Session 12: Pestilence in Cheykor

We began the Fall Adventuring Phase on the 18th day of Akdeipal, amid the Fast of Lamentation, when the Ambori remember the long bondage of their fathers in the mines of torment. It is the most solemn fast in the Amborian calendar, and as the hustle and bustle of the trade season begins to die down in Cheykor, so too the city seems to have grown gray and somber. This is the only time of year that the Ambori do not go clad in bright and manifold colors, for in memory of the long captivity of your fathers in the Black Hills, you wear the dark and somber hues of slavery, of gray and black, and the rhythm of your days is muted and downcast, punctuated only by plain evening meals and the daily ceremonies which take place, led by Feala the Well Priestess. These ceremonies are processions which are made around the base of the hill on which the shrine is located, for the doors of the shrine itself are closed and locked for the fourteen days of the fast.

These ceremonies include long liturgical recitations led by Feala as she wears a length of chain around her neck and hands. Lay celebrants accompany her, singing and chanting in a call-and-response format, as they wear small silver bracelets linked like chains, which are the only jewelry allowed during the Fast. Not everyone in town participates in every once of these processions--typically, other than the most pious citizens, the normal townsfolk only partake in Feala's three times during the fast--once, in the great procession on the first day of the Fast, and then again on the seventh and fourteenth days. It is during the great procession of the fourteenth day that the shrine is re-opened, commemorating the great and solemn Feast of Sencan, when Sencan descended into the depths of the earth to his father's anvil, to free the Hurorupeim and free his people from bondage.

Not being particularly religious, Tengelbur spent his time trying to run down answers about the Swan-Woman who had taken Orusen (to no success, as it happens). But Vanera, Reiana, and Anaris all partook in the daily processions up the hill. Accordingly, they were approach by Feala and asked to stand in for two of her celebrants who had fallen ill that day. At the appointed time, the little procession gathered at the gate of the town and began their way up the hill.

Feala, clad ever in black, wears no jewelry, but her dark hair is clasped behind her head by a silver band of thread, and around her neck and shoulders she wears a heavy black chain which rattles as she takes the first step. One of the celebrants begins a low, steady drone that forms the background for the shrill rhythm of Feala's chant:

Orkon, hated, came in friendship
Came with many gifts for children.
Brought the lore of sunken Star-land,
Brought the wisdom of the anvil.
Children gladly welcomed friendship,
Named him Parbeas, open-handed.
Afterwards he made another
Offer to the Water's Children:
Gift of woven spells, enchantments,
Death to cheat, increase of power.
The children were deceived and conquered.

As the ceremony proceeds slowly up the hill, the refrain is taken up by each of the celebrants in turn:

Long we labored in the darkness.
Long we served the black deceiver.
Long we wielded pick and hammer.
Long we suffered in the darkness.
Long our cries went up to heaven.

Anaris and Reiana blared out their parts, rather tunelessly, while Vanera executed his with more skill (as one might expect of a scholar).

As the ceremony reaches the top of the hill, the chant reaches its apex.

Long we suffered in the darkness.
Long we beat out chains of iron.
Long we dreamed that Nankeinela--
Maker both of earth and heaven--
Looking down upon our sorrow
Would send some one into our bondage
A king to lead, a smith to hammer
Bitter chains into a scepter.

With each cry Feala beats upon the shut and locked door of the Shrine. But the door is shut, and the deliverance of the Children of Water and Sky is not to come until the end of the Fast is completed. But even as Feala lowers her head, tears streaming from her cheeks, her knuckles bloody with beating upon the stone door, there is a cry. 

One of the celebrants, a young girl named Falaru, stumbled forward with a cry and collapsed. As Vanera stooped to examine her, he found a large black patch of skin slowly spreading its way across her chest, clawing its way up toward her throat. The midwife, old Fjalakar, was called for, and by the time she returned a sizeable crowd had gathered around the body. She declared it a plague of some sort, and gave an unfavorable prognosis. Without a cure, the girl would soon die. More problematically, two of the other celebrants had fallen ill earlier that day, and Fjalakar suspected the pestilence was spreading among them. The Company quickly volunteered to go for a cure, and after consulting Fjalakar as well as local lore and legend, they determined they would have two options:

• Retrieving the herb known as Dead Man's Kiss from the Cheyth Wood. This powerful herb drives out poisons and plagues by inducing a high fever (which, if not administered correctly, can itself cause blindness, sterility, and death). 
• The left eye of the hyenas of the Northern Moor are believed to drive out such pestilence if placed beneath the tongue of the victim. 

After trying to decide between the two (and one of the village elders trying to encourage them toward the latter), the party finally decided to go into the Cheyth Wood (which was nearer) in hopes of acquiring the herb. 

This wide forest of oak, ash, and beech straddles both sides of the Cheyth bellow the Crossings. In ancient times it was a great forest, one of the mightiest of the north of the world, but now it is diminished to the bounds of the lower Cheyth River Valley. But there are trees in the Cheyth-i-Hatam which still remember the days before the days when Lanenomen brought his host eastward, and they have not forgotten the might of the forest in ancient days. What it was that cut it short—whether the poison of Orkon or the wrath of the river—none can now tell. Within the heart of the forest there are many beasts great and fell, and in the days when there was peace in the North, Lemal I and his son Namal were said to have often hunted here.

It took only a day of searching to find a stand of the herb--unfortunately, as the PC's approached the thicket where the herb was, they heard the low growls and grunts of one of the Horned Beasts which haunt the Cheyth Woods. It turns it out was a Lesser Horned Beast mother with a relatively new litter of cubs, and as the Company approached she made it very clear that she did not intend to let them near her nest. Tengelbur managed to approach it, using a steady supply of apples and other foodstuffs, and nearly befriended it before Vanera and Reiana--neither of whom are particularly stealthy individuals--spooked it trying to cut the herbs. It lashed out, attacking Tengelbur (as he was nearest) and after a long and desperate fight--in which the creature's boiling blood showered the Company and also burned away most of the herb, as well as its own blind and naked young whose thick hides had not yet developed--the Company managed to slay it. Tengelbur tried to save the last one of the badly burned cubs, but it died even as he wrapped it in his cloak.

Breathless, weary, and all with their Endurance in the single-digits, that's where we left the party in Session 12 of Thunder in the North.