Grizelda (18 page)

Lenk had told her to be careful. She didn’t
owe him anything.

Near the end of the workday, she checked that
the coast was clear, then whispered, “Kricker? Are you there?”

And then somehow Kricker was there sitting on
top of her sewing machine. He waved to her.

“Hey, Grizzy!”

“Have you really been following me all day?”
she said. Up until then, she hadn’t really believed it. Was he
invisible
? She’d been looking over her shoulder all day, but
hadn’t seen a hair of him.

“Yeah. Didn’t see any sign of a bloke
following you, though.”

It was true, she realized. She hadn’t seen a
sign of the spy all day, but had been too absorbed with Loyalists
and Strikers to notice. For a moment Grizelda stopped and chewed
her lip, overcome by a bad feeling. But if her pursuer was planning
something, there was nothing she could do about it.

“Look, Kricker, I need to go somewhere by
myself tonight.”

She looked at him, hoping for his approval,
but she didn’t get any. He was scowling.

“Kricker, this is really important,” she
pleaded. “And if I go there with a ratrider … I could get in a lot
of trouble.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

A staring contest followed, but neither of
them could get the upper hand.

“You can’t stop me,” Kricker said finally.
“Heck, most of the time you can’t even
see
me. If I wanted
to tag along, you wouldn’t even know it.”

That was it, then. Kricker was coming whether
she liked it or not. Fine. He wasn’t stopping her.

“Just please, make sure nobody sees you,” she
said.

Chapter 17

“How are you
doing
that?”

Grizelda and Kricker were deep in the tunnels
outside of goblin town by this point. Kricker’s ratrider light lit
the way for them, bobbing up and down with the movement of his rat
as it scuttled alongside her ankles. Grizelda was trying to retrace
her steps the way she had come three days ago, to the connection
with the Lonnes sewers. She hoped she could remember it.

“Doing what?” said Kricker.

“Every time I look at you, you’re somewhere
else!” she cried in exasperation. “The other ratriders keep doing
it, too.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Kricker made a half-embarrassed
smile. “We’re skleining. We ratriders can sort of drop in wherever
we want.”

“How is that different from teleporting?”

Kricker thought about that for a while.
“’Cause it matters whether you’re looking or not.” He paused. “No,
that’s not quite it. It’s more like, you’re not really somewhere
until
someone’s looking. That’s not really it either,
though.” He scratched his head. “It’s kind of hard to explain.”

“Oh.” The idea made her feel kind of funny.
She was quiet for a while, trying to work it out. Meanwhile, she
was relieved to find the place with the pipe sticking out of the
wall and the channel below it. She walked past it, speeding up as
they started to go uphill.

“Whoa, hey, Grizzy! Where are we going?”
Kricker spurred his rat to keep up with her.

If you have to know, we’re going to the
surface,” she said grimly.

“You’re crazy! It’s all right for me, I know
how to keep from being seen when I’m out on a raid. You’re going to
get smooshed!”

“You can’t stop me,” Grizelda said.

Kricker couldn’t think of anything to say to
that, so reluctantly he followed her. Without any trouble, they got
to the place where she had run into the boy Toby two days before.
It looked different at night, harsh under the strange green of
Kricker’s ratrider lamp and a little light bleeding in from the
street above. Grizelda hung a left, preoccupied. She needed to find
a way to Rue de Calle without being seen. She was pretty sure she
could do it the same way she had helped Toby to escape, by
following the major streets underground.

There was still plenty of traffic at this
hour, and she could feel the grinding of wheels and pound of
horses’ hooves going over her head as she went. When she thought
she was about halfway there she stopped and pulled a square of
cloth from her bodice pocket. She’d cut it from some scrap that the
laundry didn’t need anymore. She tied it around her head, tucking
under the strands of hair at her temples until not one bit showed.
She turned to Kricker.

“How do I look?”

Kricker didn’t say anything; he just gave her
another dark look.

A little while later, when she thought she
must be under the alley behind Rue de Calle, she snuck a quick look
out of the storm drain. It was an alley, all right, and it was
deserted. Getting out of the drain in her skirt was difficult, but
after a couple of tries, she managed it.

A wave of dizziness came over her. Nothing
over her head but big, black sky, a smooth dome sliced in places by
the rooftops. She sat and stared up at it. How long? How long had
it been since she’d been without some ceiling of stone?

The thin layer of half-melted snow on the
pavement started wicking its way through her coat and shoes. She
got up, shivering. It must have been December by now on the
surface. Her clothes, the same ones she’d thrown on that dreadful
night of the gendarmes, weren’t made for winter weather, not even
Corvain’s mild winters.

All the way down the alley the back ends of
buildings sat in a row, each one much like its neighbors. Piles of
broken-down crates and broken bottles clustered around back doors
sunk in from the street. She was about to despair of figuring out
which one was the Trebuchet when the wind carried a burst of
drunken laughter in from the street. She turned to the place it had
come from, Kricker following along.

There were a few shreds of paper hanging next
to the back door where some posters had been torn down and ground
into the slush below. She stopped, bent and peeled one of them
back.

“Remember Gendarme Phillips,” it read.
“Massacred in the line of duty defending the Republic from Auks and
sorcery.”

She moved on.

Grizelda descended the stairs to the door
carefully, not wanting to slip on the ice. She hesitated a moment
before knocking on the corroded metal door. What if they didn’t
want her? What if they found out she was a witch, like the
government had, and threw her out? Well, they weren’t about to find
out, that was all. She knocked.

The noise of the reverberations made her
heart skip a beat. For a few panicky seconds she waited for
somebody on the street to hear it and come take her, but nothing
happened. She knocked again, more softly.

All at once the door flung open and a
dark-haired youth grabbed her by the shoulder and pulled her
inside. He pinned her against the wall of a landing, jamming his
elbow into her neck.

“What do you want?”

Gasping, she cast about with her eyes over
the boy’s shoulder, looking for Kricker. He had the pointed end of
his lantern stick aimed at the boy’s ankles, tensed and waiting for
Grizelda’s cue.

“I said, what do you want?” He ground his
elbow deeper.

“I’m a friend. I promise, I’m a friend. Toby
sent me.”

He looked down at her, and Grizelda thought
he was studiously avoiding betraying anything with his
expression.

“Maybe,” he said.

“I’m a friend of Toby’s. Please.”

He turned his head. “Bourgeois!” he called
down the stairs. “Come up here!”

There was a clatter, then Toby crested the
top of the stairs, limbs flailing.

“Grizelda!”

They stared at each other.

“I came to tell you I’m in,” she said.

The dark-haired one relaxed his grip, let her
step away from the wall. “You know her, then?”

“That’s Grizelda. She’s the one I was talking
about.”

A little gruffly, the boy held out his hand.
“Me name’s Mitchell.”

Rubbing her neck, she accepted the handshake.
Kricker, she noticed, had wisely disappeared.

“I’m so sorry, Griz,” Toby said. “We’ve all
been– We’ve just all been kind of paranoid since yesterday. It’s
almost midnight, so we were about to break up, but that’s okay.
They’ll all be wanting to see you.”

Almost midnight?
she thought, as Toby
led her down the stairs, Mitchell bringing up the rear. But the
work shift had only just ended when she left the goblin city. It
should have been early evening. She’d been underground so long
she’d lost track of day and night.

Toby opened the door at the base of the
stairs to a basement room where a handful of young people sat
around in a circle on upturned crates of tinned fruit. They looked
up at her suspiciously as she came in. Most of them were about
Grizelda’s age, but they ranged from children to those like
Mitchell who were almost adults. Except for Toby, they all had the
scruffy look of Lonnes’s working poor: a few unstitched hems here,
a smudge on the neck there.

When Toby announced that she was Grizelda of
the sewer episode, they all started to spring up and greet her.

“Pleased to meet you, Grizelda.”

“Toby’s told us all about you!”

“We really appreciate what you did for him.
Really.”

She hung back, a little stunned, but Toby
dragged her forward into the center of a barrage of handshakes and
names and faces, so many that Grizelda was sure she’d never be able
to match them together.

“Long live the Republic, eh, Grizelda?”

“Glad to have another girl on board. My
name’s Solander. I work for the hall upstairs.”

As soon as she managed to squeeze a word in
edgewise, she apologized for being late.

“You’re one of the ones who has to sneak
around to get here, then?”

One of the older boys stepped forward. He
might have been about seventeen. There was such a confidence in his
bearing, though, that Grizelda would have guessed as high as
twenty-five.

“Katarin’s parents don’t like us, and Toby’s
parents didn’t.” There was something left unsaid in the way he said
didn’t
. “At any rate, it’s quite all right. My name’s Jamin.
I’m marginally in charge here.” He shook her hand.

“It’s nice to meet you,” Grizelda said. “I’m–
I’m honored.”

“He’s the founder,” Solander cut in.

Jamin shrugged it off. “Welcome to the Lonnes
Underground. We all thank you for rescuing Toby.”

Grizelda felt herself flush. “Er– what’s he
going to do now? Is he in hiding?”

“Yeah. He’s keeping low at my place until the
gendarmes get off his tail.”

“Toby’s parents realized which way the wind
was blowing and decided to leave the country,” said Stevry, a
dark-skinned boy leaning at ease against a crate. “One at a time,
so the cops wouldn’t notice. His mom and dad got over the border
okay, but he and his grandpa were still here when they raided the
house. So now Toby’s waiting here until we can figure out how to
get him to Salinaca.”

“I’m not leaving, all right?” Toby said. He
crossed his arms like someone who had been through this argument
many times before.

“Yes, you are, Bourgeois,” said Jamin. “I
promised Mr. Dunnag I wouldn’t let you come to danger.”

The Underground kids looked down.

“He got caught, didn’t he?” said
Grizelda.

Toby nodded. He swallowed, raked the hair out
of his eyes. “I swear, I’m not leaving this place until the
Committees are overthrown!”

Solander gave him a quick, pitying look. Toby
didn’t notice.

“I’m not sure how much Toby told you about
us,” she said. “Probably not much, it isn’t safe. There’s just not
much we can do. We talk politics. Sometimes we paint on a building
or two.”

“We wrote those pamphlets, remember?” said a
younger one. “Mitchell’s got his own typewriter.”

Something thumped overhead. All conversation
cut off, and they waited, heads turned to the cellar door. A few
long seconds later, the normal creak of the floorboards as people
walked overhead resumed.

Solander sighed. “The thing is,” she said, “I
hope you weren’t expecting to do very much. We can’t even get
everybody to come to meetings. Especially not now.”

Grizelda looked at her, confused. Everybody
else seemed to know what Solander was talking about. In fact, they
were starting to give her funny looks.

“Haven’t you heard?” Solander said. “A
gendarme killed a child in the Liberty District. They’re saying
that the mob killed him with shoemaker’s tools. At least, that’s
what the government’s saying. The Committees of Public Safety are
really cracking down now.”

For the first time, Grizelda sat down. She
felt like all the blood had drained out of her head. It was getting
worse. How much had she missed, insulated from all the news down in
Goblin Town?

“We’ve got to do
something
,” Toby
said. “It’s getting worse and worse. The Committees are taking over
the Republic and turning it into a police state. They’re not just
targeting sorcerers now, but honest people, too.” Grizelda looked
at the floor. “When are we not going to take it anymore?”

Some of the kids shifted noncommittally;
Stevry rolled his eyes.

Slowly it dawned on her. People like her had
done something terrible; they’d helped the Auks eat people in
exchange for not getting eaten themselves. But it hadn’t been her.
It had all ended when she was only three years old. She looked at
all those kids sitting around on crates in a basement. They weren’t
organized, but they could do something. Maybe if she, a witch, did
something good for Corvain, maybe she could make it okay.

“Let’s free all the prisoners in Promontory,”
Grizelda said quietly.

For a minute, her statement didn’t even sink
in. Then they were all staring at her like she was crazy. She
wasn’t entirely sure she wasn’t crazy either. It felt like she’d
been taken under by a spell, one that made her brave. Or maybe it
was reckless. But she couldn’t stop talking now.