Erich's Plea: Book One of the Witchcraft Wars Read online

winter.

  The wheel made a continual low-pitched whine and emitted occasional flashes of extremely bright light. Slade’s curiosity about the wheel gnawed at him but he forced himself to concentrate instead on the prisoners and guards, searching for any possible weakness he could use to escape. There were only ten guards watching the thirty prisoners tied to the wheel, a number he found encouraging.

  Slade fought the mind numbing monotony of the wheel and concentrated on watching the guards and his fellow prisoners. His observations had to be made surreptitiously. Any obvious move to look around was halted by a quick lash from the nearest guard’s whip, something he learned when he felt the sting across his shoulders and the guard shouted at him to ‘keep his eyes down’.

  Not wishing to incur the wrath of the guards or the feel the sting of the lash again Slade focused for the moment on the man directly in front of him on the wheel. He was as tall as Slade with the blue-black hair and pale skin of an Ixlan native. His wide, heavily muscled shoulders and arms indicated that the human was probably a warrior.

  The prisoner walked shirtless, his bare back showing a pattern of lash marks, all of them likely to have been gained here in Diablis. Yet there was something about the strangers walk that seemed vaguely familiar to Slade. Puzzling over this Slade eventually decided he had recognized the type and not the man.

  His fellow prisoners were predominantly human with the occasional elf or dwarf. Not surprisingly there were no orcs, half-orcs, hobgoblins, ogres or goblins. These were the races that made up the bulk of The Dark One’s army, along with a scattering of humans, and their penalty, regardless of the crime, was always death.

  Gossip that filtered through The Kingdoms claimed this was because only the so-called inferior races, or more specifically humans, elves and dwarves, were fit to be made prisoners. How The Dark One reconciled his classification of humans as ‘inferior’ given that he himself was said to be human had never been fully explained. The ‘true’ warriors, a blatant appeal to the vanity of the orc and goblin races, once thought of as little more than animals by many, it was said could never be imprisoned or enslaved and so had to be killed.

  Wiser voices said the reason The Dark One killed those in his army for all infractions was solely to promote terror among the rest. Obedience tended to be more automatic if death was the punishment for every crime and there was no shortage of goblins, orcs, half-orcs, hobgoblins and ogres in the north. Slade believed that was the true reason behind the policy. Combined with the fact that if The Dark One began executing humans, dwarves and elves on a wide scale some of their native kingdoms might join together to retake Ixlan.

  Slade carefully turned his attention from his fellow prisoners to the guards. At first it appeared the guards maintained a strict watch on the men at the wheel but gradually Slade began to realize this was not the case. For the most part the guards walked around, not to keep an eye on their charges, but to talk with each other. Whether this was normal behavior on their part Slade had no way of knowing.

  The whine of the central core made it difficult to overhear what they were saying but from the small fragments of conversation he was able to catch, it seemed to Slade that all the guards were excited about some upcoming festival. With each slow revolution of the wheel Slade heard the guards talking about the food, the drink and the planned entertainment.

  Surprisingly it appeared from their talk that most of the guards in the prison complex had been given time off to attend the festival, called The Sun Ascension, which would leave the prison guarded by only a skeleton crew. Somewhere in the back of his mind Slade knew the Sun Ascension festival was familiar, although in his exhaustion he could not remember why.

  All that day Slade and the others walked. The heat, despite the winter weather, became unbearable. Sweat poured off their bodies, and still they walked. Only twice was the wheel halted, the prisoners were given a cupful of tepid water, some bread and cheese, and then the walk was resumed.

  Salty sweat dripped into Slade’s swollen, puffy eyes making them sting and dribbled down his arms causing the leather thongs tying him to the iron bar to tighten painfully, cutting into his wrists and still they walked. If anyone fell, and some did, the others kept walking, dragging the unfortunate soul along regardless until they were able to stumble to their feet. Some of them never did regain their feet, until Slade realized with horror they were dragging along a dead man. In its own way the wheel was every bit as effective a torture as those practiced in the dungeons below.

  Eventually the sun began to set and the wheel ground to a halt before each man was freed and led downstairs. Slade took note that the guards transported one prisoner at a time, with two guards to each prisoner. No more than two pairs of guards would leave at the same time, which meant that there were always at least six guards watching the still tied prisoners.

  Even if an escape attempt during this period had been possible he doubted he had the required energy or physical strength to even try. Utterly exhausted Slade was unable to do more than stand slumped over the bar and wait to be led back to his cell.

  That night he dreamed again, not his usual dreams of Ming and the past, but the strange dream of his father. This time Slade recognized the dream; the same initiation ceremony ending so abruptly with an echo of his father’s voice with its enigmatic command to ‘follow the trunk.’ For the next three days Slade endured the monotonous horror of the wheel during the day while the dream came every night.

  His conviction of the dreams truth grew and along with it a desperate need to escape. Each day the guards continued to talk about the coming festival and the small snatches of overheard conversation gave Slade the tiniest seed of a plan. If the festival was as important as the talk of the guards made it appear then there was a chance the guards on duty that day might be distracted and, of course, there would be far less of them with so many attending the Festival.

  That distraction, coupled with a tiny sliver of bone that Slade had retained from an evening meal and sharpened to a knife-like edge, might be enough to allow him to escape. At worst, he would die and after all he had been through dying no longer seemed the worst possible scenario.

  Follow the Trunk

  The morning of the festival was Slade’s fourth day on the wheel, and he was prepared. The sliver of bone was hidden between the index and middle fingers of his left hand. His heart was pounding horribly in his chest all the way to the main floor.

  With each step he took Slade’s fear, his terror, grew. Fear that in his currently weakened condition he would not have the strength required to overcome even one of the burly prison guards, let alone what would likely be many. Fear that the guards would discover the sliver of bone and then all his plans would come to nothing. As it turned out all his fears, and his plans, were in vain.

  Arriving at the wheel room Slade was pleased to note there were, as he had hoped, fewer guards than usual. In fact there were only six guards, including his two escorts. What he had not expected or planned for, however, was the distraction being provided by a new prisoner.

  The prisoner was well over seven feet tall, heavily muscled and appeared to be a nightmarish blend of troll and ogre. Slade stopped cold in shock; this was the creature that he had seen in his dream, the thing that Karel had become. Exactly as it had appeared in his dream the huge creature had the general appearance, height and musculature of the northern ogres with the green skin and elongated arms and legs of the woodland trolls.

  “Trunk not go on wheel! Trunk go home!” The creature said roughly. As he spoke, Trunk flexed his huge, elongated and extremely powerful arms and threw off both his guards with the ease of a child tossing away a small doll. Despite the creature’s thick, guttural accent he was still easily understood. Slade was certain this was the Trunk of his dreams. All Slade had to do now was ‘follow the Trunk’ as his father had instructed.

  The two guards who had escorted Slade ran, along with the other remain
ing guards, to the aid of their fallen fellows. One of the fallen guards, Slade could see, would never rise again; his neck twisted so that it appeared he gazed eternally over his shoulder. Without stopping to think Slade used the ensuing confusion and the sudden surge of energy from adrenalin to run to the wheel.

  Using the sharpened bone sliver he cut the leather thongs of the first prisoner he came to and received yet another shock. He knew this black-haired man; it was Wulfstan, who had grown up with Slade in the Palace of Anglia, and was now a member of his royal father’s elite bodyguards. For what seemed like minutes, but in reality was only seconds, the two men simply stared at each other in shock.

  “Take this,” Slade said handing Wulfstan the bone sliver, “Free as many men as you can, somehow we’re getting out of here.”

  He then darted across to the fallen guard and grabbed the long whip. Straightening up painfully, his broken ribs had still not fully healed; Slade saw one of the guards approaching him warily.

  Slade flicked the length of the whip out, demonstrating that he knew how to use the deadly weapon. Never taking his eyes off the guard Slade waited and prayed for his moment, the moment when his opponent’s attention would waiver for