GRIZELDA
By Margaret Taylor
Smashwords Edition
2009 Margaret Taylor
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Chapter 1
Grizelda shot up in bed the moment Elisabet started to shake her. She hadn’t been sleeping very deeply anyway, hadn’t managed to sleep deeply for days. She looked at the face of her friend, pale and seeming disembodied in the half-light, her expression telling everything. It’s happened, hasn’t it? she was about to say, but Elisabet beat her to the words.
“They’re at the door,” Elisabet said in a terrified whisper.
In a moment Grizelda was up and at the dormitory window. Rain trickled down the glass in rivulets, lit gold from the lone streetlamp below. If she stood on her tiptoes and turned her head in an awkward angle, she could just make out the street, where two men in dark greatcoats huddled by the lamp, trying to read a piece of paper. Gendarmes.
“I’ll get you some clothes for the weather.” Elisabet was flying, throwing open dresser drawers and ransacking their contents. “Here!” She threw a coat at Grizelda. Grizelda caught it awkwardly and resumed pulling on her dress and shoes. She was trying to do it standing up and was only getting herself into a tangle, but she couldn’t afford to sit down, she didn’t have time.
Time? She’d had bucketloads of time. Three days ago Meaven Godey the informer had found out her secret. What kind of an idiot stayed home after an incident like that?
The commotion was starting to wake up the other girls in the dormitory. They stirred and lifted their heads to see what was the matter.
“It’s the gendarmes,” Elisabet told them. “For Grizelda.”
Meanwhile Grizelda had managed to get her dress on straight. “Somebody go wake the mistress. I’ll get out the back way.”
With that she threw the coat around herself and made for the door.
“I’ll go with you,” Elisabet declared.
Together they hurried out of the dormitory, past the mistress’s bedroom, and down a darkened stairway. With luck they would be able to get down to the public part of the shop before the gendarmes got inside. After that it was only a short way through some back rooms to the alley.
“I’m so sorry, Liz,” Grizelda said as they stole down quietly in the dark.
“Don’t be.”
“I should have left when it happened. I’ve put you all in danger.”
Their whispered conversation was cut off abruptly. A glare of candlelight lanced upward through the balusters along with the sound of voices. They froze, listening.
“We take unfortunate girls off the streets and put them to good use. We’re all upstanding citizens of Corvain. I don’t know what you’re doing here.”
That was Miss Hesslehamer, the mistress, already awake and downstairs. Another voice, a male one, answered her. “We’ve got here a letter of cachet. You can’t stop us doing a search upstairs.”
Elisabet squeezed Grizelda’s hand. “Quick! Use your power and hide us!”
“Liz, you know I can’t when I’m under pressure–”
She lost her chance when Miss Hesslehamer and the two gendarmes came to the foot of the stairs and spotted the two of them. Miss Hesslehamer looked terrible, with her glasses askew and a wrap clumsily thrown over her nightdress. When she saw Grizelda standing there in her coat, for a moment it looked like she would speak. Instead she turned back to the gendarmes.
“What is it you’re going to search, sirs?” she said. It was clear in her voice she was frightened. It was the first time in her life Grizelda had ever heard Miss Hesslehamer frightened, and that scared her more than even the gendarmes did.
But the gendarmes pushed past her without speaking. Grizelda tried to bolt for it. She almost thought she was going to make it past them, but one of them snatched her by the collar.
“Not you, miss. You’ve got gray hair. You’re the one we’re here to search for.”
She tried to sneak in a bite, but the gendarme clouted her across the head and forced her to walk back upstairs and back into the dormitory. Elisabet followed them, wringing her hands, and Miss Hesslehamer bore the candle.
They made her stand in one corner where they could keep an eye on her. Like a nightmare, she could watch the whole scene play out but could do nothing about it. The girls were all sitting up in bed now, terrified but silent.
The taller one pointed at Grizelda. “Ma’am, where does that one keep her personal belongings?”
“What are you investigating her for? How do you know it was even her?”
“Under her bed, I’ll rate,” said the other, and he went to the nearest empty bed and tipped out the mattress. Elisabet’s bedding landed on the floor in a snarl. The gendarme pawed through it, not caring that his boots were treading street-grease on them.
“She’s under arrest for sorcery,” said the first to Miss Hesslehamer.
“I’m training these girls to be law-abiding citizens!”
The gendarme gave up his search and went for the other empty bed in the dormitory.
“No!” Grizelda ran forward to stop him, though Elisabet tried to hold her back. The gendarme knocked her down and heaved over the mattress.
A flurry of brightly-colored papers spilled out onto the floor.
Grizelda still lay dazed, half on her side on the floor, but when she saw these she knew she was in for it. She dropped her head.
“That’s enough!” cried Miss Hesslehamer. “I won’t have people treated this way in my own home!” There was a noise like Miss Hesslehamer struggling, then a thud as the light went out. Somebody screamed. Grizelda felt a sharp twist of her arm behind her back, then she was dragged to her feet and made to march out of the room.
Lonnes’s skyline was dominated by the massive constructions of the Auks. They had been birds. Great intelligent black birds from across the sea. They’d built their fortresses here and tried to rule Corvain and for two hundred years they’d nearly succeeded. Greater than man-sized, they must have been, for those high, broad doors were far too big for mere humans to pass in and out of. The smaller, human dwellings of Lonnes clustered together in their shadow. But the relics of the old Aukish domination were crumbling now, painted over with the slogans of the Republic. They were reduced to not much more than a charcoal-colored smudge, blurred by the rain and light of predawn.
Most of the streetlamps had long since gone out, but a few still made wavering pools of yellow here and there against the late November gray. The rain fell in a steady, insistent mist, hissing against the cobblestones and pouring off of roofs in sheets. Sogged liberty bows hung limply against citizens’ doors.
Grizelda screamed and struggled at first. She kicked them in the shins as much as she was able, and cursed them for wrongly arresting her and acting against the values of the Revolution. What was this government coming to anyway, when it dragged innocent citizens out of their homes in the middle of the night in the name of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity?
The gendarmes were not at all interested in her speeches, though, and they were too strong for her. One held her arms twisted tightly behind her back while the other clamped his arm over her face so that her screams wouldn’t wake any citizens. The fight was exhausting. By the time dawn had broken, she was so drained that she mutely allowed them to drag her through the streets, head bent. The rain ran down her head and soaked through her clothing, coat and all, so that it clung heavily to her body. She felt ashamed of herself, too. Not only had she sinned against the ideals of the Republic, but her stupid mistake had gotten all the shop tainted with guilt by association. What would happen to them now? She would face the Committee with dignity, though, and not look like a coward. Just after she had rested.
Oh, Corvain! she thought. The Revolution wasn’t supposed to be like this!
The timber of the rain’s hiss changed, deepening to a roar. The river Sarny was nearby. Grizelda looked up in fresh terror. There was a low, dark mass out where the land jutted into the river and the river took a sharp turn around it. Promontory. It had been a fort in the feudal days of the Auks and the sorcerers, but when the Republic took over, they had not abandoned it like the other buildings. They had converted it to a prison.
Grizelda’s steps faltered a little when she got to the bridge. Promontory was separated from the mainland by a moat and this bridge was the sole way in and out. It was a narrow arc of stone spanning the gap, without railings – part of the old fort’s defenses. The gendarme gave her a warning nudge in the back. She swallowed and walked forward. Early risers were just beginning to show on the streets now. Some of them stared at her as she passed but most of them hunched themselves against the wet and hurried on their way.
“Long live the Revolution!” somebody yelled. She looked around, but she couldn’t tell who it had been.
She made the perilous journey over the bridge, stumbling every few steps, then the gendarmes stopped to haggle with the gatekeeper at Promontory’s outer wall. One gendarme kept a firm grip on her while the other did the talking, until finally the gatekeeper opened up the door and let them into the courtyard.
There was a scattering of buildings inside looking sorry for themselves, separated from each other by swaths of sodden turf. But what dominated the view, even drawing her attention away from the firing range, was the bone clock. She had heard the stories about it, but she never thought she would be within the walls of Promontory to see it. They said it had been a sick joke of the Auks. The bone clock was a sort of sundial, with a gnomon of stone set at an angle in the middle of the courtyard. But the uprights, marking the twelve positions of the clock, were human femurs. Another reminder of who was predator and who was prey.
Grizelda wanted to retch, but she bit down on her lip, hard. Courage, Grizelda.
The gendarmes took her inside to be searched. Not by themselves, thank God. They led her to a small, brightly-lit room where they had a woman for these sorts of situations. Expressionless, she ordered Grizelda to take off her coat, her shoes, her dress and lay them on a bench. She was allowed to keep her undergarments on.
The woman picked up each garment and rubbed it, looking like she’d been asked to handle old seaweed.
“What’s this?” she said, holding up the sleeve of Grizelda’s dress.
There were spools running down the length of the sleeve in a line, attached by delicate leather thongs so they would wind freely when the thread was pulled. It had been Grizelda’s own idea to sew the spools on, so she could keep the thread handy in Miss Hesslehamer’s shop. She clenched her fists, wanting to snatch it back from her, but she did not.
“It’s just so I could have my thread,” she muttered.
“Hm.”
The woman removed a pair of scissors from the dress pocket and dropped them into an envelope. There was nothing else offending, so after she had patted Grizelda down, she was allowed to have her clothes back.
Grizelda pulled her dress back on, inwardly relieved. The woman hadn’t found her little packet of needles, in the inside pocket of the bodice. So she had something sharp on her. She had no idea what she might do with them, though.
“Write your name here.” The woman handed her the envelope, all folded up and sealed.
Grizelda took the pen. “Why?”
“To identify you. You can have this back when you’ve served your term.”
Not likely, Grizelda thought. It was only under exceptional circumstances that someone ever came out of Promontory alive. Somebody with connections, with a powerful or a rich family to buy them out of jail. Not like her. Still, she signed her name on the packet and handed it back over.
Somewhere in the Fish District, three rats were trotting down the pitch of a rooftop. It was midmorning by now, and the rain had still not let up. But it had softened to a steady patter, and out in the street the light would have been strong enough to read by. On the rooftop, shielded by heavy foliage, it was as good as night. Any rain that managed to filter through the tree’s leaves collected into heavy, fat raindrops that exploded on impact. The rats didn’t give the water a moment’s notice as they cleared the gutter and landed on the top of a wall. From the wall it was a quick scurry downward to the surface of the street.
They stood there a moment, sniffing the air. It was only an instant – they were just checking that the coast was clear. Then as if on a cue, they all three slipped into a storm drain one after the other.
One would have to be sharp-eyed indeed to have even seen the rats. But if anyone was watching, in that brief moment when they were exposed at street level, they might have sworn they’d seen somebody riding them.
Chapter 2
They took Grizelda to a dungeon. It had been a dungeon originally, anyway, in the days when Promontory was the Auks’ fort. After the Revolution some industrious defenders of the Republic had stripped the room out and sanitized it and called it an interrogation chamber. There were a table and two chairs provided for that purpose in the corner. It was really much too big for its new function; the room itself dwarfed the little set. The officer already seated in the far chair didn’t seem to mind.
He gave Grizelda an icy smile as she was thrust into her chair by the guards. “So.”
“What do you even want me here for?”
“You should know that better than most.”
A fresh pang of guilt. Betrayer of the Revolution. Idiot, for having let Meaven Godey see. No. She would not give this man in uniform the satisfaction.
“I’m not a sorceress! If that’s what they’ve been telling you…” She gestured angrily at the guards.
Another flash of that ironic smile, then he laid his hands together in a steeple, tapped his fingers. “Officially, you’re under arrest for counterrevolutionary activities,” he said. “But we have an abundance of evidence that you’re also a sorceress and therefore a royalist and complicit with the Auks.”
“I’ve never even seen an Auk in my life!”
That seemed to take him by surprise. “How old are you?”
“I’m fourteen!”
“They get younger every day,” muttered a guard.
“Oh, you’ve seen an Auk, then, you’re just too young to remember it,” said the officer. “You’re the first prisoner we’ve had who can’t remember the Revolution.”
“I’m not a sorceress,” Grizelda said.
“We have a denunciation on file, you know.”
Grizelda couldn’t help a little intake of breath, though she tried to suppress it. They know. No. She gripped the edges of her chair. Courage, Grizelda.
“When?” she said.
“Three days ago. Citizen Meaven Godey saw you practicing sorcery in the dressmaker’s shop when she went in to buy some thread, Friday past. She went right back out again and reported it to the police. So there’s no point in denying it any more. We have eyewitness testimony.”
The rim of her chair was metal – probably mass-produced in some goblin factory. It slipped under the sweat of her hands as she picked at it, running her hands forward and back. Why did she even bother? They were going to kill her whether she confessed or not. It was a pointless game, but they still weren’t going to get her to say she was a sorceress.
“I’m not a sorceress,” she repeated.
“They ate people, you know,” the officer said, changing tack. “The sorcerers helped them.”
“I never had anything to do with the Auks.”
“Who knows but you might have,” said the officer. “You’re a war orphan, aren’t you?”
How did they know that?
“We … think I am.”
“What do you mean, you think you are?”
“They said they found me during one of the riots,” Grizelda said, with difficulty. She didn’t want to talk about this, not to him. “The girls at the dressmaker’s. I was lost, crying for my mother…”
“Yes?”
“Nobody ever came to pick me up.” She picked at the chair.
“So for all we know your parents might have been sorcerers killed in the Revolution. You have the witch-mark.”
Grizelda put a hand to her head. Gray hair. It had gone gray long before she could remember it, and it was the reason she always went out with a headscarf bound tightly around her head. Physical abnormality was often the sign of sorcery, though God knew there had been plenty of beautiful sorcerers. When she wouldn’t tell the girls at the shop her name that day they’d picked her up, they had just called her Grizelda, which meant gray.
When the officer saw she was unable to reply, he went on. “Your denunciation went through the Committee of Public Safety, and they unanimously voted to bring you here. Your case will be decided in trial next Monday, which you need not attend. If you make a written confession it might go better for you, but otherwise the denunciation and that hair are enough to send you to the firing range. Will you confess?”
She balled her hands into fists. “I don’t believe you. I’m done for no matter what I say.”
“Fine!” He slapped the table and stood up. “Take her to a cell, and I’ll write a report of this.”
The guards came forward to take her away. Grizelda fought them for a little while, but finally she let them pick her up, by the crook of each arm. As they led her out of the room, the officer turned away and rubbed his face in frustration.
Ratriders hate the damp. They’re one of the fey peoples, made mostly of fire, so wet is hard on their systems. And after the wetness they had just endured on their latest raid, Geddy, Tunya, and Kricker were absolutely miserable.
Tunya and Kricker were taking it out on each other.
“You’re remembering it wrong!” Tunya insisted.
Kricker half-turned in the saddle, then thought better of it and decided to look where he was going instead. “No, you’re the one remembering it wrong.”
Tunya slouched. Her rat could sense that her energy was sapped and was taking full advantage of it. No matter how much she prodded it, it took its own sweet time, lumbering indolently along the bottom of the pipe. Three times she’d wrung herself out since she’d reached the safety of the sewer and she could still feel it. A clammy prickliness on her skin, cloying like bad perfume. Blech.
She threw up her hands. “You know what, never mind. This is stupid.”
“Fine.”
They continued their travel in silence for a little while. It didn’t last long. A few seconds later, Tunya couldn’t resist the temptation to sneak in one last jab.
“It was just a kitten, though.”
Kricker reacted as could be expected. “That cat was a monster! That cat was the cat from hell!”
Meanwhile, Geddy was riding ahead of them a few rat-lengths. Up till now, he’d suffered their argument in silence. Now he chimed in.
“Kricker, I was at the belling the cat incident, and that cat was no monster.”
“Hey, whose side are you on here?”
Geddy didn’t give that a reply. Instead he stopped his rat, pulling in on its reins. “I’ve had it with this. Let’s cut across.”
Tunya frowned. “I thought we weren’t doing that anymore.”
“There’s no rule against it.”
“There’s people in those tunnels. We could get seen!”
“I don’t care. I’m wet and I want to go home.”
Kricker reined in his rat, too. “Well, I’m going.” The two of them scurried down a side tunnel.
“You’re disagreeing with me on purpose!” said Tunya, chasing after them.
At first the gendarmes took Grizelda through a network of passages like intestines through the heart of the old fort. They were all too high, too broad, built for wings and talons, not human hands and feet. This part of the prison had not been retrofitted with modern electric lights from the goblins or even gas lights yet. Instead the gendarmes had brought along their own lamp, but it did not even begin to illuminate the cavernous high ceilings. The tunnels were drafty, they were damp, they were medieval. They were exactly what one would expect the inside of Promontory to look like.
But that wasn’t the reason Grizelda was shivering right now. She’d heard rumors about this place. Only rumors, of course, because those who actually saw the inside of Promontory rarely ever came out. Rumors that the defenders of the Republic, not content with the old Aukish design, had improved upon the prison. And added to it.
The gendarmes who had her did not seem to share in her terror. Calmly they pushed her around a sharp corner and down a long flight of stairs.
Grizelda gasped. A dizzying, empty space yawned below her. It was like a warehouse, or maybe more like a kennel. The room she had just entered was three stories high and as long as a street, her stairway a mere afterthought running down one wall. All down the walls on either side there were cells. Row upon row… the symmetry of it was like a cold slap after the twisting formlessness of the fort. Restless, shadowy shapes moved about inside, cringing away from the sudden lantern light.
It wasn’t fair. She knew she was an enemy of the people, it was her nature, but nobody should be shut away like this.
She tried to push herself against the wall for balance. But the gendarmes, with a quick push to her back, made her keep going. Down, down the endless flight of stairs, back and forth down the switchbacks for what seemed like an eternity. All the while Grizelda stole glances at the shadows in the cells. They were like ghosts, those shadows, not like people at all. Even though they hadn’t been executed yet they didn’t seem to have any life left.
After their long descent they finally arrived at the kennel’s floor. The gendarmes pushed Grizelda through a door at the bottom, and she stopped on the stairs, though it earned her a warning shove. She blinked, tried to clear her head. She was back at the top of the stairs again. Then she realized what had happened. There was another kennel just like the first one below them.
“How many of these are there?” She tried to turn, to look at least one of them in the face.
But the gendarmes shoved her forward without answering.
As she was hurried down the stairs, she became gradually aware that this second cell block was not quite identical to the first one. Apparently the humans had not completely succeeded in imposing symmetry on the insides of Promontory. Something about the room was slightly off-kilter, as if its corners did not quite make right angles. At random, walled-off places like scars interrupted the progression of the cells.
She was taken through no less than three cell blocks before the gendarmes called a halt. They stepped out onto the stone floor, their footsteps echoing loudly. This last block was only sparsely populated with shadows. Here and there a moving shape revealed itself, always on the lowermost row. So it hadn’t received its full complement of prisoners from the surface yet. She shuddered. The shadows made no sound – there was only a great subterranean silence.
One gendarme left Grizelda and fetched out a ring of keys to unlock a cell door. Grizelda had been numbed into a kind of a dream state by the surreal march, but at this she came to herself a little.
“Wait!” she cried. She didn’t even know what she was saying, but she felt the need to say something. “Stop! Wait!”
Something clicked deep inside the lock. The gendarme slid the door open.
“I don’t want to-” She twisted around, trying to talk to the gendarme who held her. If only she could look him in the face. He responded by pulling her arms behind her tighter. She pulled back, and managing to get a hand free, scrabbled at him blindly. She was aiming for the eyes but only managed to get a handful of sleeve.
The gendarme didn’t let himself make the same mistake twice. He pinned her under his arm and hauled her towards the cell, her feet scraping against the stone. The other gendarme stood back to let him pass.
“I can’t do this! I can’t go in there!”
But a moment later she found herself inside, sprawled on the floor. Before she had time to pull herself up, the door was shut. Something within the lock clicked again. She ran up to the door, pressed her face against it.
“Stop! Stop!”
They took no more notice of her pleas than if they had been automatons. They started walking slowly away. Worse, they were taking the lantern with them. With every step they took, the angles of the shadows lengthened, a smothering blackness creeping out of the dark corners of the room.
“Stop!”
She did not stop yelling at them the whole time they were climbing the stairs. The lantern was just a point of light now, taking a zig-zagging path up the wall. Then the gendarmes went through the door to the next level and were gone.
The darkness seemed to run down Grizelda’s throat so she couldn’t breathe. She was alone in a void, and for a moment she was afraid that maybe she was dead. In a panic, she flailed out, desperate to touch something solid. Her arm struck the bar of her cell.
She screamed, with all her fury and fear and powerlessness. Her scream slowly died off, and she sank to the ground.
Chapter 3
“You want permission to use torture?”
Mr. Mant sat back at his desk. The young lieutenant stood across from him, waiting for a reply. He’s actually standing at attention, Mant thought, smiling inwardly.
But he couldn’t remain amused for long. He was, well, slightly disturbed. The case was a young woman, not much more than a child, really, working in a sweatshop in one of the seedier neighborhoods in the city. She’d been denounced as a sorceress. Some kid in a factory would usually pass below the prison’s notice, but this was not the first time Lieutenant Calding had requested torture for a low-level case.
“Yes, sir,” said Calding. “Not that I think the Committee will grant it. They never grant the permission in the low-profile cases.”
Calding had been here for a short enough time that he still had a youthful enthusiasm for the work. Maybe a little too enthusiastic. For a moment Mant considered sending Mr. Bavar, his secretary, away. But the little man seemed uninterested in the actual conversation, never once looking up from his pen as he took dictation.
Mant rested his hands on his desk, did his best to appear bored. “Mr. Calding, I appreciate your enthusiasm, but let this one go. For all we know the girl’s innocent.”
“But sir…” The man was digging his nails into his palms. “With all due respect, sir, torture’s the most efficient way. We could have the confession out of her and shoot her and that would be that.”
Mr. Bavar stopped scribbling with a little yelp. Mant looked at the lieutenant, alarmed. He was obviously angry, and the way he was speaking to a superior ought normally to be punished. But for a moment Mant thought he saw a flash of something else. It was not anger, it was something … alien.
“I…” He shook himself, tried to push the idea out of his mind as nonsense. “It’s not my decision to make. You’ve submitted your report to the Committee, and you can – if you wish – hope they grant permission to apply the question. But I personally recommend against it in this case. She’s insignificant.”
The look flashed across Calding’s face again, though fainter. “Yes, sir.”
All of a sudden Mant wanted nothing more than to not be in the same room as the lieutenant. He dismissed Calding right away, trying not to show his disquiet.
Grizelda never thought she would fall asleep here. She supposed that she had, though, because she found herself lying on the cell floor, all curled up. Something had woken her, but she didn’t know what it was.
When she tried to get up, she discovered she was dreadfully stiff. The cold that had seeped into her joints made her feel like one of those old weatherbeaten statues of the Auk-kings and their sorcerer servants in the square. She had to take the process of getting to her feet by stages, while all the memories of the last night came flooding back to her. The gendarmes breaking into her home, the denunciation of sorcery. How could she have put the girls into so much danger? All because of her own carelessness.
Still, something was nagging at the back of her mind despite the guilt, fighting for her attention. Something that had woken her up. Then all at once it came to her. She could see. Not very well, no, but the spaces between the bars were a slightly lighter shade of black than the bars themselves, and there was a faint splash of light across the floor. Green light.
Cautiously, she pressed her face against the bars to see out. Then she reeled back in terror. Her breath caught in her chest and she was unable to look away, to scream, or to do anything save clutch the cell door and watch.
A thing was coming towards her. A furry, dark, shapeless thing undulating softly down the cellblock floor. It bunched and heaved as it came toward her. Three green lights bobbed above it like eyes.
Not thing, but things. Three furry shapes resolved from the one mass, and when they got a bit closer, she could tell that they were rats. Monstrous big rats, with slick fangs and fur that gleamed darkly in the witch-light. But the people! Yes, there was a tiny person riding the back of each rat, about six inches high. They carried green lanterns at the end of poles.
The first one looked like an ordinary man, though in miniature. Well, not quite ordinary; there were bits of newspaper sewn to his clothing in random patches here and there. The other two, though … they had an aura of otherness about them.
One was a homely woman with a haughty face and an unbrushed mass for hair that radiated from her head like a dandelion. The other was a man, tall and slim. His clothes looked like they had been taken from the uniform of a toy soldier. He’d embellished the jacket with the bones of some small animal. They seemed to be giving off light– No, that wasn’t exactly it, but there was something inhuman about those faces, as if they were not actually flesh but holes, through which she could get a glimpse of some other world where … where … colors burned brighter, was the best she could make of it. She saw it most especially in the woman, but it was there in all three of them.
In the end it was the slim man who saw her. He turned his head in her direction, did a double take, and pulled his rat up short.
“Hey, guys, look at this!” He halooed and waved them over.
The other two pulled their rats around and rode back. No sooner had the woman taken a look at her than she turned angrily on the newspaper man.
“I told you! I told you we weren’t supposed to go this way anymore!”
The newspaper man looked chagrined. “They’re not supposed to put people down this far. It’s been safe, all these years…”
“Well, now you’ve really done it, Geddy! She’s seen us! What are we supposed to do now?”
While the newspaper man beat a hasty retreat under the woman’s attacks, the slim man had been stealthily creeping up to the bars of the cell. Grizelda was too caught up in the argument to be aware of him until she felt a light tap on her knee. She turned around just in time to see the little man dancing out of her reach.
“Hey!”
The other two cut off their argument and turned to look at her. She suspected they’d quite forgotten she was there.
“Ah,” said the newspaper man, or Geddy, if that was his name.
There was an awkward silence.
“See, this wasn’t supposed to happen,” he said. After a moment’s hesitation, he gave his hat a quick tip. “You’d probably best just forget this happened and we’ll be on our way.”
“Too right it wasn’t,” said the woman, and she and Geddy started stepping leerily back toward their rats. The woman kept looking back at her, like she was afraid Grizelda was going to hurt them. In her condition, shut up in a prison cell!
That thought brought her back to her senses. Here were these inexplicable people, who had showed up at her door as sudden as a whirlwind, and now, just as suddenly, they were going to leave again.
“Wait! What are you?” she cried, desperately.
“Cool, it talks!” said the slim man.
Grizelda saw Geddy hesitate, torn between fear and something else that made him want to stay. She only hoped it was concern.
“Let’s just get out of here…” the woman said.
“But the poor thing’s all locked up…”
“Well, they’re all locked up, aren’t they?” She set her arms akimbo. “Kricker, don’t touch it, it’s filthy. Let’s go.”
The one called Kricker, who had been trying to have another go at her knee, started back, looking offended. But Geddy made no move to leave. The woman rubbed her head.
“Look, Geddy, we’re in deep. I’m not going to indulge one of your stupid hobbies while all the while we’re in the middle of ogre territory and we could get caught any minute!”
Grizelda pressed herself against the bars. “Is there anything you can do to help me? I’ll– I’ll pay you, or something. Anything you might be able to do.”
The woman, who had been walking back to her rat, stopped and turned around. “You wouldn’t be able to pay us.”
“I’m a seamstress,” Grizelda said earnestly. “Maybe I could– I could sew something for you, or mend.” She noticed for the first time, after her initial shock had worn off, that all three of the little people were in tatters. Their clothes looked like they might once have been fine, but through long abuse and neglect, they looked awful. Maybe she would have luck. “My name’s Grizelda. I work for Miss Hesslehamer’s dressmaker’s, and I didn’t do what I’m in here for.”
“Eh, what good’s sewing?” But the woman seemed unconvinced.
A little hesitantly, Geddy said, “I’m Geddy. These are Tunya and Kricker. We’re ratriders.”
“Ratriders?”
“Us. Blokes that ride around on rats. Sewer pixies,” the one called Kricker said.
Geddy cocked his head upwards. “Kricker, can you get up and have a look at that lock?”
Kricker reluctantly approached the bars of her cell. He didn’t seem all too eager to climb up high.
“No!” cried Tunya. “Kricker, get down from there!”
Kricker, who hadn’t gotten much further than his own height up one of the bars, slid back down with alacrity.
They seemed at an impasse. The ratriders stared at Grizelda. Grizelda stared back at them. If something didn’t happen soon, Grizelda knew, they were going to lose their interest and leave.
“Wait a minute,” Kricker said, as something occurred to him. “My jacket, the sleeve’s sort of coming off. Can you fix that?”
He pulled it off and handed it through the bars to her. Grizelda carefully lifted it up with her finger and looked at it. The sleeve was indeed badly torn, and showed evidence that somebody had once tried to mend it. Whoever it was had been no tailor. The stitches were drunken and lopsided and meandered everywhere over the fabric except where they were supposed to be.
“Who did this?” she asked.
Geddy pointed to Kricker behind his back.
“Huh. Don’t suppose you’d do any better.” Tunya crossed her arms. “Your fingers are too big.”
“Well, it’s only split along a seam, so it shouldn’t be that hard…”
As Grizelda started focusing on the practicalities of the task in front of her, her mind wandered far, far from the prison she found herself in. She was back in the dressmaker’s, faced with a particularly challenging piece. Needles – she still had those. She pulled the book out from her secret pocket and selected the best needle for the task, the smallest, finest one she had. And she still had the thread on her sleeve. It was hard to decide which color would match in this strange green light, but she made her best guess and bit a length off with her teeth. She would have to make do without scissors. Squinting, she tried to thread the needle.
“I can’t see,” she said.
“Here!” Tunya threw her lantern-stick at the cell door. Grizelda was just able to get the top part of her hand between the bars and flick the lantern inside.
She took it up and held it in her hand. It was silver, and engraved with a swirled design almost too small to see. Something behind those tiny panes of glass produced a steady, almost unnaturally bright green light, but she couldn’t tell what it was. Something of the ratriders’ own kind of sorcery?
It took her several tries to figure out a way to hold the lantern so that she could have both her hands free for the jacket and the thread. Eventually she ended up clenching it between her teeth. Now to business. First, she picked out all the old, crooked stitching. Then holding the thing close to her face, she made tiny, straight stitches to bring the two edges of the seam together and pulled it tight. Not to be outdone, she went on to sew the little bones on more firmly. It was clear that Kricker had been the one to attach them in the first place, and many of them were getting dangerously wobbly.
“Done.” She held the jacket out on the tip of her finger.
“Wow, thanks.” Kricker took the jacket and admired it almost reverently. He examined the stitching on the sleeve and tugged on the bones. Then he put it on and smoothed it down self-consciously.
“Are you quite done admiring yourself?” said Tunya.
Kricker glared at her.
“Can we let her out now?” Geddy said. “I think the poor girl’s paid us plenty.”
Tunya threw up her hands. “Oh, whatever.”
This time, Kricker did not give the ground a backward glance when he scurried up the bar of her cell door. He reached his hand up inside the lock. After a moment’s fumbling around, he smiled.
“Oh, this is an easy one.” A few seconds later, there was a click.
Grizelda gave Kricker time to climb back down and back away, then she pulled back the cell door and stepped outside. That was it. She’d gotten out so fast it was almost silly.
Yes, but what are you going to do now? she thought. Walk straight out of Promontory? Even if she got out of the fort, which was crawling with gendarmes, she still had a 20-foot high wall to cross and the river Sarny. It was impossible. It was stupid. She’d gotten out of her cell, but she hadn’t a single clue where she would go next.
The ratriders seemed to have come to the same conclusion.
“What do we do with her?” Geddy said.
“You know what? I give up.” Tunya threw up her hands. “You got us into this mess, you figure out what to do with her. Do you even realize how much trouble we’re in?”
“What about the drainage channel?” said Kricker.
“Okay, right,” said Geddy. “There is this- this kind of secret exit from the city, it’s not guarded by any of the checkpoints. It’s attached to the catacombs. We could guide you to it, and you could get out of the city.”
Out of the city… The thought boggled her. She’d never been outside Lonnes before. “But how am I going to get to it?”
“There are holes in the bottom of Promontory,” the ratrider said. “Sometimes we use them as a shortcut.”
Grizelda knew the longer she stood out in the hall, the greater her danger was. She had to leave, and soon. But before she went anywhere, there was something she had to do.
She knelt on the stone flags so that her face was more on a level with the little people.
“Ratriders. Or whatever you are. Thank you. I owe you so much.”
The ratriders shifted and looked a little sheepish, but soon Kricker broke the silence by running off and leaping onto his rat.
“Come this way!”
The other two presently mounted their own rats and followed him, and Grizelda walked along behind on foot. They went to the stairway and started going down. Grizelda felt uncomfortable leaving the other prisoners behind, but it didn’t seem there was anything she could do. They were strange people, these ratriders, who would save a life for the sake of a mended jacket. She wasn’t sure that they would do it again.
Down and down they went. The darkness enclosed them, pressing in on their little bubble of green light like a tangible thing. These cells were vacant, cold and silent. It was like walking into a tomb. The further down they went, the stranger their geometry got. Weird bends in the floor plans, slanting walls, cell blocks so short she felt she could reach out and touch the other side. Finally Geddy called a halt.
They moved out from the stairway until they got to one of those walled-off places that interrupted the sequence of cells. It was like a blot of nailed-up boards, not put up with any symmetry, or put up any time in the recent past, either. Time and moisture had rotted the boards entirely through. It didn’t make any sense.
“But why are there holes?” She felt she had to whisper, in this eerie place. “Why are there holes in Promontory?”
“This wasn’t part of the old fort,” Geddy said. “This rock used to belong to the goblins, and a lot of the old tunnels still go through the area.”
Goblins? Just the word gave her chills. She had always known, in the abstract, that there were goblins living under the city of Lonnes. They did a lot of the people’s industrial work for them. But the thought of actually meeting one of those slimy, twisted…
Tunya’s smile was ironic, but not entirely unkind. “Where did you think you got those pretty shoe buckles from, girl?”
“That’s why you have to be absolutely silent,” Geddy said. “We have to go through their land to get to the exit.”
Grizelda nodded, not sure that she could trust herself to speak.
Lieutenant Calding left the warden’s office highly displeased. He took his anger out in speed, walking down the hall at a pace that was more like a jog, thinking furiously. A subordinate brushed past him going the other way, and in his distracted state, he almost let him pass. Then he thought better of it and caught him by the shoulder.
“Go fetch the prisoner in 403.”
Caught by surprise, the man inarticulately pointed the way he had been going. Probably meaning that he was on some errand.
“Whatever you were doing, I’ll take care of it. Go fetch the prisoner. I want to talk to her some more.”
The man nodded, and Calding released him to scurry off and do as he was bid. Then he sank back into thought and walked on.
In an old storeroom deep in the goblin city, Mechanic Lenk was working. Not the work that kept him dashing all over the city from morning till night trying to keep the Union’s ailing machines in something resembling repair. This was his own work.
He shut the door of the storeroom behind him, thankful finally to have two minutes of spare time to rub together. He’d converted the room specifically to be his workshop. He’d put the acid up in pans and jars, anything he could find, really, and set each carefully labeled mixture on the shelf. The zinc and the copper were stored against the wall. There were a couple of half-made batteries in the back as well as a finished one that worked tolerably well, his power supply.
He brushed a tangle of bits and coils of wire on his work table aside and set to puttering on his experiment. The table was a mess, and it had its share of scorch marks, but at either end there was order. Inside a metal frame bolted to the wood there were wires coiled around cylinders and a pedal that went up and down. The Mechanic moved around the table, humming to himself, and occasionally winding a wire around its lead.
When all was arranged to his satisfaction, he thought he’d try hooking it up to the power supply. The effect was immediate. The experiment made a loud cracking noise and threw off a shower of incandescent sparks across the room. Lenk rushed to shut it off, covering his face with the webs of his hand.
Slowly the sparking subsided. When the table was cool enough again to approach, Lenk surveyed the damage. He found he had another scorch mark to add to the collection, and some of his wires had gotten so hot they’d fused together. A little further searching brought him to the source of the problem. The leads on the receiver had lost all their insulation. Or rather been stripped of it. With tools.
Wearily Lenk sat back in a chair he had stashed in a corner for just such occasions. He should have known it. Ratriders again.
Chapter 4
Geddy slipped through a triangular gap in the place where the boards met the floor and beckoned Grizelda to follow. She knelt and, experimentally tugging on a board, found that it was rotten enough to come away easily. With only a little effort, she cleared a space big enough to get through.
She was immediately aware of a change in the air once she got to the other side. The air in the cellblocks was cold, but this air was ancient. It smelled of dust and disuse. Now that there were living creatures in the chamber, the air moved sluggishly, as if out of practice. And speaking of dust– To steady herself as she was crawling through the hole in the boards, Grizelda had put her hand down on the floor. She discovered that there was a layer of gooey black tar over everything, a quarter of an inch thick.
She scrambled to her feet as quickly as possible, but she couldn’t help getting it onto her clothes a little, and the gunk on her hand didn’t wipe off easily. If the tunnels of Promontory had been too high to have been built by human hands, these ones were too low. When she stood, the ceiling just scraped her head. She could imagine the sort of crooked beings that must have scurried back and forth in this tunnel back when it was used.
They walked on down the passage, and as they went, she passed her hand over strange carvings cut into the wall. There were ceiling-high frescoes that told the story of the goblins in their glory days: teams of goblins hewing out the tunnels, holding feasts in their vast underground chambers, trading gemstones with tall, spindly figures that must have been humans. The pictures were accompanied by blocks of goblinish script that she couldn’t understand.
These tunnels must have once been part of a manufacturing plant. They passed great lifeless rooms that in their day were busy with heat and noise, now silent. Great corpses of machines stood open, uncovered, like they had been abandoned in a hurry. In some rooms they’d been dashed to their sides by some powerful torrent. And everywhere there was that thin layer of grime on the floor. What had happened here?
At length Geddy broke the silence. “I wondered if I might… See, I’ve never had the chance to talk to an ogre face-to-face before…”
Kricker and Tunya exchanged knowing glances.
Ogre. This wasn’t the first time she’d heard a ratrider use that word, and she couldn’t understand why. “What do you mean, ogre?”
“You. Topside people. The Auk slaves.”
“I’m not an–” Grizelda began, then thought better of it. “What do you want to ask?”
He looked very serious. “Could you explain to me the concept of the birthday party?”
The ridiculousness of the question almost made her laugh, even in this cheerless place. She suppressed it out of concern for the poor fellow’s feelings. “What?”
“Birthday parties. Why do you have birthday parties?” he pressed with a sort of scientific earnestness.
“But why do you want to know about birthday parties?”
“I’m-” He looked down. “I’m writing this book. About the ogre habits and customs.” He got over his embarrassment and warmed up to the topic. “I spend almost every night in your library. I kind of– knock the books out of the shelves, though I can’t really put them back again. I like your histories the best, like Romeo and Juliet.”
“Wait, wait.” Grizelda’s head was spinning. “Romeo and Juliet’s not a history. It’s made up.”
“Who the heck put something made up in the library?”
“Geddy, there’s parts of a library that have histories and science and things, and there’s other parts that have made up stories.”
“That would explain an awful lot,” he said, crestfallen.
“Look, I’m sorry, I hope I didn’t...”
“No, I’m learning so much.” He tried to put on a cheerier countenance. “Birthday parties, though, did I get that part right? I read that you people don’t like knowing that you’re getting older...”
Now that he brought it up, the whole birthday party thing did strike her as odd. “I … don’t really know why we have birthday parties. Just another excuse to have a party, I guess…”
While they were talking, Kricker had left the group and rode on ahead. But at this juncture he came riding back. “We can’t go this way. It’s flooded.”
That caused them a great deal of inconvenience, as they had to double back and find some other way. Every way they turned, they seemed to be blocked by a flooded tunnel or a cave-in. Several times, there were spaces the ratriders could have gone through, but were too small for her. They had had to turn away and try somewhere else. And as they wandered, they drifted farther and farther from their path.
Grizelda began to grow alarmed when she realized that their route was starting to tend downward. That couldn’t be right, could it? They should be going upwards if they were going to be coming out at the surface. The air was growing warmer and thicker, and the very character of the tunnels started to change. These tunnels were newer, smoother cut, and they did not have carving on the walls.
Then it hit her that these tunnels weren’t abandoned. Goblins actually lived here. Lord, what if they actually ran into one of the twisted creatures? She’d heard horror stories about them, about how they were sun-shunning, human-hating. She did her best to hide her fear from the ratriders, though, and let them guide her on.
When they started to hear a faint clanging in the distance, nobody could deny that something was wrong.
“There’s a live manufacturing floor down there,” Geddy said.
They stopped, at an impasse. The heat here was perceptible. Hot, dry air flowed into their faces from somewhere up ahead.
Tunya had been following the others along morosely, but now that they were stuck, she spoke. “We have to go back and find some other way. Geddy, I told you we shouldn’t have done this.”
“There isn’t some other way!” said Kricker. “They’re all either flooded or caved in. Why do you think we’ve been wandering all over the place?”
“All right.” Geddy looked like he was coming to a decision. “Kricker, go ahead and see what it looks like.”
Kricker rode out, and came back in a few minutes. “We’re in luck. There’s sort of this walk running along the top of the wall.”
So they went forward again, but now they stopped and waited at every corner, watching for goblins. Goblins! Grizelda was getting a sick feeling to her stomach at the thought of them. She swallowed, refusing to let these ratriders who were her guides see she was afraid.
When they passed the final turn and came upon the work floor, a blast of heat hit Grizelda with enough force to make her reel. There was the walkway Kricker had promised up ahead, a frail-looking thing winding along the cave wall, lit an infernal red from below. From this distance she could sense rather than see the great chasm that opened up beneath it, full of lumbering manufacturing machines and blast furnaces being run by slimy… She put the thought out of her mind. If they hurried, and the goblins didn’t look up, they wouldn’t notice one small figure and three tiny ones passing over their heads.
The other side looked desperately far away.
One by one, the ratriders scurried across the walkway. Each time, Grizelda held her breath, but each time, they made it. Nothing bad happened.
Pretty soon Grizelda was the only one left. The ratriders waved for her to come across, but at the last moment her feet seemed to have turned into lead. A crazy thought came into her mind then. She could go back the way they’d come. The web of tunnels was complex; surely there was some way out that the ratriders had missed. Just turn and run away.
But that was crazy.
She steeled herself and stepped out onto the walkway. Okay. She tried another step, and found she could do it. In that way, though it was achingly slow, she started to make progress across the cavern.
Then, about halfway across, she looked down.
The goblins swarmed about the manufacturing floor like ants. They poured molten iron and hauled huge sheets of metal, their crooked spindly limbs straining. They were twisted, with unnaturally tiny bodies and huge feet and limbs that didn’t bend in quite the right ways. The light of the many fires shone off their skin with a liquid sheen. Grizelda couldn’t move. Her breath started coming ragged, uncontrollable. Goblins. So many goblins.
Geddy’s voice broke in on her with an urgent hiss. “They’re going to see you!”
Grizelda shook her head slowly, transfixed. It was like a dream, the way she was vividly aware of every detail but totally unable to act. She only watched as a goblin pointed up at her, stumbled back a few steps and punched a red plate in the wall.
“Too late!” Kricker yelled.
The alarm seared through the air like a hot poker, tearing Grizelda out of her spell. She had to move, now. The work floor was all in a tumult, the goblins pointing and crawling all over themselves to get a better look. Some of them were streaming up a couple of staircases in the back of the room, and she had no doubt but that they knew some way to get from there to where she was.
She looked both ways, trying to decide whether to go back the way they’d come or go forward. Then she did a double take. The ratriders had vanished! What– But she had no time to worry about them now. With the alarm blaring in her ears and running out of time, she chose to run forward.
Either she made the wrong choice or the goblins had her surrounded, because she didn’t get far before she heard their footsteps coming up the hall in front of her. They would be on her in not very long. Turning back would just take her back to the work floor.
She threw herself against the wall and closed her eyes, tried to control her gasping. There were plenty of shadows here. More than enough. She tried to concentrate on them, but every time she felt on the brink of success, an image of slimy webbed hands filled her head. She couldn’t do it. She could never do it when she was under pressure.
Something tugged at the hem of her skirt and her eyes snapped open.
Goblins. They were ringed in a semicircle around her. Their bony bodies writhed as they fought each other to touch her with their webbed hands, screaming gibberish in some goblinish tongue. She screamed and threw her arms up over her head.
No, not gibberish. Slowly it dawned on her, hunched over on the floor, that the goblins were speaking perfectly normal Corvanian.
“What do you think you’re doing here? This is goblin territory!”
“Yeah! There are laws about this!”
“Go back where you came from, Ogreling!”
“Wait!” A voice with an air of command cut across the rest. The hubbub died down. Grizelda, however, was not keen on getting up and seeing this goblin, so she stayed hunched where she was. She listened as deliberate, squashy footsteps advanced towards her.
“No, let’s not send her home. I have a better idea.”
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