Ramakith Ard's now rounded-up family came out to be three official wives, ten slave-wives, and sixteen 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 Stand, and the sprite 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.
Truth-judging enchantments were common on Moh so Kestra was aware that there could be people with skills or spells that could deceive even such a device. However, none of the Divines among her new community could name such skills. Based on that, she figured that such means to circumvent a truth-finder should be rare enough that they could feasibly use it to sort out the situation with the slaves in Sortalheim, and even use it for condemning at least some of the guilty, even if it wasn't up to clearing all of the innocent.
And if anyone did dispute the Orb's results, she was happy to let them swear their honesty to the Heavens. That was something the Divines trusted more, so without a reason to doubt their greater experience, she would, too.
She set the orb on a shaped bit of wood that she made to look like a pedestal, choosing a nicely prominent position where everyone could see it.
On spotting the discrepancy in the children's sexes, she immediately asked Ramakith Ard'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 a Shield of Air up between them 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 saw-toothed disc made from shaped stone.
The first shield stopped the explosive-launched pellet, then collapsed to allow her disc to decapitate the younger Ramakith. The second shield prevented the saw-toothed disc from continuing on over the crowd.
Kestra didn't like killing sapients, but one didn't survive as a Lancer for fifteen years without facing down bandits at some point. Killing other sapients, human or otherwise, 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 on the funerary altar."
----------------------------------------
Kestra publicly interrogated the other adult members of the Ramakith household. According to the Divines, some form of familial inheritance of titles was as much a standard of this world's nobility as it was on Moh, and she wanted to find at least one potential heir to return the city to -- after she was done with her quest, and with putting in safeguards to prevent another such quest from being issued against the next City Lord of Sortalheim.
She fought down flashbacks to the grim work of sorting the guilty from the desperate survivors in bandit villages during the interviews. That had been some of her first work as a Freelancer, during which she found her team, and was also the main reason they moved to Telleranhook. At least then she had been a simple [Woodland Scout Novice] and not called upon to sit in judgment.
With the help of the orb revealing their lies, the interrogations went quickly. The two most senior wives and six of the ten slave-wives confessed to murdering their rivals both in and out of the seraglio, as well as the boy children of their seraglio rivals. Under Oste's laws, titles passed to one of the sons, and only to daughters in the event there were no sons.
The murder of the children sickened Kestra, and she called for the execution of the murderers. She was working through the interrogations of the daughters, who were thankfully much less blood thirsty than their mothers and senior brother had been, by the time another group was escorted into the Central Plaza.
These were Ramakith's -- and now her -- special slaves, nearly all of them travelers that Lord Ramakith had enslaved. Among them was Puck's partner, Tami.
Puck jumped down from the stage and went to his friend, helping Tami up to come sit as a witness. Tami was pale, her clothes ragged. She was obviously recently healed and low on Stamina. Kestra passed her a drinking-bowl of fish broth after Puck helped Tami to the second seat, and Kestra returned to interrogating Ramakith Ard's family.
Kestra's procedure for the executions was far more civilized, for lack of a better description, than the prior City Lord's. She wasn't trying for spectacle here, simply the rough justice necessary to start righting the wrongs Lord Ramakith had perpetrated and permitted. A quick knife thrust into the skull separating the spinal column meant the executed felt little to no pain. Lord Ramakith, in contrast, had favored hanging strangulation, not even giving the condemned the hope of a swiftly snapped neck on the drop.
The slaves and their owners had been gathered up, the slaves watching with a growing hope while their owners couldn't hide a growing dread.
At the end of 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 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 this realm, which she had learned from Yorgin's lectures was named Gossalt, and those born elsewhere.
Unsurprisingly, Kestra found that most of those not originally from Gossalt were now her slaves. That accounted for 87. She had them return to the Lord's Donjon to be interviewed in private, along with the rest of her awarded slaves.
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 included anyone born into slavery in the group who had been sold. She ordered scribes to take down the names and residences 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. He maintained a painfully neutral expression as guards escorted him up on the stage.
Kestra handed him 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 it held as many mana stones as her note 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 imitated a few of the more agreeable nobles she had worked with as she announced, "I expect that in two or three days I shall be done sorting through the matters the Heavens deemed needful to issue a quest to resolve. After that time, I intend to meet with the heads of the trading houses, the labor and the crafting guilds, and the higher realm 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 jie gate.
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 and ordered his owner remain to the side.
"Can you write legibly?" she asked the slave, a dusky-hued man with pointed ears. They were still barely within human standards, but Kestra couldn't help thinking he had elven ancestry when she spotted them.
"Yes, City Lord," he answered, keeping his gaze downcast and his tone meek.
"Write down for me all of the titles listed in your profile," she ordered and then gave 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 in your profile?"
"Yes, City Lord," he again answered meekly. The orb darkened.
"Are you under an 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 Flames and destroyed the piece of paper on which the slave had written.
She summoned the owner. "Have you bound this slave with Heavenly 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 made a slave by a former City Lord?" she asked.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
"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 glared, her order delivered with grim implacability.
He sucked in his breath, his face purpling with rage.
She pointed at the funerary altar. "Or you can join the corpses. That will also work."
The rage choked off as his eyes 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 that title."
She gave the former owner ten silver coins. "Thus are you compensated for the loss of your slave. Clerk, please record the judgment."
She did not find any other transmigrators among the non-local slaves. While one of those slaves had been enslaved by bandits, the outlaws had not served Lord Ramakith. Kestra still saw the man freed and his former owner compensated. As with the first, she asked that the new emancipated man remain to hear her out on a proposal.
In a momentary lull, Tami asked, "Why aren't you freeing all of the slaves?"
Kestra let her eyebrows pop up. "Weren't you some kind of city guard before? What do you think would happen if I just announced an end to slavery in the city, without any kind of support ready in the face of that kind of disruption? That would render about seven of every hundred people in the city instantly homeless and suddenly cut off from knowing where their next meal is coming from."
That got a stiff nod of acknowledgment from Tami, who then turned to Puck. Some wordless communication passed between the partners, and both sat back, ostensibly watching the proceedings. Puck did a better job of looking on with a bored expression. Tami's features reflected turbulent thoughts running through her mind. Kestra left them to their considerations.
When the last of the clerks returned, reporting that 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. For more than half, they had committed crimes that were serious enough to warrant some kind of serious reparations. 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 had been enslaved while innocent of the crimes levied against them, or that the crimes were just trumped up charges intended to lead to their enslavement, 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, and they murmured about her generosity, and wondered what would happen to the freed slaves.
The sun hung low on the horizon when she 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 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, then conjured up some Flames to provide light because she 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 Tami and Puck's rebel camp. She had the rebels declare their innocence of banditry, confirmed by the Orb of Truthfulness's golden glow, and then she 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.
Puck stopped Tami from saying something about the sentencing. Kestra chose the punishment based on the ones that had landed the "recompense due" group of criminal slaves in their current conditions. Long term imprisonment was not a common concept on Moh, but terms of public service, which somehow translated in the Myriad Realms as enslavement, were punishments that she was used to.
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.
Tami 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 addressed the people she had asked to wait. "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, food, and work appropriate for your skills and stats."
Then she went from freed slave to freed slave, beginning with the locals. For those who knew 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 realm 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 Ard. 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 housed the lord's slaves and servants.
Kestra pulled 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 servants rounded up the first group. 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 Rewards Stand finds came from the Random options, which got her a few crates worth of the literature of the Myriad Realms. Most of the literary scrolls in those crates addressed the philosophies underpinning governance and war. The bound books contained memoirs and more than a few gothic romances that Inspri had developed a disturbing fascination for.
All of the duplicates of those works she moved over to her retreat realm. Ralouf had put in stone shelves for a library, and Yorgin then tried to camp in the new library. The Divine snake had similar taste in literature to Kestra's Inventory Sprite, while Ralouf had discovered a few medical tracts that piqued his interest.
She didn't want to bother them, and all of the Elementals seemed pretty focused on their environmental manipulations. Graemire was even taking along with him the nature sprite Kestra had started thinking of as Natspri.
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 spoke to them with her Realm Voice. «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 a Divine Elemental of Metal had a snit and befouled about fifteen square kilometers of land that overlapped that cave. A new dungeon is 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 ones they were bound to carry out.
They got dressed and equipped, and then Kestra pulled them out of her realm.
Quite a few people startled at the sudden appearance of the two men. An alarm went up as 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, right?"
"Yes, City Lord!" The fanciest dressed of the guard saluted and oversaw hauling off poor Andol and Emgars.
Tami waited until the room was restored to order again to ask, quiet voiced, "Where did those two come from?"
Kestra shrugged. "This entire world breaks my common sense." The orb she had brought out once more glowed a bright gold.
----------------------------------------
While Kestra held court in the Central Plaza, Inspri queried her little mind out, sorting through all the information they gained from the city interfacing. There were still some bits of information Kestra would need to extract from the City Stone directly, but what Inspri learned was significant. Among that information, there were some established Legal Codes that a City Lord could implement, 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 in Dreurjan.
To Kestra's way of thinking, if a lord taxed people -- no matter the currency of the tax -- they ought to provide safeguards to ensure the taxes were used fairly, or at least for the stated purpose. Especially after the trials, Kestra despised that glaring lack of restraint upon the city's leadership, 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 Myriad Realms, it seemed. At present, Sortalheim's City Stone only recognized the Lord, residents, and foreigners. There appeared to be no distinctions between those "foreigners" who just passed through Sortalheim and those who bought homes and lived their lives in the city while not bound to Sortalheim's City Stone. Kestra added confirming that when they got to the City Stone to a growing list of things she and Inspri would need to do. If so, she and Inspri needed to formulate how to integrate a new kind of "citizen" city resident to the existing system, as well as "resident foreigners".
Kestra knew that a lot of her reaction came from how weirdly familiar and yet so alien the ways of Sortalheim and the Myriad Realms felt, and how unsettled that made her. She wanted the draft as a way to help reconcile herself to the new world she was stuck living in. She knew that forcing particular changes on people led to more problems than pointing out the necessity of broader changes and letting the people affected figure out how to fit themselves to the mandates.
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 forced freedom on 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 Myriad Realms, but she felt a need to be careful about just how they disrupted things. She set up the transmigrator she had already freed in a guest room of the donjon.
When she spotted Puck nodding off, she sent the pair of him and Tami 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. Getting to it required being the City Lord, though at present, if there were no City Lord, the first one to touch the City Stone would be given that burdensome honor.
Letting Inspri guide her through the menus, Kestra began verifying what the City Stone's settings were. Mostly, it was all "City Lord Fiat". There were costs in mana regeneration and E.X.P. to enforcing a Legal Code, and that cost was relegated to the City Residents, with a greater burden on the City Lord. It made sense, then, that none had been set before. Still, that meant that jurisprudence had had to be kept separate. The City Lords past has probably enjoyed that, because the Fiat system gave them an enormous amount of power. Given her quest, Kestra wasn't going to let that continue.
She had just finished acting as a conduit for Inspri to query the City Stone when the reminder she had requested came in the form of a knock. She left the City Stone room, making sure it was secured again, and 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, the pedestal, or the funerary altar. 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 scribe desks, setting up five stations before the stage. Scribes brought the tools of their trade with them, settling in. The stage was kept clear but for Kestra. She set out the Orb of Truthfulness on the pedestal.
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 Heavenly 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!"