January 19th – 23rd, 974
The Road to Manchester
The party began in Wolfpine, approximately two days behind Helen and the prisoners she had taken from Briarfell.
There was still a great deal they did not understand.
Hunkle, catching up on recent events, was particularly suspicious of the remarkable coincidence that Helen, the four elite Crown operatives allegedly searching for her, and the party had all somehow converged on Briarfell at approximately the same time. The others could offer theories, but few answers. Helen increasingly appeared to have been some variety of Crown intelligence operative, but why she had originally been in Briarfell—and what the Crown had known before arriving there—remained uncertain.
What was known was more immediately important.
After the party sealed themselves beneath Briarfell, Helen and the surviving Crown forces had escaped through the same tunnels by which the two groups had originally entered. Somewhere along the way they had overtaken Laveleen and the tribal Orcs and taken them prisoner as well. Reports gathered in Wolfpine indicated that Helen’s convoy now carried Oakbeard, Mossyrock, Laveleen, two surviving tribal Orcs, and the two surviving Forest Rangers, Tom and Judy.
The Crown had also improved its position considerably.
With the war now sending Crown troops north and refugees south, Helen had encountered a military detachment on its way toward the fighting and exercised sufficient authority to redirect part of it. By the time she left Wolfpine headed south, her little group had become a proper convoy: two horse-drawn wagons, Helen’s surviving elite companions, and a contingent of Crown soldiers escorting the prisoners toward Manchester.
The party had horses, however, while Helen had wagons and captives. There was still a chance to catch her.
The alternative route east toward Lake Thalmere was quickly eliminated. Wartime traffic had snarled shipping along the lake, and witnesses in Wolfpine were quite certain Helen had gone south overland. Both plausible roads eventually converged near Dolven’s Hollow, where Cassyndra had already sent Heka ahead with a message for Barin, Phineas, and the Ebon Blades.
The party elected to postpone examination of the strange equipment recovered from the Forest Rangers. They had their weapons, radios, lights, clothing, maps, and numerous other inexplicable artifacts, but understanding them properly would take time—and time was precisely what they did not have.
Ant, meanwhile, had another obligation. Gareth’s death had left behind a letter, possessions, and money intended for his family. Rather than join the pursuit, Ant separated from the others and set out for Gozneth, intending to deliver them personally.
Zborch was rather less nobly unavailable. A sudden illness rendered him incapable of useful adventuring, and he spent the pursuit ignominiously strapped to the baggage as the group rode south.
A Problem with the Road
They had not gone far before encountering approximately a dozen Crown soldiers marching north toward the war.
The party considered hiding, but the road was busy enough with soldiers, refugees, and ordinary travelers that doing so might attract more attention than simply continuing forward. They therefore rode on and attempted to look like an entirely unremarkable group of heavily armed adventurers.
The Crown sergeant was nudged by a private who recognized them and elected to respond by making a command decision not to recognize them.
His men were exhausted from a fast march, headed toward a war, and plainly had little enthusiasm for starting an unnecessary fight with a dangerous band of adventurers traveling in the opposite direction.
Unfortunately, one of his men had a good memory.
“Sarge, look. It’s Hunkle.”
The sergeant looked up at the party, sighed, and asked whether they were the people his unit was supposed to be looking for.
They assured him that they were not.
“Yeah,” the sergeant agreed. “No, I didn’t think so.”
He then explained—apparently for the benefit of these complete strangers—that word had gone out concerning a group of seven adventurers pursuing an important Crown convoy. Every Crown detachment traveling the road had been instructed to watch for them.
Obviously, these were not those adventurers.
If the party did happen to encounter the fugitives, however, the sergeant suggested that they might pass along a friendly warning: the Crown knew what they were doing, they were in trouble, and they really ought to stop following that convoy.
As for the sergeant and his men, they had more pressing concerns.
“We’ve got a war to get to.”
The two groups wished each other luck and continued in opposite directions. As the soldiers marched away, the sergeant reassured the private who had recognized Hunkle:
“See? It wasn’t them.”
The sergeant had done them a considerable favor by pretending not to recognize them. He had also revealed a serious problem. The Crown was looking for the party and they could no longer simply gallop south along the main road until they caught up with Helen.
For several minutes, the entire rescue mission came into question.
Perhaps the sensible thing was to abandon the pursuit. The party had other problems demanding attention, and continuing south now meant repeatedly encountering Crown forces already alerted to their presence. They could abandon Helen’s trail, pursue their other objectives, and perhaps find another way to rescue the prisoners later.
Then came the objection that changed the decision.
There probably would not be a later.
Once Helen reached Manchester, Oakbeard, Mossyrock, Laveleen, the Orcs, Tom, and Judy would disappear into the machinery of the Crown. They might be imprisoned, interrogated, transferred elsewhere—or simply become impossible to rescue. Whatever chance the party had to recover them existed now, while they were still somewhere on the road.
So the heroes did not abandon the rescue.
They abandoned the road.
Rather than continue directly south and risk another Crown encounter, they turned their horses cross-country toward Milcross, intending to bypass the watched road, regain Helen’s trail farther south, and somehow close the remaining distance before she reached Manchester.
The pursuit continued.
Closing the Distance
The cross-country route worked. Not only did the party not encounter any further Crown columns but by the time they reached Milcross, the two-day lead Helen had enjoyed leaving Briarfell had shrunk to approximately six hours. The Crown convoy had passed through earlier that day and continued toward King’s Rest, apparently intending to spend the night there before continuing south.
The villagers had noticed the prisoners, although they had drawn some imaginative conclusions about them. The two tribal Orcs in the wagons were already being described as captured Orcish commanders, proof that the Crown had launched a devastating counterstroke against the rebellion and would undoubtedly have the whole unfortunate business wrapped up shortly – “Just like that.”
The more important news came from Heka, who had completed the flight to Dolven’s Hollow and returned with an answer from the Ebon Blades.
Barin, Phineas, and their comrades intended to help.
There was, however, a complication. They did not know which of the two roads approaching Dolven’s Hollow Helen would take. The Ebon Blades were therefore dividing their available force and preparing two separate ambushes, one along each route.
Neither would be particularly close to Dolven’s Hollow itself. Whatever happened, they did not intend to give the Crown an excuse to descend upon the village in retaliation.
Their objective was also deliberately limited: free the prisoners and get away.
That suited the heroes perfectly who noted that the Ebon Blades knew the country better than they did and could choose the ground. The party therefore decided not to seek them out with an alternative plan or to attempt to coordinate some elaborate rendezvous. Instead, they would get behind Helen’s convoy, follow at a safe distance, and wait.
Sooner or later, Helen would ride into one of the Ebon Blade ambushes and when the fighting began, the party would charge forward and attack the Crown from behind.
Someone supplied the inevitable name – the double secret ambush.
And someone else provided the dispassionate tactical analysis – “What could possibly go wrong?”
There remained the problem of catching up.
From the time of day and the convoy’s pace, the heroes judged that Helen was probably already approaching King’s Rest and would stop there for the night. The party would catch up with a night march and would remain outside King’s Rest, allow the Crown to spend the night, and resume the pursuit in the morning.
There was even some preliminary discussion of whether Cassyndra might find something useful to do in King’s Rest while everyone was sleeping. Something, perhaps, involving both invisibility and poison.
For now, however, there was only one way to turn a six-hour gap into something smaller.
The party rode on into the night.
Things That Go Bump in the Night
The road between Milcross and King’s Rest was deserted after dark and somewhere along an otherwise anonymous stretch of road, Heka returned from scouting with unwelcome news.
Four undead were approaching through the darkness.
There followed a short and unpleasant fight. A StarryWisp illuminated one of the creatures before Calder’s magic sent it fleeing into the night and the remaining three continued forward. They were eventually battered, burned, and blasted into considerably less mobile but far more foul-smelling forms.
The creatures themselves were less interesting than what they carried.
In the light cast over the remains, the heroes discovered shovels and picks slung over their shoulders.
They also bore a familiar tattoo: the mark the party had learned to associate with Soulreaper.
The combination was unpleasantly familiar.
Back in Session 5, while withdrawing from their successful ambush of tax farmers, the party had encountered the undead Rudric Thorn carrying an inexplicable shovel still caked with earth and the very same tattoo on his rotting forearm. At the time, it had been one strange detail among many.
Much later, at Willowhollow, they had discovered what Soulreaper’s forces were doing on a far larger scale. Old graves had been opened, the North Fields battlefield had been harvested, and organized work parties of skeletons equipped with sharpened spades were systematically recovering the dead for Soulreaper’s armies.
Now, on an empty road in the middle of the night, here were more of Soulreaper’s undead carrying digging tools.
Cassyndra sent Heka to investigate, while Wolfgang accompanied the owl into the darkness. One of the four undead was still wandering somewhere nearby after Calder had driven it away, but Wolfgang and Heka managed to avoid it and soon found the excavation.
There were no headstones and little remaining evidence of who had been buried there, but several old, unmarked graves had been opened. Skeletons lay exposed in the disturbed earth.
Apparently, the party had simply interrupted another night’s work.
The discovery produced little enthusiasm – “Can’t say I love Soulreaper.”
The heroes had known for some time that Soulreaper was building armies from the dead. What disturbed them now was the realization that the harvesting had not stopped.
The rebellion was no longer something being prepared in secret. Armies were already moving. Crown troops were marching north. Refugees were fleeing south. People were fighting and dying.
And Soulreaper was still digging.
There were always more graves.
The party left the dead behind and continued toward King’s Rest.
Breakfast at King’s Rest
The party reached the outskirts of King’s Rest sometime during the night.
Heka’s reconnaissance revealed an otherwise unremarkable farming village – scattered farms surrounding a small central hamlet, with the Crown’s wagons and horses gathered outside the local inn and guards keeping watch.
Helen had indeed stopped for the night.
Rather than enter the village themselves, the heroes remained well outside while Cassyndra prepared to undertake the sort of mischief for which invisibility had presumably been invented. She would wait until morning, slip into the inn unseen, and poison the Crown’s breakfast.
The poison in question was assassin’s blood, recovered from the Crown rogue’s belongings after Briarfell. It was not generally lethal, but anyone who succumbed to it would become violently ill and remain poisoned for most of the following day.
That could make the eventual ambush considerably easier.
There were, however, ethical complications to poisoning breakfast.
The party did not want to poison the innkeeper, his family, or any other villagers who happened to be eating from the same kitchen. They also did not want to poison the prisoners. Perhaps more importantly for everyone in King’s Rest, they worried that if a collection of Crown soldiers suddenly became mysteriously ill, the Crown might conclude that rebellious villagers were responsible and retaliate against the town. One commented, “I prefer they reprisal us.”
The objective, therefore, was not merely to poison the Crown.
It was to poison the Crown carefully.
At sunrise, as King’s Rest began to stir, Cassyndra turned invisible and approached the inn.
The Crown guards were alert and apparently understood perfectly well that invisible intruders were a possibility, although they had not gone quite so far as scattering powder across the floor or stringing tripwires through the entrances. It made little difference. Cassyndra slipped through the guards, followed someone through an open door, and reached the dining room without being detected.
There she discovered both good news and bad news.
The good news was that the Crown had effectively taken over the inn’s public rooms. There were no ordinary patrons eating breakfast alongside them. The chances that anyone sitting down for breakfast that morning would be one of Cassyndra’s intended targets increased.
The bad news was that the kitchen did not prepare separate meals for the Crown and the people who ran the inn. Breakfast was being cooked communally, from the same batch. The innkeeper and his family might therefore eat exactly the same food later.
There was no way for Cassyndra to be certain that poisoning the Crown’s breakfast would poison only the Crown’s breakfast; the innkeeper’s family and the prisoners might suffer as well.
There remained, in the terminology of the operation, some potential for “mispoisoning.”
Or, less delicately, collateral damage.
Cassyndra considered the risk and elected to proceed anyway.
She introduced the assassin’s blood into the food and slipped back out.
Her contingency plan, should the stealth operation go catastrophically wrong, was reassuringly straightforward – “The backup plan is called Fireball.”
Fortunately, it was not required and she remained nearby under cover of invisibility to observe the results.
Soon there was a stir.
It was not a very large stir.
A few Crown soldiers became ill. There was some vomiting, some urgent need for the privy, and a generally unhappy breakfast. One of the captive Orcs also became mildly sick, but Helen and her elite companions appeared unaffected. Nobody was incapacitated badly enough to prevent the convoy from continuing its journey.
More importantly, nobody suspected sabotage.
The Crown concluded that it had been served bad food.
This produced no arrests, interrogations, burnings, or reprisals against King’s Rest. Instead, Cassyndra overheard the Crown representatives engaged in a considerably more civilized dispute with the innkeeper.
They wanted their money back.
This was mildly surprising in itself. During their journey south, Helen’s party had not hesitated to requisition horses, wagons, and supplies when Crown necessity demanded them. Yet at King’s Rest they had apparently paid for their accommodations and meals like ordinary travelers. Even after several members of the party became ill, they did not accuse the innkeeper of treason or threaten punishment. They essentially informed him that they understood he had not poisoned them deliberately, but the breakfast had manifestly failed to meet reasonable standards and they did not intend to pay for it.
It lent the Crown contingent an unexpected air of professionalism. They might commandeer what military necessity required but they did not regard that as permission simply to steal everything else.
Illness from breakfasts, however, were another matter. The Crown obtained—or at least vigorously pursued—its refund, loaded the prisoners back into the wagons, and prepared to depart. Cassyndra also confirmed that the captives had spent the night under guard in the stables and showed no obvious signs of physical abuse.
From outside the village, the rest of the party could barely tell that their elaborate poisoning operation had accomplished anything at all.
Cassyndra eventually returned with her report.
“So you poisoned them, not much happened.”
Apparently so.
It was time to return to Plan A.
The convoy rolled south from King’s Rest.
The heroes followed.
The Double Secret Ambush
Once the Crown convoy left King’s Rest, the party resumed the pursuit with another reason for urgency.
Along the road, they had begun hearing rumors that a Crown relief force was marching north from Manchester to meet Helen. Nobody seemed to know exactly how the message had reached Manchester—rider, magic, carrier pigeon, or something else—but the implication was obvious – the window for action was closing. If Helen reached the relief force before the Ebon Blades struck, the rescue might become impossible.
There was also no sign of Heward or Sister Eliria. Travelers who had seen the convoy described Helen, her four elite Crown companions, the soldiers, wagons, and prisoners, but nobody matching the two merchants appeared to be traveling with them. Somewhere after reaching Wolfpine, the pair seemed to have parted company with Helen and gone elsewhere.
The heroes gave the convoy approximately twenty minutes’ lead and followed.
The countryside offered relatively little concealment: rolling ground, occasional low hills, scattered trees, and farms rather than the dense woodland some of the party had originally imagined. That made attempts to creep alongside the convoy and pick off isolated soldiers less attractive.
Fortunately, the Ebon Blades knew the country and the party decided to trust them. They would follow at a discreet distance until the Ebon Blades launched their ambush and take that as their cue to swing into action.
In the meantime, Heka flew ahead to determine what was happening and she eventually returned with exactly the news the party had been waiting for. Ahead, the road passed between two hills. On the high ground, concealed men with longbows were taking positions overlooking the road.
The Ebon Blades had chosen their ground and Helen’s convoy was approaching the ambush.
The heroes increased their pace.
They did not want to arrive before the Ebon Blades attacked—the entire point of the double secret ambush was to let the Crown commit itself first—but they wanted to be close enough to charge into the rear of the convoy as soon as the first arrows flew.
There was one complication.
Helen had posted a mounted scout behind the main body who noticed them.
The party responded by slowing again and attempted to look like what they ostensibly were: a harmless collection of adventurers traveling south for reasons entirely unrelated to the heavily guarded Crown convoy immediately ahead of them.
The rear rider watched them for a while. Then he turned his horse around and rode back to investigate.
“Ho there!”
The resulting conversation was surprisingly cordial. The heroes explained that they were adventurers bound for Dolven’s Hollow, where they hoped to find employment dealing with reports of undead.
The Crown scout had heard the same rumors.
He even offered some friendly advice: if they reached Dolven’s Hollow, they might want to avoid discussing undead too loudly around anyone in authority. For whatever reason, the authorities did not seem particularly eager to acknowledge the problem.
The conversation drifted into employment. The party explained that they possessed a certain useful set of skills. The scout suggested that, with a war underway, the Crown itself might have work for unconventional operatives. Once their current business was concluded, they might consider visiting Manchester and asking around.
It was, under the circumstances, an exceptionally friendly recruiting pitch.
Only then did he mention the convoy. He was, as his uniform plainly indicated, a Crown soldier. The group ahead of him was transporting sensitive cargo, and he would appreciate it if the adventurers maintained their distance.
The party agreed.
The scout turned his horse back toward the convoy.
By then, Heka’s reconnaissance had given the heroes a good idea of where the Ebon Blades were waiting. They were perhaps two minutes from the ambush.
The scout was now riding directly toward it, creating a problem. If he reached the convoy before the Ebon Blades attacked, he might report the suspiciously familiar collection of adventurers following immediately behind.
The heroes had just assured him that they would keep their distance but made their sudden reconsideration known by casting Blindness.
The scout, abruptly unable to see, clung to his horse and urged it forward anyway, hunkering low and attempting to make himself as small a target as possible while the animal continued more or less in the direction of the convoy.
The party opened fire.
For a man who had only moments earlier offered them career advice, he received a remarkably abrupt severance package.
He did not make it back.
Ahead, Helen’s convoy continued toward the gap between the hills.
Above it, the Ebon Blades waited with their longbows.
Behind it, the heroes began to move.
The double secret ambush was about to begin.
The Battle on the Road
The Ebon Blades struck first.
As Helen’s convoy entered the gap between the hills, arrows began falling from the high ground. Twelve Ebon Bladesmen had concealed themselves around the road, and the Crown column suddenly found itself under attack from positions it had not detected.
Then the party arrived from behind, closing the double secret ambush.
The Crown escort was formidable. In addition to Helen, the convoy contained the four elite operatives who had accompanied her from Briarfell—a fighter, barbarian, rogue, and cleric—along with ordinary Crown soldiers and two additional military clerics.
The prisoners remained divided between the two covered wagons. In the first were Oakbeard, Judy, Laveleen, and one of the tribal Orcs. In the second were Mossyrock, Tom, and the other tribal Orc.
What followed was considerably less orderly than the distribution of the prisoners.
Arrows flew from the hills. Crown soldiers scrambled to respond. The party crashed into the rear of the formation. Magic began going off in every direction.
There were Fireballs.
There were, in fact, quite a few Fireballs.
Cassyndra contributed enthusiastically to this state of affairs, dropping one into a concentration of Crown troops while Calder and the Ebon Blade archers kept pressure on the surviving defenders. Calder’s Flaming Sphere added still another mobile hazard to a battlefield that was rapidly becoming inhospitable to anyone who preferred not to be on fire.
The Crown soldiers and Ebon Bladesmen suffered heavily as the fight rapidly became less an ambush than a confused melee surrounding two wagons full of prisoners.
Helen initially remained within the second wagon and fought largely through magic, using Dissonant Whispers, Beguiling Magic, Mirror Image, and other spells to harry anyone attempting to close with the convoy.
Her companions proved equally troublesome.
The Crown fighter was extremely difficult to bring down. Cassyndra finally caught him in an upcast Cloud of Daggers, dropping him before he could make use of the healing ability he had rather optimistically saved for later. Hunkle, passing on his way to the next problem, made certain that there would be no second opportunity.
That problem was the barbarian, who had demonstrated an almost unreasonable unwillingness to die.
The surviving Ebon Bladesmen repeatedly filled him with arrows while Hunkle closed with him directly. By the final stages of the battle, the two had effectively separated themselves from everything else happening around them and settled the question personally.
In Hunkle’s favor, as it would turn out.
Elsewhere, the fight steadily turned against the Crown.
The ordinary soldiers and military clerics were being cut down. The elite rogue, initially hindered by magic and forced to take cover in the second wagon, eventually returned to the fight by peppering the party with accurate shortbow fire.
Wolfgang, meanwhile, found a direct solution to the difficulty presented by covered wagons. He ordered Chorizo to go through one.
Chorizo did.
The enthusiastic Chihuahua tore bodily through the canvas and attacked the first unfamiliar person he encountered inside – Helen. Rather than attempt to reason with the beast, she turned herself invisible, pushed the dog back, and scrambled out the side of the wagon.
Merrythought took a somewhat less architectural approach to the other wagon. Using invisibility, she slipped inside and began freeing the prisoners, starting with Oakbeard. Once released, the old druid immediately joined the fight, bringing his Land’s End magic to bear against the Crown.
Calder, meanwhile, kept himself in the fight with healing magic while helping direct the Ebon Blade archers against the Crown’s remaining elite troops. Between arrows, fire, magic, charging adventurers, and one increasingly enthusiastic boar, the convoy’s organized defense was steadily coming apart.
Then Heka brought more bad news.
Cassyndra had sent her familiar high above the battlefield to discover the source of the distant drums. From the air, Heka could see soldiers approaching along the road.
The Manchester relief force was coming.
The good news was that it was still far enough away that the current battle would probably be decided before it arrived.
The bad news was that whatever happened here, the victors would not have long to enjoy it.
The Prisoners
Once the elite forces realized that they were losing, their priorities suddenly changed. The elite Crown cleric began by casting Radiance of the Dawn on the occupants of the second wagon. Tom and the tribal orc bound next to him died while Mossyrock survived.
The cry went out – “Now they’re just killing prisoners.” But the cleric did not remain to finish Mossyrock, fleeing the battlefield entirely instead.
Almost immediately afterward, Helen vanished from under Chorizo and for a few moments the heroes did not know where she had gone. Then she reappeared at the other wagon where she killed Judy. After that, she fled, making no effort to kill Oakbeard, Laveleen, or the remaining tribal orc. The pattern was difficult to miss.
For reasons the party did not yet understand, as soon as the Crown realized it might lose the battle, Tom and Judy had become more important to kill than the other prisoners were.
Whatever the Crown had wanted from them, it had apparently preferred them dead to rescued. Although the party was furious enough to kill her, they made the conscious decision to take her alive.
Helen, for her part, remained uncooperative, attempting to flee the battlefield behind the cleric rather than surrendering in a civilized manner. Merrythought proved far more fleet-footed, however, and caught her with a rapier strike to the back and a flying elbow to the head that put her down for the count.
Alive.
A Costly Rescue
The battle was over.
The Crown convoy had been destroyed. Helen’s elite fighter and barbarian were dead, as were the ordinary soldiers and military clerics who had remained in the fight. The elite rogue and cleric escaped.
Helen herself was now a prisoner.
The rescue had succeeded—but not cleanly.
Oakbeard, Mossyrock, Laveleen, and one tribal Orc were alive and free but Tom, Judy, and one tribal Orc were dead.
The Ebon Blades had paid an appalling price. Of the twelve men who had sprung the ambush, only three survived. Barin and Phineas had escaped the slaughter only because both had been assigned to the Ebon Blades’ second ambush on the other possible route and had therefore never been present.
And there was no time to remain on the battlefield – Heka had already seen the relief force approaching from Manchester.
The heroes and surviving Bladesmen freed the rescued prisoners, secured Helen, sanitized the battlefield, and fled for the pre-prepared Ebon Blades safehouse where they would spend the next two weeks lying low and waiting for what happened next.