A Sword Without a Hilt: A Song of Ice and Fire/D&D 3.5 Crossover

Sixteenth Day of the First Month 294 AC

You quietly arrange a meeting through the proprietor of the Worm, the man obviously familiar with both the need for discretion and witnesses in back alley dealings between those that do not entirely trust each other, though you suspect he would be rather surprised to know who Corlys Waters truly is.

Three companions on each side, it is agreed, and so in addition to Ser Richard you bring Kira and one of the mind dragons, both of whom seem to have won some sort of game from the grumbling accusations of cheating that follows. By contrast, your mother seems relieved not to have to tread through the muck of Oldtown's least sanitary areas. "Perhaps I've grown too accustomed to Sorcerer's Deep," she said with a smile as you part.

The lantern hangs low inside the winesink, the shadows twisting and turning this way and that with every clink of the chain, but most patrons seem not to care a whit for it, lost in whatever sorrow or vice had lead them to nursing cups of sour wine at a little past noon. Towards the back of the room you spot the man who invited you here and his own peculiar companions. The rumors about the archmaester consorting with sailors and foreigners are true, that much you see at a glance.

Perhaps the most commonplace of the four is a grey-haired man with a scar marking his face that should have taken his eye, though it is intact and peering at your warily. He wears what looks to be map cases at his belt, though among them you spy more arcane scrolls, the tools of a man who is a friend of mages and unafraid to use their works. Vargo of the Wide Road, he introduces himself, causing the young woman sitting next to him to roll her eyes at the dramatics.


"Sari, from Oldtown," she introduces herself with deliberate bluntness, though her features hint at Dornish blood. Beneath the dark cloak she is dressed in some sort of shadow-touched leather, though you cannot tell if it is enchanted because she, like all three of her companions, is warded against divination of all sorts. From the faintly lilting way she says her vowels beneath the quick and choppy Oldtown accent you suspect she may have once been one of the Orphans of the Greenblood, though not for years, or more likely decades


The third of the archmaester's companions is the one most likely a sorcerer in his own right. Ashin of Asabhad he calls himself, his gilded armor polished, hair and beard oiled to a luster even more unfitting to the setting than his name, not that he seems to be the least bit concerned about the dark looks he is getting from the other patrons. The bronze tablets tied to his armor remind you a bit of ofuda, prayer-scrolls of the shugenja, though the markings upon them are not in modern or classical Yi Tish.


And finally there is Marwyn himself. At first glance his squat stature and broad back puts one more in the mind of a warrior than a scholar, an image made all the more compelling by the fact that his nose seems to have been broken several time, though looking more carefully one can see the signs of a man who mastered magic in the days of its nadir, the square jaw bespeaking not merely stubbornness but unshakable will, and the eyes beneath his beetle brow are sharp indeed.


He looks from Soallae in his patchwork garb, that is just inconspicuous enough to pass muster but still a little too colorful to miss, to Kira in what she calls her 'busker's leathers', the glamour she uses when she wants to look like a common minstrel but too dangerous for fools to attack, and to Ser Richard, enchanted armor hidden beneath he guise of battered half-plate. Finally, he looks at you. "Well now, Master Waters, here we are, carefully not pointing daggers at each other, for all the odd hand twitches to a hilt. Am I right in assuming you hail from a place east and a little south of here that has grown richer in gold and wisdom of late?"

Here is a man who could tell you quite a lot about the Citadel and much more, you suspect, and one without any great love of his fellow archmaesters, but still you will have to be careful in approaching him.

What do you reply?

[] Confirm your identity as 'an agent of King Viserys'
-[] Ask questions
-[] Make an offer
-[] Write in

[] Deny your identity as 'an agent of King Viserys'
-[] Ask questions
-[] Make an offer
-[] Write in

OOC: Marwyn is canonically a man with friends and acquaintances in all sorts of places, so it would have been odd to make him a loner like I did Melisandre.

<< Previous

The last few years had been, all things considered, rather fruitful for Jorga. Back in the day, he had to beg and steal to have something in his stomach, now though, he was a made man with his own shop and quite a few people who respected him. It all started with that strange thing he found in the gutter, looking like a cross between a jellyfish and a dog. Back then, nobody knew what something like this was, so he just grabbed it. Granted, he didn't know any more about what exactly that thing had been now either, just that it was a lot more dangerous then he thought back then.

So he brought the thing to the Citdael, following the rumors on the street that they were paying good coin for strange things. They were a lot more careful about the thing and Jorga guessed that this was why he got webbing between his feet and a patch of scales on his left arm these days, while the Maesters didn't. Small price to pay in his opinion though. He a pouch full of silver for his troubles and with this the idea that made him who he is now. Webbing and scales and all.

Sure, there were others who tried the same as him, but unlike them, he kept to picking up what he could find that was already dead instead of grabbing a club and trying to hunt something in the sewers. He might have clubbed a few people who were nosing around in the places where he could find things most reliably, but that was just how business went. And soon enough, he had enough coin to have others do the ruffling through the gutter and even a few brave idiots who went down to get something fresh.

All the while, he was busy learning to count all the coin he was getting and keeping an ear to the ground where he could fence the rarer things. The Citadel paid well, but some other figures paid better. Nobles and merchants who wanted something fancy to show their ilk. Witches who probably boiled the stuff in their cauldrons for whatever. Even someone who claimed to be working for the Lannisters had knocked on his door once. He had paid a nice hand full of gold for a few crystals they had found in the sewers, so Jorga wasn't really caring if that was true.

Of course, he wasn't doing all this openly. The Lantern Bearers took a dim view of people mucking around with squisher corpses or going around in the catacombs, so officially his shop was selling books, inks, parchments and all that claptrap that interested the kind of people who also liked to play around with squidfaced cats and brains on legs. He himself was pointedly not reading any of these books, even though he had learned his letters in the last year, just to make sure he didn't catch whatever drove his customers to play around with these twisted things.

Over the course of his career, he had thus earned himself a quite finely honed sense of danger and a healthy helping of paranoia. So when the bell over his front door chimed to announce a new customer, he quickly looked over the small group that entered. Some Essosi looking fellow, flanked by an old man on one side and what seemed to be his lover on the other. In the read walked a rather burly looking man that had his entire face wrapped up and a rather heavy looking sword strapped to his back.

That worried Jorga, for his door chime was supposed to give off a birds chirp when someone with magic on him rung it. These fellows looked not as if they had nothing noteworthy on them. That was never a good sign in his experience. Never the less, he plastered a smile on his face and carefully grabbed a very special coin he kept behind the counter. When you spun it on the edge, the side it would fall would tell him if he should try to sell something or to duck back into the storeroom while his own burly associates would take care of things.

The role of the shopkeeper still felt like a mask to Jorga, even though he had played it for so long and so successfully. In his experience, it was equal parts sucking up to the customer and false humility. "Welcome, good sir. What brings you to my humble shop?"

"Greetings to you to, my friend. Jorga, I assume?" The Essosi was rather boisterous and loud, leaning on the counter and grinning broadly at Jorga as if visiting this shop was the greatest thing he had ever done.

For a brief moment, Jorga felt something that made the hair on his neck rise. Something was off about this fellow who was too pale, with too pearly teeth and too perfect hair. Was this a Fey? They had never bothered him so far, even though they allegedly took a dim view of everything related to the sea monsters in the sewers. Before the man had cause to grow suspicious though, Jorga nodded with a polite smile, using the movement to quickly glance at the coin. It was still spinning. His blood froze. That was not supposed to happen.

"Glad to meet you in person," the too flawless man went on. "It appears, according to a shared friend of ours, that you might know the whereabouts of a few rather peculiar items that he sold to you. A few rather rare things, if you catch my drift."

Jorga hesitated, painfully aware that if one these people was a witch, he wouldn't make it to the backdoor in time. He needed a distraction. "Theo?" He called loudly through the shop, but didn't tare to takes his eyes off the man before him. "We have a special customer that needs your help."

A moment later, Theo came out of the door to the side of the counter and things began to happen too fast for Jorga to follow. The warrior of the group before him just vanished, and he heard a strangled scream a heartbeat later. He himself hadn't waited, instead diving behind the counter and trying to run to the other door, but before he had made more then three steps, he fell face first to the ground. His chest was an inferno of pain and he tried to scream, but his lungs refused to work.

"That was unnecessary. We are merely here to talk." Slowly the old man stepped around the counter, his feet coming into Jorga's view, but the shopkeeper was not capable of saying anything in return. The pain was overwhelming, as if his heart was being torn to pieces. "Please refrain from trying to run away again. Would you be so kind?" The old bastard sounded as if he was talking to a child, not caring one bit about the man dying at his feet.

A shaky nod was all that Jorga could manage and not a moment later, his chest stopped hurting as quickly as it started. Painfully, he dredged himself up to lean against the wall, retching up some bile while trying to catch his breath. It took a while before he could speak and it was still painful to do so. "What do you want?"

"The buyer of a few things that were sold to you half a year ago. My friend here will show you what they were." The old man waved to someone on the other side of the counter and then the Essosi jumped on it, then laying down on it and curiously peering down at Jorga.

"I'm afraid Theo is a bit worse for the wear. Our friends don't know their strength, but I'm sure he will be very happy that he has only been mostly strangled to death when he wakes up. Mind, can I keep this fancy rapier he had? I'm not sure if I'm allowed to plunder people when we didn't actually kill them." With this he lifted the silver sheath of Theo's weapon.

In response, the woman spoke for the first time, he voice sounding odd to Jorga's ears. Or that was the panic speaking. "Please get to the point. I'm sure he won't mind if you take the weapon as an apology for his rude behavior."

"Yes. Keep it. I'm very sorry." He pressed the words out as quickly as he could. Jorga didn't even have to lie. He was very sorry to have opened the shop today, let alone having met these people.

The Essosi smiled in return, immediately hanging the rapier onto his belt. "Very kind of you my friend. Now, what we are looking for..." He lazily waved a hand, conjuring up a thick smoke that coalesced into a set of jars.

Seeing what they were filled with, Jorga nearly retched again. He remembered that set. He remembered the nightmares he got from looking at them and wondering what had happened to the poor bastards in them. "If I tell you, you will leave me alone?" The old man nodded without hesitation and even though Jorga didn't really trust these people, he had little choice but to start talking.

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AN: In a surprising twist of events, a few low-level Experts and Rogues are not faring terribly well while trying to oppose this party.