Snap—
The sound of the weirwood-handled whip echoed against the damp stone of the harbor wall. Hidolf Heydry, his spine bowed under a heavy slab of granite, felt the bite of the leather through his rags. It was a searing, white-hot line of agony that tore through his exhaustion.
He stayed low, his breath coming in ragged, rattling gasps. Hatred, thick and bitter as gall, simmered in his throat. He had spent the daylight hours hauling timber for the war-galleys, and when the sun dipped below the horizon, he expected the meager comfort of a straw mat and a crust of hardbread. Instead, the masters of Tyrosh had driven the slave-pens toward the battlements, desperate to mend the breaches left by the dragon's fire.
The masters provided no meat. No rest. Only the whip and the torch.
"Move, you baseborn cur!" the overseer bellowed, his face ruddy in the flickering light of the braziers. "If this section of the curtain wall isn't raised by dawn, I'll have the skin off your back for a new pair of boots!"
Hidolf didn't move. He felt the weight of the stone on his shoulders, and for the first time in ten years of servitude, the weight of his chains felt heavier still.
Snap—
The second lash caught him across the neck, opening a fresh red furrow.
The world went scarlet. Hidolf let out a low, animal growl. He shrugged the stone from his back—it hit the cobbles with a bone-shaking thud—and reached down. His fingers closed around a jagged piece of masonry.
The overseer's eyes widened, his hand reaching for the shortsword at his belt, but he was too slow. Hidolf moved with the desperate, jagged speed of a man with nothing left to lose.
"Die!" Hidolf roared.
The stone came down once. Twice. A third time. He didn't stop until the overseer's skull was a ruin of red and grey on the Tyroshi mud.
Hidolf stood, his chest heaving, the blood of his master dripping from his knuckles. He turned to the hundreds of hollow-eyed men watching from the shadows of the wall.
"Look at yourselves!" he screamed, his voice cracking with a decade of suppressed rage. "If we stay, we die in the dirt to build their walls! If we work, we die for their gold! If we are to meet the Stranger tonight, let us meet him with steel in our hands and the word 'Free' on our lips!"
He didn't wait for a reply. He snatched up a heavy iron shovel and charged toward the line of Tyroshi sentries gathering at the end of the quay.
"For freedom!" a young slave cried out, snatching a discarded torch.
The older men hesitated, their spirits broken by years of the lash, but the youth—those who still remembered the taste of salt air and the dreams of a life beyond the pens—surged forward. They took up hammers, pry-bars, and stones.
The melee began.
It spread like wildfire through a dry forest. From the docks to the artisan district, the cry went up. Slaves slipped their collars in the chaos, some fleeing into the dark alleys, while thousands more joined Hidolf's frantic charge.
But the masters of the Free Cities had put down rebellions before.
As Hidolf led his ragged mob toward the Great Harbor, hoping to seize a ship or break for the city gates, the Tyroshi Regulars arrived. These were not overseers with whips, but men-at-arms clad in boiled leather and bronze, wielding long spears that glinted like the teeth of a predator.
The slaves fought with the ferocity of cornered rats, but they were unarmored and undisciplined. For every soldier they pulled down and butchered, five slaves were run through by the relentless wall of pikes.
"We must break through!" Hidolf shouted, his shovel slick with gore. "To the gates! Once we are in the hills, we can vanish!"
His men roared, a desperate, fading sound, and hurled themselves at the weakest point of the Tyroshi line.
Kalom, the Commander of the City Watch, watched the slaughter from atop a dappled charger. He had held his post for twenty years and broken a dozen such uprisings. He didn't feel anger—only a cold, professional disdain.
"Shields," Kalom commanded, his voice bored.
The front rank of the regulars slammed their tall shields together, creating a wall of bronze. From the gaps, spear-points thrust out like a hedgehog's spines.
Pfft—Pfft—
The sound of steel biting into unarmored flesh was sickeningly constant. Hidolf watched in horror as his comrades threw themselves against the bronze wall, only to be spitted and tossed aside like offal. He tried to lead three separate charges, but each time the shield-wall held firm, stepping forward over the mounting piles of slave-corpses.
"Archers to the flanks," Kalom ordered. "End this mummers' show."
Hidolf scrambled atop a heap of the dead, searching for an opening, a miracle, a God who cared for the small. He saw only the archers nocking arrows, their bows drawn taut. Despair, cold as a winter sea, began to settle over the rebels. They knew the price of failure in Tyrosh. There would be no mercy—only the cross and the slow death by the roadside to serve as a warning to the rest.
Hidolf gripped his shovel, his knuckles white. He prepared to die as a man, even if he had lived as a beast.
Just as the first volley of arrows was about to take flight, the air itself seemed to vibrate. A sound tore through the night, a high-pitched, vibrating shriek that made the bronze shields rattle and the horses scream in terror.
"Hiss!"
It was the sound of the sky breaking open.
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