Tombs
Sometimes even the most brilliant lawyer can’t keep a crook from going to jail. The main prison in Freeport is located inside the Fortress of Justice and is known throughout the city as the Tombs. Folks will tell you the building got its nickname because it was based on an elaborate mausoleum from the Isle of Dread, but the denizens of the underworld know differently. Many criminals who end up in the Tombs are effectively dead and buried, never to be heard from again.
Architecture
This building is basically a solid block of reinforced, triple bricked walls over three feet thick. There’s a main floor above ground, with bars on all the windows. The roof of the building is shaped like a ziggurat, although there is no real reason for its appearance except to look imposing. The first floor is the headquarters for the jailers and guards. There’s also a mess hall, a kitchen, a larder, and a chapel to The Seven. Small groups of prisoners are taken here daily to hear sermons, sing hymns, and pray for forgiveness.
The prison cells are located on two levels underground. There are 60 cells on each floor, each cell approximately eight feet by six feet. Each can reasonably hold three prisoners, but they often hold several more. The walls of the cells are constructed of large stone blocks sealed with hard mortar. Only with many months or even years of hard work, persistence, and some sort of hard scraping or digging tool might one of these blocks be loosened.
Prisoners are fed twice a day with meals slipped through the small slots at the bottom of the cell doors. Some popular menu items are gruel, boiled bone and offal, stale bread crusts, and fish-head soup. Meals are served with a small cup of cheap wine. Prisoners are kept hungry, and more than a few have died of starvation over the years.
Other ways to die inside the Tombs include death by disease, venomous vermin, food poisoning, and being murdered by one’s fellow cellmates. Prisoners kill each other over insults, vendettas, and grudges, food, even scraps of clothing—or sometimes for no real reason at all.
The Tombs are riddled with cunningly concealed tunnels. These passages range from cramped shafts leading nowhere to elaborate avenues enabling select prisoners to either escape, or keep in contact with similarly incarcerated allies. The Sea Lord’s Guard has done its best to brick up these routes, but many prisoners have heard of at least one such passage. Unfortunately, the destination of these tunnels varies a great deal. Some lead to the sewers or other locations in the city, while others end abruptly in a downward plummet, old stains signifying the fate of the would-be escapee. Perhaps the worst passages are those with no end that wind deeper and deeper into the earth. Only the most desperate would take these tunnels, for prisoners are quick to recount tales of those lost to the depths who vanished, perhaps with a stifled scream.
History
In a city founded by thieves and cutthroats, the question about what to do with the assorted scum that don’t abide by Freeport’s simple laws was an important one. While the city was a haven for men of ill repute, it wasn’t acceptable for people to simply do as they wanted, lest the whole place collapse into anarchy. To deal with undesirables and lawbreakers, Francisco had a compound constructed to lock away the folks who simply couldn’t function within the bounds of even Freeport’s loose codes of conduct.
In the centuries that followed, the Tombs have developed quite a nasty reputation. They have welcomed countless criminals, murderers, rapists, slavers, and a myriad of other repellent individuals, interring them to a wretched fate in a dripping cell. Those who wind up here are rarely seen or heard from again, as if swallowed up by the fetid darkness. Disease, starvation, the teeming rats, or even other prisoners can snuff out a life quickly enough, but there are also whispers of terrible things that stalk the alleys between cells in the dark of night, dragging their meals bodily through the slots in the door and leaving little more than a mess of bloody scraps and the echoes of frantic screams.
Comments