Days of High Adventure (4 page)

“Bah!” Yaol frowned. “Little enough work in here for one illiterate peasant.”

Amanda bit back a retort over being called illiterate.
Your mistake for making assumptions
, she thought.

“Here. Hold the kettle here. Steady, or I’ll pour the whole thing out over your head.” Holding the gem in a pair of large forceps, Yaol murmured sing-song words that Amanda strained to hear
—something about snakes and renewal and shedding scales—before he placed it gently in the kettle.

“Now, take that out to the window where the sun will strike it,” he said. “You will see where. Go,” he waved before turning back to his table.

“Is this magic for you? Or for your master?” Amanda asked as she slowly moved away. Her eyes stayed on the kettle. The last thing she wanted was to spill any of this boiling hot concoction on herself.

“Being an apprentice does not mean I am not already a wizard myself!” Yaol barked. “Long have I studied. My power is great. Yet it is not
as great as Set’s chosen. Great am I, yes, but Bel-Danab is greater still! Set reveals to his faithful many secrets that cannot be found in these scrolls and books. Bel-Danab has power beyond power. Thus even those as great as I have reason to serve him.”

His rant fell into mumbles as Amanda made it to the window. She strained to hear
at first, but then decided to forget about it. It was hard to tell what to make of his claims. He clearly knew how to use magic, but Yaol sounded like he needed to convince himself of his greatness more than Amanda.

After setting the kettle where he directed, Amanda stole her first good look out over the tower’s surroundings and the city in the blazing summer daylight. As she had surmised earlier, the city was made up mostly of low buildings.
Other, more substantial structures shared the skyline: a few other towers, some large buildings that she guessed might be temples, and even a few walled estates. The city’s streets were narrow and full of market stalls, pedestrians, livestock, even statues. Beyond the city, the desert stretched out as far as the eye could see.

The tower itself was encircled by a high wall, with perhaps
twenty or thirty yards of garden space in between. A pair of small buildings jutted out from the base of the tower, both still well within the walls. One faced a gate with two armed guards posted on the inside. She wondered if there were more on the outside as well.
Great
, she thought,
a great view in a pretty tower surrounded by assholes. Just like my last job, only even shittier.

Turning from the window, Amanda kept her head hung low. She let her hair fall in front of her face. “
So you learn wizardry from reading these books?” she asked. He nodded without looking up at her.

Yaol barked out a haughty, cruel laugh. “
If one can read, yes. I had to serve my first master for ten years just so he would teach me letters in my native tongue! It grew easier after that. But every language is different. You may be able to speak many tongues thanks to my spell, but reading? Hah! That would require more power than I would invest in slaves.” He waved his hands at her as if brushing her away.

“Few know how to read. Fewer among them have the intelligence for magic. Yet for those of us who do...phaugh! You see that city out there? Insects! Dust! I laugh at them!”

Amanda bit her tongue.

Muttering to himself for a moment more, Yaol looked around his laboratory and came to a decision. “I go now to my chambers. You will clean this place up. Do not touch any of the materials! Just clean the dust off of the walls, the shelves and the floors. Do a good job of it
. Don’t stop until the sun sets!” he demanded, shaking his finger at her.

“Yes, sir,” Amanda nodded.

“Sir. Hah! Yes. Sir.” Yaol chuckled to himself, grabbing a few of his scrolls before he shuffled off. “The guard will come when it is time for you to go back to your cell,” he called back just before he closed and locked the door.

Amanda couldn’t believe her luck. He actually locked her in his laboratory. She could read every book just as easily as she could understand Yaol’s speech. Amanda rushed through the room, looking over each of the books. Some were bound in leather, others protected in wooden boxes. There would doubtlessly be some false s
tarts; nothing was labeled “Magic for Beginners.”

Then she came upon a single, large tome, laid upon an ornate bookstand. It was bound in iron
and covered in arcane symbols, with an iron chain securing it to the floor. Fearing some sort of mystic trap, Amanda dared only open it with a stick. Nothing exploded, nor did she turn into a frog or a rat. She stepped closer, reading the words on the first page with wide eyes. Then the next page. Then the next.

“Holy shit,” she breathed. “
It’s just like fourth edition rules.”

***

Eric kept his legs pumping. He hustled up the steep slope of the mine shaft, carrying his pan of rocks and debris in his arms. A cave-in at the bottom of one of the shafts that morning left virtually every slave performing this same task. With the sun high in the desert sky, though, hope of recovering survivors waned. Men in robes had arrived an hour ago, speaking excitedly of a “breakthrough” as a result of the collapse. Neither they nor the overseers spared much thought for the miners killed by that breakthrough.

After seven days of
labor, disorientation and the bite of the whip, Eric had learned that he was capable of withstanding more physical hardship than he ever would have guessed. He endured the abuse, the blazing sun and numerous stumbles and falls in dark caverns, all while performing harsh work with no end in sight… but his spirit didn’t break. He never stopped looking for an opportunity to escape.

Food and water were not hard to come by. Their overseers and guards apparently didn’t see much use in keeping their slaves weak when so much hard labor had to be done. The
slaves were only allowed to collapse on the hard ground after the summer sun had set, and were usually roused before the dawn.

Exhaustion should have killed him. He wasn’t built for this, nor had he ever been particularly athletic. Yet instead of falling apart, Eric grew steadily stronger. Instead of thinning out, he
began to bulk up. He had quickly sweat off unwanted flab that he’d never been able to shed, and found it replaced by toned muscle. Seven days shouldn’t have made such a difference, but his thickening arms and legs and his flattening stomach didn’t lie.

Outside the mine shaft, the summer sun blazed down on the broad pit that served as their camp. Other slaves were around him, some ahead, some behind. Each in turn came to a cart, into which they deposit
ed their load of rocks and dirt.

Eric shifted his grip to shoulder-press his pan up over his head
to dump his haul into the cart. He sighed as the rocks fell from his pan, but had no time to catch his breath. He trundled off back toward the tunnel. Before coming here, he’d never have been able to lift such weight, let alone immediately turn back for more.

Something firm and wooden caught on his leg. Eric stumbled and fell, dropping his pan to one side and bumping into the man in front of him. Both went down, as did the slave following Eric in line as he tripped over them.

“Damn!” shouted one. “Watch where you’re going!” complained another.

“Sorry,” Eric grunted. “Someone tripped me.” Looking up, he saw one of the guards standing over them all. He caught Eric’s eye, grinning maliciously as he stepped back. He bore a tall spear, the shaft of which he slipped out from beneath the pile of fallen men.

“Dark-skinned bastard!” A huge, bearded slave kicked Eric across the face. Only halfway to his feet when it happened, Eric stumbled back onto the ground. Eric looked up at the bigger man in shock, who returned the gaze with rage. “You tore my tunic!”

Eric wasn’t entirely surprised by the other man’s anger. Clothing was about all anyone here
could call their own, and even that wasn’t much. His jeans had been reduced to tattered cutoffs. “Hey, sorry,” Eric stammered as he sat up in the dirt. “I’ll try to make it up to you.”

“Give me those shoes,” the man said, pointing at Eric’s dusty
but durable sneakers.

“What?
These won’t even fit you! Look, I didn’t mean to bump you. The guard tripped me.”

Someone else kicked Eric from behind. “Don’t lie. Give up the shoes or we’ll take them.”

“I think someone should teach him some manners,” grinned the guard with the spear.

Eric scrambled to his feet. Slaves gather
ed around, as did no small number of guards. All watched as Eric was surrounded by an inner ring of a half-dozen men with greedy, angry eyes.

“You’re in for a beating, boy,” the first angry slave said.

Eric didn’t want to make a first move. Not only was he probably screwed, the situation itself seemed insane. Letting the slaves brawl after a cave-in that had the bosses all excited? How did that make any sense? If he could stall, maybe the whole mess would be broken up...

“I’m not giving up what’s mine. Don’t you see they’re trying to turn us against one another?”

“Oh, shut up and fight!” another slave barked. He rushed forward, throwing out a wide right hook. Eric held up his broad miner’s pan to block it. The resultant sharp “clang” preceded a howl of pain from the slave as he went down clutching his hand.

Another grabbed the pan and jerked it out of Eric’s hands. A third came in with a punch to his gut. Eric shrugged it off, retaliating with the best uppercut, jab and snap kick combo that he could muster from a few short months of karate classes. It clobbered the man with surprising effectiveness.

Someone else grabbed him by the right arm, followed by another man grabbing his left. He struggled, finding within heartbeats that he was stronger than either man. Then another came around his back, swiftly holding a shovel across his throat from behind. The big bearded one stepped in front of him with his shovel raised, ready to strike.

“Hold him steady,” the bearded one demanded.

Eric kept struggling. He heard a sudden “thump” behind his head. The shovel at his neck and the man holding it fell away. It happened just in time for Eric to twist to his left, pulling the man on his right between himself and the bearded man’s shovel strike. The shovelhead fell against the slave’s skull with a crack.

Eric and
his remaining grappler stumbled and fell together. The bearded man cursed, swinging his shovel down at Eric again, but found it blocked by someone else’s shovel. Eric looked up to see a woman standing over him, wielding her shovel like a weapon. She was tall and dark-haired, with the muscles of her limbs rippling like steel cables under tanned flesh. Like most of them, she wore only in a dirty tunic with a frayed rope for a belt.

“
Barbarian bitch,” the bearded one spat, “this is none of your business.”

“I find my business where I please,” she said
with a thick accent Eric hadn’t heard before. The shovel that had restrained Eric had been snatched up by another slave in the ensuing tangle. The woman shifted her stance, keeping both opponents view.

Eric slammed his fist into the
last man restraining him. He heard the clank of shovels and grunts of fighting men behind him and the roar of the crowd all around them, but he could do nothing about all that until he’d freed himself. Two more blows seemed to settle the matter; his opponent’s abdominal muscles collapsed under Eric’s punches, and he let Eric’s arm go.

Scrambling around to track the fight, Eric saw
yet another slave, this one unarmed, fling himself at the woman as she parried the shovels of the other two. He landed face-first upon her elbow before stumbling to the ground, blood erupting from his nose. Both of the shovel-wielding slaves rushed her.

She advanced in a spin toward one while dodging the other. Her shovelhead smacked flatly against the side of
one man’s head. Then she pivoted in the opposite direction, as if bouncing away from the first blow. As she moved, the shovel twisted in her hands. The shovel’s edge caught the bearded man right across the bridge of his nose in a sickening crunch.

Both men fell as Eric got to his feet. He was pretty sure the bearded one was dead. The woman remained in a fighting stance, her gaze sweeping the crowd. A hush fell across them all.

“That’s enough out of you,” spoke up one guard. It was the same one who had tripped Eric. He held his spear at the ready, its sharp edge pointed at the woman.

“Point that
somewhere else,” the woman warned, “or I’ll ram it up your ass.”

The world seemed to freeze. Eric and all the other slaves watched the standoff. The guard glanced at his fellows scattered among the crowd before he looked back to the woman. “Get back to work,” he said
—but he raised his spear as he spoke.

Other guards yelled out the same. Fists and
the shafts of spears prodded the crowd off in different directions. Orders were shouted to pick up the pans and get the line going again. Eric heard the crack of a whip.

The dark-haired woman looked at Eric for a moment, her chin dipping in a short, single nod. Eric was stunned. Her face was no more delicate than the rest of her body, yet she was beautiful just the same.
She plainly looked foreign, even here among the diverse crowd of slaves. On Earth, he’d have guessed her to be Asian or perhaps a Pacific Islander, but those labels meant nothing here. Her eyes held a wild pride that he’d never seen before, a confidence that made her seem somehow older than her years—which couldn’t be much more than Eric’s age.