studiobondurri The Paladin of the Holy Kingdom, Part III: Act 1, Chapter 2
The Paladin of the Holy Kingdom, Part III: Act 1, Chapter 2
The Paladin of the Holy Kingdom, Part III: Act 1, Chapter 2
Chapter 2
8th Day, Upper Fire Month, 1 CE
“Hey,” a man’s voice filtered through the leaves, “over here!”
Liam looked in the direction of the voice, craning his neck back and forth as he tried to catch a glimpse of its owner through the brush.
“Hsst! Not so loud! What if the Demis hear you?”
A second voice came from the same direction – a woman’s voice, worn thin from worry.
“The Demis are all killed,” the man replied. “The Undead got them. You’re worrying for nothing, Corinne.”
“Nonononono!” Corinne grew more insistent, “I heard! I heard they raided just last week! People got ate! Why’d you think they stopped clearin’ nearby?”
“J-just shut yer mouth!” The man’s confident tone quickly disintegrated, “The Demis’ll hear ya!”
Liam moved toward the increasingly panicked conversation, pushing the leafy branches to the side as he made his way forward. While his senses had drastically improved over the past few months, he was pretty sure that they wouldn’t be good enough to detect any Demihumans lurking nearby. There was so much cover that he probably wouldn’t notice any hidden hunters unless he tripped over them.
Still, he didn’t harbour the same concerns as the others. They were still on their side of the border, and, even if they did get lost, they were far from crossing over into the buffer zone between the Sorcerous Kingdom and the Holy Kingdom of Roble.
“Ow!”
Liam glanced over his shoulder. A boy a few years younger than him was following close. His hand was rubbing his cheek where a branch had probably struck him.
“Sorry,” Liam said. “Stay back a bit further so the branches don’t whip into your face.”
The boy didn’t listen. Instead, he raised the rock he always carried around in front of his face. Another ‘Ow!’ sounded from behind Liam as a branch rapped the boy’s knuckles.
A few minutes later, they found the still-arguing pair standing over an old corpse barely visible under the vegetation. The girl was standing a metre or so back from the kneeling man, wringing her hands while trying to look in every direction at once. Though the boy was probably loud enough to be heard from hundreds of metres around, the pair started as he and Liam appeared out of the brush.
“Help me out here,” the man said, lowering his dagger before kneeling over the corpse again.
Liam knelt beside the body. It was a Demihuman, but he couldn’t figure out the race. He could tell what killed it, though. Just below its armpit was a deep stab wound filled with maggots. The Demihuman had probably escaped past the wall near the end of the war and succumbed to its injuries.
“Lift that part over there,” the man said.
Liam grimaced as he stuck his fingers under the Demihuman’s breastplate and pulled. The man – a vagrant from the bay area by the name of Paul – bent in to cut the straps of the harness.
“We got another one over here!” A voice from another team said.
“Nice,” Paul grinned. “Keep an eye out for more!”
By the time they left the brush, five corpses had been discovered. They didn’t come for the corpses, of course: they had come for their equipment. Paul stopped their teams at a stream next to a strip of cleared-out land.
“Why’d we stop here?” Paul’s girl, Corinne, said.
“Clean up the equipment,” Paul gestured toward the stream.
“Here? I told you there’s Demihumans here! Why’d you think they stopped working on this clearing? They got raided and people got eaten!”
“Then be quick! But make sure they're clean. Those smiths’ll use any excuse to cheat us.”
“How much will we get?” Someone asked.
“Dunno. Hey, Liam, you’re a Merchant's get. Whaddya think?”
Liam went over to the equipment piled by Corinne, who was desperately scrubbing away while whispering fervent prayers to The Four. He picked up a washed vambrace fashioned out of dark steel.
Barely a silver...maybe two?
Bards, Merchants, and Rogues all had the ability to appraise items. That ability had nuances between Job Classes, but they could all discern the value of things. It wasn't as simple as having a number pop up in one’s head – though that did actually happen. The problem was that the number rarely, if ever, matched what one could get for something. It was just a baseline to work off of. After that, they had to apply things like local market conditions, connections, and negotiation skills.
“Who are we taking these to?” Liam asked.
“The weasel, maybe?” Paul said.
“The weasel gave us shit prices the last time!” Another scavenger said, “We should go to the trout.”
“Trout’s an extra day,” someone else noted. “Is it worth it?”
“The weasel always takes our stuff,” Paul told them. “He’s right near here so we can get back out here right away. We don’t want anyone else cleaning up our turf.”
If it’s the weasel, then...
“This big suit’s probably worth around twenty silver,” Liam said.
The scavengers leaned forward. Corinne looked up at him with a gleam in her eye.
“Really?” She said.
“Well, it is the weasel, so probably less.”
Twenty silver could keep Paul’s scavenger teams going for another week. Assuming that prices didn’t go up again.
“You’re still getting us a better deal than their bullshit flat rate,” Paul reassured him. “Hey, Ink, you get that?”
“Um...”
The boy that had been following Liam through the brush chalked out something on the flat rock he carried around. Liam wasn’t sure where he had come from, but Ink was the only person in the scavenger crew that could write. In Robles script, anyway.
“How much would they be worth at market?” Ink asked.
“As equipment?” Liam furrowed his brow, “Four or five platinum, I guess?”
“What!”
“The forges are robbing us blind!”
“They’re not,” Ink told the angry scavengers. “We’re selling this as scrap. It doesn’t matter how nice it is as a suit of armour.”
“What a waste,” Paul grumbled. “Hey, couldn’t we just sell this stuff to the Merchant ships? Even if we get half of the value, we’d be way ahead.”
“But the Holy King said that we need the scrap,” Corinne said.
Paul instantly turned jealous for some reason.
“You idiot,” Paul said. “With that kind of money, we could buy all the scrap we want!”
Of course. All they needed was a few more cliché lines and they would be just like the bit villains portrayed in some stupid street performance.
Liam’s mind started to race when one of the riders looked like he was about to dismount. He looked around for a distraction and discovered a disturbing sight to his right.
“What happened to those men?” Liam asked.
“Justice happened,” the nobleman’s proud tone said it all.
“But they’re wearing army uniforms...”
“The army is not above justice,” the Noble said. “And justice is the purview of the Crown through the Holy King’s loyal Nobles. Those men abandoned their posts to cause trouble along the border, and I brought them to justice.”
It didn’t look like they had been executed beforehand. Each soldier was strung up by his wrists and left to die from dehydration and exposure. There was even a man in an officer’s surcoat hanging beside a boy that was about the same age as Liam. After a few moments, he realised that no women were hanging alongside the men, which was strange. The Holy Kingdom conscripted men and women alike.
Liam glanced at the prideful nobleman and his thugs. The Holy Kingdom was in bad shape when he left it that spring, but he hadn’t seen anything like this back then.
“I’ve never seen people hung up like this before,” Liam said. “What did the Paladins say about this?”
At the mention of the Holy Order of Roble, the Riders sent nervous glances up the road. The one that looked like he was about to come down and take Liam’s boots didn’t seem so keen on it anymore.
“Hey,” someone said. “That whiny guy passed out.”
“Is he dead?”
Several seconds passed in silence between the riders.
“Dump him in the bushes,” one suggested.
“What if he’s not dead?” Another asked.
“Then make sure they’re dead,” the first man answered. “Do you want those uptight shitheads talking down on us at the gate?”
The Riders split up. Not only did they cut the wounded man loose and carry him off, but they also dragged away the other scavengers with visible injuries. Ink – who only had a cut on his forehead – started screaming.
“I-I’m not dead!” He cried, “I can walk! I don’t want to die!”
As a reward, a Rider came along and casually swung his mace, caving Ink’s face in. The scene set off a mass panic, filling the air with screams and exultant battle cries as the Riders ran down anyone who attempted to flee.
Liam curled up into a ball, hiding his face as he listened. Didn’t they get it? The Riders looked for any justification to inflict suffering and death on others.
“Make sure you put them in deep,” a Raider said after the commotion died down. “If someone finds them, they’ll just think it was the Demis.”
Demihumans have the worst reputation here...
Of course, other Human countries thought along those lines as well, but it wasn’t to the point where people would just dump their murder victims in the woods and be perfectly confident that they had gotten away with their crime.
Once the Riders returned, they resumed their journey. The stop at least allowed Liam to get back on his feet. Sweat slicked his body as they were force-marched along the dusty road under a cloudless sky. Liam had to keep an eye on the others just to match how tired he looked. The scavengers had once been a part of the army, too, so maybe their training wasn’t as great as he imagined it to be. Or maybe he had just gotten that much stronger since the last time he had been in the Holy Kingdom.
Even the Riders looked worn out by the time evening fell. It was probably a good time to escape. But did he want to do that? The Noble and his men were clearly dangerous to be around, but Liam’s job in the Holy Kingdom this time was to investigate the issues reportedly festering within its borders. The nobleman seemed like a good lead on those problems. Additionally, unlike his sister, he had been assigned to start around the Great Wall instead of one of the cities, so there must have been some reason for it.
A few Riders brought the remaining captives together, securing them to a tree while the rest of the nobleman’s men set up camp. Once everyone settled down, the Riders started looking in their direction in a dangerous way.
“Hey,” one of them said, “bring the girls over here.”
As one, the bound girls tensed.
“You idiot,” another replied. “We’re a day out from the gate. What are you going to do if one of them squeals?”
“I love me a squealer,” the first man chuckled lasciviously.
“That’s not what I meant, you dumbass.”
“I got this.”
Yet another man rose from his spot at the campfire. He sauntered over with a cocky smile.
“I’m sure you all heard us, so I’ll give it to you straight. Come over to us and you’ll get a warm meal and a tent to sleep in so long as you make for good company. Otherwise, you can stay here and sleep in your piss and shit while you freeze. Course, there’s no promise that a few of our boys figure they’ll come over for a good time anyway.”
Liam sighed internally as the briefest of calculating looks fell over the girls’ faces. In the end, not a single girl stayed behind.
“That bitch!” Paul grated as the sound of Corinne’s laughter drifted over from the camp, “She said that she loved me! That we could get married once we got a place of our own.”
“Women are all whores,” a bitter voice came around the tree.
“You all know what would've happened if they refused,” Liam said.
The man’s offer wasn’t an offer at all – it was a thinly-veiled death threat. If the girls refused to entertain the men willingly in relative comfort, they would be raped while tied to the tree and then their broken corpses would be dumped deep into the woods in the morning.
Of course, saying so probably wouldn’t make things any better, and though he understood that they had no real choice, Liam couldn’t help but feel disgusted as the girls did their best to be ‘good company’ for the nobleman’s thugs. What people said about women having a different sense of pride really was true.
By the time morning came, one of the girls was dead anyway. Though visibly horrified, the scavengers remained silent as her brutally beaten body was carried off. The surviving girls clung to the riders, doing chores and whatever else they thought would improve their chances. On the Riders’ part, they treated it all as if it were normal. The ones that had been ‘chosen’ by a girl even looked proud.
Liam was already tired by the time they broke camp and continued on their way. The scavengers around him were thoroughly demoralised and allowed themselves to be led along by their captors without a word of complaint. He was half certain that the one girl had been killed to produce the exact result that he saw. The nobleman and his thugs were skilled in all the wrong ways – another sign that things in the Holy Kingdom had taken a drastic turn for the worse.
When the gate came into view that evening, the nobleman stopped and instructed his men to check over their captives’ condition. One of them even licked his hand to pat down Liam’s hair. Once they were satisfied with the appearance of their prisoners, they proceeded to the ‘Kalinsha Gate’ – Kalinsha was actually two days from the wall – as everyone called it. It was little more than a giant hole in the Great Wall, but a pair of soldiers were stationed at the place where the gate should have been.
“Lord Reynaldo,” one of them nodded, “what do you have for us?”
That’s as far as respect for this guy goes, I guess.
They showed neither fear before the nobleman and his thugs nor very little interest in his presence. The nobleman probably stayed outside the wall because it was the only place where he could lord over everyone without being challenged.
“Illegal scavengers,” the nobleman replied. “Furthermore, they had the gall to foist forged documents upon me!”
“That’s a lie!” Paul shouted and pointed at Liam, “Just check his papers!”
Oh, you didn’t just...
It seemed that the Noble hadn’t just made up a charge. The soldier, however, ignored the theatrics and held out his hand.
“The Paladins will deal with that,” he said.
“Make sure that my name goes on the report,” the nobleman said. “I’m working day and night out here, you know?”
“Mhm.”
The papers went into the soldier’s hand. Liam also spotted two silver coins going along with them. The soldier whistled up two others from a tent nearby.
“Shift’s just about done,” he said as they shuffled over. “We’re booking these fellas over at the office.”
Another few coins passed hands – copper this time. The soldiers attached Liam and the scavengers’ bonds to a long rope and led them off. Liam looked over his shoulder to get one last good look at the nobleman who had brought them in, but he and his thugs were already riding back the way they came.