Ko Decker's page

In trouble right now, will keep it short.

Turns out the queen was going to behead a different young woman groomed to look superficially like Trinia. Perhaps she knew, and was therefore willing to sacrifice an innocent for the sake of the public appearance of justice; perhaps some other opportunists in her service had arranged the deception without her knowledge; perhaps some bounty hunter had sent a hapless victim to her death to reap the rewards. We had no way of knowing.

In any case, the execution never happened. A mysterious black-clad figure, styled to match the century-old local hero legend by the name of Blackjack, swooped in from nowhere, cut the fake Trinia free from her bonds with one dagger, pinned the executioner to the scaffold by the foot with another dagger, called upon the people to turn their anger against the queen, and fled the scene with the would-be victim across their shoulders. Amazingly, the crowd did exactly that, and started booing and jeering at the queen, forcing her to retreat.

Now, whether that was the original Blackjack, having lived through the past century by grace of being an elf or somesuch, or some new upstart following in their idol's footsteps, they clearly possessed heroic levels of acrobatic skill, martial prowess, and rhetoric presence. Among the people we knew, I could only see Vencarlo Orisini or Sabine Merrin fit the bill, and the latter had been at the queen's side during the incident. Someone also suggested Cressida Kroft, though somehow she strikes me as too... tired these days to lead a heroic double life as a vigilante.

We returned to Vencarlo's fighting school to check on the real Trinia. She would have to keep her head down for a while, and Vencarlo suggested sending her to an acquaintance's farm in Harse, a sleepy town in the rural hinterlands north of Korvosa. We considered a few alternatives but ended up going with Harse; the trusted contact man there was a convincing selling point. We dressed Trinia up to conceal her signature blonde page cut and simply walked out through the city gates. While the trek was more strenuous than I expected — Wind was the only one among us pampered city folk actually accustomed to overland walking — having Trinia with us helped lighten the mood, as she grew cheerier with every mile we left behind us. Halfway to Harse, we met our contact man over dinner at an inn, and he seemed sincere enough, so Trinia was happy to join him.

As the guy suggested a card game to pass the evening, Zellara's ghost rose from the Harrow deck in Ticaria's pocket, congratulated us on the good deeds we had done, and reminded us that she couldn't talk to us unless someone mentioned «cards» to summon her. She laid out another Harrowing for us, and it was ripe with ominous threats and lurking dangers... I suppose it was too much to hope for an early retirement from adventure.

Indeed, upon our return to Korvosa, we were stirred from our sleep by an early visitor: Grau Soldado, who implored us to help his niece, who had falled mysteriously ill. He led us to the Varisian ghetto on the mainland just off the North Bridge, where his sister received us with guarded suspicion in a modest but well-kept home. Her young daughter Brienna lay in a bed upstairs and looked very ill indeed, racked with fever and riddled with red pustules. An Abadari priest stood at her bedside, but his expertise and herbal remedies had not sufficed to break the disease. He suggested resorting to magic, which his peers at the temple of Abadar would be willing to dispense for the fair price of 150 crackers. After we tried our own hand at treating Brienna, we came to the same conclusion and agreed to pay for the spellcasting service, much to the shock of Grau's sister. (It's good to be rich.)

We returned to the city proper and headed for the temple of Abadar, only to find its magnificent steps clogged with a mob of a good two dozen angry people... covered in red pustules, clamoring to be let in.

Uh oh.

Making our way to the Citadel, it seemed everybody and their dog was participating in the witch hunt for the regicidal portrait painter, going from house to house and making noise. Walking past an alley, we found a completely drunk and dissheveled member of the city guard muttering to himself in the dirt. He had apparently taken the king's death and the city's turn to chaos very personally and all but given up on himself. We gave him a collegial pep talk, which raised his spirits enough to join us. He figured finding Trinia with us might just be the lucky break to bring him back into the game. First he was going to need a shower and a shave, though. His name was Grau Soldado.

Cressida congratulated us for completing the set of Shoanti collectibles and averting the war, and passed us a rumor about Trinia Sabor being holed up in the Shingles. Cressida wasn't too happy about her accusation — apparently the queen's word constituted the entirety of the evidence — and asked us to bring her in quietly so she could have a chat with her.

Agnor and I both unpacked our fond childhood memories of the Shingles and went about asking people for directions. Apparently our secret handshakes and street lingo were still legit, since the locals were surprisingly forthcoming, and we found ourselves in front of a certain rooftop apartment complex in short order. I knocked at the door and said we just wanted to talk, and when nobody answered, I raced back down to the entrance to see whether somebody was climbing down the façade. Sure enough, there she was, nimbly leaping, squeezing and swinging her way through the labyrinth of the Shingles. I tried to follow in her tracks, but mostly just got stuck in a narrow passage such that Wind and Agnor had to help me back out with spells and good old-fashioned pushing. Meanwhile, Ticaria didn't feel like getting herself dirty and fired small but unerring magic missiles into her back from where she stood. After the second barrage, Trinia missed a step in a particularly daring feat of rooftop acrobatics and fell to the street below, where she crumpled into a heap. The least heroic chase in the history of chases was over. (I do appreciate a good chase, but rolling against DCs of 20–30 while wearing heavy armor is just absurd.)

We healed her back to her feet and senses and threw a hooded cloak around her to shield her from the vigilante troops. We discussed hiding her in Zellaria's house or Lamm's fishery, but figured either of these were vulnerable to search parties. Grau suggested bringing her to Vencarlo Orisini's fighting school, since he had a history with Vencarlo and trusted him. We didn't feel like involving another party and marched her to the Citadel instead. Cressida made good on her promises and just chatted with her and then suggested we hide her... yes, in Vencarlo's fighting school. Apparently it's just everyone's go-to place for hiding fugitive artists. Trinia was forthcoming with information but didn't know much either. It would seem had been selected for the task of portraying the king on the basis of her honest merit as a painter (she had been surprised he didn't make a move on her), and they just had a few uneventful sessions before he died. Nobody even knew the means by which she was supposed to have murdered him.

We brought Trinia to Vencarlo, who spirited her away into a secluded room in his school and promised to keep her safe. Grau hadn't been wrong about him. (According to Cressida, Grau and Vencarlo had both been in love with Sabine Merrin, who rejected both of them, and Grau provoked Vencarlo into duelling Sabine, costing him three of his fingers...) Ticaria also decided to take some heat off of Trinia by sowing out a rumor that she had fled the city, and it spread like wildfire.

With no other leads on the Trinia case, we took some time to spend our riches from the necromancers' crypt (I treated myself to a suit of honest-to-gods plate) and then followed my idea of buying a scroll of Speak with Dead to ask the fat jailer's corpse in the crypt for Lamm's whereabouts, given that he had said something about expecting a reward from Lamm before we killed him. To my surprise, the spell worked, but unfortunately, he suspected Lamm had moved shop to a different laboratory and hired new crew, neither of which he would know. (I had so far assumed Lamm had only been a customer or supplier of the necromancers in the crypt, but possibly he had been their leader?) If nothing else, this information might help us narrow down our search. Perhaps we should tour the city's alchemical suppliers and ask for their customer lists...

In any case, the next day greeted us with the news that the king's murderess had been captured and would be publicly executed in a day's time. Unsure whether to be outraged at Vencarlo or Cressida, we made haste to the fighting school, only to find Trinia still hidden away in her room. Then who was going to receive the queen's Galtese shave on the morrow...?

To be on the safe side, Agnor treated all of us who had suffered rat bites for filth fever. However, Ticaria was worse for wear on the next day, so we took her to the Shelynite temple and bought some Clerical spellcasting to clean her up. We were rich, after all. Agnor and I didn't get sick. It takes more than filth to bring down a greenskin!

We went to Field Marshal Croft to cash in on our marine rescue mission, and picked up a new job while we were there: Apparently some obnoxious Chelaxian ambassador (is there even another kind?) by the name of Darvain Chios Ambras had been stirring up trouble by spreading rumors of an impending trade embargo by Cheliax, only to buy property cheaply from panicked sellers. The city watch had been looking around for a way to rein him in without causing a diplomatic incident, and Vencarlo Orisini, the leader of a local fighting school and a friend of Croft's, just so happened to chance upon a solution. He was in the office with Croft when we arrived, and explained that one of the kingpins of the Korvosan underworld, Devargo Barvasi, had Darvain by a tight leash by virtue of some compromising material. Croft sent us to obtain said information from Barvasi, and forked over an allowance of 1000 quackers to ease the transition. We were welcome to keep any leftover funds to ourselves.

Devargo's realm happened to be built on a number of ships tied together in port, some of them clearly only staying afloat on account of their neighboring vessels. They each appeared to specialize in a different kind of vice. We spent some time and gold on the gambling ship, and lost more than we gained, but at least were told where to find the boss. We walked right up to the aftercastle of his ship, convinced the guards we had legitimate business with Devargo, and waited to be let in.

He greeted us with half a dozen of his goons watching and many more of his pet spiders scurrying around the ceiling. It appeared he was called the Spider King for a good reason. What is it with spiders and ships in this city...? In any case, he confirmed the existence of the compromising documents: a stack of love letters to a mistress that would plunge the married ambassador into trouble if it ever reached the public. Devargo praised them for their explicit entertainment value, but was willing to part with them for 1500 imps. He proved unwilling to be haggled down to something we could afford, but then offered to settle for 1000 if one of us were to beat him at a game of Vulture's Claw. It involved two people standing on a table covered in coins with a dagger stuck into the middle, and could be won either by bagging more gold than your opponent or pushing them off the table, dead or alive. I suspect very few of those games ever get to the point of counting coins.

In any case, while I was still sizing up Devargo and figuring out whether I could take him, Agnor took him up on his challenge. I took his scythe for safekeeping (and to ensure he would get it back the instant the room turned against us), and he climbed up. When the game started, Devargo beat him to the dagger and slashed at him, but Agnor was unfazed and went straight for a bullrush. It worked on the second attempt. Not bad for an elfling! To his credit, Devargo proved a dignified loser and held up his end of the bargain. We left the ship without the goons piling on us as I had feared, and with the letters in hand.

Vencarlo just so happened to cross our ways soon after we set foot on land. He seemed satisfied with the result of our evening. We chatted a bit and found out that he knew Sabine Merrin; presumably she had been one of his students a long time ago. We then headed back to the Citadel to turn in our expensive goods before they could be stolen from us, even though it was late.

Croft didn't have a new assignment for us right away, so we spent the next day trawling the city for information on the off-chance of finding out something about Lamm. We didn't, but caught a few new rumors. Apparently, the Cerulean Society was so bold as to steal from the Queen herself, and Basha sells fake treasure maps that he draws himself... we decided to turn the rumor mill to our advantage and spread the rumor (or rather, exaggeration) that a band of adventurers stole back an invaluable piece of the Queen's jewelry to return it to her, and that they killed Lamm's son and fed him to his cro— ...alligator. Maybe that will provoke somebody into making a move. Hopefully we'll survive it if they do.

Later that day, Croft did come up with a job for us. Apparently, many city guards had abandoned their post to protect their families during the riots, which she was willing to forgive to some degree. One group of deserters, however, had instead taken over a butchery in town and were presumably stuffing their pockets at the cost of the poor people starving under the current acute food shortage, and presumably procured their meat by participating in the assaults and robberies of merchants in front of the city gates. Croft thought it best for us, as relative outsiders, to handle the crisis, rather than to send her people to fight their own. Their leader was one Eric Vancaskerkin.

When we cased out the joint, we found a long queue of rabble waiting in line, and a steady stream of them leaving the place with a wrapped hunk of meat. They said the meat was being given away for free, and turned rather aggressive when they suspected we were there to end this. Wind entered the shop and was, in fact, offered free meat, even if they salted it with a few racist slurs. Had the guards really deserted to run a charity? As an orphan, I found the notion of feeding the poor with meat very suspicious indeed. There are much cheaper ways to do so.

We decided to enter the shop together and ask them to their faces what they were doing. Agnor implored them to return to the city guard and run their side business in their spare time, but they immediately drew swords on us. I whacked one of them out cold, so the other one fled to the back to alert the others. Ticaria took out a roomful of them with that swirly spell of hers, and the rest of us rushed up the stairs to face Vancaskerkin and his lieutenant. I barely got to swing at him one when Ticaria asked me, «You're good at willpower, right?» and sent another spell at the remaining bad guys... through me. I felt like a rainbow barfed in my skull, and went down.

At least it had worked. When I came to, the others had tied up the subdued bad guys. Or good guys? Well, were going to find out now, weren't we?

With two dozen former slave children, two prisoners, and a small fortune in stolen goods on our hands, I felt the urge to head out into the city and rid ourselves of the incriminating ballast then and there. However, Agnor convinced us to spend the night in the godsawful stench of the fishery and wait for the next day, where things might have calmed down a bit and we were less likely to be mistaken for looters.

Things did look somewhat less apocalyptic in the morning, so we dared cross to the North with our child troop in tow, leaving the two prisoners tied up in the fishery. We found my old orphanage boarded up and quiet, but I knocked at the door and loudly made myself known, and eventually Auntie Tullabeth answered the door. She seemed happy to see me, but less so about the prospect of adding twenty hungry mouths to her table. When I handed her the 40 yellowbacks I had in my pocket, though, she brightened up again. Turns out being rich is quite convenient.

Speaking of which: We turned down an offer to stay for a bowl of gruel, had some actual breakfast in town, and then started selling Lamm's ill-gotten gains. Most of them, anyway; the Paladin figured that the holy symbol of Shelyn should be returned to her temple instead, and I could hardly disagree, given my own situation with Klava's holy symbol. There was also a ridiculously expensive-looking brooch bearing the royal device of the tower dragon and the imp that Agnor distinctly remembered being worn by the Queen herself in past public appearances, which we planned to deliver to the royal palace.

Selling and buying went rather well; it seems the shops and hustlers were making a killing from all the valuables people had «found in their attic» during the troubled night. I spent 340 gleamers on an absolute beauty of a sledgehammer: All darkwood and blackened steel, sleek and deadly, bare of all that spiny nonsense the Shoanti like to stick to their hammers, but with a generous amount of bracing down the sides of the haft. Worth every penny of it, if you ask me. It's going to need a name.

Walking through town, we came upon a gang of low-lives closing in on a lone noble, clearly planning to take out their frustration over the political situation on him in the form of violence. We scared them away, and the noble (a certain Amin Jalento, from a rather inconsequential house, apparently) thanked us profusely. We asked him for courtly gossip in return, and he told us of the so-called Curse of the Crimson Throne: The fact that no ruler holding the throne of Korvosa had ever died of a natural cause, and that King Eodred's passing at merely middle age fit right into that pattern.

Shelyn's might be the smallest of the major temples in town, but it's clearly the prettiest. We dropped by and showed the holy symbol, made from seashells, to an acolyte, who immediately went to get the high priest himself. Apparently, it was his personal property, and had been stolen from a shrine where it had been displayed a while ago. The high priest himself looked unexpectedly... rugged? I would have pegged him as a Druid at first sight. But he thanked us, offered us payment (which we accepted in the form of a discounted healing wand) and assured us of the goodwill of his church, which is never a bad thing to have.

When we approached Zellara's little house, Walks With Wind was seething about how the Varisian had no doubt knowingly deceived us about Lamm's exact nature and exploited us as her unwitting henchmen. Personally, I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt; perhaps she and her magical means of investigation had fallen prey to the confusion of the two Lamms just as we had. In any case, we found her house abandoned and ransacked, and what was even more worrying, covered in a thick layer of dust. Nobody had lived here for years. Wind just felt all the more vindicated about having been betrayed by Zellara, when suddenly the her deck of Harrow cards stirred in our pack and brought forth a ghostly apparition of Zellara. I guessed she had already been dead when we first met her, and she confirmed it. She had attempted to rescue her missing son herself, and ended up devoured by Lamm's crocodile. (Alligator, for vrock's sake.) The magic of her Harrow deck had allowed her to resist the lure of Pharasma's realm, contact us, furnish her house with the illusion of hospitality, and appear to us as if alive. She apologized for the deception, and offered to remain at our service for as long as she could muster. Unfortunately, she didn't have any other leads on Gaedren Lamm.

We decided to wait for the new morning with our visit to the palace, and spent another night at the fishery in the meantime. The two prisoners had spent a rather squalid day there, hungry and thirsty and soiled. Not very chivalrous of us, admittedly, but hardly on par with enslaving children. First thing next day, we brought them along to the palace and handed them over to the guards, blaming them for the theft of the royal brooch (and skipping over the rest of our... common history). The accountant gladly confirmed that story to the guards, seizing his chance to escape our inhospitable custody. Good riddance.

After we showed the brooch to the guard captain, he led us through the extra layers of fortification the palace had grown overnight and brought us to none other than Sabine Merrin, the Queen's own bodyguard. As if that weren't shocking enough, she, in turn, spirited us straight into the throne room for an audience with the Queen Herself.

I must admit I remember most of the meeting only through a daze. The Queen was tastefully dressed and veiled for mourning, and played the part convincingly. She was very grateful for the return of the brooch, which had apparently been stolen from a servant when they brought it in for repairs, and took it as a welcome omen of good hope in these trying times. She rewarded each of us with three gold ingots, each worth a hundred coins, as well as a royal recommendation to the city guard. The city was in dire need of heroes like us, and they would have more work for us, she said. And with that, we were left back in the capable hands of Sabine Merrin.

Amazing, isn't it? It comes in ingots!

Anyway, Sabine personally walked us to the city guard's Citadel Volshyenek, and we made some conversation with her along the way. Wind knew her for one of the city's most accomplished warriors, but when I asked her how she had come to her prestigious post, she wouldn't tell, hinting at a dark past best left buried. Ticaria alluded to a rumor that Sabine favored the «body» part of her bodyguard duties, which Sabine found irritating enough to be true. Interesting...

Once at the Citadel, Sabine marched us through its gates and its corridors and right into Field Marshal Cressida Kroft's office, barging into what looked like a heated argument between the Field Marshal and none other than Marcus Thalassinus Endrin, the commander of the Sable Company. (It would seem we were destined to meet all the great leaders of the city in one day...) Neither commander seemed very amused about the interruption, but Sabine seemed to carry enough clout to get away with it. The Field Marshal grudgingly accepted the Queen's decision and officially deputized us into the Korvosan Guard. I insisted on getting badges, too.

I wish I could tell this to my teenaged self... I'm a vrocking cop now. Frankly, I can't wait to hear someone yell «It's the fuzz!» when I show up. Or to pound on a door and shout, «Open up! City Guard!» If anything, our official status would help and justify our investigation to find Lamm, so that was good. Cressida was not opposed to our plans to track down Lamm either, but she didn't have any more information about his whereabouts than we did. She did, however, assign us our very first case so we could prove our worth: To track down and retrieve a Sable Company marine who had been shot down over Old Korvosa and hadn't been heard of since. Apparently someone there must have built their own ballista and used it to express their displeasure at the political situation. That sounds like my old home quarter alright...

We headed for Old Korvosa and started asking around, and sure enough, we found lost marine half-buried and pinned beneath the carcass of his dead hippogriff, desperately trying to keep two dire rats and a swarm of smaller rats at bay. We brought the dire rats down handily enough, but the swarm proved a challenge for our weapons and spells. In the end, it was a flask of alchemist's fire from Wind's hand that toasted enough rats to disperse the swarm. While had all suffered our share of nasty rat bites, our spells and the wand could take care of them. What worried Agnor more was that Ticaria probably contracted filth fever. She would need treatment. (Actually, so do two more of us, it's just that we suck at diagnosis...) Ticaria insinuated that it wasn't her first brush with the disease, which I found surprising. She then disclosed that she had been one of Lamm's lambs as a child, and he had left her for dead on a pile of trash. That was... unexpectedly dark. I figured she should probably be first in line when we finally get to kill Lamm.

We escorted the marine, Marek, back to the Sable Company's giant tower and then reported back to Cressida Kroft, only to find she would have preferred us to deliver him to her first. Now she would have to wait for confirmation from the Company until she could pay us the agreed-upon two hundred ducklings and assign us to a more interesting case.

We decided to use the rest of the day to ask around town on the off-chance that we might find a new lead to Lamm. We didn't. But as we walked through the streets, suddenly the ground quaked and split before us, and Ticaria and I fell forward into the opening pit, where a three-legged, three-tentacled monstrosity awaited. Before I could act, it had already savaged me with its threefold maw and wrapped Ticaria in its tentacles. Agnor heroically drew its attention away (Full Defense and move to provoke) so I could get to my feet and accept Wind's healing spell, but meanwhile the creature started dragging Ticaria down into the hole it had made, presumably to make a meal of her somewhere underground. We desperately stabbed and hewed at it, and when I finally landed my hammer squarely on its already damaged carapace and Ticaria managed to wheeze the trigger word to squeeze one more magical bolt from her wand, the monster collapsed.

Walks With Wind then informed us that this had been an otyugh, an offal-consuming monster deliberately employed throughout the city to relieve the badly thought-through sewage system. This worked rather well unless the otyughs got hungry enough to venture to the surface for food. Usually the city guard patrolled the sewers and fed the otyughs if necessary to prevent such incidents, but evidently they had been preoccupied in recent days. Agnor and Wind felt bad that we had killed the otyugh, given it had not acted in evil intent, but frankly, I reserve the right to smash the face of anyone and anything who attempts to eat me. At least Ticaria would have faced certain death if we hadn't defeated it in the nick of time, so I'm not going to lose sleep over it. Maybe that's an Inquisitor thing.

Oh, and this is what Ko Decker looks like.

(Imgur link; image is crudely based on this original artwork by ImJustHieuNow; posted with permission of the artist)

Ko Decker's backstory:

Old Korvosa, 21 years ago

The wooden stairs lead up steeply between the tightly huddled buildings to the precariously stacked dwellings on their roofs. Brother Klava is panting and sweating and looks back every few heartbeats; he cannot shake the feeling of being lured into an ambush. But the terror on the boy's face had looked genuine, and Pharasma would never have forgiven him for shirking his duty to aid those in need. Without hesitation, the boy leads him onto a rickety ledge and from there onto another run of stairs.

«Don't you at least have a midwife who could help?», Brother Klava asks between heavy breaths. The night is darker here than at home, with most dwellings lacking any lighting. The pale glow from the head of his cane dazzles him more than it helps.

«She is the midwife», says the boy.

«Oh.»

«Here», says the boy.

A hut lies in ruin; the rotten wood had given way. The woman is laid out on the floor, heavily pregnant, neighbors crowding around her. They have lifted the beam from her chest and covered her against the cool night air, but one of them shakes his head an says, «Too late. She died.»

One of the dead woman's hands is still clutching something, an amulett of dull pewter. A spiral. Rest in peace, sister.

«And the child?» he asks. The people look at each other. Brother Klava kneels down beside her and unrolls his bundle of tools. Suddenly he no longer feels tired.

❦

Old Korvosa, 9 years ago

«That bauble means something to you, doesn't it?» Gosef turns the amulet between his fingers and grins at the girl.

She growls back. The three other orphans are holding her back with some difficulty. They are all older than her, but she's gotten in a few solid hits earlier.

With a careless flick of the wrist, Gosef tosses the amulet into the firepit.

The girl cracks the back of her head against a face, buries an elbow in a stomach, tears herself free, and throws herself at the fire. The amulet hisses as she grabs it. She screams.

❦

Old Korvosa, 3 years ago

It is already dark and has started to drizzle, but the work's not done until it's done. She can't afford to violate the terms of her probation: Penal work or not, it's the best-paid job she's had in a long time. She sets down another pole and raises the sledgehammer.

A scream makes her prick up her ears. It came from the foreman's hut. The candlelight in the doorway flickers, and there's a few thumps and crashes.

The foreman lies on the floor. One of the men is rifling through his clothes, the other one through the desk. When she steps up, they stare at her, and then at her sledgehammer. Their eyes widen. It's over quickly.

As she turns the foreman over, she sees blood trickling from his ear, and his eyes are rolled up. Then she feels the scar on her palm throbbing and glowing even as the air cools off sharply and takes on the scent of fresh earth. The wound on the foreman's brow closes, and he gasps for breath.

«What was that?» he asks.

She stares at her palm. «Dunno», she says.

❦

The Grey, 3 years ago

The cathedral is unfathomably vast and echoes with the footsteps and muffled voices of dozens of people, who have gathered here and there to speak or chant. Others are sitting still and praying.

She approaches the nearest person in white and blue and clears her throat. He turns around; an old man with lively eyes.

«Excuse me, where do I go to apply as a novice?»

The priest drops his book and stares at her, flabbergasted.

She freezes. She is used to being unwelcome, but here of all places she has been hoping for more. She starts looking around for an escape route.

But Father Klava just smiles and says, «I know you.»

❦

The Grey, two weeks ago

She still has a harder time reading than the other novices, but it is getting easier every day. For the first time in her life she feels at home. In certainly helps to have an actual bed and access to a mess hall.

She is just turning a page when Sister Panthe comes through the door into the library, trailing two city guards. For a moment, sweat breaks from her skin. Old habits.

Nevertheless, something bothers her about the guards. Then she recognizes it: Pity.

«Excuse me. I'm afraid we have some bad new, ma'am. It's about Father Klava.»

The library grows cold.

Sister Panthe advised me to practice my writing to help me catch up with the other novices. I figure I might as well use the opportunity to chronicle my misadventures rather than just copy the Bones.

It all started last night. My investigation into Father Klava's death had run dry a week ago, and I hadn't uncovered any leads other than the name Gaedren Lamm, which had the uncanny property of shutting mouths, doors, and windows whenever I asked anyone about it. The only tangible piece of evidence, Father Klava's holy symbol, was locked behind the daunting price tag of five hundred yellowbacks likely to disappear into some indifferent buyer's pocket in a matter of days. I was about to give up hope when I received the invite.

I was walking through the soothingly calm boneyard surrounding the Cathedral (honestly, I've never understood why most people feel uneasy in boneyards... but I suppose they didn't grow up in the constant din and menace of the Shingles) when the wind smacked a card against my cheek. To my surprise, it was part of a Harrow deck (the Juggler, namely) and bore densely packed handwriting on the back. The mysterious sender (who was nowhere to be seen) knew my name and my trouble with Lamm, claimed to have suffered a similar fate, and offered me an opportunity to strike at him along with yet more angry victims. There was an address, too.

I couldn't afford to pass up the chance, so I asked around for directions and showed up at the small house near the harbor later that evening. I wasn't alone: Three rather strange fellows arrived roughly at the same time, having received similar invitations. There was a Shoanti woman who looked like she had just robbed an arts and crafts stall, piled as she was with woven goods and animal parts, a sturdy-looking Elfling bearing a war scythe, and another woman whose pale skin and bright red hair clashed with her Varisian-style tattoos and garb. The Shoanti explored the small house with spear and shield at the ready, almost certain of being lured into an ambush, and the others also showed some signs of distrust. Having lived through (and, admittedly, having perpetrated) my fair share of ambushes, I figured this was too elaborate for a mere trap, and started munching on the offering of bread and cheap-but-tolerable wine that had been left on the table for us. Even nowadays, I am not one to say no to a free meal. A note on the table apologized for the absence of its writer.

While we waited, we exchanged some cautious introductions. To my surprise,the Elfling (Agnor) recognized me — we'd had an ugly brawl some ten years ago as part of a turf between our street gangs. Apparently he had cleaned up his act in the meantime and sworn a Paladin's oath to Erastil. Good for him, I guess. I was a bit worried about having a law enthusiast on the team while conspiring to murder someone, but I suppose Erastil is the pragmatic type, and ridding the town of Lamm should certainly count as a service to the community. The Shoanti (Runs with Wind) appeared to be some kind of shaman straight out of the wilderness looking to avenge her brother, and the redhead (Ticaria) was a mage of sorts.

Our host eventually showed up and turned out to be a Varisian fortune teller by the name of Zellara Esmeranda. She had lost her magical set of Harrow cards, a family heirloom of countless generations, to Gaedren Lamm, and when her son went to steal them back, he was captured. Fearing the worst, she had used her magic to locate Lamm's hiding place, and to recruit like-minded individuals for a counterstrike. She gave us the location of the fisherman's house from which Lamm and his gang were supposedly operating, and performed a Harrowing for us to help us along the way. While she did see opportunity for changes for good, the reading was dominated by the menace of dark machinations and overwhelming change looming in the near future. Ominous words, given the unease that pervaded the city in the face of a dying king with an unpopular queen a third his age.

In any case, we found the fishery Zellara had specified, and settled into an abandoned warehouse across the street to observe it for a while. When we saw no sign of use, we went over to investigate. There was a narrow walkway circling around the back of the house, some good four paces above the water of the Jeggare, and a ramp leading into the house from the other side. We climbed the ramp and walked the short corridor to a small side door, and when we didn't hear anything from the other side, we decided to backtrack a bit and open the larger door just beyond the ramp. Agnor and I tried to leverage it open with the handle of my mace, but mostly just got in each other's way until Wind just crashed it open with a mighty kick.

We were greeted by three armed thugs and a snarling dog, whom we had apparently gathered with our considerable amount of noise-making, but they were nevertheless surprised at the reckless magnitude of our home invasion. The fight started with the Half-Orc thug clubbing Wind out cold with a lucky strike of her flail, which Agnor avenged by cleanly cleaving that same Half-Orc into two Quarter-Orcs with his scythe. Ticaria flooded the room with whirling colors, which overwhelmed the dog's poor mind and sent it sprawling to the ground. I cornered what appeared to be a human Wizard in the back of the room and tried to knock him out with my mace (I have Bludgeoner and Enforcer) but made a rather poor show of it, while he splattered painful acid at me from a magical wand and his gnome friend tried to dismember me with his kukri. Agnor took the opportunity to end the helpless dog, which enraged the gnome into trying to disembowel him in return, in which he succeeded well enough to bring the Paladin down. I was standing on my last legs at this point, and things were starting to look grim, when I finally managed to connect with the Wizard's head, and Ticaria, who had been waving a dagger about in the meantime, decided to spend another one of her precious spells to send the gnome to the ground twitching in a seizure.

I healed both Agnor and Wind back to consciousness, exhausting my own spellcasting but allowing Wind to use her own more copious spells to undo more damage. We also quaffed some of the potions we found on the two Quarter-Orcs until we could stand upright again. Oof. That had been close.

I was rather miffed at my poor performance in this matter (s#+#ty rolls...). In my defense, I wasn't at ease with the shield and mace I had gotten from the Cathedral's armorer. I'm more of a sledgehammer type, but the armorer just frowned at me when I asked for one. I swear, when this is over, first thing I'll do is to buy myself the biggest gods-damned hammer I can find.

We woke first the gnome and then the human by affording them a noseful of the fish offal's stench so we could ask them some questions. The gnome was impervious to our attempts to play good watchman, bad watchman, but the human wet his pants and claimed he had just been the accountant, told us Lamm was on the house's lower floor, and that we should please spare the children. Apparently, he was no Wizard at all, but simply learned how to use a wand. I felt even more embarrassed at taking so long to defeat him. I knocked both of them out again. I'm glad the Paladin let me. He's alright, I guess.

We found the children in the next room. There were at least twenty of them, all terrified and in bad health. They had apparently been abducted, forced to commit crimes for Lamm, and beaten by the Half-Orc for discipline. We tried to convince them that we were going to kill Lamm, and I offered to bring them to my old orphanage (it wasn't all that horrible, I suppose). The idea of someone going up against Lamm terrified them even more, and they warned us of his crocodile (alligator, actually, as one kid kept pointing out... trust a kid to know their dinosaurs!) as well as of the spiders in the boat.

Aside from the kids' dorm and what was presumably the fishery's public front, we found no other rooms and no traces of a lower floor. We went back out and took the narrow walkway around the house, finding it led to a largish fishing boat. Wind spotted an opening in the side of the house just above the water level, cleverly hidden by the boat. We were wary of trying to find a way down there through the boat, given the spiders (we figured we didn't have anything on us that would work against a swarm), so Wind tried to leap down from the high walkway. It was an almost impossible jump, and she ended up in the Jeggare, where immediately a shark assaulted her. Luckily, we had tied her to a rope, and Agnor was able to lift her back up to safety. We then tossed the dead dog into the water on the other side of the boat to lure away the shark so we could plonk into the water and climb through the passage in relative safety. It worked well enough.

The secret lower floor of the fishery had an unpleasantly low ceiling and a large opening in the middle that gave way to the waters of the Jeggare. When we cautiously advanced around the edges of the opening, a crocodile (alligator, actually) leapt out, grabbed me in its maw, pulled me back under the water, and subjected me to its famously murderous Death Roll. Yes, it's every bit as horrible as it sounds. To make things worse, a man (Lamm?) appeared from a room on the opposite side of the room and started firing at us with a hand crossbow. Agnor and Wind battled the crocodile (alligator, dammit!) as well as they could, but it would still have had enough time to kill me thoroughly dead if Wind hadn't healed me in between. The spell just woke me up enough to scream before the monster pulled me under again. Rather than save me from certain death with her fancy spell, Ticaria apparently thought fit to use it on Lamm instead, even though his tiny crossbow appeared to pose very little threat. In any case, I did eventually wake up again when Wind healed me another time, to find the reptile and Lamm dead at Agnor's hand. Not bad, for an Elfling.

To our great disappointment, it turned out the man was much too young to be Gaedren Lamm. We had gotten the wrong guy! At least Ticaria seemed convinced the man shared Gaedren's features, and given that the people upstairs had called him Lamm, we deduced he must have been Gaedren's son. Well, shattering his forced criminal child labor ring was certainly a good deed, and if nothing else, we will probably get Gaedren's attention with it. Hopefully it will give us another lead as well.

Lamm's room revealed a number of hoarded valuables among a vast amount of trash. We figured it would throw off a good thousand ducks for each of us — an unimaginable wealth for someone like me. It looks like I will be able to buy back Father Klava's holy symbol after all. Unfortunately, the treasures included a severed head bundled with a set of Harrow cards, which according to Ticaria were astoundingly magical. Zellara had suspected her son was dead, but it's still going to hit her hard.

Just as we left the fishery, temple bells all over the city started to peal, and smoke rose from various places. Someone shouted, «The King is dead! Long live the Queen!» before the voice was suddenly cut of by a scream. Sable Company marines scoured the air above the roofs and fired weapons into the streets, sometimes receiving return fire. Zellara's fortune telling had been spot-on.

Revolution or not, we had a crowd of children to get to safety. At then I'll try to spend some money as long as it's still worth something. Mama needs a hammer.

We are now 2nd level.

Welcome to an account of the best Pathfinder campaign ever written, at least according to the GM (Dr. Variel from Olwen's Return of the Runelords game). Should be fun!

We're playing in German, so apologies if I'm re-translating the proper names incorrectly. The plan is to play biweekly, alternating with Kyrademon's War for the Crown game.

Dramatis Personae

• Agnor, male Half-Elf Paladin of Erastil
  
• Ko Decker, female Eighth-Orc Human Inquisitor of Pharasma (played by Lady Elaine Alabastri-Stavian from Kyrademon's War for the Crown game / Akkumsah the Monk from Olwen's Return of the Runelords game)
  
• Ticaria Frallino, female Varisian Human Primal Fire Sorceress (played by Lady Virgilia Merkondus from Kyrademon's War for the Crown game / Azriel the Druid from Olwen's Return of the Runelords game)
  
• Walks with Wind, female Shoanti Human Wind Oracle