The Gemcutter's Daughter

23 - The Market and the Wheel

When she heard the murmurs of anxiety, Yari hopped up on an outcropping of stone and turned to face the small band who were following her into the belly of the beast. The deep dwarf warrior was the speaker for the group and leader when they were away from Iolur's guiding wisdom. She cocked an ear towards Tali for a moment before clearing her throat. Rhesis and Jarek were further back in conference with Lekt, discussing their own plan.

"We are almost to Kuldath," the deep dwarf said, a weight settling into her tone. When Yari focused on the fight ahead, the battles to be won, she seemed centered by the very arc of gravity itself, rooted so deep into the endlessness of the universe that the world around her simply had to shape to her will. It was a certainty that Tali had seen no one else wield, more solid than any stone.

The young gemcutter listened closely. She was still a stranger to the depths and inexperienced, even if her unnatural expenditure of her own life-force had left her feeling a few more years aged. They had a golem for it and that was what mattered for the fight ahead.

Yari continued with a stern edge. "I know you are afraid: of the whips, the chains, the fire, the Wheel. I know many of you do not want to go. But think of how your brothers and sisters break under their grind and be ashamed of yourselves for even thinking of doing nothing." She squared her jaw. "The masters will not simply let us go. They have made a great machine of suffering from our blood and bone. Their power must be taken and broken by the hands of the enslaved. That is the only way. You are free—lucky you—but if you do not use that freedom to rip away the lash and shatter the chains, how different are you from the hand that wields the whip?"

The fire in the words connected with Tali's heart like a white-hot hammer. The gemcutter was not a warrior, but she wished in that moment that she was. Anything to help in the fight to come.

"Zuth, you asked me what our lives would be when we left. What did I tell you?" Yari demanded.

"Struggle!" Her brother called the word with another hammer-blow of conviction.

"And that is what it has to be," Yari said. "You know me, free ones. You know I will fight until my bitter end, that I will endure anything, until there is not one unbroken link of the chains of suffering."

"Struggle!" Bar said again, this time as a promise and an exhortation. The anxious shifting in the group died down and determination settled in.

Tali felt it burning in her own heart. No one in Dhuldarim had ever believed in anything with the white-hot conviction that the enslaved in the Deep dreamed of freedom.

She heard it in Yari most of all, passionate and devoted. It was there in every fiber of the deep dwarf's being, a yearning to be free. Yari surveyed her band with a few clicks before continuing, "When you think of the rending of the claws, of the bite of the whip, remember the taste of your brother's tears, the course of your sister's blood running down her back. We are one, and so long as any part remains in chains, we are all in chains. So what do we have to do?"

This time, the answer came as a chorus. "Struggle!"

"To Kuldath!" Bar called, his words opening the gateway to channel their energy forward.

Yari jumped down from her perch to go back to walking beside Tali. "They'll be calm as stone now."

"You have a way with words." Tali beamed, grateful that her own understanding of their dwarven dialect was now to where she understood basically everything. The accents were quickly becoming familiar, even after only weeks.

The female deep dwarf made an embarrassed sound in her throat and tilted her head down. "I just prod them along. That's all."

"I'd follow you into anything after a speech like that."