One good deed

With Harthen beaten into submission we were able to find out how he got into the poison business, which we guessed was our next lead.

We went in with the story that Woe had used one of the poisoned potions and now we wanted an explanation.

Some people are so touchy—no sooner did they mention Harthen than the guy went into attack mode, and he had some neat tricks. It probably would have been easier if we’d taken some time to recover. I had ben studying one of the books some of the dwarves had loaned me and some of the tricks in there might have helped with that annoying little imp thing that was floating around near the ceiling.

We finally cleaned him up and were trying to work out whether Malakar would have to call back his dead spirit for interrogation, but on our way out the clerk transformed into the woman that had kissed Obegard and set us on this path.

Apart from the interesting equipment we’d salvaged, she actually paid us some m-o-n-e-y. Not only that, she took us to some weird library maintained by some extra-planar beings called Tellers who were able to tell us where to find Jartik, the guy we’d come here for in the first place. Maybe she had an “in” with them because it turns out she was some weird reincarnating creature called a “phoera” or “phoerarch” or something.

More or less.

They had information about where Jartik had gone from here, but then they said something about him “leaving the Accordlands” which I find vaguely disquieting.

We took the opportunity of being in a large trade city to finish up some loot disposal, and then we had to leave for the Elven forest to speak to some fey creature called Witchthorn.

Strangely enough Livia seemed to have heard of him, but all she would tell us is that he’s “evil” which the humans seem to throw around very loosely, and I haven’t spent enough time with elves to know if they’re more selective. At least she was able to provide pretty accurate directions on how to find him, which included some sort of summoning ritual she knew.

We stood around ready for almost everything except what happened. Livia did her ritual, Witchthorn arrived with some other plant-like creature, he said something about Livia coming to pay her debt, and then Livia tried to kill him.

I don’t think anyone knew what to do—we needed the guy for information, and Livia hadn’t provided any sort of advance warning about some dispute she and Witchthorn have.

I stopped to see what was going on, as did most of the others. Obegard tried to disable Livia so we could start a conversation or something. It didn’t work, but it succeeded in putting off her spell-casting and once Witchthorn had rendered her unconscious we managed to find out what was going on.

Apparently the magical skills she displays are “gifts” she procured from Witchthorn and when he told us how much she owed him we couldn’t see how she was ever going to pay.

Witchthorn had an idea, however. If we would take on Livia’s debt then he would give us the information we wanted. Hahahahaha. It was good to see that nobody else was much keener to get sucked into that one.

I don’t know exactly what we’re going to do—perhaps Livia had the right idea and if only she’d given us a hint of what she was going to do maybe it would have gone that way. It still might, though now we’re starting from behind with Livia out of it and some of the other spell-casters having already expended some of their power to prevent Livia and Witchthorn killing each other.