The two flew over the steppes, not rushing, not dawdling, both lost in their own thoughts. Liren had gone back to find the Shaman’s hat. Narantuyaa had been a pain, and lied several times, but she was useful enough. They just needed a direction. Now they had one. Fort Askarmand, on the Yness river. They had heard about slave forts in the steppes for a while. Now they would actually see one. They just didn’t know what to do when they got there.
It was a daoist sort of approach. Just flow. Don’t worry about what might, or might not, be. Just see where things lead, and don’t try to do too much. Good things would happen, bad things would happen, you couldn’t control it. There really wasn’t that much distinction between the two, as one always contained a piece of the other. Just accept, and flow, and try not to think about the fact that he just invaded a camp, harmed everyone in it, and kidnapped someone who, technically, was an enemy, but also, equally technically, was just some lady looking out for her people.
Which made him feel like a scumbag, except they were about to visit a slave fort on the borders of their kingdom, one supplied heavily by the Yuu. A fortified trading post for human lives and immense suffering. Describing it as “evil” or an “injustice” managed to be both accurate and insultingly inadequate at the same time. Yes, it was an injustice. It was morally disgusting. It was heretical by any and every definition of the word. So what were they going to do about it?
The thought grew like a toothache. What, exactly, were they going to do about one of several slave forts? Flatten it? Flatten all of them? The soldiers already did that, and they were rebuilt within a month. Tian and Liren couldn’t stop the slave trade. Not just the two of them, and not with the Yuu actively supporting it. Hell, he couldn’t put it all on the Yuu. Black Iron Gorge, what there was of it, supported the trade, the other nations buying and selling slaves supported it, and even if the Kingdom officially banned it, wasn’t it still happening?
Was he wrong? If everyone seemed to want it, was it wrong to try and stop it?
A properly daoist reaction might be to simply accept what they couldn’t change. Just sigh, shake their heads, and tell whoever had the ears to listen and a mind to understand that such a thing defiled the soul. That for the sake of this life and the lives to come, they should not trade in flesh.
You would think people didn’t need telling. Tian knew that that silver in the hand today weighed more than Hell tomorrow. It shouldn’t, but it did. Everyone knew about King Yan and the operation of the underworld, and they still did it.
It was the salt conundrum all over again. Here is a terrible problem, and you can’t fix it. It takes a big change, and everyone needs to be part of it. Though, the slave trade had been reduced. Not eliminated, but lessened. By all accounts, Hanshen was the one who reported the whole salt-slave-heretic trade situation in court and persuaded the emperor to suppress it. It was the start of his rising legend as the King of Hell.
Tian slowly crossed his wrists behind his back, standing straight on the sword as it crossed the swaying grass. Hanshen couldn’t fix the problem entirely, because he couldn’t be everywhere, and the reach of the army was very limited these days. They were simply fighting in too many places for that.
He had thought, once before, that what you really needed was teams of Earthly cultivators racing across the steppes, guided by Heavenly cultivators providing targets from above. That was before he knew about the shamans, but the idea was still sound. A suppression force. He might not be able to stop the slave trade everywhere, but there were only so many roads into the Broadsky kingdom. He could put a daoist boot on the throat of slavers with a clean conscience.
The thought brought a smile to his lips, though a very cold one. He had always been content to be extraordinary. Since when did he accept the nonsense beliefs of others as true, or the right way to do things? Taking other humans, binding them, driving them with torture, mutilation and the threat of death to labor for you was disgusting. It was without compassion, humility or frugality. It was without the benevolence the scholar-officials like Hanshen preached.
Tian admired Liren. He liked to think he looked austere, and perhaps otherworldly, as he stood with his hands behind his back on the flying sword. Liren looked gallant. A daoist out and about, ready to vanquish the evils of the world. She hated bandits with an unholy passion. He had a strong feeling that her hate would reach slavers too. Particularly since the Long Clan was in the trade.
Tian could put a boot on the neck of slavers with a clean conscience. Liren would do it with enthusiasm. But they couldn’t put a stop to it alone. They needed a lot of help. Cultivators, earthly realm cultivators, who could sweep the steppes and the border country, ripping out encampments and smashing caravans.
It would be easy to set up in the short term. Quite easy to lure in wandering cultivators, or the under-employed from the sects. It would be a sort of sanctioned banditry, and you got to feel like you were being virtuous and paid for it at the same time. Who has money? Merchants. How to get the money? Kill the merchants. Until there were no more merchants, and the cultivators went away. Then the merchants came back, and the cycle started all over again.
Yes, easy to set up and there would be no shortage of volunteers, but no staying power. He had been through this mental loop too many times. He blew away his frustration with a long breath, and refocused on the immediate issues. There would be grand shamans in the area of the fort, and heretics too. His instinct was always to go in quietly, moving hidden until he was ready to pounce. He looked once again at Liren’s gallant posture.
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There would be no sneaking around.
Fort Askarmand was a massive pile of rammed earth and rubble rising from the steppes. Long walls enclosed an open square, with built up structures around three of the edges. There was a tower on one wall, with tiers of rooms beneath it, stretching downward until they merged with the rest of the wall. It took Tian a long while to understand what he was seeing, because the scope of it felt so wrong. His mind insisted that his eyes were wrong, that the steppes couldn’t possibly build such a vast structure. His eyes won the fight. It was big enough to house a few thousand soldiers. He didn’t dare guess how many people were bound by those tall walls. Not that they could run even if the iron gates were open. The Yuu had the fortress surrounded.
“Am I seeing this right? It’s basically the same kind of tribal camp we just saw, but bigger. Vastly bigger.” Tian asked.
“It looks like there are a few tribes gathered here. Look, you can see pennants flying from some of the tents.” She pointed. “And there are more permanent buildings than just the fort. What do you think those buildings by the river are?”
“Forges, from the smoke. Tiny thing to be called a river.”
“It’s the steppes, and it’s a couple yards across. River.” Liren didn’t laugh, but her cheek twitched. “Are you sensing any cultivators down there? Because I am.”
Tian was too, all roughly in the earthly realm but that didn’t reassure him. It was nearly impossible to hide your vital energy in the Earthly Realm. He had already seen Heavenly Realm heretics do a decent job concealing themselves out in the field. He could only imagine what was hidden in the fort.
“What do we do now, Sis? I’ll admit I’m just going with the flow here. I’ve been going around in circles in my head, and I can’t seem to think of anything reasonable.”
“Yeah, you are overthinking things. We stampede the horses.”
Tian blinked. Then blinked again. There certainly were an awful lot of horses. He had never seen so many horses in one place. There was a short, stocky sea of them around the fortress, and solid walls of them lining the banks of the narrow river.
“I don’t get it.”
“We can just flare our qi, and it will stampede the horses. They are hobbled, but they will still run off, or fight each other, and generally create havoc.”
“No, that part I understood. It’s the “Why?” and “How does that help?” that I’m not getting.”
“Oh, easy. The sudden chaos will flush a lot of heretics out of hiding. Then you can kill them with your darts while I rush in and stab them. We start with the Heavenly Heretics first, obviously.”
“Right. Yes. A few notes…”
“Outnumbered who-knows-how-many to one, they have unknown tools, arrays, gu, other horrible things we don’t know about, poisons and diseases beyond number-”
“We are listing problems now, not benefits.”
Liren grinned at that, but pressed on. “The point is that we raise hell in the outer camp first. We don’t touch the fortress at all. Don’t even go near it, if we can. Kill whoever looks isolated in the camp, whoever is looking unbothered by the stampede. If we can pick off some shamans, so much the better. Now, anyone who’s pushing the Boruski is going to be powerful enough to rate a spot inside the fort, no question, and this is just one fort. But we can provoke a reaction. See who moves and how.”
“And if we do it often enough in enough places, we should start seeing some kind of coordinated response. Coordination means enough influence to affect large groups of people who don’t like listening to authority, which means we found whoever is tough enough to shift those Grand Shamans and push tribal unification. Got it. Still not seeing how we survive step one.”
“Pure hit and run. Right now, we are nobodies. Just a pair of Heavenly people floating around on swords, and we know other Heavenly cultivators don’t like making the first move if they can help it, and definitely not where their peers could capitalize on any weakness or distraction.”
“Move fast, create a ruckus, kill a few, and if we make it look like a targeted assasination, then they won’t chase us. Probably.” Tian concluded. “What do we do if they do decide to chase us? Or when we launch a second attack? Or a third?”
“We make it very obvious that we aren’t really hiding our trail. A properly paranoid person would assume that, far from the targeted assasination it first appeared to be, we are actually trying to bait them into an ambush.”
“Ah. Relying on paranoia to keep us safe.” Tian nodded, approvingly. Liren looked at him like she was worried he had developed brain issues.
“No, that’s silly. Obviously we are trying to bait them into an ambush. Did you forget, somehow, that we just robbed a warehouse? We have talismans. Binding, disorienting, explosive talismans.”
“We do?” Tian blinked. He was quite sure the warehouse just had medicinal supplies, victims, and a few random bits and bobs.
“We do. The warehouse had all kinds of strange treasures in it. The medicine was just a small part. You just didn’t look at anything else.”
That… actually was true. He had been looking purely for medicines and anything else that might be of use in saving the victims. He had given the manuals a once-over too, but didn’t remember them being anything special. He’d have to give them another look.
“I don’t know anything about setting up arrays, but I know how to paste talismans, and some of the books we captured do describe how to set up talisman traps at the Heavenly realm. We can’t flatten the fortress, but we can make them damn uncomfortable.” Liren cracked her knuckles with indecent satisfaction. “And when you get right down to it, I hate each and every person down there who isn’t in chains. I hate them individually and collectively. I hate that they are participating in this abomination, that they are profiting from it, that they respect, even idolize it. So to hell with targeted this, or clever that. We smash straight in, stack a few bodies, rush out again and see if we can’t stack a few more. Then we do it all over again, until we kill our way to someone useful. We can’t permanently end the slave trade, but we can permanantly end these particular slave traders.”