Late January, 974
The Road Back
Ant’s journey to Gozneth had taken her southwest of Manchester and away from the fighting in Cambria, toward the great bulk of Archea beyond. As she travelled, she began to understand something.
The war was getting bigger.
At first it appeared in small ways.
A pair of military wagons overtook her on the road, heading north. Then another. Then a column of infantry, boots striking the road in weary unison while officers rode alongside. At the next village, the inn yard was crowded with horses and soldiers. A blacksmith worked long after sunset beneath a shower of sparks, repairing military tack while another man waited with a stack of spearheads.
Farther south came more.
Wagons of grain. Barrels of preserved food. Replacement horses being driven north in strings. Carts piled with arrows and crossbow bolts. Men and women carrying Crown orders from one town to another. Local troops drilling on village greens. Officers consulting maps beside crossroads. Military camps appearing in fields that, a month earlier, had presumably contained nothing more threatening than sheep.
Perhaps most unsettlingly, none of it seemed the slightest bit desperate.
There was no sense that Archea was scraping together the last men and horses it could find. No frightened kingdom throwing everything it had toward a collapsing frontier.
This was machinery beginning to move. Slowly at first but ponderously enough to show the astonishing feats it could achieve when run at full power.
The heroes had spent months seeing the Crown principally through Cambria: Crown garrisons, Crown patrols, Crown officials, the soldiers stationed around Manchester and Hollowmere. They had fought some of them. They had evaded others. The Reclamation had fought them and won battles against them.
But Cambria was only one part of a much larger kingdom and travelling toward its interior, Ant could see the depth behind it.
People. Farms. Horses. Workshops. Roads. Money. Organization.
And confidence.
One evening, Ant passed a regiment encamped beside the road. Its tents covered an enormous field, and after sunset its cookfires appeared one by one until, from a distance, the camp looked almost like another town.
The following morning, the regiment was gone, headed north toward Cambria and the Reclamation. For perhaps the first time, Ant found herself seriously wondering whether Soulreaper could possibly win.
The Reclamation had undead soldiers who did not tire, did not sleep, and did not need to be fed. It possessed magic that the Crown clearly feared. It had taken Hollowmere and survived everything thrown against it so far.
But Ant was beginning to see the other side of the equation.
The question was no longer whether the Reclamation could defeat a Crown army. It was whether the Reclamation could defeat Archea.
And by the time she completed her business in Gozneth and began the long journey back, she was quite a bit less certain of this than she had been before.
Manchester
On the return journey, Ant stopped in Manchester to see Pfinder and received, for once, some good news. The Cult of the Unmaking’s attempt on Elvys’s life had been foiled.
Pfinder proceeded to tell her exactly how it had happened. He had a considerable story to tell, and Ant listened as he recounted the events that had led from his investigation of the Cult’s interest in Elvys to the final thwarting of Adrian Mercer’s plans. By the time he finished, Elvys was alive, the Cult had failed, and Adrian Mercer was on the run.
For once, at least, the news from Manchester was good.
Ant’s news was a good deal less cheerful.
She told Pfinder about Gareth and for a while the war, the Cult, the Crown and everything else receded. Pfinder had known Gareth briefly but the news hit him hard. They talked about him for some time. There was sadness, certainly, but not only sadness. Gareth had left behind too many memories for that. Some were admirable. Some were ridiculous. Some were both. For a little while, two people who had known him remembered Gareth as he had actually been rather than as another name added to the growing list of people the war had taken from them.
Eventually the conversation moved on.
There was something else Pfinder wanted to mention; something he couldn’t explain. Eloise was still in his apartment and he didn’t know why.
Laveleen’s pseudodragon familiar, as expected, had remained with Pfinder during his work concerning Elvys so she would be available to carry a return message—and enjoy some cabbage in the interim. Once the danger had passed, Pfinder had written a message explaining what had happened and attached it to Eloise for delivery to Laveleen and the others.
Eloise had departed perfectly normally.
Then she came back.
Far too soon. Much too soon, in fact, to have made the journey back to Laveleen and returned. Furthermore, Pfinder’s message was still with her. Eloise had never delivered it.
Pfinder explained that when she returned, she had been agitated in a way he had never seen before. He had tried to calm her and, later, when she seemed better, attempted to send her on her way again.
She refused to go.
He tried again the following day and Eloise became agitated once more. Eventually Pfinder stopped trying.
Since then, the pseudodragon had remained with him. She followed him about when it suited her, slept among his possessions when it suited her, and showed no indication whatsoever that she intended to resume her journey.
Pfinder looked over at her.
“I believe,” he said, “that I have been adopted.”
He had no explanation for it and neither did Ant. They exchanged puzzled theories, none particularly satisfactory.
It did, however, leave them with a practical problem. Pfinder’s original message had never reached Laveleen, and Eloise plainly had no intention of carrying another one. Ant was heading back to the others anyway and had now heard the entire story firsthand.
So Pfinder’s report became one more thing Ant would carry home with her.
Eventually she said goodbye to Pfinder—and to the pseudodragon who had apparently decided that she lived with him now—and continued west toward Dolven’s Hollow.
Dolven’s Hollow
The journey back toward Dolven’s Hollow brought Ant closer to her friends – or so she assumed.
Then, not long before reaching Dolven’s Hollow, Ant discovered a piece of paper in one of her pockets. A piece that she had never put there. She pulled it out and unfolded it and, as before, saw the handwriting was her own although she had no recollection of writing the note.
It read, FIND MARA TABB. SHE CAN TELL YOU WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW.
Ant looked at the message for some time. Her patron favored strange means of communication with her – through a mirror and, once previously, through another message in her handwriting where no message (or paper, for that matter), had previously existed. There was, as usual, no explanation.
Ant checked the other side – nothing.
So Ant continued toward Dolven’s Hollow and when she arrived, she discovered that her friends weren’t there.
That was wrong. The others had had plenty of time to reach Dolven’s Hollow; they should have been there. Grelda was there. Dolven’s Hollow was there. But Barin, Phineas, and the rest of her party were not.
There were people in town who knew that something had happened after Barin and Phineas had left and there were whispers that they had survived. But nobody Ant initially spoke with seemed to know where they had gone or whether they had met her friends along the way.
Ant put a hand into her pocket. The note was still there. FIND MARA TABB.
So she did.
Mara Tabb was an older woman who had lived in Dolven’s Hollow long enough to have learned that knowing everyone was useful and appearing to know nothing was safer. She was not an Ebon Blade fighter. Nobody was going to send Mara out to ambush Crown convoys or infiltrate military headquarters.
But rebellions require rather more than people with swords. They require beds. Meals. Messages. Places where somebody can sit unnoticed for an hour. People who remember faces and know when not to ask questions. People like Mara.
Mara recognized Ant as someone who had worked with Barin and once they were somewhere private, Mara told her what she knew. The others were alive—or at least they had been when the last word reached Dolven’s Hollow. They had conducted an ambush and retreated to a safehouse somewhere near Saint Mercy.
Where, exactly, Mara did not know – deliberately. But she knew enough to tell Ant how to find someone who might be able to help. Ant would have to go to Saint Mercy.
The Road to Saint Mercy
Ant took the main road. Under the circumstances, that was probably safer than behaving like someone who desperately wanted not to be seen.
She had been travelling for some time when she found another note, again, by surprise and, again, in her own handwriting. And again, she had not written it.
YOU ARE AN ITINERANT HEALER.
Ant read it. Then read it again. And a third time.
No matter how many times she read it, she did not become an itinerant healer. Turning the paper over revealed a blank page without any explanation as to why she had suddenly acquired a new profession… and without the usual apprenticeship, at that.
A short while later she saw four Crown soldiers travelling on foot toward her along the road. They weren’t marching toward some destination in formation. They were moving slowly, warily watching the road and surrounding countryside.
When they reached Ant, they stopped her. On the surface, the questions were polite enough but they had a firm insistent manner that made Ant, a solitary traveler half the size of any one of the soldiers, distinctly uneasy.
One soldier took hold of her horse’s bridle while another moved around behind her. Neither did anything overtly threatening, but neither position was accidental. The man who appeared to be in charge looked Ant over slowly—her clothes, her horse, her belongings, the road behind her—and asked where she had come from.
Where was she going?
What business did she have in Saint Mercy?
Had she seen anyone unusual on the road?
Groups of armed travellers?
People with exhausted horses?
Anyone who appeared to be avoiding the roads?
The questions were enough to confirm that these soldiers weren’t merely travelling; they were looking for someone in particular.
More troublingly, Ant gradually realized that they were not particularly satisfied with her answers. A lone halfling travelling toward the very town around which the Crown appeared to be conducting an intensive search might be innocent, but the soldiers clearly saw no reason to assume that she was.
The sergeant asked where she had spent the previous night. Another wanted to know why she was travelling alone. A third asked what was in her saddlebags. When Ant answered one question, the sergeant returned to an earlier one from a slightly different direction. Nobody accused her of anything, but the soldier holding her horse’s bridle did not let go.
Ant began to suspect that being innocent of whatever they were investigating might not, by itself, be sufficient to get her back on the road.
When they asked Ant’s business, she remembered the note and told them she was an itinerant healer.
The change was remarkable.
There was an immediate softening of expression. Not universal—the sergeant remained suspicious—but two of the soldiers visibly relaxed. One related that he had once been treated by a travelling healer after being injured far from any proper physician. Another had a family member who owed her life to someone doing much the same work.
The second soldier began asking Ant questions about her travels rather than interrogating her about them. The first told the sergeant that people doing Ant’s sort of work travelled alone all the time. Even the hand on her horse’s bridle finally disappeared.
Suddenly Ant’s solitary travel made sense to the soldiers. There were a few more questions, more pro forma in nature.
Finally, one of the soldiers told the sergeant they were wasting their time. The sergeant looked Ant over once more, apparently still unconvinced, but three suspicious soldiers had become two sympathetic ones, one indifferent one, and a sergeant without quite enough reason to detain her.
He waved her on.
Ant remounted her horse and continued and, after a suitable distance, she reached into her pocket and took out the note again.
YOU ARE AN ITINERANT HEALER.
This time she regarded it with considerably more respect.
Some time later, a shadow moved across the road and Ant looked up to find a giant owl circling over the countryside. Not flying from one place to another but, rather, circling. Searching.
Ant’s first instinct was to get out of sight but another scrap of paper was waiting in her pocket – DON’T HIDE FROM THE OWL.
Ant looked upward, gulped, and kept walking as the enormous bird banked in the distance and slowly flew back toward her. This was, by any ordinary standard, terrible advice for someone with a history of breaking prisoners out of Crown lockups and killing Crown tax farmers.
Nevertheless, the previous note had worked so Ant remained on the road. Heart pounding in her throat, she walked at the same pace she had been walking before. She perspired but did not run. She did not dive behind a hedge. While she suddenly developed a passionate interest in nearby cover, she did nothing more than dart her eyes furtively in that direction.
She was an itinerant healer traveling openly toward Saint Mercy.
The owl passed directly overhead.
Perhaps it looked at her.
Perhaps it didn’t.
Either way, it continued on.
And Ant did the same.
Saint Mercy
By the time Ant reached Saint Mercy, it was obvious that the Crown wasn’t conducting a simple local search. To the contrary, it had established an operation and chosen Saint Mercy as the headquarters.
There were soldiers in town and soldiers coming and going. Horses were tethered in numbers too large to belong to a routine patrol. Messengers arrived and departed. Patrols moved into the surrounding countryside and returned with reports.
And there was the giant owl again, in a field just outside of the village. It had handlers and was dressed in Crown livery. The Crown was using it to search for someone or something, making the countryside around Saint Mercy look rather more hostile than before.
She overheard enough to know that the roads were being watched by patrols and the farms were being questioned. And the sky itself had joined the investigation.
Ant also saw a woman wearing civilian clothing with nothing about her that suggested rank. There was no impressive uniform, no visible insignia of command.
But the people around her reacted to her. A Crown officer gave instructions to several soldiers and they were about to move out when the woman spoke quietly to him. The officers and soldiers stopped and watched as she pointed to something on a map. A brief conversation followed and the soldiers received new instructions and left in a different direction than before.
Later, Ant saw a messenger arrive and report to a uniformed officer. The officer took him to the woman. Ant didn’t know who she was but it was increasingly clear that she was running the search operation.
And then an older woman arrived at the Crown position in a fury.
Mrs. Bakkal
Mrs. Bakkal was not impressed by the Crown. Her adult son was missing. Had been gone for more than a week, in fact, and now, suddenly, Saint Mercy was full of Crown soldiers.
They apparently had enough manpower to walk the roads, question farmers, send patrols across the countryside and fly an enormous owl over everybody’s homes—but nobody seemed particularly interested in finding her son and Mrs. Bakkal intended to correct this deficiency personally.
Ant heard enough of the argument to learn the missing man’s occupation. He was the village grocer and had left the village on horseback more than a week ago without telling anyone where he was going; only that he’d be back in three days. But he never returned.
And Ant, in a flash of intuition, knew immediately why that mattered. Daniel Bakkal had almost certainly ridden out to participate in the Ebon Blade ambush Mara Tabb had told her about—and had never come home.
Then the sharp-eyed woman overheard Mrs. Bakkal’s argument with an officer and her attention shifted. She began asking questions.
How long had Mrs. Bakkal’s son been missing?
When had anyone last seen him?
Had he said where he was going?
Had he taken anything with him?
Ant did not remain to hear the answers – the Crown had just acquired a new thread and it was clear where it was going to lead.
She had learned enough. Now she needed to find the underground before the Crown did.
The Ember
Mara Tabb had given Ant the name of someone in Saint Mercy who might be able to help. Ant approached cautiously, but conscious of possessing an additional advantage. Long before any of this, while the party was returning to Bastionstead from Fort Arcadia, Valcour had given the party a small signet ring bearing the symbol of the Ebon Blades: a stylized ember, sharp and angular, suggesting heat rather than flame.
Valcour had been very clear about what the ring did.
Nothing.
It was entirely mundane.
Furthermore, possessing it proved nothing. The Crown could capture such a ring. It could copy one. Anyone foolish enough to trust a stranger merely because that stranger carried an insignia would not remain in a clandestine organization for long.
But the ring could open a careful conversation.
And Ant did just that, showing the signet discreetly to the stranger she sought. The reaction was subtle. Nobody embraced her, nobody announced that she had found the resistance, and nobody offered to take her to Barin.
But the conversation continued, carefully, as the two, guided by the stranger, wandered inconspicuously in a private direction. Eventually came a question Ant had heard before.
“Is the ember still warm?”
Ant answered, “It never goes cold.”
That was enough for the conversation to become somewhat less careful.
But not careless. Never careless.
Ant explained that she was looking for Barin and the others. She had returned from Gozneth to Dolven’s Hollow and found them missing. Mara Tabb had directed her here.
The Saint Mercy contact listened, asked questions and tested pieces of Ant’s story. Eventually, Ant was believed, but there was still a problem.
“I can’t take you to the safe house.”
Ant asked why.
“I don’t know where it is.”
That, Ant had to admit, was probably sensible. The Saint Mercy cell had been supplying the people hiding outside town, but it did not know their location. Supplies were left at a dead drop. Someone from the safe house collected them. So, while Ant could not be taken to her friends, she could be taken somewhere her friends would eventually come.
Before they parted, the contact also explained how Ant—or the party—could get another message back to the Saint Mercy cell if necessary which might well prove useful later. Until now, the safe house had communicated with Saint Mercy through the dead drop. Ant now knew whom to find if somebody needed to go into the village and speak directly with the cell. Then Ant was led out of Saint Mercy by a route considerably less direct than the one by which she had entered.
Outside of the village, she was blindfolded and led on a circuitous route to a non-descript wooded area. The contact informed her that this was the dead drop and that she was to wait there and left without another word.
Ant waited.
The Dead Drop
Nothing happened and at first this was entirely unsurprising. After all, nobody had promised that someone would arrive immediately. So Ant settled down and made herself comfortable.
She waited.
Still nothing.
The countryside was quiet.
Ten minutes passed.
And she waited.
Then more minutes.
And she waited. And began to think.
She had seen patrols on the road, a giant owl searching from the air, had entered a town full of Crown soldiers, and had watched a keenly intelligent woman direct a sophisticated search. Even more, she had watched that investigator acquire a new lead connecting a missing Saint Mercy grocer to something that Ant knew was very likely the Ebon Blades.
Then Ant had introduced herself to a stranger using clandestine recognition protocols, admitted that she was looking for Barin and allowed that stranger to lead her out into the middle of nowhere. And leave her there.
More time passed.
Ant began to consider alternative explanations for her circumstances. Perhaps the Saint Mercy cell had been compromised. Perhaps the woman she had spoken to wasn’t an Ebon Blade auxiliary at all. Perhaps the Crown knew about the signet rings. Perhaps it knew the challenge and response. Perhaps Mara’s information was out of date. Perhaps nobody from the safe house was coming today. Perhaps somebody was watching Ant right now to see who came to collect her. Perhaps this entire elaborate sequence had been designed to make Ant sit patiently in one place while the Crown closed around her.
Ant looked carefully at the surrounding countryside.
Nothing.
She considered leaving. She considered giving it another five minutes but not a second longer. She considered that perhaps she had already waited too long and disaster was inevitable. She considered that –
– and then she put her hand into a pocket, a nervous childhood habit. There was paper inside. She froze and glanced frantically in all directions.
No one. And nothing.
She pulled the paper out – her handwriting.
KEEP WAITING.
Ant stared at the message then turned it over.
YES, REALLY.
So Ant waited.
Five more minutes.
Nothing.
Ten.
Still nothing.
She checked the note again.
It continued to say the same thing.
Ant waited.
Eventually she heard movement.
Someone was approaching – not Crown soldiers… someone else… Several strangers emerged cautiously through the trees, evidently checking to see if the latest delivery of food and supplies was there for them. Instead, they found Ant.
The Safe House
The journey from the dead drop was deliberately circuitous with Ant blindfolded once again and Ant not told where she was going. That was probably wise too.
Eventually, however, she was brought to a farmhouse in the countryside outside Saint Mercy where she finally found her friends.
There was much to explain. Ant had been away for a while and had visited Gareth’s family and then Pfinder. She brought word that Pfinder was still alive and that he had foiled the Cult’s attempt on Elvys. Eloise was with Pfinder and refusing to go back to Laveleen.
Then Ant learned what had happened while she was gone. The ambush had succeeded.
Mostly.
Nine Ebon Blades were dead as were Tom, Judy, and another of the tribal Orcs.
Helen had been captured but the Crown rogue and cleric had escaped. And Helen was dead now too. So was Laveleen.
For Ant, one small mystery resolved itself. Eloise had left Manchester carrying a message for Laveleen. Somewhere along the way, something had happened and she turned around, went back to Pfinder, and refused to leave again.
But there were larger matters to discuss. Ant told them what she had seen about the mobilization farther south and the sheer scale of the kingdom’s war machine. She told them about the four-person patrol on the road and the questions they were asking. She told them about the giant owl, the Crown headquarters in Saint Mercy, the woman directing it all, and how the woman seized upon the report of Daniel Bakkal’s disappearance.
Some of this confirmed things the others already knew. The Ebon Blades’ local supporters had already warned them that Crown patrols were spreading through the countryside, questioning farmers and travelers, and they knew about both the giant owl and the civilian woman who appeared to be directing the search. They had also noticed the peculiar traffic of ravens flying back and forth across the area and had begun to suspect that the birds formed some sort of Crown communications network. Ant’s journey had now given them a view of the same dragnet from the outside—and confirmed that it extended along the roads as well as through the countryside around their refuge.
The news about Daniel Bakkal was different. The party had not known that one of the nine Ebon Blades killed in the ambush had been a grocer from Saint Mercy. Now they knew his name, and, considerably more importantly, they knew that his mother had just placed that name directly in front of the woman running the Crown investigation.
The Crown had another lead.
But Ant had brought something useful too. The party had never been completely unable to communicate with its Saint Mercy supporters: messages could be left at the dead drop along with requests for disguises, rumors, diversions, false sightings or whatever other assistance the cell might safely provide. That arrangement, however, was deliberately indirect. The people in the farmhouse did not know who was receiving their requests in Saint Mercy, and the Saint Mercy cell did not know where the farmhouse was.
Ant had changed one side of that equation. She now knew a particular person in Saint Mercy whom the party could approach, how to approach that person, and how to establish enough credibility to begin a careful conversation. If someone needed to enter Saint Mercy and work directly with the local cell rather than send instructions through a dead drop, they now had a way to do it.
The problem before them, however, had not changed. If anything, it had become more urgent. The Crown was looking for them, the investigation was getting closer, and they needed to leave.
And they needed, if possible, to do it without leading the Crown to the Saint Mercy Ebon Blades who had kept them alive for the past two weeks.
Nor was this simply a matter of seven adventurers slipping away under cover of darkness. Barin and Phineas were also there, along with the surviving Ebon Blades. Oakbeard and Mossyrock still needed to get back toward Briarfell, and the surviving tribal Orc needed to travel with them far enough to return to his scattered people without the Crown discovering that those people existed. Every additional traveler made concealment harder, while splitting into smaller groups created dangers of its own.
The safe house itself had done its job. The question now was whether everyone sheltering inside it could disappear before the Crown worked out where to look.
At some point amid all of this, Ant happened to check her pocket one more time.
There was another note.
She unfolded it.
TRY NOT TO GET CAUGHT BY THE CROWN.
Ant stared at it.
After everything else her patron had told her—the names, the cover story, the instructions, the impossible little pieces of information that had somehow put her exactly where she needed to be—this seemed rather less useful.
Then she turned it over.
IT’S BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH.