by Kate Milford
The thief looked down at him thoughtfully. “You have many valuable things here,” he said at last, “but not the thing I was hoping to find.”
“What were you hoping to find?” Pantin asked.
The thief hesitated. People often make the mistake of telling children too much, with the idea that they won’t understand what they’re being told—not the true meaning or value of it. This man had made that mistake before and paid dearly for the error. On the other hand, he also knew well that children often know more than they seem to. So he weighed the risks carefully, and then he answered, “I am looking for a coffret. It’s a very special sort of box, or casket.”
“Casket?” Pantin repeated. “You mean, like a coffin?”
The thief laughed. “A coffin is a type of casket,” he said, “but not all caskets are coffins. In any case, the sort I’m looking for isn’t here.”
And then he chanced to peer out Pantin’s window, which looked out on the garden grave of the dead hero.
This man was no more an expert in death and gardening than I am, but he, too, was a roamer. He had roamed long and far in both space and time, and he knew more lore than can be accumulated in the span of a single life. In a matter of seconds, he had taken in the crumbling old wall, the nettles that had filled the space inside the perimeter, and the terrible heights to which the prickly plants had grown. And, with Pantin’s question about caskets and coffins fresh in his mind, he understood immediately what he was looking for, and what he was looking at.
Heroes, you see, are rarely buried without tribute of some kind, and treasure—even if it is merely a trove of memories—is rarely put into the ground without a container to hold it.
The thief doffed his hat, thanked Pantin for his time, and left as quickly as he could, the heels of his well-shined boots drumming neatly on the stairs as he left the red house and went in search of digging and prying tools.
He came back to the house once more before nightfall, bringing three bottles of sherbet with him—not the shaved-ice sort, but the drink made with fruit-and-flower arrack—and he delivered a bottle to each home as a thank-you for letting him have a look around, beginning with the one on the top floor. Pantin, however, was not allowed to have any, even after supper, as punishment for having let a stranger into the flat. This is how he happened to be wide awake, talking to his friend the old iron gargoyle and not drugged asleep like everyone else was, when Trigemine returned with his digging tools in the dead of night and began to exhume the hero’s grave that no one had known was there.
Pantin had trouble sleeping in those days. He had been having nightmares about the time a month or so before when he had fallen through a sinkhole into an old abandoned tunnel that had been built for a pneumatic railway. And Maisie, I will tell you that if you ever find yourself suddenly falling into a tunnel anyplace belowground in Nagspeake, the thing to do is in two parts. Firstly, feel the rails to see if a train is coming. Secondly—do this part quickly if you do feel a vibration—say quite loudly, “You once showed a lost boy back to the surface. Would you please help me find my way?” For the iron in the below did once help Pantin when he was very lost in the tunnels, though that, too, is a different tale. Never forget, Maisie: Old iron hears. Old iron pays attention.
Anyhow, Pantin was awake. He sat with his back against the wall below his bedroom window, which he had opened in order to let in his gargoyle friend. Pantin called the gargoyle Troublewit after a sort of bendy folded paper toy for children and magicians, because a troublewit can take any number of forms, and the iron creature reconfigured its own shape so often. That night, Pantin was whispering to Troublewit about the injustice of not being allowed to drink any sherbet. The gargoyle didn’t reply, but it did occasionally move its mouth and flex its iron-taloned feet in sympathy. Suddenly, there was a curse from down below in the garden and a quick flash of light. The thief had begun the process of wading into the nettle sea.
Pantin peered over the windowsill. “That’s Mr. Trigonometry,” he whispered, for he couldn’t remember the thief’s name any better than I could.
He and the gargoyle Troublewit watched as the thief pulled on a pair of gloves, fought his way to the place where the nettles were tallest, took a shovel from his wrapped bundle of tools and dropped the rest, and began to dig by lantern light. “What’s he doing down there?” Pantin asked.
The gargoyle tried to convey its answer simply by means of nodding and talon-wiggling. When this didn’t work, it hunkered down and reconfigured itself into something less solid, something with empty places within that could resonate, and paper-thin places that could vibrate or collapse and swell like a bellows to pump air. It had done this before, but rarely, for it was elaborate, hard, and detailed work every time. “He is digging up the hero,” Troublewit said at last, his voice gravelly as the scraping of the shovel below, and masked perfectly by it too.
Pantin took his friend’s new voice in stride. “What hero?”
Troublewit shrugged. “I don’t know them all. There are scores of them; I can’t keep track. But this may be one of the great ones. He has been there many, many years. Longer than you. Longer than the house. There is the hero, and he is in a box, and he holds another box in his hands. Or that’s what there was when they put him in the ground. Things change over time. You know.”
“I know,” Pantin agreed. Then he remembered the conversation he’d had with the thief earlier in the day. “He said he was looking for a coffret—a box or casket of some kind. He couldn’t have thought he’d find the hero’s coffin in one of our flats, so it must be the box the hero is holding that the peddler wants.”
Troublewit looked at him. “Shall I go get it? Before the peddler finds it?”
“Can you?”
Troublewit shrugged again. “Of course. I am everywhere in Nagspeake. I can go everywhere iron is, or goes, or can get. I can take the coffret and put it out of the thief’s reach.”
“All right, then.”
The gargoyle looked at the iron rainspout. As the man in the garden toiled with his shovel, the metal spout stretched, drawing itself out into a long, thin iron vine, and slithered silently down the corner of the house to plunge into the earth below, leaving a length of itself twisted like a climbing creeper against the corner where the gargoyle crouched, unmoving.
After a moment, Troublewit spoke up again. “I see no coffin any longer, only the bones of the hero held below where the earth has tumbled them. But there is also the small box.”
But Pantin was watching the digging peddler, who swore now and again as the nettles tore at his sleeves. Perhaps, if this was the same child as in Mr. Amalgam’s tale, the boy was realizing he had met this man before, and wondering if anyone who would go to so much trouble to have the things he sought as to search for them in cursed houses and nettle-choked grave gardens would give up the hunt for this coffret simply because he didn’t find it in the first place he looked.
Troublewit glanced sideways at its friend. “I have taken the box deep underground. Don’t worry. I’ll bring it up the rainspout when the thief is gone.”
“It’s not that I’m worried about,” Pantin whispered. He ducked down behind his windowsill. “I think it’s possible he knows the box is somewhere nearby. If he doesn’t find it there, he may come back here again to look for it. Unless . . .” But the boy shook his head.
“Unless what?” the gargoyle asked. “Unless he can be convinced not to?”
Pantin nodded. “But I don’t know how we could do that.” Could the thief be scared away? Would that be enough? Doubtful. It would be better if they could somehow convince him the box he sought had never been here.
Surely the peddler with the mathematical-sounding name would never believe a boy who wasn’t even sure what the man was after. Yes, Pantin knew, because the thief had told him, that the thief was after a box. But why? What was it about this box?
Abruptly Pantin remembered that his parents were sleeping one room away. They
would know what to do. He left Troublewit crouched in the window and darted into their bedroom. There, of course, he found them sleeping peacefully, but he could not wake them. Terrified, he headed for the door of his flat, meaning to wake the mother with the twins. But then he saw the empty bottle that had held the sherbet, and he remembered that, when the peddler had delivered his gift to Pantin’s parents, he had had two bottles more meant for the neighbors. Pantin realized that he might well be the only person awake in the entire house.
It was up to him to get rid of the peddler-thief for good. But how? How could one boy alone manage that?
But then, crossing the flat to return to his room, he remembered that he wasn’t alone. He had Troublewit. And the two of them had someone else, too. They had the original owner of the box the thief was after. They had the hero.
Or his bones, at least.
“I have an idea,” Pantin whispered to the gargoyle. “It involves the hero.”
Troublewit’s iron gargoyle’s mouth stretched into an O of understanding. “Humans are afraid of bones, aren’t they?”
“Sometimes,” Pantin said. “But I don’t think this man will be. The hero will have to do more than just scare him. The hero will have to speak.”
“I can manage that.” The gargoyle nodded. “I think I know how the bones go together, but it won’t be less frightening if they aren’t exactly right, will it?”
“No, it’ll be worse,” Pantin replied in ghastly delight.
“As I thought.” Troublewit’s gargoyle face grinned back. “The thief’s digging will go faster if the hero also digs.”
Pantin shivered and leaned his forearms on the windowsill. He couldn’t quite see how it began, but after another couple of swings with the shovel, the thief paused. He tilted his head. He bent low, his lantern casting strange shadows from among the nettles. Then he straightened abruptly and staggered backwards, tripping over barbed weeds and his own feet to land on his backside and his palms. He screamed in pain, or perhaps in fear, or both. He felt around among the nettles for his shovel, still shouting obscenities, as he stared with horror at the hole he’d been digging.
Painted garishly by the light of the lantern and the shadows of the snarled weeds, the mortal remains of the hero climbed out of the hole and faced the thief.
There wasn’t much left, just old, old bone and rags, which the iron had restored to a mostly human shape, wired together in much the same way that scientists do with the skeletons that are displayed in museums. But the iron had done more than just piece the bones together; it had given the long-dead hero a bellows and paper-thin vibrating places and hollow resonating places inside the remnants of his ribs and skull, connected by delicate throat pipes.
The hero of iron and bone made a sound of rasping metal, like a sigh and a cough and a grinding all forged into one. Then, still cast in black nettle-shadow and shards of lantern light, it spoke. “Why have you desecrated my grave?”
It was enough to make Pantin shudder. But if the thief quailed, the boy couldn’t see it. Just as he’d feared, now that he was past the initial shock, Trigemine held his ground. “I am here for the coffret that was buried with you, my lord.”
“It is long gone, and I have promised curses for any that disturb so much as the weeds that cover my resting place.” The hero raised a bone-and-metal hand and pointed a finger at the thief. “Go.”
“I will go.” But the thief tilted his head and looked at the hero thoughtfully. “How did it come to be gone, then, my lord? Who disturbed your rest before I came? And how long ago? Perhaps I can avenge the theft for you.”
Pantin and Troublewit looked at each other. “Oh, dear,” Troublewit said softly. “I should have had the hero say that it was never here at all. How shall I have him reply now?”
Pantin thought fast, but before either of them could come up with an answer, the bones of the hero below gave a strange shake. As the boy and the gargoyle stared down into the grave garden, the creature Troublewit had constructed began to move. Not merely move: it began to change. It was a bit like watching someone who had been sitting or standing for too long suddenly straighten up and shift around to work out the kinks—if, in working out the kinks, that person also had to actually put some of its body parts back in the right places. Joints that the iron had connected at slightly wrong angles twitched themselves true. A scapula that had been installed backwards stretched up and out like a wing, reversed itself, and folded back into place. The hero’s left hand plucked one finger from its right, the iron filaments that had been holding it in place instantly letting go as the hero tugged it. Then, as he held it over an empty spot on his left hand, the filaments there reached out and wired the finger securely in.
“Are you doing that?” Pantin asked, confused.
“I am . . . not,” Troublewit whispered. “I don’t understand this at all.”
Then, his bones in the right places now and standing taller than before, the hero began again to talk.
“I will speak for myself now.” The voice was subtly different this time. The reorganized body did not look up at the window, but both boy and gargoyle were immediately certain it was aware of their presence and that the statement was meant for the two of them.
Trigemine, meanwhile, simply inclined his head. “As you say, my lord.”
“And you will drop that spade.” The hero nodded its skull at the shovel the peddler-thief grasped. “You hold it like a weapon.”
The thief hesitated only a second, then plunged the shovel’s tip into the weedy earth so that it stood vertically, handle within reach. “As you command, my lord.”
“Your politeness is a farce,” the hero said. “You are a thief. A robber of graves. But you are too late. The iron has taken my coffret. It has taken it down, deep into the earth, below the tunnels under the city, below the land that lies beneath the tunnels. It is out of your reach.”
“Is there no way to retrieve it? I would happily do whatever’s required to bring it back to you, my lord. I have no interest in what it holds. I would ask only the box itself in payment.”
“There is no way at all,” the hero said, “unless you can convince the iron to return it. I rather think, however, that the iron would return the box to me anyhow if I were to ask it. But I do not propose to do that.”
Trigemine looked at the iron-and-bone revenant for a moment. Then he kicked a foot out savagely at the shovel, and he swore.
“So much for your sham politeness,” the hero said in a tone of dark amusement as the shovel flew across the tiny cemetery and struck against the old wall. “Go now, before you do any more damage to my garden.” He stretched out his arms, flexed his composite fingers. “For I believe I could do a good deal of damage with this body if I chose to.”
The thief swore again, collected his tools and his shovel, and fought his way through the nettles and out into the night. He did not take his lantern, because the hero stood in the way.
When the thief had gone, the hero turned up to the window. “Come down, please.”
Pantin and Troublewit looked at each other. “All right,” the gargoyle said, and Troublewit scrambled easily down the stone of the wall. Pantin leaned out the window and saw the metal of the rainspout change its shape again, this time into a perfectly serviceable ladder that stretched all the way from the boy’s window to the stone wall of the grave garden below it. He followed Troublewit down. As they stood on the wall, the nettles that choked the garden parted, clearing a path from Pantin and his friend to the hero of iron and bone. Heart pounding, the boy and the gargoyle approached.
“M-my lord?” Pantin said experimentally.
At that, the hero actually laughed, and the sound was truly bizarre as it resonated through the ironworks that made up its insides. “Don’t be ridiculous, child. No one called me that, even when I had breath, blood, and a proper body.” He looked down at the form Troublewit had built of his remains. “I think I understand why you have done this,” he said to the gargoyle.
“Did you also plan to take the coffret?”
Pantin glanced at Troublewit. “We hadn’t thought that far ahead,” the boy admitted. “Mainly we wanted to stop the thief from taking it, though I couldn’t tell you why—other than that he had clearly come to steal it.”
“That is reason enough. Do you know what is in it?” the hero asked, looking from one to the other.
“No,” Troublewit said. It was not of iron. I could not have looked inside without opening it.
“The thief wanted only the box,” the hero said thoughtfully. “That is interesting.”
Pantin nodded, but of course he was thinking, perhaps as you are, that it was the least interesting thing to him at the moment. One of the great heroes of the city, or perhaps his ghost, had taken possession of this strange, partly human body and was now speaking to the boy and the metal gargoyle as if it was all perfectly normal. Pantin couldn’t quite bring himself to care right then about why a thief might want a box.
“I would like to borrow this frame,” the hero said at last, looking at Troublewit. “The parts of it that aren’t mine, that is. Will the iron permit me—that is, would the iron that now holds me together consent to travel with me, for a time?” His voice had a curious note of reverence to it as he spoke to the gargoyle, and for the first time, Pantin thought about the fact that the friend he called Troublewit was more than a mere decoration someone had built into the red stone house. Troublewit was part of something no one in Nagspeake quite understood, something huge. His friend Troublewit was a mere projection, in the way that some kinds of mushrooms are merely a small, visible part of a huge network that stretches, unseen, for miles in the soil.
“Yes,” Troublewit said at last. “The iron will travel with you for as long as you choose.”
Pantin eyed the rags that were the revenant’s only garments. “If you will stay a minute more,” he said, “I can give you one of my father’s old coats.”
The hero nodded, and Pantin hurried back up the ladder and through his sleeping flat to the cupboard where his family hung their cold-weather things. He returned with an old tarpaulin coat and a felt hat.