Grizelda (3 page)

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.