The hard, pebbled skin of the Ogrand smashed down against his table hard enough to splinter the smoothly finished hardwood surface.

Lifting his fist from the now ruined table, worth more than the peasants around here made in a year of scrounging the rivers for fish, he lifted the table easily, hurling it against the distant wall to crash against it, coming apart in shards of finely worked lumber.

The door opened hesitantly, the canine face of the attendant outside nervously peering in.

"Is your Grace in need?" the whining voice asked hopefully.

If something was needed then they would have an excuse to disappear for a time obtaining it, which got them out of arm's reach. Several secretaries had had less wisdom and were now rotting in whatever hell awaited for it.

The room's owner growled a throaty, gutteral sound, like an lion's growl, snapping his tusked jaws together.

After a moment of calming, the hulking creature, a seven and a half foot tall brute with obvious power in its frame, muscles printing against the contrastingly delicate fabric of his clothes, their immaculate cut denoting the wealth of their bearer on full display.

"I am not in need, Yorsin, but thank you for your diligence. No, wait, actually I need another table, delivered today. Of the size and approximate working of the one which seems to have suffered an unfortunate failure." The deep voice said, with a smoothness in direct opposition to the growl and sudden rage of a moment ago.

The attendant, a thin Wolven Beastkin, knew better than to second guess the owner of that office and ducked away without further words.

The text that had triggered its rage scrolled fire through its mind, one that was surprisingly sharp for all of its obvious physical strength. A surprise that had led to more than one of its competitors being put into situations where that strength could break them apart and further its agenda.

"There will be absolute Hells to pay when word reaches Lord Morion that his third daughter's husband was found cut to pieces." The Ogran man spoke to his pet monitor lizard, snugged happily on a sunning rock.

"That idiot had to go out with a catch crew didn't he? Well, it figures, Morion's spoiled git was pushing for a bigger role in the family business and who listens to me when I say he isn't fucking ready?" Bitched the imposing Ogran to his scaly confidant.

The urge to smash another piece of furniture boiled through him and he clenched his four thick fingers into a fist to avoid wrecking any more of his prized office. By the Stones, he'd loved that damned table. What a mess. How do you botch a snatch and grab for a single Brownie scout and a Human welp?

Growling deeply, the Ogran started penning a letter, scrunched uncomfortably over a side table meant for holding lamps. Lord Morion had to be told and he had to start looking for whoever it was that had set Gresen to watering the roots, as these Knife Ears liked to put it.

Somebody was going to pay dear for his table.

*****************Elsewhere*****************

"You win, Taipan." Ulric informed his Shadow-wife, despair complete.

Her unsmiling, yet incredibly smug expression reminded him of how easily she was able to express herself with only her eyebrows.

"And what is my prize, Ulric?" She asked innocently.

"Oh, I'll give you something all right, you galling strumpet of a murglefishin lurglsput" He started, trailing off indecipherably.

They'd been in the city five days now. For three entire days they'd beat feet, they'd pounded sand, they'd thrown shit at the wall made of teflon, and they'd burned time like a ninety year old man burns a furnace. All. For. Nothing.

Not a clue had they found, yet, for who had set up the attempt to kidnap his wife and have him murdered in the wild. Around and around, the two of them had gone in the confines of their room, trying to shake loose some detail or angle that would shed light on who had set up the pseudo caravan guards and why.

The why seemed somewhat clear enough: slaves were awesome, especially when they lived for hundreds of years.

According to the now pale-skinned beauty walking by his side, Prosper made a hefty percentage of their profit on the trade of slave-bonded sapients, of all races. Most valued though, were those of the long-lived races: the Aes'r, the Svartalfin, the Saurid Beastkin. These brought a pretty coin at auction for how long they could potentially last; sometimes three or four generations of a Human household could be served by a single one of these.

Slave collars, enchanted by what Ulric had determined was magic constructed by a Vardan equivalent to a Nazi, would ensure the obedience of the poor bound soul and prevent their attempt to self-terminate. The sickening practice was enough, on its own to have Ulric's hackles raised, but the practice of owning thinking beings was even more fucked when he was informed that the slaves were bred, frequently by their owners, and the children also enslaved.

It wasn't long before Ulric was firmly in camp Nuke the Bastards with regards to Prosper, as if he hadn't had reason enough to see the people running that place joining history's footnotes on evil bastards with too much power.

None of that, though, had helped to find out who was responsible for the group that had been sent out to do their awful deed. On the bright side, all of the self-loathing, dissatisfaction, and regret for giving in to his more bestial impulses with regards to killing the Elves in that group was gone like a summer rain on desert sand. They'd better hope he didn't figure out how necromancy worked, which, according to Taipan was a real thing, or he'd kill those sonsofbitches again. Slaver bastards.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

He'd noticed it earlier, but the Lord Instinct didn't discriminate between people or things. Anything, anyplace, or anybody he viewed as being under his umbrella were HIS. Any man, beast, cloud, or what the fuck ever that infringed on that put themselves front in line to be scattered like dust on the wind. He literally couldn't help it, he'd as soon turn his heart off as make it go away. Bald'rt had said it was just a part of being what they were. He was starting to really understand what that meant now.

When he'd heard Taipan read that message, with its declaration that they were going to take her and kill him, his entire world had gained a certain degree of clarity. Somebody, or somebodies, needed killing. Their adventure, already a bit dour, already sort of set to a grim endpoint, had gained a special spice. Ulric's immediate concerns were now centered around hanging a human trafficker by their intestines from the nearest glowlamp, the magically lit five-meter tall posts with an enchanted globe of light at their tops, providing light to the city streets at night.

The former engineer had once been a peaceful recluse. That man was dead. Ulric Einar, Twice Borne, [Lord of the Ancient Glade] was going to make the rivers run red if that's what it took to keep his domain free from trespassers and his wife free from harm. He couldn't be sure, but he felt like his class was about to change. There was a…vibration…in him, in his sense of purpose. It was similar to when he'd accepted being a warrior back in the glade, in having to fight to make his way in this world.

That concept was evolving. Especially when he learned of things that made him sick, made him furious at their mere existence. The Bane. Torturing souls until they turned their own core, that miraculous connection to the ethereal, into a droplet of self-loathing that magically destroyed anything of its own species. Slavers robbing men, women, and children of their rights to a free life and then making that a generational curse. These were things that he did not believe should exist and, he was starting to feel like, if no one else was going to do anything about it, then he would. And they'd godsdamned weep for their sins when he got his hands on them.

He shook off the simmering rage that was threatening to derail him. Back to the matter at hand.

"Okay Taipan, I was wrong, there was nothing nefarious about the [Silver Rice] merchants but I still say those hampers would be the perfect size to transport a living person by ship." He said, defending his theory gamely.

They were, damn it. The merchants they'd investigated though, all five of them, though fiercely competitive with one another, had been clean of connections to their attempted kidnappers so far as either he or his Shadow could determine.

When Ulric had first seen those ships, incredibly, fitted with skids for hauling by oxen on the frozen rivers, and their containers of rice he'd immediately latched onto the idea that the traffickers were moving their victims by ship. It was far, far, more discreet than overland travel and far easier to avoid the complications of a prisoner that had to move under their own power. No, a ship was, by far, the most efficient, and therefore more probable, method of transporting live cargo. Thus he'd lobbied hard to investigate these obvious candidates.

Two days of surveillance had revealed nothing. The sailors moved their cargo with efficiency and maintained their ships with incredible alacrity, motivated by the shout of bosuns and the hoarse exclamations, riddled with profanity, that indicated none of the sailors had parents, bathed, were free of sexually transmitted disease, or were of value other than being processed to plug gaps in the ship's hull. Ulric had learned a great deal of Elvish that Brighteyes had never so much as hinted at in their lessons so long ago.

A day of pretending interest in transporting a wagon load of the goods had also produced no incriminating evidence, other than that, according to Taipan, the offices in which he'd discussed terms were slightly too evident of success to be explained by completely above board practices. Smuggling was a practice as old as trade though and didn't indicate that a merchant's operations were up to the level of inhumanity that would have been required to engage in slave trading.

As for the meetings with the merchants themselves, that likewise produced nothing tangible. One of the rice merchants flatly refused to do business with a Human trader, no matter their origin. Two others were only willing to allow him to enter their company headquarters when he successfully convinced them that he was not from Prosper or any land under said capital City of Prespang's thumb. That part was easy, Ulric really was, for all intents and purposes, a barbarian heathen of the wilds. It stung, but it was a useful reality at the moment. The other two were open to business regardless of his origin but had their own problems. The first was happy to sell some of their rice to a foreign trader but wanted a heavy bribe, a 'guarantee of productivity', to entertain negotiations, at which Ulric in not manufactured disdain declared them pirates in spirit, if not in outright violation of the laws of the land. The second suggested that a night of Ulric's business partner's company would do much to assure him of their friendly cooperation. That one lost a finger instantly, the wound cauterized in his own desk candle while his Shadow's other hand covered his mouth and she explained to him that his only hope for another tomorrow was to pay for it and leave the city before the suns rose. That he did and, though they'd gained no leads, they did gain an Aur Knight for their trouble.

They'd discreetly checked the storage warehouses the night of their business interviews, half the reason for those interviews being finding the location of the entrepot in the first place.

It was somewhat informative for Ulric to learn that his Shadow was, in addition to her incredible repertoire of skills in the outdoors, an accomplished lockpick. He'd gotten to observe that the simple internal mechanisms were not sufficient to stop her from disabling the lock within a few tens of seconds, and thus gaining them entry into the warehouses, before a sweep of hired thugs on patrol could determine that anything was amiss. They spent two hours in each depot searching for any sign of trafficking and found none. Actually, aside from a few stashes of a powder Taipan had said was an outlawed hallucinogen, of which they now had a sample for personal use, there was absolutely nothing untoward. Those five were rice merchants and that was it. Some honest. Some not so much. But rice merchants, to all evidence that the pair of them could obtain through three days of focused effort.

Which killed Ulric's theory and set them back to zero. Taipan had bet from the outset that they would find nothing. He tried not to grind his teeth.

"What do you want for your victory, besides satisfying the physical need to gloat?" He asked, putting the ball into her court.

Metaphorically.

"I will accept a massage, the good one where you start at my feet and work all the way to mine scalp. Mind my ears, it is not an excuse for you to be grabby paws." He was informed, with all the smugness his partner could muster.

Head hung, Ulric had no choice but to accept his penance for losing them three days. They were on the clock here. Not only was this detour costing them time they'd intended to be on the road, but every day also increased the odds that the missing catch team would be recognized as missing and a hunt for them begun in earnest. They were in a catch-22.

To leave the city without solving this problem put an enemy at their backs. To stay put them in danger of discovery and having that enemy converge on them. At least in the wilds, he could throw lightning and fire without worry about killing innocents and Taipan got orders of magnitude more terrifying when the city walls faded behind the hills and dales of the forests. The only reason Ulric was going along with this hootenanny was because his ever-competent Shadow-wife assured him that they would encounter more such teams if they did not successfully decapitate this trafficking ring, literally, and under worse circumstances, now that one team had failed.

"You were not completely wrong, Glade Chief." Taipan admitted, letting her downcast Honor off the hook.

"Our traffickers are using the rivers. They are also almost certainly using one of the ships in these docks as well." She added, bolstering Ulric's mood greatly.

"The issue," the now pale beauty mused aloud, familiar tapping of her lips at odds with her new appearance, "Is that they will not be running their victims through any sort of trade vessel, as these are too likely to be checked. No, this screams of a very tightly controlled, very highly coordinated operation run by a singular individual. The [Bark Weasels] that ambushed us were of the same immediate family, probably a lesser splinter of a greater house, one that has contacts enough to secure their covers and facilitate their movements. "

Ulric immediately jumped on that idea, "What about a Greater House with ties to the Zellussin? Or, maybe not a House, but a high-level member of Trachn'ir's governing body who would have those ties? Like, a magister or a tax collector or someone like that. They'd have access to all of the shipping manifestos and be able to hide their own shipments. This shit is all headed downriver to Prosper's gateway on the Vatyn, right?"

Taipan frowned at him slightly.

"Hhhmmm…Where did you come up with this idea? I do not know which I find more alarming, that such a thing would occur to you or that you are probably correct." She questioned, not even with the decency to pretend she wasn't surprised by his intuition.

Ulric shrugged, "I read a lot of history and my old world's pre-collapse governments basically operated by a combination of inertia and sheer, naked graft."

False crimson tresses waved as she looked at him with some amount of sadness in her now blue eyes.

"Everything I have heard of your homeland says it is a gift that you died young." The Huntress commented.