The Fire Chronicle

by John Stephens

  An awful thought occurred to Kate.

  “How … long have I been here?”

  “Dunno.”

  “When did you find me? It’s important!”

  “Couple hours ago. You were just lying here. I went to get Jake.” He nodded at the boy with the stick. “Figured if you were dead, we could get the wheelbarrow, take you down to the doctor college. We coulda used five dollars.”

  Kate couldn’t breathe. She pushed past the two boys and through the wooden door. Pale sunlight blinded her, and she threw up an arm. She looked about, blinking. She was on a rooftop; a maze of low buildings stretched out in all directions. The room she’d woken in was a kind of shed. The air was bitingly cold. She could see her breath before her. Ice and old snow crunched beneath her feet. Dressed for summer, Kate could only hug her arms tight to her body.

  She stepped to the edge of the roof and looked down. The building was just six stories high, and she could make out huge snowdrifts funneling people along sidewalks. In the street, horses were pulling carts, undisturbed by the presence of cars and buses. Kate listened for engines, horns, the squeal of tires; but the only sounds were of people and carts and horseshoes. She scanned the horizon. There was not a tall building in sight.

  Her heart began to beat faster, and a memory came to her. Michael had been trapped in the past, held prisoner by the Countess, and she and Emma had gone back to rescue him. They’d been in the past scarcely half an hour when the Atlas had faded and vanished before their eyes. Kate remembered the witch explaining how the Atlas belonging to that time had exerted its dominance, that two copies of the book could coexist for a brief period, but eventually, one would vanish.

  The boy said that he’d found her two hours ago. The book was long gone.

  A hand grabbed her arm and she whirled about, thinking the Screecher had somehow followed her. It was one of the boys.

  “You gotta be careful. You’re gonna fall.”

  Kate stepped back from the edge. “What’s the date?”

  “December something.”

  “I mean, what year is it?”

  “You kidding?”

  “Just tell me.”

  “It’s 1899,” the other said. “How don’t you know that?”

  Kate said nothing. She just looked out at the white rooftops of the city. She was cold, and alone, and she was trapped in the year 1899. How was she ever going to get home?

  The boys—their names were Jake and Beetles (no explanation)—said that seeing as things hadn’t turned out as they’d hoped and she appeared to be more or less alive, she had to come and see Rafe. Kate told them that she didn’t know who Rafe was and she had no intention of going to see him. The only thing that mattered—she thought this, but didn’t say it—was finding a way back to her brother and sister.

  “Where’re the stairs?”

  “You can’t just go off,” Beetles said. “Anyway, you’ll freeze.”

  The boy had a point. While he and his partner each had on two jackets, multiple shirts, and heavy-looking wool trousers (every article patched and raggedy, but no less warm for that), Kate wore just an old pair of sandals and a sleeveless summer dress. She was already shaking. She was also, she noticed, covered in dried mud.

  “Fine. Where”—her teeth had begun to chatter—“where can I get a coat?”

  “Over on Bowery.”

  “I thought I was in the Bowery!”

  “I mean the street. Come on!”

  The boys led her to the fire escape, a rickety, rusting skeleton flimsily attached to the side of the building, which they raced down pell-mell, setting up a great rattling and shaking. Kate hurried after them, certain that at any moment the whole contraption was going to break free of its moorings and plunge into the alley. A ladder at the bottom stopped nine feet off the ground, and the boys dangled from the last rung and dropped, landing catlike on their hands and feet. Kate did her best to follow suit, but found herself hanging in midair, unwilling to let go.

  “Come on!” the boys yelled. “It ain’t far! Come on!”

  She grunted in pain as her feet struck the frozen stones and a shudder passed through her ankles. She stood, the heels of her hands stinging.

  “Finally,” Jake said. “I thought you were gonna set up house there or something.”

  “Maybe open a shop, huh?” said Beetles.

  “Yeah. The Hanging-at-the-End-of-the-Ladder-Too-Scared-to-Let-Go Shop!”

  “You’re hilarious,” Kate said. “Just show me where to get a coat.”

  They led her down the alley and across the street that Kate had seen from the roof of the building. Her sandaled feet sank deep into the drifts, and hard crusts of snow scratched her bare legs. She tried not to notice the stares she got, a girl in a thin dress in the middle of winter, and she followed her two guides down another alley and out into a street that was wider than the first and lined end to end with stalls. Throngs of darkly clad men and women milled between the ramshackle booths as vendors stood about, extolling the qualities of their goods in one language after another.

  “This here’s Bowery,” said Beetles. “You can get a coat here.”

  “I don’t—I don’t have any money.”

  Now that they’d stopped moving, Kate was trembling badly.

  “You got anything you can trade?” Jake asked. “What about that locket?”

  Kate’s hand went to her throat, her numb fingers fumbling at the gold locket. Her mother had given her the locket the night their family had been separated.

  “I … I can’t.…”

  “What else you got?”

  But Kate had nothing else. Her mother’s locket was the only valuable thing she owned. And she was freezing, literally freezing to death. She could ask for help from the people walking past, but that would require explanations: who she was, how she had come to be here.…

  “The chain’s gold. I can trade the chain. But I’m keeping the locket.”

  The boys took her to a mute old man who examined the chain, nodded, and gave Kate a shabby, moth-eaten coat and a wool hat. She pulled them both on, grateful, and her shaking began to subside.

  “All right,” Jake said. “We helped you. Now you gotta come see Rafe.”

  Again, Kate refused.

  “Rafe ain’t gonna like it,” Beetles said.

  “I really don’t care what Rafe likes.”

  And she turned away down the line of stalls. She was still shivering slightly, the cold being very cold and her new coat and hat very thin and ragged; but she had held on to her mother’s locket and she was not going to freeze to death. That was all that mattered. So what if she couldn’t feel her toes?

  Your problem now, she told herself, is getting home.

  Her copy of the Atlas had disappeared because another copy already existed in this time. Kate knew where that copy was—far to the north, in the mountains surrounding Cambridge Falls, it was locked in a vault beneath the old dwarf city—and her first thought, back on the roof when she’d realized her situation, had been to make her way north and retrieve the book. But she’d quickly abandoned that plan. The copy in the vault had to be there for her and Michael to discover in the future. It felt strange to be protecting events that were still a hundred years off, events that in her mind had already taken place; but such were the ironies of time travel. And truth be told, Kate was relieved that she wouldn’t be swimming through the long underground tunnel that led to the vault. The last time she’d done it, she’d watched a dwarf get pulled down by the creature that lived in the depths, and she was not at all eager to go back.

  Her second idea was, on the surface, much simpler. Find Dr. Pym and have him send her home. The Countess had helped Kate travel through time without the Atlas; the witch had tapped into the magic inside her, the power of the Atlas that was, even now, coursing through her veins. Kate was certain that Dr. Pym could do the same. But how to go about finding him? Could the dwarves help? Michael had said that a dwarf might live for hundreds of
years. Was it possible that Robbie McLaur was alive? Surely he would be able to contact the wizard. Once again, it seemed that Kate’s only hope lay in going to Cambridge Falls. But it was a daunting journey. She would need to take the train to Westport (provided that trains in this time ran to Westport). Find passage across Lake Champlain. Then there was the long road into the mountains. And she would need money to buy tickets and food and, as soon as possible, shoes and socks and a sweater and …

  She willed herself not to panic. One step at a time. She could do this.

  She sensed the boys coming up beside her, and glanced over to see them each juggling a blackened, smoking potato. They passed their prizes from hand to hand, blowing on them until they were cool enough to crack open, an act the pair performed with relish, inhaling as the released steam rose into their faces.

  “You want some?” asked the boy named Jake.

  Before she could answer, he’d ripped his in half and handed it over. The skin of the potato was black and flaky, but the inside was soft and smeared with a greasy, buttery fat, and as she ate it, Kate felt herself warmed, and she was grateful to the boy for sharing. She felt no ill will toward them for hoping to sell her corpse. They were clearly very poor, and in 1899, five dollars was no doubt a fortune.

  As the trio threaded their way through the crowded market, Kate found herself wondering who the boys were. Did they have families? Unlikely. Their clothes were too hodgepodge, their faces too dirty. Perhaps they lived in an orphanage? Also unlikely. Kate knew what orphanage children looked like. Even the rebellious ones had an anxiousness that these boys lacked. So where did they live? Who protected them?

  They reached an intersection. A bone-thin, dark-haired man stood in the midst of a small crowd, talking loudly in a language Kate didn’t understand. He had a long black beard, no shirt, and in his left hand, he held a flaming torch. With a cry, the man ran the torch over his pale, sunken chest, down his other arm, over his head, and suddenly the whole upper half of his body, including his long beard, was engulfed in flame.

  Kate was about to scream, to call for water, when the small group of spectators began clapping their mittened hands. And she saw that the man’s skin was neither burning nor blackening; indeed, he appeared to be grinning. What was going on?

  Then she heard:

  “Dragon eggs! Real dragon eggs! Raise your own dragon!”

  Coming toward her was a red-faced, frazzle-haired woman whose hands and forearms were marked with burn scars. The woman carried a basket lined with old hay in which were nestled three enormous eggs. The eggs were dark green and leathery, each one the size of a grapefruit, and they were all smoking ominously.

  “Dragon eggs!” the woman called, continuing down the street. “Three weeks from hatching! Makes a wonderful companion!”

  Kate turned to the boys, who were licking butter off their fingers and seemed totally unfazed.

  “Did you see that?”

  “See what?” asked Jake.

  “What do you mean, what? That man’s on fire! People are clapping! And that woman’s selling those … eggs!”

  The boy shrugged. “That’s Yarkov. He’s always setting himself on fire.”

  “And I bet those ain’t real dragon eggs,” Beetles said. “You’d probably end up with a chicken or something.”

  Kate was so stunned by their reactions that she involuntarily took a step back and was jostled sharply.

  “Oi! Watch it, you nit!”

  She looked around and saw a stocky, bearded figure whom she immediately recognized as a dwarf. He had a dead goose draped over each shoulder, and the birds’ long necks hung limply down his back. Grumbling about tourists, the dwarf marched away, the goose heads bobbing at his heels.

  Kate managed to say, “That’s a dwarf.”

  “Course it’s a dwarf,” said Beetles, who was now cleaning his teeth with a match. “What else would it be?”

  “But—” Kate stammered. “—But—”

  And then she understood, remembering the day that she and Emma had sat with Abraham beside his fire in the mansion in Cambridge Falls and the old caretaker had told them how the magic world had once been a part of the normal world, but then the magic world had pulled away and hidden itself. According to Abraham, the division had happened on the last day of December in 1899. That meant—

  “It’s all still here,” Kate said. “Magic is still here.”

  “Not here.” Beetles jerked his head in the direction the dwarf had taken. “The magic quarter’s that way.”

  “Show me.”

  A minute later, Kate was standing at the end of a block of tenements. The muddy street was crammed with makeshift stalls, vendors were hawking products, shoppers were bundled up and hurrying against the cold. For being the magic quarter, Kate thought it all looked very normal. Then she noticed that one of the tenements, a reddish building with a wide front stoop, kept switching places with the building to its right, the result being that it was slowly making its way up the street. And she saw that another building shivered each time the wind blew, and that the windows of another—this made Kate very uneasy—kept winking at her.

  And besides the average-looking men and women going about their shopping, Kate saw dwarves moving through the crowd, smoking their long pipes and attracting no notice whatsoever. And there were other creatures, smaller than dwarves and beardless, who wore furry caps and stood arguing in tight groups, poking one another with their tiny fingers. Kate watched them in amazement till a woman passed by carrying a basket and drew her attention. The woman was sweet-faced and grandmotherly, and Kate was about to smile at her when she saw that the woman’s basket was alive and squirming with snakes.

  “Come on,” said Jake and Beetles, and they each took an arm and led her forward.

  The first stall sold wigs of fairy hair in different colors: gold and silver, pure snowy white, a rather arresting pink. The next stall promised to remove curses. The one after that let you buy curses (boils, baldness, pursued by cats …). There were three or four stalls occupied by fortune-tellers, one of whom was a girl of Kate’s age who watched her closely as she went by. There was a stall that sold toads, tended by a man who looked like a toad himself and called out his wares in a deep, reverberating croak. There was a large tent where four shirtless and sweating dwarves hammered away at anvils with a rhythmic clinking and banging while another dwarf worked the bellows of a fire so hot that Kate actually unbuttoned her jacket. There was a tent devoted to eggs: not just dragon eggs, but also unicorn eggs, griffin eggs, manticore eggs, and eggs of animals that Kate had never heard of. There was a stall whose entrance was covered by a tarp, with a dense green smoke escaping from under the canvas, the tendrils crawling across the slush and cobblestones. Kate followed the boys’ lead and stepped carefully past. Another tent was stocked with thousands of stoppered glass bottles, and the boys informed her that this was where you bought glamours. A glamour, they told her, was a potion that let you change your appearance, and many of the more eye-stopping magical folk used them when they went among normal humans. As Kate and the boys passed by, a tall, thin man with green, scaly skin like a fish downed the contents of a clear glass vial and was instantly transformed into a short, pudgy man with brown hair. And there was a stall that was stacked high with wooden boxes and had a sign declaring THINGS THAT BITE. When they’d passed the stall for the third time without having doubled back, the boys told her that it was a trick some vendors used, making their stalls appear again and again. And there were tents where men and women in dark cloaks who had strange markings on their faces and hands were huddled and muttering over boiling black cauldrons that smelled of dead fish, burning hair, and sickness. Kate kept well clear of these.

  As they’d walked, the street had veered and become even darker and narrower; Beetles now plucked at her sleeve.

  “We should go back.”

  “Why? There’s more—”

  “Here on out is Imp territory. It ain’t safe.”
/>   “Who’re the Imps?” Kate asked.

  “The Imps is the Imps. The gang what controls this part a’ the Bowery. They only been here a few months, but they’re bad, real bad.”

  “Real, real bad,” said Jake.

  “We should go back and find Rafe.”

  “Yeah, no foolin’ anymore; Rafe’s gonna want to talk to you.”

  Kate didn’t respond. A plan had begun forming in her mind. Couldn’t any wizard or witch send her through time? Maybe she didn’t need Dr. Pym. Maybe she didn’t have to go all the way to Cambridge Falls. Her eyes fell on a woman in a dark green shawl who sat before a covered booth. She had brown hair that was streaked with gray, and there was a softness in her eyes that appealed to Kate. She pulled free of the boys and walked over.

  “Excuse me?”

  The woman looked up. “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry,” Kate said haltingly. “… Are you … a witch?”

  “I am. Do you need help?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  “Well, come in. Let me see what I can do.”

  The woman stood and opened the canvas flap. Kate hesitated, wondering if she was being rash. But the thought was fleeting. Cambridge Falls was a long and difficult journey, and this woman was right here.

  The woman smiled, as if guessing Kate’s thoughts.

  “I promise, child, I don’t bite.”

  Nodding, Kate stepped into the stall. She glanced back and saw Jake and Beetles gesturing for her to come away. Then the witch dropped the flap and shut them out.

  “First things first, you want tea. You look half frozen. Have a seat; there’s a chair behind you.”

  To Kate’s surprise, the inside of the booth was warm and cozy. Three or four overlapping rugs shielded them from the cobblestones. A squat black stove, its pipe snaking up through the roof, heated the stall nicely. There was another armchair opposite the one Kate occupied, and beside that, a wooden cabinet from which the woman was taking a small earthenware jar. She opened the jar, extracted a handful of green-black leaves, and stuffed them into a pot that was bubbling on the stove. The smell of peppermint filled the air.