Grizelda (4 page)

“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 problem. 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, she 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.