The administrators of Falcon Point did not waste lamps or torches on lighting their jail cells. These had been strung up with lighting in the days of magic, and in fact laws dictated that prisoner’s cells had to be lit. But now resources were simply too scarce. Laws had also dictated that prisoners be given daily access to showers, laundry facilities, and three meals a day. That was a different time.
In the basement of the Old Fort, it became painfully clear how quickly the centuries had fallen away. This was a medieval dungeon, and those who were unfortunate enough to be held here when the cataclysm struck withered with newfound neglect and malnourishment. In a few more weeks, diseases would become established in this prison that would never leave, but would pass from one inmate to the next, claiming life after life for generation after generation. Soon every sentence would be death, not by hanging, by guillotine, by burning, or by stoning, but by starvation and sickness in a dark hole in the ground.
Not that this new age would be more cruel. It would simply lack the extravagant wealth required to run humane prisons.
The guards threw Jaysynn into the dungeon underneath the Old Fort and left him on his hands and knees while they marched down the hall, carrying the torchlight away with them.
Before getting to his feet, before reflecting on what he might do next, Jaysynn worked to get his hands out from behind him, slipping them around his legs and under his feet while he lay on his back. They were still bound, and he had little hope to undo the knots any time soon, but at least his hands were in front and not behind.
Once the last traces of the guards’ torch vanished, Jaysynn could see only blackness. He felt his way around the room, running his fingers and the thick flesh of his palms along the cool rock floor and across the mortar lines until he found the wall. He stood up and kept his hands against it, sliding his feet slowly along the floor looking for a bed. But before his slinking toes found any piece of furniture, his hands found something in the wall.
A deep crack. He could stick his fingers and half of his hand into it. He traced it up and down. It ran through the floor as well, but less prominently, and it was hidden from his feet in a line of mortar. But on the wall it was broad and deep, and seemed to get only bigger as it ran up above his head, and above where his hands could reach.
And gradually, he was able to see it, to focus on this one line that was darker than the other shadows that covered the room. He could see the shapes of the stones in the walls. On looking around the room, he could even see a cot, and the bars of his cell, all nearly saturated in darkness.
With his eyes now, he followed the crack above his reach, and saw that it led to an opening in the wall. Not a hole, but a barred window. The damage may have been hundreds of years old, but more than likely it was caused by a tremor at the time of the Cataclysm. Maybe the guards weren’t even aware of it, and maybe they had thrown Jaysynn in a bad cell, in one that had a back door.
If so, Jaysynn thought, it was incredible fortune. A miracle, even. “Okay, Elthor,” he said. “I’ll try it.”
He stuck both his hands in the crack. His palms faced out, putting pressure on the stone, as if he was going to pull the crack apart and make it wider. But in reality that pressure was to hold his weight. He worked his feet along the crack in a similar manner, and in no time he had scaled the wall to the height of the window, where he grabbed one of the bars and looked around.
Outside his window was a graveyard where the first kings of Falcon Point lay beside the modern heads of state whose pictures lined Vac’s office. It was bordered with an iron fence on the far side, and on the other side of that fence was a great pit that used to be the Remirian Well.
Jaysynn took the view in at a glance, mostly scouting out ways to stay hidden while running across the graveyard—if he could get out. But he turned his immediate attention to the window itself. The crack had again found the mortar between stones, and one of the bars was set into that ancient cement. The crack separated the walls from one of the bars, so it was entirely free at the bottom. At the top, however, it was as secure as it had ever been. It stuck into a hole drilled into one of the stones, and that hole had been sealed with mortar. But, Jaysynn thought, it might be possible to break it free from there. Since it was secure at the bottom, the builders might not have thought they needed to attach it as firmly at the top.
It was worth a shot. So Jaysynn let go of the bar he was holding and quickly grabbed onto the loose bar—with both hands, because they were too tightly bound for him to hold two different bars.
He did not get the opportunity to twist the bar free, however. The crack apparently extended above the window as well, and as soon as he grabbed the bar and held his weight by it, the stone above the window broke loose. Jaysynn fell backward from the window, and the stone came chasing after him.
He tried to take the fall smoothly, but without good use of his arms it wasn’t easy, and he still took a blow to the back of his ribcage when he hit the stone below.
The rock that fell just missed him, but it made a loud clap when it hit the ground. Jaysynn didn’t know if there were any guards near enough to hear it—he couldn’t see any torchlight—but he knew he didn’t have time to feel pain. He quickly scaled the wall again, sucked in his lungs and squeezed through the gap in the middle of the remaining bars.
In his short glance across the graveyard he had memorized the steps he would take, and he followed them now, through trails of shadows cast by trees and towering monuments, until he was over the fence and in the Well. The edges of the Well behind the graveyard were gently sloped, and he ran in deep enough so that his head was invisible beneath the edge of the burnt-out banks.
Deeper in this Well was a maze of cliffs and canyons, but Jaysynn stayed near the edge, running just below the rim until he was away from the castle yard and in back of some old mansions which had more and bigger cracks than the Old Fort. There he climbed out and spied on the graveyard, but no one stirred.
He waited for some time to see what kind of search operation might be coming for him, and as he waited he worked the knots, pulling with his teeth and scratching them against broken bricks along the edge of an alley until at last he was free.
Then he pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, a rough sketch of a bread oven that Kyrie had drawn for the projects man earlier that day, and that had wound up in his pocket after being passed among the three of them a number of times.
He climbed back into the Well and found a charred piece of rock. He scraped it along the surface of the paper until all the smoke was rubbed off the point, then found another rock to finish the job. It was slow work, but his message was short: “I am still here.”
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