by Stanzin
CHAPTER 25.2
Lesley's Diary - The Great Escape - August 31,1909
I left you last time with an ambitious, ambiguous resolution: to do everything within my power to save the Refugees of Helika.
I bloody well succeeded.
Oh, if only I could share my veins with you right now. If only you could get into my head and be giddy with me. I’ve heard the word triumphant… but I never knew it could feel so good, so raw, so bloodthirsty. I want to scream again, just scream, without words and without meaning – my soul wants to make noise.
I could tell you a million reasons I pulled it off: Winnie and Emil’s influence, and the influence of other Elders in the camp, a family of ex-military personnel, my own demonically enhanced magic and advantages… but there’s only really one reason I pulled it off. Only one strength. My greatest advantage.
My greatest strength is my enemy’s complacency.
I saw it at once, when I helped the prisoners escape. Not one, not one of the Spooks thought after the escape, that perhaps the prisoners had access to magic.
Not one of them suggested that perhaps the measures taken to jail Mundane prisoners would not be enough to jail Magical prisoners. And not one of them thought that they could ever become vulnerable to the very people they were supposed to be jailing.
But I must be coherent!
This Teacher… whoever he is, he wants war between Helika and Domremy. I’ve no idea why, and I seriously don’t think either country can afford a war right now. But once I learned that he needed our (the refugees) deaths to bring that war about, I knew we had to leave, and immediately.
If his one-week delivery estimate for the antidote, beginning the Wednesday of August 18th, held true for the Wednesday of August 25th (and so the trigger of the second riot), then I had to get us out before then.
No way I could do this alone. I swore Winnie and Emil into absolute secrecy immediately, and told them everything I knew . And then I had them do the same to the other Elders. I told them we needed to escape, and, in a single night, we came up with the PLAN.
There was only one place to escape to – Domremy. The border was fifty kilometres northwest of us, as the carpet flies. There were only two points of entry – Virgin’s Pass and Reefer’s Way. Virgin’s Pass was to Domremy City itself - we settled on it.
We had to do five things. First, we had to incapacitate the entire remaining battalion of Spooks. Second, we had to arm every mage in the camp with its own instrument. Third, we had to break the ward stones. Fourth, we had to get fifteen thousand refugees to the border. Fifth, we had to get past the Helikan Border Guard.
And we had to do it all in a single night.
To incapacitate a battalion, you need a general sort of attack, a common weak point. They targeted our food; there was no reason I couldn’t target theirs. Winnie and the other Elders told me where to look in the warehouse; I snuck in and snuck back out with every ingredient necessary to make the strongest hypnotic potion they knew how to brew. They charmed the potion so that it would strike anyone who ingested it with sleep exactly when we wanted to, and not before. We figured everyone would be done with their dinner by midnight. Any break we made would have to be at night, so the best time to unleash the potion within their blood was when they were already asleep. There would have to be minimum commotion.
Arming the mages amongst us wasn’t difficult. Two thousand of our numbers were mages, which surprised me. I hadn’t expected that many. The night after we drew up the plan, Falstead’s Friendly Ghost led a cabal of Listmakers and Elders into the warehouse. We searched hours for instruments and didn’t find a single one. I’d just begun to panic and wonder if the Spooks had broken our instruments when another Listmaker (the same one who’d realised how the Reflectives were being selected for execution) found them bundled into one large crate. We took the instruments and replaced the instruments with junk from the other crates.
We were ready with the first and second steps in the pre-dawn hours of Thursday, the August 19th.
The ward stones were more complicated. It would have been too much luck to hope that my demon-enhanced magic could break the wards… but it could not. I tried, but I only have the power to step through the wards as if they weren’t there (I know. Terrible. I want a refund). We sent the word out at noon on Thurday – was there anyone in camp who knew how to break wards? And that’s where we found our family of ex-military personnel. Can you believe that we found a hundred and seventy year old geezer who’d actually fought in the eight Crusade? His great grandson, Killian, turned out to be from Domremy, in Falstead for a vacation, a Gurukul trained amateur wardmaster. I took him to the wardstones. He said it would take him two days to study the wards, and devise their anti-charm. He was told he’d be sleeping during the day and working during the night. We gave him his instrument. That night, and the night after, I stood with him as he, invisible, worked on the wardstones. Early the second night, one hour past midnight, he finished his study. The next evening, he had the anti-charm ready to cast.
The fourth task was the scariest. How do you get fifteen thousand sick people fifty kilometres away in one night? Flight. There was no other possible answer. We would need carpets, thousands of them. We didn’t have a thousand carpets. We, the refugees, didn’t have 50 carpets. But the Spooks did. Every Helikan White has its own carpet… even so, and counting the carpets of those dead in the riot, we had only a thousand or so carpets. At eight people to a carpet at a time, we had only enough space for a little over half of the camp.
The answer was obvious.
Two trips.
But we didn’t have time for two trips, not if the fifth step of our plan was to succeed. If we had to overcome the Helikan Border Guard, it would have to be under cover of darkness. We would have to strike no later than five in the morning. Our advantage in that fight would be my power of invisibility – a seventy-five foot radius within which nothing could be seen… a power that could not could not be penetrated by mortal magic. Our disadvantage was that we were sick, and that we’d be fighting after two gruelling round trips from the camp and the border.
Of course, we couldn’t simply land up at the border… we had to know if the trip was possible first! So as soon as Killian finished his study of the wards in the pre-dawn hours on the morning of the twenty first, I sneaked out of the camp with a few mages, and we flew to the border.
We learned three things – one, that a flight to the border took a little over an hour, which meant a round trip would take two. Two round trips would take four. We had to be in striking position (look at me using fighting words!), at least a half hour before that. Which meant we had to begin flying out of camp at thirty minutes past midnight. Which meant we had to have finished incapacitating the Spooks at by midnight, preferably earlier. Spooks, those not on duty, have their own curfew – at eleven.
If a thousand carpets were to remain unseen, then they would have to fly high. Also, two trips meant that we had to fly direct, in a straight line. There wasn’t going to be time for anything else if we all had to reach there by a five o’clock deadline. For two reasons, this meant height. For between us and the border, there were several mountain ranges, none less than eight thousand feet in height, and in some places, over ten thousand feet. It’s true, carpets can fly up there… but our real problem would be the cold. And that was the second thing. At ten thousand feet, the air is nearly cold enough to freeze water. Add wind chill, and some of us could literally die. Thankfully, this is where our additional mages could help – those who weren’t flying the carpets, would warm the others on their flight. Sustaining warming charms on eight people for an hour wasn’t hard… but it WAS exhausting, and we would need all our strength to attack the border.
The compromise wasn’t ideal, but it was inevitable – the frailest amongst us would be kept magically toasty on the flight over. The rest of us would have to bundle up warm, for we needed at least five hundred mages in fighting shape. This meant another raid of the w
arehouse, this time, for enough clothes for about ten thousand people. We decided to carry out that raid immediately as soon as we returned.
We did one more thing – we scouted out a secure, somewhat hidden place to land, less than a five-minute flight from the border. Here, we buried an anchor – an iron horseshoe imbued with its own magical signature. This anchor would serve as a direction marker for each carpet’s pilot, who would be given a rudimentary tracker of its own.
It was four thirty in the morning when we returned. By five, I’d let fifteen hundred mages into the warehouse. By six, we were carrying out everything that looked like cloth and linen out, huge bundles and mages walking invisible through a camp of waking Spooks, the crates in the warehouse half empty now.
The final raid, for the carpets, would have to be executed on the night of escape itself. Five hundred mages, who would not be flying carpets or warming the fliers. No, these five hundred would be our fighters. Here at the camp, and at the border. At the camp, their task was, with my assistance, to sneak into the Spook barracks, and relieve our slumbering guards of the carpets they stored in their kits. We were done in fifteen minutes. Immediately after, I snuck into the Spook HQ and stole the records of property, deeds, and titles held by each refugee.
There were fifty Elders amongst us. We marked their wrists A to Z, and then A2 to X2. Each elder nominated about twenty lieutenants, all of whom could fly, all marked with their letters, and their own number to signify their status. Each such pilot-lieutenant was responsible for about 15 refugees, divided into groups of refugees who would also be numbered.
Thus, for the first stage of the Great Escape…
Elders could be lettered A to X2…
The lieutenants would be lettered from A to X2, followed by their own number (for example, (J2 – 17).
And the refugees assigned to each lieutenant would be marked according to which batch they would fly in, I or II, (for example, J2-17-II).
Thus, each lettered Elder was responsible for roughly three hundred unique refugees.
The lieutenants had three simple but crucial tasks. First, to break the blood-tracking devices on everyone’s arms the second it was midnight. Second, once the trackers were broken, they were to lead the first batch of refugees under their care to the execution square – that’s where we would be taking off from, for that’s where the stockpile of carpets stolen in the final raid would be brought. Third, to nominate in each batch two spotters – one of whom would keep an eye on the carpet in front, and the other, on the carpet behind. We could not let a single carpet go astray.
How did we enforce this massive organisation and logistic? Trickledown magical Oaths of Secrecy. Winnie and Emil swore in the Elders; the Elders swore in their lieutenants; who in turn swore in every Mundane refugee under their command and the remaining one thousand Mages. There was no choice, or option of refusing. Any refugee who refused adamantly to be sworn in, was to be executed – no one person could be allowed to jeopardise the rest. (Thankfully, it did not come to this.) I had everyone swear a second Oath – that no one could maliciously, directly or indirectly, bring harm to the Spooks as they slept, at anytime during our escape. We could not be sure of our Success, and we didn’t need to give the Empire more reasons to execute us. It took a day and a half to swear everyone in once we started, and then another day to divvy up people by their chains-of-command; and to drill our plan into their heads.
Sadly, this meant I’d have to let Borix and Walder go unscathed for now. We’d have to settle our debts at another time.
With one thousand pilots, five hundred warmth-enchanters, and about five hundred fighters, we planned the escape to happen on the midnight of the 24th.
And then, late afternoon on Sunday, the 22nd of August, something very, very curious happened. He Scryed me again, our Trueblood beyond the border. And this time… he wasn’t alone.
Somehow, he had Domremy with him.
My mind exploded at the time, of course. Of all the twists and turns and curves, this was really much too much. But there was no time to interrogate him. He told me that the Blood Tree was a secret weapon built to murder us refugees. He told me the murder could happen tonight. He told me to break the rune links.
I’ll admit it – he managed to terrify me.
And then I knew… we had to escape not tomorrow night, but tonight.
I did as he said, and had the Elders command everyone to break their blood-links. We had barely broken two thousand or so of them, when the devices just cracked and fell off on their own accord. Whatever he’d been trying to at his end… it must have worked. Thankfully, the Spooks haven’t been bothering us much since the riot, and less since the executions were stopped, so they remained unaware about us track-free refugees.
At seven in the evening, I entered the Observant kitchen complex and poured the charmed sedative brewed by our potioneers into the Spook battalion’s food. The Observant civilians had already been removed from the camp after the riot.
At eleven thirty, the potioneers activated the sleeping agent. The five hundred fighters and I were already poised to break into the Observant sections. Twenty minutes later, we had a thousand carpets ready to unroll in front of the stockade square. It had not been flawless – three of the Spooks had not eaten. We had to subdue them; they were not harmed. The others slept. As the pilot-lieutenants and their first batches lined up, I had Killian nullify the wards with his anti-charm… and the magical barrier around the camp was dispelled.
Carpets were unrolled, refugees were seated, and they began to take off.
Emil came on my carpet, which was in the first batch. The first ninety carpets carried the full strength of our fighters, five hundred mages, to our hiding spot near the border.
We climb high, oh so high. We spotted ahead, and we spotted behind and let the anchor we had buried not far from the border guide our flight. We flew in the formation of birds, a beautiful and fragile and precious V. I would tell you about the stars and how bright they were, and how everything but the wind was silent, and how we were bitterly cold, and how the dim carpet of mountain peaks were capped with snow below us… but I was the most tired I’d ever been in my life.
I slept.
Around half past one, we landed in the concealed glen where our anchor was buried, and our pilot-lieutenants immediately turned back for the camp for their second batch of refugees. We quickly set up heated shelters. I could see the refugees were skittish and scared even in the near absent moonlight. The warmth helped, and we told them to sleep.
And then, at two in the morning of the twenty-third, our fighters and I began the most crucial part of the night… to bring the fight to the Enemy.
By my original plan, tonight I would have spent the hours until dawn silently marking the locations of border posts in the valley so we knew exactly which ones to attack on the morning of the twenty fourth. Now, we had to hunt them down in the darkness, one by one, and feel our way through.
Our advantages: my extended invisibility, my ability to bring others through wards, and our superior numbers. They never had a chance. Watchtower by watchtower, in bursts of silent and furious spell-casting, we incapacitated and trussed up the Helikan Border Guard. With only twenty or so men at each tower, it wasn’t hard, not with two hundred invisible fighters within seventy-five feet of me. By four in the morning, we had destroyed forty-two towers.
At four-fifteen, I gathered all five hundred of our fighters in an invisible sphere around me, and we took on the South Gate and the battalion posted inside. Just as at the watchtowers, they never knew who hit them. I try and imagine now, what it must have felt like to them, to be so easily defeated by an unknown force, in a near-fortress that’s never, ever been breached.
We conquered South Gate in one hour. Fifteen minutes after that, we sent a flyer back to the waiting refugees. We opened the gates on both sides. Emil and a few others stepped through South Gate, and headed north into The Promise. At the halfway mark, they sent
up a great beacon of white light, dazzling like a small sun in the darkness. They kept it up the whole while that the pilots navigated north through Virgin’s Pass, to where I waited for the refugees. They came when the sky was steel grey, a swarm of survivors racing to freedom.
I feel so poetic right now.
Then came the easiest of my tasks… I had to stand in one place. My demon magic, which so wonderfully nullifies the effects of any wards in my thaumic radius, let me stand at the south entrance of South Gate… as fifteen thousand refugees walked through and into The Promise. They couldn’t see me, but I watched every single one of them pass through.
Twenty minutes after the last of them passed through, with not a single casualty on either side, more Helikan Border Guard forces arrived… but they were too late. We let them have the Gate back. We couldn’t have defended it anyway. Emil and the other men had managed to get the attention of Domremin Alpine Army.
What was to happen next, was politics, and a Ghost had no part to play in this.
So Winnie made me a nice shelter, and I fell asleep, and didn’t wake for the next eighteen hours.
Have you any idea how much the world can change in eighteen hours?
Completely.
The Helikan Border Guard and the Domremin Alpine Army had surrounded us… and put us into yet another bleeding barrier-ward. Apparently, we were so politically volatile elements that the merest wrong move from us could set off the next Continental War.
Have you any idea how beautiful The Promise is? It may be the nicest prison ever. The grass is fresh and green. The sky is a deep blue. The mountains are a grand size. The walls are look deadly. The escapees from Helika are spread out all over this paradise. Everyone’s found their own corner again… but they don't’ look sad anymore.
I’m glad.
I’m enjoying being lazy. I just sleep and eat. That is literally all I do, all I care to do. I could just fly out of here… I really could. One invisible flyer on one invisible carpet and one invisible passenger. I could be home in an hour, or two at the most.
I haven’t been able to bring myself to leave though. It’s strange… but I feel responsible for the escapees. Oh who am I fooling – the real reason I’m not returning is that I’d have to dive right back into real life… and I don’t want to. Not just yet.
Sleep is the best thing in the world.
Emil’s been set up as the point man between us and the world. He managed to get them to let us send letters (though they’re being censored by a Shamanate neutral). Still, these are the first letters we are confident will reach their addressees. That’s something. We’ve been getting letters back, and it’s cheering people up to no end.
Today though, something important happened. They let us have newspapers, and we finally found out what’s going on… and my mind exploded again.
The Blood Tree had collapsed, and with it, the Blood Census… but they were talking of building another one. I can’t let them, obviously.
That’s my vacation cut short.
And then there’s the boy, Gregory Grey. I don’t know much about him, but I know enough: I know that little over a week ago, Gregory Grey was appointed Hero Of Domremy. I know, that little over a week ago, a Domremin with Communion spoke to me.
I think I’ve found my Trueblood.
Where did he come from? They say he’s the son of The Greys… then where are his parents? Are the fantastic stories they tell of him true? Did he really ask the Throne to make a mage out of every kid? When did he open his Cradle? The papers don’t mention that he was at the Blood Tree… have mother and father shushed it up? Do they know of his Sentinel?
The papers say he and his friend are using their fledgling celebrity status to initiate arbitration between the refugees, Helika, and Domremy. Why the unexpected philanthropy?
They say you’re flying us kids out on an airship… that you managed to strike a deal for a Observant majority judging panel in exchange for the safe extraction of refugee children. Why?
Are you looking for me, Gregory Grey? Would you recognise me if you saw me? But you won’t see me… not unless I want you to. But we’ll meet soon enough.
Do I owe you my life, Gregory Grey? Do the refugees? What would have happened if we had not had your warning… if we had delayed another day?
When the time comes, I’ll thank you.