by Dave Butler
“No!” Grim barked. “No, Charlie, you’re not.” The troll stood up and wrapped a towel around himself. “We’re all made somehow, Charlie. However you were made, you’ve got a father who loves you, and you’re very much a person. You’re a very special boy, Charlie Pondicherry.”
Charlie wasn’t sure he was convinced, one way or the other. Machines could move, and they could certainly look like people, but Charlie felt like much more than a machine. If he really was a…device, like his father’s owl or Lucky Wu’s sparrows, how was he able to see? It was true, he’d never really needed much food—maybe he’d never needed any food, it occurred to him, but he shook the thought off—and he could hold his breath a long time, but…Did the Sky Trestle token dispenser smell passengers as they approached it? Did it taste the coins that were pushed into its slot?
There were too many questions, and Charlie just couldn’t face them right now.
“Anyway, I’ve got a bap,” Charlie said. He remembered the sight of his father being dragged away in a collar by the Iron Cog’s hulders. “We’ve got to rescue him. We’ve got to find the troll with the piston arm, and find out why the Cavendish Hats people took my bap and why they want me, and what all the blasting powder was for.”
“All those things,” Grim agreed. “Just as soon as you take a bath. You’re so dirty, beggars would be embarrassed to have you.”
Charlie bathed and washed his own hair and gouged mud out of his ears and scrubbed his fingernails without thinking very much about what they were made of. When he had finished, Grim had somehow laundered and dried Charlie’s clothes, and Charlie got dressed again in his coat and John Bull. He decided not to ask Grim if he had any creams for his skin.
He felt like a new boy.
Grim looked like a new troll. He wore a tightly knotted white cravat and white kid gloves. He had clean, pressed red trousers and a matching red waistcoat, and a fine chain across his stomach hinted at the enormous gold watch that he pulled out and consulted once as he dressed. Over it all he hung a yellow coat, a mirror of the one he had turned into rope in the prisons of Underthames. His hair gleamed with oil and was tied with a gold ribbon in a queue down his back, poking out underneath a brand-new top hat. He showed Charlie the label: the hat was a Cavendish, and they both laughed. Grim’s breath even smelled minty, and after he rubbed his tusks with thick paste from a jar whose label read ADELGUND’S SOLUTION, they were white as china.
Henry Clockswain had returned, and sat quietly dozing in a chair in the office, wearing a clean shirt and coat, with all its buttons. Ollie rubbed his eyes and looked about when Charlie and the troll woke them all up. “Here now, what’s this? Are we going to the palace and someone didn’t tell me about it?”
“Why do you care?” Bob laughed. “It ain’t like you’d dress up or anything.”
Ollie spat in both hands and combed his hair with his fingers. Bob just unbuckled his bomber cap. At Grim’s reminder, both boys checked their weapons. When the kobold announced that he’d lost his gun in the fire, Ollie only sneered.
Grim produced three loaves of bread, a brick of butter, and four apples from his larder, and they were devoured in seconds.
At the last moment Bob disappeared into the bathroom for a few minutes. He came out grinning and winding his injured arm in small, slow circles. “Just exhuming my injury,” he explained.
“Examining?” Charlie suggested.
“Yeah. It ain’t too bad.”
They set out again.
Charlie had lost track of time. There was no sign of the sun yet, so he thought it must be the early hours of the morning. It took fifteen minutes of waiting and fruitless waving, but finally Grim hailed a hansom cab by flagging it down with a white handkerchief, and they all climbed in. The cab was a wide, two-wheeled carriage with a window on each side and open in the front, and was pulled by a crusty gray rhinoceros. The cabdriver stood on a little platform at the back, with his reins running over the top of the roof and down to the draft animal’s bit and bridle. The rhinoceros strained at its harness and scuffed at the cobblestones as it waited for its passengers to get aboard.
“Where to?” the cabbie shouted through his thick scarf.
“Limehouse!” Grim barked. “St. Arnfinn’s Lane, if you know it.”
“Disgusting!” The driver spat. “And with kids, even!” But he cracked his whip, and the rhino snorted into motion.
“Where are we going?” Charlie asked.
“Back into the stink,” Ollie muttered.
“Everything stinks,” Bob said. His chin straps bounced against his cheeks. “An’ everybody. Except Grim an’ Charlie, now. Welcome to London.”
“The, ah, dairies,” Henry Clockswain said. He folded and unfolded his hands repeatedly.
“The dairies,” Grim agreed, and then they both fell quiet and stared out opposite windows. Charlie was squished in the middle, so he looked over the trotting rhinoceros at London as it flashed by.
Two policemen passed, going the other direction. They rode zebras and carried cutlasses at their belts, and Charlie recognized their dark blue uniforms with short capes and buttons. He shrank into the seat of the hansom cab to hide, but neither of the policemen noticed him.
The streets became darker. Charlie saw fewer long coats, and more tunics and togas and robes. Then he began to see hulders. Not many, and some of them staggered as if they were sick, leaning against walls and even falling to their knees.
The hansom turned down a smaller street and stopped. “St. Arnfinn’s,” the cabbie grumbled.
The street was unpaved and muddy. The buildings looked like shops, with iron bars dropped in front of the windows for the night. There were no signboards, but hitching posts stood in front of many of the doors. Large horses waited, tied to the posts, along with a couple of zebras and even a yawning tiger, all saddled and hitched.
The lane reeked of animal sweat and dung, and something else. Charlie sniffed a moment and thought about it.
Sour cheese. St. Arnfinn’s Lane smelled like sour cheese.
He saw no humans, and only a few hulders. The trolls moved slowly, or lounged against the street’s brick walls in silence.
“Thank you.” Grim paid the cabbie, they all climbed down, and then the rhinoceros pulled the cab away.
Grim approached one of the idling trolls. The other troll was bigger than Grim, and mostly hidden behind a shabby black coat and scarf. “Looking for Egil Olafsson,” Grim snarled, and tossed a coin to the hulder. “The one they call One-Arm.”
The troll caught the coin and bit it. He squinted at Grim and then nodded at an open doorway across the street. Grim nodded back.
“Of course it would have to be that one,” Grim said to nobody in particular. He sighed, shifted his belt, tucked his shirt in, and lifted his hat to tease a few strands of hair into place with his fingers. Then he patted Charlie on the back. “Follow me, Charlie. And brace yourself.”
Charlie shuffled into the darkness on Grim’s heels. Past the troll’s flapping coat he saw a glimmer of dusty yellowish-green light. Then he and Grim punched through a curtain of bones knotted into leather thongs, which made Charlie think of a spider’s web. He shuddered, and entered a small room with a standing desk.
Behind the desk stood a woman, and she was beautiful. She was tall, taller than Charlie’s bap, though not nearly as tall as Grim. Long blond hair tumbled around her face and was pinned back by a tortoiseshell comb over one ear. Her eyes twinkled as blue as Grim’s even in the flickering yellow-green light. Cherries shone on the cheeks and in the smiling lips of her cream-white face.
“Grim Grumblesson,” she said. “I hope you left your high horse tied to the hitching post outside.”
Grim growled, a low, purring, throaty noise that made Charlie step back. “Something wrong with caring about the future of my people, Ingrid?”
“Is there something wrong with having a little fun?” the woman countered.
The light to Charlie’s left winked
out and back on again. Surprised, he turned to look at it. He was even more surprised to see that the light came from an insect. The bug was the size of his fist, and it was all abdomen, like an aphid or a tick—Charlie had seen pictures in Insects of the Isles, a dog-eared tome in his bap’s library. Insects of the Isles didn’t mention any aphid or tick this big, though, or any that cast light. The insect’s abdomen glowed a sickly yellow, with just a hint of green.
The bug was free, and crawled slowly along the wall of the room. Charlie reached out to touch it with one finger—
and it flew away, shup-shup-shup-shup, three or four feet to a new perch on the wall.
Charlie looked around. The room was lit by nothing but bugs, fifteen or twenty of them, all slowly creeping around with their lights winking.
The rest of Charlie’s friends stopped just inside the door. Ollie muttered something Charlie couldn’t make out.
“Some kinds of fun are out of bounds,” Grim ground out slowly.
“Dairies aren’t illegal,” Ingrid countered. Another thong curtain behind her parted, and a man strolled out. He wore a cravat, waistcoat, and top hat, and he was tall, with big muttonchop side-whiskers. Hair pulled into a queue behind his head made him look a little like Grim, though a human version. In his hand he swung a cane with a large metal knob at the top. He slapped the knob into the palm of his other hand to punctuate his sentences.
“Anything wrong, darling?” he asked. Slap.
A glowing bug scuttled onto the desktop, and Ingrid brushed it away. “I don’t think so, Sal,” she said. “The lawspeaker here was just telling me he doesn’t like our business.”
“Grim Grumblesson.” Slap. “Well, I reckon I already knew what Mr. Grim Grumblesson thought of my business.” Slap. “The two things about my business that Mr. Grim Grumblesson might like to keep very firmly in mind are that my business ain’t illegal and that my business…is my business.” Slap!
Grim trembled. Charlie was afraid the troll was going to explode, but when he spoke, his words came out measured. “I’m not here about your dairy, Sal. I’m here to help this boy.” He patted Charlie on the shoulder, and Charlie smiled his best smile.
Ingrid’s harsh expression melted into something warmer. She looked touched, and something else. Sad, maybe.
Sal shook his head. “If you’re looking for an orphanage, this ain’t it. Try the nuns up the street.”
Grim growled. “I’m here for Egil One-Arm. Give him up, and we’ll have no trouble.”
“I don’t know no Egil One-Arm.” Slap. Sal stepped a little closer.
“And if we did know him, he isn’t here,” Ingrid added. The warm expression was gone.
“And if he was, we wouldn’t tell you, anyway.” Slap. “ ’Cause if there was a jotun here named Egil, he’d be a customer, and that’d make him my…business.” Slap. Slap.
Grim’s voice rumbled low. “Egil Olafsson, called One-Arm, is a criminal. That makes him my business. You can let me in, Sal, or I can raise the hue and cry. If I come back here with a dozen honest hulders who aren’t milkers, there’s no telling how much accidental damage they might do to your disgusting…business.”
Sal’s face twitched in the yellow-green light. Slap! Ingrid looked from Sal to Grim and back again. Just in case, Charlie slipped his hand into his jacket pocket and wrapped his fingers around his clasp knife.
A glowing bug dropped from the ceiling onto the desktop. It landed belly up and lay there with its legs twitching.
“Fine. We’ll do this the hard way.” Grim turned to leave.
Sal swung his cane.
Splat!
The glowing bug on the desktop exploded. It left behind a yellow-green phosphorescent puddle and a few bits of insect carapace. Charlie swallowed.
“You win, lawspeaker.” Sal looked at Ingrid and smiled a greasy smile. “This time.” He turned and disappeared into the back.
Ingrid pointed at another curtain to her right.
Grim nodded and led the way. Before he turned and lost sight of her, Charlie thought he heard her murmur, “Poor kid.”
In the dark hallway beyond, lit by just one bug crawling slowly along the ceiling, Gnat flitted to Charlie’s side. “Ingrid used to be married to Grim,” the pixie whispered.
“Oh,” Charlie said. “Grim was married to a human woman?”
The pixie shook her head. “Ingrid’s a hulder. All hulder women look like her. Many human men desire them in marriage.”
Charlie thought back to what he had read about hulder society. “The Almanack didn’t mention that.”
The pixie shrugged. “ ’Tis a sensitive point.”
The hall turned, and they began trudging up stairs. “You must have the second edition,” Grim said, barging into the conversation. “Smythson wrote a lot more in the first edition, but some of us went and had a conversation with him. We persuaded him that certain sufferings were private and didn’t need to be printed for all the world to read about.”
“You heard us,” Charlie said.
“I’ve got big ears. And we weren’t married. She decided that settling down wasn’t really the life she wanted. Said she couldn’t see me as a father, and didn’t want to see herself as a mother.”
“If she’s a milker, you’re better off,” Ollie sniffed.
“She’s a milker,” Grim agreed. “And she likes human men. As far too many of her sisters do.”
The stairs ended in a hallway, with thong-curtained doorways on each side. The sour-milk smell was stronger up here, and mixed in with it was a stink of animal sweat and other bodily fluids. This was what it would smell like inside a latrine in the middle of a cow pasture next to a boarded-up cheese factory, Charlie thought.
“This is work for smaller folk than you, Grim,” Gnat said. She zipped through the nearest curtain.
Grim shuffled to a halt and drew his pistol. He checked its caps and turned its cylinder to move the hammer off the empty chamber. Bob and Ollie followed his lead; Bob struck a martial pose with his sword, and Ollie opened and shut the umbrella twice. Charlie unlocked his clasp knife and held it in his hand, blade pointed at the floor.
“May I ask…why the insects?” Charlie was starting to imagine them crawling over his own skin.
“Glowbugs,” Grim said. “When you’re dealing with milkers, you want to minimize the fire hazards.”
“I don’t like this. We could still call the London police,” Henry Clockswain squeaked. “They can’t all be bad. We’re stirring a pot of bees here.”
“No,” Grim croaked, his voice like the brakes of a train. “This is really none of their affair.”
Gnat emerged from a curtain. “He’s in here.”
“Follow me, lads,” the troll said. “And watch out for the arm. It packs a wallop.”
Grim burst through the curtain, and Charlie followed right behind. The room was square and hot, with tall shutters closed over the windows. In the center of the room was a long, low, wide platform. It was carved of wood and looked like a bed without a mattress, raised off the floor to the height of Charlie’s knee. The sides of the bed were solid, and they were carved with a dense network of images. Charlie thought he could make out dancing, drinking, and feasting in the carving work. Not human, though. Trolls.
On the bed lay a hulder. He was huge, maybe even bigger than Grim. His eyes were open, but they were rolled back into his head and twitching. His snaggletoothed mouth gaped wide. Thick drool slid down his check and puddled under his neck. He wore a white film of milk like a mustache on his enormous upper lip.
Beside the bed a clay pitcher sat on a heavy chair. Over the back of the chair hung the troll’s large coat.
Charlie could see the troll’s right arm clearly. It was brass from shoulder to tip. Its shoulder and elbow were ball joints, and the arm ended in another ball, with three pinching claws like grotesque fingers. Charlie saw the shoulder joint clearly because the troll’s chest was covered only in a filthy sleeveless undershirt; the bal
l of the shoulder seemed to be permanently attached to the hulder’s flesh with brass bands that wrapped around his chest. It wasn’t a prosthetic, like a pirate’s wooden leg; this device was part of Egil One-Arm. The rest of the troll shivered, but his arm lay still and slowly piped thin jets of steam out its ball joints.
This was the hulder whose face Charlie hadn’t been able to see while he kidnapped Charlie’s bap. This was the troll from Cavendish Hats who had knocked Grim Grumblesson down with one punch.
Grim stood over Egil One-Arm with his Eldjotun pointed at him.
Charlie stared. “This is terrible.”
“Milk makes trolls sick,” Ollie explained.
“Yeah,” Bob agreed, “only some of ’em like it.”
“Or they don’t have the strength to quit.” Grim’s voice was somber. He pointed his pistol at Egil One-Arm and squeezed the trigger.
BANG!
Smoke poured from the gun. Egil sat up, eyes rolling wild and unconnected in his head. His mechanical arm didn’t sit up with him; it fell to the floor with a loud clang-g-g!
Grim had shot Egil’s arm off.
“What?” Egil bellowed. “Who’s there?”
“Stay back,” Grim warned the boys. “Bob, watch the door.” He bent and picked up the severed arm. Its claws clenched and unclenched spastically.
Bob stationed himself by the exit, sword in his good hand.
Egil slapped himself on the side where his arm had been. “What happened?” His eyes were starting to roll in the same direction. “Where’s my arm?”
“Got your arm right here,” Grim said. He reached forward with the mechanical arm and pressed it against Egil’s face. The claws clenched, squeezing Egil’s forehead and cheeks. “The bad news for you is I’m in a foul mood today. The good news is I think you can tell me a few things that will cheer me up.”
“I won’t tell you nothing!” The claws on One-Arm’s face squeezed, and the hulder grunted in pain. Blood trickled down his cheeks.
Grim twisted the arm. His face was full of fury and hatred. It was the ugliest Charlie had ever seen his big friend, and he lurched back. “The kidnapping!” Grim yelled. “What do you want with Raj Pondicherry?”