A Chronicle of the Iron City

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Being an Account of Service Rendered Beneath the Overlord's Shadow

Compiled from the journals of a Society member, sworn to anonymity, herein recorded for the guild archive.

 

I. Arrival

The docks of Freeport do not welcome you. They assess you.

I arrived by galleon out of Antonica, carrying nothing of value save a satchel of provisions and a name I had not yet decided to spend. The harbormaster's eyes moved over me as a merchant appraises livestock, cataloguing, measuring, determining whether I was worth the trouble of admission or the simpler trouble of disposal. He waved me through without a word. That, I would come to learn, was Freeport's peculiar hospitality. It does not greet. It tolerates.

The Sprawl opened before me like a wound in the earth, low buildings pressed together against their will, the smell of cook-fires and rot and ambition mingled into something that was almost a perfume if you allowed yourself to breathe it long enough. Children moved in the alleys with the fluid silence of rats. Men in the grey and red of the Freeport Militia watched from corners with the particular stillness of those who have learned that motion invites questions, and questions invite paperwork, and paperwork invites blame.

I had been sent here by the Society for purposes I was not permitted to record. What I may record is what I witnessed.

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II. The Nature of Service

In Freeport, loyalty is not earned. It is purchased, and the price is always renegotiated.

I received my first commission through a contact in Beggar's Court, a woman whose name changed with the season and whose face I never saw clearly in the same light twice. She had errands. Everyone in Freeport has errands, small cruelties disguised as commerce, the sort of work that requires capable hands and a willingness to forget what those hands have done before the sun has finished setting. I performed what was asked of me. I asked no questions. Questions, as I have noted, invite trouble in the Iron City.

The Militia was everywhere and nowhere all at once. Their authority was absolute in theory and erratic in practice, as tends to be the nature of power in a city where the Overlord's gaze, though far-reaching, cannot rest upon every corner simultaneously. In the districts where his eye was felt most keenly, the streets ran in straight lines and the curfews were observed with religious punctuality. In the places his eye drifted over without settling, other arrangements prevailed. Longshadow Alley was such a place. I spent three evenings there and returned each morning with information I will not commit to this chronicle for reasons I trust the Society will understand.

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III. The Dismal Rage

The temple quarter unsettled me in ways the alleys did not.

I am not by nature a fearful soul. The Society's service has taken me to tombs older than the city of Qeynos, to dungeons where the air itself carries the memory of screaming. But there is a quality to zealotry that touches something older in the blood, a warning that reason alone cannot quite articulate.

The Dismal Rage served Cazic-Thule, the Lord of Fear, and they did not wear their devotion lightly. They wore it as the Militia wore their crimson, as a statement of ownership. The city suffered them because the Overlord suffered them, and the Overlord suffered them because even Lucan D'Lere, in his centuries of cold calculation, had decided that the power of fear was a resource too useful to spend against its practitioners. There were those within the temple district who looked upon me with eyes that were professionally vacant, trained to register neither mercy nor curiosity. I completed my business there quickly and did not linger to observe the rites.

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IV. The Cost of Knowing

By the end of my service in Freeport, I understood something about the city that I had not expected to understand.

It is not, at its heart, a cruel place. Cruelty implies a kind of passion, a decision made with relish. Freeport is indifferent. Its machinery grinds because machinery grinds, because the gears were set in motion long ago by a will that has endured beyond the natural span of mortal ambition, and what that will produced was not evil so much as it was efficiency stripped of all sentiment. People died. People prospered. People disappeared into the Militia's custody and were sometimes released and sometimes not. The city continued. The Overlord continued. The flags bearing his sigil caught the coastal wind and snapped with a sound like a distant judgment, every morning, without fail.

I departed as I arrived: assessed, permitted, ignored.

The Society's business was concluded. What was learned will serve those who sent me. What was witnessed will remain in these pages, kept behind the veil where all things of value are kept, until such time as the knowledge is needed.

May those who follow me into that city go quietly, and return wiser.

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The City of Freeport Timeline

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Recorded by an unnamed hand Filed among the private chronicles of the Norrath Secret Society Antonia Bayle

Seek. Discover. Endure.