So let me comment on the portions of this unrelated to purchasing decisions.
"It has been," you say cautiously.
"I'd believed from the High King's reticence that the flow had stopped. It's hard not to feel hope in that it was redirected at Karak Vlag, rather than ended at Karag Dum. But I am curious how you came to know of it. Did the Elves tell your Order, or did King Belegar inherit secrets?"
"Neither," you say after you regain your mental balance. "It was a new discovery."
1. Was this a deliberate lie? The Elves told us.
2. Borek knows a lot of secrets and gives no shits.
He smiles bleakly. "Karag Dum remembers much that others have forgotten, even when some might prefer we didn't. Even when we might prefer we didn't."
And at this moment, Borek is all that remains of Karag Dum's memories.
"That plant Wizard?" You shake your head. "Then- oh." He looks over his shoulder to check for listeners. "I'd considered it long ago, but no Dwarven force would reach it intact - anything small would be enslaved by raiding parties long before they reached the supposed safety of Uzkulak, anything large assumed to be an invasion force and opened fire upon. But I suppose you have both the mobility and the required flexibility."
Yeah, Borek definitely gives no fucks. Trading with Chaos Dwarves? Only worried about the practicalities.
Failure to reach my home will always be the greater evil,
That statement gets more terrifying the longer you think about it.
After an hour or so of covering a map with notes and measurements, you determine that the best time to part ways with the Expedition to minimize return time while weighed down with cargo is still a little away, so the next time you find yourself burdened with spare time you make your way to the Alexis. Snorri Farstrider was the one that argued most passionately and pushed to risk the most for the sake of Karak Vlag, and you're curious why that is, and a little concerned that it means his mind won't be on the road ahead. Like many others - including yourself at times - he's taken to spending a fair bit of time at the foremost part of the deck, but unlike the others he's practical enough to have set up a chair and a sunshade there. You find him gazing to the steam-wagon's right, or possibly starboard, at the vast expanse of emptiness to the south.
Have to say, I love the image of Snorri in chair and parasol, leaning back with his feet stretched forward. Rangers know to relax when you can.
"The greatest accomplishment of Karak Vlag's Rangers. For millennia the east was considered lost to us because you can't follow the mountains without hitting Uzkulak, and you can't cross the Dark Lands without encountering traitor patrols. But this was the Golden Age and we never gave up back then. Karak Vlag's Rangers eventually managed to chart a path through the Zorn Uzkul from lake to lake and reached the Mountains of Mourn without the traitors ever catching on. The mountains were rich and had never seen a pick, and Karak Vrag, Karak Azorn and Karak Krakaten rivalled the riches of the Old Holds for a time. The range seemed wide enough that we could expand into it for a thousand generations and still have room aplenty. But then the Golden Age came to an end."
"The War of Vengeance?" you prompt.
"That certainly didn't help, but more relevantly in the east, Ogres arrived after having eaten their way through the Giant Lands. The holds of the east held out for a long, long time before falling, but the only contact that was possible with them was by dashing across the Dark Lands, not winding their way through mountains now filled with Ogre tribes to reach Zorn Uzkul. That was the end of Karak Vlag's geopolitical prominence. Even the Silver Age largely passed it by, since there were Norscans and Kurgan between them and the Empire. It wasn't until the founding of Kislev that it began to recover."
A fascinating history lesson. If Karag Vlag were to ever "recover" from its current circumstances, it sounds like the only path will be by allying itself with Kislev, and that path goes through Praag. It's an ironic thought, if the rebuilding of that chaos-tainted city that so many think was a waste of time turns out to be a lifeline for Karag Vlag and a source of dwarven goods for Kislev. So many ways this could echo.
"Are you from Karak Vlag?" you ask. He'd been introduced to you as if he was Clanless, but you subsequently learned he was part of Clan Redbeard, who you thought were from Karak Kadrin. Now his apparent familiarity with Karak Vlag has you wondering again.
He barks a humourless laugh. "That's a question I've been asking myself a lot lately. Clan Redbeard of Karak Kadrin watched the mountains to their north, and Clan Grimsteel of Karak Vlag watched them to their south. They saw a lot of each other and had good relations, and three of my eight great-grandparents were from Grimsteel.
Could someone pick up the phone? Because I
called it.
me said:
Anyway, Snorri is too young to have actually been to Karak Vlag, and he's a member of a Karak Kadrin clan, but I wouldn't be surprised if he had family who were in Vlag when it disappeared. Remember he was telling us that once upon a time his clan and the Karak Vlag Ranger clan shared responsibility for patrolling High Pass. That's the sort of relationship that creates deep ties, probably including marriage alliances. He might well have a great-uncle or great-aunt who disappeared along with Vlag.
More.
"That about sums it up. Though, would they even want our loyalty? You saw them. Well, heard them. Utterly convinced that this was just the latest daemonic trick."
"I think they would," you reply sincerely. "Once enough time passes that they realize there isn't a barb in the tail waiting to hook them. I think it will be a long, long time before any of them feel comfortable walking under the open sky, and they'll need Rangers now more than ever."
"That's a nice thought," he says, and the quiet - or at least, as close to quiet as it gets with the massive engines thrumming away below you - stretches as he considers that. "Well, whatever the future holds there, it doesn't really matter until after we're done with this Expedition. And it's only going got get more dangerous from here on out."
That is a nice thought. Here's hoping we gave Snorri some hope for the future that will render him less distracted in the days ahead.
Hah! You know, in 100 years "Clan Redbeard was always waiting faithfully for Karag Vlag to return," might become the narrative, Redbeard's quasi-exile turned into a prideful story of faith and dedication. That's how dwarves rewrite history. The facts are usually sacrosanct, but they can choose how to remember motivations and meaning.
It's not hard to find your way to Uzkulak, as there's a great fire at the peak of the mountain it is carved into to guide both travellers and Chaos Dwarf patrols to it. You'd half-expected a giant skull to have been carved into the face of the mountain with the mouth as the entrance, but as you approach you find it difficult to spot anything that would be out of place on the Karaks you've become familiar with. An odd glow flickering around some of the gun emplacements, perhaps, or the empty plinths that you assume once must have bore statues of the ancestors. For whatever reason the Chaos Dwarves haven't decorated their birthplace in the same megalomanic style as the pictures you've seen of Zharr-Naggrund; most sources assumed that the operative parts of the Hold are below the ground level that guests are allowed in, but a few pass on rumours that the lower levels are sealed, and only opened to throw in someone that has particularly annoyed or displeased them. You wonder if it's true, and wonder what it would mean of a people that have such a desire to put distance between the place where they found their God.
How fascinating. But how do you
really feel about Hashut, oh Chaos Dwarves?
You know, in humans you'd probably get a slow trickle of returnees over the centuries, begging for the Ancestors to take them back, disclaiming responsibility for the bad decisions of their (small "a") ancestors. But that damn dwarven pride. None will ever beg to come back, and the ones that stayed true would never take them.
You scramble for anything that's not your actual name or 'Grey'. "Gabriella," you land on. "Gabriella von, er, Nachthafen."
"Gabriella von Ernachthafen," he repeats, carefully scrawling runes with a quill. He looks you up and down. "Grey, Black, Thrall, or incognito?"
You blink at him. "Incognito," you say.
This was a truly great sequence.
"Have you brought any of the following goods to Uzkulak: bound Daemons, precious stones or metals from Nehekhara, any seed, bud, fruit, or cutting from Athel Loren, unshielded warpstone, spherical devices made of brass, Vampire body parts, any item created or possessed by the Skaven Clan Pestilens, gilded skulls made of black bone, anything from the Temple-City of Zlatlan, any mummified bodies of large, frog-like beings, unshielded wyrdstone, any kind of projectile capable of moving on its own, any of Kadon's Scrolls of Binding, golden whistles, instruments stringed with unicorn hair, keys made of crystal, or any sort of stone that glows with a green light?"
The ones I'm not sure about without looking it up on the wiki:
1. Gilded skills
2. Zlatlan
3. Wyrdstone
4. projectile on its own
5. Scrolls of binding
6. Golden whistles
7. Unicorn hair
8. Kryptonite
"You have entered at night. Dusk tomorrow is the limit of your stay without renting accomodation. When you exit Uzkulak, ensure that you are recorded by the attendent at that exit, or you may be incorrectly marked for death. Glory to Hashut."
It would be embarrassing to forget her pseudonym, but I'm sure Grey Wizards are trained to remember stuff like that.
You make your way through the hall where a handful of bored Officiants sit behind tables covered with samples; apparently the goods are left in the care of the Officiants for a fee, and if the goods remain here for long enough and the fee consumes enough of the value of the goods, Zharr-Naggrund buys them. There's little that won't be taken if the price gets low enough, because there's little that can't be burned, smelted, or fed to slaves. You find ingots, furniture, bolts of various cloths, weapons, armour, wooden boards, even chunks of ore, most of low quality and much of it water-damaged. Finally you find what you're looking for in a corner stacked high with ropes and sails: a slimy chunk of brined meat that has long since oozed out its moisture into a growing stain on the table. You ask the price, and it'd be slightly high if the barrel had just been sealed, let alone for something that was shipped for an unknown time, stolen in an unknown location, shipped an unknown distance to Uzkulak, and has been sitting in storage for an unknown period. But it's meat, and the quantity the Officiant says is available would feed the Expedition for about one and a half weeks, leaving you slightly better off than the original schedule.
On the other hand, "slightly high" isn't nearly as bad as Borek was predicting. We've got the magic to purify the meat so it's safe to eat, which makes this a definitely good deal.
The first piece that causes your eyebrows to rise is a four-fingered arm made of solid gold and covered in sigils you don't recognize. You can sense dormant power within it, and a lot of it - but too tightly contained to tell what sort, except that it's not Dhar. The fingers are razor-sharp talons and the palm has a raised circle you're sure is where that power you sense is output. But though the Norscan selling it does not seem to know anything about its magical properties, he does know solid gold when he sees it, and that puts a solid floor on the price. Eight hundred gold coins is a shockingly exorbitant price for a complete mystery and it's not like you're short of strange things to prod at, but you suppose if all else fails you could resell it for melt value.
If we got this, it would basically be to turn it over to Johann and Max and tell them, "make of it what you can". Tale of Metal would probably tell a fascinating story, yes it would. Honestly the Tale of Metal results might be worth 800 coins all on their own. That said, it's more of a Gold Wizard thing.
The second is from a Naggarothi Corsair that won't stop smirking at you, and among the goods scattered haphazardly across the table is some sort of nut that glows so brightly with Ghyran that it gives you a headache in your soul to focus on it. Your questions uncovers that the Corsair got it from 'somewhere', where it belonged to 'someone', and was stolen 'a while ago'. You're starting to understand why the Ulthuani don't get along with these people. The price is a jaw-dropping one thousand gold coins, and your shock and outrage at that only seems to make the Corsair more delighted, which leads you to suspect that's why they gave you that price. But you must admit you've never seen so much magic concentrated in so small a form.
Like the arm, that is a lot of money for something that Mathilde personally can't do anything with. Of course, it might also accelerate Panormia's project to restore the soil of Karak Eight Peaks by decades, literal decades. Simply planting the seed might be enough to turn the caldera into rich and healthy soil.
The third and final curiousity is a set of books and papers apparently taken from an Ulthuani explorer who ventured into Lustria and the Southlands to investigate the strange lizard-folk that are said to reside there. That she took rubbings and sketches instead of the golden plaques themselves might be why she survived so long while engaged in such a dangerous endeavour, but it was no protection from the other hazards of the world, and apparently a Chaos Dwarf ship caught her vessel off the Shifting Mangrove Coastline on the eastern side of the Southlands. Her fate is unknown and probably tragic, but her rather extensive writings have been sent here to see if they can find a buyer. If they don't, they're likely destined to feed a forge somewhere.
This seems like an auto-buy, honestly. It's relatively cheap and it would be a shame for this knowledge to go to the forge. In fact, there's the smallest possibility that we might learn something of the flows of magic from it.
