Anya’s place it sits in the back of a semi-circular depression, making the building look like it has backed its way into a corner. Roots from trees on the ridge above have emerged from earth behind it, their blind progress following the building’s surfaces. Were it not for the flickering light of the many candles inside the protagonists would guess this was deliberate, natural camouflage.
The shack itself is old and rickety. The boards are uneven and have a rough finish to them, porch roof appears to be held up by stripped tree branches, and the windows are unglazed – only tacked-on gauze keeping the insects out. From damp, rotting beams hang wind-chimes made from clattering animal bones. Before the threshold is a thick arc of red-brown powder which Mordecai shifts with the tip of his sword.
After Midian’s inquiries are rebuffed by the occupant, Mordecai kicks the door in and brusquely enters the abode.
Anya herself looks in worse shape than her home. She is old, perhaps in her eighth or ninth decade and wears a cloth patch across her left eye (which, Midian later notes, removed two or three weeks ago). From her squint, it seems her other one isn’t working too well either.
She was afraid of and cowers when Mordecai telekinetically wrenches the knife from her hand.
At this point she gives up, and does whatever she can to get rid of the strangers (beginning with patching Midian up sufficiently that he can walk unaided). Her subsequent interrogation is hampered by her addled mind and she frequently mistakes Midian for Kith (referring to both by one of Lum’s epithets, “Wayfarer”), so Mordecai attempts to take what he needs from her mind. At this point his own mind is almost sucked down into a spiralling darkness the likes of which he has never experienced. Whatever is in there with him certainly enjoys the rising panic before he extricates himself, fleeing into the night. Midian tries to stop him, attempting to freeze him in place with one of his warp-spawned talents, but (having to restrain himself so as not to injure his felow renegade) is unable to overpower the psyker’s formidable mental defences.
Not wishing to leave empty-handed, her returned and perservered with the interrogation piecing together what he could. Anya hadn’t been able to tell Kith what he’d wanted to know – there were no “magical” ruins about the place and certainly no temple. At one point she muttered, “I told you what you wanted to know – you should already have your army by now!” but when pressed said she didn’t know why Kith/Midian/Wayfarer needed an army (and was confused as to why he wouldn’t know), only that she wanted nothing to do with it.
Eventually, after Midian promises to return the eye he took from her, she is pressed into redoing Kith/Midian/Wayfarer’s “reading”.
She takes a fat yellow serpent from a basket and prays at a cluttered shrine consisting of herbs, animal bones, a Vinh-minted coin (Xanatov’s side is on display), a ceramic figurine of a woman holding a basket of fruit, and another figure – this one of carved stone - of some robed figure. Midian notes that it is not uncommon for primitive religions to disguise themselves within the trappings of a dominant religion, so doesn’t question these things. All this time she mumbles nonsense words to herself. She finishes abruptly, cutting open the serpent and emptying it’s entrails into a burnished copper bowl.
“See! Same as always, Wayfarer. Same as Anya always tells you. You and the Kingmaker are already on the path.”
She then goes into a fit. It abrupty ends and her bodylanguage shifts to that of someone with much greater confidence.
The reading leaves Anya weak. So weak that she can’t resist when Midian deocularises her with her own knife.
He realises that he has essentially doomed her to a painful death – likely sooner than later – so she is, effectively, of no further use to him. With this in mind he further realises he can engage in the spite he had intended to visit upon her for wounds inflicted by the undead in the jungle around her home (given what she was harbouring inside her, it doesn’t seem that unreasonable that she was their cause). He starts up his chainsword and carves her into chunks. As an afterthought, he searches the place thoroughly, finding a spidery grimoire beneath the floorboards. From the multiple corrections in various hands, he deduces that Anya wasn’t the first witch to own this book.
With the source of his terror very much dead, Mordecai is able to return and the pair snatch some fitful sleep.
The next day they head back, avoiding the village of Perdition alltogether. Hal (who is late) notes on the way back their dischevelled, bloody clothes, and listens with mild interrest to their story of how they killed some peasant witch.
Back in Vinh City, they head for a public park, the location of which Midian had planted in the transportation network. They wait for some time but eventually find their quarry. Maya Zin pulls a gun on Midian, preparing to publically execute him. She is forestalled not by threats or subtle mind-control, but by logic.
She initially tells them that she knows Midian set Kith up, and that Midian was trying to userp Kith’s place in the great work they had done on Vinh. Midian can see that this isn’t something she really “knows” (it can’t be, it isn’t true (though if he’d known it would have been – ha!)) but something she’s trying to convince herself of. Why? Because Midian’s someone she can kill and get away with it. The person she really suspects (and who our protagonists push her gently towards) is the Amael, Lucretia Casmirre. But that, she knows (so must already have conciderred) is a suicide mission.
The protagonists get a little more out of her, but she slams on the breaks before revealing everything she knows. Eventually, she wants an oath from Midian – he will not leave Vinh until Lucretia Casmirre is dead. Midian conciders. What she has is too important, it could get him something he very much wants. So, quite honestly, he agrees (for one, he suspects a second assassination attempt would be less nihilistically planned). She stares him in the eye and understands.
Maya Zin was bought when she was, she guesses, aged 11 or 12. This would make her about 23. Kith had her raised and trained to be a spy. Spies are a necessity for noble families, so Kith’s purchase isn’t unusual, but it hints at long-term vision, an independent streak and a more than healthy sense of paranoia. As she grew the two fell in love (Midian notes that this is unusual, if true – Navigators shouldn’t risk weakening their bloodlines by poluting it with offspring not wholy “of the gene”), culminating when he granted her her freedom.
A year or so ago, when the House’s fortunes started to slide, Kith decided to devote himself to what had previously been a dalliance – the study of Lum. He became convinced (for whatever reason) that Lum’s eventual disappearance wasn’t a mundane event, but the result of some empowering event. And it was power that Kith too could gain access to.
There’s more, but Maya tells Midian she’ll need to make contact with others first. In the meantime she sends him to Hostel Sierra, where she has stashed the mysterious “pages” with which she hooked Midian’s attention.
Midian finds them exactly where he is told they’d be – in a small, glass-fronted wooden box taped to the back fo the dresser. The first of the velum pages is an Astromantic map of the Vinh system, with an odd error upon it: it lists Vinh as “SRef: X”, but Vinh isn’t the tenth Stellar Reference point in the system, it’s the first (there being no other planets between it and the system’s sun).
The rest of the pages are unclear – they’re someone’s personal notes, written solely to benefit themselves and use phrases whose meanings are never explained. It would take some time to make more sense of it…
The shack itself is old and rickety. The boards are uneven and have a rough finish to them, porch roof appears to be held up by stripped tree branches, and the windows are unglazed – only tacked-on gauze keeping the insects out. From damp, rotting beams hang wind-chimes made from clattering animal bones. Before the threshold is a thick arc of red-brown powder which Mordecai shifts with the tip of his sword.
After Midian’s inquiries are rebuffed by the occupant, Mordecai kicks the door in and brusquely enters the abode.
Anya herself looks in worse shape than her home. She is old, perhaps in her eighth or ninth decade and wears a cloth patch across her left eye (which, Midian later notes, removed two or three weeks ago). From her squint, it seems her other one isn’t working too well either.
She was afraid of and cowers when Mordecai telekinetically wrenches the knife from her hand.
At this point she gives up, and does whatever she can to get rid of the strangers (beginning with patching Midian up sufficiently that he can walk unaided). Her subsequent interrogation is hampered by her addled mind and she frequently mistakes Midian for Kith (referring to both by one of Lum’s epithets, “Wayfarer”), so Mordecai attempts to take what he needs from her mind. At this point his own mind is almost sucked down into a spiralling darkness the likes of which he has never experienced. Whatever is in there with him certainly enjoys the rising panic before he extricates himself, fleeing into the night. Midian tries to stop him, attempting to freeze him in place with one of his warp-spawned talents, but (having to restrain himself so as not to injure his felow renegade) is unable to overpower the psyker’s formidable mental defences.
Not wishing to leave empty-handed, her returned and perservered with the interrogation piecing together what he could. Anya hadn’t been able to tell Kith what he’d wanted to know – there were no “magical” ruins about the place and certainly no temple. At one point she muttered, “I told you what you wanted to know – you should already have your army by now!” but when pressed said she didn’t know why Kith/Midian/Wayfarer needed an army (and was confused as to why he wouldn’t know), only that she wanted nothing to do with it.
Eventually, after Midian promises to return the eye he took from her, she is pressed into redoing Kith/Midian/Wayfarer’s “reading”.
She takes a fat yellow serpent from a basket and prays at a cluttered shrine consisting of herbs, animal bones, a Vinh-minted coin (Xanatov’s side is on display), a ceramic figurine of a woman holding a basket of fruit, and another figure – this one of carved stone - of some robed figure. Midian notes that it is not uncommon for primitive religions to disguise themselves within the trappings of a dominant religion, so doesn’t question these things. All this time she mumbles nonsense words to herself. She finishes abruptly, cutting open the serpent and emptying it’s entrails into a burnished copper bowl.
“See! Same as always, Wayfarer. Same as Anya always tells you. You and the Kingmaker are already on the path.”
She then goes into a fit. It abrupty ends and her bodylanguage shifts to that of someone with much greater confidence.
“A hollow soul, marked by sin,Whoever Anya is at this point isn’t too helpful. It doesn’t know nor cares about Maya Zin and sees the Wayfarer and Kingmaker’s progress as inevitable.
“A traveller lost, hell beckons him.
“The monarch chained to stolen throne,
“A temple found… [laughter] by eye of crone.
“An ancient prize, sought, seized and won.
“First found, last forged, soon done.”
The reading leaves Anya weak. So weak that she can’t resist when Midian deocularises her with her own knife.
He realises that he has essentially doomed her to a painful death – likely sooner than later – so she is, effectively, of no further use to him. With this in mind he further realises he can engage in the spite he had intended to visit upon her for wounds inflicted by the undead in the jungle around her home (given what she was harbouring inside her, it doesn’t seem that unreasonable that she was their cause). He starts up his chainsword and carves her into chunks. As an afterthought, he searches the place thoroughly, finding a spidery grimoire beneath the floorboards. From the multiple corrections in various hands, he deduces that Anya wasn’t the first witch to own this book.
With the source of his terror very much dead, Mordecai is able to return and the pair snatch some fitful sleep.
The next day they head back, avoiding the village of Perdition alltogether. Hal (who is late) notes on the way back their dischevelled, bloody clothes, and listens with mild interrest to their story of how they killed some peasant witch.
Back in Vinh City, they head for a public park, the location of which Midian had planted in the transportation network. They wait for some time but eventually find their quarry. Maya Zin pulls a gun on Midian, preparing to publically execute him. She is forestalled not by threats or subtle mind-control, but by logic.
She initially tells them that she knows Midian set Kith up, and that Midian was trying to userp Kith’s place in the great work they had done on Vinh. Midian can see that this isn’t something she really “knows” (it can’t be, it isn’t true (though if he’d known it would have been – ha!)) but something she’s trying to convince herself of. Why? Because Midian’s someone she can kill and get away with it. The person she really suspects (and who our protagonists push her gently towards) is the Amael, Lucretia Casmirre. But that, she knows (so must already have conciderred) is a suicide mission.
The protagonists get a little more out of her, but she slams on the breaks before revealing everything she knows. Eventually, she wants an oath from Midian – he will not leave Vinh until Lucretia Casmirre is dead. Midian conciders. What she has is too important, it could get him something he very much wants. So, quite honestly, he agrees (for one, he suspects a second assassination attempt would be less nihilistically planned). She stares him in the eye and understands.
Maya Zin was bought when she was, she guesses, aged 11 or 12. This would make her about 23. Kith had her raised and trained to be a spy. Spies are a necessity for noble families, so Kith’s purchase isn’t unusual, but it hints at long-term vision, an independent streak and a more than healthy sense of paranoia. As she grew the two fell in love (Midian notes that this is unusual, if true – Navigators shouldn’t risk weakening their bloodlines by poluting it with offspring not wholy “of the gene”), culminating when he granted her her freedom.
A year or so ago, when the House’s fortunes started to slide, Kith decided to devote himself to what had previously been a dalliance – the study of Lum. He became convinced (for whatever reason) that Lum’s eventual disappearance wasn’t a mundane event, but the result of some empowering event. And it was power that Kith too could gain access to.
There’s more, but Maya tells Midian she’ll need to make contact with others first. In the meantime she sends him to Hostel Sierra, where she has stashed the mysterious “pages” with which she hooked Midian’s attention.
Midian finds them exactly where he is told they’d be – in a small, glass-fronted wooden box taped to the back fo the dresser. The first of the velum pages is an Astromantic map of the Vinh system, with an odd error upon it: it lists Vinh as “SRef: X”, but Vinh isn’t the tenth Stellar Reference point in the system, it’s the first (there being no other planets between it and the system’s sun).
The rest of the pages are unclear – they’re someone’s personal notes, written solely to benefit themselves and use phrases whose meanings are never explained. It would take some time to make more sense of it…
Although the map is not signed by it's author, i'm going to assume it is one of (or a copy of) Lums (he discovered this place after all).
ReplyDeleteLum has worked on leaving his 'legacy' (the possesed crone called it 'The Path' (that's not me being a meta-dick this time, she actually said that!)), so it is possible that the 'error' is a personal code or clue left by Lum in order guide people to his legacy (whatever the heck it might be!).
Assuming this is a personal code or clue of sorts, it would mean that there are 9 other planets or locations of relevence to Lum's legacy.