A violent night at Cloudhollow Pass has left the famed Ember Circuit race in disarray, with the gathering's longtime starter and judge, Hjalmar Ironstone, dead in Rockfall Gorge and the operation's handler slain at the gathering itself, according to multiple witnesses among the goatherd camps.
The trouble began, by all accounts, when a grey-cloaked traveler known locally only as Erdeth Greycloak uncovered evidence that the Circuit's favored yearling had been doped with pitch and char, a practice that goatherds say has quietly plagued the races for seasons without proof. "The eyes gave it away before anything else, dull and glassy, like the animal was already burning out from the inside," Erdeth said, describing the moment he first studied the favorite beneath the awning. According to Erdeth's own account, Hjalmar Ironstone had suspected the handler Corvus Wintermoor for three seasons but had never been able to prove it. When Hjalmar called Wintermoor out publicly, the handler and two hired men drew steel rather than answer the accusation. Erdeth killed Wintermoor with a single thrust and, witnesses say, poured the very pitch stolen from the doped feed over the handler's body as he died, a grim mark on the man's own scheme.
With the favorite scratched, the race ran as scheduled, and Erdeth's own goat, Goarth, finished a strong second despite shying at the crowd on the final stretch. But the violence did not end at the starting gate. Wintermoor's two hired men fled into the night after his death, and one was later found shot through the throat in Rockfall Gorge. Separately, and far more gravely, witnesses in the high country report that Barragan Irongrave, identified as the moneyed backer behind the doping scheme, dispatched a crew of five armed men of his own to hunt down Erdeth before the gathering's torches burned out.
That ambush also unfolded at Rockfall Gorge. Hjalmar Ironstone, having thrown in with Erdeth against the scheme, was struck by crossbow fire and finished with a blade while lying wounded, his death coming at the hands of Irongrave's hired crew rather than Wintermoor's fled men. One of the attackers fell afterward as Erdeth, hidden among the boulders, avenged the slain judge, before sounding Hjalmar's own starting horn to summon the Circuit's goat herd and scatter the rest of Irongrave's crew into the dark. Erdeth later said he meant for the horn's call to carry through the gorge, a signal that the judge's death would not go unanswered.
"He believed Erdeth, and I believed him too. Two of my folk kept watch all night and wouldn't touch Irongrave's bread," said Cormac, the goatherd who sheltered Erdeth through a cart-by-cart search of the gathering mounted by Irongrave's men. Erdeth's public accusation before the crowd, however, fell short of rallying the gathering fully, leaving many caught between fear of Irongrave and disbelief that the Circuit could be so thoroughly corrupted. Hjalmar was buried beneath a stone cairn at the gorge where he fell. Barragan Irongrave's exact whereabouts remain unconfirmed, and a ledger said to detail years of the scheme's payments is believed still to be hidden in his black-wool tent. Residents at the gathering say the matter is far from settled.