Fairfax carried the king through the western passage's darkness.
The passage was narrow. Four feet wide, seven feet tall, the dimensions that the palace's original architects had specified for the specific purpose that the passage served: the escape of a monarch whose palace had fallen and whose escape's concealment required the passage's dimensions to be the dimensions that construction within existing walls allowed. The passage ran through the palace's western wall's interior, the space between the wall's inner and outer surfaces, the space that the wall's four-foot thickness provided and that the architects had converted from structural mass into the corridor that the architects' paranoia about fallen palaces had demanded.
