Perhaps the eclipsers deserved to be prisoners—they kept humans captive just the same, so was it not right that the tables be turned for once? But the humans—the humans didn’t deserve to be in chains. No human should ever be kept in chains, or in a canyon, or anywhere else they didn’t want to be.
But freeing them didn’t mean slaying eclipsers—picking off the wretched beasts and ridding the world of a few more of them. Freeing these slaves meant fighting other humans.
Could she even kill them? Humans were the good guys—it was eclipsers she wanted to kill.
But then she shook the thought from her mind in an instant; of course she could. The humans up there—the ones who led the caravan—stood in the way of the freedom of other human beings. Perhaps they worked with eclipsers, capturing other humans for their own gain in resources and immunity from the eclipsers’ hostility; Casmia did the same thing for a time, working with Honn to trade Oleja in for a reward. Even some of the people of Ahwan had been willing to throw Oleja back to the eclipsers for their own selfish wants. She knew not where this group was bound, but if their trail ended at an eclipser camp, she had to stop it here, now, before generations to come suffered at the hands of some cruel eclipser overseers.
And even if they weren’t destined for an eclipser camp, these people still lived in the same circumstances she once had. They could neither go where they wanted nor do what they wished. What difference did it make if a human bound their hands rather than an eclipser?
Evil didn’t latch itself to a blood, maybe, but she would spill plenty before dawn arrived.
Chapter Twenty-One
Eleven slavers worked in the group; eleven versus Oleja’s two, and that was the most generous head count of her own force. In her biggest fight, it had been only five against her and Tor—or four, considering the envoy captain stood back and stilled his own hand while his lackeys fought her.
Eclipsers may have an advantage in brute strength, but they lacked in tactics. Humans, or at least the ones Oleja had seen fight, made up for their lower strength—and then some—purely in their ability to strategize with and aid their allies. They did not, for example, leap from a boulder onto another’s back, dealing the final blow to their wounded companion. She could expect these humans to have some experience fighting, especially together as one force. Plus, several of them carried crossbows, and jumping into the middle of nearly a dozen enemies who could all have their bolts aimed at her in a fraction of a second sounded like the best way to lose a fight.
Unless she came up with a plan, her odds against the slavers did not look good.
Dividing them seemed best—dealing with one half and then taking care of the other, or leaving the latter to return to an abandoned camp, assuming she could send them away long enough. Their captives would be gone by the time they noticed anything amiss.
But she had to take something else into consideration too: once free, these people carried nothing with them—no food, no water, no supplies to help them survive the desert. She certainly didn’t have enough to share with so many mouths, so she needed to steal supplies from the caravan as well—otherwise, she freed the people from one horror into another. And she knew both with more familiarity than she cared to.
Divide the slavers, steal their stuff, free the slaves. Easy.
Fragments of a plan swirled around in her mind. She needed a distraction, something to draw the attention of the guards away from the group. But she needed them divided long enough that she didn’t risk the other half returning before she finished the rest of her plan. That meant that the distraction needed to pull them farther from the camp—more than a few steps, at least. She had to send them off looking for something—or someone.
But that something couldn’t be a single person, or even a small group. Two or three of the slavers might step out on such an errand, leaving the remaining eight or nine behind—a group still too large for her to manage comfortably. If only she had a whole camp of people she could use to draw them in, a camp ready to disperse in an instant, sending half a dozen guards off searching for them. But numbers was the one strength she didn’t have on her side.
To draw away one or two, she could start a fire down in the quarry and sit beside it. When spotted, a member of the slaver group would split off and approach her, but long before they reached the bottom of the quarry she could douse the fire and flee, vanishing into the darkness and leaving the guard to hunt for her. Her disappearance might draw the attention of another guard or two, but one girl didn’t warrant an enormous party searching for her whereabouts—they’d sooner keep their numbers on defense in case she approached the camp.
One girl didn’t warrant a wide search, but if she pretended there were more, she might just be able to split the group. She could create the illusion of many, but never let them see anyone—not even her—so they’d never know. But that required some way to douse the fire without approaching it.
Maybe a cradle hung just above the fire so that the fire’s tendrils ate away at it, and once it broke it spilled water down on the flames. Yes, that could work.
From her bag, she pulled a piece of dried and treated animal skin; she brought it from Ahwan intending to make another waterskin if necessary before her trek into the desert, but seeing as she had fared fine so far, she could use it as part of her plan instead.
She descended back to the quarry floor in the dark. Tor followed along, though he cast several glances back up towards the slavers that made Oleja’s heart leap, thinking they heard her and looked down into the depths, but no faces peered back through the darkness. Only the moon and the stars looked down at her now.
At the bottom of the quarry she cleared a space and began piling up all the twigs and dried grass she could find. She added a small shrub too, brown-green needles and all. Around it, she placed a whole circle of stones, each one just the right height to be used as a seat.
Stretched across stilts above the pile of brush, she built her cradle. The skin spanned the distance between stakes like a spit, loose enough to hold water in its sagging center. She emptied nearly one full waterskin into the cradle. Though she hated to let the water go to waste, she reminded herself that she could refill her supplies from the slavers’ wagons after she looted them.
Around the fake campsite she paced heavily up and down, away and back, and between each of the stones, creating many clear trails that all ran together, indicating either a large group or one incredibly antsy individual. She scattered a few other items about—pieces of human-made scrap from her bag, scraps of cloth, crumbs of hardtack, and a few nuts, all placed carefully in spots they were sure to be seen. She even took a bit of a cloth bandage from her bag and, after nicking the tip of one finger with her knife, stained it with blood and dropped it on the ground. The more obviously recent the campsite, the better.
With everything set, she lit the fire, then hurried off back up the side of the quarry with Tor. She took a path winding up the north slopes, and at the top she slipped behind a mound of gravel to wait.
The flames grew and smoke billowed out, rising up into the sky. For a brief moment she worried she hadn’t designed the fire to burn slowly enough and that the water would douse it before the guards even spotted the blaze, but then she heard a shout from somewhere off to her left. The gears of her plan whirred to life.
Two figures left the slaver camp and began to pick their way down the slope. They didn’t even get halfway to the bottom before, in a plume of steam and smoke and sputtering light, the fire flickered as it was reduced to faint tongues of flame. A moment later, only embers remained.
The two guards reached the bottom of the quarry and hurried over to Oleja’s fake campsite. They paused there for a minute, stooping, looking about, and then together they hastened back to the slopes and made the climb back up to their camp.
Oleja grinned from where she watched. She had taken a gamble on the plan, but so far, everything worked.
When the guards reemerged and started
down the path into the quarry again, three others walked with them, all carrying torches alongside their swords or crossbows. Five guards, leaving six behind at the camp. That was a number she could handle.
She waited until the group reached her campsite and began to spread out, their torches acting as beacons that pinpointed their locations and made it all the easier to see where each walked. As they struck out in different directions, searching for the people they would never find, Oleja hurried out from her hiding place and moved softly through the quiet of the desert night.
She nocked an arrow as she darted behind the last gravel mound before reaching the slavers’ camp. Peeking out around it, she studied the scene before her.
Huddled in the middle, clustered between two of the wagons, sat the human slaves. Two long chains linked them now, separating them into two groups. The chains attached to the wagons on the left and right and held the people there in the middle, allowing them to move only a few feet before the chain grew taut and they could stray no farther. A dozen or so feet away, the two eclipsers sat beside the third wagon, bound to its weight in a similar fashion. Firelight illuminated the group; most of them slept.
On the southwest and northeast edges of the camp, two guards patrolled. A small cluster of tents sat to the side, but unless all of the other four guards slept within, she had no idea where they might be. And she couldn’t have gotten that lucky.
“Hey, you!”
Well, if the remaining guards wanted to remain hidden, shouting at her was a poor way to do it.
The voice came from above her. Oleja looked up to see one of the guards standing tall atop the pile of gravel she crouched behind. He leveled his crossbow at her.
She jumped to the side just as the bolt struck the ground where she had stood only a moment before. Raising her bow, she loosed an arrow in return, and with a loud, splitting thud, the crossbow flew from his hand, spinning off down the side of the gravel mound. Oleja already charged up the slope towards him.
The man scrambled to draw his sword, but he didn’t move fast enough. A moment later, Oleja grabbed his head in both hands and shoved it downwards as she brought her knee up to connect hard with his nose. His body slumped. She let it tumble down the side of the mound, unconscious.
Five left.
Tor growled somewhere below her on the ground. Her eyes flicked for a moment to the eclipsers where they sat, and then to the human prisoners as well. A few looked up, blinking through the darkness, their eyes focusing slowly on the girl who had just taken out one of their guards and now readied to handle the others as well. The girl who had come to save them.
Their hero.
Unfortunately, the other two guards now trained their attention on Oleja as well.
“Stop right there!” shouted one.
“Chief, we have company,” called the other, turning his head to shout towards the tents.
Oleja nocked another arrow and fired it at the closer of the two. It caught him in the thigh, and he dropped to the ground, screaming in pain. Any in the camp who weren’t awake before certainly were now.
And the other guards had heard, no doubt. They’d be heading back and arrive soon.
Loosing another arrow, she took down the second guard with another shot to the leg. The closer of the two raised his crossbow, grunting in pain, but he got barely a moment to aim before Tor raced across the ground, a dark streak in the shadows, and slammed hard against the guard’s hand. The crossbow flew from his grip. Tor bit down hard on the man’s neck. Oleja turned away.
Four left.
The other guard took a shot with his crossbow as well, but he lay too far off and the bolts flew with neither the power nor accuracy to strike her. Firing another arrow in his direction, she knocked the crossbow from his hand as well. And then she ran down the slope of the gravel mound.
Three left.
By the time she reached even terrain, three more figures emerged from the tents—bleary-eyed but toting weapons of their own. Only one carried a crossbow.
Oleja sprinted across the camp, leaping over one of the chains binding the people as she approached the final three guards. The one with the crossbow took a shot, and it caught her in the shoulder. The leather armor stalled the bolt, but the tip still bit at her flesh. She grunted in pain but kept running.
Before the crossbow-wielder could load another bolt, she was on him. One swift kick brought him to his knees. He threw his weight forwards in an attempt to trip her, but she sidestepped him and then kicked him hard across the face. Dazed, he lay there for a moment, but then he tried to stand. Another kick brought sleep back to him just as quickly as her commotion had taken it.
Two left.
The last two guards advanced with swords. Oleja reached down and drew the sword of the guard she had just bested. She had only enough time to turn and block as the first of the two guards’ strikes came down upon her.
They matched each other’s strikes blow for blow until the final guard—the chief—joined the fray. Oleja, in her minimal experience with a sword, struggled to keep up with the pair. These were no well-trained swordsmen by any means, but there were two of them and only one of her. She needed an advantage.
She managed to land a blow on the chief, cutting a gash into his side. He hissed in pain and drew back for a moment. Oleja took a step back of her own. She matched her other opponent’s next strike, then turned and ran. The guard—and at his heels, moving slower, the chief—followed close behind.
Oleja ran to the nearest of the wagons and hopped into the bed in one bound. Atop the ledge, she turned back to face her opponents. The guard ran up behind her, and as he reached the wagon, he tried to swing at her leg. She jumped over the blade with her right leg but caught it against her prosthetic. The ring of metal on metal filled the air.
Before he could draw back his weapon, Oleja hooked the blade in the crook of her prosthetic and kicked, wrenching the sword from his grasp and sending it spiraling through the air. It landed just beside the line of captives. One woman picked it up.
The guard’s eyes went wide. Oleja leaned over the side of the wagon and, with one mighty swing of her sword, she struck the metal loop to which the chain attached. A crack formed around a deep gash cut through the weaker metal, but it did not break. The man nearest to the loop reached over and slammed one manacled wrist down against it. The force bent the piece and freed the chain, which dropped to the ground. The line of captives surged forwards, and the woman with the sword swung at the guard. He screamed as the crowd enveloped him.
One left.
Oleja vaulted over the side of the wagon just as the chief reached it, one hand pressed to his wound as it leaked dark blood nearly the color of ink in the shadows of the night. His other hand still gripped his sword. With a pale and strained expression, he looked to her. Sweat beaded on his brow.
“Who are you?” grunted the chief. “How did you find us?”
“I am Oleja Raseari. And I found you by luck, but certainly not yours.”
She swung her sword hard and it clashed with his blade, but the force made him stagger back. She kicked him in the groin and he crumpled, and then with another swing she disarmed him. The sword clattered on the ground. She kicked it towards the captives—now captives no longer.
“They’ll do as they wish with you,” she said. The chief tried to scramble to his feet. Oleja kicked him back down.
She handed her sword off to another eager hand and then went to the wagons one by one. In a furious haste, she tossed out parcels of food and drums of water. She refilled her emptied waterskin from one drum but left the rest. Then she hopped back to the ground. The other guards would arrive any moment.
The two lines of captives watched her. She paused, and then spoke.
“I am Oleja Raseari. You are all free to go where you wish now.”
“Well… nearly,” said one man.
“We need the keys, miss,” said a girl. She held up her arms, wrists out, displaying her manacles. Olej
a’s eyes drifted down the line to each of them in turn, all still shackled.
A key. Of course they needed a key.
“Where are they?”
“The chief has them,” said a voice. Oleja turned back to where she’d left the chief. He no longer lay there on the ground—instead, he staggered across the sand as he ran for the towers of gravel all around.
One quick arrow brought him down, burying itself deep in his calf. She ran to him and found a key ring on his belt, then returned to the wagons.
“Here, take this and free yourselves—and hurry. The other guards will be back any moment. Then take the supplies and flee into the night.” Oleja handed off the keys to the first of the people, who began unlocking their bonds with trembling hands. Manacles fell one by one into the sand.
Oleja collected what arrows she could. She found Tor on the other side of the camp, still sitting by the body of the man he killed. Blood stained the fur around his maw.
“Come on, we need to make ourselves scarce too,” said Oleja. She hefted her bag up higher onto her shoulder and winced in pain. The crossbow bolt still stuck in her shoulder; she would remove it when she got a safe distance from the camp.
The last of the manacles fell away and the people gathered the supplies. With surprising speed, they took off, vanishing into shadows outside the firelight. Shouts approached from the quarry, growing louder. The captives had escaped with only a minute to spare, it seemed.
Tor growled, and Oleja looked to him. His eyes focused on the third wagon waiting near the edge of the camp. The two eclipsers still sat against it, watching Oleja with wide eyes.
In the light she could see why they didn’t stand as tall as other eclipsers. In addition to being bonier and less densely muscled, they looked to be young, with rounder faces and shorter hair. Both male. Perhaps teenagers.
Only rope bound their hands, though thick rope, and wound many times around their wrists and forearms. Most likely the slavers hadn’t found manacles large enough and had improvised instead. Chains wrapped through the bonds and bound them to the wagon nonetheless.
Seablood Page 21
