Although Calimshan had always appeared powerful, its actual population of citizens might have numbered only a few hundred thousand... while its slaves numbered in the millions.
That was why the country had collapsed so completely before a powerful enemy.
To the slaves, the Calimshanis were no better. They were more willing to serve the God-Monsters... who did not care about the bloodlines of those who worked for them. To them, slaves were slaves.
Yet the things the God-Monsters casually gave those slaves were beyond anything they had once dreamed of... the powers of trained adventurers.
The Calimshanis might have considered that life worse than death, but their slaves found it rather wonderful... after all, they had lived like that all along.
The Calimshanis' cruelty toward slaves was notorious throughout Faerûn.
So there was definitely something suspicious about the tens of thousands of refugees who had appeared outside Mill Forest within days. The problem was not the refugees themselves, of course. Most simply wanted to escape enslavement... and anyone with a shred of courage would try to reach the towering wall at the forest's edge.
After all, the God-Monsters would never pen themselves in behind a wall.
But the fact that the refugees had passed through the God-Monsters' blockade was strange... before the Undead arrived at Mill Forest, only a few hundred Calimshanis had escaped there, and back then, just over a hundred God-Monsters had guarded the routes.
Their overwhelming strength had let them kill most who dared resist.
More importantly, the Undead had finished building the Great Wall days ago, yet neither kind of God-Monster had attacked it... a surprise assault like the one on Mount Alarim was their normal response. Only after suffering heavy losses would they choose to ignore it, not give up from the start.
Most likely,