BECMI Chapter 99 – Freedom Rides on Black Wings
The first city across the Tenagua River was called Isoford, and was once a prosperous trading town. Now it was a major garrison for the Khirifi, and the only natives left were slaves working the fields around the town or used for basic labor with little thought for their welfare.
Yes, I’d be coming back this way soon.
The road led west, and I followed it, Duum and I still flying low, still Invisible, still watching patrols pass by, people slink out of their way, and seeing the occasional impalement, pile of heads, or crucifixions of rebels or defiant locals. I really wanted to slice apart some of these patrols, but that would have to wait until, until…
Until we saw the line of slaves being led west, a score of men and women clad in rags and little else, overseen by half their number of armored soldiers on horseback without any sympathy for the fact they were walking and in chains, wanting them to move faster, faster-!
The officer’s curses at the woman he was about to lash died with a screaming Barb punched through his chest in a spray of crimson, a black Skull shrieking as it swooped towards the next nearest target in a Chain of Humanbane and Holy damage mixed together. Three Barbs, three Chained Skulls exploding through these fuckers, vivus swirling and devouring them as it looked like crimson and black flames, reducing flesh and bone to powder as the men screamed and died under the Kicker damage… and Duum and I became visible as my Bat swooped in grandly.
The slaves cried out, thinking a big and very nasty monster was going to attack them, but he just landed as the horses scattered, the clothes and armor that had been their riders falling off of them.
“Horses, stay where you are,” I ordered them coldly, and they slowed down and paused as they understood me. “You’ll have a new set of riders in a moment.” I swung down from Duum smoothly as the men and women there gaped at me.
Funf’s TK reached out, found the key in the remains of the officer’s garb, and it first zipped over to in front of me, drawing everyone’s attention and silencing them as they fixated on it.
Then it flashed over to what looked like the healthiest of the men, and with the speed and coordination of a telekinetic hand, snapped him out of his manacles with great speed.
They all started to raise their hands and cry out to be next, and I snarled, “Shut up. Put your hands down. I can’t unlock the chains if you are moving around. STOP MOVING.”
The air temperature fell ten degrees. They all shut up and stood there obediently, while the key flicked from point to point with speed and surety. No need for leverage or twisting around, just insert and turn it, and the manacles were dropping away, one opened every few seconds, and the slaves were being released.
“You. You look like you know where to go,” I indicated the first man I’d released, who was looking at the horses waiting there.
He glanced at me, decided it would be smart to be gracious to his rescuer and not be turned into dust, and said hastily, “Yes, ma’am. We can’t go back, and I’ve friends in the fens a few miles to the south. With the horses, we should all be able to make it there quickly!”
“Good enough.” Funf’sTelekinesis could handle multiple objects, so I promptly started gathering up the vivus-emptied clothing, armor, and dropped weapons from the soldiers from the various places they were scattered, and then flicked up a dozen Disks for them all to sit on. “These can be dragged easily behind the horses if you can’t ride. I don’t have time to lead you all, but if you are swift, you should have no problem avoiding the patrols.”
Half the group was already freed, and those who might have had military experience were already going for the armor, weapons, boots, and clothing. Those who didn’t were instead pulling extra clothes out of the saddlebags of the patient horses or packs hefted onto the Disks.
“Yes, my lady. May I ask who helped us get free?” the man asked, shaking out a decent shirt of the white dust inside it without a care and pulling it on.
“I am the Lady Edge, working out of Darkmoor City.” I watched all the activity taking place narrowly, but none of them got any ideas of taking out the monstrous Bat and the elfin who had killed ten soldiers with a Cantrip she could repeat all day. “I am following the slave trains west. I believe that the Khirifi are sending slaves out, and they are not coming back?”
Their grim expressions answered the question before they did. “Aye, and that’s the truth of it. Hundreds of folk rounded up and marched off to the west, never to be heard from again.” He spat eloquently back in the direction of the city. “Whatever they are planning, it’s something fell and horrible, and they can’t get enough blood and bodies to feed it fast enough!”
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“I see. Well, if there’s some level of communication between the resistance in the area, you might want to tell them that I’ll be cutting down any slavers I see, so there might be a lot of freed slaves like yourselves running about soon.” My eyes narrowed dangerously at the darkening of his Brown Aura. “Bring them all to your friends in the Fen, Master Jargryle. I will be checking up on them and you. If you decide to sell off some of them to enrich yourselves, you will soon be enjoying the same fate as these soldiers.”
He paled slightly, a rather self-serving plan evaporating as my ruby eyes raked him over, clearly knowing his name. “Uh, yes, ma’am. The goods and the horses should be enough to secure them a place…”
“See that they do.”
The last manacle clinked off of bare legs, and the woman involved fairly leapt away from them. Funf picked up all the chains that people didn’t grab to use as weapons and threw them off the side of the road into a heap of brush, effectively hiding them from view.
“Do the right thing, Master Jargyle, and be rewarded. Be a dastard, and Feed the Land.” He swallowed as I swung atop Duum, and my Bat gave him a hungry once-over with a very fanged grin.
One beat of Duum’s wings and we shot skywards, fifty feet up in a second, impossibly fast and agile. Another beat and we turned west again, Primus’ Air Elemental Command shimmering and cloaking us both in Invisibility, taking us out of sight and ready to unleash some more surprises from any other chain of slavers we saw on the way.
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I was ruthless, and quite merciless. Three more groups of slavers were dead before I reached the former regional capital of Moonraven, and I hit Moonraven like the Wrath of the Heavens.
Commune with City told me everything I needed to know about where the Khirifi were. They didn’t consider themselves people of the city, so it didn’t, either, and the city was happy to point them out to me, along with all the slave pens they had put up and were channeling ever south and west.
It was a very, very bad night for them.
Improved Invisibility covered Duum and I as we flitted here and there, my Bat falling unseen upon groups of soldiers and tearing them apart, while arcing Skulls and BarbraysChained between groups of soldiers, rounding corners, going through slits and windows, Seeking them out while the Kicker damage killed them and ruptured forth in more screaming black rose-eyed Skulls hunting for victims.
The alarms went up soon enough, but all that did is gather the Khirifi together into smaller areas, ones I could use Chained Shards on to scythe through them and kill hundreds at one time. Eruptions of screaming Skulls flew in all directions, blasting through the invaders and turning them into white ash in sprays of jet and crimson flames.
One barracks door flew open, just in time for the Cloudkill to pour inside. Sepulchral screams competed with panicked cries that nobody heard, and then there was only sinister chortling as the invaders went silent. A whole garrison fell to a Widened Fireball taking out the entire building. Leaping Chains of Barbskulls preceded me along the walls and wiped them clean of sentries and guards, their screams dying unheard. The first alarm force in the citadel gathering outside the keep perished to a Pyroclasm wiping them and everyone else outside away en masse, killing hundreds of ready soldiers at the same time.
Moonraven Castle would have been the hardest to clear, but I was already inside by the time the alarms went off, ruthlessly hunting down the Khirifi garrisoning it.
Interdictions meant nobody and nothing was Teleporting away, and the shrines and temples of Gulguz were the very first things I cleared inside a Sound Bubble. Priestesses and their guardians died screaming and alerting nothing.
“Citizens of Moonraven,” I announced in Magevoice, covering the entire city. “I am purging the city of the Khirifi in residence. If you would care to clean up after them and release the slaves, I would be obliged. Oh, and you might want to lure in any patrols that come in and slaughter them all as long as you can get away with it.”
Things did get a lot more excitable after that, especially for the people who had sold out their fellows and colluded with the invaders, but that wasn’t my problem.
Could the Elbers hold the city on their own? Probably not. But there was going to be a resistance movement nearby which could act quickly, and I, I was not intending to stop any time soon.
Gulguz and his obedient minions needed to be eliminated, and that was all there was to it.
There were torches and lanterns running all around the city in the wee hours as I took off, letting the people of the city root out the last few Khirifi survivors. The civilian families of the invaders were not going to like being treated like they had the Elbers.
There were more slave trains to the west, and slave gangs of hundreds of Elbers working on the roads across the territory conquered by the Khirifi. I had to meditate a few hours to recover my spent Valences, and then I was going to find that volcano and really see about the fire.
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It was a grim duty, but I continued it. There had been no alarm reaching out down the roads ahead of me. I had sealed the gates of the city before the dawn, and no Khirifi had made it over the walls to escape me. Those patrols from north and south finding their way there should hopefully be riding into a whole bunch of arrow fire now.
There was one road gang on the way, hundreds of barely-clothed Elbers suffering from malnutrition laboring to build up the roads for the fledgling empire of the Khirifi.
They were not expecting to be attacked at high noon out of the sun. I came in from the east side of the camp, SeekingSkullbarbs hunting out the armored men and dropping them where they stood. Duum slowly beat his way forward over the camp as I sent Skulls riding streams of crimson in all directions, pinging on both the Evil that was flaring in my Detect Evil at IX+1, The Vista of Eternal Darkness, and anyone in armor and the colors of the invaders.
There were a few attempts to shoot at me with spells or missiles, none of them getting anywhere. Duum dodged them all leisurely, and rarely did anyone get off more than one volley or spell before I was replying in kind, screaming Skulls in black and red raining down from the skies to reap their lives.