The immortal wizards were the most powerful humans ever to walk the planet Tharia, but the wars between them devastated the planet and the whole world breathed a sigh of relief when the last of them was killed. In an attempt to cheat death, though...
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Yyathum Proth writhed in the chair in helpless terror. He rocked himself from side to side with all his remaining strength, tearing manically at the leather straps that held his wrists and ankles, but the solid oak and iron held him securely and in the end he could only flop helplessly, panting in exhaustion.
The leather bonds were only a small part of his terror. His chief fear came from his inability to change his shape or appearance. The theft of the wonderful power he'd had ever since budding from his parent nearly two hundred years before. With that power he could have shrunk himself to the size of a goblin and slipped out of the slack straps, or swelled to the size of an ogre and smashed the chair to firewood. It was the iron collar around his neck that held him rigidly to one shape, and the pain of it was almost too great to bear. It seemed to send feelers into the very heart of his being to draw away his strength, like a monstrous leech sucking his blood, leaving him as weak as a baby and trembling with the knowledge of his danger and vulnerability.
Finally he gave up, realising there would be no escape that way and knowing that, even if he could have freed himself from the chair, he would then have been faced with the greater challenge of escaping from the cell, which seemed to have been carved out of the living rock. He was underground, of course, and the door was made of inch thick iron bars, strong enough that even in his ogre form he would have been unable to bend them. No escape that way. The clay man forced himself to calm down, to think rationally. He was aware that he was more intelligent that all but a handful of humans. He might be able to outwit his captors. Yes, that was it. He would escape by using the formidable power of his brain, not his body. He made himself look around, therefore, and take stock of his surroundings. Every scrap of information he could infer or deduce might be useful to him.
He had to be in Lexandria Valley. It had been a wizard who'd captured him as he'd emerged from the teleportation cubicle in Tara, plunging him into a spell induced coma just as he was congratulating himself on his escape. Where else would a wizard have taken him but to the centre of wizardry on Tharia? He could sense the anti-magic permeating the walls, floor and ceiling of the cell. That wasn't decisive in itself, of course, as many of the larger cities had one or two magic proof cells in their prisons for the confining of wizards who broke their laws, but in his own mind the case was settled. He was in the cells of the proctors, dug out of the heart of one of the mountains surrounding Lexandria Valley.
And he was still alive! He hadn't been killed out of hand, as clay men careless enough to be captured so often were. Everyone feared and hated clay men. Only in one of their secret communes could they declare themselves openly and walk about in their natural form. Any clay man caught by humans was killed, and yet here he was, still alive. That meant they wanted something from him. Information, probably. The names of those who had employed him. He grinned evilly. He had a bargaining chip. They couldn't simply read the information out of his mind because of the mind protection spells the Shadowwizards had cast on his body back in the war. They could try to torture it out of him, but if he was strong enough to resist they would eventually have to bargain with him. He had no compunctions about betraying his employers. He would give them to the proctors without a moment's hesitation as soon as he'd bargained a good deal for himself.
