Project Empress 024

 Chapter 6

Child of Iron; Child of Steel

Cara woke up to pain and twilight. Her head was experimenting with different approximations to the Platonic ideal of pain. Her mouth and nose were dry and burning, while here arms were a half numb, half sore bundle in front of her. She tried to lift a hand. It didn’t move, instead it sent jolts of stabbing pain up her consciousness to keep her headache some company. Cara blinked, trying to focus her blurred sight at the traitors she once called her hands. They were neatly tied together at the wrists, the rope wrapped up her forearms until it reached her elbows. As she eyed her hands, tried moving them together. Her arms jerked up. She almost punched herself in the face. She evaded her attack by jerking her face away, which sent a new dazzling display of a firework of pain through her head. She groaned. Cara considered letting herself fall to one side, to curl up into a fetal position in the hope that unconsciousness or at least sleep would take her into their merciful arms, but decided against it. Even small movements, minor things like breathing and the mere act of existing brought her a rich buffet of pain. She didn’t want to know what would happen if she had to absorb the impact of tipping over. 

‘Where am I anyway…?’, Cara thought. She should be on board the Ruhig Blut. She was pretty sure that she had been fighting pirates. She remembered sending a pirate flying over the ships railing and smashing another one in the face…

Cara smiled as she remembered her successes in actual combat against real opponents. Her smile considered Cara’s situation and left in disgust. In its stead the pain flooded into the space it had left.

“Ow…”, Cara said. Saying that hurt. She followed it by an exploratory groan. That seemed to work so she groaned some more. It didn’t help much with the pain, but just hearing something and being able to moan about her situation did help to lift her mood just far enough out of the muck that she could start to focus on her situation.

Her body was one angry ball of cramps, crowned by a blazing beacon of pain that used to be her head. Her head, that was bound to be the pirate that had struck her down. The rest of her body seemed to be loudly protesting the weird half sitting half squatting position she was in. Which in turn she was forced to remain in, because she found herself inside a smallish cage. There wasn’t much room above her, so she could not stand up. In front of her was not enough room to stretch out her legs very far. She could fall to her side after all… To her right was enough space to fall and stretch out a bit. He legs didn’t seem to be bound… Strange. But then that would have made it harder to put her in the cage for whoever had done that, Cara assumed. The cage itself was inside some kind of storage room. She could see a narrow corridor in front of her, large crates on the other side. Two more empty cages to her immediate right and some kind of crate to her left.

‘Ah well, the firework of pain it is then’, Cara thought to herself and let herself fall over to the right. She did not fall very far when she learned that she had also rope around her neck biding her to the bars of the cage behind her. Gasping, shocked by new yet unexpected pain she struggled to get back to her original position, screaming while keeping her mouth as immobile as possible, producing a high pitched keening in the process.

“Holy shit, could you be any louder?”, a female voice hissed from behind the create to the left.

“Eh…?”, Cara croaked.

“You are making too much noise. Continue like that and someone will come. Probably to make you shut up…”, the voice said.

“Who are…”, Cara was about to ask.

“Shhh…”, it hissed from beyond the create. “Fuck. Me. Here we go…”

As Cara was still trying to find out what the voice meant by that she noticed that a metal door was being opened to her far right. The heavy door swung open and heavy steps moved towards her. Tough work boots, out of which grew equally heavy duty trouser legs, appeared in her field of view. 

A great full beard appeared from above, behind which a male face was hidden who measured her up from behind his beardy camouflage. 

“Are you awake then?”, the face behind the beard said in a voice a bit higher than expected.

Cara nodded very carefully. 

“Are you thirsty?”

Cara nodded. 

“Hungry?”

Cara was hungry but the though of moving her mouth at all filled her with horror so she decided to shake her head instead.

“Right. Wait here”, the man behind the beard said, his tone of voice not betraying an kind of sarcasm. 

It took Cara a while to get the irony of the beard-mans statement. “Heh…”, Cara laughed unhappily. Shortly after the man appeared again. He had a decent sized wooden bowl in his hand. He turned it so that it would fit through the bars and placed it close to Cara, he then reached through the bars and poured water into it out of a large water bag. 

“Drink. There’ll be food in about an hour. I’ll come back then and see if you are hungry then OK?”

Cara nodded.

“Good girl”, the beard hiding a man said smiling and left. The echos of the heavy metal door falling shut again had already faded away, when Cara had managed to get the bowl close to her face. She somehow had managed to not spill much of the water on the way and carefully began to drink. The moment the water touched her lips she realised how thirsty she was and started to gulp down the water.

“Can you maybe drink without making so much disgusting noise?”, the voice behind the crate asked.

“Could you please stop being so rude?”, Cara said.

“Sorry”, the voice said. “I’m a bit on edge. My plans have just been put in major jeopardy.”

“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that… ouch…”, Cara said. “What happened?”

“You happened”, the voice said. Cara could hear the pouting in the voice.

“You are very rude”, Cara said. “No wonder they put you in a cage.”

The voice snorted. “I’m not in a cage.”

“No? Are you in a barrel then?”, Cara asked.

“Nope. I am in a crate.”

“That’s a weird place to put a prisoner… but then you are a very unpleasant person”, Cara said, slowly finding the perfect way to speak without making her head explode more than it already had.

“I’m not a prisoner, you potato. I am a stowaway.”

“Oh…!” Cara said. And having forgotten her rules of pain reducing talking, she added a quick “arrrrgh…” to that.

“’Arrrgh’, indeed”, the voice from the crate said. “It was smooth sailing up to here and I was going to make my exit soon, with none of the idiots out there being the wiser. But then you appear all damsely and distressed.”

“Oh”, Cara said, more careful this time. “So if I am the innocent princess, kidnapped by pirates… does that mean you’ll be the knight in shining armour that’s going to save me?”

Somehow Cara could feel that her invisible companion was rolling her eyes.

“Ranger”, the voice said.

“Huh?”

“I’m not a knight. But I’m a ranger. No shining armour. Mostly reinforced aramid fiber and some cleverly placed metal plates. Also, in a really bad mood, because you, miss damsel are a fucking liability. But I can’t very well leave you here…”

“You are far to rude to be a knight”, Cara said. “Also I’m not a liability. I can fight.”

“Oh really, is that the reason why you ended up inside that cage?”

“I beat two pirates before one snuck up on me, that wasn’t sportsman like.”

“Oh no, we should write a strongly worded letter to the pirate guild.”

“We can do that?”, Cara asked.

There was a short pause… a few existential breaths being taken and exhaled again.

“No, damsel. There is no pirate guild. And even if there was one, they would certainly not take letters from their prisoners and stowaways, seriously…”

“Makes sense…”, Cara said thinking about it.

“So… you can fight?”

“Yes”, Cara said.

“What do you do? Self defence?”, the voice asked.

“No… well… yes…”, Cara said, she felt another roll of the eyes incoming, “Everyone learns self-defence in Monasteria. But I am also trained”, ‘a very tiny bit’, she added in her mind, “in the historical martial style of Liechtenauer. The old style.”

“Look at at… the damsel does have teeth in the most unexpected places.”

“Ewww…”, Cara said shuddering.

She heard movement from her left, some rumbling a few muffled bumps as things were shuffled around. Then from above a figure dropped down from above her cage. It was a small, woman who held a veritable bouquet of weapons in her arms.

“I am Elisa Klein Cunningham, I am a solin-ger, a forge-walker and I’m going to get you out of here.”