Chapter 108: Slave dealer (First Part)

Luck finally appeared to be on my side as all the problems weighing down on my mind for weeks were solved one after the other.

The most important of which being that thanks to Jazor, a safe passage toward the Dorell Kingdom would be assured for my future group by his friends. Not having guards controlling our identities at the border or simply conducting a body search was a relief impossible to deny considering the nature of our group’s members.

Therefore, immediately after the end of this gathering, I tried to pass on this good news to Paul and Alianelle. However, they had already left the dilapidated hotel where I had spent the night with them, and this time without leaving any note or indication behind about their future whereabouts.

I was starting to worry when Paul finally came to find me himself the following day. His search revealed that his friend, who could have offered them shelter for a few days, was already gone from the city. Without any other solution available, he settled with Alianelle in a third hotel, apparently barely better than the previous, but discreet and affordable for his meager savings.

He was certainly immensely relieved to hear about the solution found to safely cross the border with his daughter, but each day spent inside this city was an ordeal for him and Alianelle. A single mistake could condemn his daughter to insufferable torments for the rest of her life, like her mother before her. However, despite his eagerness and worries, we couldn't leave yet.

Just like me Paul also wanted to free Himara and Seth.

Something that couldn’t be done before the auction.

Walmir had affirmed to me that with his arrival, and his confirmation that all his other colleagues were dead, his employer would have no other choice but to start this auction quickly for the sake of the mines.

To avoid escape attempts, rebellions, and a lot more troubles that so many slaves could cause in such an isolated city, a unique tradition had been created by the Dwarves of the first Advanced town. Twice a year, they organized a release of slaves who had accomplished the desired amount of work which was decided when they started their labor. These newly freed slaves were replaced by others freshly captured that were sold in a grand auction.

An auction already severely delayed by the wrath of the wilderness, making the situation inside the mine tense because of the slaves who should have already been freed.

That’s what Walmir explained to me, probably to reassure me that this auction would soon be organized.

I had no idea when Walmir was going to inform me of the date, but in the meantime, Paul agreed to stay locked up inside his shabby hotel room with Alianelle to avoid any accident.

Fortunately, the fact that after a few days inside this city, Alianelle’s presence and true nature weren’t revealed yet seemed to prove that Ilan had indeed kept his word to not sell Alianelle’s secret to anyone.

Another most welcome news for both of us.

With this threat weighing constantly on him almost gone, Paul’s paranoia seemed to have somewhat lessened. Although, he hurriedly left to rejoin his daughter after the end of our short discussion.

How long he would have to stay inside this hotel room, I didn’t know, but we were both of the same opinion that the shorter the better.

Another future problem was being taken care of by Kakuz — the elegant dwarf — who accepted after a bit of convincing to act as my intermediary to meet the various merchants of the city with the help of a few of his friends. It was difficult to convince him to willingly spread a certain rumor, but it was absolutely necessary, of that I was sure. Unfortunately, even with his help, something like that was going to take a few days at the very least.

With this thought in mind, I patiently waited for Walmir’s message.

Doubt certainly bloomed faster than trust as each day spent waiting for Walmir to finally contact me, seemed to make my decision to leave the children into his hands waver.

Four days had passed since the meeting with Jazor’s friends, so only five since I let Walmir take Seth and Himara with him, but the worry gnawing constantly at my mind ever since couldn’t be easily ignored. At the very least, it was impossible to relax as Jazor did as he appeared determined to catch up on his sleep, lost while rushing to reach this Advanced town.

Fortunately, Zena took it upon herself to make him move from his bed because, on the morning of this fifth day in this town, she suddenly barged into our room to wake him up and make him finally do something useful. I wasn’t inside the hotel at the time, but the mess she made and the beating she gave him when he refused were apparently epic according to the hotel owner.

I deeply regretted having missed that, but I had other more important things to take care of.

Having finally run out of patience, I had decided to track down Walmir and his employer using the only person in my acquaintances who knew them both.

However, finding Ilan inside the city proved to be more difficult than I had anticipated. I was forced to once more wander the streets while interrogating unwilling passersby. When I finally found him near the Mercenary Guild, weary from a day of searching, the sun was already starting to set.

Nevertheless relieved, I approached him and immediately noticed his scowling face keeping everyone away from his path. Something I was the only one not to do, and almost regretted as Ilan quickly disappointed me when he informed me that I had wasted my time.

No matter how much I pleaded, he categorically refused to give me a single detail about Walmir’s employer besides warning me against trying to meet him without being invited first. Apparently, this chief of the slavers of the first Advanced town was an important and unscrupulous figure that it was better not to antagonize.

My previous encounter with Jazor’s Dwarven friends and my long collaboration with Walmir had put some things in perspective and challenged some of my preconceptions about slavery and the people related to it. However, according to Ilan’s description, this will not be something likely to happen with this man if the horrors about him that he briefly told me about were true.

Ilan’s unsavory description of this personage made it even more difficult than before to leave Himara and Seth into his hands for another day, but it also made it clear that it wouldn’t be smart to suddenly show up uninvited.

Before leaving him to return to my hotel, I learned why he was making such a face. He was the one that Jazor was talking about when he promised Zena to find another mage, slightly weaker than him according to him, to participate in the defense of the city. I didn’t know how Jazor had managed to convince him considering how unwilling Ilan appeared to fulfill this mission.

Fortunately, my long wait ended the following day when I finally received a letter from Walmir at the reception of our hotel, which Jazor was now paying the rent for both of us.

It’s with this paper in hand that I was currently roaming the narrow and poorly designed streets of the city. Despite asking for directions from guards, merchants, and regular inhabitants, my goal appeared desperately hard to find. Things would have been probably easier if the rare passersby, who were trying to go about their business as usual were more willing to help me. Despite their polite smiles and apparent relaxed attitude, at first sight, the truth was that it wasn’t possible for them to completely hide their nervousness about the reality of our current situation.

Behind this facade of calm that all the inhabitants still present were trying to maintain from a silent common agreement, it was impossible to deny that the city was under attack. Even the professional smiles of the merchants around, eager to answer the queries of their rare clients, seemed forced.

No one could blame them after nearly a full day and night of confrontation outside the wall by an unending wave of endless enemies. There was a reason for Zena to have come to get Jazor to help them.

This horde had appeared yesterday and immediately assaulted the wall with the same mad abandon as I had witnessed along my journey across the wilderness. No matter how many of them failed to break through the impenetrable defenses of the city or collapsed under one of the defender’s magic, they kept attacking without any regard for their lives.

Under the influence of mana, normal animals could undergo a long and difficult evolution to open the door to sentience and magic. To achieve this, they had to overcome a frenzied period. Before becoming a true magical beast, they had to become deviants and survive this period, more or less long, where their own safety and survival come after their bloodlust.

The wrath of the wilderness was created because of a significant rise in the ambient level of mana, so in a sense, those animals desperately trying to tear us apart despite their catastrophic losses were all already deviants on the hard path of evolution that few would cross.

Of course, for most of them, the rise in the level of mana of their environment was too sudden, too brutal for them to properly evolve as deviants. As a result, most of them didn’t show the same abnormal strength or resistance as a normal deviant, if there was such a thing as a ‘normal deviant’. However, few among the inexperienced defenders, forced to take the weapons to replace the soldiers and mages gone to salvage the situation elsewhere, were aware of it.

That’s probably why Zena had come herself to get Jazor out of his bed as soon as possible to make him uphold his promise to help defend the city. The addition of a strong true mage experienced enough to know this subtle difference was precious beyond measure in such troubled times.

Jazor was also aware of this, so despite his apparent reluctance when he left, he had done his best to defend the city and honor his part of the deal, which was the only way for Zena’s superiors to accept that several competent mages would have to leave for a few days to accompany my group beyond the border.

The brief conversation I had with Jazor when he came back to our room exhausted from his first day of combat was enough for me to understand that.

As I continued to walk on the paved road of the city, turning around regularly to find the right path, the streets appeared pretty calm, but even this far away from the walls and the ongoing battle, it was possible to hear the distant clash of weapons, the roars of the crazed beasts and the explosions similar to distant thunder in a clear sky.

In the same way, when the earth under my feet started to shake, I immediately recognized Jazor’s magic.

His most developed aspect of the earth element was linked with earthquakes.

By applying vibration to his weapon or fists, he could bypass any defense — even from the monstrous Krath — and defeat or downright destroy his opponents by directly attacking their inner organs. However, such a powerful application of this aspect of the earth element could only be used with direct physical contact. Something impossible to do, while standing far away from so many different opponents.

Fortunately, learning the secret of an aspect of an element could lead to the creation of a multitude of different magics. By using the same aspect of the earth element, Jazor could also create incredibly devastating earthquakes and lay waste to hordes of opponents.

I saw him do it more times than I could remember but also knew as a result how taxing this kind of ability was for him.

If Jazor was using it, now, the situation outside must be even direr than any of us, away from the battle, could imagine.

Even direr than the day before.

Unfortunately, despite this realization, I couldn’t do anything to change this situation to help my friend. The worst thing to do would be to draw everyone’s attention to me, something that was doomed to happen if a normally defenseless child suddenly showed magical prowess beyond anything humanly possible to defend the city.

Another earthquake, stronger than the previous, made all the buildings around me shake, and forced me to stop in my tracks. The carefully maintained stalls were thrown to the ground while the masks of calm and confidence worn by the inhabitants crumbled. How many were forced to stay, or didn’t have any other place to escape to, I didn’t know.

All I could do in this instant was pity them; not because I had found a way out of this battling town and not them, but because I knew Jazor whereas they didn’t, and wasn’t forced to pray for my safety unlike them.

I had faith in Jazor and knew that as long as he remained standing, we were all safe.

However, when a menacing flock of a dozen giant birds with silver wings suddenly appeared beyond the clear sky, I wasn’t able to show the same confidence. I had learned battle after battle to fear and hate these opponents and knew that Jazor’s magic had little effect on them.

Distant vibrations had caused the few people’s faces around me to turn pale and made their knees grow weak. With a direct threat to their lives, finally in front of their eyes, flying in the sky in a strange crossed formation, I thought that all hell would break loose, that the apparent courage and confidence of these people would completely disappear.

However, I was wrong.

Curiously, this time none showed any reaction of fear or panic.

They all raised their eyes to the sky to watch with mild curiosity these harbingers of death circling their city beyond their reach to prepare for their attack.

I soon understood why none of them feared them as they should.

It wasn’t that they weren’t aware of the lethality of their magic, or oblivious to the sharpness of their talons used with deadly accuracy and inhuman speed, but simply that no harm could befall them. No matter what tactic these cursed birds used, a translucent red layer prevented them from landing any attack on the defenseless population under it.

For the people watching calmly this scene of crazed birds attacking one after another with everything at their disposal, it was apparently one thing for the integrity of the wall to be threatened by earthquakes of unknown origins, and another entirely different to begin to imagine that the perseverance of these birds would be rewarded.

For them, the magic of the wall was absolute, for the defenses it summoned couldn’t be broken.

After a few minutes of this rampage, when even these crazed animals maddened by the ambient mana appeared to have understood this reality, flaming arrows split the sky, hit a few unlucky individuals of this massive flock, and forced the rest to hurriedly escape.

The burning bodies of the victims of these attacks from some unknown defender of the city continued to violently thrash around for long seconds under the eyes of the populace suddenly much more interested in this display of shining violence. When their ability to fly was finally taken away from them by the pain and the importance of their growing wounds, the birds didn’t immediately fall to the ground but continued to be strangely maintained, floating in the sky, by this barely visible red layer.

It’s only when their body completely stopped despite the flames still consuming them, that this layer of support disappeared. The birds hit the hard ground one after the other in a sickening noise of broken bones and crushed meat.

Satisfied that their attacker had met their just end, the few passersby and merchants who had stopped in their tracks, finally resumed their respective activities. This bloody sight I witnessed many times in many different forms didn’t summon any disgust from me anymore, but also certainly not the strange satisfaction all these people seemed to have felt when these unfortunate creatures met a fate too cruel for any decent being with empathy to accept.

If this scene was a little too visual and bloody to my taste and my nose, disturbed by this distinct and sadly now familiar odor of burnt flesh, at least it had the merit of showing me the might of the magic protecting all these inhabitants from the cruel madness beyond the wall.

A few more different species with wings tried their luck during the time it took me to reach my destination, but this time I didn’t stop to add images to the unwelcomed sounds in the background. So loud were the screams of these poor souls and so boisterous were the acclamations of the few people finding this spectacle welcomed and even entertaining that I failed to immediately notice just how desert the part of the city I had just entered truly was.

Before the order to make the crossing of the border much more difficult, many were wise enough to escape this city with only the clothes on their back. As a result, along with the fair number of people mobilized at the wall for the defense and the original defenders of this city gone to lend their strength elsewhere, the streets were all pretty deserted to the grief of the many merchants who had chosen to stay here in these troubled times. However, it was still possible to regularly cross paths with Dwarves and Humans alike or even see a few faces hidden behind their curtains.

Not here.

Not a single soul could be seen.

Many houses were present on each side of the road, in a joyous mess that I had learned to hate, but they were empty. My magic sense confirmed what my eyes and ears could only guess. The only building with living beings inside was standing in front of me.

A single paved and well-maintained road led to this impressive two-story building made of black stones as if to confirm to me that it was the only destination possible, the only place of interest in this deserted neighborhood. The massive wooden door at the front was tightly closed and appeared to shine under the rays of the sun as if it had been carefully polished. The glittering facade gave me the same impression of unnatural cleanness, even more striking compared with the modest houses around that had obviously been abandoned by their owner for quite some time.

An innocent soul walking by accident on this road would have certainly been drawn to this curiosity and a careless or downright naive person would have probably approached to admire the intricate golden patterns on the black walls.

However, I was done being careless and had lost my innocence a long time ago despite my youthful appearance.

This kind of outward elegance couldn’t hide the fact that no window could be seen on the glistening, immaculate black walls or that the number of people under this building was at least ten times superior to the people waiting for me beyond the closed door.

I didn’t need to reread Walmir’s instructions to know that I had finally reached the place where Seth and Himara were detained.

Unwillingly, a part of the monstrous mana I was keeping deep within me for my own safety resurfaced for a brief instant, as if this subconscious part of myself knew what kind of disposal this sordid place deserved. However, I quickly tamed this beast within me and forced the slumbering power down once more.

Now wasn’t the time to fight.

If I had a way of safely saving all these unfortunate souls along with Seth and Himara waiting behind these closed doors, I would have already done it. However, even in this half-deserted city, devoid of most of its strongest mages, I knew that I wasn’t strong enough for that.

Maybe one day I will be.

Maybe one day, after my body had grown up, the slumbering and unnatural power I had gained with my reincarnation would be within my grasp, free for me to use and able to get rid of anything in my way.

However, this time hadn’t come yet.

Aware of the risks for a lone child to enter this kind of building, I forced the door open and entered the dim interior while wondering what could be hiding beyond this darkness.