Inukudish is a Nikkad town, just to the north of the Shgutu River and the beginning of the Grand Gorge. It takes advantage of a bend in the river and several small feeder streams to grow a fine crop, the proximity of the nearby hills to harvest abundant game, and the presence of those same hills and the gorge itself to engage in its primary business: the production of lumber and the dispatch of logs to wood-hungry people to their south.
Wood, especially the harvest taken from trees of a sufficiently stout size that they might form sturdy support poles or level boards, is rare in Shdustu and accordingly reserved for critical tasks. One of the most important of these uses is for support, whether to make the critical lattice framework in yurts or as roofing beams in homes. Another is to produce the single-axle wheels and flat carrying frames of the carts used by the Kharal to haul certain goods across the steppe. Of course, there is also the need to produce stout shafts for tools and spears. While the lattice frames of yurts and the similar climbing trellis structures the Nikkad produce to form wall-climbing gardens are thin, they still require strong wood to endure the seasons of the region. Need to conserve timber means that none of the peoples of Shdustu builds primarily wooden homes, and furniture of solid wood is very rare. Instead, chairs and the like are made using woven wicker construction, or simply forgone altogether in favor of blankets, cushions, pillows, and rugs serving as support. As such, logs harvested in the hills and dispatched south along the river represent a significant source of income, enough to sustain the existence of a large town such as Inukudish. The Tasgusun Hills also supply, through trade with the local Bahab population, especially sturdy shafts of narrow-grained wood grown on high slopes that is prized for the production of spear shafts and arrows.
Though the endeavor is highly profitable, the log cutters of Inukudish must carefully manage their take or overly damage the forest. Wide open cuts spawn concentrated regrowth that leaves local forests vulnerable to crown fires in late summer, a destructive phenomenon capable of obliterating whole forests in a single day. Instead, they must cull the saplings and keep the forests wide and open with much space between the trees so fire, an inevitability in grassy Shdustu, does nothing more than lightly scar the trunks. Transport represents another barrier to the use of this resource. Even the flood can transport only so many logs, and the ability of carts or camels to haul timber is modest at best, it being bulky and heavy. These restrictions, combined with the relatively narrow stretch of irrigated land between the town and the great river, keep this place small. The local population reaches no more than two thousand five hundred Nikkad, and this is the rare settlement with space to spare within its walls. In that fashion, it offered greater comforts than most towns in terms of finding a place to spend the winter, and the local prince welcomed the Dragon Expedition's presence.
Conversely, the smaller population and status of this place presented reduced commercial opportunities. Master Lam was forced to exchange goods at terrible prices, eliminating accumulated profits from earlier in the season. With the expedition therefore unable to pay for winter lodgings and food using silver alone, Erun was obligated to enter negotiations with the prince for an arrangement in which the Sanid Empire generously offered its services as a gift to the prince in return for the equally generous extension of his hospitality. Such political obfuscation of bargaining remain a feature of politics even in this remote place, a consequence of the nominally sovereign nature of many small Nikkad settlements such as Inukudish. Thankfully, an agreement was reached with relative ease. The soldiers of the expedition agreed to serve as trainers for the town's modest complement of soldiers and its obligatory militia. Our caravaneers found work conducting animal husbandry, a field always in need of additional steady hands, or conducting winter maintenance of the town walls. Our various specialists mostly joined their efforts to the few local kindred spirits they found present. Rare indeed is the settlement that would refuse the services of additional apothecaries or healers.
To save on expenses, the Greencoat mercenaries were released from service and allowed to join a caravan heading south even though winter had clearly arrived. Though the double-humped camels bred in central Shudustu are capable of enduring even the most ferocious of blizzards beneath their shaggy hair, thick as stout ropes at this time of year, it is their human handlers who represent the point of vulnerability in such efforts. Camels have been know to stumble into towns with their drivers tied to their backs, frozen solid and many days dead. Such are the risks of a cold land where fuel cannot always be secured.
The Greencoats, though they avoided the battle at Sun-Scourged Fortress, had rendered fair service to the expedition and were cheered by the rest of our number upon their departure. Many of us watched them go with considerable trepidation, knowing the dangers of the region surrounding the gorge now that winter had come. Nor was this worry purely a matter of camaraderie, for the mercenaries had been tasked as messengers upon the expedition's behalf. Both official dispatches and personal letters were sent south in the care of Estiqin. It was hoped that, sometime in the spring, these would be transferred to Gudishgul Fortress and from there make their way across the desert and ultimately back to Crisremon where the court would learn of our progress. A significant packet comprised my own production, including a preliminary report regarding all we had encountered and a series of maps I produced and copied out in the hope that at least some information of value would reach the Emperor in the case the expedition failed to endure and return. For the purpose of redundancy, several additional copies of these documents were made and granted to hopefully trustworthy merchants throughout the winter.
Ultimately, a soldier of the Silversheen Mercenary Company placed a copy of these records, though regrettably not the personal missives for which such duplicates were not produced, in the hands of a Sairn Merchant named Master Raman at Gudishgul Fortress. These eventually reached the court in the final days of the Twelfth Year of Enduring Peace, nearly a full year after they were dispatched. The Greencoats, it was later learned, were attacked by a Kudustushgu khanate war party in late spring as they pressed south from Ushgidush. Most were killed and their supplies were plundered. Estiqin's husband was killed, but she escaped capture. In a demonstration of great will and insight, she buried the documents given to her in a jar at the base of a stone monument. After a prolonged period of recuperation in Shnudidishgu, she returned to travel and eventually retrieved these missives, ultimately taking them all the way back to Crisremon in person. Though they did not arrive until nine years after the initial dispatch, the return of the documents was highly valued by the Nassah Clan, the Inspectorate, and others, and Estiqin was granted the privilege of an audience with Husun the Sixth, the only member of her people ever to stand before the Imperial Court, and numerous other rewards.
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Once these messages were dispatched I was one of the few members of the expedition granted any significant liberty. Erun and his servants, including our young translators, were positioned in the prince's court. They were nominally honored guests, but in truth were deployed as a prop to increase the local ruler's appearance of authority. A boring position, dealing with repetitive provincial matters as it did, but essential to secure goodwill. I spent a few days observing the proceedings, but the various acts of small town governance and dispute resolution were of little interest and presented no significance to this record. Much the same can be said of the official acts of any provincial or city magistrate in the Sanid Empire. If the reader is truly interested in the business of farmland upkeep, craft guild prioritization, or the planning of personal ceremonies, there are court texts describing such matters in exhaustive detail already. Though Erun informed me that he found the sessions broadly interminable, especially since, as a bachelor, he was endlessly plied by the prince to spend time with various nieces as potential marriage partners, he considered it a small price to pay for a lack of conflict during the lengthy winter. Tomad, though nominally free of responsibilities during this interval, retained an ironclad grip on the expedition's finances and kept the men working to task throughout the frigid season from within the simple mud brick building he'd had them construct and furnish as his personal housing. More than any other expedition member, he found foreign architecture distasteful.
Those who remained unattached to any specific duties were the four Redbone Explorers and the two sorcerers. The former were authorized to range far and wide on their own initiative, in the optimistic if unlikely hope that they would happen upon some broken caravan or lost treasure that would secure funds for the coming year. The latter, though nominally assigned to the local branch of the Chapter House, doubling its membership by virtue of their arrival, their vastly superior skill compared to the pair of apprentice-level practitioners residing in the town meant they could not be compelled to undertake any specific actions. Lord Udrand, who hated the snow and the cold and complained endlessly of damp socks if the ground sported even so much as a light frost, elected to spend the winter indoors. His stated goal was to compose a treatise comparing locally-developed sorcerous theory with that of the standard imperial methods. To this end the locals opened up their library and answered seemingly endless questions from the older lightning master in their eagerness to absorb such scraps of teaching he might offer when jovial. His progress on this project was rather limited, at least in terms of pages composed, but I believe the locals learned a great deal. The Lady Indili, by contrast, was only too eager to depart the town and take every opportunity to explore the wintry steppe. Though snow and ice precluded her search for fossils and other bones, the list of natural mysteries she devoted her energies to investigate proved quite inexhaustible.
Out of this impulse, a natural system developed. Two of the Redbones, the cousins Nakarid Nivast and Kadaric Nivast, were little fond of sorcery and spent the winter hunting for treasure or serving as escorts when any other officer found it necessary to leave the town. The other pair, the talented youth Drasid Ulust and the grizzled but indomitable Glukish of Stones, were more open-minded and found the presence of a sorcererous protector welcome. These two would repeatedly join Lady Indili and myself during travels in the environs surrounding Inukudish. My presence was tolerated, despite my difficulty keeping up with the Redbones and a tendency to stop and conduct what they considered unnecessary surveying, through my ability to translate. Drasid spoke only the simplest travel phrases of Kharal, and though Glukish was in fact almost perfectly fluent in the language, the veteran explorer had been afflicted with a severe stutter his whole life and rarely spoke at all as a consequence.
This little group of four persons made three journeys out from Inukudish during the course of the winter. For the first, we traveled northeast to the camp of the Khagan of Sunshtasgus accompanied by Erun Nassah that we might pay our respects to this mighty ruler and witness his soldiers in a battle between the Kharal khanates staged in the depths of winter. For the second, accompanied by the Nikkad warrior women added to the expedition in Ushgidush, we traveled northwest to the oasis town of Susmunshtu to meet with a wizened sorceress of great renown. The third mission, without any additions beyond the core group, ventured into the Tasgusun Hills and brought the expedition into contact with the Bahab for the first time. It also probed deep into the past history of Shdustu and the legacy it has left behind. Each of these journeys took somewhat more than a month, with the final one lasting the longest, but this was far from the entirety of the winter, which this far north into the steppe reliably encompasses seven months of the year, from the tenth month through the fourth. In the extreme north of Shdustu this increases to nearly nine months, and summer is miserably brief as a consequence.
Various insights gleaned from these travels, and from the time spent among the local population of Inukudish, offered a picture of significantly greater detail regarding the life and people of the region than could be obtained during the hurried summer journey and are related in the following chapters.