The Raconteur's Commonplace Book
Page 5
Pantin set the book down, returned to the map fragment with the horned and tentacled creature, and examined the legend beneath its curling claws. There, under the icons for train tracks, caves, roads, and rivers, was a symbol that looked a bit like a slice of pie topped by a circle. It was a keyhole, and it was labeled PASSAGE.
He hurried around the room, looking at the legends and keys of any map he thought was too small to carry him away. The keyhole was there almost every time, sometimes shaped differently, sometimes labeled transit or departure or strait, but always recognizably a keyhole. At last he came back to the one on the desk that he’d nearly fallen into. Yes, there was the little keyhole in its legend, labeled aditum.
“Adit-gate.” Pantin laughed, a bizarre, out-of-control sort of giggle. “Aditum.” Then, abruptly, he stopped laughing. He folded up the map and shoved it unceremoniously into his pack.
Immediately he could feel the fury of the room around him. He didn’t wait to see what other uncanny traps it had at its disposal. Pantin sprinted for the arched entryway that, by all appearances, gave into the foyer. He leaped through it headfirst, sprawled onto tile, and came to rest with a thud against the big center table.
The front door was open again, and thin gray light sifted through the trees beyond the drive out front. A tall figure stepped into the opening and lifted a glowing cheroot to its mouth.
“Morning,” said the peddler, exhaling smoke.
Pantin got to his feet and marched across the foyer to the door, not entirely certain where he’d wind up when he crossed the threshold. Apparently the peddler had the same idea, or something like it, because although he very carefully did not step in, he reached one hand through into the house. Pantin took it, gripping the gloved palm as hard as he could, and let the peddler pull him outside.
And then . . . he was outside.
The peddler looked down at the shaking, exhausted child. “How’d you do?” he asked, puffing on the cheroot.
Pantin reached into his pack and passed him the map.
The peddler unfolded the page and stared down at it. “What the hell is this?”
Pantin looked around, his bleary eyes landing on the remnants of the fire the boys had built the night before and the sleeping bodies lumped around it. From the looks of things, only two of them had stayed. “The map key,” Pantin muttered. “That’s what you want.” Then he stumped down the porch stairs and kicked the nearest sleeper in the gut. “Hey!” he snarled as the boy jerked upright. “Where’d the rest of the cowards go?”
Then he fell over in a dead faint. But when the story was told later, as it was again and again over the years by the students of Pantin’s school and beyond, it was reckoned that nobody could fault him for that. After spending a night in Fellwool House, the boy had earned his rest.
INTERLUDE
The room applauded politely, all except Captain Frost, who tapped the last few grains of sand down from the top of the glass, turned it over on the sideboard, and hurried out of the parlor. A moment later, a gust of air and a rattling of the windowpanes told them the captain had gone outside by the front door. When the breeze had stilled, Tesserian riffled through one of his decks and handed Maisie two of the knaves: the black knave of keys and the red knave of caskets, to finish a peaked window.
Phineas Amalgam sat back and drained the dregs of his coffee. Then he looked at Petra. “Was that the one you meant?”
“That was it.”
“Ah.” He nodded his thanks to Sorcha as she refilled his cup. “That story isn’t in any of my books yet, you know.”
Petra frowned. “Certainly it is.”
“It isn’t. When I was telling the bit about the suits of armor, I remembered. It’s meant to go into my next collection, but I hadn’t decided which of two versions of the story to include. There’s one where it’s not suits of armor in that hallway, but instead the floor is lava and the house has a much better sense of humor.”
“Well, I must’ve heard it somewhere, mustn’t I?” Petra asked breezily. “I assumed it was from one of your books, but perhaps it wasn’t. Or perhaps I was thinking of a different peddler tale after all. There are so many.”
“Peddlers always get short shrift in folklore,” Masseter complained from where he stood beside the mantel with his arms folded. “They’re always villains.”
“Was this peddler a villain?” Tesserian asked thoughtfully. He glanced at Maisie. “What do you say, miss? Was the peddler a villain?”
Maisie considered. “I think—”
Mrs. Haypotten tsked as she bustled over with the teapot to refill Tesserian’s cup. “Sending a child into that sort of danger? Certainly he was.” She patted Maisie on the shoulder and bustled off again in a flurry of blue polka-dotted crepe. Maisie, whose face was safely hidden from standing adults by virtue of her being seated on the floor, rolled her eyes.
“You see?” Masseter shook his head and took one of the little cigars from his pocket. “Villains, even when they’re not villains,” he said, plucking a spill from a vase of long paper matches that stood on the mantel, matches that Sorcha had fashioned so that they looked not like sticks of twisted newspaper but like tall, thin, sculpted paper flowers.
“No smoking in here,” Mrs. Haypotten said briskly as she left the room to refill the empty teapot. Masseter glanced sharply at Sangwin, who tossed the end of his cigar out the window.
“They’re not always villains,” Amalgam said mildly. “I can think of plenty of tales where they’re not.”
“You can.” Masseter deposited the flower-shaped spill back in its vase, then dropped into an empty chair beside the fire. “You sift stories for a living. But can anyone else?” He looked around the room. This turned out to be a bit of a challenge. Silence fell. Captain Frost came back, his shoes and beard wet from the rain, and took up his cup, and still no one could think of a tale in which the peddlers were not the villains.
At length, in the chair in the corner, Madame Grisaille spoke from the depths of her wrap. Her voice gravelly as ever, she inquired, “Can you think of one, Mr. Masseter?”
Masseter closed his eye and pressed a finger in the space over his nose between it and the patch. “I am a peddler of a kind,” he observed, “and I’ve heard it said that every man believes himself to be the hero of his own tale. So perhaps this is a more difficult question than I thought when I first asked it.”
Reever Colophon had been sitting in one of the three high-backed chairs before the fire with his legs thrown out long and careless before him. “I know one,” he said, stretching his arms overhead. “I’ll tell the next tale, if you like, and you lot can say if the peddlers are the villains in it or not.”
THREE
The Whalebone Spring
The First Twin’s Tale
There was a port town that crouched between a bay and a hill; you may have heard of it.
If you have, understand that this was long before the days of the pirates who in later times became the runners of rotgut whiskey and Cuban cigars, endangered butterflies and irises that bloomed in illicit colors. It was before the ancestors of men like John Deadlock and Carrick Bend, who for a while turned smuggling into a way to rebel during one of the city’s darkest times. These were earlier, more innocent days, and the port was a small and simple place that relied on ships and traveling merchants for news of the world over the hill and beyond the bay.
One morning at the opening of market season, a Yankee peddler came to town on a wagon drawn by a black nag. He stopped in the square, unhitched the pony, and with a few jerks of a crowbar and a few swings of a hammer, converted the wagon into a stall. He began to set out his wares: sundials and water clocks, chronometers and pocket watches, mantel clocks, candle clocks, tide clocks. Clocks that announced the hours with chimes, with internal pin-cylinder music boxes, with ingenious wooden figurines that clacked tiny rosewood claves or rang miniature glass bell trees. Last of all he hung out a shingle that read ALPHONSUS LUNG, CLOCKMAKER.
The day after that, a third Yankee peddler drove a wagon drawn by a pied pony into the square and set up his stall under a shingle that announced him as IGNIS BLISTER, PYROTECHNICIAN. He filled his shelves with things that flared and flamed and burst: candles, fireworks, fusees, black powder, flash powder, rushlights, repeating matches and friction matches and foxfire torches.
The fourth Yankee peddler to arrive drove a pair of tall red horses, and in his wagon he carried three ebony coffers wrapped in bands of brass. They seemed the sorts of chests that could hold only treasure, or saints’ relics, or the heads of kings. The fourth peddler took one coffer down carefully, and the curious citizens jostled and pushed for a glimpse within as he lifted the lid.
Inside, there was only paper.
The first three Yankee peddlers scoffed. The fourth fixed them with a faint smile as he unpacked sheaves of paper that had been stitched into pamphlets. “You laugh, brothers. What do you sell?”
The first Yankee peddler nodded up at his shingle. “Clocks and watches, brother. I am called Lung.”
“Tinware,” sniffed the second, clipping patterns into a lantern with a pair of shears. “My name is Bone.”
The third lit a cigar with a cedar match that flared green. “Blister,” he said. “Infernal devices and sources of light.”
The fourth Yankee peddler tipped his hat to the other three and went on laying his pamphlets out upon the counter of his stall. “And I am Drogam Nerve.”
“But what do you sell?” Cassiterides Bone inquired.
Alphonsus Lung picked up one of the pamphlets and flipped through it. “These poor things? What sort of pathetic bookmonger are you?”
“I am no mere bookmonger, and those are not merely books,” Nerve retorted. He plucked the pamphlet from Bone’s fingers. “I am a catalog merchant. I don’t sell these. I sell what’s in them.”
“And what’s in them?” Ignis Blister asked over folded arms.
Drogam Nerve smiled again and pitched his voice so that everyone in the square could hear his answer—which, on this market day, was a lot of people. “Everything, my friends. These are catalogs, and with them you can find and order anything and everything imaginable.” And he bowed to the assembled people of the town.
Well, this was something new. The citizens pored over Nerve’s catalogs with their woodcut illustrations and discovered astounding goods they hadn’t even known existed. For some things, Nerve sold blueprints the purchaser could follow to build a house, a train station, a carriage; for others, he took orders and promised delivery of the actual item within a fortnight.
But the peddler called Nerve was not the only one to arrive that day. A ship docked, carrying news of coming danger: invaders from up the coast and over the hills were headed south. There was only one enemy likely to come from that direction, and it was the only enemy capable of striking fear into the town on the bay. An impromptu community meeting came together in the market square to discuss what should be done.
“That’s easy,” said the Yankee peddler called Lung. “You will need timepieces in order to coordinate your defense, and a great clock whose tolling can be heard throughout the town, so that all will know the hour of the attack.” And he opened his cart and showed them small pocket chronometers and enormous timepieces with bells that pealed like alarms. “I have heard tell of these people,” he warned. “You must not be caught unawares.”
“No,” said the Yankee peddler called Bone. “What good will knowing the hour do if you can’t defend yourself? What you need is fortification: a great and powerful perimeter strung from hilltop to hilltop to keep the invaders at bay. I, too, have heard of these people, and you must at all costs keep them from entering your town.” And he displayed lengths of fence and barbed wire with edges sharp as a razor’s.
“Those won’t work,” argued the third Yankee peddler, the one called Blister. “You need more than clocks and fences. I know these people. You must destroy them outright, or you haven’t a chance of survival. You must arm yourselves.” And Blister showed them weapons: cheirosiphons, fire lances, firepots packed with glittering incendiary powders, and bottles of Greek fire.
The fourth Yankee peddler waited until his fellows had finished. At last, the people of the town turned to look at him. He shook his head slowly.
“You may announce the hour of their coming with one of Brother Lung’s clocks,” he said. “You may hold them at bay for a while with Brother Bone’s fortifications, and you may even kill some with Brother Blister’s handiwork. But it will serve only to delay the inevitable. In the end, they will win, and they will take your city because they outnumber you and because they are stronger, rougher, madder than you. In the end, if anything can best them, it will not be you—you will all be gone, either fled or killed. Only the city itself will remain. In the end, only the city can stop them.”
“How can a city do this?” the mayor asked. “Do you know a way?”
Drogam Nerve took a catalog from his stall, opened it, and showed the mayor the page he had selected. “You must build this.” This was a sequence of designs that would turn the city itself into something like a combination of a clock, a fence, and a bomb all wrapped into one.
“How much?” the mayor asked.
Drogam Nerve smiled and pointed to the price printed in the bottom corner.
The city hurried to raise the money, bought the plans for Nerve’s device, and began to build. It was an infinitely complicated design. Some of the components—escapements and flashpans and fuses and assorted bits of metalwork—could be had from Lung, Bone, and Blister, but the design also required pieces the likes of which had never been seen in the town on the bay. These had to be ordered from Nerve as well, who hired the fastest riders to be found to undertake the journey to the warehouse of his partner, Octavian Deacon.
Piece by piece, the city was turned into an infernal device.
Finally, the time came to put the last part into place: a great steel spring. “Pass the word for the mainspring,” went the call through the town, but among the parts that had been ordered, there was no giant steel mainspring. “Pass the word for the mainspring,” went the call again, but the local engineers had no springs big enough to power the city-turned-weapon.
Time grew short. The mayor went to the Yankee peddlers. He found them sitting in the market square, playing cards. “Mr. Nerve,” he said, “we seem to have forgotten the mainspring, and we haven’t steel enough to make one.”
Nerve went for his catalogs, but the mayor shook his head. “There is no time,” he protested. “Our enemies will be here in a matter of days, surely.”
Alphonsus Lung looked up from his cards. “You have no steel, but what about whalebone?”
“Of course,” the mayor snapped. “Half of our citizens are whalers. But what good does that do?”
“Among my clocks,” Lung said, “there is one from China that uses a mainspring of whalebone. If you have enough whalebone, you can fashion your spring from that.”
The mayor looked to Nerve, who consulted the plans. “Well,” he said, “I wouldn’t be able to tell you how it might affect the mechanism.”
“You mean it might not work?” the mayor asked.
“Oh, it’ll work,” Nerve replied. “The question is, will it work in the same way? When you change the construction of a device, you often change the manner in which it operates. You are proposing to alter the very heart of the machine. Certainly it will make a difference.”
At that moment, a deep explosion like the firing of a cannon echoed through the landscape, and saffron clouds spewed into the sky
over the hill. “That is one of my incendiaries,” Blister said, eyeing the haze. “They have reached the head of the river.”
The city was out of time. No one had any better solution, so the mayor ordered the town’s engineers to craft a mainspring from whalebone as fast as they could. In a matter of hours, the giant whalebone spring was finished and placed where it belonged, at the heart of the mechanism that turned the city into a snare. The device was wound by a dozen men circling around a huge capstan. The trap was set.
Then a far-off sound like the shearing of giant scissors tore through the air. “That’s one of my fortifications,” Bone said, peering westward through a spyglass. “They are only a few miles away.” The time had come to evacuate.
So they left the city: the citizens piled into ships, and the Yankee peddlers hitched their ponies and horses and mules to their wagons. The mayor invited them to watch the battle unfold from the vessels out beyond the harbor, but the Yankee peddlers shook their heads, and one by one they started up the winding road that had carried them into town in the first place.
The city was deserted when the invaders swarmed into it. A cry of triumph rose from its streets as they discovered that they had conquered without even having to fight. Meanwhile, out on the vessels in the bay, half the citizens watched the city through spyglasses while the other half counted down the minutes on an assortment of timepieces purchased from Alphonsus Lung, until at last the time had come for the trap they had made of their city to spring on the invaders.
And then the assorted clocks on the ships sounded their varied alarms.
Nothing happened.
The citizens shook their timepieces. They stared across the bay. They waited. Still nothing happened, and nothing continued to happen as the conquerors took possession of the port.
The city did not spring the trap it had become. Something was wrong, either with Drogam Nerve’s plans or with the way they had been executed, or perhaps with the whalebone spring itself.