Mi'ishaen laid on her back for a few moments, happy to simply not be tied to the chair any longer. Her back and arms ached miserably, and one of her wrists was bleeding. She panted hot breath into the chilly air for a few moments, watching the puffs manifest themselves like Aleksei's words when he began losing his temper.
She vainly attempted to breathe more deeply.
The female half-Elf groaned and began to shift herself. Mi'ishaen summoned strength instantly, seemingly from nowhere, to roll back over and lock her arm around the guard's neck again. The woman put up less of a fight the second time than she did the first time, and the Tiefling again flopped herself down to the ground to breathe.
And this is the easy part, she thought to herself.
She counted to thirty, again in the attempt to slow her breathing and calm her racing heart. Her chest hurt, and each beat felt as though her heart might burst out of it.
Okay, she thought after a few fruitless moments' effort. To work.
Rolling over again, she took the wrist that was bleeding and made ritual-like markings all over her chair. She made sure that the guard was absolutely clean of blood, then took a few moments to practice running and jumping off her chair. Truly reaching full extension hurt her side, her joints ached from the cold and damp that she'd sat in for so long, and she found her head spun when she hopped up and down.
It'll have to do. I won't have another chance at this.
She crumpled the guard's hand around her knife and made another small cut in her wrist to draw some more blood. She used it to dab at the walls and the cell door, then finally left, leaving the cell door slightly ajar.
The hallway outside was utterly black, and Mi'ishaen didn't dare try to get a torch. To conserve her energy and make sure she was as quiet as possible, she got on her hands and knees and crawled up the pitch black incline that led to the lit hallways above. Within her, her heart began speeding up again as though she were running a marathon. She inched up the hallway slowly, pausing every time she heard footfalls. Her head pounded, and it seemed as though it were ages before she could actually time the pace of the moving guards. In the shadows just behind one of them, she managed to make it all the way to a small room where a half-full dinner plate stood.
Mi'ishaen's stomach roared at once, vengeful against the days it had spent churning mossy water, stale bread, and air. She heard voices up the hall, however, and tore her eyes away from the plate in favor of cramming herself into the few shadows that existed at the back of the room.
Something solid that she didn't see from across the room poked her in the back.
"...and I can't help how many patrols have gone out, or how many other prisoners there are," a male-sounding voice finished as a shadow crossed the small room's threshold. "Somebody's got to scrub the cells, half the store's rotted, and none of you want to share your feed. Oughtta get a cat and a priest down here- I got people puking and fainting in the halls for want- aw, c'mon!"
Mi'ishaen watched the shadow on the floor, careful not to look up- it was easy for light to reflect in one's eyes if one did, and any little clue could give her away. Whoever it was that was holding the conversation with the man seemed to berate him farther for his wish to clean whatever cell was bothering him.
"Oh, push off," he answered finally, moving away from the doorway. "You're so concerned, you take an extra go-round. Oh no? Too much trouble? Right, then shut it up."
Mi'ishaen waited until she could no longer hear him nor the echo of whomever he was speaking to. While it was good to note that the guard was stretched thin at the moment, it meant that pathways that were normally set and able to be tracked might be erratic. She quickly turned to see if she'd suffered an actual bleeding scrape from her accident in the dark, only to discover that she'd scraped herself on a large, unlocked chest. Upon opening, she was surprised to find her armor, all of her weapons, the small ruby, Aleksei's bottle of frenzywater, Silveredge's sewing equipment and katars, Niku's branded strap, and Bahlzair's pact knife, snugly fit into a jet black leather sheath.
I can't believe I'm about to do this.
Mi'ishaen pulled her armor over her prison garment- again, a thin cotton dress- and began fitting everyone's things into the various pouches that were empty. She was glad she hadn't taken her stolen merchandise with her, since it gave her room to be a pack mule. The frenzywater was the toughest to stow, but in the end, she put it in the pouch behind her and prayed that she wouldn't have to fall on her back again. She took the leather sheath out of the chest last, fingering it carefully, as though the knife inside would jump out and bite her.
There were more hollers down the hall, and although they were unintelligible, they were enough to give the Tiefling rogue a bit of extra urgency. Her stomach growled too insistently when she attempted to pass the plate twice, and for a moment, there was a fear that it, not any other sound that she might make, would ruin her chances of escape. The candle light in the room seemed to dim slightly, and the room suddenly became significantly colder.
Mi'ishaen immediately thought the lack of food was driving her insane. She quickly grabbed the bread that rested on the plate and sopped up some of the ignored meal with it. The food was mediocre, but having been starved for some time encouraged her to gobble it down anyway. When she heard the footsteps returning, she pulled herself away from the plate, noticing suddenly that she had decimated more than half of what had been left behind.
"It is not raining, sweet heart of my beloved's heart."
Mi'ishaen blinked, surprised, and could say nothing. The chill left the room, and the candles grew sharply brighter. Her heart beat regularly and calmly, and her head didn't spin; yet she knew she hadn't imagined the gently-used, but commanding female voice. Shaking her head clear of the creepy feeling that suddenly made her skin break out in goosebumps, she crept carefully along the half-lit hallway again, noticing that every prison cell could be accessed off the same single pathway.
The uniformly spaced cells were laid across it at intervals, making it seem more like Silveredge's catacombs than any of the simple prisons that Mi'ishaen had seen before. Just as she'd passed the third set of cells, the runes on the hilt of the knife began to faintly glow. Nodding to herself, Mi'ishaen peeked down each side to see if the any guards were around. Finding that particular hall of cells blessedly deserted, the Tiefling crept to her left to see if she could find Bahlzair.
The Drow was all the way at the end of the hall, calmly meditating in a cell that was so disheveled that it looked as though he'd been wrestling a bear in his spare time, with his back to the barred door. Mi'ishaen didn't stop to ask questions- she simply slid the sheathed weapon between the bars and started back up the hallway.
Bahlzair looked over his shoulder and down at the weapon, which was still glowing as though it were an ember in a recently-doused fire. With an interested grunt, he picked it up, took the loose tunic that had been given to him off, and pulled the black skinned sheath on. He listened to the whisper of Mi'ishaen's freshly re-booted hooves along the prison stone, and waited until he could hear their rasp no longer. Then he got up, fished the keys that he'd taken off his jailer's dead body out of the severely damaged bed in the corner, and let himself out.
Mi'ishaen inched from hallway to hallway, timing the way the mostly disinterested guards walked halfway down each side, then walked back toward the main hallway and on to another dual row of cells. It seemed to take forever to reach the large arch that gave out toward the city streets. Thankfully enough, it was dark outside- whether that meant it was very early in the morning or very late at night, the Tiefling couldn't be sure. She quietly and cautiously slipped past the inner guards without incident, found a poorly manned corner of the stone-walled courtyard, and got about the business of finding a way over it.
She managed to find the strength to spring from the side of the prison building to the center of the courtyard wall in order to pull herself up and over the high wall. Just as she had successfully scaled it, she heard shouts behind her. When she was on the other side, she paused to listen, but couldn't hear anything that referenced her escape, or her, at all. Instead, there were bellows and screams about the escaped Drow murderer who had apparently solved the lack of food for prisoners problem by eating part of a guard.
I'm less surprised at that than I should be, Mi'ishaen thought to herself as she began to stealthily make her way back to the Coalwater manse. Probably if I'd been any hungrier, I might have done the same.
She was kidding herself about that, and she knew it. As it was, her jailer would wake up to chaos- some of it fantastically real, and some of it realistically false. The hope was that no one would be able to tell which was which for a long, long time- and part of that would mean running into the guard again, just as purposefully as she had done the time before.
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