The Undertow

The drowned drain-caves beneath House Vandahl's bluff gaol above Valenfeld — where the cells' waste and the gaol's overflow have run for longer than anyone keeping the ledger, and where a locked-up stranger's only way out is up and out through the dark.

The bluff gaol above Valenfeld holds House Vandahl's short-term prisoners in dry cells cut into the rock, and every one of them drains into the caves below — the Undertow, named by whoever first had to wade it. The House garrisons the gaol above; it does not garrison the drains, and hasn't in longer than the current warden can say. Nothing living was meant to nest down there, which is exactly why something always does: vermin thick enough to have given up fearing torchlight, and deeper in, wherever the water pools and stops moving, worse. The caves climb toward a coin of daylight on the forested bluff outside the gaol's walls, which makes the Undertow less a dungeon in its own right than the one door a desperate prisoner has ever found out.