The Arcanist (23 page)

Marcus said nothing about it though, save to smile and nod politely as his father gave the requisite best wishes for the event after the introductions had been made. And he smiled and nodded some more as he sipped his rose hip tea, a concoction that truly did not appeal, while the agreement was read out loud by both parties. His father had long ago taught him that it was incumbent upon anyone, especially anyone there in an official capacity, to accept with good grace whatever hospitality was offered by their host. And somehow he managed to keep smiling and nodding as the two documents were signed and the appropriate prayers said.

But an hour or so later as he left the meeting with his father he couldn't help but wonder just what they'd allied themselves with. A temple or a trading house? Or something else? Something for want of a better word, political.

Still, there was one good thing to come out of the signing. If Edouard was still alive in Simon's dungeons, there would now be some representatives of the family living in Therion keeping a watchful eye for him if he should eventually make it home. Hand maidens living in his holding as they built their shrine there. And Breakwater was one of the closest towns to Theria. If there was word of his brother's fate, they would hear it there first.

Of course if by some miracle Edouard did manage to escape as he had promised Leona he would, and then went home, he was going to be surprised to find he had house guests.

Chapter Twenty One

Edouard had to concentrate as he sent his needle thin ray of fire into the stones in the side wall of his cell, something that was made all the harder by the pain and cold. And of course the constant worry he had that their gaoler would hear him or see the light of his magic and find out.

The last wasn't likely though. The gaoler spent much of his time there drinking behind his desk, and the rest of it sleeping off his ale. He seldom bothered them, which was for the good as far as Edouard was concerned. He wasn't a nice man, and he could be loud and nasty. Life had obviously not been good to him. He'd grown corpulent and pallid due to his long days spent underground with the prisoners, and worst of all, bitter. He hated his duty and he blamed the prisoners for his fate. Sometimes when he was in a bad mood he would take his frustrations out on them.

Usually he wasn't violent. But that was due more to his poor physical condition than anything more noble. The gaoler started puffing and wheezing if he had to walk more than a few paces. He simply didn't have the vigour to start whipping and beating people. The heavy mace he carried was more for show than anything else. Mostly he just screamed at them to shut up, seldom even getting up from his chair. Occasionally he threatened them by smashing his spiked mace into the oak desk in front of him. It made a satisfactory thump. He didn't like it when they made a noise. Possibly because he had a sore head from the ale he drank constantly. Of course sometimes he was simply spiteful. It appeared he enjoyed the power he had over them.

There were many ways in which he could be vindictive, and throwing buckets of cold water over them was only the beginning. Sometimes it was his piss that came through the little barred window instead if he was feeling really miserable. He would regularly throw their food through the slot, or the thin gruel that was called food, leaving them to scrape it off the floor if they wanted to eat. Other times he didn't feed them at all, choosing instead to sit at his desk and eat it himself. There was a reason he was unable to fit into his armour.

Several times he'd denied Edouard his drinking water, but with a small wooden bowl and the endless trickle of water running down the walls, that wasn't such a serious problem. It still tasted foul though, and heating it to kill whatever demons of pestilence and disease might swim in it didn't help. The other prisoners weren't so fortunate he guessed.

Often the gaoler would walk by the cells on what passed for his rounds, rattling the thick bars of their doors with his steel pike as he screamed at them. Just in case they were sleeping. He seemed to be of the view that if he had to be awake then so did they. But mostly he sat at his desk drinking from the piles of skeins of ale and cider he stored in it. More often he was prone, passed out on the floor beside it.

He was a disgrace. Marcus, if he'd had a soldier like him in his guards, would have had him up on charges. It was a terrible failing. When a military man was actually so fat that he could no longer fit in his armour and wandered around all day with the cuirass flapping open and his belly hanging out, it suggested that there were discipline problems with the squad. Serious ones. But whoever their gaoler's commander was obviously didn't care so much about those things.

He was not a nice man, and Edouard had no sympathy for what he knew would happen to him when they escaped his watch. Maybe, if he was really lucky and the world did have some form of natural justice, their gaoler would end up inside the cells instead of them. And Edouard would have dearly loved to be the one to have thrown him in them. Of course he planned to be long gone by the time that happened.

How long he'd been in the dungeon Edouard didn't know. There was no sunlight to tell him of the passing of days, and feeding time was irregular at best. His guess based on the logic of two meals a day was that he'd been a prisoner for eight days, plus however many more he'd spent unconscious after the whipping his brother had given him, and then after his crude attempt at healing himself. But he could be very wrong. Since that healing he'd spent much of his time in the darkness, rousing only every so often. He could have missed a great many meals as he slept. Edouard supposed he could ask the gaoler but that would just be asking for trouble.

What he did know was that other than Leona he'd had not a single visitor in all that time. He hoped that was because his family had managed to flee the city, and not because they'd been caught and were locked up in another set of cells somewhere else. There were several dungeons in the city. But he had no way of knowing. All he did know was that they weren't in the same dungeon as him. Often when the gaoler was asleep the other prisoners would talk among themselves, and while he couldn't make out much of their voices through the thick doors, he didn't recognise any of them.

Simon and his sinister adviser hadn't visited him either. He guessed he simply wasn't important enough for them to waste their time on. He was nobody of note. Just a minor brother to the false king. And he was safely secured. The chances were that they expected him to simply rot away and die in his cell, never to trouble them again. Meanwhile they had to cement their rule.

In fact he was surprised that they hadn't simply killed him outright. They'd come close to it though. After days spent in fevered dreams he'd been kitten weak and starving from a lack of food. And for many more days after that he'd barely had the strength to raise a spark. Enough to warm his cell a little from time to time and cleanse his drinking water when he needed to drink, but little more. His work with his fire to heal his wounds had been only partially successful and his flesh had wrestled with the demons of disease and fever ever since.

But finally the last of the demons of sickness had left him and he felt awake and alert enough to begin work. Enough even to find the scraps of his vest that had been thrown in the cell with him and put it on. It didn't really keep him warm. But it did make him feel a little more like a man and not some animal trapped in the darkness.

It was time to escape.

He wasn't going to escape alone though. Apart from the fact that he would have felt guilty leaving anyone behind in this dark, damp hell, there was strength in numbers and he didn't want to have to end up fighting the entire city guard alone. If possible he didn't want to fight at all.

So his plan was simple. The dungeon consisted of twenty or so cells arranged in a rectangle around the guard's desk. The only door in and out was past the corpulent gaoler at his desk, and it in turn led to a passageway where more guards stood watch. He heard them sometimes yelling down to their gaoler. That was not a safe way of escape. But he could make his own way out. Especially if, as he hoped, some of the realm's other sparks were also locked up with him.

His plan was simply to burrow sideways through the cell walls, going from one to the next and linking all of them up. Then when all the cells were connected and he knew who else he was sharing the dungeon with, he and the others could simply burrow their way out of the cells, through to the underground passages that he knew ran below the castle, and into the sewers. From there it was just a matter of following the river of waste water out of the city to freedom.

Edouard began by focusing his magic into as small and tight a ray as he could, knowing that if he was to melt stone it had to be that way. A flame might have been able to melt entire walls with his magic, but he knew that no flame would ever have been imprisoned in a dungeon with them. Flames were too dangerous. If Simon and his black robed advisor had decided they were a threat they would have just killed them. He wasn't completely sure why they'd allowed him to live. They knew he too had magic that could help him escape. Perhaps they'd considered him too weak to do anything?

He wasn't. And despite the fact that he was no flame, a small ray of searing hot fury was all he needed. A finger of cutting as it was called by some.

He sent it deep into the stone and watched with satisfaction as the stone quickly turned orange and began to melt. Just a little bit, a thin line of lava that started trickling down the stone walls. But that was all he needed and he knew it was working. He was cutting a passage through the walls. Beginning his escape.

It took time, a lot of time, and there were all sorts of things to worry about. There was the light from the magic which he worried might escape his cell through the small barred window in the door and be seen by the gaoler. There was the smoke too, which he worried might start filling the air and choking them all. And then there was the noise which he knew would become quite loud when it came time to push the blocks out of the wall. But as long as the gaoler was sleeping, he hoped that none of that would matter. So he continued cutting and listened for any sound that might indicate that their gaoler had woken.

In time he managed to cut out three sides of square one and a half feet high and the same across, and he began kicking at the stone with his bare feet. He knew there was no point in cutting the bottom line of the square out as the stone would simply sink into the molten rock and reset like glue. He just had to hope that the mortar around the base would be weak enough that it would give way without the rest of the wall supporting it. But fortunately with the other cuts that wasn't such a problem, and little by little he felt the stone giving way. It was trying to reset into solid rock, but because it was so hot that took a little time. Long enough for him to keep pushing at it with his feet and feel it give an inch at a time.

And then in one glorious moment he felt the section of wall he'd cut out give way completely, and between one second and the next it tumbled to the floor of the next door cell with a crash. His heart raced when that happened. The noise was so loud that he was sure it would have woken the gaoler. But when he went to the window in the door to check it was to hear the man still snoring away. Apparently he had a goodly load of ale to sleep off. Maybe he'd even hit the cider judging by the depth of his slumber.

Still, Edouard stayed there by the door for a bit, listening carefully to make certain before returning to the hole he'd made and his chance to meet his neighbour. Then, when he was satisfied it was safe, he poked his head through the hole into the next cell.

“Hello?”

Edouard called out softly, a little worried that the gaoler might hear him. But it wasn't really that likely. Not if he hadn't woken up when the stone had collapsed to the ground. Besides, the door to the cell was solid oak at least three inches thick with only a tiny little barred window in it. The walls of course were stone, a foot thick and more. Sound wouldn't travel far through such barriers. And their gaoler was in a drunken stupor anyway. Still, now that his escape had begun, no matter how painfully slow it might be, he didn't want to get caught. He called again, mostly to make sure it was safe.

There was no response though as the man in the next cell was snoring. Obviously he also was catching some relief from the boredom of sitting in a dark, dank hole waiting for nothing to happen. Still, at least the cell was occupied. He kept worrying that he might be completely alone in the dungeons. He knew he wasn't given the muffled noises he kept hearing from the gaoler outside his cell as he yelled at the other prisoners, but for some reason the fear had remained. Maybe the voices he'd heard weren't really other prisoners? Maybe they were just in his mind? There was something simply terrifying to him about being trapped alone in the darkness. But now he finally had proof that there were others.

Carefully, worried a little that the rest of the stone wall might come down on top of him, Edouard wriggled the rest of his way through to the other side, and to the other prisoner. It was actually easier than he'd thought. He was never the largest of men, and the stone blocks that made up the huge walls were massive. Easily larger than his girth. They were so large in fact that a man couldn't have budged one out of the wall on his own. But a spark with fire in his fingertips could still melt one.

“Dry.” He muttered his surprise to himself as he discovered the cell next door was quite a lot dryer than his. He'd developed a bad habit of talking to himself over however many days or weeks he'd been locked away in this place. Worse yet he held conversations with himself, a sure sign that all was not well with his mind. But still a dungeon cell without water running down the walls was cause for a little surprise, so he told himself. Maybe even to the point of talking to himself.

On the other side Edouard quickly found his feet, and with his eyes adjusted to the perpetual gloom of the dungeon, he could make out his neighbour. Lying on a pile of loose straw – he actually had straw – he was a man of somewhat rounder proportions than was considered fashionable. That quite likely accounted for the snoring. He was also heavily bearded, and – as Edouard crept closer and finally managed to make out at least a little of his face – of advancing years.