Broken Chains

A splash, shriek, then the slap of flesh from behind him made him whirl around. Just outside the Guards quarters, men circled around a small man who writhed on the ground at a slaver’s feet. It was Bryhon. The only slave Stonecrusher knew who actually knew his own name. The empty slop pail, the stains on Malere’s robes, and the terror in Bryhon’s eyes told Stonecrusher all he needed to know.

Malere’s next kick lifted Bryhon a span off the ground. "It was, I m..m.." Bryhon tried to speak and roll away from Malere, but after another kick to the face, Bryhon’s head snapped back, and he lay still.

"You will pay! You will pay you little worm!" Malere rained kicks to Bryhon’s face and chest as guards slowly gathered around to watch.

The moment stretched slowly out. Stonecrusher focused on the face of one of his very few friends, contorted in pain. Malere had killed for much less than this, and now Bryhon would die. As had so many before him. As would so many after him, now, and forever.

"Noooo!"

Stonecrusher whipped the hammer over his head, with a roar that was a blend of joy and rage. The hammer hit Malere squarely, snapping his spine like a dry twig. The hammer carried him into the stone wall four strides away, where Stonecrusher watched him screaming on the ground, his back bent at an angle that said he would never walk again.

Hundreds of slaves rushed all around the lowest part of the quarry. Thousands more looked down from higher levels and wooden walkways. A cluster of white-haired Vayare poured out of the guard’s quarters, and stopped to stare at the screaming man on the ground, and then at the slave who now stood over him. Stonecrusher recovered his hammer, as well as Malere’s thick black staff.

Head high, he scanned the thousands of Cyntare who stared at him in the most totally complete silence he ever remembered. His uncertainty vanished. He knew now was the time. He filled his lungs and threw his arms wide. "We will be free!"

The guards rushed him.

The first two, one on each side, simply reached for him. He almost laughed at their ignorance. Instead he crushed the head of one with the hammer, swung the handle up into the chin of another, pivoted halfway around and released the hammer in an upswing, into the face of the third. The rhythm of the hammer beat against him. Again, he stood alone.

The rasping hiss of blades clearing sheath drew Stonecrusher’s eyes to the remaining guards as they struck as one. He faked wide with the staff, feigned imbalance, then leapt backwards between two pillars beneath a stone balcony. He shrugged his tunic away, threw it at them and waved the staff in front of him wildly.

The guards hesitated. He screamed again, paralyzing them a moment longer. In that time he dropped two with a single thrust. The staff cracked and swung as he fought them, ignoring the cuts and gashes, screaming defiance with all his might. The certainty that he would die in a manner of his choosing gave him a reckless abandon, he felt more alive than at any other time in his life.

And then it was silent again. Coming back to himself, he realized he stood alone, looking over the dead and dying bodies of five guards. The others retreated, looking over his head to the balcony above. Even as he snapped his head up, he knew his hesitation would cost him.

When he met eyes with the priest, his head froze, his arms felt leaden. Fear shot through him and held him in place. Unreasonable, childish in its completeness of terror, the fear consumed him. His vision darkened and he felt himself falling where he stood.