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What is known to perhaps only a dozen individuals is that the Comitas also have a long-standing mandate to secret away willing slaves and bondsmen from the whips of the Cathagi masters and help them land on their feet in Cantǒn. If such a direct obstruction of local customs, laws and business were to become known their entire presence and primary mission of protecting pilgrims would be jeopardised. Absolute discretion and secrecy is required, of a breed altogether different from the fluid networks of the Ordo Reginate. These Comitas members have a special dispensation from the Mater Reginate, harking back to some of the earliest Queens of Canton, formally absolving them of any dishonour or reprimand for contravening their knightly code to always speak the truth. They are permitted to mislead, even outright lie and deny involvement, so long as the deception is done in the furtherance of this secret goal. Although no one explicitly says as much, you infer that the current Mater Reginae has continued the ongoing tradtion. You’re no historian scholar, but you wonder if the tradition of oaths of silence being more prevalent among the Comitas is tied to minimising abuse of this absolution as much as possible.
You would have thought such offer of emancipation would see slaves departing Cathagi in droves, but the truth is sadly different. There is a caste system of sorts, revised in eons past since the strife roused by the Brothers Adam and Cain. Social mobility, you’re told, is difficult but not impossible. A lowest caste slave, one seized in a raid from foreign lands, might never raise in rank. But they may be permitted some liberties, even start a family of the same caste should their new master be pleased with their service, and their children raised as members of the next caste up. It is a twisted incentive for generational bondage, but the reality is that only the lowest of the low or those cursed with cruel masters yearn to escape this life when in their mind the alternative is destitution at best and starvation or murder at worst.
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