The cell door slammed shut with an echoing, metallic blast. Princess Bianca struggled dimly to the nearest wall and collapsed against it, numb to everything save the heaving pain in her chest and throat and the fearful tears welling in her eyes. The gown her mother had given her just for this night’s ball was already wet and streaked with grime, a terrace of white ribbons torn free to trail behind her. She curled up and hugged her knees, the welling in her throat growing stronger, when a rough, squirming shape started crawling its way around her skirts. With a scream, distinctly unladylike and born more of catharsis than indignation, she kicked the filthy rat clear over to the other side of the cell. The creature struggled back to its feet and scurried dizzily for the cover of a pile of rags when a grimy hand shot out and seized it. Before the Princess’s widened eyes, the figure in the pile shifted forward. She was dressed all in rags, quite easily concealed in a pile of trash, and though the Princess could discern arms and legs, the cloth draped over the figure’s head like a hood meant only her hands and lower face were visible.
“The guards here think they’re real sadistic bastards,” the figure said in a voice creaky yet curiously youthful, “they love denying the prisoners food to keep us weak, and brag about how they never bother sending ratcatchers down here.” The figure, Bianca thought it was a woman now, looked at the squealing rat from under her makeshift hood. With a quick, sure movement, she grabbed the rat’s head and twisted. A muffled snap rang out in the cramped room. “This works against them, y’know.”
The figure sunk her teeth into the rat’s underbelly, casually ripping out a mouthful of fur, meat, and guts. She slurped up a trailing entrail and began chewing noisily through the gristle before noticing her cellmate was staring at her, wide eyed, and seemed to be trying to push herself back through the wall.
“What?” the figure asked, watching the Princess with heavy-lidded eyes. The Princess pressed her face into her knees and shook her head. In a moment, the gruesome sounds returned, and the Princess took a deep breath. Part of her wished she hadn’t, as the air in the cell was cold, clammy, and smelled of mould tinged with rat blood, but it cooled the fire in her chest. Eyes only slightly damp, she looked about the cell, trying to ignore her cellmate. The same rough, wet masonry dominated all of the barren cell. The ceiling was high, with a single tiny hole set towards the top of the ceiling to provide light, two iron loops that presumably once supported manacles, and very little else. Streaks of rust ran down the walls wherever any iron fittings were set in them, speaking of the decay the wet, darkened air inevitably brought.
A few minutes passed. “So, what are you in for?” the figure asked, pulling a leg bone from the half-eaten rat and examining it closely. “Get caught porking with someone important? You’re not an assassin, and I can’t imagine anything else a partygoer at the palace could get thrown in for.” The Princess remained curled up in a tight ball, stiff, shaking slightly. The figure shrugged and tucked the bone away somewhere in her robes.
“I…I don’t know what’s going on. I was at the party and…and there was all this sudden shouting. The guards grabbed me, and when I asked what was happening they…” The Princess touched the lump on her head and winced, fresh tears staining her gown. She looked up at her cellmate and sniffed, blinking her reddened eyes. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
The figure looked closer at the Princess. She had dirty blonde hair, quite a bit dirtier now, and freckles dotting her cheeks and about her collarbone. An upturned nose and upper lip. Skinny as hell.
“Now that I get a good look at you, you’re one of the Princesses, right? Sabrina, or Allegra, or…”
“Bianca.”
“Ah, the Princess Bianca. Well…” the figure leaned back into her rags and looked up at the tiny window high up the wall. “In my professional opinion, I’d say you’ve gotten wrapped up in a coup.”
“A coup…?”
“Yeah. One going real deep, if at least a bit of the royal guard is in on it. I’ve been hearing skirmishing for awhile, but now it sounds like most of the city is a battlefield.”
The young Princess looked up towards the dot of light near the ceiling, but the silence in the cell deafened her.
“A takeover? But that means…Father…and everyone…” The Princess gritted her teeth, forcing back bile. “Who would do such a thing?”
“Well, girl, you’re in the royal family, you should know. Some bastard princeling, a greedy Duke, even an ambitious military officer. Anyone with power and at least some dim claim to the throne.”
“Then…then what would they want me for?”
“I dunno, to ransom you? Use you as a political pawn? Maybe they just want to play with you.”
Bianca’s hand dug in to her gown, fingers almost tearing the delicate silk. Her cellmate looked like she was going to say something, but her face shot to the doorway and she wormed her way deeper into the rags, quickly becoming invisible. A few seconds later, voices echoed from somewhere outside, and torchlight flickered under the door. There was a loud click and the door opened, the conversation suddenly clear.
“…there just her then?” a gruff voice asked. He stuck his head in and did a quick sweep of the room, his eyes coming to rest on Princess Bianca, now huddled tightly in a corner. She recognized him as he set in; Meadows, an adjunct to the captain of the guard.
“What’s going on?” she asked, surprised by how steady her voice was. Meadows leaned out and said something to someone in the hallway, then slid into the room, closing the door behind him. He had on the short purple cape of the palace guard over elaborate dress maille, and his waxed goatee curled down into two bars that looked like fangs.
“There’s no need to worry, Princess.” Bianca pushed herself deeper in to the corner.
“What’s going on?”
“All this will be over soon, Princess.” There was something evil in his voice, something she didn’t like in his eyes. The Princess’s looked from Meadows’ face to the pile of rags and back a few times. He was standing right over her. He opened his mouth to speak again, when suddenly two grimy hands flashed over his shoulders, wrapping a rusty chain around his neck. He was pulled backwards, almost doubling over. The Princess turned away and closed her eyes, though this forced her to focus more on muffled gags and desperate shuffling. Seconds, minutes passed. There was a soft scrape of maille on flagstone. The Princess opened one eye. Her cell mate was standing over Meadows’ prone form, wrenching the chain a few times for good measure. Her “hood” had fallen off, revealing a mess of shaggy black hair. The woman’s eyes were dull black pinpricks. She dropped the chain and started searching him, a crooked non-smile splayed over her face. She might have been pretty, the Princess thought, had she not looked like she was constantly doing an impression of a shark. The woman drew forth a jeweled rondel from Meadows’ hip and regarded it fondly for a moment. Bianca’s insides squirmed as the woman suddenly looked her in the eye. She placed a conspiratorial finger to her lips and crept to the door with an oily grace. Silently, she slid out the door. There was the ringing crunch of maille being severed, a loud thump, a clatter, a shout that became a scream, and a string of wet thuds. The Princess rose, fear, anger, confusion, frustration, and hope building an unaccustomed fire in her gut. Her cellmate pushed the door open and grinned wildly at her, a hunched, rag-covered ghoul against lurid yellow torchlight.
“Come on, girl! You want to sit in that cell forever?” The Princess managed to not spare a glance at Meadows as she lifted her skirts and stepped over his body. Two guards were sprawled in the narrow hallway, the white plumes of their palace guard helmets clashing with the pools of spreading blood. Her companion was already flying down the hallway, heading deeper into the dungeon rather than towards the distant stairway to the palace proper. The Princess sprinted to catch up with her, fine white shoes clacking loudly against the cobblestones as torch after torch flew past them. She saw that her companion held one of the guard’s swords in her off hand now, in addition to the dagger.
“I never got your name!” she said, panting slightly.
“It’s Griselda! They called me Griselda the Shrew!”
“That’s a bit odd!” the Princess said, struggling to keep her skirts out from under her feet.
“Tell me about it! Stab a few guys to death while female and suddenly everyone’s got you typecast!”
The two rounded a corner to find themselves facing a thick wooden door. Griselda slid her weapons into her ragged cord belt and took a knee, fiddling with the handle and examining the lock closely. She pulled a pair of rat bones out from somewhere among her robes and started wrenching them about the lock. Cursing under her breath, she tossed the thinner one aside.
“Girl, give me a hairpin or something.”
As Griselda scraped the hairpin and thick rat bone about in the lock, the Princess hugged herself limply and looked about, though there was nothing to look at. She felt she should be worried, dismal over the possible fate of her family and friends; was the assassination attempt at the ball successful? Was the whole city really engulfed in war? And yet, she felt curiously exhilarated. Escaping from that abysmal cell and forced so far out of her comfort zone left her feeling slow and excited, like a child being taught a new game.
The door creaked open a few inches as Griselda peeked cautiously about. Crouching low and moving with infinite care, she crept in to the wider cellblock, senses probing every corner and shadow. With a shriek, the door opened the rest of the way, and the Princess Bianca clomped in behind her. Griselda rolled her eyes and padded towards the far door.
“My God…” The Princess said, her voice echoing about the chamber, “what kind of a place is this?”
“What’s it look like? It’s a cell block” Griselda replied distractedly, her whispered voice carrying to every inch of the chamber regardless.
The Princess walked slowly about the cell block, eyes wide. There were tiers and tiers of cells – a dozen levels of cell-lined square ledges going up and down into the darkness. A single shaft of blueish light from some window high above left the chamber feeling terribly cold and sorrowful. Chains hung over the pit, a few holding narrow cages suspended over the darkness. A skeleton slouched in one cage, its head having slipped through the bars and fallen out.
“Why? Griselda, why in the world would my father need this many cells?”
“To house prisoners, you think?” Griselda growled, stooping over something by the door. “At wartime, he’d probably need all the cells and torture rooms he could get.”
“Torture rooms…?”
Griselda muttered under her breath and turned towards the Princess.
“Girl. Do you really think the King has never had cause to torture someone? To raze an inconvenient village or two, or poison a political rival? I know you weren’t exactly raised for a life of politics, but naivate must have a limit somewhere.” The Princess leaned back against the balcony rail and stared dejectedly at the floor.
“There’s no excuse for that. Never an excuse.” She said distantly. Griselda missed the thoughtfulness in her voice.
“If you ask me, the problem is he wasn’t brutal enough,” she said distantly, “Otherwise, maybe he wouldn’t be facing a coup right now.”
With a scrape, the lock yielded, and Griselda pulled it open with a grin. The head of an axe cleaved the air she had been a moment before, hacking a spray of stone out of the floor. Griselda rolled aside and came up in a low crouch, struggling her blades out of her belt. The Princess looked frantically about as three palace guards piled out of the doorway, but they fanned out wide, and would surely catch her if she did anything but leap off the rail to certain doom. The one with the axe took another swing at Griselda. She dodged out of range, then slipped back in low, amazingly low, sliding across the floor like a shadow, the tip of her sword digging in to his stomach. Though his hauberk absorbed most of the blow, the pain made his frantic attempt to knock Griselda’s sword away clumsy, and he paid for the lowered guard with a knife expertly jabbed through his helmet’s eyehole. Griselda ripped her knife out of the guard’s head, throwing him to the ground, and surged towards a guard trying to grab the Princess.
He turned just in time to get one clumsy swing of his sword at her, but she was far too low and fast. She tackled him, sword-first, her blade sliding into his stomach up to the hilt, and kept going, trying to bowl the swiftly dying guard into his comrade like a gruesome shield. The force of her charge knocked the guard back, slamming him into the bars of a cell, but he blocked the body of his fellow guard with his halberd, stopping the blade sticking out of his back inches from his own stomach. With a grunt, he shoved the body aside and swung at Griselda, who barely managed to pull her sword free in time to dodge out of range. The guard pressed his advantage, rapidly jabbing at Griselda, who could only backpedal frantically while swatting at the halberd with her sword. She ducked into the door the guards had barged through and the guard followed, taking a wild swing as he stepped out of sight. There was more clashing of metal, the sound of blade rending maille and flesh, and indistinct shouting – from more than one person.
The Princess gripped the rusty handrail she was leaning against hard enough to draw blood from the palms of her hands, her chest heaving. The sword of the soldier who had tried to pin her lay at her feet. She looked at the open doorway, at the indistinct battling shadows in the flickering torchlight, and reached for the hilt. Griselda crashed against the door as she ran full-tilt back into the cell block. She’d lost her own sword somewhere along the way.
“More coming! Lots more!” she shouted as she sprinted past the Princess and vaulted over the rail. The Princess gasped as Griselda, rags flailing, fell past floor after floor of cells to disappear into the darkness below. The jangling of maille turned her back to the door for a heartbeat before, gritting her teeth, she hauled herself over the rail as well. The Princess flailed and grasped at the rushing darkness, her scream slowly fading as she disappeared from sight.
“How many more sewers do we have to crawl through?” the Princess Bianca asked miserably.
“These aren’t sewers, they’re aqueducts.” Griselda replied. “They ferry water from the underground reservoir the castle is built on to the rest of the city. Normally they’d have bars at regular intervals to keep people from breaking in, but it looks like whoever organized the coup removed them so they could sneak spies and assassins in and out.”
“That’s an awful specific assumption, I think.”
“Paranoia is a useful trait,” Griselda said, flashing her a sharklike grin, “but it’s not very ladylike.”
The Princess lowered her head so that only her eyes were above water and glowered at Griselda. She didn’t remember much after jumping off the ledge, just screaming, a lot of pain, and the sensation of being dragged. She only really came to her senses when Griselda started splashing water on her in some dilapidated side room off the aqueduct. They’d been wading shoulders-deep for how long Bianca had no idea.
“Hey, look at it this way,” Griselda said to the tunnels ahead of her, “At least going through all these tunnels washed some of the grime off of your pretty pink party dress.”
“It’s not pink,” the Princess muttered to herself, “It’s salmon.”
A grate lifted off a drain set in the side of a grand memorial. Griselda peered out. The city was eerily quiet – every door and window was shuttered tight, and the distant clatters of battle, muffled, like something happening in a dream, was all that broke the neighborhood’s perfect peace and desolation. Griselda flowed out of the grate, and reached down to help the Princess out.
“So, I’ve been thinking,” she said, “whoever planned this probably pulled all sympathetic forces they had to help take the castle. The city walls are probably all but unguarded now. I know a spot where we could jump from the roof of a warehouse to the woods outside easy. We could get away from all this, nice and quick.”
Princess Bianca looked at the deserted cobblestone streets, the tightly packed buildings. It was getting dark, but it was unlikely that the city would be brightened by torches and lamplight that evening.
“I take it that’s not what we’re going to do, though.” Griselda said. The Princess looked up at the ancient, crumbling face of the war hero whose monument she had just crawled out of the dirt beneath. What was this conflicted feeling boiling up her throat? Fear? Sorrow? Sympathy for the city’s silent, ignored citizens? Some weird, twisted version of hope?
“My family is dead, aren’t they?” she asked quietly. Griselda leaned against the plinth.
“Well, yeah. I didn’t want to say it earlier, but the King and Queen, I’m almost certain they didn’t survive the time it took the guards to drag you to the dungeons. All your siblings and close relatives, too, assuming they weren’t in on it from the start. I think it was basically a fluke that you survived.”
“So.” The Princess said, not looking away from the statue. Her eyes were fixed on the darkening purple sky surrounding his head. “That means I’m the sovereign now.” Griselda laughed sharply.
“You’re the rightful ruler now, sure. But there’s someone else marching towards your throne, if he isn’t already in it. The smart thing to do, the proper thing, would be to give up the throne and flee to some isolated nunnery, hoping the usurper never decides you’re worth killing off.”
The Princess turned to Griselda, locked eyes with her. There was something in her gaze, something difficult to place. It wasn’t hardness, a deadened look Griselda had grown so familiar with. It wasn’t quite determination, though that was a component. It certainly wasn’t that watery, carefully cultivated naiveté – that had been washed away with the grime on her gown. If she had to give it a name, Griselda would have called it…
“Beautiful.” She grinned, her teeth gleaming like the glittery eyes of monsters hiding in the dark. “It looks like we’ve got work to do.”
No comments:
Post a Comment