Escape Attempt (Ch3 – Part 1)

On that day, Vermon rode his horse across the roads of Ashtrem, heading for home without stopping.

Orb, walking behind him, finally collapsed to the ground, unconscious. Foreseeing that, Vermon immediately stopped his horse and got off.

When he carried Orb, he could hear his heaving chest. Again, with this annoying shortness of breath.

Furthermore, his clothes were wet due to his heavy sweating and bleeding. Vermon put him on his horse’s back and climbed behind him again.

He was not worried about the possibility of being infected by the plague while dealing directly with Orb, who did not completely recover.

After all, the descendants of Uthus[1] had been blessed with immunity to plagues, allowing them to deal directly with the infected without fear of infection.

However, he was so annoyed by the fact that he and his slave drew the attention of passersby that day.

Orb’s behavior has left him in a sour mood as the former refrained from complaining, expressing his pain, asking his master for help, or requesting rest.

When Vermon reached his spacious house, two servants greeted him in the front courtyard. He left Orb on horseback and spoke to them.

“Take him to the isolation room. Give him no food or water until I say otherwise,” when the two of them pulled Orb down, Vermon stared at him and coldly added, “Remove his bandages and burn his clothes.”

Orb had regained consciousness by then. His eyes were hidden by the strewn, damp hair over his face.

Startling everyone, Orb shouted as he pushed the two servants behind him and darted toward Vermon with the little blade he had stolen earlier.

Orb directed a stab at Vermon’s face, but the strong Arkosian man blocked it with his hand and pushed Orb’s hand away.

Vermon’s other hand grabbed Orb’s and twisted it in a flash until he dropped the blade. He violently punched Orb’s face with his injured hand, sending him to the ground unconscious for the second time.

Orb’s limbs rested on the ground in utter defeat except for his hand, which Vermon held with force.

“As you have seen, he is ferocious and deceitful. Tie him up and leave him in a bare corner. Make sure there are no tools around him or furniture. I’ll deal with him later,” he coldly spoke to the terrified servants.

He shoved Orb’s body out of his way and left it lying on the front courtyard like a filthy, abandoned puppet, then crossed the yard quietly and slowly despite the great fury raging in his chest.

* * *

Vermon pondered why Orb was so rebellious and angry after everything he had done for him since he brought him from the Empamalangon Kingdom. The young man’s resistance was terrifying and exhausting; neither intimidation nor violence crushed it.

Vermon had never brought home a slave who drained him of all his energy and occupied his mind to the point where he felt an urgent desire to talk to his friend, the Crown Prince, about him.

When Vermon entered his private chamber to treat his injury, he sat down before a low table, took out a transparent liquid and a roller gauze from a hidden drawer, and began to disinfect the wound, which was so deep that it required stitching.

He then sent for his physician, Luba[2], who came to visit him without delay. The old physician sat down on the ground before Vermon, silently wondering why Vermon had not cured his injury using his Uthusian energy.

When the physician had finished disinfecting and stitching the wound, he was not worried about Vermon’s condition due to his perfect health and strong build; however, he could not help but wonder, “We are sons of Uthus, our wounds can heal using our inner energy. Why did you summon me to treat your wound in such a primitive way?”

“I wanted to experience what it’s like to have a wound that doesn’t heal quickly,” Vermon replied, fixing his eyes on the cotton balls stained with his blood.

At that moment, he saw, in his mind, Orb lying on the ground of the fountain square where he was brutally lashed, the blood-stained shirt, the torn flesh, and his frail body sweating all over while stifling grunts of pain.

The thought of it all made him so irritated.

“Really?” The physician asked in disbelief, “You did not want to use your inner energy and preferred to stitch your open wound?”

“Yes.”

Old Luba raised his eyebrow, examining Vermon’s features with his big eyes, and probed, “Didn’t you summon me because your new slave needed my help?—as always?”

“Ah! I see my foolish servants wasted no time in informing you I acquired a new one.”

Vermon narrowed his eyes, and a smirk tugged at the corners of his mouth, subconsciously rolling his injured hand into a fist.

Vermon then raised his head and fixed his bright eyes on the face of the physician.

“Rest assured, my lord—I won’t interfere. If you don’t want me to see him, I won’t,” Luba nervously grinned.

“Then, leave my house at once, old Luba!” Vermon replied. Though the smirk on his mouth grew threatening, he was still unwilling to kill his old physician.

* * *

The sun had set when Vermon went to the isolation room, a standalone room in the back of the main courtyard, secluded by a small front yard with a door separating it from the main house.

The bare room was three meters high and four meters wide, with a lamp hanging from its wooden ceiling, a window opposite the door, and a cold wooden floor. The rest of the space lacked furniture that might provide comfort and warmth.

Vermon used this room for years to discipline his servants and slaves. For that reason, he added a one a single wooden pillar to which a whip and ropes were attached to tie the slaves and lash them.

When he entered, one of the two servants met him while he carried Orb’s blood-stained clothes, old bloody bandages, and large mud-stained shoes.

“I instructed you to burn his clothes a while ago. Why is there a delay?”

“We resorted to using sleeping incense sticks, — master, and waited for it to take effect— to make him sleep;” trembling in fear, the servant added, “he was resisting us—ferociously, master.”

Vermon stared at Orb for some time.

The young man was lying on the ground, on his right side, with his back to the door, his hands and feet bound with ropes resting on each other.

His sweat-drenched hair hid his face; however, his still subdued body and the sight of his scarred feet would have been distressing to anyone who saw him.

Although the servant had given Orb a new white shirt, new blood stains had formed on it. When Vermon noticed this, he stood behind Orb and lifted the edge of his shirt with the pointed tip of a thin cane he had brought with him.

Vermon saw the marks of his brutal lashes on Orb’s back, crisscrossed blazing red lines, some of them torn, inflamed, and still bleeding.

However, he did not want to help him, and thought that if Orb remained that way for a while, he would learn a tough lesson through suffering and pain. He would become obedient and submissive to his master without any form of resistance.

“Don’t stop burning the incense sticks,” Vermon suspected that the exposure to the incense smoke would irritate Orb’s stiff lungs as the wheezing sound did not stop. Yet, he chose to disregard that intentionally.

“Let him be like this until I decide what to do with him,” he ordered.

The servants took turns watching Orb and burning incense sticks. Those incense sticks failed to put Orb to sleep completely.

However, they made him feel drowsy and numb enough in his limbs to weigh him down and weaken his resistance to the servants’ attempts to give him doses of anti-plague medicine and frequently change his clothes.

* * *

They continued this way by orders of Vermon until the third day, when he came to the isolation room and bent on one knee behind Orb to untie him.

Vermon silently smiled while looking at the sleeping young man as if he was promising himself some entertainment out of his deed.

Before leaving the room, Vermon ordered his servants to stop burning the incense sticks, making them wonder what their master was thinking.

That night, Orb sat straight after ensuring no one would enter the room. His body was stiff from lying down for a long time, and his sore and pus-filled feet hurt him when he stood and tried to walk.

He felt very dizzy because of his hunger, as he had not eaten anything for days except for the medicine that burned his empty stomach.

When Orb felt his way in the dark, with his left eye tracing the source of light emanating from the window, he found the thin cane that Vermon had left him resting against the wall next to the window.

Taking the cane in his hand, Orb stood in front of the window and considered escaping from the empire and that sadistic man who seemed to enjoy insulting and torturing him so much. He also wanted to escape to find a solution to his problematic seal, which marked his enslavement. And so, he was desperately willing to nullify its effect.

He quietly opened the window and jumped with difficulty even with the window being a bit low on the wall.

In the yard, Orb encountered another difficulty. Despite the great height of the outer wall surrounding the house, he had no choice but to try to climb and jump over it.

He found an old wooden ladder placed on the side of the wall. Aren’t they sloppy about locking windows and leaving a ladder here to help me escape? Orb had his suspicions but chose to disregard them and go on with his decision to escape.

When he raised the ladder cautiously and began to climb it, he experienced discomfort due to the increasing pressure on his feet.

Orb reached the highest point of the ladder and began to examine the other side of the wall very closely.

It was almost impossible to see with one blurry eye in the dark, and he did not know what the ground surface below him looked like at that height.

Unfortunately, he could not use his energy as before due to his fatigue and poor health. So, he mustered up the courage to jump from the edge of the wall to the ground surface.

His feet rested on a grassy surface, but his pain was too great that a whimper slipped from his mouth, and tiny water droplets rimmed his pale eyes.

The soles of Orb’s feet were groggy and bloody. He cursed Vermon for removing his bandages and began to limp along, alternating between attempts to hasten his pace and moments of slowing down.

Orb managed to walk tens of meters from the main house but suspected two people were following him.

Not wanting to worry himself with useless thoughts, he reduced them to mere fantasies, attributing them to his intense hunger and the effect of the incense sticks he inhaled for a long time.

This was until he heard someone’s foot kicking small pebbles on the ground in his direction.

* * *