Chapter 15 #2
“Shit!” The voice was Sharp’s but the fear had to belong to someone else, surely?
“What is it?” Einsa wasn’t the only prisoner calling out to know.
She caught the word “water” among the confusion of answers and distress. Then she heard it, the splash of falling water. They were flooding the chamber! It would have been easy, likely the instructor just had to turn a wheel to divert the stream’s water into the room.
Einsa continued to wrestle the locking mechanism against a background of splashing and screams. Her pick ground uselessly among the mud and rust flakes, finding no purchase.
She had studied the pins and tumblers of sophisticated locks, along with the ratchets and cylinders of older, more basic models.
She’d practised until her fingers bled and calluses formed.
Everyone had secret fears, or at least if they were sensible they were secret.
Hand that advantage to your enemies—and in here the instructors were the enemy—and they would torture you with it.
Einsa had several hidden fears, but her terror of confined spaces was the biggest secret.
Meeting a better sword on the floor of the Wound Garden would never be a pleasant ending, but she had steeled herself against that eventuality.
Until today she’d yet to imagine a worse ending than being trapped in some small enclosure and left to rot.
But drowning in one now topped her list of awful ways to die.
Panic can make a nightmare of even the simplest tasks. When your life hangs in the balance on the outcome of buttoning up a shirt, the act of doing up a button can seem like juggling five balls at once.
Einsa couldn’t feel the water. Her coffin had been damp and muddy to start with and it seemed to be keeping out the rising tide for now, but she could hear the splashing intensify, and the quality of sound in the chamber had changed in some ineffable manner that spoke of flooding.
The robustness of her coffin would be moot, however, when the water level reached the row of airholes about two thirds of the way up.
Einsa fumbled through her picks for an alternative. She heard a coffin lid nearby clang open and she cursed, jealousy and fear drawing obscenities off her tongue. She wanted to beg the girl for help, though it would do her no good.
Einsa began to poke about in the mechanism with her narrowest and simplest pick, hoping to form some kind of picture in her mind of what opposed her and where she needed to apply the forces that would turn the lock.
It was the coldness rather than the wetness that she noticed first. Cold water leaked from the keyhole over her trembling fingers.
Another lid clanged open.
“This isn’t your coffin, Einsa.” Sharp rapped briefly on the iron before splashing away.
Time passed. Einsa cursed and wept and struggled with her picks. Two more coffin lids opened with great splashes and the acolytes couldn’t keep from cheering as their friends emerged, though they would pay for the celebration later.
“Gods…no.” Einsa had two picks in the lock when her attempt to twist the larger one resulted in a release of tension.
If she’d had less experience living in her hands she might have thought that the mechanism had rotated.
But Einsa had broken enough picks to know the difference between a lock surrendering and the pick giving up.
“Please no…” With a piece of broken metal jammed in the workings a lock could seize up permanently.
Slowly, water began to spill down on both sides of her, dribbling through the airholes the flood had just reached.
Einsa choked on a scream. She couldn’t leave like this. Not like this. Not howling until the waters filled her mouth while the class watched on.
With what felt like infinite trembling patience, she rotated the pick back and withdrew it, the waters still dribbling through the lock that must now be inches below the waterline.
The relief of finding the pick head distorted and ready to break but still attached to the stem made a brief dent in the high tide of her own terror.
Einsa hadn’t jammed the lock, but, cradled by the icy water which now touched her ears, she rapidly returned to the panic that had been tightening its vise around her.
She replaced the pick with an alternative and began to work both the new and the old around the grime-choked mechanism in what the small still-rational corner of her brain told her was hopeless stirring.
Above the splashing and the cries of other trapped acolytes being consumed by their fears, Mollandra’s voice somehow reached through Einsa’s frenzy. “Einsa! Stop! Wait!”
“Fuck you!” Stop? The little bitch was shouting for her to stop from the safety of the stairs? She probably hadn’t even got her toes wet.
An image of Einsa’s mother jolted through her mind, unasked for, unbidden, silent but filling her blind eyes.
The stony countenance, which had broken only in rare and precious moments of affection, was one Einsa had come to understand over her years in the Academy.
It showed nothing now save faint disappointment.
Perhaps without Mollandra’s “Stop,” Einsa would never have thought of her mother, at least not until the drowning’s end when the pain left her waterlogged lungs and she sank into the endless depths.
“Stop. Wait.” Einsa took a deep breath and withdrew both her picks.
With the keyhole vacated, and with Einsa’s guiding hand not squashed against it, the leak became its own little cataract, water jetting out since the pressure at the lock was greater than at the surface.
“Stop. Wait.” Einsa let the breath out and inhaled slowly.
The water filled her ears now, deadening sound.
It reached the corners of her eyes, and she raised her head so that her nose pressed against the heavy coffin lid.
She tried to picture the workings of the lock, tried to put what her picks had revealed together with what she had learned.
Distantly she was aware of the wild shrieks and thrashing din of a neighbour who had also forgotten the lesson.
Maybe that would be her soon, but beneath the cold memory of her mother’s stare she vowed to keep herself together for as long as humanly possible.
Slowly, she returned one pick to the lock.
Miraculously everything felt clearer and more certain.
She had waited and the water jetting through the lock under pressure had undone Treecie’s sabotage, cleaning out the mud and rust. Einsa advanced the metal tooth, seeking the pressure point she needed to turn the mechanism.
Often, doing all the right things could still deliver the wrong result. This was one of life’s harsher lessons. When you did the right thing belatedly it was even less reasonable to expect a good outcome.
Einsa calmly worked the picks even as the water reached her lips. She closed her mouth, pressed her nose hard against the unyielding iron, and worked on, reaching, testing, applying measured force. And when the water reached her nostrils she stopped breathing and kept working.