“Been watching you eat while the rest of us go without. Been watching you throwing your money about, northerner.” His scowl deepened and he fell quiet as if he’d asked me a question.
“Northerner? Me?” That was a new one, though I guessed technically it was correct. I eyed him up, wondering if I could overpower him and definitely not wanting to have to try.
“Suppose you throw some of that money my way-in fact suppose you hand it over nicely, boy?”
The cells had fallen quiet behind me, the inmates in front of me all staring my way. All I had to defend myself was the key in my hand, clutched somewhat awkwardly because of the double florin hidden in my palm. My other hand held the orichalcum cone and I kept it tight to my stomach where it pinned up the fold of my shirt, pregnant with a modest fortune in gold.
“Uh.” Panic seized me and my legs got ready to run away. The lout extended a raw-boned hand, reaching for my neck.
“Knock him flat, Jal!” Hennan piped up unhelpfully from behind me. He’d got that damned “Jal” habit from Snorri.
Inspiration struck before the bully did. “Look!” I said, and opened the hand with the key to reveal the gleaming gold disc in my grimy palm. For a second his face lit with reflected light while an amazed and stupid grin spread across his face. “Fetch!” And I tossed it through the bars into the cell behind him. A score of filthy grey bodies immediately threw themselves on top of the double florin and with a snarl my tormentor turned and charged into the fray roaring dire threats.
“Spend it in good health.” I closed the gate behind him and locked it, slipping the key into my pocket.
I turned back, expecting my audience to be at least a little impressed but it turned out they hadn’t gone quiet because of my little drama at gate number five. Racso stood in the mouth of the corridor, three guardsmen behind him, big men draped in chain-mail shirts with bare steel in their hands.
“Get. Back. In.” Racso dropped each word like a stone. He’d replaced his usual baton for one ending in an ugly lump of black iron. The grey sea of bodies drew back toward the cells, the multitude of their shadows swaying and swelling across the walls as the orichalcum pulsed within my grip. A few more seconds and my chance would be gone entirely.
“Look!” I shouted, digging out a handful of gold from the fold of my shirt and holding it toward the ceiling.
That got their attention. Scores of heads turned on scores of scrawny necks. The peculiar nature of our incarceration meant that in my hands I held their freedom. Despite threats, sharp iron, or blunt instruments, there were few here who couldn’t buy their way out the door even now with ten double florins. Many of them could purchase their release with just one or two coins and at the very least a single coin would give them a year of food and drink, another year between them and feeding the pigs.
I let the money do my talking. I threw the whole handful over the heads of Racso and the guardsmen and sent it rattling on down the corridor behind them.
The effect was immediate. The debtors surged forward without a moment’s hesitation. Even Racso and the guards were looking in the direction of the departing florins. The debtors didn’t so much attack the men in their way, but rather they flowed over them, and each other, a rolling tidal advance.
I grabbed Hennan and hurried on at the rear of the wave, setting a booted foot to the back of Racso’s thick neck as he struggled to rise. Always kick a man when he’s down, I say. It’s the best chance you’ll get.
The debtors who had collected the most gold, scrambling for it in the half-crazed melee with almost no light to see by, now pressed on through the prison, desperate to pay out their debt before their hard-stolen florins were taken from them in turn. Those who had done less well in the free-for-all gave chase, anxious to even the distribution of funds.
Unfortunately a few of the crowd paused to think about where the money had come from and were still paused as Hennan and I reached them. A shabby man of middling years stepped out into my path, an old woman at his shoulder naked but for smeared filth; to the side waited a young woman with straggling dirty-blond hair, heavyset and mean-eyed, wearing what seemed to have once been a sack. Three older men, small and similar enough to be relations, moved from the shadows to back them up.
“Cough up.” The young woman held out her hand. “Three doubles will cure my ills. Heard you’re a prince. Three doubles is the cheap way past me, lover-boy.”
Immediately the rest of them started clamouring out their demands and crowding forward in a grimy rabble.
“Get back!” I boomed, and they stopped. Royal breeding will do that for you. The accent, the posture, and centuries of breeding the lower classes to obey, all combine to allow a prince’s outrage to carry rather further than the common man’s. “How dare you?” I drew myself up to my full height, puffing out my chest, and raised my hand to strike any of them who came near. The threat of violence must have been somewhat muted by the fact I kept my left arm clamped across my belly, holding thirty or forty more double florins tight against myself.
“Well?” I roared. The debtors seemed frozen by my reprimands, staring at me slack-jawed. I took a sharp pace forward and all of them bolted for it, a half dozen and more of them scampering away down the dark corridor. “Well!” I grinned down at Hennan, quite surprised how successful I’d been. “I think-” Two large hands clamped about my throat and cut me off. I whipped around in panic, scattering gold, before the grip fully tightened, and found myself facing what had really scared the other debtors off. My eyes met the dead gaze of a guard whose head flopped at a wholly unnatural angle. His neck must have been broken at some point during the exodus of debtors over his prone body.
Fear is marvellous stuff. Not only will it get you running considerably faster than you thought possible, it will lend you more strength than you should rightly own. Not enough strength, sadly, to break the hold a dead man has on your neck, since being dead seems to lend some men strength as well, but enough for me to drive my assailant back across the chamber. I slammed him into the bars of a cell. I think I also managed to knee Racso in the face on the way past as he sat up, groaning. .
The charge took everything out of me and I hung in the dead man’s grip, black spots crowding my vision and a feeling of distance sliding over me. The pain in my neck and lungs receded as the world drew away, shrinking to a single bright spot. I had time in that soft and enfolding darkness to reflect on two things. First, that being choked by corpses was becoming something of a habit, and second, that my only chance for survival depended upon the greed of the many and the quick thinking of a singular child.
As the last traces of my vision faded from me I saw a dozen hands reach out through the bars, pinning the dead man to them. And just before the pounding of my heart grew so loud as to drown out all other sound, I heard the grating of a sword being dragged across stone.
• • •
I woke suddenly, freezing and wet.
“Hold it!” Hennan’s voice in the dark.
“W-” My throat hurt too much to say more.
“Take this.” Something hard pressed into my palm and brilliance erupted, filling the space with razored white light. I closed my hand around the orichalcum and screwed my eyes shut. The boy had thrown water over me. . I hoped it was water.
It then occurred to me that I appeared to be a lot more naked than I had been. My next question started off as a “Where are my clothes?” but changed swiftly into “Where the hell is my money?”