"I understand, dear Ashwillow," Jack said with a shallow bow. "I hope you'll forgive me if I attend to my defense against these charges?"
He started to work the spell of shadow-transport-only to have his feet kicked out from under him before he'd even muttered a single syllable. Someone standing behind him knelt and caught him in a hammerlock, beating his forehead into the cobblestones hard twice, then three times, until his ears rang and all he could see were stars.
"I knew you were going to do that," snarled a familiar voice. Marcus bound his hands tightly behind his back, and then gagged him as well with little gentleness. "There, that should keep you from working any spells. You're not going to get away quite so easily this time."
Jack was hauled to his feet and held up by his arms, although his vision swam and blood ran down his face. He caught one glance of Illyth's horrified face, and then he was wheeled about and frog-marched down the street in the center of a knot of watchful guardsmen.
CHAPTER TWELVE
As might be expected of someone in Jack's line of work, he was no stranger to the city's gaols. Fortunately, he had endured no long incarcerations, nor had he ever been convicted of any serious crimes. More than once, he'd simply waited until no one was looking to charm a guard and talk himself out of prison or absented himself from the judicial process with a well-timed spell of invisibility or disappearance. In fact, Jack had acquired a dangerous level of confidence in his ability to avoid legal complications.
This time, the city officials were not treating him as a common burglar, rumored fence, or suspected swindler. They were treating him as a murderer, traitor, and spy, whose known magical powers merited the utmost caution. He was fitted with a set of enchanted fetters that utterly blocked any attempt on his part to wield magic, then he was interred in the strongest, most secure, and incidentally most dismal cell in the city, in the prison-fortress of Ill-Water.
Ill-Water was not actually located in the city proper; it was built on an artificial island of massive stone slabs a few hundred yards out beyond the harbor entrance, surrounded by the cold waters of the Inner Sea. Raven's Bluff reserved Ill-Water for prisoners whose crimes, abilities, or stations were so far beyond those of the common criminal that no possibility of escape could be allowed. For cutthroats, brawlers, smugglers, and highwaymen, the city's prison hulks offered weeks, months, or years of backbreaking labor. For crimes of a less violent nature, the Nevin Street Compter sufficed, but for those who had aligned themselves against the powers of Raven's Bluff, Ill-Water was the fortress of last resort.
Jack saw no other prisoners, no exercise yards, no mess halls, nothing of the outside. He was ferried to the island prison in the lightless hold of an armored prison barge, led through a cyclopean maze of winding stone passages and massive iron doors, and then finally deposited in an oubliette four feet square and about fifteen feet deep, reached only through an iron trapdoor bolted and locked from outside. A grill of thick iron bars about a foot square in the center of the trapdoor provided the entrance for food, water, and a thin glimmer of yellow light. A similar grill in the center of the cell's cold stone floor served as the means by which his wastes exited.
And there he remained for some interminable time in the darkness, relieved only by the pale gleam of torchlight from some distant spot in the hallway above, and in the silence, sundered only by the unending dull thundering of the surf breaking against the prison's massive foundations. Neither condition showed the slightest fluctuation or variance; before he'd slept even once, Jack had lost track of whether an hour, a half-day, or even several days had passed. He tried talking to himself, singing, thinking up dirty jokes, challenging himself with mental puzzles, marching in place, and straining at the iron fetters that bound him, but ultimately the tedium overcame him, rising up like a dark and sinister flood, drowning him in despair and futility so that he simply slouched on the floor and gazed upward longingly at the light.
Jack had always imagined that any incarceration might be an arduous and exacting kind of adventure, an opportunity to survive a difficult experience and then escape from it in a particularly daring and skillful manner, the kind of experience that would only add to his fame and renown. What he had not expected was to be buried in a cold stone shaft and simply forgotten about. He hadn't expected to be alone, with nothing but the mocking half-light and the maddening reverberation of the distant surf to keep him company.
After he'd slept twice, he was awakened by a guard's passage. Jack leaped to his feet in excitement, amazed at how so common an occurrence as a human being walking by overhead could seem like the most entertaining break in the tedium. The small grill in the center of the trapdoor opened; a basket containing a flagon of water and some tough black bread was lowered on a length of twine.
"Remove the bread and the flagon," directed the voice from above. "You can keep the container until your next meal. You'll put the flagon in the basket, and it will be refilled. Do you understand?"
"Yes," said Jack. "Listen, I would like to speak to-"
"One more word, and you'll miss your next meal. Two more, and you won't eat for three days. You are not to speak at all, unless asked to. Do you understand?"
"Yes," said Jack.
He fidgeted and grimaced, desperate to say something, anything to keep the person above nearby, but he did not doubt for a moment that the jailer would do exactly what he said he would and skip him for the next few rounds.
"Good."
A shadow moved across the light above; the basket was abruptly drawn up again. Jack resigned himself to chewing on the tough bread and washing it down with the icy water, and considered whether or not he should begin a count of feedings by way of marking the time.
He slept again, awoke and spent a long time staring at the walls, and then the basket was lowered to him again. He received another chunk of coarse bread and a refill for his water flagon. The cycle repeated several more times. Jack wondered if strangling himself with his fetters might be preferable to eternal incarceration, and to divert his mind from such a grisly prospect, he began to hatch for his own fancy the most outrageous escape plots he could imagine.
"I could scale the cell walls chimney style, seeing as they have carelessly been left so close together," he mused. The shackles were unfortunately fixed to a heavy bolt in the cell floor, preventing him from climbing anywhere near the trapdoor above.
"I see that my jailers thought of that already," Jack muttered after trying the scheme. "Then perhaps I shall work at dislodging the grate below. I am a small fellow and may be able to fit through the opening and discover where the cell's wastes are discharged. Given that this place is built upon an artificial island, they are almost certainly emptied into the sea. It is a foul path indeed, but I am desperate and cannot be fastidious in these matters."
The bars were as thick as spear shaft and evidently anchored deeply in the stone walls. With the strength of an ogre he could not have pulled them loose.
"Very well, then. I did not care for that scheme, anyway. Instead, I shall remove these enchanted shackles, thus making available magical abilities that must surely suffice to free me from this dismal place."
The shackles were enchanted quite well. Hours of experimentation convinced him that he'd have to break most of the bones in his hands to free himself of the irons on his wrists. Broken hands, of course, would drastically inhibit his ability to work magic, and there was no way that his feet could be crushed or pulped enough to slip out of his ankle irons.