Grizelda

by Margaret Taylor

  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 tha
n 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.”<
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  “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.