Ruin at Sais by Arealius the Sailor, of Port Olni
This manuscript was developed by the author with the assistance of AI tools. Google Gemini and Claude were used for drafting support, readability, and idea exploration. All intellectual contributions, narrative decisions, and final edits are the sole work of the author. AI was employed strictly as a tool, not as a co‑author, and its role is disclosed here in accordance with publishing integrity standards.
Customs, and values may not align with modern societal standards or moral principles.
Gor is Copyrighted by John Norman
Ruin at Sais
By Arealius the Sailor of Port Olni,
The ash of Sais had long since settled into the red soil of Gor, but the stench of dead empire seemed to linger, clinging to the damp morning mist rolling off the Vosk. Where once the white marble of a grand river power had gleamed under the Gorean sun, only charred stumps of masonry, shattered columns, and blackened foundations remained. Sais had not been conquered; it had been stricken by Dar-Kosis—the Holy Disease, the Sacred Affliction.
To Goreans, Dar-Kosis was a wasting, highly contagious horror reminiscent of that carried with a sacred, terrifying weight. Dar-Kosis was spread by direct contact with an afflicted person. It was not spread through the air or water. By strict Gorean law, anyone who contracted the affliction was instantly declared legally dead. Their rights vanished, their property was forfeit, and their very name was erased from the rolls of their home city, forbidden to be spoken again. Those marked by the affliction were forced to wear loose yellow robes as an unmistakable warning to the untainted, carrying crude wooden clappers to signal their approach long before their hollowed, decaying faces could be seen.
When the plague had taken root in Sais, the surrounding cities—driven by primal terror of the rot—had put the entire metropolis to the torch and iron, walling off its memory and leaving it a hollow, blackened shell to rot on the riverbank.
For Arealius, the sight was both a sobering warning and a strange source of solace. Standing at the bow of the heavy wooden merchant barge, his hand resting near the hidden dagger at his belt, he looked upon the rubble with the keen, disciplined eye of a caste-trained scribe.
His flight from Port Olni had been born of shame—the humiliation of relying on materials supplied by a treacherous, vengeful female slave. That disgrace had driven him onto the river, but it was the bloody brawl in the Lara paga tavern that had made him a fugitive. He smiled grimly under his breath. The senior scribe of Lara and his two posturing apprentices had expected a caste-bound intellectual to bow to their arrogant taunts. They had not expected a desperate man to kick an apprentice between the thighs, crush a windpipe with an open palm, and smash an elder's face first into lap of paga girl then to the unyielding cobblestones.
It wasn't the way of the Caste of Scribes. It was dirty, brutal, and thoroughly effective.
The master of the merchant barge, a thick-necked man clad in a sweat-stained tunic, barked orders to his rowers as they drifted to close near the ruined wharves of Sais. The upper Vosk had been peaceful enough—small agricultural settlements, minor river posts, and sleepy trading docks where no one asked about a lone scribe travelling without a house or a city's seal. But Sais was a place of ghosts and contagion.
Night was falling over the Vosk with the heavy, oppressive suddenness of the Gorean river country, swallowing the ruined, ash-blackened silhouette of Sais on the starboard side of the barge. The river—vast, muddy, and ceaseless—carved through the darkness, its dark waters carrying the steady traffic of the continent's primary trade artery. Even near a dead city, the Vosk was rarely empty; off in the distance, the flickering stern-lanterns of distant grain-barges bound for Ar glowed like lost stars on the water.
The barge master and his six boatmen knew the reputation of Sais. They knew the ruins harbored the ghost-like remnants of those taken by Dar-Kosis—the living dead, stripped of name, law, and citizenship, clad in tattered yellow shrouds. But the crew had grown complacent. In the eyes of healthy men, the afflicted were merely pitiful, rotting castaways who hid in the dark, clacking their wooden warnings and begging for scraps. They did not expect cunning. They did not expect a trap.
Near the rotting timbers of the abandoned wharves, where the skeletal hulls of long-decayed river craft groaned against the stone piers like sunken leviathans, the heavy wooden barge suddenly shuddered.
A sickening, grinding screech tore through the deck under Arealius's boots. The vessel lurched hard to port, sending water casks rolling across the planks.
"By the Priest-Kings!" the master roared, grabbing the steering oar as the barge ground to a complete, agonizing halt in the mid-current shadow of the ruins. "The bow! We're hung up on something!"
"It's not silt!" a boatman shouted, thrusting a long pole into the river. "There's timber down there—sharpened stakes and iron chains bound under the surface!"
Before the crew could process the realization that someone had deliberately snared the river lane, the water around the hull erupted.
They did not rise like mindless beasts, but with the quiet, terrifying precision of men who had retained their minds even as their flesh fell away. From behind the shadow of a half-submerged, rotting grain-keel, yellow-shrouded figures surged out of the dark water. They pulled themselves up the sides of the barge using trailing mooring lines and crude iron grappling hooks.
"Dar-Kosis!" screamed a boatman, dropping his pike in sheer, instinctive terror. "The Holy Disease!"
Fear on Gor was a sharp blade, but the terror of Dar-Kosis was a poison that paralyzed the bravest men. To touch them was to forfeit your life, your name, and your soul to the yellow robe.
"Fight them off, you fools!" the master bellowed, drawing his short sword, but his voice quavered. He backed away as a dripping, yellow-draped form hauled itself over the gunwale.
Under the tattered yellow cloth, half-decayed faces gleamed in the moonlight—sunken eyes, sloughed skin, and exposed bone, yet lit with a desperate, terrible intelligence. They moved with coordinated purpose. They were not seeking food; they were seeking a vessel. They wanted off the dead shore of Sais.
Arealius backed against the central cargo crate, his heart hammering against his ribs. He was no warrior, and he certainly had no armor, but the panic in the air was a death sentence. Two boatmen were already scrambling blindly toward the stern, abandoning their posts, only to be dragged down into the river by pale, ruined hands reaching over the transom.
A figure in a sodden yellow shroud vaulted over the bow rail, a rusted iron butcher's cleaver gripped in a hand missing three fingers. This wretch must have been a warrior. The sight of the yellow fabric sent a jolt of primal horror through Arealius—if that rot touched his bare skin, his journey ended here.
As the afflicted man lunged with surprisingly swift, calculated malice, Arealius didn't bother trying to fence or parry. Stepping inside the arc of the swing, he grabbed a heavy wooden oarsman's bench, thrusting it forward like a shield to keep the yellow cloth away from his body.
The edge of the bench struck the attacker squarely under the chin with a sickening crack. Before the afflicted man could recover, Arealius drove his boot directly into the hollow of the man's knee, folding him backward, and smashed the wooden bench down onto his chest, driving him back over the edge into the dark, churning waters of the Vosk.
"Arealius!" the barge master screamed from the helm, swinging his blade wildly at another intruder but refusing to step close enough to land a lethal blow. "They're on the deck! The barge is contaminated! The ship is dead!"
The real tragedy of the attack was already done. Three of the afflicted were now standing on the main deck, dripping river water and possibly disease onto the timber, effectively trapping the remaining three boatmen at the stern. The vessel was stuck fast on the underwater barrier, lit only by the swinging stern lantern, surrounded by the rotting wrecks of Sais and a river that offered no escape.
Seeing the yellow-shrouded forms gaining ground on the deck, the bargemaster didn't waste breath on commands. Panic drove his hands as he snatched a burning pitch-torch from its iron sconce near the helm and slammed it directly into an unsealed cask of sul paga near the amidships cargo.
Flame erupted in a blinding, roaring sheet of orange, blue, and gold, instantly causing the barrel to burst from the heat of the flames, severing the bow from the stern. The fierce heat hissed against the damp river air, lighting up the decaying piers of Sais and the hollow, gaunt faces of the attackers in stark relief.
"To the water, swim!" Arealius bellowed, his voice raw over the crackle of the blaze.
He didn't wait to see who followed. The boatmen at the stern hesitated, their eyes wide with horror as they looked from the spreading inferno to the dark, freezing waters of the Vosk. That second of hesitation proved fatal.
The afflicted who had already boarded surged over the fallen deckhands, savaging the men who had been dragged down moments before. Even as the flames licked at their tattered yellow shrouds, the diseased attackers showed no regard for the fire, driven by a desperate, collective madness to secure the vessel. On the starboard side, more yellow-robed swimmers cut through the dark water toward the burning hull, unbothered by the growing heat.
"May the Priest-Kings curse this dead rock!" the barge master swore, his voice cracking. With a swift movement, he sheathed his short sword, turned, and threw himself over the port gunwale into the river.
Arealius vaulted the rail right behind him, hitting the shock of the cold Vosk water with a heavy splash.
Surfacing in the dark, he kicked frantically away from the burning wreck. The river was lit like day by the roaring funeral pyre of the barge. Beside him, the bargemaster and two surviving boatmen were stroke-for-stroke in the current, gasping for air and cutting hard across the river channel, putting the burning vessel between themselves and the swimming afflicted. Behind them, the agonizing screams of the trapped sailors were cut short by the roar of the fire and the merciless onslaught on deck.
Reaching the far shore—a wild, uncultivated bank opposite the ruins—the four men hauled themselves out of the muddy silt, exhausted, coughing, and shivering violently. They didn't linger to look back at the blazing shadow of Sais.
Driven by pure adrenaline and the primal terror of contagion, the master, Arealius, and the two surviving crewmen plunged directly into the thick, dark tree line. They ran blindly through the brush, ignoring thorns and roots, not stopping to rest or speak until the first golden rays of the Gorean sun broke through the forest canopy at dawn.
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The dawn arrived cold and damp, filtering through the thick canopy of the river forest in pale, grey shafts. The four survivors lay collapsed among the damp roots of a massive, gnarled turpentine tree, their breath coming in ragged, white plumes. The adrenaline that had carried them across the Vosk and through miles of tangled brush had finally burned out, leaving behind the crushing weight of exhaustion, bruised limbs, and freezing cold.
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Arealius was the first to sit up. His scribal robes were ruined—torn by briars, heavy with drying river mud, and smelling faintly of smoke and stagnant water. He checked his belt with trembling fingers. His pouch and cloak were gone, lost somewhere in the dark waters of the Vosk, taking with it his few remaining copper tarsks and his brass stylus. All he had left was the heavy iron dagger tucked inside his belt leather and the soaked clothes on his back.
Beside him, the barge master—a heavy-set man named Thurn—was staring blankly at his own bare feet, having lost his boots in the mud near the riverbank. The two surviving boatmen, young men from the lower river settlements, were huddled together, shivering uncontrollably in their wet tunics.
"We take stock," Arealius said, his voice raspy from smoke and cold. He cleared his throat, forcing the authoritative tone of a scribe into his words, though he felt as battered as the rest of them. "Show what you have. We won't make it to the next settlement on panic alone."
For a long moment, nobody moved. Then Thurn let out a short, bitter laugh, the kind of laugh a man gives when the alternative is to weep. "Stock," he repeated. "Aye. Let's take stock of a burned barge, six drowned men, and a cargo of grain and wine now feeding the eels." He scrubbed a filthy hand down his face. "I am a ruined man, scribe. Ruined."
"You are a living man," Arealius said flatly. "On Gor, that still counts for something. Empty your pockets. All of you."
It was, perhaps, an odd thing—a fugitive scribe with blood-crusted knuckles giving orders to a barge master twice his weight—but grief and shock had hollowed out the chain of command that would normally have governed such men, and in its place something simpler had taken root: whoever spoke with certainty, spoke first.
The two boatmen, boys really, no older than seventeen or eighteen summers, went through their soaked tunics with shaking hands. One of them, a lanky youth with a scar through one eyebrow, produced a small belt-knife, a coil of wet cord, and a lump of waterlogged bread that had disintegrated into paste. The other, shorter and broader through the shoulders, had nothing but a fire-steel wrapped in oiled leather—soaked through, but perhaps salvageable once dried.
"Names," Arealius said, before either could apologize for their poverty. "If we're to cross wilderness together, I'll not keep calling you 'boy.'"
"Kelvo," said the lanky one.
"Aravin," said the other.
Thurn, still sitting in the mud, patted himself down out of habit more than hope, and came up with a belt pouch containing a small whetstone, a strip of dried tarsk-meat gone soft with river water, and, surprisingly, a short sword still in its scabbard, though the leather had swollen and split.
"That blade is more than any of us have," Arealius said. "Guard it. We may need it before we need bread."
He set his own dagger on a flat root between them, a gesture that cost him something—on Gor, a man's steel was often the only thing standing between himself and slavery, or worse—but he judged, correctly, that a show of shared risk would hold these strangers together better than a show of authority alone.
"Here is what I know," Arealius continued. "Sais lies behind us, and no sane crew will lay close to the northern bank even traveling toward the coast again after last night—which means no rescue comes from the river, not soon, and not for us. Somewhere north and west, perhaps two days' hard walk, lies the trade road that runs from Turmus toward Ar's Station. If we hold that road, we hold a chance at a caravan, a patrol, or at worst a farmstead willing to trade labor for food."
"Two days," Aravin said hollowly. "Without boots. Without a fire, likely, until this steel dries."
"Two days is better than none," Arealius said. "And it is considerably better than staying within a night's swim of Sais, waiting to see whether anything followed us across the river. Although I doubt that, they seemed to be after the barge. Perhaps for its cargo, for supplies. They seemed intelligent, they worked together."
Thurn spoke up, "I think they were afflicted warriors or merchant guardsmen. They handled the weapons they had very well."
That silenced them. Kelvo's eyes flicked involuntarily back toward the tree line behind them, toward the unseen Vosk, as if a yellow shape might be picking its way through the ferns at that very moment. Nothing moved but the wind.
Thurn was the one who finally broke the quiet, hauling himself to his feet with a grunt, favoring his bare and blistered soles. "The scribe talks sense," he admitted grudgingly. "Priest-Kings know I've little taste for taking orders from a man half my weight and twice again my age, but I'll not pretend I have a better plan rattling around in this skull of mine. Not this morning."
"Then we move while the light holds and the ground is cool," Arealius said, rising. His legs ached in ways he hadn't known legs could ache, and the cold had settled so deep into his bones that he doubted he would ever feel entirely warm again. But sitting still, he understood with the same cold clarity that had once made him a passable scribe, was its own kind of death on Gor—slower than a cleaver, but no less certain.
He retrieved his dagger, tested its weight once in his palm, and slid it back into his belt.
"Kelvo, you have the sharpest eyes—you walk point, ten paces ahead, and you call out anything that isn't tree, root, or bird. Aravin, stay with Thurn; if that fire-steel dries by midday, we'll want it before dark. I'll walk rear guard."
"Rear guard," Thurn repeated, one eyebrow lifting, some of his old gruffness returning now that there was a task in front of him instead of a wreck behind. "Since when does a scribe walk rear guard?"
"Since last night," Arealius said, and there was nothing grim or boastful in the way he said it—only the flat, tired truth of a man who had already discovered, twice now in as many tendays, exactly what he was capable of when a blade came for him in the dark. "Move out. We've a road to find, and a city behind us that I intend never to see again."
The four of them struck north through the turpentine wood as the sun climbed higher, four ragged shadows in a green and gold morning, carrying between them a dagger, a spoiled sword, a fire-steel, and considerably less certainty about the world than any of them had possessed two days before.
They found the trade road by midafternoon, exactly where Arealius had judged it would be—a rutted ribbon of packed earth cutting east and west through the trees, worn smooth by generations of cart wheels and tharlarion hooves. But the road brought its own hard truth with it. East, toward Ar's Station, lay a full tenday's walk through country neither Thurn nor the boys knew, past at least two river towns that might well have already heard, by drum or river-gossip, of a burned barge and a fugitive scribe wanted for assaulting a high caste in Lara.
"West," Thurn said, chewing on the problem the way he might once have chewed a strip of dried tarsk, lay Sulport.
"I've put in there a dozen times," he said, easing himself down onto a fallen log to inspect the raw, blistered ruin of his feet. "Sulport's no city of note—no walls to speak of, no Ubar's seal on its gate—but it sits fat on the grain trade. Half the farms between here and the Vosk delta ship their harvest through it. Barges going down-river stop there before the Vosk widens. If any of us mean to buy passage, or hire on for honest labor, or simply vanish into a crowd that isn't asking questions about Lara—" he glanced pointedly at Arealius "—Sulport is where a man does it."
Arealius considered the two directions in silence for a long moment, weighing a scribe's caution against a fugitive's arithmetic. East was the unknown. West was people who might have heard his name, but also people, and food, and the ordinary cover that a working port town offered a man willing to keep his head down and his hands busy.
"West," he said finally. "We'll want to look like farm labor before we reach it, not survivors of a burning. Sulport's harbor watch may be lax, but they'll still notice four men who stumble out of the trees with nothing to their names."
Thurn snorted, but there was no real argument in him. "Then west it is, scribe. Though I'll say now—my feet have opinions on the matter, and none of them are polite."
They struck south before west, angling down through the last of the wood until the trees thinned and the land opened into long, rolling swaths of cultivated country: hoja fields gone gold-green in the summer heat, rows of sa-tarna wheat rippling under the wind like a second river running parallel to the Vosk itself. The southern bank, it turned out, was a gentler country than the wild northern shore they had fled—dotted with low farmhouses of packed clay and timber, irrigation ditches cut arrow-straight between the fields, the distant lowing of verr somewhere beyond a hedge line.
It was, after two days of ash and river-terror, almost unbearably peaceful, and none of them trusted it.
"Keep off the cart paths where you can," Arealius said, as they picked their way along a ditch bank shadowed by tall rushes. "A farmer minds his own harvest. A farmer who sees four strangers cutting straight across his planted rows minds us instead."
Kelvo, walking point as he had the day before, proved to have a genuine gift for it—an instinct for the low ground, for the gaps in a hedge line, for the moment a distant figure in a field was a farmhand bent over his hoe rather than a threat worth freezing over. By the second morning south of the turpentine wood, hunger had become the more pressing enemy. The lump of ruined bread was long gone, and Aravin's fire-steel, dried at last over a carefully hooded flame the first night, had produced nothing to cook but a single unlucky frevet that fed four starving men only a mouthful apiece.
It was Thurn, of all of them, who solved it—not through cunning, but through the plain, unglamorous authority of a man who had spent thirty years hauling cargo and knew exactly how a working farm operated.
"There," Thurn said, on the third day, pointing his chin toward a low farmhouse with a threshing yard visible beyond its wall, where two men labored over what looked like a broken cart axle. "That's honest sweat, not wealth. A farmer mending his own axle wants hands he doesn't have to pay in silver. Let me talk. I've bartered with harder men than farmers."
Arealius held back at the tree line with the boys while Thurn limped forward, barefoot and filthy, and made his case in the plain, rolling cadence of a river man who had clearly done this before—a barge lost on the Vosk, he claimed, no lie needed there, and three hands with strong backs willing to trade a day's labor for bread, water, and whatever boots the farm might spare. The farmer, a weathered, suspicious man named Cabot, eyed them for a long moment, glanced at the sky, and finally grunted that an extra set of hands on that axle wouldn't go unrewarded.
They worked through the heat of the afternoon—Thurn and Kelvo on the axle, Aravin hauling water, Arealius, whose scribe's hands were better suited to a stylus than a mallet, set instead to mending a torn section of grain sacking, a task Cabot's wife regarded with open, faintly amused skepticism until she saw the neat, even stitches he produced.
"You've done needlework before," she observed.
"I've done fine copy-work before, and mended a sail or two," Arealius said. "The hands remember patience, whatever they're holding."
It bought them, in the end, a solid meal of bread, cheese, and boiled roots, two waterskins refilled at the farm's well, a spare pair of worn but serviceable boots that Cabot's own son had outgrown, and—more valuable than any of it—directions. Sulport, Cabot told them, lay perhaps two days further west along the river road, past three more farmsteads and the larger holding of a grain factor named Philemon, whose barges ran the harvest down to the port on a fixed schedule. If they kept to the towpath along the southern bank rather than the high road, Cabot said, they'd avoid the toll-post a local magistrate's man kept on the main route—a toll-post that asked for names as readily as coin.
It was, after two nights of cold camps and colder fear, the nearest thing to comfort any of them had known since Sais.
Kelvo and Aravin, worn through by a full day of hauling water and wrestling cart wood under Thurn's gruff, exacting direction, ate their bread and cheese with the single-minded hunger of the very young and very tired, and were asleep within the hour, curled close to the fire like dogs. Thurn watched them go with something almost fond in his weathered face before he eased himself down onto a section of log Cabot's hand had rolled over for seating, working the new boots off his blistered feet with a low, satisfied grunt.
Arealius settled across the low fire from him, feeding it a length of split kindling, and for a long while neither man spoke. The fire cracked and settled. Somewhere beyond the threshing yard, an ox lowed once and went quiet. Above them, the twin moons of Gor climbed clear of the tree line, and the ordinary, working peace of a farm at rest settled over the camp like something Arealius had nearly forgotten existed.
It was Thurn who broke the silence, staring into the flames rather than at his companion.
"I've hauled that river for eleven years," he said. "Bought my first share in that barge with money I bled for on someone else's deck. Bought out the last of it only three seasons past. Wine, grain, cordage, a factor's silk bound for Ar that I was to be paid for on delivery and not before." He shook his head slowly. "All of it feeding the current now. Or feeding them."
Arealius said nothing, only let the silence hold the space Thurn needed.
"A barge master without a barge is no barge master at all," Thurn went on. "He's a big man with rope-scarred hands and no trade, begging labor off a farmer who pities him his bare feet. I've seen men come to that, scribe. Old river hands, done in by a storm or a wreck or a bad debt, ending their days hauling nets for other men half their skill, drinking away what little pride is left them in some paga tavern that remembers what they used to be." He spat into the fire. "I swore I'd not be one of them."
"You didn't lose that barge to bad seamanship, or to drink, or to a debt of your own making," Arealius said quietly.
"You didn't drive the stakes into that riverbed," Thurn said, not unkindly. "You didn't lash chains under the water and wait in the dark for a fool crew to hang itself on them. Don't take my ruin onto your own back, scribe. I've carried cargo enough tonight without carrying your guilt as well."
Arealius was quiet a moment, turning the brass stylus he no longer owned over in his mind, the way a man will worry at a wound that isn't there anymore. Then, because the fire and the dark and Thurn's own plain honesty seemed to invite it, he said what he had been turning over, unspoken, since the ruins of Sais first came into view.
"There's a different guilt sitting on me," he admitted. "Not the barge. Lara."
Thurn glanced up at that, waiting.
"Three men," Arealius said. "A senior scribe and two apprentices, in a paga tavern, over nothing that should have mattered—a jest about my caste standing, my accent, the cut of my robe. Nothing worth blood. And I put one apprentice on the floor with his stones crushed, crushed another man's windpipe with my bare hand, and broke an elder scribe's face against cobblestones hard enough that I don't know, to this day, whether he lived to see morning." He watched the fire rather than Thurn's face. "I've spent my whole life being trained to solve problems with a stylus and a steady hand, Thurn. Every year of my caste training was aimed at making me patient, precise, controlled. And when it mattered, when three men who were more mouth than menace pushed at me in a tavern, I didn't reach for patience at all. I reached for something else entirely, and it came far too easily."
"Easily," Thurn repeated, "or well?"
Arealius looked up.
"There's a difference, scribe, whatever your caste taught you," Thurn said. "A man who does something evil easily is a man who enjoys it—who goes looking for the next tavern, the next excuse. I've known a few of those. You're not one of them, or you'd not be sitting here turning it over in the dark like a stone in your boot." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "What I saw on that barge, when the dead of Sais came over the rail, was a man who did what needed doing, quick and hard and without wasting breath on hesitation, and then got three of us to the far bank alive. That's not a sickness in you. On this river, it's very likely the only reason any of us are sitting at this fire instead of feeding fish."
"And if it happens again?" Arealius asked. "Not plague-dead climbing over a rail with a cleaver, but an ordinary man. An argument. A jest that goes too far. What happens the day it isn't apprentices in a tavern, Thurn, but some farmer's son who says the wrong thing to a fugitive scribe with nothing left to lose?"
Thurn considered that for a long moment, and when he answered, there was no easy comfort in it—only the flat, weathered honesty of a man who had buried enough friends on this river to have earned the right to speak plainly.
"Then you'll have to decide, before that day comes, what kind of man you mean to be with it," he said. "That's all any of us can do. The Priest-Kings didn't carve it into stone for you, and neither will I. But I'll tell you this much for nothing—a man who lies awake worrying he's become a monster is generally not the monster he fears. It's the ones who never ask the question you want to watch for."
He rose then, groaning at his own stiff knees, and kicked a little more dirt over the fire's edge to bank it for the night.
"Sleep, scribe," he said. "Whatever you did in Lara, whatever's coming in Sulport—it'll all still be there in the morning, and you'll face it better rested than not." He settled back onto the ground near the sleeping boys, pulling his borrowed cloak tight against the night air, and within a few minutes his breathing had settled into the slow rhythm of a man too exhausted to argue further with his own conscience.
Arealius sat awake a while longer, watching the banked coals pulse red and fade, Thurn's words turning over slowly in his mind alongside the memory of an apprentice's scream and the wet, final crack of an elder scribe's skull against stone. He did not reach an answer that night. But he found, when sleep finally came for him, that it came easier than it had any night since Lara.
They left with first light, as Cabot had asked, the farmer's directions carrying them west along the towpath toward Philemon's holding and, beyond it, Sulport.
"Wise farmer," Thurn muttered, once the farmhouse had shrunk behind them. "Knows exactly which questions a man doesn't want asked of him."
The towpath ran close along the Vosk itself, a hard-packed track originally cut for the draft-beasts that hauled the heaviest barges upstream against the current. Traffic on the river thickened with every mile they covered—grain barges riding low and heavy in the water, a scattering of smaller fishing craft working the shallows, once a sleek, low galley flying the pennant of some minor river house that none of the four recognized, cutting past under oar with the arrogant speed of a vessel that answered to no toll-post at all.
They slept the fourth night in the loft of an abandoned grain shed a half-day short of the Philemon Holding, and it was there, huddled in the dry straw with the boots Cabot had given them finally easing the worst of the road's damage, that Arealius allowed himself, for the first time since Sais, something close to a plan beyond mere survival.
"Sulport has a scribe's hall," he said quietly, half to himself, watching the last of the daylight fade through a gap in the shed's plank wall. "Every port town of size does—someone has to keep the harbor manifests, the grain tallies, the toll accounts. A caste-trained hand is worth coin there, even a hand no house will yet vouch for."
"And if word of Lara has already reached that hall?" Thurn asked, not unkindly, but without softening the question either.
"Then I'll have learned that before I've given them my name," Arealius said. "A scribe listens before he writes. It's the one part of the caste training that's kept me alive twice now."
Kelvo, half-asleep already in the straw, murmured something about how a man who'd broken an apprentice's knee and burned a barge to the waterline in the same tenday probably ought to consider a caste change, and Aravin's tired laugh was the first honest laugh any of them had managed since the fire on the Vosk.
They covered the last stretch of the journey in a day and a half, the farms growing steadily denser and better-tended as they went, the towpath widening into a proper river road worn by heavier traffic, until, cresting a low rise on the morning of the sixth day since Sais, they saw it at last: Sulport, sprawled unwalled and unhurried along a wide bend of the Vosk, its harbor crowded with masts and grain barges, smoke rising from a hundred cook-fires, the murmur of a working port town carrying faintly on the morning wind.
"There it is," Thurn said, and for the first time since the fire, something like hope crept into his voice. "There's your scribe's hall, Arealius. Question is whether it's your salvation or the noose that finally catches you."
Arealius said nothing for a moment, only studied the sprawl of rooftops and river traffic below, the scribe in him already cataloguing exits, wharves, and crowds, the fugitive in him already counting the ways it could go wrong.
"Only one way to learn which," he said at last, and started down the rise toward Sulport.
"There it is," Thurn said, and for the first time since the fire, something like hope crept into his voice. "There's your scribe's hall, Arealius. Question is whether it's your salvation or the noose that finally catches you."
Arealius said nothing for a moment, only studied the sprawl of rooftops and river traffic below, the scribe in him already cataloguing exits, wharves, and crowds, the fugitive in him already counting the ways it could go wrong.
"Only one way to learn which," he said at last, and started down the rise toward Sulport.
Editor's Notes: (Scribed by Gemini)
In John Norman’s Gorean Saga (the Gor novel series), Dar-Kosis is a horrific, highly contagious, wasting disease closely analogous to leprosy.
Nature and Symptoms
Wasting Effects: It causes progressive physical deterioration, skin lesions, and nerve degeneration.
High Contagion: Goreans live in absolute terror of contracting it, as touch or close proximity is believed to spread the affliction.
Cultural and Religious Status
The "Holy Disease": The Initiates—the religious caste on Gor—teach that Dar-Kosis is the "Sacred Disease" or "Holy Disease" directly touched by the Priest-Kings.
Taboo Against Curing: Because it is framed as a divine affliction, attempting to cure or treat Dar-Kosis is widely treated as heresy or sacrilege by Gorean society.
Social Isolation and Garb
Distinctive Yellow Robes: Those infected are immediately exiled from their cities and must wear loose yellow robes and hoods to signal their condition.
Clappers/Bells: Sufferers are required to carry clappers or wooden clackers to sound a warning to anyone nearby so uninfected travelers can clear the path.
Dar-Kosis Enclaves: Exiles wander the wilderness or live in isolated lazarettos and destitute camps far from Gorean cities.
Plot Device in the Series
Because Goreans flee instantly at the sight of a yellow-robed Dar-Kosis victim, the guise of a Dar-Kosis sufferer is occasionally used as a disguise by fugitives or warriors attempting to travel through dangerous or enemy-controlled territories undetected.
In a physical sense, sufferers of Dar-Kosis share certain visual and behavioral similarities with classic zombies, but medically and conceptually, they are distinct:
How They Resemble Zombies
Physical Decay: Because it causes severe skin lesions, tissue degradation, and loss of extremities, sufferers visually resemble the "rotting" aesthetic of corpses or walkers.
Shuffling Gait and Loss of Sensation: Nerve damage causes numbness, impaired coordination, and a slow, uneven stride.
Social Horror and Avoidance: Like zombies, Dar-Kosis sufferers are treated as living biohazards. Their presence causes immediate panic, and they are forced into wandering, destitute bands outside Gorean cities.
Key Differences
Mental Clarity: Sufferers remain mentally intact and fully human. They retain their memories, speech, emotions, and consciousness; they are not mindless, violent, or driven by irrational instincts.
No Reanimation or Cannibalism: They are living human beings fighting a chronic illness, not reanimated corpses, and they have no drive to bite or consume others.
Avoidance Over Aggression: Because of strict Gorean laws and their own desire for survival, the afflicted actively warn others to stay away using wooden clappers, rather than hunting or pursuing uninfected people.
In summary, while a Dar-Kosis victim might look like a zombie from a distance due to extreme physical decay and yellow rags, underneath they are simply ostracized human patients suffering from a leprosy-like wasting illness.
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