Oh, I thought hopelessly, this isn’t going to end well.

I swung around toward the Attolian and without warning shouted in his face. “This is all your fault, isn’t it?” I shouted. “I would be safe at home if I hadn’t listened to you.” The Attolian looked at me, as bewildered as I had expected. He hadn’t understood the Setrans. “I am sorry,” he said, as if an apology in this predicament was helpful. He didn’t call me Morik, and this wasn’t an act. “You would be better off if you had stayed with N—”

Not even these stupid slavers would believe our story if he mentioned my master by name. I shifted my weight, and using both feet, I kicked him as hard as I could between the legs.

The Attolian screamed. For an eternal moment his face was frozen, wide eyed, in shock and pain. Then he clutched himself and rolled to his side, curling up like a newborn over his injured manhood. Meanwhile, I continued shouting, calling him vile names and cursing him for his imaginary faults. The slavers laughed. The man with the flask swung it at my head, but by then I was already retreating as far as the chain would let me, even as I kept up my name-calling. The Attolian lay on his side gasping. When he could talk, he spoke in Attolian, so hoarse and so shrill that the men nearby were more likely to think they’d misheard than that the words had been unfamiliar. “—kill you,” were the only ones clear to me.

Laughing with the other slavers, the man with the flask stepped back to watch what would happen.

I could only pray that the Attolian would realize the reason for my actions. Or that if he didn’t, the slavers wouldn’t really let him murder me. I couldn’t be sure what to expect from men who would kill a slave rather than take the trouble of chaining him properly.

Very frightened, I tried to retreat further as the Attolian got himself up on his knees and crawled toward me. It did little good. He lifted the chain attached to my ankle and pulled. He was still too hunched to sit up straight, but the muscles in his arms tightened and I slid helplessly toward him.

I curled into a ball, the only defensive measure I could take. Rather than smashing my head with his fist, the Attolian seemed more intent on getting his hands around my neck. Like a plated lizard, I curled even tighter. The Attolian grunted as he pulled my arms away from my face. I took a chance and flipped myself over and scrambled away, but he pulled me back. We repeated this maneuver several times, to the hysterical amusement of our captors, until suddenly it was over. The Attolian had gotten a hand around my neck, and I couldn’t move. He pressed me against the ground as I tried to pry his iron fingers away.

I would have tried to explain myself at that point, I would have said anything to persuade him to let go, but my breath was no more than a whistle, and then even the whistling stopped. All I could hear was the blood pounding in my ears. It grew louder, and the Attolian’s face grew darker and seemed to be receding.

Then the darkness began to clear. The slavers had pulled the Attolian off, and I could breathe again. Sobbing for air, weeping with relief, I looked around to see if they had had enough entertainment or if they meant to release him for another round. It seemed they had had amusement enough, because they dragged the Attolian as far as the chain permitted and hammered a spike through one of the links into the ground, pinning him in place. They should have secured him to one of the iron staples in the rock wall, but it would have been more work, and they were too lazy. Instead, they added another spike to the chain just out of his reach, fixing that link to the ground so that he couldn’t pull me toward him. Then they went away to sleep, leaving the grumbling Kepet on guard, warning him to do a better job or the Attolian might work his way free in the night and kill his little friend.

I sat rocking, holding my throat, not once looking toward the Attolian. The slaves around me curled up on their sides, shifted briefly on the hard ground before they fell into exhausted sleep. Through all the noise and the fighting, they had paid us little attention. They were too far gone to care much. I watched Kepet as he, too, fell asleep.

In the silence I heard the dry scratching as the Attolian worked at the spike that pinned him in place. I didn’t look. Nor did I look at the soft slithering click of the metal links in the chain as he moved across the ground to the second peg. The chain pulled at my ankle, and I lifted it so that it would make no noise as he approached, but instead of growing slack, it stayed taut. I turned to see him moving catlike in the arc described by the length of his tether, heading for Kepet. He reached for him, and there was a popping sound, so small even the noise of a cricket would have obscured it. Then the Attolian carefully lowered the body to the ground.

The rest of the slavers were farther away, beyond the Attolian’s reach. Holding my breath, I turned to the slave sleeping beside me. Gently I shook him awake. He looked up at me, confused and exhausted. I put my finger to my lips and then pointed. The slave sat up, saw Kepet’s body and the Attolian standing over him. He could have warned the slavers in hopes that they would reward him, but he did not. Silently he woke the man next to him. Any one of them could have given us away, in hope of a reward, perhaps his freedom, but the slavers had sealed their fate. Not one slave made a sound. Lifting the chains and holding them, they gave me room to move closer to the Attolian so that he in turn could move closer to the other slavers.

One after another, he broke two necks. Each time there was a frenzied but nearly soundless kicking and a quiet crunching sound as the bones gave way.

Sickened, I pulled on the chain, like a panicked man trying to rein in a runaway horse. The Attolian, feeling the tug at his ankle, turned to me, murder in the set of his shoulders. Spineless, I let him have the slack he needed. He faced me a moment longer, then took up a log from beside the fire and, swinging it hard, clubbed the next man and the next. The slavers were finally aware of their danger, but it was too late. As those remaining leapt up, the Attolian swung his club and laid each one out in turn.

“Tell them to sit on these men,” he said to me, and waved at the slaves. They didn’t need a translation. With a rattling of chains, they jumped onto the slavers. If they’d had any strength at all, they might have torn them apart, but the most they could do was hold the men while the Attolian reached for the hammer and pry bar that had been left lying nearby. In a few strokes, he was free. He freed each of the slaves next, leaving me for last.

Once the restraint on my ankle was gone, I went to the packs dumped on the ground near the mules and began to go through them. There was no bread and there was no time to cook the grains, but there was dried meat and some dried fruit. There was a leather bag filled with tin coin, probably their payments for recent sales they had made at other mines. Behind me, the Attolian began hammering the cuffs around the ankles of the slavers he’d left alive. Cursing, they strained to get free of the slaves piled on top of them. One man did get loose, briefly. The Attolian downed his tools and seized him by the head, then hauled him struggling across the campsite to where Kepet lay with his neck broken. The Attolian never said a word, only held the slaver there, face to the body, before he dragged him back and threw him down beside his colleagues, where he lay without moving and without speaking.

Once the slavers were chained, the slaves came to me for the food I had found in the mule packs. There was little water left in the skins, but one of the slaves, speaking for the first time in a hoarse voice, said that the skins had been filled earlier that evening at a spring by the road, so more water was not far away.