Grizelda

by Margaret Taylor

  “I can’t see,” she said.

  “Here!” Tunya threw her lantern-stick at the cell door. Grizelda was just able to get the top part of her hand between the bars and flick the lantern inside.

  She took it up and held it in her hand. It was silver, and engraved with a swirled design almost too small to see. Something behind those tiny panes of glass produced a steady, almost unnaturally bright green light, but she couldn’t tell what it was. Something of the ratriders’ own kind of sorcery?

  It took her several tries to figure out a way to hold the lantern so that she could have both her hands free for the jacket and the thread. Eventually she ended up clenching it between her teeth. Now to business. First, she picked out all the old, crooked stitching. Then holding the thing close to her face, she made tiny, straight stitches to bring the two edges of the seam together and pulled it tight. Not to be outdone, she went on to sew the little bones on more firmly. It was clear that Kricker had been the one to attach them in the first place, and many of them were getting dangerously wobbly.

  “Done.” She held the jacket out on the tip of her finger.

  “Wow, thanks.” Kricker took the jacket and admired it almost reverently. He examined the stitching on the sleeve and tugged on the bones. Then he put it on and smoothed it down self-consciously.

  “Are you quite done admiring yourself?” said Tunya.

  Kricker glared at her.

  “Can we let her out now?” Geddy said. “I think the poor girl’s paid us plenty.”

  Tunya threw up her hands. “Oh, whatever.”

  This time, Kricker did not give the ground a backward glance when he scurried up the bar of her cell door. He reached his hand up inside the lock. After a moment’s fumbling around, he smiled.

  “Oh, this is an easy one.” A few seconds later, there was a click.

  Grizelda gave Kricker time to climb back down and back away, then she pulled back the cell door and stepped outside. That was it. She’d gotten out so fast it was almost silly.

  Yes, but what are you going to do now? she thought. Walk straight out of Promontory? Even if she got out of the fort, which was crawling with gendarmes, she still had a 20-foot high wall to cross and the river Sarny. It was impossible. It was stupid. She’d gotten out of her cell, but she hadn’t a single clue where she would go next.

  The ratriders seemed to have come to the same conclusion.

  “What do we do with her?” Geddy said.

  “You know what? I give up.” Tunya threw up her hands. “You got us into this mess, you figure out what to do with her. Do you even realize how much trouble we’re in?”

  “What about the drainage channel?” said Kricker.

  “Okay, right,” said Geddy. “There is this- this kind of secret exit from the city, it’s not guarded by any of the checkpoints. It’s attached to the catacombs. We could guide you to it, and you could get out of the city.”

  Out of the city… The thought boggled her. She’d never been outside Lonnes before. “But how am I going to get to it?”

  “There are holes in the bottom of Promontory,” the ratrider said. “Sometimes we use them as a shortcut.”

  Grizelda knew the longer she stood out in the hall, the greater her danger was. She had to leave, and soon. But before she went anywhere, there was something she had to do.

  She knelt on the stone flags so that her face was more on a level with the little people.

  “Ratriders. Or whatever you are. Thank you. I owe you so much.”

  The ratriders shifted and looked a little sheepish, but soon Kricker broke the silence by running off and leaping onto his rat.

  “Come this way!”

  The other two presently mounted their own rats and followed him, and Grizelda walked along behind on foot. They went to the stairway and started going down. Grizelda felt uncomfortable leaving the other prisoners behind, but it didn’t seem there was anything she could do. They were strange people, these ratriders, who would save a life for the sake of a mended jacket. She wasn’t sure that they would do it again.

  Down and down they went. The darkness enclosed them, pressing in on their little bubble of green light like a tangible thing. These cells were vacant, cold and silent. It was like walking into a tomb. The further down they went, the stranger their geometry got. Weird bends in the floor plans, slanting walls, cell blocks so short she felt she could reach out and touch the other side. Finally Geddy called a halt.

  They moved out from the stairway until they got to one of those walled-off places that interrupted the sequence of cells. It was like a blot of nailed-up boards, not put up with any symmetry, or put up any time in the recent past, either. Time and moisture had rotted the boards entirely through. It didn’t make any sense.

  “But why are there holes?” She felt she had to whisper, in this eerie place. “Why are there holes in Promontory?”

  “This wasn’t part of the old fort,” Geddy said. “This rock used to belong to the goblins, and a lot of the old tunnels still go through the area.”

  Goblins? Just the word gave her chills. She had always known, in the abstract, that there were goblins living under the city of Lonnes. They did a lot of the people’s industrial work for them. But the thought of actually meeting one of those slimy, twisted…

  Tunya’s smile was ironic, but not entirely unkind. “Where did you think you got those pretty shoe buckles from, girl?”

  “That’s why you have to be absolutely silent,” Geddy said. “We have to go through their land to get to the exit.”

  Grizelda nodded, not sure that she could trust herself to speak.

  Lieutenant Calding left the warden’s office highly displeased. He took his anger out in speed, walking down the hall at a pace that was more like a jog, thinking furiously. A subordinate brushed past him going the other way, and in his distracted state, he almost let him pass. Then he thought better of it and caught him by the shoulder.

  “Go fetch the prisoner in 403.”

  Caught by surprise, the man inarticulately pointed the way he had been going. Probably meaning that he was on some errand.

  “Whatever you were doing, I’ll take care of it. Go fetch the prisoner. I want to talk to her some more.”

  The man nodded, and Calding released him to scurry off and do as he was bid. Then he sank back into thought and walked on.

  In an old storeroom deep in the goblin city, Mechanic Lenk was working. Not the work that kept him dashing all over the city from morning till night trying to keep the Union’s ailing machines in something resembling repair. This was his own work.

  He shut the door of the storeroom behind him, thankful finally to have two minutes of spare time to rub together. He’d converted the room specifically to be his workshop. He’d put the acid up in pans and jars, anything he could find, really, and set each carefully labeled mixture on the shelf. The zinc and the copper were stored against the wall. There were a couple of half-made batteries in the back as well as a finished one that worked tolerably well, his power supply.

  He brushed a tangle of bits and coils of wire on his work table aside and set to puttering on his experiment. The table was a mess, and it had its share of scorch marks, but at either end there was order. Inside a metal frame bolted to the wood there were wires coiled around cylinders and a pedal that went up and down. The Mechanic moved around the table, humming to himself, and occasionally winding a wire around its lead.

  When all was arranged to his satisfaction, he thought he’d try hooking it up to the power supply. The effect was immediate. The experiment made a loud cracking noise and threw off a shower of incandescent sparks across the room. Lenk rushed to shut it off, covering his face with the webs of his hand.

  Slowly the sparking subsided. When the table was cool enough again to approach, Lenk surveyed the damage. He found he had another scorch mark to add to the collection, and some of his wires had gotten so hot they’d fused together. A little further searching brought him to the source of the p
roblem. The leads on the receiver had lost all their insulation. Or rather been stripped of it. With tools.

  Wearily Lenk sat back in a chair he had stashed in a corner for just such occasions. He should have known it. Ratriders again.

  Chapter 4

  Geddy slipped through a triangular gap in the place where the boards met the floor and beckoned Grizelda to follow. She knelt and, experimentally tugging on a board, found that it was rotten enough to come away easily. With only a little effort, she cleared a space big enough to get through.

  She was immediately aware of a change in the air once she got to the other side. The air in the cellblocks was cold, but this air was ancient. It smelled of dust and disuse. Now that there were living creatures in the chamber, the air moved sluggishly, as if out of practice. And speaking of dust– To steady herself as she was crawling through the hole in the boards, Grizelda had put her hand down on the floor. She discovered that there was a layer of gooey black tar over everything, a quarter of an inch thick.

  She scrambled to her feet as quickly as possible, but she couldn’t help getting it onto her clothes a little, and the gunk on her hand didn’t wipe off easily. If the tunnels of Promontory had been too high to have been built by human hands, these ones were too low. When she stood, the ceiling just scraped her head. She could imagine the sort of crooked beings that must have scurried back and forth in this tunnel back when it was used.

  They walked on down the passage, and as they went, she passed her hand over strange carvings cut into the wall. There were ceiling-high frescoes that told the story of the goblins in their glory days: teams of goblins hewing out the tunnels, holding feasts in their vast underground chambers, trading gemstones with tall, spindly figures that must have been humans. The pictures were accompanied by blocks of goblinish script that she couldn’t understand.

  These tunnels must have once been part of a manufacturing plant. They passed great lifeless rooms that in their day were busy with heat and noise, now silent. Great corpses of machines stood open, uncovered, like they had been abandoned in a hurry. In some rooms they’d been dashed to their sides by some powerful torrent. And everywhere there was that thin layer of grime on the floor. What had happened here?

  At length Geddy broke the silence. “I wondered if I might… See, I’ve never had the chance to talk to an ogre face-to-face before…”

  Kricker and Tunya exchanged knowing glances.

  Ogre. This wasn’t the first time she’d heard a ratrider use that word, and she couldn’t understand why. “What do you mean, ogre?”

  “You. Topside people. The Auk slaves.”

  “I’m not an–” Grizelda began, then thought better of it. “What do you want to ask?”

  He looked very serious. “Could you explain to me the concept of the birthday party?”

  The ridiculousness of the question almost made her laugh, even in this cheerless place. She suppressed it out of concern for the poor fellow’s feelings. “What?”

  “Birthday parties. Why do you have birthday parties?” he pressed with a sort of scientific earnestness.

  “But why do you want to know about birthday parties?”

  “I’m-” He looked down. “I’m writing this book. About the ogre habits and customs.” He got over his embarrassment and warmed up to the topic. “I spend almost every night in your library. I kind of– knock the books out of the shelves, though I can’t really put them back again. I like your histories the best, like Romeo and Juliet.”

  “Wait, wait.” Grizelda’s head was spinning. “Romeo and Juliet’s not a history. It’s made up.”

  “Who the heck put something made up in the library?”

  “Geddy, there’s parts of a library that have histories and science and things, and there’s other parts that have made up stories.”

  “That would explain an awful lot,” he said, crestfallen.

  “Look, I’m sorry, I hope I didn’t...”

  “No, I’m learning so much.” He tried to put on a cheerier countenance. “Birthday parties, though, did I get that part right? I read that you people don’t like knowing that you’re getting older...”

  Now that he brought it up, the whole birthday party thing did strike her as odd. “I … don’t really know why we have birthday parties. Just another excuse to have a party, I guess…”

  While they were talking, Kricker had left the group and rode on ahead. But at this juncture he came riding back. “We can’t go this way. It’s flooded.”

  That caused them a great deal of inconvenience, as they had to double back and find some other way. Every way they turned, they seemed to be blocked by a flooded tunnel or a cave-in. Several times, there were spaces the ratriders could have gone through, but were too small for her. They had had to turn away and try somewhere else. And as they wandered, they drifted farther and farther from their path.

  Grizelda began to grow alarmed when she realized that their route was starting to tend downward. That couldn’t be right, could it? They should be going upwards if they were going to be coming out at the surface. The air was growing warmer and thicker, and the very character of the tunnels started to change. These tunnels were newer, smoother cut, and they did not have carving on the walls.

  Then it hit her that these tunnels weren’t abandoned. Goblins actually lived here. Lord, what if they actually ran into one of the twisted creatures? She’d heard horror stories about them, about how they were sun-shunning, human-hating. She did her best to hide her fear from the ratriders, though, and let them guide her on.

  When they started to hear a faint clanging in the distance, nobody could deny that something was wrong.

  “There’s a live manufacturing floor down there,” Geddy said.

  They stopped, at an impasse. The heat here was perceptible. Hot, dry air flowed into their faces from somewhere up ahead.

  Tunya had been following the others along morosely, but now that they were stuck, she spoke. “We have to go back and find some other way. Geddy, I told you we shouldn’t have done this.”

  “There isn’t some other way!” said Kricker. “They’re all either flooded or caved in. Why do you think we’ve been wandering all over the place?”

  “All right.” Geddy looked like he was coming to a decision. “Kricker, go ahead and see what it looks like.”

  Kricker rode out, and came back in a few minutes. “We’re in luck. There’s sort of this walk running along the top of the wall.”

  So they went forward again, but now they stopped and waited at every corner, watching for goblins. Goblins! Grizelda was getting a sick feeling to her stomach at the thought of them. She swallowed, refusing to let these ratriders who were her guides see she was afraid.

  When they passed the final turn and came upon the work floor, a blast of heat hit Grizelda with enough force to make her reel. There was the walkway Kricker had promised up ahead, a frail-looking thing winding along the cave wall, lit an infernal red from below. From this distance she could sense rather than see the great chasm that opened up beneath it, full of lumbering manufacturing machines and blast furnaces being run by slimy… She put the thought out of her mind. If they hurried, and the goblins didn’t look up, they wouldn’t notice one small figure and three tiny ones passing over their heads.

  The other side looked desperately far away.

  One by one, the ratriders scurried across the walkway. Each time, Grizelda held her breath, but each time, they made it. Nothing bad happened.

  Pretty soon Grizelda was the only one left. The ratriders waved for her to come across, but at the last moment her feet seemed to have turned into lead. A crazy thought came into her mind then. She could go back the way they’d come. The web of tunnels was complex; surely there was some way out that the ratriders had missed. Just turn and run away.

  But that was crazy.

  She steeled herself and stepped out onto the walkway. Okay. She tried another step, and found she could do it. In that way, though it was achingly slow, sh
e started to make progress across the cavern.

  Then, about halfway across, she looked down.

  The goblins swarmed about the manufacturing floor like ants. They poured molten iron and hauled huge sheets of metal, their crooked spindly limbs straining. They were twisted, with unnaturally tiny bodies and huge feet and limbs that didn’t bend in quite the right ways. The light of the many fires shone off their skin with a liquid sheen. Grizelda couldn’t move. Her breath started coming ragged, uncontrollable. Goblins. So many goblins.

  Geddy’s voice broke in on her with an urgent hiss. “They’re going to see you!”

  Grizelda shook her head slowly, transfixed. It was like a dream, the way she was vividly aware of every detail but totally unable to act. She only watched as a goblin pointed up at her, stumbled back a few steps and punched a red plate in the wall.

  “Too late!” Kricker yelled.

  The alarm seared through the air like a hot poker, tearing Grizelda out of her spell. She had to move, now. The work floor was all in a tumult, the goblins pointing and crawling all over themselves to get a better look. Some of them were streaming up a couple of staircases in the back of the room, and she had no doubt but that they knew some way to get from there to where she was.

  She looked both ways, trying to decide whether to go back the way they’d come or go forward. Then she did a double take. The ratriders had vanished! What– But she had no time to worry about them now. With the alarm blaring in her ears and running out of time, she chose to run forward.

  Either she made the wrong choice or the goblins had her surrounded, because she didn’t get far before she heard their footsteps coming up the hall in front of her. They would be on her in not very long. Turning back would just take her back to the work floor.