South Razel

South Razel, also called South Razer, is a small town in the campaign Mürekkep ve Çelik ("Ink and Steel"). It lies about four days by cart from White City, near the birthplace of the mage Castor, who was sent there on an errand for The Hand. The town belongs to the provincial lands close to White City and so lies under the emperor's rule; no local lord is named.¹²³

The errand

Traumir told Castor that about two kilograms of Bloodstone had vanished from an imperial mine and that the Hand believed it had been traced to Razel. A prophecy foretold that the people of Razel would soon meet a great calamity in which many would die. Castor's task was not to save the townsfolk but to reach the stones before imperial intelligence, learn how they were being worked and bring them back.⁴⁵⁶

The town

South Razel has a small inn kept by Kobal, with no sign outside but the name Yol Taşı written within. It has two rooms; the spare one holds three beds, and Castor and his companions stayed there. Nirati, a captain who does not look local, commands ten or twelve guards from a small wooden post of two rooms with a desk for papers and a store of weapons. Coloured clothes, new household goods and donkeys before many houses suggested that the town was growing more prosperous.⁷⁸⁹¹⁰

The cemetery is very large for so small a town. It is explained that the battlefield of Victory lay some thirty to thirty-five kilometres away, and that the dead who could not be carried home were buried in nearby settlements. The impression that graves had been opened or that the dead had risen was not borne out: Castor found almost no fresh graves.¹¹¹²

A street conjurer, Aypol Morks, entertained the town's children with sleight of hand from a donkey cart. A company of dwarves called Çamçekici had been working a coal mine to the north, four or five hours away, for more than three months, trading coal for bread every few days; the innkeeper remembers one of them, who came with a goat, but not his name.¹³¹⁴¹⁵

The tremors

For a week or a week and a half before Castor arrived, the town was shaken by intermittent tremors, far more often than was normal. Nirati said that a learned man passing through had called them movements of the earth, and later wondered whether the dwarves had dug beneath the town. When Castor arrived he sensed a faint, growing trace of transmutation filling the air. During the strongest tremor the conjurer bared his arm and cast a spell, a divination cast in response to the quake rather than its cause; the ground split in cracks a metre or two deep.^1617181920

Beneath the town

Guided by Aypol's divination, Castor and Leonard entered from the cemetery, where the earth was softest. A rough tunnel, dug with spades and propped with recent timber and not of dwarven make, led to a natural cave with running water and on to an open space walled with old, dusty stone: the remains of an ancient settlement buried beneath the town.^21222324

There stood eight devices like the ritual and amplifying machines the Archon had used in the war of Victory, fed by elemental energy to make rituals safe and strengthen spells. Five were working, and they had been altered to turn one kind of magical energy into another, working the stones. Each was bound to a suit of armour whose parts hung in the air by magic, set to wake if its machine was stopped the wrong way. Castor shut the five down one by one in the right order, and each bound suit fell to the ground. Castor held that no single mage could have built such machines; Aypol judged that they must have been altered, and who altered them was not found.^252627282930

The burning

While the party was below, houses burned on the surface. Glanfall later told how at least three man-sized things of metal and wire, like suits of armour, attacked the townsfolk; Nirati and his men fought them, but their weapons seemed useless, and they led the people away. The shaking had stopped about twenty minutes before the party came up; many had fled, few had died, but the houses were burned.³¹³²³³