The Raconteur's Commonplace Book

by Kate Milford

  Out on the bay, the mayor and the engineers argued over what had gone awry, and the citizens wailed and blamed and despaired. In the end, only one thing was certain: Nerve had said the device would work with a whalebone mainspring, but he had definitely been concerned that this makeshift heart might change how it worked. Perhaps changing the spring had changed its timing.

  So the newly exiled townsfolk watched their city fall—the city they had built, and loved, and then turned into a giant infernal device and left to defend itself. They watched, and still they waited for the whalebone spring to release its force. And still, nothing happened.

  In the city, the conquerors celebrated as they took possession, unaware that all around them a hidden weapon lay coiled: a weapon in the shape of a city, its whalebone heart winding slowly, slowly down. And it winds down still, all around us, as the city waits and bides its time.

  Which leaves this problem for all who hear my tale to solve: Who are you descended from—the townsfolk or the invaders? And are you, even now, living in the middle of a trap that continues winding down to the moment in which it will finally spring?

  Ticking? I hear no ticking.

  INTERLUDE

  Reever told his tale without getting up from his chair, with the fire alternately casting him in shadow and gilding his cowlicks with reflected shades of red and gold. He spoke almost without moving.

  Maisie, staring up at him from the floor, gave a shiver, barely noticing as she accepted the four aces that Tesserian handed her. The Blue Vein Tavern was in a port town between a bay and a hill. Had something been ticking? Other than, of course, the case clock between the vase of matches and the big music box above the fire? She glanced at Petra, who gave her a wink as she clapped for Reever’s performance.

  “Delightful.” Jessamy Butcher stood and crossed from a shadowy little table in one corner of the parlor to pour herself more coffee at the sideboard.

  “I’m delighted you think so,” Reever said with a lazy smile. “Will you be telling one yourself?”

  “You’ve been wondering what kind of tale I’d tell, haven’t you?” Jessamy’s voice was light as she stirred sugar into her coffee, but Reever Colophon saw her fingers twitch on the cup, and he wondered fleetingly if she was about to crush it the way she’d crushed her sherry glass.

  He watched her hands, watched her face, noted the reddish stain still darkening one swish of pale gold hair. “For days.” There was nothing lazy in his expression now, or in his voice.

  The room held its breath. If there were music, he would ask her to dance, Maisie thought with a pang. And then she realized that this amounted to exactly the same thing; perhaps it was just as impossible to keep secrets when you told a tale as it was when you danced. Others in the room looked in amusement, wonder, envy at the young man who had, with a mere two words, laid so much out in the open. Sorcha, trying to imagine saying such things out loud herself, glanced almost involuntarily at Negret, who’d taken a chair beside the glass display case full of music boxes in the corner nearest the hallway door. She was the only one who saw the flash of sadness cross the other Colophon twin’s face.

  Jessamy met Reever’s eyes at last, and the rest of the room might as well have vanished around them. “I think you know the kind of story it would be.” Her empty hand closed around the stains in the palm of the glove it wore as the rust-streaked lock of hair fell down over her temple again.

  He forced his own hand not to reach for her clenched fist or smooth back the fallen curl, but instead to lie still on the arm of his chair. “I don’t care. It would be yours.”

  A beat, then two; then Jessamy tore her eyes away from him and pushed her hair back into order. “Someone else,” she said abruptly, and took her coffee back to the table in the corner.

  The room exhaled. Reever closed his eyes, opened them again.

  From the chair by the glass cabinet, his brother spoke up. “I’ve thought of another one, Masseter. A story where the peddler isn’t the villain.”

  “O rarest of lore,” Masseter said archly. “Would you share it?”

  “I will. And as it happens, it’s doubly rare, being a story in which—well. Let me just tell it.” Negret smiled at Maisie, who, truth be told, was still feeling a bit unsettled by Reever’s tale. “I think you might like this one.”

  FOUR

  The Devil and the Scavenger

  The Second Twin’s Tale

  If you beat the Devil, you can win your heart’s desire. Everyone knows that, and some foolish folks probably think they could do it, too. But the Devil is a master gambler, and he makes his living off that sort of fool. It takes arrogance to dream of challenging him, but arrogance rarely helps anyone win, and the Devil, who is not usually arrogant, almost never loses.

  Still, it’s happened, though it’s a rare and peculiar thing when it does. This is the tale of one of those occurrences, when the Devil got the worse of a deal. And this encounter was special right off the bat because it isn’t often the Devil encounters something he wants. Usually, deals with the Devil begin with someone wanting something from him. Folks don’t have much—other than their souls—to tempt the Devil. Not usually.

  On the road between two remote towns, the Devil was walking alone at twilight when he came to a crossing of ways. And there, stopped under the fingerpost, was a scavenger’s wagon.

  Now, the scavengers in this part of the country had a certain reputation, and as the Devil approached for a closer look at the rag-and-bone fellow peering up at the signs with a frown, he was reminded of stories he’d heard. It was said that the scavengers in these parts were all descended from one or another of the legendary Yankee peddlers of old. It was said they could work near-magical feats with the things they collected, and if they could not make a thing they needed from what they had or could find, they simply changed their minds about needing that thing. And while you might think someone whose work is picking through cast-off things and rubbish would be considered the lowest of the low, the way I understand it is that among the chapmen of those parts—the many sorts of itinerant peddlers on the roads and in the towns—the scavengers were first in precedence, and therefore in any gathering of peddlers, the scavengers were honored most highly.

  As the Devil strolled nearer, it occurred to him that this scavenger was a bit on the small side. Then, as the Devil’s shadow fell across the ground before the stranger and announced his diabolic presence, the small figure turned, and the Devil noticed two things. First, the scavenger had eyes the silver-gray of half-dollars or the full moon on the right kind of night. Second, the scavenger was small because it was a child—and not only a child, but also a girl.

  The girl and the Devil greeted each other the way solitary strangers do: friendly, but wary-like. Well, the Devil wasn’t precisely wary; you don’t have to be wary when you’re the Devil. But he was curious.

  “Lost?” he asked.

  “Nope,” the girl said easily, “just deciding. You?”

  “Nope,” the Devil replied, “just intrigued.” And he admitted that he had never encountered one of the famous scavengers of these parts.

  “Well, then.” The child beamed, trotted past the stamping mule at the front of her wagon, and began to turn a crank on the side, near the front wheel. The crank was nearly as big as she was, and as she rotated it, the side of the wagon unfolded creakily, gaping wide like the lid of a music box until the whole thing had converted itself into an open-fronted shop topped by a patchwork awning.

  The scavenger leaned on the crank and waved at the shop front. “Be my guest,” she invited in a voice that whistled slightly as she spoke. The Devil tapped the brim of his hat, climbed a set of stairs made from bolted-together pieces of mismatched metal, and took a look around.

  Most everything was in a drawer or a chest or a box. There was a trunk of colorful rag scraps and another of white ones. There was a crate of furry dead critters that were probably waiting to be skinned and rendered down, and another of critters wit
h scales. There was a chest of paper fragments: wallpaper, newspaper, printed broadsides and used postcards, torn crepe paper crowns from expended Christmas crackers. A wooden cask of teaspoons sat under a shelf full of the jars of flitting goldfish the scavengers traded to children for household oddments. And hanging from the ceiling on threadbare lengths of faded satin ribbon were a dozen or so clocks of all sorts: cuckoo clocks and pocket watches and spring-wound tin alarm clocks, all ticking together: tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

  There were other things, of course, but the Devil was vaguely disappointed. It was more or less the same bunch of stuff scavengers everywhere carried. Even the clocks; the fact that they were so perfectly synchronized was a little unsettling, but they all looked like perfectly ordinary timepieces as they whispered together: tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

  The girl was watching him closely with her odd silver eyes. “Don’t see what you’re looking for?” she inquired in her whistling lisp. The Devil got the uncomfortable feeling that she knew what he had been thinking.

  “Just don’t see anything I particularly need,” he said carelessly.

  “What do you need, I wonder?” The little scavenger looked at him thoughtfully.

  “I don’t need anything,” the Devil said. It was true.

  She nodded. “It would have to be something very special, then. Something you want.”

  The Devil grinned and allowed that he couldn’t really imagine what that might be. But to himself, he admitted again that he was curious. And again, as soon as he’d had the thought, he wondered if the scavenger knew it somehow.

  “Let me think.” She zipped past him and began opening drawers. The first item she held out was a molded black thing, roughly oval and carved to look like a long-necked bird with its head resting on its feet. “It’s an inkstick made from soot collected after a martyr was burned at the stake. You grind a bit against a stone and mix it with water to make writing ink.”

  “How on earth could you know where the soot came from?” asked the Devil, skeptical.

  “I know because I gathered the soot and made the inkstick myself,” she retorted. “I can show you the mold I formed it in.”

  The Devil assured her that he believed her, but all the same, he didn’t feel he simply had to have the inkstick, even if it had been made from a martyr.

  “Here’s a knife made from iron extracted from a saint’s blood,” the scavenger said, opening another drawer and removing a blade. “Perhaps that is the sort of thing you’re looking for?”

  “How did you happen to find a thing like this picking through garbage?” the Devil asked, looking at the knife. It was very beautiful; the space just above the cutting edge on both sides had been etched with a creeping pattern of lilies of the valley. “And how could you possibly be certain about where the iron came from?”

  “I didn’t scavenge the knife,” the girl said with a grim smile. “I scavenged the blood. I extracted the iron myself. That’s how I know what I say is true.”

  But the Devil had caught sight of something more interesting than the martyr’s ink or the saint’s iron. When the scavenger had begun hunting for something to tempt him with, she’d looked through a big drawer whose contents had clattered hollowly as she’d shoved it mostly closed again. Mostly, but not totally—the Devil could still see what it held. It was full of white and off-white and gray and pale-brown bits and pieces. Bones. All sorts and all sizes of bones. And one of them was very interesting.

  It was a short, thick, squat bone engraved all over with a pattern of neat hatch marks stained with brown ochre ink. Where there weren’t hatch marks, there were curling rows of cursive words in a language the Devil recognized and yet couldn’t quite bring the name of to mind.

  “It’s a pastern bone,” the scavenger said, unerringly spotting the item that had captured his attention. “Part of a set for playing knucklebones, I suspect. You need five to play the game, but I only have that one.” She plucked it from among the rest and held it out. “Here.”

  The Devil turned the pastern bone over, and even up close, the shapes carved into it taunted him. He knew every language ever invented, and he knew this one, too, but it had been so long since he’d encountered it, he couldn’t remember where he’d seen it or when, let alone how to make sense of the writing. It was as if he had the words of a song stuck in his head, but the name of that song was hovering just out of his memory’s reach.

  In the end, that was the thing that made him want the bone. “How much?” he asked as casually as he could.

  The scavenger considered. “One tooth,” she said at last. “Your tooth.” She tapped her lip where it hid one of her canines. “This one. The sharp one.”

  Whatever the Devil had been expecting her to request, it wasn’t a tooth. “What for?”

  She shrugged. “You never know when something like that might come in handy.” She opened another drawer and took out an ugly contraption that looked like an oversize house key with a little claw at one end and a turning crank at the other. “I can pop it right out myself, right this minute. Won’t even hurt. Well, not much. Not for long. Probably not, anyway.”

  Not exactly a confident statement, but that hardly mattered. It wasn’t that the Devil was concerned about pain, and it wasn’t as if having one tooth gone would be any kind of inconvenience. Still, in this wagon he’d seen ink made from a martyr and a knife made from a saint, and he couldn’t help but wonder what this young scavenger would do with one of his eyeteeth. But he was sure she wouldn’t tell him to what sort of use it might be put, and he just didn’t like the idea of making a deal he couldn’t clearly see both sides of.

  And yet, there was that engraved bone, and the more he thought about it, and the more he tried to remember how to read the language carved upon it, the more he wanted it. Certainly a mystery like that would be worth one tooth.

  And yet.

  Overhead the clocks whispered on: tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

  Well, the Devil decided to handle this the way he handled every bargain he made. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll play you for it. If you win, I’ll trade you for the tooth and I’ll give you a favor as well, with no strings attached to it. If I win, you give me the bone, and your soul, too.”

  The scavenger scratched her head as if she was thinking, but her silver eyes were sharp. “Do I get to choose the game?”

  “Certainly,” the Devil said in his most gentlemanly voice.

  “Two teeth, then. And keep your favor.”

  “Done,” the Devil snapped, only a little surprised. “What’s the game?”

  “Not a game,” the scavenger corrected. “A challenge. If you can guess what I plan to do with your tooth, you win and I lose. If you can’t guess”—here she paused to look thoughtfully up at the clocks tick-tick-ticking away—“in sixty seconds, then I win.”

  “How many guesses do I get?” the Devil asked.

  The scavenger smiled thinly. “As many as you have time for.” And she reached up for the lowest-hanging of the clocks, a large pocket watch, and untied it from its faded blue ribbon. She held it high so that the Devil could see its face, and the two of them watched the second hand as it climbed toward the twelve: tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

  “Begin,” said the little scavenger.

  The Devil, of course, had already been racking his brains to remember everything he knew that could be done with teeth. He figured he had a clue in that he’d seen what the silver-eyed girl had done with the saint’s blood and the martyr’s ashes, so he tried to think about what could be done with the hard bits of a body.

  “You’ll make it into porcelain,” he suggested.

  The scavenger shook her head.

  “You’ll use it to make a cupel to separate silver from ore, or some other alchemical thing.”

  “No.”

  “You’ll make some sort of bone oil from it, something to burn in a lamp or to poison a well.”

  “No.”

  “I don’t su
ppose you’d use it for something as simple as scrimshaw, or making needles or awls with, or that sort of thing?”

  The scavenger shook her head again. “I have plenty of bones I can use if I want to do that.”

  Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Twenty seconds left. The Devil was starting to get frustrated.

  “You’ll make it into baking powder. You’ll make it into neat’s-foot oil for getting rid of scales. You’ll bury it and hope it grows into something interesting, a dragon, or some sort of warrior prince. You’ll . . .” No more ideas came. Now the Devil was completely at a loss.

  Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

  “Time,” the scavenger sang. The Devil grabbed the watch, but of course the girl had no need to lie. A minute is a minute—usually, anyway—and the Devil’s minute was up.

  “Bad luck for you. You came up with some good ideas, though.” With one hand the scavenger took a wooden stool from where it hung on the wall, and with the other she pushed the Devil out of the wagon into the night.

  She put the stool on the ground, and the Devil sat, because what other choice did he have? He’d made a deal and he’d lost. All he could do was look up and try to focus on the stars while the little silver-eyed scavenger girl put her dental key into his mouth, tightened the claw around one of his canines, and wrenched it out by slow turns.

  She’d lied about how badly it would hurt.

  The other one she took was a molar from the back, and when it was all over, she packed the holes in his mouth with cotton soaked in moonshine liquor and handed over the carved pastern bone the Devil had bought with his pain and his teeth. Somehow he couldn’t quite look at it now, so he just tucked it right into his pocket as he stood up to make himself scarce.

  Before he left, though, the Devil turned back to the scavenger. “What’s the answer?” he asked indistinctly through his mouthful of cotton and firewater.

  The scavenger rattled his bloody teeth in her palm, looking like she was deciding whether or not she thought he deserved an answer. At last she simply smiled, pulling up her lip with one little finger, and all at once everything, including the lisping tone of her voice, made perfect sense.