Ah, back to this nice, wholesome story of sociopaths and evil gods.
Today is a Wren chapter. A while back, Wren got into a fight with some people trying to loot the smoking remains of Yushuv’s beloved peasant village, took them out because they were just mortals, and took their horses. Now he’s trying to rest at an inn and see what new items the town has on offer. He decides to get a wide hat, which is a felt/leather hat because the book is boring and no one’s wearing conical straw hats or anything.
The burly shopkeeper charges him a ton for it and Wren pays, as It was clear from the expression on the shopkeeper’s face that he recognized the horses Wren rode in on, and just as clear that the extra cost of the hat was the price of his silence about it.
I wonder who they were, though? If they were people from this town, then other people should recognize the horses. If they were just passing through, then are there any protections? Although actual Exalted has government above the town level, we’ve seen no sign of that here. Everyone seems to just be doing their own thing, so are crimes committed against people from outside of town who were outside of town at the moment actually crimes? Are there any legal structures that apply to them?
It seems there’s enough law that Wren is grateful to pay the bribe money, and goes on to pay the guy still more to take care of the horses and get a room. He hangs out in the common area enjoying that delicious staple of stew on bread while other people talk.
There was one woman, an enormously fat farmer with a shaved head and earrings that dangled to her shoulders, who swore that on the day the village had been destroyed, she’d seen a bird the size of a horse circling over the temple and singing prayers of mourning. When pressed, she admitted that she hadn’t actually seen it, but had heard about it from a friend who had, and then the rest of her protestations were drowned in laughter.
There’s often the sense of a faint narrative sneer behind it when women show up, but even paying attention it’s hard to say conclusively. Overall, women exist semi-regularly and get a range of descriptions. The second example speaker is another woman, a very old one.
told in hushed tones of the ghosts who stalked the streets of the town, rending the flesh from any living man who dared stay there overnight. Only the intervention of a priest, she said, had saved this town from the same fate. He’d gone riding in, she said, with a host of companions behind him, and fought the ghosts for a day and a night. When he’d finished, he burned every body in the place and put his sign on it, so that no one with half an ounce of sense would ever set foot in that place again.
Wren listened to that one with half an ear. It sounded vaguely as if a Wyld Hunt or some such had made a fast sweep of the place, burning the dead and proclaiming victory without doing any work. He snorted over his stew. It was typical, really, and the fact that the local peasants had made it into an epic worthy of the Five Dragons was typical, too.
Here we see the wobbly setting again. Wyld Hunts are a known factor and they’re all about shock and awe. Wren is presenting this as knowing if it’s a Wyld Hunt adds something important and tells everyone that actually it was just business as usual, because we have to be really, really clear he’s better than the rubes. But there’s absolutely no reason the woman couldn’t just be saying this about a known Wyld Hunt, and then Wren could talk about how much the peasants glorify the Hunts and view them as saviors when really it was just some cursorary sweep they were ordered to do and didn’t even do a good job of.
And here’s the real loss – what if Wren was weirded out by how they were talking like they didn’t know about the Wyld Hunt? What if what actually happened was that fate ninja have been fucking around to try to cover things up so that “a bunch of Immaculate-trained well-equipped people dealing with a spirit problem” somehow didn’t register to anybody in the vicinity as “Wyld Hunt”. As Ketchup Carjack explained last book, it is incredibly important that no one believe the Wyld Hunt can be defeated. So, if you’re hearing something that should be a Wyld Hunt but isn’t, maybe it’s a defeat. And something that could defeat a Wyld Hunt is terrifying to everyone.
Finally, it’s time for a story that’s going to be important.
The hosteler was not a large man, nor was he an attractive one. A spade beard hid what Wren suspected was a weak chin, but his shoulders were broad and his walk was that of a man used to long marches. His left arm ended in a stump just below the elbow, to which some enterprising smith had attached a long and wickedly sharp hook. A wad of clay sat on the hook‘s end at the moment, a preventative measure against accidents, but Wren had no illusions as to how useful it would be if the man decided his hook needed to come into play.
Scars ran up and down both of the man’s arms, white against his heavily tanned skin. He’d clearly been a soldier at one point, and when he spoke his words had an Isle accent to them.
The author is not stingy with description. There’s a lot to go here. The injury is clearly why he’s no longer a soldier, but either he was never from around here or he somehow got all the way to the Imperial Isle as a soldier and stayed long enough to end up with their accent. In other areas, one option would be that after getting injured, he ended up staying here rather than bothering making his way back – and given how oppressed the peasants on the Isle itself are, being one out here could well be better. But there’s an issue with that. This is the Scavenger Lands area, where it’s a big plot point that it’s an area where the Imperial Legions aren’t stomping around. On the other hand, if he’s a deserter from the Legions, this would be a good place to lay low for exactly that reason.
But anyway, he gets to actually talk. He apparently was close enough to see firsthand the birds circling overhead. And he says that he saw somebody leaving from the place.
“He was a tall man, and thin. Black armor on him, and long sword. He looked like he should be guarding caravans down on the south side of the Inland Sea, maybe, or prancing around the Imperial Manse pretending to be a noble. Arrogant, he was, and almost handsome enough to make it stick.”
The “pretending to be” is a little weird – I think I get what’s meant, but you’d be brutally murdered for pretending to be a noble anywhere near the Imperial Manse. Also, Exalted actually has a specific class for non-Dragonblooded aristocracy who pretend they’re better than the rest, patrician.
“He had a horse, a big black one. Mean. Didn’t like being stabled with other horses, and they didn’t like being stabled with it. Only the goats liked it
Okay so obviously we know goats = evil but this is such sloppy, sloppy writing.
Goats are associated with death by a very long and convoluted bit of reasoning. They’re smarter and more willful than other domestic animals, which, while annoying, certainly isn’t going to make them more okay hanging out with deadly things just because humans stick them together. They’re also tied to gods like Pan (again, capitalizing on the fact goats aren’t as placid as other domestic animals and exist at an intersection between civilization and wilderness) and virility. Now, that then turns into devil associations, which works fine because the big issue back in the day wasn’t life vs death but order vs nature. As time goes on we get more concerned with death and so a lot of demonic stuff now focuses on death, and goat horns get carried into that.
But without thousands upon thousands of years of this particular religious association, looking at the animal itself, they should be the first ones to start screaming and the first in line to kick the door down and escape.
Given most life is opposed to not-life, are there any animals that’d be fine with the horse?
I’d go with none, I think – even the carrion eaters need things to be alive at some point. Canonically I’m pretty sure shadowland areas don’t get a smaller slice of the normal animal life. Rather, what is in there is stunted at best and more often badly warped. But really stupid animals might not care, and animals that have shadowland heritage would probably be chill around it, so you could drop a note that everything but Bob’s weird dog, you know, that skinny mute one that spends all his time tearing up rats, he curled up in the stall next to it.
Our nicely observant friend goes on to give a nuanced analysis of Ratcatcher’s bags, saying there were few so he must have been someone sure he could get additional supplies any time he wanted, either with piles of money or piles of stabbing.
Now, the road between here and the town isn’t much for danger, but still, it’s not one you’d ride all night if you had a choice. Wise men stopped in Qut Toloc back in those days, and started up again with the sunrise. Not him, though. I asked him why he hadn’t stopped there, and he said, ”I generally stop at the first town I come to.”
Haha! Ratcatcher is so much cooler when we’re not in his head.
Wren is all “so like, what did you do about this?”, like he’s some starry-eyed child. He shouldn’t need to ask to know the answer is absolutely nothing what kind of idiot are you, you think one person is going to trifle with a guy who maybe killed a whole town?
“I did charge him extra, though. He had enough jade for ten.”
“I’ve got some jade,” Wren said diffidently, and hefted the purse he’d lifted from Bright Crow’s saddlebags.
So, the underlying reason to complain about how jade isn’t in circulation like because even a single smallest piece is worth more than anything they could have that is that this is a world of incredible inequality. The richest rich are incomprehensibly more wealthy than the poorest poor. And this is important, because we’re seeing that same dynamic in play with Ratcatcher. Not only did this guy see a mass murderer, but he sees no problem with recounting to everyone else in town the tale of how he stabled the guy’s horse, gave him a meal and sent him on his way, because everyone understands there’s nothing that could be done. That’s the disparity in power. And Exalted doesn’t ever have just one disparity – the solars on the top of the heap are untouchable unstoppable immortals. That Exalted’s official currency is unusable for day to day purchases is an important part of the themes of the setting.
Wren wants to keep asking questions despite the fact there’s really nothing to ask, and when they ask if this guy is a friend, he’s offended and stupidly blurts out that what no Mr. Townkiller tried to kill him.
A low murmur ran around the room, and Wren realized he’d made a mistake.
Wren should’ve realized his error the moment he said it. Really, he shouldn’t have said it at all, but that I’m willing to forgive with how unexpected his life’s been recently.
The real problem here is we’re doing the wrong script. This is “inexperienced hero fresh off the farm tries their hand at investigation for the first time”. Wren is asking questions that show an ignorance of the basic world he lives in (“but why didn’t you do something once you knew he was a dangerous killer who might murder you if you did something?”) and clumsily insisting on pursuing a subject because he’s just so excited to have a lead, despite the fact doing so is attracting attention and the NPC obviously already volunteered all the plot-relevant information.
Wren may have somehow stopped being the shrewd, experienced operative we were told he was in the first book, but he’s not wholly incompetent and quickly clarifies what he means:
“It was in a brawl. In Stonebreak,” he added quickly, knowing that few if any of these folk had traveled that far. “He was using loaded dice, and someone called him on it. Things got ugly, and he started laying about. It took a pair of priests to roust him, and there were a half dozen dead men on the floor by the time he was done. I got out with a cracked skull and a new appreciation for the evils of gambling.”
This is a really good bullshit story. It gives him a clear motive for hating the guy while suggesting the guy hasn’t a clue who he is and made no particular effort to dispatch him. And it works, so Wren can now ask those super-important questions: a series of petty requests about what exactly the guy looked like.
When Wren sought to test him and described a shield device Ratcatcher didn’t carry, the man shook his head. Clearly, he’d seen the genuine article.
This is so fucking stupid. Ratcatcher isn’t a knight carrying some precious shield with his emblem on it. It’s entirely possible he could’ve had a shield then and lost/abandoned it without giving a shit, or had it as a temporary piece of equipment that was then given to a new person. Hell, we know he actually just got a new shield! Wren may not have the full context on Ratcatcher, but his short trip with the guy involved him having humadoggies that there’s no mention of back then, one of which he killed as soon as it was a problem, and also there was his whole lecture about the all-devouring void. There’s nothing about this guy that suggests intense attachment to personal property would be a thing.
When Wren tires of asking these badly conceived questions that could’ve easily thrown him off, the other guy wants to know why he cares so much.
a dice brawl’s not a good reason to hunt a man.”
“A dead village is,” Wren said, surprising himself with his answer.
As bad a job as he’s done investigating, this redeems him a lot. It’s a good answer, it’s the sort of thing main characters should be doing, and best of all, it’s actually in line with some of what we’ve seen from him earlier. Even back as a human, Wren spent his downtime between Serious Monk Missions running around trying to make things better, never really satisfied by what he was being told was the right thing to do. Intervening here, in something no one else will/can, makes a lot of sense as the first thing he’d do with his newfound abilities.
The guy then volunteers another bit of info – a few days later, some food and clothing was stolen, and ghosts were blamed, but he figures it was someone who survived. Wren recalls that the actual ghosts he met talked about a kid.
Wren heads to bed at last.
But sleep would not come, and all night he saw images of a small boy running, half-blinded by tears of grief and rage.
It also says something good about Wren that this is what he builds out of the little information he has, but reminds us at the same time that Yushuv, like the rest of the characters in this, is not anything good. Maybe the author is trying to retcon it and say that no really, this is what happened…but this is just Wren’s assumption and a reasonable one if you don’t already know how monstrous that boy is.