The lanterns blanketing the ceiling of the hall, swinging in an undulating canopy of amber effulgence, still glowed from the wedding earlier.
The Serfs must have been interrupted by the attack.
Navy handed Fitz the Professor’s long knife, and the Master took Fitz’s legs. He hung down over the distant floor. Three lanterns he cut free, dropping each of them, still burning, to the stone below, where they smashed, throwing out oil in long arcs that, only partly by design, pooled in a ring round the open black hole, swirling with mist, of the well head. The limp lengths of rope Fitz tossed down, away from the burning oil; they hit the floor in thudding, loose coils. Then he clutched at three adjacent lanterns and, with a length of cord he had saved before, bound them together.
Fitz drew the braided rope up towards the ceiling as the Master pulled him back.
‘You first,’ he said to Navy. She clutched the three bound ropes, then pinched them between her knees, clamped her feet together on the lanterns beneath, stood up, and smiled. The Master joined her, and they spun slowly under their own weight, first this way, then that, as they caught their balance. Below, the Professor – who had watched Fitz’s every move – uncleated the three ropes and began to pay them out. They dropped into the glowing air of the hall. Ned, then Clare, caught a loop of one of the ropes as it went down, and fell with it, hanging. At last Fitz followed, praying that the thick iron hooks in the hall’s ceiling would bear their weight. All the while the Professor paid out the ropes steadily, leaning back against the three staples through which they passed, bracing his foot on the wall before him. Fitz handed himself down the length as he approached the floor, securing himself with his knees and taking the burn of the cord across his thighs. When he finally hit the floor, the last of the little group to alight in the empty chamber, they found themselves standing in a ring of flame, directly beside the Sad King.
Professor Farzan bounded over the flames, swirling his long travelling cloak about him to ward the fire away. In one hand he carried the ends of the three thick cords. In another he dragged a length of one of the other ropes Fitz had cut down. He bound them together with a braid, pulled on it to tighten it, and handed it to Fitz.
‘Twelve bells has struck, and the tide is out,’ Fitz said. ‘The well of the Sad King is empty. It will take us to the sea. The walls are under attack. It’s our only way out of the Heresy.’
The Master only smiled.
Somehow, they all managed to get a foot into the tangled knot of cords that bound the lanterns, even as it spun over the mist rising from the well below. With several hands on the long length of rope, they dropped into the floor, paying out the cable as they went.
For the first time, as they fell through the floor, Fitz could see the sides of the well shaft. Built entirely of stone, it was nonetheless studded everywhere with holes, from which, even now, tentative hands extended, reaching towards the light as if for food, then pulling back. The sides of the well were near enough that the six of them, falling slowly through the centre, could reach easily to the walls.
It was studded everywhere with holes. But it was studded, too, with doors.
There were no handles on the doors. There were no locks.
They’re devoted to their own captivity. They don’t even know they are free to escape.
Fitz reached out as the lanterns drifted past, and thrust a hand into one of the holes. He pulled. As they fell past it, the wooden door yawned slowly ajar on its hinge. A terrified, pale body, dressed in rags, stood behind it.
‘Go!’ shouted Fitz. ‘Get out!’
The lanterns fell further. Another door was in his reach, another bar, which he lifted. Opposite him Navy did the same on the other side, then Clare. As they passed, again and again they pulled open the doors – five, then ten, and as they fell, ten more, then twenty. Behind every door the forms crowded – pale, ragged, frightened. Cold and shivering. Boys and girls.
The real children of the Heresy.
‘You’re free! Go!’ he shouted, his voice rising with confidence.
The lanterns began to fall faster, now lurching along as the rope dragged above them on its hook, the three men straining to hoist against the weight of their bodies. As he watched above through the swirls and curls and eddies of the mist, through the rays cast by the lanterns slicing through the gloom, a few arms, then faces, here and there pushed into the well shaft.
‘Tear it down!’ shouted Fitz. They were almost at the base of the well, almost at the place where soon the tide would flow anew. There wasn’t long to go. He looked down. He looked up.
‘Tear it down! Tear the whole thing down!’ he screamed. ‘Every stone! Take it apart and throw it into the
