50
For a while I just lay on my back with my eyes open. Nothing hurt and I didn't want to move in case it started again. My breathing was easy and I didn't want to push it lest my ribs leap back into the fire-storm they had been.
The bed was the most uncomfortable imaginable. Basically a thin sack of straw on a stone base. My hands explored it. So did my nose. It stank. So did I. I checked my body, it was fine, the cloth of my shirt was stiff, which I thought was odd but didn't think about. I turned my head. There was light coming from a corridor. Bare stone walls and a thick door. I was in a cell. In a prison. We don't have prisons, but the barbarians do. What would we need prisons for? If you are a commoner and guilty we fine you or we kill you, a noble goes into exile. Foreigners are like commoners. Why would you need a prison? A foreign noble was a guest if held against his will; guarded but still a guest. Civilization is a wonderful thing. Prisons are for barbarians.
With care I moved my legs off the bed and sat up. Glancing down I saw why my clothes were stiff. Blood and mud and… well, other things. No wonder I stank. There was nowhere to go, but still I stood up. Dizzy and weak, I supported myself with one hand on the wall and shuffled slowly to the door. It wasn't far. There was an opening as big as my head. I couldn't resist the temptation. Outside, looking left and right a corridor of similar doors stretched away to end doors of different design. There were lamps attached to the walls, burning oil and casting a fair light.
“Anyone here?” My throat was so dry that the words came out as a croaky whisper. I tried again, mustering some spit and swallowing first.
Movement here and there, then heads began to emerge. It would have been comical. No, I smiled, almost laughed aloud, it was comical. Disembodied heads, poking through holes in doors into a well-lit corridor, blinking away tears from the added light. I looked left and right, counting and recognizing.
“Next time stick to the plan,” Kerral said, trying to make his voice harsh and failing miserably.
I laughed and it hurt my throat, so I stopped. I couldn't think of anything to say. Sheo, Kerral, Yebratt, Larner, Hettar, Lentro, and Gatren. I named them again in my mind, smiling foolishly.
“Have I missed anything?”
They laughed. We all laughed. Well, we were alive against all expectation, and whole and, most importantly, not alone.
51
The sudden outbreak of morale didn't last. I apologized for getting them into this state. Everyone was very good about it; not your faulting and so on but I still felt like a shit.
Standing with our heads shoved through the doors was uncomfortable so we stopped after a while. There wasn't much to say. We were prisoners, our army destroyed. Probably not a man had survived apart from us, and it didn't take long to figure out why. Nobles carry a ransom. At least that's what we thought for an hour. After that something happened to change our minds. Someone came to visit.
I'd been stretching, testing my body, finding out how it was. Weak, dizzy, I'd lost more weight. Memories were flashing up in my mind and I was trying not to pay attention to them. Lots of killing. Lots of getting hurt. Not fun. Nothing I wanted to remember. When I heard the key rattle in the lock of a distant door, I froze. By the time the door was open my head was out the hole and I was looking both ways. I wasn't alone. I'd explored the outside of the door with my arm stuck through the hole, nothing useful had come under my fingers. This time it was just my head. My heart lifted for a second at what I saw, then sank. The young battle mage, Ferrian, was at the end of the corridor, stepping casually through the open doorway and walking down the corridor. My heart had lifted at the sight of him but only for that moment. He wasn't alone. He was clean, well dressed, unhurt, and had two barbarians following him. He wasn't going to say anything good.
Hettar didn't get it. “Ferrian, my boy! Get these doors open!”
“Gladly,” the young man answered, waving one hand in an easy but meaningless gesture. A stone gleamed on one finger. “As soon as you can convince my master that you have forsaken the evil rule of the city and sworn allegiance to him.”
The stunned silence was very effective. I broke it. “Your master?”
My tone of voice, incredulous, accenting the word master, was lost on no one. No patron of the city acknowledged anyone as master. There were no superiors, only equals of one's own class. The very idea was shocking, horrifying, and utterly impossible. He couldn't mean it.
But he did.
“Kukran Epthel has opened my eyes to the evil the city represents, taught me the error of my thinking, given me belief in a better way, a new dawn of man that will see the old evil of the city ground into dust and scattered like ashes.” The fever in his eyes was that of the convert, his voice rising and falling in cadence of remembered speeches, the hallmarks of the non-thinker, the faith holder, the madman, and I stopped listening. He wasn't going to say anything rational, but that didn't worry me. What frightened me was that he wasn't going to do anything rational either.
Hettar made the mistake of interrupting him. “What are you talking about boy? Did you take a blow to the head?”
Ferrian had been pacing up and down the corridor as he spoke, looking at each of us as he passed. He took one long pace and struck the old man a blow with his fist that snapped his head to one side, his neck thumping into the wood of the door. “Like this?” Hettar tried to pull back at once but it was a second blow that sent him from sight. I heard him fall. At the end of the corridor the two barbarians laughed, harshly. “A blow to the head like that, old man? No,” he turned back to the rest of his seemingly rapt audience, “it was no blow that opened my eyes but the wise words of a kind and thoughtful man. I see what you are, you greedy, cruel, evil petty men, seeking only your own ends, without thought to the price others pay for your actions. Your slaves outnumber yourselves! Your oppression stretches a thousand miles, beyond even the borders you choose to hold! Seven centuries you have marched where you will, destroyed what you chose, looted with impunity, stolen away men and women and children from their loved ones and damned them to lives of brutal slavery!” He was working himself up into a rage.
“Not all of us keep slaves,” I said mildly.
He froze, turned slowly on his heel and came to stand in front of me, eyes bulging, breath heaving. “You!” He spat the word, then took several breaths, calming himself visibly. “You freed a slave, just recently. I remember. It was the talk of the camp. They ridiculed you. Mocked your kindness. They called you weak, said they would never serve such a fool.” His voice was raising again.
“I didn't do it for them.”
“No. You did it because it was the right thing to do! No man should be a slave to another!”
I nodded. Trying to keep him calm. “What does your master want?”
He turned sharply away. “You will teach him and his acolytes how to use stone. You will teach him how to use magic. And that magic will aid us in bringing down the city and sharing its bounty amongst the oppressed that we will set free!”
He went on, working himself up into a rage again. I glanced around from face to face of my companions, seeing what I felt, what I already knew. They would teach him nothing and we would all die here.
“Pick one!” The guards were getting bored with his diatribe.
“Him!” He stabbed out an arm, ramrod straight, pointing at Gatren.
The young man's eyes widened but he didn't let his fear show more than it must. His face paled and he withdrew his head into his cell, knowing it would make no difference. I didn't envy him. We don't have torture chambers – sorcerers can cast a truth spell at need – but we know what they are.
