Grizelda

by Margaret Taylor

  “Keeps the ratriders out. There’s still enough of the fey in them that they can’t stand the stuff.”

  Ratriders? Crome resumed climbing the stairs, and Grizelda resignedly followed him. The stairs were metal, oxidized with the moisture, and spiraled all the way into the ceiling. Crome seemed to have warmed to his subject, because he kept on talking, not looking back to see if she was listening. She was listening, very closely.

  “They sabotage our machines just for fun, you know. Buggers would steal your nose off if you didn’t keep an eye on it.”

  So, the ratriders didn’t limit themselves to unsuspecting young seamstresses. No wonder the goblins wanted to keep them out.

  On the second floor of the laundry there was a hall that wouldn’t have been cramped for a goblin, but it was for her. She had to duck slightly to go along and felt that her elbows were constantly in danger of scraping the walls. Some of the doors hung open and through them she caught glimpses of an office and a room that must be where Laundryman Crome lived.

  Crome led her into a little triangular space like an attic that was obviously being used for storage. There was a strange collection of junk in there: old shelves, rags and broken washer tubes, empty containers. Whenever a part from the laundry outlived its usefulness, it seemed, it was dragged up here to die. For some reason there were a full-length mirror and a wagon wheel in the corner. And the paint was peeling.

  “This is where you’ll sleep. I’ll have a mattress brought up.”

  Then he just left her. No ceremony, no goodbyes, nothing. Part of her was relieved to see him gone, but part of her– Slowly she sank down, not even caring about the layer of dust on the floor. Oh, how she missed Elisabet and Miss Hesslehamer. She was alone, all alone, in a city of goblins who hated her. This was all the ratriders’ fault.

  A slow drip from somewhere above had leaked down the wall and spilled across the stairs, making Calding’s going slippery and treacherous. Each wet step shone in his lantern’s light. He held the lantern close to him and cursed. Damn leak from the river.

  This little investigation into the Warden’s strange behavior required some discretion, he knew. He had not bothered to inform anybody he was going into the cell blocks and he had timed it so that he would not be likely to run into anybody on the way down, either. He kept quiet and kept his lantern half-shuttered, too.

  He counted blocks until he got to the fourth one. There, at the bottom of the stairs, he stopped. There was nothing out of the ordinary here. He stepped forward, reading off the engraved plates in front of the cells as he went. It didn’t take him long to find 403. That gray-haired one’s cell.

  There was nothing wrong with it. He found the door was unlocked when he tried it, and there was no sign of any force. No bent metal, no blast marks or strange residues that should have been left if she really were a sorceress. It was merely empty.

  Then he realized that the cell block was not silent. There was a sound, like a rising wind in a pile of leaves, but it was in fact a chorus of many soft, papery voices. It was coming from everywhere.

  He turned all around, trying to find its source. “Who are you?”

  She’s gone– the voices said. She’s gone – he’s going to keep this hushed up – she got away…

  It was the prisoners themselves who were speaking. He’d never seen them so agitated before. They moved about in their cells, speaking to each other and pointing out at him. He didn’t like the way they were looking at him.

  He pushed the thought aside and strode up to the nearest cell with all the command he could muster. The person inside was of indeterminate age, but he guessed it was female.

  “Tell me what happened here,” he demanded.

  The woman looked up. She was old, surely. She wore a ragged dress in the Royalist style, a headscarf over natty rolls of hair that spilled down her shoulders. He tried not to think of hedge witches.

  She gave him a strange look that he couldn’t read. “The girl got away. You won’t be seeing her any more.”

  All right then, so they wouldn’t give him a straight answer. He turned away in disgust and started going back up the stairs. When he was about halfway back to the fort an agreeable thought occurred to him. What he had learned here could be useful.

  Chapter 7

  Grizelda was awoken the next morning by a voice coming from somewhere around her nose.

  “Hey, are you awake?”

  She rolled over. The feel of these sheets was unfamiliar, not at all like her bed at Miss Hesslehamer’s shop. And that man’s voice – what was he doing here? Men were never allowed upstairs. She opened her eyes slowly, trying to focus.

  All at once she knew exactly where she was and she definitely recognized that voice.

  “Why can’t you people leave me alone?”

  She shot to her feet, tangling her ankles up in the sheets in the process, which forced her to sit back down again awkwardly. She grabbed the pillow up in her fist and scanned the room for that ratrider. Where was he?

  Geddy had leapt out of the way at her explosion of covers and now he was hiding behind the leg of a dresser with the other two ratriders.

  “Haven’t you done enough damage already?” she asked him.

  “We just wanted to see how you were getting on.”

  She fished around behind her for her shoe. She considered throwing it at him, but in her current condition, she knew she would miss by a mile. Instead she started stuffing it on her foot, not looking up at him.

  “Not very well, thank you very much.”

  Tunya huffed. “Well, that’s a warm welcome. I told you, Geddy.”

  “Listen, have the goblins been talking to you? They’re lying. They just don’t like us.”

  “Not likely,” Grizelda said. She found her other shoe and started stuffing it on. “You led me to the goblin lair and then you left me. I think you should just not come talking to me anymore, okay? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go eat breakfast.”

  She wiggled her shoe into place and stood up. She blinked. The ratriders had vanished.

  Once she was dressed, she scuffled down the stairs to the work floor. She hadn’t realized how late it was; a couple of early workers were already lounging around down there. Ducking her head to avoid their notice, she quickened her pace to the door.

  The air outside was colder than before, some sort of equivalent of morning in these caves. It smelled of motor oil. The damp beaded up on her arms and caught in the back of her throat. Not too far away, a goblin was sweeping the street. When he saw her come out, he gave her an evil look. He packed up his broom and crossed to the other side.

  And a good morning to you, too, she though.

  The first thing she had to do was figure out where goblins ate breakfast. Did they have houses, with kitchens? She hadn’t seen any kitchen up in the laundry, and Crome wasn’t there to ask. Did they eat bugs they harvested off the cave walls? Or, a terrible thought struck her, what if goblins didn’t eat at all? What if they didn’t realize human beings needed to eat and they expected her to work down here with nothing at all? She pushed the idea out of her mind and decided to try the square, where the mechanic had taken her yesterday. The place was crowded, so there would at least be somebody to ask.

  But finding somebody to ask was easier said than done. Whenever she approached a group of goblins, they treated her as worse than invisible. The nice ones turned up their noses at her and went the other direction. Sometimes she got threats. What she didn’t get were directions.

  There were flashes of color streaking across the upper parts of the buildings over the goblin’s heads. They were like the hazy tail-end part of a flame, not quite there, and always wavering. When she tried to look at one closer, she was surprised to find a pair of bright eyes staring back at her. It was a ratrider, not one that she knew. At once it jabbed its rat and rode away again.

  Whenever they held still long enough, they looked like they were wearing the contents of a magpie’s nest: bu
ttons, bits of shell and feathers, shiny beads from broken necklaces. They peeped out of windows and from behind cornices to watch her. Whenever she got close, their rats took them quickly out of sight.

  Grizelda wandered as far as the square without getting any help. It was a lot less crowded now than the last time she’d been here. Without all the goblins around, she realized just how prominent the statue in the middle was. It was made of a darker stone than the flags around it, a snag in the otherwise smooth lines of the square. She drifted closer. Three figures stood with their backs together on a pedestal. The first one was industriously hammering away at a rock; the second held up an axe in a warlike gesture. The third held a piece of paper. There was writing around the base.

  INDUSTRY, SCHOLARSHIP, UNITY.

  As she was reading this, her eye was caught by a bustle of movement at one of the square’s borders. A lot of goblins were coming in and out of one particular building that didn’t look very different from its neighbors. They were mostly coming out at this point, putting on their hats and hurrying off to their various jobs around the city. It seemed as good a place to try as any.

  She crossed the square and went inside. It was a large room, low-ceilinged and stuffy. A clatter of silverware filled the air. A lot of goblins were lined up against one wall with bowls in their hands, waiting for somebody behind the window to serve them something. Bingo! This must be where the goblins got their food.

  She took a bowl off the rack and got into line. Rows and rows of stone benches filled the room; goblins sat on them with their bowls, some of them in clumps, some alone. One of them was walking up and down the rows, making some sort of impassioned speech that involved lots of arm-waving. She realized with an unpleasant feeling that it was Miner Nelin. She turned her head and tried to make herself small.

  When it came to her turn in line she handed her bowl to the goblin behind the window. He snatched it from her with a growl, filled it and handed it back, along with two biscuits. She stared down at it.

  “What, not good enough for you?” He put a claw on his hip.

  “It’s just … this is normal food. This is bean soup.” She couldn’t lift her eyes from it. She addressed herself more to the soup than to the server.

  “Did you expect us to grow our own in this pit? No, we have to buy your ogre food. And at a high price it is, too.” When she didn’t move, he made a menacing gesture with his claw. “Go on! Shoo!”

  She hurried away to find herself a bench, head down. If she could just avoid attracting Nelin’s notice long enough to get a seat in the corner, she might be able to stuff her soup and get out of there without a confrontation. But she had no such luck. In her hurry to get to a seat, she bumped into a goblin going the other way.

  “Hey, watch where you’re going, Ogreface!”

  The remark was loud enough to make heads turn clear across the room. Nelin stopped mid-sentence and pivoted on his heel. Grizelda froze in the middle of the aisle.

  “So, the oppressor has arrived at last,” he said.

  She was too terrified to speak. She stared at him a long moment. Then she picked out an empty table in the corner, behind him. Very slowly, she started to move.

  “Hey, what are you doing? Just walking away?”

  On either side, the goblins leered at her. She kept on going.

  Nelin took his case to the other goblins. “Look at her! She’s just walking away!”

  She was not quite sure if doing nothing was going to work. If Nelin wanted to try something violent, she wasn’t sure that the other goblins would stop them. They looked willing to try something violent themselves. When she passed him, he just started gesticulating at her.

  “Goblins, this is the sort of thing we’re up against. Privelege. She lives off the fruit of our labors. Those shoe buckles were manufactured with goblins’ sweat. Then the Republic’s merchants, with their unfair prices…”

  She sat down at the table in the corner. It looked like Nelin was just going to keep making his speech, so she started eating her soup. It had gone cold, but by that point she didn’t care. She ate it quickly and used the biscuits to swab every last bit out of the bottom.

  She dumped her bowl in a bin with a clatter and left the cafeteria at a very undignified pace, almost a dead run. She swore she could feel dozens of eyes watching her as she left.

  Grizelda had barely made it back to the workroom when the work whistle blew. She bent over, catching her breath. Crome looked at her askance. She looked away. This was not a good way to start her first day of work.

  In a dozen places around the room, the workers took up their salt dishes and started laying rings of salt around their work areas. She was the only one among them not at her station yet. She picked her way through them to get to her sewing machine, feeling conspicuous.

  She picked up her saltcellar and looked at it. Well, here went nothing. She laid the salt thickly in a double ring around the sewing machine. She’d let the ratriders try and get through that one.

  Then she surveyed the sewing machine. She had not been very confident about it to begin with, and this morning it seemed more intimidating than ever. There was a panel of controls where the foot pedal was supposed to be! Maybe it was powered by electricity or something, she didn’t know. When she crouched down to get a closer look at it she couldn’t make any sense out of the goblin symbols on the panel. She tried pushing some buttons at random to see what would happen.

  That had an effect, anyway. The machine started. Then a little while later it stopped, then it started again. It seemed to be starting and stopping whenever it felt like it, regardless of what buttons she pushed. Meanwhile the laundry workers brought their torn clothes to her and set them in a basket by her side. She started running them under the machine’s needle. The clothes were coming awfully fast, faster than she could keep up with. All the while a cloud of steam built up in the room, making everything she touched tacky. She sewed as fast as she could, but the pile of waiting clothes was getting larger by the minute.

  “Hey, Grizzy!”

  She stiffened. She didn’t even want to look, but she forced herself to lift her eyes to the top of the machine. Sure enough, there was the one called Kricker sitting cross-legged on a lever.

  She looked behind her. There were some workers in a direct line of sight who might notice if she caused any sort of disturbance, so she lowered her head and pretended to keep on working.

  “How did you get here?” she said in a furious whisper.

  “See for yourself.” Kricker pointed behind her.

  She turned around. There was her salt ring, scuffed into oblivion by her own clumsy heels, making all those trips back and forth to the basket.

  She snatched a shirt from the pile and threaded it under the needle.

  “I thought I told you to leave me alone.”

  “Look, we weren’t tricking you, honest. There really is a secret exit. We can break you out of here tonight.”

  “I don’t want to hear it!” She grabbed the saltcellar and raised it like a weapon. She wasn’t quite sure what she was going to do with it. Then something else happened that made the decision moot.

  There was a loud blam! blam! from the direction of the sewing machine. Unattended, the shirt had gotten gummed up in it. The needle chewed hopelessly at this tangle of fabric and buttons, laboring to rise and fall. It made a final choking sound, then fell still, hissing softly.

  All at once Crome was vaulting over baskets of clothes to get to her end of the room.

  “What the hell happened here?”

  “Laundryman, it wasn’t me, it was the–” Grizelda started to point. Then she sagged. The ratrider had vanished on her again.

  Crome marched up to her and the machine. Bracing his foot against the side, he tugged on the shirt with his good arm. A piece of it tore off in his hand. She winced. “Goddamn it!” he said, flinging the piece away, “I can’t entrust you with the simplest job–”

  The other workers were beginning
to stare. He turned around and gave them a malevolent look. When nobody moved, he said, “Well, go on! Somebody get the mechanic.”

  One goblin politely detached himself from the group and jogged out the door. The other goblins shook themselves and pretended to go back to work, but, Grizelda noticed, most of the time they were sneaking glances back at her and the laundryman.

  Crome turned back to Grizelda. “As for you,” he said, “go stand over there where you can’t do any more harm.” He pointed at the wall.

  She bit her lip, then walked in the direction he pointed. The room was silent apart from the humming of machinery. She stood with her back against the wall, fists clenched tight, feeling the tears hot in her eyes. She’d screwed it up. That was fast. She’d screwed it all up just like she’d screwed it up when she got herself caught at the dressmaker’s.

  She stood like that for what seemed like a long time. In time the laundry started up again around her. Cautiously at first the goblins resumed their tasks, afraid the same fate would fall on them if they jammed up their own work. Then they started to work more confidently. Before too long the laundry was roaring at full speed again.

  Just when Grizelda was beginning to wonder if she would be required to stand there for the rest of the day, there was a burst of activity at the laundry door. One goblin bounded inside like a small flurry, pushing aside a couple of workers who happened to be in his way. He was already talking and pushing up his sleeves without bothering to give Crome so much as a nod.

  “This had better be good, Laundryman. There’s a combine down in E and two coal washers and the generator’s acting funny again. We could have a powerout any moment. Is that it?” Mechanic Lenk pointed at the ruined sewing machine.

  Grizelda made a strangled noise. The mechanic didn’t notice her, though. As soon as Crome nodded, he strode towards the sewing machine, still talking a mile a minute.