The Lantern Road

The Brant is a ridge road. For sixty miles either side of it there is no other way between Thurlow, down in the valley, and the districts above. One night a month that road belongs to a man named Aldous Ferrin. The district pays him a wage to stay up there and keep walking it instead of coming down into the valley. Nobody hides this. It is written up in the district ledger where anyone can read it, and it has held for thirty-one years.

The arrangement works because three stone shelters are spaced along the road with lanterns burning in them, and Ferrin will not come near a lit one. The man who fills and lights them is Emmot Prine. He is seventy-one and has walked that round since he was forty. The oil is kept at Hark Tower at the top of the road. Hark Tower has been dark for three nights and nobody has come down from it.

So Ottiline Fisk, who holds the district's lamp money and signs for it, hires a sword. The job is not to kill anything. The job is to walk Emmot Prine the length of the Brant and get a light back in that tower, because Prine is the only person living who can strike the stages, and he cannot be hurried and he cannot be left behind. Fisk counts the fee onto the table and tells you, before you take it, that she pays for a lit tower and not for who comes back down.

The night she needs it lit is the night Ferrin walks.

You get a few days in the valley first. There is a lamp-oil wagon to bring in, a fuel tally that does not add up, an order of families who tend the shelters and are down from eleven households to two, and a man who keeps the district's dogs and hopes he never has to use them. You don't have to do any of it. All of it pays. Then one night on the road, uphill, at the pace of a seventy-one-year-old. Then a morning to settle up, and a month later one more walking night, to see whether what you patched has held.

Who this one is for

Every other campaign in the catalog sends you to a place with a problem in it. This one gives you a distance to cover, a deadline, and a man who walks slowly. You can go and talk to Ferrin in daylight, in his own kitchen, before the sun goes down. He will put the kettle on and tell you where on the road he usually is and when. He will not promise you anything, because he cannot.

There is no fight here you have to win. The question is whether you will hurry an old man over bad ground in the dark, and what that costs you, and what it costs you if you don't. Somebody in your party will suggest leaving him in a lit shelter and coming back for him later. He is wrong about that, and he is not stupid for saying it.

You type what you would actually do, in your own words. Whether Prine walks into that tower or gets carried into it depends on how you moved him.

Before you start

You start at level 3. You have a nineteen-year-old hired for the rope work, and an old man who is not there to help you. He is the thing you have to deliver. You bring your own character and choose everything about who they are. Plan on one evening for the road itself, and more if you take the valley work: a few days down there, one night on the road and the tower, and a last walk a month later.

When you want a job you can finish in a single sitting, the catalog has those too.

Faces you'll know on sight