Read Chapter 8: A Crack in the Wall

The mortar crumbled like stale bread under Thomas’s fingers. He had been at it for what felt like hours, working blind in the dark, the stones of the cell wall weeping cold moisture against his wrists. Agnes had left him a stub of candle and a rusted iron spoon, and he had used both until his palm blistered and the candle burned to nothing.

Now he dug by feel alone.

The wall was old, older than the rest of the cell. The mortar between the lower stones had turned to sand, and his fingers found the seams easily enough. He worked a stone loose, then another. The gap he made was barely wide enough to fit his fist through, but behind it he felt nothing but air.

The promise of a passage. A way out.

He paused, listening. Silence from above. The guards checked the cells at irregular intervals, and Thomas had learned to count the gaps between their visits. Long enough. He pushed his arm through the gap, feeling along the other side. A narrow crawlspace, judging by the draft that kissed his knuckles.

He went back to work.

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By the time a gray light bled through the chink in the cell door, Thomas had opened a hole just wide enough to squeeze through. His shoulders scraped the stones as he forced himself through, the rough edges tearing at his tunic, and he dropped into a cramped passage that stank of damp earth and old rot.

He lay there a moment, chest heaving, tasting dirt.

The passage ran parallel to the crypt—he knew it from the layout of the chapel above, the angle of the foundation walls. If he crawled left, he would likely end up under the nave. Right, and he might reach the crypt's outer wall.

He went left. He had no intention of meeting the silent brute again without a weapon.

The passage narrowed until he had to wriggle on his belly, elbows scraping the floor, and then it ended in a pile of collapsed rubble. He pushed against it—loose. A few careful minutes of digging brought him to a breach that opened into the ruin of the old mill.

He crawled out into the gray dawn, blinking against the light, crouched among the tumbled stones and rotted beams of what had once been Blencarn's mill. The wheel was long gone, the millpond dry and choked with weeds. No one had used this place in years. Which made it the only safe corner of the village to hide.

He crouched behind the fallen millstone and watched.

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From the mill's broken upper floor, Thomas had an unobstructed view of the village street and the chapel beyond. He hid himself in the shadows of the rotted joists, his knees against the splintered floor, and he watched the village come to life.

The gates were shut. Men with Sir Richard's colors—a black stag on a green field—stood at intervals along the palisade. They walked in pairs, carrying spears, their faces grim and bored. Merchants' carts had stopped coming days ago. The market square, which Agnes said had once bustled, now held only a few huddled figures who kept their eyes down and scurried between doorways.

Thomas stayed in the mill through the day. He saw Agnes once, emerging from the lane that led to the square, a basket on her arm. She paused at the edge of the mill's shadow, and for a moment Thomas thought she would look up. Then she walked on.

By dusk, his hunger was a dull ache. But he did not move.

He watched.

And in the watching, he saw the pattern.

At moonrise—a sliver of bone-white light above the chapel steeple—the cart came. The same cart he had followed nights earlier. The sexton drove, his shoulders hunched, and the same silent brute flanked it, walking at the horse's head.

Thomas's heart quickened. He watched the cart stop at the chapel door. The sexton climbed down, and the two of them lifted a bundle from the back—a body wrapped in rough linen, the shape of it unmistakable. They carried it inside. The door closed behind them.

He watched the rest of the night. And he saw them again. Twice more. Three bodies in total, carried through the chapel door under the eye of Sir Richard's men, who made no move to stop them. One of the guards even helped lift a bundle, his face registering nothing.

Thomas's suspicions crystallized into certainty.

These were not plague corpses moved for burial. These were people—the disappeared, the taken—carried into the crypt by night. Not because the village feared disease, but because Sir Richard controlled the death of every man, woman, and child in Blencarn.

By dawn, the cart had stopped running. The village stirred again, men going to the fields, women drawing water, children playing in the dirt.

The miracle of Blencarn, the fasting village that kept the plague at bay, was fed by bodies.

Thomas slid down from the mill's upper floor, landing soft in the weeds. He was safe. For now. But hiding in a ruined mill would not save him, nor save the dying girl, nor uncover what had happened to Elias Thorne and his daughter.

He needed to see Sir Richard. Not through the eyes of a prisoner, but from inside the manor itself.

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The manor stood at the north edge of the village, a fortified stone house behind a low wall. It was the oldest building in Blencarn, older even than the chapel, and its windows were narrow, dark slits that looked out on the village like narrowed eyes.

Thomas circled it from the cover of the treeline. The gate was manned by a single guard, half-asleep against the wall. The stables were on the far side, and beside the stables, a kitchen door that opened into the servery.

He crossed the open ground in a low crouch, keeping to the shadows where the moonlight did not reach. The night air was cold, and his breath fogged before his face.

The kitchen door was barred from inside. He felt along the lintel, found the catch the servants used when they went out at night—an old trick he had learned in another village, another terror—and the bar lifted. The door swung inward on silent hinges.

He slipped inside.

The kitchen was warm from the banked hearth. Utensils hung from the ceiling, their shadows long and black. He moved quickly, listening for footsteps, for voices. The manor was quiet. Too quiet.

He found a staircase at the back of the kitchen and climbed. The upper floor was a gallery of closed doors. He passed one, then another—a storeroom, a sewing room—before he reached a door that stood ajar.

Lamplight spilled from within.

Thomas pressed himself against the wall and edged closer. Through the crack he saw the ledger on the desk, its pages open, a quill lying beside it as if the writer had been interrupted. He pushed the door wider and stepped inside.

The room was a study. Maps on the walls, a roaring fire in the grate, and on the desk, the ledger.

He turned the pages quickly, his eyes scanning columns of names. Each entry had a date, a cause of death—"fever," "flux," "brought low"—and a single mark in the margin. A black dot, small and neat.

He found the page he was looking for.

Elias Thorne. Apothecary. "Disappeared."

And below it, his daughter. A girl of eight, Thomas remembered from Elias's descriptions. Healthy. Had never shown a mark.

Her entry read: "Transferred to London. Expenses to be borne by the Bishop's account."

Thomas stared at the words. His blood grew cold.

"Transferred."

Not dead. Taken. Sold.

He flipped forward through the pages, his hand shaking. Page after page of names. All bearing the same mark.

Somewhere in this ledger was the answer to everything—the hidden crypt, the night processions, the plague that never came and the miracle that kept it away.

He heard a footstep behind him.

He turned.

Father Aldous stood in the doorway, his face gray in the lamplight, his hand resting on the hilt of a knife that Thomas knew the priest did not own.

"I told you to leave," Aldous said. "I told you it was kinder."

Thomas did not move. "You knew about the children."

Aldous's face contorted. "I knew about the debt. I knew Sir Richard would do anything to clear it. I did not know it would go this far—"

"But you knew enough to keep the crypt's secrets."

The priest said nothing.

Thomas lifted the ledger. "The Bishop's account. A noble in London. These are not plague deaths, Father. These are payments."

Aldous's hand trembled on the knife. "Put it down, Thomas. There's no way out of this manor that doesn't pass through me."

Thomas looked at the priest, at the gray face and the shaking hand. And then he smiled—a thin, mirthless thing.

"Then I suppose," he said, "we will have to go out together."