Chương 215: Chapter 72: Seeing Hell and Tracing a Path

After three months they reached the border of the duchy of Aelthria and the wild lands of Thyll. The journey had not only been toward the west, but also a persistent drag toward the north, moving away from the royal roads, entering a geography where maps became vague and the authority of the crown a distant promise. Spring, which had caught them on the road, was now dying, giving way to summer at its peak.

The nights were a symphony of strident insects; the days, a festival of light and color where wild flowers stained the prairies with purple, yellow, and white. The air smelled of grass freshly cut by the passing of the wagons, of damp earth, and the distant sweetness of laden fruit trees.

They had traveled at a dizzying speed, four months of constant heartbeats over the earth, of noisy and brief inns, of landscapes that blurred in the memory like watercolors under the rain, of changing carriages, from chelokran in rugged terrain to titanopods in valley areas. Now, in this remote corner of the realm, the world seemed to have flattened, expanding into a deceptive tranquility.

Endless prairies stretched under a deep blue sky, dotted here and there by orderly plantations of wheat that swayed like an amber sea. A small estate, humble in appearance, rose in the middle of the plain. Its surroundings, unlike the dusty road, were surrounded only by open countryside, by solitary coral trees stretching their branches in almost architectural formations, and above all, by mollucapras.

The giant snails, with white and nacreous shells that sparkled under the midday sun like scattered jewels, moved with majestic slowness between the furrows, leaving behind a silvery, damp trail. They were the legitimate wealth of the land, the facade of a barony that, according to the papers, lived off the breeding of these mollusks, wheat, fruits, and the shearing of lanqirios.

However, the marchioness did not stop to contemplate the mansion forever; her stealth lessons, her learning with the jester had taught her one thing: to hunt, one must know. The village she came to know only as much as necessary, it was the closest and surely the main one of the barony, it was a handful of adobe houses with thatched roofs that seemed to slumber at the edge of the road due to the tranquility. It was small, insignificant for her purposes, but useful only as a resting point, as a planning point.

She was driven by the ominous feeling that had accompanied her throughout the journey, the craving for the truth, tangible and elusive. She had devised a plan during all the free time she had. So as soon as they arrived at the village inn, she left Fjora in charge of the preparations: gathering local information, securing the titanopods, buying discreet supplies. She did not have time to integrate.

Selena, after months of travel and of ruminating on the information Corren had given her, had the profile of Baron Bernard Scargoth burned into her mind. The man had inherited the title and these lands from his father Edward, along with a mountain of debt that had broken the barony.

So much so, according to the whispers that the Path of the Inner Voice had captured, that his other three brothers had been sold to the crown as servitude for debts, a sordid but legal practice for those who were desperate, after all by paying off the debt a slave could always buy their freedom. In that mollucapras farm and wheat, the crops were the respectable face.

The real business, the one that inflated his secret coffers, was threefold: slavery, kidnapping, and the trafficking of drugs such as velón, dream sap, and wing glitter; many of them even manufactured the corsol so addictive in the neighborhoods of Terracanto. Selena reached the limits of the estate at dusk on the first day, the sun beginning to stain the sky orange and purple, a long shadow stretching over the fields. The property was much more guarded than its rural appearance suggested.

Guards in hardened leather armor and short swords patrolled the perimeter, their harsh gazes scrutinizing the plain. Following Valerian's teachings, Selena merged with the growing shadows. She had become stealth itself, emptying her presence, controlling her breathing to match it with the whisper of the wind in the grass, in the leaves of the trees.

It was the art of the jester, of her master, the one she herself had been forced to polish in the streets of Kaelburg, in her test following a man who was a shadow among shadows, after all she had managed to hunt him down and now stealth was also her second skin. Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more. In the distance, her heart beating strong but cold in her chest, she saw the operation. Five large, unmarked wagons were stopped near the barns.

From them men, women, and children were getting down, pushed and dragged. They went chained, with rags that barely covered their backs, their wrists and ankles bound with rough ropes. From afar it was clear they belonged to different nations, as the children were mainly of Khelganor Nordic features, the men however were Sandstrohm with their ebony skin, and the women were a mosaic of skins ranging from the darkest to ones pale as snow.

Their faces were masks of exhaustion, fear, and a resignation that broke the soul. The guards, men of harsh features dressed in common merchants' clothes, separated them with brutal efficiency: men to one side, women to another, children to a separate pen. The sound of blows, dry and dull, reached her whenever someone stumbled or resisted. A man who tried to run was brought down by a mace blow to the back and dragged toward a dark pit enclosed with wooden planks; the lid closed behind him with a definitive thud.

Selena's stomach churned. A hard, piercing feeling ran through her chest: anger, disgust, fierce compassion. But above all, a strange sensation arose, familiar yet new: the void. Not the void of absence, but the one named to her in the Cabal, the one echoing in her arcane title. A cold, ethereal void that did not drown emotions, but rather wrapped them, calmed them, turned them into data, into variables of an equation she had to solve.

It gave her a brutal clarity, an icy distance from which to observe the horror without it blinding her. Perhaps this is what they meant, she thought, with a shiver that was not of fear, but of recognition. It will be helpful if it allows me to find the truth… It was a void that, instead of annihilating her, sharpened her. It was a terrifying truth for any other person, but for her, here and now, it was an advantage.

Her most lethal weapon was not green fire magic nor Acendrar; it was this inner quietness, this ability to see hell and trace a path within it. She infiltrated further, slipping among the coral trees of the garden surrounding the main estate, a stone and wood construction larger than it seemed from afar. From there, pressed against the rough trunks, she observed through the windows illuminated by oil lamps. She mentally noted guards, shift changes, routines.

The slavers, once their cargo was unloaded, gathered in a separate shed to drink and play dice; however, they were not the same ones guarding the house. Inside it, movement was scarce: quiet servants, guards posted at the doors, and sometimes, teenagers running through the hallways. They were Baron Scargoth's children. Selena withdrew that first night with the data fresh in her mind, but she did not stop. She returned every night, a patient and persistent shadow.

The patterns were engraved, not on paper, but in her soul; she made them habit, turned them into an intimate map of the estate's routines. Thus, she discovered the human contradictions under Scargoth's roof. The baron had three children. The youngest was named Frank and was a fourteen-year-old boy, yet he stood out the most for being different. With light eyes and a gentle expression, he was often seen bringing water to the slaves or exchanging furtive words of comfort.

His father beat him for that, forbade him from having pets by taking away the nimoras that swarmed over the estate's roofs, and more than once, for defending a slave child, both had been locked in the dark pit for hours. The boy would come out trembling, his eyes reddened, but without malice, only with a deep sadness. Then there were the twins. Their names were Leonor and Leticia; they were two young blondes, with light sky-blue eyes, perfect mirrors of each other in appearance, but not entirely in secret.

They were Scargoth's pride and delight, spoiled, dressed in the finest dresses illegal money could buy. Despotic like their father, they enjoyed watching the servants suffer; but what Scargoth was ignorant of was that one of them, under the cover of night, slipped away to meet with the Sandstrohm slaves passing through the estate, seeking in their worn bodies a forbidden pleasure and a mute rebellion.

The other twin was not far from that behavior; she knew about her sister, but kept quiet, as she herself met in secret with one of the young female servants. Their furtive kisses and their nights together in the barn were an open secret that only the shadows, and now Selena, knew. Scargoth's wife, Baroness Julia, was an elegant person. She resembled her son more in goodness, when she could afford to be. She was kind to the house servants but turned a blind eye to her husband's crimes.

Her morality was flexible, bent by the fear of losing status, however weak, that the title and the facade provided them. She preferred comfortable blindness to uncomfortable courage.