by A. Giannetti
Elerian’s life quickly became a blur of work and short periods of rest, each almost indistinguishable from the next. Before long, with no way to measure the passage of time, he could not have said whether he had labored in the bowels of the mountain for days, weeks, or months. He continued to hide his magical powers, determined to wait as long as necessary for the right opportunity when he could use them to escape.
One day, Elerian and Ascilius unexpectedly had their task changed. After turning in their digging tools, they were set to carrying heavy buckets of ore from the chamber where they had labored for so long to the crusher in the main cavern. Their new task required them to walk past the pit in the floor on each trip to and from the crusher. Ascilius, along with the more experienced prisoners, kept well away from the opening, forcing Elerian to do the same, but some of the newer prisoners paid no attention to the pit, sometimes passing quite close to it. On one of the return trips to the tunnel, the pair of slaves in front of Elerian strayed near the rim of the opening. Suddenly, Elerian saw something dark dart over the edge of the shaft. Even with his keen sight, he was not able to get a good look at it, for it moved much too fast, and it seemed to be cloaked in shadow. Seizing one of the prisoners, it leaped back into the pit with him. There was a rattle of the chain linking the prisoners, and the second man screamed as he also disappeared over the rim. The lines of prisoners passing the opening moved even farther from the edge of the pit, but their guards paid little attention, swinging their whips vigorously to keep everyone moving. For the rest of that work period, screams rose out of the dark depths of the opening every time Elerian walked by it. Evidently, the Goblins were not the only creatures in the mine with a taste for cruelty.
After they had carried ore for a long, wearying time, Elerian and Ascilius were moved by their guard to the crusher. Along with dozens of other prisoners, they walked in endless circles in a trough worn into the stone floor by the bare feet of countless slaves, pushing long wooden shafts as thick as a man’s chest. These shafts drove the enormous gears that turned the enormous stone wheels that crushed the raw ore. It was an exhausting task and more than once, Elerian saw some worn out slave slip from his shaft and fall to the floor to be dragged along by his chain, for on no account would the guards allow the crusher to be stopped. If blows from their whips did not rouse the fallen one, the Goblins cut his off his head with their long black knives to free his chain. The head was thrown into the crusher, but the body was always taken away for a gruesome feast.
When their time on the crusher was done, Elerian and Ascilius carried broken ore in buckets into the next cavern where they piled it on to the floor next to huge furnaces. The ore was smelted by Dwarves, the only race hardy enough to work continuously in the stifling heat from the smelting fires. Each time the Dwarves drew orange, molten iron from the furnaces to make ingots, showers of red-hot sparks shot into the air, raining down upon the hapless prisoners who were nearby and burning holes into their skin. Any slave who flinched from the sparks and spilled even a part of his buckets received a beating or worse from the watchful guards. One terrible day, Elerian watched a young Hesperian flinch from a spark, dropping his entire load near the feet of one of the guards. As Elerian watched in horror, the furious Goblin dragged the screaming prisoner over to a furnace and threw him through the open door into the fire burning inside. The Goblin laughed uproariously as the unfortunate man’s partner began to scream and tear at his collar as the furnace heated his chain. When he was finally allowed to pull the end of the chain from the furnace, the red-hot collar at the end of it was empty. Elerian had already conceived a healthy hatred for Goblins, but after that incident, his hatred crystallized into a desire to rid the Middle Realm of the entire race.
On the return journey from the smelters, Elerian and Ascilius carried out, in their empty buckets, the cooled slag from the furnaces, loading it into wagons that waited near the entrance of the cavern that contained the crusher. Each time he approached the cavern entrance, Elerian examined it carefully out of the corners of his eyes. As far as he had been able to discover, this was the only way out of the mine and, despite the guardians, presented his best opportunity to escape.
“I am leaving this place during the next sleep period,” Elerian thought to himself as he dumped a bucket of slag into a wagon bed. “I will change into a rat and slip out past the guardians at the entrance. If I succeed, no one will know what happened to me.” Because he had wisely refrained from using his mage powers all this time, no one, not even Ascilius, suspected that he could perform magic.
Just then, a line of new prisoners entered the cavern. One of them caught Elerian’s eye. He was tall Tarsi with clear gray eyes and dark hair shot with white. There was a tenseness about him that attracted Elerian’s attention, and he watched out of the corners of his eyes as the Tarsi was brought to the anvil to receive his collar. A Goblin removed his shackles. Elerian started when the Tarsi suddenly vanished. The guards began shouting, and a continuous, eerie, high-pitched cry immediately echoed through the cavern.
Elerian’s third eye opened, showing him the Tarsi sprinting toward the entrance of the cavern beneath the golden cloak of an illusion. “He is a mage,” thought Elerian to himself in surprise. He looked toward the entrance and saw that a red, flickering curtain of light had already sealed off the opening. The Tarsi either could not see it or did not care about it, for he sped straight toward the barrier. When he reached it, he recoiled as if he had struck a wall of stone and fell to the ground. Before he could regain his feet, a small wooden door near the entrance to the cavern opened, and four shaggy black lupins bounded out into the open. Crimson eyes burning with eagerness, they scented the air and immediately converged on the fallen Tarsi. Surprisingly, they made no attempt to injure him, seizing his clothes and extremities instead so that he was held helpless. A pair of Mordi who had run out of the doorway behind the lupins cast a net over the Tarsi. Like a live thing, it tightened around him, and at its touch, the Tarsi became visible again. Howling in excitement, the Mordi dragged him off through the entrance to the cavern. Elerian shuddered, wondering what awful fate awaited him for trying to escape.
The incident troubled Elerian, for it raised questions he could not answer. Would the guardians detect him also, even if he was in another shape? Was he strong enough to break through the barrier they would throw up before him if they did? Could they detect magic anywhere in the mine or just near the entrance? As he followed Ascilius back to the furnaces for another load of slag, Elerian decided to put off his escape attempt until he either found out the answers to these questions or became desperate enough to brave the guardians regardless of the consequences.
After they were done carrying ore, Elerian and Ascilius were given the task of bringing the cooled bars of iron from the smelter into another cavern where smiths formed them into whatever the Goblins required. The smiths were all Dwarves, chained to their anvils. They were naked except for leather aprons and so blackened by soot and dust that it was almost impossible to distinguish one from another. Within reach of their chains were small forges where human slaves worked the bellows. A deafening clangor of metal on metal continually filled the cavern as the Dwarf smiths plied their hammers. Elerian could not help but notice that the majority of them worked to produce implements of war.
On one occasion, as Elerian and Ascilius set down their load of iron next to one of the Dwarf smiths, a group of tall Urucs walked into the cave. They were all dressed in rich black velvet instead of leather armor. At the forefront of the group was a tall Goblin wearing an iron crown set with red rubies, which glowed like coals in the baleful light of the forges. Elerian had seen that cruel visage twice already, and he kept his head down lest Torquatus turn his way and somehow recognize him.
The assemblage of Goblins went up to one of the Dwarf smiths, who was forging a long black sword that had intricate silver threads running along the length of its blade. Torquatus took the sword from the Dwarf, testing its balance. H
e then swung it at the anvil. The sword sheared off a fist-sized piece of iron from the anvil. Torquatus appeared well satisfied with the weapon, handing it back to the Dwarf to be finished.
Elerian noticed then that Ascilius was glaring at the group of Urucs with a look of utter hatred. Knowing that they would be noticed if they stood there staring instead of working, Elerian tugged gently on the chain joining him to Ascilius. He was relieved when the Dwarf followed him immediately without saying a word.
BELIAC
With the passage of time, Elerian found it increasingly difficult to endure the endless labor of the mines, the poor food, and the boredom that were his daily lot. Used to the freedom of the forest, the stone walls around him weighed heavily on his spirits. He had never carried any extra weight, but now his body thinned to nothing but bone and muscle, like that of Ascilius. His hair and beard grew long and tangled, matted with dirt and dust that turned it to a dirty gray color. Each time he awakened, Elerian felt himself slipping a little closer to the madness which he had seen overcome so many of the other prisoners. He began to think seriously of either attacking the guards in hopes they would kill him and end his torment or attempting to slip past the guardians, regardless of the consequences. Strangely enough, it was the gift of the Ondredon’s memories, which Elerian had previously discounted as useless to him, that now saved him from committing a rash act that would almost certainly have resulted in his death.
He began to escape from his miserable existence by taking refuge in the scenes of long ago Fimbria that had become a part of his memory. He discovered that, even awake, a part of his mind could withdraw into that long vanished landscape while his body toiled in the mine.
He always saw the same grove of silvery beech trees and the same winding path, but Elerian never grew bored with the memories passed on to him by the Ondredon, for the details of the scenes they presented to him changed constantly. At times, the leaves of the beeches were the red gold color of autumn. At other times, they were the new green of spring, or the darker green of summer. Sometimes, tall, slender figures dressed in gray walked on the path in pairs or in groups. Animals appeared there, too. In one memory, Elerian saw a silvery gray animal, resembling a horse, pass by on the path, stepping lightly on trim, gleaming hooves. Its long mane and tail had a silvery sheen, and its eyes were the color of amethysts.
No matter how deeply he immersed himself in these waking dreams, however, Elerian’s escape from his life as a prisoner was always temporary because of the Mordi who guarded the prisoners. Because new slaves were constantly being brought into the mine, the Mordi cared not at all if a prisoner lived or died. When the Wood Goblins often grew bored with their duties, they amused themselves by devising ways to torment their charges. Their fiendish tortures and the pain they inflicted dragged Elerian back to the reality of the mine no matter how deeply he sank himself into his memories.
One of the cruelest of the Wood Goblins was named Beliac, and he often had Elerian and Ascilius assigned to him. He took a particular delight in tormenting Ascilius, and as a consequence of this, Elerian also came in for his share of mistreatment.
Beliac’s inventiveness seemed without limits when it came to torture. He delighted in heating the tip of his spear in a brazier and then burning Elerian or Ascilius, unawares, with the red hot metal while they worked, laughing uproariously when they flinched at the unexpected pain. When they dug, he cunningly wrapped the end of his whip around their shovel handles, tugging on them so that they spilled ore on themselves, filling their eyes and mouths with dry, choking dust and grit. Other times, he pulled their feet out from under them with his whip, causing them to fall heavily and spill their loads. The worst part of the whole business was that neither Elerian nor Ascilius dared to resist his torments in any way or even show any anger, for that would have led to a vicious beating or worse, as Elerian had already seen with his own eyes.
During one of the work periods when he and Ascilius dug for iron ore, one of the men working nearby had lost control of himself. He was a Tarsi, new to the mines and still strong. After a guard lashed him across his back for moving too slowly, he spun around and lunged at the Goblin with his shovel raised up in the air, ready to strike the Goblin with it.
With a cruel smile on his face, the Mordi had quickly stepped back; watching with amusement as the chain around the Tarsi’s neck brought him to a sudden stop, for his chain mate had frozen into terrified immobility. As the Tarsi raged at the end of his chain, dragging his horrified co-worker behind him, the Goblin had cracked his whip, coiling the end of it around the Tarsi’s ankles. After a strong tug on the whip by the guard, the Tarsi had lost his balance, falling heavily to the ground. As the Tarsi struggled to free himself, the Goblin had blown a short, harsh note on the dark horn he wore on a strap looped over his left shoulder. Other guards had quickly appeared to help him subdue the Tarsi and bind him with ropes. Talking excitedly in their harsh language, they had dragged him off.
Elerian had not seen the Tarsi again until after the next sleep period when he and Ascilius were assigned to carry ore to the crusher. On his first trip, Elerian saw the Tarsi spread-eagled on the floor, not far from the crusher. His wrists and ankles were tied firmly to steel spikes driven into the floor, and a crowd of Mordi was gathered around him, subjecting him to every torture their evil minds could conceive of. For three work periods, Elerian had walked helplessly by the Tarsi, listening to his screams as the Goblins tortured him, all the while trying to keep him alive as long as possible to increase the length of his torment. The prisoner joined to the Tarsi’s chain had remained by his side the entire time, for rather than free him, the Goblins forced him to sit and watch the torture. By the third day, he went mad, cowering and gibbering to himself at the end of his chain.
Ascilius had stolidly ignored the torture, but rage had consumed Elerian each time he walked by the laughing group of Goblins. The fact that he could do nothing to help had made the situation even worse. There were hundreds of guards. If he attempted a rescue, he would be quickly overpowered, without having helped the unfortunate prisoner in the least.
When he had entered the cavern at the start of a fourth work shift, Elerian had immediately noticed that the screams had stopped. The prisoner in the center of the cave was gone, along with his chain mate. Only the bloodstains on the stone floor remained as testimony to his suffering at the hands of the Mordi.
After the death of the Tarsi, Elerian endured the torments of the guards as stoically as Ascilius, but deep inside him, his hatred of the guards continued to fester. During one particularly trying day of enduring Beliac’s fiendish torments, it bubbled close to the surface, threatening to rage out of control. Ten times Beliac’s lash tangled around Elerian’s shovel handle, causing a load of dust and ore to spill over him. After each spill, Beliac’s lash had cut across his back like a hot knife when he stooped to scrape up his spilled load. A red haze clouded Elerian’s vision. “The next time I will kill him,” he thought calmly to himself. Even the threat of torture was no longer sufficient to stop him from either throttling Beliac with his hands or slaying him with a destruction spell.
Beliac must have sensed Elerian’s mood. With a wicked light in his eyes, he lashed Elerian across his bare back when he stooped to scrape up another shovelful of ore. Elerian immediately attempted to straighten up so that he could attack the Goblin but found himself unable to move. A hand had suddenly tightened around his right wrist with a grip of iron. Driven beyond reason by a need to slay Beliac, Elerian tried to break free, but his wrist was held prisoner by an immense force, seemingly as immovable as the mountain over his head. The red mist before his eyes cleared, and he saw with surprise that it was Ascilius who gripped his wrist. He was so startled that he forgot about Beliac, for in all this time, the Dwarf had never given him a moment’s attention. Ascilius looked at him for an instant, shook his head briefly and then, letting go of Elerian’s wrist, resumed swinging his pick with barely a pause.
B
eliac had failed to witness the brief exchange, for another prisoner had distracted him for a moment. When he turned back to Elerian, he had already resumed working, stoically ignoring all of Beliac’s further attempts to provoke him. Eventually, the Goblin left to torment another other hapless slave.
Ascilius ignored Elerian for the rest of the work shift. Later, when they were allowed to sleep, Elerian whispered a question to Ascilius when the guard was out of earshot. As his tongue shaped words that had become unfamiliar from long disuse, Elerian was startled by the harsh sound of his own voice.
“Why did you help me today, after all this time?”
Without opening his eyes or giving any indication that he was awake, Ascilius replied softly, “I have seen dozens of men wear that collar and eventually die. There seemed to be no point in talking to another who would also die soon. I expected each day to be your last and yet, you have remained alive.” Ascilius opened his eyes, which gleamed and took on a reddish sheen from the glow of the mage lights hung on the walls. “Who are you?” he whispered. “No Hesperian could have lasted this long. You grow thin but you are still strong.”
“I am just another prisoner?” said Elerian evasively, for he was not ready to trust the Dwarf with his secret. He decided that it might be best to give a false name, too.
“My name is Balbus,” he said softly and then fell silent when he heard the soft step of the guard. The guard remained nearby, preventing Elerian and Ascilius from speaking again.
When they were roused for the next work shift, Elerian wondered, at first, if he had only imagined talking to his companion, but he noticed immediately that Ascilius no longer avoided looking at him. Instead, he cast many sideling looks at Elerian, a speculative look in his dark eyes. The guard they had today was not as attentive as Beliac, so eventually, Elerian had a few moments to talk quietly to his companion while they mined ore.