Nightfire | The Whispering Wall #1

Twenty Seven: Prison Break

"He's doomed."

Arlen took a moment to realise that someone had actually said it, rather than it being another echo of his thoughts. The guard beside him was staring down at the Assembly platform, where Silas knelt to give his testimony. It had been a piss-up in a brewery from start to finish; since the otherworld girl had managed to wriggle out of the noose, and the acolyte had nothing substantial to prove his innocence, no witness except the Angel slave, who was categorically against him, there was no hope of him winning. It was really only a case of what his punishment was going to be.

And, unknown to anyone else in the Assembly hall, including Silas himself, a case of how Arlen was going to get him out of it.

He had set off early that morning. His preoccupation with tracking Jordan and his habits – not hard, since the boy had rarely left Yddris's house in the past week – had meant that finding a mark for impersonation had been a rush job, and he had wanted to establish early that the guard he was impersonating was feeling off colour. The real guard was probably floating face down in the Aven's reservoir by this point, but no one would have found it yet. He had successfully fitted his story around a raging hangover from a convenient bender on his victim's part the previous night.

"He knows it," Arlen muttered. He glanced up at the high table and wasn't surprised to meet Yddris's eye. He had no intention of letting the witch man spring a trap on him this time. He had picked a door guard, all the easier to get into the main body of the castle and hatch an escape for himself and Silas.

"Eril's never going to forget this, is he?" his companion said. They turned their gazes to the Orthanian Head sitting on Lord Harkenn's right, who was an odd shade of grey and giving a convincing impression of struggling over a chamber pot under the table.

"If I were Harkenn, I'd be more worried about Ethred."

The baron sat in the Assembly stands close to the high table with an expression like thunder. He had come out in ostentatious finery and was making the attempt to look as intimidating as possible, though any effect it may have had on Lord Harkenn was negligible. In fact, the high lord looked in unusually high spirits despite the setting. At Harkenn's shoulder, standing just behind his chair and looking less delighted, was the slave, trussed up in chains and just having returned from the witness platform. Her face was unreadable, but her gaze didn't move from Silas.

"Oh yeah," the other guard said. "He's a favourite of the baron's, isn't he? Well, damn. Don't envy his Lordship the job of dealing with that fallout."

Before Arlen could respond, Harkenn's hand came down with a bang on the high table. The room had been quiet before, but the sudden and total absence of sound left Arlen reeling a little.

"The sentence is hanging," Harkenn said. He fidgeted as though he very much wished to be somewhere else. "The date will be set after I have consulted with the Houses."

Arlen moved forward with the other guard to retrieve Silas as two others swung the vast doors wide behind them. The gathering in the stands began to get up and leave. The acolyte had fallen to his knees, staring up at the newly-vacated seat at the high table where Harkenn had been sitting with an expression of numb shock. Before he bent down to grasp Silas by the arm, Arlen looked up and locked eyes with Yddris before the Unspoken swept away.

He had to confess himself surprised that the witch man hadn't tried anything yet, but he wasn't going to dwell on it. He grabbed Silas's arm, and his lip curled of its own accord at the skin and bone limb under the prisoner's robe. There was nothing to work with; no strength, no evident common sense, no grit. Why Marick had wanted him to take Silas on, when the acolyte would be of much more use under one of the Devils' forgery artists, he still couldn't quite understand.