The Raconteur's Commonplace Book

by Kate Milford

  The hero pulled on the coat, and his strange body adjusted again, lengthening and narrowing to approximately the proportions of Pantin’s father until the garment fit perfectly.

  “Thank you,” the hero said, looking at Troublewit and Pantin from under the brim of the hat. “As a token of my thanks, you may keep the coffret and what is inside it.” Even as he spoke, a film of iron, thin as paper, spread over the planes of his skull, layering a face of dark metal over the bone.

  “Thank you,” said Troublewit.

  “Thank you,” said Pantin.

  The hero nodded, and the nettles parted again, this time to give him a path to the overgrown main gate of the grave garden. When he reached it, the vines tangled in the hinges flexed their green fingers to pull the door open ahead of him.

  He did not take Trigemine’s lantern, but as he walked toward the trees at the edge of the woods, he bent to pick up a branch from the ground. At the timberline, one of the strange, roaming bonelights that Pantin had often caught glimpses of came drifting through the darkness. The hero held up his branch as if it were an unlit torch, and the bonelight landed atop it like a tame parrot.

  Thus illuminated, the hero disappeared into the woods, leaving the two friends to ponder what had happened, and what this strange gift they had been given might turn out to be. Pantin, of course, was young and had many wonders left to see; Troublewit was—or was at least part of—something older than the stones of the house, older than the river itself, and it was a wonder simply to discover that there were surprises left in the world for it to encounter.

  Did they find the coffret again?

  Of course, for there is no place in Nagspeake where the iron cannot go if it cares to.

  What was inside it, that beautiful box made to hold something just the size of a miracle or a memory?

  As I told you, I never looked inside. Pantin did—but that’s the beginning of another story for another time, and this is the end of the story I set out to tell.

  Or nearly the end. Perhaps . . . yes, now that I think of it, I suppose it is just possible that this sort of thing—raising the dead, wiring them up like museum specimens, and setting them loose in the city—this sort of thing could be precisely why people say old iron behaves badly in a graveyard.

  INTERLUDE

  The assembled listeners applauded. Tesserian and Maisie added a balcony to their card castle, made of the king of knots, the knave of bottles, the two of spades, and the ace of caskets, though the gambler had to hunt for the ace for a moment before Maisie herself spotted the corner of the card peeking up from behind the band on his hat.

  “I am sorry, Mr. Masseter,” Madame said with a nod to the man in the chair to her right. “But you see, in this story, it wasn’t so much a peddler as a robber posing as one.”

  “I do see the distinction,” Masseter said, sounding mildly annoyed nonetheless.

  Petra looked thoughtfully at him as she slipped her stocking feet out of her shoes and folded them up underneath her on the sofa. “I have been thinking of your question of peddlers, and I have remembered another tale in which the peddler is not the villain.” The dragonfly in her hair caught the firelight as she turned and glanced over her shoulder at Sangwin, the printmaker, who had stayed by the window overlooking the river from which he’d chucked his cigar. “It’s the one you mentioned, the day you arrived.”

  “I don’t recall.” Then Sangwin’s face shifted through quick realization into discomfort, and then confusion. He frowned sharply at Petra, the lines on his face blending with the shadows cast by the rain on the window beside him. “But . . .”

  “Yes, you do,” she said, ignoring the printmaker’s disquiet. “You remember. It was Phineas’s tale of the uncommon keyway that brought it to mind, but I’ve been hesitating because I confess I wasn’t sure whether I might offend Mr. Masseter by telling it. Then it popped into my thoughts again with Madame’s story of the miraculous box. It was a tale you did the illustrations for, I think you said.”

  “Why would it offend me?” Masseter asked. “You’ve just said the peddler in this story isn’t a villain.”

  “It isn’t that the fellow in question is a peddler,” Sangwin said cautiously, still looking at Petra. “It’s that he loses an eye. And of course, yes, there is a peddler in it, but that’s a different character.”

  A strange shifting passed around the room as each person within it tried with varying degrees of success not to look directly at the russet-colored patch that covered Masseter’s left eye. All except Petra, who laughed. “Oh, I had thought they were both peddlers. You must tell it. Clearly I’d get it all wrong.”

  Sangwin looked dubiously from Petra to Masseter.

  “Put your mind to rest, Sangwin.” The peddler smiled thinly. “Does the fellow in your tale at least lose his eye in a spectacular fashion?”

  Sangwin considered. “It’s somewhat the point of the story, the losing of the eye, and yet I don’t know if I can answer that question.”

  “Tell it, then,” suggested the still-smiling peddler, “and we shall decide.”

  The printmaker inclined his head. “Then I will.” One last curious flick of his dark eyes at Petra, then he glanced at Maisie, who sat with her knees drawn up to her chest watching the two of them with open curiosity. “Do you know what is a hollow-way, young lady?” he asked.

  Maisie shook her head.

  “It is a passage through trees,” Sangwin said. “But a hollow­way is more than that, too. A hollow-way is a sunken road, a place where the track has been worn down so that it lies below the level of the land around it, and the trees on all sides form something like a canopy overhead. To pass along a hollow-way is much like traveling through a sort of forest tunnel.” He glanced out the window at the drowning woods on the far shore of the rising Skidwrack. “They are very old ways, and old ways often lie differently on the landscape, leading to places other than where you think they ought to if you merely look at them on a map. Strange things can happen on roads such as these.”

  He turned to face the room, leaned his back against the windowsill, and laced his brown fingers together before him. “Of course, I can picture the woodcuts I made for the pictures perfectly well,” he murmured, looking up at the blackened exposed beams in the ceiling. “It was forty years ago now at least—one of my first journeyman projects. I made so many versions—with different trees in the drawings, different woods for the printing blocks, then different inks made from more trees still. The words, though . . . but of course, it’s a poem. Let me just remember the first line, and I ought to be able to recite the rest.”

  On the floor by the fire, Tesserian handed Maisie a knave with a single visible eye.

  SEVEN

  The Hollow-Ware Man

  The Carver’s Tale

  The sun doesn’t fall on the hollow-way, not even when branches are bare.

  The trees knot and tangle around it;

  the bracken and vines curl about it;

  the leaves whirl and crackle all through it—

  it’s always deep twilight in there.

  Folk hereabouts shun the hollow-way if another road might do as well.

  They say that it’s more than just dark there,

  that uncanny creatures oft walk there,

  and good folk who chance it get lost there,

  and find themselves halfway to hell.

  So it’s mostly deserted, this pathway; we avoid it whenever we can.

  Except every autumn emerges

  a figure from out of the birches.

  From the mouth of the hollow he lurches:

  the traveling hollow-ware man.

  The hollow-ware man is a peddler, his wares an assortment of tin.

  And kettles and teapots he’ll sell you

  of copper and nickel and brass, too;

  buckets and silver-plate cups, too:

  all things that are empty within.

  Now, the hollow-ware man is a strange one, but his wares, th
ey are wondrously good.

  He peddles such strikingly sweet things,

  gleaming and bright filigreed things,

  uncommonly well-made and neat things

  that hold more than you think that they should.

  And other things, too, he will sell you, whatever you can’t do without.

  The rarest of things you can get here—

  uncanny and wondrous things had here—

  miraculous things can be bought here

  when the hollow-ware man is about.

  Unbelievable hollow-ware wonders he crafts with his hammer and flame

  that he only will sell in the hollow-way,

  on his way out of town, in the hollow-way.

  But they come at a cost in the hollow-way:

  not everyone comes back the same.

  One day into town came a stranger, a man with such cold eyes of blue.

  He said, “I’ve come in search of a box, here,

  a particular, finely wrought box here,

  a box I can fit to this lock here,”

  and he showed us the lock he had, too.

  The lock was no everyday gadget, and anyone looking could see.

  So we sent him the way of the hollow-ware man;

  we sent him straight after the hollow-ware man.

  He’d only just left, had the hollow-ware man—

  there was only one place he could be.

  So the man vanished into the hollow-way; what happened next, we never knew.

  But he came back that night walking slowly;

  he trudged into town, undone wholly;

  and when he looked up at us coldly,

  his left eye was tin and not blue.

  For the hollow-ware man takes strange payments in exchange for his goods so divine.

  He’d asked a high price for the right box;

  one cold blue eye for the right box;

  and then he’d installed that bizarre lock

  and a replacement hollow-ware eye.

  The stranger he left us that evening, ’fore the blood even dried on his cheek.

  Of the box that had cost him so dearly,

  that had blinded him halfway (or nearly),

  of the lock that it fitted so queerly—

  the stranger refused to speak.

  INTERLUDE

  A momentary silence fell. “And so?” Mr. Sangwin asked, his voice uncomfortable and artificially light as he picked up his glass from the windowsill. “Is our peddler here a villain or no?”

  Masseter made a thoughtful, humming sound. “What do you think, young lady?” he asked, glancing down at Maisie. “After all, the box was clearly worth an eye to the man who bought it. Whether or not he was pleased to pay that much, he chose to do it. He could have walked back out again when he’d heard the hollow-ware man’s price.”

  Jessamy spoke up from the other side of the fireplace. “Maybe he didn’t feel he had that choice.” Her voice was quiet but hard. “Just because a fellow can charge an eye doesn’t necessarily mean he ought to.”

  “I don’t think people should charge eyes,” Maisie said decisively, her own eyes locked on Tesserian’s cards as he picked out the king of caskets and the knave of lenses.

  Mrs. Haypotten tutted. “Honestly, you lot with your grim tales. Who’s next? Hasn’t anyone got a cheerful story?”

  “I’ll tell one.” Everyone turned to the beautiful man with the scar below his eye who lounged at the opposite end of the sofa from Petra, his outstretched arm still just barely not reaching her shoulder. “It’s a love story. And in deference to your wish for more cheerful yarns, Mrs. H., it’s even got a happy ending.”

  “Oh, my.” Mrs. Haypotten blushed. “Well. That’s very nice of you, dear.”

  “It ends well,” Sullivan said, “but it begins in the dark, and in the cold.”

  EIGHT

  The Coldway

  The Scarred Man’s Tale

  Here is a winter place, if you like: when the river Skidwrack freezes, a whole world comes into being in the city of Nagspeake that wasn’t there before, a sort of neither-here-nor-there-land above the river but below the district called Flotilla.

  Flotilla is the island district. Some of it is built on pilings that were sunk, Venice-style, into the muck at the bottom of the river long, long ago. Some is built of boats lashed to the landed bits (such as they are) and to one another. There are bulkheads that ring the whole, but sunken mechanisms move them when the district needs moving about. They say that once, in order to protect a legendary ship and its crew, every single one of the component vessels cast off and scattered into the Skidwrack, causing the entire district to vanish in a matter of hours, leaving nothing but those old oaken posts, left behind like fragments of an incomplete skeleton.

  So there is the river, and there is the district of Flotilla upon it. When the river freezes, there comes the Coldway: a warren of tunnels with the frozen river underfoot, where the curved sides of boats of all sorts form the walls and a ceiling arched like a cathedral, where the bows and gunwales of the vessels nestle up against one another to form the roof. In some places it’s high-ceilinged like a cathedral too; in others the tunnels scarcely have height enough for an adult to walk upright in them. Because the makeup of Flotilla changes so often, the Coldway is never the same place twice. And yet, for all that the shape of the route changes and for all that it is temporary, I am reminded of something Mr. Sangwin said about the old ways that traverse the landscape; the Coldway, too, is, at its heart, a route just as great and powerful as any of the other noble old roads that cross the world, and a map of the Coldway shows a realm in which strange things often happen.

  And, like any great and old and strange place, there is a great and old and strange tale about it: that the Coldway is no mere path of ice, but the back of one of the mysterious creatures of the Skidwrack River: the blue-and-green serpent known as the caldnicker.

  The caldnicker spends much of the year lying at the bottom of the riverbed. Mostly it sleeps, though now and again it stirs in its rest, shifting the inlets of the Skidwrack with it. The caldnicker dreams almost ceaselessly, but sadly the majority of its dreams dissolve in the river before they make it to the surface. All of this changes, though, when the first winter frost begins to settle on the riverbank. Then the creature rouses itself from its dreams and makes its way downriver to Flotilla, where it winds itself among the hulls, twining in and about and throughout the spaces under and between the structures, and then falls asleep again until springtime.

  This, of course, is why the floor of the Coldway is made of such dark ice, and why it freezes in unusual patterns that resemble frost-rimed scales. It’s also how the oldsters of Flotilla explain the peculiar lights and sounds that are so often to be found in the tunnels: When the caldnicker sleeps on the surface of the river, the dreams that in the underwater slumbers of warmer seasons merely dissolved into the Skidwrack are borne instead into the freezing air of the Coldway. There they solidify, and there they walk, roaming the paths formed by the body of their still-sleeping dreamer and haunting the Coldway like ghosts until the thaw. And then, like the frost and the ice and the winter, they vanish.

  These are old stories, of course, and there isn’t much talk of the caldnicker outside of Flotilla in these modern times. But to this day, the people of Flotilla call the annual freeze of the waterways beneath their city the nick—as in, There’s no Coldway until after the nick settles in properly. And, of course, while the explanations for them have changed over time, the nick still brings with it the peculiar sounds and lights that have always haunted the ice-floored tunnels below Flotilla.

  And speaking of the changes time brings: Because the Coldway is, of course, never the same place twice, each winter when the river freezes, someone quite intrepid has to go into the tunnels and map them. Because without a map, it doesn’t do to venture into the Coldway. It’s frigid, of course, and precious few are the places where the vaulted bow-and-gunwale ceilings part to reveal
open sky. Voices carry there, but not up to the surface. If you get lost in the Coldway, you will freeze before you are found, if you are found at all. Most likely your body will keep in the cold until the river-ice melts and the Coldway disappears, and then it will sink into the Skidwrack, never to be seen again.

  The people of Flotilla keep those maps to themselves: the Coldway and its route are their secret. And here is the secret of the secret: To this day, the intrepid surveyors of that in-between place are almost always children, because they can venture down onto the ice before it’s thick and strong enough to hold an adult. In addition to being reckoned a great adventure (and one that logically ought to be forbidden on the grounds of danger), it can be lucrative. Good surveys of the Coldway fetch high prices.

  One winter, at midnight on the coldest night yet, a girl called Mair dressed in her warmest clothes, packed a bag of matches and candles, a canteen and some bread and cheese and a chunk of cake, some artist’s pastels, a staff, and a long rope with hooks at either end, and snuck out of her bedroom window into the frigid night. It was the first night she thought the ice might’ve been sturdy enough to dare walking on, and if she hurried, she thought she might well be one of the first surveyors to venture out, which meant a generous bounty if she was also quickest to get her survey to the cartographer who would make that year’s map.

  For an hour or so, nothing outside the ordinary happened. The cavern was gold and green in the light of her lantern, and the ice floor had frozen in the same uncommon pattern of frost-edged scales it always did. The walls and roof were a curving patchwork made up of scores of boat hulls in a rainbow of chipped and faded colors. Thick icicles hung from them, along with knotted lengths of cordage, which, by long-standing tradition, were always lowered down from the houses and ships by their owners and masters for the aid of anyone using the passages below. Mair knew to stay close to the hull walls, where there were handholds and where the ice was thicker. She walked with one end of the hooked rope tethered to her belt and the other end clutched in the hand that also held her pencil as she noted the twists and turns of the labyrinth. She knew how to test the floor’s thickness before she put her weight on it, and she knew the particular, peculiar sounds the ice made in that space, and how those creaks were different from the sound of the ice splintering.