Graeme Talboys - Stealing Into Winter

With a sigh, she stepped away, pulling the blanket round her shoulders. The sighing sound continued, even after she had expelled the air from her lungs. Became a rushing whistle. That grew louder.

Swearing in the dust-filled darkness, spitting more grit, and counting more bruises, Jeniche clambered out from under fresh debris. Something sharp snagged on her tunic and she pulled herself free. Dazed again, it was several long moments before she noticed that it was brighter. That the door to her cell hung at a crazy angle from just one hinge.

Once she noticed, she did not hesitate. The gap was small, but she was used to that. Head first, twisting part way and leaving the blanket behind, she squirmed out into the room beyond and was back on her feet in an instant. Wiping grit from her soles with a quick flick of her fingertips, she moved across the stone floor to the entrance to the corridor and peered into the dust-filled gloom. At the far end, lantern held high, a prison guard approached with a corner of his keffiyeh held across his mouth and nose. She dodged back, wondering if she could get past him.

Instinct made her go for height and she climbed on the table where the guards placed the food before pushing it through the feeding slots. Crouching ready to leap, she heard another loud crash and, as she fell, was astonished to see the guard expelled from the corridor into the room.

He hit the wall hard, his lantern crashing to the floor. The flame guttered, dust in the oil. From the floor, Jeniche watched the guard for a moment, but he was either unconscious or dead. Nothing she could do.

‘Keys.’

The hoarse voice came from the cell where those large, pale hands once more gripped the bars.

‘Get his keys and let me out.’

Jeniche was many things. A thief mostly. With standards. A liar when needed. Sometimes she was unlucky. This was, after all, a prison that was collapsing around her ears. And she was young. But stupid, she was not. And there was no way she was going to release the evil hulk on the other side of that locked door – a psychopathic rapist due for public execution.

She made a rude gesture in his direction before retrieving the keys from the unmoving body of the guard. A stream of lurid insults and threats poured from the darkness of the cell and the door rattled loudly. Jeniche retrieved her blanket, wrapped it round her shoulders, told the rapist in explicit and colourful terms what he could do to himself in the confines of his firmly locked cell, and stepped toward the corridor and freedom.

Freedom was not forthcoming. Instead, there was another loud crash and more debris poured into the space. Jeniche felt the floor tilt and fell, rolling against a wall hard enough to knock the breath from her lungs. She lay gasping for air that was saturated with stale dust, wanting to scream with frustration and fear.

Silence settled as the air began to clear. And in the darkness, she could see a pale, shimmering speck. Blinking, she looked again through more tears. A patch of different darkness. Filled with stars.

With hurried movements, she began pulling the bits of shattered brick and broken wood off her legs, wiggling her toes to check that nothing was badly damaged. Everything seemed to be working, but her left foot was trapped at the ankle. She leaned forward, feeling into the rubble and finding what must be the remains of the table, pinned firmly by large lumps of masonry that lay just out of reach.

A tear rolled free and she made herself calm down, scenting the night air as it reached tentative fingers of freshness into the fusty interior. Distant voices, shouting; other sounds she could not identify wove a picture of chaos. If she could only free her foot…

Shuffling forward, she began to work again at moving the wreckage. Swift movements, quiet so as to avoid attracting anyone’s attention. Her foot moved. If she could just twist it to the left, she thought, or maybe bend her knee, just so. And as she contorted herself, feeling freedom edge closer, there came a grating noise from behind her, followed by an enormous metallic crash.

A dark shape loomed between Jeniche and the patch of starry sky. She pulled again at her foot as the escaped rapist leaned in close.

‘So, I can go fuck myself, can I?’

A seemingly endless silence followed in which Jeniche saw the anger on his face turn to puzzlement and then an evil sneer. She looked down and realized she had lost the blanket again and that her tunic was gaping open, revealing far too much.

‘How about,’ grunted the hoarse voice, close to her face, ‘I fuck you, instead.’

A hand groped its way to her leg.

Her own hands clawed at the stony rubbish as the broken table was pulled from her trapped foot and she was dragged across the floor. Sour, urgent breath hissed into her face and she saw his pale, ravenous face in front of hers as her fingers gripped something sharp. Her feet were trapped again as he sat on her legs. Hands fumbled with her tunic.

Frustration, anger, fear, and a blind desire to hurt powered the swing of her arm. He saw it coming and moved his head back. He didn’t move quickly enough. The torn metal base of the guard’s lantern caught his nose and ripped it from his face.

Jeniche could hear him screaming as she scrambled up the loose scree of brickwork and stone toward the patch of sky. She could hear him screaming above the shouts that were louder now she was outside. Even when she climbed stone stairs up out of the courtyard and found herself on a flat roof, she could hear his howling. But the immediate and very personal threat he posed faded as she looked around and saw the city of Makamba on fire.

For long, precious moments she ran from edge to edge of the roof, turning, looking, and trying to understand. In the darkness above her, things she could not see whistled past and tore into buildings in the Citadel and beyond, throwing debris in all directions. Arrows trailing flame arced in the night, finding dirt and oblivion, awnings and wood piles, jars of oil, flesh.

All through the Citadel, across the docks, up along the great ridge of the Old City, and beyond to richer enclaves, buildings burned. Flames leapt and roared, casting angry light into the dark parts of the city. And everywhere she looked, people ran; shouting, crying, and brandishing buckets and weapons.

Arrows fell with a clatter onto the roof where she stood, waking her from the distant nightmare. Wasting no more time, she ran and leapt the narrow gap between buildings onto a shallow-pitched pantile roof. The clay tiles clattered beneath her bare feet as she went up over the ridge and down the other side, her eyes trying to make sense of the unfamiliar roofscape as flame-shadows danced.

Running along the edge of the roof, she looked down to the ground three floors below. The only way out of the Citadel was through one of the gates, and she knew she needed to get there quickly. There had been a lot of people down on the river front, pouring off barges. She doubted they were ships’ crew.

At the corner of the building was a buttress. Without stopping to think about how narrow it was, she slipped over the side and shinned down, rolling into a small pool of shadow when she hit the ground, a yelp of pain bitten off behind tight clenched lips.

In the chaos, she took a moment to massage her stubbed toes and survey the scene. The Citadel did not have a complex layout, but it was haphazard, having evolved from the original, walled trading settlement. With all the confusion and the need to look as if she belonged, she hobbled across to a main path where a bucket chain had been formed. As one bucket passed, she slipped across, grabbed another that had been dropped and headed toward the small customs house; found herself being jostled toward the main gate just as she had hoped.