Grizelda

by Margaret Taylor

  It was night. The field was lit blindingly by electric lights, so bright they drowned out the lights of the city around them. The station seemed to hang alone in a void. The ratriders were all in position, hiding out in cracks and crevices with the Undergrounders and nearer to the scene of the action, too, in places too small to conceal any human. Some of the more enterprising ones were mounted on Laricia’s bats already.

  “You ready, Griz?” Stevry whispered.

  She nodded and shifted position, trying to get more comfortable. As she moved her eye was caught by an insignia embossed into the metal on the underside of the car. A simplified drawing of a hammer, a scroll, and a sword, encircled by the words, INDUSTRY, SCHOLARSHIP, UNITY. Goblin made, of course. All their industrial goods were goblin-made. If the goblins really did go through with some sort of a boycott, it would be a disaster–

  “It’s coming! Everybody get ready!”

  That was Geddy, perched somewhere up on top of the car where she could hear him but not see him. Grizelda tensed, straining her eyes at the space just beyond the reach of the electric lights. Beside her, Stevry did the same. The train was hard to see, black metal against the night. They saw its smoke column first, then reflections off of its metal, gleamings in the dark. Finally the whole train pulled into view, coming into the station.

  The supply train had come, right on schedule. Just like Geddy had predicted. Would they really be able to pull this off?

  “Okay, we’re going to go in and break the engine,” Geddy said.

  The ratriders in all their various hiding places wriggled in preparation. One of the bat-mounted ones was eager; he dove from his place on the station roof toward the engine before the others.

  There was a strange, muffled noise, then the underside of the engine shattered outward. A split second later, before she could even register what was happening, the noise changed into a boom. Then images, fragments – the lone bat beating a hasty retreat ahead of the shockwave, a door flying through the air. Stevry pulled Grizelda back. They crouched under the car, covering their ears, as pieces of metal rained into the siding above them.

  Finally the noise subsided. Shakily, Grizelda crawled forward to look. Gendarmes were running to the ruined engine from everywhere, shouting orders to each other, helping a startled engineer out of the cab. The train had just exploded. That didn’t make sense. That wasn’t supposed to happen.

  She twisted her head around so she was looking up the side of the car.

  “Did the ratriders do that?” she called up to Geddy.

  “No!”

  The electric lights blinked off. Plunged into this sudden darkness, Grizelda couldn’t see anything but light-dazzles. This wasn’t part of the plan either. She could still hear the gendarmes working below. As her vision cleared, she could just make them out: dark shapes moving in silhouette against the city lights. The ratrider lights blinked out – they must have covered them, so the gendarmes wouldn’t see.

  “Let’s go!” Stevry had scrambled out from under the car and was tugging her forward. She resisted him.

  “No. The ratriders didn’t do that. Something’s wrong. It’s like somebody sabotaged the station,” she said.

  “I don’t know how it happened. Let’s just get the stuff while we can!”

  Lieutenant Calding walked at an unhurried pace down a quiet street nearby, heading away from the train station. He twirled a pair of wire cutters in one hand. Even from here, the commotion at the station was quite audible. His mouth twitched, the closest to a smile he was going to get. It was far enough away now. He tossed the cutters into a garbage can with a negligent motion. Then he stripped off the insulating gloves and threw those away, too.

  Chapter 21

  “Mr. Paxon, I didn’t expect you so–”

  Mr. Paxon, the inspector from the Committees of Public Safety, had barreled into Mant’s office without so much as a by-your-leave.

  “That’s not the point,” Paxon cried. “The point is that there was an atrocity last night!”

  What now? Paxon wasn’t supposed to be here; Promontory had passed the Committees’ inspection, hadn’t it?

  “Not another gendarme–” Mant began.

  “No, a whole train!”

  A whole train got assassinated? Mant had no idea what the inspector could mean. Trying to maintain some sort of control over the situation, he got up and stood in front of his desk, eye to eye with the red-faced Paxon.

  After too much time had passed and Mant still had not made an intelligent reply, Paxon threw up his hands. “Good God, man, haven’t you heard the news?”

  Mant shook his head.

  “A bomb gone off in the government supply train. Loss of power to the whole station, and under cover of darkness, the thing was looted. This wasn’t just some ragtag band of pamphlet-pushers. This was organized. Maybe they have ties to the military.” His gaze turned inward, and he started to pace, tapping his lip distractedly.

  For a few moments, Mant was speechless. He watched the inspector pace until he could put together a sentence.

  “Sir, my organization will do everything in its power to help–”

  Paxon looked at him. “You don’t understand, do you? You’re finished, Mant. You’re over. Those gendarmes at the station, they did nothing to stop it. They didn’t stop the mob. They lost track of a prisoner!”

  “I’m fired, then,” Mant said a little stiffly.

  “The higher-ups in the Committees decided we needed a more militant warden to cope with the situation.”

  Somebody who was good at his job. Somebody … efficient. Somebody who wanted to use torture on little girls.

  “I can imagine who,” Mant said.

  Before Paxon had had time to decipher this remark, the secretary, Bavar, stood up.

  “He’s a good warden! I’ve worked under him these last five years–”

  Mant and Paxon looked at Bavar in surprise. They’d both forgotten the bookish little man was there.

  Paxon fixed Bavar with an icy look. “Nobody asked you.”

  “Don’t, Lars.” Mant gestured for Bavar to sit down. “I’ll go.” He started pulling open the drawers, getting his things. “If Lieutenant Calding wants this job, he can have it. This place is going to pieces. I don’t want any part of it anymore.”

  Laundryman Crome steeled himself for what he was about to do next, squared his shoulders, smoothed down the two or three wispy hairs on the top of his head. With his good arm he rapped on the door of the Chairman’s office. When a muffled welcome came from within, he entered and shut the door behind him.

  “Chairman Grendel,” he said, with a dip of the head.

  The Chairman was reading, but at Crome’s entrance he set down his paper. Then he pulled off his reading glasses and folded them up with a snap in one hand. It was gesture Crome remembered from their school days.

  “Hello, Crome. Please, sit down.”

  Crome did. Carefully he set both arms down on the Chairman’s desk, his good one, and, with a little effort, his twisted one, too. He took a breath.

  “I want you to turn the girl in.”

  The Chairman looked at him. “And have you just come to this conclusion overnight?”

  “No, I’ve been … thinking about it for a long time.”

  “My decision stands, Crome. I won’t send an innocent girl into the likes of that ogre government.”

  “Oh, innocent!” He couldn’t help letting his voice take on an ironic twang. “I’ve been keeping track of her comings and goings from the laundry, see. She disappears in the afternoons. Doesn’t drag herself back until hours after lights out, when she thinks I’m asleep. What do you think she’s doing? Socializing?”

  “She’s not required to account for her time to you,” the Chairman said.

  “One time I spotted her coming into a Proletarian Theater meeting, but I didn’t see her leave. She must have snuck out during the play.”

  “Considering the quality of Badambal’s plays, I
can hardly blame her.”

  Crome sagged. “Grendel, why?”

  “I might ask you why you’re so determined to turn her in after you volunteered to take her.”

  “I only did that because I owe you, you know that!” Crome clutched his withered arm in his anger. “Nelin’s trouncing you. The girl is helping.”

  “I know,” said the Chairman.

  “Then why don’t you do something about it, for God’s sake?”

  “What would you have me do?” A little heat crept into the Chairman’s voice for the first time.

  “Turn in the girl! Demand higher prices from the ogres. Something!”

  “You know very well what would happen if we tried that. They’d cut off our supplies and let us starve to death.” He very deliberately put his glasses back on his nose and picked up his paper. “No, I’ll issue a public statement next week. That’s all.”

  But the Laundryman did not leave.

  “You used to be such a firebrand, Grendel. Remember, at the People’s School?”

  “I was as young and as foolish as Nelin back then.” He was still calm, but he did not look up from his paper.

  “But you spoke of liberty, economic justice. Don’t they have a place anymore?”

  “I have a people to take care of now, Crome.”

  “Does that really change anything? That you ended up Chairman of the People’s Goblin Union of Lonnes and I ended up a laundry operator?”

  “Yes, it has!” The Chairman crumpled his paper into a ball and stood up.

  For some time, Crome just stood there, breathing hard, looking at him. Then he tore off his red armband and threw it at him.

  When Grizelda finally came home that night, she dragged herself up the laundry stairs and threw herself onto her mattress without a backward glance. She didn’t think she moved all night. She woke up sore all over, so stiff she could hardly move. She stumbled like a shambler creature as she tried to make up her bed, wincing with every movement.

  The train incident had been such a blatant act of theft. She wasn’t even sure it had been bloodless. Was that really the conductor she’d seen the gendarmes helping out of the wreckage, or just wishful thinking? And the strange events that had surrounded the whole affair had her deeply worried. Somebody else had been there, somebody who was not the Underground.

  She was covered head to foot with a thin layer of grime. Furtively she washed her face and hands in the little washroom at the end of the hall, doing her best not to wake Crome. She managed to get most of it off, but her dress was still a mess. As she had no other to change into, she would just have to deal with it.

  At the head of the stairs she discovered she shouldn’t have bothered to keep so quiet. The Laundryman was already awake and puttering around on the production floor. He gave a start when he saw her; he turned around so his right side was facing away from her. Hiding something. She’d seen that gesture before.

  “Where has your band gone?” she said.

  “What are you doing up so early?”

  “No.” First she’d lost Mechanic Lenk, now Crome, too. She started descending the stairs. Everything was playing out like a bad dream; she couldn’t stop now even if she tried.

  “Why don’t you answer my question?” said Crome.

  She was supposed to be intimidated. That was the way the game worked with the Laundryman, he would throw her a scowl, and she was supposed to back off and go back to work, do what she was supposed to do. But she had just been up half the night hauling boxes in the dark. She’d endured mad dashes and whispered directions, long waits cramped in a boxcar to evade the gendarmes, and the bad times when somebody fell and she did not know if they were going to get back up. No, this time she was going to be angry.

  “Where is it?” she repeated.

  “I threw the bloody thing away!” He spoke too fast, too high, eager to get the words over with.

  “All right, why?”

  “Because Grendel’s a filthy ogre-lover!”

  It was like a slap. To call the Chairman names, the Chairman who seemed to be the only decent goblin left around here–

  “Don’t you dare talk about the Chairman like that!” she shouted. “He saved my life!” Her vision blurred and she gripped the banister tightly.

  “God, girl, do you think you’re the only one?”

  “What?”

  The Laundryman’s face twisted horribly. “Can you believe that Grendel and I were both young once? We went to school together and then we worked in the mines together. It was our first time in the river section. When the accident happened and all the water came rushing into the shaft, I lost it entirely. Managed to get this pinned between a car and the wall.” He thrust his ruined arm out at her. “Everybody else panicked and ran for it. Grendel was such a stripling of a Mechanic, I don’t know how he did it, but somehow he tore me loose and dragged me out of there. The tunnels were so badly damaged that we sold them to the ogres to build a prison in.”

  He stopped, as if too tired to go on. This could not possibly be happening.

  “The Chairman saved your life?” It was the only thing she could say.

  The Laundryman seemed to sag, to shrink. “And this morning I was so furious at him I threw my band at him. Damn it, I owe him. I’ve always tried to pay him back. But this time he’s just gone too far!” He cupped his face in his remaining good hand and was still. He was no longer a goblin but a noiseless statue, a pile of bones.

  All of Crome’s vitriol, all his tyranny on the work floor, they had been hard to take. But to lose the ability to hate him … it was too much for Grizelda to think about. She fled, stumbling back up the stairs.

  Calding, Warden Calding, threw open the doors of the officers’ mess hall with an expansive double-armed shove. They slammed against the wall with a satisfying crash. That fool of a new lieutenant Whatshisname winced and the officers inside all stared at him like startled rabbits. He could get used to this.

  He strode down the center aisle of the hall to the podium. “I called this general meeting to introduce myself as Promontory’s new warden. Consider me introduced. You all know that the police force has been having difficulties these past few weeks. Incredible breaches of security, hostility from the people, even rumors of missing prisoners. All that is going to change.”

  He scanned their faces, looking each officer in the eyes in turn. Yes. Some of them were good. Some of them would have to go. Those ones that were still petrified, still looking at him like he had just smacked them. If they couldn’t even handle a dramatic entrance, how could they be effective leaders of the gendarmerie? He would be doing a lot of sorting in the next few months. Efficiency. Finally.

  “This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you not to worry. That it’s an honor to be following in my predecessor’s footsteps and nothing … substantive will be changing in the operation of this prison. It isn’t true.” He leaned forward. “Warden Mant was fired for being an incompetent jackass. Do not expect the same from me. Expect to get your sorry behinds cleaned up, straightened out, and kicked into gear as I clean up the mess he left!”

  He paused to let their horror sink in.

  “Dismissed.”

  He spun on his heel and walked out the way he came.

  Around midmorning Geddy showed up in her room. Grizelda was sitting cross-legged on the mattress, feeling miserable. He was about the last person she wanted to see right now, but he showed up anyway. One moment there was nothing, then the next time she looked he was sitting there on a paint can.

  “Oh, hi, Geddy,” she said without much pleasure. She scooted around on the mattress so she was not quite facing him.

  “I wanted to know how things were going at work,” he said.

  “Why should something be wrong at work?”

  “Because you’re not there.”

  She couldn’t escape that point. She sighed. “It’s the thing with the train last night. I hadn’t bargained on so much stealing.”

  �
��That’s not everything.”

  Why did he have to be so insightful? He folded his arms and gave her a stern, for-your-own-good look. She looked back at him and refused to say anything more.

  “All right, don’t tell me. I came for something else, too. The day after tomorrow night there’s going to be a pixie ring. Ratriders don’t usually let anybody in from the outside, but they decided you can come. And you can bring a guest. I thought it would take your mind off things.”

  “But that’s the night before the big breakout!”

  “Exactly. Everything’s coming together. This’ll help you relax.” Then when he saw the look on her face, “Go on, Griz.”

  She tried not to grimace. “I’ll think about it.”

  Chapter 22

  Grizelda did finally go back to work, but there were subtle changes in the way she went about it now. She no longer apologized when something jammed, and the next morning she took her time about setting up. What did she care about keeping in line with the goblins anymore? They were all against her, anyway.

  Crome didn’t say anything about her new attitude. Probably he didn’t dare.

  Work took up a lot of her time, but she still found that the waiting for the breakout was getting intolerable. She wasn’t sure if having the ratriders’ party to look forward to helped or made it worse. The Undergrounders had had their final meeting the night before, going over their homemade maps of the tunnels under Lonnes and ironing out last-minute details of distribution of prisoners, supplies, and Laricia’s fliers. They all seemed really excited about it, but she hadn’t been enjoying the work quite as much since the train incident. Something was wrong with the plan, but she didn’t know what.

  When the evening bell rang, there were still three hours to go before she was expected to show up at the ratriders’ grotto. She wandered the streets of the goblin city for a while. The shrinking number of Loyalist bands she found everywhere she went was so distressing that eventually she gave up and went back to the laundry. She went up to her room, pulled the ream of blue paper out of its hiding place, and started to fold.