Brazzant

Brazzant was settled long ago by criminals from the Ark, for a surprising reason: Archon's administration decided that some people were not worth killing. Rather than execute its worst offenders it shipped them out, aboard shadow ships — magical warships that carried a sentence one way. Brazzant was chosen over Cerberus because it was the less dangerous of the two: it had no giants.

Centuries later, those exiles had become a people of barbarians, hunters, and fishers. They still speak the language of the Ark, six centuries out of date, but never write it. They have no system of magic. The power is in their blood, as it is in every human, but without a method they can express only a narrow and limited part of it.

What they possess, they have built into their bodies, with help from the land itself. The flesh of Brazzant's beasts transforms whoever eats it: muscles swell, bones harden, and organs grow stronger. This is no merchant's tale; one meal of owlbear flesh is proof enough. The plants and roots that grow in this cold carry the same survival traits and pass them on. This is the source of the barbarians' prodigious strength.

Einar is the king of Brazzant and its legendary barbarian; his techniques bear his name. He comes from clan Plume, which claims that in his youth he tamed a highland white wolf. Killing one alone is an exploit remembered for a generation. Beneath him, clan chiefs maintain their camps beyond the cities.

The island is "administered" by warband leaders. Each holds territory where the band hunts and farms. When the land is poor, they wage war for better ground. They also wage war for women: the tribe with the most women grows the fastest. Infant mortality is high, and many others die fighting beasts. Anyone who survives it all is extraordinary.

The barbarians commonly use neither currency nor writing. They exchange services on their word and honor. Trade with them is barter or nothing. They buy dwarven weapons and Cerberan horses, then sell meat, rare plants, and peerless mercenaries. In Lamar, a dwarf merchant who promises that an axe is sound had better be telling the truth.

The chicken stands at the heart of Brazzant's culture. Barbarians eat it, wager it, and swear by it. One who abstains from chicken for a month enters the legend of their clan, a distinction perhaps awarded once in a generation.

The island also holds gold mines. Dwarves work them under armed protection because the clans never hesitate to raid them.

What a Barbarian Eats

Their pharmacy is food, and it is not gentle.

The berserker mushroom is scarlet with green spines and must be soaked before swallowing or it is too dry to be worth eating. It floods the nervous system; a man under it tears the leg off a giant. Only a clan chief can carry it for long without dying, and anyone else has a short window to vomit up what is left. A druid who forgets to mention this is a hazard to his own people.

A giant's brain, properly prepared, is excellent, extremely nourishing, and leaves permanent gains in the mind. Killing a giant of Cerberus is the rare feat every barbarian wants, and the feast that follows it does not wait for the man who earned it to wake up.

Highest of all is the silver salmon. On the mountain of the bird that flies high, above every other lake, sits a small lake at a summit permanently inside a snowstorm, and only one salmon can reach it. Whoever eats it is cured of everything, made strong as a giant and quick as a Brazzant hare. The salmon of the lake below can launch themselves vertically for kilometers, which is the only practical way up: net one, tie yourself to the net, and have someone strong throw you at it.

Under the summit lake there is a flooded cavern whose walls are cut with crimson runes. A red mist rises from its floor, lifts a man off the ground, opens him without harming him, and takes out what should not be there. It drew Sobiesansky's worms out of two of them and left. Into the third it went in and stayed, into the man and into his hammer both, and did not come out. That is where Einar stopped being a chief's son.

Cerberan Horses

The horse of Cerberus is an enchanted animal, bred and broken by the people of the island: taller, tougher, faster, slow to age, and still improving. It will not breed unless it feels its life is complete, which means it must be given great and worthy things to do—it thrives on them.

In the first years of the colony these horses let men fight giants and ogres at all, until the mages made the point moot. Now the warrior elite rides them and the rest are sold at enormous prices to Brazzant, against meat and the rare ingredients Cerberan alchemists cannot get anywhere else. The village of Flèche is where the breeders of the interior plains meet the merchants of Vlad and set the year's price; the finest animals never reach the public market at all.