Dread Warrior by M Turville Heitz

Author:M Turville Heitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy, epic fantasy, sword and sorcery, warfare, political conflict
ISBN: 9798991885317
Publisher: M Turville Heitz
Published: 2025-02-11T06:00:00+00:00

23: Jali

The groan woke him. His own, Jali Janson realized. He tried to roll, to move his face from the yielding thing that made him retch so that he choked. His hands remained bound behind him by the frayed rope that had hauled him over rock and bramble to this place, ripping the skin and clothing from his body, bruising and battering him, so that his tormentors left him for dead. Too old, too independent, too much a troublemaker. That streak came from his fa, Jan, a famous Gnat officer. A pang of memory for Sihma Harbor struck him. He was so far from home! But not alone.

He tried to rouse the girl still bound at his back by a cord at his waist, near torn through.

“Libria!” he whispered into the dark night. Only the soft sounds of death answered.

He began to tremble, his skin cold, his face hot, wishing he could go back to the long sleep that had kept him ignorant. He tried to squirm from beneath her slight weight. Her head lolled back and forth across his back. He knew where he lay: a pit dug beside a dry stream, the refuse pile of his camp. His captors had dragged other young people from Sihma Harbor here and tossed them aside with the bones of meals and mine tailings. They dumped others as well, youths from strange places he only heard of through covert stories told late at night when the guards thought them sleeping.

Troublemakers like Jali Janson became heroes at night when pupils like Libria Keeper roused themselves to anger at the whispered tales told of a freer time. This camp taught no great wisdom as Libria’s father Aron had promised the parents of Sihmad Shal’s children. Minarian labor camps taught only death and hatred and broke spirits of youths kept far from places where people might learn of their plight in terrain too inhospitable to support escape. If they cooperated, learned to yield, they might hope to work their way up to some less onerous labor. If they survived. And now dispatches would be sent to Aron Keeper and perhaps even Cookie, relating how their children died consumed by a rampant fever, or some lung ailment, or buried in an avalanche, or in a fall from a precipice.

Libria Keeper died because Jali convinced her to resist learning the new way. Jali died a troublemaker. They made a convincing demonstration when dragged behind a horse along the rocky trail into camp so that all would see the bloody punishment for those who made trouble, who resisted. Yet, he lived.

He tried to rouse Libria again though she felt cold against him. The stench of the pit dulled his senses, made him groggy. Again, he choked and retched, at last squirming upward, the loop of rope that held Libria to him biting into his chest. He crawled, hands still bound behind him, for the clean air he knew awaited above, his skin screaming its torment as knees gripped the stone.

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