If I thought the chattel hold smelled unpleasant from up in the overhold, it was downright nauseating to be in there. If you've ever been to a pig farm, it smelled an awful lot like that but worse. While there were waste pots, not everybody could get to them - and, even if they managed, all that waste was still right next to us in the hold, only in a pot instead of on the deck. Despite the stench, the recent addition of three child prisoners, and the steady jostle of chains with the rocking of the ship, most of the prisoners were asleep. Those who were awake eyed us with trepidation or curiosity - all except for the group of around two dozen imprisoned youths who were close enough to us to hold a conversation over the sound of clinking chains.
I tugged at my chains to confirm that they were as solid as they looked. They were.
"So… do we break out now?" I asked. I sounded congested because I refused to breathe through my nose - I did not care for the miasmic smell.
"I reckon night's better'n daytime, what with the passengers 'n most of the crew being asleep," Mailyn said.
"Right… here goes nothing." I turned to Aldo, who was next to me in our 'chain gang'. "Aldo, let me see your shackles."
I would soon find that breaking out of a prison hold is a good deal more difficult than sneaking in a set of bolt-cutters. It's a good thing there were children almost twice our age in the vicinity, because our track record for good decisions was decidedly sparse. It turns out that seven-year-olds are not the world's greatest masterminds. Between Aldo, Mailyn, and myself, there was enough raw brainpower to supply some small nations, but we severely lacked in every other mental attribute. My granule of a plan had been:
1) Smuggle the bolt-cutter with me into the chattel hold.
2) Un-bolt as many people as possible.
3) Freedom!
No key to the cage doors? That was a problem for future Vix. Overcoming the crew (and passengers) without any weapons? Another problem for future Vix. Lenschel, the oldest boy in and unofficial leader of our little chain gang, pointed out these oversights.
"Plus, you can't even work the bolt-cutter with your chains on?"
That was a valid criticism - our shackles prevented us from moving our hands more than twenty-five or so centimeters apart, which meant I couldn't open the cutter wide enough to slide over the iron bracers that the brass bolt securing them ran through. The obvious solution was for two people to work the cutter for a third person, but our chains only had enough slack to reach the person next to us and not the next person over. I made a few tries at cutting through Aldo's bolt, and then he tried mine, but we simply needed more leverage. And poor Mailyn had a dislocated finger and couldn't work the cutter at all. On top of that all the jangling of chains was pretty loud.
"Calm the fuck down or I'm coming in!" the guard shouted from behind the heavy cage door down on the other side of the hold. We had been making quite a bit of noise. We waited for what seemed like forever until word passed down that he'd dozed off again.
I set the bolt-cutter on the deck and tried to operate it using my body weight. "Maybe if I…"
"Damnit. Stop. Just stop, Vix. Let me try," the older boy, Lenschel, whispered. "Slide it over."
I clutched the bolt-cutter to my chest. "It's mine."
He sighed and ran his fingers through curly black hair. "I promise I'm not going to take it. But we only need one of us to get out of their chains and then they can free everybody else. Do you want to get out of here or not?"
I clutched the bolt-cutter in my small hands, considering any approach that didn't involve my giving the bolt-cutters I'd stolen to somebody I hardly knew. The theft of the cutter was the first scheme I'd ever masterminded, and I was reluctant to just give away the spoils. Plus, Lenschel was a lot bigger than me, but that meant he'd also probably make a lot more noise trying to work the tool. Then an idea popped into my head - one that I mentally kicked myself for not having thought of sooner. I turned to Aldo.
"What about your hand trick?"
"My hand tr-" he furrowed his brow. "Yeah. Yeah, that might work."
Aldo let out a long breath and then gave it a try - during his year in the streets, Aldo had discovered a talent for a form of minor shadow magic called 'shadeform' at the Collegium, essentially a lesser form of shadow magic. Outside of direct light, he was able to partially shift his hands, allowing them to bypass solid objects to a limited extent. As you might imagine, such a skill is immensely useful for cheating at street games, picking pockets, and generally excelling at minor mischief. Unlike me, Aldo could use his talent at will, but he could only do it two or three times before his deeply-undeveloped thaumic capacity was expended…
But we only needed it to work once.
With a look of intense concentration, he stared at his arms and willed them to blur into a shadeorm… and they did. In the dim light of the chattel hold, his limbs darkened visibly and then went gauzy around the edges. They immediately shifted in the shackles, the iron bands slipping forward as if his arms had suddenly decreased in size. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough of a decrease to slide them off, and he hurt his wrists for his effort when his hands shifted back into normal space.
I winced when I saw the oozing scrapes encircling both wrists. "Sorry… I didn't know that would happen," I said.
"Yeah, well… now you know," he said with a frown.
"Come on, quit wasting time and slide the bolt-cutter over," Lenschel said.
I'd just decided to do exactly that when Aldo added: "I reckon your hands are smaller than mine."
Aldo and I were about the same height, but I was slenderer than he was and our shackles looked to be identical child-sized ones. Make what you will from the fact that Gionian merchant ships have extra sets of child-sized shackles. If Aldo could almost escape his bonds, then maybe I could slip mine entirely… if I could manage the same trick he did. The truth was I'd only ever slipped into the Shadelands once, while trying to escape from the Lapis-Crowns back at Uncle Horantz's, and I'd never been able to recapitulate the feat. But there was no harm in trying… well, no harm beyond scraped wrists.
"I'll try," I said, my tongue poking out as I concentrated. I recalled Rook's little lesson back in his pub, of remembering how I felt the first time that I went into the Shadelands and replicating my state of mind. Obviously, an experienced mage doesn't have to recall some emotional state from their childhood when manipulating their thaum, but for a novice, it is an invaluable tool when practicing new skills.
It wasn't hard to concentrate on that feeling - of fear. Of hopelessness. Despair. Anger. Because I felt all of those things then, stuck in the chattel hold of a Gionian ship, just as I had on the night the Lapis-Crowns took me. A dark fire burned within me, thaum pulsing out like a palpable thing, and I pulled that horrible flame out into the world and envisioned it enveloping me, consuming me in my entirety. And, as I did that, I fell into the Shadelands for the second time…
I descended into them, into the place that is not a place, into an empty facsimile of our world of form and color. In the hold's dim lighting, there was almost nowhere off limits to the shadows. The reinforced beams of the ship became like the gnarled bark of trees burned to charcoal; the solid iron of my shackles became fuzzy loops that seemed to waver in an unfelt breeze; and the people… the people of the teeming hold weren't there at all. Instead, where each person should have been, was a tiny smudge of guttering, colorless light. It is said that powerful shadow mages can skirt the abyssal realm to move about unseen under the noonday sun, traverse great tracts of terrain in a single step, and slip through spaces that insects would find cramped…
But as a neophyte in the craft, I could only circumvent the dictates of the regular world by the meekest of margins, squeezing a single small hand out from an iron shackle that suddenly felt substantially larger. Then I felt it - not a presence, per se… if anything, it was the opposite of presence. A tiny tendril of primordial wanting wending its way from deeper in the darkness, calling me down… pulling me down. The moment I registered its tentative tug, my mind rebelled, and then the world came rushing back in and I found myself back with my fellow prisoners and feeling like I'd just run an obstacle course.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
"Her… her whole body went black," one of the older girls said. If they'd been impressed by the sparks flying off Mailyn's body or Aldo's arms going dark and blury, my whole body going shadowy and indistinct definitely reinforced that the three of us weren't quite ordinary kids.
"That's a hell of a trick," Lenschel observed. He glanced up to make sure we weren't being directly observed before raising his own shackled hands. "Try to do mine when the guards start banging."
"Why does he get to go second?" Mailyn pouted.
"Because he's strong enough to do it a lot more easily than any of the rest of us," I said - it made sense to get Lenschel's hands free, and he could then work on everybody else. Plus, if he was doing it, that meant less work for my poor little hands. I spread the bolt-cutters as wide as they could go, readied myself, and clamped down with all my might. And failed to cut the bolt. "It… it didn't work," I said. "I…"
Before I could start to panic, Lenschel pushed the brass bolt of his shackles back into the mouth of the bolt-cutters. "Yeah, but you made it about a quarter of the way through. Keep going."
So I did. It was slow going - it took quite a few tries, timed with the motion of the ship, and what felt like hours to break the bolt securing Lenschel's right hand in the manacles. Every so often, guards would check the chattel hold, lowering a lantern down from each of the overholds above us and then counting us off. Theirs wasn't a perfect system. Certainly, it was one that I would exploit with my extensive expertise as a sneak. But at the time, Aldo was the most experienced rogue among us, and what he knew could fill a thimble with room to spare. Finally, with red, blotchy blisters starting to form on my palms, my efforts paid off and I cut through the bolt affixing Lenschel's left wrist. With a grimace of pain, he pulled his hand out of the loosened shackle and motioned for me to hand him the bolt-cutter, which I did after only a moment's hesitation.
He moved down to the next prisoner in our line - a girl about his age named Bulia. She raised her left hand, and Lenschel managed to cut through her bolt in a single mighty squeeze, the metal cracking and half of the broken bolt zipping past my face and pocking against the bulkhead behind me. Then he moved to her right hand, waited for the hold's chains to jostle with the ship's sway, and repeated the action.
I couldn't help but frown - it had taken me forever to break just one of his bolts. "Well… that's completely unfair."
"Free me next!" Aldo whispered.
"Why you?" Mailyn hissed.
He gestured toward the cage door separating us from the next compartment of the hold. "You know anybody else who can pick those locks?"
"I could try," she insisted.
"Yeah, and you'd get caught."
"But you might need my help," I added quickly.
"That's true," Aldo admitted.
Accordingly, Aldo was freed next, followed by me, followed by Hiramino and Bellia, the two stowaways, because Hiramino wouldn't give Aldo the hairpins I'd accidentally deposited in the hold until the two of them were freed. Only then was a visibly irate Mailyn unbolted from her shackles. We'd just about finished with the first lock when the shadows started to shift - the guards were lowering a lantern into the hold for their hourly check. Aldo and I scrambled back to our spots, leaving the hairpins right in the lock and practically leaping into our individual chain fiefdoms along the line. I grabbed my shackles, held them to my body, and prayed to High Asuna that the guards wouldn't notice the twenty or so bits of broken bolt currently rolling about the deck.
"Sixty-three… is that right?" one of the guards asked.
"Yeah, checks out," the other said. I let out a breath as the pair pulled the lantern back up and went on their way.
"Be more careful," Lenschel hissed at us.
"You're not my dad," I replied.
He scowled. "Just remember the plan, kid."
I have to give Lenschel credit - he and Bulia had come up with a pretty solid plan despite their complete lack of Collegium training in such matters and despite none of us having any special skills worth writing home about. As opposed to my primordial three-step plan, theirs was as follows:
1) Unbolt everybody's shackles, or as many people as possible, without being detected. While the daytime guards might be more assiduous, we could probably just hide our unbound hands from view and the night shift would let it slide.
2) Unlock the cage doors between the sub-compartments of the chattel hold. Fortunately, the doors would stay closed while unlocked, so they wouldn't be swinging around wide open for the guards to spot.
3) Create a distraction to get the guards at the main entrance to open the door. Our current plan was to have one of us kids pretend to be gravely injured using the contents of one of the waste pots to look like we were bleeding. They would wander up to the main door and collapse. I resolutely refused to be the distraction on account of not wanting to be covered in human waste.
4) When the guards opened the hold door, we would rush them and take control of the ship.
5) If it became clear that we couldn't take control of the ship, we would jump overboard and swim westward until we hit one of the outlying atolls of the Cabezos.
It was a risky plan. It was an audacious plan. But, to its credit, there was nothing obviously unworkable about it, and it even had a contingency for if we couldn't take control of the ship - as Hiramino the stowaway pointed out, most sailors carry knives on them, and the crew has access to a substantial armory in the off-chance that something like a prisoner escape happens. But most prisoners don't manage to smuggle in bolt-cutters and hairpins.
Our contingency - Step 5 - came courtesy of Bulia, who'd noticed our ship turning northward during the early stages of Step 1. This could only mean that the Auspicio had approached as close to Perditan waters as they were willing to get and were now headed northwest toward Isil Filar, a small Gionian island conveniently perched in the middle of the Pelagic. This meant we were around a day and a half from our stop at Isil Filar and, more importantly, it meant there would be several small outlying atolls due west of our current location, the closest we would be to non-Gionian territory for the entirety of our voyage. If we could make it to those islands, there was a very good chance that a passing Perditan patrol would spot us. And, better yet, if we did manage to take control of the ship, all we'd have to do was sail due west until we found the Cabezos… and Floria's pirate navy would almost certainly find us well before then. Of course, no plan is perfect…
"I can't swim," one of the younger kids said.
"Me neither," Aldo admitted. "But I'm sure as hell gonna try."
"Not sure I want to get took by pirates," Mailyn drawled.
"The Perditans are twice as civilized as these bastards," Bulia stated.
"Hey, we're Gionians," Aldo said without much conviction.
"Yeah, well… you can stay behind if your national pride demands it," she replied coolly.
"Hells no. We was heading to Floria anyway, wasn't we, Vix?"
"That's right," I said. I figured it didn't hurt us any to divulge that in present company - it wasn’t the same as admitting you had introduction papers to the Perdita Free Collegium. "So… if we're going to get there, I guess we better get those doors unlocked…"
The cage doors were secured with a basic thaumaturgical lock called a Coglio Tri-twist, a three-tumbler lock with a magical safeguard that disengages the pins if there's too much pressure on the 'safety' pin. It's the sort of lock that any Collegium Sneak can open in about a minute flat. Even disinvigorated, it took Aldo and me around fifteen minutes. It would have been completely impossible for us if anybody had bothered to magically activate the lock, but I guess none of the guards were able to and Second Mage Awis'le and his cadet had more important things to do. It clicked open and we crept toward the next lock in the series.
As we passed, a woman who reminded me of my Aunt Terizia blinked blearily and whispered, "Wh- what's happening?"
"Sit tight, miss, we're doing a prison-break," I whispered.
Aldo nodded his agreement over my left shoulder. "Our friends'll get your chains off real soon."
The prisoners started to rouse and mumble among themselves, downcast eyes suddenly alit with meager hope, and as I saw their hope rekindle, pride swelled in my chest. These were my people, and they hadn't been broken.
We proceeded to the next lock and managed it in seven minutes. With confidence and hope filling me near to bursting, we proceeded to the third. I was certain we could get our time to under five minutes (which, again, isn't that great, but with two seven-year-olds with two silver hairpins at their disposal, it's fairly impressive). We managed under five minutes - in fact, we might have managed under four. Our part of the plan was complete and well ahead of schedule. now all we had to do was methodically unbolt everybody over the next two or three hours (before dawn was preferable), cause a distraction (using human waste as fake blood), and then overwhelm the guards as they opened the door…
"Guards coming!" one of the prisoners hissed.
I looked up and gawped as lantern light flickered about the overhold above us. Aldo and I scrambled back toward our accustomed spots on the floor, leaping over heaped prisoners, deftly avoiding chains, silently sprinting across the deck of the chattel hold like true sneaks. We entered our section just as the lantern began its slow descent, the winch chains squeaking as the guards worked it down. I dove on top of my loose chains, wincing as the shackles dug into the skin of my belly, and dared a clandestine peek up to see how things were going.
"Sixty-two… sixty-three…" the guard said. "Checks out."
Just as I was about to let out a breath of relief, the sound of squealing metal called out like an out-of-tune coronet. I turned my head toward the source of the sound, cringing as I saw the closest door wide open, swinging on poorly-oiled hinges as the ship slowly rocked. The guards above muttered amongst themselves while repeating the prisoner count to be safe. They muttered some more.
"Well somebody's got to go down there and lock it."
"Better check the prisoners while they're at it, make sure there's no funny business. I'll flip ya to see who's got to do it…"
"Nah, we should both go."
"Yeah, probably…" They left the lantern dangling in place and tromped out of the overhold.
I turned to Lenschel, our unofficial leader, panic squeezing my chest and creeping into my voice. "They're coming! What do we do?"
His hazel eyes scanned across the twenty or so of us who were already free - most of us children or teenagers. He set his jaw and glared at the distant door that separated us from freedom. "What do we do? The second they open that door, we rush 'em."