His brother was rustling his clothing and rummaging around for something.
Malagach cleared his throat again. “I wanted to beat Zakrog so badly. He’s been tormenting us so long.”
Rustle, rustle.
“I didn’t think...I mean, I guess...this is my fault. You shouldn’t be here, Gor. I’m sorry—”
Pat, pat, pat.
“Cursed green gods, what are you doing?” Malagach demanded.
Gortok sighed like a father mourning a lost child. “They took all my tools.”
“Tools! I’m trying to apologize to you, and all you can think of is your tools?”
“How else are we going to escape?” Gortok asked.
Malagach rubbed his temples. His whole head ached. He tried to focus on more pressing problems. That Zakrog had thought to search Gortok’s pockets and steal whatever tools he had on him showed surprising foresight. Maybe he had just been looking for more things to sell, Malagach thought bitterly. Or perhaps the trapper himself had searched Gortok and taken them.
“We better see if there’s anything in here we can use then,” Malagach said.
“Right.” Gortok rattled the door latch.
“It’s locked from the outside,” Malagach said dryly.
“Just checking. No point in building a fancy get-out-of-a-locked-wagon invention if the door is unlocked.”
“Oh, please. You’d spend an hour building a gadget to jump into a tree when it’d take you thirty seconds to climb to the same branch. In fact, you’ve done that.”
“Yes,” Gortok said in a tone of fond remembrance. “But I had tools.”
They groped around the windowless black interior of the wagon, seeking anything useful. While goblins had superior night vision to humans, they still needed ambient light—moonlight or at least some starlight—for their eyes to work in the dark.
Furs were the dominant cargo, and Malagach’s fingers brushed against coarse bear, silky fox, and soft rabbit. He found a cask he could not open, though it was secured to the corner with metal wire, and he was able to pry off about a foot’s length. On the gritty floorboards, his toes brushed against a four-inch-long nail, which he also pocketed.
“Oh,” Gortok said.
“Find something good?”
“Rubber bands!” This announcement was followed by the thwank of a rubber band being shot across the wagon and into the wall. Malagach rolled his eyes.
“Find something useful?” he corrected.
“I’ve also got a rock...and some moldy twine.”
“So...no,” Malagach answered his own question.
“What’d you find that’s so useful?” Gortok asked.
Malagach was about to share, but the wagon slowed to a stop, and voices sounded outside.
“Given the feebleness of the prison-break aids we’ve found,” Malagach said, “I suggest we try to surprise them by jumping out the door and running.” If they could get into the trees, they might have a chance. Goblins might not be warriors, but they could hide well, especially in the dark.
“Running?” Gortok asked. “That wasn’t our best event this afternoon, and humans have longer legs than Zakrog.”
“We have to try.” Malagach crept to the door, ready to leap out as soon as it opened. “You go left, I’ll go right, and we’ll meet...” He realized he had no idea where they were.
“In the middle?” Gortok scooted up beside him.
Malagach shrugged. “Yes.”
The scent of wood smoke penetrated the wagon. As late as it was, perhaps they were being delivered straight to the slavers’ camp instead of another trade-off point. He was not sure how that knowledge helped him.
“Mal?” Gortok asked.
“What?”
“I don’t blame you for getting us stuck here.”
“Thanks.”
“Though if you get us killed or enslaved for life, I might blame you a little bit for that.”
In the dark, Malagach could only sense Gortok’s grin.
“Let’s see the goods,” a male voice came from right outside the door.
A clank and scrape of metal on wood announced the removal of the lock. The door opened. Time for their escape attempt.
Malagach shoved the door open farther and launched to the right.
While he was still airborne, burly arms caught him about the middle, abruptly ending his flight. Gortok made it to the ground, but a booted foot stuck out and tripped him after two steps. Another set of burly arms picked him up and let him dangle upside down. Malagach found himself stuffed under someone’s armpit.
“How...embarrassing,” he muttered, referring both to the ease of their capture and their current positions.
“A little bit, yeah,” Gortok said.
By craning his neck awkwardly, Malagach could count six human men in addition to the trapper. Everyone carried a musket, a pistol, or both. Some of the slavers also bore swords and coiled whips at their belts.
Malagach’s guess had been right, and they were in a camp located next to a wide river. Parallel to the waterway was a train of eight wagons, each with an iron cage mounted on the back. The horses had been unhitched and were tethered at the edge of the camp. Bedrolls surrounded a crackling cook fire, and a handful of scattered whale oil lamps spread illumination amongst the wagons. Three of the cages already had occupants: an elven boy and five human children, three girls and two boys. Many bore bruises on their faces. All of them huddled in corners and stared out with wide fearful eyes.
“Check them,” said a tall lanky man with gray hair and a beard trying to swallow his face.
Malagach jerked when his lips were peeled back so someone could examine his teeth. Next fingers poked into his ears, hair, and pulled up his tunic. He squirmed at this indignity, but his captor held him firmly.
“No lice, good teeth,” came back the verdict.
Gortok received the same dubious accolade. The slavers patted them down, searching for weapons. Apparently none of the scraps they had purloined from the trapper’s wagon were big enough to notice.
“Fine goblin specimens,” the trapper said. “They’re easily worth ten silver each.” He wore a cutlass and pistol at his waist and cradled a musket in his arms. Old scars marked his face and the backs of his hands. Though the trapper was outnumbered, he did not seem concerned, certainly not enough to fail to demand the price he wanted.
The fellow with the expansive beard—Malagach decided he must be the leader—said, “Three silver. They’re short and spindly.”
“You just described ninety-nine percent of the goblins in the mountains,” the trapper said. “Their meager stature and compliant natures are what make them versatile slaves. These two are young and pliable, easily trainable to muck out stables or serve tea to the master. Nine silver.”
“Pliable?” Malagach murmured.
“Who’re they calling spindly?” Gortok demanded.
“Silence!” The trapper glared at them.
Apparently it looked bad when the supposedly compliant and pliable wares mouthed off. Malagach was not inclined to curry favor with the trapper though.
It seemed Gortok was of the same mind, for he stuck his tongue out at the trapper and then told the lead slaver, “He only paid one silver for us.”
“And barely toted us fifteen minutes,” Malagach added.
The slavers guffawed at the consternation on the trapper’s face.
“Five silver,” the leader offered magnanimously.
After another glare at Malagach and Gortok, the trapper agreed to the price. A fellow next to Gortok’s keeper pulled a book, quill, and inkwell out of a wagon. Once the money exchanged hands, he propped the book on a rock and dipped the quill. He painstakingly penned something at the bottom of a column of numbers, but then peered uncertainly at his calculation.
“You forgot to take one away from the tens column,” Gortok, still dangling upside down, said helpfully.
“Oh, yeah.”
The putative bookkee
per made the correction before realizing the source and staring at Gortok with a startled expression. The leader too eyeballed Gortok with narrowed eyes. Goblins who could read were rare. One who could do math—upside down—was probably not something any of them had seen before.
“Put ‘em in that cage,” he said finally.
Their keepers hurled Malagach and Gortok into their new prison without the gentleness one might hope for from men planning to sell the ‘goods’ later. Malagach’s shoulder thudded hard into one of the steel bars, but at least his head was spared another bashing. Gortok recovered quickly enough to peer out and see the metal key turn in the door lock.
Once their prisoners had been locked in, the slavers returned to the fire and their bedtime preparations. Two men were set to guard, one near the wagons and another roving the perimeter of the camp.
For a goblin, the cages were just tall enough to stand in, and Malagach and Gortok immediately examined every corner and tested each bar. Gortok stuck his hand out and probed the hinges and door lock. Malagach lifted the straw bedding and checked the integrity of the floorboards. Unfortunately their prison was sound.
A couple of the men had removed their boots and shimmied into their bedrolls already, but Malagach noticed the leader sitting with his arm on his knee, head turned toward his newest acquisitions.
How long had he been watching? The man rose and walked over to their cage. Malagach clasped his hands behind his back and tried to look innocent, or at least suitably subdued by the situation.
“You two are going to be trouble, aren’t you?”
“No, sir,” Malagach said.
“Yup,” Gortok drawled at the same time.
The man snorted. “I’ve been in this business a long time. I can spot troublesome slaves right quick.”
“Perhaps you could release us now then,” Malagach said, “in order to preclude the possibility of us causing future damage.”
“There’s two ways to deal with troublesome slaves,” the leader said. “You can break ‘em.” He patted his whip and nodded toward the elven boy, who, though sitting, did not rest his back against the bars. “Or you can make a deal with them, give them something they want in exchange for their cooperation.”
“We like deals,” Gortok said.
Malagach kept his mouth shut. While the whip made Ma’s switch seem a paltry punishment, he doubted any deal this man might offer would be any less undesirable.
“As you can see,” the slaver said, “we have a number of empty cages. We’d thought to obtain at least ten young goblins on our way across the mountains, but your people seem quite adept at hiding their villages. We’ll barely break even with this lot.”
Across the mountains, Malagach thought. According to maps he had seen, the desert lay over there, a stark place he had only read about. If they were taken that far, he was not certain they could get back. Dragons dwelled in the high mountains, and stories said the desert monsters made trolls seem friendlier than bear cubs in comparison.
“Perhaps,” the slaver said, “you two could earn your freedom.”
“How?” Gortok asked.
“Yes, how, considering you just parted with ten silver coins for our lice-free hides,” Malagach said.
“And good teeth,” Gortok said.
“If we could trade two goblins for ten or twelve, it’d be worth it,” the slave leader said. “You wouldn’t want to share the whereabouts of a rival clan’s village, would you?”
Malagach snorted. He would rather take his chances with Gortok’s rubber bands than have some goblin ballad composed about how he had been the greatest betrayer of his own kind since the Wizard Wars.
“Or perhaps some rivals within your own clan?” the slaver suggested.
This time Malagach froze before he could utter the snort.
Zakrog’s face floated before his mind’s eye, and for a moment, Malagach couldn’t catch his breath. And, yes, there were at least ten of Zakrog’s followers that Malagach would be relieved never to see again.
He licked his lips. Why was his heart suddenly pounding in his chest as if he were back in that race? And his palms were damp with sweat. He couldn’t actually think of betraying.... Who? Those who betrayed him not two hours earlier? Wouldn’t it be some sort of grand justice to send them off to the very fate they had tried to seal for him? To have Zakrog and his crowd trapped in a life of whippings and drudgery in a harsh land?
“Think about it tonight,” the leader said. “If you won’t deal, we’ll start with the breaking in the morning.”
“We’re not interested,” Gortok said and then glanced at Malagach after the slaver had walked back to his bedroll. “Are we?”
“I...” Malagach said. “I...need to sit down.” Actually he laid down and stared up at the wooden boards of the cage ceiling.
“Zakrog?” Gortok asked.
Malagach’s lips flattened in grim acknowledgement. “Him. The others.” He knew Gortok wouldn’t have to ask what others. “They’ve been tormenting us every day for as long as I can remember. Can you imagine them just being gone tomorrow? And every day after that? They’d never be there to bother us again.”
“Eh,” Gortok said, “Us being us, we’d probably just attract a new flock of bullies.”
Malagach barked a short laugh. “Maybe, but there’s no one left of Zakrog’s cruelty caliber in the village, not amongst our peers anyway. We’d be practically grownups before any of the younger whelps got big enough to be a problem.”
Gortok sat in the straw next to Malagach. “Even supposing life would be heaps better without them, how would we send them off to the slavers without risking the whole village? We can’t lead these troll kissers home.”
“Dead Rock Cave,” Malagach said. “We’ve got our tree hut, and Zakrog’s crew has their ugly little fort out at Dead Rock. They go out there nearly every day. It’d be easy to set up their capture.”
“You’ve certainly got this all worked out.” Gortok’s white eyebrows wriggled beneath his bushy bangs.
“It would be...easy,” Malagach said. “Slavery is rampant east of the mountains. Goblins over here get abducted. It happens. No one in the clan would ever know we had anything to do it.”
“I reckon that’s just what Zakrog said.” Gortok paused and added, “Without using words like rampant and abducted.”
Malagach rolled his head to the side and considered his brother. Just what Zakrog said. What was Gortok implying? That if they did this, they’d be just like the bullies they wanted to get rid of? That couldn’t be true, could it? One admittedly vengeful action couldn’t possibly be measured against a lifetime of vengeful actions.
Gortok’s face was impassive. Had he meant to imply anything at all, or had Malagach only imagined it because his head was already wrestling with itself? Maybe this was just something Malagach could not do. And could he not do it because he was strong...or because he was weak? Or because it was just an evil thing to do no matter who was at the other end of the deed?
Growling, he threw a clump of straw between the bars.
“That mean we’re turning down Big Beard’s offer?” Gortok asked.
“Correct,” Malagach said and wondered how often he might regret the missed opportunity in the future.
After Malagach had sulked for a while, Gortok asked, “You know what’d be really fun?”
“Escaping?”
“Escaping and strolling back into the village in the morning, walking right by Zakrog as if nothing had ever happened.”
At first Malagach did not answer. The words did create the image in his mind though, and he allowed a “Hm,” to escape. And then, “The expression that would put on Zakrog’s face would be...delightful to observe.” Another moment passed. “We’d really have to hustle with our escape if we mean to get home by morning.”
“Naturally.” Gortok smiled. “Show your pockets.”
Malagach did so while casting his gaze around the camp. By now, the leader and all except t
wo of the slavers were snoring in their bedrolls. Malagach could hear the steady footfalls of the roving guard, and the other man sat on a rock a few meters away. The leader had pointed specifically to that spot, which offered a clear view of Malagach and Gortok’s cage, perhaps determined to thwart any escape attempts by his new prisoners. Malagach was used to humans underestimating him and his brother and was not sure whether to be flattered or annoyed that this one did not. At least the guard did not share his leader’s vigilant mindset. He was sliding around pieces in a handheld wooden puzzle.
“Ah!” Gortok’s fingers latched onto the scrap of rusty metal wire Malagach had taken from the cask. Gortok lowered his voice and breathed, “This is perfect. In fact, it’ll almost be too easy.” Using his teeth, he sawed the wire into two lengths of about five inches.
Malagach sat with his back to the bars, to block the guard’s view of Gortok. He watched his brother add a right angle to the end of one and quietly hazarded, “Lock pick?”
“That’ll be the pick.” Gortok pointed to the as yet unmodified piece. He lifted the one he was shaping. “This is the, uhm... I don’t have any books on thievery, and locks aren’t covered in my engineering text, so I don’t know what it’s called. It holds the picked pins in place while you work on the rest.”
Gortok had begun his career of inventing and building contraptions by disassembling everything he could get his hands on—including many things his hands ought not to have been on—so it did not surprise Malagach that he knew how a lock worked. But having never seen the inside of one himself, he had no idea what Gortok was talking about. He said only, “Perhaps if we’re going to find ourselves in many locked cells, we should find a professional to train you up on the terminology.”
“As long as I’m with you, cages and cells are probably going to be a given.”
Malagach huffed but did not refute the statement. This was not the first time they had been incarcerated together. And while this wasn’t his fault, exactly, the blame for the incident with the troll cage over the fire pit might possibly be attributed to one of his plans....
“Not that great.” Gortok eyed his two new tools critically. The second one he had left largely alone aside from giving the end a slight hook. “Kind of flimsy, but did you see the key? That’s a simple lock.”