Witch hunters of Sınır Sapı

The witch hunters of Sınır Sapı are the band of witch hunters at work in the district of Sınır Sapı in the campaign Zincirsiz ("Unchained"). The legion's major counts them, with the Empire and the elves, among the three parties investigating the sickness there. They are led by Master Otto.¹²

In the town

The innkeeper says the hunters walk the streets on their own and some evenings come to the inn. After some of the killings, he says, it was given out that a sick person had attacked, and he does not know how closely anyone looked into whether the dead had truly been sick. Jonathan River, a mage without papers, feared them. The old elf Ektelyon and the dwarf Fundin each explained the hunters' manner towards them by their age, family or trade; Fundin is on warm terms with them through his dwarven tales and their dinner invitations.³⁴⁵⁶⁷

They keep a temporary camp inside the town, a main tent and seven or eight smaller ones, where wounded men were being tended. Otto asked outsiders to search a suspect's house in secret, since he could not lightly accuse an officer of long service. After an explosion in the forest most of the hunters went out to the countryside, leaving one or two guards at the camp.⁸⁹¹⁰

A hunter once watched Jonathan and Olaf openly from the head of a street. Later, while Captain Markus was inside his house, an unnamed hunter outside moved between two buildings to get a better view; Jonathan, wearing the captain's likeness, stepped out as if to look at the creaking door and went back in. Whether the watcher was fooled is not known.¹¹¹²

Code and reputation

By Otto's account his men fought drow in a hidden part of a cave in the countryside and took a map and two short swords from them. He says that the hunters' common code stands above any one man's orders, and that his men would not obey an improper command.¹³¹⁴¹⁵

Markus feared that the hunters would kill him whatever anyone said; Jonathan answered that he himself worked with Otto. The Inquisition keeps posts across the Empire, and its members make it their task to kill outlawed sorcerers, cultists and cursed creatures. Witch hunters meet even seemingly innocent witnesses who try to help with great suspicion, and they are known for preferring firearms.^161718191920

Spoiler: The foe's threatRevealSpoils: Zincirsiz #13 · Say what you have read

The being that spoke through Markus boasted that it could stage murders within families and bloody signs to make the town look stricken by something devilish, and so drive the hunters to wholesale destruction. The governor said that neither Otto nor the elf commander knew that the sickness was a made-up story.^21222324

At the cave

Before going into a cave, Jonathan judged that reaching the hunters in the forest would take an hour or two and chose not to wait. He wrote a signed note giving the cave's rough location, saying that their captain knew of the inquiry and that there was no time to wait for support, and asking them to search the place if he and his companions did not return; a squirrel called by a rabbit carried it off.²⁵²⁶

After the fight the hunters came to the upper entrance with a gunshot and a call to raise hands: four or five of them, with two carts and horses. They took charge of what was left in the cave, its documents among it. Jonathan believed that handing them his prisoner would lead only to torture; Otto, for his part, told him the hunters would open no inquiry into what he had done. The hunters had been ordered not to touch Teresa, as a friend of the elves.^2728293031