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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 4790577" data-attributes="member: 143">Chapter 34Mara leaned her head back against the cold stone behind her, and tried not to give way to despair.  Her head hurt still, and her vision out of her left eye was still a little spotty after the blow she’d taken from one of the duergar warriors that served as their jailors.  That escape attempt, her second, had probably been ill-advised, but with each passing moment spent here she felt increasingly desperate.  A high-pitched cackle drew her attention up to the lip of the pit, where one of the devils was perched.  The thing would have been small for a human, but the devil’s harsh features and the nasty spines that jutted out from all over its body gave it a fearsome appearance.  She shifted, raising her manacled hands in front of her in what might have been a defiant gesture, had the chains holding her been long enough to let her stir more than two feet from the wall.  The devil laughed at her and moved on. “It won’t be long now,” the goblin whispered.  “So you’ve said,” Mara said, her own voice low to match that of her fellow captive.  Gru was one of the prisoners that had been here in the pit when she’d arrived.  The goblin seemed healthy enough, though he had several old scars that crossed the left side of his face.  She was more concerned with Tandrin, who’d been less and less responsive in the day and a half since she’d arrived here.  The halfling now lay against the wall, his manacles forcing him to stretch his arms up above his head even at rest.  She hissed his name, quietly, but the halfling didn’t stir. There were other slaves in the pits, maybe a dozen in all, but she hadn’t really gotten a good look at any of them since she’d been dragged in here by her captors.  Tandrin had apparently come from Jaron’s village, along with about a dozen other halflings, but he hadn’t known more than Mara about the other captives.  When he’d been awake and communicative, he had told her that their captors had taken off one of their number a few days back, the priest from their village, a woman named Yarine.  Mara seemed to remember Jaron saying something about her, before.  From what she knew of the slave trade in the Labyrinth, she and the other prisoners that were taken out of this chamber by the duergar could be almost anywhere by now, and the chances of tracking them down were almost nil.  She hoped for her friend’s sake that he and his cousin had left the Labyrinth, and not looked back.  Good advice, if too late for her to take it. “I shouldn’t be here,” Gru persisted.  The goblin seemed more annoyed than anything else at having been enslaved.  “I’ll show these dwarf bastards, once I get out of here.  You’ll see, as soon as I’m sold, I’ll be free faster than you can spit.”Mara mumbled something non-committal and craned her neck as she head the bolts on the door to the slave quarters being thrown back.  The pits were deep enough so that she couldn’t get a clear view of that part of the room, but she could hear the heavy tread of her captors, the gravelly sound of their voices as they spoke.  The duergar barely came up to her shoulder, but they were tough, a fact she knew all too well. And then there was Murkelmor, who made her shudder even to think of him.She couldn’t hear what was being said, but after about a minute, she heard footsteps approaching.  One of the duergar guards was shouting orders, and she heard the cackle of one of the spined devils, followed by the ugly noise of a whip being cracked. “Looks like you were right,” Mara said to Gru. “Don’t meet their eyes!” the goblin warned, cowering against the wall.  But Mara wasn’t one to cower, and so when the duergar appeared at the lip of the pit, Mara’s stare was raised to face his.  She didn’t falter, even when she saw that it was Framarth.  The theurge let out a cruel laugh at her defiant look. “What are you going to do with us?” she asked him.  She already knew how dangerous Framarth was, but the duergar seemed to be in a fine humor.  He gestured, and another duergar appeared at his side, holding several sets of manacles linked by a long length of black chain. “You and these others have become a liability,” the duergar theurge said.  “Fortunately, we have arranged for a buyer who will happily… remove… the problem for us.  We don’t normally deal with their kind, but for you, we will make an exception. Take the woman and the halfling,” he said to the guard.  Mara tensed, but she felt the cold chill that warned her even before she looked up to see the spined devil perched on the lip of the pit directly above, looking down at her. “You can resist, but you may prefer to save your strength,” Framarth said to her.  “You may have need of it, when the troglodytes get their hands on you.”If Mara had felt cold before, she now felt an iciness pierce her gut.  As the dwarf loomed over her, his shackles clinking in his hands, she could hear the theurge’s laughter, closing around her like the crumbling walls of a grave.</blockquote>

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