by Noah Layton
‘I found something rather peculiar in a box beneath one of the beds, too,’ Elera said, retrieving a small pocket-satchel from her inventory and handing it to me.
I opened the satchel and eyed the contents then, unable to see, tipped a little into my hand.
A small quantity of red dust fell into my palm.
‘That would be moonrise,’ Lara said instantly, nodding at it. ‘It’s the drug that Werger’s so-called wives were using, the one he had them hooked on.’
‘Mm…’ I said absently, examining the dust. Many of my tribespeople had used moonseed back at our land – Tormus and Eri were experts at growing it and we had spent several nights under its spell, waking up rested and with clear heads the next morning.
Moonrise, on the other hand, was a combination of moonseed and ashgraze. It was highly addictive and highly destructive, and it had caused Werger’s wives to become dependents who passed themselves around their master and his guards in exchange for another hit.
I had no doubt that it would bring in a much better price than the moonseed on Agraria’s market, but I had seen what it could do, and I had no desire to spread that kind of pain into the world.
‘Tell me if you find any more of this stuff,’ I said to everyone. ‘We’ll keep it in storage back at the land.’
‘You think that we should sell it?’ Artrix said. ‘It would fetch a reasonable price, better than moonseed alone…’
‘God, no. Moonseed I’m fine with selling, but this stuff is too harmful. That said, we don’t know when things will come in handy. Everything has a use.’
I deposited the moonrise into my inventory, where it amounted to two units.
I looked over the further contents of what we had taken from the guardhouse and helped remove anything else that wasn’t a part of the actual building.
We separated everything into two piles – those we were keeping and those we would destroy. Weapons, potions and valuables were distributed into the keep pile, while beds, clothes and shoddy pieces of armor were dropped into the destroy pile.
That said, destroy might have been the wrong word – deconstruct was more appropriate, if it was possible to do such a thing.
There was no sense in just dumping them in the forest. We could make something of use from them.
Once we had removed everything, I deconstructed the house in the same fashion as the first, adding more stacks of wood to my inventory in the process before piling them into the carts.
Then came Werger’s own quarters.
A thorough check in the basement presented nothing beyond the chests overflowing with bluestone that Morok had already unlocked for us, as well as a few additional precious ores that must have been found in the process.
I elected to leave them down there for the time being; if we really were committed to salvaging the deal of a dead man, there would be no point in bringing it all back to my land. The meeting point was much closer to this land than my main section of tribal land, and ferrying it back and forth only made more work for us.
Besides, we had enough to shift.
I withdrew the precious metals from the chest and deposited them in the carts
Lara and Santana kept watch outside while Alorion kept two eyes on Morok. Ariadne, Elera and I returned to the treehouse once more and began rifling through everything.
Clothes were the first things to go. Werger had more outfits than I could count, as well as several sets of steel armor, not that he exactly did much fighting.
And then, there was:
‘Please do not tell me you expect us to wear such things in the future, Tall-man?’
I glanced over at Elera, who was removing piles of wears from the closet. She produced a kinky red-laced nightgown and held it up to herself.
‘That looks very expensive,’ Ariadne purred, her fox-ears twitching. ‘Lace is so difficult to make. But I expect that none of us have the desire to wear his wives hand-me-downs.’
‘You can wear whatever you want,’ I replied to Elera. ‘And nothing does not count as whatever you want, unless we’re in my quarters back at the land.’
‘I can live with that.’
‘Is there anything else in there?’
‘Just clothes.’
‘Well, keep looking. His gold stash has to be around here somewhere.’
I was still yet to come across it. Werger’s body was lying in a shallow grave just beyond the border of the land. I had checked him just as I had left a week back, but my search had yielded nothing but the Brutal Limb Breaker, the crushed remains of which were now sitting on the shelf above my bed, and the clothes on his back.
That was a part of Agraria’s system that made things tough; you could never know what a person was hiding in their inventory. If they were dead you could rifle all you wanted, but the only way to know what a living being had in their inventory was for them to hand it over to you physically or through a trading window.
Or, you know, you could drive a sword into their back, wait for them to die and then take what they had.
A dead man’s inventory was everybody’s business.
Werger could have given it to Morok for safekeeping, if he trusted him that much, which I seriously doubted. But if he didn’t have it, where the hell was it?
I still had two chests in the room to check, of course.
The heavy padlocks that guarded their innards were stronger than any I had ever seen, and with no skeleton keys left and no sign of the actual key, brute force was the only option.
I called up Lara, and together we carried both of them outside and into the clearing beneath the tree.
I drew my broadsword and aimed my swing like a pro-golfer, then drew back and struck.
CLUNK.
It rattled in the latch but remained firmly in place.
It took another eight well-calculated strikes before it finally bust free. I laid my sword down and ripped it away, then flipped the lid open.
1793GP
1x Cut Ruby
4x Uncut Sapphire
‘There’s the gold…’ I muttered. ‘I just thought it would be more than that for a guy like this…’
I broke the padlock on the other using the same brute-force method.
2x Gold bar
3x Poor Emerald
1x Cut Sapphire
10x Silver Bar
‘That looks like the rest of it,’ I smiled, smiling up at Santana and Lara. ‘This was beyond worth it. We’re going to be living the life soon enough.’
***
With the cart’s inventory filled and our own splitting at the seams, we prepared to return to my land.
But there was one more thing I had to deal with; Morok.
I found him on the other side of the tree where I had left him.
‘Listen,’ I started, looking down on him. ‘Here’s my predicament. I’m not a slave-driver, so there’s no way that I’d tie you up and throw you into a pit and force you to work. But I trust you about as far as I can throw you, which might be pretty far, but all the same, I can’t just set you free. You know where my land is, and that means you could bring people back here.’
‘I would never!’
‘Says the guy who greeted me by firing a crossbow my way.’
Morok went to speak, but paused. I raised a sceptical eyebrow, and all he could do in response was sigh.
‘My point exactly,’ I continued. ‘So, while I’m not a slave-driver, I am going to need to take precautions to look after myself and my tribe.’
I pulled up my inventory and removed a length of rope from it.
The moment Morok saw it his eyes went wide.
‘Oh, no, no, not again…’
It took more than a little fighting and scrambling, but in the end the goblin’s wrists and ankles were once again bound.
I slung him over my shoulder and dropped him carefully into the back of the cart alongside the rest of the haul that we had acquired.
‘So we’re bringing him with us?’
Ariadne asked, folding her arms and looking down at our captive.
‘For the time being,’ I replied. ‘He’s too much of a risk.’
‘I think that’s everything, then,’ Elera said.
‘Almost,’ Alorion replied, clambering atop a pile of supplies in the back of the cart and looking out over the land. His eyes were more focused than usual. ‘Werger’s imp is out here somewhere. Or rather I should say your imp, now.’
‘You’ll always be my imp, buddy,’ I said in earnest, even if it was a weird thing to say.
‘That is kind of you to say, Jack, but with ownership over this land this new imp is now also yours too.’
‘If she’s loyal to me, shouldn’t she be out here by now?’
‘Perhaps she is just afraid. I can think of a way to lure her out, though, if you would allow me to?’
‘Be my guest. What did you have in mind?’
‘Just leave it to me.’
Alorion hopped down from the cart and crossed on foot to the gap in the fence where we had entered.
I looked to my wives, who all shrugged at me. I moved our caravan in his direction.
My imp had stopped just before the entrance to the new land, and was now looking up at the towering trees that stood just beyond the border.
‘Alorion?’ I said. ‘Are you all right…?’
He remained perfectly still, staring up into the trees. The silence was deafening, and his motionlessness was starting to worry me a little.
Suddenly he released a high, feral sound from his lips, howling into the forest.
Alorion had always maintained a weird mix of upper-class, British-twanged speech and habits that reflected something closer to an animal than human.
That screaming sound was much closer to the former than the latter.
But there was method to this madness, because just seconds after his howl ended, a lower howl was returned from the forest.
Alorion took a deep breath, then suddenly broke into a series of bizarre, sharp movements.
Maybe I would have laughed if I wasn’t totally captivated by it. My wives were, too.
Then I realized what was really happening.
He was dancing.
The fact that there was no music playing made it even weirder.
My eyebrows raised involuntarily as I stared down at Alorion blankly like an idiot. I didn’t have the heart to ask him what he was doing.
But I knew how he was with women.
‘I struggle to form relationships with the opposite sex. I have all the desire in the world to find a mate, but I find it difficult.’
He was going balls to the wall in attracting the imp’s attention. This was part of the mating routine.
We waited in anticipation until the branches in the trees just above our heads began to rustle.
Alorion continued to dance until there was a sudden sharper rustling nearby.
Suddenly the new imp appeared, dropping down onto the fence and looking to Alorion.
She was similar in size and shape to Alorion himself, but with skin of a more orange shade that clashed with the green belonging to him.
My imp stopped dancing and looked up to her.
‘I am Alorion, of the Orakin Tribe. This is Jack, the master of our tribe. As the new master of this land, he claims ownership over you, and demands your loyalty.’
Ownership. I hated that word. I would build my wealth till the end of time, but when it came to sentient beings…
Still, it was lucky for Morok that I was so merciful.
The new imp looked to me for a moment, then smiled.
‘Greetings. I do not like to admit it, but I am glad that such a thing has happened. Werger was a vile being.’
Her higher voice denoted that she was definitely female.
Alorion looked at me over his shoulder.
‘She seems rather less conservative than myself.’
‘True.’ I turned to the imp. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Nyah, Master Jack.’
‘You don’t need to call me master,’ I said. ‘Jack’s fine. Is there any light you can shed on this place?’
‘I am afraid that I know comparatively little about your predecessors for an imp,’ she said. ‘Werger despised me. He confined me to the forest.’
‘Another reason for me to not feel so bad about killing that asshole,’ I replied. ‘Well, to make up for him, here’s a reward; make the treehouse your new home.’
‘… Really?’
‘Definitely. I need somebody to keep an eye on this place, and who better than the imp that comes tied to the land? We’ll be back in a few days.’
That was that. Nyah climbed down from the fence and began to move towards the tree.
In doing so she crossed paths with Alorion. They began to sniff each other like a pair of dogs, before both drawing away.
With that she headed to the tree.
‘So, does that mean she likes you?’ I asked my imp.
‘She is, uhh… How should I say… Holding back.’
‘Playing hard to get, you mean?’
‘Something like that.
‘You weren’t nervous, were you?’
‘Not at all. I think that it was all in my head after all.’
‘Attaboy.’
***
We were met with no threats during our return journey, except for the one of disloyalty that Morok inevitably brought with him.
When it really came down to it, though, the safety of my tribe was the most important thing to me. I did not trust Morok remotely enough to leave him unattended from here on out – he had worked for the enemy and, even if that enemy was very much dead, that was enough to make him a threat.
Upon returning to my our land I picked Morok up out of the back of the cart and carried him over to the tree.
‘I find this in very bad taste,’ he muttered. ‘This is inhumane.’
‘So is slavery, but you still stood by and helped some jackass profit off it.’
I set him up against the base of my treehouse home.
Oddly I was reminded of Coron, the only surviving bandit of the group that had tried kill me weeks ago, and how I had tied him up as my captive before handing him over to the captain of a merchant ship.
He was a young man who had fallen in with the wrong crowd. He could change.
Morok, on the other hand, was far too weathered to change who he was.
‘Here’s the deal,’ I started. ‘I’m going to have my people build a small shack for you to stay in. Nothing fancy. It’s only there to protect you from the heat during the day. You’ll be given food, water and a place to go to the bathroom, and that’s it. Just until I can figure out what to do with you.’
‘That sounds… Far too pleasant.’
‘Don’t think of it as a holiday,’ I replied. ‘Think of it more like… A prison cell.’
With the help of the fox-people I built up a small shack next to the eastern lookout post over the next half hour.
After setting Morok down inside, still tied-up, I ferried over a trough of water and a pot of vegetables.
‘A trough?’ Morok said. ‘You are treating me like an animal.’
‘I could treat you like a dead animal if you want?’
Morok gulped.
‘This will do fine.’
‘That’s what I thought.
I headed back to the tree and we got to work arranging the spoils of war. We unloaded our haul at the storage structure by its corresponding totem. I used 100GP to improve the inventory space that it allowed, and one at a time we stored everything within that we had removed from the land.
After all was said and done I decided to spend some time alone in the room, examining the vast array of storage slots before me. There were hundreds now, the vast majority filled. It was a gargantuan mosaic of food, unused weapons, decorations and valuables, and any tools and equipment that we needed.
And it was a complete mess.
I decided to spent t
he early afternoon rearranging it all into organised sections. Our food stores were divided into vegetables and meats, the latter we had a decent amount of lately because of the taurems that Jeremiah and Lola had recently slaughtered back at the Rourke Homestead.
Weapons couldn’t be stacked, but there weren’t too many of them, and they were always valuable. With our greater numbers and defenses built, I would shortly upgrade the Weapons Totem, seeing as we now had the gold to do it, and hopefully turn it into a proper armory for my tribe.
All of the precious ores were organised into their own area. I would need to figure out how to go about smelting them into bars soon enough so that we wouldn’t need to purchase them from the trading post.
Finally there was the miscellaneous category of items, and that was the largest by far. It consisted of pieces of rope, tools, raw materials for building and potion-making, and the important things that people rarely ever think of such as large stacks of torches to light the darkened nights.
It was mid-afternoon by the time I had finished it all, and as I re-emerged from the dark room and into the daylight, a true sense of life struck me.
All of my watchtowers were manned by the fox-people. My girls were scattered about, helping Tormus and Eri out with the farming or taking a break in the shade of the doorway to one of three family houses that now occupied our land – Cass and her brothers, Tormus and Eri and the fox-people.
I stopped and took a seat on the steps leading up to the treehouse. I looked out over everything. I was the kind of person that never sat still – not just because of my place as tribe master, as a leader of a group of people who depended on me for direction, but because of who I was.
But for a few seconds, just a few seconds, I took time to dwell on what I had, in the peace and tranquillity of the Orakin Tribe’s land.
I had over 10,000GP sitting in my inventory, and a storage hub stocked with enough supplies to keep the entire tribe well-fed for weeks. I had four beautiful wives who nursed me and took care of me and warmed every one of my nights.
But the bell of expansion was always ringing, and the deal with the mysterious tribe to the west was right there, on the horizon, ripe for the picking.
The only problem? It brought with it a potential danger that could put my life, and the lives of my tribe, on the thinnest, knife-edge line that I had experienced so far.