In+Burgy

Our new situation seems to be this: Cue has agreed to live in Burgy Keep, impersonating the Duke of Burgy. It seems that few knew him and even those hadn't seen him in 3 years. Marriage with Mayfin is still future but probable. As a reward for defeating the creatures at the mine, stopping the plague, and generally fulfilling our quest, Owen has granted us ownership of a large warehouse in the town. This warehouse should be able to bring in a profit to our characters, but first we must repair it and pay the back taxes. I wonder if Owen was rewarding us or requiring more help from us, as the back taxes are considerable. Gorlon has decided to build a second floor in it, creating some rooms among the rafters where he and others may live if they wish. I wish him well, he seems so shy and ill at ease among so many people. I wonder if he knows Burgy is by far the smallest of the major cities. This gives him something to do and a place to stay. With the monsoon rains coming, he will have plenty of time to build up the area. Maybe by next spring he will feel more comfortable here in town. The local friar tried to take him out to a local youth social and get him drunk to help him relax, but it was a disaster. I guess he now associates getting drunk with fighting and being condemned to die. He ran out soon after arriving and seems to only partially trust the poor friar, who has been very helpful to several of the rest of us already. I grow more fearful of the Magisterium. I tried to tell Sir Christoff Sanders of the events in the mines, but he refused to listen at certain points, saying he didn't want to know. Saying such knowledge is dangerous. Owen then said the same thing. I didn't understand at first until Darius read more of the Priest's journal. It seems to be common practice for the clerics and paladins of the Magisterium to take conscripts with them during cleansings. It also seems that the conscripts never return, they always seem to die during the missions. In the journal we see that IT IS standard practice for conscripts on such missions to be killed before returning to base. HOW can the Magisterium do such things??? I no longer await the news that will come from the northeast. No doubt the regiment sent there will return eventually, with only clerics and paladins surviving. It appears the inquisition also kills off any who know information that the Magisterium doesn't want the people to know. The existence of orcs and kobolds here in the north seems to be one such bit of forbidden knowledge. Cleansing the mine of kobolds and a heretical ugly man would earn us death if they knew what occurred there.

As part of our further training impersonating the duke as acting as his men-at-arms, our group went with Mayfin two days northwest of Burgy where she had heard some bandits were located. We were hoping to meet them and offer them jobs in repopulating the Silver Mine and Dubik's Pass. We met Smoke Purnell along the way, apparently trading or at least speaking with men who, upon seeing us riding up, immediately fled into the woods. Is he acting as a fence for bandits, rationalizing it as helping the poor? With no proof of wrongdoing, we passed it on by this time, but will keep it in mind. Upon arriving in the town, we found that to help cover a poor harvest they had bought a few carts worth of food from another town. That food had never arrived, nor had the two teenagers sent out to find it. While Mayfin spoke with the town leader, the rest of us went backtracking the carts' route. About 5 miles outside of town we found the carts being led off the road by orcs. After a brief battle we slew 2 orcs and a foreign human mage. We healed up Gorlon and searched. We found the bodies of the cart drivers, the two teenagers, and 2 more orcs that the cart drivers had killed. We tracked them back to their camp and found that it had only held the 5 of them. We then burned the 5 bodies, and took the human bodies back to their town to be blessed and buried. We said the bandits had fled, burned their camp to destroy the evidence, and were gone. We told Mayfin the truth later that night, and she suggested we backtrack the bandit orcs to see where they came from.

We did this the next day, and by noon had found they led to a cave up in the mountainous ridge nearby. We circled around and snuck up to the entrance. We suddenly rushed inside and killed the 2 sentries. We snuck further inside and killed some orcs carrying crates. This led to a room with a lift in the center. Orcs were coming up, so we waited for them and killed them. We got in the lift and went down a level. This level was empty except for a humanoid monster who strangled Gorlon but we finally managed to kill it before it killed him. Poor Gorlon keeps getting beaten on. Anyway, we then took the lift down to the bottom level and killed more orcs moving crates and finally captured a foreign cleric worshipping a foreign god. We had finished, but there was a symbol carved into the floor we couldn't understand. We decided to spend a night to read his journal and study it more. Darius finally hit on the idea of filling the carving with liquid to see what would happen. A secret door opened and we met some unexpected beings with a very strange story, but it finally answered many of our questions about Guy and the Magisterium. The ramifications of the information are staggering.