Grizelda (27 page)

“I promised Geddy I wouldn’t go to any more
of the meetings.”

“Geddy’ll be there. I’ll vouch for you to
him.” A note of urgency crept into Laricia’s voice, which was
normally so calm. “This is important!”

To Laricia, it seemed, it would be that
simple. She’d simply speak to Geddy and everything would be fine.
Grizelda wasn’t sure it would be that easy. But what if there
really was going to be a mass execution? She had to be there, for
the Undergrounders.

In the end, she decided to go.

Life in the goblin city had been playing
tricks on her sense of time again, for though it was the end of the
workday down there, on the surface it was right around noon. She
winced as she stepped out of the storm drain into the alley behind
Rue de Calle. She’d forgotten how bright it could be, that sun
pounding down from right overhead. Dogs barked. In her haste to get
to the surface, she’d neglected to put on her headscarf, but now
she regretted it. It was the middle of the day; someone might see
her. Appalled at the risk she was taking, she bustled into the
Trebuchet basement as quickly as possible.

Inside, the Undergrounders were sitting on
crates huddled in a close circle, looking stricken. Solander held a
newspaper.

“Grizelda!” Geddy shouted when she came in,
but Laricia cut across him.

“It’s my fault, Geddy, I made her come in.
Now, what have we got?”

As Grizelda took a place in the circle,
Laricia flew up to join the other three ratriders who had come to
the meeting: Geddy, Tunya, and Kricker. They were perched on top of
a tall stack of boxes situated so they could read over Solander’s
shoulder. Toby had risked coming out of hiding to come to the
meeting, too. He sat opposite her in the circle, looking ominous.
Fortunately, she didn’t have to decide what to say to him, because
just then Solander laid the newspaper down flat on the makeshift
table.

“Promontory administration is secretly
planning a mass execution of its prisoners on the first of
January,” she read, pointing at a column. “Right here.”

“And look who they’re saying is the warden,”
Jamin told her. “Some guy named Calding. The word is that the old
guy was incompetent, but this one isn’t. I think that’s why there
were guards that night.”

That made sense to Grizelda. “But is it
true?” she asked.

Solander shook her head. “That’s what we’ve
been trying to figure out – This is one of the rebel presses, if
you’re wondering why they’re covering it,” she added, as an aside.
“One of their people got a hold of an internal Promontory memo. It
gives the gendarmes detailed instructions on how they’re going to
do the execution. The Clarinet doesn’t usually make stuff up.”

“I think it’s a trap,” said Katarin.

The suddenness of her pronouncement made them
all look at her. She was a little flustered, but she went on.

“They know there’s somebody out there who
wants these prisoners freed, right? They think we’re going to come
back for more. This way, they set a time limit. If we’re going to
do it, we have to do it in the next week or so. They’ll just watch
out for us.” She tapped the paper. “I mean, look at the timing.
This has got to be in response to the breakout.”

“Maybe they just decided it’s too dangerous
to keep the prisoners alive anymore,” said Stevry.

“That sounds like a challenge to me!” said
Toby.

He stood up, and his fists were clenched.
Grizelda bit her lip and looked away.

“If they want us to come, let’s come!” He
looked around at them fiercely.

Katarin began, “Bourgeois, there’s going to
be loads more guards than last time–”

“We’ll be extra careful–”

“–they’re sure to know about the holes by
now–”

“–we’ll find deeper holes–”

“You can’t go in there!” she finished in
exasperation.

Toby turned to the rest of them. “Yeah, maybe
it is a trap. Can we really just leave them there when we know we
could do something about it? Seems to me that’s what the sorcerers
did.”

Grizelda was feeling more and more humiliated
by the second.

“Yeah, this time we have to,” said
Katarin.

“I agree with her,” said Mitchell.

But Solander said, “I don’t want to go, but
Toby has a point.”

“Yeah, he does.” Jamin rubbed his forehead.
“It’s a bad idea. We ought to wait until things cool down. But
people are definitely going to die, and are we going to sit here if
we know we can do something about it?” He looked at Stevry.

“Stevry, you haven’t said anything yet.”

“I’d go if I thought we could pull it off,”
Stevry said. “I’m not so sure we can.”

Jamin turned around so he could face the
ratriders behind him. “What about you?”

“
No
,” said Laricia. “I can’t speak for
the rest of my fliers, but I say it would be a hideous risk.
Grizelda, I should never have brought you here. I didn’t know the
details.”

“No,” said Geddy.

But Kricker met Jamin’s look fiercely. “If
you decide you’re going to go, I’ll go with you.”

Then Tunya, to all of their surprise, said,
“I’ll go, too.” Kricker seemed the most shocked of anyone in the
room.

“It looks like we’re about evenly split,”
said Jamin. “I was afraid of this. Grizelda.”

Grizelda was suddenly acutely aware that all
eyes had turned on her.

“This project was your baby. You decide.”

Why did it have to come down to her? She
looked around at all of the Undergrounders, Toby on the one side,
Geddy on the other. Obviously she wasn’t good enough for this job;
look what had happened the first time they’d tried to break
prisoners out of Promontory. And they thought she was some kind of
a leader!

But how many people were going to die on New
Year’s Day if she didn’t do anything?

“We’re going in,” she said.

Chapter 26

Organizing a second breakout right after the
first one turned out to be a more difficult undertaking than
Grizelda had realized. It was true that they did not have to start
completely from scratch. A lot of their supplies and a little of
their money from the first breakout were left over and could be
reused. But the problem of safety kept coming back to them. She and
the Undergrounders spent hours pouring over Laricia’s maps, seeking
out entrances to the cells that were deep enough and small enough
that the guards would overlook them.

Would they be deep enough? Would they be
small enough? That last week was a miserable time for her. It
didn’t help that they had half as much time to plan as before.
Grizelda left the laundry earlier and came back later at night than
ever before. She was so exhausted she started nodding off at work.
But she had to go through with it. She was a witch. Toby didn’t
like her – but why didn’t he tell on her? – but he didn’t like her,
and he was right not to. No matter what Geddy said about keeping
the magic. Maybe, if she did something good for Corvain, she could
make it okay.

But what if they all got killed on the
breakout that was her idea in the first place?

Jamin had decided on a policy of splitting up
even more than last time, to help them keep from being caught. The
Undergrounders would travel in pairs and each come to the cells by
a different entrance. The ratriders would run communication between
them. Much to Grizelda’s dismay, the Undergrounders paired her with
Toby because somebody had gotten the idea that they worked well
together. She kept quiet because she knew if she objected, she
would have to explain why.

They decided to set the date of the breakout
for New Year’s Eve, the latest that was possible. It would give
them the greatest amount of time to get their plan in place. For
Grizelda, this added a kink: she was going to have to skip the
debates. She figured she would be able to manage it, though. After
all, hadn’t she slipped out of the Union Hall once before, the day
the pig iron prices caused a riot?

The morning of the breakout, she woke up
surprisingly calm. She’d expected to be as full of jitters as the
last time. Second thoughts about the new Warden and worries about
the safety of the Undergrounders and the ratriders. But no. It was
too late. She had no choice in the matter anymore, so worrying had
no point. It was as if whatever happened after tonight didn’t
matter. On a certain level, this fatalism frightened her a lot, but
she wouldn’t let her fear come to the surface. She spent that day
drowned in a strange clarity. Like somebody walking up to the
firing squad?

When evening came, all the goblins gathered
in the square to file into the Union Hall. Grizelda joined the
crowd and passed under the great stone arch and into the hall with
the rest of them.

It was packed in there, like it always was.
The close proximity of so many bodies made it hot inside, and the
sound of many voices crowded the dim air. Calmly, still calmly,
scarily calmly, she ascended the stairs to her seat. She knew
exactly what to do.

Once the goblins had for the most part found
their seats, the lights went up on the stage. The goblin with his
clipboard came out and read announcements, the usual stuff about
tunnel closings, culture parties, and the perennial safety warning
about the collapsed mineshaft in Section B. She scarcely heard it.
None of the goblins were paying attention to him, either, but they
had a different reason. In the front of the stage there were two
podiums, empty. They stood in opposite corners of the platform as
if unwilling to get near each other.

The goblin with the clipboard left, and then,
to a silent hall, Chairman Grendel and Miner Nelin entered the
stage. They walked side by side in an attempt to look amicable, but
it was obvious there was barely suppressed hatred between the two
of them. Each of them took a podium.

Chairman Grendel raised his arms to address
the audience.

“Comrades! Fellow goblins! We are here today
for what has become an annual tradition, the election-eve
chairmancy debates. Before we begin, I’d like to warn my opponent–”
He gave a little nod to Miner Nelin. “–that I’m rather used to
winning these things. May he have better luck than his thirty-three
predecessors.”

There was scattered laughter. Grizelda knew
that Miner Nelin would give a clever retort next. That was how it
worked. But she wasn’t following the debate. It was time for her to
go. She slid out of her seat and started climbing down one of the
ladders that connected the Hall’s upper levels together. Each level
she passed she checked that the coast was clear, but all she saw
were rows and rows of goblins apparently enraptured by the
proceedings below them. Nobody turned to look at her.

She easily switched from the ladders to the
stairs while the voices droned on above her. The stage over her
head was silhouetted by the spotlights, a black square with a
corona. What light managed to get past the stage threw the small
circle of floor at the bottom of the Hall into a murky twilight.
She crossed it quietly, and had almost made it to the foot of the
entrance arch when somebody grabbed her arm.

“Who’s there?” a voice said, and pulled her
backward, into one of the beams of light bleeding down from the
stage. In the instant she saw that it was Mechanic Lenk who had
her, he saw her, too. He pulled her closer.

“Grizelda? What are you doing here?”

“What are
you
doing here?” Furious at
him, she tried to twist away, but his long nails dug into her
arm.

“Tell me where you’re going! You’re up to
something dangerous and I know it!”

She glared at him.

Lenk met her gaze with equal intensity. “As
of December the fourth, you had traveled through one of the passes
up to the surface on at least two occasions. Crome also tells me
you are behaving strangely. This cannot go on.”

In her surprise, for a moment she stopped
struggling. It had been Lenk. Lenk, who could not even get together
the courage to help defend her against Nelin’s faction, it had been
Lenk who’d sent that spy after her.

“Of all the people, I never would have
thought…”

“I never intended Bolo to try to hurt you. I
hired him to look after you, tell me if you were getting into
trouble. I sacked him after the unfortunate alley incident.”

“I didn’t think you had it in you,” she
said.

His grip on her arm tightened. “Tell me where
you’re going.”

“Not until you tell me what you’re doing down
here! Spying on me some more?”

“No. Didn’t I just tell you? I don’t know a
thing about what you’ve been doing since the fourth.” His
expression was hard to read in the half-light. “If you must know, I
always leave these meetings as early as possible so I can get more
work done. The Chairman turns a blind eye, though if I officially
got caught, I’d get fined.”

His explanation fell flat. The coward Lenk,
now what was he up to? She had to get up to the sewers or else she
would be late. Above their heads, either the Miner or the Chairman
had scored a touché, because the crowd broke into scattered
applause.

She spoke in a low growl to avoid being
overheard. “If you don’t let me go, I swear I’m going to scream,
and they’ll catch both of us.” She tried to twist away again, but
he held her all the tighter.

“And I say you’re not. You’re much more
afraid of getting caught than I am. A fine? What do I care about a
fine? You’re going to go right back up those stairs and you’re
going to stay there until this debate is over.”

He turned as if to march her back up the
stairs, but she made a sudden movement, a last desperate attempt to
wrench herself free. It didn’t work, but it knocked him off
balance. His head hit the stone of the arch. He grunted, and for a
moment his grip slackened. It was all Grizelda needed. She pulled
herself loose and sprinted out into the street.