Secrets revealed...

Having finished tending to his beasts the herder returned to the small fire that had been kindled by his brother beside the poor excuse of an oasis. They had reached this waypoint an hour before the oppressive sun had set beyond the sand dunes, and now the light was gloaming. Out of this half light the brothers were surprised to see a stooped figure emerge. The herders reached for stout clubs, ready to defend themselves and their herd, but relaxed once it became clear that the figure was that of an old man shuffling slowly into the light cast by the merger camp fire. The brothers invited the old ashik to warm himself by the fire and share in their meal, as was the custom of the desert dwellers, the old man nodded his thanks and settled himself down as slowly as the passing of time.

Fed and warmed, the old ashik looked from sibling to sibling and said “I have no physical means of payment for your hospitality. I have no possessions of worth, nor can I work your herd, but I have a story to tell and if you will listen, it is a story of survival!”

Darkness. Not the utter darkness of blindness, but the half dark of an internal room. The heat is less brutal in here, but the leather bindings and giant’s hair rope securing me to the wall don’t make for a comfortable journey. But why would my captors want to make my journey comfortable.

I was taken in a raid on my village by slavers and carted off to what I now know was the city of Urik. I was then sold in the slave market along with others from many races. Humans, Muls, Dwarves, even Elves and a giant mantis like creature. Even now I shudder at the thought of that most alien of creatures. My arm still hurts from where we were all branded with our new owner’s mark. And that brand now marks me as the property of the Resherek Merchant House, I am no longer Ka-Reen. I am just goods.

I didn’t get a good look at my cell mates through my tears of pain as we were loaded onto the massive mellikot wagon, but when we get our first visit from the guards to give us a meagre ration of gruel and water, enough light spills into the cell for me to get a good look. Two humans, a man and a tall lithe woman; two muls, one a stocky lump of muscle and the other smaller but no less powerful looking; and finally a dwarf, who is as broad as he is tall. Once the guards have left the tall, lithe redhead starts to strain against her bonds saying through gritted teeth;

I am nobody's slave!

But no matter how hard she strains, she makes no impact on her fastenings. She slumps back down to the floor, her energy spent quickly in the heat. After a few moments she speaks again;

I am Scarlet, but everyone calls me Scar.

I quickly name myself as Ka-Reen, pleased that I can refer to myself as a human and not someone's property. The human male calls himself Miloch, the smaller of the Muls says that he is known as Balboa. The larger Mul just says;

Kank!

I guess that was his name, but he said nothing else. It would be odd to be named after a herd animal. The large slab of muscle that is the dwarf leans forwards and proudly announces;

I am Arthur of the Mul-Ard clan.

Once the silence is broken the cell mates begin to talk more, all except the large Mul who remains stoically silent and still. Balboa, the smaller Mul, starts to moan about the fact that he is not comfortable flying like this, it takes the rest of us a while to realise that he is talking about being high off the ground. Scar asks if anyone else saw the Elves and the Thri-Kreen being sold at the auction. I asked her what a Thri-Kreen was, and she described the giant mantis creature.

The mekillot wagon rumbles onwards and time passes, but I have no idea how quickly we are moving or how much time has passed. The monotony is broken only when Scar tests her bonds once again, this time trying to loosen her neck collar, but again she is unsuccessful. Eventually the door to our cell opens and six guards enter, two of them clear away our gruel bowls and pass out more water while the other four keep an eye on us from just inside the doorway. I spot that Scar is watching the guards closely and so I turn my head to take them in. They are dressed in desert robes and keffiyehs, holding obsidian shortswords and with bone daggers strapped about their waists.

And then Balboa blurts out;

Can I have a rock? I need a rock! Can I get down for a bit? I really need to get down. Just for a little while. Just to feel the earth under my feet.

But he may as well have been shouting into the wind for all of the attention that the guards paid him. But while he was shouting I overheard the guards at the door talking about us. They said that House Resherek would get a good resale price for us in Tyr, but that we would all die building the Grand Ziggurat. I paled. I panicked. But I was held tight by my bonds. Once the guards had left I told the others what I had heard.

Arthur the Dwarf says that Tyr is a large city to the north close to the mountains and that it is rumoured to control an iron mine. A short while after the guards had given us our second ration of water the gentle rumbling of the mekillot wagon stops. Arthur states that he believes that we have stopped for the night. Can it really only be the end of our first day in this gloomy cell?

What I assume is the morning of day two starts with a visit from the guards to issue us with water and gruel. Once again Balboa speaks up;

Can I have a rock?

There is a momentary pause as the guards steadfastly ignore him and then he babbles;

Oh no! I’m so sorry! I fully understand how busy you are. What with having to feed us and look after us. And here I am being all selfish and asking for a rock. What was I thinking? I’m so, so sorry. You carry on.

I’m unsure, but I really think that he felt sorry for the guards. How could he possibly feel sorry for our captures? This time after the guards leave it is Arthur the Dwarf who tests his bonds. He flexes his massive thews, and the strain of his attempt shows across his broad features, but his bindings remain intact. He settles back down with a grunt. And the day passes with only our evening ration of water to break the boredom. I watch the guards dish out the water ration and slowly realise that they are a different set of guards to the ones I first observed. That means that there are at least twelve guards, escape looks more and more unlikely.

The following day brought a now familiar pattern. With the guards bringing us water and gruel once more, and once more steadfastly ignoring our existence. In fact I believe that they would have paid us more attention if we had been animals. No one tried to break their bonds that day, and Arthur the Dwarf even commented on the fact that he didn’t even see the point in trying.

Later, I have no idea what time of day, the steady wagon rumble became more of a bumping and jostling. And at what we had come to call our evening ration of water the guards made comment;

I wonder if this is rocky enough for the little one?

Balboa did not look impressed.

By day four in our cell and Scar was becoming agitated. She tried her bonds again but to no avail. In fact the only ones who didn’t seem agitated were Arthur the Dwarf and the ever silent Kank the Mul. Kank has seemed as docile as his namesake since we were thrown into this cell and I am beginning to see where he got his name from. The morning ritual of water and gruel was uneventful, but by the demeanour of the guards I got the impression that this is going to be a long journey.

And then it happened. Everything moved so quickly that I was just caught up in the rush of events. From outside, muffled by the walls of our cell, we could all hear a voice rise above the sounds of the mellikot wagon;

The Jura Dai are not slaves. Your king must release our people or all his caravans will perish in the desert!

At the sound of this shout Scar once again tests her bonds, and this time she is successful in breaking the bone ring that is shackling her wrists together. The bone circle breaks with a loud crack, and I am worried that the guards will hear and come rushing. A second later and there is a second crack, but this is louder than a thunder clap over a barren salt flats, and the mekillot wagon stops dead.

Almost simultaneously Arthur and Kank reach up to the bone ring securing them to the wall of the cell and with muscles bulging under the strain they both break themselves free. They then proceed to free Balboa, and once his bone holding ring is snapped they get to work on snapping the giant’s hair rope that is securing the rest of their bonds. In a matter of minutes they have worked together to free all of us from our bondage. All the while I have been hearing the sound of shouting from outside the wagon, most of it in the common tongue, but some in a language that I do not understand.

Kank scoops up one of the larger pieces of a broken bone ring and heads to the cell door. He is able to force the bone between a crack in the door planks and force it upwards with a heave of his significant bulk. There is a cracking as the door planks separate and a thunk as the locking bar drops to the floor on the outside. Kank slowly pushes the door open, and through the crowded bodies I can make out an empty corridor beyond.

Kank steps into the corridor and looks up and down, the corridor is clear but he can hear shouting outside coming from the left. Arthur says that we will need supplies if we are to survive, and so we all head right further into the wagon. I make sure that I place myself in the middle of the group, Scar and Kank take the lead with Arthur beside me, and Balboa and Miloch bring up the rear. We quietly approach some steps leading up to a raised platform, from the bottom of the steps we can see one of the guards urging two slaves to load and fire a ballista. While he is shouting at the slaves the guard steps forwards to the edge of the platform just as a hail of arrows peppers the platform.

The guard is struck in the right arm by one of the arrows, and that is all of the opening that Scar and Kank need. They both leap up the steps two at a time, closely followed by Arthur, and attack the guard. Scar gets there first and swings a fist at the guard, he sees her at the last moment and instinctively raises his injured arm to block the blow. Scar lands a mighty punch and once again he reels in pain. He reels straight into a right hook from Kank. The powerful Mul lands a solid blow on the guards jaw and he staggers back a couple of steps.

Watching from the bottom of the steps it was difficult to see what happened next, but the guard looked straight at Scar and a heartbeat later Scar let out a scream of pain and staggered backwards a couple of steps. Kank swung his fist once again, and again the guard caught it on his injured arm. But this time he was prepared for the pain, he stepped backwards and stared straight at Kank, in that split second Arthur stepped in and hit the guard a clubbing blow in his midriff and the guard dropped to the floor unconscious.

For the first time in four days we get a view of our surroundings, it does not fill us with hope. The mekillot wagon is surrounded by hundreds of Elves, many with bows aimed at the wagon, and a large group of them marching towards the wagon with flaming torches in hand. Everyone quickly grabbed a ballista bolt to act as a spear even me, though I’m not sure how to use one but I guess that it is stick the pointy end in to them. Scar also grabs the guards obsidian shortsword and bone dagger, and then we quickly head further in.

We follow the corridor another twenty feet and see two sets of double doors, one opposite the other. Arthur says that he believes that one set leads outside and so we go through the other set. They lead into a large square room stacked high with obsidian weapons and with another set of double doors at the far end. We all quickly grab more weapons and then head through the other set of doors. They lead into another long corridor that is the mirror image of the one that we have been following. We backtrack and continue along the corridor that we were originally following.

We almost immediately come across a single interior door, it leads into a small room that we all enter and start to search, with the exception of Kank who stands guard at the door. Arthur manages to find a small pouch of ceramic pieces that he tucks into his breechcloth. It is at that moment that we all hear Kank say;

We got trouble.

By the time that we get back into the corridor we find Kank dropping his weapons onto the floor, I look left and right and can see four Elves in each direction with bows trained on us. One of the Elves says in heavily accented common;

Drop everything and leave the wagon or we will fire.

I quickly drop everything, and slowly the others follow suit and we retrace our steps back outside. Once we have made it out into the open, we can see that the Elves are setting fire to the mellikot wagon. I also notice that a number of the Elves are jeering at the Thri-Kreen, and that Balboa has thrown himself to the ground and seems to be making sand angels. One of the Elves approaches us and says;

You are none of our concern. We care not for you. Take two weapons and two quarts of water and begone.

I guess that we are free. I’m not sure that improves our life expectancy.