“I see.” The owl closed first one eye, and then the other. “My mistake. Well, since you’re on a tour, let me make amends by offering you a demonstration. The Zarka-Heidelsneck Reconstruction Mechanism is the most magnificent sight in this outpost town.”
Lin yearned to get away from the unctuous air, but Mrs. Zarka was clearly involved with Isvan in some way. She pinched Rufus again: go further, search harder. He nodded. “Thank you. We would be honored to see the Machine.”
“Excellent. Nit! Fetch me a shoe from storage!” The owl huffed back into the Machine Vault, leaving the door open for them. On the threshold, Lin almost staggered. The air inside felt like a rotting barrier. But even worse was the thin keening noise that rang through the cavernous room.
“Enter!” Mrs. Zarka intoned. A fireplace roared at one end of the chamber, and next to it there was a desk and a painting named Wichtiburg that showed a city of towers and chimneys. But these tokens of civilization were dwarfed by the hulking monster that filled the entire opposite end of the vault.
The Machine was riddled with wires and tubes through which a sluggish dark liquid flowed. Tiny, red lightbulbs turned on and off, chasing each other across the metal surface. At either end there was a large compartment behind a dirty glass door, and between the compartments ran a glass tube.
Mrs. Zarka was standing by a control panel in the middle. Rufus plodded over to her, whiskers wide.
“It’s enormous!” he said, reaching for one of the switches. “How does it work?”
Mrs. Zarka swatted his hand away.
“Do not touch anything! The control panel is not for Rodents or other incompetents!”
“Excuse me,” said Rufus. “I may be a Rodent, but I’m not incompetent.”
Mrs. Zarka stared down her beak at him. “Really? Then you are not as uneducated as everyone else in this unhealthy cold? Perhaps you have studied Technocraft at the university in Wichtiburg?” She opened her beak wide. “Do you even know the first thing about shred science?”
Rufus was forced to take a step back.
“I thought not,” Mrs. Zarka said. “So stop pawing and observe. Today we will make this.” She held up a photo of a Feline shoe under Rufus’s nose. “But my Machine can make anything you wish for—spices, gems, fine clothes. Even living creatures, I believe, though Teodor will not allow it, that old-fashioned fool.”
Mrs. Zarka lifted her monocle and glared across the room at Lin.
“Well, fresher? Are you going to loiter by the entrance all day? Come closer!”
Lin reluctantly left the door and its promise of fresher air and walked to the middle of the room. There she stopped, swaying. Rufus finally noticed that something was wrong and joined her.
“You’re all pale!” he whispered.
“How you can stand it?” Lin groaned.
“What, the smell? It’s not exactly pleasant, I’ll give you that, but . . .”
“No, the noise!”
Rufus started to say something, but Nit poked his head through the metal door. “Forgive me, Mrs. Zarka,” he said unhappily. “We don’t have any shoes that are calculated and ready for shredding. But perhaps this might do?”
He produced a limp piece of brown leather and held it up for Mrs. Zarka’s approval. “I dare say it’s a peculiar one, too narrow to be a Rodent model.”
“Excellent,” Mrs. Zarka hooted, launching herself at the door so she could snatch the piece of leather out of Nit’s grasp. Lin got a glimpse of it as the owl rushed past, and she was glad her hood hid the shock on her face.
It was her slipper, the one she had lost when they fled from the Winnower’s cottage. “If you’ll just let me do the basic calculation . . .” Nit called after her, but Mrs. Zarka waved him to silence.
“We shall make an exception. It is common sense that a slipper and a shoe must be close together in numbers.”
She shut the slipper in one of the Machine’s compartments and strapped a headgear made of metal bands and suction cups to her head. “This brain goggle will pluck the image of the shoe from my mind.” Next, she picked a bottle of dark liquid from a rack, emptying the contents into a spout in the Machine. “Now that I have injected the Machine with Thorndrip, I can . . .”
She pushed a large lever to the floor, and the rest of her sentence drowned in a piercing wail that seemed to come from the depths of the Machine. Lin tried to protect her ears with her mittens, but the wail was in her head, stabbing her. Through leaking eyes, she watched her slipper begin to slowly dissolve from one end. The long glass tube filled with a pearlescent light. In the second compartment, a perfect shoe appeared out of nothing.
But still the slipper was almost whole.
The shoe rattled. Small blisters boiled across its surface, gathering in larger cankers. Then it exploded into black specks that melted off the glass door.
Mrs. Zarka’s headgear buzzed and sparked, and the owl flopped backward to the floor.
Even through the terrible scream, Lin heard an alarm howling. The entire Machine vibrated now. Vials of Thorndrip fell down from the rack and broke, and the red lights started to burst, one by one. In the long glass tube, a web of fine cracks had appeared, spreading out like veins in pale skin.
Rufus ran over and pulled hard at the lever. It wouldn’t budge.
Lin swallowed, trying to focus. There was a strange, metallic taste in her mouth. The door to the office was open, and a slack-jawed Nit stood in the doorway. “Help!” she yelled at him, and he came tottering over the heaving floor. But instead of shutting the Machine down, the mouse began pulling the unconscious Mrs. Zarka toward the exit. Behind the painting of Wichtiburg deep fissures ate across the wall. Lin had a sickening feeling that getting out of the vault might not be enough to escape.
“He’s right!” she screamed at Rufus. “We have to leave!”
But Rufus was busy hauling a fire poker and the heavy desk chair across the floor. With all his strength he launched the chair at the glass compartment.
Lin crouched down and covered her face. Glass rained around her. She peeked out between her arms as Rufus lifted the poker like a baseball bat. He didn’t even flinch when a large shard flew by, grazing his whiskers, but swung the metal rod and hit the slipper out of the compartment with a precise strike.
The pearlescent light flashed one final time and disappeared. The noise died down, leaving a ringing in Lin’s head, and the alarm was cut short in time for the slipper to give a wet slap as it hit the wall. A thick silence filled the vault, until Rufus began gasping for air.
“Rats!” he panted. “That was close! Are you okay?”
He turned to Lin, lifting her hood so he could see her face. His jaw dropped first, then the poker. “What happened to your nose? Were you hit by the glass?”
Lin touched her nose. Her fingers came away bloody. “I don’t know.”
Rufus sniffed at her. “Oh no, your ears are bleeding, too! Are you in pain?”
Lin rubbed her temples. Her ears ached dully, but she felt a tremendous relief that the keening sound was gone.
“I think it was the noise.”
“You mean the alarm?”
“No, the other noise. The screaming one,” Lin said.
“That’s what I was trying to tell you before Mrs. Zarka started the Machine! There is no other noise!”
“But there was!” Lin said, confused. “It’s gone now, but it was terribly loud!”
Rufus sniffed at her again.
“I think we’d better have Doctor Kott examine you, just in case. Let’s get you out of here.”
He pulled Lin’s hood back into place and put a sheltering arm around her. But before they reached the door, Mrs. Zarka burst back into the vault, feathers smoking. She searched the scene, registering the shards on the floor, the spilled liquid, the shattered compartment, and the cracked glass tube
. Finally she spied the slipper, which lay on the floor, looking for all the world like any old scrap of leather.
“Nit!”
Nit appeared behind her, trailing a length of bandage. “Yes, Mrs. Zarka?”
“To whom did that slipper belong?”
Lin kept very still. Because of Nit’s comment on the peculiar shape of the slipper, she had given no sign that she recognized it before, and she certainly dare not claim it now.
“I . . . I don’t know,” Nit said. “One of the gatherers found it in the woods earlier today.”
Mrs. Zarka’s voice dripped with acid. “I do wish you had thought to inform me of this before you made me feed an unknown object into my delicate, invaluable Machine.” She poked her talons in his direction. “You screw-cogged idiot! You deserve to be raked!”
Nit bowed his head, shivering, and Lin realized with a pang that he was expecting some sort of punishment. She couldn’t bear it anymore. “Actually, Mrs. Zarka, I think you have it wrong. You would be badly injured if Nit hadn’t risked his life to save you. He’s a hero.”
Nit looked up, forehead all lined with astonishment. Rufus chewed his tassels as he watched Mrs. Zarka, but Lin pressed her lips together. She would rather be exposed than discover what it meant for someone to be raked.
Mrs. Zarka lifted her monocle. Lin could feel the one-eyed gaze trying to burn through her hood. “Is that so?”
Lin stood her ground. “Yes.”
“Then I suppose we shall make an exception.” Mrs. Zarka turned her back on all of them to fetch a pair of tongs from the fireplace. Gently, gently, she used them to pick the slipper off the floor. “What are you?” she muttered. “Not what you appear, that much is certain. No rune marks, or any Technocraft enhancements. Yet magical you are, magical enough to almost ruin my beloved Machine.”
She turned to Nit.
“Send for a glassblower immediately! That pretty Feline if you can find her. She is the best.”
Nit vanished, and without sparing Lin and Rufus a thought, Mrs. Zarka brought the slipper over to her desk and sat down to work.
Rufus swished his tail. “Lin is bleeding. I’m taking her to Doctor Kott.”
“Yes, yes,” the owl said, dismissing them with a wave of her wing.
“One question before we go, though. Why were you expecting Isvan?”
That got Mrs. Zarka’s attention. A greedy light kindled in her green saucer eyes. “Isvan? The Winterfyrst? You have seen him?”
Lin and Rufus shook their heads in unison. Mrs. Zarka wheezed, and Lin couldn’t tell if she was suspicious or just annoyed. “I have sent for him several times. I require his skull measurements.”
Rufus’s fur bristled. “Skull measurements? What do you need those for?”
“That’s confidential,” Mrs. Zarka said. “Not even Nit is allowed to assist me on this project. It is not suitable for the uneducated.”
That was the last drop for Rufus. “I don’t know why the House let you build this ugly Machine in the middle of Sylveros, but I’m going to tell everyone how dangerous it is. And how you treat poor Nit and everyone around you!”
Mrs. Zarka closed first one eye, and then the other. “No need for that,” she wheezed. “Isvan has nothing to fear. The device is entirely for his own good. Besides it has all been approved.”
“It’s been . . . approved?”
“Oh yes,” Mrs. Zarka said. “By the House.”
• • •
On their way back up the stairwell, Rufus stomped so hard on the metal steps that they almost didn’t hear it, a small voice rising from the bottom.
“Wait!”
Nit’s forehead made a growing, gray moon in the murk as he climbed up to join them, clutching a piece of paper to his chest. “I wanted to thank you for defending me. No one has ever done that before.” He swallowed nervously. “And I wanted to tell you that Isvan did come here that day.”
“The day that was missing from your ledger?” Rufus asked.
Nit nodded. “September twenty-ninth. Mrs. Zarka instructed me to take his entry out since we couldn’t grant his request.”
“Why not?” Rufus said. “I thought the Machine can make anything you want.”
“It can, but only if you feed it something equally powerful. And Isvan wanted this.” Nit handed them the brittle paper.
It was an illustration of an ice ax. Swirly carvings curled up the long handle, and the head was transparent like ice, engraved with the Winterfyrst snow crystal. Beneath the drawing there was a name: FROSTFANG. ALLOWS THE BEARER TO CONTROL THE SUBSTANCE OF ICE.
“September twenty-ninth was three days before he stole Lass’s ax,” Lin said.
“He got so upset when I said we couldn’t help him.” Nit rubbed the back of his head. “I said we should ask Mrs. Zarka, but he knocked me down and ran. There were icicles all over the counter afterward.”
“Control the substance of ice,” Lin whispered. “Does that mean what I think it means?”
Rufus whistled softly through his teeth. “Frostfang is magical!”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Doctor Kott lived in a part of town particularly favored by the Feline clan, a tall hill wound around with narrow alleys, overlooking the Great Square. The doctor’s house perched above a small widening at the hairpin turn of a street, and his lights were on under the stethoscope sign. But the good doctor had failed to answer the door, and neither did he appear at the mead house next door, where he liked to have his dinner. Under the sleek, typeset sign of the RED CAT, Rufus pulled his whiskers in dismay. “Where the rats is he?”
Lin sighed. “I said it’s okay. I’m not in any pain.”
“And I said I don’t care. You’re seeing the doctor.” Rufus peered through the mead house window, nostrils flaring. “The salt fish and hot pepper chowder is almost ready in there. Doctor Kott won’t want to miss that.”
Lin crinkled her nose. “I don’t think we have time to wait for him.”
“He brews all his medicines at the Remedy Chamber down at the House. I bet my tail that’s where he is.”
“Well, we don’t have time to run around and search for him, either!” Lin’s irritation was rising to the surface. Since the ear-bleeding thing, Rufus had gone into some sort of worrying frenzy, stopping to peer into her ear every twenty steps.
“You’re right. But maybe we could do both.” He tugged Lin into the square of light from the mead house window. “Stay here where the Red Cat patrons can see you. I have to report those cracks in the Machine Vault. They should be secured, or the whole barn could come down on someone’s head. I was going to leave you here with Doctor Kott while I went down to the House, but I guess I’ll have to find him while I’m there.”
“Then I’ll come with you!”
Rufus shook his head. “That’s just the thing. I can’t take you. The Canines that work in the reception hall are bloodhounds. They would smell you in a heartbeat. You understand that, don’t you? Of course, you could wait in the Square, but then you might as well stay here, away from the crowds, in case the doctor comes back.”
Lin started to protest, but Rufus put his knuckly fingers on her mouth. “Blood doesn’t come out of people’s ears for no reason. I need you to see the doctor. Please? Just wait here, and I’ll be back in no time.”
He set off down the hill on all fours, and soon his rusty tail whipped around the next bend and disappeared. Lin crossed her arms and leaned against the wall. The lilting voice of a willow flute trickled out from the mead house to nag at her. This whole exercise was really pointless. The pain in her ears had diminished to a cotton-ball feeling, and her foot was as good as new. Besides, if Doctor Kott were to examine her, one more Sylvering would know about the human girl.
Not far away, a bell tolled five times. Five o’clock, and still they had no idea where Isvan was. Her father
always said: “If you want to make a plan, start with what you know.” Inside her mitten, Lin counted off the information they had gathered. First, there was the letter they had found in Isvan’s pillow, which may or may not be the reason for his falling out with Teodor. Second, there were the mysterious bite marks in his home, and the fact that someone had been there when Lin and Rufus arrived. Someone who had fled out the back stairs. Third, both Lass and Nit had thought Isvan’s behavior seemed strange, as if he were scared. And fourth, Figenskar and Mrs. Zarka both wanted the Winterfyrst for some reason.
She frowned at her mitten, but she didn’t take it off. Cold was seeping through her pants, numbing her thighs, and she had to get away from that willow flute. She began pacing the little street instead. Start with what you know. Well, the only thing she knew for certain was that Isvan had disappeared sometime after October third, and that he had wanted a magical ice ax. What she didn’t know was why.
All the way up here, she had tried to convince Rufus that they should go and see Teodor. But Rufus had refused. “I don’t trust him with this,” he had said. “In fact, I don’t trust him at all.” Lin didn’t trust Teodor either, but if anyone knew something about that ax, it would be the old fox. She grimaced as she made another turn, and there she froze.
She was not alone in the street. She hadn’t seen him, withdrawn in the unlit lane between Doctor Kott’s house and the Red Cat, poised at the edge of his stone base, leaning forward. A statue of a boy with slicked-back hair and a pinched nose. A fellow Twistrose, crowned with old snow.
“Why aren’t you on Eversnow Square with the others?” Lin brushed the snow off his plaque.
EDVARD URIARTE. 1919.
None of the Twistrose statues she had seen featured their Petlings, but this boy had a crow at his feet. A bird, not a Beak, and it lay on its back, as if it were dead.
“I suppose you solved your puzzle, since they made you into a statue. Any tips on where I can find Isvan Winterfyrst?”
The statue stared past her under hooded lids. Lin turned to see what he saw. Edvard Uriarte might be hidden in the shadows, but he had a magnificent view of Sylveros.
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