He doesn't know I'm still alive. And voids, I don't know if he's alive. But I have to get to him. It's the most important thing in the world to me now. I have to tell him he can come home. His father's gone: he died proud. But now there's no reason for Jai to stick it out any more. I have a letter at home that can get him out of the Army, and into the University. I want him to come back. To me, to Reitha, to safety. Before he gets himself killed.
Alert, I miss nothing. I memorise which guards bitch about which, who plays flip-chits with who. I know about money owed and money lent. I study the side-passages as we're marched from forge to cell to quad to food-hall. I construct a layout of this place in my mind and study it silently in the dark when I'm sitting in our cell.
And I start to see cracks in their security.
The guards are slovenly, safe in the knowledge that the prisoners are deep inside a garrisoned fort. As long as certain doors are kept locked, sealing the prisoners inside their own complex of corridors and cells, then they think escape attempts are futile. The perimeter of our prison section is tightly policed, but what goes on within is not. Guards do not take head-counts at any point. We swap jobs in the forge all the time, and nobody cares as long as the jobs are done. Prisoners often disappear, taken away by scholars. Sometimes they come back, sometimes they don't. It's possible to slip away and not be missed by anyone.
Despite the strict laws that govern them, Gurta are naturally disorganised. Discipline is imposed on them by society, so they have no need to foster it between themselves. It makes them a volatile people, their institutions patchy with feuds and infighting. Their army has suffered more defeats because of their basic nature than anything else. Their willingness to throw their lives away for their cause makes them fearsome opponents, but their inability to work together makes them sloppy.
I know these people well. I've escaped them before, I can do it again.
I begin to make my plans. The Gurta may be lax, but their confidence is at least partially justified. I'm forced to discard most options because I would be discovered within hours. Guards would notice an unlocked door, a missing key, and they would begin searching. I could evade them, maybe; but I don't fancy my chances of escape if the whole place is after me.
Besides, there's a complication. I'm not going alone. Feyn is coming with me.
I don't even want to think about why. Leaving him here would be to condemn him to death, but that in itself isn't a reason to bring him. There's a whole prison full of people in the same boat. And if I'd never come here, he'd still be being battered regularly, waiting for his captors to get round to cutting him up.
Anyway, I'm not responsible for the boy. That's the point.
So why do I feel that I am?
He's curiously evasive when I ask him about his time in Farakza. He speaks of past events in a very roundabout way, and tends not to refer to himself. Maybe he's over-modest, I don't know. But eventually I glean the facts by implication. He used to be a curiosity for the scholars here, but he made sure only to speak in his native language and to feign ignorance of Eskaran, to prevent them interrogating him about his culture. His people don't like to give up their secrets to outsiders.
The scholars tried to decipher his speech for a long time, failed, and soon left him alone to concentrate on more rewarding tasks. Obviously the order to keep him alive still stood, though he apparently wasn't so valuable that they would trouble to protect him from the beatings of other prisoners.
Well, all that is by the by. I need his help. The idea that I have requires more than one person. In fact, it requires a third member, too. Someone I'm not looking forward to talking to.
The man who tried to rape me while I was drugged.
Charn. Other prisoners have been extending wary gestures of friendship. A tacit nod in the food hall here and there, a raised hand across the smoky forge. In the quad, a skinny Eskaran man with a deformed leg invites me to play a game he's invented, involving a series of grids drawn in dirt on the flagstones, using pebbles as markers. It has some serious flaws in the rules, easily exploitable; but for a time, I'm diverted, and I find that I'm enjoying myself.
His name is Juth, it emerges, and he's a publisher from Veya. He'd travelled to a village near the Borderlands in response to an intriguing letter from an author, promising a story unlike anything Juth had read before. While he was there, Gurta raiders sacked the village, having somehow got behind Eskaran lines. The author was killed, the manuscript burned along with the village, and Juth was captured when a blazing spar fell on his head and knocked him cold. He shows me the burns on his hairless scalp, beneath his cloth cap. Then he shows me the far more horrific ones on his back.
'My great regret,' he says, 'is that I read a portion of the manuscript before these barbarians came to destroy it. It was the most wonderful literature. I would rather have remained ignorant, so that I could pretend it did not matter that it is lost forever.'
Charn and Nereith mutter with their gang of cronies, casting glances my way. I doubt they have the courage to try anything, though I'm sure they would if they thought they could get away with it. But they're scared of me, and they're scared of Gendak. I meet with the scholar semi-regularly now, and that affords me some protection. If I were to be hurt, the Gurta might take an interest in my attackers.
Gendak's questions are gliding closer and closer to matters that I can't talk about. He wants to know about Ledo and Clan Caracassa. Things deeper than his usual sources can provide. Given the right motivation there will always be traitors willing to sell information to the Gurta, so anything that is public knowledge at home is safe enough to discuss. But he's feinting and probing, wanting more from me, retreating when I evade but always edging closer to his goals. I'm still undecided as to whether he's in it purely for knowledge, or if he's digging for secrets his masters can use against mine. Either way, we're going to come to an impasse soon. Things might get unpleasant then.
Feyn and I talk over my plan for escape, and we search for alternatives. For such a passive boy, he's fearless now he's decided we're getting out. His people are not afraid of death or punishment; in fact, their philosophy appears to involve not giving a shit about anything. He couches it in slightly more elegant terms, though I'm sure I'm only getting the outline and not a true understanding. They believe all connections are temporary, so to cling to them makes no sense. When someone is gone, they're gone. Live for now; the present is all there is. You can't know what will happen next, so why worry? Consequences are natural and inevitable. Just do what you feel you must.
The SunChildren, if he is representative, strike me as a very calm people, and yet they're impulsive too. I really think he was, as he says, just waiting. Waiting to die, or waiting for something to change. I was that change. I've offered him a possibility of escape which he didn't have before. Even if he had to push me a little to get me going.
So now he's decided that we're getting out of here, whatever the risk. The idea of dying in the attempt doesn't faze him in the least.
I like this boy. He's weird, but I can't help wanting to look after him. 'I need to talk to you.'
Charn tears a strip of meat off the bone and puts it in his mouth. They've been feeding us well lately, presumably watching what effect it has on our mood and work. He's making a show of being unconcerned, but I know being this close to him makes him jumpy.
He's sitting at a bench, Nereith opposite. The two men I injured the time I broke Charn's nose are no longer part of his crowd. They were taken away and never came back. I don't know what happened to them, and I don't really care.