Grizelda (8 page)

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:
buttons, 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.