The lock on the barracks door was heavy, solid Northwatch iron. Even Doran's brute strength couldn't break it without a sound that would wake Sergeant Rath himself.
"It's impossible, Aris," Doran whispered, pressing his ear against the damp, cold wood. "The guards check every hour. We can't break through the front."
Aris was already moving. The barracks was a death trap—a coffin waiting for a wake-up call. The decision to leave was made; now, the execution required flawless, ruthless precision.
"They guard the doors and the gate," Aris murmured, scanning the low ceiling. "They do not guard the drafts."
He pointed to a small, barred ventilation hatch near the roofline, usually kept open only a crack to prevent the fifty men inside from suffocating entirely. It was secured by a single, internal wooden bar sliding into iron grooves.
"It's too high," Doran said.
"And too loud," Aris noted. "But we have leverage."
The plan was simple, reckless, and relied entirely on Aris's discipline and Doran's quiet strength. They waited for the deep-night lull—that hour after midnight when the guards' movements were slowest and the wind was loudest.
A thick, cold mountain fog had rolled into the valley, draping Grimwatch in a silent, grey shroud. Their luck had turned.
Aris took the leather belt he had won from Jev and tied a double knot at the heavy buckle end. He then climbed onto Doran's shoulders, his bare feet steady despite the pain in his shin. The belt was long enough to loop over the wooden bar of the vent.
"Pull," Aris whispered.
Doran braced himself, pulling the belt taut. The cheap leather creaked ominously.
"Not fast! Steady!" Aris hissed, pressing his hand against the ceiling to feel the vibrations. "Use the leverage to slide the bar just enough to free the end. Slow. Fluid. Quiet."
Doran, treating the heavy belt like an ore cart he had to guide gently around a corner, pulled with agonizing slowness.
Creak. Skree...
The wooden bar, swollen by the damp air, shuddered in the groove. The sound was microscopic, yet in the silence of the sleeping barracks, it sounded like a splintering tree.
Clack.
The bar dropped free.
Aris scrambled back down. The vent, barely the width of a man's chest, was open.
"We go light," Aris instructed, stuffing his half-loaf of stolen bread and the belt into his tunic. "Spear head only, wrapped in cloth. Doran, you take the pike head. It's too long to carry the full shaft. We can find a sturdy stick outside."
They discarded their dull iron caps and heavy leather tunics—too cumbersome, too loud.
Aris squeezed through the vent first. The rough wood scraped his ribs, but he pushed the pain away. He dropped onto the cold, damp ground outside the barracks, disappearing instantly into the thick fog.
The camp was a labyrinth of noise and darkness. The smell of burning wood and stale sewage was amplified by the fog.
Aris pressed his back against the stone wall of the armory, listening. He could hear the heavy steps of the patrol guards, their coughs, the distant rattling of their gear. He counted the steps between the corner of the armory and the main path: sixty-four. And the time between their appearance: ninety seconds.
"The time between the outer perimeter guards is two minutes," Aris whispered to Doran, who landed silently beside him, an impressive feat for his size. "We have seventy-five seconds to cross the drill yard and make it to the rear palisade before the corner guard turns."
Doran nodded, his face invisible in the fog, but Aris could feel his absolute trust.
They moved. Not sprinting, which would alert the ear. But running with smooth, efficient silence—the gait Aris had spent two years perfecting in the mines, a skill he called the Ghost Pace.
They reached the rear palisade with twenty seconds to spare. The wooden wall was thirty feet high, impossible to scale.
"The trench," Aris breathed, pointing toward a stretch of the wall near the cook fires.
The latrine trench was the camp's shame—a crude, open ditch meant to carry human waste and refuse out of the camp and under the palisade, into a runoff pit by the river. It was an appalling sewer, the air above it thick and noxious.
"Gods, Aris," Doran gagged, already tasting the foul air.
"It is covered by the fog," Aris whispered. "The guards hate the smell, so they watch this section less. It is our weakest point."
A section of the palisade had been crudely raised a foot off the ground over the deepest part of the trench. It was barely wide enough for a crawling child.
"I go first," Aris commanded. "If I am clear, follow immediately."
He dropped into the icy sludge. The smell was overwhelming, a shock of pure filth that made his eyes water and his stomach seize. He pushed forward, crawling through the freezing, viscous muck. The pike head in his hand was his only protection.
He reached the end of the trench and slid under the wooden palisade. His face, hair, and clothes were saturated in sewage. He was outside.
He waited, listening. Ninety seconds. The guard was due.
Doran, following his friend's example, plunged into the filth. He was wider, and the wooden beam dragged heavily across his back, forcing him to keep his arms tucked in.
Just as Doran was halfway under the barrier, a guard coughed directly overhead.
The guard stopped his patrol, rubbing his neck, staring into the swirling fog. Doran froze, half-in, half-out of the palisade, his massive body completely still in the muck.
Aris knew the guard would smell them soon. He had to create a distraction.
He reached into his tunic, pulled out a small, sharp piece of shale he had saved, and flung it hard. He threw it not at the guard, but at a cluster of metal pots thirty yards down the riverbank.
Clang! Clang!
The noise was sudden and metallic.
"What was that?" the guard snapped, immediately drawing his short sword and running toward the sound, away from the trench.
"Go! Now!" Aris hissed.
Doran surged forward, scraping the skin off his back, but he made it. He tumbled onto the cold grass outside the palisade, gagging, but free.
Aris didn't let him rest. He dragged Doran to his feet and pulled them deep into the cover of the nearest pine forest.
They stopped only when the sounds of Grimwatch—the camp, the shouts, the patrols—were swallowed entirely by the vast, silent wilderness of Northwatch.
They were free. But they were covered in filth, armed with rusty spearheads, and ten years old, with a three-day march ahead of them to the Thornwood Crossroads to save their friends from an entire cavalry regiment.
"Thornwood," Aris whispered, his teeth chattering from the cold and the adrenaline. "West. South. We move."
He checked the stars, adjusted his bearing, and started marching south. The escape was over. The rescue mission had begun.