68: Jaeger Keep

I think the magical beastman in the forest was sent for me. Not to kill me, perhaps, but it was sent by the gods, for me. It was a message. I had been on the horns of a dilemma, whether to stay with this group (I am loathe to call them friends) with their chaos and murder or serve Shallya more closely in the Order of the Chalice. I had chosen to go back to whiny Kurtis, and psycho Solvej, and mysterious Erhardt for my own selfish reasons and had been sent a message. I had got the message.

I felt like I owed Otto an explanation, but I doubted he would understand, and so I just ended up insulting him, and upsetting him. I tried to tell him he needed to be less trusting and more prepared to look after himself because I might not be there to look after him for much longer. I tried to explain that in the Parable of the Bees, he was the only bee left, but that just confused him. And then I told him he wasn’t a bee and that confused him even more.

I had to buy a hat. I had always been scathing of some of the hats you see in the Cult of Shallya, and the other cults, especially the Verenans. Many cultists seemed to think they needed a tall hat to demonstrate their rank, and some ended up looking preposterous. But when we got to Schoninghagen I went to a haberdasher and selected a tallish hat in duck-egg blue and ordered a chalice to be embroidered on it and told Otto it was to command more respect.

We asked our landlord in Schoninghagen whether we should go all the way to Middenheim before turning off to Jaeger Keep, but he seemed to think that the best route was to follow the dirt track directly there, if we didn’t mind witches. So we decided to risk the witches to save time.

We decided that the best plan was to turn Kurtis in and get the bounty. This would be good cover, and earn us some money, and we would have to play things by ear over how we could liberate Kurtis again, or if we even wanted to. Needless to say, Kurtis didn’t like this plan and so I fed him some graveroot to keep him placid. That might sound cruel, but the alternative was to have Erhardt strangle him with his magic, so I was doing him a favour.

Kurtis’ bounty was twice that of Solvej’s, which she was a bit disappointed about, so we said it wasn’t worth handing Solvej in as well, but I think the real reason was that we were too scared of her.

Otto was getting a bit short of money, and we needed to pay for our board, so while Kurtis was lying in bed, stupefied by the graveroot, he went through Kurtis’ stuff, but as Kurtis had already told us, he didn’t have any money with him.

I was with Otto in the bar when he tried to buy a small bottle of brandy. I’m not sure what that was about, but he insisted on getting a small bottle with some brandy in it, from the landlord, and then he disappeared for a while. I’m not sure what he was doing, but it felt a bit suspicious, and I warned him not to get his bottle of brandy mixed up with the potion I had given him earlier. I later learned he had put his last dose of rat poison in the brandy.

We had a long day’s travel, so we set off early, mindful of the supposed disappearance of travellers and the witches on the prowl. The landlord set us up with some lard on toast which made Solvej feel nostalgic for our days back in the watch in Ubersreik. It did make me wonder how awful things had become for her to be looking back at those times with warmth. Although, Solvej was a much nicer person back then, so maybe that was what she was missing.

Because Buttercup was no longer with us, we had to keep Kurtis alert enough to be able to walk, but not so much that he would put up a fuss about being sold for bounty, so Solvej walked alongside him, supporting him. I think normally it would have been touching to see Kurtis struggling along and his wife doing her best to support him in adverse circumstances, but I didn’t really give a toss anymore.

We did meet one big bloke, a grizzled veteran, who offered to protect us on the way, for only two crowns. Solvej offered to protect him for only two crowns. They had a standoff but as big as he was, he blinked first, and sloped off. But Otto seemed to think this had been a kind offer, which just goes to show exactly how he’s too trusting and not really prepared to look after himself, as I had tried to tell him.

We managed to reach the keep just as it was getting dark. The guard said he’d never heard of the dowager duchess. It didn’t seem reasonable that she would be hanging out in such a dump, but it did make us wonder why we had to come up here, and perhaps the whole thing was some sort of convoluted plot to get Kurtis, or all of us.

The Martyred Lady tavern was definitely a welcome haven of warmth and light in the cold gloom of the Schadensumpf which made the Midden Moors look hospitable. We decided to simply strut in and announce we had captured Kurtis, and see what happened. Because we didn’t want to collect her bounty (yet), Erhardt disguised Solvej. She did look really good in her disguise. I think Erhardt based her look on another character from a different salacious pamphlet, one about vampires and werewolves, or something.

Erhardt went into the tavern alone to scout it out, and then Solvej went in and got herself a room. Konrad, Otto, and I went in with Kurtis and we probably made an unlikely bunch of bounty hunters, but luckily Konrad did the talking. The landlord seemed surprised, but pleased, that we had managed to get Kurtis, and told us the agent for the bounty came in quite often and should be round this evening, and that we could just wait for him. The landlord and Konrad made a few jokes about Kurtis and the stories in the pamphlet. I told him I was a man of the cloth, and he could tone down the salaciousness, but he told me I could just leave. So even with a new hat I still wasn’t getting any respect.

Solvej crept around the inn posing as a maid, to make sure it was safe, and didn’t find anything suspicious, but made the landlord’s wife suspicious when she offered to plump her pillows.

We got a room and took Kurtis up there to wait for the agent. Otto must have noticed the change in me, because he said he was worried about me, and said that we were brothers in Shallya, and fellow bees. He is the only one I am going to miss, I think, but I told him that that ultimately, we weren’t brothers, and we weren’t bees, and stormed out. He followed me, and apologised, and so we hugged it out, on the landing, until Solvej came out in her hot vampire disguise and told us to keep the noise down. So Otto suggested we go back in our room and pray to Shallya.

Erhardt was still in the bar, and soon the back door to the tavern opened, which was a door in the keep itself that led directly into the swamp, and a diminutive figure covered by a cloak entered. He had a few words with the landlord who pointed him upstairs. It looked like he was heading up to us, but as soon as he caught a glimpse of Erhardt, he legged it back into the swamp. And Erhardt recognised him, too, for it was Glimbrin.

Erhardt went after him and used his magic to entangle the gnome. Erhardt asked whether Gimbrin was after Kurtis, and he admitted he was, and Erhardt said they might be able to do a deal. Glimbrin agreed he would buy him if Erhardt was prepared to sell him. So Erhardt brought Glimbrin up to our room, to finalise the deal.

When Otto saw Glimbrin he stopped praying to the goddess of peace, and drew his dagger and lunged at the gnome, shouting, ‘you little bastard.’ I knew that Glimbrin had stolen Otto’s prized tusk-dagger a couple of times, and that Otto had borne a grudge against him for some time, but I hadn’t realised how much it must have rankled and quite how much he obviously hated him. Anyway, the gnome dodged Otto’s attack, but Otto kept at it. He lunged again, and Solvej stepped in to stop him. Obviously, without Glimbrin we had no chance of tracking down the pamphleteer.

Unfortunately, Otto continued to follow through and caught Solvej squarely in the guts with his dagger. It was a blow that would have ended most people, it would certainly have killed me, but Solvej is much tougher than she looks these days, and she looks very tough. Otto immediately apologised, shocked at his own actions, and offered to see to the wound, but Solvej refused. I suppose that should have been cue for me to step in and offer to help, but I didn’t bother.

When it had all died down, we asked Glimbrin about his patron, but he was pretty cagey. He said he was working for a tall, cold woman, and as everyone was tall to Glimbrin, that didn’t narrow it down much. And he said he would lead us to her, through the swamp. While we were talking, we were calling Solvej by her real name, and so her disguise was pointless. Glimbrin offered to buy her, too, but we explained that we would only be doing a deal for Kurtis.

Glimbrin led us from the tavern into the swamp. On the way, Otto apologised to the gnome and offered him some brandy as a peace offering. He agreed and took a swig from Otto’s bottle. I had had my suspicions about this bottle, and when, after a few more steps, Glimbrin fell to his knees then keeled over in the swamp, I guessed that Otto had poisoned him, and so I rushed to see to him. He had not taken enough of the poison, and although he was unconscious, he was still alive and I would be able to save him.

And so, in the dark, in the middle of the Sigmar-forsaken swamp, on the trail of some Shallya-knows-what conspiracy, I began to wonder what I was even doing there. Shallya, or someone, had tested me, and I had failed, and now I was being tested again, but for what? I wondered what difference all this would make. What good was Glimbrin, a selfish, thieving gnome who had tormented Otto and given us nothing but grief? And what good were we? I had been helping Solvej and Kurtis and everyone else, achieve little but mayhem, and had chosen to continue to help them over Shallya and been punished for it.

I knew what the right thing to do was, but where had that got me? Where had doing the right thing, every time I could, really got me? To the middle of some fetid swamp, in the dark, covered in crap, with a dark secret, for what reason? To whose benefit? What difference would it make, I thought, if Glimbrin had died of the poison? Otto would get what he wanted, for good or ill, but what other difference would it make, in our world filled with far greater evils?

And so I held his little gnome face under the water until the last bubbles of air had escaped from his mouth, and he was dead. I looked at Otto, who was staring at me in surprise, but no one else had seen it. I stood up and reported that Glimbrin was dead. And Otto told everyone he had seen him slip and hit his head on a rock.

So we were stranded in the swamp with no idea of where to go. Solvej tried to find a path through but there was little to go on, and Otto commanded Schnitzel to sniff out a path but he had no idea. We wandered through the swamp aimlessly for a while, but then had to admit defeat and trudged back to the inn. We had no chance of finding the mysterious patron, if she even existed outside of Glimbrin’s cunning imagination.

We eventually got back to the Martyred Lady tavern and had a drink. We called Solvej her name, again, in front of the landlord, who wondered if she was the actual Solvej, but she lied and said she wasn’t and that Solvej was a really common name round her way. Then it was past time for bed. Erhardt decided to spend the night in Solvej’s room, but I think he was really spending the night with his hot vampire fantasy. Preparing for bed, I could hear the wind outside, blowing across the swamp, and it sounded strangely melodic for some reason. I was going to ask Kurtis about it, but he was still too subdued.

Otto was a bit upset about everything, though consoled himself with the idea that you don’t appreciate the sun without a little rain, but I didn’t recall the last time we had seen the sun among all the downpours we had been caught out in.

I think Otto was a bit disparaging about me, because Solvej told him to shut up as Lukas was a good guy who held us all together. She called me an anchor, and the biggest anchor in the group, or something like that.

And then, feeling the affects of Otto’s dagger blow she came to me for healing, and I told her the Parable of the Bees and then I told her to fuck off.