Grizelda (9 page)

“This had better be good, Laundryman. There’s
a combine down in E and two coal washers and the generator’s acting
funny again. We could have a powerout any moment. Is that it?”
Mechanic Lenk pointed at the ruined sewing machine.

Grizelda made a strangled noise. The mechanic
didn’t notice her, though. As soon as Crome nodded, he strode
towards the sewing machine, still talking a mile a minute.

“The thing is, I don’t have any extra time to
spare on you. Yes, clothes are important and all, but do you
understand how much work it takes to keep anything running around
here?”

He gave the situation a quick scan. “You’re
lucky. It looks like I can fix this quick.”

He threw down his toolbox, rummaged around
inside it, and selected an awl. He tried a variety of angles around
the machine, sighting along the tool like a pool cue, finding the
best way to pry the gnarl of shirt free. Then he looked up.

“Laundryman! What’s the matter with the girl?
She looks about ready to pass out.”

Did she really look that bad? She pressed the
back of her hand against her cheek and tried to guess her color. It
probably wasn’t very good. What a disgrace. She wished she could
just hide and not let these goblins remark over her like she was a
zoo animal.

“It was her fault,” Crome said.

Lenk gave him a look, but didn’t say
anything. Instead he wedged the awl between the shirt and the
machine and levered it down. With a lot of prying in this fashion
and the help of some scissors, he managed to get the shirt free. By
that point it was not a shirt anymore; it was a tangle of shreds.
He handed the tatters to Crome.

He gave it a look as if he had just been
handed a cow pile. More out of politeness than anything else he
managed a terse “Thank you for your work, Mechanic,” then he turned
away in search of an appropriate wastebasket.

Grizelda and Lenk were left alone together.
As soon as he was sure Crome’s eyes were off of them, he set down
his awl and put a hand on her shoulder.

“You’re Grizelda, right?” he said.

She nodded.

“You look terrible.”

She made a smile that was not exactly happy.
“I’m afraid I do. It wasn’t my fault about the shirt, honest.”

Lenk checked over his shoulder. The coast was
still clear. “Look, when work’s over, how would you like to come
have a cup of tea? I think you could use it.”

Tea? Something
normal
. She could use
that more than anything else in the world.

“I think I would like that very much,” she
said.

“Seamstress Grizelda, you may resume your
work.” That was Crome’s voice, in a warning tone.

Lenk gave her a hurried set of directions to
his home, then he had to leave, grabbing up his toolkit and flying
out the door as fast as he had come. Grizelda returned to her
work.

Chapter 8

Nothing else disastrous happened for the rest
of the day. Though Grizelda still didn’t understand a thing about
how the sewing machine operated, she managed to struggle along.
Finally, some time in the afternoon, the second whistle blew. The
day was over. She guessed the goblins had these precious few hours
in the evenings to do with what they wanted.

She folded up the last of her clothes and
left the building as fast as she could. Outside, the air was still
damp and machine-smelling. She started walking, taking care to
avoid eye contact with the goblins this time. What was the matter
with them, anyway? They seemed to hate her just because she was
human. She kept her head down and moved quickly.

Even so, it took her a while to find the
address. The directions Lenk had given her led her to an older part
of town, where most of the buildings were abandoned. It had seemed
to her, with the little she knew of the city, that there were
plenty of normal places for the goblins to live, nice, respectable
apartment-like things. But Lenk had chosen to make his home on the
first floor of an abandoned factory. When she finally found it, she
stood a while just outside the gate, looking at it doubtfully. He
had told her in their hurried conference on the work floor that he
lived there for the peace and quiet. But it was so
old
. The
factory sagged like an old coat that had seen better days. The
walls were cracked and it looked like part of the roof in the back
was caved in. She went up to the door anyway, and when she knocked,
Mechanic Lenk must have been waiting for her, because he opened the
door right away.

He welcomed her into a room that had once
been a manufacturing floor. Everything of value had long ago been
stripped from it, leaving only the bare concrete. One end, back in
the shadows, showed signs of a jumble of wreckage from the
collapsed roof. The other end had been colonized by Lenk. There was
a table and bed, some handmade shelves, and a sink, spared somehow
from the stripping that had gone on everywhere else. There was a
stove set up, with some copper wires leading out of its back to
another room. He had done his best to cheer up the place, but she
still didn’t see why anybody would want to live here.

Lenk started by apologizing for the lack of
chairs. He disappeared into the other room for a few minutes,
leaving her to wait, then came back with a big armchair that he
pushed up to the table. He invited Grizelda to sit down, then went
to go get his kettle.

“They do allow some private property around
here, thank goodness,” he said.

As for private property, Lenk seemed to have
a little. There was a handful of books on the shelves, maps tacked
up to the walls, a half-polished gear and its greasing cloth left
lying on the table. There was also a teacup on the table, with a
dark liquid inside. She picked it up and sniffed it.

At that moment Lenk turned around and saw
her. With a look of terror, he made frantic motions for her to
stop. She lowered the cup, confused.

“That’s battery acid!”

Grizelda jerked the cup down onto the table,
fast. Lenk took it gingerly and set it on the shelf.

“If you see anything weird lying around in a
cup down here, please, don’t touch it!”

“But why do you leave battery acid lying
around in a teacup?” she said.

“That’s only when I’m trying a new
formulation. Hold on.” He scraped something out of the kettle and
set it aside. Then he filled the kettle with water from the tap and
set it on the stove. Once the water was safely heating, he
continued.

“I don’t have enough actual jars for the
acid,” he said. “I scrounge around for whatever I can find, pots,
pans…”

“And teacups,” Grizelda added.

“They’re small, they’re good for holding
samples. I’m sorry. I usually keep them in the workroom, I just got
careless this time…”

“I didn’t drink it,” she said.

Lenk came around and sat down on the edge of
the bed. “Your first day of work didn’t go very well.” It was a
statement, not a question.

Grizelda nodded. “The goblins all hate me and
I don’t know why. Well, not you, and probably not the Chairman,
but…” She shook her head. “I can see it every time I go outside. I
don’t understand. I walked in on you and everything, but that can’t
have been
enough
, for the sort of looks they give me…”

Lenk put up a hand to gently stop her. “We
can talk about that, but that’s not exactly what I meant. What I
meant was the ratrider that caused the incident with your sewing
machine this morning.”

Grizelda bit her lip in guilty surprise, as
if he had caught her doing something wrong. “How did you know it
was a ratrider?”

Instead of answering, he got up and checked
the kettle. It wasn’t ready. He stayed at the stove anyway, facing
away from her, while he spoke.

“I suspect, Grizelda– I don’t know, but I
suspect that the ratriders also had something to do with your
showing up on our doorstep the other day. You don’t have to tell me
if you don’t want to,” he added quickly.

Good
, Grizelda thought.

“It has to do with the way ratriders are. You
wouldn’t have had any experience with them. They conceal themselves
when they go above the surface.”

He sat back down. “One of the reasons I
invited you here was to offer you a little friendly advice.
Ratriders are fey; they don’t feel the way goblin beings – or human
beings – do. When they make mischief, either they don’t understand
or they don’t care that it hurts us. It’s their sick idea of fun to
sabotage our machines and lead travelers astray. So my advice to
you is that whenever you have the choice, avoid the company of
these ratriders. They may say they’re helping you but they never
are.”

His little speech was interrupted when the
kettle started squealing. “Ah! The water’s ready.”

Lenk got up and busied himself at the stove,
allowing Grizelda to feel sheepish in a little privacy. Secret exit
from the city? How could she have been so stupid? It had been the
stupidity of someone who was desperate, that was what.

After Lenk took the kettle off the heat, he
took the lump of stuff he’d scraped out before and spooned it back
in. Grizelda realized that the lump, an oily greenish mass, was
actually tea leaves. She opened her mouth, closed it, then
pretended not to notice what she’d seen.

They’d never reused tea leaves at the shop,
even when times were at their hardest.

Lenk brought the cups back to the table, and
Grizelda took hers, feeling highly uncomfortable. She couldn’t
think of anything to say that didn’t have to do with ratriders or
reusing tea leaves. She turned the cup around in her hands. It was
still too hot to drink.

“What did you mean when you said you’re
making a new formulation?” she said, searching for some way to make
conversation.

“Ah.” Lenk seemed embarrassed, but if
Grizelda saw what she thought she saw, he was also a little
pleased. “I’m working on an experiment. One that takes a lot of
power. You can’t trust the grid down here – I keep telling the
Council of Foremen they’re pulling too much with all their electric
lights on the streets – so I made my own batteries. It’s actually
just in the other room. Would you like to see it?”

That must have been the mysterious other room
where the wires led. Now her curiosity was piqued. Goblins were
amazing, the kinds of contraptions they came up with and sent to
the surface. Electricity, steam trains. It would be interesting to
see a real goblin inventor at work, creating some new technological
marvel.

“All right,” she said.

They got up and went through the open door,
taking their cups with them. Grizelda took a sip from hers and
grimaced. It might as well have
been
battery acid.
Fortunately, Lenk was ahead of her and couldn’t see her face. He
was talking about how the goblins relied on the electric lights too
much now, and that they should have kept with the cave fungus of
their ancestors. Electric lights made them too dependent on the
merchants.

The other room was smaller than the room
where he lived and messier. Yet there was an underlying order to
the mess. Bits of machine parts lay in piles on the floor, yes, but
they lay in piles according to type, and the collection of jars and
pans on the shelves was sorted and labeled. But the table in the
middle of the room was the center of attention. There was a pair of
machines connected by wires sitting on it amid a collection of
scorch marks. For the life of her, Grizelda couldn’t tell what it
was supposed to do.

“I’m trying to build a telegraph,” Lenk said.
“I’m afraid I can’t demonstrate it for you because the other day
some ratrider stripped all the insulation off my wires.”

She nodded and smiled, but Lenk was able to
tell immediately that she had no idea what a telegraph was.

“In principle, it’s a way of transmitting
information over long distances,” he explained. “You push down a
lever on
this
end,” he pointed to one of the machines, “and
it closes an electric circuit that turns on an electromagnet at
that
end, and that lever goes down. So the goblin at
that
end can tell what the goblin at the other end is doing
with the lever. If there was some sort of agreement between them
what the sequence of ups and downs meant, they could
communicate.”

Grizelda listened politely, and when he was
done, she thought she had the gist of it.

“It seems to me it would be a lot easier to
just send a runner,” she said.

“Not when you’re sending a message
between
goblin unions!” Lenk said. He was getting excited
and punctuating his words with more and more hand gestures.
“Goblins can’t travel by day; if we saw the sun we would go
pfft
! just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “And the post
is barred to us. But if we had this system of near-instantaneous
communication between the unions, think of the things we could do.
Say the ogre merchants wanted to lower the price of the steel they
were buying from us, and if we don’t go along with it, they say
they’ll move their business to the goblins under Yves. With this
telegraph, we could pop a message over to Yves and tell them not to
put up with this nonsense. Both the unions would benefit.”

Grizelda didn’t reply right away. The goblins
gave her hate-filled stares every time she went out onto the
street. Now Lenk spoke of steel prices and ogre merchants … and he
reused tea.
So the oppressor has arrived at last
, that was
what Miner Nelin had said to her. Gradually she was putting two and
two together.

But Lenk misinterpreted her silence. “I’m
afraid I’ve bored you with my pet delusion.” He rapped the table
top. “It works all right across the table, but I can’t get it to go
any farther. I heard a rumor that some goblins under Salinaca City
managed it. But that’s just the problem. Can’t get any
confirmation.”