Tian and Liren floated above the ruins of the fortress. The steppes were looking pretty ruined too. The tough green grass had been ripped away, first by stampeding horses, then by explosions, then by hellish fire. It was pockmarked with corrosion left by destroyed gu and impact craters from missed bombardments. It was the first time since he left the Redstone Wastes that he thought a place could be correctly described as a wasteland.
“I keep waiting for someone else to pop out.” Liren muttered. Tian just nodded. He was keeping his eyes moving too.
Ten minutes of silence passed. Liren cracked first. “Screw it. If I get jumped, kill them for me.”
“Fair. Start with the Deadheart’s body. I snagged the ring.” Tian held up a suspiciously clean storage ring. The cleanliness was suspicious solely because Liren had seen the state Deadheart was in when he started his fall from the sky. At a certain point, what constituted a human body was more a philosophical question than an anatomical one.
“Why? If you already have the ring.”
“Because I took a peek inside, and there is a ton, but none of it screams ‘Personal stash of a demonic heavenly heretic.’”
Liren shrugged and swooped down on the remains of the remains. “I’d forgotten how much I hate demons. We’d been seeing so many gu recently, I’d half forgotten about them.”
“I will admit that Gu will always have a special place in my heart. The part where they burn forever, scream forever, in a suffering mass so diabolical, those scumbag demons will start turning up and suggesting that I should calm down, enjoy a cup of tea and maybe some crackers or something.” Tian touched his heart. The little oil lamp of compassion still burned in there, battered and scuffed, but no dimmer than before. Not a single speck of its light existed for gu or their creators.
“Demons, though.”
“I’m not saying demons are better or worse. I’m just saying that I really, really, extremely, very much, a lot, hate gu. As far as I know, and ever hope to learn, they are the perfect opposite of my dao. Or put another way, they are everything my dao exists to oppose.” Tian slowly drifted through the sky, trying to keep an eye in every direction simultaneously. It didn’t work terribly well, but it worked a bit, and it was what he could do.
“And here I was going to get you a demonic cricket for your birthday. The music is supposed to be very soothing.”
“Really?”
“Really I was going to get you one, or really they are soothing?”
“Either?”
“Found it! The nasty bastard had it implanted in his pelvis near the base of the spine. That’s a new one for me. It’s not a ring either. A spatial storage bead. Oh, that is… disgusting. I don’t have the words for this.”
“Diabolical?”
“Don’t be an asshole.” Liren glared up at Tian. “Come and take a look for yourself, and see if you can still crack jokes.”
“Later. I think there are some people still alive in the fortress. Let’s investigate.”
The two sped over. The purple flames were still burning, though they were rather patchy. “What happened here? It looks like the fire started in that corner of the drill yard, but it scattered all over.” Tian pointed, but Liren shook her head.
“It didn’t start there. It spread from inside that tower.” She pointed. “The question is why, and how, I guess. Let’s see what shape the survivors are in.”
The results of their exploration left the two immortals shaking. It was one thing to know intellectually that slavery was an atrocity, that surely many died around the fortress, that an institution built on coercion and fear must have the means to coerce and inspire fear. It was another to walk into the carefully whitewashed cells, barely six feet on the square, and realize that there was no functional limit to the number of people that might be crammed into it. Tian counted eight bodies in one cell, ten in another. Others were “better,” long rooms with chains running along the straw covered floor, and bodies freed from slavery in death, still cuffed to the running chain. From the smell, there had been no access to a latrine.
There was no escape for the enslaved people. Not in this life. Tian pressed his palms together and bowed. “May Granny Meng grant you relief, may King Yan unburden you, may your next lives be peaceful and free.” He sighed. “And in your next life, may the immortals you meet cultivate their virtue as much as their strength.”
“There should have been a way to save them.” Liren’s face was bloodless.
“They should never have needed saving. Come on, the survivors are this way.” They moved through the hallways quickly. They were unadorned, utilitarian. Wide flagstones were used, well mortared in place. “Easy to mop, and much cheaper than tile. I imagine that’s an important consideration here.”
The survivors were four immortals, technically. Their cultivation was ruined by the backlash of the spell when it hit the fortress. Each had rather disgusting sigils and unnatural forms carved on their chests and backs, shapes with seeming magical purpose.
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Tian picked a man with one eye at random, and took his pulse. A moment later, he shook his head. He checked over the rest, but they were no better.
“Think you can stabilize one of them long enough to have them answer some questions?” Liren asked.
“I can try, but… no, not really. I think they are dead, their body just doesn’t know it yet. Their nerves are practically all burnt out, their heart rates are far too high, qi and vital energy dissipation is almost total, and I’m not sensing any shen at all. These are just breathing corpses. Check for storage devices. Maybe the answer to whatever question you might have is in one of them.”
A search turned up no storage devices, nor answers. In fact, the number of questions multiplied. “Do these people look like they come from the Kingdom?” Liren asked.
Tian opened his mouth, then closed it again. “The robes look like kingdom make, but now that you mention it, they don’t really look like the nomads of the steppes or people from the Kingdom.”
“Wizards from another country? Were they heretics, slaves? Are they even daoists?” Liren wondered. Tian could only spread his hands helplessly. If she didn’t know, how could he?
One of the foreigners started going into convulsions. It was mercifully brief. With a final exhale, the tattoos rippled like a pond when the wind blows across the water, and when the shaking stopped, they were gone.
The rest soon followed. Tian and Liren shared a helpless look, stowed the bodies, and moved on.
They collected all the bodies. Every slave, every heretic, every horse, chicken and dog. Any living thing that died in this place was gathered up, sealed with talismans, and stowed for future incineration. You didn’t leave bodies available for heretics. They could do far, far too much with them. Cleaning up the battlefield outside was going to be a nightmare. They would have to make pyres and burn entire tribes.
“What are you looking for?” Tian asked.
“Anything I can find, really. I think all the stuff that immortals are going to care about will be in the storage rings of the heretics, but this was a major caravansery for the slave trading route. They would have to have supplies of all sorts here, as well as trade goods that didn’t have a pulse. Once we make sure they are clean and free of taint, we can bring them back to Burning Flag City. Every little bit of extra supplies helps, right?”
The warehouse on the surface was ruined, but much of the supplies inside were still salvageable. There was storage in a basement as well, root vegetables kept cold in the ground, barrels of pickled meat, fermented vegetables, all carefully preserved.
“How certain are we that the meat is beef and pork?” Liren asked.
“Lamb, actually, according to the invoice. I know my first thought was human flesh, but according to this,” Tian waved the log book he found on a table near the door, “It’s pickled lamb. I know I’m not going to eat it regardless, but from what I can tell, it should be safe for human consumption. And I’m running my qi through it hard.”
Liren grunted. She was too.
They wound up filling four storage rings with mortal supplies, arms, armor, fodder, anything they thought might be of use. They stripped the fortress bare, then toppled and burned what remained. Then they started the grim work of cleaning up the steppes. They worked quickly, and had experience in the field. That didn’t make the work any more pleasant. The pillar of black smoke that rose with the dawn would have been visible wide across the steppe land. Tian wondered what the oncoming caravans or tribes thought of it.
“I know if I was a shaman, I wouldn’t let my tribe spend a single second near here. I doubt the kings need any persuading about that either.” Liren shook her head. “Pull out the flying boat. This was a success, even if we feel like crap. Time to go home and get a bath.”
Tian cracked open Deadheart’s storage bead almost as soon as they were in the air.
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.” Liren shook her head, digging her pole into the air with noticeable venom.
The human organs were expected. The barrels of blood were expected. Utterly corrupted, plainly demonic materials were expected. Tian didn’t know iron could scream and seethe with tormented faces rising and falling from the surface, but there were two heavy knives in there that did exactly that. Unexpected, but still within a certain realm of expected. It was a very rich demonic cultivator, who suffered the backlash of not one, but two major arrays. The fight might well have gone otherwise, if he had a chance to show off what he was really capable of.
What was unexpected were the fetuses. Human, obviously. Some still in their amniotic sac, others smoked and threaded on leather thongs. All painted and anointed with foulness. Vessels for demons, perhaps, or seeds. In the hands of Deadheart, they were simply resources. He had built quite a collection. Each had a little tag, neatly listing the biographical history of the fetus, along with its “birthday.”
“I kind of wish Little Treasure was here.” Tian muttered. “Did we lose merit for having our fight over the mortals, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds? Or did we gain merit for killing these monsters?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know. We weren’t trying to kill the mortals, we were just…”
“Indifferent to them. Unwilling to let considerations about them affect our plan. The greater good, which just happened to require the death and suffering of those weaker than us. Yeah, you really do understand your seniors more when you step into their shoes!” The bitterness of his words made speaking painful. Worse, he knew he was lying to himself.
It wasn’t just “hundreds” of bodies they burned. It was thousands. Any explosion that could send Tian tumbling helplessly was more than enough to kill any mortals caught in the blast zone. This had started as targeted assassinations, but it had ended in an outright atrocity.He had no idea what the consequences would be. Just that there would surely be some, and they would be dreadful.
“We did, however, get a couple of literal chests of spirits stones out of this. And, painful though it is to say it, an immense amount of medicine. I think we now have enough mortal gold and silver that we could use it to ballast ships.” Liren made a stab at finding some positives. “Not to mention a stack of spells to look through, and a decent pile of not-cursed equipment. The City will be able to hold out a little better, for a little longer, with this. And… There are two more major fortresses we can raid. They will know we are coming, and will be even better prepared next time, but that means we have pinned down, at least temporarily, some of their forces.”
Tian nodded. “All nice to have, but only one thing is really important. The money. We just screwed mightily with Threadcutter’s money. There isn’t a single person, heretic or orthodox, who will stand still when that happens. Killing him, and getting out of the blasted Steppes, is one step closer.” He tilted his head back and closed his eyes. “Yay. Winning.”