Da Warpath - "The Well"
3 weeks ago
Alex Polimeni
Hail, warrior!
In the weeks before every Animosity Campaign, we hold a prelude period we call Da Warpath , featuring reveals, information and pre-registration for the coming narrative event. With Animosity VII - Azyr Asunder kicking off this July 12th , the hour is at hand...
... Da Warpath has begun!
***
Months ago
Light spilled suddenly out into the foggy street as the door of the Singing Stonehorn swung open. Warm air rich with the scents of beer and brown butter crystallized in the damp evening. Voices, laughter, the clink of mugs and clatter of dice, all spilled out into the dark street, followed a moment later by the fifth son of the Prefect of the Vale.
The door swung quickly shut behind the young man, and there was a long pause, the sort where many eyes met and eyebrows raised, then the muffled sounds of laughter echoed from behind the thick wood.
Pelham liked the Stonehorn, and they liked him well enough. He was never short on his tab, always picked up a round or three for the house, and never started the sort of fights that would cause trouble for the landlord. Even the hardest miners and quarrymen couldn't help but like him. It certainly helped that each man and woman who sat down at the card table with him always ended up walking away with an extra week's wages in their pocket. He made sure of that. If they sniggered behind his back, made jokes about the privileged rich boy, well what of it? He was all those things. He hadn't asked for them, but he wouldn't apologize for them either. They could have their jokes, and he could have his nights at the Stonehorn.
He took an unsteady step forward, then another, then let forward momentum carry him down the familiar streets. He was clear-headed enough to remember to put one foot in front of the other and drunk enough to not be certain where it would go after that, so he let blissful muscle memory carry him forward in a warm haze.
As he neared the end of the street, he saw a shadow peel itself from the stone wall. He didn't stop or change his stride, but he felt the pleasant fog around him burn off in a sudden rush of adrenaline. He didn't reach for his sword, but his left hand tightened over the handle of the long knife at his back, concealed by his rakish duellists cloak. The figure stepped into a pool of light. It was wearing a heavy and battered leather cloak, weather worn and roughly sewn where it had been scarred by knife cuts and cargo pikes, but Pelham relaxed as he saw the glint of familiar maille beneath.
"Lucern! What the devil are you doing out at an hour like this! Don't you know it's dangerous to go walking the streets late at night all on your lonesome?"
The commander of the Valeguard, the city's watch and his father's personal guard, quirked an eyebrow that had been split in a fistfight with an ogor a decade before.
"You best not be suggesting that me and my officers can't keep our own streets safe, boy."
"Your streets? Certainly not, I am sure they're as safe as a button. But these streets?" Pelham gestured widely out around him, then leaned in for a conspiratorial whisper that echoed from the surrounding walls. "These streets, I heard they belong to the seditionists now."
The two men fell into a comfortable stride, moving between the pools of light cast by street lanterns.
"Keep your voice down lad. There's no sense prying a fault, and you know how sounds travel." And words, they both thought, though it didn't need saying. Someone was always around to hear everything in the city, and careless words had a habit of finding their way to the wrong ears.
"Maybe we ought to do a bit more listening of our own. A lot of these Unionists make some good points."
"That so? And who told you that, your friends at the Stonehorn?"
Pelham said nothing.
"Besides, you really think your father hasn't heard their arguments already? That he just ignores the Guild envoys out of what, spite?"
"It just seems to me like they're not asking for anything unreasonable. Freedom to expand their charters, grow the Guilds or operate independently, set aside trade regulations that were made centuries ago. The days of refugee camps huddled around workshop forges are long gone."
"Aye, maybe so. Maybe they're not unreasonable. Maybe every man, woman and child could come in and tell us exactly what they want, and not a one of them would be beyond your fathers power to grant."
They were passing through a market square now, and Lucern gestured them over to a well that sat at its centre. He sat down wearily on its lip and pulled out a pipe, then held it up to Pelham. The young man put a hand over its bowl and spoke a few soft words, then a little light of embers sprang to life within and pleasant smoke began to rise. Lucern grunted a thanks, and Pelham smiled. It was one of the few tricks he'd picked up at the Academy that the old guard appreciated.
"Imagine this was the only well in the city. It would have to provide for everyone, but it's deep and strong, and everyone can have their fill with water to spare. This is good, yes?"
Pelham rolled his eyes. Even all these years later, the man still acted like his tutor. Lucern just looked at him though, stolidly awaiting an answer, so Pelham gave an exasperated "Yes."
"Good. Well Johan, from the Stonehorn, wants to draw some extra water to make his ales. This isn't unreasonable, is it? We all benefit from that, after all. Then Alyice wants to draw some extra as well so she doesn't have to take her flock up to the river in the summer. Fine. Then Eron sees them taking more, and realizes if he takes more too, he can grow his garden and make some more coin on the side. Is that unreasonable? Wouldn't it be unfair to deny him what the others took? Then someone else sees Eron making more for themselves, and realizes they can do the same, and since there's nothing stopping them they can take as much as the other three combined and make even more than their neighbours. Now the well, which had enough for all, is starting to look barren. Can you allow everyone to take what they will? Can you tell those who have not that they cannot take what others, without regard, have taken, and call that fairness? Can you take away from those who have relied on what they were able to take to build their lives?"
"It is the tragedy of the commons, I have heard this before."
"Then stop just hearing and actually think. Our city has laws that have let us grow from nothing. They are hard. They can be harsh. This is a hard, harsh world. Your father knows this. He doesn't turn down the Guilds because he wants to be a tyrant. He does it because he knows that he cannot give everyone what they want. The Brewers say they would build a better, fairer city. Better for the Brewers, I'm sure. The Boltbreakers say the same, but what they want never seems to line up with what the Brewers want, or the Blacksmiths, or the Bellows. They say liberty for all, and call for a king's head on the wall, but the funny thing about heads on walls is that they always end up multiplying. It's not starting the guillotine that's the problem, it's ending it."
Pelham stared at his teacher. The old man's head was surrounded by a cloud of pipe smoke, while Pelham's own felt dangerously clear. He could feel a splitter of a headache coming on.
"So we just get make the rules then, because we've got the shiny stick and the palace and the swords, and call that fair? No matter what anyone else likes?"
"Your father gets to decide how to interpret the laws because Sigmar himself set your line the duty and responsibility to make it so." Lucern clutched the small twin-tailed comet amulet that hung at his neck. His quiet piety always struck Pelham as at odds with the man's gruff, practical demeanour, but he knew it was as deep and true as the old man's rhetorical well. If the old man ever retired from the Valeguard, and Pelham had his doubts as Lucern had 'guard' stamped across his soul, he suspected it would be to a quiet Sigmarite temple up the mountain.
"As for liking it? No, your father doesn't expect to be liked for what he does. No one likes being told what they can and can't do. But he does it, and takes their anger, and takes the whispers and the plots because someone has to be there to tell them 'no, you can't simply do as you wish, because we're all drinking from one well.'"
Now
Pelham held the comet amulet in his hand, fingers idly toying with the beads. Lucern had left it in his quarters when he rode out the morning it had happened. Pelham hoped he might still be alive, trapped in the rubble or cut off in some corner of the city, trying to get back in contact with the palace, but he doubted it. The old man had been his mentor for a long time, to their mutual exasperation. He wanted to go look for him, but he didn't.
The office building they had turned into their makeshift war room bustled. There were lines of people waiting to see him, petitioners from the city and mercenaries that had emerged from the strange gates that seemed to appear everywhere. It felt strange to be needed at all, never mind be needed in a hundred places at once. One quiet moment, lost in the bustle, and with a simple stealth spell he could walk right out unseen... No, he couldn't.
Like it or not, the city was in his hands now. He hadn’t asked for this. He hadn’t been taught to command. That was always supposed to be someone else’s job. He was meant to … get drunk, toss some coins around, be the butt of their jokes. A likeable, maybe pitiable, human face to put on the Prefect’s house, while the real leaders took care of things. He’d learned more about leading from Lucern, when the old guardsman had hauled him, drunk and stumbling, home in the evenings. Smiling, he thought of the well. It was a whole lot shallower now than it had been those few months ago, and the demands had never been greater. There were a lot more people out to take from it too. They all had a right, maybe more than he did, to divvy it up. But who would keep it flowing? Who would ensure everyone got their fill?
Pelham hadn’t asked for this, but he wouldn’t apologize for it either.
It was time to get to work.