I Am Owed This

[Nwilmen]

Somewhere in Waterdeep...

”Bets! Place yer bets here! Last chance, you drunk’n louts!”

The shouts of a bookmaker pierced the din of three score carousing men crowded together in a subterranean room. Pipe smoke choked the air above their heads, mingling with the rank odors of ale, bodies, and blood. In the center of the room there was a sunken pit a yard deep where two burly men beat on each other with bare knuckles. Whenever one staggered back against the wall from a particularly sound blow, the spectators above urged him back toward the center with yells and kicking feet.

”Up, up! Ye miserable dog!”

”My mawmaw hits harder ’n that!”

”Waste’ve coin.”

”Bite him! Bite him!”

Along the far wall a group of distinguished-looking men spoke with one another in sibilant tones, somehow able to communicate despite the raucous betting. None were dressed opulently, but the crisp tunics, bejeweled fingers, and silent, towering footmen hovering over the shoulder of each bespoke of nobility and privilege. While a few watched the pit with eloquently bored eyes, the rest merely waited for the main event.

Weaving between the drunken throng, a plainly dressed figure sought a better vantage point. Feminine visage shadowed by the angles of a weather-beaten tricorn, the woman sipped a drink and scanned the crowd. Had this been a different day on a different mission, she might have fit in with the wealthy cadre, showing them up with flashy clothing and flashier boasts just for the fun of it, with a crew of hardened sailors at her heels. But tonight she was alone, armed with nothing but her wits, a dagger, and a hidden cache of golden trade coins sewn into the lining of her corset.

The tip given by one of her informants in Avanthyr had been a bad one, or so it was shaping up to be. Talk of an unremarkable sloop with a plainly-named captain that never seemed to take cargo in or out fairly screamed ”Cartel” to Evelyn’s over eager mind, and she set off in pursuit of the ship’s next port-of-call in Waterdeep. Bribes and information gathered from a few friends in port afforded her access to a local black market event, one night only, and so here she found herself, underneath the root cellar of a dockside watering hole, already given up on the prospect of locating her target.

It was a flimsy excuse, she knew, but she’d jumped at the chance to shirk her fine clothing, buy passage on a trade vessel dressed as a vagabond, and throw herself again into a world where her name meant nothing and the ability to survive meant everything. Time spent on Sundren’s shores had left her restless, and her simultaneous betrothal and kidnapping at the hands of the insane Aurelianus instilled her with a sense of helplessness. Here she was in complete control of her fate, for better or worse.

”Gentl’men, we have a winner! Claim yer winnin’s here!”

Though it was difficult to see through the thick veil of smoke, Evelyn could make out the prone figure of one combatant being dragged out of the pit by his boots into a darkened tunnel leading out of the pit into another portion of the cellar. The crowd surged as people crowded around the bookie to trade coins before most wandered back upstairs to the tavern above, either to spend their winnings or drown their sorrows. A few takers, seemingly better-off than the rest, stuck around, but suddenly Evelyn found herself among no more than a dozen noblemen and their bodyguards.

Some stared at her.

She stared back.

Not one to be intimidated into admitting she was out of place, Evelyn straightened her posture to summon all the haughtiness she could muster, coolly sipping her rum and hoping it made up for her decent but inexpensive tunic and breeches. She watched a tavern worker douse the pit floor with a bucket of water to clear away most of the blood. Gradually the others lost interest in her, and she in them.

Before long, a fellow in a brightly colored doublet emerged from the pit doorway, a parchment in hand. His white hair was slicked back above a plump face and rosy complexion.

”Fine sirs, gather, gather! We are ready to begin. As usual, it's one hundred to increase, and twenty five when I no longer have that. Are there any questions?”

There was a tense moment of silence when several more of the bidders glanced her way, but she feigned nonchalance as the auctioneer waited.

”Excellent.”

Without warning, a large half-Orc entered the pit leading a row of chained people. Mostly human males, there were also a few elves and one woman, totaling fifteen in all. They were manacled separately but shuffled along in linked foot shackles. They came to stop in a semi-circle, taking up one half of the pit wall while the bidders looked on speculatively.

”Number one. Calishite male.”

The half-Orc growled softly as he unlocked the first shackle encircling the right ankle of a middle-aged man with coffee-colored skin. He was hauled toward the center of the pit, head bowed. The slave master cuffed him under the chin.

”Stand up straight!”

The slave complied, not looking at any person present. His skin was sallow but his shoulders were broad.

”Shall I open the bid at one hundred? One hundred. Do I hear one hundred? Found just last week, a fisherman. Good for labor! One hundred to the man with the good brooch. Two hundred? Where is two hundred? Where is two hundred? Two to the black hat! Three, do I have three? Three? Where is three? Two twenty-five? Do I have two twenty-five? Two twenty-five back to the gold brooch. Do I have two fifty? Do I have two fifty? Going once, two twenty-five. Going twice. Sold to the good brooch!”

[blurry89]

Hope was the bigger danger; back then, morale was the battle, more so even than the barbarians or assassins and wizards. So long as there was still hope, a person could still keep moving, keep fighting, keep breathing. The real world was full of magical gas that killed them screaming and disease that crusted over the tongue and eyes. Blood and pus spurting from limbs blown off. Corpses of men and women they stacked waist high for cover. They'd crawled face first, elbows and knees through six inches of shit and mud, eaten the maggots off the dead and called it rice because to stop was to give up, and to give up was to die.

Thirst and bugs and dust and stench and rain and tears and hunger and blood. This is war. Lots of men with hard or empty eyes who didn’t talk or brag much. He wasn’t like any of them, though. Every night he slept with his boots on. And when he woke up in the morning, he sang and joked and desperately didn’t think. It's easy not to think when adrenaline's coursing through your body and it moves on its own. He finally understood why they did everything six thousand times in basic training—so you didn't have to tell your body what to do because it would just remember, like walking through your pitch-black house at night and never bumping into a corner of a table or a wall. He had a house, once.

He laughed and roared and shouted at the enemy, calling them foul names Mama would have washed out of his mouth with soap had he said such things at home. This was his way of staying alive: life is like a game, the greatest, most elaborate you can imagine, and it's to be played with abandoned joy.

He stumbled over roots and old concrete blocks and poised on the edge of a hill when the world exploded into sound and flying dirt. He felt a crushing blow against his chest and another against his head and then …

When the arrow found its mark, he didn’t even feel it. Julian just lifted his face to the sun.

--

The arena changes him. There are some days, of course, where things are still the same (or as near to the same as can be), days where he and the other gladiators – some like him, soldiers on the losing side of the battlefield, others not like him; civilians on the losing side of a war - only talk is of the kill, of battle and tactics and lives lost and their equipment, which is consistently substandard. This is the arena, after all, and they're only slaves. They sleep in the dirt with the other animals.

”Number one. Calishite male.”

Then there are the unfamiliar times, when they speak of the past, and not of the present, re-embroidering past encounters until memory's thread wears thin, until some stories, told too many times in their hunt for significance, lose meaning altogether. The lashes on his back never do.

”Stand up straight!”

This is the tragedy of the arena - its timelessness. The duels are different, but it’s the same thing: he puts on his courage and adjusts his helmet and idly raps his fingers on the blades of his twin shortswords like it’s nothing but normal, because it is. His hands don’t even shake anymore. His palms don’t sweat every time he grasps the hilts. They used to. He misses it sometimes.

“Shall I open the bid at one hundred? One hundred. Do I hear one hundred? Found just last week, a fisherman. Good for labor! One hundred to the man with the good brooch. Two hundred? Where is two hundred? Where is two hundred? Two to the black hat! Three, do I have three? Three? Where is three? Two twenty-five? Do I have two twenty-five?”

They never talk of the future. The future is a death to the applause of an audience who they grew to love.

“Two twenty-five back to the gold brooch. Do I have two fifty? Do I have two fifty? Going once, two twenty-five. Going twice. Sold to the good brooch!”

Julian looked down the chain towards Aerimus – a fisherman. He desperately wanted to feel some sort of … connection with the slave, who now followed his new master. Some sort of pity. Remorse. But when he watched the man slink off, his shoulders hunched, his eyes downcast … only a loathing disgust. In his mind he saw them outside the arena, as free men who weren’t forced to kill and die for the enjoyment of others. When Aerimus rounded the corner and disappeared from sight the raven haired man gave it up. And when the bidding started on the elf down the chain, Julian decided that it didn't matter at all.

His gray-gray eyes drifted back towards the crowd who would buy them. Men who lived in lavish estates and counted the lives of their most prized stallion over theirs. Oaken fingers fitted with ivory bracelets and emerald rings, more worth than who they were, and those same fingers that condemned them to death.

Two hundred and twenty five in gold coin, in fact.

The hatred blazed brightly, then vanished. From somewhere inside came then a shock of all-consuming rage, the nova-like intensity of which startled even him. But then the rage was gone, too. It seemed to drop away like a torch tossed flickering and shrinking into a bottomless well. What replaced the loathing and fury was something very different, something cold and distant and . . . only impersonally attentive.

Blood for blood. The resolution in his mind was just.

Kill them. Kill them all.

[Nwilmen]

Evelyn watched as the portly bidder in the gold brooch stepped forward to pay for his purchase, the footman at his side bearing his employer’s new slave toward the pit exit with rough hands.

Pity for the slave flickered briefly through her chest, but she tried to dash it with cool detachment from the scene playing out before her. The auctioneer had already begun bidding on the next slave - an elf - after neatly checking off his first sale of the evening. She was struck by the efficiency of it all, this peddling of lives as wares, but a bleeding heart would not help these people now.

Choices had led them here, she reasoned dispassionately, and while it wasn't exactly blame to be laid, it was certainly ill luck. Whether in dice or in life, not every number is a winner. Make a mistake and you could always choose to correct it later - but what hope was there for these who now had all other options forcibly taken away from them?

”A very discerning eye, sir!”

The next two slaves, the woman and another elf, had both been bought by the same man, goateed with a snub nose. He, too, left with his bodyguard guiding his new purchases through the exit. The woman stumbled on her way through the passage before being hauled up violently by a wrenching fist.

Evelyn felt her jaw muscles tighten.

Feeling eyes on her, she calmly allowed her gaze to drift back toward the remaining stock, realizing she would have to bid at least once to keep up appearances. It would have to be a desirable choice so she could bid early, then let someone else win the purchase. But who to choose? It was then she realized one of the slaves was actually looking back at them, and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up.

His eyes were burning. Unlike the inert bodies on either side of him, this man was a pillar of fury and muscle, hands clenched around the few links of chain that bound his manacles. Heaving measured breaths through his nostrils, he radiated the promise of blood and broken bone once freed. His gaze passed her way, and a hurricane of loathing and wrath recalled the sensation of quavering timbers as the hull of a vessel resisted being torn apart by raging seas. It was frightening, and it was thrilling.

Then without warning, she watched the rage disappear, cool indifference taking its place. The tempest dissipated and she could not help but stare at the unexpected transformation, feeling her stomach drop the way it did when a ship has just ascended the crest of a mighty wave - right before plunging over the edge. The air around him seemed to still, but she recognized the calm for what it really was. It was the eye of the storm.

”See something you like, miss? And only at two hundred so far! Do I hear three?”

The auctioneer was speaking to her and she realized she’d been caught staring. Time to play the game.

”Three hundred,” she said with false confidence.

”The bid is at three hundred! Do I hear four? Ah, yes, back to the gentleman with the cane.”

Evelyn glanced to her right at a severe-looking man dressed in black and gold, left hand resting imperiously upon the cold silver handle of an ebony cane. He was tall and thin with a hawkish nose, curled gray hair, and spared her a baleful glance with cold blue eyes. The urge to punch him in his thin-lipped mouth was sudden and surprising.

”Four.” She let the number roll easily off her tongue, staring at the thin man as she did.

”It seems the lady is interested after all!” the auctioneer gushed. ”Five, sir?”

The nobleman prodded the ground with his cane once.

”And five back to the gentleman. Do I hear six?”

”Six.”

”It’s the lady's bid again!”

Another quiet thump of the cane.

”We have a bid of seven hundred!" the auctioneer gushed with barely disguised avarice. "Do I hear-”

”One thousand.”

The auctioneer's grin faltered a moment as the thin man glared, livid, at the woman in the tricorn hat.

”One thousand,” Evelyn repeated, not breaking the stare.

”Yes, ah, one thousand coins. Do I have a raise?”

The sibilance of whispering disturbed the air, but the thump of a cane did not. Finally the severe man abandoned his furious regard and glanced with utmost disinterest toward the slave, shaking his head in the smallest of movements.

”Sold to the lady! Congratulations, madam!”

Rooted to the spot, she let her eyes fall to the slave again - a slave she’d just purchased. The full gravity of the situation hit her with the force of a gale wind. With no towering footman to escort him, she was about to walk out of here alone with a volatile man easily twice her weight. No way anyone here was buying that. She’d get a knife in the back before they made it out of the building, if the slave didn't snap her neck first. Not the best decision she had ever made.

But not the worst, either.

”You’ve chosen the most promising of the lot. You certainly have superior taste in this kind of stock.”

It was the noble who had just lost the bid. His head and shoulders bent gracefully over the grip of his cane as he offered her his hand. Lifting her chin, she took it without hesitation and shook - but then his fingers convulsed tightly around hers. A tiny needle of white hot pain blossomed in her palm, and her arm flinched.

”Please accept my congratulations.” Holding her gaze with coldly satisfied eyes, he brought her hand to smirking lips and placed a kiss on the back, right over the spot where one of his golden rings dug into her flesh. Then he released her, and she took a step away with teeth clenched.

Evelyn registered the auctioneer’s plying words as she fished ten heavy gold coins from her tunic with automatic movements. If he noticed a tiny smear of blood on them, he did not say. Her head already felt heavy as she gazed up at the slave, who met her with detached scrutiny, and her suddenly dry mouth felt stuffed with rags as she spoke.

”Let’s go.”

With the blurry concentration usually reserved for nights of heavy drinking, she placed a steady hand on the chains linking the slave’s manacles and led him out of the pit with her chin held high.

...

Walking through the narrow tunnel felt like pushing her body through a chest-high river. A barred door was ajar at the end, dull moonlight filtering through. It was both her only escape and the guarantee of an ambush. Anticipation sent a rush of adrenaline through her veins, and suddenly the toxin was overwhelming. She staggered and braced her other hand against the wall of the corridor.

”You need to listen to me closely,” she began, grip on the man’s chains tightening.

”The docks are on the other side of this building. There’s a ship anchored at the second-to-last pier, The Dauntless.”

She pushed the door open slowly. The street was relatively empty save for a handful of destitute sailors sleeping under piles of trash, and a prostitute and her john necking in the mouth of an alleyway. None of them would offer witness to the violence about to occur.

”Give the captain my name and it will take you far from here. I can't fight them off, so you’ll have to run.”

Sweat broke out on her forehead as she turned to face the slave with a lock pick already in hand. She reached for one of the manacles with shaking fingers, hoping he wouldn't knock her lights out before hearing the name that promised his escape.

[blurry89]

”Let’s go.”

He was one acquainted with death. As sure as fire born of starlight gave vision, death was marked on and around him like a blazing omen in the sky. He'd seen angels aflame come to torch and purify, and at some point he had offended the Gods in a night sky between here and now, with only the heat of his anger and the passage of a killer in the arena left over from the exchange.

”You need to listen to me closely,”

What she was, he didn't fully have words for; a woman. A woman had bought him. A woman with no entourage. The first gleamed sight of her she'd appeared to him looking and smelling like something divine, seemingly just to torture him with some wretched lick of hope and a mouthful of frustration, ifs and maybes wrapped up in a corset and topped off with a buccaneer’s cover. She was Valkur’s daughter, meant for someone and something higher, the work of an artist. Regal air outlining athletic curves and softer curls, shining in her emerald eyes, until the breath of some sweet wind stirred the embers of her soul and she'd stepped into the shithouse of a gladiatorial arena and bought him, for one thousand gold coin.

“The docks are on the other side of this building. There’s a ship anchored at the second-to-last pier, The Dauntless.”

Julian was going to kill her. Stray motes of lantern light refracted off the sweat on her brow. She stumbled. She wasn’t herself; that much was obvious. All the better. Now what he needed was the right weapon. His hands clenched and unclenched, and he pulled taut the chain link that bonded them. This would do.

”Give the captain my name and it will take you far from here. I can't fight them off, so you’ll have to run.”

Julian’s thoughts of vengeance and justice fell stories between them to throw a metallic tantrum at her hopelessly ruined sea boots. He watched the manacles. A huff or a weak sneeze from her.

He looked up and felt the cool air on his bare wrists and smelled lavender.

“Behind you,” said Julian.

[Nwilmen]

No sooner had she lifted her head to anticipate the man’s next move than he spoke the warning, and she turned to look at the doorway they'd just exited. Belatedly she felt the extreme foolishness of turning her back to the newly freed slave, but the sight of three hundred pounds of noble bodyguard kicked her brain into a series of rapid calculations.

He was human, well over six feet and carried no visible weapons. His cold snarl upon spotting them and the tightening of his hands into fists told her those were his primary tools of violence. Her eye perceived the subtle shifting of his weight so that his feet pointed directly at her. If she was his first target, then he certainly hadn't seen the manacles in the dirt. A knife appeared in Evelyn’s hand.

The exchange that would follow played itself out in her mind with deadly clarity: Meet his charge with an obvious overhand strike. Move is easily deflected by subject’s left forearm. Relax muscles, let motion roll knife-wielding arm under subject’s and back up, striking down into the brachial artery before subject’s bicep contracts. Left side disabled. Anticipate right handed swing at the head. Duck, turn, a punch to the right kidney. Elbow to the axillary artery, and while in recovery, cut right hamstring. Leave subject to bleed out and run.

The roll and strike to the thug’s bicep succeeded. The rest, however, did not.

The worst part was that she did, in fact, anticipate the meaty fist aimed at her temple, watching it sail towards her head with frightening clarity. But no matter how she willed her feet to move and her spine to bend, it could not happen fast enough.

She saw the brilliance of stars explode across her vision, and then not a thing more.

[blurry89]

Julian watched the thug watch the woman go down like a falling comet, watched the thug’s ugly face fill with a voltage that infiltrated his eyes. The thug faced him; Julian last seen this look in the arena before a coup de grace had been executed.

Weren’t you going to kill her?

That derailing intention and spittle that had replaced pinpoint aggression in the lantern light burned across the thug’s face as he focused once more on the daughter of Valkur…by the goon’s own crisp, grunted admission, the intent to finish off the prone woman. Julian watched the man bend to lift the woman’s head off the ground by the hair with one hand, while the other meaty fist followed the suddenly accurate ordinance behind his beady eyes and mailed into her sickled frown and its bleeding edge. A sickening symphony of crunching bone and slapping flesh. When the man’s muscle cocked back a third time with fatalistic intent, so did Julian.

The swinging arc of his manacle caught the hired muscle just under the chin.

Weren’t you going to kill her?

The would-be murderer stumbled crookedly off the woman, found balance against the nearby wall. Julian thought that was okay, though, because it only provided a better angle for the chains he snapped around the thug’s windpipe. His victim argued the point, a low guttural choking sound that fell on deaf ears - he tried a different approach with more visceral results and whipped the back of his head into Julian’s mouth. The former gladiator tasted iron and spewed blood. He emulated the gleaming pearl snarl tugging on his busted lip, and wrenched the chain harder, determined to pass basic seamanship through the thug’s neck. His cheeks bloomed a rare exquisite rose as Julian rode him down into forced oblivion.

A wet snick cut through the assailant’s spastic gurgles. Replaced them with a bubbling squelch. And finally, nothing. Julian came up swaying like switchgrass in a stiff breeze. Then he spat a wad of strawberry phlegm, swiped at a marbled cheek with the back of his hand, and staggered to the woman.

He caught the bruises on her face in one last flare of lantern light: the trench of congealed blood carved above her right eyebrow; the burst capillaries in her left eye, their red feelers licking the edge of her green-green iris; the rosy abrasions jailed behind her exhausted bangs; the pale lavender blush that had conquered her right cheek and was annexing the bridge of her nose.

It was as close to awful as someone could look and still pull off…no, she looked awful.

Weren’t you going to kill her?

He heard the patter of feet behind him; Julian lifted the woman’s limp body into his arms and took off down the way she had directed. He told himself it was because he didn’t know her name and then he left the lie for what it was behind; with the blood and the feet and the dust.

[Nwilmen]

Hope is the bigger danger, more so than it is a strength; a chink in the armor of austerity her kind used to defend their names and livelihood. True, it could be used by the more idealistic to cast off the blinders of fear, inspiring them to heroic deeds and impossible feats. But she had stopped wearing her dreams on her sleeve long ago. She learned that to have hope is to carry a vessel that could be lost or stolen or worse, spilled blood-red on the ground.

”Ahoy! Who goes there?”

And that hope is not immutable and could become despair as day becomes night and life becomes death.

”Julian.”

There was a time when she had entertained hopes of carrying on her forebears’ legacy, surpassing it. As the first scion of her family, she had much to gain and much, much more to lose. The battle wasn’t fought with steel but with words, money, and machinations, aiming not to snuff out a beating heart but to fracture the bedrock of the ego until a fatal error was committed. Loss of respect, rather than blood, would be the death of the establishment and the many livelihoods that depended upon it. She was not willing to risk it all by allowing emotion to overwhelm reason, to expose hope to the seeking blades of the enemy.

”Who the hell're... Swive me, it’s Meriadoc. Tom! Get the physician up, lively now! Bring her here, mate. What happened?”

Experience taught her that unpredictability was the surest way to avoid a blow. Keep the cards to your chest and an ace up your sleeve, and then throw the deck out the window. Cast the dice off the table. Move the rook diagonally. By taking the rules out of the game, acting on impulse, it left only her wits and her opponent’s to quickly reorder the ensuing chaos and control the outcome.

”She has been poisoned.”

Failure to control the outcome was rarely a consideration. There was only room for absolute confidence lest she lose the esteem of her crew, but there was always a stalwart ally waiting at the point of her fall. She liked to chalk it up to preparedness, cunning, and Valkur’s favor, never allowing herself to envision an end result that did not include one of the lucky three.

”Quick, then, sick bay’s through here. No time to waste.”

She could only cast her line, one final gambit, into the darkness before it swallowed her whole.

To be continued?

[and break 12345]

Julian Esler's experiences had taught him -with relentless, excruciating regularity- that people inevitably change when presented with a situation that forces them to question what they are. For a very long time, Julian was certain that change always did far more harm than good. He still wasn't quite sure.

What he was sure of, was this - he was a retainer to Evelyn Meriadoc of the same noble house. He was being paid well. He was being given a fresh start to a 'new' life. He was given new armor and a very fancy cloak. And he was finding the theatrics of noble etiquette a complete waste of his time and effort. As put by a ... fellow advisor ... he had the mannerisms of a Bloodmaim Orc.

Even still, Julian had managed to take a firm grasp of the trade and common tongue since Evelyn had purchased him and offered a life outside a Calimport gladiatorial arena. No longer was he speaking in broken and awkward words. No longer did Sundren City sit on the ground. No longer did he want to end her life.

Well, most of the time.

“It's war, then?" He asked.

Julian had been following Evelyn Meriadoc for some time now and could still taste the salty air on his tongue. He wondered how the smell had followed him down the path until he read his water slick gauntlets and then stopped reading his water slick gauntlets.

It never stopped raining.

As populated as Port Avanthyr was, as far as its distant mazes of cobble stone streets pinched into the odd building of one merchant or another, the recent war still managed to remind everyone of the fact that the Port was still recovering from the wake of devastation; it was the constant hum of beggars and orphans, looking, listening, crying amongst themselves in the streets and the slums. It was the congregation of Meriadoc House Guards, Blackwood Mercenaries and Helmite paladins and soldiers. All but the first annoyed him.

He certainly wouldn't forget by following the noble, to whom ‘Follow me – I'll answer your question’ meant walking very fast and not answering his question.

Evelyn did occasionally dole out anecdotes or philosophy as believed by her; truisms she undoubtedly spent time contemplating herself before allowing others to reflect on and tarnish them with their lazy, flawed minds. So maybe she didn't know what to explain. Maybe nothing was worth explaining.

Then she turned and said – “Did I ever tell you anything to make you believe otherwise?”

Julian read his water slick gauntlets and then stopped reading his water slicked gauntlets.

War, then.