Tal'gard

Tal'gard is a walled city of the Sürgün Günlükleri ("Exile Chronicles") campaign, a rich centre of production that Kemp Corvus and his companions reached one evening while escorting Baron Vermont Porvis through a land in rebellion. Timber, clay, brick, stone and marble are produced there, and because the city sits at the middle of the road network these goods travel on to other parts of the Empire, White City and Batıkalkan among them. It has no great deposits of gold or silver.^{1 2}

The city

The wealthy live in houses of stone and brick, with gardens adorned in marble. A castle on the hill above the city was finished about twenty years ago and has never yet seen war.²

No river or spring lies close by, so wells matter: houses and shops face onto them, and small neighbourhood squares form around each well. The dwarves travelling with the baron took the plentiful water underground as a sign that caves might lie beneath.³

The old eastern walls are breached in places, and smugglers use them. Around the east gate stands Kuyubaşı, a one-storey tavern opposite a collapsed well, with no rooms for guests; armed men of the criminal underworld gather in the streets around it, and notes, goods and money change hands inside. Behind a fence at the back are four tables for dice, though no great stakes are played there. Its burly keeper had known Rainer Karga for about two years as a man who came and went, without knowing where he stayed, and offered to carry word to him for a fee. A seller nearby said that a butcher called Sieghart and his men held sway over the quarter's flow of news.^{4 5 6 7 8}

Baron Vermont's winter house in the city is a stone mansion, newer and smaller than the family's old forest house, with a wide walled courtyard and garden a stone's throw from a guard post. About twenty house guards and servants keep it. The baron chose to hold the council there rather than at the castle, where he was expected, and the legionaries of Kemp's escort were quartered in its courtyard so that their presence would lend weight to the meeting.^{9 10 11}

Government

Tal'gard has no single lord. A council of five great noble houses, each ruling a different stretch of the surrounding countryside, governs the city, and Baron Vermont, by his title, ranks highest among equals. The rich guilds wield strong political influence. The city guard is a guild-like company of paid guards funded by the families, not a true military force.^{12 11}

The mage Klobus described the other four. Lord Belligard is a distant kinsman of the baron who follows his lead, and would become the most important man in the city if anything befell him. Lord Vembord, who comes to the city about twice a year, heads a very rich house whose grain, vegetables and beer feed the city and its surroundings. Palberd Junior, aged about nineteen or twenty, is to take the place of his sick father, both his elder brothers having died; his house is strong in forestry and timber, and hunting in the forests around requires its leave. Lord Dornball, well groomed and in his late thirties, owns stone and marble quarries and employs many craftsmen, and his wife is tied to the circle of the quarry guild.^{13 14 15 16}

The rebellion in Tal'gard

When the baron's banner was shown the gates opened; inside them refugees gathered around cooking pots among soldiers. The chief of the guard reported that Rainer had slipped into the city disguised as a refugee a few hours ahead of the company and had not been found, and he suspected a wounded man was hidden somewhere, since costly medical supplies were being sought in the back streets around Kuyubaşı.^{9 17 18}

That evening the baron took the head of the council table, with the four other lords and their advisers, and presented Kemp and his companions as his rescuers. Young Palberd said they had believed the baron to be on the rebels' side because his daughter was with them. The baron answered that the movement had begun as a peaceful protest against taxes, and asked that no support be given to a violent rising. The council wrote a decree ordering that rebels be seized or reported and that those who helped them be counted as rebels, with a reward for true information.^{19 20 21 22}

Kemp said he had come on the prince's orders and would report regularly, and explained the legionaries as a sign of the mission's seriousness and of loyalty to the Empire. The council soon turned from the losses of the famine to trade and an invitation to the baths, to the open discomfort of the legion officer Malecris. When someone proposed closing the gates to new refugees, Kemp proposed instead a guarded, humane camp outside the walls; the council agreed, leaving the building, guarding and feeding of it to a later meeting.^{23 24 25 26}

Fearing that Rainer might strike at symbols of the Empire, the company had the guard watch the bank, the tax house and the prisons. By morning three prisoners had escaped, a tax evader, a thief and a deserter, but the bank and tax house were untouched. Rainer had passed a district gate in the night with some twenty men while the five guards there, afraid, did nothing; the chief of the guard begged Kemp to pardon them. They were spared and sent to learn discipline under the legion, and a lifelong support for the families of guards fallen in service was adopted, the baron bearing its cost when the other lords held back.^{27 28 29 30}

A week of inquiries

Over the following week the company sounded out the city. Ephorus, disguised as an elf in good clothes, bought drinks at the merchants' gaming tables. Sympathy for Rainer grew in the poor quarters and hatred of him among the wealthy, though attacks far apart from each other were all laid at his door, and not all of them can have been his. Klobus told Katherine that more than ten mages lived in the city, most doing small work such as examining objects, mending and fortune-telling.^{31 32 33}

In sixteen meetings at the baths, at country houses and in city mansions, the lords answered in round words and gave nothing concrete. A closed council decided that a group of refugees would stay inside the walls, housed in the poor quarters and chosen as workers by the lords who produce food, to the displeasure of the other lords. Outside, fighting went on; the rebel army suffered defeats but kept its camps, while the city itself stayed comparatively safe and rich.^{34 35 36}

The bells and the duel

One day the church bell on the main square rang three times. By local custom three strokes announce the death of someone important to the church, four the death of the crown heir and five that of the emperor. A priest told the people that an old churchman had died peacefully in his bed; Ephorus had seen him in White City, where he had started religious debates that improved the treatment of non-humans. Though not formally the high priest, he had outshone him, and was the emperor's most trusted adviser.^{37 38 39 40}

It was in a public square of Tal'gard that the champion Sir Vulcar Goldensteel answered Rainer's challenge in a duel to the death. The ground was marked off with ropes and stakes and the guard was strengthened, and on the day the square was packed.^{41 42 43}

Spoiler: The end of the duelRevealSpoils: Sürgün Günlükleri #23 · Say what you have read

Rainer Karga breathed his last in the city square amid applause and laughter.⁴⁴