It all started with a bar room brawl in a seedy dockyard tavern in Chittagong where Yspadadden, Ubaron and Ranulf were trying to have a quiet pint. The local enforcer was an extremely short, wide fellow who looked like a dwarf, except that he didn’t have a beard. He was remonstrating with a large group of vikings, containing a number of apparent berserkers, who had plainly hit the quarrelsome stage in their voyage of inebriation. They took badly to being asked to tone it down and replied with fists, boots and drinking utensils. Dwarf or no, the short beardless fellow was severely outnumbered and looked to be in some trouble, so they decided to wade in to his defence. They were quietly by assisted by a bronzed beach-bum with a loud shirt, gold medallion and an artful line in trips and accidental shoves. They all made short work of the drunken vikings and helped eject them from the bar. The enforcer mumbled his thanks but did not seem keen to talk.
“Hang on a minute,” says Yspadadden, “I know you. You’re Silden, the Priest of the Maker. We raided the Tomb of Kolvar’s Tomb together. Where the hell’s your beard?” The beardless one looks shifty and tries to deny it, claiming to be called Denny. Then the beach-bum weighs in. “You are Silden. You used to hang out with Grettir. I’m Banthil, you must remember me. We’ve been on expedition together at least once – even if it was a long time ago. I know – we explored the Lodge of Hakkar the Swift, with Aradan the Uncanny.”
Silden sits down heavily on a bench with his head in his hands. Under intense questioning a tale of woe pours out of him. Its gist was this. After the unfortunate incident in which he had turned into a were-bear and eaten the gnome (B22) Silden had returned to Sequarl to pick up the threads of his old life. Grettir and his folks were good to him but he knew that they knew what had occurred. Shame and guilt gnawed at him and he decided to remove to Chittagong where no-one would know his name or story. He called himself Denny, but though you can run, you can’t hide from yourself. He lost his faith in the Maker. He began to drink heavily to assuage his inner turmoil. Gambling debts brought him low. Then they brought him lower still as the Temple of Ran bought up all his debt and enslaved him. They shaved his beard and kept the shavings as surety, putting him to work in this low dive as a bouncer and potman.
“This cannot stand,” says Yspadadden. “Tell us where your beard is held and we will retrieve it.” His companions nod.
Silden believed that it was held, with the personalia of other debtors, in a tower within the compound of the Temple of Ran and Aegir on the dockfront. Indeed he could point it out from the street. The tower was plainly an old imperial construction and probably no longer its original height. Yspadadden’s best guess was that it had once been a lighthouse. It was surrounded by walls and other temple buildings and looked a tough nut. “I bet there’s a sewer entrance”, said Yspadadden, and immediately thought of his old friend Ranji Rat.
It had been a good few years since he had last seen Ranji, and it took some effort to track him down. It was plainly a week for finding old comrades in dire straits. They found Ranji in a dive even lower than the one in which they’d found Silden. His tale was simpler if no less tragic. A couple of years ago he bust his left arm rather badly and couldn’t afford to have it fixed properly. Now he couldn’t use his bow or climb and was struggling to find employment beyond picking pockets or begging on the streets. Luckily for him Yspadadden and Ubaron had the right spells to fix him up. They had to break his arm again and reset it, but they pumped in enough magic to make it right as rain in an afternoon. The Guild of Surgeons would have charged a pretty penny. However, they now had a sewer guide and Ranji was pretty confident he could get them where they wanted to go.
He was as good as his word and led them through the sewers to the basement of the tower. There they slew many undead guardians and a demon in the shape of a giant toad. They freed some captives and found plenty of loot, along with a jar that contained the luxuriant shavings of a dwarven beard. All this was done quickly and efficiently so that they escaped the Temple before the general alarm was raised and dispersed into the city.
Silden agreed to come back with Yspadadden and Ranulf to Dingradur where he made his home and set up a Fane to the Maker. Yspadadden revealed to him that he had, at least in part, avenged him by tracking down and slaying the Fire Giant that had caused the werebear incident. To Yspadadden’s relief, Silden showed no interest in the axe, Gore Raver, that had once belonged to him and that Yspadadden had wrested from the giant. Indeed he well remembered that the axe, which could speak aloud, had done nothing but taunt him for his lack of intellect. Yspadadden gave him a dwarf-wrought battle hammer named Grey Crusher and he pronounced himself well contented. His beard began to grow again.
F-20
OE Date: February 694
Characters: Yspadadden, Ranulf, Ubaron, Silden, Banthil NPCs: Ranji Rat
Real World: 2002? ; Where: Surbiton