The Attolian looked at me. “She sent him to the potter,” I said. “To see if he could use a young man with a strong back.”

While we waited, we took stock. We had a blanket roll apiece, and the slavers’ spare clothes, odds and ends we had taken for camping, and their weapons. “We can sell my knife,” I pointed out. The longer knife was of no use to me. The Attolian had done all the cutting with his own knife, while mine had hung at my waist since I had taken it from the slavers. I pulled it out so that the Attolian could look it over.

“It’s nothing fancy. I doubt anyone here would buy it,” he said. “We can probably sell it in the city, though, along with the bow and the arrows.”

It turned out that the potter wasn’t going to the city, but he was delivering his pots to an estate partway there. He not only agreed to take us along, he promised us two hennat to load and then unload his wagon. From the estate, we could walk to the city in a day or two. The tavern wife gave us a generous measure of bread and cheese for one of the hennat. There would be no more hunting with the bow and no more caggi either. Any goats we saw would have owners who would strongly object to our shooting their farm animals, while smaller prey would have plenty of cover. We wanted to waste no time on snares. If we took a day or two to reach the city, we had enough money to feed us on the way. Once we got to the city, the Attolians would provide.

We spent the night in the potter’s shed and loaded his wagon in the morning. I’d been thinking of wine jars for serving in a tavern, but these pots were huge, almost as high as I am tall, made to hold grain, not wine. The potter was an old man bent by the years at his wheel. He couldn’t have lifted a single pot, but he had an ingenious block and tackle to get them into the back of his cart. The Attolian’s strength just made everything easier. Once the pots were loaded, we climbed up ourselves and sat on top of them. We chatted with the potter while his mules carried us at a brisk pace, and we were unloading the pots that evening, halfway to the coast. We spent the night in a stable at the estate and started again in the morning.

It was an easy walk. There was farmland on either side of the road and, in the distance, aqueducts bringing fresh water to the city. There were smaller ducts as well, carrying water to irrigate the fields and, in some places, to drive mills. All the people of Zaboar seemed to be engineers putting the runoff from the Taymets to good use.

Our waterskins were empty when we saw the mill, and it seemed reasonable to cross the drainage ditch by the road and approach the large stone building to ask for a drink and a chance to fill our skins. As we got closer to the mill and its sagging outbuildings, though, our steps slowed. The mill was in poor repair. The wheel wasn’t moving. The elevated wooden race leading to it was bone dry. There was a garden laid out inside a low stone wall, but its plants were dried and withered, and the mill yard was empty. There was a well, though, in the center of the yard. Or at least there was a worm-eaten wooden well cover lying on the ground with a square hole in the center.

We caught a glimpse of children between the buildings, but a larger figure shooed them inside, and we heard a door close. Somewhere in a shed a dog, a large dog by the sound of it, began barking ferociously. I was ready to head back to the road, but the Attolian walked on toward the doorless entryway to the mill.

Tiptoeing hesitantly up beside him, I heard voices inside. The Attolian looked pointedly at me, and I cleared my throat and called a greeting. The voices fell silent. The Attolian stepped into the darkness.

Politely he called out, asking aid for travelers.

Someone laughed harshly.

My eyes had finally adjusted, and I made out five or six men leaning against the motionless mechanisms of the mill or sitting on the bags of grain. The mill smelled of mold and decay.

“Gentlemen,” I said politely before my voice trailed off. These weren’t gentlemen.

“The miller?” the Attolian asked. He bobbled the emphasis on the second syllable, but one of the burly men stood up.

“This is my mill,” he said.

“We hoped to fill our waterskins.”

The men laughed again, looking at one another.

The Attolian took a half step back and balanced his weight. He didn’t put his hand on his sword, though.

“There is no water here,” said the miller. “The carrion picker uphill stole it.”

“Then we will go,” said the Attolian. But before he could take another step back, all the men stood at once. The Attolian drew his sword. No sooner was it free of its scabbard than a man, unseen on the machinery above, dropped onto the Attolian’s shoulders.

I had looked around already for a weapon. There was nothing that would serve as a club, but there was a half-filled sack nearby. As the men in the mill closed in on the Attolian, I lifted the sack by its upper edge and swung it, first back behind me and then in a long, sweeping arc toward the head of the approaching miller. The first blow was the most satisfying. The bag was heavy enough and its momentum great enough that it knocked the miller clean over. The bag kept going, nearly pulling me over, too, while the Attolian was handling his attacker with ease, first backing hard against a post, pinning the man, and then stepping forward before slamming him again. His attacker was knocked back and front. He dropped to the ground, clutching his nose with one hand and the back of his head with the other.

My second attempt with the bag was weaker. I didn’t have time to swing it back as far and instead danced a step or two forward to add some momentum. The sack was rotten and split just as it hit the man I was aiming for. It wasn’t half filled with grain, as I had assumed, but flour. As the split widened, the flour erupted in a stinking cloud. To my great distress, the Attolian caught the worst of it—he retreated, struck blind. Our attackers retreated as well, but we couldn’t afford to dawdle. I backed into the Attolian and was pushing him toward the door as the miller was climbing to his feet, wiping the flour from his eyes. There was still some left in the sack, so I swung again and again at him until all the flour had escaped. Finally, I was swinging an empty sack, and we were out of the mill.

I would have run for the road, but the Attolian planted himself at the doorway, assuming the men would have to come at him one at a time. There was no time to point out that the mill would almost certainly have more than one entrance. I was pulling hard on the Attolian’s shoulder, and thinking I would explain to him his stupidity at a later date, when the barking that came from some outbuilding suddenly grew much louder. The dog was already rounding a corner and loping toward us. It was a huge beast, black and as big as a donkey, I swear, with a ruff like a lion. I shouted a warning, the Attolian turned to fend it off, and the miller lunged from the doorway.

Parrying the miller’s knife, the Attolian had no chance to use his sword against the dog as it went for his throat. Overwhelmed, he went down. He rolled onto his back and briefly made it to his feet, but the miller pushed him hard as the dog jumped again. The Attolian stumbled, then staggered under its weight. Struggling for his balance, he went backward, stepping onto the rotten well cover. There was a soft rending sound. He and the dog disappeared. We heard a heavy fall and a single sharp yelp, then a long silence.

The burly miller looked at me with hate-filled eyes. “No water,” he spat. It was a dry well.

I turned and ran.