Grizelda (21 page)

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.