The Proxy Court

[warcode]

It took him seven weeks to summon the water horse.

The guards here were nothing like the well supplied and disciplined soldiers that manned the City blockade. These were draftees and exiles, mercenaries and nervous City expats and indifferent locals. While the















Every day, the captives of Knifehead Prison were marched out into the boglands to cut peat. The guards in their gas masks and dive armor stayed safely on the boardwalks, while the prisoners squelched out into the mud and braved sinking mires and the things that lurked in channels of open water. They were not chained, nor were the guards particularly watchful. If anything, they were more concerned with keeping an eye on their surroundings. The bogs spread for several miles in every direction before giving way to flooded forest or river basin or rocky, jagged coastline, and there were always rumors of things come up from the sea and now trapped in the marshes. Without a convenient airship or other transport standing by, an escapee going on foot would be forced to spend a night on the boardwalks, when the things in the water and the tall grasses came out to hunt, drawn to warm bodies.

Water horses liked to drift motionless in deep channels with the top of their heads just breaking the surface, their dark eyes nearly hidden among the waterweed choked tangle of mane and forelock. Eels and mudfish and bloodworms burrowed through the muck and congregated in shallow pools, and here and there the spines of carnivorous fish broke the surface of the channels as they hunted. Great sharks and giant ocean-going eels occasionally swam this far inland, following the rivers. Falling into the water was the same as a death sentence. Jumping in was unthinkable. Knifehead Prison’s reputation for being inescapable owed nothing to the diligence of the guards or the cleverness of its construction, but to the certain death waiting in all the surrounding areas.

So the guards did not particularly care that every day, one of their captives stood alone at the edge of the boardwalk and plucked a blade of sawgrass to slice across his finger, allowing three drops of blood to fall into the dark water, which always immediately roiled with activity below the surface. Nor did they care if he sang to himself softly under his breath, muttering words