The Great Glass Mountain - Session Seven

Seghers

 

The Company ate with Boar, his wife Muriel and her bodyservant Glorietta at the great hall of Bravecrossing. It looked like the interior of a tavern, where Boar had spent most of his life drinking, with the addition of wood floors. The food was campaign fare with a few flourishes added by the kitchen servants. Simple ingredients stewed or pan fried with lots of salt. 

 

Glorietta sat away from the table and worked on a strange needlepoint design stretched across a frame while the others ate and went over what they had learned over the last week or two. The Red Mail Mercenaries were still operating in the region, though nobody knew how many were left. They used seals and sigils probably stolen from the herald to pretend royal authority, but were really after the Crown themselves. The Tangled Seer told Boar that the Crown would restore the Glass Knight's spirit. The flying swords were a rogue element, nobody knew if they were working with the mercenaries or if they were a separate group of bandits. They needed straw for their flying machine and had access to other advanced technology. 

 

The lady of Bravecrossing gave Valenta the use of her servant for the night. The Queen noted that silent Glorietta's needlepoint looked less like a drawing and more like writing in a language she couldn't understand. Glorietta said it was the first layer of a tessalated pattern in a background. She was going to stitch the Company chasing after the Flying Swords in their balloon.

 

Mielot 

 

The Knights spun on a wheel. The land rotated before them like a globe, but instead of changing day to night it changed the seasons. Milk finches crowed as autumn began. Peasants brought in the harvest, pickled vegetables and fattened animals to sustain them during winter. Before they could finish the wheel turned again and winter entombed them. The peasants feared starvation and the season switched back to summer. The wheel spun faster and faster until they feared they would vomit. They tried to escape but found themselves tied or nailed in place, crucified.

 

Auckland fell out of bed, head spinning. Tiber was so tangled in the sheets he couldn't move. In the great guest room, Valenta found she had accidentally kneed Glorietta in the face.

The Company prepared to quest for the Crown. Boar offered them the use of the castle's armory. The Knights filled in the missing pieces of their panoply with the ugly black armor worn by boar's troops. It looked like cast iron pottery beaten into shape, but when they donned it the knights realized it was no brittle cookware. They knew Boar's levies were the best in the realm, and it occurred to them that if he ever led them against the Glass Mountain he'd win easily. He spent the tolls levied on the bridge to equip his peasants with the best gear barter could buy and decreed they should practice in it one day a week. Auckland took a big sheet of cloth to signal the balloon if it flew overhead.

 

Muriel whispered something to Boar. He took an oilcloth off a case of crossbows and handed them to the Knights. They couldn't go out with just a hunting bow and a javelin. They crossed the bridge and went north of the river to search for the Crown.

 

 

The Company meandered up and out of the river valley. As they crested the rise they could see an enormous crowned oak on the south side of the valley, rising out of the treeline where they had emerged on the previous day. To the north the countryside was sparsely populated, most of Boar's subjects lived within walking distance of the crossing. Over the day's travel the Knights passed a few uninhabited towers, rude stone foundations with wooden structures overtop. These signal towers let Boar's troops start fires to summon reinforcements from across the land. As the sun went down the Knights made camp in the foundation of one such tower.

 

Something moved in the treeline at the bottom of the hill. A group of men. The setting sun hid the color of their armor but it protruded with spikes like the panoply worn by Boar's troops. Auckland blew his horn to signal them and Valenta went out to negotiate. A single armored warrior came out of the forest. He was happy to encounter fellow soldiers from Bravecrossing. He was happy to join forces and hunt bandits together. Only, there was a curfew in effect. The Knights recognized the phoney curfew as a tactic of the bandits. From somewhere on the other side of the hill, a dismayed shout went up. Whoever it was recognized the Company.

 

Tiber peered out of the stone tower and shouted a challenge. The six mercenaries creeping up the opposite side of the hill loosed their longbows. The projectiles clattered against the rock but drove him back into the house, where he retrieved his crossbow. Valenta discharged hers at the lone footpad sent out as a distraction, dropping him quickly. Tiber fired his into the dark but the dark and the weight of return fire from the bowmen kept him from hitting anything. Auckland worked his way down the hill and around the flank of the approaching soldiers. Half the oncoming troops discarded their bows and rushed uphill with their poleaxes while the others rained arrows on Tiber's position. Auckland sprang out of the dark and hacked into the guy on the end, then no-sold his return blow. The mercenary (who he now recognized as the survivor of the tavern fight) fled into the night. 

Pozzati

Valenta rounded the house and fired her crossbow at the remaining bowmen. Tiber rushed out of the house and barreled into the trio coming up the hill. His taunts had sapped their will to fight and he hacked through them. Auckland took an arrow across his helm and was concussed, but it didn't stop him from chopping through the archers until the last one accepted his offer of quarter. The Knights bagged him and two wounded red-mail bandits (who had attached cutlery to their armor to give themselves the silhouette of Boar's troops in the dark).

The Knights lit a signal fire in the tower. It took a couple hours for troops to arrive at a gallop. Quill (one of Boar's lieutenants) and a handful of mounted spearmen, ridiculous in their heavy armor on their tiny horses. He congratulated the Queen and her escort on dispatching seven armored fighters in the dark, and asked her permission to torture the brutes for the location of their hideout and remaining soldiers. Valenta nodded but it proved unnecessary. The Salt Knight's bruising words had broken their will to fight and they gave up what they knew: they were all that was left, after their leader died at the Tavern many of their comrades deserted. One believed they had been hired by the King, but another saw Veyril ascend the mountain to get the contract from a "winged man". They knew the Crown was somewhere to the northeast of their current position.

 

Quill and his bailiffs policed up the weapons and horses left by the mercenaries and dragged the captives away to face Boar's justice at Bravecrossing. The Knights scarfed the blue flowers from the Funeral Plain and went to sleep. They didn't remember their dream.

The Knights ventured at a gallop into the forest at the edge of the moor, but were stymied by a barricade of thick spiderwebs. Molted and dead tiger spiders dangled from the trees, along with the acid-pitted bones of people and animals. The barrier was not defended but hacking through would have taken as long as riding around. The Company turned east. The forest ahead grew thicker and they spied live spiders rushing through the undergrowth. The orange and black beasts did not attack the Knights, in fact they appeared completely uninterested in battle. The Knights followed them into a corridor amid the trees, spun from webs to create two parallel walls. The horrible felicerates peered down at the Company with their manyfold eyes and brushed forelegs over their mouthparts, but still did not attack.

 

In a clearing, the pantherachnids had spun a carpet of sturdy webbing over a depression in the earth, so that only a single stump protruded from the improvised floor net. On that stump was the Twelve Wood Diadem, the Crown. The Knights remembered their dream from last night. They each recalled standing in the clearing and donning the crown, and being surrounded and struck down by the other three.

 

 

 

Given what they'd seen and heard, the Knights agreed not to touch the Crown with their bare hands. Valenta hooked it with a poleaxe taken from the mercenaries and shoveled it into a saddlebag while the others stood guard against potential spider attacks. The Crown whispered "wait" and then went silent as the bag closed over it.

 

The spiders turned and left. Developments in the meadow no longer held their interest. With the sun going down after a day of hard riding, the Knights trusted that the beasts would not return and made camp in the clearing. They placed the Crown high in a tree, like a sack of food in bear infested countryside.

Reme shouted inside his mausoleum. The Mourners made a mistake. He had been buried alive. He asked if the Queen had gotten away. Tiber thought it was a trick at first but he couldn't stand listening to his squire suffocate in the dark. He grabbed a mattock (there were always masonry tools strewn about the Plain) and raised it to hack away at the stonework. Someone grabbed him from behind and he turned to strike them down.

He stood in the clearing at the base of the tree where the Crown was hidden. Valenta and Tiber struggled to restrain him as he raised his weapon. The Salt Knight fell to his knees, terrified and ashamed at what he had almost done in his dream.

The Crown was clearly a dangerous artifact and the Knights wanted to confirm it was a good idea to hand it over to the Glass Knight. According to Boar's map there was a Seer a day's ride south of their position, across the river. They galloped south and arrived at the river by midday, animals exhausted. The river was wide and slow but too deep to ford safely. They spent the rest of the day felling a few trees and made a raft to cross with their horses.

 

They made it to the Seer's grove by sunset. A titanic tangle of rose bushes and blood-drawing thorns. Petals blue and red and pink and purple, every color except white. They spent almost an hour riding a circuit around the grove before they found the way in. A hand emerged from the brambles and pointed to a space large enough to crawl through, then withdrew as the thorns tore at its skin. The Knights tied up their mounts and entered the secret garden.

 

Inside the briar patch was a rose garden with flowers climbing trellises to form a cage overhead. Servitors clad only in flower petals and thorn piercings tended the vines. The path led to a stone bench. The Knights sat down and a face emerged from the flowers. The Tangled Seer addressed the Company. He asked the Knights what season it was for them, and when he learned it was the end of Summer he delivered his message. 

• Valenta had to give the Crown to the Glass Knight. It would restore his spirit and he would need it for what was about to happen to the Realm.
• Tiber was invited to Eldermass, the secret Autumn meeting of Seers. The Screaming Seer had invited him there. If it wasn't obvious why, he would surely explain on the date of. 
• Auckland was encouraged to head to the southeast corner of the realm to find a scary monster to hunt. Nothing else was worthy of his skill at arms. 

The Seer's multiple faces receded into the foliage before they could clarify further, called away to another place and time. The servants approached with a sacrament for the Company to take with them: dried roses with sharp thorns to drive through their tongues as penance. It would hurt like hell but restore their Spirit.

 

With that out of the way, the Knights slept in the Seer's glen, anticipating the ride back to the Capitol to present the Crown to Valenta's husband the Glass Knight.