It was clear by sundown that we were in desperate trouble. I could no longer pretend to myself that we could escape. We’d run up against a cliff and moved as quickly as we could along the face of it, weaving in and out of rockslides that had come down. We’d found an opening that we’d thought might lead us upward, but the ravine had narrowed as we climbed, and we’d reached a point where the ground rose too steeply for us to continue without using our hands as well as our feet. Even the Attolian would find it a challenge, and I was almost out of strength, hunched over and gasping, when he looked up in alarm and dragged me backward under an overhang.

“What is it?” I asked. “What did you see?”

“They’ve skylighted themselves, probably on purpose. I’m sorry, Kamet, at least three of them are at the top of the slope above us.”

“Can we go back?”

“No. They revealed themselves because they know we are trapped.” He dropped the bag he’d been carrying, with the remains of our purchases from Koadester, and the waterskins as well.

“What now then?” I suppose I thought he’d produce another lion’s den for us to shelter in.

He didn’t. He loosened his sword and began to draw it out.

“No,” I said, pulling his hand away. He looked at me, startled, while I racked my brains.

“We’ve hardly seen them, and they haven’t had a good look at us. Take off the sword belt and your breastplate. They aren’t the Namreen—they don’t know for certain who we are. If we are two escaped slaves instead of one, then maybe we are not the prize they are hoping for.” Stripping the Attolian as I talked, I took his belt and the sword and the plate and hurried to push them deeper under the overhang where they would be out of sight, then directed the Attolian to empty his purse. Making a face, he tipped almost all of our coins out into the grass and replaced the purse in his belt. Then he helped me pile what loose rocks there were until our cookpot—I was really going to miss that pot—and his armor were well hidden.

When we were done, the Attolian stood staring at the rocks, like a man bewildered. I had to take him by the shoulders and turn him away.

“Don’t look anyone in the face,” I warned him. “Don’t say anything if you don’t have to. Let me talk. Don’t disagree with anything, don’t even think to yourself that you know what they do not because it will show on your face. Everything shows on your face, so just try to think of nothing at all. Look at the ground, do you understand?”

He nodded. I helped him to reshoulder the bag that had held our provisions, hoping that the men who pursued us would not notice any decrease in his bulk now that his armor had gone. Then I had to think how I could pass off someone with muscles like his as a slave. That he was a foreigner was not a problem—many slaves were. He was a field hand, perhaps, but that only raised the question of how he and I might be escaping together. Field hands would have little contact with the house slaves. If I’d ever planned an escape from my master, it would not have been with one of his ditchdiggers. The Attolian was very good-looking, though, and I chose that fact to guide my story. He might be a field hand brought into the house as a pet for the mistress. That was not uncommon, and it would only be helped if he played stupid and kept his mouth shut. I could only hope he would do so. He was far from arrogant, but his stubbornness might do us in.

Confident that they had us pinned, the slavers made no attempt to hide their approach. When I heard their voices, I began to berate the Attolian, blaming him for everything under the sun. He was slow, he was stupid, if he’d done as I’d told him, we would have been safe and—in ridiculous counterpoint—that we never should have tried to escape and it was his stupid idea and I shouldn’t have listened when he suggested it. The Attolian went along with me, punctuating my rant with bumbling attempts to interrupt me or accept the blame.

“Morik,” he said, giving me a common name, “Morik, I didn’t know. I’m sorry,” he said humbly.

Trying to conceal his Attolian accent, he spoke each word with deliberation that made him sound appropriately thickheaded. His accent really had improved, I noticed, but gods save us, he still had his earring in his ear. I fell silent, staring, and the Attolian hastily pulled it out of his ear and popped it into his mouth. Better to have thrown it away with the coins, but there was no time to argue with him.

“Ho,” said the leader of the men hunting us. “What have we here, a slave and his friend thinking they could run off?”

Only then did it occur to me that he could very well mention the death of my master. I was completely unprepared to have that revealed. Panicked, I began to babble. I blurted out an invented name for our mistress and the farm outside of Koadester where we had come from, explaining that our disastrous mistake was entirely the stupid field hand’s fault. He’d been brought into the house as the mistress’s pet and it had led him to ideas about his own importance and I was terribly, terribly sorry to have been misled by him and was prepared to be taken home and would be a very good slave in the future.

I was so frantic and so stupid that I think this alone convinced them I could not be the murderous, conniving slave described on the bills posted in Koadester. The slavers looked shocked as I rattled on, at first merely skeptical that the hulking Attolian could be the mastermind of our escape and then disappointed.

The leader of them, to my surprise, swore in Setran, and I wondered if all of the men were Setran. Their features were indistinct, but they may have been from the Goli tribes, who’d scattered after being put down by the empire. The Attolian looked at me, but I ignored him, praying that if the Setrans talked of my master and his death, they might do it in a language the Attolian couldn’t understand.

Behind us, we heard clattering rocks as the slavers who’d been on the heights above us finished making their way down.

“This isn’t them,” said the disgusted leader in Setran.

The men cursed, casting their hate at us, their disappointment dangerous.

“Two of us could have collected these,” said one burly slaver. “We’ve left the rest with Kepet, and he’s probably asleep again.” He reached for his sword, and the Attolian tensed. He didn’t need to understand the language to know that the slaver meant to kill us outright. I turned a little to lay a warning hand on his arm and leaned against him, retreating from the slaver and discreetly nudging the Attolian back as well.

I licked my lips and said, “I am my mistress’s majordomo and amanuensis. Q-quite valuable.”

“Put up, Shef,” another of the slavers said.

“They’re still worth more than the others put together,” added another.

Shef lowered his sword back into its sheath, but then he punched me so hard that I fell straight to the ground, leaving the Attolian without any guide. I could only cover my head and pray that he would follow my example and take the blows he had coming to him.

Evidently he did. I heard him grunt as he hit the ground. We might have suffered longer from Shef’s disappointment, but someone above spoke after only a few more blows. “Let’s go. We still have to catch up to Kepet, and you’re right that he is probably asleep by now.”

The slavers pulled us to our feet and efficiently tied our hands, looping a rope around our necks to make a leash to lead us back down the ravine and from there back to the trail we had been following. Even in the dark, they seemed familiar with the terrain. I fell several times and heard the Attolian go down as well. I winced as one of the slavers said, “Oh, you don’t like that, do you?”

We followed our previous trail only a little while and then left it to travel overland. The slavers led the way to a much wider path, a clearly well-used cart track we would have come to if we had continued along the road skirting the hills just a little farther. We walked uphill until we reached their camp on a patch of flat ground just off the road with a curving rock face behind it, like an outdoor room, made by chance. It was obviously a regular stopping place, with iron staples sunk into the rock at head height to tether the mules. There was a mortared fire ring in the center and a stack of firewood next to it. A lively fire was burning, and as predicted, a man was asleep beside it.

The slaves they were transporting were chained together, as close to the fire as they dared get, close enough to attack the man in his sleep, but he was hardly in any danger. When I saw the slaves, my heart constricted, and I squeezed my eyes momentarily closed.

There were perhaps twelve or fifteen of them. They were skeleton thin and covered in filth and sores, their clothes only rags. These were not the slaves of the imperial city or even of the outlying farms. They were the cheapest of slaves, the most miserable souls of the human race, bound for hard labor in the mines. They could have been anchored to the staples in the rocks, but weren’t. Even with surprise on their side, all of them together would not have been a match for the healthy and well-fed Kepet. They sat or lay, indifferent, as the Attolian and I were brought into the circle of the firelight and chained at the end of their row.

One of the slavers cursed and lifted an empty ankle cuff. A slave had slipped away, and not for the first time evidently. The slavers kicked Kepet awake and swore he would pay for the missing slave from his share. Kepet argued that the man wasn’t worth any money anyway, but the other slavers drove him off into the dark to fetch the missing slave back. Then they argued about who would make food.

One man was finally bullied into the task. He put a pot onto the fire, pouring in water and dried meat and a few vegetables to make a thin soup and then adding a scoop of grain. When it was obvious that nothing was coming to either of us from that pot, I told myself that the meat in it was probably caggi.

I heard the Attolian whisper under his breath, “Not nearly as tasty as grilled rodent,” and essayed a weak smile.

The other slavers’ dinner had been cooked and eaten before Kepet came back. He was alone, but carried something in his hand. He walked along the group of slaves, kicking each awake and showing it to him, and then moving on to the next. When he reached me, I saw that what he held was a severed hand. He walked to the fire and threw it in.

“Gods all damn you,” the other slavers shouted. “Why did you do that?”

“You said you’d keep his price from my share, so keep it. I told you he wasn’t worth the trouble he makes.”

“You didn’t need to throw it in the fire,” snarled the man who’d been doing the cooking. He fished the hand out and threw it onto the road.

Then Kepet sat and ate what was in the pot, complaining that the other slavers hadn’t left much. Only when he was finished did they feed the slaves. I saw there was another pot, not in the fire, where they had put grain to soak. Shef carried it along the row of chained men, scooping out a handful of grain, then squishing it into a cake and dropping it into the outstretched hands of the slaves. Each time he held it in the air first as the slave begged for it. He was followed by a man with a water sack and a cup who did the same.

“Please, please, master, please”—the whispered supplications like the voices of those already in the gray lands.

The Attolian wouldn’t beg and got neither the grain nor the water. I took the wet lump the slaver had given me and divided it, handing one half to the Attolian. Then I picked out the grains from the cake and ate them one at a time to make them last. The slavers meanwhile passed a wineskin among themselves. As the drink loosened their tongues, they talked about their new slaves and where the best place to sell us would be. Dishonest to the core, they would make no attempt to return us to our supposed owner. They were on their way into the hills to take the slaves to a tin mine, but that wasn’t the place to sell a trained slave and a healthy field hand. They would take us with them to the plains below. One suggested that our invented owner might have posted a reward, but none of his colleagues thought it worth the time to go back to Koadester to see. Better, they thought, to see us as a windfall, take us west to the first market, and sell us there. As we had no slave chains, they could plead ignorance of our owner’s identity if they had to. Unethical but predictable. After a while the talk turned to the Attolian’s good looks, and I grew more concerned. I had been too successful perhaps in casting him as the pampered lover of our imaginary owner. Swigging from a flask of wine, one of the slavers stood up and strolled over. He passed me and squatted next to the Attolian.

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.

I went through all the pockets and purses of the slavers and emptied out all their money. “Thieves,” snarled one of the slavers. “You won’t get away with this.”

One of the slaves laughed harshly. “And if you catch us, what? We will be sent to the mines?”

The Attolian took up the hammer again and dragged the end of the chain to one of the rings set in the rock wall around the campsite. Once he’d secured it, using an ankle cuff to make a closed loop, he stood. Muscles straining in the red glow of the firelight, he pulled until he was certain it would take a hammer to get free. Then the Attolian threw the hammer as hard as he could into the dark.

“You cannot leave us here,” protested one slaver.

I translated for the Attolian.

“Tell him he’s next to the road,” said the Attolian. “Someone will come by.”

“And if no one does?” said the man, when I repeated the words in Setran.

The Attolian snorted, guessing what the slaver’s words meant. “Then maybe Kepet will have got off easy,” he said. I didn’t bother to translate that.

We packed up the mules, and the Attolian herded all of us down the road. The slaves moved slowly, but the Attolian was patient. He and I could hardly move faster anyway in the pitch dark over the rough surface, and we would have missed the spring on our own. One of the slaves warned us when we were close, and we listened for the sound of water murmuring over rocks. We stopped there to fill waterskins—two of them our own, taken back from the slavers. The Attolian explained that he and I would take some of the provisions and head back up the road toward the mines. “We go north,” he said. “We are hunted, and our hunters will come after each of you. You may want to try to hide in the hills or make your way down to the plain. I can’t tell you which is best.”

“And the mules?” The slaves were resting in the dark all around us and I didn’t know who spoke.

“You can have the mules,” said the Attolian, “but ride them hard, and abandon them in the first village you come to.”

“Those slavers will be out for blood,” said another voice.

“And our pursuers even more so,” the Attolian warned.

Diffidently I said, “There is a temple of Amrash at Nerket. Go west on the wagon trail below here, and when it joins the emperor’s road to Zabrisa, go back east. It’s not far from where the roads meet.” The temple at Nerket was a sanctuary for escaped slaves, which would have angered local slaveholders more were it not that the slaves, once received in the temple, were forbidden to leave. The priests of Amrash were very poor—it was a subsistence living a slave faced within the temple walls. Common decency should have allowed such a haven for those so abused by their masters that they would choose that life. Cynicism made me think the sanctuary was tolerated because the slaves there had so little value. For the men crouched in the darkness around us, a life of peaceful service to the god and a roof over their heads would be a haven indeed.

There was quiet while each considered the risk and weighed it against his good fortune in being free at all.

“I’ll take a mule,” said one of the men.

“I as well,” said another, “but I have the strength yet in my legs to get along on my own. I won’t take a mule if there is someone who needs it more.”

No one else, weak though they were, was willing to risk being mistaken for us. We stripped the packs from the mules, passed out what was valuable in them, and then handed them over to their riders.

“When you reach the first town, ride through it, so you can be seen to be a gray-haired slave on his way to the sanctuary—not an Attolian, not a Setran house slave. Then abandon the mule and hide for a while, or go overland. Those hunting us should not follow you further.”

Odd that he called me Setran. I had not felt myself a Setran in a long time. Nor Mede either, for that matter. Our earlier conversation seemed to belong to a different world now, when the Attolian and I were comrades by the nighttime fire. Setra was no homeland to me. I had no homeland, but perhaps the Attolian only wanted to think of me as something other than Mede because he hated the Medes, or because he hated and respected the Medes but merely hated me. I didn’t know.

With two waterskins between us and much less than our share of the food and money, we started back up the road toward the mines. The Attolian had not dithered over the disposition of the food and money, and I think that he gave most of it away. We each had a blanket roll and a set of spare clothes, useful but smelly. The Attolian was armed again with one of the slavers’ swords as well as a hunting knife and a small bow and its arrows. We were better equipped now than we had been on leaving Koadester, except for the Attolian’s missing breastplate and our cookpot and all our money gone.

I would miss the cookpot. We should have taken the slavers’ when we had the chance, but we’d left it in the ashes of the fire. I know the Attolian was thinking of his sword and his armor, buried somewhere under the rocks to the east of us, but there was no time to go hunting them and little chance we could find them anyway. He said nothing, but I could guess how much it pained him to abandon them.

I had a long knife and a very small one that I had taken because it was just like one I had used for years to shape my pens. I felt I was more likely to get something done with the smaller knife in the right place than with the larger one, which I was afraid even to draw from its sheath. I did not discount the possibility that I might be using the knife on the Attolian, who had not once looked at me, though he had addressed several remarks meant for me to the air above us as if I were floating somewhere overhead, and several to the ground as if I were reclining somewhere to his left. Even if it had saved us, I did not expect him to forgive me that kick to the groin. I would pay a price, I was sure.

Head down, I followed him back up the road. When we got close to the slavers, we could hear the sullen argument going on as they tried to twist the pin out of the cuff and work the iron staple out of the rock. It was easy, in the darkness, to pass by without being noticed. The ground was dry and hard, and I doubt we even left footprints.

We went on as quickly as we could without risking a fall. As the sky began to lighten, we came to the end of the road. It opened out, to our right, into many smaller tracks around the tips and tailings of several mines. Sheds scattered across the hillside were dark and silent and still in the predawn air. Ahead of us, only a thread of a hunting track continued up the rocky slope. Without speaking, the Attolian began to climb. With the growing light, it was not impossible to find the way, and by the time the sun cleared the horizon, the mine was some distance below us.

The hunting track began to cut farther and farther to the right, headed toward a stretch of scrubby bushes. It was probably a loop that would eventually return to the mine, whereas we needed to make our way uphill. The Attolian picked a likely saddle in the ridge above us and began moving toward it. The whole hillside was rocks. As we moved higher, there was no more soil, just an unending pile of stones, all of them rounded, even the ones as big as a bull, unstable and threatening to roll underfoot. Picking a way, step by awkward step, was exhausting. I fell farther and farther behind.

Finally, the Attolian passed out of sight behind a large boulder, and I stopped to catch my breath, seeking some hidden reserve of strength that I didn’t find. While I was still looking for it, the Attolian moved back into view and waved at me to catch up. I put my head down and focused only on my next step and the one after that. When at last I reached the place where I had seen him, I found behind the large boulder a flat area the size of a large tabletop, mostly level. The Attolian was already lying down on it with his back to me. I dropped beside him.