Grizelda by Margaret Taylor

it up, shook out his bucket, then…
    Quack!
    The sound was as unexpected to Grizelda as it
was to everybody else. Instead of falling down with a clang, the
rinser lid fell down with a quack. As far as she could tell, only
the rinser workers in the area had heard it. They started talking
quickly to each other and pointing to the rinser in question. The
news spread, and soon most of the goblins in the room had left off
work to have a look at the cursed rinser. Grizelda leaned out from
behind her sewing machine to get a better view.
    All of a sudden Crome was among them, pushing
through the crowd with a bosslike attitude. “What’s the matter
here?”
    The worker who had started it all, Grizelda
noticed, was nowhere to be seen. The other rinser operators all
started pointing at the machine and talking over each other, each
of them sure he was the one who had the story straight.
    Crome silenced them. He strode up to the
rinser and lifted the lid with a little difficulty. Nothing
happened. But when he let it fall, it quacked again.
    His eyes flicked to the floor.
    “All right, who scuffed the salt ring?”
    He turned around and swept the room with a
suspicious glare. He lingered over each face in turn, trying to
pick out some sign of guilt.
    Quack!
    Grizelda giggled. She couldn’t help it. She
had to cover her hands with her mouth and turn away out of fear for
her job, but it was still funny. Crome opened and shut the lid
several times in an unsuccessful effort to get the thing to stop
quacking, then getting increasingly angry, he growled and kicked
it. It quacked again.
    Just when Crome had given up in disgust and
was beginning to turn away, the lid burst open of its own accord,
catching him on the upper lip. He yowled and leapt away maybe three
or four feet. Grizelda was crouched behind the sewing machine with
her knuckles in her mouth, laughing so hard that she was sure Crome
was going to see her. That look on his face when the machine
whacked him was precious.
    “I’ve had it with those damned ratriders! I’m
telling a foreman!”
    The laundryman stormed out of the room like a
hurricane, leaving a stunned silence behind him.
    When Crome had left, it was as if a weight
had lifted from the air. The mood on the work floor became almost
cheerful. The other workers talked to each other while they worked
in a way they had never done before. Grizelda was affected, too.
Without Crome watching over her shoulder all the time, she felt
defter, less stupid. She plucked up the torn clothes and ran them
through the machine so swiftly that she found herself waiting for
the other workers instead of the other way around. She’d also come
to a decision.
    That quacking rinser lid had to have been
ratriders. It was all good fun, but it was also wrong, this
sabotaging the machines like Mechanic Lenk was talking about. She
was going to have to go find those ratriders and talk to them.
    The instant the work bell rang, she threw the
last of her work in a drawer and got up. She followed the tide of
laundry workers as they streamed out into the street and went their
separate ways. She started walking.
    She wasn’t quite sure what she was going to
do next. She had a vague idea that she might try talking to the
ratriders that flitted around in the goblin city. As usual, they
were dashing in and out of sight in the spaces between the rooftops
and the cave ceiling. Here one moment, they were gone the next,
having slipped through a chink in the wall or ducked behind a
facade. She kept walking until she happened to catch sight of
one.
    “Hell–”
    The word died on her lips. The ratrider had
vanished in a flash of color before she’d even started to
speak.
    The same thing happened on her second try.
This wasn’t going to be as easy as it looked.
    She decided to change her tactic. There was
one of those typical apartment-like buildings on the corner where
the traffic of ratriders seemed to concentrate, like a thoroughfare
of sorts. After checking