I crept over, all ready to wake him with a tap to the shoulder. At the last moment, his eyes snapped open. They glided quickly over me, absorbing my unfettered ankle, the empty shackle loose upon the flags behind.
"Damasco," Alvantes said softly. "Whatever you're doing, stop it now."
"Don't make this more difficult than it has to be," I hissed back. "I'm escaping. If you don't like it, fine, stay here and give my regards to the executioner. But nothing you say is keeping me in this cell."
"Gods damn it! If you try and leave now, you'll ruin everything."
"Much as I hate to put out the noble folk of Pasaeda, I'm sure I'll learn to live with myself somehow."
"Things aren't how you think. You need to trust me. Just listen…"
"Wait… you lost me at trust. Whenever I do that it never ends well."
Alvantes obviously wasn't going to be convinced, and there was no way I'd risk letting him persuade me. Maybe he had some grand scheme in mind; maybe he was just suicidal. Either way, I was through chancing my life on the whims of others. Waiting for death in the royal dungeons of a foreign land, that was where trust had led me.
Still crouched, I scampered to the door. Now that I'd begun, now that my plan was in motion, I was twitching with barely contained fear and tension. If I didn't keep moving, I knew I'd lose my nerve altogether.
Of course, there was a small yet significant flaw in that logic. My plan was more or less a plan in name alone.
The chain bolted to my shackle was unusually generous. Whoever had determined its length had either been a humanitarian devoted to the consolation of prisoners or had only had an exceptionally long chain to hand. Even shackled, I could have crossed our cell from corner to corner.
It was long enough that with the door open, it would reach outside. It might even be long enough for the shackle to be snapped closed around a certain guard's ankle. If it was, I might have a fighting chance of getting past him.
"Damasco."
Then again, it was a hundred times more likely that he'd hear me picking the lock, opening the door, sneaking up on him or all three, and jab a sword into some part of me that didn't function well with metal stuck through it.
Still, it was that or try to fight him with a lock pick.
"Damasco!"
Was it even possible to turn the lock without the guard hearing? Slipping my picks into the keyhole, closing my eyes, I focused all sensation into my fingers. There was no way this would be as easy as the shackle. No one made cell doors easy; fiendishly complicated was more the fashion. It was going to take every ounce of my skill and ingenuity…
Unless the lock was already open.
Well, that was undeniably strange. Poorly made shackles were one thing. Open cell doors were quite another. That went beyond the pale of careless security.
"It's unlocked, isn't it? Will you listen to me, damn it!"
My mind was awhirl. Something was bafflingly wrong here. Alvantes clearly knew at least a little of what was going on; logic demanded I stay and listen. But an insistent voice told me that whatever it was I wouldn't like it, and the shriek of my instincts drowned out everything else. I'd been caged. Now I was almost free. Who cared about hows and whys? Fate had thrown me a bone and only a fool would ask what it had come out of.
There was no handle on this side, of course. However, the lock casing was a broad iron sheet that slightly overlapped the wall. When I teased my fingers round the plate and pulled, it came easily, revealing a chink of wavering light. I tensed, fear drawing tingling fingers down my spine. I gripped the open shackle in my right hand, the edge of the door in the other. Striving for an impossible compromise between silence and speed, I drew the door towards me.
A choked, dry wheezing met my ears. Even as I registered it, it turned into a derisive grunt. Another wheeze, another grunt…
The guard was snoring.
He was dressed differently to those I'd seen upstairs, in baggy trousers and a jacket of leather covered with brightly glistening studs. His helmet, knocked off-kilter where his head rested against the bare stone wall, had tilted over one eye. A spear rested beside him, and a curved short sword hung at his hip. His expression of unassailable peace contrasted oddly with the cacophony of rasps and snorts coming from out of his mouth.
Perhaps the sensible precaution would have been to draw his sword and slit his throat. But whatever else I might be, I was no killer. Anyway, I was sure enough of my light-footedness that I knew I could get past without him waking. From the sound of those snores, I could probably have herded cattle past him.
I darted a last glance back at Alvantes. Having given up trying to persuade me, he was now fumbling with his own shackled ankle. Perhaps he thought he could get it off by sheer, brute strength.
He looked up when he felt my eyes on him. "Damn it, Damasco!"
I had no doubt he was privy to facts I lacked. Why else the open door, the sleeping guard? Yet nothing about that fact made me want to stay and listen. Alvantes, after all, had gotten me into this fix. His no-good king was the one who'd thrown me in prison for no good reason.
Well, no more. It was time Easie Damasco started trusting his instincts again.
Or so I tried to tell myself. As I shuffled out and drew the door closed behind me — I couldn't put it past Alvantes to shout out to the guard — it was all I could do to keep my hands from shaking. Because the truth I didn't dare admit was that the odds of my even getting out of the dungeons, let alone making it to the Castovalian border intact, were just below non-existent.
I couldn't afford to think like that. One step at a time.
The first step was clear, at any rate. To my left, the passage ended in unbroken wall. That meant I was going right — which, inevitably, took me past the sleeping guard.
The knack to sneaking has little to do with trying to be quiet. Trying to be quiet makes noise, however slight, and of exactly the irregular kind that draws unconscious attention. I'd do better to move smoothly and swiftly, making sounds that would be easy for a barely aware mind to dismiss, forgotten even before they were acknowledged.
Knowing the theory didn't make the practise less intimidating. I sucked in a deep breath and started walking.
Thirty or so light, easy strides took me to the end of the corridor. If the guard heard me on any level, it didn't register enough to break the rhythm of his snores. I'd made it — that far, at least.
I paused to take the measure of the adjoining corridor. It ran both ways for a considerable distance, ending in each direction at further junctions. Every so often, cell doors punctuated the stone-blocked walls. I'd no way to tell which, if any, were occupied.
Though bronze cressets hung at regular intervals from the ceiling, only one in three was lit, leaving the intervening spaces swathed in thick shadow. That suited me. It wasn't enough to hide in if anyone should pass by, but it would suffice to make them doubt their eyes if they caught a fleeting glimpse at a distance.
From the point of finding a way out, however, the corridors were less promising. There might only be two choices, but I had nothing to base my direction on. Our journey down here had been long and meandering, and my thoughts had hardly been on memorising the route. Perhaps either way was as good as the other, yet the risk of heading deeper into the prison's depths was enough to give me pause.
Once more, I reminded myself I couldn't afford to think like that. To the right, the passage looked fractionally gloomier. With nothing else to go on, that would have to decide it.
I ducked out and scurried that way, taking care to crouch whenever I passed a window grille — in case there were other prisoners like Alvantes who frowned on escape attempts. I was nearly at the end of the corridor when I heard a sound. It was vague and muffled, impossible to identity — but it was still more than enough to chill my blood. It had come from somewhere ahead of me. More than that, I couldn't say.
I thought about turning back, but uncertainty had me in its grip. I froze instead, and str
ained my ears. I dreaded a further noise, yet at the same time almost craved it, just to break the tension building like a drumbeat in my mind.
When it came, it was so soft that anyone else would certainly have missed it. Another advantage of knowing how to move quietly — once you were familiar with the tricks, it was a thousand times easier to notice those hardly existent sounds that marked a stealthy approach.
This was only the faintest swish, as of light cloth brushing skin. Once I'd identified it, however, I could follow it — impossibly quiet, but steady, rhythmic. Someone else was sneaking through these passageways; someone with a tread so close to silent that if I hadn't been concentrating with all my attention, if I hadn't known exactly what to listen for, I could never have heard them. And now that I'd caught the minuscule noises giving them away, I was sure of something else as well. They were heading my way.
I thought about retreating towards the cell. But my advantage cut both ways. Odds were that anyone so proficiently furtive would identify my tread just as I had theirs. Whoever they were, the fact that they were sneaking at all made me doubt I'd want to make their acquaintance. Who knew what went on in the dungeons of a mad king? Who could say what types might stalk its mazy depths?
I glanced around for an alternative. To my astonishment, luck was on my side. I'd passed the last cell door, but between me and the next junction was another entrance, a wooden gate with no grille or lock. I guessed it was a storage cupboard or some such, since no light showed from the wide gap at its base.
Sure enough, when I opened the gate it revealed a small alcove. The walls were lined with wide shelves, empty but for a few bags and loose bric-a-brac; the remaining space looked just big enough to contain me. I slipped inside, drew the gate closed. Sure enough, there was ample room. So long as no one happened to glance at the gap beneath the door, I'd be perfectly safe.
Unless this cupboard was exactly where the approaching steps were headed.
Trapped in that close darkness, I felt sure of it. Poised perfectly still, listening to that negligible rasp of cloth on flesh drawing nearer, I convinced myself beyond question that I'd concealed myself in the most dangerous place imaginable. Only the tiniest voice of doubt kept me from running as the near-inaudible steps drew closer, closer…
And passed.
They continued down the passage. They began to fade. Soon I doubted whether I could hear them at all.
Still, I waited. I stayed motionless — determined to catch even the minutest sound. Even when I was sure beyond doubt there was nothing to hear I continued to listen, until the very silence itself began to roar like distant surf.
It took all the strength of will I had to force myself back into life. Maybe the steps had passed and maybe they hadn't. Either way I didn't intend to starve to death in a closet.
At the last moment, it struck me that the alcove might contain something useful to my escape attempt. By the dim light from beneath the door, I appraised the contents of the shelves. Mostly, they were almost empty, but high on the shelf behind me three bags were piled together. They looked oddly familiar — and taking one down, I realised why. It was my own.
Once I got over my initial surprise, I realised it made sense. The alcove could only be a temporary store for prisoners' goods. Everything was as I'd last seen it; my pack didn't appear to have been so much as opened. Even my coin bag was there, and judging from its heft as I slipped it into a pocket, undiminished. Whatever the royal guards might lack in competence, they were at least honest. I reclaimed my cloak and boots and drew them on. I slung my pack over one shoulder. I was about to slip back into the corridor when my brain caught up with what had been staring me in the face the whole time.
Two saddlebags.
Alvantes's saddlebags.
Alvantes's apparently undisturbed saddlebags.
Which meant…
Instinct took over, the force of a lifetime's habit, so powerful that I couldn't have resisted even had I wanted to. In the darkness it was hard to judge which bag was the one I wanted, so I dragged a couple of shirts from one, spread them over the stone floor to mask the sound and emptied both out. That done, I found the false bottom easily by touch. It had been carefully stitched in place, but I wasn't in any mood for niceties. I prised my fingers through the seam and pulled with all my strength. It held for just a moment and then began to tear, with the ping of individual stitches reaching crescendo with one steady, brutal rip.
Too excited by then even to heed the noise I was making, I tossed the scrap of fabric onto the clutter of Alvantes's belongings and reached into the freshly revealed portion. My fingers closed around metal — perfectly smooth, not at all cold to the touch. I drew it out. It was splendid, so refined and elegant in design that it was hard to believe it had ever sat on fat, fop pish Panchetto's head. Yet I hardly glanced at it. Instead, I shrugged off my cloak, wrapped the crown in it, crammed both together into my pack and slung the pack back across my shoulders.
Just as I was about to leave once more, I noticed something amidst the heap of Alvantes's turned out possessions. It was a tube of metal, catching the scant light from beneath the door. I recognised it as the telescope — the one I'd used outside Altapasaeda, the one I'd coveted until its existence had been crammed from my mind by the events that followed.
I reached down. Now it was mine, after all.
As I stepped back into the passage, my heart was hammering. Rationally I knew I'd been condemned to death anyway; but somehow, having indulged my light fingers in so grand a fashion seemed to make it all the worse. Now, not only was I condemned, I was actually guilty of something. I glanced left and right, disorientated by my time in the darkness of the closet.
I heard footsteps.
I knew straight away that it wasn't the same tread as before. This person was striving for quiet as well, but they weren't half as capable. They were moving too quickly for a start, as though they weren't quite decided which they cared more about, stealth or speed. What was going on? Just how many people were wandering around these dungeons? I'd been in less lively market streets. This time, I was sure the steps were behind me, approaching from the direction I'd arrived by. It was tricky to judge distance, though; the naked stone seemed to distort and re-echo sound.
I wasn't about to take any chances. Nor was I trapping myself back in the storeroom. Instead, I scuttled around the next bend, keeping low, ready to drop into the shadows at the slightest provocation. Once I'd passed the corner, I paused again to listen. Had the steps drawn closer? It was impossible to judge. Those dim passages were disorientating. One moment the sound seemed to be behind me, the next in front. Or could it be that there were two people approaching? I didn't think so, but my nerve was slipping. It was easy to imagine a teeming horde of guards closing from every direction.
The corridor beyond the junction was much the same as the one I'd left, but bare this time of cell doors. Again, it ran to left and right. This time I chose left. The passage seemed to go on forever. I was sure I wouldn't reach the end before whoever possessed those phantom steps came into view. The more I lost my nerve, the surer I felt it wasn't one set of feet but many — that I was hurrying into danger, fleeing from one threat towards another.
However, the next junction revealed not guards, nor even another passage. It opened onto a short landing between flights of stairs.
I managed to calm myself a fraction. This was progress. Every instinct told me I was underground — weren't prisons always underground? — and so the logical choice was to ascend. Yet something made me doubt. Maybe it was only my natural sense of direction awakening, or maybe the sudden realisation that perhaps the reason those distant footsteps seemed all around was that they were reverberating from the floor above.
Yes, that must be it. Now that I concentrated, with the worst edge of my fear receding, it made perfect sense. It was easier to judge here, too, with the uninterrupted access of the stairwell. These stone walls were like the coil of a seashell, siphoning noi
se down into their depths. I was confident that what I'd actually been hearing was activity from the higher level, a constant, barely audible rapping of feet against flags.
Or maybe not. With a shiver, I realised one set was different. One set was definitely behind me. And it was definitely getting nearer.
That settled my decision.
I plummeted down the stairs, taking them three at a time. At the bottom was a small antechamber, with one low door to the right and another, larger and heavier, in front of me. There was a narrow, barred window set high in the door ahead. Through those bars, I could see darkness and the vague impression of distant walls. Close up, I could feel the faint breath of cool night air.
I'd found a way out.
There was only one problem. I knew there'd be a guard waiting on the other side.
There had to be. I'd been far too lucky getting this far. Luck always ran out eventually, and when it did, it generally went with a bang. I might have the element of surprise, but he'd be armed and armoured and infinitely better at fighting — not to mention capable of calling his many colleagues to his aid.
Above and behind me, the footsteps were drawing nearer. They must be in the second corridor by now. My bid for freedom was rapidly coming down to a choice of who got to catch me first. If I was quick, perhaps I could overpower the guard outside. I could put him down long enough to make a run for it at least. I might even get as far as the first gates. And then… and then…
One step. One step at a time.
Gently, hoping beyond hope that it wasn't locked, that its hinges were well oiled, I gripped the great ring that served as a door handle, twisted, pulled.
The hinges hardly complained; a whisper of metal on metal, like a breeze through dry grass. The door drew inward. A rectangle of purple velvet sky unfurled in the opening. I pressed against the wall, craned my neck to see through the slim gap.
There was no guard.
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