Grizelda

by Margaret Taylor

  At least nobody else knew a prisoner was missing. Yet. He’d have to hurry.

  Mant scooped up the report and stood up from his desk. It was time to go check the archives.

  Mant didn’t like sneaking around to get to the archives, but he felt that he had to. He tried to tell himself that he had nothing to worry about. It was a perfectly normal thing for the warden of a prison to go looking in his own archives. If anybody saw him, they wouldn’t think something was wrong. Still, he didn’t want anybody to see him.

  Fortunately, he didn’t run into anybody on his way down. Once he got to the place, down in the bowels of the fort, he slipped inside and closed the door. He looked with sinking heart at the jumble of papers and cabinets before him. Sure, within each set of budget records and interrogation reports the papers were alphabetized, but none of the drawers showed what kind of documents they contained.

  What he was looking for was the arrest records, the ones they filled out at the front desk for each prisoner that entered the building. Those gave the names of the arresting officers, who were usually the same officers to take the prisoner down into the cells. After a few guesses, he found them. Fortunately the page for 20 November was still near the top.

  With typical Promontory inefficiency, the arrest records didn’t include prisoner names. But there were only a couple of entries that might have fit. Half the arrests that day were for assault, and most of them were made much too late in the day. This Grizelda probably came in just before dawn.

  One of the entries was a clear strongest candidate. Humphries and Lemond, for spying, 6:30 a.m.

  He had something to work on there. He was about to leave when something struck him and he went to look for the girl’s denunciation.

  There had to be a denunciation on file, of course. She had to have a citizen testify against her before they could get the warrant to arrest her in the first place. It wasn’t going to help him find out how she had escaped, but that note written in the margin of her interrogation report continued to bother him. The denunciation might shed some light on exactly what the girl had done.

  After some searching around he found the right drawer, all right. But as soon as he pulled it out he groaned. The denunciations were all out of order and half of them were missing.

  Early the next morning the Chairman summoned Mechanic Lenk into his office. Once the mechanic had shut the door and taken off his coat, Chairman Grendel wasted no time in speaking.

  “I will be straightforward, Mechanic. Have you considered my proposal that you run in the election?”

  Lenk grimaced and avoided meeting the Chairman’s eyes. “Look, we’ve discussed this before…”

  “Well? What’s your answer?”

  Lenk didn’t reply. He had suddenly taken a keen interest in the pattern of the floor tiles. Not the election conversation again.

  “The people like you,” the Chairman persisted.

  “I know. That’s what you told me last time.”

  Lenk didn’t understand the Chairman. He thought the world of him, but he didn’t understand him. Years ago, why had he plucked Lenk, mild-mannered Lenk, out of the People’s School and groomed him for the Chairmancy? He didn’t want it. He’d never wanted office. He just wanted to invent things.

  “The circumstances have changed somewhat since last time,” the Chairman was saying. “Now the ogre child’s involved.”

  Lenk looked up suddenly. “You don’t really think she’s going to change the outcome of–” When he saw the Chairman’s expression, he looked away again. “Good Lord, you do.”

  “You’re the best shot at keeping the Miner out of office now. I’m too old.”

  “I can’t.”

  The Chairman slammed his hand down, sending one of his pens skittering away. “Damn it, why?”

  “I’m not a politician, I’m a scientist. I don’t care if mechanics become Chairmen, I want to stay Mechanic!”

  There was a pause. “It’s not because you have any sympathies with the Miner…”

  Lenk winced, his silence a confirmation. He didn’t want this sort of attention.

  The Chairman said quietly, “What would you have me do?”

  “Fight back against the ogre merchants, like Nelin suggests. Do something. They’re strangling us.”

  The Chairman was silent for a long while. “Thirty-three years I’ve had this post and I’ve never been seriously contested.” He shook his head. “Maybe a young goblin could start a war with the ogres. I just can’t get my mind past the casualties anymore. You spoke just now of things you just can’t do. I’m too old, Mechanic.”

  “You picked the wrong successor, Chairman,” he said. “I just can’t do it.”

  Grendel’s look turned cold. “Then we shall agree to be mutually disappointed in each other.” He turned away, leaving Lenk to find the way out by himself.

  Life got better for Grizelda after that miserable first day. The next morning she woke up on time. On stepping outside, the goblins were just as hostile to her as ever, but she was beginning to learn how to deal with that. In the cafeteria she knew that it was best not to make eye contact, not to make faces, nor to stay too long in one place. She made a point to glide along at a pace that repelled conflict like water off a rain jacket. She was practicing the art of making herself invisible.

  She reported to work in plenty of time. She laid out her salt ring perfectly, and once she was done, she took care to step over it every time she passed in and out. She’d like to see Crome find a way to criticize her this time.

  The sewing machine and Grizelda seemed to have worked out a grudging peace, and after a while, she fell into a working rhythm. Take the piece of clothing out of the bin and flop it on the table, flip it inside out, and bring the sides of the tear together under the needle. The pleasure of doing work well was almost like being at the shop again. For a while she imagined that she was back, that the roar of the machinery was the chatter of women, and the gnarled, green workers around her were Elisabet and Grace, and the mistress, Miss Hesslehamer.

  She felt a fresh pang of homesickness and guilt, and wondered yet again whether her stupidity with the paper had gotten any of the others thrown into prison. There was no way to get news down here, and the not knowing was terrible.

  She tried to force herself to stop fretting about the shop by keeping half an eye on the many comings-and-goings of the laundry. Everything around her was activity. The workers loaded clothes in and out of tubs; they wheeled back and forth carts of powdered soap. They ran clothes through dangerous-looking rollers that looked eager to snap off any finger that got too close. They hung clothes in front of banks of fans in hopes that they might dry in the steamy atmosphere.

  There was a clank from somewhere nearby, and Grizelda saw a worker stumble, rubbing his head. He’d obviously hit it on one of the many haphazard pipes that ran through the room. One of his coworkers laughed and clapped him on the back. He shook himself and went back to work. None of the goblins seemed to notice that when he fell, the worker had trodden on his salt ring. Grizelda noticed, though.

  Should she tell? What if she got in trouble? Grizelda abandoned even the pretense of working at her sewing machine and watched intently. For a while work went on normally. The goblin who had tripped hauled up buckets of damp, soapy clothes and dumped them into a rinser vat. This rinser vat had a lid as big as he was that he had to lift up every time to dump in the clothes. He lifted it up, shook out his bucket, then…

  Quack!

  The sound was as unexpected to Grizelda as it was to everybody else. Instead of falling down with a clang, the rinser lid fell down with a quack. As far as she could tell, only the rinser workers in the area had heard it. They started talking quickly to each other and pointing to the rinser in question. The news spread, and soon most of the goblins in the room had left off work to have a look at the cursed rinser. Grizelda leaned out from behind her sewing machine to get a better view.

  All of a sudden Crome was among t
hem, pushing through the crowd with a bosslike attitude. “What’s the matter here?”

  The worker who had started it all, Grizelda noticed, was nowhere to be seen. The other rinser operators all started pointing at the machine and talking over each other, each of them sure he was the one who had the story straight.

  Crome silenced them. He strode up to the rinser and lifted the lid with a little difficulty. Nothing happened. But when he let it fall, it quacked again.

  His eyes flicked to the floor.

  “All right, who scuffed the salt ring?”

  He turned around and swept the room with a suspicious glare. He lingered over each face in turn, trying to pick out some sign of guilt.

  Quack!

  Grizelda giggled. She couldn’t help it. She had to cover her hands with her mouth and turn away out of fear for her job, but it was still funny. Crome opened and shut the lid several times in an unsuccessful effort to get the thing to stop quacking, then getting increasingly angry, he growled and kicked it. It quacked again.

  Just when Crome had given up in disgust and was beginning to turn away, the lid burst open of its own accord, catching him on the upper lip. He yowled and leapt away maybe three or four feet. Grizelda was crouched behind the sewing machine with her knuckles in her mouth, laughing so hard that she was sure Crome was going to see her. That look on his face when the machine whacked him was precious.

  “I’ve had it with those damned ratriders! I’m telling a foreman!”

  The laundryman stormed out of the room like a hurricane, leaving a stunned silence behind him.

  When Crome had left, it was as if a weight had lifted from the air. The mood on the work floor became almost cheerful. The other workers talked to each other while they worked in a way they had never done before. Grizelda was affected, too. Without Crome watching over her shoulder all the time, she felt defter, less stupid. She plucked up the torn clothes and ran them through the machine so swiftly that she found herself waiting for the other workers instead of the other way around. She’d also come to a decision.

  That quacking rinser lid had to have been ratriders. It was all good fun, but it was also wrong, this sabotaging the machines like Mechanic Lenk was talking about. She was going to have to go find those ratriders and talk to them.

  The instant the work bell rang, she threw the last of her work in a drawer and got up. She followed the tide of laundry workers as they streamed out into the street and went their separate ways. She started walking.

  She wasn’t quite sure what she was going to do next. She had a vague idea that she might try talking to the ratriders that flitted around in the goblin city. As usual, they were dashing in and out of sight in the spaces between the rooftops and the cave ceiling. Here one moment, they were gone the next, having slipped through a chink in the wall or ducked behind a facade. She kept walking until she happened to catch sight of one.

  “Hell–”

  The word died on her lips. The ratrider had vanished in a flash of color before she’d even started to speak.

  The same thing happened on her second try. This wasn’t going to be as easy as it looked.

  She decided to change her tactic. There was one of those typical apartment-like buildings on the corner where the traffic of ratriders seemed to concentrate, like a thoroughfare of sorts. After checking that none of the goblins around were watching her, she crossed the street and walked up to the foot of the building. She craned her head back so she could see the second story, where most of them were.

  “Excuse me, ratriders!” she shouted up to them.

  Maybe they’d heard her, and maybe they hadn’t. There seemed to be a slowing in the blur of color, as if collectively she’d disturbed them and they were pausing to listen. Still, it wasn’t quite what she wanted.

  “Hold still so I can talk to you!”

  Finally one of the ratriders stopped. He sat astride his rat like a warrior, its bridle richly decorated with red beads and hawk feathers. He wore a crest of red hedgehog bristles. He looked down at her imperiously.

  “What is it?”

  She hadn’t planned ahead of time what she was going to say. The ratrider’s crest twitched slightly while he waited.

  “Ratrider, do you know where I can find someone called Geddy?” she said. “Or Tunya or Kricker? I need to talk to them.”

  “Follow me!” His rat leapt away across the rooftop.

  Grizelda had to run after the two of them immediately to keep up. They were a fluid, red and fast thing; ratrider and rat were one. They leapt across gaps between buildings, dodged obstacles, making skittering sounds on the stone as the rat’s claws found purchase. Grizelda was afraid to run too fast for fear of drawing the goblins’ attention. Several times the ratrider had to stop and wait for her, radiating impatience.

  He took her out towards the city edge, the run-down part of abandoned buildings where Lenk had invited her to tea the day before. She had no idea where he was going; she only hoped this wasn’t going to end like the last time ratriders had offered to give her directions. Abruptly the ratrider changed direction; he drew her down a road she had never seen before. The caves here were different. They weren’t organized into boulevards like the goblin city or even hewn smooth like the abandoned mine tunnels. Instead they had been left almost the same way as when goblins first settled here hundreds of years ago: the caves wandered as if cut out by water, narrowing and widening without any regard to order. The floor was bumpy, so Grizelda found she had to watch her feet carefully as she went. Here and there great stalagmites rose out of the floor, reaching so high they touched the ceiling and made columns.

  Maybe this had been a bad idea. But she couldn’t afford to turn back now; she wasn’t sure she could find her way back out of the caves without her guide.

  The rooms that they left behind them did not go dark when the light from the ratrider’s lantern was gone. Instead they still shone dimly in that same greenish color. Curious, Grizelda looked at the cave walls a little closer. There was fungus growing on them. Its glow was hardly visible when the room was lit up. But when she cupped her hands over it, there it was, faint but definite.

  They came to a place so narrow that Grizelda could only pass through it sideways. Even then, it was a struggle. She inched along, getting her elbows and knees scraped up in the process. Then her guide ran on ahead and disappeared around a corner. She had a moment of panic as she was plunged into darkness. Her mind filled with images of being trapped here forever and starving to death.

  But she could still see.

  As her eyes adjusted she realized she was not in total darkness but a twilight. There was the faint glow of the cave fungus, yes, but most of the light was coming from the bodice pocket of her dress. Confused, she reached in her hand.

  Tunya’s lantern stick. She must have forgotten to give it back to her after she’d escaped from the cell. She pulled it out and held it up. All at once the tunnel was illuminated again. Now she could see that she was not really stuck, it was just a tight fit. If she sucked in her breath and pushed harder…

  She came free and stumbled out into the ratriders’ cavern. Like the rest of the caves here, it had been carved out by a little gush of water that had been diverted from the Sarny somehow and driven deep underground. The stream fell from somewhere around the ceiling into a swift running channel that looped around, then darted back into the earth again.

  The ratriders had built their own miniature city around this little river. The houses crusted the walls like barnacles, all connected to each other by a spider’s web of rope bridges so thick there was hardly any place for her to stand up straight. Over generations, the ratriders had brought down things from the surface and used them to build up their homes. Little bits of cardboard and tin siding, tree branches, greeting cards. Silverware. Every way she looked she was faced with achingly familiar objects from the world of her home.

  Every house had one of those green ratrider lights by its front door so that the river sp
arkled with thousands of reflections. In general cheeriness the city was the polar opposite of the goblins’ home.

  Grizelda found herself struggling to remember what she’d come here for. It was about something bad.

  Meanwhile, news must have gotten around that she was here. The ratriders came running out of their houses and crowding onto the rope bridges to get a look at her. They were jostling each other so badly and leaning so far out to get a better look that she was afraid somebody was going to fall.

  “It’s the sewer girl!” they cried.

  “The girl who sews! From the promontory!”

  Everybody looked delighted to see her, even though she didn’t really remember having met any of them before. Everybody, that was, except for Tunya, whose dandelion-puff of hair stood out easily from the crowd. Tunya glared up at her defiantly, arms folded. Geddy and Kricker were also there.

  Grizelda realized there was another ratrider who did not look all that thrilled to see her. She was a black-haired woman, sitting cross-legged on a rock ledge in the back. Neither excited nor filled with hatred, she merely surveyed Grizelda coolly. She was dressed in what looked like … aviation gear?

  Grizelda shook herself. She was here for a purpose, to talk to the ratriders about the goblins’ machines. Sure, they were cute, but it was all just an act, remember? She wouldn’t let it distract her a second time. As she stepped forward, one of the ratriders waved at her, trying to get her attention.

  “Hey, sewer girl!”

  “Listen.” Not sure who she was supposed to talk to, she directed herself to Geddy. “Did you do something with the machine that started quacking in the laundry today?”

  But it was impossible to get anything resembling a private conversation in the town of the ratriders. As soon as she’d finished, they all started offering their input so liberally that Geddy couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

  “Did you like it?”

  “It was Kricker’s idea!”

  “We made a fool of the laundry goblin for you! It was great. He was just standing there, and then wham!” One of them swung his fist in the air and spun around gleefully.