Thurlow's Tales - 1x02 Watching the Detectives

 

Come the morning, after breakfast, we set off to the Royal Assurance to make good on our agreement to aid them in a murder investigation. A Sergeant Suminar Malati walked us north from the market square to a row of terraced houses roped off from the curious, and there (with all the cheer of a woman handing you a bill) she passed the whole business into our hands and left us to it.

Inside we found an alchemist, Griffo Clayhanger by name, now face-down in a heap of purple powder upon his own workbench. The air about him was sharp with brimstone. A prudent person would have retreated and assessed the scene from a safe distance. Applied stout leather gloves before handling possibly dangerous elixirs. Not Horton. That great inquiring mind and towering intellect. He wets a finger, dips it the purple powder, and tastes it. Well, dear listeners I also fell over in shock. I'll spare you the particulars, save to say the world turned some very pretty colours for him for a while after.

I decided to call next on the neighbours. I went to the left and met a man so eager to talk he'd must have spent years with his ear to the shared wall between his and our murder victims cottage. From him I learned that Griffo had had a frequent caller often at dusk (a pretty young woman the man told me), and that the night before the killing there had been a baby crying fit to wake the dead. A second woman, older and hooded, had called and the neighbour thought she left carrying the child away into the dark. Griffo and the hooded woman had spoken together in no tongue he'd ever heard before.

Missenbar, meanwhile, managed to draw a half-burnt scrap of parchment from the cold fireplace, and on it a single word still legible in the Orcish tongue: ‘bamagat’, which for those of you unfamiliar with the Orcish tongue means underground. I know a little of languages, and I knew this one was not a place, but a password. The name of a hidden road that spirits the endangered away to safety.

Upstairs the tale deepened further. An empty wicker cot, a child's picture book "The Very Hungry Carrion Crawler", and a sealed letter holding a coin. A coin older even than myself, if you can believe such a thing. On the coin was a lion-faced figure and the words ‘Until the fall of the gates’. It was Horton, having recovered from his dalliance with the purple powder who in the end found the truth of the murder. A needle of bone no bigger than an eyelash, caught in the dead man's collar, and the little dark wound it had left in the back of his neck.

Horton, meanwhile, was sent to charm the little old lady on the other side of out victim's cottage. She welcomed him kindly and set before him a mushroom omelette. Now Horton is a growing lad and likes his food, so he ate it. Not long after finishing the first few forkfuls the rest of us heard a terrible crash, loud enough to bring down the roof. We decided we should investigate, and found Horton stretched senseless on the floor with a great dark-furred shape attempting to haul him away by the hair heading toward the back door…

Thurlow's Tales - 1x01 Beginnings and Bar Guests

Gather in, listen carefully, for every tale must start somewhere, and this one starts with rain. That sort of rain that seems to set in around mid morning and you just know that it isn’t going anywhere today. Now, at a cross roads in the kingdom of Sacken, there is a town called Ettmoss, and in that town a tavern by the name of the Giant's Heads. It is kept by a good woman called Amity Kama. It was there, on an afternoon that was suitable only for ducks, that fate, that fickle mistress, did what fate does best: it wove the paths of strangers so that they found themselves all sat a the same table. 

The first of these strangers was Horton, young and blond and never more than an arm's length from his axe. The second was Missenbar, a halfling with hair the blue of a summer sky, who swore up and down he was some sort of traveller. And lastly there was an elderly teller of tales plying his trade from town to town. I feel dear listener, I should point out that I was that storyteller. And that what I now recount to you is a true and honest retelling of the events that I myself witnessed.
We had scarcely taken our seats when the door blew open and a battered band of adventurers staggered in, carrying one of their own (a tiefling, out cold). Sent to clear a cave of goblins, so they told it, they had been ambushed by a barghest. Barely had they caught their breath and treated their wounded when the door banged again, and in strode a blue dragonborn with two guards at his back, all bluster and pointing fingers. He wanted the leader of this band a noblewoman, with the crest of some minor house worn as a medallion around her neck. (a warlock, we would learn later, named Ata Keseau).

Well. You know how it is when faced with such rudeness. Especially in a room full of strangers who've had just enough to drink. My companions of chance moved as one. Missenbar slipped in to strike the brute as Horton put both hands to his chest and shoved. I did my small part from the back, an unseen hand I conjured to knot the guards' bootlaces together, so that the two of them went down in a heap the moment they tried to charge. The blue dragonborn, meanwhile, was learning hard lessons from Missenbar's fists, and when at last he turned to flee, he found he'd left it too late; down he went, beaten senseless by the little halfling. Horton dragged the great lizard out by the collar and dumped him in the street, the better, he said, to tidy the place up.
As the dust settled, we did what any sensible folk do after a fight: we sat down together over food and drink. Atta told us she'd run from her home, and begged us to carry a small ornate box out of Ettmoss. Inside it lay a platinum figurine she believed her own family were using to hunt her across the land. “Take it to a town called Oitti,” she said, and hand it to a man named Politt. This she hoped would lead her pursuers astray. Horton being the upstanding young chap that he is agreed straight away.

However more bad news came in from the street as we were informed that the dragonborn was now lying dead in the gutter. Horton was most concerned that he would be blamed. And Amity had to be most reassuring, telling him that she would provide alibis and character references for him. Soon enough in walked two of the Royal Assurance (the king's law, for those unfamiliar). They promptly offered to forget the small matter of the dragonborn in the street, if only we fate touched strangers would look into a small matter of a murder. We were to bring them the guilty party. We naturally agreed and so the night ended: Horton to bed with an axe beneath his pillow, myself in my favoured chair by the fire with a cup of tea, and Missenbar shown up to his room, the three of us saddled with two jobs apiece before we'd so much as finished our first drink together.