Grettir receives a distress signal from the Kistin in Kos – indeed he receives three of them all at once. Paradoxides had originally devised this system based on two paired runesticks: when one runestick was broken its pair in Sequarl also broke, indicating an emergency. A version of the system was maintained for House Sequarl by his personal magician, Kojar. The Kistin carried three of these runestick (mostly for redundancy – the system was not completely foolproof). This morning, all three sticks broke simultaeneously. No protocol required this and Grettir smelled a rat. Instead of going directly to the Kistin, in dry dock in Telnus, he had Kojar teleport him to the nearby Governor’s palace. He alerted the guards to his suspicions and jogged round to the dry dock with a squad of them. There he found a scene of horror.
The Kistin had been daubed with arcane symbols and in the midst of them was Wurra, crucified upside-down upon the prow. She was still alive, though barely. Of the rest of the crew there was no sign, but a note pinned next to Wurra, said that if Grettir sought his crew, he would find them in Zongar.
Grettir released Wurra from the nails pinning her to the ship as gently as possible. She was a hard woman but when she came round she was wild-eyed and plainly terrified. It took time to piece her story together. The author of this calamity, it seemed was a notorious Tyrosian pirate, demon-trafficker and devotee of Pyray, called Del Shannor. He and his men had infiltrated the dock – no doubt aided by sorcery and took Wurra and the crew completely by surprise. She did not know what happened to the others, but feared the worst. Wurra’s trauma was infinitely compounded because this was not the first time she had encountered Del Shannor. On the previous occasion, too, she had been the only survivor of her ship. On that occasion she had watched, helpless, as all her crew were tortured and torn apart by demons. It was beyond her understanding that Del Shannor had twice left her alive, alone amongst her crew-mates.
Grettir put Wurra in the charge of healers from the Surgeon’s Guild in Chittagong to try to mend her broken mind and spirit. He called in priests to cleanse the taint of Pyray from the Kistin. There were fulsome apologies from the Governor of Kos himself for the failures of security. However, with the Kistin crewless and out of commission there was little he could immediately do to retrieve his comrades – if indeed they still lived, which from Wurra’s account, he doubted.
E-9a
OE Date: Winter 691
Characters: Grettir NPCs: Wurra
Real World: January 1997; Where – ?
See also Salrod’s Diaries