Chapter 10 - Part 2

“My name is Thomas,” the stranger said. The worst of his wounds had been patched up, sometimes with a minor curing spell, but usually bandages and stitches. The thing he called a stormstalk had its head wrapped in a thick leather hood. Privately the Orphan thought it would be best to have killed the thing, but it would harm the man, and so he had been overruled. “My mother is – was – normal. She was a seamstress in a small village that had no proper name, up in northern Karrnath.”

They were in the common room. Pienna was there, sitting in the center of a semicircle of chairs around the stranger, who had been stripped of weapons and tied down to a chair with thick ropes. Workers were cleaning up the mess, sweeping and mopping. The windows had been shut, keeping out the curious. The innkeeper had not been very happy about this, until Pienna had given him a hefty bag of coins. Now the common room was closed to the public for a ‘private party.’

The Brelish ambassador was there, listening to the tale. Pienna had been expectantly polite to him, as if she knew he was coming. Oddly the man’s bragging nature was subdued as he listened. Iron Orphan had not traveled in the coach nearest the ambassador’s, but he could tell that this was not the man’s normal behavior. Truthfully the warforged – or lawforged as he preferred to call himself – had not been allowed near the ambassador. In fact there were several times when the passengers wanted him out of the caravan altogether. As the Balanced Palm teachings dictated, he had been patient and polite with them when the subject had come up. For some reason everyone associated the warforged with the war itself, and resented him as a result.

“Where the Mror River passes the Icetop Mountains, the town would grow seasonally to accommodate the mining and logging in the area that came in during the summer. The river would crack open, and then the boats would come with the men and traveling peddlers. In the autumn, the river would swell shut, and close behind the last boat leaving. Only a handful of people stayed in the off-season, including my mother and I.” Thomas’ voice was soft as he spoke, as he sadness that he had forced himself to forget was thawing out as surely as the Mror River itself. “I was always to hide myself, to keep a cloak and hood on, and to avoid anyone who looked sharp.”

“You were born with that thing then?” Chubat asked. The dwarf was fully restored to health, thanks to Pienna’s administrations. Between the duruidess and the adept, everyone had been cured or bandaged. Iron Orphan had not needed any repair, although he had a few magical oils hidden on his person that could accomplish repair in seconds.

“No, a different one,” Thomas said. “At first the midwife thought it was an afterbirth until it bit her. My mother already had gained a reputation as having no morals, now she was accused of being bewitched as well.”

“It would help if you would stick to what’s relevant to the story,” Vuchen said, holding his sword hilt. Vuchen had not wanted to question Thomas, he had wanted to kill him. An argument between him and the mayor had ensued, until Vuchen had finally stood down and allowed Thomas to be revived and questioned. Iron Orphan didn’t follow the entire thing, but it seemed that the presence of a dragonmarked house complicated the political situation here.

Thomas looked at him from under a bandage on his forehead, and began to laugh. “Do you think I wanted to come down to this town? Do you think I ever wanted to see another human being again?”

“You aren’t a human being,” Chubat growled.

“Everyone be quiet,” Pienna said firmly. “I will decide when he is off-topic.”

Delegado muttered something uncomplimentary. Iron Orphan heard it, but not clearly. The half-orc was none to pleased to see Iron Orphan, and was even less pleased that Thomas hadn’t been killed outright.

“Thank you,” Thomas said to her. “The talk of my mother’s morals had to do with her being pregnant with me despite never having married. She protested that she had never lain with a man, but no one believed her.”

“How’d she get pregnant then?” demanded Chubat.

“She missed her first monthly cycle after traveling across Lake Dark by herself at night,” Thomas said. “She had a dream as she slept in the boat. A dream of a man with the face of an angel, and a body made of stolen flesh, who reached out and touched her. She said that she felt him deep beneath the earth, trapped, but reaching out. When she realized that she was expecting me, she knew it had been the man in the dream.”

“The daelkyr,” Pienna said. Most people looked puzzled at what Pienna said, but Chubat snarled and gripped his axe. Delegado got up from where he had been lounging, and conspicuously counted his arrows.

Iron Orphan went over to the half-orc. “What is a daelkyr?” he asked, keeping his voice low. Thomas was talking about how his mother had to leave her birth village once he was born, and go to the seasonal town that he grew up in.

Delegado looked at Iron Orphan like he wanted to bite him or make another sarcastic comment, but then swallowed. “You don’t want to know, warforged.”

Iron Orphan thought of telling Delegado that he wanted to be called a lawforged, but then decided that warforged was a step up from ‘clickety-clack’ and other remarks the half-orc had made. Thomas was discussing how the thing on his neck, which he called a stormstalk, was not the linked thing that he had been born with. “I would appreciate it if you would tell me,” he said.

Delegado wiped his brutish face with a strong hand and sighed. “The daelkyr almost destroyed this world. It was about nine thousand years ago. They tore into this reality from another dimension, a place of madness and wrong things. They decimated the great Dhakaani Empire, burning and smashing through the western half of the continent. The whole of the Eldeen Reaches was like the Demon Wastes.”

Thomas was discussing growing up with his attached thing, his symbiont as he called it. Sometimes it brought him messages from the thing that was his father, telling him to capture, murder, and do horrible things. At a young age he ran away, following the death of his mother in a ferocious blizzard when no one would help her.

“What happened then?” Iron Orphan asked, keeping his voice low.

“Thousands of years before Oalian was anything more than just another tree, orc druids managed to shove the unreality that the daelkyr came from away from Eberron,” Delegado said. “The druids then began calling themselves the Gatekeepers, because they locked away the unreality, and helped imprison the daelkyr who were left, along with their disfigured servants, deep within Khyber.” He made a wry smile. “Well before humans were anything more than nose-pickers in Sarlona, orcs saved the entire world.”

“Ah,” the warforged said. Thomas was discussing wandering as a wild man in the frozen north, and them spending some time with an old, blind shaman who taught him some magical secrets. Thomas could not cast spells, but he could make use of devices that wizards would fashion. Apparently he had a thick collection of scrolls on his person when they had searched him, and some of his prowess in battle came from scrolls that he had used before coming into Merylsward. “Every child in the Shadow Marches knows this, but it is forgotten by much of the rest of Khorvaire?”

Delegado eyed him sharply. “Not every child, but yeah, pretty much. You’re an insightful machine, aren’t you?”

“Insightful enough to know that you insult people in order to keep them away,” Iron Orphan said, walking back to Pienna.

“I lived off the land for a time, then I got drafted into an ad hoc military unit that was attacking a Mror holding,” Thomas was saying. “We were fodder, really, conscripts and prisoners that were a distraction for the undead that were attacking via another route. A dwarven wizard slew most of us with a spell, including the leech that lived on me. I went into a rage and managed to cut through his shields with a knife. I then lay prostrate in the snow, half-dead. While there, I had a trance. My father spoke to me. His voice sounded far away. He promised to send me a new servant, but ordered me to do his will. The stormstalk then found me, and it invigorated me when it attached to me. I rose in the night, and got away before the official corpse collector added me to Karrnath’s undead regiments.”

“Then you did evil, following his bidding,” Pienna whispered.

“Aye,” Thomas said, looking ashamed. “For a year or more I traveled, hiding in the night, killing those that he sent me to, meeting with dolgrims and other things not to be described. I grew sick of myself, and him, despite the glory and riches that he promised me.”

“And what makes you think anyone would want you around?” Delegado whispered into Iron Orphan’s ear.

The warforged ignored him. He could tell Delegado hoped to spook him, as the half-orc who had spent years stalking game had crept up on Orphan silently, but the last remaining member of the Balanced Palm was wholly in tune with his senses, and he had heard the half-orc clear as a bell. “Your taunts lose something when it takes you so long to think of them,” was Orphan’s only response.

“I was given an axe, that axe there, used in the wars from thousands of years ago against the goblins,” Thomas said. “I slew a hobgoblin gatekeeper with it, in the mountains east of the gnome lands. I told myself she was my enemy, but when I saw the dolgrims – when I saw what they did – the gatekeeper had her husband and children with her. I could no longer obey unquestioningly after that.”

“Pruchig was her name,” Pienna said. “She had found an important piece of Dhakaani lore that she was arranging to have brought to us.”

“She had a scroll on her that they burnt,” Thomas said. “Some kind of ancient secret.”

“So you’ve admitted you’re our enemy,” Chubat said. “Why is he alive?”

“Because a spell that detects good registered on him,” Pienna said. “And one that detects evil did not. And because he did not start the fight, you and Delegado did.”

“With good cause!” the half-orc yelled.

“Indeed!” added Mayor Tippish. A chorus of affirmatives followed.

“Perhaps, but because Iron Orphan’s beliefs do not let him kill when there is another way to solve the problem, we are able to see it was a mistake,” Pienna said archly.

“I cannot believe a Gatekeeper is talking like this aberration should be allowed to live,” growled the leader of the Wardens of the Wood.

“Speaking for House Vadalis, I do not see why he still breathes,” Vuchen snorted.

“Speaking for the Kingdom of Breland,” the ambassador said, raising his very powerful voice, “I think you’re idiots for not trusting Sister Pienna. She’s the expert, not you.”

A dead silence followed. For once, no one disagreed with the loudmouth from Breland.

“Continue, Thomas,” Pienna said gently, a small smile touching her lips.

Iron Orphan felt a surge of pride. He and Pienna had embraced when they had met, but they had not time for a proper exchange of salutations given the immediate issues of security and tending to the wounded. She had barely time to introduce him to the glowering Chubat, and the giant cat named Missy. He was glad to see that she recognized that he had not succumbed to the bitterness that she had seen him express in Eston.

Thomas was talking about massacring the dolgrims, and then getting onto a pirate vessel headed for the Marches. He had made a slow way overland across the great swamp, avoiding the friendly overtures of those clans allied with the Dragon Below, and the threatening stance of those clans allied with the Gatekeepers.

“I wanted to be alone,” the man said. “Eventually even the messages from my father faded. I had only the stormstalk for company.”

Chubat came over to where Delegado and Iron Orphan were standing. “Orc,” he growled in a whisper. “All of the moons must be full at once, because I’m actually agreeing with you on this Thomas character.”

“Chubat, I’ll stop calling you names if you get it straight,” Delegado hissed back, also keeping his voice low. “I’m a half-orc, not a full orc. I’m proud of both sides of my heritage.”

“And yet a minute ago you called humans ‘nose-pickers from Sarlona,’” the warforged noted, also in a whisper. Delegado’s response was very rude. “I can’t do that,” Orphan said. “I don’t have genitals.” Thomas was talking about his collection of scrolls from old ruins in the Shadow Marches and in the Byeshk Mountains.

“So how did you two meet?” Chubat asked.

“I bested him in combat,” Iron Orphan told him.

“What a coincidence,” Chubat said with a grim twinkle in his eye.

“I was only a kid and you caught me by surprise,” Delegado said. The half-daelkyr was now discussing a staff that throbbed with magic that he had been able to use, until it detonated from his clumsiness in manipulating the arcane. Thomas had been buried alive under a rockslide.

Chubat snorted, then eyed Orphan’s weapons. “Those are of exotic make. But nicely done.”

“They are heirlooms,” the warforged explained. “I am the last of my order. The war has brought us all under.” He regarded Delegado for a moment. “Some with less justification than others.”

“I don’t know what dug me out,” Thomas was saying. “But I was given a choice, to return and serve or to be left to die.”

“They attacked me, remember?” the half-orc snapped. Several heads turned, and Pienna frowned at Delegado before gesturing Thomas to continue. “Besides,” Delegado said, now in a lower tone of voice. “If not for that blasted Valenar, your order wouldn’t have even known I was there.”

“This is a tale I would love to hear someday,” Chubat snickered, enjoying Delegado’s discomfiture. Thomas was telling how a hidden dagger caught the thing that dug him out in its fifth eye, and then he drove the dagger into its brain. Vuchen was making a sarcastic comment about how Thomas was quite the tale-spinner, but everyone else seemed to believe the man with the thing attached to his neck.

“Like you’re proud of everything you’ve had to do?” the half-orc challenged the dwarf. Chubat only glowered in response. To the warforged, Delegado gruffly said, “I’m sorry about your order. I take it Visha died as well?” Iron Orphan nodded. “Shame. She was a good woman, even if she did leave me for the goblins.”

“You have a lovely effect on everyone,” Chubat said, suppressing a laugh.

“She died nobly,” Iron Orphan said, trying to figure out how to finesse the half-orc’s kind words. He suspected that it was in the nature of a peace offering. “There was a write-up about her in the Korranberg Chronicle.”

Delegado’s head came up at that. “By name?”

“Well, yes,” the warforged said. “What’s wrong?”

“House Cannith put a price on her head,” Delegado said. “They asked my House to pick it up but we refused the contract.”

“They’re not likely to hurt her now,” Chubat pointed out.

“I did some digging,” Delegado said. “She helped some prisoner of Cannith escape, which is why they wanted her. Cannith may use the notice of her death to pick up the trail.” Iron Orphan saw Delegado’s eyes narrow, looking at the warforged’s shoulder, where his monk’s clothing covered the spot where he had once been branded.

Iron Orphan was very, very still, and he pretended to be listening to Thomas talk about fleeing through a strange section of the Eldeen Reaches where the trees were all wrong, and then finally living alone for six years in the Icehorn Mountains.

“Why did Tharashk refuse the contract?” Chubat asked, intrigued.

“I have no idea,” Delegado said. He was staring at Iron Orphan now. The warforged tried not to flinch. Delegado was not a stupid man, and if would try to pick up the Cannith price on his head independently…

“So what made you come here?” Mayor Tippish was asking.

“Dreams,” Thomas said. “A dragon, a great blue thing that stood in a large desert, creating fresh water with magic so that plants could grow. It kept coming again and again, telling me first to find the halfling, and then telling me to find Sister Pienna. Every night the dream was more vivid. Sometimes it warned me of a hidden tiger, other times of things without flesh. After about five or six months I left the mountains and journeyed here. And then the half-orc spotted what I was.”

“Delegado d’Tharashk, at your service,” the half-orc said with a bow.

“Now what?” Vuchen asked.

“Now the hour goes late, and I must consult privately,” Pienna said. “Chubat, please sit with the ambassador and the mayor in a private place to go over initial plans. Iron Orphan, please collect Thomas’ things, and lead him upstairs to my room. Delegado, I have a job for you, and I would like you to accompany me upstairs as well. Vuchen, I would like to meet you later.”

A series of affirmatives followed, from everyone except Delegado. He walked over to Vuchen first, and whispered something in his ear. Vuchen frowned, and whispered back a one-word reply. Iron Orphan caught the reply. Vuchen had said “Maybe.”

Everyone went about their appointed tasks.