Don't Eat the Chili

Among the ruined buildings on the edge of Vorsand, the companions met up, and by way of greeting indulged in a few minutes spirited argument about who had started which fight, and whether any of them had been a good idea, as they rode from the wreckage of the Dragon's capital.

That night, the question of what to do next cropped up. Their original plan of siezing control of Vorsand seemed beyond salvation, and the choice lay between returning to Khundrakar to sort their loot and refurbish the dwarven ruin, or to side-track to Belamir and explore the possibilites of Awakening magic for Billy the bear and some of their horses. Despite Sack's misgvings about being involved with the Elder Race again, the party finally decided to turn south for the Desolation, and Belamir.

So, the next morning, they began the long journey, passing first through Duceor and northern Antrol, ravaged by the passage of the Elvenhost during the recent war. Duceor was largely deserted, but the stolid, resilient Antrollers had already begun to revert to their traditional small sheep-farms, and much of the damage of war was being erased.

Five days from Vorsand, they rode into Thallith, greatly expanded under Varkar's rule, but now partially ruined, and home to the relatively few Antrollers preferring an urban lifestyle.

Some local authorities appeared to be in place, mainly consisting of a rearguard garrison left by Gozan during his retreat from Belamir after the breaking of the Kingmaker. To some of these, the companions broke the news of the fall of the General (without much tact), but there was little reason to linger in Thallith and they pressed on without stopping.

From Antrol they crossed into what had been Tellare, Surya's (and Mazahir's) homeland. Still under the heel of the Kin governer installed by Varkar, Tellare was almost the opposite of Antrol; organization and control were everywhere. Small villages and towns, farms and hamlets, were interspersed with forts and garrisons, and soldiers were everywhere, equipped similarly to the troops in Varkar's old armies, but with a vertical image of a mace broidered on their tunics rather than the dragon's strange rune.

On the evening of the 20th, the group broke their journey in a village called Oterto; a small cluster of houses, an inn, a shippen, a shrine to Pelor, and lurking just outside the token palisade, a grey stone tower, once the manor of the knight holding the lands, now clearly a garrison. The group dismounted in the town square, and Sigred set off the find stabling while the others investigated the inn, glancing up at the signboard of The Duck and Ferret as they entered.

Inside, they found half-a-dozen round tables scattered around the common room, occupied mainly by locals; one, near a corner, hosted exclusively soldiers in the mace-marked surcoats.

Leaning at the bar, the companions ordered ale, and chatted with the landlord, trying to get a feel for how things were. Surya tried to tell the barkeep who he really was, but the man laughed disbelievingly; "Oh, yes," he chuckled, "and I'm Varkar Barduric! Flap, flap!" and laughed again. On an obscure impulse, Sack unpacked the Sceptre Gozan had desired so much, and the landlord laughed again.

"Don't tell me, don't tell me - that's the Imperial Sceptre of the Emperor of Erlyid?" he gurgled, his good humour somehow infectious. Sack grinned and tucked it away again. They chatted to the man, digging for more information about the occupation and whether the local folk resented it. The landlord admitted that legends about the Dragonslayers, and the Last Tellaran, were all very well, "but we've got to live in the real world," he said, meaning that there was little change likely in his opinion.

Hildraft glanced back at the table of soldiers, then asked the landlord, "Why have they all got dicks on their chests?" The barkeep made frantic shushing movements; clearly this was asking for trouble. Undeterred, Hildraft looked around at the soldiers, a gleam in his eye that his friends knew well.

Sack immediately got up, and - pretending to chat to people at intervening tables - made his way across to the main door. Surya handed the landlord a big handful of gold and gems from his pouch, saying "This is for the mess..." then also walked into the centre of the room, leaving Hildraft alone at the bar. The landlord quietly lifted the trapdoor behind the bar and disappeared into the cellars. The dwarf leaned back against the counter, a warm feeling of impending aggro cheering him immensely.

"Hey!" he shouted - loudly - in Norton, the language of the North of Alair and the most likely to be understood by the townsfolk. "Why have you all go dicks on your chests?!"

Absolute silence fell. The only sound was the faint thud as Sack closed the outside door. Then one of the soldiers turned pointedly to Surya.

"Did you bring the vermin?" he asked. His answer was a steely slither as Surya drew his two blades (covering entirely Sack's stealthy unsheathing as he moved from the shadows near the door) and growl from Hildraft as he hefted the Axe of Glass and set his feet. With a wave of his arm, the leader sent two men towards Hildraft and led the remainder into the middle of the floor to confront Surya. One remained at the table, a short bow ready to support his comrades. "Place your weapons on the floor and surrender; you're under arrest!" the leader barked. "You will be taught to show proper respect to Lord Vane the Mace!"

He was not obeyed. With two terrifying axe-blows, the wronged dwarf laid his foes dead at his feet. In the centre of the room, Surya committed equal mayhem on the three men accompanying the leader, and dealt that worthy a painful wound. Given a clear shot by the completeness of Hildraft's defence, the bowman shot, wounding him slightly, and then started horribly as he realized that Sack had slid up right beside him all unawares, blade held to his throat.

Snarling, Surya completed the execution of the hapless patrol leader, and stood panting, struggling to restrain the urge for more slaughter that washed through him from the blade in his hand. Grinning at the trapped archer, Sack reached his other arm over, touched the man on the forehead with a finger, and released his sleeve-gun. He'd never used it before, but the look of surprise on the dead face as the hapless soldier was nailed to the wall was eloquent testimony to its' design.

The short, bloody encounter was over, almost before it was begun, and the adventurers realized that all the locals had slipped away... except for those around one table. Four men, indistinguishable from the ordinary villagers except in that they hadn't run away. One of them applauded quietly as he got to his feet. "Well fought," he said. "You seem to have proved your position as far as the occupier's armies stand. I am Delgarde."

Sack got a hat, and went around the table as if collecting coins after a particularly entertaining show. Delgarde grinned at him, and dropped a signet ring into the hat. Surya had just enough time to observe the black gryphon of the old Tellaran royal house carved and painted on it before Sack snatched it up and swallowed it! Delgarde shrugged. "Well, it'll keep it secret," he admitted.

The rebel leader ordered drinks and meals from the reappeared landlord, and some of his men set to work, making the bodies disappear in a matter of minutes. "Don't eat the chili," muttered Hildraft sarcastically.

Delgarde explained that his organization, rather than holding out any hope of actually defeating the Kin-led occupation forces, existed primarily to cause trouble to them. While there were, he said, no pure-blood Tellarans left, he and his followers felt sufficiently close to the spirit of the original inhabitants of the country to desire its' freedom from the Kin yoke.

"It's not easy, though," he confessed. "Vane the Mace is damned good; competent, a good leader and a perilous fighter in his own right. There are these rumours of the Last Tellaran going around, one of the Dragonslayers they say, and I can't deny that such a man would be a potent rallying point - but I don't believe he exists." The companions glanced at each other.

Delgarde went on to explain that the garrison in Oterto was much larger than a village this size should normally warrant. The ruined fortified manor house on the edge of the village had made a good place to site a depot and staging fort, and now nearly two hundred of the Mace's troops were stationed there.

The adventurers immediately set to, discussing whether they should take out this garrison, while Delgarde looked at them, nonplussed. Either they were slightly mad, or these strange people were something quite out of the ordinary...