by Hilari Bell
She got down on her hands and knees, and Weasel stepped onto her back as if it were a footstool and squirmed through the new-made gap in the bars. He looked down.
“Rot!”
“What? What is it?” Arisa demanded.
“We’re not even close to the ground. This window is over a hundred feet high!”
Possibly more. The moon had risen, and judging distance in the dark was always harder, but the ledge of rocks at the base of the wall was a long way down. A narrow ledge too. Just wide enough to smash your body before it bounced down the cliff into the sea, which was even farther below.
Down was suicide, even with their blanket rope. So what about up?
Weasel wiggled a few inches farther and turned to look. The nearest window opening was twenty feet above them. And with the luck he was having lately, even if they could have reached it, it was bound to be barred. But looking at the wall’s sharp curve, he now knew where they were. He wiggled back through the window.
“We’re in the old watchtower,” he told Arisa, dropping to the floor as he spoke. He staggered, and she caught him. “It’s on the far side of the oldest part of the palace. I thought this wing had been closed for decades.”
Arisa clearly wasn’t interested in palace architecture. “Can we climb down?”
“No,” said Weasel. “The walls are sheer and we’re way too high.”
“Even with the rope? If we climb down a bit there might be cracks in the wall. Or something.”
“Or there might not be,” said Weasel. “In which case you’re hanging on the end of a fraying rope, fifty feet above a rock ledge, beyond which is an even bigger drop. No, thank you.”
Her mouth tightened stubbornly.
“You want to see for yourself?” Weasel asked.
“Yes.”
Then he had to get down on his hands and knees, so she could step onto his back and haul herself onto the thick ledge. It was a bit insulting that she hadn’t taken his word for it, but he wanted to examine the floor, anyway.
He was still crawling around several minutes later, when she dropped back into the room.
“You’re right,” she admitted. “I felt all around the window for cracks. There aren’t many, and none of them are deep enough to support a climber. We’re going to miss those blankets, though. What are you doing?”
“Checking out the floor,” said Weasel, which should have been obvious, since his nose was almost pressed against it. “In prisons, real prisons, they build the floors so the stones can’t be pried up. But this tower wasn’t built to be a prison. And I’ll bet the mortar around these flagstones is really, really old.”
“You know a lot about prisons, for an honest clerk.”
“I used to know a lot of burglars,” Weasel told her. “Not really well, but there was a tavern where I’d eat sometimes, and a lot of them met there. They told stories about breaking into and out of all kinds of places.”
“And they didn’t slit your throat when they caught you listening?”
“I was in a different branch of the same trade,” Weasel admitted. “At the time.”
One of the stones shifted slightly under his probing hands.
The first stone he found that had enough give to rock was too big to lift. It took another hour of crawling around before they found another stone that wiggled. And it took most of another hour for Weasel to chip out the mortar around it with his penknife.
But neither of them was bored. This chance to escape was beginning to look like … well, a chance, and Weasel filled the time telling her about Justice Holis’ arrest and his meeting with the prince.
“I’ve never heard of this Concordance of Nobles,” the girl commented thoughtfully. “But it sounds like your friend’s conspiracy came close to succeeding, and the regent won’t take that lightly. Was Justice Holis one of the top conspirators?”
“One of them,” Weasel confirmed grimly. “But I have two weeks to get him out. Well, thirteen days now.” Could he possibly get the justice out in thirteen days? If he failed … Weasel pushed the thought aside; thinking of consequences of failure made his stomach knot. He’d be no use to the justice if he went into fits. He took a steadying breath. “I can’t believe I slept all day.”
“That’s not uncommon, after a beating,” Arisa told him. “Your body needs to recover from the shock.”
“How would you know? You get beat up a lot?” It might have sounded sarcastic, but Weasel was honestly curious about this girl.
“Not me,” she admitted. “But I’ve seen it. My mother’s an … importer of sorts. It’s a rough trade.”
Weasel’s brows rose. “Your mother’s a smuggler?”
“Not herself,” said Arisa. “She’s a dressmaker, really. But she owns a warehouse where she keeps fabric, and since she’s a dressmaker, people expect to find bolts of silk there. Do you have any idea how high the import duty on silk is?”
“Don’t people also expect to see a duty-paid stamp on the bolt end?” Weasel asked.
“They do see duty-paid stamps,” Arisa told him cheerfully. “My mother takes care of that. Sometimes the ink is even dry.”
“Nice,” said Weasel sincerely. “And of course, being a respectable widow—please tell me she’s a respectable widow—no one would ever suspect her of dealing in smuggled goods.”
“My mother is an entirely respectable widow, who’d faint at the mere thought of smuggled goods,” said Arisa. “Unfortunately, some of her buyers here in the city aren’t that respectable. I was with them, carrying a message from my mother, when we were all arrested.”
“Ah.”
“They don’t know who my mother really is,” she went on. “So I need to get out of here before the guards figure out that the only way to find my mother is through me. Do you want me to work on that for a while?”
“I think I’ve got it,” Weasel told her. “Let’s try to rock the stone.”
It took a while to get a rhythm established, but soon the stone was bouncing a little higher with each push. Suddenly Arisa reversed her grip, slipping her fingers under the edge.
“It’s heavy!”
“Here, let me get in there.” Weasel scrambled around to her side of the stone. With both of them pushing, it tipped up easily, balancing on the stones beside it. The moonlight didn’t penetrate the black pit that yawned beneath.
“This isn’t good,” said Weasel. “The floor could be twenty or thirty feet down. We need light.”
“We don’t have light,” said Arisa. She fished in her pockets and pulled out a brass droplet.
“They didn’t take your money?”
“They took my purse, not the coins in my pockets. But I don’t have much.”
She continued to search till she came up with a tin nothing. She held it over the center of the opening and dropped it. The soft clink sounded almost instantly.
“Not too far,” she said.
“It could still be far enough to break an ankle,” Weasel told her. “Particularly in the dark. And we don’t even know what we’d land on.”
A reckless grin transformed the girl’s plain face. “One way to find out.” She turned and slid her legs into the hole.
“Are you crazy?” Weasel demanded. “You don’t know what’s down there!”
“I know what’s up here,” said Arisa. Was her face paler? In the dim moonlight Weasel couldn’t be sure, but her determined expression was clearly visible. “I’m tired of this place. Your company excepted, of course.”
She lowered her body into the gap, catching herself first with her elbows, then with just her hands clutching the edge. Then she let go.
Thump. Crash. “Ow!”
“What? How far is it? What did you hit? Are you hurt?”
A soft snort emerged from the darkness, followed by a scraping sound. “Nice to know what your priorities are.”
Weasel thought about what he’d said. “Sorry. Are you hurt?”
“No.” She sounded more cheerful now. �
�Not beyond a few bruises. I hit a crate on the way down and it broke.”
Shuffling sounds now.
“There are a lot of crates down here, and other stuff too. Wait a minute. I have an idea.”
“What idea?”
“Give me a minute. I’ve found the wall now, and I’m feeling along it…. Yes!”
“What?”
He was answered by the rasp of a striker, and a glow of light that wavered and then steadied. To his dark-adapted eyes, the candlelight seemed bright.
“People often leave them by the door,” said Arisa. “In rooms they don’t use much. Though someone’s been here relatively recently. These strikers have only been around for about ten years, and the candles don’t have much dust on them.”
“They’re the only thing that doesn’t.” Weasel peered through the opening into a large room filled with stacked crates, and cloth-covered lumps that were probably old furniture. There were also chests, some of which could have been thrown up onto the roof of a coach tomorrow without anyone giving them a second look. But other chests, made of dark wood with iron hasps, had probably been here since the tower was built. There was even a pile of metal scraps Weasel thought was a suit of armor, but he couldn’t be sure because all the pieces were lying in a heap on the floor. Everything was coated with dust.
“Can you move one of the bigger crates, so I can stand on it and reach the ceiling?” Weasel asked.
“It’s not that long a drop.” You sissy, her tone added.
“It’s not the drop,” Weasel told her. “This time I have an idea.”
He took a small revenge, ignoring her questions while he tied the blanket rope to one of the secure bars and thrust the rest of it out the window. By the time he returned to the hole, a tall crate stood beneath it.
“Stand back,” he warned her.
“Why?” But she stepped back, and the shower of loose mortar Weasel swept through the hole answered her question.
“All right,” she said resignedly. “What are you doing?”
“Making it look like we’re dead.” As he lowered himself to the crate, he told her what he’d done.
“Do you really think they’ll think we’re dead?” She climbed up to help him. Maneuvering the heavy flagstone from below was harder than lifting it in the first place.
“Depends. If they believe we’ve gone out the window and don’t look farther, you bet they’ll think we’re dead. No one could survive that fall, and if we bounced off the ledge the sea would take the bodies. If they realize we weren’t crazy enough to go out the window, they’ll find this stone in about two minutes.”
“So we’d better get out of here.”
The stone thumped into place, bruising Weasel’s knuckles. “Absolutely.”
Only a minute later, they discovered that the door wouldn’t open.
“You didn’t check it?” Weasel asked incredulously.
“I was busy,” said Arisa. She stood on her toes to look down through the door’s small, barred vent. “I was getting the light you wanted, and stacking crates so you could get down, and helping you put the stone back for your fancy scheme.”
“All right, all right. Can you see anything?”
“It’s a padlock,” said Arisa. When she took her face away from the vent, she had red marks on her forehead and chin. “I was hoping it would be a bolt, and we could reach down and slide it back.”
“If I can reach it, I can pick it,” said Weasel, trying to sound more confident than he felt.
Arisa eyed him dubiously. “I don’t think you can. What about taking the hinges apart?”
“The hinges are on the other side.”
“Oh. What about breaking it down? If we can find something heavy to use as a ram …”
“This door? Us and what other three men? These are oak planks, an inch thick. And looking at the spacing of the bolt heads, I’ll bet they’re braced with iron bands on the other side.”
“I can’t see the bands, but I could only see the lock because it stuck out from the door. And I don’t think you can reach—”
“I can try,” said Weasel.
It took several more minutes hauling crates around to build a platform where he could kneel to stretch his arm through the narrow gap. He had his lock picks laid out, ready, but…
“I can’t reach it,” Weasel gasped, straining again. “I can’t even touch it, much less pick it.”
“You couldn’t … I don’t know, reach down with a stick?”
“Maybe, but even if I could touch it with a stick, so what? I have to be able to reach it with my hand to pick the lock.”
“Then we’d better start looking for a ram,” said Arisa. Her face showed weary discouragement, but her voice was firm—the One God be thanked. The last thing Weasel needed was a weeping female.
And if his own eyes stung, well, that was because of the dust.
“A ram will make enough noise to fetch everyone in the tower,” he objected.
“We haven’t been making enough noise already? I don’t think there’s anyone else here. And even if someone does come, what do we have to lose? We’re caught in this room as surely as we were in the cell.”
That was true, but still … Weasel watched gloomily as she explored the shrouded furniture.
“One of these table legs might do, if we could break it off.”
Weasel looked at the table in question. It appeared to consist of whole tree trunks, which had been bolted together and only then planed flat and polished. “You’ve got as much chance of breaking that table as you do the door. You’d need an ax.”
“Maybe we can find one. They’ve got everything else down here. The armor! There might be an ax with it! Or a mace, or …” A sudden surge of hope carried Weasel across the room with her, to the corner where the discarded armor had been piled. It took several minutes to sort through it all, but in the end …
“Nothing.” The girl’s voice was still steady, but she wiped her cheeks with both hands, leaving dark smudges behind.
She was crying now, but Weasel wasn’t about to complain. He felt like he might start any second himself.
“Look at the bright side,” he said. “At least the air is fresh. When we hear them above us we can pound on the ceiling, and they’ll lock us up in a real cell that we can’t get out of. And feed us before they hang us.”
“You call that the bright side?”
“Well, at least the air is …”
It struck both of them at the same moment. They stared at the candle.
“Why is the smoke flowing away from the door?” Arisa whispered.
“Because there’s another way out! And we’re going to find it!”
Without the stream of smoke showing the way, they’d never have looked for another door. But when they dragged away several chests, a large wardrobe cupboard, and a wooden statue of a man in old-fashioned clothes, there it was. An ordinary wooden door, set neatly into the stone wall.
“The hinges are on our side!” Weasel exclaimed. “Even if it’s locked, we can—”
Arisa reached out and pulled the handle. Rust squealed as the door swung toward them.
“I hope you’re right about us being the only ones here,” said Weasel, stepping into the room. It was larger than the first, full of still more crates, chests, and odd-shaped lumps of fabric, as dusty as the last set.
“It’s just another storeroom,” Arisa said.
“But the candle smoke’s still being pulled away.” Weasel pointed to a corner.
There was barely room to thread their way between the stacks of palace detritus. Weasel gave wide berth to a heap of old curtains, which had to be full of mice and maybe rats. Arisa sneezed twice.
When they reached the far wall, the smoke rose upward. Arisa held her candle over her head. “There’s a hatch up there, or something,” she said. “I can barely see it.”
Weasel frowned. The ceiling here was much taller than in the previous rooms—almost three stories. “How do
we get up there? That hatch is higher than the floor of our old cell. Suppose …” His heart sank. “Suppose it just leads out to the sea, like the window did.” A ventilation shaft. It seemed horribly likely.
“We’re going in the opposite direction from the window,” Arisa objected. “Look at the stubs of those beams, coming out of the wall. I think there was a floor up there once, and it burned or fell down. I think we’re moving back toward the palace. I bet it’s a secret passage.”
Weasel laughed. “Secret passages only exist in three-volume novels,” he told her. “Bad ones. But it must go somewhere, and to quote this girl I know, ‘There’s only one way to find out.’”
It was easy to find crates they could drag over to the wall below the hatch. It was harder finding chests and bits of furniture light enough to lift to the top of their growing stack.
Weasel was sorting through a corner, cluttered with what looked like the remains of a theatrical performance. At least, he couldn’t think of anything else that called for an eight-foot-tall silhouette of a tree. Some of the chests here, which probably held costumes, were lighter. He reached into a bundle of filthy cloth, ready to yank his hands back at the first brush of a furry body, and his fingertips touched metal.
A sudden surge of dizziness brought him to his knees, his vision graying away. His grip on the object tightened instinctively—it helped hold him up. When his senses cleared, his cheek was pressed against the dirty cloth and Arisa was frowning down at him.
“Are you all right?”
“I guess so,” said Weasel cautiously. The strange weakness was passing as rapidly as it had come on. “I just got dizzy. I haven’t eaten since … it must be day before yesterday by now. You should have saved me some food.”
“I tried,” said Arisa. “The guards took it when they came for the dishes. What’s that?”
“A shield,” said Weasel, and then wondered why he was so certain, for fabric obscured its shape. He fumbled the cloth aside. It was a shield, steel plate over dark wood, with rotting leather straps. It looked old, and battered, and real—a better match to the dismantled armor in the first room than to the silver-painted swords of the theater.