DF211 - Wake Me Up Before You Go Go (Elara) (Patreon)

Elara would have woken with a start, but she couldn’t move. She panicked, but only in her head.

“Don’t freak out, your Highness, it’s just temporary.”

The voice was familiar. Elara wanted to demand answers from her, but her voice was stolen along with everything else.

Caris? What’s going on? Are we in danger?

It wasn’t out of the question that the Tiatians could have attacked the town. Getting her out now might be an urgent necessity, but would Lord Nos… Anton have sent this woman?

Caris—if it was her, it was too dark to be sure—ignored Elara’s unspoken questions and chose instead to efficiently strip the bed of its blankets and tie Elara hand and foot. Elara was unable to resist. Her limbs and voice refused to obey her.

She’d heard of this, she realised. Caris was a Thieftaker, and some of them had Traits that let them capture criminals without injury. She burned with the indignity of having such a Trait used on her, but that was all she could do.

Caris held a small bottle to Elara’s lips, and a single drop of some acrid liquid entered her mouth. Elara tried to spit it out as the bitter taste filled her mouth. Her throat started to itch as the liquid made its way down.

“Don’t worry, it’s not going to kill you,” Caris murmured. “It’s best applied when you’re paralysed, you can’t try to choke it out.”

Elara wanted to cough up whatever the liquid was, but she couldn’t. The only thing she could do was breathe. Ironically, just as the taste was beginning to fade, she could feel the paralysis starting to lift. She was still bound, so all she could manage was a frustrated wiggle, but she could cough.

Silently.

“Oil of Silencing,” Caris explained, as Elara coughed, then screamed, all in perfect silence. “Not recommended for internal use, but I’ve used it plenty of times.”

She frowned. “A gag isn’t going to cut it, not with all the sharp ears about. At least the elf is out of the castle. Do you think she’s the one Zaphar is sleeping with?”

Elara wasn’t able to respond, of course, but she tried to make her glare suitably withering.

“Yeah, don’t answer that,” Caris muttered, redundantly. “Time to go.”

She hefted Elara easily on one shoulder and made for the door.

Go where? Elara wondered, but she could only wonder silently. She struggled, but Caris was much too strong to be bothered. Strength progressions were common in enforcement Classes.

Where are you taking me? Who paid you? Elara demanded, but only in her head.

Caris carefully stepped over a body, and Elara belatedly remembered that there had been a guard at her door. He didn’t look injured, just unconscious, but she was unable to get a good look as she passed by.

Did she do that to all the guards? Elara wondered. Anton had cut back on the guards in the castle, as they were needed on the wall, but there were still a respectable number of them covering the roof, the stairwells and the outside doors. However, Caris wasn’t headed to the stairs. She stopped at a door on the same level as Elara’s room. Opening it, she carefully maneuvered Elara inside.

“Take a seat,” Caris said, dumping Elara into a comfortably padded chair with armrests. Elara looked around, confused. This was… Lord Nos’s study? It was a study, certainly, and it seemed too fine for his chamberlain to write out his correspondence in.

Caris left Elara to her own devices for a moment and went straight for the cabinet at the back of the room. Elara wondered what she should do. She could, perhaps, manage to wiggle out of this chair. Falling to the ground would make noise that might be overheard. It would hurt, though.

Elara was steeling herself to go through with it anyway when Caris turned back.

“Ideally,” she said softly. “You’d agree to cooperate so I could untie you and you could climb down under your own power.”

Climb down what? Elara wondered. Not that it mattered. She did agree it would be ideal to be untied, but it wasn’t like she could reply.

“Yeah,” Caris sighed, apparently reading something in Elara’s angry glare. “At least a port town has plenty of rope.”

Getting lowered down a secret shaft like a leg of ham being moved into a cellar might well be the most humiliating experience of Elara’s life. She wondered if Caris could have found a burlap sack to put over her head and make the mortification complete.

She couldn’t even stand when her feet reached the ground. Bound as she was, all that she could do was slowly topple over as Caris continued to gently lower her. By the time Caris made it to the bottom, Elara had been lying on the cold, slightly damp, stone floor for what felt like an age.

Ignoring Elara’s discomfort, Caris detached the rope from her and let it slide back up the shaft to the upper rung of the ladder, where she had looped it around. It only took a few more tugs for the entire length to drop down to the ground.

Caris picked the rope up and wrapped it in a coil.

“We’ll probably need it later,” she told Elara. “Never waste a good rope.”

Elara had no comment. The stone was cold through her thin bedclothes, and she wondered if she would be catching a chill.

She also wondered if she would be permitted to walk now. She wasn’t looking forward to putting her bare feet on cold stone, but it would be better than being tied up. Unfortunately, it was not to be. Caris put the rope over one shoulder and hoisted Elara on the other.

“This tunnel is how I got into the castle,” Caris said, answering one of Elara’s unasked questions. “It’s supposed to be a secret, but I know a few tricks for ferreting those out. There’s an entrance right in town, if you can believe it.”

As it happened, the placement of secret passageways and doors was a common conversation topic among Zamarran nobles, and Elara was well-prepared to talk about it. There were as many opinions about the subject as there were nobles, but very few nobles were willing to admit that they had acted according to the positions they espoused. The only people who could be trusted to speak honestly about the subject were those who had no power to construct such things.

The fact that there was no acknowledged best practice made for a discussion where there was no argument for authority. Only skilled oratory and logic could carry the day. The sort of topic where an educated and intelligent princess could make her mark and impress those around her.

Or she could stay silently fuming as she was carried along like a roasted suckling pig to wherever her fate lay.

Caris walked on, uncaring of Elara’s plight. Their way was lit by a glowstone she had taken from Lord Nos’s study. They passed a gate, but Caris barely gave it a second look. The stonework was more elaborate than the hewn rock of the tunnel, featuring carved stone blocks and decorative ivy carvings.

“That’s a second entrance to the dungeon, if you can believe it,” Caris said as they passed.

Elara shivered. She’d been raised to think of dungeons as uncaring natural features that spawned monsters and killed men indiscriminately. Since she’d met the dungeon that this gate led to, she had only become more confused.

Kelsey wasn’t uncaring by any means. Elara wasn’t sure if that made the murder worse or not. Did it mean that there was a possibility of help? Elara stared at the gate as it receded into darkness. Dungeons could send monsters out, it was known. Exactly why, and under what conditions they could do so… was less known.

The gate remained closed, though, and vanished into the darkness behind them. Caris kept on, until Elara could hear the sound of waves and smell salt in the air.

So, it’s the Tiatians then, she speculated.

“This is where it gets tricky,” Caris said. She put Elara down to do… something to the gate, Elara couldn’t see. Whatever it was, it caused the gate to open. Caris carried Elara through, allowing the gate to swing closed behind them.

Then they were walking towards daylight and the crash of waves against the cliffs. Caris tucked her lightstone away and shielded her eyes against the bright sun. Elara didn’t get to do that, of course, but she slitted her eyelids until the brightness faded.

They came out only a few feet above the waterline. The sea wasn’t particularly heavy today, but the light waves crashed against the cliff with enthusiasm, sending up a spray of salt water that soaked the pair.

Elara looked for the boat that would take them away and hand her over to the Tiaitians, but she couldn’t see it. All the ships she could see were too far out to sea.

“Yeah, I bet you thought we were taking a ship, right?” Caris said. “This was an old smuggler’s route, after all. But there’s also a path that gets you out of town unnoticed.”

She pointed.

Elara stared. What Caris was pointing at wasn’t a path at all. It was a few footholds carved out of the rock, a barely visible line that one could follow. Or try to, if they didn’t mind being dashed from the rocks by a wave, or slipping from an algae-encrusted outcropping. It was barely concealed suicide for someone without climbing traits, and Elara had her hands and feet tied.

She still couldn’t make a sound. She could scream as much as she liked, but the oil coating her mouth and throat would not allow her to speak.

“Yeah, yeah, don’t worry. I’m not going to let my paycheck die,” Caris said. She was cutting the rope into shorter lengths. “I can make the climb, even if you’re tied to my back. The important thing is that you avoid struggling.”

Elara glared at her captor. She most certainly would struggle! There was no way she was going quietly—easily along with this so-called plan.

Caris shrugged and hefted the first piece of rope.

“Suit yourself,” she said. “I think you’ll change your mind once you’re firmly attached, though. It would be a shame if we both die.”

Elara struggled as much as she could, but Caris was both too strong and too skilled at exactly this sort of thing. Oh, and Elara was trussed like a prize turkey, which didn’t exactly help. It took Caris almost no effort to secure Elara to Caris’s back. Caris seemed used to the weight, twisting from side to side to see if there was any shifting of her load.

It was embarrassing, but Elara didn’t have any choice. She could move her legs to shift her weight, but all that would accomplish would be to drown them both. And as much as she wanted to drown Caris, Elara wanted to live.

She still screamed as Caris took them across the cliff. She couldn’t stop herself; the sea was surging just below, and there was nothing she could do to stop her fall. She was entirely reliant on her captor. So she screamed.

She was the only one who could tell. No matter how much air she forced out of her lungs, there was only silence. Every jerk as Caris took a new step, every lurch from a slipped misstep, Elara screamed in silence.

She didn’t realise when they got to the end. Her eyes had been screwed shut for a while. It was only when Caris cut the rope and Elara fell to the ground that Elara knew she was done.

It was soft ground. Earth, with some grass. Elara opened her eyes to see trees above her.

“Right,” Caris said brightly. “Let’s see about getting paid, shall we?”