Chapter 3: A Hard Day’s Work
Hours and hours went by for the two girls as they were moved from one piece of torture equipment to another. Neither of the girls knew how long they suffered within the terrible dungeon and, in truth, the draks and goblins lost track too. But eventually Lathrak and his colleagues judged it was time to put the girls to work outside once more. They were left with numerous burns and injuries, dragged out of the torture chamber with heavy chains around their wrists and ankles. When they finally emerged from the deep dungeon, they found themselves in the bright glare of the fierce desert sun. After three days and nights in the dungeon, the sun blinded their eyes, but when the girls attempted to lower their heads away from its glare, the draks roughly jerked them back up and forced them to stare directly into its rays. The heat was intolerable and, having received precious little food or water during their long days of torture, the girls already found themselves with a terrible thirst.
The thought of putting their exhausted bodies to work filled the girls with a sickening dread, but they knew they would have no choice. This was how it went for the slavegirls of Mantius: work, rape and torture were the only three activities they engaged in. There was nothing else.
“You’ll be transporting salt today, whores,” Lathrak told them, pushing them forward with a pain stick. “Pick up the slabs, load them in the carts, and pull the carts to the road. Work too slowly and you’ll pay for it. Got that?”
The two girls had no choice but to obey. They had been kept as naked as they were in the dungeons, with not even a loincloth to hide their modesty. They faced a day of hell in the camp with dozens of drak guards equipped with pain sticks, lightning sticks, rhino whips, and wooden staves waiting for any excuse to punish them as they worked. They were close to the salt pit where Elise had spent most of her days at the camp. A pair of slavegirls worked the crank to bring the crates of salt up to the surface and Elise and Alina had to carry this crate to a cart, load it in and then drag the cart away toward the entrance of the camp. There were three other pairs of girls doing the same thing, competing with each other to work fastest. There was no need to guess the penalties for being the slowest of the four.
Alina and Elise kept the heavy chains on their wrists and ankles and the guards fitted a salt gag to the eighteen-year-old’s mouth and a wolf nettle to the older girl’s. They would not be permitted to speak to each other or offer any encouragement, but they would share the same fate if they failed to reach their target. Princess Alina, the draks knew, would feel a crushing sense of responsibility to save the younger girl from unnecessary punishment, driving herself through every conceivable barrier of exhaustion as the day wore on. The guards were looking forward to watching her torment herself, and even more so to the moment she inevitably failed and condemned both girls to another night of horrific torture in the dungeons.
Brought up in the long cold winters of their northern homeland, the enslaved women of Ayimir found the desert heat of Mantius utterly intolerable. Their pale skin burned in the hot sun and their throats quickly parched in the dry, broiling air. Alina and Elise were no different. As they bent their naked bodies into picking up the heavy crates and loading them onto the carts, they had to fight every instinct to seek shelter and rest. Gagged, they had no saliva to combat the hot salt air, and within just a few minutes they were panting with exhaustion and thirst. The drak guards, towering above the stooping girls, lashed their backs bloody with rhino whips and pressed pain sticks into their flesh, growling at them to work faster. Some rode around imperiously on horses, wielding staves that they cracked down against the girls’ shoulders, chests or thighs. All around the camp were the sounds of punishment and pain: the crack of whips, the crackle of pain sticks, the thud of staves and fists, the high-pitched squeals of tortured females.
Lathrak, Golrok and their colleagues had returned to the guardhouses for food and rest, leaving Alina and Elise to the tender mercies of the other guards. The two naked girls finished loading a cart with a dozen crates and then began to heave it toward the gate of the camp, Alina pulling from the front and Elise pushing from the rear. The ground was littered with sharp rocks and salt, which cut and stung the girls’ feet as they dug their heels into the work. Naturally the draks had left the soles of their flayed, lacerated and burned from the three days of torture, making each step a torment in itself. The drak guards, meanwhile, lashed them incessantly, walking alongside the girls as they heaved their bodies against their load.
“Faster, you worthless cunts!” snarled the draks. “Put your bodies into it!”
Alina’s bare breasts were exposed as she pulled the cart by its handle, and whips and pain sticks tormented her perfect mounds incessantly. For Elise, it was her back and buttocks that bore the brunt of the punishment, bleeding from dozens of lacerations already with barely an half an hour of the day gone. It took fifteen minutes for the girls to reach the gate and then they had to run back with the empty cart. By the time they returned to their work station, the salt crates had mounted up and they had no second of rest before the guards snarled at them to begin loading.
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