"Master! Come quickly!"
I jerked awake. I was inside my tent with the lovely Lena by my side, her throat chained to a stake I had rammed into the ground. Amber was at the tent entrance, her body tense with alarm.
"What is it, Slave?" I try to blinked the sleep from my eyes. Lena kissed my shoulder and reached over to fondle my testicles.
"It is Master Fogrim!" Said Amber, breaking into English. "I think he is about to kill one of his slaves!"
I shoved Lena aside, pulled on my pants, and exited the tent.
Outside was a small campfire we had built in the wee hours of the morning: only then had we felt safe stopping. The slaves lay on the ground in a row, sleeping. Except for Haley and Amber who I felt were too smart to run away in a forest where alien intelligences may have been hunting us, all the other slaves lay on the ground, hogtied. Haley slept curled up by the entrance to my tent like a puppy kept outdoors for the night. Fogrim’s tent was open; I could see neither he nor his Shang pet Yura, inside.
"This way, Master," Amber beckoned.
I followed.
I found Fogrim 50 feet away, standing in front of a tree sapling. Yura knelt with her back against it, tugging at the chains that held her wrists and ankles. Another chain secured her throat to the sapling. She whimpered and cried out in her tribal language, tears streaming down her face. Fogrim, his chest and face covered in ash markings, ignored her as he rubbed all of oil over her naked body.
Beside him on one side was an obsidian-bladed ritual knife. On the other was a wooden statue of a devouring mouth surrounded by tentacles: the God Yog.
"Fogrim! What are you doing?"
There is still time," he did not look up as he oiled Yura’s throat and cheeks, "to seek the protection of the Great God Yog."
"Fuck no you won't!" I stepped forward. "You are not killing her!"
His hands became fists and he gave me a sharp look.
"I have no time," he said through clenched teeth, "for your heathen madness!"
"I am not letting you murder her."
He turned back to preparing his slave.
"Hey! Hey!"
I walked up to him and grabbed his shoulder.
Fogrim turned and punched me right in the face.
Note that I am not proud of what happened next.
I punched him back right in the jaw. He snarled and rose, grabbing at my arms.
We grappled. Fogrim drew his huge fist back and started punching me in the head, again and again. I split his lip open and kneed him hard in the gut. He groaned and leaned into me, and tried to sweep my leg. I locked my arm around his neck and yanked him off his feet.
We went down on the ground like a pair of drunks. The only sounds were our grunting and Yura’s screams.
I felt something pushing into my side. There was a loud crack and it gave way.
Fogrim got off me at once.
"I'm okay," I sat up, one hand to the throbbing side of my face, "you stupid bastard."
But Fogrim wasn't worried about me.
He held the broken pieces of the idol in his hands, looking back and forth between them. He started trying to force them back together but there were too many pieces now.
"I'm sorry about your statue." I said.
Fogrim said nothing.
I got to my feet.
"I'm going back to where I hid the battery. Don't murder any slaves while I'm gone. Promise me."
"I cannot," he said without looking up. There was a tremor in his voice.
"Fogrim, I was right about the Deep Ones in the well back at Red Water. I was right about the Mi-Go battery - and that we had to get the hell away. I'm not asking you to trust me about something you don't understand. I'm asking you to do the opposite. Stop acting on something you don't understand."
He turned and regarded me.
"They are hunting us,” he said. “The Mi-Go, the scourge of my people, are abroad in these lands and hunting us."
"You don't know that. You don't know anything about the Mi-Go. So stop being afraid when you don't even know if you have reason to be. Either treat what I say with the same fear you treat the Mi-Go with, or treat the Mi-Go with the same contempt you treat my ideas with." He looked back down at the ruined idol and slowly stood.
"You have my word that I will not sacrifice her, or any other slave. Today. There would be no value in it; I doubt things could get worse after this," he stuffed the fragments into a small pouch.
"That's all I ask. Also, learn to block against a groin kick."
"We do not fight so in Hyperborea."
"Also, learn to learn.”
I turned and left.