21. N
Rock glowed with a dim light, enough to light the cage after the sudden darkness. Triana focused on more immediate concerns.
“Owww!” She rubbed the back of her head, where it had struck the bars, then examined her fingers. No blood, but the beginnings of a large lump and matching headache. She touched her throat, and winced at the burns. She saw the remains of the metal collar off to one side, melted and misshapen.
Rock had moved to one side of the bars, and appeared to be testing them using a dozen or so of the fine extrusions … thin pseudopods that it used to, well, she wasn’t sure what it was doing … tasting the bars?
She noticed his … well, more complicated than he … its color continued to darken, and it certainly appeared more active than she had seen before.
“Feeling better?” she asked. “Getting the rods out helped?” She looked over to where the black ichor puddled on the floor. It smelled vile.
A wash of sensation flooded her mind, a cacophony that overwhelmed her senses. She closed her eyes and covered her ears. “Too much. It’s too much.”
The second effort came through more gently …
a merging of feelings, of being collared, and set free.
She could appreciate that. She held up one hand, and focused, whispering a simple incantation.
The illusion of holding a burning ball of fire appeared in her hand.
She played with it for a bit, then let it go. She smiled. I’m back.
She got up off the floor, wincing at the pain in her back where she had struck the bars. She felt her burned throat throb as she stood. “Between my back, my neck, and the lump on my head …. Was that necessary?”
Rock placed a feeling in her mind of how it had felt to be collared, which she interpreted as Would you rather have that back on?
“Good point,” she agreed. Rock tentatively extruded an appendage towards her and she got another feeling.
Soothing. She remembered how he’d healed her, not one, but several times.
Without a doubt, saving her life. “No,” she said, but trying to radiate thanks back at him.
“This is just inconvenient. Save your strength, we may need it.”
She looked at the rod that lay closest to her. “Is it like a collar?”
Another feeling pressed into her mind, an agony of being collared, held down, and having her blood forcibly taken from her. Day after day. Year after year. She felt a flash of nausea. Then a sensation, drawn from her imagination, of her mother … a brood-mare exhausted and discarded.
“So, it’s worse. Not only does it keep you from using your magic for yourself, and serve as a punishment device, it also drains you? Of what?”
A single memory of her doing an illusion, and a hint of exasperation for missing the obvious.
“Magic. I saw that. The parasites, the elves here, draining you. Using the rods.”
She received a feeling of being a creature moving very, very slowly over very hot ground.
She ignored Rock’s reply. He seemed to have picked up a bit of sarcasm with his recovered magic. She needed to puzzle through this. Something Haldeen had said.
“You’re a Source. That’s why they have you here.”
Rock replied first with a feeling … then with her memory of seeing the first ray of sun peeping up over the horizon when she had been very little.
“So, if the rods are out, then the magic they are taking—”
Rock interrupted with a memory of a dry riverbed.
She felt her eyes widen. “And”—she said, thinking aloud, figuring that Rock would get her meaning both ways—“those barriers keeping your friends out aren’t powered anymore? Do they know that?”
On the one hand … good riddance if the Predators swarmed the wall and invaded the city, but on the other hand, there were presumably innocent people here who didn’t know that their protections were paid for almost literally in blood.
Two memories intruded into her thoughts.
The riverbed again … they’ll know the moment it goes dry?
The second, not actually a memory, but a feeling of deep sadness.
She had a glimpse in her mind of others like Rock, collared and used as Sources for the city.
Not just this city. city after city after city in this world, all of them torturing these creatures to get more power than had once been gracefully given to them.
Why? If the “Predators” hadn’t been attacking them before this, why had they decided to take some captive to force more magic out of them?
Slowly, tentatively, a few images. Armies. Elven armies fighting each other. A scene that would have been familiar to her, if the elven lords of her world hadn’t used the gladiators to work out their power struggles instead of armies.
“So they needed more power to fight each other. And when they started capturing and torturing you, that was when you all started fighting back. Which meant needing more of you to hold off the others coming to free the captured.”
Yes. The images grew too complex then, things he …
it … was trying to show her, using her memories, but in unfamiliar ways.
She tried to sort through them, the flashes …
though it was starting to dawn on her that Rock was rifling through her mind for memories the way she had gone through closets looking for the perfect gown.
She tried to piece a pattern together, while ignoring Rock’s exasperation at limitations of the material he had to work with …. “The ones outside … attacking like they did the day I arrived … want to free you … but they can’t … because of the shield, and those weapons I saw.”
Rock cast the memory of a butterfly landing on a painted flower. Close enough.
She ignored the sentiment, and expanded on her thoughts.
“And those attempts to free you and the others are going on all over every city in this place. Right?”
Then something occurred to alarm her, and she swore.
“And we’re inside who knows how many tons of rock, and your friends are about to ram the walls! Rock, we need to get out of here before they bury us by accident!”
A memory of finding shade after a long, hot walk on a summer day. Finally.
She noticed he was still attempting to do something with the bars, using extrusions to probe and test the bars.
“I don’t understand.”
A memory of earthworms digging into the ground, then a memory of earthworms wriggling on the portico after a rain. She was puzzled at first, then made the connection … the extrusions were like earthworms, and the pavement of the portico from her memory was … too hard to dig through.
“This would be a lot easier if you could talk,” she said. “Let me see.”
She approached the bars, starting with the small door that the guards opened to bring food and take away her soiled clothing. She studied the lock for a while, working out its mechanism. Basic. Designed to close animal cages. She’d opened similar locks as a child. She knew the tool she would need.
She rose and went to the remains of the hopper where Rock’s “food” had continued to fall. She rummaged around the debris for a bit, before she found a bronze nail she could bend to her will.
Humming happily, she used her magic to straighten the nail and stretch it out, making a simple tool with a hook that could slide into the lock.
Now properly equipped, the lock yielded up its secrets in a few heartbeats.
She opened the door to the cage, and stepped out.
The door was sized for something elf-sized, and there would be no way for Rock to get free.
She could leave him. He was free now. Presumably his friends could get him out without hurting him. Or could they? If the rods had been able to penetrate his carapace … all that rock coming down on top of him … might crush him.
Might ….
No. I can’t take that chance. He freed me. Now I have to pay him back by really freeing him.
“How did they bring you in?”
Rock shifted, and began using its extrusions to trace an area.
She quickly shuffled out of its way as it traced a path.
“I don’t understand … wait, I do see. The small door is set inside a larger cage door.”
Now that she knew what to look for, she could see the outline of the larger door.
The large animal entrance topped thrice her height, and took up an entire section of the wall.
She could just make out its edges, where the bars of the door fused with the bars on either side.
She would not defeat this lock with a bronze fibber-key, and the spell-work was beyond her. No lock was undefeatable, though … if you had the key.
“All right, I need to get the control for these doors. I’ll be right back.” No response from Rock. It occurred to her that her thoughts might not be altogether private. “I will be back. I just need to find the control.”
No response.
She started for the door, and had crossed halfway through the stables when she turned back.
“I need a weapon.” Rock shuffled back, still testing different portions of the bars.
She saw the shovel she had used to feed Rock, lying where she had dropped it.
The handle. A club. She picked the shovel up, tested it to use it to chop, then gave that idea up.
Too awkward. She slid the shovel between two of the bars and pulled back with all her strength.
She heard the handle creak and flex, but no luck.
“A little help?” she asked Rock. He shuffled over.
She stepped back out of his way as his weight took the strain of the shovel.
It snapped, with no more effort than she might use to break a toothpick.
“Show-off,” she grumbled.
She scooped up the wooden piece and made for the stable doors.
The shovel handle made a club as long as her arm, with a nice heft.
She gave it a couple of practice swings as she walked, getting a feeling for its weight.
She knew the work feeding Rock had made her stronger, and she could feel her strength in her swings.
She grinned. She might not be up to taking on one of her gladiators, but she felt ready for whatever might come.
She got to the heavy stable doors. She hadn’t really paid attention to them before, but they appeared to be twin slabs of wood and bronze; thick wooden planks held together with bronze straps, actually.
She backed up a couple of steps and could see the tops of the doors had wheels that fitted into a track, and would roll to the side when opened.