Brasti went to stand by the iron gate. ‘That’s a thought that’s going to freeze my balls at night.’
‘Your balls will have to sort themselves out on their own,’ Kest said. ‘The guards left a moment ago to go on their rounds. Based on the last time, I estimate that they walk the perimeter of the lower floor of this fort twice every hour, and each circuit takes them roughly ten minutes.’
I joined the two of them at the gate. ‘So we have about nine minutes to work out the details of our escape and then wait for the next cycle.’
‘There’s no guarantee that they won’t leave at least one guard watching us, Falcio. This is the first time they’ve all left at once – this may be our best chance.’
‘How?’ Filian demanded from inside his cell. ‘The gate is locked and far too strong to break. How can you hope to open it without tools?’
‘We’re the Greatcoats,’ Brasti replied. ‘You think this is the first time we’ve ever been beaten to within an inch of our lives, stripped of our weapons, deprived of our coats and locked up in a cell? The Tailor practically included a pet rat with every coat just to keep us company in situations like this.’
Sadly, he was only mildly exaggerating.
There are, for those who make a study of this sort of thing, three basic ways to break out of a prison. The first – and generally the best – is to bribe the guards. If you happen to be a powerful noble, or have one or two nearby who owe you a favour, this has an excellent chance of success. Alas, that solution was unavailable to us since we were in a foreign country with no allies, not to mention the fact that Trin’s efforts to bribe one of the local Warlords had resulted in that poor bastard’s death as well as her current incarceration inside this fort.
The second method for escaping a cell is to somehow get the guards to open the door and then overwhelm them. Unfortunately, despite the many and varied ways in which prisoners have, throughout the ages, sought to lure their captors into opening the cage, few of them tend to work – I mean, your average guard might not be a genius, but nobody’s actually dumb enough to fall for the old ‘help-he’s-choking-on-his-food’ trick. No, the only way this approach works is if you’re being transported from one place to another, or when the guards happen to be drunk when they’re coming to feed you, beat you up for the hells of it or kill you because it turns out you don’t have a rich uncle who likes you enough to part with sacks of gold just to return you to the bosom of the family.
The third method of escape – and the subject of many a delightful literary romp – is to slowly, over the course of weeks, months or even years, find the single flaw in the prison’s design and work away at it until you can effect your escape. Unfortunately, while Avarean hospitality was turning out to be no worse than anyone else’s these days, I was fairly sure that our relationship with the Magdan was only going to go downhill once he realised we weren’t going to kill Trin for him, which meant we were unlikely to have time enough for Plan C.
‘We’re going to die, aren’t we?’ Filian asked from inside his cell, sounding as if he was trying to summon the courage to face his end. The idea that there’s some virtue to bravely facing death is another literary device best left to Bardatti romances. Besides, I had no intention of letting a damned traitor like Morn – I mean the Magdan – take my life. Not until I’d killed him first.
Did I say there were only three ways to break out of prison? Actually, there is a fourth: arrange your escape before they lock you up. That’s why I’d dropped my rapiers in the snow and goaded the Magdan into beating me up with his fists: I’d needed to get close to his pockets.
Morn was a Greatcoat, so of course he knew all the tricks and tools we kept in our coats, and there was no way he was going to leave Kest, Brasti and me with ours. So while he’d been busy pummelling me a bit more, I’d taken a couple of small tools from my own pockets and dropped them into his. Then in the hallway outside, when I’d thrown myself at him one last time, I’d retrieved what I could.
See? I’m not always a reckless idiot.
‘What did you bring?’ Kest asked.
I reached down to the corner of the floor just on our side of the gate and lifted up a set of three small, flat pieces of shaped steel attached to a narrow ring. ‘It’s only the small set of lockpicks,’ I said, ‘but there’s a rake, a hook and a double-ball.’
‘I thought I saw you placing something else in Morn’s pockets,’ Kest said.
I nodded. ‘A caltrop. Couldn’t get it back out when I jumped him, though.’
‘I’m surprised he didn’t figure it out,’ Trin said from her cell. ‘It all sounded rather theatrical from in here, Falcio.’
I smiled. Many of our former fellow magistrates used to chide Kest, Brasti and me for what they called our ‘childish antics’. People like Morn thought we were trapped in the past, trying to emulate the Greatcoats of legend rather than dealing with the dark realities of the present. But there are times when a fast blade simply isn’t enough.
‘So what did you bring to the party?’ I asked Brasti.
He knelt down and picked something up from a pile of dust and dirt. ‘Amberlight,’ he said. ‘Managed to toss it there when I threw my hands up in what I feel was a highly underrated performance of “just look at the mess Falcio’s got us into this time”.’
‘Not bad,’ I said. ‘A shame we don’t have some kind of knife, though.’
‘I have one,’ Kest said. ‘The rope blade from inside the left cuff of my coat.’
‘Where in the world did you hide that?’ Brasti asked.
Kest opened his mouth and extended his tongue. Sitting there was a narrow black blade just under two inches long. It might be small, but those serrated edges were razor-sharp.
‘How in hells did you manage to keep that there without cutting yourself?’ Brasti asked.
Kest carefully removed the blade from his tongue. ‘You just have to concentrate, that’s all. Actually, I’d almost forgotten it was there.’
‘You really are a freak of nature, you know that?’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘so while Kest uses the blade to cut Filian and Trin free, Brasti, you get to work on the gate.’
He knelt down and inspected the lock. ‘It’s not complicated, but the mechanism looks heavy. I should be able to do it in about ten minutes.’
‘We need it done faster.’
He shrugged. ‘Complain to the Magdan.’
‘Okay, just get started,’ I said, turning over options in my head. ‘We’ll need to take out the guards. There’s four of them, so we’ll want a moment when they’re distracted, then we boot the gate open as quickly and forcefully as possible.’
Brasti was already at work on the lock. ‘It won’t work. When the lock is open, the bolt is retracted. If I open it before they get here they’ll see that the gate is unlocked.’
Hells. Hells. Hells. Why must everything be so damned complicated?
‘Then it’s hopeless,’ Filian said. The boy appeared to have a finely tuned sense of the poetically tragic.