There was no sun into the cellar, and no good way to tell time. For Fii, it felt like forever since the slavers went back to their game, leaving him to hang with the dead.
Rat woke up with a moan somewhere between the first and tenth hour after they were captured. Fii was meditating his own failures, nails digging into his own thighs, growing angrier and angrier with every thought. He could pick the lock. He might even be able to escape. And then what? Leave Rat here, and pretend that he had saw nothing, heard nothing today? Where’s your recklessness now, Firelis Tyv’ern?
Shock had numbed him to action. He was distraught.
Fii looked up, and caught Rat’s slowly clearing eyes. Perhaps Fii should leave Rat here. It would greatly improve Fii’s own chances. Slavers. Ha. And they claimed his mother was one of them. The world seemed to have turned on its head today, and Fii wasn’t sure where that left him. As a slaver’s stock.
Hunger gnarled in Fii’s belly. It must have been a full day since he last ate, but even his own spit tasted bitter. Rat, now finally alert, was rattling on the cage bars, drawing the slavers’ attention with his blind panic. The slavers looked up. One of them smiled. The rest were laying down their cards. Something was about to happen.
The next hour was one of the longest in Fii’s short, seventeen years.
One by one, the children were all uncaged, and their wrists snapped into thick manacles with long, dragging chains. The youngest few were tied to the older ones’ backs. Fii and Rat went last, and they completed the lineup. The chained line were theren shown to a tunnel hidden behind the cages. They stumbled through it, and the slavers prodded them to hurry every other step. The other end of the tunnel led to a shack. The outside of the shack was an area with near the city walls that looked terribly familiar.
Night had fallen, covering the land under a canvas of black nothingness. Tonight was a moonless night, and even the stars seemed dim with an absence of light. Other than the chain-gang and the slavers, there was no sign of any living thing within the vicinity.
With the ease of those who had done this a thousand times before, the slavers directed the children to the city walls, to the tunnel that arched over a ditch. Two men stood guard, while the others led the chain of children through.
Ha, Fii thought. There was something sardonic about the situation. He was leaving the city how he entered. This time, however, he stepped right into the ditch of rotting foliage and fetid wastes, and felt the slime reach his knees. He should be disgusted, but disgust wasn’t coming. Disgust was as far away to him as this morning had been, and almost as far away as reality seemed right now.
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