บท 5: Confinement room
A knock on the door interrupted the Warden before he could threaten her with more words and actions, "What?" he barked at the door when another knock was heard from the other side of the room.
As strong as she tried to be, Penny was scared for her dear chastity. She knew the disadvantages she held at the moment. She was now a girl who was part of this illegal-legal trade of the slave establishment. Not to forget a human compared to this vampire who pulled the back of her hair painfully making her flinch but she didn't dare to move this time. She had hoped for him to stumble back when she had struck him not once but twice but that put her in further trouble.
"Mr. Gibbs has arrived to speak to you," the guardsman relayed the message. Before Penny could start counting and praying her lucky stars for whoever interrupted this Warden's time with her, the Warden replied,
"Tell him I am busy," the Warden must have been part of the lower vampires as she had heard that only the pureblooded vampires also known as the elites of their society possessed dark, red-blooded eyes.
"He says that it is urgent. He's come from the council," answered the guard who was adamant to leave the front door of the room they were in. The Warden pushed her away from him with a tch sound. Straightening his uniform jacked, she saw him open the door and step outside, "Put her in the confinement room. I will deal with her later."
Confinement room?
It didn't take long for her to know what it was as she was led to another floor which had hardly any light in here. The corridor was dark and if it weren't for the lantern the guardsman held in his hand, she was sure she would be lost in here forever. Her hands had been bound as the man dragged her behind him as he led the way.
As Penny walked behind him, she took note of the many empty cells at the beginning before she caught on to see two of them being occupied. A man and a woman who were bound and put inside the cell. If she thought the cell room she had previously been in was bad then this was worse. There was a strange stench that came from the rusted cell rooms which were small.
Once they reached the end of the corridor, the guardsman pulled the ropes hard and pushed her inside the empty cell before locking her up. At this point in time, she had decided it was for the best to not test any of the guardsmen in here anymore or the Warden. She could still feel the fearful shivers running down her spine which didn't sit well in her mind.
The cell was locked and the guardsman went away leaving her alone with the other two people who were locked in their own confinement cells. It seemed that the people who ran this establishment wanted her to reflect on what she had done as there was nothing else to do here in the pitch darkness but she didn't know what there was to reflect? Thankfully, she had taken a glimpse of the small cell before the light had disappeared.
She had been lucky compared to the rest of the slaves who entered this part of the world. Slaves were treated like dirt. The Warden was there to make sure they obeyed so that the slaves wouldn't misbehave with their future owners but then there were some traders, who enjoyed slaves like those. Some were killed, some violated, some who broke their spirit by the time they were sold and some like her cellmate, who just didn't care what happened.
The first one hour, Penny sat down on the ground, covering her nose as she could barely continue to inhale the repulsive smell. Bored, she slept for the next hour but when she woke up she was greeted back by the darkness. She didn't know how much time had passed in here and the more time she spent here, the more her mind started to get depressed.
She then came to understand it wasn't just about reflecting upon what she had done. The confinement rooms were a place where one was not allowed to speak or hear or see anything. They were cut off from the outside world as punishment.
Not knowing when she would be let out, she shouted, "Hello! Is anyone there?" and she received nothing but silence, "Hello!"
Shouting to speak to the people in there seemed to be useless and she continued to sit idly in the cell room. The privilege to eat or drink was taken away such that she spent two days in the confinement room. As it was her first time, she was let out on the third day. Another guardsman pulled her back to the cell she was assigned to.
The light was harsh on her eyes making the young girl flinch her eyes as she walked through the corridors. As she passed some of the cells she could hear snickers coming out from girls at her plight.
"That's what happens when you decide to be a prude," she heard one of the girl comment while the other said,
"Isn't she the new one? They never know how to behave. Do you think she would have cried?"
"I bet she has, look at those eyes and the way she walks..." the first one tried to whisper. Penny didn't know why they were trying to whisper when she could hear them quite well, "Warden Clayton must have fucked her already.
The guardsman didn't react to it as if he were deaf and the young girl had drained too much energy to speak. She didn't want to go back there when it had been only a few minutes since she had stepped out of the confinement room. Her body felt weak with the pain. The two days she had spent there alone with no one to speak to, it had slowly started to make her mind go numb and tired. Alone. The loneliness wasn't as worse as she had felt when her mother had passed away but she could feel the emptiness that surrounded her.
When they reached her cell, Penny's eyes fell on the woman named Caitlin who looked at her with a blank expression. The guardsman opened the iron door with a creak and she stepped inside like a docile person.
"I told you to keep your head low," said the woman from where she sat, "Are you alright?" she asked when she noticed Penny limp.
"I did. You didn't tell me I was supposed to strip," the young girl frowned, going to the other side, she slid down to sit on the floor. The air that she breathed now felt like bliss compared to what she had been inhaling in the darkroom she came from.
The woman chuckled, "Did you think you were going to a tea party? It is a slave establishment, Penny. Stripping here is not a big deal. You aren't part of the outside world which you once had. That is in the past and you need to realize this is what your fate is right now," the woman could see how the girl was having a hard time accepting this fact. Escaping was good until one would get caught and punished severely, "All you had to do was listen to the guardsman without a thought to save yourself."
It took Penny a few seconds to dawn what the woman actually meant. She shook her head, "I have saved myself," she whispered the last two words.
Her cellmate raised her brow in curiosity, "What is with the limping then?"
The young girl smiled and her expression turned sour. She raised her right leg which was bare for the woman to see blood smeared at the bottom, "I stepped on a nail in there."
While Penny had spent her time in the confinement room, she had walked around the little room to waste time before stepping one foot on the sharp nail making her yelp and cry in pain. She had hoped to find something to kill time with but this was not what she had been wishing for. It had taken her hours to pull out the sharp object.
She had cried, cried to the point where her eyes had turned small and red as if the bees had stung her eyes. Though Penny knew the truth, the other slaves who had seen the girl rebel assumed that she had been punished like the others who didn't know their place here. After all, it wasn't uncommon for the slaves to be treated in such a manner.
"You are lucky to have escaped his clutches."
"The Warden's?" asked Penny.
"Yes."
"I have something to ask," said the young girl looking at the woman, "Have you ever been to the confinement room?"
"Yes."
"Why does it smell so bad?" she continued to question remembering the awful smell she could barely breathe in. It wasn't the body waste but something else she wasn't aware of. The woman didn't answer her right away. A guardsman came to pass by their cell with a slave being pulled behind him. The girl wore fresh clothes, unlike other slaves which meant she was new, "How many are brought in here in a day?"
"Five to six. Sometimes it goes up to ten," the woman skipped the previous question and answered the second one.
"Do they have room for every one of them?" by what she saw, each cell held two slaves and she doubted that she saw any cell on her way back here which was vacant. Having been stuck in the confinement room, she hadn't found the opportunity to look too far on how the establishment looked like. Until now what she had seen was only a glimpse.
"Slave trades happen once a week and customers are never short when it comes to buying them. Slaves are sold like items in the market. To be more specific the black market," the woman explained, "Every two slaves that get sold one gets replaced in here. To your previous question, the stench you smell of are of the dead bodies that are sometimes piled up in there before getting disposed of," Penny looked taken aback by this.
The woman didn't look like she was joking, "D-dead bodies?"
"The slave establishment is a shady place to be in. Did you think they only keep us here without doing anything, to sell us out quickly?" but that was what Penny had thought, "The dead bodies are of the slaves and very rarely of the guardsmen. Slaves sometimes take their lives unable to live with the thought of being branded and sold to another person. And sometimes, they are killed."
"Why?"
Caitlin shrugged her shoulders, "It can be plenty of reasons but I assume it might be when a slave is particularly volatile in the head or when the men here drink the blood to the very last drop. I don't know," Penny didn't know what to say to this, "That is why I said you turned out to be just lucky. The Warden has killed a greater number of people than you can imagine."
"And no one says anything?"
"What will you say? More importantly to whom? This place was built way before the law was brought up in the four lands. It is run by the higher society, the elite as they call themselves to be," the woman scoffed, rolling her eyes, "Those night creatures and the humans with money run this shit hole. They need slaves to do their bidding be it blood, sex or for abuse. I heard a man raise his voice once, hoping the council would do something which was years ago. The next day he was found dead in his home. Such is the world that we live in. If you go shouting and trying to catch attention, I can guarantee you that you won't be here with me but somewhere screaming as one of the guards..." she didn't complete her sentence, turning her head away, the woman looked up at the sky through the window.
After hearing this, the slave establishment appeared much darker than it was before.
"Is there no way out of this?"
"The next auction of the slaves will take place in the next six days. What you can hope for is to land yourself a decent master or mistress to look after you. That Penny is the easiest way out unless you are ready to torture yourself down in the dungeons."
The blonde girl furrowed her brows, "Could I ask you for a favor?"
"Depends."
"Will you walk with me outside?" If she was planning to escape, she had to know where and what about the establishment before she would be sold out in the black market. Six days. Was it enough to be able to plan out for an escape? asked Penny to herself, only time could answer her. She would either be free or she would be caught before hell would descend down on her life.
"I can do that," agreed the woman and she was thankful for it.
Both the women left their cell room on the account that they had work and when they did reach the ground level, Penny came to realize that her plan to escape was far away from reality. The slave establishment was built within the tall walls that surrounded it. No one could climb those walls that were high and flat. And even if one knew how to climb these tall walls, there was a possibility that halfway through they would be sighted and caught by more than two guards. Each corner and about, a guardsman stood guarding the perimeter.
"Don't look at them," the woman warned and this time she readily listened not wanting to go through another punishment, "Come, I will show you something else," she heard the woman say to turn and walk back.
Penny walked with her until she heard a series of screams coming from the right side that looked like a cave, "What is this?" she asked the woman who accompanied her.
"Let's keep walking," Penny couldn't stop looking at it but finally tearing away her gaze from the cave she heard the woman say, "Every slave in this establishment gets branded just like the cows and horses to make sure if they find a stranded slave who has run away, it would be easy to bring them back to where they belong. Take my advice and don't try to escape."
"You are asking me to be part of something I don't want to be," Penny frowned.
"Impulsive girl, nobody wants to be part of it. I say this for your own good," the woman smiled coyly at a guard who stood there with a smirk.
"You are friends with the guards?"
"Friends is a broad term and I wouldn't use it. I give them what they need and take the favors I need," she didn't bother to ask what those favors were as it wasn't hard to know, "If you get caught, Penny. You will be branded just like any of them right now."
Penny stopped the woman, halting both their footsteps to ask, "What says I won't be if I don't try escaping?"
"Slaves are usually marked on the first or second day of them entering the slave establishment. To your fortune, they haven't caught you yet. If you get caught, it won't be just branding your skin but you will have worse than the confinement room to be in but, if you can get onto the list of slaves that are going to be sold. You can escape once you are outside. There will be no one to catch you," now this perked Penny's ears.
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