THE BREAKOUT

Mother Agnes did not struggle when the guards took her, and that was the part Tamsin found hardest to bear.

The old woman rose from the cot with the slow dignity of a duchess leaving a ball, drew her blanket around her shoulders, and held out her wrists to be shackled as if she were offering them for a bracelet. The three guardsmen stood in the doorway with their lantern light flickering over the black glass, and not one of them would look at her face. They had done this before. Tamsin could see it in the way they held themselves, with the stiff shoulders and averted eyes of men who have found a way to carry out an order without thinking about it, and she hated them for it with a clean cold hatred that surprised her by its force.

"You cannot do this," she said, scrambling off the cot. Her chain dragged on the floor and rang against the glass. "She is an old woman, she has been in this place for six years, and she has done nothing at all except sit in a cell and mind her own business."

"Sit down, Miss," said the nearest guard in a flat voice. "It's not for you to say."

"Then whose is it to say? Who is the person who decides that an old woman should be taken out of her bed in the middle of the night and..."

"Hush, cher," said Agnes, so gently that Tamsin stopped in the middle of the word. "Don't you waste your breath on them, because they are only the hands, and the hands never know what the head is doing. Come here to me, child, and let me look at you before I go."

Tamsin crossed the cell in two steps and stood in front of her, and the old woman took her face between two dry, hard, spotted hands and studied it for a long moment with those bright black eyes. In the blue light her white hair looked like a halo of spun glass, and the lines in her face were deep as plowed furrows, and she was smiling, which was the most terrible thing of all.

"You have a good face," said Agnes. "I knew it the first night, when you sat up and sang to me in the dark without being asked. There is a lot of green in you, chère, more than I have ever seen in one body, and they are going to try to take it, and I want you to remember something for me." She leaned closer, and her voice dropped so low that the guards could not hear it over the humming of the walls. "Give me your hand."

Tamsin held out her hand. The old woman pressed something into the palm and folded the fingers shut over it with her own, hard, so that the edges bit into the skin.

"It is a seed," whispered Agnes. "It is the sap of an old bloodroot that grew in the Bayou Reach before any of these Gilded folk were born, hardened in the hand of my grandmother and my grandmother's grandmother, and I have kept it in my cheek for six years where the guards could not find it. Plant it where the water is sick, and sing it the song, and do not let anyone tell you that it is too late."

"Agnes, I cannot take this from you, because you will need..."

"I won't need anything where I am going." The black eyes were wet, but the voice did not waver. "Now let me go, child, because they are growing impatient."

She kissed Tamsin's forehead, once, dry and light as the touch of a leaf, and turned and walked out of the cell between the guards without looking back. Her bare feet whispered on the glass stair. The sound grew fainter and fainter, going down and down into the dark under the Glasshouse, until the humming of the walls swallowed it entirely.

The door clanged shut. The key turned. And Tamsin Reed, who had not cried at her arrest, or in the courtroom, or on any of the six long nights in the cell, sat down on the cot with the seed clenched in her fist and wept as she had not wept since her father's funeral, with great ugly gulping sobs that shook her whole body and echoed off the walls of the glass box in which she lived.

…

She did not know how long it lasted.

When she finally stopped, her head was pounding and her throat was raw, and the blue lamps in the corridor seemed to have dimmed. She opened her hand. The thing lying in her palm was no larger than a peppercorn, dark and shiny and hard, the color of old amber with a thread of red running through it. It was warm. She held it to her ear, absurdly, as if it might speak, and heard nothing but the slow thud of her own pulse, and then, very faintly underneath, another beat that was not her own, patient and steady, like the heart of a sleeping animal.

Plant it where the water is sick.

She wiped her face on her sleeve, and looked about for a safe place to hide it. There was nothing in the cell but the cot and the bucket and the chain. In the end she tore a strip from the hem of her gray shift, wrapped the seed in it, and tucked it into the neck of her gown against her scar, where it lay warm against her skin like a second heartbeat.

Soren will come, she told herself. Soren will come, and he will do something terribly foolish, and I shall be furious with him afterward.

The thought was so ridiculous, and so exactly what she wanted, that she began to laugh through her tears, which alarmed her much more than the weeping had. She pressed her hand over her mouth and sat very still until it passed.

…

They came at three o'clock in the morning.

She heard them before she saw them, because the glass of the Glasshouse carried every footstep up and down its length like the strings of a harp. She heard the great gate groan open on the heath, and a murmur of voices, and the heavy tread of a dozen men crossing the entrance hall. She heard the clipped, nervous tones of the Governor, and then another voice, a cold, bored, aristocratic drawl that she knew so well it made her heart turn over.

"I have no interest in your regulations, Governor," said Soren, from a great distance, in the voice of a man who has never been refused anything in his life. "I have a warrant from the Emperor's own office, signed this afternoon, for the inspection of the prisoner Reed on a matter touching the security of the Crown. You may read it, if you wish, but I should warn you that the Emperor is not accustomed to being kept waiting."

"Of course, my lord, of course, I only wish to see that everything is in order."

"Everything is not in order, since I am standing in your hall at three in the morning. Be so good as to show us the way."

She was off the cot before she knew it, with her hands pressed against the glass. A door slammed far above. There was a confused sound of boots and clashing metal, a short sharp cry, the thud of a body falling, and then a high clear singing note that she had never heard before, as of a wineglass struck by a spoon, and she felt the whole floor vibrate under her feet.

Light, she thought wildly. That is the sound of Gilded Light, when it is being used for something other than a ballroom.

Another cry, and the crash of a falling sword, and Dorian's voice, raised in a cheerful roar of "Mind the stairs, gentlemen, they are rather slippery!" Then footsteps were pounding down the spiral stair, two sets, taking the glass steps three at a time, and a blaze of white-gold light fell down the well of the stair and lit up the corridor like noon.

…

Soren came round the turn of the stair with a sword of light in his hand.

She had never seen anything like it. It was a blade of pure gold fire, as long as his arm, with a hilt that seemed to be formed of nothing but the glow itself, and it ran with a clear singing note that made the frost on the walls tremble and smoke. He wore a long gray inspector's coat, with a silver badge pinned to the breast, and his hair was wet with melted snow, and there was a smear of blood on his cheekbone that was not his. His pale eyes were blazing. He looked like something out of the old pictures in the Founders' Book, an angel of the Dominion in its fury, and he was, she thought with a sort of dazed and helpless tenderness, utterly and magnificently ridiculous.

"Tamsin," he said. He stopped before the glass wall of her cell, a little out of breath, and his face changed in the golden light as though a lamp had been turned up inside it. "Are you hurt? Have they done anything to you, or touched you, or..."

"I am perfectly all right, you impossible man, and you are going to get yourself killed." Her voice cracked. "What on earth are you doing here?"

"I am rescuing you. I thought that was fairly obvious." He lifted the sword. "Step back from the door, if you please, because I have never done this before and I am not entirely sure how it will go."

She stepped back. He drew the blade of light through the glass in a single clean stroke, the way a man cuts a sheet of ice, and the pane of the cell door slid sideways and fell with a crash and a shower of sparks. The whole wall seemed to sing. The blue lamps in the corridor guttered and went out. Soren dropped the sword, which dissolved into a drift of glimmering motes, and caught her in his arms as she stumbled out over the shattered glass.

"You are shaking," she said, into the front of his coat.

"I know that I am shaking, thank you very much." He had buried his face in her tangled hair, and his voice was muffled. "I have been shaking for six days."

"Soren, we have a great deal to talk about, and a great many people to rescue, and I am afraid that most of them are downstairs."

"Most of them will have to wait." He drew back, took her chain in his gloved hand, and with a quick sharp burst of cold turned the iron links brittle as candy, so that they snapped at a touch and fell in pieces to the floor. "I came for you, and the others will come in their turn, but we must be gone from here in a quarter of an hour, or we shall not be gone at all."

…

Dorian was waiting at the foot of the glass stair with two unconscious guardsmen at his feet.

He had lost the gray inspector's hat and acquired a long bleeding scratch across one forearm, and his sword was out, and his lopsided grin was bright with a savage and extremely cheerful joy. A third guard lay across the bottom step with his legs in the air. Behind him the long corridor of the lower level stretched into the dark, lined with glass cells, in each of which a pale face had come to the wall and was watching.

"Miss Reed," said Dorian, with a bow that would have done credit to a drawing room. "I trust you are well? I'm sorry about the mess. I was assured that the Governor kept a tidy establishment."

"Captain Pike, I am so very glad to see you that I could weep."

"You've done enough of that for one night, I think, and anyway we haven't the time." He glanced up the stair. "The Governor is locked in his own coal cellar, and the rest of the watch is occupied with a very convincing fire that I started on the third floor, but they'll sort themselves out in a quarter of an hour. This way, if you please."

He led them along the corridor at a run. The faces of the other prisoners followed them, drifting past the glass like the faces of the drowned, and Tamsin saw a young man with a shaved head press both palms flat against the wall and mouth something she could not hear. She stopped walking, because she could not help herself.

"Soren, those people..."

"I know exactly what you mean." His voice was rough. "I know it, Tamsin, and I swear on my mother's grave that I will come back for every one of them. But if I open these cells tonight, there will be forty prisoners running through a burning gaol, and the Watch will cut them down on the heath like rabbits." He took her arm. "I am sorry. I am so very sorry. Come with me."

She went with him, although it was the hardest thing she had done since the courtroom, to turn her back on those pale faces and follow him down the corridor, and she held on to the seed against her throat and made a vow to herself, there in the dark, that she would not forget.

At the end of the corridor there was a wall of rough gray brick, damp with seepage, with a rusted iron ring set into the foot of it.

"The boiler house tunnel," said Dorian. "Walled up thirty years ago, I'm told, by a governor who didn't wish his prisoners to have an easy way out. It has the great advantage of nobody knowing that it's there."

"Stand back," said Soren.

He laid both palms on the brick, the gloved one and the bare one together, and closed his eyes. For a moment nothing happened. Then a white rime spread out from beneath his hands, thick and glittering and fast, and Tamsin heard a sound like the cracking of a great frozen lake. The mortar split. The bricks groaned, and swelled, and burst outward all at once in a shower of frozen dust, and a black round hole yawned in the wall with a cold wind blowing out of it that smelled of rust and coal and ancient dark.

Soren staggered backward and caught himself on the wall, breathing hard, and the frost on his hands melted away in wisps of steam.

"I am quite well," he said, before she could speak, and she knew from the sound of it that he was not.

…

The tunnel was low and narrow and wet, a brick-vaulted passage that dripped steadily onto the iron rails of an old coal tramway. They went along it in single file with Dorian in front, holding up a stub of candle, and the roar of the burning gaol fading away behind them. The rails glinted dully. The candle flame wavered in the wind. Somewhere above them there was a muffled crash, and a faint shouting, and a bell began to ring.

"A hundred yards to the boiler house," said Dorian over his shoulder. "Then the freight yard, and a coal train that leaves at four, according to my informant, who was paid a great deal to be accurate."

"What if it leaves late?"

"Then we shall be shot, my dear Miss Reed, but I shall make it a point to be shot in front of you."

"That is not as reassuring as you appear to think," said Tamsin, and was startled to find herself laughing again.

They had gone perhaps fifty yards when Soren caught her hand and pulled her gently to a stop.

Dorian was out of sight around the curve, a spark of candlelight dwindling in the dark. The tunnel had grown utterly silent, except for the drip of the water and the sound of their own breathing. Soren turned her to face him. His eyes in the dimness were two pale smoldering coals, and his hand, which held hers in a grip like iron, was not quite steady.

"I have to say something," he said, "and I fear I will not manage it properly, because I have been rehearsing it for six days and now all the words have gone."

"Then do not say it properly. Say it in whatever way comes."

"I should have been in that hall," said Soren. "When Pell stood up, and when the Chancellor spoke, and when they put the chains on you, I should have broken the whole damned room in half, and instead I stood there like a statue and let them lead you away. I let them do it because I was thinking about the Council and the Charter and the proper forms, and I have never in my life been so ashamed." His voice shook. "I am so sorry, Tamsin. I am so terribly sorry."

"Soren, you do not need to say all of this tonight."

"You told me once that I should not be sorry later, and I am breaking that promise, because I..."

She kissed him.

It was not a gentle kiss. It was quick and fierce and desperate, with the taste of salt in it and the smell of coal smoke and cold iron, and his arms closed round her so hard that her feet left the ground. For a long moment the tunnel and the gaol and the Chancellor and the whole murderous world ceased to exist. When at last she drew back, she pressed her forehead against his, and her breath came in short ragged puffs that mingled with his own.

"You came for me," she said. "That is all that matters, and you do not have to apologize for anything else. You came for me, and if you ever say that you are sorry again, I will hit you with a very heavy book."

"I will remember that," said Soren unsteadily.

"I am glad that we understand each other. Now come along, or Dorian will be shot without us."

…

The coal train was waiting in the freight yard, in a smother of steam and falling snow.

It was a long dark line of open wagons behind a squat black engine, drawn up on a siding at the north edge of the heath, and the yard around it was empty except for a signalman asleep in his hut. They crept along the line of cars in the shadow, bent double, and found one at the end that was loaded to the brim with great black lumps of anthracite and had a gap between the boards at the corner. Dorian swung up first and held down a hand. Soren boosted her over the side. The coal was freezing and sharp and filthy, and it slid and rattled beneath her knees as she crawled forward, and she was covered in black dust to the elbows before she had gone three feet.

"I have always wanted to travel in this manner," said Dorian, settling into the lump. "I have the highest respect for coal."

"Be quiet, Dorian," said Soren and Tamsin together.

They lay in the dark, shoulder to shoulder, with the great chunks of coal pressing into their ribs. After a time the engine gave a hoarse whistle, and the couplings clanged all down the line, and the wagon lurched and began to roll. The wheels clattered over the points. The smoke blew back in long gray streamers across the stars.

Tamsin pulled herself up to the crack between the boards and put her eye to it.

The heath rolled away behind them, white and silent under the falling snow. In the middle distance the Glasshouse burned, a great jagged tower of blue and gold flame that lit up the underside of the clouds, with little black figures running about its feet. And beyond it, miles away, spread over the horizon like a necklace of fire, lay the lights of Highmark: the palaces on the cliffs, the gas lamps of the avenues, the tall white needle of the Cathedral spire with the Sunwell glowing faintly behind it, green-gold and secret. The lights shrank steadily as the train gained speed. A freezing wind came through the crack and stung her eyes. She watched the city until it was no larger than a handful of sparks.

Something rattled against the boards and caught in the crack, a crumpled scrap of newsprint that had blown off the yard fence where it had been pasted. It flapped for a moment, pinned against the wood. Then she reached out, smoothed it flat with her blackened fingers, and read in the light of the burning prison the great black headline that it bore, over a woodcut of a tall figure in a greatcoat. The name had been set in newer and blacker type than the rest of the line, as though it had been dropped into a slot that someone had prepared long ago and was only now permitted to fill.

DUKE SOREN ALDRIDGE DECLARED TRAITOR.

She turned her head. Soren was lying beside her with his face turned to the sky, and the snow was falling on his lashes, and he did not look at the paper. He only reached out and took her hand in his bare one, and held it tightly, and went on watching the stars as the train carried them north into the dark.