Five minutes, or perhaps more—in the dark, I could not read the little clock I wore as a locket—passed, and I heard the rumble of the mechanical wheels pulling the curtain ropes. I’d best go now.
After a nervous moment in which I struggled to pry the panel open, the door creaked and swung away from the wall. I hurried into the passage, careful not to bang the door as I closed it behind me. The first corridor stretched, constricted and straight. I took it, and when I came to the first juncture, I remembered following Liut and Finnarún as they laughed softly, turning left. Soon came the twisting narrow staircase I had to descend, and finding it confirmed I’d remembered correctly. Now, at a brisk jog on through to the street, I would arrive at the alley to meet Alflétta in a matter of minutes.
When I came to the side street I did not see Alflétta at first. Then my eyes caught a shadow that moved from a dark recess. The older man appeared in the weak light cast by the moon, his face ashen in its pale illumination. He thrust the leather bag at me.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
“You understood my terms?” he whispered back.
“Indeed I did. I shall endeavor to find news of your friend.”
“Very well,” he said, and I watched his back as he disappeared out of the alley. I hoped none had seen him, both for myself and for his safety.
Rushing, I donned the costume, the mask, and the boots, stuffing my flimsy dress into the bag with the tools I’d packed. Ready at last, I prowled to the edge of the alleyway and spent a good minute searching the night with my eyes and ears. Counting in my mind to a hundred, I heard nothing, saw nothing out of the ordinary. If someone was there, I could not spot them, and I could not spend the few hours I had worrying about it. I had two tasks to do, and little time to do them.
First, to Grumflein.
~~~
Standing at the base of the prison, I saw the age of the stone wall as I never had from a distance. Grumflein Prison rose in a strange cylinder with a curve on one side that narrowed the building as it stretched higher, until it reached a platform that suddenly widened the structure, so that at a distance, it looked like a pole weapon. Grumflein predated every building in Helésey, as far as I knew. The palace as it stood now was probably one of the newest structures in the capital, built by Eiflar’s father in the modern design that drew inspiration from the ancients of many cultures. The Temple was even newer. Some of the buildings, especially in the Lavsektor and near the spokes of the Torc, were far older, but none were as timeworn as Grumflein.
I touched the stones in the wall. They felt damp and cold even through my hardy leather gloves. Here and there bright spotlights shown, some always moving, but I had found a pocket of shadow to crouch in as I studied the wall. Damp, yes, but the mortar between the stones was rotting away, which created foot and handholds. Nothing I’d like to climb without a rope to rely on as a standby, but no more challenging than mounting the ladder to the granary in Söllund.
Touching the nub of embroidery by my right eye, I peered into the wall. After a moment, the stones faded, and I could see beyond. Four men sat round a table, two playing henefatafel with the other two as their audience. Releasing the nub, I searched the curving wall above and spotted the lit windows first. They were small—no more than a foot and a half in height and width, and twisting iron bars bent out from the wall above them, running vertically down to implant themselves in the wall beneath them. Cement anchored the bars in place. I counted four iron bars on the first window, four on the second, four on the third. They were standardized, then, each probably the same dimensions, each with the same four iron bars. Peering into the dark areas of the wall, I made out unlit windows as well. I couldn’t really see the bars; the windows just made pockets of blackness in the wall.
Having already scouted all around Grumflein, I knew that two guards stood outside the only doors at the base of the prison. I was well on the other side from them. I supposed I should consider it luck that the doors stood on the straight side of the building’s wall, while I considered the best way to climb the curving wall on my side. How often did the prison guards patrol the street surrounding Grumflein? If I waited, I might find out, but I had other things to do. Better to risk the ascent without a rope—after all, the curve would mean I wouldn’t be making a purely vertical climb, and I only needed to reach the first dark window, for I reasoned that the corridors and offices of the administrators of Grumflein would be lit like the room I had observed through the wall, while the prison cells would not. Tonight would not see any attempt on my part at freeing the prisoners. Tonight was just for intelligence gathering.
I cast about for something, anything, that might aid me in my climb. I would have to speak with Spraki about the problem eventually, but the delay was more than I had patience for now. At last I found a long chip of hard rock. With a deep breath I shoved it into the mortar between the stones above my head. They had been cut into bricks, and some had decorative carvings on them, I noticed as my masked face pressed up against them. I slotted my toe between stones lower down, and released my first hold to throw my arm above me. The shard plunged into the mortar without difficulty; it was crumbling and rotten with age. Fingers grasping, I repeated the upward swing with the other arm, and then followed up with each foot. As I secured my feet, I reached above me again. Over and over I repeated the pattern, mind locked on the task, eyes never looking down.
As I gained altitude, the air grew colder. The wind picked up. The stones, damp below, became colder, and frost touched their edges. My toes stable, I reached higher, slamming the shard into the mortar again and again. Pulling myself up, I pressed a silk-covered cheekbone to frigid stone. The frost was spreading. I risked leaning my head back to make out the window above. I still had far to go.
Spotlights whirled and sometimes a flash would hit my arm or leg, but no alarms began to sound. No one had escaped from Grumflein in over a hundred years, that I knew of. It occurred to me, with a kind of hope, that if prisoners had escaped from Grumflein, the konunger in power at the time would have demanded the incident hidden from common knowledge. What good was the threat of a prison that people could escape from? But it did seem that the administrators of Grumflein Prison had become complacent. Two guards at the door, four in the room on the ground floor, perhaps the occasional patrol, and some spotlights that no one paid any attention to, otherwise they would have noticed Raud Gríma crawling up their wall by now.
The fingers of my left hand slipped and I grunted as my body hit the wall with a thud. The air in my chest puffed out of my mouth and I clutched the rock chip I held with my other hand, my toes curling in my boots.
Ice. It covered the stones here.
For a moment I stayed still as a statue, panting against the wall, trying not to panic. Then I forced my breathing to return to a steady, normal rhythm as I dug the fingers of my left hand into the decaying mortar between two stones above me. The edge of the lower stone felt slick. With a deep breath I put my weight on the hand and moved up the other one. I shoved the rock shard between stones on that side and gritted my teeth. I had no trouble with my feet—they hadn’t reached the ice yet—and I paused before trying to raise my left hand again.
Should I go back down? Was it folly to climb an ice-covered wall in the hopes that I would speak to some convict through a window and they would even know Lini Madr? Against my resolutions I let my eyes peer down towards the ground. Between the dark and the beams of spotlights that contrasted with the shadows to make them deeper, I saw nothing but a void. My head swam. I squeezed shut my eyes and pressed my forehead against the stone, cold seeping through my mask letting my mind wander from this place and time.
How very nice a seat in an opera box sounded at that moment. How sweet to sip a glass of brandy—pear brandy would be perfect—as I watched talented singers wail out the story of the Lukasenna—a retelling, of course, in which Tyr alone condemned Luka for his outrageous behavior at Alfódr’s table and Tyr, and not Alfódr, drove L
uka from the hall of Aegir. I had heard much of this opera. The author kept many verses from the original epic in which Luka criticized the Gods, but not the one where he taunted Tyr as a cuckold; in doing so the writer pleased Galmr and the royal couple by mocking the Gods and raising up Tyr as the only one among them that Luka could not touch. How nice it would be to have this author’s profession, and for no one to ask anything other than that you please the crowds with stories. I wondered whether they let the writer keep his children close to him, or if he was required to let some blackguards tear his children from his arms, as they had torn Bersi from mine. Damn them all. I would not give up now. I would bring down this city, and no icy wall was going to stop me.
I opened my eyes. Above me, I could now see the lower bend in the four bars of the window driven into the wall, heavily covered in cement at their base. I only had a little over two more feet to go. With a shuddering breath I pulled the shard from its slot between stones and reached, stabbing the mortar above. I wrenched my left hand free—my fingers did not want to cooperate—and stretched my arm, slapping the wall with my palm, running it over the stone, burrowing fingers into the mortar above the brick. Then my feet, the toes skidding over the icy stone edges. My teeth ground together. I hardly dared pause in my efforts, but speed would be no ally either, for all that was necessary for my whole body to slip was for one ill-placed hand or foot to come away too fast. With each reach of my arm above me, I hoped to touch the end of the iron bars, and somehow, over and over, I did not. Turning my face up with great care, I saw that the bars lay one more full pattern of new holds away. Clenching my jaw, I raised the shard and plunged it into disintegrating mortar, but as I shifted my weight to it, the rock slid. My other hand tensed so much it hurt as I pulled my weight back to it. Allowing myself a pause of only two deep breaths, I tried to bury the chip deeper with another hard thrust.
It held. I moved the other hand, pausing before trying my feet, testing my hold. Good enough. I pulled a toe free, bent my knee, and ran the edge of my boot along the lip of stone in a spot I had used as a handhold just a few minutes before. The boot edge skimmed the stone and flew off and down. I cursed the ice. And how, exactly, was I going to make my way back down this execrable wall when I was done with this fool’s errand?
With the third try my boot found purchase. My nose felt frozen from pressing against glacial brick. My hands ached, and a muscle in my back spasmed, sending a shudder of fear through me. Just one more movement left, to bring up the other leg, and my body with it. The most dangerous movement, for I was most apt to fall. Swallowing, I heaved up, dragging the foot from its mooring, and slid it along the edge of the next level of mortar, bits of the stuff gritty and loose and trickling down into the void. If I could just find a secure shelf for my foot, I could let my left hand go and reach for the iron bars above me. Gripping one of those would surely mean a relief from this treacherous ice. I ran my foot along the edge, nudging, prodding. A chunk of mortar came loose and fell—after a sickening pause I heard it hit the pavement below. My toe slipped into the groove it left behind, and held.
Sucking in a breath I released my left hand and swung it up. It hit the outer iron bar and my fingers, aching and cold even inside the leather glove, wrapped around the metal like a sailor’s knot. I let the shuddering air leave my lungs as I pulled the rock free and slipped it into my vest’s right side pocket. Then I raised my right hand and caught the bar on the other side from the one I held. Hoisting myself up, I peered through the window.
Dark as it was on the outside, the inside of the cell was even murkier. I might have used the mask’s ability to attenuate darkness, but it would have meant releasing a bar to press the nub. A stench wafted to my nose, and I was grateful for the filter of silk. What light existed in the cell came from the window. My head blocked some of it, and it was soon obvious that the cell was occupied because I heard complaints muttered my way.
“Who’s standing in front of the window?”
“Get the hell away from there.”
“I’ll knock your head off your shoulders.”
I was in luck. It was a common cell, with several inmates. Perhaps one, at least, would know Lini Madr.
“Evening, chaps,” I said in as deep a voice as I could manage, what with being out of breath from the climb and straining to hold the bars.
Silence met this greeting.
“I say, I don’t suppose anyone’s willing to answer a question or two?” I called in what I hoped sounded like a jovial tone.
“What mischief is this?” someone exclaimed.
“Yan-gantytan!” someone screamed. He was immediately shushed by a half a dozen others.
“The Lukan’s outside the window!”
“Yan-gantytan! Yan-gan—!” the second cried again, until someone must have covered his mouth. A yan-gantytan was a malicious spirit that was supposed to lure incautious travelers into bogs. How this man could think I was one showed he’d lost touch with the reality of his whereabouts, if nothing else. The third one had a better guess casting me as a follower of Luka, flame-haired god of chaos, mischief and magic. Upon reflection, I rather liked the idea.
“Um, hello?” I said.
Movement sounded, and after a minute two faces came into the dim light the night cast into the gloom. Both men—all the voices I’d heard, even the hushing, had been male—with thick beards and gaunt faces. “Who are you?” one asked.
I cocked my head to the side. “Really, I am insulted. You’ve got someone well-versed enough in folklore to babble of yan-gantytans but no one here’s ever heard of Raud Gríma?”
The mouth on one hung open, a dark blotch in the pale of his face, while the other squinted at me.
“Well, that’s unimportant, I suppose,” I said, the strain on my arms beginning to truly burn. “I wonder if you could perhaps help me. I’m… looking for someone.”
They stared back, and in the dim I made out more faces approaching, moving slowly, dreamlike.
“Anyone here ever heard of Lini Madr? I gather he was arrested some time ago. Perhaps… three months?”
The man with his mouth open cut his eyes to the squinty one, who in turn cast a look back towards the rest.
“Lini Madr? Anyone?” I said.
“I know him,” someone in the dark crowd answered. “I used to sell wine in the Torc, you know, just a cart with a few bottles, pour a glass for a few coins.” I heard others shuffling, turning towards the speaker. “Lini Madr often came through the Torc. Didn’t know he was here.”
“I did,” said another. “I saw him when they brung him in. Used to shine his shoes on the corner I had in the Lavsektor. Fond of that Dance Hall, weren’t he? Didn’t I see him, when they dragged him in, his wrists in chains? Always the kind to give a man an extra gratuity, Jarl Madr. Not like some.”
I gripped the bars more tightly. “You saw them bring him in? Do you know if he’s still here?”
“Stuck in here, ain’t I?” the man responded. “No way to know.”
“What you want this Madr for?” someone who hadn’t spoken before asked. “You going to rescue him?”
“You planning on letting us out?” the man who used to sell wine asked.
“Well,” I said, glancing at the bars, “no to both. Not tonight. But if things go as I planned, I will let everyone out, eventually.”
“Eventually,” Squinty said with a snort.
“Oh, aye, and I’ll sprout a crown and call myself konunger,” said the shoe-shiner.
“Well, in case you haven’t noticed, I have managed the rather challenging task of climbing this wall in order to chat with all of you,” I said. And I was going to have to wrap it up or the muscles in my arms would give and I’d disappear from their sight just as unexpectedly as I had appeared. “Don’t rule me out.”
There were some grunts and mumbles in response to that.
“You could come back,” Squinty said at last. “We could ask around.”
“About Lini Madr?
” I said.
He nodded.
“It’s a deal,” I said.
The fact that they watched, faces crowding the tiny window, as I made my way back down with agonizing care did nothing to make my descent any easier. But I did like the idea that I might have given them hope—even if it was just a little.
~~~
The time had come to set tonight’s main plan into motion. My arms and legs trembled when I hit solid ground again, but I had no time for a break. I had to push myself hard to keep moving, though I dearly wanted to curl up in a dark corner until I felt normal again. There was nothing for it, however—if I hoped to avoid discovery I would have to do what had to be done in two hours or less. Then, I would speed back to the opera house in time for the lights to come up and reveal me sitting like a good little courtier in my private box.
Some of what I needed I already carried in the bag, but I had to retrieve planks of wood from an alley by a warehouse I’d scouted some nights before. One four foot plank, and four two foot planks. They were thin, but still cumbersome, especially since after the climb my arms felt like jelly. I hoisted them in a bundle on my left shoulder and ran to the spot at the top of an incline I’d determined would work best for my plan. Dumping the boards, I checked my clock pendant. Acquiring the planks and bringing them to the top of the hill had already taken forty-five minutes. I unzipped the bag and started pulling out my tools.
Using heavy iron wire and hemp rope I tied the boards together to create a sawhorse a little like those we used in the barn in Söllund. Then with more wire, I attached two spot-lamps to each corner. The lamps were about five inches in diameter. I strung the electric wires from their backs over the sawhorse and guided them all the way off the street, to a corner where I would hide. I plugged the metal bits on the ends of the wire into the small box Spraki had assured me would function to power them, then did a quick test of the switch. The lamps blazed on. I cut the electricity and brought my bag over to the hiding spot.
The City Darkens (Raud Grima Book 1) Page 32
