UpGELERT, BART, AMMERDALES' EYES ONLY
As Marcus & Pan weren't present during your troubles, they should only find this out by word of mouth from you, should you choose to tell them.
The statue was dragged out of Redflood Lake by a fisherman from Mossbridge. He had spent a couple of days bringing it up after his nets fouled on it, and was well pissed off when the village bailliff told him it obviously belonged to the Schwarzgelts as it came out of their lake. So, when the bailliff went to tell the Schwartzgelts about their new treasure, he rowed it back into the middle of the lake and dumped it overboard again. For this, he was flogged.
In reality, of course, he only said he'd dumped it back in the lake. In fact it was secreted on the far side of the lake and picked up by Ammerdale, Gelert and Bart. Gelert and Bart had set out prominently with the cart from Mossbridge and, as expected, been searched by the nosy bailliff - so it was safe to load the statue on when they passed its hiding place. The fisherman expects to get a cut of the sale price (he expects to get half the cash).
It is made of red sandstone and depicts a pretty woman, standing on a plinth with the runes Truth / Harmony carved into it. At some point, its left hand has been snapped off; and its right hand looks like it was carved around something (possibly a sceptre from the way it was held) which is absent. It is covered with weed, slime, mud, and other lakebed detritus.
Janus, the Thule alchemist, suggested casting a Detect Magic spell on it. (As an Irippi Ontor, he has several Detect spells.) This showed the statue is faintly magical, with some bright sparks from the broken wrist. Janus suggested this meant there was an enchantment on the statue at one time, which was broken when the hand was snapped off.
Beneath the dried slime on the base is a word in what Janus claimed was the old Karmanian alphabet: ÊROGh, i.e. Erath. Gelert immediately thought of selling the statue to The Magister.
The cart trip from Bloodburst to The Magister's wasn't quite so straightforward as implied in Game Memo20.
As your cart trundled north, with its cargo of turnips & the statue, a strange mist descended. The sound of the horse's hoofs took on an echoing, cloppy quality: it seemed to be walking over a rocky path, not a muddy one. The vegetation seemed sparser, greyer and there was no birdsong.
Suddenly, the horse pulled up - the path ended in a cliff. Gelert had been through this before, on the same path, with Marcus and Pan a few days earlier. And now a sinister scrabbling sound could be heard approaching. Before, when the Thing had targeted Marcus, it hadn't seemed anything like as frightening. But now... where were they? How could they escape? It was then that Gelert / Bart / Ammerdale noticed the statue's eyes were glowing faintly red. What could this mean? They could feel their grasp on comfortable reality slipping. But Gelert knew that whatever was out there, was inimical, and perhaps their only hope lay in this statue. The two Runes carved into the plinth at the base of the statue were glowing too.
Something about them reminded the PCs of worship ceremonies at their shrines, where you pray and focus on their Runes. In desparation, they Prayed to the statue, prayed harder than they ever had before. The entire statue began glowing, and suddenly, it animated! It clumsily (lacks a hand, remember) climbed down from the cart. It approached Ammerdale, reached out, and took his dagger. Then, holding this out in front of it - not like you'd hold a weapon, but as if it was presenting it to something - it marched out into the mists to confront ...?.
It disappeared into the swirling fog, and a minute later there was a bright red glow from that direction. The PCs felt as if a great weight of fear had been lifted from their minds, and the mists dispersed. They were back on the road to Arin House, and the staue lay a hundred yards off, back on its plinth in its old position. The dagger was in its grasp, but was easy enough to extract.
Bart and Gelert (and the less than demonstrative Ammerdale?) were profoundly moved by this experience, and became instant Believers in the statue, whoever she was. (They still intend selling her, though... ?)