‘Perhaps we can escape somehow?’ said Akiko, standing up and examining the bars to her cell.

A crazed cackle from a cell at the far end greeted her suggestion. ‘Escape? You’d need wings to escape this pit of despair!’ said a dishevelled pile of rags.

Until then, Jack had thought they were the only ones in the prison block. But now a dirty, toothless face appeared between the gaps in the cell bars. The shrivelled creature licked its cracked lips and stretched its skeletal fingers out towards them.

‘Abandon all hope!’ it croaked. ‘For we are all damned. The devil rules over this infernal prison.’

‘Why aren’t you shackled?’ asked Jack, glad of the bars between them and this lunatic inmate.

‘Been ’ere so long awaiting trial that the chains no longer hold me,’ he replied with another skittish laugh. ‘They just slide off me bones,’ he said, showing Jack his stick-thin wrists.

Jack’s low spirits plummeted even further. They would die of starvation before they were ever set free!

‘Me name’s Arthur, by the way,’ the prisoner went on, then frowned, ‘or at least I think it was … Most people call me Mad Bob.’ He offered a toothless grin. ‘Pleased to make your acquaintance!’

Jack nodded a cautious greeting, then turned to Akiko. ‘We have to get ou–’ Jack almost leapt out of his skin. She was standing right outside his cell door.

‘I already have,’ she said with an impish grin.

He stared in astonishment. ‘B-but how?’

‘The bars are bent at the top, from the weight of the roof,’ she replied, pointing to a wider opening high up in the ironwork. ‘I was able to squeeze through.’

Though he was aware of Akiko’s ninja skills, Jack was still taken aback at her extreme agility. He would have thought only a squirrel could have scaled the bars and slipped between such a narrow gap.

‘The bird does have wings!’ gasped their fellow prisoner.

‘I’ll go and find the keys,’ Akiko whispered, heading towards a darkened stairwell, ‘for the doors and your shackles.’

‘Don’t worry about me,’ said Yori, who’d finished chanting. He held up his hands, free of their shackles.

Mad Bob’s skull-like eyes widened into black holes of awe and fear. ‘It’s witchcraft!’

‘No, the shackles were simply corroded,’ Yori explained matter-of-factly. ‘A little chanting – soft kiai-jutsu, as Sensei Yamada calls it – and with the right resonance, the brittle metal weakens and cracks.’

Jack looked at his own shackles. They were new. No chanting would break them.

‘I’ll be back with our weapons and hopefully your purse too,’ said Akiko, before disappearing up the flight of stairs.

‘We won’t be seeing ’er again,’ muttered Mad Bob peevishly.

Jack shot him an irritated look. ‘She’ll be back – you don’t know Akiko.’

There was a snort of manic high-pitched laughter. ‘Once a bird takes flight, it won’t return to its cage.’