Desnus 25, 4713 (small hours, Seinaru Heikiko)

Qatana has gone to a very dark place and I don’t know what to do about it. Or even if I should do anything about it because, let’s face it, I am hardly an impartial judge here myself. I was visibly shaking not an hour ago, and my hands are still trembling now. The farther we travel the more it’s obvious that people are the same pretty much everywhere. We color our skin, dye our hair, change our clothes, but it’s all just a veneer over a core that is no different from one place to the next. In the face of anomie, people revert to their worst qualities and those qualities are as sure as the setting sun.

I fear that maybe mom is right. What if there really are souls that aren’t worth saving?

There were seven women held in slavery here. And not just held in slavery, but imprisoned in it, jailed at night in bamboo cages “because they had to sleep somewhere”. They range in age from their early teens to their mid twenties, all of them captured and forced into servitude, some with their families killed in front of them, and their villages burned. When we rescued them, one of the first questions they asked Radella was if we were their new owners. They literally thought they had been sold like property.

It’s no wonder Qatana is in a state. Hishasi’s guided tour of the fortress led her through Kaer Maga and emerged thirteen years in the past. That he’s still alive is not a measure of any sort of restraint, either hers or mine: it’s purely a practical decision, and even then, for me, it was a struggle. In a way, all the surviving bandits are fortunate that I prepared my spells to subdue rather than kill. Any attempts at instant justice would just ring hollow, and that played a significant part in my internal debate.

One of them was not so lucky. After we saw the defaced shrine, both Qatana and I had reached a breaking point. She acted first, and ordered the remaining bandits into one of the bamboo cages. One of them hesitated. She did something with her hands while speaking the words to a spell, and he screamed in abject terror and died on the spot. You might say it had a sort of chilling affect on the others. The insurgency ended before it even began; with a newfound obedience, they stepped inside and we locked them up.

And then, by gods, it got worse. Qatana brought in the recently-freed slaves and asked them if any of our prisoners had taken advantage of them. They were in no condition to answer anything, even seeing their tormentors locked in cages, but Dasi had a spell running and it told us enough. They’d all been abused, even the youngest of them, and every one of the men had taken liberties with someone. It was impossible to know who had victimized whom, but at that point what did it matter? If I’d had prepared my spells differently, I could have incinerated them all on the spot and walked away with a clear conscience.

And I probably am fortunate, there. Maybe. If I am being honest, I am still undecided. Maybe I should have done it, anyway.

Except that the others would have objected. And then I’d also have to explain myself to Ameiko. Not that she wouldn’t understand given that business with her half-brother, but it would be more the principle of the thing. I am supposed to be better than that, even if I’m not.

Would Ameiko understand, though? I have to wonder. Everyone knows Qatana’s story by now, and Ameiko knows it better than most, but only Qatana lived through it. Only Shalelu got to see it first-hand. And as far as I know, only she and I heard the stories—and only I got immersed in them, the details slowly trickling in over the years the followed.

It took months for Qatana to even open up at all. When I first saw her in Korvosa she was still in a state of denial over what had happened. I didn’t know what it was at the time, of course—what 10-year-old understands these things?—I just knew that it wasn’t normal, that she seemed both fully aware yet blissfully ignorant of what had happened in the preceding months. I didn’t know exactly what had happened to her, but I knew it was bad. Worse than what I had been going through. Worse than I was capable of imagining at that age. (Now? Not so much.)

So who would understand? Almost certainly not Olmas. He and Qatana had a very long talk after the incident at the cage. I don’t know what they said to each other, but neither left looking particularly happy so I can probably guess: he expressed concern that she was taking the role of jury and executioner against prisoners who had surrendered to us, and she didn’t understand why there was a problem. Rationally, I know he’s right, but I am having a hard time being rational. Maybe that’s the point, though. Do we really make the best decisions when we can’t separate ourselves from crime and victim?

But it’s not like we’re serving up vigilante justice here, either. She even said their fate would be decided by Jiro. As the ancestral owner of this place, and in the absence of a daimyo who gives two shits about his villeins, I think that’s more than fair. And, so what if she had to make an example of one? It was obviously necessary. I mean, if killing almost everyone here wasn’t proof enough that we should be taken seriously, then gods only know what they would have tried to do when we weren’t watching. At least now we can be relatively certain they won’t oush their luck. Or test our limits.

We’ve had enough surprises for one day as it is, so my patience for those is paper-thin. The women we rescued said there was another girl being held captive, one they referred to as the “cat lady”. She was, of all things, a were-tiger, kept as the personal slave and concubine of the “scary man”, the druidic shaman Kamuy-Paro. Turns out? She wasn’t a slave, or held against her will. So. Surprise!

She put on a good act, though. Zosi found her chained to a bed in Kamuy-Paro’s personal quarters, and she played the part of the unwilling prisoner and play thing of Kamuy-Paro to a tee, even going so far as killing one of the bandits that got in her way. She had convinced all of us of her story, captured and forced to be bitten by a were-tiger to inflict the curse upon her for his amusement (for all we know, that might actually be true). But, really, she was just biding her time, looking for a chance to strike. Considering she was a willing submissive in whatever depraved sexual fantasies Kamuy-Paro was living out, she took the evidence of his death—that would be his still-bleeding-out corpse—rather well (which, I suppose, should have been a clue). It wasn’t until Zosi and Dasi informed her of their plans to make maps from his skin (eesh!) that would “reveal his secrets” that she couldn’t sustain the ruse any longer. I guess they weren’t specific on what those secrets entailed, and there were secrets she wanted keeping. Like, who she fucking was.

She attacked us while Olmas, Radella and Qatana were on their tour with Hashasi. She probably thought she could take us. She was wrong. Surprise! I conjured a pit underneath her, and then Ivan gave her a push with a spell, and down she went. She couldn’t get out, especially after I covered the walls with sleet and snow. Zosi dropped bomb after bomb on her until the screams went silent.

Good riddance.

Gods, these people. Kamuy-Paro was a lunatic who we’re told set people on fire. Their chieftain, Gangasum, built his fiefdom like an Ulfen raider short on manners. The guards used their slaves as personal toys, and killed them out of hand (the women said that they haven’t seen the stable boy in a while; when asked about that, Hishasi said, “We need a new stable boy”). And, of course, all of them found sport in desecrating a statue of Shizuru, which tells you plenty about where they stand.

And the daimyo turned a blind eye to all of it. So to hell with him.

(predawn, Seinaru Heikiko)

The women warned us not to enter the secret garden at night. Come to think of it, Kamuy-Paro said much the same. This was Kamuy-Paro’s rule, and he knew what he was talking about. Based on what we learned about him? I wouldn’t be surprised if he was somehow responsible.

I have no idea what those things were. It was like the a pile of firewood just stood up and attacked, ignoring all of our magic as if it wasn’t there (except, unsurprisingly, for magical fire). This makes me suspect they were some form of golem, but who knows? Now they are kindling and splinters so it hardly matters.

Ivan and Radella are talking to the women and helping get them settled in. I have not been included in that discussion because I am quite obviously not in a state where I can be a calming influence. Right now, I am not what they need, and even if I tried I’d almost certainly make things worse rather than better. It’s for the best I stay out of it.

It’s been a long night. The sun will be up soon, just in time for us to go to bed. Later today, I teleport with Qatana to fetch Ameiko and Jiro because we suspect we’ll need the Seal to open the vault. They will come back on Qatana’s spell since it’s faster than the chariot I can conjure. I’ll teleport back because I am impatient and not likely to be good company.

And we have a new problem to worry about. While we were fiddling around in Kamuy-Paro’s garden, my spell that detects magical scrying alerted me for just a couple of minutes.

Someone is watching us.