Free The Well of Darkness by Randall Garrett Page A

faced us, there was comfort. We didn’t kiss, but merely held each other, her body pliant and soft, her embrace as strong as mine.
    The door opened. Tarani stirred and pressed her cheek against mine. So softly that I barely caught the words, Tarani whispered:
“There is hope”
Then she moved away from me, leaving a giant coldness where she had been.
    The way to Lingis was straight, hard, and boring. I had a lot of time, in those five days, to remember the final few seconds of the interview with Indomel, the picture of the room indelible in my mind: Obilin stony-faced, Zefra still immobile, Indomel sort of blank-looking. All of them loomed in my remembered vision like statues; even I seemed frozen. Only Tarani was alive, breathing, warm. She glowed with vitality, and promise, and a curious sort of peace.
    There is hope
, she had said.
    Obilin had led me directly from the house to the gate of Lord City, where a group of guards waited with full backpacks and a lot of suppressed questions. We had stopped just out of their hearing range.
    “They will take you to Lingis,” Obilin had said. “Naddam will be expecting you in five days, and it is worth the girl’s life not to be even an hour late. He will show you the routine before he leaves. Be sure the mine continues to produce as well, but never forget that
you are as much a prisoner there as the slaves are.
“
    He had given me a sword, and a folded, wax-sealed sheet of paper. I had put the sword through my baldric, aware of Obilin’s alertness, fighting the tempting vision of the sword lashing out, of Obilin falling into his own blood. I had been sickened by the savagery of the image, even more so by the pleasure I felt in anticipation of its execution. That, and the background awareness of the consequences to Tarani, had guided the sword safely and unblooded to its place.
    “There is a clerk,” Obilin had continued, after a slight hesitation. I had wondered if he had been disappointed that I hadn’t tried something. “He sends daily reports directly to the High Lord; he has been instructed to see you every day; the first day he misses you will be the last day of Tarani’s life.”
    He had spoken savagely, and I had seen a new truth—part of Obilin’s hatred, now at least, was concern for Tarani’s welfare. I had control of her fate, and Obilin was losing control of mine. At least, so it had seemed to Obilin and to me.
    “One last word,” Obilin had said, gripping my arm painfully. “Remember that Naddam is not the only guard in Lingis who reports to me.”
    He had shoved me toward the group. The six guards—most of whom had been assigned to the rotating schedule around my confinement—had sandwiched me between two columns, and we had left Eddarta.
    Naddam greeted me, in Lingis, with understandable resentment. Obilin’s explanation—I got a glimpse of the message which had arrived by messenger bird the day I had left Eddarta with the “official” transfer orders—was patently transparent, and he wanted to know what was going on.
    I didn’t tell him anything, at first—but Naddam turned out to be a real surprise. He had the same tough-muscled, scarred look as most of the mine guards—generally not the pick of the crop—but Naddam was an intelligent man, as compassionate as his role would allow him to be.
    The mine operated from a city-like enclosure two man-days away from the Lingis River for which it was named. Water was hauled in by vlek and stored in rooftop tanks to provide drinking water and an occasional bath.
    The slaves were organized into semi-military groups, each of eight groups assigned to a small barracks. Each group had twelve to fifteen slaves and four guards, divided into two teams which alternated resting and working six-hour shifts broken up among the duties of actual mining, hauling, and loading ore, and “camp” duties like cooking, washing, and cleaning. During any given seven-day, one of the slave groups would have it slightly