The Great Glass Mountain - Session Ten

Tiber the Salt Knight stood outside the grotto at Eldermass, the Conclave of Seers. The Screaming Seer leaned against the cave entrance, not screaming. It looked like he was crying but when he saw the Salt Knight he got it together and passed him a note.

 

The Salt Knight interpreted this as the Winged Seer hiring the red armored mercenaries who killed Reme. He asked what the Screaming Seer expected him to do with this information. The Screaming Seer handed him a long blade of knapped flint. Tiber entered the cave.

 

The pool in the cave was fed by an underground stream and crystal clear, lit by a hole in the ceiling. The Tangled Seer gazed out of a cluster of vines that hung through the hole. The Drunken Seer lounged in a heap of smashed clay vessels. The Winged Seer hung from the stalactites. He laughed at Tiber because he wasn't going to go through with it. Tiber didn't think killing the Winged Seer to avenge Reme would bring the Squire back. The Drunken Seer concurred. If he was interested in resurrecting Reme he should offer Queen Valenta to the underworld. The Seers argued among themselves until the Drunken Seer silenced them with a glare. Tiber was suspicious of the Seers because they all told him to get the cursed crown for the Glass Knight. They told him the crown was the sign of a true king. He told them he was going to get drunk. The Drunken Seer flung a pinch of wine lees at him and he reeled, intoxicated. He stumbled out of the cave and the Screaming Seer took the blade from his hand and went into the cave. 

 

Someone screamed. It wasn't the Screaming Seer.

 

Tiber woke up face down in a field of heather, stripped of his panoply. His barbed sword was stuck in a tree. His armor was scattered around him and his horse licked spilled beer from a toppled urn. He heard Auckland shout his name and the noise sent a dagger of pain behind his eye. He gave a rasping cry, stood and gathered his belongings. There was something caught in his fist.

 

Autolykos and Auckland verified that the Salt Knight was intact and helped him don his armor. He related the story of Eldermass and wondered if the Screaming Seer had really killed the Winged Seer. The note suggested that the Crown was interfering with the Seers' ability to accurately perceive the future, obscuring their vision until it was all they could think about. They decided to hit up the Tangled Seer on their way to quest for the Flying Swords, which Auckland still felt was their best bet.

The Company rode west from the Drunken Seer's sanctum. Through an acrid swamp where visions of bog bodies and shining bronze weapons in the peaty water nearly steered them off course. They reached the river but couldn't find the ford they used in spring. They spent the rest of the day cutting wood for a raft. One of Boar's barges sailed downriver bearing armored warriors on the way to the capitol. By night they crossed, and as they gained the opposite bank a vision sprang out of the distant mountains to the east. A towering citadel mirrored above the horizon, crooked and wavering but taller than even the Glass Mountain.

 

The Company moved through the marsh on the west side of the river. The Tangled Seer peered out of the reeds. He was a league or two from his rose garden and the Knights asked what he was doing here. He was hiding from the Watcher, an agent of the Citadel who hunted Seers. The Knights had seen the Citadel in the mountains east but the Tangled Seer disappeared before they could interrogate him further. They journeyed ahead into the forest and Autolykos was the first to detect trouble. The smell of heated iron, like a blacksmith's forge. He bade the group occupy a defensible position and peered out into the weald. Four hounds of iron bounded through the undergrowth, belching smog as they hunted their quarry. The Salt Knight shouted a challenge to the beasts, diverting them from their course. The Company hit them with a hail of missile weapons and the metal monsters struggled to gain the elevated position occupied by their human foes. They snarled and bit but were forced back by the Company's swords and poleaxes. The iron hounds fled into the woods to the west, leaking slag from the wounds they bore.

Tero Porthan

 

Auckland was still exhausted and addled from the sleepless night crossing of the river. Autolykos and the Salt Knight rode ahead to pursue the monsters, concerned they were headed straight for the Seer's glen. Their fears were well founded. A league of pursuit found the four wounded statue hounds snapping at the heels of an almost-naked servant of the Tangled Seer, caught in the enormous rose bush surrounding the glade just out of the monsters' reach. The beasts were in bad shape and a hail of arrows forced them into the briar patch, where they became tangled and fell to the Company's hand weapons.

 

The musclebound, flower clad cultist thanked the warriors for their assistance. The Citadel was after the Tangled Seer, who fled before their approach. He was told to inform the Knights that the Beast they sought was somewhere on the river in the southeast corner of the realm, opposite their current position. The Knights took the metal skull off one of the inert statue-dogs, which bore the makers-mark of the Citadel (the silhouettte of the tower they saw in the mountains). They waited for Auckland to catch up in the morning and planned their next move.

The Company decided to find the Beast. If the realm was about to be flooded then they needed to address the problem directly rather than recruit the Flying Swords as part of the Glass Knight's plan to evacuate the realm and invade their neighbors to the north. They set out east for a long journey across the realm. That night they dreamed they watched themselves by the fire through a strange crystal lantern, balanced on a pylon in a room missing a wall that gave them a view of the mountains below.

 

The Knights forded the river again, it had only been a couple days and the raft was where they left it. A boat came up the river, one of Gert's vessels from Cugganscove on the coast. It was loaded with warriors in scale armor, but also with peasants and burghers and their belongings. The King's daughter had wasted no time rallying her people for the evacuation of the realm. The Company roved east, keeping out of the cursed swamp but giving the capitol a wide berth. They didn't want it known that they were moving in the opposite direction from the quest they said they were on.

Eero Järnefelt 

 

Autolykos' keen eyes spotted a group of the King's companion cavalry hanging someone from a solitary willow tree. The Captain of the Guard Paste was among their number and when the scene was pointed out to them the rest of the Company recognized the condemned woman as one of the Flying Swords they'd seen in the basket. Paste knew all three of their faces and intervening would have alerted him that they were going in the wrong direction, so they left the bandit to her fate. A league hence they found the peasantry setting fires in the wild grass that grew among the foothills of the great mountains to the east. Autolykos approached a mounted sergeant overseeing the proceedings, who explained that the Flying Swords had been spotted sailing overhead. Though the King's men had been sent to recruit the outlaws they were still engaged in banditry, which made them enemies of the realm until they accepted the King's shilling. So the peasants were starting fires to make smoke, which would choke the airborne brigands as they flew through it.

 

That night the Company dreamed of the tower again. The one over the sea, looking down at the inlet. They bent to their work, removing floor tiles to access bronze mechanisms corroded and immobilized by the salt air. They could hear a loom somewhere above.

 

Autolykos was local to the area and Auckland had scouted a realm, both knew there was a shepherd in the area who might shelter them before they fell upon the Beast. They had never met her but the law of the land demanded hospitality. They entered her valley with weapons sheathed and drew two excited sheepdogs away from the herd. They were work animals but they instantly detected the withered hound who accompanied Autolykos and were excited to meet a new dog. The Shepherd hailed the Company from a rock outcrop above her hut and invited them into her home.

Ste. Genevieve

 

The Shepherd lived alone in the hut. She poured weak beer and served the Knights porridge and dried mutton. They learned much of the Beast from the herdswoman. It had killed two of her sheep and one of her dogs. It had no interest in eating them but took trophies from each. The head from one, the heart from another and pieces of skin from a third. She had no faith in Alexander the War Knight's ability to deal with the problem but if the Company wanted to take it on she'd be happy to scavenge their panoply after it killed them.

 

The Shepherd was no friend to the Glass Knight, the Realm, or especially to Boar. Her husband had fought for the Toad, who Boar had betrayed. She proudly displayed his panoply on the wall and if the Knights had a problem with it they were welcome to kill her too. But those were old people stories and she would treat the Company like she would any traveler who asked for shelter. Just as, she assumed, they would let her sleep by their hearth if she came to their grand castle.

 

The Beast was a league to the southeast. To the southwest one league was the sanctum of the Screaming Seer. She heard him sometimes. He adopted a child at some point but the child had gone off to become a Knight himself. The child, the Salt Knight told her, had died protecting the Queen. The Shepherdess willed that it had been the other way around. She liked the Chain Knight no better than her bastard husband. 

That knight they dreamed of a hag sitting atop their bed, paralyzing them as she sharpened her clip-pointed seax. In the morning she surprised them with a gift of a whole lamb, cut into its constituent parts and preserved by drying/salting/pickling. Odds were they would die and she'd retrieve it along with any valuables they carried, but if not they were welcome to eat it up.

 

 

The Screaming Seer lived by a swift flowing river. Not wide and gentle like the one that flowed past the Great Glass Mountain to the inlet. A narrow river that raced through canyons and caves. The Company wished to call upon the Screaming Seer before challenging the Beast, and on the path down into the canyon they came upon a black armored knight astride a black horse, bearing an enormous two handed blade with a blunt tip in a scabbard of black leather. On the scabbard were images of Goblins and Crowns and Shadows and, at the very end, of a fierce Beast. The Knight asked the Company if they intended a pass d'armes and they demurred, so he gave them the road. They asked his name. He was commonly called carnifex or sharpjudge by those who retained his service, but his given name was Phinney. They asked how long he carried his armor and sword and he said he had lost count of the years. He measured time in the number of performances given and with the most recent the count had risen to twenty seven. He found the sword in a forest during his moment of greatest triumph and, if he was being honest, it was all downhill from there. Knighthood was an extra die of damage, a blow deferred before falling backward into the grave. The Company rode past and he was gone.

The Seer's camp was a series of ledges on a cliff over the river, like an inverse of the Winged Seer's hall. His cultists wore coats over their bare chests and tended fires to keep their home dry. The Screaming Seer lay on a platform jutting over the water and screamed. His arm was missing, freshly severed. The servants told the Company that a guy with a big sword did it. Tiber surmised that this was punishment for his revenge against the Winged Seer. A white rose stained with blood, driven into the stone wall with a piton.

 

The Company asked the Seer about the Beast. He screamed incoherently. A scrap of birch bark paper fluttered out from the scaffolding as he stomped. Autolykos caught it before it fell into the river. The note explained that the Beast had no want of food or water, it fought to dominate other beings. To lose was to die but to win was not necessarily to kill. The Knights were encouraged by this. If the monster could be persuaded to drink up the oncoming flood it would save the realm.