Looming nearby, the wreth guards wore breastplates and shoulder spikes enhanced with bone and burnished metal. They carried ivory spears and hooked chains they could hurl out like a scorpion’s sting. Occasionally, the wreths made an example of a prisoner to keep the weak and terrified captives in line, and that made Glik cautious. The guards didn’t hate them, simply saw the humans as a resource, bodies to fight and bodies to work as part of their larger plan. Glik drew no attention to herself.
Learn, plan, stay alert, she told herself. There will be a way out.
One guard snapped at a sluggish worker pushing a cart of ore over the uneven ground. The metal-tipped whip whistled out and struck sparks from the stone wall only a hand’s breadth from the slave’s head. The man leaped to work.
The bleak camp’s dwellings were made of sand, hardened mud, and rock shaped by wreth magic. Mages deflected the wind that whipped through the canyons. For shade, fabrics and skins were stretched over frameworks made of gnarled hardwood.
Glik sat under the meager shade of her tattered awning. Bright sunlight poked through the holes, warming her arm as she used a rough rasp on long sticks to fashion arrow shafts. The slaves were making thousands of arrows for some upcoming titanic battle. Glik tossed her finished arrow with a clatter onto the pile of similar shafts. Others would sharpen the wooden tips and cover them with a resin that hardened like glass. She had no idea where fletchers would get arrow feathers out here in the desert, but that wasn’t her task. The beginning is the end is the beginning. She was trapped somewhere in the middle. For now.
As heat waves rippled from the desert canyons, she saw dust and smoke rise into the sky from mining operations in the striated mesas where workers extracted ore for smelting. Dour mages watched over the work crews, adding spells and drawing upon what magic remained deep within the landscape.
Among the captives Glik met survivors of entire villages overrun by wreths, whole populations bound and whisked away, leaving behind only whispers and ghosts. These people had no one to write down their lives, and many died here without anyone even recording their names. That made Glik sad, because a person’s legacy, their name, was all they contributed to the universe. She drew a quick circle around her heart.
Seeing her, others made the gesture, muttering the same phrase. Individual Utauk traders and even large caravans had fallen afoul of wreth raiders. She was not alone here, but in a sense their isolation—where they were watched over at every moment—had rendered all of them alone. She vowed she would get to know them, build a sort of alliance.
As her hands worked on the next arrow shaft, she fell into a fugue. Although her fingers were sore, bleeding in some places and callused in others, and the work was so routine, she forgot what she was doing.
At least Ari had escaped. The beautiful reptile bird was another reason Glik rarely felt alone. Their companionship was so close they could feel each other’s emotions even when they were apart. When Glik was captured, the ska sensed her terror through their heart link, but Glik had pushed her away to keep her safe. The reptile bird had pumped her wings, darting among the thermals to fly far from the slave camp. Because she could still sense her ska, a part of herself remained free.
Now from her canyon prison, Glik looked up into the blue depths of the sky and focused her inner sight, going higher, rising beyond any clouds. She felt dizzy, falling up into nowhere, yet she pushed farther into her vision. Intending to search for her ska, Glik was startled to sense another great reptile with large scales, an ominous presence out there. She had seen something like this once before, glaring at her from behind a resinous shell in a mountain eyrie, just after she had found Ari’s egg. As Glik drifted in her strange waking dream, she also envisioned skas, thousands of skas coalescing and then breaking apart … wings, countless small wings. And then gigantic wings.
A dragon’s roar shattered her trance, and Glik blinked back to awareness to see a wreth mage standing nearby, inspecting the workers. He was broad shouldered and bald, his face deeply chiseled, his eyes gold and intense. He wore a heavy robe of oxblood-dyed leather imprinted with arcane runes. The garment looked like a book of dangerous spells.
Mage Ivun led this labor camp and sometimes even deigned to speak with the prisoners, as if he thought that explaining the wreth mission would make the slaves work with greater fervor. Glik stared at the ugly man, still trembling from the vibrant vision that had just consumed her.
Ivun addressed the workers in a booming voice. “You will help the sandwreths triumph in the coming war. With your assistance, we shall exterminate the frostwreths, then we shall wake the dragon and destroy it, so that Kur rewards us. You will be part of our victory.”
Ivun’s intense eyes were like lodestones sending out shimmers of energy. Forced to listen, the wretched captives stopped their work, but their lack of response seemed to disappoint the wreth mage.
When Ivun lifted his left hand, the leather sleeve fell back to reveal a shriveled arm like the forelimb of a dead beetle. The mage straightened his arm to point a gnarled finger toward the captives. “In our great wars long ago, thousands of human soldiers wore sandwreth armor and carried our weapons. They fought the enemy for our glory. That battle is not over. Now we call upon you again. We created your race. You owe us your service.” He grumbled in his throat and scanned the squalor of the camp. “There can be no greater meaning to your existence. This is why you were all made.”
The captives muttered in low tones, a mere murmur that could not be identified. Disappointed by the reaction, Mage Ivun strode barefoot across the rocky ground toward his stone headquarters. The wreth guards pummeled the captives back to work.
In silence, Glik observed how cruelly the guards treated her fellow captives. How did the wreths believe they had the right to destroy so many lives? Lives of good people?
Humans had lived without wreths for thousands of years now, creating their own civilization, making their marks in the world, creating a legacy. They had earned the right to be their own masters, not just to be tools for wreths to use or throw away.
Glik could survive this place. But survival was only the first step. She had to help these people escape.
6
AS the Isharan warship entered Serepol Harbor, black fabric dangled from the red-and-white-striped sails to signal that something terrible had happened on Fulcor Island.
Cemi stood at the bow, feeling very alone as they sailed back home with the wounded empra. Her view of the bustling harbor appeared to be blurred with an ocean fog, but when she felt the trickles running down her cheeks, she realized that tears had clouded her vision. Her mentor Iluris was alive, and dead at the same time—unresponsive, empty.
The young woman’s body hitched as the horrible memories flashed through her. She had burst into the empra’s guest chamber to find her on the floor, her head smashed against the stone ledge. An assassin who looked like the Brava Utho had attacked, holding magical fire in one hand and a knife in the other. Treachery from the Commonwealth, the same people who had lured the empra there under pretext of peace!
Cemi had felt in a daze since their frantic escape on that stormy night, rushing the wounded empra down to the ship. Now, days later, though her head was bandaged and the blood had stopped flowing, Iluris had not spoken, not opened her eyes, not moved at all. A faint whisper of breath came from her mouth, and she still had a heartbeat, though it was faint and erratic.