Magpies and Magic II : The Great Escape

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER THREE

The Pentagram Council were having as much success in the West as in the East. The Barbarians under Asomorph’s leadership had put up a good fight but were almost totally defeated. They were left holed up in their one remaining coastal town, Skyrax, in the extreme north. The port was on the border of the ice-sheet and they were faced with three choices: go even further north into almost certain death from the extreme cold, stand and fight or flee by boat. The Barbarians had enough ships for their now depleted forces to escape, but Asomorph had fought against that option for months.

But as the summer was coming to an end and the possibility of escape by boat was threatened by the fast approaching ice-sheet, he gradually heard more demands from his warriors to flee.

Talking to his deputy, Ulk, he asked if they should leave. Ulk told him that everyone wanted to go. They were only barely holding off the few Dark Elves that had reached the port. Everyone knew a huge force was coming up the coast. But Ulk had not consulted his colleagues: he was expressing his own view. He had ambitions to head a new Barbarian kingdom in a new land. Tired and feeling dejected, Asomorph gave the order to take to the boats.

The Barbarians loaded all their possessions onto their long-boats and headed West. The Elves had achieved their ambition to remove the Barbarians from Junopia; the Barbarian presence was now to be felt in Middlita instead.

Malcolm and Trelio found themselves being taken down to Block F of Ultricon prison. The insides of the prison cell blocks were remarkably open plan, and consisted of a series of cells lining a central area that more or less governed itself with only a few Troglodytes observing. The tunnel entrance was blocked by a pair of tremendously heavy stone doors that meant escape that way was going to be near to impossible. Trelio discovered very quickly that no magic worked in the prison. He did not know how they did it but he could not feel the magical energy inside him; it was like when the Giants were nearby.

Malcolm, as the only bird in that block, received a large amount of attention from his new fellow inmates, who looked like a ragtag bunch of creatures, though most of them were human. A surprising number were pleasant, at least in terms of their conduct, which surprised Malcolm. A few Ogres tried to hassle Trelio and Malcolm but his large sharp beak pushed them away. It seemed they were some of the few proper ‘criminal’ prisoners, most were ‘political’ prisoners, either from the royal forces or from the revolutionary regime. It seemed both regimes had been locking people up here and never released anyone. An uneasy truce existed between the two groups, at least in Block F.

Sadly in Block G, where Madeleine and Kolan were escorted to, the situation was very different: there was outright war going on between the criminal elements in the block. Kolan and Madeleine ended up almost immediately in a fist fight with two Trolls who didn’t like the fact that Madeleine was not naked. Trolls had a very different idea of gender roles to even the humans and the total opposite of the Dwarves.

In Block C, Roubar, Hilary and Krolith were by the standards of Kolan and Madeleine having a pleasant time. It was almost entirely made up of political prisoners, mainly newly imprisoned by the revolutionary regime. It struck Roubar as a little odd that, as one of his new prisoner comrades said, the prison authorities had decided to put all the most troublesome royalists in the same cell block.

In conversations with the other prisoners Roubar worked out that Princess Stephanie was most probably held in the ‘Central Core’, a super-high security section between all the blocks. The other blocks all fanned out from around it. At one end of Block C there was a raised area with a grated fence where the training area of the Central Core could be seen. Roubar looked up to it in the hope of seeing Princess Candera but saw nothing. He discovered that only once every two weeks would they see anyone up there. A fellow inmate described seeing someone matching Princess Candera’s description which greatly encouraged Hilary to believe that she was indeed still alive.