Break the Chains

Chapter Thirty-Nine

A good plan, Detan had taught her, functioned on three founding principles: it must be followed, it must be trusted, and it must be thrown straight out the window when it inevitably goes to the pits.

She ran like her ass was on fire, only vaguely aware of the shouts behind her. Detan knew what he was doing. He must. She just had to get Nouli. If he proved reluctant, then she’d knock him on the head and drag him out. If Kisser was in her way, she’d knock her on the head and drag her out, too.

She brushed past the woman who must be Pelkaia, skin crawling all the same as she touched the likeness of Thratia. Honey darted in front of her, blonde mop of hair glowing in the sunlight as she flung the door open. The three of them spilled out into the breezy day, the weather cool and pleasant and bright, cheerfully ignorant of all Ripka’s plans evaporating before her eyes. Her heels skidded in the dirt outside the yellowhouse’s door. Enard grabbed her arm, steadying her.

His expression was calm, controlled. Willing to do whatever needed doing next. Would have made her a fine deputy, had circumstances turned out very differently.

“What now?” he asked.

Shouts and clangs and grunts sounded behind her. She pretended not to notice. Detan had given her a task. She knew how to perform her duty.

“We need Nouli.”

“Kisser’s uncle?” Honey asked.

“You know him?”

She toyed with the ends of her hair, gaze tracking some sea bird as if it were the most fascinating thing in all the world. She was bored, Ripka realized. Bored and looking for some new challenge – or more than likely for someone new to kill. “Met him once. Don’t know where he is.”

Ripka eyed the path back to the prison, laying a map in her mind over what she saw. They weren’t far from where Nouli’s workshop should be, but then, there was no telling what would happen if they re-entered those hallways. They could get lost. They could be captured. And while Honey was itching for another bloodbath, Ripka had no stomach for it.

Enard cleared his throat.

“I’m thinking,” she snapped.

“Had you, perhaps, considered the grate against the wall?” His tone was gentle, but still held a rebuke. She’d been too tangled up in the strange doors and labyrinthine pathways. She’d let the complexity of the situation blind her, when the solution was so simple. Nouli’s venting window had been covered with a grate, a rather obvious addition to any stone wall. They just had to find it.

“Clockwise or counter?” she asked.

“I’ve always been fond of widdershins.” Enard grinned down at her, his sweat-slicked hair swooped over to one side. She would have chuckled if she weren’t so very aware of the shouts of battle behind her.

“Let’s go.”

They cut across the fields, ignoring the possibility of detection from above. Things were moving too quickly, and she could hear hints of the riot raging within the prison’s choking arms. The guards would, hopefully, be too busy to pay the fields any mind. And if they weren’t – well, Honey was more than willing to deal with them.

Each time they passed a window that could not be Nouli’s, a lump of dread hardened in Ripka’s heart. How long had they been away from the yellowhouse, from whatever nightmare battle raged within? She had no doubt that Pelkaia could handle herself in a fight, and that lackey of hers had stood with the stance of one who’d seen one too many rows, but Detan and Tibs weren’t prepared for this. She wondered how much sel Aella had tucked away in that house, and just how angry and scared Detan might actually be, and forced herself to move faster.

“Captain,” Enard said from somewhere behind her, the question in his voice strained by lack of breath. She paused halfway up a hill, and was shocked to realize how far ahead she’d run. Enard and Honey approached the base of the hill, their faces red from exertion.

“What?” she asked, voice thready from lack of air.

“Look around.”

The hill she stood atop was one of a handful arranged to form a narrow valley in the fields. There was nothing natural about their placement. The humps were too regular, the spacing almost perfect. And while the contents of the valley could not be seen from anywhere below the hills – and what inmate ever had reason to climb them? – the crop was obvious to her now. Hip-high shrubs laden with dark, black-brown leaves bowed in the wind, the sun making their glossy foliage gleam like an oil slick. Though the valley funneled most of the wind out toward the sea, Ripka could scent the sun-warmed leaves. The sticky tar aroma of mudleaf.

So here was Radu’s cash crop, carefully tended alongside the food crops. She had never been so desirous of a flint to strike in all her life.

“Oh,” was all Honey said as she came to stand alongside her.

As the scent of the mudleaf plants wafted up to her, Ripka recalled with sudden clarity the faint aroma of mudleaf in Nouli’s laboratory, and she choked back a laugh. Of course he wasn’t a user of that rival drug. He’d never risk slowing his already damaged mind. No, he’d just had his workshop placed near the one place the fewest inmates on the Remnant would be allowed to go.

She scanned the wall with renewed intent, and there, near enough to the end of the row of hills that it was nearly covered by the mounded soil, gleamed a faint hint of metal.

“Gotcha,” she said, grinning, and jogged down the side of the hill, struggling to keep her jelly-tired knees under control. Just a little while longer, and then she could throw herself down to rest on the deck of the Larkspur. They were so, so close.

Brown-black smears of sticky nectar clung to her arms and legs as she waded through the rows of mudleaf shrub. She hesitated before the grate, breathing deep of the sea-damp air, waiting to be sure she caught no hint of the poisons Nouli brewed within wafting out at her. When she was certain the vent was clear, she felt along the edge of the grate, fingers dragging over the rough metal, until she found the hook that held it in place. Shoddy workmanship, but all the better for her purposes.

With Enard’s help she levered the grate free and threw it to the dirt, then peered carefully within. The room was faintly lit, the ruddy glow of cheap beeswax candles behind dusty glass the only source of light in the room.

“Nouli?” she whispered.

A soft rattling echoed from within. Nouli’s head appeared above his table, his face sallow and pinched with worry and suspicion.

“Captain, is it? Thought you buggered off with my supplies.”

“Our task was betrayed, I’m afraid. To the Glasseaters.”

Nouli hissed through his teeth, darting an uneasy glance at the door. “You’d better come in.”

“Can’t you come out?”

He glanced pointedly at the window, then at the width of his chest, and Ripka sighed. There was no way he could squeeze through. They’d have to take him out through the prison proper, and that meant risking detection.

“Honey,” she said as she levered herself up to crawl through the window. “You don’t have to help us with this. You could sneak back into general pop, maybe even all the way to your cell–”

“I’m coming,” she said, and though her voice was as soft as always there was no room for argument in it.

After what felt like a good half-mark of cursing and squeezing and scraping, they were all three through the vent, forming a half-circle around Nouli and his cluttered table.

“We must go now,” Ripka insisted. Nouli clutched a satchel bulging with papers tight to his chest.

“My niece…”

“We were sold out to the Glasseaters. Kanaea Bern is the only one who could have done this.” She hated to cut to the point so, but there was no time for this. They had to flee, now.

“She wouldn’t!”

“Unless it was you, there is no other possibility.”

He sucked his lips and shifted his weight, then pushed his spectacles up his nose and nodded to himself. “I do not like it, but I believe you. She has been acting… strange… lately. I fear she is more and more her father’s child every day. A gambler, that one. Obsessed with risk. I see no other solution to the evidence before us.”

Ripka sighed with relief. It was a pleasure to convince a mind as loving of evidence as her own. “Good. Do you know any shorter paths out of this place? We must avoid detection at all costs, and make it to the sparrow’s nest, where our escape ship is docked.”

Nouli barked a frantic laugh. “Impossible. There are less used ways, but with the prison in chaos there’s no way to know where the guards will be. Never mind any rabid inmates running amok.”

Ripka forced herself to relax her jaw. “Very well. Then we will do our best. Be quick and be quiet, do not speak unless–”

The workshop door flung open. Silhouetted in the brighter light of well-tended oil lanterns stood Kisser, flanked by two tough looking men who wore guard’s uniforms. Ripka reached instinctively for her cutlass, cursed and grabbed for one of the crates Nouli used for chairs instead.

“You two,” Kisser said, “are terrible at dying.” She advanced into the small room, thugs in tow.