None of them were wearing slave collars.
I wonder if that has anything to do with Kara thinking she was dead, I thought as I finished glancing between the group, the brief sentence being the only thing to cross my mind before the woman reacted to my earlier words.
“And there’s our second bright light,” she stated in the same tone as earlier, matching my roving glance over her party with one of her own, her eyes scanning over each of us in turn before finally landing on me. “Hrm. And I thought we had it hard here. Is Fredric having trouble feeding all of you? Or did something else happen to you? You almost look worse than that poor arakissi over there.”
“It was a side effect from using an artifact to kill a Naffarian slave-king,” I replied without a missing a beat, any self-consciousness I may have still had about my appearance having begun to fade in recent weeks. “But on the plus side, I actually don’t need to eat or drink anymore. So that’s handy.”
“Really?” she answered with sudden interest, several of the other slaves behind her showing the same. “Now that sounds like an interesting story.”
“And I’d be happy to share it,” I said. “But maybe after we’ve had a chance to bring the tension down a notch here and have some proper introductions go around.”
“Fair enough,” the woman agreed with a nod as she finally lowered her hands and assumed a relaxed expression. “And you have nothing to worry about from us. If Cline hadn’t cleared you, then you’d have never seen us.”
“We appreciate the vote of confidence,” I replied, wondering where exactly things would have gone had the opposite been the case as I matched the half-elf stance, feeling the tension slowly drain from my body.
“I’m sure you all do,” she said dryly as everyone else slowly began to relax too, two of her companions stepping forward to join Theia who was still at Zua’s side while the others moved closer to us. This movement prompted Kara to move towards them as well, whatever shock she might have had at the group’s sudden appearance being outweighed by seeing if she could help her friend.
“In either case,” the woman continued, having spared a glance towards the fallen lizardwoman before turning back to me, “yes, I’m Aryana. Aryana Blackwater, former Royal Knight of Eberia. I served with Fredric closely at times during the war—whenever our postings put us in the same place. And until I found myself caught up in all of this shit, I was getting ready to enjoy a nice fresh start in Aldford, away from all the poison in Eberia. But from what I managed to catch about your own experiences, I imagine that you can fill in the blanks about how exactly those plans went astray.”
“All too well,” I agreed, earning a grim nod from her as she continued speaking.
“As for now, assuming that you all haven’t been able to piece it together already, I serve as one of the resistance leaders among the slaves here, planning and waiting for an opportunity to bite back at our new masters,” she said. “An opportunity that before your timely arrival seems to have suffered yet another setback.”
“I’m sorry,” I replied, giving the woman a somewhat defeated shrug at her words. “Had we known what was going on, we might have made a move to intervene and save Garr and Arcturus. Since we were coming in blind, we didn’t want to get involved in something without knowing the bigger picture.”
“Which is the smartest thing that you could have done,” Aryana said, waving away my apology without so much as a second thought. “Had you gotten involved and killed those orcs, you’d have at best triggered a brutal crackdown on the slaves here, or at worse, raised the alarm and gotten yourselves plus Garr and the others either caught or killed. At least with where we are now, the orcs are still unaware of your being here, which, believe me, is great for all of us, Garr and Arcturus especially.”
“But past that,” she continued, her face falling as she turned to look towards Cline with a questioning look, “that still begs the question of what happened to Garr in the first place and why he got caught.”
“Don’t know,” the man replied simply to the implied question as he reached into the very pocket that Berwyn had noted earlier to pull out what looked like a five-inch-long wooden spike, handing it over to Aryana without glancing at us. “Took care of mine and waited to regroup, then I heard him get pinched. Arcturus managed a distraction to get it to me, but he got nabbed because of it. They’ll be getting lashes and at least one rough questioning, but I’m not sure if they’ve been made.”
“Then we will need to hold our breaths and see if that’s the extent of their punishment this time,” Aryana replied softly as she took the piece of wood from the man and turned it over in her hands thoughtfully. As she did, I was able to see that a variety of what looked like magical symbols had been carved into the sides of the spike, giving it a rather exotic look. “In either case, I think that’ll be all for now. You should get back to somewhere where you’re seen before anyone notices you’re missing, and take Kara with you. You’ll have to brief her quickly and make sure she knows what’s at stake. I’m also afraid that from the looks of it, her friend is going to have to join us on a more permanent basis.”
“I’ll make sure she knows what that means,” Cline assured, the big man standing up without another word. As he did, he turned his head to give me a curt nod in farewell before stepping over towards Kara and the others. Unfortunately, however, I was suddenly too distracted to reply in kind to the man, having picked up on something in their exchange that didn’t make sense to my ear.
“Hold on a second, what do you mean this time?” I asked as I mentally replayed a portion of the conversation. “Garr and Arcturus have been captured before?”
“I wouldn’t call it exactly ‘captured’, but no, it’s not the first time they, or any of the others, have been taken for…let’s just call it enhanced questioning,” Aryana replied with a shake of her head. “And after saying that, I have a pretty good guess what you’re going to ask next, and I’ll be happy to explain it in due time. First, if you’re willing to indulge me, I’d like to hear the full story about what you told Cline—not just the highlights that we walked in on. If we’re going to be working together to sort out this shitshow here, I need to know what you all know and then start filling in what blanks I can.”
“Wait, that’s it?” Constantine asked, both him and the group having watched silently during our exchange so far. “You give us a little bit of a hard time and then boom we’re working together? Just like that?”
“Do I look like a woman with a lot of other options right now?” Aryana countered, going on to gesture at both herself and then her entourage. “Aside from a little bit of magic at our disposal and a few scraps of gear we’ve been able to stash away, what you see is all you get with us. On the other hand, you eight here are all fully kitted out with both weapons, armor, and magic. I’m not exactly in a position where I can ignore that.
“Hell, if I were to be brutally honest, the fact that you’re all from Aldford is just a bonus to me,” the woman went on to add. “Things are bad enough here that I’d pretty much take anyone with the gear you’re all wearing, assuming at least that I could point them in the right direction.”
“Well, I guess when you put it that way…” Constantine replied, shrugging his shoulders as he spoke.
“That’s the only way to put it,” Aryana stated. “And I’m not going to lie to you all, we’re in a desperate situation here, and your arrival couldn’t have come at a better time. Except for, you know, yesterday or literally any other day before it. But you’re here now and that’s what we have to work with.”
“And that we will,” I said as I settled down to retell our story once again, though this time I expected it to take much longer. “So. Where do you want me to start? And you’re sure we’ll be safe here? This might take a while.”
“From the beginning, if you don’t mind,” Aryana replied as she moved to sit down on a convenient rock nearby and settled in to listen. “And this place is safe enough as any here.
Right now, the bulk of the slaves are working on harvesting the western half of the field, so there’s no reason for anyone to be wandering this far out. If they do, one of my people will warn us with plenty of time to spare.”
“All right,” I said, pausing briefly to collect my thoughts. “In that case then, we’ll start things a little earlier this time around…”
Starting anew once again, we all retold our story to Aryana and the others, this time going into much more detail with regards to the war we’d found ourselves in and how it had unfolded. A patient listener, for the most part, Aryana allowed us all to speak with only a handful of interruptions for questions, all of them revolving around the timing of when different events took place. Apparently, they’d noticed the fallout of some of our efforts long before the war had started, the most obvious being the one following our attack on the Grey Devils, thus cutting off the flow of new slaves. But beyond that, there had been an unusual amount of excitement from some of the orcs during the events at the Twilight Grove, the reason for which they hadn’t been able to place.
“Things were relatively calm here until around that time. I wonder what caused them to change…” Aryana mused, her eyes unfocused as she stared towards the ground, temporarily lost in her thoughts before she shook off her introspection and motioned for us to continue. “Sorry, that’s not important right now, please continue. Your war started with them shortly afterward, right?”
“Pretty much the very next day,” Cassius replied, the man going on to describe the first razing of Shadow’s Fall and the beginnings of our war with the Dread Crew.
From there, the conversation shifted to the progression of war itself, everyone speaking in turn to give the woman the full details that she sought. Leaving nothing out, we told her how the war progressed from its initial stalemate and into the full-blown conflict that it was today, eventually leaving her shaking her head in awe.
“Maybe I was a little unfair thinking that you should have all been here sooner,” she said as we finally wrapped up our story for the second time, several of her companions echoing the same. “From the sounds of it, you’ve all just been scrambling from disaster to disaster, and this is only the latest one in a long line of them. It’s a miracle itself Aldford is standing, let alone you all making it this far.”
“Well, you’re not exactly far off saying that,” Halcyon commented in a dry tone. “But honestly, at this point, we’re used to it.”
“I can certainly imagine why,” Aryana replied, shaking her head. “But I suppose there is something to be said that you’ve managed to overcome all of them so far. Hopefully, as Garr would say, fate will smile on you all one more time. Because after I tell you what you’ve all just walked into here, you may decide that it might be a better idea to walk back into the forest and forget this place even existed.”
“That sounds…ominous,” I answered, gauging from her tone that she was completely serious.
“Only because it is,” she said, exhaling sharply before continuing to speak. “But I promised you that I would tell you everything that you need to know about this place and the orcs, and so I will.”
Pausing to take a deep breath, it was then Aryana’s turn to begin her story of how exactly she’d come to be at Khudazal in the first place and her efforts in building a resistance to strike back at the orcs.
“I was with one of the first caravans to leave Coldscar to join Aldford,” she said, her eyes taking a faraway look as she started to speak. “There was me and fifteen others that had been either recruited to join the settlement or had simply heard about its founding and were interested in starting a new life out there. Of those fifteen, three of them happened to be adventurers—or rather bandits, except we just didn’t know it yet.”
Aryana paused for a second time to spit on the ground before she continued speaking, her head shaking from side to side as she did so. “They hit us a couple days out of Coldscar once we got moving, maybe two or three dozen of them just…swarming us without any warning. There was simply nothing that we could do. I like to think I’m no slouch when it comes to fighting; I survived nearly thirty years’ hard service in the war, after all. But to go up against that many bodies at once? Surrender was the only option.
“Especially when we only thought they were after our supplies and wagon,” she added, almost as an afterthought.
“But they weren’t,” I stated, trying to imagine how it must have been from their perspective.
“No,” Aryana said quietly. “It was when they rounded us up and told us to start marching northward that I realized something was wrong. My first thought was that they didn’t want any witnesses and that they were taking us to a hole or somewhere where they could get rid of us. But instead, they kept us walking. Straight until we reached the forest and then far into it.
“Marching us relentlessly, they took us to two different camps, one being some sort of grotto where they stashed our wagon and supplies, then to a second camp much farther in,” she said, turning to look me in the eye. “I think that was the same camp that you mentioned earlier in your story, where you fought those…things. It was there that we were handed off to a second group of adventurers and the man you call Carver.”
A shiver went through Aryana as she looked back towards the ground at the memory, eventually resuming her story. “They let us rest the night there before forcing us to march once more, this time towards the northwest, cutting through the forest until we reached its far border, only then shifting straight north along its edge. From what I was able to pick up from their conversations at the time, the inner heart of the forest was apparently too dangerous to travel though, due to the more vicious creatures that lived within.”
“We can definitely confirm that,” I stated, our recent journey through the Hartwyld and the monsters therein still rather fresh on my mind.
“I can imagine,” Aryana replied with a curt nod, her eyes flicking briefly to the dried blood and dirt that caked our armor. “Anyway, they had us walking for most of that day until near nightfall when we finally met the orcs. There was a group of them waiting for us with a barred wagon on the edge of where the forest met the plains. I’ll admit that I was a bit in shock at that point, not to mention exhausted, so I missed whatever they might have said to one another, but it was clear that the orcs were expecting us.
“I’ll spare you all of the details of what happened after that, but to sum it up, we were loaded into the wagon, taken to the city here, and then…processed,” she said, rolling up her left sleeve to reveal a fist-sized crimson brand in the shape of a broken skull on her forearm. “That’s when I got this, courtesy of the Crushbone tribe, one of the largest here among the orcs. During that time, they also tested each of us to determine who could wield magic or had received any training in it. Those who had been were segregated away from those who could not, no doubt because we were both more useful to the orcs but also more dangerous at the same time.
“Once we were separated, we were then collared,” Aryana continued, reaching up to touch her bare throat where the heavy iron ring that we’d seen on Cline and the other two slaves would go. “Those who were unable to cast spells received a simple iron shackle around their throat, and those who could received a special one, a siphon collar. It is designed to drain all the mana from their victim’s reserves until none remained. This was a crude yet effective way of making sure that they would be unable to cast spells—unless authorized by an orc slavemaster, who would be able to suppress the collar’s effects through the use of a special key that some of them carried, as well as authorize what spells its wearer could cast.”
“A mana-draining collar,” Halcyon stated in a curious tone once Aryana finished speaking. “That’s a bit more…advanced than anything I considered the orcs being able to do, but I can definitely see it being useful for keeping spellcasting slaves in line.”
“And the orcs are nothing but skilled in keeping slaves in line,” the woman replied, inclining her head
towards the mage. “Most of the time at least.”
“How did you get rid of your collar then?” I asked while doing my best to suppress a shiver at the thought of a mana-draining noose around my neck. Given my dependency on mana to stay alive, being collared would effectively be a death sentence.
Which I guess would solve my problem of being collared in the first place, I added mentally—at least once I died and respawned elsewhere.
“That happened much later, maybe only a few weeks ago,” Aryana said. “But I stole a key from a slavemaster, shortly before I shoved him into a forge and set the foundry I’d been assigned to on fire.”
“It was at that point that I ‘died’ as Kara put it,” she went onto explain afterward. “But in saying that, we’ve skipped ahead a fair bit, though I suppose it’s not a bad spot to jump forward to. There isn’t much to say about the life of an orc slave, short of it being a grueling and degrading existence. In any case though, when the opportunity came to steal the key and vanish from sight, we’d already formed the beginnings of our resistance here, and my being at the orcs’ beck and call was beginning to interfere with our plans.
“‘We’, in this case, being myself, Garr, and an arakissi shaman named Senzin. Both of them had been here long before I arrived and had already started planning for ways to harm and hinder the orcs. Apparently, both Garr and Senzin’s people have been involved in a brutal war with the orcs for the last year, which they apparently started shortly after we routed their tribes in Eberia and broke our siege.”
“Hang on,” Cassius interrupted in an incredulous voice. “You’re telling us that the orcs picked two different wars right after Eberia kicked their ass? Why would they do that? I thought they moved to attack the Ascendancy that was encroaching on their territory to the east.”
“So did I. So did all of Eberia,” Aryana replied, simply offering the big man a shrug in response to his other questions. “Apparently, that wasn’t the case, though. At least not entirely. From what I’ve pieced together from the other slaves, the tribes all split up to defend each of their own individual territories respectively and found both of their peoples encroaching on it. Hence provoking the new wars in response.
Glory to the Brave (Ascend Online Book 4) Page 50