Of Seeds Dead and Living
Seventh Day of the Second Month 294 AC
You eye the chariots of bone while held aloft by Dany's magic and briefly contemplate what they would do if you cleansed this sorrowful field with fire, but in the end you shake your head and decide against it. This is naught but a mummer's battle and not the only one taking place on these plains tonight. Until the sickness can be cured, it would serve little to meddle here.
"Let's go, there's nothing for us here," you call.
After a long look at the horizon, his thoughts likely running along the paths yours had already taken, Waymar agrees, adding only, "It's going to take a lot of holy oils and prayer to make this place fit for legion land grants. Best keep it to those who keep their swords close."
None of the living or dead can contradict that.
On you fly, south and east to the City of Caravans, leaving the dead to slay the dead in gruesome mockery of tragedies that were. The sun rises into a pal of black smoke above Kasath like the blood red eye of some distant ever-watchful beast. There are no trees to hide among here, nor do the dead keep to behind the walls. Chariots ride into the distance and the fleshless bones of the lesser dead move in the slow senseless labor, trying to sow crops which the tread of their own feet poisons.
"The officers and overseers at least have to be ensouled," Teana muses as you land in a copse of frail of aspen still clinging to the edge of a narrow stream. "But given that they are doing this..." she motions vaguely in the direction of the fields 'tended' by the dead. "I'm not certain how much sense we can get out of them."
"Perhaps they are wary of becoming a meal for the One-that-is-Many," Eskil's dry rasp interjects.
"Cowards," the envoy of Mardosh hacks as if to spit on the ground, though nothing beyond the word leaves his withered lips.
"We need to talk to some sort of leader, or even just someone with a measure of prestige," Tyene muses as she carefully picks the leaves off her 'dress'. In truth it is armor every bit as much as what Waymar wears, but since she is not trying to play the knight, she prefers to glamor it into something more like fine Dornish garb. "We could spend all month going from manse to settlement to watchtower trying to persuade each in turn that there is another path."
"We could simply pick one of the larger villages and ask." Dany nods toward the chariots. "Our escorts should be enough to keep the lesser dead from attacking on sight, even if they were so inclined."
"But that would warn the... master of Kasath," you hesitate upon the title before deciding that you cannot call a tortured chorus of stitched together souls a 'lord'. "We might be better served arriving in secret, first as merchants perhaps, and seeing what welcome that gets us."
Oddly enough, the Mardoshi envoy does not grumble at this, as you had almost been certain he would. Catching your gaze, he shrugs, an incongruously human motion from the previously motionless warrior. "You can buy and trade surely? A merchant in truth you could easily be, though not only a merchant."
Making a mental note of his willingness to use omission in trickery, you roll out the map and settle on discussing where you might make your first move, be it in the outskirts or Kasath itself.
What do you do next?
[] Visit the largest and most 'prosperous' settlement
-[] With the full delegation
-[] As a living merchant
[] Try to infiltrate Kasath proper
[] Write in
OOC: No precise undead descriptions in this one since Viserys and company did not get close lest they be spotted before they chose to be. Not yet edited.
