They had beaten Arn surprisingly little. From the grotesquely armoured guards, he had received only two cracked ribs, bloodied lips, and a black eye. From the pot-bellied—and rather clumsy—jailor, he had received a gash to his hand from a dull knife used to tighten a screw in a shackle. And, from the sickness in my mind, Arn thought, I’ve received the worst wound of all. He had lost his freedom—what measure of it he had possessed as a slave.
Gamden languished from his own set of shackles, of course, always in Arn’s sight. Gamden had received a worse beating apparently, though part of it had been from Arn—their chains had afforded him enough leeway to thrash his once-friend in a fit of fury. Of course…that had been how one of his own ribs had been cracked.
For the first time since then, Arn decided to speak with his prison-mate. “I never thought of you as a killer, Gamden. Is my mind so far gone that even my delusions don’t make sense?”
Gamden short beard was stained with blood. He lifted his head and squinted at Arn with his right eye; their left one was swollen shut. “I’ve killed before. Don’t you remember when they branded us? We each killed guards that day.”
“So that inspired you to murder their… Stone Spear?” he asked. Though, that lump of a man would have quivered and collapsed at the sight of a true Razaad Stone Spear—as enormous and muscular as he was fierce and ruthless. Arn remembered days when his dreamworld showed him such great men; now it only showed him traps of metal, and deathly curses by fire.
“I needed to wake you up,” Gamden said. “We didn’t survive this long by doing what others told us. We should have killed Quenden when we first had the chance.”
Arn shook his head. “I’m sure you’ve accomplished that now as well.”
Gamden—or the part of Arn’s mind that thought it was Gamden—must not have considered that, for the other prisoner let his breath out in a whistle.
“In any case,” Arn pointed out, “we’re not likely to get another chance to disobey orders in a long time. You killed Crar because you wanted me to stop acting like a captive. But now?” He rattled his chains for emphasis.
He was still surprised Crar had died. Such a little hole in such a big man….
The jailor must have heard him shaking his chains, for keys soon clanked in the locked metal door of their locked metal cell. Arn looked to his left to see two men admitted. One was armoured as Crar’s guards had been—dark metal ribs were embossed across his chest-plate and his lowered visor resembled a sinister creature with fangs bared hatefully. The other man wore a long, violet robe, bound at the waist with a gold sash. He had a bushy moustache and curly ringlets of dark hair on his head. Arn thought he might have been the man Crar was meeting with that fateful day, but he could not be certain.
The man spoke in a high-pitched voice. “It’s been decided to keep you alive, killer.”
Arn lifted his head with the faintest smile. The irony—could he die even if he wanted to?
“I wouldn’t smile yet,” the man whined. “We have sent news to Master Tarro. He will want to meet the man who killed the great Merchant of Orm River. You will likely die by his hands—he does take this sort of thing personally.”
Arn shrugged. He didn’t know who that was, and he didn’t really care. Maybe he had survived Razaad, the Deep, the isle, and the slavery all so he could die in this dank metal cell. Maybe not.
The metallic monster that stood beside him did not seem to like the smile on Arn’s face. He stepped closer, muttered, “You’ll get what you deserve, fool,” and drove his gauntleted fist into Arn’s ruined face.
“Could you not!” Gamden cursed when the first wave of pain subsided. But the hit had been substantial, and they spent the next hour flitting between lucidity and the tumultuous punishment of a molten dreamworld.