[Durelin]

Adnan

“No! What do you think you can do out there, except finish getting yourself killed? Sit down and let me fix you up. Please!”

Finish… The word bounced through Adnan’s head roughly, and in his dizziness he could do nothing but obey Athwen’s command. His vision moving in and out of focus, he looked down at his wounded hand for the first time. Even though it was wrapped in makeshift bandages, he could feel his stomach curdle. The cloth was soaked thick with blood. He stared at it, thinking that it should hurt more, even willing it to hurt. The numbness was worse than pain. At least pain let him know that something was still there. But he knew…he knew parts of it were missing. Parts of him.

Adnan could not say a word, and Athwen wasn’t about to encourage him to. There would be no arguing now. The young man watched Khamir walk away, and then suddenly the tears came. He tried to hide them, and hold them in, but it was no use. The water silently flowed from his eyes, but he watched Athwen start unwrapping the bandages around his hand steadily. His nausea lessened, and his vision seemed to be correcting itself better. The cloud around his head no longer seemed so foreboding.

But the tears still came. He closed his eyes to try and force them back in, but in his mind’s eye he was faced with the bloody image of the man he… Adnan snapped his eyes back open, only to look down upon his naked hand caked in a sickly mix of wet and dry blood, and see and count only one…two…three fingers…

Then all went dark.

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Khamir

Neither the slaves nor the slavers fought by any rules, and both were equally as ruthless. For the slaves, this battle was about survival, and they would do whatever they had to in order to maintain their existence as now free men: that they had an abundance of hatred for their enemy truly meant they would do anything and everything in their means to stop them. For the slavers, it was all about money, about power, about pride. The hatred was thick on both sides, but the slaves still outnumbered the slavers, even if only barely.

Khamir, Nasim, and Gamal fought together, Khamir and Nasim taking on a slaver together while Nasim guarded their rear. Nasim, clearly to Khamir’s eye the sharpest shot of the three, at least, wielded a simple sling, but did a great deal of damage with it. An Easterling on horseback could not land a strike on him or the two slaves he fought with, as he launched dense, rough edged stones at the slaver, pinpointing vulnerable locations, and stinging the horse’s skin when he needed to, causing it to rear up and dance quickly away from Nasim and the others, its eyes wild with fear.

Khamir waited for a moment’s breath simply to aim adequately as Gamal did his best to keep the horseman the two faced busy with his spear. The man was tall and had a long reach, and he had crafted his spear himself of thick wood. He had spent weeks looking for the proper piece of wood, and had spent just as many weeks shaping the weapon. The stone shard that served as a spearhead, though primitive, served well enough. Having taken as long as he could risk, Khamir launched one of his two remaining throwing daggers at the slaver. The man went down, and Gamal was quick to jump on him, thrusting his spear down with all the force of his body behind it. Khamir was just as quick to attack, bring his foot down firmly on the man’s head. Gamal’s weapon ran true, and impaled the man in the throat, sneaking in between the metal plates that were supposed to protect him.

As Khamir pulled his dagger out of the man’s right shoulder, he found himself with a moment to scan the battlefield. He saw familiar faces, but not as many as he would have liked. And not the one he was looking for. He did not have time to think of Shae further, as Gamal had wrenched his spear free of the slaver corpse, and the two then raced over to help Nasim with another gold-plated enemy. But the one armed man fought with more fervor to bring down this man quickly, as the feeling that he was racing against time increased in him.