Communique, Day 9, Part 3

The emancipated slaves were, however, hard at work – even though they must have been infinitely more tired than the courier. After using the washtub in the morning, Aten couldn’t help but notice that everything was cleaned up, all the feces and the bloods and the divots from the night before were washed away, as if they were never there. And, most importantly, the corpse was gone, which made Aten more than a little apprehensive when Kayli passed him a plated of what looked to be both hot, and meat.
“You didn’t…” he asked, looking at the plate in horror, while some other part of his rain simultaneously mused over what made him jump to this conclusion and wondering how the whole deal would taste if it were true.
“While that would be terribly effective,” Kayli began, digging into her own plate with a renewed vigour. There wasn’t a scrap of anything approaching proper table manners on her, and she ate hunched over, as if guarding the food. Aten guessed that made sense. “We’ve never been made that hungry. We just burned it. There’s a pile out back where we destroy a goodly amount of material on a nightly basis, kind of a communal garbage heap from the farms. It was our turn to get the burning done. Dude was a bastard, but necessity demanded he get something resembling a funeral pyre. Not exactly pleased, myself. Buried the bones and whatever else didn’t transform into ash by the heap, itself. Y’do what you have t’do, y’know?”

Aten took note of how she tended to speak at length, and seemed to be under the distinct impression that pausing for breath was a weakness other people possessed. This land to the curious habit of speaking quicker and quicker as her thoughts drew out longer. It was, in a word, endearing to Aten, who was reminded of an old lover of his.
She was probably killed in the attack. The woman was fiery and refused to take gruff from anybody. Came from working in a tavern, she would claim, dealing with hands-ey soldiers was a good way to train herself in self-defense and confidence.

“So, a plan,” Kayli began, the majority of her food already disappeared into her belly before Aten had taken three bites, “We’re gunna need one. First on the agenda is going to be the hardest part.” Aten took a bite of the meat in front of him, which he had identified correctly as port. “Now, we’re going to need more soldiers – big deal here is this – us slaves, we’re motivated more than any of the others. We’re invisible and can flit about on errands. There’s a few here who also used to work as spies and courtesans for high-ranking military folk. We know how to not attract attention. And, with the skeleton force left behind, we outnumber the Silks at least ten men to one. The problem there being that one silk could probably take ten or so of us before we took him down. It’ll be a close battle of we issue a call to the slaves to fight it out.”
Aten nodded glumly. He had seen enough battles in his last five days of being awake – ten days if you counted the time he spent reliving and imagining scenes of carnage behind his eyeballs.

“That’s not good. We need another plan.” He said simply, and Kayli nodded, with a barely suppressed grimace. “I did say we were deciding, didn’t I?” she scolded the Troizan before returning to her outline.
“Now, you see, with the Second Aspect church disposed that means some excellent things for us. The Saharoth are some of the finest swordsmen in Thanavia, and, Silks being Silks, out Shaharoth are particularly vicious. If we can somehow contact some remains of the disposed Second Aspect Church, we’d have a huge advantage, not to mention any Paladins we can bring to the fray. Leaders, though…” Kayli let the sentence trail off, letting the thought lead itself to its natural conclusion. A hint Aten wasn’t exactly taking well. “The Fourth Aspect would barely be on our side.” He said with a half-cocked half-smile. “Pacifists aren’t much good in a revolution. Especially an armed revolt.”

Kayli shook her head. “Well, there’s that, and then there’s the fact that they continually voted down abolishing the entire practice of slavery in the first place. Before the Third Aspect even got its seat back on the Oligarchy.”