Chapter 3

I

“Every week, for the past thirteen years at least, you have been summoned by my jailers, of whom you are so terrified you will not even name them.” I did a little bit of math in my head, “That means you have done it at least seven hundred times. Seven hundred time you have left this place and returned, and you don’t know how many men guard the way.”

I was standing over the crumpled iron door, looking at it and trying to figure out how I had done what I had done and trying to ignore the desire inside me to have Cathy do more of what she’d done a few hours ago, escape was more important.

Cathy was leaning against the wall a few paces behind me. I couldn’t see her, but she sounded annoyed. “It never occurred to me to count the Guards, and I didn’t leave at night every time. Different shifts have different numbers of guards.”

I snorted. Cathy didn’t know the number of guards in any of the shifts. She knew precious little that could help my escape. I’d been trying to extract information since her little nap ended, and even though she tried to be helpful, her memory left a lot to be desired. I was tired after beating my head against a wall for the past hour.

“Are we really going to escape tonight?” She asked fearfully.

“Yes.”

I entered my personal chambers, to look at the rotting corpses of insects one more time; the upside-down cockroaches, the centipedes with all their little legs still, the spiders eternally resting in their webs. It was gratifying, a sign of what was to come. I was going to do this to every single one who had a hand in my imprisonment.

Every. Single. One.

But first I had to get out.

I turned to Cathy, who had followed me. “Are you sure you will be able to handle a boat?”

“I told you I was a fisherman’s daughter, I didn’t say I was a sailor. I haven’t sailed anything since I was nine.”

Her answer had not changed since the last time I’d asked her, which felt like years ago, but was at most five minutes.

“How long until nightfall, Cat?”

She shrugged, “Another two hours. You’re getting worked up again Atsa.”

I nodded and started taking deep breaths.

Just another two hours. Two hours and I would be out of this personal abyss.

II

Cathy spent the two hours before nightfall preparing. She chose a blanket for me to wear, “because the nightwinds are chilly”; she picked out two of her meat-knives to take, giving the smaller one to me; and she even tried to make some kind of shoe I could wear out of bedsheets, failing miserably. Her stress built up as time passed, I could see it in her face and eyes. Like water filling up a half-cracked vase, it was okay for now, but I could see that the vase was going to break open and spill the water at some point. I just hoped that when the stress came to a head, it wouldn’t interfere with my escape.

I wasn’t much better than her, I spent the entire time sitting cross-legged, breathing deeply and trying to keep myself as centred as possible. I was not a strong or fast man, I couldn’t outrun those who wanted to hold me, nor could I outfight them. The only thing left to me was my mind, and to use that I needed to be calm. More importantly, I had been meditating when I did something and crumpled a steel door like low quality paper. I was trying to replicate that sequence of events. I didn’t succeed in doing anymore magic. But the meditation did calm me down. Enough that my train of thought was derailed, my mind decided to shut down, and I fell asleep. Supposedly, people aren’t supposed to nap as they meditate, but when your only use for the technique is calming down so you can sleep ... Well, breaking a bad habit is difficult.

It didn’t feel like I slept for a long time, but when Cathy shook me awake it was night.

She spoke once I was conscious. “I will check upstairs and then come for you.”

Cathy had a key to the main door of the chamber. She used it every morning to bring food and water from the Guard barracks’ kitchen above us. I found it very convenient that another feat of door-breaking was not required of me. I was not sure I could do anything like that again.

I wrapped a blanket around me as Cathy had ordered. I didn’t exactly know what she meant by ‘nightwinds’, but she’d been insistent and she more about the outside than I did, probably. I waited by the door for her to return.

She was pursing her lips when she came back, but nothing had gone wrong yet.

She came inside and grabbed the sack she’d prepared. I didn’t know what was inside it. The thing looked full and heavy. There were even two ladles sticking out of the top. I was going to comment on the ladles, but words seemed too hard. Before I could figure them out Cathy spoke. “No one’s guarding the stairways or the main hallway. I didn’t dare go any further.”

I nodded, too worked up to actually speak. Cathy turned around and led the way. I followed her outside, stepping into freedom.

Which sounds dramatic, but it was actually an anti-climatic step. One second I was in a prison chamber with stone walls and then I was in a stairway with stone walls. It didn’t even feel all that different. Everything looked, felt, and smelled the same.

We were on a landing, with stairs spiralling up and down on each side. The broken, jagged surface of the walls a remnant of the library’s construction. Cathy started climbing immediately, I followed her, even though my curiosity had been piqued by the stairs leading downwards. I was of a mind to figure out how deep the caves actually went.

Stairs were hard. The first few didn’t feel all that bad. By the time we reached the next landing, I was panting so hard Cathy noticed; she slowed her pace. I silently thanked her.

We climbed for what felt like hours, but was far less. The climb had a strange effect. I started it with my body tight and anxiety making my bones shake, despite all the meditation I’d done. But doing something so physically demanding distracted me. I had to focus all my energy on putting one foot in front of another, on hauling my weak body up the stair and towards freedom. It didn’t leave much space for stress.

The last few steps were the most difficult, all I could do was look down and breath. I was so distracted I didn’t even notice that the flat floor in front of me was not another landing. The sight of smooth walls from the corner of my eye was the first thing that caught my attention. When I raised my head, I was not ready for the sight greeting me. I was in a large and cavernous room, with a ceiling so high it was concealed in darkness. There were bookcases in rows throughout the room, each one stretching to impossible heights, the tops disappearing into the shadows above. The floor was some sort of white stone, cold under my bare feet.

There were books everywhere. On the bookcases, of course, but also on the tables scattered along the walls. Some tomes were lying on the ground with thick layers of dust on them, there were scrolls hanging half open on the tables and some dangling from bookcases. The air was dry, drier than one would’ve thought naturally possible. The gas lamps were different here, their flames burnt blue instead of the normal yellow.

Cathy spoke in a hushed tone. “This is the lowest floor of the library.”

I glanced at her then returned my gaze to the priceless collection lying in front of me. These were the oldest books in this library, acquired by Prince Orvit himself, most of them unknown to anyone living. The blue flames were a gift to the Prince Orvit, from the his Sorceress Qoura. It was said that Qoura’s master, her teacher, had enchanted each and everyone of them personally at her request. The blue flame was supposed to consume humidity and moths. Looking at the ancient scrolls intact in such disarray, I found little room for doubt.

I was in the middle of a potentially lethal escape attempt, but the room’s magnificence robbed me of any sense of urgency. I walked forwards to inspect the books in a daze. Cathy pulled on my hand, and guided me towards the door to the another room. I resisted for a moment, then followed her with a final look over my shoulder at the collection. All these books, and I had to read the bullshit Cathy brought me? We were going to have a conversation when this was over. Her fear of my jailers was understandable, true. I hadn’t even been mad at her for only bringing me the book they approved before seeing the library. But if so many books were just lying around without anyone guarding them, she could’ve at least smuggled a few stray tomes for me.

Cat led me to another stairway, different from the first, it was man-made rather than carved out of rock. The stairs were all a uniform height, and climbing them felt far easier than haphazard ones we’d first encountered. Even so, Cathy let me rest for a few minutes before we climbed the three stories to the ground floor. If I had to guess based on the relative climb lengths, I would say my chambers had been twelve or thirteen stories below the lowest floor of the building.

Cathy noticed I was winded once all the climbing was finished. So she walked ahead to test the waters. I waited alone, which was far more scary in comparison to the waiting I’d done down in the caves a few sure minutes ago. Every little sound, every natural groan of the structure, made me jump. My own breathing startled me once. It was ridiculous on so many levels I had to fight a battle to keep myself from breaking out in hysterical laughter.

Cat returned to find me sitting with my back against a wall, one hand holding my nose and mouth closed while another was in front of my stomach. I was trying to laugh as silently as possible. She looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. Maybe I had.

I got the laughter under control, just barely, and Cathy reported her findings in a whisper. “No one in the hallway, but there are two men guarding the back door. And I told you there is always someone guarding the dock and the boat. The rest of them are in the kitchen and the mess hall.”

“Do you think we can sneak past the guards?”

“No. They’re right in front of the door.”

“We wait then. Maybe they’ll leave their posts.”

We went down one floor, in order to have some warning if someone started coming down the stairs. And we waited. Periodically, Cathy would go up, check the way out, and come back shaking her head. I meditated between her rounds, opening my eyes every time she stood to leave and waiting for her return before starting the deep breathing again.

Magic eluded me. I could feel a whisk of something, an invisible string right in front of me, deftly avoiding my touch, but I could not grasp it for the life of me. I should’ve been able to grasp it easily, but I my inexperience was showing. I searched for the needed crutch, that small nudge required for me to enter the twisted reality. I failed over and over again.

After her fourteenth round, Cathy did not shake her head. “The guards are asleep.”

“What about the one on the pier?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can we get the quartermaster?”

“No. We already have to sneak past three guards to get out. To get the old man we’ll have to go past the mass and there are some people still inside, playing a game of dice. Add that complication and we’ll never get out.”

I didn’t say anything. We were so close to freedom, and yet the ground was so slippery I was terrified of taking the remaining few steps.

Cathy pulled our knives out of her makeshift sack – I’d given mine to her since I had nowhere to put it. My knife – even though it was smaller than Cathy’s – was heavy, with a broad blade looked sharp despite its age; I had no idea how to use it. It suddenly occurred to me that I should’ve practised during the wait, gotten familiar with it, at least learned how to swing the damned thing without injuring myself.

Cathy captured my eyes, her gaze was hard enough to surprise me, it was a look hard to associate with the mild-mannered, soft-spoken woman she was. “Just aim carefully and push it into his neck. I’ll take the one who’s standing and you take the one sitting against the wall. They’re both asleep, so it shouldn’t be too difficult.”

“Okay.” The single word came out easily, but my voice was weak. My hand, the one that didn’t have a knife in it, went to my neck. I searched around, trying to figure out the best place to stick a sharp blade in; the front was obviously not a great idea. The windpipe had a protective barrier, the thyroid cartilage, in front of it and penetration would be difficult. Since I was not an adept, avoiding any difficulty seemed like the best idea. I could stick it in from the side, into the carotid arteries and the jugular veins. If aimed properly, the knife should go in and sever both sets of blood vessels as it came out of the other side, theoretically, the windpipe should not survive the stab I intended. Of course, what one learned from theory and dusty drawings of corpses may not transfer well into the real world. I just had to accept the risks.

Catherine took out the ladles. She held one to a burning lamp for a few seconds; the long and thin piece of wood burst into flames. I took it and she set the next one on fire.

My plan depended on getting to the boat without anyone realizing what we were doing. But it also depended on the guardsmen in the library’s lighthouse not shooting us full of arrows as we passed them by, something they were sure to do once they recognized the boat we were on. Avoiding the lighthouse was not an option, the cliffs around the library meant we had to go past it to move towards Karanas safely. I’d decided to start a teeny-tiny fire in the library, and sail the boat far enough to make sure no one could see us. Once the men in the lighthouse noticed the fire – which they would notice, since the lighthouse was a part of the library and most of the smoke would be venting through the chimney-like structure – they would be too busy surviving to notice us. I didn’t know if there was a god who claimed responsibility for the generally upward motion of smoke and other hot gases; but if there was, she had my thanks.