Posts tagged with "grey city" - Faerye Net

The Grey City XXI

2009-08-19T14:00:31+00:00

The Grey City I
The Grey City II
The Grey City III
The Grey City IV
The Grey City V
The Grey City VI
The Grey City VII
The Grey City VIII
The Grey City IX
The Grey City X
The Grey City XI
The Grey City XII
The Grey City XIII
The Grey City XIV
The Grey City XV
The Grey City XVI
The Grey City XVII
The Grey City XVIII
The Grey City XIX
The Grey City XX

Eirian jumped up but even as she opened her mouth, she saw Carys lift her finger to her lips.

“What’s the matter?” cried Mouse. “Did somefink bite you?”

“No, I…thought I heard something,” Eirian covered. The boy was looking back and forth from Sly to her, his eyes skipping past Carys unseeing.

For her own part, Eirian gazed at her older sister. She looked herself — more herself, perhaps, than she’d been since they arrived in the City. There was pink in her cheeks, a violet tucked behind her ear. But the entire cheerful, colorful sight of her was only partly there, like the scenery painted on cheesecloth for village fêtes.

How the little girl ached to run away from Sly and Mouse, to hide in an alley or a doorway and talk with Carys. Could she touch her? Could she hold her? Through what magic had she returned from death? She licked her lips, and focused on Sly. “So, where is it you’re taking me, Sly? And what shall I do there?” she asked, both to gain time and to acquaint Carys with the position.

Sly scowled, still gruff after her emotional revelations. “To Knock’s, o’course, to make as proper a thief of you as may be.” She looked down at her rather outsized boots with a momentary return of softness. “‘Til you’re too big an’ are sent across to Ma’am Betty’s ’ore-ouse for to be a nance.”

Eirian saw Carys’s face slacken in disbelief, then gather into lines as the two Warrens children made ready to depart. Mouse took his silk handkerchief — his, as the legal owner was not in evidence — from Eirian’s hand and folded it carefully before replacing it in his satchel.

“C’mon!” he said. “We have such larks, we Knock’s boys!” and he started down the cobbles toward the heart of the Warrens.

Sly started to saunter after him, but Eirian lingered, hoping for a moment alone with her rediscovered Carys.

“No use dallyin’ or tryin’ to get away,” Sly said, turning. “You’re in the Warrens, an’ won’t never find nothing better.”

“Nothing better than being a thief and a — well, a thief’s bad enough!” Carys fumed.

“Sly, what do they do to thieves if they catch them? The Runners, I mean.” Eirian asked, speaking up.

“’Angs ’em, mostwise. Some cop it more special from time to time.”

“It could hardly be anything less,” said Carys with some venom, but her face was frightened. They turned into a wide street, originally dirt but now paved haphazard with stones and grates from other thoroughfares. A man walked by with a bushel of crowbars on his back like firewood, his coat chinking with other tools. On the corner, a woman on a stool was sewing a large pocket into the lining of a young man’s coat while he waited in his shirtsleeves.

“I was sorry to hear about your…sister.” Eirian continued, pausing to think. “What was your name before you joined Knock?”

Sly looked at her sidewise, but said, “Stephen.”

“It’s a nice name. What did your parents do?”

“Da were a clark, an’ Mam took in washin’. ‘Ere, what d’you want to know all this for?”

“I didn’t know I wasn’t allowed to have a conversation!” Eirian said with a bit of her usual spirit.

“Well, you can ‘old up your end then. What’d your family do out-Country?”

“It’s not all the same like that, you know. You City types say ‘Country’, but there are many places, all different. Our home’s very pretty. Hills of rock, and heather, and little creeks and falls.” She was silent for a moment, listening to the sound of a boy yelping in a falling-down house. “We raised sheep, little mountain sheep with curly horns hidden in their long wool. Carys and I—” she glanced over into Carys’s tender face — “we used to help with them. Mama carded the wool and Papa took it into market.”

Sly frowned. “Must be awful lots of room in Country. You can’t fit more’n a dog or a pig maybe in the best lodgin’s here.”

“Lots of room outside. Inside, there was only enough for a kitchen and hearth, a bed for us girls and one for Ma and Pa.”

She looked over at her sister once more, and saw she was biting her ethereal lip. She could not, as Eirian could, forget the present danger in recalling past joys.

Sly’s face was also troubled, and her long swaggering step slowed. “’Ere we are,” she breathed. “That’s Knock’s down there.”

Eirian saw that this street ended at a high, orderly wall, and the road widened into a cul-de-sac before it as if the way, dammed up, had collected in a pool. Across this space two buildings leered. They may have started life alike, two great half-timbered public houses that bulged over their ground stories like the bellies of two jolly fellows over their too-tight belts. But use had given the one house an air of suspicion and the other of promiscuity. Every shutter of Knock’s was closed tight, and the whole veiled with a uniform layer of dust. Ma’am Betty’s had every window thrown open and some spilling outward in rickety balconies, and the shutters painted in bright mismatched hues as if to emphasize their purely ornamental nature. No sign hung on either facade, but from the upper stories of Knock’s hung a clothesline of colorful handkerchiefs, while at Betty’s this festival flag role was supplied by assorted petticoats.

Sly paused at the mouth of this road, looking toward these familiar haunts. She seemed to struggle for a moment, then set her mouth as if biting the end off of something. “No ’elp for it, Bo-Peep,” she said, and started to make another cigarette.

Eirian almost thought she could feel the rage in Carys, like the queer pressure before a summer storm. “No help? From you, perhaps!” the gentle girl growled, and Sly looked sharply over her shoulder, the cigarette paper drooping in her fingers and scattering curls of tobacco.

Carys was becoming more solid before her sister’s eyes, her wrath and love and need to protect condensing in her until she was thicker than a fog coming in from the sea, more substantial than skimmed milk. She floated like an avenging angel over the filthy Warrens stones, and even Eirian shivered to see her.

Perhaps now Sly could see her too, for she stared a long time, and tears started down her cheeks unchecked. “I’m sorry,” she said at last to the apparition. “I’ll save ’er, if I can.”

Grey City XX

2008-09-08T09:16:29+00:00

“I won’t tell, Sly, I swear I won’t!” Eirian heard herself say in a meek voice.

Eirian was, it’s true, brave and willful, but she was also very young. She had seen her sister killed and barely escaped that fate herself, to say nothing of time without sleep or food, or other terrors weathered. Either being held out over the river or the painful submission of her promise was too much. She crumpled in on herself to cry. Sly reeled her prisoner back in, and set the girl on her booted feet, only to see her fall on the bridge cobbles.

“Here, what’s wrong wif her?” said Mouse, running up. Sly shrugged, so the boy tugged at Eirian’s shoulder. “What’s the matter, Peep?”

Eirian turned her red face up from the stones and scrubbed it with her apron. With a ferocious scowl, for Sly and to keep the tears down, she said, “Those filthy Runners killed my sister. Like it was nothing, like she was nothing. And now I’m alone.”

“Not alone, Peep! You’re one of us now!”

“One of who?”

“Why, one of Mister Knock’s lot! He has the old inn ‘cross of Ma’am Betty, in the far edge of Warrens, near t’the docks.”

Sly listened, rolling a cigarette with none of her accustomed speed.

“We’re a big merry crew at ol’ Knock’s, boys everywhere. It’s somefing to see!” Mouse sat down beside Eirian and looked at her, then dug in his satchel. He brought out a bundle with a guilty glance at Sly. “I nipped it from a baker’s this morning. We mostwise share at Knock’s, but it smelled so good and I was out on me own…” He removed a large, bright handkerchief that covered the loaf of sweet bread, more than half intact, and handed both to Eirian. “That should cheer you!” he said, “and a real silk kerchief to wipe your mouf wif afterwards!”

Eirian stopped frowning, nearly letting a tear escape. She paused for a moment, then hid her face behind the food without attempting speech. Mouse clapped her on the back and contributed such encouragements as “Down the hatch, that’ll do it!” and “Tastes better than a Runner, don’t it?”

Sly, having finished the manufacture of her cigarette, lit it and watched the smoke rise. "I had a sister once meself. When I come to Knock’s. ‘Most of an age, ’er an’ me was, but the same size, for all I were the helder. It were some years back, i’the Pocks Winter. Mam and Da already carried off, Sylvia an’ me ran off by the neighbors. ’Eard tell it ’ad passed this side the river already, so we came ’ere and found Knock.

“‘E weren’t afraid, ‘avin’ weathered Pocks in the first wave like a plucked ‘un. So ’e put us in a back room like, an’ shore our ‘eads proper for the fever. Once a day ’e came in with water an’ to make sure we was amongst the livin’ still.”

Sly took a deep breath, held in the smoke for a long time. “An’ one mornin’ I woke up, my fever broke, an’ ‘e — an’ Sylvia were gone. When Knock came by wif the water, there was only one boy for to join his gang. Only me.”

Eirian, at last, looked up from her food, understanding in her eyes. And there, standing next to Sly in the haze of tobacco smoke, was Carys.

The Grey City XXI

The Grey City XIX

2008-08-27T11:16:06+00:00

Carys awoke on the pavement of the Orchard Street sidewalk. At least, it seemed she did. The sidewalk was there, under her hand, when she raised her head to look, but she did not feel it. Nor could she hear the scraping and rustling she would have expected as she collected herself and stood.

“Eirian!” she called, and she could hear that well enough, though the world did seem quiet, muffled, in the City dawn. She looked down to dust off her skirt, and decided she needn’t bother. Her dress and apron were clean and new, and the dirt under her fingers had disappeared. Her feet did not quite touch the ground – perhaps why they made no sound – and there was a bright, fuzzy quality to the air around her arms and legs, but after all, she had died. She had to expect some effect.

She could not see the Runners or her sister on the street. The rising light made it obvious that hours had passed. The first thing was to find Eirian, and as she thought about her she felt an almost physical tug down Orchard Street. Unquestioning, she started in that direction, moving all the more quickly for her feet not touching the ground, all the more quickly for the pull to which she surrendered.

Around her the City was transformed, and not by the pallid morning light as she had first imagined. The buildings seemed less substantial, less important. As she turned into an alley, then out onto another street, she paused to stare at one of the houses. Its third story flickered, as if seen with one eye and not the other. The effect was disturbing at first, but it had its amusing side as well, particularly when Carys spotted a stout woman in a mob cap walking along a hallway that was here, gone, here, gone.

Indeed, now that she was beyond the disused storefronts of Orchard, Carys could see people all around. They were no more solid than the buildings, but much more colorful, and Carys could see them even through the walls, like washes of watercolor. It cheered her to thus glimpse a normal life, a child being lifted to a window and the bustle of colors she assumed must be an early breakfast being set out or eaten before a workday.

Resuming her glide, she saw a strange shape in the offing, undulating across the thoroughfare. It bristled and shimmered like a centipede, but as she approached she saw that it was some sort of fence. Scattered on the street ahead of the barrier was a pattern of blotches, dark on the washed-out cobbles like soot but splattered and pooled like paint. The stains intensified as she approached the stockade, but she had to look up as she negotiated the boundary, mesmerized by the shifting shapes and almost afraid that the teeth would arrange themselves to close against or capture her.

Beyond the fence, shattered brick facades flashed whole, but seldom, as if it were a past too far removed to remember. The pull of Eirian’s path laced upwards through the hulks and changing debris. Carys followed along for a time on the ground but found the way blocked by an old wall, mortared stone with layers of pilfered tile, unflickering with the certainty of years.

It would take a long time to backtrack and take the aerial route, and she could tell she was getting close, that Eirian was only a half-mile ahead, not moving. She held her solid hand up to the unchanging but half-seen wall. It stopped, as if by habit, half an inch away from the stone, but she took a deep breath and pushed. It was like thick pudding at first, then easier and easier as her conviction grew. She stepped through the wall as if through a waterfall and headed towards her sister.

The Grey City XX

Grey City XVIII

2008-08-11T10:59:44+00:00

Eirian stayed huddled in the flotsam at the edge of the Warrens long after the Runners had turned back into the darkness. Shudders rocked her, and set up tinny peals in the metal fence palings in which she sheltered.

Carys was dead. She had known at once but in an animal way, a kenning without thought to future or meaning. Carys was dead, and she had been driven to a wild, unknown part of this horrible city. Where would she go? How could she escape, and who could she ask now that she was alone? She huddled, oblivious to the light building in the hazy air by the minute.

There was a scent of tobacco smoke, and a footfall crunched on the cinder street. Eirian clutched at the poles around her, held her breath.

“Whaddid they want?” said a boy’s voice, and a much older girl replied:

“Wanted a good scare, most like, so they come down t’have a look at the Warrens.”

“Ran away quick enough.”

“Why they calls ‘em Runners, in’it?”

The speakers slouched a little closer to the gate, and Eirian saw them — a slab-faced boy of about her age and a terribly skinny young woman in a man’s waistcoat and trousers, smoking a bit of tobacco rolled in paper.

“Nothin’ goin’ on ’ere,” declared the girl. She tugged her cap low over her eyes, turned, and tossed the stub of her cigarette into the debris. Eirian yelped as the brand hit her cheek, and the strange girl’s hands were around her wrist before she realized her mistake.

“Intruder!” cried the boy as the other dragged her captive out into the ruddy bonfire light. “Who is it, Sly?” he said, shrinking back.

“It’s only a girl.”

Eirian felt moved to protest. “You’re a gi—”

Sly’s hand clamped under her chin and turned her face to the firelight. “Look what a fresh face she’s got – and the clothes! A Country lass, no doubt.” Her words were light, but she didn’t blink, and her chin had the set of fury.

The boy stared at Eirian’s illuminated face. “What’s that by her mouf?”

Sly said, “Looks like blood. Must have bit ’er lip, then.”

Eirian shook her head free and said, “I have not!” She scrubbed at her cheek with her already filthy apron, and glowered at Sly. “I bit that Runner.”

The boy’s eyes widened. “Bit a Runner? And lived to tell? Sly, maybe we should take her home, for all she’s a girl? P’raps somefing could be made of her.”

The lean girl scowled but nodded. “First, let’s show ’er the sights. Show ’er the secrets of the Warrens.” She leaned close to Eirian’s face, and her breath was full of stale smoke. “Then she’ll be one of us, like.” She spun and set off across the street, the boy prodding Eirian to follow.

“Keep ’er close to me, Mouse,” Sly ordered as she reached the stoop of an empty-windowed house. “Don’t want ‘er fallin’ into any traps, do we?”

Mouse chivvied Eirian along, into the house and up a stair to the second floor. “First floor’s weak,” he said. “Fall right froo to th’basement.”

Sly traversed the second floor and leaned out of a long window, its sill dirty from many feet. After looking both ways, she stepped out. Eirian followed and found herself on a broad metal beam wedged between this building and the next. The big girl led across and paused on the sill of the opposite window. “Don’t touch the floor,” she said to Eirian. “I mean it.” She ducked into the house and swooped out of sight. Following, Eirian was nearly hit in the brow with a returning trapeze fashioned from two ships’ lines and a hefty ladder rung. She peered across to where Sly hunkered on a face-down wardrobe, then peeked over her shoulder. Mouse flapped his hands encouragingly.

She tightened her grip on the rung and pushed off from the window. She barely made it over the broad, bare floor, but Sly grabbed one rope and she was able to hop onto the creaking wardrobe. “Why can’t we touch the floor?” she puffed as Mouse made his flight.

“It tilts,” Sly said. “Flops down an’ dumps you onto great rusty spikes. For the Runners, Lor’bless’em.”

Similar dangers were pointed out to her, or occasionally avoided with such habitual grace that her guides forgot to mention them. Eirian leaned on a handrail, and Mouse had to grab her to stop her falling to a pavement far below. The deeper they went, the more certain Eirian was that she would never find her way out alone without misadventure, and the more people they heard or saw. Once Sly shushed them as they walked along a flat roof where five grown-ups were taking out pens and inks, wax and seals, preparing to harness the full morning light. Eirian peered at the pages before them, very official-looking, but Sly grabbed her sleeve and pulled her on.

Now the path returned to the ground, tracing a strange worm-trail between flimsy buildings and along streets almost crowded out of existence by ramshackle houses. Many corridors or alleys Eirian glanced down came to a sudden end at a wall, or stopped in a flurry of doors giving on various improvised shelters.

Sly paused to roll another smoke, and strolled along smoking and raising her cap or hand to passers-by. Some people, like the scrivening group, seemed to be setting about their work as the sun rose above the level of the buildings. Others were returning, heavy bags over their shoulders and strange implements in their hands. Women in bright clothes stumbled back likewise, some arm in arm with tough-looking men whose pockets bulged forth clubs or gun-butts. Their brusk calls and beery good-mornings set up a background babble like the cawing of crows.

“What is this place?” said Eirian.

“’Tis the Warrens,” Mouse said, confused.

“I know, you’ve said, but what do all these people do here? How do they eat? There is no market, no shops, no gardens…why do the roads go nowhere?”

“You ’ave ventured far from ’ome,” laughed Sly. “The Warrens is our place, in’it? A place for pickers, mashers, smashers, slickers, wheelers and nances, any as makes their way on the East side of the law. There’s plenty for sale for those as knows where to look.”

“You’re thieves?”

Sly rolled her eyes. “Such a flat. Yes, Bo Peep, we’re thieves.”

Mouse nodded. “An’ you can be one too, for a few years any rate. Girls make more as nances, once they get big.”

“But Sly-” Eirian began, but the girl grabbed her arm and twisted it, pushing her ahead.

“That spot there’s where Tooth Charlie killed Archie Deuce over a repeatin’ watch,” she said with feigned enthusiasm, and pointed to a broken hitching post. “Greatest smasher’s ever was, an’ Charlie mashed ’is ’ead in on that post.”

She shouldered onwards, and led them into twisting alleys where gray-faced women divided meager breakfasts for their broods. A tight squeeze between two clapboard sheds, and they were on a high wall above the broad, fetid river. A few yards downstream, a vast hulk of stained stone jutted into the current, and Mouse broke away towards it. Sly pushed Eirian along the wall to the bridge.

For it had been a bridge, once. Though the wind scoured this part of the river of its full fog, Eirian could not clearly see the remnants of the bridge on the other side, but one arch persisted on the Warrens side, ending ragged. There had once been shops along the span, which accounted for the plain, unfinished look of its sides now that the wooden structures had fallen, rotted or burned away. Sly gestured, and Eirian walked carefully onto it.

“Why is it broken?”

“No one knows, now. We says we did it, and they,” with a gesture to the respectable other bank, “says they did it. But someone did it with a great lot of gunpowder, many years back. An’ no one’s managed to build another one since.”

Mouse had run to the farthest end of the bridge, and was drawing on the exposed rock with a bit of chalk.

“Look ’ere,” said Sly, and gestured to a great gap in the downriver side of the bridge, where several openings had been broken into one. The river coiled black and deep below. Sly flicked her cigarette butt over the side, and it fell long and slow to the water. “It’s called the ‘Ole. Maybe it’s as the river turns ‘ere it’s so deep — maybe it’s a trick of the sewers wot lets in just above. But it runs deep and pulls down, some say into tunnels from when the city was new, founded by foreign gemplemen who dug. Wherever it ends up, it don’t give anything back. An’ that’s why they say the Warrens keeps their dead.”

With a quick jerk, Sly tripped Eirian forward over the side and caught her by her apron sash. The fabric cinched away her breath, and she felt terror blaze into anger as she was suspended a hundred feet above the filthy, roiling water.

“I don’t want to hear another word out of you about Sly bein’ a girl.” She spoke low and quick, so Mouse would not be alarmed. “I ain’t starved meself since age eight to keep the change at bay just to be ruined by some farm girl with a smart mouth and a big head. Sly is a lad, you ‘ear? A slight one, ruined by years of starvin’ to keep small enough for a door panel or a window hentry, but a roisterin’ great lad all the same. Swear you’ll keep it dark.”

“What?”

“My secret! Swear I’m a boy or I’ll pitch you, sure’n I will!”

Eirian screwed her mouth shut and stared at the mesmerizing sweep of the river below, the way a great braid of the water rose as if taking breath and then dove under its fellows, dragging all the Warrens’ refuse down to pack into some long-forgotten grotto, dead upon dead, forever.

Grey City XIX

The Grey City XVII

2008-04-26T13:07:37+00:00

There was a curious sound that Carys could not place. It was short, percussive, and repeated at odd intervals. It sounded like something fragile breaking, far away. crack.

Then Carys heard her mother hum, and she remembered. Sunday mornings in their house, Mother would sneak out of bed and start to cook. Papa would lie in the bed, sleeping as if his body knew it was his only day of rest. Eirian, in the little cot the sisters shared, lay curled into a cozy knot like a hibernating squirrel. As the smells of cooking spread out from the cast-iron stove, the sleepers would stir and sniff, then kick off their covers and stumble towards the table.

But not Carys. It was not her nose, cold above the quilts and sheepskin, that woke her, but her ears. crack. In Mother’s hand, resting against callus and ground-in dirt, egg after egg broke against the edge of the stone mortar. crack. Carys knew that each blow split an egg perfectly into two ragged, hollow bowls, knew without opening her eyes. And she did not open them. Not until Eirian or Father had snuffled out of bed and Mama had said, “I’ve led you out of bed by your nose again!” did Carys flutter, blink and stretch. Such sweet deceit she remembered now with the absent-minded tune and the muffled, delicate crack.

Carys remembered it all, every moment her childish mind had been too busy or careless to catch. The pain and fear she had never forgotten; the body thinks it needs those things to survive. But the joys she now recalled — deep beyond memory, or rediscovered like a beloved toy at March’s first thaw — overwhelmed the sorrows.

The sweet smell of milk that had led her to Mother’s breast, the first rainbow, the spring breathing lavender onto the tall slate hills, the way a lamb butted your hand when it knew you were safe. Father teaching you to dance, the voice of the girl who lost her baby raised in song more beautiful for its knowing ache. Figgy pudding, the warmth of a blanket burrow on a stormy night, and Eirian’s breath, as familiar as your own, warming the night beside you. The voices of Mother and Father are drawing closer, more than a memory, real voices singing a song you do not know. Now you are remembering the good parts of your last months with your family, the moments you could not see through the fear and grief. Papa telling you tall tales and family history from his sickbed, and Mama — oh, how could obligation and worry chase away this glow of pride — Mama telling you she trusted you to look after your sister, knew your heart and strength.

The song was strong now, and there were words in it, indistinct as if heard through a door, felt more than understood. The dark around her was alive with warmth and music, but she could feel a thread of chill like a draft on her back. It came from the body’s world, the City she had escaped, escaped alone, and Carys turned and followed it, swimming into the cold current of time, back to the City, the night, and to Eirian.

Grey City XVIII

The Grey City XVI

2008-04-12T00:08:17+00:00

Eirian ran down Orchard Street, down indeed for the road slanted toward the river. She could hear the Runner behind her, and her breath was broken by sobs. The Runners might sneer about Country stock, but a Country girl was wise in life and death, and Eirian knew what she had seen.

Now she must run. Mother said to mind, she thought, must run. The footsteps behind were gaining on the gentle slope, so Eirian darted sideways into an alley, dodged around a broken bottle. She did not look back. The man’s shined boots fell regular as clockwork, as pistons, the only variation the sound they made on cobble, or straw, or shards.

The alley gave onto a street of shabby tenements, and the girl thought of pounding on doors, but swallowed the notion away. Who would help her against the majesty of the Law? Here the gaslights were often broken or unlit, and she ran from dark into dark, not daring to think or plan more than a step ahead, a yard.

The street loomed into existence building by building, smelly and endless. Breezeways and alleys appeared, but were closed off with planks or rusting iron gates. Dogs barked as she hurtled by their houses, recognizing criminal, or prey, or fear. Ahead, something changed; a red glow built and she could see that on both sides of the road ghost-buildings rose, black from ancient fire. At their flanks rose strange bristles of junk, of fence palings and curtain rods, old signposts and even a bit of spiked church railing. They fanned from either side in a strange display and cast flickering shadows towards her like fingers. The sound of dogs behind her had grown, more animals joining, hounds belling, and through their noise she could barely hear the Runner’s footfalls. She threw a look backward to make sure he was still there.

Jeffers, no longer white but scarlet with fury and exertion, was no more than an arm’s length behind. With a yelp Eirian tried to surge forward, but tripped on a charred brick and tumbled into the ashy street. She felt the Runner’s hand clamp around her little shoulder like a blacksmith’s tongs, and was jerked upright again.

The jumbled barricade was near now, and the wide gateway in it — strangely clear and inviting in such a stockade — seemed to Eirian to promise freedom, the bonfires a more wholesome light than the sickly gaslamps. She flailed, out of breath and half-mad with desperation, and, turning her head, bit down on Jeffers’s gripping fingers so hard she tasted soap and blood.

Free, she ran for the gap in the threatening fence, and was through, running from cobbles onto uneven earth, curving away from the threshold and staring, wild-eyed, over her shoulder. The Runner did not follow.

She ducked into a doorway, taking what time she could to breathe, and watched Jeffers turn away, wrapping a hankerchief around his bleeding right hand. He was not watching her, so she slipped into the shadows between this building and the burned-out next, nestling into the jungle of rusting poles and spikes. The Inspector ran briskly into view and joined his junior at the pale. Eirian spat convulsively. It was a vulgar gesture Carys would have despised, but she spat her hatred and the Runner’s blood onto the ground.

“Jeffers, report,” she heard, faint but clear.

“Subject Erin Owens, on point of apprehension, entered the Warrens; pursuit suspended per statute 34a sub2, pending your determination.”

The Inspector’s eyes never flicked toward the girl or the fires. “As if there could be any doubt.”

“But sir! She bit me!” Jeffers waved his bloody cloth. “That’s assault on an Officer of the Law…”

“I am not going to call in a regiment to sweep the Warrens just because your apprehension form is shoddy. Call it off.”

“And the corpse report?”

“Write it for the other, Carrie.” The Inspector waved a hand. “The Warrens keep their dead as well as their living. We won’t see Miss Erin Owens again.”

The Grey City XVII

The Grey City XV

2008-01-27T00:01:08+00:00

The sisters stood straight, too tired or proud to recognize their danger.

“What’s this, then, Inspector Blackburn?” said a mousy young man with no decoration on his black uniform save the row of effulgent buttons.

The senior Runner flicked his stare from the waifs to the young man. “Were I not here, Jeffers, how would you determine what ‘this’ is ‘then’?”

Jeffers might have blanched, had the half-light allowed him any further shades of pallor.

The young man’s eyes rolled back in a shudder of pale eyelashes. It lasted only a moment before his piscine gaze was back on the girls.

“Carrie and Erin Owens. To be taken in if not properly housed by this evening.” The inspector nodded, and Jeffers inflated a finger’s breadth. “They aren’t much in the brawn department, are they?”

“No, and Country stock besides.” The inspector made a hollow clapping behind his back with his cupped hands. “What are the current statistics on Country workhouse assets, Mr. Jeffers?”

The eyes flickered again. “61% mortality within a year, sir, and poor work-to-investment.”

The Inspector nodded slowly and reached for Eirian’s shoulder. “Take a report. Carrie and Erin Owens, known vagrants, found dead of exposure at —”

“1:07 in the morning, sir.”

“Thank you.”

Carys stared up at the snake-dark eyes of the Inspector, and confusion began to kindle to anger. She grabbed the pristine wool sleeve in her dirty paws and pushed the man’s hand away from Eirian. “We aren’t what you said, and we aren’t dead! And don’t you ever touch my sister!” She found in the echoes that she was screaming. She, little Carys, the ladylike, the soft, screamed strong and shrill in the foreign night and liked the sound. She pushed Eirian behind her and faced the Runners.

The Inspector’s arm swung back, but not towards Eirian. The clean, white hand coiled around Carys’s throat.

“Bodies to be collected at earliest convenience and conveyed to Central.”

“No!” shrieked the littler sister, scratching and pulling.

Carys was being lifted off the ground now, light as a doll in the Inspector’s grip. “Eirian —” she rasped. “Get away.”

“NO!” the little girl buffeted the Inspector’s shins with her ragged, skirt-muffled boots.

“Jeffers?” the Inspector said, and the smaller man moved around to dart at Eirian.

Carys had both her hands on her captor’s wrist, but her feet dangled wildly. “Mother said to mind me, Eirian! RUN!”

Eirian made a strangled sound of protest as she ducked Jeffers’s hands, but began to run. She bowled against the young Runner’s legs with such force that he fell over, and as he floundered she paused for a moment, to see how Carys would follow.

The Inspector, never glancing at the escaping quarry, brought up his second hand and made a quick, practiced movement. There was a cracking sound, like ice popping on a winter stream, and Carys was dead.

The Grey City XVI

The Grey City XIV

2007-02-24T23:42:18+00:00

“Carys!” Eirian shouted, and heard her sister’s voice nearby, frantic and muffled. A dirty white hand emerged from the dark shapes around Eirian, and scrabbled at her shoulder. The little girl grabbed onto it and pulled, feeling dry grasping ropes slip by her on either side. Carys’s other hand appeared too, then her face, and the two girls clung to each other in a world of questing, whispering tendrils.

“What’s happening?” said Eirian with a sniff, and when Carys didn’t reply, she answered herself. “We’re in the roots, aren’t we? How did it happen? Carys? Carys, what will we do?” Her only answer was the rasp of root on root as the arms wrapped about them, shoved them on, caught them up, moving them ever onward.

“Carys!” Eirian whined, and her sister blinked and looked up. She could tell which way it was, from the way they lay in their hammock of arms, and from the occasional glints of light that showed her Eirian’s face.

“I suppose we climb,” she said, quiet as if the roots might hear her plan.

“Climb?” Eirian said in disbelief, but Carys pushed her up, and her white fingers curled around a tendril.

“It’s just like climbing a tree.”

“My legs are too short,” Eirian grumbled, but kicked out with them, finding purchase in the reaching limbs. Carys followed.

The roots tried to envelop them anew, but they reached through the new shrouds and pushed them aside. They pulled on the ones that tried to flee upwards, as Eirian had once pulled cat’s tails. The light grew closer, and the little girl called back, “I think my hand is out!”

The rest of her followed, and she clung to the base of a tree like a sloth, even as it sent its roots up to feel about her bootless ankle. She turned to look for Carys, and saw her pulling her way out of the dark.

There was no time to catch their breath or to embrace. Hand in hand, they flew across the hungry ground. At every step, it fell out from beneath them and tried to trip them. Eirian was tired to tears, but she could not spare the breath to cry. She fell, and the roots began to swallow her. One twisted around her left wrist as Carys pulled at her right, and she flopped awkwardly for a moment before she broke free.

“Carys! The branches aren’t reaching for us!” Carys looked up involuntarily, and almost stumbled herself. “They can’t move their branches!” Eirian pulled her hand free and dodged a root. “Come on! You’re taller, I can’t reach!”

The older girl swerved to reach a tree trunk, and fell against it heavily. She jumped for the lowest branch. She pulled herself up, confidence returning as her legs recalled less urgent climbs, kinder trees.

“Carys!” Eirian yelped, jumping from foot to foot to confuse the roots. She strained upwards, and Carys’s hands were in hers. Her feet scrabbled against the trunk as her sister pulled. They fell back into a fork of the tree together, and held each other close.

“Are you hurt?” Carys said, trying to judge through the dirt and twigs.

“I’m not,” Eirian said, and pointed to Carys’s forehead, marked with a long scratch. “You are, though.”

Carys felt at the cut and winced. “I’ll be all right.” She looked down at the ground. In the dim light, she could see it moving, seething like water about to boil. Eirian untucked the end of a wool scarf from her own neck, and tried to gently smudge the dirt away from her sister’s wound. Carys smiled reassuringly. “Really, it’s nothing.” She looked down at the scarf, a long lilac one of their mother’s. “I lost the trunk, Eirian.”

“I’m no fool,” Eirian said with a scowl, and continued to scrub. “You couldn’t have helped it.”

“I know. But we’ve nothing of home now.”

“We’ve got us.”

Carys smiled. “Yes. And I promised Mam I’d take care of us both.” She pulled away with a reassuring pat and stood carefully on a big bough, holding another with both hands. Eirian clung more closely to the tree.

“I can see the fence! It’s quite the other way from how we were heading.”

Carefully, they jumped from tree to tree, Carys coaxing Eirian after her. The trees were large and untended, and their branches grew together. Their skirts caught on the branches, and the roots rasped unpleasantly below. At last, they reached the last tree. They shimmied down and jumped away from the lashings of the frustrated trees.

“Your mark!” said Eirian. They rushed with heady relief to the dark trench in the leaves that marked the exit. They laughed high, silly laughs of relief as they fell on all fours and crawled through the opening, out of the rustling malice of that place.

They were still feebly smiling as they stood, filthy and ragged, and looked up two dark uniforms into the faces of the Runners, shining solemn and white under the midnight lamps.

Grey City XV

The Grey City XIII

2006-06-06T14:04:24+00:00

Button Street was a narrow brown place with slight buildings leaning against each other like a drunken chorus line. Ragpickers yelled to and at each other in an odd trade patois which both girls felt they were one thought, one moment from comprehending. Dessicated old women sat outside, using the last daylight to piece together bits of many ruined shirts into one whole one.

Their brown fingers were pricked into roughness by the trade, and their milky eyes could barely see the tiny stitches they made by rote. Carys hoped she would never be such a crone, then shivered. As things stood now, she would need luck to reach such an age and station.

“It’s almost twilight, Carys,” Eirian said. “Will we reach Uncle Iestyn and Bopa Marged tonight?”

“I don’t know, Eirian. We must keep walking, and we shall see.”

“But the Spectre said—”

“In-spector, sweetling—”

“The Inspector said we must be in a house tonight.”

“So he did, so we must hurry on, and hope to be in a house, or to remain unseen, either one.”

So Eirian marched after Carys, keeping her sulks to a minimum, as they walked from the poorest part of Button Street to the most affluent, and back into the only mildly squalid; from evening into twilight.

They turned on Orchard Street, which despite its name was quite urban, rows of expressionless, decaying storefronts; and Brewery, where great red brick buildings gaped at them with all the ghostliness of day-busy places seen by night.

For it was night, now. The girls walked quickly, the cold breeze clutching at their stained skirts and pulling at their heavy bags. But the wind carried more than discomfort. Carys stopped and held out a hand to stay her sister. “Footsteps,” she whispered, feeling fear rise around her like the fog from the River.

“They’re running,” mouthed Eirian.

“To be taken in if not properly housed by next evening.” “’Ouse where they works you.” “You’ll be moved on when the Runners come.” “Wermin!” The approaching footsteps bounced clearly off the high brick walls.

Carys suppressed a sob, and turned. They ran back down Brewery and turned onto Orchard, arms aching and knees battered by the suitcase and trunk.

“Carys!” cried Eirian, pointing. Ahead on their left, the grey buildings fell away, leaving a decrepit plank fence. Behind it, bare branches straggled up into the night sky. “An orchard!” she said, and surged towards an inviting gap in the boards.

“I am quite sure that wasn’t here,” Carys gasped, but followed. They pushed the trunk and carpetbag past protesting slats, and grubbed in after them themselves.

They stood at the edge of a vast orchard. Moon and starlight diffused throughout the clouds overhead, and drifted down to earth in a pale uniform glow. Ahead of them, the lines of trees diverged, straight and infinite. Eirian walked a bit to one side, and different lines opened up, just as long and unchanging. She shuddered.

Carys looked around. “Come back!” she hissed, and Eirian wandered back. “This orchard is a great deal larger than it looked, dear. We mustn’t lose this spot, for who knows where else the fence may let us through?”

This seemed like good sense, and the two girls excavated great armfuls of dead, crisp leaves, leaving a dark, bare stripe of loam which pointed to the gap in the fence. Now they were even grubbier than before. Sighing, Carys scrubbed a bit at Eirian’s little face, and retied the ’draggled ribbons of her bonnet. They had spare aprons in their luggage, but those could wait ’til morning, since sleeping in an orchard was unlikely to be a clean experience!

They walked a few feet into the trees, and sat down on the thickly fallen leaves. Around them, the grey trunks stood in ranks, silent save for the far-away clicks of branch upon branch in some unfelt wind.

“Carys? Isn’t it March?” said Eirian, staring at the web of twigs above.

“Yes.”

“Shouldn’t the leaves be soil, and the boughs be in bud?”

Carys sighed. “We are a long way from home, dear. I scarcely know in which direction the sun sets here.” And the girls, nestling into each other’s arms on their crackling bed, shut their eyes and went to sleep.

Eirian dreamt that she was back on the Alcyone, belowdecks, lurched back and forth in the senseless tussle of the waves before she gained her sealegs (or, as she had called it, her ‘seahead’.) The black deckboards blurred and grabbed at her stocking feet; it was dark water and she was going to drown, pressed in by the blackness. She woke up to Carys’s screams. They were drowning, in a morass of dark, twining arms.

The Grey City XIV

The Grey City XII

2006-03-15T17:25:49+00:00

The Grey City I
The Grey City II
The Grey City III
The Grey City IV
The Grey City V
The Grey City VI
The Grey City VII
The Grey City VIII
The Grey City IX
The Grey City X
The Grey City XI

People were coming and going on the street ahead of them — they seemed furtive, as those in the street they had just left did, but these were all men. On the corner, Carys saw another boy. This one was dressed not in stenciled sackcloth, but in a bedraggled velvet suit, one that might once have belonged to a little lord in an old painting, spilling long curls over a now-vanished ruff. The back of his bowler, now towards the sisters, was enlivened by the tops of two peacock plumes, staring.

As they came closer, Carys saw that the curious figure was leaning on an umbrella, not a broom as he had supposed. “I beg your pardon,” said she, and was surprised to see a wrinkled face turn to her. The old man was tiny, his entire person, toe to plumes, stretching only a foot higher than Carys did herself.

“Yeeeeesh?” he said, with a grin clearly wood-grained.

Carys stuttered, but Eirian stepped in. “Sir, we were hoping you might be able to help us find our way.”

“Way? Mishter Shneadle findsh many thingsh for many people, little duchesshesh.” Far from being ashamed of his false teeth and the resultant whistling in his speech, he seemed to flaunt it. “But he requiresh shpeshificationsh.”

“Well, I had a full address, but it’s lost now,” said Carys. “Hardock Street?”

“Ah! In the Shouthdownsh. What’sh your businessh there?”

Carys was discomfited, but Eirian answered — she rather liked the funny little man. “We’ve an aunt and uncle waiting for us. Or, at least, they would be waiting for us had the letter been sent before Mother died. But we’ve an aunt and an uncle, at any rate.”

“Have you really?” said Shneadle, or Sneadle, his voice half insinuating and half wistful. His eyes, blue in their swaddling of wrinkles, watered slightly. Carys twitched her sister’s little hand in annoyance, and nodded to the little man, trying to force certainty into her gaze.

Just then, a woman came out from the flaking gilt doorway nearest to Sneadle’s, or Shneadle’s, corner. She was sturdy and quite tall, with black hair and more than a bit of painted color — purple above her stern eyes, red on her cheeks and lips, and a swath of white across her broad bosom, above tight ruffles of lurid magenta. “Wotchoo got there, Sneadle?” she called.

“Nothing, ma’am, nothing at all. Leashtwaysh, jusht shome little girlsh ashking directionsh.”

“Little girls?” said the giantess with interest, peering appraisingly down at the two. They squirmed closer together.

“Yesh,” he responded, and threw a quick glance at Carys, his eyes rolling like a cornered animal’s. “But…they’re messhengersh! Losht their way, dontcha know, but urgently exshpected at both endsh.”

A sooty brow shot up, but the homunculus held his wooden smile taut. The woman snorted. “Send them on their way, then, Shneadle, and stop wasting your time and our money.” She turned away.

Something relaxed in the very air, and Shneadle’s (or Sneadle’s) grin suddenly seemed genuine, for all its wood grain.

“Right, my prinshesshesh. Run Shouth along thish shtreet, which ish Threadneedle — no, better head Wesht first. Wesht to Button Shtreet, and avoid Threadneedle all together.” He looked over his shoulder at the gilt door. “Turn left on Button, there, then walk for almosht a mile, turn right on Orchard, left on Brew’ry, left at Posht Alley, and Hardock will, ash they shay, preshent itshelf.”

The girls nodded solemnly, and backed away from Threadneedle and the strange little man, who winked at them furiously for as long as they could tell, before a man in a long coat slunk up to him, also, it seemed, for directions; and the girls turned onto Button Street, disappearing from his sight.

The Grey City XIII