21: Afloat

We were shunted into one of our rooms and two guards were placed on the door. Soon enough Gulgad and Erhardt came back from getting rid of the scholars’ bodies and joined us. I asked Erhardt whether he had also disposed of the strange daggers and he said that he did. Gulgad was amused that Kurtis had been made judicial champion, and Kurtis wondered whether Gulgad might be a better choice. We were not sure whether non-humans were allowed under the law to represent Imperial nobility in that capacity, however.

We also discussed whether Otto might actually be guilty. We all saw the mad look in his eyes, and in his drug-fuelled state, after having been poisoned, who knows what he would have been capable of? I wondered whether the assassin was the same person as the thief, for Otto had had his purse stolen and also his tusk-dagger. Also, the body of the first scholar had been dropped off while Otto was there. Was this all by the same person. If so, their motivation seemed to be unfathomable. Otto would have been a witness to all three acts, and yet completely unreliable.

We discussed the idea of blaming the scholars for Bruno’s death, but as we had just disposed of all the bodies, that would not have helped our case much. We decided that keeping the incident with the scholars secret would give us some leverage over Gustav, who we decided would be able to keep us safe, at least until Kurtis’ judicial duel.

Then the gravin arrived. She told us that Otto could not be guilty of the murder as he wouldn’t be stupid enough to commit it with his own weapon, which some of us doubted. She had cleverly appointed Kurtis as judicial champion in order to trap Bruno’s assassin into making an attempt on his life. She said that we should carry on as normal and wait for the assassin to strike and if we survived that and captured the assassin, we would have her gratitude. It was an offer we couldn’t refuse.

She allowed us all to have one item back that had been confiscated from us. Everyone chose their weapons, but I chose my Shallyan prayer book because ‘the words of Shallya were the greatest weapon anyone could possess,’ is what I would have said a few weeks ago, but now I wasn’t really feeling it, but chose the book, anyway. They even gave otto his tusk-dagger back which showed a remarkable lack of respect for the legal evidence.

We all got ready for a fitful night. Erhardt and Solvej had the first watch, and I got to sleep quickly enough. It may have been a fraught evening, but it had been a long, busy one and I was tired out. I was woken abruptly by Kurtis’ screams and saw a figure looming over him stabbing a dagger repeatedly into his face. I saw the dagger smash into his skull, showering the room in teeth, cutting through his tongue and leaving his face a mess. Then I saw another strike slash at his ear, damaging it beyond use and causing blood to spurt all over his sheets. It was clear he would be dead within moments.

But such is the dream state, the moments between sleep and wakefulness, where the imagination runs wild, and the senses are unreliable. In fact, the assassin had misjudged things in the darkness. She had mistaken Kurtis’ pillow for his face and stabbed that instead, rending it beyond recognition. One thing was for sure, the pillow would never sing again.

Gulgad was the first to react and swung his axe through the darkness damaging the assassin’s sword arm. He also had the presence of mind to instruct us all to keep the assassin alive. Then still screaming, Kurtis grabbed his sword and impaled his would-be assassin, and she was dead. This is about the third time in as many weeks that Kurtis had managed to dispatch a helpless victim and make things more difficult for us. The idea of him being a judicial champion is plainly ludicrous, unless his opponent is stabbed a few times and tied to a tree before the fight begins, I suppose.

And of course, Erhardt and Solvej were not blameless. They had been on guard and had probably both fallen asleep. Solvej admitted her fault, but Erhardt tried to insist that he had actually been awake, but the assassin had somehow managed to slip by him undetected. He even claimed that she had come down the chimney.

Alerted by the Kurtis’ screams a couple of guards rushed in and soon took the assassin’s body away. I’m not sure they could really claim to be guards considering how many attacks they had failed to stop in one night, but they still managed to throw their weight around like guards do the world over.

Intrigued by how this assassin, small as she was, had managed to get into the room, Otto decided to try out the chimney. Gulgad helped him up, so he could climb part of the way up. He could see a gap inside the chimney breast linking this room with the one next door, so we decided that is where she must have come from. Of course, being Otto, he got stuck and we had the rigmarole of pulling him out again and giving him (and us) a headache. The rats of the Reikland were safe for at least one more night.

After some even more needed sleep the guards roused us and insisted we go to see the gravin. The gravin seemed relieved and almost friendly. She told us that the assassin, a woman called Dominique, had been part of her retinue for a few weeks and she worried how easily her security had been breached. For this reason she had decided to make all of us her personal guard and we would accompany her to Kemperbad and keep her safe on the way. As Kemperbad was mostly on our way to Altdorf we were happy enough with this, but again it seemed like we did not have much choice.

After the morning’s preparations we all boarded the gravin’s barge and began our journey down the River Tranig towards the Reik. It took a while for us to reach Kemperbad, and though we made sure we looked like we were guarding the gravin, we didn’t feel she was in any immediate danger. For the first time since we had all met up, we were able to relax. The Reikland drifted by quite peacefully, we were in no danger, we had somewhere comfortable to stay every night, and decent food to eat. The life of a riverboater, at least upon the gravin’s riverboat, seemed ideal, especially when compared to life in the slums of Ubersreik. I wondered about our plan to head for, and get lost in, Altdorf, and I feared it might be just like Ubersreik but worse.

Kurtis spent a lot of time with Genevieve, the gravin’s harpist, although he didn’t seem as relaxed as the rest of us. I had a quick word with Genevieve to give her my support, but also to warn her about Kurtis who didn’t have the most consistent track record with young women, in my view. I couldn’t help thinking that Solvej was more keen on Kurtis’ relationship with Genevieve than Kurtis himself was. Perhaps she was actually a bit of a romantic, despite her poor manners and primitive northern ways.

Otto spent his time hunting for rats and then practicing his taxidermy on them. He made a stuffed rat-Gulgad and gave it to him. I’m not sure it looked that much like him, though it did have orange hair. We never saw it again. Later he made a rat-Solvej which looked much better, so his craft was definitely improving. Solvej seemed quite pleased with it. Erhardt wrote a few letters and posted them, sporadically. I have no idea who they were for, but it was probably about wizard stuff, unless he was spying on us, which I suspect he may have been doing all along.

By now my Ratte Fever had completely gone, and Gulgad’s had never really taken hold so I suspect Father Gunther’s cure had worked. Solvej spent a lot of time gossiping with the servants, especially the women, trying to pick up any information, and I think her efforts at idle gossip were actually more effective than our more pointed questioning, which didn’t seem to get much information at all. Still, we could not identify any accomplices Dominique may have had.

Despite the peace of the journey, I was troubled about my place in the cult and Shallya’s plans for me, so one evening I prayed for a sign. That night I received a vision of a ram standing by a wall, and beyond the wall was a butcher. I am not sure whether Shallya intended me to be the ram, the butcher, or the wall. But if visions were easy to interpret, then anyone could do it. Who would want that?

Gustav had a few words with Solvej. He was concerned that she had been lying about her name and her Stimmigen cover story and wanted to know exactly who we were so he could check up on us. Solvej stuck to her guns however and refused to give him any information, insisting that our interests were aligned with his, and we could trust each other in any case.

We got to Castle Reikguard, most of the way to Kemperbad, and decided this was a chance to get Kurtis the new lute we had promised him. To be honest I wasn’t really looking forward to having to listen to that racket again, but I had promised, like the rest of us, and so we honoured that.

Kurtis confided that he was a bit concerned about the up-coming fight, as if that were a surprise to any of us, and asked Gulgad to take his place. Gulgad, of course, had no problem with that but we were unsure of the legal position, so needed to look into it. Solvej told Kurtis that he would do fine as a champion. Was she trying to get him killed? I agreed with her.

Having made good progress, we arrived in Kemperbad two days ahead of the trial. What a spectacular city. The city itself was at the top of a cliff hundreds of feet above the river. There was a sort of wharf on the cliffside, but anything going into and out of the city had to be winched up on precarious platforms and cages.

I decided on seeing the great cliffs that perhaps that was the wall of my vision, and perhaps I was the ram, after all, and the butcher lay in wait for me in the city. Buoyed by this, I decided I would visit the temple of Shallya there for inspiration.

The evening before the duel, Kurtis admitted to Gulgad that he was very scared about it and asked for advice about facing his doom without fear. Gulgad told him that it wasn’t about having no fear but about what you did in the face of fear. Fear was just another opponent on the battlefield who needed to be faced. And Gulgad told Kurtis that he thought he was a decent swordsman in any case, which I think was a lie to make him feel better. He advised him to defend more than attack and to try to distract his opponent, in order to gain advantage.

Then Kurtis made Gulgad promise that if he did die to take his grandfather’s pendant back up into the mountains near the site of the Battle of the Broken Leg and hang it on a tree there. He said his grandfather had been at the battle and had fought bravely and died a hero. I think this is probably just another one of those family stories that Kurtis is so full of. I suspect that none of them are true and his mother just made them all up to entertain him when he was a boy. I think she should have probably revealed this before he left Ubersreik, because now he seems to be living his life following a load of imaginary tales, and they were the sort of tales that might get him killed.