A Rule of Queens (Book #13 in the Sorcerer's Ring) by Morgan Rice Page A

as
slaves, as they do every other city in the Empire not of their race. They work
us until we die.”
    “Haven’t you tried to escape?” Kendrick asked.
    Bokbu turned to him.
    “Escape where exactly?” he asked. “We are
slaves in the service of Volusia, the great northern city by the sea. There is
no free province of the Empire, nowhere to run to within hundreds of miles of
here. We have Volusia to one side, the ocean on the other, and the vast desert behind
us.”
    “And what lies on the other side of the desert?”
Gwen asked.
    “The entire rest of the Empire,” another
chieftain chimed in. “Endless lands. More provinces and regions than you can
dream of. All under the thumb of the Empire. Even if we managed to cross the
great desert, we know little of what lies beyond.”
    “Except slavery and death,” another chimed in.
    “Has anyone ever tried to cross it?” Gwen
asked.
    Bokbu turned to her somberly.
    “Every day some of our people try to flee. Most
are killed quickly, an arrow or spear in the back as they try to run. Those who
escape, disappear. Sometimes the Empire brings them back days later, corpses
for us to see, to hang from the highest tree. Other times, they bring back mere
bones, eaten by some animal. Other times, they never bring them back at all.”
    “Have any survived?” Gwen asked.
    Bokbu shook his head.
    “The Great Waste is merciless,” he said.
“Surely they were taken by the desert.”
    “But maybe some survived?” Kendrick pressed.
    Bokbu shrugged.
    “Perhaps. Perhaps only to make it to another
region and become enslaved elsewhere. Slaves have it worse than us in other
Empire regions. They are killed randomly and routinely every day, just for the
amusement of the taskmasters. Here, at least, we’re not torn apart from our
families and sold off for fun. We’re not shipped from city to city and town to
town; here, at least, we have a home. They allow us to live as long as we labor.”
    “It is not much of a life,” another chieftain
added. “It is a life of bondage. But it is a life nonetheless.”
    “Can you not raise arms and fight back?” Kendrick
asked.
    Bokbu shook his head.
    “There have been other times, other generations,
in other cities, that have tried. They have never won. We are outmanned, out
armed. The Empire have superior armor, weaponry, animals, enforced walls,
organization…and most of all, they have steel. We have none. It is outlawed
here.”
    “And if a slave rises up and loses, the entire
village is killed.”
    “They outnumber us vastly,” another chieftain
chimed in. “What are we to do? Are a few hundred of us, with our wooden
weapons, to attack a hundred thousand of them, while they wear steel armor?”
    Gwendolyn contemplated their predicament. She
understood, and she felt compassion for them. They had given up on who they
were, on their proud warrior spirit, to try to protect their families. She
could not blame them. She wondered if she would have done the same in their
position. If her father would have.
    “Subjugation is a terrible thing,” she said. “When
one man thinks he is greater than another, because of his race or his weapons or
his power or his numbers or his riches—or whatever reason—then he can become
cruel for no reason.”
    Bokbu turned to her.
    “You have experienced it yourself,” he said. “Or
you would not be here.”
    Gwendolyn nodded, looking into the flames.
    “Romulus and his million men invaded our
homeland and burned it to the ground,” she said. “There are but a few hundred
of us now, all that remains of what was once the most glorious nation. At its
center, a city of such prosperity that it put any other to shame. It was a land
overflowing with abundance of every sort, with a Canyon that protected us from
all sorts of evil. We were invincible. For generations, we were invincible.”
    “And yet, even the great fall,” Bokbu prodded.
    Gwen nodded, seeing he understood.
    “And what happened?”