The Progenitors

Chapter 7

Hallen looked around the room desperately - to leave for another hiding place now would be suicide. The chamber was small by noble standards, about eight by eight feet with a small but well-made bed in one corner, and a chair made of stone in another. One of the oddities of Wilhelm was the common nature of stone; when the town had been founded, it had been founded to provide a place for the numerous miners in the area of the granite that was found easily throughout the surrounding areas. Only the nobles could afford stone furniture, which was twice as expensive and half as comfortable as the normal wooden variety.

There was also a small window in the corner, filled with actually glass rather than a shutter. The window was much to small for Hallen, though - it would take an opening twice the size of the one he had now to get out.

Thumping on the door signalled the arrival of the nobles. Hallen swore beneath his breath as he searched for a weapon to fend the men off with. If escape was impossible, then he would have to use the defensible doorway as the location of his last stand - one that was, in fact, a last stand seeing as he wasn't going to survive the battle.

The thumping on the door intensified, and Hallen decided on the chair as his weapon of choice. The piece of furniture weighed upwards of 50 pounds, and could be used like a battering ram on the first person to enter the room. Then he would have to use his knives to...

A battering ram... and an opening twice his size.

Switching directions, he carried the chair over to the window and knocked out the glass, ignoring the cuts to his hands and arm that he accrued. Then, using the chair like a hammer, he attacked the side of the wall nearest to the window with as large a swing as he could muster. He could barely lift the chair, let alone swing it, but shoddy construction took care of the rest.

Lord Dule always had been a cheapskate.

The wall around the window fell outwards and onto the roofs below. Of course, he had forgotten that he was on the fourth floor of the keep. Just looking down gave him vertigo, so instead he focused on the roof five or six feet away. That was his only chance; running from roof to roof might lead him to a place where the houses were only one story and he could safely drop down to the streets below.

The pounding on the door ceased, followed shortly by a thudding noise as the nobles realized that their swords would do what their fists could not. Hallen had only survived so long due to their inability to grasp the benefits of hitting wood with a sharp object - he thanked the gods for idiots.

With a running leap, he barely cleared the ledge of the roof across from the keep, then scrambled down out of site on the opposite side of the buildings top - hoping the guards wouldn't spot him. A splintering crack followed a few seconds later as the door finally gave way to the pathetic assault and the nobles flooded the room. Peering over the edge, Hallen could count five or six men peering out through the hole he had made in the wall, though none of them noticed him in the dark. The feast had lasted so late that it was almost midnight, and the lack of light was almost worth all of the tedium that he had to survive during the dinner.

When it looked like the men had gone, Hallen got up from his hiding place and began to cautiously move from roof to roof; it would be horrid luck to survvie this long only to plummet to the streets below. His guess had been right - farther away from the center of the city there was a long stretch of one floor houses that he could use to make his escape. The houses looked like they were located in the Beggar's district, so there would probably be no nobles present either. A doubly good choice then.

It only took Hallen thirty minutes to reach the first house he could climb off of, and it only took him 5 seconds to clamber off the roof and heave a sigh of relief. Having solid ground under his feet was a wonderful feeling, and he was so busy being relieved that he didn't even hear the talking at first.