Rakesh pushed the thought aside.
Next to him rested a rope of old, cast-off garments knotted together. He’d tied the makeshift rope to a jagged piece of metal sticking out of the old wall. Lichen grew on the stones here, giving off a strange, greenish hue that glowed under the fairy-fires. As with all fabric in Iskawan, the fabric rope was damp.
With no sun, the cold lands were always damp. Rakesh couldn’t remember what it felt like to be dry or warm. The mist crept into everything. Sometimes, even his mind.
Rakesh glanced over his shoulder to Iskawan and the sharp, dark spires decorated with erratic wind vanes. No one was watching him. Of course they weren’t. Vakums – those poor souls who toyed with magic and ended up losing their minds, locked into their own heads like prisoners –wandered blankly through the walled city. The rest of the undesirable people sent here by the Empire worked out the least miserable existence they could manage until the unnerving sameness of life in the walled darkness drove them half-mad. They either jumped off the wall to kill themselves or found a sharp stone to do the job.
Rakesh fingered a locket dangling over his chest, then clenched it in his fist. He wouldn’t go mad. He had something that no one else did – hope.
With a grunt, Rakesh rolled onto his belly, gripped the rope, and disappeared over the side of the wall. Knots tied every now and then in the rope then helped him control his descent down, but his hands still ached with the effort of holding onto the slippery fabric.
He continued down, controlling his breathing while filling his lungs with the vile air. Sweat broke out on his arms, his back. He felt ahead with his feet, keeping the fabric between his toes. Slowly he moved, lowering one hand at a time.
Until his makeshift rope ran out.
Rakesh wrapped his right arm around the rope, then tentatively reached out to the wall with his left. Unlike other areas where old ladders and crumbled stone gave him footholds, this section of the wall offered only smooth, flat stones. Water trickled down its front. The top of the wall above him had disappeared into the fog, and Rakesh hung in a vacuum of darkness.
Nothing above, nothing below.
He swung and stretched with his feet, grunting, but felt nothing beneath him. With a curse under his breath, he gripped the rope with both hands and slowly started to ascend.
The rope still wasn’t long enough.
Pull after pull, Rakesh hauled himself higher and higher. His arms began to tremble. The bones and muscles in his shoulders protested. Slowly, the fog receded. Hints of light came into sight. Sweat poured down his neck and back until, finally, he reached the top again. He pulled himself onto the jagged wall, and gave off a final exhale.
Three fairy-fires clustered over him. He shooed them away.
Now was not the time to be seen.
Rakesh hauled the rope back up, tucked it into a hidden crevice, and covered it with spare rocks.
He required more time before he could find his freedom.
He’d have to trade for more fabric. Patrol the streets for any loose cloth that could be sewed into another rope. Attempt to make or find something he could trade for something better, which, in a city like Iskawan, was only as easy as your own cleverness. It was a desperate hunt, to try something like this. All this fabric could make him a rich man if he went into bartering like some of the others. But he wouldn’t. This was a frantic search to win his freedom.
It was better than waiting for death.
The idea to make a rope had come to him while patching a pair of old pants back together ages ago - perhaps years. Time held no real meaning here. While such efforts to create a sturdy and long enough fabric rope required time, it wasn’t as risky as when he tried to sneak under the bottom of a convoy wagon and had nearly been crushed on the rocky, uneven road. Once they caught him, they escorted him back.
It had taken an untold amount of time to recover from the beating and conceive his next plan.
Without the fairy-fires nearby, Rakesh had managed to hide his secret under the cover of darkness and move away from the spot along the top of the wall.
Time had worked her ugly, ravaging power over this wall. Uneven stones jutted up, sticking high in the air. The wall rambled up and down, occasionally giving way to sharp points.
Rakesh knew its unevenness by heart now. He roamed the parapet every day, climbing abysmal ladders, scaling chinks in the wall. Or, at least, once in the cycle of what he imagined was a day.
In Iskawan, the passage of time became an unknown. Unimportant. Why did it matter what hour it was when no hour changed anything?
The darkness prevailed. The inhabitants ate according to hunger and slept according to fatigue.
Rakesh hopped over and around stones, moving silently. He pushed himself. Although weary, he pushed harder, faster. Strength would be his only option when he fled. Unlike the rest of the captives of Iskawan, he hadn’t succumbed to the darkness yet.
Iskawan had not infiltrated his heart. The locket bouncing underneath his ratty, sweat-soaked shirt ensured that.
Nor would a lack of hope ever conquer him.
Twenty minutes later found him near a cluster of artificial light orbs made in Aviskara, the city of knowledge from the northern continent of Shamal. He crouched down and peered over the wall’s edge. In the distance, lights from the Mudra Clan flickered. Right below him, the thick, wooden doors below him were shut.
Shut. The Southern Doors were always shut.
Below him in the prison-city the Vakums wandered slowly, shuffling, their blank eyes staring out of expressionless faces. Some of them just sat, staring into the void in the distance with no signs of life on their strangely slack faces. More Aviskaran orbs congregated down the main facade of Iskawan’s biggest street. Their light allowed Rakesh to just discern the strangely decadent, once lavish buildings there that by now had fallen into disrepair.
People called out, haggling for trades. Old carts and wagons creaked as they were moved around in the darkness, in and out of the dark alleys. Imperial soldiers crowded the Southern Doors. They stared straight ahead as if they couldn’t bear to look back and acknowledge all the Vakums and the forgotten people behind them.
Rakesh looked back to the lights of the Mudra Clan in the distance, then down to the doors. His heart sank.
No matter how long he’d tried, the inevitable seemed so obvious: He could not escape Iskawan through the Southern Doors. The strange, flickering yellowing light of candles in the city came from some of the wealthiest of Iskawan’s members. They were the ones who lived above the main road in those buildings that hadn’t fallen prey to mold and decay in the pervasive darkness.
“The Yojin,” he heard a woman say. “They have not been here for many sleep cycles. Do you think they’ll return soon?”
Rakesh’s heart pounded painfully in his chest. The Yojin. The three, strange imperial agents who patrolled Iskawan, watching the inhabitants and checking the security.
“Why do you count the cycles?” came an answering bark. “There is no point. The Yojin will come when the Yojin come. Life is nothing.”
Rakesh lowered himself behind a boulder that had cracked in two. A cold wind whistled down his spine, bringing goosebumps to his skin.
The female’s voice snarled in response, “Life is something! You should become a scrounger. People drop things all the time. Then you trade them. It’s how it’s done!”
Rakesh glanced down the wall. More fairy-fires remained closer to the main part of the city, but some had wandered close.
Off in the distance, the shadows cast by the Aviskaran orbs were shifting.
Iskawan had many secrets, many shadows. Only the fairy-fires could illuminate them.