Grizelda (10 page)

“No, I wasn’t bored, really.”

“It’s all right,” Lenk waved the apology
away. “No need to listen to me. Did you enjoy your tea?”

Grizelda was still cradling the cup
nervously, undrunk. “I liked it very much,” she lied.

Lenk glanced at her still-full cup, and she
knew that he knew. The two of them quietly allowed the lie to
stand. “You had probably better be getting home, so you can start
work tomorrow,” he said. He tapped her on the shoulder
affectionately. Those webbed hands weren’t so bad, really, once you
got used to them.

“I think you’ll end up all right. The goblins
may not like you, but if you don’t step a toe out of line, there’s
nothing they can do about you.”

They made their way out of the room with the
telegraph and back to the work floor. Lenk took back her cup. They
exchanged a few pleasantries, ending with Lenk getting a promise
from her to come to him for help if she had any more trouble from
the launderers. Before she knew it, they were at the door.

“Er, Grizelda…” Lenk began. “Do you mind if I
ask you a … a difficult question?”

Grizelda, grateful for the tea and the
advice, said yes without even thinking about it.

“For what crime was it exactly that you were
arrested by the government of Corvain?”

And the poor mechanic had such a look on his
face that Grizelda realized he was afraid he’d just been
entertaining a murderer. In any other situation it would have been
funny. Yet she didn’t feel like laughing. Not after what had
happened to Miss Hesslehamer and the girls.

“It was for sorcery,” she said firmly. “But I
didn’t do it. I’ve never done a piece of magic in my life. The
Republic took a disliking to me, and I don’t know why they did it,
but they did.”

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked,” Lenk
said, embarrassed. “It was out of morbid curiosity.”

Grizelda felt herself flush, too. “If anyone
asks you, you will tell them I didn’t do it, right?”

“Of course.”

The atmosphere cleared instantly. Not long
after they parted on excellent terms. Grizelda walked home thrilled
that she had gained an ally.

Grizelda lay awake a long time that night
thinking about Auks. She’d never actually seen one as far as she
remembered; she was three years old when the citizens threw them
out. But she’d heard the stories. Great black predatory birds, with
hands like men and beaks for tearing. The terrible blood tax they’d
meted out to her people. One human being, from each province…

They were the bad guys, the symbols of
oppression and tyranny. She hadn’t dreamed that human beings could
do that sort of thing, too.

Chapter 9

Mant didn’t know where to start. Yesterday a
gendarme had come up and told him that a prisoner was gone.
Vanished. Nothing about who this person was, or how they’d gotten
out, or when. All they knew was that the cell was empty. There was
absolutely nothing to go on.

He’d been pacing his office, but for a moment
he stopped in his tracks. No, the case wasn’t quite dead. That
gendarme underling had said that Lieutenant Calding had been the
one to send for the prisoner, hadn’t he? A memory tugged at him,
something about the way Calding had been acting strangely that day.
He went to his desk and started digging through it, throwing out of
the way all the other papers he’d accumulated in the last
twenty-four hours. There it was. The interrogation report about the
kid that had gotten Calding into such a fuss. The date was right,
20 November, and when Mant scanned down the page he picked out the
cell assignment, 403.

403! The empty cell! Now he was on to
something. He poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down to read
the report straight through.

She was a girl, or by a stretch of the
imagination she could be called a young woman. Worked in one of
those charity workshops run in the poorer parts of Liberty
District. There was nothing more of interest until he got to the
part about the charges, at which point he almost choked on his
coffee.

These charges were ridiculous. Conspiring to
bring back the monarchy? Acting as a spy? A fourteen-year-old
couldn’t have done this.

At the bottom of the page there was a note
handwritten in by the lieutenant.
Witch mark: prematurely gray
hair. May be other marks, though none obvious.

This was getting weirder and weirder. There
was no mention anywhere else in the report of sorcery, yet Calding
had taken it upon himself to point out her mark. Could he think she
was a sorceress? There simply were not any sorcerers anymore;
they’d all either died fighting alongside the Auks or fled the
country long before the revolution was over. Plenty of people had
witch marks, but it didn’t mean that…

Mant’s eyes flicked back to the top.
Grizelda. Gray. That must have been someone’s idea of a bad
joke.

So now he knew who this prisoner was. And he
had a rough idea of when she had escaped. It must have been
sometime between when the lieutenant finished interrogating her and
when he’d found out about the disappearance. That was a space of
only a few hours. He could look up who had been down to the cells
in that time and ask them what they’d seen.

At least nobody else knew a prisoner was
missing. Yet. He’d have to hurry.

Mant scooped up the report and stood up from
his desk. It was time to go check the archives.

Mant didn’t like sneaking around to get to
the archives, but he felt that he had to. He tried to tell himself
that he had nothing to worry about. It was a perfectly normal thing
for the warden of a prison to go looking in his own archives. If
anybody saw him, they wouldn’t think something was wrong. Still, he
didn’t want anybody to see him.

Fortunately, he didn’t run into anybody on
his way down. Once he got to the place, down in the bowels of the
fort, he slipped inside and closed the door. He looked with sinking
heart at the jumble of papers and cabinets before him. Sure, within
each set of budget records and interrogation reports the papers
were alphabetized, but none of the drawers showed what
kind
of documents they contained.

What he was looking for was the arrest
records, the ones they filled out at the front desk for each
prisoner that entered the building. Those gave the names of the
arresting officers, who were usually the same officers to take the
prisoner down into the cells. After a few guesses, he found them.
Fortunately the page for 20 November was still near the top.

With typical Promontory inefficiency, the
arrest records didn’t include prisoner names. But there were only a
couple of entries that might have fit. Half the arrests that day
were for assault, and most of them were made much too late in the
day. This Grizelda probably came in just before dawn.

One of the entries was a clear strongest
candidate. Humphries and Lemond, for spying, 6:30 a.m.

He had something to work on there. He was
about to leave when something struck him and he went to look for
the girl’s denunciation.

There had to be a denunciation on file, of
course. She had to have a citizen testify against her before they
could get the warrant to arrest her in the first place. It wasn’t
going to help him find out how she had escaped, but that note
written in the margin of her interrogation report continued to
bother him. The denunciation might shed some light on exactly what
the girl had done.

After some searching around he found the
right drawer, all right. But as soon as he pulled it out he
groaned. The denunciations were all out of order and half of them
were missing.

Early the next morning the Chairman summoned
Mechanic Lenk into his office. Once the mechanic had shut the door
and taken off his coat, Chairman Grendel wasted no time in
speaking.

“I will be straightforward, Mechanic. Have
you considered my proposal that you run in the election?”

Lenk grimaced and avoided meeting the
Chairman’s eyes. “Look, we’ve discussed this before…”

“Well? What’s your answer?”

Lenk didn’t reply. He had suddenly taken a
keen interest in the pattern of the floor tiles. Not the election
conversation again.

“The people like you,” the Chairman
persisted.

“I know. That’s what you told me last
time.”

Lenk didn’t understand the Chairman. He
thought the world of him, but he didn’t understand him. Years ago,
why had he plucked Lenk, mild-mannered Lenk, out of the People’s
School and groomed him for the Chairmancy? He didn’t want it. He’d
never wanted office. He just wanted to invent things.

“The circumstances have changed somewhat
since last time,” the Chairman was saying. “Now the ogre child’s
involved.”

Lenk looked up suddenly. “You don’t really
think she’s going to change the outcome of–” When he saw the
Chairman’s expression, he looked away again. “Good Lord, you
do.”

“You’re the best shot at keeping the Miner
out of office now. I’m too old.”

“I
can’t
.”

The Chairman slammed his hand down, sending
one of his pens skittering away. “Damn it, why?”

“I’m not a politician, I’m a scientist. I
don’t care if mechanics become Chairmen, I want to stay
Mechanic!”

There was a pause. “It’s not because you have
any sympathies with the Miner…”

Lenk winced, his silence a confirmation. He
didn’t want this sort of attention.

The Chairman said quietly, “What would you
have me do?”

“Fight back against the ogre merchants, like
Nelin suggests. Do something. They’re strangling us.”

The Chairman was silent for a long while.
“Thirty-three years I’ve had this post and I’ve never been
seriously contested.” He shook his head. “Maybe a young goblin
could start a war with the ogres. I just can’t get my mind past the
casualties anymore. You spoke just now of things you just can’t do.
I’m too old, Mechanic.”

“You picked the wrong successor, Chairman,”
he said. “I just can’t do it.”

Grendel’s look turned cold. “Then we shall
agree to be mutually disappointed in each other.” He turned away,
leaving Lenk to find the way out by himself.

Life got better for Grizelda after that
miserable first day. The next morning she woke up on time. On
stepping outside, the goblins were just as hostile to her as ever,
but she was beginning to learn how to deal with that. In the
cafeteria she knew that it was best not to make eye contact, not to
make faces, nor to stay too long in one place. She made a point to
glide along at a pace that repelled conflict like water off a rain
jacket. She was practicing the art of making herself invisible.

She reported to work in plenty of time. She
laid out her salt ring perfectly, and once she was done, she took
care to step over it every time she passed in and out. She’d like
to see Crome find a way to criticize her
this
time.

The sewing machine and Grizelda seemed to
have worked out a grudging peace, and after a while, she fell into
a working rhythm. Take the piece of clothing out of the bin and
flop it on the table, flip it inside out, and bring the sides of
the tear together under the needle. The pleasure of doing work well
was almost like being at the shop again. For a while she imagined
that she
was
back, that the roar of the machinery was the
chatter of women, and the gnarled, green workers around her were
Elisabet and Grace, and the mistress, Miss Hesslehamer.

She felt a fresh pang of homesickness and
guilt, and wondered yet again whether her stupidity with the paper
had gotten any of the others thrown into prison. There was no way
to get news down here, and the not knowing was terrible.

She tried to force herself to stop fretting
about the shop by keeping half an eye on the many
comings-and-goings of the laundry. Everything around her was
activity. The workers loaded clothes in and out of tubs; they
wheeled back and forth carts of powdered soap. They ran clothes
through dangerous-looking rollers that looked eager to snap off any
finger that got too close. They hung clothes in front of banks of
fans in hopes that they might dry in the steamy atmosphere.

There was a clank from somewhere nearby, and
Grizelda saw a worker stumble, rubbing his head. He’d obviously hit
it on one of the many haphazard pipes that ran through the room.
One of his coworkers laughed and clapped him on the back. He shook
himself and went back to work. None of the goblins seemed to notice
that when he fell, the worker had trodden on his salt ring.
Grizelda noticed, though.

Should she tell? What if she got in trouble?
Grizelda abandoned even the pretense of working at her sewing
machine and watched intently. For a while work went on normally.
The goblin who had tripped hauled up buckets of damp, soapy clothes
and dumped them into a rinser vat. This rinser vat had a lid as big
as he was that he had to lift up every time to dump in the clothes.
He lifted it up, shook out his bucket, then…

Quack!

The sound was as unexpected to Grizelda as it
was to everybody else. Instead of falling down with a clang, the
rinser lid fell down with a quack. As far as she could tell, only
the rinser workers in the area had heard it. They started talking
quickly to each other and pointing to the rinser in question. The
news spread, and soon most of the goblins in the room had left off
work to have a look at the cursed rinser. Grizelda leaned out from
behind her sewing machine to get a better view.

All of a sudden Crome was among them, pushing
through the crowd with a bosslike attitude. “What’s the matter
here?”

The worker who had started it all, Grizelda
noticed, was nowhere to be seen. The other rinser operators all
started pointing at the machine and talking over each other, each
of them sure he was the one who had the story straight.