At the bottom of the stair, as they’d been told, there was a door sporting a modest padlock. Eril kicked it in with a poise and economy of motion that looked extensively practiced. A couple of shattering blows at the latch with his heel, the door sprang inward on its hinges, and they found themselves in a long underground chamber lined along one wall with cage-fronted cells. Bandglow seeped in from windows set up near the heavy-beamed roof, much the same construction as the joyous longshank chamber and the same effect: There was just enough pale silver light to make out figures huddled to the back of each cell on the floor. Mostly young women, one or two more androgynous forms that might have been boys—the difference, shrouded in any case beneath each clutched-up, moth-eaten gray blanket, tended to drown out in the low light. Hollow, terrified eyes and curled defensive postures created an unsexed uniformity. Each captive cringed visibly as the booted feet went past their cell, clung harder to the blanket as if it might be torn away from them. One or two started to make a tight-racheted keening, but you couldn’t really tell which of them it was—the sound crept out past the bars and filled the whole chamber like the relentless drip of water. It put Ringil’s teeth instantly on edge. He hadn’t heard anything like it since the war.
“Good thing Girsh isn’t here to see this,” Eril murmured. “He’d probably want to let them all out.”
“Yeah.”
They found the tool section at the end of the row, a long alcove set with three workbenches broad enough to take a human body and lined along the back wall with hanging racks for the tools. Ringil scanned the racks, spotted a couple of delicately finished branding irons and some other suggestively shaped implements whose applications he didn’t want to think about; then his eyes fastened thankfully on what they’d come for. Four identical, long-handled manacle cutters dangling side by side. He lifted one off its hook and flexed the scissor motion a couple of times.
“Should do the trick.”
“Right. Let’s get out of here.”
Ringil hesitated. He tossed the cutters across the chamber to Eril, who fielded them one-handed with a knife fighter’s precision.
“You go. I’ll catch you up.”
“What?” Eril looked from the cutters in his hand to Ringil, and then, with dawning realization, down the long line of cells. “Oh, come
“I said you go. I won’t be long.”
For a moment it looked as if Eril might argue. He held Ringil’s eye, face unreadable, hefted the cutters a couple of times. Finally, he shrugged.
“Your call. But Girsh is in no state to hang about. Soon as I get that bolt out of his leg, we’re leaving. Don’t miss the boat.”
“I won’t.”
Eril nodded, turned, and headed back up the line of cells to the door. He didn’t look at any of them, didn’t turn his head at all.
Ringil took another pair of manacle cutters from the rack and went to the first cell in the line. The lock was a simple affair, two bolts and a cowled fastener. It took him less than a minute to mangle it apart with the cutters. He opened the cage door and stepped hesitantly into the space behind. Instantly the girl on the floor recoiled into one back corner of the cell, as hard and as fast as the walls would let her. It was almost as if she’d been thrown there by some external force he was radiating. He saw, even in the low wash of bandlight from the windows, that she was trembling violently.
“You’re free to go,” he said, feeling foolish.
She just stared back up at him, eyes and knuckles and the blanket edge. The awkward way she’d sprawled in the corner revealed one thigh to the hip, a small triangular glimpse of buttock and waist beyond—pale, naked flesh and the small weave-patterned discoloration of a brand on the hip bone. The blanket was her only clothing.
He left her, went mechanically along the row of cells, wrenching the locks apart with a rising fury that made him clumsier each time, made the cutters slip and turn as he used them, as if they had a mind of their own. His teeth gritted tighter, his breath came harder, the locks buckled and tore, hung off each door like mangled body parts, or else they slipped and clanked on the floor at his feet. And he knew, all the time, even as he was doing it, that he was wasting his time.
