Something powerful is drawing Ward back to Devil's Island. Something he thought he had forgotten. He must evade vicious lighthouse keeper George Jaggles in order to rescue it, but Jaggles will soon be the least of his worries. Because an assassin is...
The door in the wall had to be a furnace. Some prisoners would not survive the torture, and their bodies would need to be disposed of; if it was reported at all, it would be claimed that the prisoner had taken his or her own life. This disappointed the public, for hangings were popular, but it reinforced the perception the Brotherhood wanted to promulgate: that heretics were by their nature cowards.
Nick vacillated before the door for a moment. Surely it came out somewhere: a furnace must be lit somehow, and it must have a chimney. And they wouldn't keep it going day and night. There was a good chance it was cold.
He spun the wheel, pulled the door open, and threw himself into the space beyond, just as the Brothers opened the door to the chamber. They swept across the room as he pulled the door closed behind himself.
"Come back young man," one of them crooned. "You will burn alive in there." But they didn't try to open the door.
Nick turned and looked at the room, seeing the naked woman shackled to the chair, and the ash and bones of the dead in their hundreds upon the floor. He walked towards her, and she looked up. Her gaze was terrible. He forced himself to look away. They spoke. It was a strange conversation, carried out silently, in their heads. She – or whatever it was that inhabited her body – expressed surprise that he didn't burn. He toyed with setting her free, for he felt sorry for her, but his thoughts were on his own escape, and he left that place.
He crawled through the door behind her and found himself on the landing at the top of a long stair. He took a lanthorn from the wall. But he had no matches. He tore a piece of his shirt off and rolled it up into a kind of wand, opened the lamp's fuel tank, and dipped the wand inside until it was soaked with oil. Then he worked two stones loose from the wall in which the mortar had long since crumbled, and struck the stones together until the sparks caught on the oil-soaked wand. Then he lit the lanthorn with this torch. One last look back at the woman in the leaden room, then he closed the door and descended the staircase to the tunnel.
Something made him stop not far from the foot of the stairs. This section of tunnel seemed no different to any other – nevertheless he could sense something was here. It was a peculiar feeling. He shone the lanthorn over the detritus piled up against the tunnel walls, and his eyes lighted on a dirty glass bottle, half buried in the refuse. He pulled it free. The glass was too opaque to see through, and the rotten cork stopper in the neck of the bottle disintegrated when he tried to pull it out. When he turned the bottle upside down a leather pouch fell out of it. Tipping the contents of the pouch out on his palm, he saw the dice for the first time. He quickly put them back inside the pouch, recoiling inwardly as he touched them. He briefly considered throwing the pouch back on the rubbish pile, but changed his mind and put them in his pocket instead. Then he pushed on down the tunnel.
After wading through the flooded section of tunnel he reached the Adamantine Door. Beyond this lay an empty tunnel, blocked by a gate, through which moonlight shafted tantalisingly. The gate was locked. He had to return to the Vault to find a piece of wire with which to pick the lock. In ten minutes he had the gate open.
He found himself behind the Courts. He crept across the courtyard, hid beside a guard station, and waited there for the Postern Gate to open. It was a long cold night for a boy in wet clothes.
With dawn came the rumble of a wagon from outside the Gate. He watched as a sleepy Red opened the Gate. Nick rolled under the wagon as it passed the threshold of the Gate, bouncing to his feet after it had passed over him. By the time the Red saw him he was already bolting away towards the long grass on the other side of the road.
Nick's escape became famous among the legends of the criminal world, though he told nobody how he had done it. Years later, when Mildew suggested raiding the Vault, he felt he had to confide in her. He had only briefly mentioned the Guardian. That something deadly guarded the Vault was all she needed to know, and she had never brought it up again.
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So Deville, Nick, and Ward were all immune to the Corpusant. Why?
