Grizelda (11 page)

Crome silenced them. He strode up to the
rinser and lifted the lid with a little difficulty. Nothing
happened. But when he let it fall, it quacked again.

His eyes flicked to the floor.

“All right, who scuffed the salt ring?”

He turned around and swept the room with a
suspicious glare. He lingered over each face in turn, trying to
pick out some sign of guilt.

Quack!

Grizelda giggled. She couldn’t help it. She
had to cover her hands with her mouth and turn away out of fear for
her job, but it was still funny. Crome opened and shut the lid
several times in an unsuccessful effort to get the thing to stop
quacking, then getting increasingly angry, he growled and kicked
it. It quacked again.

Just when Crome had given up in disgust and
was beginning to turn away, the lid burst open of its own accord,
catching him on the upper lip. He yowled and leapt away maybe three
or four feet. Grizelda was crouched behind the sewing machine with
her knuckles in her mouth, laughing so hard that she was sure Crome
was going to see her. That look on his face when the machine
whacked him was precious.

“I’ve had it with those damned ratriders! I’m
telling a foreman!”

The laundryman stormed out of the room like a
hurricane, leaving a stunned silence behind him.

When Crome had left, it was as if a weight
had lifted from the air. The mood on the work floor became almost
cheerful. The other workers talked to each other while they worked
in a way they had never done before. Grizelda was affected, too.
Without Crome watching over her shoulder all the time, she felt
defter, less stupid. She plucked up the torn clothes and ran them
through the machine so swiftly that she found herself waiting for
the other workers instead of the other way around. She’d also come
to a decision.

That quacking rinser lid had to have been
ratriders. It was all good fun, but it was also wrong, this
sabotaging the machines like Mechanic Lenk was talking about. She
was going to have to go find those ratriders and talk to them.

The instant the work bell rang, she threw the
last of her work in a drawer and got up. She followed the tide of
laundry workers as they streamed out into the street and went their
separate ways. She started walking.

She wasn’t quite sure what she was going to
do next. She had a vague idea that she might try talking to the
ratriders that flitted around in the goblin city. As usual, they
were dashing in and out of sight in the spaces between the rooftops
and the cave ceiling. Here one moment, they were gone the next,
having slipped through a chink in the wall or ducked behind a
facade. She kept walking until she happened to catch sight of
one.

“Hell–”

The word died on her lips. The ratrider had
vanished in a flash of color before she’d even started to
speak.

The same thing happened on her second try.
This wasn’t going to be as easy as it looked.

She decided to change her tactic. There was
one of those typical apartment-like buildings on the corner where
the traffic of ratriders seemed to concentrate, like a thoroughfare
of sorts. After checking that none of the goblins around were
watching her, she crossed the street and walked up to the foot of
the building. She craned her head back so she could see the second
story, where most of them were.

“Excuse me, ratriders!” she shouted up to
them.

Maybe they’d heard her, and maybe they
hadn’t. There seemed to be a slowing in the blur of color, as if
collectively she’d disturbed them and they were pausing to listen.
Still, it wasn’t quite what she wanted.

“Hold still so I can talk to you!”

Finally one of the ratriders stopped. He sat
astride his rat like a warrior, its bridle richly decorated with
red beads and hawk feathers. He wore a crest of red hedgehog
bristles. He looked down at her imperiously.

“What is it?”

She hadn’t planned ahead of time what she was
going to say. The ratrider’s crest twitched slightly while he
waited.

“Ratrider, do you know where I can find
someone called Geddy?” she said. “Or Tunya or Kricker? I need to
talk to them.”

“Follow me!” His rat leapt away across the
rooftop.

Grizelda had to run after the two of them
immediately to keep up. They were a fluid, red and fast thing;
ratrider and rat were one. They leapt across gaps between
buildings, dodged obstacles, making skittering sounds on the stone
as the rat’s claws found purchase. Grizelda was afraid to run too
fast for fear of drawing the goblins’ attention. Several times the
ratrider had to stop and wait for her, radiating impatience.

He took her out towards the city edge, the
run-down part of abandoned buildings where Lenk had invited her to
tea the day before. She had no idea where he was going; she only
hoped this wasn’t going to end like the last time ratriders had
offered to give her directions. Abruptly the ratrider changed
direction; he drew her down a road she had never seen before. The
caves here were different. They weren’t organized into boulevards
like the goblin city or even hewn smooth like the abandoned mine
tunnels. Instead they had been left almost the same way as when
goblins first settled here hundreds of years ago: the caves
wandered as if cut out by water, narrowing and widening without any
regard to order. The floor was bumpy, so Grizelda found she had to
watch her feet carefully as she went. Here and there great
stalagmites rose out of the floor, reaching so high they touched
the ceiling and made columns.

Maybe this had been a bad idea. But she
couldn’t afford to turn back now; she wasn’t sure she could find
her way back out of the caves without her guide.

The rooms that they left behind them did not
go dark when the light from the ratrider’s lantern was gone.
Instead they still shone dimly in that same greenish color.
Curious, Grizelda looked at the cave walls a little closer. There
was fungus growing on them. Its glow was hardly visible when the
room was lit up. But when she cupped her hands over it, there it
was, faint but definite.

They came to a place so narrow that Grizelda
could only pass through it sideways. Even then, it was a struggle.
She inched along, getting her elbows and knees scraped up in the
process. Then her guide ran on ahead and disappeared around a
corner. She had a moment of panic as she was plunged into darkness.
Her mind filled with images of being trapped here forever and
starving to death.

But she could still see.

As her eyes adjusted she realized she was not
in total darkness but a twilight. There was the faint glow of the
cave fungus, yes, but most of the light was coming from the bodice
pocket of her dress. Confused, she reached in her hand.

Tunya’s lantern stick. She must have
forgotten to give it back to her after she’d escaped from the cell.
She pulled it out and held it up. All at once the tunnel was
illuminated again. Now she could see that she was not really stuck,
it was just a tight fit. If she sucked in her breath and pushed
harder…

She came free and stumbled out into the
ratriders’ cavern. Like the rest of the caves here, it had been
carved out by a little gush of water that had been diverted from
the Sarny somehow and driven deep underground. The stream fell from
somewhere around the ceiling into a swift running channel that
looped around, then darted back into the earth again.

The ratriders had built their own miniature
city around this little river. The houses crusted the walls like
barnacles, all connected to each other by a spider’s web of rope
bridges so thick there was hardly any place for her to stand up
straight. Over generations, the ratriders had brought down things
from the surface and used them to build up their homes. Little bits
of cardboard and tin siding, tree branches, greeting cards.
Silverware. Every way she looked she was faced with achingly
familiar objects from the world of her home.

Every house had one of those green ratrider
lights by its front door so that the river sparkled with thousands
of reflections. In general cheeriness the city was the polar
opposite of the goblins’ home.

Grizelda found herself struggling to remember
what she’d come here for. It was about something bad.

Meanwhile, news must have gotten around that
she was here. The ratriders came running out of their houses and
crowding onto the rope bridges to get a look at her. They were
jostling each other so badly and leaning so far out to get a better
look that she was afraid somebody was going to fall.

“It’s the sewer girl!” they cried.

“The girl who sews! From the promontory!”

Everybody looked delighted to see her, even
though she didn’t really remember having met any of them before.
Everybody, that was, except for Tunya, whose dandelion-puff of hair
stood out easily from the crowd. Tunya glared up at her defiantly,
arms folded. Geddy and Kricker were also there.

Grizelda realized there was another ratrider
who did not look all that thrilled to see her. She was a
black-haired woman, sitting cross-legged on a rock ledge in the
back. Neither excited nor filled with hatred, she merely surveyed
Grizelda coolly. She was dressed in what looked like … aviation
gear?

Grizelda shook herself. She was here for a
purpose, to talk to the ratriders about the goblins’ machines.
Sure, they were cute, but it was all just an act, remember? She
wouldn’t let it distract her a second time. As she stepped forward,
one of the ratriders waved at her, trying to get her attention.

“Hey, sewer girl!”

“Listen.” Not sure who she was supposed to
talk to, she directed herself to Geddy. “Did you do something with
the machine that started quacking in the laundry today?”

But it was impossible to get anything
resembling a private conversation in the town of the ratriders. As
soon as she’d finished, they all started offering their input so
liberally that Geddy couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

“Did you like it?”

“It was Kricker’s idea!”

“We made a fool of the laundry goblin for
you! It was great. He was just standing there, and then
wham!
” One of them swung his fist in the air and spun around
gleefully.

“Did I … like it?” Grizelda said,
nonplussed.

A couple of them started a pantomime of
Crome’s angry, one-armed stalk around the laundry room.

“We did it because you’re the sewer
girl.”

“You fixed Kricker’s jacket for him.”

“Very nice. Very pretty.”

One of the pantomimers broke off. “If I make
the electrical system break down tonight, will you sew for us some
more?”

“Wait! Wait,” she said. They quieted down a
little. “I won’t sew
anything
for you if you keep doing
that. You’ve got to stop.”

The mood in the cave dampened a little. They
shifted their weight and looked at each other, as if she had just
spoiled all their fun.

“You’ve all got to go back inside right now,”
she said. “I need to talk to the ratriders who found me.”

Reluctantly, they started to go. “Going” was
a relative term, because Grizelda didn’t actually
see
the
ratriders going anywhere. They weren’t walking up to the houses and
stepping inside. There were just fewer and fewer of them in the
cave each time she looked, as if they were vanishing into thin air.
Soon there was nobody left but her three.

Wearily she sat down on a lumpy place in the
cave floor and rubbed her head. The three ratriders looked on.

“Let me get this right,” she said. “You made
my boss get hit on the head because you thought I would
like
it?”

“We thought you would think it was funny,”
said Geddy.

“
No.
I could have lost my job. I…” She
stopped, then chucked ruefully. “All right. It was kind of
funny.”

For a couple of minutes, nobody knew quite
what to say.

Geddy ventured first. “There really is a
secret passage,” he said. “We weren’t lying about that. We could
get you out of here tonight.”

A secret passage. Grizelda could imagine what
kind of a future she had in store for her if the ratriders were
telling the truth, and, well, what if they were? Hiding by day,
crossing country by night, hitching rides on trains. All with a
scarf tied tightly over her head to hide her witch mark. Getting
across the border to Salinaca. And if she did manage it somehow?
She didn’t speak the language, she had no family there or even any
money. She would have to start over from absolutely nothing.

The alternative was to stay here with the
goblins. It was dreary work, but it was a living.

Her mind made up, she shook her head. “I
don’t think I’m going to take that secret passage. But thank
you.”

They looked surprised, even Tunya, who had
been conspicuously looking at the wall for most of this
conversation.

Lenk was right. The ratriders really just
didn’t understand. But did that mean they didn’t care?

“I’m still sort of…” Grizelda hesitated. “Is
it all right if we call a truce?”

“What sort of a truce?” Geddy said.

“You’ve got to stop breaking the goblins’
things. They don’t like it. They work really hard, and they don’t
make a lot of money, and you messing up their machines just makes
it even harder.”

They looked at her as if she had just asked
them to grow another head.

“Look, if you tell all the others to stop the
pranks, I’ll sew for you. As much as you want.”

“As much as we want?” Tunya said
suspiciously.

“Well, guys?” Geddy looked at his two
friends. Kricker nodded. Tunya shrugged.

“All right, a truce,” Geddy said.

Grizelda stood up and held out her hand. In
turn, the ratriders each shook her finger.

Chapter 10