“At least some slaves will see freedom,” Neeva observed.
“Yes, but at a terrible price,” Rikus said. He started toward one of the throngs waiting to climb out of the city.
“We have no time to wait in line,” Er’Stali said, leading them away from the crowd. “Come with me.”
The sorcerer guided them to a space along the wall where there were no ropes, then took a piece of twine from his pocket. He pointed one palm downward. The air beneath his hand began to shimmer, then a barely perceptible surge of energy rose from the ground and into his body.
Once the sorcerer had collected the energy for his spell, he muttered a quiet incantation. The twine in his hand rose skyward, growing thicker the higher it went. By the time it reached the top of the wall, it was the size of a sturdy rope. Er’Stali grabbed the line and scrambled to the top of the wall as spryly as a man a quarter his age.
Neeva sent Caelum up next, then followed herself. Unlike the old man and the dwarf, she moved slowly and with great effort-a sure sign that her wound was troubling her. By the time she had reached the top, a crowd was gathering at the bottom of Er’Stali’s rope, eager to put this new escape route to good use.
When Rikus’s turn came, he moved even more slowly, for his left arm still hurt too much to use. He had to pull himself up a short distance with his good arm, then wrap his legs around the rope and hold himself in place while he reached higher. Nevertheless, his progress was steady and he soon found himself atop the wall.
Once the mul had joined the others, Er’Stali took another strand of twine from his pocket and started toward the other side of the wall. Rikus did not follow. Much of Urik was visible from this vantage point, and the mul could see greasy columns of smoke rising from all parts of the city. With the Scourge of Rkard’s aid, he could even hear the shouts of rioting slaves as they destroyed what they had so reluctantly created, and the dying screams of the indolent masters for whom it had been built.
That much he had expected, but what sickened the mul was the sight in the main boulevard. Near the slave gate, the bodies were heaped in piles taller than a half-giant. As Rikus’s gaze followed the street toward the king’s gate, the corpse piles gradually grew smaller. A few yards shy of Hamanu’s slave pens, Rikus could even see the bloodstained cobblestones through the tangle of dead flesh. Already the kes’trekels had descended on the feast and were ripping at the bodies with their hooked beaks and three-fingered hands.
When Rikus looked toward the templar quarter, he saw the reason the Urikites were not putting more effort into stopping the outflow of slaves from the noble quarter. Gathered along the top of the city wall, a half-mile or more from where the mul stood, were several thousand quarry slaves. From what Rikus could see at that great distance, they were attempting to flee the city by sliding down ropes, climbing the rough mudbrick surface, or even jumping.
Pressing them from both sides were large companies of Urikite regulars. Hamanu himself wandered behind the wall, plucking slaves off and passing them down to guardsmen waiting below.
Rikus looked back to the carnage on the slave boulevard. “I did this,” he said. “I promised them they would die free, and all they did was die.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Er’Stali said, stepping to the mul’s side and trying to guide him to the far side of the wall. Neeva and Caelum had already descended without Rikus noticing. “Perhaps it’s not so unreasonable to have believed you could destroy Hamanu. After all, I am told you destroyed Kalak.”
“No,” Rikus said. “I was one of a handful who destroyed Kalak. All I did was throw the first spear. Without Agis, Sadira, and Neeva, I would have failed at that too.”
“One cannot accomplish great things without risking great failure,” the old man said.
“This wasn’t even a great failure,” Rikus answered. He pointed toward the sorcerer-king, who was still plucking slaves off the wall on the other side of the slave gate, “Hamanu must know that I escaped, but he’s more concerned about losing quarry slaves than he is about recapturing me.”
“We can thank the moons for small favors, can we not?” Er’Stali said. Again, he tried to guide Rikus toward the far side of the wall.
As the mul started to turn away, a great uproar of panicked cries and pained shouts erupted from the crowds inside the city wall. Rikus ran over to the magical rope Er’Stali had raised earlier. There he saw that more than a dozen companies of Imperial Guards were pouring out of the smoke-filled streets of the noble quarter. While the mul looked helplessly on, the half-giants rushed toward the escape ropes, using their lances like clubs to knock slaves out of their paths.
Below Rikus, a gaunt, gray-haired man wearing the hemp robe of a domestic slave clutched the rope. He began to climb, casting frantic glances over his shoulder as the half-giants drew closer. The mul grabbed the line from the top and tried to pull the old man up, but he was of little help. With his left arm still weakened by the wound in his chest, he could not grip the rope with both hands.
The first guardsman reached the wall when the man was about halfway up. “Come down, boy,” the guard ordered, brandishing his lance.
The old man stopped climbing and looked up at Rikus, his red-rimmed eyes silently pleading for help. The mul tried again to pull the rope, but he barely succeeded in raising it a foot.
The half-giant touched the tip of his lance to the slave’s back. “Come down or die,” the guard growled.
The old man stared at the brute for a moment, then repeated a saying that Rikus had often heard in his days in the Lubar pits: “My death will free me.”
With that, the slave looked toward the sky and started climbing, though he knew he would never reach the top of the wall.
“Thus the book begins:
“Born of liquid fire and seasoned in bleak darkness, we dwarves are the sturdy people, the people of the rock. It is into our bones that the mountains sink their roots, it is from our hearts that the clear waters pour, it is out of our mouths that the cool winds blow. We were made to buttress the world, to support-”
Er’Stali pinched his eyes closed, trying to remember what word came next.
Along with Caelum, Neeva, and all the dwarves of Kled, Rikus held his breath, not daring to exhale for fear of disturbing the sorcerer’s concentration.
For the first time in a thousand years, dwarves had gathered in the Tower of Buryn to hear the history of their race. One hundred magical torches, each kindled by Er’Stali and set into its sconce by Lyanius himself, lit the great hall’s ancient murals in all their vibrant glory. On every pillar hung a gleaming axe or sword, especially polished and shined to remind the audience of the incredible wealth of its heritage. Even the dwarves themselves were adorned for the occasion, wearing beautiful cassocks of linen, dyed red in honor of the crimson sun. It was a gathering of which Rikus felt sure the old kings would approve.
At last Er’Stali opened his eyes and shook his head. “I am sorry, I cannot remember the story from there. Perhaps I will do better with the story of how King Rkard drove Borys of Ebe from the gates of Kemalok.
An approving murmur rustled through the hall. Lyanius lifted his hand for quiet, and the room once again fell as silent as it had been for the last thousand years.
“It was in the fifty-second year of Rkard’s reign that Borys returned. Of our knights, only the king and Sa’ram and Jo’orsh remained, with five hundred dwarves each. Borys of Ebe brought with him a host of ten thousand, with mighty siege engines and his own foul magic.