Something powerful is drawing Ward back to Devil's Island. Something he thought he had forgotten. He must evade vicious lighthouse keeper George Jaggles in order to rescue it, but Jaggles will soon be the least of his worries. Because an assassin is...
It boomed out over the city, rolling across the fields beyond and reverberating off the distant hills. The ground shook.
A few stunned seconds, then Ward and Carmen were up on their feet. Her heart hammering, she picked up the barking iron, keeping it out of sight at her side as they left the thicket and moved towards the prison. It felt more like floating than walking. She glanced at Ward, but his eyes were on the prison gates, over which a mushroom-shaped dust cloud had risen. Without realising it she had broken into a trot, but he grabbed her arm and held her back. They had been told to walk.
They passed the prison gates. Nobody had issued forth from them yet. A steam klaxon began to wind up from somewhere inside the prison, beginning with a guttural growl before swooping up into a scream; even with their ears still ringing from the explosion the noise was tremendous.
It'll wake the whole city, Carmen thought with a mixture of fear and exhilaration.
They reached the corner of the prison and Carmen looked down its northern flank – what remained of it.
She didn't know much about gunpowder. When, the night before, they had gone down to the Powder Room that lay in a dry chamber deep beneath the city and at a safe distance from the Scowerers' living quarters, Carmen had cast her eyes over the thirty or forty barrels crowded into it, and had asked innocently if they were going to use them all, Wrinkler had laughed. "Only if we want to blow up the whole (unprintable word) city. Nar, one'll do the job."
Carmen hadn't believed it at the time. Now through the dust she caught glimpses of the gaping hole the powder keg had left in the wall. The explosion had taken out half a guard tower – the remaining half still stood like a weird mushroom. There was a great pile of rubble where the wall had been, and a huge block of bluestone, sheared in two, lay at her feet, smoking in the cold air. Now she understood why they'd been told to wait in Killing Field.
In the lulls when the klaxon wound down Carmen thought she heard shouts from inside the prison, but she and Ward had almost reached the rubble pile before she saw the first people. They were two men, wearing prison clothes. Their heads were bald, their cheekbones standing out high on their faces, and their bodies wasted and thin. Their clothes flapping on them like those of scarecrows. In the depths of their dark, sunken eyes glittered an hysterical excitement. They moved fast over the rubble, using both hands and feet, like monkeys, stumbling past Ward and Carmen without looking at them.
They were followed by a prison guard. He was not pursuing them – he had other problems. His hair was wild, and his face and body coated with dust, making him look like a golem. The dust that coated his left hand was clotted and brown with blood, where a bone, shockingly clean and white, poked from his wrist.
The cart-driver Carmen had spied earlier sidled over from a nearby building, behind which she knew the drass and cart were now parked. The guard with the broken wrist pulled instinctively away from this phantasm, as if he thought it, though half his size, might attack him, but the driver merely brushed past the guard. Dazed and disoriented, the guard stumbled away along the wall, under the shadow of the teetering guard tower. He disappeared around the prison's northwest corner.
The driver's brush with the guard appeared to have produced the big hoop of keys that had been attached to the guard's belt. The driver, who despite being virtually invisible behind a wild beard and a misshapen hat pulled down low over his eyes, Carmen knew to be Lightfinger, threw the keys to Ward, winked, and sidled back to the building from where he had come. He would now, according to their plan, drive the cart on to a rendesvous point in the maze of factories to the west. Wrinkler was with the cart, hidden under the sheet of torpin with the barrels, all but one of which had been empty all along. It was he who had helped Lightfinger get the powder keg off the cart, roll it down the slope to the prison wall. It was he who had lit the fuse.
Carmen glanced up. The dust from the explosion had now pillowed up into the sky in a thick, soft column, ragged at the top where it was teased by a light breeze coming in from the sea. It would be visible from across the city.
She turned and followed Ward up the rubble pile. They passed another pair of scarecrow-like prisoners. Carmen wondered what they had done to be imprisoned. Were they murderers? But the escapees paid no more attention to them than the first pair had.
They reached the summit, and Carmen looked down into the prison yard. It was a murky, swirling dust-world in which incorporeal shapes darted about like fish. In the lulls between the klaxon's wails Carmen heard muffled shouts, and wails of pain.
At the bottom of the rubble pile they passed a guard whose leg was trapped under a massive piece of masonry. Carmen swallowed. There was an acid taste in her mouth.
Ward took her hand. "Don't look," he said. "Don't stop."
Thank Hatto my mere wasn't here, she thought.
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Writing Tip #75: Make your story more exciting by blowing something up.
