The Audience with Muranekk
21 August. Kvothe, Agatha, Ubo, Dravona, Sylvara, Caldris.
The climb
Vortikand led the party up a switchback trail to the rebels' hold — a flat shelf of rock a hundred yards across, roofed low, ringed with loose stone piled up so it could be pushed down onto anyone climbing. In the near-dark, two or three dozen derro moved around low cooking fires. Nobody threw anything. They simply let the party come up.
Walking in through a camp full of spellcasters, Kvothe quietly cast Tongues on himself — hiding the spell inside a conversation with Ubo so the derro wouldn't notice. For the rest of the night he understood every word of Undercommon, alongside Dravona's interpreting.
Muranekk
Their leader turned out to be a thin, ancient derro with a mustache that hung to his waist, a sack for robes, and a stew-pot he was stirring when they arrived. Vortikand presented him: "This is Muranekk, leader of us, the smart derro." He spoke only Undercommon, and the party took about four seconds to nickname him Yoda.
He ladled out mushroom stew and got straight to business. He wants the Great Ones gone. He wants his enslaved people freed rather than killed. And he raised, without any anger at all, the fact that the party have spent the whole campaign killing derro who were victims:
"Everyone kills sleeping brothers. The question is what you do about it now, and whether that is interesting."
What's under the mind flayers
Then came the part that reframed the whole war.
The party had assumed the mind flayers were the top of the food chain. Muranekk corrected them. The "Great Ones" — the illithids — answer to the "Old Ones," who live far below, in a deep, deep ocean beneath even the City of the Glass Pool. He scraped a picture into the dirt with a charred stick: a great, bloated catfish with tentacles coming out of its face.
Ubo dredged up the name from somewhere: aboleth. Ancient, powerful, mind-magic creatures — and that was all he could remember. It is the first time anyone in the party has heard there is something worse than the mind flayers, and where it lives.
The night
The party camped a short way off and did the evening's work — Kvothe performed for the derro (and rolled a natural 20), Ubo gathered a couple of meals' worth of mushrooms and promptly gave them away to a derro he'd befriended, Dravona cooked, and Agatha prayed.
Sylvara was uneasy. Everyone the party has ever dealt with, she pointed out — the tribes, even the vampire — came straight out with their terms. Muranekk hadn't asked for anything at all. Caldris stood off to one side with his arms crossed, watching the derro. The party agreed the caution was fair, slept in their armor, and set watches.
The demonstration
In the morning the whole hold gathered in a ring — not threatening, Agatha judged, but waiting for something. She decided to hang back at the edge with Sylvara while the others went in.
Muranekk had arranged a test. Two derro walked forward a third — blank-faced, white-eyed, a thrall of the Great Ones, named Thindrick. "You free him. We must see that you can do the thing you say."
The party did not want the derro to learn that the freeing comes from Agatha's warhammer. So they put on a show. Kvothe bellowed nonsense incantations and threw an illusion over Agatha to look like the magic was coming from him; Dravona cast alongside him for effect; and Agatha sidled up close and "tripped," dropping the Chain Breaker so it struck the ground.
The pulse went out. Thindrick's white eyes cleared. "Where am I? Where are we?" The hall sucked in its breath and then broke into astonished chatter. Muranekk smiled.
"You can do as you say. You are capable of paying your blood-debt."
As they packed to leave, Sylvara leaned in and murmured that she didn't think Muranekk had actually been fooled by the performance — he'd made a face. It had been worth a try.
The debt
Muranekk laid it out as plain arithmetic, and without a trace of resentment:
"Twenty and three of my sleeping brothers you have put down. I counted. I always count. Twenty and three you will wake. Then we are level, and level people can talk."
Then, with a glance at the newly freed Thindrick: "...Twenty and two. One must always count."
In return, the rebels will march with the party on the City of the Glass Pool. Wake the sleepers, swell his ranks, hand him back his warriors — and he fights at their side. He also mentioned, in passing, that the loyalists' leader, Darlakanand, doesn't know he is himself a puppet of the Old Ones. "When he knows — that will be a great joke."
South, and a freeze-frame
For the first payment, Muranekk pointed the party to the Singing Stones — a place they set out for long ago and never reached. A group of enslaved derro are held there, and Darlakanand has them guarded; nobody knows why, except that he clearly thinks the place matters.
A day's march on, Sylvara scouted ahead and found four spiked barricades across a narrow passage, held by thrall derro with crossbows. The party is determined not to kill them — killing thralls both offends their new ally and only adds to the debt. Kvothe went in invisible and scouted over the barricades; Ubo summoned a pair of rhinoceroses to smash through the defenses without goring anyone.
The first rhino — carrying Agatha and Dravona — crashed through the first barricade and sent a guard tumbling. And there the night ended, freeze-framed like the end of an episode, with the charge just begun and nobody having rolled for initiative yet.
Next time: the rush on the Singing Stones, and the first sleepers wake.