"How are you bearing up?" I asked.

"Better than I dared hope," he said, still rubbing his eyelids. "I have the start of an excruciating headache, but now that I am out of the sunlight, perhaps it will subside." He lowered his fingers, opened his eyes, stretched his right leg out and stared grimly at the swollen flesh rising from his ankle to his knee. He'd taken his shoes off earlier, which was a good thing, as I doubt he'd have been able to pry the right shoe loose now. "I only hopethat subsides too," he muttered.

"Do you think it will?" I asked, studying the ugly bruise.

"Hopefully," he said, rubbing his lower leg gingerly. "If not, we may have to bleed it."

"You mean cut into it to let the blood out?" I asked.

"Yes," he said. "Desperate times call for desperate measures. But we will wait and see with luck it will improve of its own accord."

While Mr Crepsley was tending to his ankle, I unwrapped the chains around my wrists and legs and tried picking the locks. Mr Crepsley had taught me the fundamentals of lock-picking, but I'd never quite got the knack of it.

"Here," he said after a couple of minutes, when he saw I wasn't getting anywhere.

The vampire made quick work of the locks, and seconds later the cuffs and chains were lying in heaps on the floor. I rubbed my freed flesh gratefully, then glanced at Harkat, who was using the hem of his robes to wipe green sweat from his face. "How come they didn't put handcuffs on you?" I asked.

"They did," he replied, "but they took them off … once I was inside my cell."

"Why?"

The Little Person's wide mouth split into a hideous smirk. "They didn't know what I was or … what to make of me. They asked if I was in … pain, so I said I was. They asked if the handcuffs … hurt, so I said they did. So they took them off."