Grizelda (12 page)

Crome never mentioned the outcome of his
conversation with the foreman. The morning after the quacking
machine incident he was oddly silent about the entire topic,
preferring instead to storm around the laundry in a worse mood than
ever, checking up on the machines for any sign of unusual
behavior.

As she set up for work, Grizelda imagined how
that conversation must have gone. She could just picture Crome
angrily trying to explain to a goblin official how he had gotten
outwitted by a washing machine. She smiled inwardly.

Upstairs, there was a small pile of ratrider
clothing sitting on her mattress, waiting for her to mend that
night.

After sneaking a look to the left and right,
Grizelda extended her heel ever so slowly behind her and set it
down on her salt ring. A quick scuff and the circle was broken.
Geddy appeared not long after.

As usual, he seemed to come out of nowhere.
She didn’t recall looking away, but she must have, because she
found herself looking back. And there was Geddy, sitting
cross-legged on top of the sewing machine.

She picked up a sock from her pile and
flipped it inside out without looking quite at him. As she fed it
under the needle, she bent her head in close and whispered, “Hey,
Geddy.”

“Hey, Grizelda.” He sat there watching her
for a minute, absently swinging his heels against the side of the
sewing machine. Then he said, “I was reading this thing the other
day about invisible hands, and I wondered, if, well…” He hesitated.
“If that was one of those metaphor things again?”

She honestly didn’t know. She didn’t know the
answer to a lot of Geddy’s questions, but he didn’t seem to mind
because he always had another one in line to ask her. And Grizelda
enjoyed the company. They kept up a steady, hushed conversation
underneath the hisses and clangs of the laundry machines. They shut
up quickly whenever another laundry worker got too near. While they
talked, Geddy would run and get new pieces of clothing for her.

He grilled her on any and all aspects of her
life on the surface and listened to her answers with a rapt
attention. She was amazed by how keen he was for all of it. He
wanted to put absolutely everything into that book he was writing
about humans. At his pressing, she found herself talking about
everything from horses to barbershops, as well as her life back at
the shop. She told him about that time when all of the girls had
pooled their money to buy a stereoscope. They’d spent all evening
after the customers were gone passing it around and giggling at the
funny, cross-eyed pictures.

And then she started to talk about sunlight,
not realizing how much she missed it until she got herself started.
The way the light looked slanting through the trees in the morning.
The way the Sarny sparkled in the summertime when the steamboats
came up from the sea with their loads of crabs.

Sometimes Geddy seemed to know more about
Corvain than she did.

“Did you know there actually used to be good
sorcerers?” he said. “They weren’t all the Auks’ tax collectors.
The books since the revolution tend to tone it down a lot, but I
read in some of the old ones that a lot of the sorcerers fought
with the resistance fighters during the Auk conquest.”

Grizelda opened her mouth to speak, but
before she could reply, there was a loud, evil-sounding clank from
somewhere behind her. As was getting to be the norm in this
laundry, everybody stopped their work and craned their necks around
to see what had gone wrong this time.

Crome seemed to know what was the matter
before he had even gotten over to the source of the noise.

“It’s that laundry soap again,” he said. He
turned to Grizelda. “Seamstress Grizelda, you’re not doing anything
important.”

She looked up at him, startled. Fortunately
Geddy had disappeared some moments before.

“Go and get another bag of that powdered
soap. We keep it in the warehouse a block south and to the
right.”

Not certain if she was in trouble again, she
got up and prepared to go. Crome seemed to mean what he’d said; he
motioned her to the door. She picked her way across the work floor.
As she passed through the anteroom full of cubbies, Geddy leapt
onto her shoulder from somewhere above.

Once they were out on the street and she’d
checked that the coast was clear, she asked him, “The conquest …
you weren’t there, were you?”

“Grizelda, that was over two hundred years
ago!”

She frowned. “I thought fairies lived
forever.”

Geddy prepared to go into another of his long
explanations about the fey kind. “Okay, for one thing, we’re not
fairies, we’re pixies. And secondly, no. We’ve been mortal since we
followed you people into the city. See, I have this theory that
because we spend so much time around humans–”

“Wait!”

Grizelda stopped in her tracks and held her
hand up for silence.

“Did you see that?”

Geddy shook his head, but just then Grizelda
saw it again. A flicker of movement in the alley across the street.
She took a couple of steps toward it, but as soon as whoever was
there saw her change direction, he or she (or it, you never knew in
this place) got up and ran away.

She started walking towards the warehouse
again, but just as soon as she came to the next cross street, there
it was again. The figure seemed to be keeping pace with her,
falling back whenever it thought she was looking, coming in as
close as possible when it thought she wasn’t. She exchanged a
glance with Geddy and started walking faster. On her way back from
the warehouse with the soap, she came almost at a run.

She dropped off the bag of soap at the door,
then held off on getting Crome’s attention until he was near the
back of the room, which was relatively more private. Then she
cornered him.

“Somebody’s following me,” she told him.

Crome didn’t answer her. He seemed more
interested in whether she’d brought the soap. It was already being
hauled away by two laundry workers to refill the washing
machines.

Even Crome didn’t care about her! She tried
again. “Is there anything you can do about it?”

Crome focused on her, as if he had not been
paying attention. “What, that somebody’s following you? Go to the
police if you want, girl. It’s not my business.” He started to move
away.

“Laundryman, I’m scared.”

“Like I said, it’s not my business.” Then he
left her, to go assist the two workers with the soap.

On the next step of his search for the
disappeared prisoner, Mant went to the officer in charge of
personnel and told him he needed to see a gendarme named
Humphries.

“You just missed him, sir,” he said. “He went
home for the day not too long ago.”

“When will he be back?” said Mant.

“Blessed if I know, sir. I think he’s
ill.”

Mant sighed. “All right, what about a
gendarme named Lemond?”

A blank look. “Who’s Lemond?”

Mant felt like screaming. He managed to
maintain his composure long enough to get out of the room, though.
Once he was sure nobody was looking, he yelled like a maniac and
kicked the wall – too hard. Then he cursed and rubbed his foot. Now
what?

Chapter 11

When Grizelda woke up the next morning, she
knew immediately that something was wrong with the sound. It took
her several moments lying awake on the mattress to figure out
exactly what was wrong. Finally she realized that there
was
no sound. Instead of the usual bang and rumble of laundry machines
warming up for the day, all was silence.

She slipped on her shoes and crossed the hall
to the head of the stairs on tiptoe, feeling somehow like she
shouldn’t break the silence that had descended on Goblin Town
either. The work floor below was all deserted, the electric lights
off.

Great. What fresh hell was this? She must
have woken up in the middle of the night and thought it was
morning. But no, it felt like she’d slept a full night through. The
only way to resolve this was to go outside. Maybe she could figure
out what the goblins were doing this time.

The rows of dormant laundry machines loomed
over her like sea monsters as she crossed the work floor. Some of
them had little lights on them that blinked at her in the half
light. Made her feel like she was being watched.

Outside the daytime-simulating electric
lights beat down on the street in a blare of white and a wave of
that motor-oil smell again. Grizelda winced and shut the laundry
door partway. After her eyes had adjusted, she stepped outside.

There were goblins walking the streets
outside just like any other normal day. And, if it was possible,
they looked a tiny bit more gay than usual. Or less dour.

“Excuse me?” She went up to an older goblin
who was nearby. He only turned up his nose at her and walked
away.

She tried this two or three more times before
she finally got a goblin to pay attention to her, more out of
irritation than anything else.

“What?” he snapped.

“What’s going on here?” she said.

“It’s PT day. Means there’s no work. You’re
free to go get caught in the grinder or something, ogre.”

“But it’s a Thursday–”

But it was no use. The goblin quickened his
pace and left her.

Grizelda stood there in front of the laundry
for a few minutes, considering what to do next. So there would be
no work for that day. There was nothing for her to do, not that she
knew of. She might as well spend the day wandering the city. She
picked a direction and started walking.

If today was a goblin holiday, it seemed
against the holiday’s rules to have too much fun. Most of the
city’s population, as far as she could make out, had crowded into
the bars that were dotted everywhere. They drank clear and
bitter-smelling stuff with grouchy looks on their faces. A handful
of goblin children stood around on a street corner playing
halfheartedly with a metal top.

After a while, on a street near the city
square, Grizelda found herself in front of a building with the word
COMMISSARY engraved on the front in bold, black letters. It was
heavy and solid and imposing-looking, like a lot of old buildings
in town. It sounded interesting. Cautiously, she pushed open the
door.

Grizelda found herself in a low-ceilinged,
dim and musty room. In contrast to the electric lights out on the
street, this place was lit only by a battered gas lamp hanging from
a hook in the wall. The whole place smelled like dust and bicycle
grease. In the back were rows and rows of shelves, their contents
obscured by the long shadows they cast over each other. In front of
them was a counter with a goblin sitting behind it, staring at her
malevolently. He did not speak.

She seriously considered turning around and
leaving. But an idea had occurred to her when she saw those rows of
shelves in the back of the room. Scissors. Maybe they had scissors
here. She was ready to face an angry goblin to get back what
Promontory had stolen from her.

The cashier’s gaze followed her the whole way
while she crossed the room to the back. Despite her determination
to get scissors, it made her highly uncomfortable. It was a relief
to finally get between the shelves, to have heavy slabs of metal
between her and those eyes.

Back here, the smell of old bicycle grease
was even stronger, and the shelves reaching up almost to the
ceiling blotted out most of the light from the front. She scooted
along sideways to avoid bumping her elbows on the things sitting on
display around her: nails, bolts, tin cups, jars of lamp oil. The
prices of each were handwritten on scraps of paper with what looked
like a quill pen and tacked up behind them.

Finally, in the back, Grizelda found what she
was looking for. A sorry-looking bin of scissors, squashed between
some canned biscuits and a pile of chain. Most of them were rusted
shut, but she picked the likeliest-looking one and tried it on some
of the thread from the spools on her sleeve. It wasn’t very good,
but it cut. She took it out to the counter with her.

“Excuse me, I…”

Grizelda realized the goblin behind the
counter was fiercely ignoring her, inspecting one of his long,
curved fingernails instead.

“Um, my name’s–”

“I know who you are!” the goblin snapped, and
snatched the scissors from her. “You want to buy these?”

“If it’s not too much trouble.”

“Hmpf,” he said, flicking over the pages in
his ledger with his nail. “I’ll deduct the credit from your pay
account…”

Struck by an impulse, Grizelda said, “Do you
sell paper here?”

“Like what kind of paper?” he said, still
intent on his work.

Grizelda’s heart leapt into her mouth. She
hadn’t intended to ask for paper, not here, not after what had
happened. Now the goblin was sitting there looking at her, waiting
for an answer.

“Just– just any kind of paper,” she said
hastily, wishing she could take it back.

“Row four.”

She already knew what was in row four. It was
nasty, brittle stuff, yellowed and curling around the edges. It had
probably been sitting there for more than a decade. For a moment
Grizelda’s distaste got the better of her.

“You don’t have any pretty paper?”

The goblin gave her a skeptical look.

Grizelda decided to cut her losses and just
leave, but finally the goblin spoke.

“I can put in an order.” He heaved a heavy
sigh and started searching around for something behind the counter,
involving much banging of drawers and rustling of papers.

“Yes – that’s wonderful – thank you!” She
started backing out of the room, then she realized she’d left her
scissors at the counter and ran back up to get them. Garnering a
look of ire from the cashier, she slipped them into her bodice
pocket and left in a hurry.