10: Burning Ants

After staying up all night, having a patrol first thing in the morning, then catching up on some sleep and then another patrol that evening, we weren’t able to continue our investigation into Vielfras’ death until the day after. Then when we woke up we learned that Orban had been moved to the cells at the court house.

We went to see Heske Glazer to tell her about Vielfras’ wanting her dead. We hoped to shock her into being more cooperative than Orban had been. She was surprised to hear the news and also surprised to hear that Vielfras thought she had been spying on him. We talked more about her work and how she had been grinding lenses for a wizard. I assumed this was for the Wizard Christoph Engel who Vielfras had been arguing with, but it was for a Celestial mage called Sibylle Hagerdorn who lived in the Grey Mountains. She had last picked up a lens a few days ago.

A street urchin came up to Heske and she kindly handed him a small piece of spare glass. As we watched, the urchin began to use the glass to focus the sun’s rays on the ground and burn some unfortunate ants. And the penny dropped. 

It dawned on us all at the same time that perhaps this wizard had been using Heske’s lenses to focus magical power, and she had used that power to assassinate Tylo Vielfras. Perhaps Heske had been spying on Vielfras. Perhaps he was a follower of the Dark God of the club for fighting and needed to be stopped. Perhaps this wizard was working for good after all. We knew we needed to travel up to her place in the Grey Mountains and find out.

We learned that the wizard’s laboratory was a tall tower in the mountains near the village of Elssen, the Tower of Vane, and we arranged with Pfeffer to commandeer a coach to get us most of the way there. While making our preparations, however, we got the news that Orban had been released from the courthouse by dubious means. I guess that is what happens when you have lots of friends in the watch.

We realised we needed to get some gear if we were going to go up to the mountains, and ended up at Nordwander’s, a Dwarf supply shop that catered to humans, too. We didn’t have much cash, but Kurtis’ silver tongue managed to get us a decent deal on a load of warm coats. But as a condition of the deal, Gudrun Nordwander, the owner of the shop’s adventurous son, would be coming with us.

We got the coach to Traisburg, in the foothills of the mountains, and needed to spend the night there. As a man of the cloth with no vices and little appetite, and who has his own cell at the temple of Shallya, life for me in Ubersreik is very inexpensive. So I was surprised to find the cost of lodging at an inn was so high. In any case I only had a couple of pennies to my name as I donate all my spare cash to the temple. So Erhardt lent me the money for a stay in the inn’s common room. He said I could pay it back to the temple, which was very reasonable of him. Erhardt certainly seemed to come across, rather than a mysterious, feared, Imperial wizard-spy, more as a mild-mannered scribe or accountant, but perhaps that is what he wants me to think.

That night at the inn Gudrun insisted we tell him about all out exploits as heroic adventurers. I don’t know how Kurtis and Gulgad managed to give him the impression we were heroic adventurers, but apart from the story about the troll, and the one about the fire, and the one about the riot in Marktplatz, and the one in the club for fighting, actually, maybe we were heroic adventurers after all.

The next day we walked for most of it, across the rising foothills, the going was tough. To be honest I had not travelled much outside of Ubersreik, but I always imagined that roads were a bit like the ones in the city, cobbled, and sort of even, but these were little more than ruts in the ground, punctuated by rocks and puddles. But we made good time and got to Elssen before dark, where we planned to spend the night before reaching the tower the next morning. It was during this part of the journey that I noticed that Kurtis was wearing a particularly more stylish and well-made coat than the rest of us. It seemed that his deal with Nordwander allowed for one expensive coat and four cheaper ones.

I was feeling the cold a bit and not really enjoying my trudge through the mud, but Gudrun was nattering away, in his optimistic way. I was not sure what he thought he had let himself in for, but whatever he was thinking, I was sure it wasn’t accurate.

Towards the end of the day we came to a narrow part of the track near an old stone bridge. Coming the other way was a group of ragged and wretched villains. They were raving about something or other. My first thought was that they were Sigmarite fanatics but that did not seem to be the case. As they approached us, a frothing mouthed fellow suddenly lunged towards me, rending at me with filthy nails. He drew blood, and we managed to push him away. He was ranting about rats and conspiracies and other nonsense, but the pain in his eyes and his desperate behaviour showed that he sincerely believed whatever it was he was going on about.

Looking back, I now think this was when I contracted Ratte Fever. Though the symptoms would not show for a couple of weeks, this feels like the moment it must have happened, and the perhaps I should have been a bit more charitable towards these unfortunate souls. On the other hand, had I avoided them altogether I wouldn’t have caught anything.

We spent the night in Elssen and in the morning headed off towards the Tower of Vane, which is where we expected to find Hagerdorn. Now that the weather had cleared we could see the tower commanding the view for miles around. We managed to get a local to rent us a boat to get us across the river in exchange for the rat trap that Solvej had been carrying around for days. Though the trap was worth more than the crossing, I thought it must be a very good deal for us because it was very unlikely we would even find a need for a rat trap in the foreseeable future.

As we began the last leg of our journey, we heard a voice calling from behind us. It was witch hunter Marband. She addressed the foul sorcerer of the Dark Gods, Erhardt, and demanding he face her. And it was at precisely the same moment, we saw a band of Ubersreik watchmen marching towards us from the other direction, and at their head, it was Sergeant Orban.