Karl made a guess as to what those weapons would be worth at home, given that they were all Common Grade magical weapons, then put about half that much money on the bench in front of him.
The Minotaurs didn’t look happy with the offer, but they didn’t look insulted, so he was at least close to what they would accept after he helped him with the attack.
Karl added six more gold coins, and watched as the largest Minotaur woman began to relax a little.
Two more gold coins, and most of the others had lost their concerned looks.
“Do we have a deal?” Karl asked her.
She was the oldest, the largest and the most powerful. By most standards, she should be in charge.
She looked around the other farmers and nodded in satisfaction. “Yes, we can accept that, merchant. We appreciate your business. Going to the city has become a troublesome experience lately.”
Karl smiled. “If you see others, you might want to flag them down. They will appreciate a safe spot to stop for the evening, with all the new troubles, and many of them have been avoiding buying anything in the city. The higher quality items aren’t going into Oakhamping, so there is nothing worth buying.”
The farmer nodded. “That’s why we had so many here. We were waiting until we had a full cart load to take them for sale. If we all leave at once, other than one family, they can watch our animals, and we will have enough guards for the trip. But now, we can put it off until next year. We’ve got enough to buy what we need, but the farms have been mostly self-sufficient for a while now.”
“Best of luck to you, then. We will get on our way so that we can get to another safe spot before it gets dark.”
The Minotaurs nodded, and Karl picked up their purchase to load into the wagon.
The beasts didn’t immediately return to their spaces, Cara and Rae just wandered away from the farm, as if the locals would forget that they existed if they were out of sight.
Or, perhaps they really did. Nobody seemed concerned about a missing pair of Royal Rank beasts as Karl led the team away with Remi curled up in the middle of the wagon, on top of their new cargo.
It would be more comfortable if they put the net in place, but that blocked the side benches where everyone else was sitting.
So, it wasn’t long after they were out of sight of the farms that the beasts, other than Thor, returned to their spaces to rest. Hawk had scouted everything within an hour’s walk, so he returned for breakfast, with the intent to head back out after, but for the moment, they were just an average looking merchant wagon. Karl had even dismissed the Lamia bodyguards after the battle, so they didn’t have an excessive number of guards.
Hawk came back out a half hour later to scout the area and directed them straight east, away from the river.
[There are too many fights along the river. All the wagons have attracted the Drakes, which has attracted more monsters, and others hoping to get loot or valuable drake scales and body parts.] He explained.
That was a good point. The drake body parts were actually precious resources. The price might be dropping hard in this area, but if they had a number of bodies with them, they could sell them after they were out of the area where the monsters were spawning.
Giant Strength rings were some of the cheapest magical items you could get in the Golden Dragon Nation because of the spawns and now the wars. So the same would apply to the drake scales in this area for at least the next few months until the materials had cycled through the market.
[There are a lot of farms out here. Should we go to the ones that are being attacked so we can loot them?] Hawk asked.
He meant it the same way that they had traded with the last one, but that was just a form of looting to Hawk because coins had no value in his brain. You just got them from hunting things or getting rid of stuff you didn’t want.
[How far off course are the battles?] Karl asked.
[Not far, you’ll be able to see them if we stay on the best course.]
“Hawk has found more farmers fighting. Does anyone mind intervening? The materials are valuable, and we can sell them later. Plus, it leaves fewer monsters to worry about at night.” Karl offered the others.
Ophelia sighed as she turned to look out the front of the wagon. “As much as I hate to say it, that’s what a local merchant would do. All these farms are potential customers. If we’re not going to follow the river to the road, we might as well trade with all the rural farms along the way.
I just wish that we had gotten a reason that there are no towns along this entire savanna.” She agreed.
Tessa nodded. “It’s because of the nomadic tribes. Nobody dares to try to build a road and settle villages out here, but there should be random farms and nomadic villages.”
“And because the nomadic villages move to where the food and water are, there are no permanent roads, only recently used trails. Alright, that makes sense.
I will follow Hawk’s directions to the farms, and then we will trade with the nomads as we go. I suggest that we keep some bags or barrels of food for trade once we get to the nomads. That’s all that the Orcs will trade for, and I don’t know what the Demons will want.” Karl suggested.
Dana looked at Karl like he was crazy. “And what makes you think that we can trade with the Demons?”
“It shouldn’t be impossible. The ones we’ve seen so far have been intelligent and reasonable enough. If it’s just a matter of being evil, I think we’ve all met a couple of humans who would qualify for the title.”
Dana huffed in annoyance. Karl was likely referring to the mine bosses, but she recalled that one year when she was a kid that her dad opened a general store. He had been absolutely terrible to his employees until word spread through town and people stopped coming to buy from him. The last straw had been when another shopkeeper came in with his goons, beat her father unconscious and looted the store empty. With all the store profit spent on liquor, he had nothing left to restock or repair, and that was the end of his attempt at self-employment.
If that was the sort of evil that the Demons were, it would be manageable. But she suspected that it was a more primal sort of amoral evil. Like an aggressively cruel version of Rae.
That could be much harder to deal with, and there weren’t enough of them to take on an entire nomadic tribe. If they were going to be passing through the nomadic areas, it would be better to just try to avoid them entirely.
Tessa and Lotus were thinking nearly the same thing. Demons were unpredictable, unless you were dealing with matters of their aspect. Obsession Demons were actually the most predictable, once you knew what they were obsessed with.
Wrath and Plague Demons were far less predictable, and the unaligned ones nobody could predict. They seemed to enjoy pranks more than anything else.