Grizelda Read Online Free PDF Page A

followed him, and Grizelda walked along behind on foot.
They went to the stairway and started going down. Grizelda felt
uncomfortable leaving the other prisoners behind, but it didn’t
seem there was anything she could do. They were strange people,
these ratriders, who would save a life for the sake of a mended
jacket. She wasn’t sure that they would do it again.
    Down and down they went. The darkness
enclosed them, pressing in on their little bubble of green light
like a tangible thing. These cells were vacant, cold and silent. It
was like walking into a tomb. The further down they went, the
stranger their geometry got. Weird bends in the floor plans,
slanting walls, cell blocks so short she felt she could reach out
and touch the other side. Finally Geddy called a halt.
    They moved out from the stairway until they
got to one of those walled-off places that interrupted the sequence
of cells. It was like a blot of nailed-up boards, not put up with
any symmetry, or put up any time in the recent past, either. Time
and moisture had rotted the boards entirely through. It didn’t make
any sense.
    “But why are there holes?” She felt she had
to whisper, in this eerie place. “Why are there holes in
Promontory?”
    “This wasn’t part of the old fort,” Geddy
said. “This rock used to belong to the goblins, and a lot of the
old tunnels still go through the area.”
    Goblins? Just the word gave her
chills. She had always known, in the abstract, that there were
goblins living under the city of Lonnes. They did a lot of the
people’s industrial work for them. But the thought of actually
meeting one of those slimy, twisted…
    Tunya’s smile was ironic, but not entirely
unkind. “Where did you think you got those pretty shoe buckles
from, girl?”
    “That’s why you have to be absolutely
silent,” Geddy said. “We have to go through their land to get to
the exit.”
    Grizelda nodded, not sure that she could
trust herself to speak.
     
    Lieutenant Calding left the warden’s office
highly displeased. He took his anger out in speed, walking down the
hall at a pace that was more like a jog, thinking furiously. A
subordinate brushed past him going the other way, and in his
distracted state, he almost let him pass. Then he thought better of
it and caught him by the shoulder.
    “Go fetch the prisoner in 403.”
    Caught by surprise, the man inarticulately
pointed the way he had been going. Probably meaning that he was on
some errand.
    “Whatever you were doing, I’ll take care of
it. Go fetch the prisoner. I want to talk to her some more.”
    The man nodded, and Calding released him to
scurry off and do as he was bid. Then he sank back into thought and
walked on.
     
    In an old storeroom deep in the goblin city,
Mechanic Lenk was working. Not the work that kept him dashing all
over the city from morning till night trying to keep the Union’s
ailing machines in something resembling repair. This was his own
work.
    He shut the door of the storeroom behind him,
thankful finally to have two minutes of spare time to rub together.
He’d converted the room specifically to be his workshop. He’d put
the acid up in pans and jars, anything he could find, really, and
set each carefully labeled mixture on the shelf. The zinc and the
copper were stored against the wall. There were a couple of
half-made batteries in the back as well as a finished one that
worked tolerably well, his power supply.
    He brushed a tangle of bits and coils of wire
on his work table aside and set to puttering on his experiment. The
table was a mess, and it had its share of scorch marks, but at
either end there was order. Inside a metal frame bolted to the wood
there were wires coiled around cylinders and a pedal that went up
and down. The Mechanic moved around the table, humming to himself,
and occasionally winding a wire around its lead.
    When all was arranged to his satisfaction, he
thought he’d try hooking it up to the power supply. The effect