"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.
"Damasco."
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.
"Damasco!"
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.