Private Lead to Gold

[Baku]

The abyss was as deep as the Mansa needed it to be.

A wise man had once taught a wise man that it was wise to break the spirit of those who ran afoul of the Greatest City's laws. To bury them beneath the Earth and make them dig up the Mother's gifts so that they might understand what it was their people fought so hard for. Why they worked and why they drew breath beneath and within the winds Nzuri had provided them. And so deep within Khurun, those law breakers labored night and day to fine crystals of many colors to be shipped by airship to Miradj'Dah. Foremen moved about the camps so far away from the sun that they had to be lit by torches and lanterns. Whips cracked across the dense, hot air as unruly prisoners were punished for their weakness or their unruly nature. Even if the Miradi sun's light did not reach the depths, it's heat still beat within the vast tunnels beneath the Kaikias. The air was hard to breathe and many died from the thick air. The caverns rumbled whenever magitek charges went off in the deep. Stone dust of many colors filled the lungs of prisoners of war and criminals. It mixed with loose and mundane earth and drifted through the darkness to the surface above...

Baku wrapped his shawl around his face as he was lead through the deep by one of the workers that knew the depths well. The air smelled of sweat, dirt, death, and desperation. Once the man had led him to a certain group of laborers, Baku and pointed out the one he was looking for. A woman that was damned hard to distinguish from a man was the one he needed. One with particular set of skills. The man who had guided him lashed her across the back. One of many she was like to have received and bid her follow him through the tunnels and to the surface. Most prisoners lived their the rest of their days within the deep mines. Once in a blue moon, one of them got their chance to see the light of day...

"You are the one they call Fray, no?"

 

[Fray]

Fray had been here for only a handful of days, and already she was contemplating how many guards she could kill before she inevitably got put down like a mad dog.

She could have gone on lamenting her situation. Or, hating those who had betrayed her and landed her ass in this bottomless shithole of misery. But honestly, what good would that even do? She'd already punched everything she could punch, broken everything she could afford to break, and swore up and down her entire arsenal of foul language. But at the end of the day, she was here, they were not, and that was that.

There were times Fray felt grateful. Of all the people who could end up here and survive, at least for a time, she was a rather exceptional candidate. Cockroach like, someone once described her as. Spiteful rat, another had offered. Neither was appreciated, but she supposed that it was better to be something filthy and alive, versus something filthy and dead.

And, shroud be damned, she was filthy. Aside from all the sweat, dirt, and blood, there wasn't a single patch of dirt or air that wasn't contaminated with crystal dust. Some of her fellow prisoners called it The Slow Death. Because it was, and Fray had every intention of going out on her own terms. Sure, her heritage allowed her to see better in the dark, feline eyes flashing gold beneath the flicker of torchlight, and a life of violence meant that hard labor mostly just hurt her pride. But the dust was an entirely different issue. An issue of time. The scrap of cloth wrapped around her face could only do so much in way of protection.

Unfortunately, her beloved blades, along with the rest of the belongings she had shown up with, were locked away somewhere beyond her reach. Fray looked down at the pick axe between her hands, a fine coating of dust already settling on its surface. It could work, if she practiced swinging it in different directions a few times. One benefit of being sentenced to hard labor was staying in fighting shape, if you ignored the lashings, beatings, and lack of proper food.

Her other option was to transform. This would get her decently far, until the tunnels got too narrow. Which meant a quick and humiliating death, trapped in her beast form no less. No, that was to be her absolute last resort.

A burst of white hot pain lanced across her back. Fray grit her teeth and stumbled forward, but refused to cry out, denying them the satisfaction.

The mercenary turned prisoner turned to face whoever had just whipped her across the back. They'd hit her at just the right angle to re-open the previous lash she'd receive. Now she had two sources of blood dripping down her back. It put her in a positively smashing-a-pick-axe-through-skulls mood.

She was not, consequently, expecting to find herself eye to eye with a dark, wiry man bedecked in odd jewelry. His features were obscured by a rich looking shawl wrapped around his face, but he seemed wealthy judging from his robes alone, which were so clean and well made in contrast with everything else in this glorified mass grave that it almost hurt to look at them. Barely five days, and she'd already begun to forget what civilized life was like.

"I am," she answered, back straight and pick axe held meaningfully in her hands, like she wasn't starving and exhausted and losing her mind with anger. Like she wouldn't kill every last mother fucker before her if it meant getting out alive. The guards around had tensed, hands hovering over their whip handles. "What's it to you, old man?"

 

[Baku]

"Do I truly look so old? You speak so harshly, Fray." he said with a laugh that was far too carefree for their present surroundings. Where men, women, everything outside and all in between slaved beneath the Miradi sun that their foes to the west called Ko and many a name besides. Baku reached up and pinched his own cheek with a laugh as he looked down at the pickaxe she wielded as though it were a child's toy. For one involved with the Suma, it was hard to look at such an instrument as anything else. The weapon he wielded in return was a smile. One that was hidden under the brown shawl he wore but shone true through brown eyes that were fixed on the mercenary-turned-prisoner.

"Enough of that. That will do you no good down here in the Mansa's tunnels. But what I have come to propose may offer you a reprieve and perhaps even freedom from what you have suffered here... Ah, come, come. Get those chains off of her and that pickaxe out of her hands. I do not want her smelling when she boards my airship."

Baku gestured for the men guarding the mines to due their due diligence, which they did. Strong hands went to remove Fray's weapon and her shackles if she would but just allow them. His smile never faded as even in the deep, he could hear the sound of the Scarab humming over the tunnels. Before the Miradi had expanded their influence across the vast deserts of Kaikias, there were Scarab Lords that held dominion over their own swathes of sand and dust. When they were defeated by the new power in the land, the greatest of their carcasses and carapaces were used as armor for airships of great size. The hum of their wings was tremendous. A sound that stuck in one's memory when priviledged to stand near.

"How did you come to be a prisoner here, mercenary?"

 

[Fray]

Fray did not trust the laughing man, whose brown eyes twinkled and even browner skin crinkled. Truthfully, she had no idea how old or not old he was, since his eyes were all she could see above the rich fabric of his shawl. But Fray had wanted to knock him off balance as he had done to her. Evidently, she had not succeeded.

Meanwhile, the newcomer’s light hearted amusement was a brassy, lurid thing amidst the swelter of human suffering. It was so out of place that it completely jarred her senses. She blinked once, twice. Yet there he still stood, as solid and real as the cave walls slowly choking them all to death. She blinked one more time, holding her eyes shut a few seconds extra, just to be sure. Opened them again. Nope. Still not a hallucination.

The Deva could scarce believe what he was saying. He offered her freedom as if it were some banal thing. Like a cloak on a chilly day, or a cup of water on a hot one. Before she could even respond properly, the cursed chains–the very ones that had been chafing her skin raw and limiting her every movement–were suddenly gone. As quick as they had been slapped on. The guards who removed them were rather skittish about the whole thing, though Fray did not notice. Her mind was too busy stumbling through the implausibility of it all.

She looked down and realized the pick axe was gone too, her hands slack. From there, the newly freed prisoner followed her unlikely savior back through the tunnels, barely registering her surroundings. Her feet carried her through the all too familiar paths and her mouth answered his question without its usual garrulousness.

“The usual, boring reasons,” she replied, voice carrying the distant tone of disbelief. “Desperation. Betrayal. I needed money so I did a job that was too good to be true. Should have known. Turns out they were using me to take the fall and left me behind to get caught. And get caught I did.”

Fray did not, of course, disclose the specifics behind why she needed that money in the first place. Not that it was of any importance to anyone else, only injurious to her own dignity.

After a while, a new thought occurred to her. It pierced through the fug of bewilderment enveloping her mind, all sharp and pointy, kind of similar to–

“Swords!” she blurted like an idiot. “Longboy and Fang. Where are my swords?!”

 

[Baku]

​

"Wise ones might say that you have fallen into the maw of Takoumba, He responded casually through his fine, yet dusty shawl.
"Those great and gaudy are subject to his hunger just as those who find themselves in the dirt. And yet the Mother shines through. Always."

Elsewise, why would he be here in this place? Why would he even be alive. The contraption in his chest seemed to pulse at the thought and suddenly there were a thousand others. Voices he heard from the other side every once in a while. The older sages he'd been mistaken for when first meeting this Fray had called it "Ruha be ni yen-tigi- the spirit walks in iron skin". It had been his heart that was broken when he placed it in his chest... It helped him find his way and even though Fray had not known it, it had led him to her.

He'd damn near jumped out of his skin when she screamed for her swords and he looked around briefly as though he might find them on the ground. Her weaponry. Of course. A mercenary is nothing without the tools of their trade. Baku clapped his jeweled hands and called for the guard to bring her companions to her and they nervously complied. It occured to him entirely that she was attempting to find Fatboy and Long to mount some sort of escape, but he was troubled not by it. He took a moment to look her in the eyes when she was reunited with her blades.

His smile reaches his eyes and he continues to lead her to the hum of salvation.

 

[Fray]

The grip of panic tightened until Fray struggled for air in a way that had nothing to do with cave dust. She wanted to rip the flimsy cloth off her face, to rush headlong down the tunnels and threaten the first guard she laid eyes on. It felt like the walls around her were closing in. Until now, she had held fear at bay in order to survive her grim imprisonment, but with the reality of escape drawing ever nearer, the absence of her blades felt rather like dying.

They were all that was left of her family. She’d dug them out from the rubble, after Fen’s rampaging had ended and the dust fully settled. And since then, they’d never left her side. She simply had not allowed it. It had taken every ounce of control–as well as the sharp end of an axe held close enough to her neck to carve a thin red line–for her not to explode into her monstrous form when they confiscated her swords. If she had died then and there, no doubt Longboy and Fang would have been auctioned off to the highest bidder, or simply stolen by some unworthy, dust-covered cretin. The thought alone kept her up almost every night, but also gave her a reason to keep her head. She would need it, after all, to get her precious blades back.

So it was that when the mysterious man clapped his brightly adorned hands and guards fetched her weapons without question, Fray came quite close to collapsing to her knees.

The Devahni blinked down at the two swords in her hands, none the worse for wear. She could scarce believe it. A part of her had been convinced she’d never see them again. Beside her, the two guards had backed off discreetly, hands hovering near their own weapons, as they watched with dubious expressions.

When she looked up again, her benefactor smiled a true smile before taking the lead once more, guiding them farther and farther away from certain death. In that moment of reunion, she had felt delirious enough to kiss the man’s bejeweled hands, maybe even pick him up and spin him around a few times like a newly wed bride. But the guards’ presence reminded Fray of her hate, and hate curdled all that initial joy back into cold, hard lumps of suspicion.

“Why me?” she eventually asked, forced to squint and hold up a hand to shield her eyes from the blinding light of day as they exited the caves. “I’m not complaining, mind you. Nor disagreeing. I’m fantastic, the best, won’t find better in all the lands.”

Now that they were back out in the open and she was able to rip off the oppressive cloth around her face, Fray’s chattiness returned with a vengeance.

“But ah…this had to be an absolute shit journey to make, and…well, hell. How did you even know I was down there?”