49: The Truth Hurts

There is another Shallyan parable which we call the Parable of the Village Priest. Whatever deity you wish to ascribe to the village priest is up to the listener, of course. Hint: it’s Sigmar.

There was once a priest who looked after his village as best as he could, and he considered himself a good person because he always obeyed the strictures of his god and did his best for the people of the village. And the villagers were good and did their best to obey the priest’s teaching.

Then one day, one of the villagers became disfigured. The priest said it was his god’s will that the villager should be killed. The villager protested that he was a good person and always obeyed the gods. But the priest followed the will of his god, and the villager was put to death.

Then a few years later, another of the villagers became disfigured. The priest said it was his god’s will that the villager should be killed. The villager protested that he was a good person and always obeyed the gods. But the priest followed the will of his god, and the villager was put to death.

Then one day, the priest woke up and saw that he was disfigured. And he insisted to himself that he was a good person and always obeyed the gods.

I’m not sure anyone was that interested in hearing any parables as we made our way back to the farmstead. They were more interested in talking about poisoning the ham.

I had the idea, as foolish as it sounds to me now, that if we could all talk about this freely and frankly that everyone would be able to see the matter clearly, and that we would all agree to do what we could to save the farmers. They do say Shallyans are naïve.

I left everyone to it and hurried back towards the farmstead ahead of them. Otto decided to come with me. I wasn’t very pleased about him thinking killing the farmers was like killing rats, but for my plan, I needed to get rid of him. So I told him to stay back with everyone else. But, as usual, he couldn’t take a hint and so he followed along behind me, like Schnitzel follows along behind him.

Back when we were travelling on the Emperor Wilhelm I had made a potion, that according to my notes, should encourage the drinker to always tell the truth. I had intended it to be used on those we needed to interrogate, to avoid having Solvej freak out on them. But I hadn’t found any use for it. I had made enough for six doses. And it had occurred to me that perhaps that would help us sort this out.

Now, we as Shallyans don’t go on about truth like the Verenans, like it is the only thing that matters, or that it has a purity and righteousness of its own, divorced from any context. We’re not that dogmatic. But, of course, the truth has its place, and it’s easy to say, you should always seek the truth. But it’s often more complicated than that.

Anyway, I made some tea and told Otto to go off and check the granary. It sounded like there might be something wrong with the grain, and that had caused the farmers’ eyes to change. Normally I wouldn’t entrust such an important job to Otto, but I needed time to lace the tea with this Nectar of Veracity, as the book called it. Unfortunately, he came back before I had finished. He was probably even less diligent in checking the grain than I imagined he might be and he caught me pouring the potion into the tea. I must have been looking a bit guilty, too, as he immediately suspected something. In fact, he suspected that I was poisoning everyone. So, I drank my share of the tea, to prove that it was nothing dangerous and asked him to drink his, but he refused and knocked my cup out of my hand.

It was around this time that Ursula walked in. I’m not sure what Solvej was thinking, telling Ursula where we had gone, but this was probably the worst thing that could happen. The last thing you need when trying to help afflicted innocents is a witch hunter wannabe turn up to dispense Sigmar’s righteous justice. I managed to give her a cup of tea, though.

I feel like the potion had already kicked in at this point, because I went off on a bit of a rant about how thick Otto was and how his meandering thoughts didn’t make any sense. And for good measure, I followed up with my thoughts on Ursula, which were a bit less kind. It was sort of liberating, though, to be able to give them a piece of my mind, that I wouldn’t normally feel I could. Anyway, Otto punched me in the face and stormed off with Ursula.

Erhardt arrived and I tried to offer him some tea as nonchalantly as I could, but he immediately suspected something was wrong. I felt the need to explain my plan, and how I had spiked everyone’s drinks and asked him to drink it anyway. But he took the tea and went to find Solvej. From what I could gather, Solvej drank it down, and Kurtis was so jealous that I had made tea for Solvej, that he came in to ask for his tea.

Otto and Ursula came back as Ursula had asked Otto to tell everyone that I had poisoned them because she couldn’t trust herself as she had drunk the truth potion. Otto told everyone that he was mad because I had told him he was thick and meandering, but, inspired by the potion, I think everyone agreed with me, anyway. He also implied that I was being influenced by the dark gods, or something. Luckily no one takes any notice of him.

And so, my plan kind of worked. We all ended up sat around the kitchen table discussing the issue with the farmers, being truthful and honest. I don’t think I remembered to tell anyone that Erhardt hadn’t drunk the potion, and I don’t think it would have made any difference to Otto, anyway.

Otto showed Ursula his experiment with the dying rat in the jar. It was still alive and may have even grown, and its eyes were glowing. He agreed to sell it to her for 5d. I think Ursula just wanted to destroy it, as she wanted to destroy the farmers’ new home in the trees, and probably the farm, as well. She wondered whether it could just be burned down. This was not the sort of conversation I had envisioned when I decided to introduce the truth nectar.

I had also not considered the conversation going beyond the immediate concern of the farmers, but Erhardt, rather mischievously, asked Solvej whether she had killed anyone who didn’t deserve it. She admitted to killing an innocent bystander in Kemperbad, but blamed Otto for injuring him first. I then asked Kurtis a personal question, which I won’t repeat here, but suffice it to say the conversation soon degenerated. This truth serum was powerful stuff.

Solvej then blurted out that she had framed Genevieve for stealing the gravin’s pearls. This shocked everyone, except Erhardt apparently, who, she revealed, already knew about it. She explained why she did it. It was something to do with keeping the group together for mutual protection, or something, but no one was really listening. Then Kurtis blamed the framing of Gen for his murder of her jailer. This was another revelation that we’d had no idea about. Apparently, Kurtis had got upset with Gen’s jailer and had lured him to a meeting and then stabbed him to death behind a tavern in Nuln.

Then Solvej accused Kurtis of fancying her, which he admitted he did, and insisted she must fancy him, and she had to admit she did. I revealed that I wanted Solvej to fancy me but only because no one else did, and I couldn’t get girlfriend. Solvej asked Ursula if she found Erhardt ugly-hot (I don’t know what this means) and she said she did. And I lost track of who else found anyone else attractive, but it was quite a lot of us.

Kurtis told me how much I annoyed him, so I had to tell him how much he annoyed me, even though we were best friends really, which I suppose must be true, but I’m not sure I realised. I went through a number of occasions where he had made fun of me when we were children, and he just laughed and said he only did it because he was jealous of me, but then I said I only kept telling him off because I was jealous of him.

Then Ursula insisted we all needed to be whipped to show our purity, and while Solvej obliged her, I didn’t want him going anywhere near me with his awful flail. Then Solvej whipped Ursula as hard as she could, but she barely flinched. Needless to say, I was beginning to regret the whole truth serum idea.

It was almost a relief to get back to the talk of killing innocent farmers. Everyone, except me, agreed that we should kill the farmers. I told them they were just frightened, and to my surprise they admitted that they were frightened, of the witch hunters, of the mutation, of everything, but that was why the farmers had to die. Their only disagreement about why and how to go about it. Solvej wanted to run the farm, Kurtis wanted to move more farmers in so he could make money, Ursula wanted to get back in the good books of the witch hunters.

Otto asked Ursula if she could whip the mutation out of the farmers, and she admitted she couldn’t, but she could burn it out of them. Kurtis was trying to do a deal with Ursula so that he would look good in the eyes of the witch hunters when they killed all his farmers, so they started trying to come up with a backstory they could tell the witch hunters that would make them both heroes.

That was when I decided to go. I left the farm and followed the track back towards the forest where we had first met the farmers. I had the vague idea that I would tell them that we had decided to kill them, and that they would be in a position to decide whether to fight back or move deeper into the forest where they couldn’t be found. I’d got about half way there when I noticed, or I think he let me notice, that Erhardt was with me. I explained my plan and he looked at me doubtfully. We could see a pair of eyes on the edge of the forest, but they looked less bright than they had the previous evening. The eyes went to move back into the wood, so we called to them, and they waited for us.

Meanwhile, back in the farm everyone was still having a free and frank discussion. Otto said he didn’t care that I had gone, and Solvej decided that she liked having Otto around because he was actually quite pure, if pure meant stupid, dirty, and innocent. But Otto insisted that there was no point being clean because then you would just get dirty. Kurtis went up to the watchtower to look for me and spotted me and Erhardt crossing the field. So they decided to go after us.

Before we could talk to the farmer, we heard a loud scream coming from the forest. The farmer immediately turned and ran towards the noise, and so we followed. When we got to the hollow, we could see five strange shapes skittering around the tree. They had goblin-like figures riding them, harassing the farmers, and shooting arrows at them. One of the farmers was lying on the floor with an arrow in his neck. We could make out that the creatures were huge spiders.

Erhardt blasted (or whatever he does) one of the spiders, injuring it severely and throwing its goblin rider off. I managed to reach the injured farmer and saw to his wounds. I stopped the bleeding, but he fell unconscious. I could now see that the farmers were defending their hollow by the tree, while the children were huddled within it. It was strange to see monstrous spiders with goblins on their back. We had seen the wolf riders at the battle of Pfeildorf, but they had looked a bit more civilised than these. These goblins had wooden armour and were bedecked in feathers and things like that. I guess that’s what you’d expect from goblins that lived in a forest, though.

Erhardt managed to loose another one of his magic bolts and one of the spiders exploded. He was getting good at his thing, these days. There wasn’t much more I could do for the farmer so I ducked into the hollow to make sure the children were alright.

Then the rest of our honest group arrived. Ursula went for the goblin who had fallen off his spider and whipped it with his flail. And then Kurtis finished it off. Solvej took a couple of shots at another goblin and hit it. And Otto slinged one, got a good hit, and then Schnitzel followed up and ripped it apart. I hadn’t seen Schnitzel so ferocious before. Maybe it just doesn’t like goblins.

The goblins were circling around shooting their bows, but they weren’t doing too much harm. One of the spiders had bitten Matthias the blacksmith’s leg and it was bleeding, so I rushed out to deal with it. The fight went on, and the goblins had the wherewithal to recognise Erhardt as a threat and so they shot at him and injured him. But the rest of the group were dealing with the goblins quite competently. Marbad got bitten in the leg by a spider and Solvej got hit by a goblin arrow, but we were more than holding our own.

As I was treating Erhardt’s wounds, however, Ursula decided that I needed to be dealt with, as some sort of ally of the corrupted, which may have been technically true, and so she left her goblin opponent to Kurtis and ran towards me swinging her flail. Fortunately, she missed me and managed to injure herself, instead, which I choose to believe was a manifestation of the mercy of Shallya and not just Ursula being an idiot.

Solvej killed the final spider, and the farmers piled onto the last goblin and battered it to death, and they were safe. From the goblins, at least. Maybe not from us. Ursula went to attack me again, and I said a Shallyan prayer to make her see the error of her ways, and to her credit, she did have the grace to look a bit ashamed of herself.

In the aftermath of the fight, I looked at the farmers and I could see the lights in their eyes were severely dimmed. Perhaps they were right that the issue was with the food they had been eating and after a few days without that food they were beginning to recover. I thought there might be hope for them, but I think Ursula didn’t care about that and intended to kill them anyway. And I suspected she intended to kill me too, for standing up for them. At least I knew I could rely on my friends to back me up. And because of the truth serum, I have to point out that the last sentence was sarcasm.