Grizelda (2 page)

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.”