by Alex Lang
Someone was coming down the main hallway, and there was no chance they hadn’t heard all the noise being made.
Kyris motioned for Grunul to exit, but the man just held up his shackled wrist, showing the chain attached to the wall. Sharing a look with him, Kyris eased the cell door closed, then moved to the left side of the gated entrance. Almost forgetting, he seized the light crystal in his fist just as the footfalls entered the antechamber.
“Oh, you lot are quiet now, eh?” a male voice said. “I heard you all yammering. Best be silent and let me enjoy my evening meal in peace.”
Kyris could see the man’s shadow growing as he approached the gate.
The distinct jingling of keys was followed by a hand grasping the gate and pulling it closed.
Kyris would need to dart out into the light and strike, but before he could, the old man yelled, “Drogy, you fat goat-licker. I got something for you.”
“Eh? What are you on about, Kohan?” the guardsman asked.
“Why don’t you come in here and find out?”
“You lookin’ to be manacled, you old bastard?”
“I like to see you try, you son of a nightspawn whore!”
The guardsman opened the gate and took a step in. “I don’t know wha—”
A powerful upward thrust of Kyris’ shortsword struck the man under the chin. The blade went deep, the tip penetrating the back of the skull. The guardsman issued a single strangled croak then collapsed, lifeless to the ground, almost pulling the sword from Kyris’s hand.
“Oh, ho, we got ourselves a killer,” Kohan commented.
“What happened?” the blond man asked.
“Drogy’s dead as stone,” Kohan replied.
“Are there more?” Kyris asked.
“Just the one at night.”
With a bit of effort, Kyris freed the sword and cleaned it on Drogy’s tunic. He took the ring of keys from the dead man’s belt and went back into Grunul’s cell. After some searching, he located the right key to unlock the manacle.
Grunul rubbed his wrist, then gave Kyris a curt nod. Upon exiting his cell, he immediately moved to Drogy’s body and claimed the guardsman’s cudgel, taking up position at the gated entrance to keep watch over the antechamber.
Kyris couldn’t imagine how he would feel if freed after prolonged imprisonment, but he was certain he wouldn’t be as stoic as Grunul.
Kyris moved towards the cell of the old man, Kohan, intent on freeing him next but then hesitated. The guardsman was dead. If he left with Grunul now, no one would discover his absence until the next shift, probably morning. Without the rest of the prisoners, he could adhere to his original plan of escape. Bringing the others along was an added burden and risk. But he had already stated he would free them. Would the Marlander insist he be true to his word? This task was too important to jeopardize. How could he face Jahna if he was to fail?
Kyris looked up to see Kohan staring at him. The gaze was disconcerting as he got the distinct impression that the old man knew exactly what he was thinking. He silenced all doubts and continued to the old man’s cell door, unlocking it with the guardsman’s key.
“You have my eternal gratitude, young sapling,” said Kohan as he stepped out from his cell, inhaling deeply as though savoring a better quality of air.
Kyris freed the blond man next, also cutting away the leather mittens.
“Nerisca, of House Tirotta,” the man said, giving Kyris pause. A highborn? Nerisca did not appear to notice and continued, “You will be well rewarded for this, and my captors will pay dearly for what they have done.”
At a loss, he simply nodded, then moved to the cell to Grunul’s right.
The man in the cell, Brogan, the old man had called him, was dressed and manacled like the rest. He was bearded, tall, brawny. Whatever the reasons for the artificer’s imprisonment of these men, they appeared to have been fed well, at least. Except for Kohan. Kyris unlocked the manacle and cut away the mittens, and the man rushed out the cell without a word.
The five of them were in the outer room now. The prisoners looked at each with curiosity, and Kyris realized that these men had never seen one another. Their fellow captives had been just voices.
Brogan moved to exit the gate.
“Wait,” Kyris said. “There’s still another.”
They all followed his gaze to the door at the end of the room. It was about to get cramped in here, he thought, moving towards it.
“Hold on,” Nerisca warned. “Do you know what’s in there?”
“Yes. Do you?” Kyris asked.
They all exchanged looks.
“We know something is in there,” Nerisca said, “but they’ve never spoken. Not to us. The torturers never took him upstairs, either. They worked on him down here. We heard the… noises. And no man made those cries.”
“Well, you half right about that,” Kyris said as he unlocked door. They all gathered around except for Grunul, who stayed by the gate. He flung open the door.
“By the gods above!” Nerisca exclaimed.
“Foulspawn!” Brogan spat.
“Oh, he’s a big one,” Kohan said from behind.
The beastkin glared, having woken since Kyris looked through the hatch.
Kyris took a step to enter the cell.
“What are you doing?” Brogan said, grabbing hold of Kyris's forearm.
“I'm setting it free, like I did you.” The two stared at each other, and the man’s free hand formed into a fist. Kyris tensed, anticipating an attack, but Brogan released his arm and stepped back.
“Perhaps you shouldn’t,” Nerisca offered.
“It could be wild, crazed,” Brogan said. “What’s to stop him from attacking us?”
“He seems calm enough,” Kyris said casually, though in truth, he was having second thoughts. The bullcor’s size and presence were disturbing, but the way the huge beastkin stared at him with those black orbs didn’t help matters. “With this many of us, we’re not sneaking out of here without notice. Wouldn’t you all welcome the help of a bullcor?” Kyris thought he might have been trying to convince himself.
“Yes, if he does not eat us first,” Nerisca whispered.
Kyris glanced to Grunul who still stood by the gate, trying to gauge what the man thought, but the Marlander gave no indication as to an opinion. He turned to Kohan, knowing what Brogan and Nerisca’s views already. “What do you say, old one? Do you think the bullcor should be freed? Do you think he would help us escape?”
Kohan swayed back and forth. “Why don’t you ask him?”
“Oh.” Kyris looked to the bullcor. "Do you understand me?"
The beastkin gave a small nod of his large head.
“If I free you, will you promise not to harm us?”
Again the beastkin nodded.
“This is folly,” Brogan snarled, and this time it looked as though he would attack, but Grunul was there with a hand on the man’s shoulder. Brogan glanced to the cudgel in Grunul’s hand, then backed down.
Kyris stepped into the cell and again was awed by the size of the bullcor. If he didn’t have a guaranteed escape by use of the Gloom, he might have run back out. In truth, he wasn’t sure why he was so adamant. A moment before, he was contemplating leaving them all except Grunul. Why was it important now to free this beastkin? Did he feel some kind of kinship with the beast? Or was this some form of atonement for what he had done in the fighting pits of Yond. He hadn’t known it wouldn’t be a true contest, that it never was with the beastkin.
“I am going to free you, then we will escape this place. Is this acceptable?”
The giant seemed to give what was said some thought, which Kyris found odd, but he eventually nodded again.
Kyris began to unlock the four chains that secured each limb, the giant’s eyes on him all the while.
Once the last metal restraint had fallen to the floor, Kyris hurriedly left the room. The bullcor slowly rose from his stone seat. Stooped to exit his cell, the highe
r ceiling of the outer room allowed him to stand somewhat. Kyris tried not to flinch back, but from the gasps he heard from behind, not everyone was successful.
The giant bullcor reached up and unfastened the leather straps that secured the metal mask he wore, tossing it to the ground. He worked his lower jaw, like that of a cow chewing cud and flared his wide nostrils.
“Baluras,” the bullcor said in a deep resonant voice, tapping his chest. “Thank you.” His words were accented, and there was a slow deliberateness to his speech.
“Ah, right. You are welcome,” Kyris replied. “Should we get going?”
Kohan placed a hand on Kyris’s arm to get his attention and motioned towards the one cell he had not inspected. The one across from the first empty cell.
“Is someone in there?” Kyris asked.
The prisoners shared looks and shrugs.
“I don’t know,” Grunul said. “I have heard the guards enter during meal delivery, but I’ve never heard anyone speak from it. But then, I had never heard,” he looked up at Baluras, “him speak, either. Till now.”
Kyris turned to Kohan.
The old man nodded. “See for yourself.”
This was no time for games, he wanted to say, but his curiosity got the better of him.
With his quartz light held to the hatch, Kyris slid back the metal barrier.
Something shuffled and worked itself into the corner. The light reflected off two red eyes, and Kyris took an involuntary step back. The occupant of the cell threw an arm across their head but not before Kyris got a glimpse of an elongated, fur-covered face with a thick scar crossing its left eye. The prisoner was dressed in the same gray uniform, but his looked more ragged and threadbare. Another beastkin of some sort. What was going on here?
When Kyris backed away from the door, Brogan and Nerisca crowded in around the hatch to get a look in.
“What is that?” Nerisca asked.
“Another nightspawn,” Brogan said, then immediately flinched away from the bullcor though the giant did not move or seem to even hear.
Kyris nearly laughed at Brogan’s declaration of the beastkin being nightspawn. No, he thought, the wraiths that hunted him whilst he used the Gloom were foul and unnatural. The malice and wrongness of it was almost tangible. These creatures, strange as they may be, were just flesh and bone.
Kyris inserted the key and unlocked the door.
Brogan looked at Grunul and Kyris, then to the others as if for support. Finding none, he said, “Fine, but this is on your heads, letting these things loose in the city.”
Kyris hesitated a moment, realizing he was letting them all loose without context as to why they were imprisoned in the first place. But it was too late to turn back now.
Kyris moved in the cell, but the creature tried to back into the corner even more, as if attempting to sink into the stone walls.
“It's all right,” Kyris said, halting his advance. “I won't come closer. The door is open, and you can leave when you choose.” He tossed the ring of keys to the cell floor. “I wouldn't wait too long, though.”
When he left the cell, Kohan went inside. He heard a whispered conversation, then the old man resurfaced.
“Can we get out of here now?” Kyris asked.
At the junction, Kyris motioned towards the stairs up to the factory, but then he considered the darkness at the other end of the main hallway. The guardsman had come from that direction. “Do you know what lies farther down there?” he asked of Grunul.
The Marlander shook his head. “They didn’t exactly give us a tour. I was either in my cell or up there.” He said the last with a sneer.
Kyris followed the group upstairs. The prisoners had stopped in the room with the wooden contraption. There was a mix of hateful glares and averted gazes, and in the case of Nerisca, outright fear of the thing. Kyris hurried them out into the hallway, passing the storage rooms to gather in the center of the building near the forge.
“Where are we?” Brogan asked voicing the question for all the escaped prisoners as they gawked at their surroundings.
“Um, it’s a factory. For the quartz lamps and other things, the best I can figure,” Kyris replied, his answer only confusing the group further. “We’re in a facility of the artificers, in Hammerfell.”
“We were being held and tortured by tinkerers?” Brogan asked, his disbelief clear.
“I heard the hammering but never imagined this,” Nerisca said.
It hadn’t occurred to Kyris that the prisoners didn’t know where they were or who had imprisoned them.
“What now?” Grunul asked.
“Now? I have no idea,” Kyris replied.
“You don’t have a plan?” Nerisca asked.
“I had several,” Kyris snapped. “I didn’t know what condition I would find Grunul in, so I made sure to have options. None of those options accounted for five of you, let alone a bullcor.”
“We fight our way out. That’s the plan,” Brogan said.
“I will stay,” Baluras spoke, his deep voice commanding everyone’s attention, “and fight.” The giant beastkin ran a hand over his chest, over the spot with the strange ridges, and for a moment Kyris thought Baluras might claw his own skin. “I will make these men pay for what they have done.”
Brogan nodded slowly in agreement as if coming to a realization. “You are right, beast. These tinkerers have much to answer for. They have inflicted torment without just cause. They have done things…” the man’s hand drifted to his upper back, “which I will force them to undo.”
Kyris started to object, then looked to the others for help, but they all seemed lost in their own thoughts. A fight was unavoidable with this many, but what if Grunul also wished to stay? The Marlander was obviously battle-hardened. He would wager that Brogan, too, knew his way around a sword. Nerisca had a hesitant manner about him that suggested the opposite. Baluras was, well, a godsforsaken bullcor. The one that concerned Kyris the most was Kohan. All the others appeared in decent health, surprising given their treatment, but the old man looked frail and emaciated.
“There are guardsmen all over this compound,” he blurted. “At least a dozen, by my counting. Possibly more. Three times that many in laborers.”
Brogan gave a wicked smile. “I am a scion of Allithor with no small amount of power. Baluras here is a… beastkin.” He said it as though for the first time. “Nerisca, you’re of Kalaa, correct?” He skipped over Kohan and asked Grunul, “What about you, Marlander? You have the savagery of your people?” When Grunul didn’t immediately reply, Brogan continued on, “A dozen guards will not be enough to stop us. We will not run, we will make them pay for what they have done to us.” The last was directed at Baluras, and the giant nodded.
“You are all scions?” Kyris asked, his confusion compounding.
“If you lot plan on running, go ahead,” Brogan said. He had separated the group in two. Baluras and Nerisca on his side to Kyris’s Grunul and Kohan. “We’ll stick around a bit longer.”
Nerisca seemed uncertain about this proclamation.
“However,” Brogan added, “I wouldn’t linger too long.” He moved further into the workshop.
Baluras gave Kyris a nod, dipping his truncated horns, then followed the Allithoran. Nerisca looked between the two groups, seemingly torn. Deciding perhaps his chances were better with the formidable giant, he gave Kyris an apologetic smile and rushed to join the departing men.
“What just happened?” Kyris asked of no one in particular.
“Trimmed the fat, if you ask me,” Kohan offered with no trace of irony.
A flurry of questions swirled in Kyris’s mind, but all he managed was, “An Allithoran?”
“An outcast, most like,” Grunul said. “Perhaps banished from the keepers, or maybe he never was one? There’s always those that don’t fit in.”
Kyris stared at Brogan’s back as he left, feeling conflicted. The man had seemed a right whore-son, but anyone who rejected the keepers co
uldn’t be all bad.
“What of you two? No desire to wreak vengeance upon those that imprisoned you?” Kyris asked.
“Bah, I’ll leave the vengeance to the young. I just want to be gone from this cesspool of a city,” the old man said. “No offense intended.”
“None taken. And you?” Kyris directed at Grunul.
“Oh, there will be a reckoning, but not this night. At least, not from me. There are those I need to speak with first.”
With the group thus reduced, perhaps one of his original escape routes would work, Kyris thought.
“Old one, do you think you are strong enough to climb the walls with the aid of a rope?” Kyris asked, pointing through the high windows at the tall barriers.
“The name is Kohan, young sapling. Call me old one again and I’ll show you how strong I still am.” Kohan then peered at the walls and muttered something to himself.
Kyris looked at him, waiting for an answer.
“Well, if I hadn’t been denied the nourishment of Volis in that hole. By Noll, what they take me for, a Myriden?”
Kyris didn’t understand what the old man was going on about but felt the gist of it was ‘no’. While silently bemoaning how it was that he’d gotten saddled with this additional burden, he smelled smoke. Looking up, he saw the flickering lights dancing on the walls in the far corner of the warehouse, and though he could not see the source, he knew the cause well enough. A fire was ablaze, and dark smoke was already rising to the ceiling.
Brogan and his cohorts emerged from that portion of the building. The Allithoran was armed with a mace in one hand and held a lit torch in the other, looking rather pleased with himself. Nerisca had found himself an ax, and Baluras a long two-handed sword that appeared more like a poker in his hand.
“You lot still here?” Brogan asked.
Kyris ignored him, instead turning back Kohan and Grunul. “The stables. Can either of you ride a horse?” he asked.
“Of course I can, I’m not an invalid,” Kohan said, and Grunul nodded.
Thank Shar for small blessings, he thought. Every horse he’d ever approached seemed more keen to bite and kick than let him ride them. “All right. I suspect things are about to get loud around here. The stables are to the right, outside this door.” He motioned in the general direction. “Secure horses, I’ll secure the gates. When you see them open, charge for them. Got it?”