Grizelda

by Margaret Taylor

  “The thing is, I don’t have any extra time to spare on you. Yes, clothes are important and all, but do you understand how much work it takes to keep anything running around here?”

  He gave the situation a quick scan. “You’re lucky. It looks like I can fix this quick.”

  He threw down his toolbox, rummaged around inside it, and selected an awl. He tried a variety of angles around the machine, sighting along the tool like a pool cue, finding the best way to pry the gnarl of shirt free. Then he looked up.

  “Laundryman! What’s the matter with the girl? She looks about ready to pass out.”

  Did she really look that bad? She pressed the back of her hand against her cheek and tried to guess her color. It probably wasn’t very good. What a disgrace. She wished she could just hide and not let these goblins remark over her like she was a zoo animal.

  “It was her fault,” Crome said.

  Lenk gave him a look, but didn’t say anything. Instead he wedged the awl between the shirt and the machine and levered it down. With a lot of prying in this fashion and the help of some scissors, he managed to get the shirt free. By that point it was not a shirt anymore; it was a tangle of shreds. He handed the tatters to Crome.

  He gave it a look as if he had just been handed a cow pile. More out of politeness than anything else he managed a terse “Thank you for your work, Mechanic,” then he turned away in search of an appropriate wastebasket.

  Grizelda and Lenk were left alone together. As soon as he was sure Crome’s eyes were off of them, he set down his awl and put a hand on her shoulder.

  “You’re Grizelda, right?” he said.

  She nodded.

  “You look terrible.”

  She made a smile that was not exactly happy. “I’m afraid I do. It wasn’t my fault about the shirt, honest.”

  Lenk checked over his shoulder. The coast was still clear. “Look, when work’s over, how would you like to come have a cup of tea? I think you could use it.”

  Tea? Something normal. She could use that more than anything else in the world.

  “I think I would like that very much,” she said.

  “Seamstress Grizelda, you may resume your work.” That was Crome’s voice, in a warning tone.

  Lenk gave her a hurried set of directions to his home, then he had to leave, grabbing up his toolkit and flying out the door as fast as he had come. Grizelda returned to her work.

  Chapter 8

  Nothing else disastrous happened for the rest of the day. Though Grizelda still didn’t understand a thing about how the sewing machine operated, she managed to struggle along. Finally, some time in the afternoon, the second whistle blew. The day was over. She guessed the goblins had these precious few hours in the evenings to do with what they wanted.

  She folded up the last of her clothes and left the building as fast as she could. Outside, the air was still damp and machine-smelling. She started walking, taking care to avoid eye contact with the goblins this time. What was the matter with them, anyway? They seemed to hate her just because she was human. She kept her head down and moved quickly.

  Even so, it took her a while to find the address. The directions Lenk had given her led her to an older part of town, where most of the buildings were abandoned. It had seemed to her, with the little she knew of the city, that there were plenty of normal places for the goblins to live, nice, respectable apartment-like things. But Lenk had chosen to make his home on the first floor of an abandoned factory. When she finally found it, she stood a while just outside the gate, looking at it doubtfully. He had told her in their hurried conference on the work floor that he lived there for the peace and quiet. But it was so old. The factory sagged like an old coat that had seen better days. The walls were cracked and it looked like part of the roof in the back was caved in. She went up to the door anyway, and when she knocked, Mechanic Lenk must have been waiting for her, because he opened the door right away.

  He welcomed her into a room that had once been a manufacturing floor. Everything of value had long ago been stripped from it, leaving only the bare concrete. One end, back in the shadows, showed signs of a jumble of wreckage from the collapsed roof. The other end had been colonized by Lenk. There was a table and bed, some handmade shelves, and a sink, spared somehow from the stripping that had gone on everywhere else. There was a stove set up, with some copper wires leading out of its back to another room. He had done his best to cheer up the place, but she still didn’t see why anybody would want to live here.

  Lenk started by apologizing for the lack of chairs. He disappeared into the other room for a few minutes, leaving her to wait, then came back with a big armchair that he pushed up to the table. He invited Grizelda to sit down, then went to go get his kettle.

  “They do allow some private property around here, thank goodness,” he said.

  As for private property, Lenk seemed to have a little. There was a handful of books on the shelves, maps tacked up to the walls, a half-polished gear and its greasing cloth left lying on the table. There was also a teacup on the table, with a dark liquid inside. She picked it up and sniffed it.

  At that moment Lenk turned around and saw her. With a look of terror, he made frantic motions for her to stop. She lowered the cup, confused.

  “That’s battery acid!”

  Grizelda jerked the cup down onto the table, fast. Lenk took it gingerly and set it on the shelf.

  “If you see anything weird lying around in a cup down here, please, don’t touch it!”

  “But why do you leave battery acid lying around in a teacup?” she said.

  “That’s only when I’m trying a new formulation. Hold on.” He scraped something out of the kettle and set it aside. Then he filled the kettle with water from the tap and set it on the stove. Once the water was safely heating, he continued.

  “I don’t have enough actual jars for the acid,” he said. “I scrounge around for whatever I can find, pots, pans…”

  “And teacups,” Grizelda added.

  “They’re small, they’re good for holding samples. I’m sorry. I usually keep them in the workroom, I just got careless this time…”

  “I didn’t drink it,” she said.

  Lenk came around and sat down on the edge of the bed. “Your first day of work didn’t go very well.” It was a statement, not a question.

  Grizelda nodded. “The goblins all hate me and I don’t know why. Well, not you, and probably not the Chairman, but…” She shook her head. “I can see it every time I go outside. I don’t understand. I walked in on you and everything, but that can’t have been enough, for the sort of looks they give me…”

  Lenk put up a hand to gently stop her. “We can talk about that, but that’s not exactly what I meant. What I meant was the ratrider that caused the incident with your sewing machine this morning.”

  Grizelda bit her lip in guilty surprise, as if he had caught her doing something wrong. “How did you know it was a ratrider?”

  Instead of answering, he got up and checked the kettle. It wasn’t ready. He stayed at the stove anyway, facing away from her, while he spoke.

  “I suspect, Grizelda– I don’t know, but I suspect that the ratriders also had something to do with your showing up on our doorstep the other day. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” he added quickly.

  Good, Grizelda thought.

  “It has to do with the way ratriders are. You wouldn’t have had any experience with them. They conceal themselves when they go above the surface.”

  He sat back down. “One of the reasons I invited you here was to offer you a little friendly advice. Ratriders are fey; they don’t feel the way goblin beings – or human beings – do. When they make mischief, either they don’t understand or they don’t care that it hurts us. It’s their sick idea of fun to sabotage our machines and lead travelers astray. So my advice to you is that whenever you have the choice, avoid the company of these ratriders. They may say they’re helping you but they never are.�
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  His little speech was interrupted when the kettle started squealing. “Ah! The water’s ready.”

  Lenk got up and busied himself at the stove, allowing Grizelda to feel sheepish in a little privacy. Secret exit from the city? How could she have been so stupid? It had been the stupidity of someone who was desperate, that was what.

  After Lenk took the kettle off the heat, he took the lump of stuff he’d scraped out before and spooned it back in. Grizelda realized that the lump, an oily greenish mass, was actually tea leaves. She opened her mouth, closed it, then pretended not to notice what she’d seen.

  They’d never reused tea leaves at the shop, even when times were at their hardest.

  Lenk brought the cups back to the table, and Grizelda took hers, feeling highly uncomfortable. She couldn’t think of anything to say that didn’t have to do with ratriders or reusing tea leaves. She turned the cup around in her hands. It was still too hot to drink.

  “What did you mean when you said you’re making a new formulation?” she said, searching for some way to make conversation.

  “Ah.” Lenk seemed embarrassed, but if Grizelda saw what she thought she saw, he was also a little pleased. “I’m working on an experiment. One that takes a lot of power. You can’t trust the grid down here – I keep telling the Council of Foremen they’re pulling too much with all their electric lights on the streets – so I made my own batteries. It’s actually just in the other room. Would you like to see it?”

  That must have been the mysterious other room where the wires led. Now her curiosity was piqued. Goblins were amazing, the kinds of contraptions they came up with and sent to the surface. Electricity, steam trains. It would be interesting to see a real goblin inventor at work, creating some new technological marvel.

  “All right,” she said.

  They got up and went through the open door, taking their cups with them. Grizelda took a sip from hers and grimaced. It might as well have been battery acid. Fortunately, Lenk was ahead of her and couldn’t see her face. He was talking about how the goblins relied on the electric lights too much now, and that they should have kept with the cave fungus of their ancestors. Electric lights made them too dependent on the merchants.

  The other room was smaller than the room where he lived and messier. Yet there was an underlying order to the mess. Bits of machine parts lay in piles on the floor, yes, but they lay in piles according to type, and the collection of jars and pans on the shelves was sorted and labeled. But the table in the middle of the room was the center of attention. There was a pair of machines connected by wires sitting on it amid a collection of scorch marks. For the life of her, Grizelda couldn’t tell what it was supposed to do.

  “I’m trying to build a telegraph,” Lenk said. “I’m afraid I can’t demonstrate it for you because the other day some ratrider stripped all the insulation off my wires.”

  She nodded and smiled, but Lenk was able to tell immediately that she had no idea what a telegraph was.

  “In principle, it’s a way of transmitting information over long distances,” he explained. “You push down a lever on this end,” he pointed to one of the machines, “and it closes an electric circuit that turns on an electromagnet at that end, and that lever goes down. So the goblin at that end can tell what the goblin at the other end is doing with the lever. If there was some sort of agreement between them what the sequence of ups and downs meant, they could communicate.”

  Grizelda listened politely, and when he was done, she thought she had the gist of it.

  “It seems to me it would be a lot easier to just send a runner,” she said.

  “Not when you’re sending a message between goblin unions!” Lenk said. He was getting excited and punctuating his words with more and more hand gestures. “Goblins can’t travel by day; if we saw the sun we would go pfft! just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “And the post is barred to us. But if we had this system of near-instantaneous communication between the unions, think of the things we could do. Say the ogre merchants wanted to lower the price of the steel they were buying from us, and if we don’t go along with it, they say they’ll move their business to the goblins under Yves. With this telegraph, we could pop a message over to Yves and tell them not to put up with this nonsense. Both the unions would benefit.”

  Grizelda didn’t reply right away. The goblins gave her hate-filled stares every time she went out onto the street. Now Lenk spoke of steel prices and ogre merchants … and he reused tea. So the oppressor has arrived at last, that was what Miner Nelin had said to her. Gradually she was putting two and two together.

  But Lenk misinterpreted her silence. “I’m afraid I’ve bored you with my pet delusion.” He rapped the table top. “It works all right across the table, but I can’t get it to go any farther. I heard a rumor that some goblins under Salinaca City managed it. But that’s just the problem. Can’t get any confirmation.”

  “No, I wasn’t bored, really.”

  “It’s all right,” Lenk waved the apology away. “No need to listen to me. Did you enjoy your tea?”

  Grizelda was still cradling the cup nervously, undrunk. “I liked it very much,” she lied.

  Lenk glanced at her still-full cup, and she knew that he knew. The two of them quietly allowed the lie to stand. “You had probably better be getting home, so you can start work tomorrow,” he said. He tapped her on the shoulder affectionately. Those webbed hands weren’t so bad, really, once you got used to them.

  “I think you’ll end up all right. The goblins may not like you, but if you don’t step a toe out of line, there’s nothing they can do about you.”

  They made their way out of the room with the telegraph and back to the work floor. Lenk took back her cup. They exchanged a few pleasantries, ending with Lenk getting a promise from her to come to him for help if she had any more trouble from the launderers. Before she knew it, they were at the door.

  “Er, Grizelda…” Lenk began. “Do you mind if I ask you a … a difficult question?”

  Grizelda, grateful for the tea and the advice, said yes without even thinking about it.

  “For what crime was it exactly that you were arrested by the government of Corvain?”

  And the poor mechanic had such a look on his face that Grizelda realized he was afraid he’d just been entertaining a murderer. In any other situation it would have been funny. Yet she didn’t feel like laughing. Not after what had happened to Miss Hesslehamer and the girls.

  “It was for sorcery,” she said firmly. “But I didn’t do it. I’ve never done a piece of magic in my life. The Republic took a disliking to me, and I don’t know why they did it, but they did.”

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked,” Lenk said, embarrassed. “It was out of morbid curiosity.”

  Grizelda felt herself flush, too. “If anyone asks you, you will tell them I didn’t do it, right?”

  “Of course.”

  The atmosphere cleared instantly. Not long after they parted on excellent terms. Grizelda walked home thrilled that she had gained an ally.

  Grizelda lay awake a long time that night thinking about Auks. She’d never actually seen one as far as she remembered; she was three years old when the citizens threw them out. But she’d heard the stories. Great black predatory birds, with hands like men and beaks for tearing. The terrible blood tax they’d meted out to her people. One human being, from each province…

  They were the bad guys, the symbols of oppression and tyranny. She hadn’t dreamed that human beings could do that sort of thing, too.

  Chapter 9

  Mant didn’t know where to start. Yesterday a gendarme had come up and told him that a prisoner was gone. Vanished. Nothing about who this person was, or how they’d gotten out, or when. All they knew was that the cell was empty. There was absolutely nothing to go on.

  He’d been pacing his office, but for a moment he stopped in his tracks. No, the case wasn’t quite dead. That gendarme underling had said that Lieutenant Ca
lding had been the one to send for the prisoner, hadn’t he? A memory tugged at him, something about the way Calding had been acting strangely that day. He went to his desk and started digging through it, throwing out of the way all the other papers he’d accumulated in the last twenty-four hours. There it was. The interrogation report about the kid that had gotten Calding into such a fuss. The date was right, 20 November, and when Mant scanned down the page he picked out the cell assignment, 403.

  403! The empty cell! Now he was on to something. He poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down to read the report straight through.

  She was a girl, or by a stretch of the imagination she could be called a young woman. Worked in one of those charity workshops run in the poorer parts of Liberty District. There was nothing more of interest until he got to the part about the charges, at which point he almost choked on his coffee.

  These charges were ridiculous. Conspiring to bring back the monarchy? Acting as a spy? A fourteen-year-old couldn’t have done this.

  At the bottom of the page there was a note handwritten in by the lieutenant. Witch mark: prematurely gray hair. May be other marks, though none obvious.

  This was getting weirder and weirder. There was no mention anywhere else in the report of sorcery, yet Calding had taken it upon himself to point out her mark. Could he think she was a sorceress? There simply were not any sorcerers anymore; they’d all either died fighting alongside the Auks or fled the country long before the revolution was over. Plenty of people had witch marks, but it didn’t mean that…

  Mant’s eyes flicked back to the top. Grizelda. Gray. That must have been someone’s idea of a bad joke.

  So now he knew who this prisoner was. And he had a rough idea of when she had escaped. It must have been sometime between when the lieutenant finished interrogating her and when he’d found out about the disappearance. That was a space of only a few hours. He could look up who had been down to the cells in that time and ask them what they’d seen.