impromptu speech. Lucius tips his new “boss” a wink, and disappears into the crowds ahead of the Liberator, presumably to work security, and most likely “encourage the proper response” from any less-than-enthused members of the crowd. With so much else on his mind, Heydricus lets Lucius go without a second thought, or word of reproach.
