Kemp Corvus

Kemp Corvus is a human warrior of the Sürgün Günlükleri ("Exile Chronicles") campaign, a son of the noble House Corvus. He came to the town of Osterhn with his cousin Sarah, the daughter of his uncle, to hear the tales told around Kızılkale, and there joined the drow Ephorus in the company the campaign follows. He had military training but had not yet fought for the Empire.^{1 2 3}

Family and early life

Kemp is the thirteenth and youngest son of Lord Braum Corvus. The family lives largely on fast boats on a lake and owes its wealth to caviar, of which it is almost the only supplier; hence the sturgeon on its banner. As a young man he left a comfortable home of his own accord for the barracks, starting with the lowest tasks, because he believed in the order of the Empire. Far down the line of inheritance, he chose adventure over the narrow life his title offered.^{4 5 6 7}

Osterhn

The town's lord, Jasper, publicly offered the newcomers work against the goblins. Kemp swore on his family name to Finart that Jasper would answer for the death of Finart's mother, in return for sixty days without revenge. He carried the plea of hostage farmers' families to Jasper and announced their release in the square, and gave a donation to the temple of Amarath for the families, asking that his name be kept from them. The innkeeper Exalon armed him with a simple enchanted longsword.^{8 9 10 11 12}

At a goblin camp near Diştepe he knocked the last officer senseless rather than kill him, so the company brought back a prisoner. Soon after, posing with Sarah as Ephorus's captives for sale, he reached the den of the goblin chief Moluk, where all three were overcome and taken alive.^{13 14 15}

Captivity

When Kemp answered the goblin leader Borgar with an insult, Borgar's men cut out his left eye; by his own later account he lost a finger in the same captivity. Under threat to Sarah's life he was made to teach the goblin commanders how humans fight, and tried to give them as little as he could. After fifty-five days he and Sarah were exchanged for Moluk and a load of weapons that Jasper delivered. The soldier Kerbor sent him an eye band, and Jasper later returned his lost longsword.^{16 17 18 19 20}

The goblin war

Riding out with the witch hunter Gordon, Kemp stopped Sarah's bleeding when she fell while Gordon prayed. Feeling he owed Kerbor his life, he led the rescue from a hobgoblin mine, where he agreed with a hobgoblin holding a blade to Kerbor's throat that both would lay down their arms and carry the captive out, and kept his word to let him go.^{21 22 23}

Before the decisive fight he called Sarah his sister and Ephorus his close friend, and the three swore to protect one another. Borgar knew him by his missing eye; while Sarah heated Borgar's armour, Kemp showed him the blind side of his face, told him he had been brave only while Kemp's hands were tied, and killed him. A priestess of the temple healed his cracked ribs. When Jasper handed Exalon over to the witch hunters, Kemp called it dishonourable, and he joined Exalon's rising despite an earlier promise of neutrality.^{24 25 26 27}

Spoiler: The assault on the castleRevealSpoils: Sürgün Günlükleri #15; Sürgün Günlükleri #16 · Say what you have read

In the castle Kemp refused Jasper's offer of single combat as unequal while he was tired and wounded. Jasper's icy sword struck him senseless; when he came to, Sarah was dead. He refused to kill the wounded houndmaster Alistar in his bed, saying that would not be vengeance. He signed a paper asking to be buried beside Sarah, and Gordon gave him the modest ring he had meant to give her.^{28 29 30 31 32}

When the company caught Jasper, Kemp struck him once with his sword hilt and then held back, thinking Sarah would not have wanted a surrendered man killed. He wore Sarah's own ring on his neck. At the trial he left the verdict to three notables, since he was himself an accuser, and pronounced death by beheading; Ephorus carried it out while Kemp held the ring in his palm. At the funeral he said that as a small child he had taken Sarah for a mother and then an elder sister. He then backed Exalon as the town's ruler.^{33 34 35 36 37}

In the crown prince's service

The young mage Katherine, who said House Corvus had paid for her schooling at Archon, joined Kemp, who disliked her calling him "my lord". His family, reached by magic through the mage Cassius, told him a new lineage record and ring could be had in any great city with an imperial bank.^{38 39 40}

At the frontier fortress of Riverguard the Corvus name won him a room of his own. Carrying only his icy sword, Buz Kenar, he offered his service in the name of his house to the young crown prince Conrad against a rebellion, arguing for talks first, like tuning strings that had fallen out of harmony, and force only if they failed. He was given thirty men for a quiet inquiry, a pedigree scroll drawn up by witnesses and scribes in place of his lost papers, and a document in Lingua Imperium entitling the force to provisions from the villages on its road.^{41 42 43 44 45}

The force marched under the blue and white sturgeon banners of House Corvus, with daily command left to the officer Malecris. When two soldiers of different units were caught gambling, Kemp spared them a beating and doubled their work and watches instead. At the forest house of Baron Vermont Porvis he learned that the baron's daughter had joined the rising and that the family now backed it out of fear. To get them out he arrested the household knight Kleber as cover; when the Bloody Coin mercenaries took up arms, he refused to leave his soldiers, fought with Buz Kenar and was badly wounded.^{46 47 48 49 50}

Besieged in Lord Verdun's castle of Sarpyar by the rebel Rainer Karga, he refused to surrender after a war priest lost a single combat to Rainer. He kept Malecris in command after the officer caught a legionary forced to carry poison against the baron; the poisoner was not seen again. At Tal'gard he proposed a guarded camp for refugees, spared five guards who had let rebels pass, and backed support for the families of fallen guards. When the spy Foltest arrived claiming other orders, the prince's aide Frederich declared the decision Kemp's. In the end the knight Sir Vulcar met Rainer in a duel, and Kemp gave the signal.^{51 52 53 54 55 56}

Spoiler: The rebel's duelRevealSpoils: Sürgün Günlükleri #23; Sürgün Günlükleri #31.5 · Say what you have read

Kemp chose the duel knowing that Foltest's poison would weaken Rainer, against Katherine's objections, and watched Rainer die of it. Long afterwards Rainer's old friend Esbert Axar sought him out in Gromkar; Kemp admitted to him that he had taken help in the duel without his opponent's knowledge.^{57 58 59}

The prince praised the plan that had shrunk the rebellion through a show of strength, touched Kemp's shoulders with a sword and raised him as Sir Kemp Corvus, and gave him a ring of purple stone bearing his family's arms. Ephorus gave him a writing set with an eagle-feather quill, which Kemp used to answer a letter from his brother announcing that the family had won its long dispute over fishing rights. He had the baron renew Ephorus's lost papers of freedom, asking Ephorus first whether he would accept the insulting form it required. In a last battle against hobgoblins he dragged the unconscious Frederich out of the fighting.^{60 61 62 63 64}

Home to House Corvus

The Corvus lands lie around the lake; Lord Braum's heroism in the conquest and at the battle of the Dwarf Gate had widened them. Six riders under the black sturgeon banner met Kemp, led by Captain Luash, his sword teacher. At the small castle of Mersin Konağı his much older half-brother, who runs the house in practice, embraced him; his mother, Lady Violet, ran to hold him, and he met his wet nurse, Mistress Hughes, and his sisters Lady Edith and the younger Lady Sybil. His father, frail, kept to a stone room out of the sun, and the house wizard Aethelwulf eased his pain. The family gave Kemp an ember-red sword of fire to match his icy blade, noting that the house had no ancestral war sword, only his grandfather's fishing rods. Each son may fish the lake with five boats, so the boys learn boats from childhood.^{65 66 67 68 69 70}

Spoiler: The father's bargainRevealSpoils: Sürgün Günlükleri #25 · Say what you have read

Alone with Kemp, Braum said his many sons were no accident: long ago he made a bargain with powers in the lake, many sons in return for protecting life there. He admitted that not all he killed in the war beneath the earth were soldiers or wicked, and saw his son's friendship with a drow as an atonement.^{71 72}

The ghost town

Gordon's companion Varis asked for help freeing souls trapped by a devil in an abandoned stone town. In its ruins Kemp saw the ghosts of Osterhn soldiers he had known, mastered a rage that made him want to strike Ephorus, and carried out a goblet wreathed in black mist, refusing the vision it showed him. He duelled the devil with both swords until he fell, and Katherine's spells finished it; Gordon stopped his bleeding and a priestess healed him.^{73 74 75 76}

Spoiler: Later eventsRevealSpoils: Sürgün Günlükleri #25; Sürgün Günlükleri #27; Sürgün Günlükleri #43 · Say what you have read

Sarah's soul was among those trapped. In the last rite Gordon asked Kemp for kinship blood; Kemp gave it, and with the blood of the captive doctor it became a new young body: Sarah, breathing. Kemp covered her with his cloak and gave the withered Gordon the ring of Sarah's he had worn. He hid the cost from Sarah at first, and much later told her that Gordon had broken his oath before his god to bring her back.^{77 78 79 80}

Gromkar

At the gate of Gromkar the Corvus name was enough. The baron said he listened to Kemp not only for his birth but as a one-eyed warrior with companions. Kemp introduced Ephorus as his guard and his companion, and agreed to help the house of Demirkapı, not as anyone's sword but because the land's people needed help. He told the baron that his father had fought in a past campaign into the Underdark. Ephorus gave him a thin book on old dwarven lineages.^{81 82 83 84 85}

Spoiler: A sworn oathRevealSpoils: Sürgün Günlükleri #31 · Say what you have read

The dwarf Brundar Demiryürek died in a fight with drow; Kemp swore on his honour to count Brundar's blood as his brothers.^{86 87}

Lord Balgur Demirkapı gave him a suit of dwarven full plate made for him alone, which returns to the Demirkapı on his death. Sent by the champion Karak to fetch an object from a sealed tomb in Yaşlıtaş, a great mossy rock above the villages of Dik Nehir and İki Kaya, Kemp waited there for his friends, found the pup Kısmet, and struck the last blow at the young green dragon in the tomb. Later Sarah gave him a diamond on a chain, and Kısmet's barking woke him to drow assassins in the night.^{88 89 90 91 92}

Below ground he held the front against a drow priestess with the fighter Baltazar, taking Baltazar's place when he was badly wounded.⁹³

Spoiler: News from homeRevealSpoils: Sürgün Günlükleri #37 · Say what you have read

A family letter told Kemp that his father had died after an illness, that his eldest brother now headed the house, and that his father had left him the ancestral long spear hanging, his name carved on it, on his bedroom wall.^{94 95}

With the same post came an unsigned letter in dark red ink, warning that the "Puppeteer" did not like those who spoiled his plans.^{96 97}

DağAltı

In the old mines with the traveller Hermes, Kemp smashed a skull floating among black chains, stopping the risen skeletons; it proved to have been a duergar archive of centuries of knowledge, lost for good. From an old fortress came a metal horn ending in a bearded dwarf's face. When drow ambushed the company, Kemp blew it, and the spirits of old dwarven guards fought beside them for a time.^{98 99 100 101}

In the battle before DağAltı, planned so that forces from the northern fortresses would take the enemy from behind while the High King drew the attack, Kemp led a unit of long-bearded veterans at the centre. They held a shield wall; he sent reserves to the faltering left wing, duelled a skilled drow swordmaster, and drew the enemy to open the way for his friends' blows. The dwarves won, and the companions received a document of dwarven friendship.^{102 103 104 105 106}

Spoiler: The end of the campaignRevealSpoils: Sürgün Günlükleri #45; Sürgün Günlükleri #50 · Say what you have read

In a spider temple a drow matron was killed; as the wounded company fled, someone broke the object meant to carry them home and a winged figure brought them out. After the Puppeteer threatened their families, they went back to Osterhn and defeated him with none of the companions falling for good, though Exalon and Baltazar died. An imperial intelligence officer then released them from their bonds to the Empire.^{107 108 109 110 111}