Max

Max, also called Maximilian, is a travelling sellsword in the campaign Zincirsiz ("Unchained"). Jonathan River, Olaf and Tim found him sitting in a corner of the village house of Elm, a man who looked as if he had seen war: about a metre seventy tall, lean and fit, with long fair hair and a long knotted beard. Under his cloak he wore armour like plate; he carried playing cards in his pack, and on his left arm was the tattoo of a woman.¹²

Background

Max says that he is from White City, and that he braids his beard in memory of northern friends he valued, who are dead; the beard alone does not make him a man of Olaf's homeland. He had lately finished a job in the north, he said, and was resting before looking for work in a larger city. He left an earlier calling to travel as a sellsword, and told Olaf that he had once done work under water. Jonathan introduced him to others as a former imperial soldier.³⁴⁵⁶⁷

He is cautious by habit. While the others talked he went out to look over their cart, and in his corner of the barn he loosened the boards for an escape and hid a dagger, alchemist's fire and a firelighter under his pillow. He kept a finely made hand crossbow hidden as he opened the door at night. He prays to Amarath; she is the goddess of all people, to whom healers, those who fear for their families and common villagers turn, and who cares for mercy towards the defenceless.^89101112

The lost girl

When Liam came for help in the night, Max joined the search. Struggling to sort the tracks by the waterfall, he suggested that Jonathan sharpen Olaf's senses rather than his own. At the lake he found no animal tracks, dropped in an insect that simply drowned, and lowered a lit stone on a rope into the clear water. He stayed awake with Jonathan and saw the lake vanish at sunrise; he guessed it might be a gate through which the girl had been taken, and found the old bones of a girl on the dry bed.^1314151617

When the village returned to its everyday look, Liam greeted him as a guest of a week, and there was no second Max in the corner. His loosened boards were sound again and his flasks in place, but the alchemist's fire was gone, though in a closed flask that much would take years to vanish. Asking to be checked himself, he went over his recent past: his memories of leaving his calling and coming here were broken, as memories are, but they held together.¹⁸¹⁹⁵

Trust

Max was uneasy when they spoke of Tim taking a child's shape, and Tim, to be open with him, took on his face, body and voice, keeping only his own clothes; Max asked him to turn back. Jonathan then told him of Olaf's northern wolf nature and showed his own power to move things with his mind, naming silver as Olaf's weakness as a sign of trust. Max hid his unease and remembered it. They spoke of questions about the past by which to know a changed Tim, but no one was cut with a silver knife. Jonathan vouched for his friends and Olaf for Jonathan, and Max, trusting a northerner's word for now, agreed to look for a way out with them.^2021222324

He took off his armour to move quietly. At the village smithy he melted fifty silver coins to coat crossbow bolts, but knew nothing of the craft and ruined two; the smith, whose skill was limited to horseshoes and plain ironwork, spoiled about ten more, and in the end a single usable silver-tipped bolt came of it.²⁵²⁶²⁷

Not knowing the girl's family, he asked Liam about buying sheep and so learned of Lena, arranged to see her at her house, and unsettled her by asking about her daughter. At the meeting he brought the children in when Bold sensed movement outside, and he stayed awake when a spell of sleep took the others.^28293031

Zarama

Max did not take the stranger Zarama's explanations on trust. He checked outside for an ambush, looked for a crest on him and tried to learn whether he already knew the forest path, without result. He asked whether Zarama would stop them by force, and Zarama said he had no such power. Max thought the man's errand, his strength, the new things he told them and his moral counsel did not fit together, and wanted to follow the girl to find the true cause; these were his own doubts, not proof against Zarama.^32333435

He prised open Lena's box with a knife and found only simple rituals. That evening Liam came again to his door with the same worry, words and answers as before; Max asked the same questions, heard the same replies, and rode to the lake on his horse with a map drawn beforehand. He tied his horse short of the water and hid.³⁶³⁷³⁸

As the girl's feet touched the water, Max ran out and lifted her, but the lake kept pulling. He dropped the rope he meant to tie her with; Jonathan held her briefly with his mind, and Olaf burst from hiding and pushed with Max until she fell back, alive.³⁹⁴⁰

Beneath the lake

Max warned that a hunter under water would have the advantage in its own ground. He made earplugs of cotton and honey for himself and Olaf and taught Olaf a few hand signs, and tied the joined ropes to a tree and a rock on the shore. With Olaf he found and cleared the covered opening in the lake bed and swam on through the channels, feeling the pressure and the weariness despite the magic that let him breathe. In an air pocket he found an old adult bone that crumbled at his touch.^4142434445

On dry land he questioned the risks of the strange script and the ancient stonework, and several times felt that he was being watched. When Blink brought up rusted metal from a pit, Max recognised by its crest, ornament and make the armour of a paladin of the earth temple, from before Victory Day and more than about two hundred years old; other metal there may have belonged to clerics. He left wet kindling along the way to mark the path back, and searched ahead for traps, noting the fresh air and the worked stone, while the companions weighed whether they would meet people, a cult or necromancy.^4647484950

In the Hall of the five doors, Max questioned Jonathan's hunger for mysteries and the risk of never returning. Jonathan showed him the relic he carried in its true form as a necklace, which left an evil feeling and had covered his wrist with wounds, and told him its story. Max suggested taking the parchment from the centre of the hall as they left; Jonathan refused, and nothing was taken.^51525354

Beyond the doors, he tried without success to match the belongings of the lord Kuzon's men with the collection he had seen. In a room with a beast larger than a bear, he was the first to draw; the beast clawed him and Olaf, and he killed it with two of three shots from his hand crossbow to the head, recovered one bolt whole, and dressed his own wound. There he carved a spiral, instead of a common X, by a hole in the wall, and later a second spiral in another room; passing through the door of the future, the companions found his first spiral still there beside the beast's aged bones. He hoped to find the earth temple's paladins in that earlier time, checked their food and water, and said that they could not wait forever.^555657585960

When Jonathan took the parchment and a wind blinded them, Max wanted to make for the door but could not see it, and waited, calmed by Jonathan's words.⁶¹

The sleeper

In the small room beyond, Max examined the Amnesiac sleeper of Elm: his workman's clothes, his hands, his thirst. He saw that the man read every script with ease and accepted that he was out of the ordinary, but could not say what he was. He suggested that the man's dreams might be making the shadows around him. Weighing their safe escape against the risks, he and Jonathan argued over taking the man with them, handing him to the Inquisition or to Zarama, or leaving him; Max refused to take the relic from Jonathan when it was held out to him. In their long talk about what to do with the man, he stressed that it was not his place to judge an unknown good or evil, and the limits of the risk he would accept.^6263646566

Spoiler: After the lakeRevealSpoils: Zincirsiz #26 · Say what you have read

When they came out and Tim told them that three months had passed and that he was at Turunç Kale, Max said that he knew the country around the castle and could find the way. In Elm he examined the dead and found that some had drowned.⁶⁷⁶⁸⁶⁹