by Kate Milford
A moment later, a door opened to Hugo’s left and someone began coughing. “What on earth happened in here?” a female voice said, and a moment later a girl about Hugo’s age came wading through the particular. “This is . . . this is either disgusting or fantastic, and I can’t decide which.”
“Common difficulty when studying relics,” Gaz explained. “Edita Skellandotter, apprentice reliquarist, please meet your first customer. He has brought us this fine London fog and needs a vessel for it.” Then he appeared to remember that he hadn’t asked Hugo’s name.
Hugo introduced himself, Gaz lit a lamp, and Edita put on a pair of spectacles very much like Hugo’s fog glasses, which reminded him to pull his own over his eyes. The three of them stared down at the broken glass. Edita looked up at her teacher. “Globe or case, do you think?”
Gaz smiled and shook his head. “That’s for you to decide. With your customer, of course.”
The girl looked at Hugo through lenses that were faceted like a fly’s eye. “Does it need to open? Will you be wanting to take it out again? I could make this into a beautiful snow globe if you wanted.” She blew at the fog swirling between them. “Tiny pigeons instead of snow, maybe, flying over a city and a river, buoyed up by this fabulous murk.” She was describing London. Hugo’s heart leaped. Before he could say yes, however, Edita tilted her head. “Of course, a snow globe won’t open,” she added, coughing.
“Oh.” He wasn’t sure he ought to let it out again, but he didn’t like not having the option. “What was the other thing? A case?”
“Wardian case,” she explained. “A glass box for plants and little living things. Generally meant to stay closed, so the environment inside creates its own equilibrium. But you could open it.” She looked at him closely through her many-planed spectacles. “I think that’s what you want. A sort of . . . cloudarium.”
“He does have to be able to put the fog back, if it’s to be let out,” Gaz cautioned.
Edita nodded. “I quite see that.” She thought for a minute, then waved in the direction from which she’d appeared. “I think I have something.” She vanished into the miasma. Hugo and Gaz followed, the reliquary maker guiding the boy across the workshop and into a back room.
The visibility in there was better, and Hugo looked around in wonder at the collection of glass objects that filled every surface. Since she’d mentioned snow globes, he wasn’t surprised to see a shelf of sealed spheres holding all manner of particles suspended in a variety of liquids, many of which were swirling, even though presumably no one had shaken them. More glass spheres, these ones much smaller and clearly meant to be worn as jewelry, hung on chains from pegs on the wall. But mostly, there were glass boxes of every description. Some were fairly plain three-dimensional geometric shapes made of panes of glass and metal joinery, but most were works of architecture: houses, churches, lighthouses, castles of all shapes and sizes, even a treehouse built into a small but apparently living tree. Many of these had already been planted with flora. A door on the far side of the room stood open, revealing a connecting glass-walled conservatory bursting with greenery.
Edita looked over the baubles hanging from the pegs above the table and selected a small blown-glass sphere on a silver chain. “I think this will do the job. I think you want to be able to carry it.”
She removed the cap that both closed the sphere and allowed it to hang from the chain, then took down a jar from a shelf, selected a single tiny white carved bird from a mass of similar pieces, and popped the bird inside.
“Hold this, please,” she said, handing the glass ball to Hugo, along with a copper funnel she took from one of the worktable’s drawers. “And hold this over the bauble. Now, who’s got the box?”
Gaz had brought it with him. Edita took it and carefully turned the cap widdershins one rotation, then two, then three. Hugo held his breath as she opened it—the instructions, after all, had said to never fully remove the lid. But when she lifted the top away and tipped the lower part of the container over the copper funnel, the last bit of fog slid obediently into the sphere. The tiny carved bird swirled into motion, buffeted by currents in the confined murk.
“Thank you,” Edita said, taking the sphere from Hugo and replacing its cap. As she turned it sunwise, the fog that was rising up around their shoulders now began to rush past them and into the pendant by way of the tiny crack of space between the glass and the lid.
It took her a long time to tighten it. A whole minute, then two. An impossible length of time, considering how very small the pendant’s cap was. But of course, there was a vast amount of fog to bring back, and with every twist, more of it flowed through the vanishingly small crack into its new container.
At long last, after what seemed like hours to Hugo, the room began to clear as the final wisps of the fog trickled into the sphere. And then, finally, Edita raised her face, sooty and exhausted, and held up the reliquary.
“Sunwise to close, widdershins to open,” she said in a cracked voice. They’d all been coughing quite a lot. “But you don’t have to do it that way. Look.” And she showed him how the cap also contained a tiny dropper, like a medicine bottle or something to dispense perfume. “You can measure out exactly how much you want, then just wind it in the same way when you’re ready to, by twisting the cap.”
Hugo watched the tiny bird swirling in the fog. It looked exactly like any of the thousands of pigeons he’d caught glimpses of in particulars back home, like tiny ghosts in the mist. “Thank you,” he said in his own ravaged voice. “It’s perfect.” Then a terrible thought occurred to him. “How much does this cost?”
Edita smiled tiredly and reached for the long-forgotten, cracked glass box the fog had been shipped in. “Give me this,” she said. “Reliquary glass, even broken, should never go to waste.”
And so the deal was made and the city saved from the mysterious Nagspeake particular . . . though my father and grandfather both said that after that, very occasionally, there was a strange, oily yellow fog that came flowing down the Skidwrack when Hugo—or whoever possesses his reliquary these days—lets the particular out to roam for an afternoon.
INTERLUDE
“At last,” crowed Sangwin, “a merchant who isn’t a nightmare!”
“Three of them,” Tesserian said. He held out three saints to Maisie: a man calming a stormy, mist-shrouded sea; a young-looking girl holding two eyes on a plate; and a bald man holding a pair of massive keys. The castle now stood as tall as Maisie’s shoulders.
“Do people really carry relics and reliquaries?” Maisie asked. “In the real world?”
“They do,” Sangwin said, getting up from the table in the corner and passing her the marten he’d been carving. “You can go to Feretory Street yourself someday, if you like, and see some.” He turned back to the table, swept up the pile of wood shavings, and, after a quick glance at Sorcha for permission, leaned carefully around Maisie, Tesserian, and the castle and tossed them onto the fire, where they sent up a quick flash of crackling sparkles.
Mr. Haypotten cleared his throat as he began to move around the room again, refilling glasses. “There is also one here in the inn.” There was an uncertain, almost embarrassed tone to his voice. “My old friend Forel is a reliquarist. You know old Forel, don’t you?” he said, turning to Reever Colophon, who happened to be the closest of the two brothers at that moment. “He’s one of—follows the same—” He raised a hand toward the red-haired man’s tattooed face, then arrested the gesture, flushing. He pivoted with his bottle, only to find himself under the scrutiny of Antony Masseter, who was watching this exchange with intense interest from the chair by the sideboard. Now his embarrassment was impossible to miss. Haypotten’s face burned like the filament in a light bulb.
“He’s a High Walker,” Reever finished, smiling a little coolly. “As are my brother and I. Yes, we know Blaise Forel. You might say he recommended your inn to us.”
“Knew,” Negret corrected absently.
�
��That’s right,” the innkeeper’s wife put in, looking at her husband. “He went missing years ago, didn’t he?”
“A missing reliquary maker?” Masseter said. “I’d quite like to hear more about that.”
“What’s a High Walker?” Maisie interrupted as she balanced the marten on the pitched roof of one of the castle’s gables. She was thinking back to the night before, when she and Madame Grisaille and Sorcha had danced with Reever and Negret. They’ll know your secret, she had said to Madame, but the old lady had waved the worry away. My dear, they already know. They have been in Nagspeake longer than anyone. The city has no secrets from them. Only people confuse them these days.
Then, Reever, to Madame Grisaille: You have always danced with us, so dance with me now.
And she thought back even further, to Madame’s story of the roamer-hero in the garden grave. 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.
“Land,” of course, could have simply meant exactly that: more earth, just down farther. But somehow that wasn’t the way Maisie had understood it at the time. She had taken it to mean another place. Another city, perhaps: a city below, a place you could get to, as Jack had climbed the beanstalk to the land of the giants, if only instead of a beanstalk you had wild ironwork, and instead of climbing up, you went down. Down below Nagspeake, down below the tunnels that ran underneath it, down, and down, and down.
“What’s a High Walker?” Reever repeated, his cool smile warmed by Maisie’s open curiosity. “A High Walker is rare, nowadays—though there was a time when we were much more common in this place. You remember what the lady said about roamers? A High Walker is a sort of roamer.”
“You have one of Forel’s relics?” Negret asked the innkeeper. “He gave you one?”
Mr. Haypotten hesitated. “I . . . well, yes, to your first question, and not exactly, to your second.” He had been filling Sangwin’s glass, and he turned the bottle of spirits nervously in his hands. “I have been wondering if I ought to say something to you about it.” He set down the whiskey. “But the truth is, it’s been misplaced, and I couldn’t bring myself to admit it.”
“Misplaced?” Negret repeated in a cold tone that seemed entirely at odds with his usual good nature.
“Part of it, I should say. But—well, let me go and get what’s here, and you’ll see.”
Captain Frost tapped his half-hour glass, turned it, and followed the innkeeper from the room.
“He left it here,” Mrs. Haypotten said as the rattling of windows told them all that Frost had stepped outside by way of the inn’s front door. “Mr. Forel, that was. He left . . . well, he left a number of things with us after his last stay. He often came here to work when he wanted a change of scene, you know. For years we kept a room, special for him, fronting the Skidwrack bend. You never knew when he’d show up.” She looked at Reever. “The room you’re in, Mr. Reever, in fact. That’s the one he used to have when he’d come.”
Reever and his brother exchanged a glance. Negret got up from his chair and began to pace the small bit of unoccupied floor between the hallway doors and the chairs before the fire. The others, variously embarrassed on the innkeeper’s behalf and curious about this sudden change in mood, occupied themselves with drinks and quiet small talk.
The windows rattled again, and a moment later, Captain Frost came back. Mr. Haypotten returned only a minute or two after that. He held a roll of gray oilskin in one hand. “This is it. What wasn’t lost.”
He held the roll out to Reever, the closer of the twins. But Negret stalked across and took it instead. “His bookbinding tools.”
“Those are all there,” Haypotten continued nervously, glancing from the twins to Masseter, who was watching with naked curiosity as Negret tugged open the knot in the leather tie that held the roll closed. “He only left a handful.”
“Bookbinding? But I thought he made things for holding bits of holy people,” Maisie said, spreading out before her the unused cards painted with saints. Plenty of them held books, but she didn’t see how a book could be a reliquary unless you could somehow press a relic, like a flower or a butterfly, and preserve it between the pages.
“And so he did, but remember Mr. Haypotten’s tale,” Negret muttered, unrolling the oilskin to examine the instruments tucked in its pockets: styluses and awls; needles blunt, sharp, and curved; looped linen thread in a dozen colors; scoring tools and folders of bone and horn; sharp-ended scalpels and a tiny pair of scissors; minute vials of powders; and a round box he knew without having to look would contain a cake of beeswax. Then he rolled it back up and tied the leather lace closed again. “A relic isn’t always what you think. Neither, therefore, is a reliquary.” He looked up at the innkeeper. “That’s what’s missing, isn’t it? A reliquary.”
Mr. Haypotten red as a poppy now, opened his mouth. But before he could stammer out another word, Maisie spoke up. “Is it a book, then? The thing that’s missing?”
All eyes turned to her. “Yes, it was,” Mr. Haypotten managed.
“And that’s what you’ve been looking for all this time?” Maisie asked Negret. “You’ve been searching the bookshelves.”
The young man’s tattooed face cracked into a smile. He passed the roll of tools to his brother and crouched before Maisie. “You saw that, did you?”
Maisie grinned back. The words Anyone would have seen came to her tongue, but then she realized everyone hadn’t, so she just grinned wider and said, “Yes.”
Negret’s smile broadened too. “And did you find it?”
“I found something,” she replied cautiously. “It might be what you’re talking about.”
“Show me,” Negret suggested with a conspiratorial wink.
Maisie got to her feet. “It’s in my room.” She glanced apprehensively at the Haypottens, wondering if she was about to be in trouble, but the innkeeper and his wife managed encouraging faces as she left the parlor, though their expressions faded back to nervous tightness the moment she was gone.
No one spoke this time. There were no sounds but the crackling of the fire, the soft creaking of Madame Grisaille’s chair, a brief sizzle from the heating coils, and Negret’s quietly pacing feet, until Maisie returned with a small bag made of dusty purple brocade and handed it over.
“Wherever did you find it, Maisie?” Mr. Haypotten asked, his voice thick with relief. “It’s been missing these ten years, at least.”
“There’s a gap where the top stair on the way to the second floor doesn’t quite meet the wall,” Maisie explained. “It was in there, along with some little bones. I think they might’ve been a mouse once.”
Sorcha stared, then laughed. “You did used to have that cat.”
“That cat,” Mrs. Haypotten groaned.
Negret ignored all of this as he picked open the tie closing the brocade bag and reached long, reverent fingers inside. “Aha.” And he took out a very small book bound in buff-colored leather decorated with a pattern of charcoal-gray pinpoints.
Everyone in the room who was close enough to see it spotted immediately the similarity between the gray-dot pattern on the book and the patterns that lay scattered across the faces of the two Colophon brothers.
“That is a reliquary, then?” Maisie asked, peering into Negret’s palm for a closer look.
“Or is it the relic?” Sangwin asked in a grim undertone. Then he winced, along with almost everyone else in the room, as Maisie plucked the book from Negret’s hand.
Negret, however, merely nodded. “It’s both. He made his own reliquary,” he said as Maisie fanned the book open. “Not just anyone can do that.”
Mrs. Haypotten muttered a near-silent prayer and crossed herself. She had long had misgivings about what sort of leather the little book was bound in, but by unspoken agreement, she and her husband had never discussed it. This, however, seemed to be confirmation of her worst suspicions.
Obl
ivious to the older lady’s distress, Maisie turned page after page. All were blank. “But there’s nothing in it!”
“Not yet.” Negret gave her a conspiratorial wink. “Except that’s not quite true.” He reached out and flipped to a place where four ends of thread—it might have been waxed linen or fine gutstring—had been left uncut after having been used to tie two knots holding the pages in place. “And see here.” He pointed to where the thick paper that had sandwiched the threads and knots held a visible pattern of impressions like a branching river, or the lines of a palm. “Thread your kitstring, then tie certain knots, leave certain lengths, press the pages, and sometimes you can divine your fortune. So perhaps there is something to be read here, after all.”
“Seems late for telling that fellow’s fortune,” Masseter observed drily.
Negret lifted his shoulders. “Depends on what one wants to know.”
“Could you tell our fortunes?” Maisie asked eagerly, handing the reliquary volume back.
Negret raised an eyebrow. “There’s peril in telling a fortune. I’m not sure anyone here would risk it.”
Maisie all but hopped up and down. “I would! Tell mine!”
A shadow passed over his face. “Another time, perhaps. You have to sew the stitches and tie the knots yourself, or it won’t be your destiny that’s written. And then of course the book has to be pressed. Fortune-signs are like photographs. They take time to develop.”
He passed book and bag to his brother, who cradled them in his palms with all the solemnity of a priest holding a wafer. Then Negret crouched before the girl and her castle. “But speaking of stories yet to be told, we haven’t heard a tale from you yet, Maisie.” He took from his pocket the little book he’d bound the day before from scraps and Tesserian’s spare aces. “What would you write, if you had a special book full of empty pages, a book meant to contain miracles?” He held it out, an offering.