Ramakith's rounded up family came out to be three official wives, ten slave-wives, and sixteen enslaved, sterilized concubines. Among these women, he had sired thirty-one living children. Twenty-four were daughters, and of the seven boys, three were still suckling infants, two more were toddlers, one had been hidden as a daughter and had reached the age of twelve, and the other was a man nearing thirty years of age.

Kestra had turned Inspri loose on the inventory of the Reward Shop, and the sprite had discovered a wonderful little device that only cost 850,000 challenge points. It was called the Orb of Truthfulness and had to be fed any grade of mana stones to operate, but it glowed golden for truth and a disgust-inducing warp of blue-black shadows for lies. Subjective opinions, orders, and questions left the orb dull.

On spotting the discrepancy in the children's sexes, she immediately asked Ramakith's eldest son, "Have you killed any of your siblings, or ordered their deaths?"

"No, of course not!" the man protested, and the orb turned into a ball of shadows.

"Were any of these kills done solely for your benefit?" she asked.

"I would never do such a thing!" he said, earning more shadows.

Kestra pursed her lips. "I did not ask what you would do; I asked what you have done." The orb briefly glowed golden. "Yes or no: have you killed or ordered killed any of your siblings to profit from their deaths?"

"No! What outrageous slander!" he roared.

The orb returned to shadows.

"As you have murdered for profit, I declare your life forfeit," Kestra ruled, the orb turning inert.

"This is a travesty! An injustice! How dare you!?" the man roared.

Kestra pointed at the orb. "Use your Inspect spell, you blithering idiot!" she snapped.

Another of those hand-held pellet guns like the one the late Lord Ramakith had used appeared in the younger Ramakith's hand. Kestra had an Air Shield up with her Control Air spell before he pointed his hand, and she put another up behind him. Then she used a third application of Control Air to pneumatically launch her own projectile, this one a sawmette disc made from shaped stone.

The first shield stopped the explosive-launched pellet, then collapsed to allow her sawmette to decapitate the younger Ramakith. The second shield prevented the sawmette from continuing on over the crowd.

Kestra didn't like killing sapients, but you didn't survive as a Lancer for fifteen years without facing down bandits at some point. Death wasn't new to her.

Nor, did it seem, was it all that new to Puck, though more than a few of the crowd recoiled from the swiftness of the brutal exchange.

Kestra waved to one of the guards. "Put his body, and his head, beside his father's funerary altar."

Kestra had sorted out the wives, calling for the execution of the two senior official wives and six of the ten slave-wives by the time another group was escorted into the Central Plaza.

These were the "special" slaves, nearly all of them travelers that Lord Ramakith had enslaved, and among them was Puck's friend, Tank.

Puck jumped down from the stage and went to his friend, helping him up to come sit as a witness. Tank was pale even for his naturally light skin tone, wearing ragged clothes, obviously recently healed and low on stamina. Kestra passed him a drinking-bowl of fish broth after Puck helped him to the second seat, then returned to interrogating Ramakith's family.

She was working through the daughters, who were thankfully much less blood thirsty than their mothers and senior brother had been.

The executions had also been far more civilized, for lack of a better description. Kestra wasn't trying for spectacle here, simply the rough justice necessary to start righting the wrongs Lord Ramakith had perpetrated. A quick knife thrust into the skull, separating the spinal column meant the executed felt little to no pain.

The slaves and their owners had been gathered up, the slaves watching with a growing hope while their owners felt a growing dread.

At the end judging Lord Ramakith's family, five assorted wives, twenty-three daughters, and six sons survived the late city lord.

Kestra sent a guard off to the Jade Pearl Auction House with a note for Manager Mardu before she returned to sorting out the slaves.

According to the notices Inspri had handled for her, there were 11,346 residents of Sortalheim, of whom 793 were slaves. Even if she flew through the interviews, she wasn't going to get to everyone that day, so she ordered the slaves and their owners to sort themselves into different groups. The first division were those slaves born to First Horizon, and those not.

Unsurprisingly, Kestra found that most of those not of the First Horizon were now her slaves. That accounted for 87, whom she had returned to the Lord's Donjon to be interviewed in private.

Five more non-local slaves were owned in the city, and Kestra had them stay near by.

For the rest, she had them group by whether they were enslaved as a matter of criminal punishment, or were sold into slavery. Kestra had anyone born into slavery included in the group who had been sold. She had scribes go through and take down the names and addresses of the slave owners and their sold-slaves.

Manager Mardu, escorted by twelve guards from the Jade Pearl Auction House, arrived at the Central Plaza during this process. His expression was painfully neutral as he was brought up on the stage.

Kestra handed him over a box of mana stones. "I sell these to you at the currency rate in exchange for half in coppers, three-tenths in silvers, and the remaining in gold coins, less the cost of the storage device to transport the funds. Is this acceptable?"

He looked into the box, verified that there were as many mana stones as her note has promised, bowed, and handed her a storage broach while storing the box of mana stones. "More than acceptable, Honorable Divine." It amused Kestra that her truth-revealing orb glowed gold at that.

Letting her voice carry with a bit of amplification via Control Air, Kestra announced, "I expect that in two or three days I shall be done sorting through the matters the Ten Horizons deemed needful to issue a quest to resolve. After that time, I intend to meet with the heads of the trading houses, crafting guilds, and higher Horizon association branches. The topic shall be governance of the city going forward. Even if some of those invited are prevented by prior obligations from participating in this meeting, as has been indicated to me may be true of the Jade Pearl Auction House, I feel it important that such individuals be present to bear witness to the discussions."

"I shall be honored to accept such an invitation," Manager Mardu said, bowing again, and keeping the orb golden. He recognized the dismissal, and he and his guards went directly to the realm anchor.

After that, Kestra sent the broach off to Inspri, who removed the currency and shuffled it over to her storage ring.

While she waited on the clerks, she called forward the first of the non-local slaves, having his owner remain to the side.

"Can you write legibly?" she asked the slave, a dusky hued man.

"Yes, City Lord," he answered meekly.

"Write down for me all of the titles listed on your profile," she ordered, giving him the materials to do so.

When he finished, she perused the list. Keeping the orb in her vision, she asked, "To the best of your knowledge, are these all of the titles on your profile?"

"Yes, City Lord," he again answered meekly. The orb darkened.

"Are you under a realm oath that prevents you from speaking on any matters that might relate to the titles showing on your profile?" she asked.

He hesitated, then looked at her with regret. "No, City Lord."

The orb darkened again.

Lowering her voice and conjuring up a sound shield, she asked, "Do you have the Transmigrator title?"

The slave hesitated as he gazed at the orb. "I … cannot survive answering that question, City Lord," he offered, scared and hesitating his way through every word.

"Will you suffer if you are no longer legally enslaved?" she asked.

More calmly, the slave answered, "I--. No?" The orb turned inert.

Kestra dismissed the bit of Control Air, then conjured Fire and destroyed the piece of paper on which the slave had written.

She summoned the owner. "Have you bound this slave with realm oaths?"

"Why would I do such a thing?" the man asked, smiling insincerely.

"Yes or no," Kestra demanded.

"I have secrets to which my slaves are privileged. It would be foolhardy not to do so," the owner answered, no longer smiling. The orb's golden glow got a resentful glare.

"Was this man enslaved by Lord Ramakith?" she asked.

"I don't see why that matters," the owner hedged.

"Yes or no."

"Maybe, yes?" Inert.

"As a statement," Kestra ordered.

"Yes!" Another glare at the golden glow.

"Release this man from any oaths he has taken to you," she ordered, quite grimly.

He sucked in his breath, his face purpling with rage.

She added, pointing at the funerary altar, "Or you can join the corpses. That will also work."

The rage choked off as his bulged. He swallowed, and shakily stated, "I release my slave from the oaths he has made to me."

Golden light dissipated off the slave.

"The title I asked you about, do you possess it?" she asked the slave.

"Yes," he answered. The orb glowed gold.

"You are hereby freed from your enslavement," Kestra decreed. "I request that you remain to hear a proposition I have for those who hold our shared title."

She gave the former owner ten silver coins. "Thus are you compensated for the loss of your slave. Clerk, please record the judgment."

There were no other transmigrators among the non-local slaves, and while one had been unjustly enslaved, he had not been enslaved by Lord Ramakith. Kestra still saw him freed, his former owner compensated. As with the first, she asked that he remain to hear her out on a proposal.

When the last of the clerks returned, reporting the names of the sold-slaves and their owners had been recorded, Kestra dismissed the sold-slave owners with the admonishment to return to the Central Plaza the next day, before the sun rose over the city walls.

Then she moved on to the last group, the supposed criminals. Of these, there were 137.

She interviewed each of them, each interview recorded by the legal proceedings scribe. She asked about the circumstances surrounding how they became slaves. She pried for the nature of the crime they had been accused of, and whether they were actually guilty of the crime. More than half she deemed their enslavement just. She sent them and their owners off, with the warning that there would be new laws concerning the treatment of slaves coming out soon, and they would be applicable from the time that Kestra became the City Lord. To act with compassion would be the safest course in the meanwhile.

Those she deemed to have been unjustly enslaved, she ordered freed on the spot. She paid the owners ten silver coins in compensation, and asked the newly emancipated slaves to remain a while and hear her out on a proposal.

There was a crowd watching it all, as she had planned, and they murmured about her generosity, and wondered what would happen to the freed slaves.

The sun hung low on the horizon when finished interviewing the last of those enslaved for crimes. She checked her progress on her quest, wincing as she saw there had been nine more people to suffer an unjust enslavement since receiving the quest.

Quest: Free the Slaves!

Requirements: Free those Lord Ramakith Ard of Sortalheim has unjustly enslaved.

Progress: 23 / 147 Freed Slaves

Rewards:

‎ Rewards vary by completion

EXP: 5% to next level

She looked about, and realized that the prisoners awaiting trial were still in the holding cage.

Kestra stretched her neck, conjured up some Fire to provide light, and decided to sort them out, too.

Of the twenty-seven people in the holding cage, all but five of them had been caught in the raid on Tank and Puck's rebel camp. She had them declare their innocence of banditry, and set them free. The five others proved to be a murderer (guilty), two youths charged as thieves (complicated), a slave accused of murdering his master (innocent), and a burglar (guilty). The murder had been an escalation of a fight over a whore's attentions, so Kestra sentenced the murderer and the burglar to swear themselves into slavery in service of the city for a term of ten years. The alternative was to join the corpse pile, and they swore with alacrity at that warning.

The youths were guilty of petty thieving, but they were also barely into puberty and starving. She had them stick around with the emancipated slaves.

Tank and Puck were still watching on, almost as good at fading into the background as Kestra had been before leveling up her Stealth skill.

Kestra spun up her Control Air spell to make that sound shield again. "Before I speak with you individually, I want you all to know that if you don't know what to do with yourselves now that you are free, I am willing to hire you as city laborers. This will come with livery, room, and food, and work appropriate for your skills and stats."

Then she went from freed slave to freed slave, beginning with the locals. Those who know what to do with their freedom, she gave a bag of coins, thirty copper and twenty silvers. The ones who choose to hire on with the city, she sent off with the clerks to be assessed for the best work they could do to benefit Sortalheim. She extended the same offer to the man from a different Horizon and the two youths.

The man took the money and went on his way while the youths joined the city laborers.

Then she came to the transmigrator.

"Now, it's time to go see about sorting out the slaves I personally gained from Ramakith. I expect a lot of them will be in your shoes, and have taken soul-shock from the difference in cultures. Let's go see how to handle that, yeah?"

The Lord's Donjon took the shape of a mansion with two wings to the sides set forward. The mansion faced east, and the south wing served as the administrative hub of Sortalheim, while the north wing was given over to housing the lord's slaves and servants.

Kestra got updated maps from the guards, then had groups of the slaves brought into the main servant's dining hall. She took a moment to check in on her personal realm while the first group was getting rounded up. She saw that Yorgin was sleeping, a book beside his stone and moss bed, and Ralouf meditating, a few scrolls neatly stacked beside him.

Another one of Inspri's finds was among the Random options, which got her a few crates worth of the literature of the Ten Horizons. Among those were more than a few that addressed the philosophies under pining governance and war, and more than a few trashy romances that Inspri had developed a disturbing fascination with.

All of the duplicates of those books had been moved over to her retreat realm. Ralouf had put in stone shelves for a library, and Yorgin had tried to move in there. The snake had similar taste in literature to Kestra's Inventory Sprite, while Ralouf had discovered a few medical tracts to consider.

She didn't want to bother them, and all of the Elementals seemed pretty focused on their environmental manipulations.

Checking on the library reminded Kestra of her two prisoners. She retrieved their piles of gear from Inspri and then dropped the clothes, armor, and storage items next to them in their cell. She said, «Get ready to return to service, fellas. You got the notice about the new city lord and the transfer of your fealty oaths, right?»

"Yeah," Emgars the Whiner said. The relations between the two guards had shifted to a guarded armistice since being imprisoned together, and both looked apprehensive about what was to come.

«Well, here's your new lord's first order to you. Don't say anything about meeting me or where you've been incarcerated, not even to each other. You may allude to this time as 'when we were removed from that rebel cave'. Not bandit, rebel. You should probably also know that Metal Elemental had a snit and befouled about fifteen square kilometers of land that overlapped that cave. New dungeon's going in there to clean it up.»

The guards sucked in their breath as their oaths of service prickled through, warning that Kestra's orders were one they were bound to carry out.

They got dressed and equipped, and then Kestra pulled them out of her realm.

Quite a few people got to be startled by the sudden appearance of the two men. An alarm went up and suddenly city guards swarmed the two newly released men.

Kestra told the city guards, "Remember, firm is fine, compassion is necessary! No one wants to repeat the Ramakith cock-up and get quests issued to fix their follies, now, right?"

"Yes, City Lord!" The fanciest dressed of the guard saluted and oversaw hauling off poor Andol and Emgars.

Tank waited until the room was restored to order again to ask, quiet voiced, "Where did those two come from?"

Kestra shrugged. "This entire realm breaks my common sense." The orb she had brought out once more glowed a bright gold.

While Kestra had been in the Central Plaza, Inspri had been querying her little mind out, sorting through all the information she had gained from the city interfacing. There were some established Legal Codes, but none of the damned city lords were actually bound to seek mutual prosperity with their residents, not the way the Noble's Compact bound the Honorables elevated into the noble ranks back on Moh.

That irritated Kestra, so she started Inspri on drafting something that would hold the leadership of a city accountable to its citizens. And citizenship as Kestra knew it was an utterly foreign concept to the Ten Horizons, it seemed, so Inspri had needed to formulate how to integrate a new kind of "citizen" city resident to the existing system.

For her part, Kestra kept working through the night, interviewing her own personal slaves, freeing most of the local-born only to immediately hire them as city laborers or hand over enough coin for them to support themselves long enough to establish themselves wherever they chose to resettle. A few had panicked, terrified of being freed and returning to the families that had sold them in the first place, so Kestra hadn't freed them yet. She was giving them time to realize that they had more options than being enslaved, legally or filially.

The transmigrators she was saving for last. They were … disruptive, which was probably why they had been summoned to the Realm of the Ten Horizons, but she felt a need to be careful about just how they disrupted things.

When she spotted Puck nodding off, she sent the pair of them off to get some sleep, and also had the mansion staff ensure they got a bath, clothes, and food in whichever order they wanted.

She paused around dawn to get her own bath and change of clothes, and eat some breakfast. That and channeling her Minor Healing spell removed the traces of fatigue from her system, as well as the last vestiges of her wound.

From there, she went to the City Stone. According to the maps she had pulled data from among the mansion staff, the City Stone was kept in a sub-ground level of the mansion. It was a fixed position; once set, it had to be moved through the City Interface or not at all.

Letting Inspri guide her through the menus, Kestra began inputting a legal code for the city. None had been set before, which had meant that jurisprudence had had to be kept separate. The City Lords past has probably enjoyed that, letting everything default to a fiat system, but Kestra wasn't about to let that continue.

She got in the basics, like no murdering people, and saved it as a draft, work in progress when the reminder she had requested came in the form of a knock.

Then she got a shift change of clerks together with some of the city guards to keep order and returned to the Central Plaza.

The corpses had been cleared away from the stage, but not her chairs. She ignored the seat when she mounted the stage once more. Instead, she looked at the last five hundred slaves in her city.

Laborers brought along scribes desks, setting up five stations before the stage. Scribes brought the tools of their trade with them, settling in. The stage but for Kestra was kept clear, where she set out a pedestal from her storage to hold the Orb of Truthfulness.

Kestra used Control Air to carry her voice once more across the plaza. "Slaves! Order yourselves into five lines. Each line will start at one of the scribe desks before this stage. The scribes will take statements from the slaves -- slave owners may not answer these questions, nor prevent the questions from being answered in full . These questions will be: what is your name on your profile ? By whose authority were you made a slave? What was the justification given to make you a slave?

"There might be quite a number of these, but broadly speaking they will be punishment for a crime, self-sold to cover debt or avoid starvation, sold by family member, sold as a prisoner of war, sold by bandits. I'm sure I'm not even touching all the reasons.

"Finally, slaves, the full list -- full! -- of your titles as listed upon your profile will be asked.

"The clerks will then hand up the pages with your answers to an attendant on the stage, who will deliver them to me. You will queue to the south side of the stage and come up when I call you. I will ask you, before the Orb of Truthfulness, if you answered the scribes honestly. You will answer Yes or No. I will then ask if you provided the scribes the full list of your titles. You will answer Yes or No.

"If the orb reveals you have lied, you will be remanded to an interrogator, who will have the duty to determine the truth of the questions I have just listed."

She let that statement settle in for a moment.

"Owners! If you have bound your slaves with realm oaths that might interfere in answering these questions, I suggest you repeat the following: 'I release only that part of the oaths made to me that would prevent my slave from answering the questions just described'.

"If your slave ends up in front of an interrogator, you will be right there, too!

"Now, line up!"