The first day was the easiest day. It was the day that you had the most will power. You could take a hundred lashings on your first day, if you had the constitution prepared for it. I went in at around morning. Right before dawn. And I had left about midday, the torturer too tired to continue. His arm too spent, too achy. Months ago I would have begged him to finish after the first hour. I don’t know what changed; I could have become dumber, or stronger, or more stubborn. All of them seemed related to some capacity.

  What I did know was that my back bled and my shirt stuck to the torn skin. Little skid marks down my shoulders and spine, a wet bleeding back that latched onto the rags and pulled them a little to the side. The torturer brought me down from the chains. I fell to the floor, arms and legs heavy, and he lifted me up. He took me to the door and knocked and two guards grabbed me by the arm pits and escorted me through the narrow cobblestone halls. Tunnels we navigated through light coming down the corner. The tunnels led to columned passage ways. Long stretches that used to be home to hundreds of city dwellers. These halls led to the central gape, the ocean floor below and the network of chains and ladders and steel bird cages. They lifted me. Up I went. Watched. Deliberated upon by wardens. An unusual edge to their eyes. Perhaps not unusual, perhaps just right given the circumstances. There was news of the shower fight, you could hear it in the whispers in the walls. Little cracks in the rote movements of the prisoners; in the lines waiting for food, in the mining fields, in the corridors of the prison. The boat too, was supposed to be set by now. Anchored to the South side, as I had requested. Things were coming out of place for them and coming into place for me. As I sat in my little hole I started to imagine the sea. The sprawl of ocean. The boat. The albatrosses. Little things you can’t appreciate in a cell.

  And every time I did imagine, Hannibal’s face appeared. The long hair. The sharp features. His face and Chaucer’s side by side. Like a coin in the air spinning wild. It couldn’t just be that I escaped. It couldn’t just have been that I let things go. It never was that. None of this ever was that-!

  Months ago I was an anon. Invalid of a time erased and buried. And now it was all coming back, the years drowning me. A history inescapable. What a false idea to believe that I could just escape who I was, or that I’d even want to. People mold into their fates, they become what they were always going to become. Just as I was destined to become Vice Captain of the Fourteenth. Just as I was destined to become the General there after (a bit of jumping ahead), just as I was destined to become prisoner. Just as I was destined to become free man. Ex-Crow.

  I sat in my hole in Shrieker’s Veil, my back against the pit walls. No rain fall tonight. A surprise. Just the cool air getting colder and colder. Myself, getting colder and colder. Hannibal must have thought that I thought that he thought I knew something. I thought about that a lot.

  Thinking. Waiting. And finally, in the peak of my drowsiness - not that I knew whether it was day or night outside - I fell asleep with the final mantra in my head, the list to kill;

  One, Vicentius Volarus.

  Two, Soveros.

  Three, Xanthus.

  Four, Gilbert.

  Five, Hannibal Duvall.

  I repeated it and repeated it and repeated it, name after name, lullaby of death.

The birds squalled before anyone else was here to lift me. And they woke me long before anyone else. An unusual night it was, I’d gotten some sleep for once. My back felt stiff, nothing a good stretch couldn’t fix.

“Get up. You know what time it is.” One of the guards said. I did. Did they?

Everything went as it usually did. The grate opening, the chain slack on my wrist then tightened. The lift. The land, the walking. Staring. Staring. Staring. Whispers from the other prisoners. A guard beating a prisoner. Prisoners growling, almost feral against the stick coming down on them.

  There was a tension in the air as I descended down and was yanked towards my torture chamber.

  I went through corridors, eyes trailing to the steel gaps in particular doors where I could see the shadows of torturers and whip dealers. Soon I too would go to my own dealer. Soon I too would be in a room. We stopped in front of a door, the long line of other rooms to my left and right and nothing particular about my room except that it was mine. Two guards stood at opposite ends of the door frame and eyed me. I looked straight forward. One of them turned and opened the door for the torturer and myself. My arms were locked behind me, in chains. My feet too, were chained together though I could still walk with small steps. The door closed behind me, the torturer walked up and looked at me. I saw the gaps in his armor. In between the helmet and the jugular. A loose fitted shoulder pad on his right. Slits in his ankles, arm pit, the back of his knees. Every little detail of him I studied. The door behind us, locking from inside and out. The key around his neck, a bit off to the side and underneath his chain mail.

  The sword on his left, two knives opposite side. He was big. Not too big. Taller than me, two inch reach advantage perhaps.

  He pushed me towards the center and brought down the hook on the ceiling, set above a chair at the center of the room. The list of executioner tools set out on a metal tray nearby. Alcohol, all kinds of puncturing items and skewers, saws. The whip. Of course, a classic.

  I knew what my most dangerous part was, did he know when his most dangerous part was? That point of no return, the point of your defenses and capacities being closed shut.

  Mine was being tied to the chair, chains below the seat. His was moment before tying me down, when he had to get the chair raised.

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  I stood a top the seat. He told me to extend my hands back, to move the spine of the chair in between and eventually through a bit of dexterous shuffling, to get the rest of the chair in the gap.

  “If you don’t get your arms out more, I’ll use the hook.” He said.

  “Then use the hook.”

  I stood in front of him. Him behind me, the chair in his hands. I could feel his smile at the challenge. I turned my head and spotted him. The guard dropped the chair, he walked a bit to the side, reached for the hook on the ceiling. He turned his back. I bent down and jumped, shuffling the chain below my feet. The rattle was sudden. He turned. I wrapped the chain around his neck and grabbed his head and pulled it towards the hook. It went through the bottom of his mouth, not fully. He was alive, grabbing onto the hook and trying to take it out of his mouth. A lever contraption to the side raised the hook up and down as it’d done to me several times before. I raised it the hook and the man’s body with it. I grabbed the key, yanked from their leather knot. I shuffled the chains back underneath his dancing legs.

  He screamed. The blood made him gargle. What’d that give me? Ten seconds?

  The keys fit in my cuffs. They all used the same key. Cheap, efficient, stupid.

  Then the keys went down to my feet. I left one on, it was faster that way. I just needed one cuff off, anyway.

  I grabbed the guards sword, he was still struggling on the hook. The two came in, fast. I’d hoped for ten seconds, they were there in seven.

  They eyed me.

  “Escap-!” I ran towards the screaming one, we clashed swords. The other tried to slash, I moved and he struck his friends armor with a blunt strike. I spun, returned a hack straight for the neck of this one. He dropped his sword and grabbed his neck. The other shook his hand where he’d been hit. I pushed him down, clumsy knight. I wrapped my wrist chains around his neck, my body and knee to his back. And I yanked underneath the chain mail, moving the chain up and down until it slid underneath his chain mail. I could feel the tactile flesh, a little smooth and elastic. And I strangled him. I crushed choked, what a strain it was to crush his throat. The skin tore and the blood came out of his neck and he could barely breath. His body convulsed. By then I let go of one hand. There were echoes in the chambers of foot steps.

  Two of them were still alive, to my surprise. One with a crushed throat and one still trying to get the hook out of his throat. Not that I needed them dead.

  Quickness was the game, not brutality. Not yet.

  I took a sword from the floor. Not from anyone particular, just the first one I saw. Then keys. All three sets that they had. Then two knives, the belt and all and made my way out. I looked left and right down the halls. Right had less noise. I went there.

  “I’ll be back to finish you.” The door closed behind me. “I promise you.”

I went down the hall. And what do you think I did? Go for Hannibal? Kill all the guards I could see? Somewhat. The corridors were small and darkened at points. I did in fact hurt several guards down the line, stabbing them in that gap in their helmet. But that was not the ambition. The ambition were the lines of rooms. The ambition were the rooms. I opened each door. Took each set of keys. There weren’t that many guards, there never were for this place. So I would go and beat the torturer, who usually had no weapons in their hands but the whip. A blow I could tolerate. And I would run in and push them to the ground and stab them through their bodies.

The prisoners would look up to me, mouth agape. I’d lower them. Undo their chains. They’d rub their wrists. Or perhaps hold their lashed spots, raised and reddened skin. And I’d ask.

  “Will you fight?”

  They’d stare with mouth agapes. Some would slink to their corners. But many, many more would nod.

  I told the first prisoner I did this to. I raise one of the leather rings of keys. I’d collected many on my waist.

  I raised them and I grabbed the big key.

  “This one opens the small doors, okay?” I grabbed the small one on the rings. “This one opens the cuffs.”

  I raised the third.

  “This one opens the main hall doors. Do you understand?”

  They nodded. Each I told this too. Their eyes growing more intense as they listened.

  “Then go off. Free as many. The more the better.”

  I tossed the keys. They grabbed weapons. Some put on armor. Helmets. Strange figures, those lanky tortured souls wearing big bulky armor. Some couldn’t fight. Others were more than ready.

  Things…prison escapes…they grow out of hand easily. You free one man. Perhaps that man dies, but say he doesn’t? Say that man saves three others? You can see how things go. All I really had to do was get ten good soldiers. Those ten saves who knows how many more. After a while my job stopped from freeing them. I came to the end of one hall, into the giant halls rounding. Shuffling feet. People going every which way in the chaos. A man beaten to death.

  My job wasn’t freeing anyone anymore. Not as a priority. My job was simple to get the doors open for everyone.

  Down the center I could see the bird cages lifted up. Wooden doors coming down. Bells resounded through the guts of the building, through the gears. Doors came down on main halls. Kitchen. Second floor. Fifth floor. Some slower than others.

  Giant wooden doors with spikes at their bodies. I saw a guard try to make his way inside, he was crushed. Cut in half. People off the other end screamed, open them up. Open them up.

  The chaos. The moving torches.

  Forgive my rhapsody. But I loved watching everything burn.