The Devil's Workshop

There they found the man’s unconscious body. Cinderhouse ignored it, walked right past it and started up a staircase that he said would lead them to a higher tunnel, but Jack stopped, his hand against the wall to help hold him up. He stood over the body and watched the man breathe, his chest rising and falling arrhythmically. There was a gash in the man’s head and his leg was badly broken. Dark sticky blood had pooled beneath him, but the wounded leg had begun to clot.

“Who do we have here?” Jack said.

Jack barely whispered, but the chamber caught his question and bounced it around the walls until it boomed down at Cinderhouse. The bald man turned and stood next to Jack, looking at the other man’s still and silent form, the legs and arms splayed across the cobblestones like those of a snipped marionette.

“He’s nobody,” Cinderhouse said. “An irritant.”

“Oh, but I like irritants,” Jack said. “For instance, I’ve become quite fond of you.”

Cinderhouse scowled, but accepted the insult. “He followed me down here. He was in Bridewell.”

Jack lowered himself slowly to his knees with a grunt and bent over the unconscious man. He brushed his hair out of his eyes and sniffed the man’s face, squeezed his mouth open and smelled his breath, sucked in the air from his lungs. Jack smiled and looked up at Cinderhouse.

“What was his name? Did you know it?”

“He called himself Griffin.”

“You say he was in the prison with you?”

“Yes. He was.”

“For how long was he there?”

“Not long. I know I saw him there the day before we escaped.”

“But not before that? How odd.”

“I don’t know,” Cinderhouse said. He squinted and scrunched his features so that he looked like a child trying to remember instructions. “I don’t think I saw him before that.”

“Almost as if he arrived just in time to escape, would you say?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“That’s all right,” Jack said. “Of course you don’t, my lovely little fly. Don’t trouble yourself.”

Cinderhouse smiled weakly, unsure of whether he had disappointed Jack. Jack stared down at Griffin and reached out, gently probed the wound on his leg. Griffin stirred and groaned in his sleep. Jack put his lips to the unconscious man’s ear and murmured. “Exitus probatur,” he said.

“Ergo acta probantur.” Griffin’s voice was thick and gravelly, but Jack heard him clearly.

He looked up at Cinderhouse and grinned. “Do you know what we have here, Peter?”

Cinderhouse shook his head, thoroughly confused.

“We have another acolyte. Isn’t that wonderful?”

“Is it?”