Salt Storm: The Salted Series: Episodes #31-35 Galvin, Aaron (classic fiction txt) 📖

enough. The drawing of his blade and the others in his gang to follow cemented the idea.

Despite all that he had seen, Lenny cringed at the idea of leaving the Orcs to Henry’s whims. He reminded himself of all the Orcs had done in Bouvetøya. His father’s death in Røyrkval. The Selkie criminal back in New Pearlaya that Edmund had shown him for being one the Orcs had strung up in Lenny’s place too.

Serves the Orcs right. He told himself, even as Declan’s teachings and his own conscience warned that to kill in such a way was not justice, but cold-blooded murder. Still, Lenny made his peace with the torturing to come, turning away that he, at least, would not need to add those images to his memories.

Looking out across the crowd of Selkie freed, however, he spotted more than a few children watching the ongoing affair. He keyed on a standing, Selkie boy among the crowd, his face already burdened by darkness and harsh realities. For all that Lenny saw in the boy’s eyes, he took note when the Selkie boy winced at one of the Orc soldiers yelping at Henry’s cruel taunt with the point of his blade.

Lenny to action. “Wait,” he said, wheeling back to the ongoing affair upon the platform.

The Leper gang did not heed him, flipping the tussling Orc soldier onto his belly, then holding him fast. Henry came among them with his blade handy, his left knee needling into the crook of the Orc’s back. Though he stopped at Lenny’s calling out, the glint in Henry’s eye warned that he did so only out of curiosity for the little man speaking up on the Orc’s behalf.

Brutus too came to the fore. “What’re you on about, Dolan?” he asked. “You got a better idea for how to make these here suffer first?”

“Nah,” said Lenny, glancing to the Selkie boy in the crowd again that Brutus, at least, might take note. “But ya can’t kill them. Not here and now anyway. Not like this.”

Brutus snorted. “And who’s going to stop us, lad? You?”

“Not me,” said Lenny. “You’re gonna stop yourself. Henry and his gang too. Because it’s like ya said, Brutus – they’re burning the evidence. If ya kill these Orcs, then who’s to say otherwise? Who to believe us?”

“You see all these seated out here, Dolan?” Brutus swept the end of his blade in pointed direction over all the newly freed Selkie prisoners. “They’re evidence too. T’will be their voices to carry the truth of this day and all those before it, so they will. Aye, let their voices stand as witness for the horrors that happened here.”

“Won’t do no good, if they can’t speak.” Lenny nodded toward one of the Selkies who had prevented Tom from punishing Yusuf in the crematorium. “Those we found burning the bodies had their tongues cut out, all on orders from that Commander Pohl over there. That way they couldn’t tell the other slaves what was happening. None of these we freed from the crematorium can talk.” He looked out on the Selkie masses, wondering if they too had all received a similar punishment, or if they stayed silent throughout the exchange for fear of what would happen if speaking up.

Brutus shook his head as he marched down the steps of the platform and then slowly over toward Lenny. “You’re a Dolan, lad. Figured you to be a wiser sort than this.” His blade still clutched in hand, Brutus stopped in front of Lenny and looked down on the smaller man. “You think the Merrows and Nomads, the other Orcs, any of them at all will care what these Selkies have to say about what happened here, do you?”

“I don’t think it,” said Lenny, a single glance in Tom Weaver’s direction making him reflect on conversations had with a younger Weaver. Lenny’s jaw clenched with conviction at the memory of warning Garrett outside Crayfish Cavern on how the Painted Guard soldiers had planned to defile Ellie and other captive Silkies. How Lenny’s warning and Garrett’s passing the message on had led to their rescue by the Painted Guard pod mother, Makeda. How her judgement of the Orc intentions and assault had later led to the castration and banishment of her guilty soldiers for their crime.

Lenny furthered his belief by thinking back to his exchange with the Merrow queen, Nattie Gao, outside of New Pearlaya too. How she had promised the Selkies freedom in exchange for teaching her daughter about the Salt’s harshest realities and what they meant for slaves. Lenny cursed himself again for rejecting the offer in favor of making his own choices and way. How all the decisions he made thereafter had led him to the pain and loss and place he stood in now. “I don’t think just anyone will care,” he reiterated to Brutus. “I know the right people who will listen to what’s happened here and do something about it too.”

“Well, most of us don’t have your fancy friends, do we?” said Brutus. “And even if you did have someone from up on high who you think would listen, lad, it don’t mean they’d do nothing about all this to stop it from happening again.”

“They would,” said Lenny. “But they gotta know about it first. Gotta give them something to use to back our claims too.”

“Oh? Your word not enough for your fancy friends then, eh?” Brutus asked before poking him in the chest. “Tell you what I know, son. All the friends I have left are either here, or dead. All of them Selkies too. And most of them killed by this sort.” He jerked his head toward Commander Pohl. “Their kind will never stop trying to put an end to folk like us.” He sighed. “Oh, I been a long time Salting away in prisons of all sorts, Dolan. Now, that I’m free of them slave mines too and seen all these horrors here? Don’t seem like much has changed for our