Devilry Afoot: Terror in Kurtstein

The Terror in Kurtstein

This week saw intrepid heroes return to the horrors of the 30years war in another remote game of Devilry Afoot hosted by majordomo Curt in Saschatchewan. Introducing:

Paul (in Washington DC) as nobleman Johann von Falconburg, and his faithful man servant Jürg

Reilly (in Queensland, Australia) as Dameonologist Albrecht Braun, scholar

Keith (in Vacouver, Canada) as Dr Raymond the Lucky, physician

Millsy (in Sydney, Australia) as the grizzled veteran soldier Kessler

And a curious collections o' scallywags they were...

The Road to Kurtstein

Timor Domini principium sapientiae. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. (Proverbs 9:10)

A few weeks after Magdeburg, in a dining hall still smelling of the siege that had ended it, Giovanni Battista Seni had poured the wine himself. They were an odd company, assembled by design other than their own: a gentleman and the servant who followed him, a demonologist, a physician who wanted to dissect monsters, and an old campaigner who had learned that death found villainous and virtuous alike.

Count Wallenstein's astrologer watched them over the rim of his cup with the satisfaction of a man who had found precisely the goods he was promised. "Word travels strangely in this war," he said, "but it travels. Magdeburg has produced a remarkable number of reports. A child-preying entity banished, a spectral procession saved, churchyard horrors dispatched. Enough, at least, to convince my patron that the Empire has a problem larger than one ruined city. Your names have become useful to me. Not merely Falkenburg's. The physician, the demonologist, the old veteran soldier. Each of you has already demonstrated a particular talent."

"We've had luck," Falkenburg said, which was true as far as it went.

"You've had skill," Seni corrected, "which interests us a great deal more."

"Your former companions have gone their separate ways. Captain Reichenau remains in Magdeburg for the present, and the Franciscan has gone his own road."

Johann thought briefly of Chück, and wondered what he would have thought of the company Seni had assembled.

Seni continued, "The others have likewise found their destinations. Yours happens to be Kurtstein. I would not call this errand a test, precisely." He smiled, thin and dry. "I would only observe that Count Wallenstein watches how a man performs his first small commission before he offers him a larger one."

Braun, who had said little through the meal, set down his cup. "And how large a commission does the Count have in mind?"

"That depends a great deal on what you bring back, and in what condition. A smith whose iron does what the rumours claim is worth a great deal in a war... and you will not be the only ones who have heard of it. The Swedish crown keeps its own collectors of curious talents these days, and not every Imperial officer answers first to the Emperor's interests where a prize like this is concerned. Bring the man back safely and quickly, and you will have shown my patron what kind of instrument he has found in you."

Kessler, glass already refilled twice, broke the silence that followed. "And if we don't come back at all, Herr Seni?"

Seni did not answer at once. He turned his cup a quarter-turn on the table, the way a man turns a chart to catch better light, and studied them each in turn as though he were reading something off their faces that had nothing to do with the meal. "Mars still burns red over Magdeburg, they tell me," he said, almost to himself, "though I hear a Franciscan considered that Venus was already rising to answer it. Mercy following hard on the heels of Wrath. A tidy enough reading, if a man believes such things." He let the observation sit a moment before the smile returned. It was said that Count Wallenstein would not march an army without first consulting what Seni saw written in the stars.

The Astrologer Giovanni Battista Seni advises Count Albrecht Eusebius Wenzel Von Wallenstein 

That dinner had been three nights ago, since when the silence of the road to Kurtstein had been broken only by horses' hooves and a distant, directionless howling that might have been wolves. Count Wallenstein's coin sat heavy in Johann von Falkenburg's purse and heavier still on his conscience, for a man did not get rich in the Empire's thirteenth year of war without paying in more than mere silver.

They had ridden hard from camp. Falkenburg and his manservant Jörg were the vanguard, Falkenburg watching the road while Jörg watched his master, his hand resting easy on the silvered guard of the rapier that had been his grandfather's before it was his, the Falkenburg motto worn half-smooth beneath his thumb from years of the same habitual touch. Yet the company that had cleared the shrine at Magdeburg was not the one riding behind him now. Friar Chück had returned to his order and his studies, for now at least; the Prioress and the boy had been placed somewhere the war could not easily reach, a convent past Halle, if Falkenburg's memory served, though he had not asked twice to be sure of it. In their place Dr Raymond "the Lucky" trailed behind with his satchel of powders and case-bottles clinking softly at every stride, occasionally checking the contents as though the road to Kurtstein were a laboratory rather than a road to somewhere men had stopped coming home from. Braun rode with the stillness of a man who had spent more nights reading of devils than sleeping, a crossbow across his saddle and a bundle of sharpened stakes beneath his cloak. Old Kaspar Kessler brought up the rear, halberd resting across his saddle-bow and his wineskin lighter than it had been at dawn.

Kurtstein's low stone gate rose out of the mist ahead of them, standing open, unchallenged by any watchman.

"Abandoned?" Jörg asked.

"Listen," said Braun, reining in short of the gate.

Beneath the wind: laughter. Thin, musical, threaded with something that raised the hair on every neck present, drifting towards them from somewhere down the high street.

"That is no watchman's call," Kessler muttered, and took a long pull from his wineskin.

They went in anyway, because the smith was in there somewhere.

Somewhere a dog gave one low whine and fell silent, as though it had thought better of it. The timber-framed houses leaned over the cobbles like conspirators sharing secrets. The cold had a taste here, flat and metallic, the way well water tastes of the pump it's drawn through. Every door was shut fast, more than one marked with a crude cross scratched at eye height, and above three separate lintels, wilted sprigs of wild rose and hawthorn, their protective virtue long since spent.

"Someone here knows what walks these streets," Braun said grimly, loosening the crossbow at his hip.

The faint laughter drifted and faded behind them as they turned off the high street, and for a time it seemed content to let them go.

The Daughters of the Night

Wer nachts pfeift, den holt der Teufel. He who whistles in the night, the Devil fetches him. (German folk saying)

They kept to the shadow of the eaves as they crossed the town, following the cold, dark houses towards the smith's dwelling. They found it by its cold forge and shuttered windows, no different from its neighbours save for iron hinges that did not creak when Falkenburg's fist fell upon them. The man who opened it was broad through the shoulder in the way of his trade, a leather bundle already clutched to his chest as though he had been waiting all night for someone, anyone, to tell him it was time to run.

"You're the ones Count Wallenstein sent," the smith said. It was not a question.

"Gather what you can carry and no more," Falkenburg told him. "We haven't time for a return trip."

"I have had little enough to gather since their singing started," the smith said grimly, pulling the door shut behind him with a hand that shook only slightly. "Two nights now I've barred myself in and listened to it walk past my window. I had begun to wonder if anyone was coming at all."

"You'll wonder about warmer things soon enough," Kessler told him, not unkindly, and set off back the way they had come, the others falling into a loose, watchful ring around the smith. They had gone no more than six paces when the laughter changed pitch, sharpening as it found them, rising suddenly into words, sing-song and playful, pitched to carry.

"Come and see... come and see what waits within..."

Three women stood in the middle of the high street, bathed in a pale light that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere, clinging to their skin like moonlight made solid. They wore only thin shifts, white linen translucent with damp, and their bare feet did not seem to feel the frost on the cobbles. They were young, impossibly young, and achingly beautiful in a way that made a man's reason falter.

Their mouths broke the spell first. Dark stains ran from each woman's lips to her chin, black in the moonlight but unmistakably not black at all. Blood, and beneath the cold night air a faint copper tang reached them even at this distance.

"Sweet travellers," one of them called, her voice like a bell struck underwater, "you have come such a long way. And found what you came for, I see." Her eyes slid to the smith at the centre of their ring, and her smile widened. "Won't you rest with us a while, before you carry him off?"

"Thralls," Braun breathed, low enough for only the others to hear. "Wine-drunk on their master's leavings. Don't look at their eyes! Don't answer them!"

"Fascinating," Raymond murmured, reaching for the small case at his belt where his grenades were carried.

"Later, Doktor," Kessler growled. "If God is kind, you'll get your chance to blow one of them to Hell before this night is through."

Falkenburg tore his gaze from the women and fixed it on the black slate roofs beyond, forcing his mind back to the matter at hand. They had the smith, now they had to keep him. If there were thralls walking the streets at the witching hour, something far worse was master of this town tonight; and whatever it was would want the smith just as badly as Wallenstein did.

"We get him to hallowed ground," Falkenburg said, low, urgent, "and we do it now."

"He is not for you," the first woman sang, drifting closer, close enough now that Falkenburg could see that her breath did not fog in the freezing air. "He is promised. You may come in all the same, sweet soldiers. But you may never leave."

Braun's hand closed hard around Falkenburg's arm. "The church," he said. "Now. Move!"

They moved: Falkenburg gesturing Jörg across the street, Kessler barking Raymond back into step, Braun walking backwards with the crossbow finally levelled, watching the pale shapes come on.

The women had closed half the distance already, bare feet skimming the frost-slick cobbles without a sound, and even as Falkenburg watched, the tallest vanished into the black gap between two houses. Her sisters continued after Raymond and Kessler, but Falkenburg knew the missing woman would be circling to close the trap from both ends at once.

"She's flanking," Kessler snapped. "Move straight across!"

"Jörg, with me!" Falkenburg cut a line diagonally across the high street towards the black bulk of the church tower rising beyond the square, Jörg a half-step behind him, driving a path through the open ground before the other two women could close it. Braun came next, one hand fisted in the smith's collar, half-dragging him across in their wake.

Behind them Dr Raymond had gone very still and Kessler remained by his side. He set his lantern down upon the cobbles and stood with a small clay grenade cradled in both palms, its fuse already lit from the lantern and spitting bright orange sparks into the dark. Its fuse hissed and spat like grease thrown upon a cook-fire. His eyes held the particular, unhealthy delight of a scholar finally given leave to test his theories on living subjects.

"Doktor." Kessler's voice, flat and wary. "You are holding that a mite close to your face."

"I am timing it," Raymond said, without looking up, tilting the grenade as though admiring the sparks. "The fuse burns unevenly. I've adjusted the mixture myself, less saltpetre and more-"

"I saw those things take a man's hand off in the opening engagements at Magdeburg," Kessler more briskly, backing away a step, his grip tightening on the halberd all the same, for he was not about to leave the man to face three hungry corpses alone. He took a long pull from his wineskin instead. "Half his arm, Doktor. Gone. Just so you understand."

"Then stand a little further back," Raymond suggested amiably, "and watch from there."

The grenade fizzled on as the women came on faster, and down the black gap between the houses, unseen and unheard, the third of them was already out of sight.

Dr Raymond and the "special fizzling grenade" token

Falkenburg had no path left to him but forward. The church tower stood black against the far rooftops beyond the town square; but the quickest way towards it lay through the tangle of yards behind the town's one inn. He led them through the inn's garden instead, boots crashing through a low hedge, towards the small stone shrine that stood among the trees there, their first waypoint on the way to the church proper.

He was three strides into the copse when she came around the corner of the inn's wall. All pale flesh, grinning mouth and teeth.

The thrall was on Falkenburg before his duellist's instincts could bring his rapier up to guard, her claws opening his shoulder. Jörg arrived a heartbeat later, lantern in one hand and hanger in the other, with his familiar blunderbuss slung across his back. Though his first stroke missed, it drew her attention long enough for Falkenburg to recover. Together they drove her back; Jörg's hanger finally found her arm, and when she turned towards him Falkenburg struck. The blow glanced away, but it exposed her flank. Jörg's next swing did not.

Her head left her shoulders and went sailing into the dark hedge beyond, and what remained of her folded to the frozen ground, already unmaking itself into something that no longer troubled to look like a woman at all.

Death amongst the Ducks...

For a moment neither man spoke. Then Jörg let out a shaking breath and turned to where Falkenburg stood swaying against a tree trunk, his left arm hanging dark with blood. Only then did Jörg realise that his own hands had gone numb around the hanger's grip. Whether from cold or from what he had just done with it, he could not have said.

"Can you walk?" Jörg asked.

"I can walk," Falkenburg said, through his teeth. "The others..."

"Are still coming, and so is her sister, most like, wondering why this one's gone quiet. The garden shrine first, to catch our breath. Then the church."

Back in the open street, Dr Raymond had eyes for nothing but the sizzling grenade in his hand. Its fuse hissed and spat, throwing a small, furious light across his face, and for one endless moment the death in his palm seemed the only true and interesting thing left in Kurtstein. Then the moment came, and he drew back his arm and threw.

The casing was slick with damp and oil and turned in his grip as he released it, and the grenade sailed long, missing the ground between the two advancing women entirely to strike the cobbles just behind the second of them.

Whatever the failings of aim, the blast that followed was spectacular in every other respect: a booming crack that threw light and stone dust the length of the high street. The thrall it caught did not so much fall as come apart, flung into ruin in a dozen directions, and where a laughing young woman had stood a heartbeat before there was now only wreckage and the stink of black powder.

Her sister's scream tore through the wreckage's echo, and it was a scream of sisterly rage. She closed the distance to Raymond before he had even registered that the grenade had worked, claws raking in to catch him across the forearm and chest, and the doctor went down onto one knee with blood welling black through his sleeve as she leaned in for what would plainly have been the finishing stroke.

Then Kessler's halberd came in low and level, driven forward with the full weight of an old soldier's charge, seeking to spit her on the blade.

But she was not there to receive it. She twisted aside with a speed that mocked the blade meant for her, the point passing harmlessly down her flank. She turned towards Kessler, tongue running slow over blood-slicked lips, and smiled the smile of a woman who did not believe an old soldier with a pole-arm was worth her trouble, before turning back to finish what she had started with Raymond.

That was her mistake. Kessler recovered the halberd and swept it around in a practised arc. This time the blade found her throat, and she folded down beside the doctor in a heap of white linen gone suddenly, finally still.

Kessler stood over the both of them a moment, breathing hard. Then he reached for his wineskin, found his hand shaking too badly to trust it, and thought better of the idea.

"On your feet, Doktor," he said instead, hauling Raymond up. "And next time you feel the urge to test your theories, do it somewhere I'm not standing downwind."

Kessler permitted himself one more pull from the wineskin before he corked it.

The Master

Media nocte clamor factus est. At midnight there arose a cry. (Matthew 25:6, Vulgate)

The thralls were dead. Creatures that had traded their souls for a taste of eternity, their bodies finally committed to the grave. For a moment the party allowed themselves to believe the worst of the night was behind them. Braun and the smith came stumbling up from the garden to find the others gathering by the little shrine, breath heaving white in the cold, tallying what the night had cost them.

The laughter came in that one unguarded moment of relief.

It rolled out across the rooftops of Kurtstein from no single direction any of them could name, deep and slow and utterly without mirth, a sound that seemed to come up through the cobbles rather than down through the air. This was not the tittering, girlish laughter that had drawn them into the high street an hour before. This was older. Heavier. The laugh of something that had watched three of its own fall and found the spectacle, at most, mildly diverting.

The Master comes...

The temperature seemed to drop as the sound faded, sharply enough that every man felt it in his lungs. Somewhere above them, something that was not the wind stirred the night air, and a dread settled over them that had nothing to do with wounds or exhaustion.

Falkenburg first broke the silence, hefting a rapier that was not quite steady. "That," he said quietly, "was not one of those ladies."

"No," Braun agreed, turning the smith bodily back towards the garden. "That was what sent them. Move, all of you. We are not nearly done with this night!"

Raymond needed no second telling. He snatched his lantern up and set off at a dead sprint towards the shrine, his wounded arm clutched to his chest and forgotten in the simple, animal urgency of putting distance between himself and whatever had just laughed.

The little shrine offered nothing but a scrap of carved stone and a name half-worn from its plinth; paltry protection against whatever had just laughed its way across the rooftops of Kurtstein. Real sanctuary, hallowed by a Bishop's hand, lay only in the consecrated ground of the Church proper, across the square. To linger here was to delay a reckoning that would find them regardless.

"I'll lead," Falkenburg said, before anyone else could claim the honour, despite the blood soaking his sleeve. "Whatever comes at us, we protect the smith." Jörg fell in at his shoulder, the hanger bare in his hand. Braun took the rear, crossbow raised, watching the hedgerow with the steady vigilance of a man who understood exactly what walked these streets tonight. It was he, watching the wrong direction for half a heartbeat too long, who never saw it come.

It came over the garden's hedge without a sound and was on Braun before the crossbow in his hands could do him any good. Claws raked his chest and shoulder, tearing through cloak and doublet both, and Braun's own cry joined Falkenburg's from earlier in the night as he staggered back against the hedge with blood spreading dark across his front.

There was no space to bring the crossbow to bear; the thing was too close, too fast. He let the weapon fall and his free hand found instead the glass vial of holy water at his belt, carried through every hour for precisely such a night as this. He smashed it against the creature's flank without ceremony, with the raw certainty of a demonologist who had run out of cleverer options.

The spray caught it full across the shoulder and neck, and the effect was violent. A thin, steaming mist rose hissing from the creature's hide, carrying with it a smell like a snuffed match. And the scream that tore from it bore no resemblance to anything a man might make in pain. High and utterly inhuman. It recoiled in a convulsive lurch and danced back into the shadow of the hedge.

"It recoiled from the water. Good. The old protections still hold!" Braun yelled to the others.

The shapeless dark gathered and resolved, for the first time, into something Braun could name. A wolf's shape, black and huge and wrong in ways the moonlight would not quite let him fix in his mind, its hide still smoking where the water had touched it, though nothing about it had truly been born a wolf. Its eyes fixed on Braun with a hatred that had nothing of an animal's simplicity in it. Whatever wore that shape had not been born to it. It had chosen it, as a witch might choose the form of a beast when the Devil granted such a thing.

Falkenburg saw the creature's retreat for what it was; a moment, and no more than a moment, in which the rest of the party might yet win the open ground between the garden and the church unmolested.

"To the church, all of you, now!" He turned as he shouted it, rapier drawn, his ruined shoulder forgotten in the same rush of desperate resolve that had put him at the front of the line. He went after the retreating shape alone, driving it towards the garden's far wall and buying whatever ground the others needed.

He broke from the garden's far side into the open square with the church's dark bulk rising before him at last. There, the shape stopped its retreat and turned.

Its eyes locked onto him, red and burning with the hatred of something that remembered exactly who had scalded it with holy water. The shadow that had worn a wolf's shape began to unmake itself, limbs lengthening, the black hide drawing upward into something that stood on two legs. By the time it closed the distance, it was very much a man, save for the teeth: long, yellow-white and slick with blood not its own.

Johann's rapier found only air. The creature slipped inside his guard, and then the claws were everywhere. His buff coat offered no protection. Falkenburg felt his strength depart with his blood and fell to his knees. The church tower swam above. And darkness took him.

von Falconburg's stand against Darkness 

Jörg's shout, when it came, was pure fury.

He dropped sword and lantern both, crouching over Falkenburg's fallen shape to snatch the vial of holy water still hanging at his master's belt, and was on his feet throwing before the thing had so much as turned to meet him. The vial shattered against it dead centre, and the creature recoiled into a shapeless mass of smoke, shrieking as it fled for the deeper dark across the square.

Behind them, Braun struggled in the dark to load a sharpened wooden bolt into the crossbow's groove, cursing each time the bolt slipped free. Dr Raymond had broken from the garden entirely, moving fast up the open road with his lantern held before him, searching for any gap that might let them through to the church. Some distance behind him was Kessler, with halberd hefted over his shoulder and following on legs that no longer quite answered him.

The creature recovered quickly. It returned to the square in man-shape, stalking rather than charging, with eyes fixed on Jörg with an intent that needed no words. It meant to answer, in full, for the holy water that had scalded it twice over in one night.

As it came, its eyes changed. Something shifting in their depths that did not merely reflect lantern-light, and Jörg felt himself drawn despite himself, a traitorous curiosity rising unbidden. His footing loosened beneath that gaze, his anger softening into something far more dangerous than fear. Then he thought of Falkenburg, crumpled and bleeding on the cobbles behind him, and the softness burned away in an instant.

"No!" The scream tore out of him raw and absolute, and whatever hold the creature's eyes had begun to close around him broke apart under the force of it. The thing recoiled from the refusal in his voice, and turned instead towards easier prey, drifting sideways across the square to where Dr Raymond stood alone with lantern extended in one hand.

It came for him from the shadows, overconfident and certain of an easy kill. Raymond swayed back from the raking swipe and the claws parting nothing but night air. Before the creature could correct itself his own blade was already coming up and in, biting deep along its flank in a stroke cleaner than anything he had managed with his grenade.

The creature's back was to Jörg now, wholly given over to the doctor before it, and Jörg did not waste the gift. He came in from behind with a scream of no words in it, swinging his blunderbuss as a two-handed club and furiously drove the stock into the creature's shoulder. He wedged himself in beside Raymond as the blow landed, the two of them boxing the thing between them, and for one desperate moment it seemed almost possible that they might keep it too busy to kill either one of them before help arrived.

It was Braun, watching from the hedge line, who saw what the others could not: that the creature's whole attention was fixed on Raymond and Jörg both, and that the ground between the garden and the church door stood, for this one narrow moment, entirely clear. A fleeting chance at best, but a chance nonetheless. The smith had crouched behind the garden wall, too terrified to move until Braun saw the path to the church clear.

With Dr Rayond and Jürg engaged with the Master, Braun spies a chance as Kessler staggers down the road

"Run now!" he bellowed at the smith, who broke into a dead run across the open square. His bundle of tools clutched to his chest, and sincere but half-remembered prayers tumbling out with every stride.

The creature's eyes found Raymond again, wary now where they had been overconfident before. Its gaze had gone bottomless, twin pits that seemed to draw the doctor's whole mind down into them, his sword arm slackening, his feet forgetting, for one terrible heartbeat, that they had anywhere left to run to at all.

Braun did not hesitate. He dropped the crossbow and instead closed both fists around the missile: no bolt now, just sharpened wood and a demonologist's desperate faith behind it. He came up out of the garden at a dead sprint, vaulted the hedge without breaking stride, and drove every last ounce of that momentum down through his arms. Into the creature's left eye.

The natural 10 Reilly rolled to trigger his Demonologist skill and critically wound the Master Vampire!

The agonised scream was the worst sound any of them had heard in their lives: a shriek that seemed to come from somewhere far larger than the body it was torn from. Smoke boiled up from the creature's frame and it staggered backwards five stumbling steps before its shape came apart entirely, unravelling into shadow and a final, fading scream that swallowed itself somewhere in the black streets beyond the square. There was no body; only smoke, silence, and gore splattered cobblestones.

For the first time since they had passed through Kurtstein's gate, the night was simply quiet.

None celebrated. They knew too well how much else might still be listening in that town's darkness. Jörg hefted Falkenburg's unconscious weight from the cobbles, Braun took up the rear with the stake still clutched white-knuckled in one fist, and together the party crossed the last of the open ground to the church doors with their prize past the threshold and into the candle-scented confines within.

The doors were iron-bound heavy oak, and were slammed shut with hands that had not yet stopped shaking. There would be no sleep for any before dawn. But for the first time since the laughter had first found them at the gate, they were safe.

The Morning After

Der Morgen ist klüger als der Abend. The morning is wiser than the evening. (German proverb)

Morning came to Kurtstein the way it comes to towns that have survived something they were not certain they would. Slowly, and with a great deal of caution.

Shutters opened one at a time, and doors followed. Hesitant at first, then all at once until the high street filled instead with the citizens of Kurtstein, staring at the wreckage strewn across their cobbles, the strangers, and the familiar smith who stood bruised and bloodied and, against every reasonable expectation, alive.

Word ran through the town faster than any of the party could have accounted for: the smith had been kept safe, the pale-faced women would trouble no one again, and whatever dark thing had ruled Kurtstein's nights was, at last, unmade. Grateful hands pressed coin into the party's own, fistfuls of worn silver offered by people who had little enough to spare and gave it anyway. Others brought linen and salves and clean well-water, and it was these that Raymond seized upon with far more genuine relief than he had shown for any grenade, setting briskly to the work of treating the party's wounds and above all, Falkenburg's.

Falkenburg's injuries were grave. Raymond worked over them for many an hour, and for a long while even he would offer no certainty. Eventually he declared that Falkenburg would keep his arm, and his life, though the scars would remain for the rest of his days. Jörg did not stir from his master's side the entire while, crouching at Falkenburg's shoulder through every stitch, holding a bowl of clean water when Raymond needed one, and Falkenburg's good hand when he did not.

Kessler said little that morning, unusual enough that Raymond remarked upon it once and did not again. The old soldier sat apart with his halberd across his knees, turning his wineskin over in his hands without drinking.

The smith, once his own hurts were seen to, made his offer without much ceremony. To each of them, he said, he owed a debt no coin from Wallenstein could properly settle, and he meant to see it paid in the only currency that was truly his own: honest work from his own hands, before the winter roads closed. Falkenburg he named first, promising to reset the old rapier in a new scabbard chased with silver, the family motto picked out fresh where years of handling had worn it thin. For Jörg he proposed a stouter lock for the blunderbuss, one that would not fail twice in a single night; for Kessler, a halberd-head that would hold its edge through a hundred such nights as this one; for Raymond, a case for his grenades built so the casings would never again slip a damp and desperate hand. To Braun he said nothing at first, only studied him a moment too long, as though uncertain what a man who dealt in devils might want made for him.

The demonologist Braun noticed it, 

crouched beside the smith to help bind a graze along his forearm that none of them recalled him taking in the night's fighting. The wound was old, half-healed, silvered with scar tissue, shaped in a way that struck Braun's eye like a struck bell: a ring of small puncture marks, evenly spaced, the kind no blade or claw left behind. He had seen its like once before, sketched in the margin of that same confiscated grimoire, beside a passage on binding and branding he had not, at the time, believed literal.

He said nothing of it, just glanced up to find the man watching him with an expression that was very carefully still. Whatever else Kurtstein's blacksmith might be, Braun thought as he finished the binding, he was not merely a craftsman who had been lucky enough to survive a bad night.

He was, in some fashion, already spoken for.

---------------

Post game:

von Falconburg did not initially survive this encounter but the presence of a physician with the party allows a reroll and he survived, albeit with 'horrific scars". All other wounded characters recovered their injuries.

The party was awarded 100 silver by the grateful citizens of Kurtstein, which they chose to split evenly. More interestingly, the smith othered to craft a special request item for each of the characters to suit their particular talents.

As we play infrequently we play that every survivor acquires a new skill after a Mission (but not followers, sorry oh faithful Jürg). Falkenburg took duellist and has requested that the smith craft him a special main gauche parrying dagger.