Terror of the Trdlo - Part VI - She's Gone Feral

Public Domain - orig. Fox Film Corp  - Theda Bara as Carmen 1915

The four horses and riders advanced slowly onto the Square of St. Vlasta before the fortress-like brewery/convent.  Ludmilla had gone quiet, but still looked awkward and unhappy, swaying and glaring atop her horse.  Silvernose rode in the middle of the column, with Zdenka next and Ludmilla bringing up the rear.  From cobblestones to uneven potholes and back again, the tread of Silvernose’s horse jarred him. He kept wincing and altering his position on the saddle.   

“Um, already a bit saddle sore, I fear,” said Silvernose, red-faced.

“I’m sorry about that, my friend,” said Zdenka sympathetically, steering her horse to walk alongside Silvernose’s.  

The riders stopped talking for a while as they rode out of Vodnikov.  Their horses’ shoes clinked, thudded and splashed as they struck cobblestones, dirt, and puddles.  

Zdenka had already seen much of the damage that had been done to the city in the fighting and rioting that had occurred a little more than a month ago.  There were still many makeshift tents and lean-tos against the buildings made by people whose homes had burnt or been demolished.  But now Zdenka noted to herself the amazing bustle of repair and new construction that was afoot.  Many of the besiegers of the Convent of St. Vlasta had been ethnic Krajans, unemployed neighborhood boys from Vodnikov.  They had been unenthusiastic soldiers, but desperate for any job.  They were much more eager as construction workers for their own quarter of the city, once Baron Rudiger von Possenreisser started bankrolling them. 

Beata, whose mount lead the column, turned around in her saddle with a serious expression: “Silvernose, can you tell us now the circumstances of Sieglinde’s absence?”

“She’s gone feral,” Silvernose replied sadly.  

“Oh no!  Do you mean things are going poorly between you?” asked Zdenka.  “Has she run off somewhere?”

Zdenka and Beata had both been initially suspicious of the strange-acting woman they had all met only a month ago, and doubly so when a mutual attraction kindled between her and their gallant and garrulous long-time friend, the superlative swordsman and duelist whose name referenced the silver prosthesis on his face.  Their anxiety on Silvernose’s behalf was somewhat stilled when Sieglinde proved a valuable, likable, and kind comrade-in-arms to all of them, and had pressed her suit with their friend in only the gentlest, shyest manner.

“Maybe the former,” Silvernose answered. “And most definitely the latter.  For the past week, she looked anxious, I thought.  She said she needed to ‘find something away from people’ and absolutely refused to explain a word more.  I asked her if she was angry with me, and she said she wasn’t.  She said she would visit the Convent of St. Vlasta after a month, either to find me or a message from me regarding my whereabouts.”

“I’m so sorry,” said Beata.  “Surely, she bears no ire in her heart against you, and will fulfill her promise to return to St. Vlasta’s.  She never minces words, nor speaks untruthfully.” 

“Our errand won’t keep us away from St. Vlasta’s and Vodnikov for longer than a few weeks,” Zdenka reassured Silvernose.  “You’ll see her then, at the convent, and I’m sure she will have sorted out everything that was troubling her, and she’ll make happier and much less distracted company for you.”

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Next episode: Part VII - A Little Traveling Music... here.

A Guide for the perplexed-
Terror of the Trdlo, Serialized:
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V

Terror of the Trdlo - Part V: Silvernose arrives minus his weird girlfriend

Silvernose, thanks to the unintentional courtesy of Skylum Luminar and MS Paint

In the next few hours, Zdenka and Beata readied supplies for their journey in the brewery’s courtyard.  Some of the admiring young Sisters stole away between prayers and brewery reconstruction to load Beata’s horse with provisions.  Beata had to smilingly decline much of the overpacking threatened by their enthusiasm.  Zdenka smiled, too.  She was going to appreciate being with Beata on the road, alone, or at least alone-ish with three other people, minus the fluttering presences of these young clerics.

The older nun, Sister Wojtecha, who had enforced the end of the Sisters’ break time, was now leading a horse bearing saddlebags and Sister Ludmilla.  The thin, tough, sunburnt white-haired woman with broken teeth was dressed in a burlap robe.  She sat awkwardly on the horse, swaying and complaining constantly.  Coming up alongside Beata and Zdenka, Ludmilla narrowed her eyes at the women.

Mother Vlasta had, in the meantime, sent messengers to summon Silvernose and Sieglinde.  Zdenka and Beata had not seen the strange couple for several weeks.   Silvernose had finagled accommodation for himself and Sieglinde across the Stone Bridge, under the Castle, on the Schwab side of the river, at the townhouse of the newly-minted Baron Rudiger von Possenreisser.

Zdenka looked up and caught sight of the rotund, silver-proboscised, splendidly-cloaked Silvernose leaning elegantly against one of the brewery’s new gateposts.   They smiled broadly and bowed to one another with elaborate flourishes.    

Beata complimented Silvernose on the expert razoring he had arranged for his goatee.  She said that the precisely-trimmed point of his beard was sharp enough to impale the heart of any fair damsel he encountered.

Zdenka punctured their arch banter with a serious question: “Where is Sieglinde?”

Silvernose’s smile shifted into a purse-lipped grimace.  Uncharacteristically, he for once seemed at a loss for words.  After an awkward number of heartbeats, he said: “I will tell you when we are en route.  She won’t be accompanying us on this little adventure.”

“Oh,” replied Zdenka softly. 

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Want to read the next episode, Part VI: She's Gone Feral?  Or Parts I-IV?

All Terror of the Trdlo story links are here.

Terror of the Trdlo - Part IV - The Hermitess

Louise De Hem - An Old Woman - Wikimedia Commons

Beata approached with tension in her step.  She could feel that Mother Vlasta was not pleased with the dynamic she was arousing in Vlasta’s youngest charges.  She greeted Mother Vlasta with formality, and sat at the table next to Zdenka.

The abbess explained her offer to both women.

“Sister Ludmila is a hermitess who is not formally or directly part of our order, but we are sympathetic to her goal of becoming closer to God via a different, lonelier path than we who live together in a cloister.”

“Oh, we know her,” said Zdenka.  As much as Beata had been gathering admirers among Mother Vlasta’s nuns, Ludmilla, who had taken refuge in the Convent of St. Vlasta a few days ago, had been ruffling the Sisters’ habits with her paranoid accusations and quarrelsome nature.  

“Indeed, we need no introduction to Sister Ludmilla,” smiled Beata ruefully.  She had been the target of some of the once-and-future recluse’s screaming tirades in the convent’s overfull guest wing.  
Mother Vlasta grimaced, then continued.  

“Then you will have an understanding of the urgency of the mission: I should like you to use your special skills and talents to eliminate the threat that drove Ludmilla from her hermitage in Skalica.  I will provide you five horses.”

“Reverend Mother,” said Zdenka, “Four horses – for me and my friends: Beata, Silvernose, and Sieglinde.  The fifth…for Ludmilla?”

Mother Vlasta’s thin face broke into a broad grin.

“Yes, you must take her with you immediately.  If the hermitage cannot be made clean or safe or otherwise habitable for Ludmilla, you must find suitable accommodation for her elsewhere… at least two hundred versts east of Vodnikov!”




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Did you miss the beginning? Part I is here.

Parts II and III and all the previous and future links are here.

Following this particular installment is Part V: Silvernose Arrives Minus His Weird Girlfriend

Terror of the Trdlo - Part III - Nun: The Wiser

Um, Abbess in Brewery Uniform - Bartolomeo Passeroti, Wikimedia Commons

“Feuerpause!”  

A tall, stately woman in the habit of the Sisters of St. Vlasta entered, deadpan-ordering a cease-fire in Schwabisch military jargon.  It was the abbess, Reverend Mother Vlasta, named after the patroness of the brewery, the abbey, the former Kingdom of Krajansko, and her order.  She bent down to wrench Zdenka’s first dagger from the floorboards, straightened, and walked toward Zdenka with the pommel carefully extended toward the leather-armored young woman.

“I thank you, your Reverence,” Zdenka said as she lowered her arm and tucked the unthrown dagger inside her armor.  She took the dagger Mother Vlasta handed her and tucked it near the other one.  Then she tied back her unruly midnight-dark hair.

“I have been watching both you and Beata from the murder holes in the floor above,” said Mother Vlasta.  This was no large surprise to Zdenka, who had come to know Mother Vlasta a little in the weeks she and Beata had been staying in the convent/brewery.  During the recent siege and invasion, Zdenka had also looked down into the beer hall through the murder holes in its ceiling.  

“I’ll wager you’re a bit anxious to get out of town, and I have a job opportunity for you and Beata involving a few days of travel and a few weeks of work,” Mother Vlasta continued.

The abbess was a superlative reader of people, Zdenka had discovered.  Zdenka could readily admit some of things she was sure Mother Vlasta had intuited. 

She was bored, now that the battle to repel the attack on the convent was many weeks in the past.  The brute-force demolition and reconstruction work on the brewery’s experimental production equipment was finished now, too, and she felt in the way when the brewer-nuns were setting up specialized vats and vessels and calibrating them according to their expert knowledge.  

What was harder to admit was that she still felt ill at ease in Vodnikov, which she had returned to more than a decade after fleeing it in order to save her life.  Zdenka sometimes still saw the hideous, hatetwisted face of her enemy, Bulvarka, loom up to glare at her in the crowds bustling across St. Vlasta’s Square, but she would shake her head or close her eyes for a moment, and the criminal boss’s haggish visage would disappear.  It would feel good to be away from the neighborhood again.

Hardest of all to admit to others or to herself was the jealousy she felt when the beautiful young nuns gazed with rapt attention at Beata. They reminded Zdenka of the novices Beata had seduced long ago – the reason Beata had been defrocked and forced out of the convent she had grown up in.

Undoubtedly, shrewd Mother Vlasta had subtly discerned a similar dynamic between Beata and Vlasta’s young Sisters.

This gave a certain force and urgency to her job offer.

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Before this one:

Terror of the Trdlo - Part I

Terror of the Trdlo - Part II

and the one AFTER this one, Part IV: The Hermitess

Terror of the Trdlo - Part the Two-th

From Unsplash.com

For part I of this story I wrote, click on THIS.  There will be narrative blood.
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THE TERROR OF THE TRDLO - Part II

The Sisters of St. Vlasta, most of them quite young, had been enjoying the latest in their increasinglyfrequent breaks repairing and refurbishing their abbey and brewery.  A little more than a month ago, their home and enterprise had been besieged and invaded by an army of mercenary thugs.  Zdenka and her friends had been instrumental in winning this battle.  It was imperative for the nuns to get their damaged brewery running again and start mass quantities of beer, Vodnikov’s economic lifeblood, flowing to the neighborhood’s Krajan-owned pubs again. 

Zdenka turned her head to watch the nuns’ heroine.  She puffed a springy curl away from her face.  

Zdenka could see Beata’s lovely eyes and teeth sparkling in the firelight as she told tales.  Her golden curls glinted around her head like a halo.  Beata looked like a mischievous angel inciting a flight of her sisters to sneak into God’s kitchen and siphon away a few drops of divine mead.  

“And so it had become a subtle duel,” Zdenka heard Beata’s bell-toned voice change to a stage whisper.  “I summoned Aurelie, the Count’s ravishingly well-favored servant girl, and bid her to attend my message carefully and impart it exactly to her master.  I kissed her full for sixty heartbeats, then sent her across the room to kiss the fiery-eyed Count.”

Shocked and titillated laughter pealed and shrieked through the beer hall.  With that, an older nun announced over the din that it was time to get back to work.  She pushed back her bench, straddled it, swung one leg after the other, lurched back to the brewery.  With a rutching of benches on the rough floorboards, the other nuns followed suit, still ebullient with the risqué frisson of what they had heard.

“Isn’t she fascinating!” a particularly young ruddy-cheeked Sister burbled to no one in particular as the gaggle of nuns exited the room.  “So absolutely beguiling!”

Zdenka watched from her corner and sighed.  Beata’s story was true.  She had been there.  She remembered how miserable she felt, shivering in her hiding place behind the Count’s favorite tapestry, the Count’s filched jewels secreted in her belt, hearing every detail of what was transpiring between the Count and Beata and Aurelie.  

At the time, Zdenka was afraid to claim any right to be jealous.  But Zdenka had recently begun asserting herself and demanded Beata clarify things between them.  

Now Beata insisted to Zdenka that she was changing, had changed, that her true soul loved Zdenka and Zdenka alone among mortal women or men.

It was a struggle for Zdenka to believe.  She had seen contrary evidence so many times in past years.

Zdenka was lost in thought, alone with only Beata remaining in the room with her, albeit at the opposite end, straightening her skirts and standing up from the bench where she had recently been holding court.

Zdenka drew another dagger from its hiding place in her armor, absent-mindedly readying another throw at the same knothole she had bulls-eyed earlier.  A door from the brewery side creaked suddenly open.  Zdenka spun her head toward it and bolted up from the bench into a fighter’s crouch.

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Click on the link for Part III - The Terror of the Trdlo - Nun: The Wiser

The Terror of the Trdlo - Part I

Thanks to Pixabay.com for the two photos I mashed up

There aren't enough books coming out these days in the vein of Clark Ashton Smith, (I'm thinking Averoigne), Jack Vance (I'm thinking Cugel) and Fritz Leiber (Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser) in my opinion.

So I decided to write something that tries to evoke a similar mood, even if happens in a mash-up of Prague from the Middle Ages to the 1800s National Revival to the 1990s, when I was lucky enough to live there for several years and imbibe (hic!) some of the culture.  My LOST LUSH: RELOADED  adventure was created from similar cloth, so here the inspiration flows in a narrative fiction direction.

I also wanted to expose these pastries called Trdelnik or Trdlo which are apparently all the rage among tourist traps in the center of Prague these days.  They are not "AUTENTIK TRADITIONAL of OLD PRAG" - despite all of their blaring signage to the contrary.

Without further ado - hope you enjoy...
             -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Terror of the Trdlo

Zdenka drew another silver-chased dagger from one of many concealed sheathes in her custom-built black leather armor.  She slouched in a shadowy corner of the Convent of St. Vlasta’s beer hall, seated on the farthest extreme of a long wooden bench, her back propped up against the scratched wood of the walls.  The dark skin of her face was drawn taut over her high cheekbones, lined with tiny scars.

The beer hall was on the street level floor of the Convent of St. Vlasta, the tallest building in Vodnikov.  The brewer-saint’s castle-like stone-walled nunnery glowered back at the enormous, even taller Castle of the Duke across the Moldava River.  The embattled Krajan people had always rallied around this most patriotic of saints, whose iconography always depicted her with a beer mug in one hand and a sword in the other.  It was difficult for the convent and its brewery, which the saint had founded in the long-ago heyday of the former Kingdom of Krajansko, to avoid the suspicion of the Schwab oppressors, who had divided and conquered them, and whose stronghold was the Castle.

Over the decades, overt military sorties over the Stone Bridge became less frequent than nocturnal incursions by obnoxious Schwab tourists - slumming swells and rakehells – seeking the “loose” and “fun” atmosphere of the pubs on the Krajanisch side of the river.  Due to arcane legal loopholes, the law of the Schwabenreich, the Schwab Empire, extended its easternmost reach only to the western bank of the Moldava.  On the other side of the river, across the Stone Bridge from the looming Castle, in Vodnikov, former capital of the former Kingdom of Krajansko, Schwab martial law faded away as the conquered Krajan people resigned themselves to a laissez-faire (mostly) apolitical anarchy.

Schwab nobles and thugs would violently lash out against people in Vodnikov only in case of any open sedition, major public disorder, or random sadistic whim.  Otherwise, the right bank of the river held a magnetic attraction to drunks, drug addicts, poets, party-goers, thrill-seekers, mystical anarchists, crossdressing cabaret enthusiasts, artists, heretics, sexual rebels, alchemists, and black magicians.  Krajan people native to Vodnikov had to live and work amidst the squalor and chaos and Schwab traffic through their homeland and headspace as best they could.  

Zdenka had fled her native Vodnikov at a young age, wild-eyed, covered in the blood of some, but not all, of her dangerous enemies.  For a dozen years, she had been wayfaring to every corner of the Schwabenreich, a mercenary guard protecting pilgrims and merchants, among many other things.  She had returned to the neighborhood of her birth for the first time only last month. 
Zdenka slowly twirled the dagger balanced in her left hand.  Without disturbing the unruly droop of dark, wiry curls hanging over her face, Zdenka flicked her dagger through the smoky air to thunk another perfect bullseye in her chosen floorboard knothole.

She shifted in her wood-paneled corner, her leather suit of armor creaking, turned her head to look across the room.  Over a sea of deserted tables and benches, through the haze of a huge roaring hearth, the focal point of the room’s attention and activity sat surrounded by a knot of rapt admirers, all nuns wearing their leather jacket brewery uniforms.

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The next installment of The Terror of the Trdlo:
Zdenka vs. the Green-Eyed Monster (Jealousy, That Is)

He Who Watches Review at OSR News!

Yikes!  

This review was done more than a year ago, but I was oblivious for all that time.

Belated thanks to Jeremy of  OSR News and Reviews for posting (in 2019) a detailed, even-handed review of my first-born (or rather first-conceived) child:

                                Click here for He Who Watches review at OSR News and Reviews

I laughed out loud reading the paragraph starting with "The PDF is horrendously ugly..." - all the criticisms are spot-on!  My only defense is... Daniel Johnston, Roky Erikson, John Waters.

A trashy Egyptsploitation DIY vibe was my only guide out of the wilderness of my own skull for this 2016-2017 joint.  I hope DMs buying and running this with their players will enjoy surfing on a similar vibe.  Also, I had written the thing before I had absorbed the design and layout Best Practices advocated by Bryce Lynch of tenfootpole.org

To answer the burning question of "What was he THINKING by doing that?" read:

                                  Top 10 Reasons I Wrote He Who Watches 

Jeremy's review ends with a fine summary of the soul of the adventure:

               He Who Watches is far from a perfect module, but it exemplifies
               the best of what the OSR is about, unleashing people's creativity
               and it has that sort of whimsy found in the early days that is often
               lost in modern products.