Crown Thief (21 page)

  Alvantes opened his mouth to speak. No sound came.

  Then, apparently as an afterthought, Alvantes's father turned back and struck his son with all his strength across the face. It was a ringing open-handed blow, and it left a glowing welt in its wake. Yet Alvantes's head moved not one iota. He hardly seemed to feel it.

  Alvantes Senior turned away once more. This time he marched from the room without another word – just as he'd promised. The confused guard hurried after, still trying to divide his attention equally between all three of us. Once they were both across the threshold, the door slammed shut.

  For once, I couldn't but feel genuine pity for Alvantes. His thanks for loyalty was to be called a traitor and condemned to die; now his father visited solely to rub his nose in those facts. As if that weren't all bad enough, it was clear the old man was playing with a severely depleted deck of cards. Bad enough to endure so cruel an invective from a parent. For it to be hardly more than gibberish seemed to me that much worse.

  I thought about making some attempt to express my sympathy. But nothing came to mind that did the situation justice – and based on what I saw in Alvantes's face, I doubted he'd even hear it. Moreover, I was quick to remind myself that my own circumstances were hardly any better, and identical in the long run. Anyway, wasn't it Alvantes's blind faith in his vindictive King that had landed us in this mess?

  At least I understood now how he could have been so calm before. Alvantes had expected his father, evidently high up in the Court, to pull whatever strings it would take to secure his son's freedom. I was actually disappointed. Waiting for someone else to pick up the pieces didn't fit well with the Alvantes I knew – especially when the father he'd been so naively relying on was an unfeeling lunatic.

  Alvantes's scheme, such as it had been, was a dead loss. No last-minute reprieves or eleventh-hour rescues would be forthcoming. There were only two ways I was leaving that cell, and one of them would end on the headsman's block.

  It might be hopeless, it was almost certainly suicidal, but my options had narrowed to just one.

  It was time I put my plan into action.

 
 
 
 

Getting the shackle off my ankle was easy enough.

  The lock was ancient and showy, constructed to look sturdy rather than be difficult to overcome. In fact, the harder part had been unpicking my shirt collar for the lock picks concealed there. I was almost disappointed no one had bothered to search me more thoroughly. They'd confiscated my cloak and found the loose picks in its pocket, they'd patted me down from head to toe, but that was all.

  If I'd been relieved at the time, I now found it worrying. Either the Royal Guard were incompetent or they were profoundly confident in their wider security. In that case, the shackle was little more than ornamentation. It was the layers of locked doors and armed men they relied on to keep me in place.

  Then again, there was another explanation, perhaps even more likely. With our execution so imminent, they'd assumed we'd have no possible time for escape.

  I felt duty-bound at least to try to prove them wrong.

  I spent a minute massaging circulation back into my ankle. Across from me, Alvantes sat with his eyes closed, as he had since his father left. I doubted he could be sleeping, but he was so perfectly still that it was hard to judge. I'd have expected my sympathy for him to have dried up by now; it surprised me to realise it hadn't. There'd been something peculiarly affecting in hearing him be torn apart so thoroughly and yet so nonsensically. If Alvantes's father had been determined to convey how little his son's death meant to him, there were pithier and less senile ways he could have gone about it.

  Which led me to the question I'd be agonising over. Did I try to take Alvantes with me? Of course we despised each other, but there was a definite divide between that and leaving him to die. Anyway, there was no denying he'd make a useful ally. However little he knew of the palace, it would beat my plan of blundering at random until I stumbled upon a way out.

  All well and good. But something told me Alvantes was unlikely to approve of my interventionist approach to incarceration. He might be just obstinate enough to have his head chopped off out of some misplaced sense of duty – and if he wasn't usually, his father's speech could have tipped the balance.
Shut up and die with dignity
was exactly the kind of message a man like Alvantes didn't need to hear.

  The truth, though, was that I couldn't very well leave him. If I should ever meet Estrada again, even I'd have trouble explaining that one.
Alvantes? The last time I saw him, he was in a cell waiting to be beheaded. I'd have asked if he wanted to escape with me, but it seemed rude to wake him.

  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.

  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.

  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 strained 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.