Copius Contrafibularities & Clear Drink for the Charcoal
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"Boss? There's some dwarfs at the gates, callin' themselves an envoy or some such." Hanusch bit back a curse at Lanric's words, as the words snapped him out of a comforting spell of nostalgia. It would not do to show any startlement on his part, lest the lads start thinking that his edge was growing less keen. Turning away from the tankard he'd been sampling from (pewter now, instead of wooden, he was a man of
respectable station now), he now faced the man with a quirked brow, and an expression bearing just the right tinge of questioning whether he was born with the brain of a Snotling.
"Again? Didn't that ranger patrol drop by just a fortnight ago to hear our 'pledge' to runnin' this place on their behalf?" It had been satisfying to see the looks of bemusement on their faces as he led them through a village surging to grow, rather than the hamlet terrorized by each dusk they'd clearly been expecting to find. Oh, they tried to play it off with a great deal of grumbling, but Hanusch had seen through those sorts before. Really, when it came down to it, there wasn't all that much difference to deciphering the grousing and surly faces of a dwarf to a man from either bank of the Stir. If anything, the amount of facial hair made the visual tics even more noticeable. For all that their takeover of Steingart may have temporarily uprooted his band, it was pleasing to see the lack of squeamishness on their parts upon sighting the drawn and quartered mutant corpses framing the village gates.
Though he hadn't led them into the woods as part of the tour, so they wouldn't have seen the ones he'd left alive, screaming themselves hoarse on breaking wheels. No sense in testing the water's depth before you knew the current's strength, was one of the truisms his ol' pa had left to him. Hah, he couldn't imagine the man would much recognize his son if he were to look upon him now.
It's funny, the way one's path in life could turn out. Once, he'd been a proper apprentice, learning the trade to take over his family's brewery in Gersdorf. Now, after half a lifetime spent on the run as an outlaw and then cattle rustler, here he was, stooped over a still again.
"Nay, this one weren't those rangers, showed up with four other dwarfs, all wearin' steel from head to toe. Ne'er seen the like of 'em. Shined like mucks*, they did, with carvin's of dwarfs beatin' the snot outta sum Greenskins on 'em, on all their hammers an' armour an'-"
"Right, right, that's enough yappin' outta you already. Get them dwarfs inside an' waitin' at the hall's hearth, on the double. And get Salina in here! I've got guests to prepare for, seems like."
By the time he heard the door swing closed, he had already turned his head back towards the table, leveling a gauging look at the battle atop it. While in the midst of leading his band in driving off the mutants, Hanusch had spied with his eyes the sight of an old boon, one which had had him mutter a genuine prayer to Taal for the first time in years. Looking at the finished, distilled bottle, and the three beside it yet to be uncorked, he felt tempted to utter the prayer again for his good fortune. His half-remembered family recipe had provided an unexpected boon.
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Hanusch pondered, in the privacy of his own thoughts, whether there really was all that much change from his 'profession' as head of a band of rustlers to being a burgomaster. If nothing else, it seemed as though the effect you tried to project through what you wore didn't seem to change much in intent. What those above did with garish colours and expensive silks and rare furs, his ilk did with steel. Power, and the ability to use it. Power over lives, power over wealth. Power over law.
The overcoat he'd chosen to replace his old cloak with was much the same deep green, but thankfully had less patches and obvious seams where tears had been sewn back together. The mantle of fresh wolfskin over his shoulders was a lovely affectation in his opinion, and brought him back to the scarce few good memories of his boyhood. The coat itself was linen, but thickly padded, and Hanusch had chosen to leave it unbuttoned for the moment to show the light blue jack underneath. Though it remained the same canvas and felt affair he'd worn for years, the feel of the steel plates sewn into the underside was more comforting than the softest wool to him.
Perhaps the most outright fanciful addition to his outfit had been the immense belt that cinched the open coat at the waist, apparently having served as the badge of office for Ummenbach for a good three generations after some minor Averheimer ponce had been politely exiled to the place and commissioned it. Good, strong leather covered by solid iron plates, each one engraved with a brass sunburst. The loop at the side was likely meant to have been used for a scabbard, but that had likely been sold off at some point, and the sword with it. For now, it served for carrying a suitably weighty-looking flanged mace, with his old lasso at the same place it had always been.
Oh yes, he was sure he cut an impressive enough figure as he strode in through the door to greet the dwarf envoy. And then he lay eyes on this party of five, and wondered if anything short of carrying a sodding Runefang would have made him feel less underdressed.
Each of the four bodyguards for the envoy were much like Lanric had described. Massive hammers, plate armour polished until it gleamed like silver, engraved with scenes of battles. Hanusch found the great long funnels of steel scales the enveloped their waist-length beards amusing. But the envoy's appearance was what surprised him the most. For one, there was no beard on the face.
Hanusch had once, by happenstance, stumbled onto a roadside shrine to that
Tilean Estalian southern goddess, Myrmidia. The troupe had stopped in a sleepy little hamlet where the ranchhands were too sloshed to remember faces, and apparently some 'knight of a blazing sun' had built it a decade earlier to mark leading the local militia against a sizable horde of goblins. While his attention had been more on the style of the small spear-clutching statue (the knight seemed to have been a real talent with a chisel in his day, to get that look of a cloth sash tightly hugging
bare hips on unyielding stone) the face had also captivated him for a time.
This dwarf's bare face, framed by a full head of braided hair that reached past her knees, brought to his mind that same...
statuesque (heh) look, like her expression had been carved from marble. Hanusch hadn't had the particular displeasure of running across many nobles in his life, but he imagined that most of their legendarily haughty bearing was in an attempt to imitate the expression she cast into the world as though she'd been born with it. She could likely have walked into the room alone wearing nothing but that expression, and still exuded more authority and power than Hanusch could remember from any roadwarden or militia sergeant.
Not that this dwarf lady
had done so, by any means. A pair of boots, sturdy and polished leather with hobnails from the sound on the stone of his 'new' towerhouse peeked out from below a thick knee-length skirt. The skirt, in turn, flowed out from a high-necked bodice of boiled leather, itself lovingly chased into decorative symbols he thought looked like gauntlets over a bearded and helmed head, silvered and gilded and studded with opals the size of hen's eggs. The sleeves were loose, embroidered with gold and silver thread before closing to a tight cuff at the wrist.
"Greetings,
Khazidbezeki**. You have the honour of being addressed by
Kvinn Sidda Hammerfist, niece to
Rik Kagnus Hammerfist, king of Karak Gantuk." The words rumbled out from one of the living steel statues her retainers masqueraded as, though the beard-armour kept Hanusch from seeing which one had actually spoken. Clever trick of throwing their voice, that, not breaking uniformity yet not overblowing the announcement by having all four speak at once.
"Yes, uh, and I would be Hanusch Kurst, the, uh...
Khassid-beseki of Ummenbach, yes?" He didn't at all like the halting tone he gave, but the first round of this game had been lost. Calling him something or other in a language he didn't know had put him off-balance, keeping him from recovering from the shock of their collective finery when he'd been expecting something more like the rangers before. The first round was theirs, but there were still ways to emerge on top at the end. "May I inquire as to why a king's niece has decided to grace this village with her presence?"
"You may,
umgi," now spoke the lady herself, holding herself up with all the imperiousness one could manage for a woman who would need a footstool to be at eye-level with Hanusch's chest. She still didn't do a bad job of that, "With the recent campaign of clearing monsters out of Solland being undertaken by Clan Rakidum, my esteemed uncle had chosen for us to take the overland route to Karak Ornsk and go around the mountains by way of Steingart. While on the road, we caught sight of great columns of smoke, far thicker than our rangers had ever reported sighting from this
Khazid. Thinking you were under attack, I chose to come here, to see if we might render any aid." Hanusch wasn't sure if he imagined it, but he thought he'd seen an eyelid twitch at the mention of this decision to intervene in a potential battle through the visor of one of the armoured dwarfs. "Instead, we've found a village hard at work feeding an entire forest to flames."
Hanusch put on, what was in his own estimation, a decent show of being bashful. "Ah, that. Well, no fears on that part. The forest has simply been recently made safer to work in, so we had taken the chance to expand the charcoal-burning operations here. A great deal of smell and smoke, yes, but lucrative all the same." From the corner of his eye, he saw Salina enter the room by a side door, carrying one of the bottles. The bodyguards tensed up for a moment (good ears on them, he'd been a rustler for half his life and not even heard the door give a single creak) but made no other motion as she hastily withdrew.
"Hm, charcoal you say? The trees not good enough for regular timber goods?"
"Nothing wrong with the trees themselves, just the size of the forest and distance from any place that would be interested in buying timber downstream. Any place in easy reach for ferrymen has greater forests nearer to them than our stretch of the woods, and there's no great carpentry tradition to be found within Ummenbach, so turning the wood to charcoal and selling it off is most of what can be done with it with what we have. And charcoal burning is a dirty business, so you don't have as many people hurrying to compete with you."
She gave a steady
hm at that, eyes turning away from him for a moment to ponder, before alighting on the bottle. Ah, here Hanusch could get back in his element. "Excellent, the refreshments have arrived. Would you join me in sharing this bottle?"
"Hmph, I shall
umgi. But I've not been given much reason to expect much of manling brews." Despite her words, she still joined him over at the desk beside the hearth, placing an engraved tankard of what Hanusch prayed for his heart's sake to be only
gilded steel next to the bottle. Popping off the cork, Hanusch poured into her tankard before retrieving his much more modest one of plain pewter.
"Now, manling, how far along would you say you are with your making of charcoal here?" Sidda asked, taking a seat on the chair across from his.
"I would say we are at full swing with piles we have built. With thirty piles burning, we can produce six whole sacks of charcoal each day. Why do you ask?" Hanusch asked in turn, feigning ignorance as to what this conversation was steering towards. Seems like it wasn't grain the dwarfs would come to trade for, like he'd originally expected.
"The simple truth of the matter, is that Karak Gantuk has need of more fuel for the forges. With the recent threat of the
Thaggoraki surging, Karak Hirn has need of all the steel it can get, and Karak Gantuk is determined to do their part for the good of the
Karaz Ankor. Because of this, my uncle chose me to go forth to clans Rakidum and Silverhaft to negotiate a trade deal for their coal, so that our few miners need not divert from their search for iron ore to seek coal as well, yet keep the forges blazing day and night. And yet, now I wonder if a better accord might be reached with you." Tilting the tankard back, she took a swig and made a surprised hum in her throat. "Not much in the way of flavour, but with a half-decent kick to it. Where did you get this from, Hanusch?"
Again with the words he doesn't understand.
"Trade secret, I'm afraid," Hanusch replied cheekily, and she seemed to not be willing to call him out on it. "So, you'd be willing to trade for Ummenbach's charcoal? I'm sure we could come to a satisfactory accord."
"Make no mistake, manling, no deal nor contract has yet been made. A master smith would need to first examine the charcoal you have and gauge whether it is of suitable quality for
dawi steelworking. But yes, selling to our Hold with a degree of exclusivity would be lucrative, you can be assured of that.
Un ek nuf anurbar um zonbak wazzocki..."
*** Taking another sip of her drink, Sidda's brow furrowed. "This really isn't as bad as I'd been warned manling brews were. Were it not for the lack of flavour, I'd think you have served me some beardling brew. What is it?"
The clinking of gold already resounding in his ears, Hanusch replied in good cheer: "Oh, in truth it is my own concoction. I
was thinking of 'Black Mountain Meltwater' for a name..."
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*Imperial rural slang for silver. Causes no less confusion in-universe.
**In Khazalid, literally translating to 'village/town/settlement-owner'. Used to address human mayors and land-owners who don't possess noble relations or display immediately obvious martial leanings.
***
"And it would mean not having to trade with those sun-touched wazzocks."
So here, part 2 of the amazing adventures of Hanusch Kurst and co. in moonshining and (unintentional) war profiteering. Hope you like the little touches of Khazalid in there,
@Mayto.
