Grizelda (15 page)

Chapter 14

Toby took one look at the ground and reeled.
It looked so far away from out here, much farther than it had
looked through the attic window. He stood with his heels braced on
the too-narrow window ledge, clutching the frame behind him. A
couple of tiles slid loose when he moved, tipping off the roof edge
and shattering on the cobblestones three stories below.

He could hear the gendarmes moving around
inside the house. They’d come so much sooner than they’d expected,
before they were ready. Mum and Dad at least were all right,
but–

Something crashed downstairs. It sounded like
a vase. They were working their way upwards, and though it would
take them a while to get past the cabinet he’d dragged on top of
the attic door, it was only a matter of time.

The blood pounded in his ears. Trapped. He’d
run out of house to hide in and there was no way left to go now but
one. Taking a deep breath, he lowered one foot down to the level of
the drainpipe. It held his weight. Praying it would keep doing so,
he let down his other foot. He leaned against the roof for balance
and started inching his way along toward the side of the house
where the old oak tree was.

That tree looked miles away.

Grizelda tucked the package under her arm and
left the Chairman’s office, feeling slightly dizzy. On her way back
out of the government building, she tried to avoid the questioning
eyes of the clerks. Typewriters slackened and whispers started up –
she’s not fired, and what
is
that under her arm?
She
tried to brazen her way through it by striding through the room as
quickly as she could without giving anybody a glance, but it didn’t
really work. Still they stared at her, and she was quite relieved
to reach the outside door.

But as soon as she closed it behind her, she
realized that something in the square was very wrong.

There were too many goblins out for this time
of day. Instead of the usual scattering she would find in the
middle of a workday, the place was crowded. It was almost as full
as the night before when the goblins were assembling for
Proletarian Theater, but instead of all the motion of the crowd
going towards the Union Hall, it was directed towards the statue in
the center. She heard distant shouting.

The goblins didn’t even bother to turn up
their noses at her as she picked her way through them, so intent
were they on pushing each other and craning over each other’s
shoulders to see … something. Grizelda still couldn’t tell what it
was yet.

And then she saw it. Somebody was standing up
on the statue’s pedestal, somehow making the stone worker, warrior
and scholar seem as if they’d been pushed aside.

“Three-quarters of the Whithall price?
Three-quarters of the Whithall price is disgusting!” said Miner
Nelin. “That’s barely more than the cost of production. But they
just keep doing this. And they’re going to keep on doing it unless
we fight back!” He slammed a bony fist into his palm.

Nobody even noticed Grizelda standing there,
elbow-to-elbow with the goblins.

Somebody from the crowd shouted, “What are we
going to do, huh? Tell them no? Then we don’t get any money.”

Another goblin elbowed him. “Shut up,
Loyalist.”

“I’m just saying–”

“Hey, don’t you touch Fetzin!” A third goblin
gave a hard shove to the one who had criticized the Loyalist.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

She had to get out of here. Now.

She should have left a long time ago. As the
fight in front of her escalated, Grizelda started backing away.
This was getting badly out of hand. Now the fight was drawing in
more goblins by the minute and sooner or later one of them was
going to notice her.

“Hey, look! It’s the oppressor!”

She tried to turn away and run, but from
somewhere a sharp limb punched into her side and threw her to the
ground. The package flew out of her hands, skittering across the
stone. She scrambled after it, half on her knees, and snatched it
up to her chest.

Finally Toby made it to the place where the
oak tree’s branches brushed up against the side of the house. He
swung himself over the edge and fished around with his feet for a
foothold. The leaves were almost totally gone by this time of the
year, leaving the tree looking as fragile as a mass of spun sugar.
But he knew better. He’d been climbing this tree ever since he was
a little kid. He clambered down it with a great deal more
confidence than he had felt on the roof.

He dropped to the grass and turned around to
find himself standing face to face with a gendarme.

The world was all feet and legs, pushing,
shoving, clawing at her. Clutching the package, she tried to crawl
away but the press squeezed her, pushed her back. She stood up and
got thrown down out into the clear space in front of Nelin.

All she could see was a weird, ant’s-eye view
of the statue, straight up at it from below. Instinctively she
pulled in her sprawling limbs and sat up. There was the miner,
standing right in front of her. For a moment, their eyes met.

He looked more stunned to see her than
anything else. Hatred hadn’t really registered yet. She wasn’t
going to give him time.

She got to her feet and ran with one hand
still tight around the package, the other thrown up to protect her
face. Goblin hands plucked at her clothing, but they couldn’t stop
her. She ran until she was out of the square and then she kept on
running.

Toby stumbled back a few steps, staring. The
gendarme’s expression mirrored his own. The man gaped at him, then
finally got it together enough to reach for the butt of his
gun.

Toby didn’t wait for him to finish. He turned
around and ran for it. From somewhere behind him a whistle blew and
men started shouting. He hopped a hedge and dashed down the street,
his jacket flapping behind him. A startled couple leapt out of his
way.

Feet pounded the cobblestones behind him.

“Thief! Stop him!”

Grizelda ran to the first place that occurred
to her, the abandoned part of town where she’d been the day before.
In an old alleyway she stopped, leaned against a wall, panting.
Then she sat down and started to shudder.

Where was she going to go now? Every time she
closed her eyes, she imagined hundreds of phantom hands plucking at
her clothes again. She shook her head, trying to get rid of the
memory like shaking off water. The ratrider lair was a decidedly
attractive prospect. It was safe there. They liked her. She could
hide out for a couple of hours until it was over.

She waited until she was feeling a little
better. When she tried getting up, she discovered her knees had
gone all watery. She took hesitating steps at first, slowly getting
her strength back. She thought she recognized a nearby tunnel as
the one her ratrider guide had taken her through on the way to the
grotto. When she got to it, though, she realized that it was
completely different. A bunch of old mineshafts lay beyond that
didn’t look at all familiar. She wandered around a little, trying
to find a landmark, but the search was fruitless.

She was about to give up and just wait where
she was on the edge of town for a few hours when something drew her
attention. It was a pipe. It ran along the wall, then stopped
halfway down, its open end exposed. There was a little runnel in
the floor below it that would have caught the water when it was
actually running. Currently there was not much more than a damp
patch.

Goblins didn’t build pipes above their street
level like this.

With rising excitement, she followed the pipe
down the tunnel, hoping to find where it came from. No more goblin
buildings here. And yes, the ground was definitely sloping upward
beneath her feet. Then she heard a sound she thought she would
never hear again. Road noise. It was extremely faint, but she could
make out every part of it, knew from long experience what sounds to
expect even before they came to her. The grinding of carriage
wheels above her head. Feet treading, people’s voices.

She was in a sewer – a human sewer.
Water-seeps on the pipes gleamed faintly in the chilly early winter
light. Must be an overcast day up there. The walls were stone, and
the floor, too, and in the middle there was a trench for the city’s
water to flow.

She shouldn’t be here. The terms of her exile
had been that she would never go above the surface again, and
especially never speak to another human being. If Nelin’s gang
found out that she had even come this close, she would be in a
world of hurt.

Then the sun came out from behind a cloud and
all at once a dazzlingly bright trapezoid formed on the wall
opposite her, streaming in through the drain.
Sunlight.
It
brought back the memories with a force like a punch in the stomach.
It was time to leave, but she couldn’t help it, the homesickness
was too strong. She moved forward and angled herself so it hit her
full in the face. The light gave little warmth, but it turned her
closed eyelids bright red. Just for a moment.

He was no thief! But the gendarmes knew what
they were doing, damn them. In a trendy neighborhood like this one,
that
was what got people’s attention.

Already heads were turning. Citizens were
backing away from Toby as if he was diseased. At least they weren’t
trying to stop him, but it was only a matter of time. Then he saw
Mr. Brontborg, the man who lived two houses down from them. Bad
news. He’d had it in for Toby’s family ever since his mum had
written those political pamphlets.

There was nowhere to
hide
around here.
Just lawns and the big gabled houses of rich people. He tried
ducking into an alley, which turned out to be a big mistake. It
dead-ended in a brick wall right in front of him. About a story up
he could see the stems of frost-deadened plants sticking over the
top of the wall – too high to climb. And there was nothing but the
back doors of houses to his left and right, nowhere to go there.
Meanwhile, the gendarmes were getting closer every second, if Mr.
Brontborg didn’t catch him first.

Out of desperation, he threw himself to the
ground and slid through the storm drain.

Grizelda was jolted back to reality by
running footsteps and the crash of an overturned trash can.
Instinctively she slid backwards, reached out to the shadows to let
them envelop her.

All of a sudden a boy fell through the drain
and landed on the stones below. Grizelda stifled a cry. The boy
tried to leap to his feet and failed, instead scrabbling backwards
like a crab with too-long, knobbly limbs. He had the nice, neat
clothes of Lonnes’s well-to-do upper class, but they were rumpled
now as if he had just been fighting for his life. He stared around
him, eyes wide but unseeing, searching for something.

Grizelda stepped forward into the light, and
his look turned into one of terror as he pushed himself farther
back. His hair flipped down into his face and he shoved it back
with a frantic gesture.

“Who–”

Footsteps ran overhead, and two men shouted
to each other. A trash can scraped across the pavement. The boy
frantically waved his hands for silence and mouthed one word:
gendarmes
.

Gendarmes. She knew what that was like. The
two of them waited together, hardly daring to breathe. The feet had
stopped; there were muffled snatches of a conversation between two,
maybe three men. One of them raised his voice, the other made a
submissive sound. Then the feet moved on.

Grizelda waited there, for one, two, three
minutes, just to be safe. When she couldn’t take it any more, she
ran over to the boy to help him up.

“Are you all right? What are they after you
for?”

But he refused her help. “What are you doing
here? Where’s my hat gone? Ouch!” He banged his head on the tunnel
ceiling. It knocked his hair loose and he pushed it back again.

“Here!” Grizelda ran to get the cap, which
had rolled off into the corner. She set it in his hands.

He looked at her suspiciously. “You’re not
going to turn me in, are you?”

“No! I’m–“

Now she’d done it, she realized. She’d broken
her exile by speaking to him. And she couldn’t exactly tell him
about the goblins, could she?

“I’m hiding, too,” she finished lamely.

They stood there, looking at each other, and
for a moment Grizelda thought he might explain what was going on.
She wondered if she should leave before she got into worse trouble.
Then the boy shoved the cap down on his head and started clambering
up the storm drain.

“I gotta go now! Thanks! Bye!”

“
No
.” She dragged him down, pulling
him by his ankles. “You’ll just get caught.”

“But I gotta go get Jamin! Let go!” He’d
managed to get halfway out by this point, arms and body out on the
street, legs still below the surface. He kicked mightily, but she
refused to let go.

“You can’t afford to be seen on the street,”
she said.

He slid back down. “What are you going to do
about it?”

What was she going to do about it? She was
playing this by ear.

“Tell me what’s going on,” she said. “Why are
they chasing you?”

“Some stuff Mom wrote. They’re okay, though,
they got out, but– Oh, God, they’ve got Grandpa!” He lunged for the
drain, but she still had a hold of his ankles and held him back.
The boy sank to the ground.

She knelt by him. “Are you okay?”

“No. It’s just– Grandpa. He was still in the
house, he–” He looked up at her. “I have this friend, his name is
Jamin. I have to go tell him what’s happened. I have to go back up
there.”

“You can’t,” she said.

Exile or no exile, she was going to do
something about this. And maybe she had an idea.