Greenglass House (10 page)

The lock turned easily and the door swung wide. Negret squinted into the dimness. “Stay here. There's a light someplace, if I can just find the string.”

“Hold on!” Sirin grabbed his arm. “Check for traps first, remember.”

Negret stopped dead on the threshold. “What traps?”

Sirin leaned past him and peered into the gloom. “I don't know, but it's never a good idea to just go barging into a strange room. You always should check for traps. Someone could be lying in wait, or there could be some kind of thing rigged up to decapitate the first person to step inside, or maybe there's a curse on the door so if you go through it—”

“You're talking about my house!” he exploded. “And you're being ridiculous. Curses don't exist and nobody's rigged a—a decapitation thingy in our attic.”

Sirin shrugged. “Okay, Mister Lacking-in-Imagination. There could be a loose floorboard. There could be a spider web. I'm just saying, check a place before you go in.”

Grumbling, Negret examined the door frame and discovered that there was, in fact, a spider web. Then he stepped inside and found the pull-string for the light. More accurately, he walked into it, the little round knob tied to the bottom of the string clunking him between the eyes. He gave it a tug, and a bluish-gray filament fizzled to life inside a glass bulb on the ceiling just inside the doorway. From the unimpressive circle of luminescence, Negret could just see a string hanging from another, still-dark bulb deeper in the attic. He pulled that one, and then another farther in, and then the next, but even once all four bulbs had carved out their individual pockets of illumination, he and Sirin were still standing in a mostly dim and indistinct space.

The attic of Greenglass House was slightly smaller than the lower floors, owing to the big sloping roof. It had probably once been a single open space, but over the long years of the house's existence it had been slowly partitioned into smaller sections, not by walls but by piles of things: here a collection of iron-banded teak chests piled up like a giant's discarded luggage; there a bank of chairs of all sorts, balanced precariously one atop the next; yonder a row of racks full of mismatched garment bags, moth-eaten fur coats, and several sets of embroidered silk pajamas that had worn paper-thin with time so that the embroidery was the only thing keeping them from disintegrating. The spaces between these makeshift partitions had been filled in little by little with the ephemera of years upon years, everything from dented brass musical instruments and keyless wind-up toys to tattered tablecloths and sweaters to precarious stacks of dusty books whose missing spines had been repaired with thick black thread. Above it all, the roof creaked in response to the wind's howls, and here and there frigid little gusts found their way in through hidden cracks and crevices.

“If I had something to hide, this is where I'd put it,” Sirin said. “How are we ever going to look through all of this?”

“I don't know. Seems too obvious to me.” Plus, the thing about attics and basements was,
everything
in there had once been a treasure to someone. Otherwise there'd have been no reason to keep it. If the chart's secret was somehow tucked away in this warrenlike room, it was just one secret among a thousand. Somehow, this spot didn't seem . . .
special
enough.

Still, an attic was an attic, and Sirin insisted that exploring rooms was a big part of any campaign. “It's not just about finding clues,” she explained. “It's also about finding tools that might be useful down the road. Even if
it
isn't here—the thing the map leads to, whatever it is—there's got to be stuff that's useful to an escaladeur who listens to houses.”

“All right. I think there's some cool stuff over—”

“Negret! We have to search the
whole place.
Don't skip around.”

“Fine.”

So Negret and Sirin began to methodically comb the attic. “How do you know if something's going to be useful?” Negret asked as he reached tentatively into the pocket of a fancy green coat with tails hanging down the back and gold braid looped at the shoulders. A piece of paper in the pocket fell to tatters when he brought it out for a look. The other pocket yielded a single mothball.

“Sometimes you don't know,” Sirin replied from the other end of the rack. “I mean, when you're playing the game on paper, if it's important enough for the game master to tell you it's there, it's probably going to be useful. But I guess we'll just have to go with our guts.” She drew the arm of a thin silk robe out away from the rest of the hanging clothes. “Perhaps a cloak of invisibility?”

Negret scoffed despite his best efforts to stay in character as Sirin took the yellow robe from its hanger and swirled it delightedly around her shoulders. “What's a . . . a . . . your character . . .”

“A scholiast.”

“What's a scholiast need with an invisibility cloak?” he asked. “Aren't you already invisible to everyone but me?”

“I like it,” Sirin replied simply as she admired the embroidery. “Plus, it has pockets! Gotta have a way to carry your gear on a campaign. I shall name it the Cloak of Golden Indiscernibility.” She kept the robe on as she bent to start looking through the small boxes stacked on the bottom shelf of the rack. “Hey, try these on.” With her top half hidden by the low-hanging coats, Sirin reached an arm back and held out a pair of black cotton slippers. “Think they'll fit you?”

“What for?” But even as he asked, Negret realized how they might be useful to an escaladeur: they had thick woven fabric soles. These would be very quiet shoes, without any of the squeaks of ordinary footwear, yet they wouldn't slip around on wooden floors or tiles like sock feet did. He'd managed to keep pretty quiet sneaking up here, but in these shoes, maybe he could be almost as quiet as Clem.

He toed off his sneakers and pulled on the slippers. With socks they were tight, but without them they fit perfectly. He took a few testing steps. “They're perfect. Thanks, Sirin.”

“Don't mention it. Want one of these fancy coats?”

“Nah.” The shoes looked nondescript enough that they might go unnoticed. An escaladeur needed to blend in. “I don't want to stick out.”

He wandered over to a stack of wooden crates and lifted the lid off the closest one. It was full of old bottles wrapped in scraps of linen, and he'd just reached in for a closer look when something else caught his eye.

Wedged between the boxes and the wall was a door. Not a door
to
anyplace, although it must've been once upon a time. It leaned at an angle against the wall, its hinges unmoored and tarnished and sad-looking, and it was nearly identical to the heavy old attic door, down to the green glass knob. “Wonder where that came from?” he mumbled, trying to think of a doorway in Greenglass House that was without its door. Had it belonged to one of the many rooms in the house and just been replaced with a newer door at some point? Why had it been saved, then?

Negret leaned over the crates, reaching to touch a chipped facet on the glass knob, and as his fingers found it, something fell with a rattle to the ground. Stretching a bit farther, he could just barely make out a dull dark shape wedged in the angle between the bottom of the door and the boxes.

He eased backwards and landed lightly on his slippered feet, then squeezed himself between the stack and a pile of newer cardboard boxes that stood beside it. Then he bent awkwardly and worked his fingers along the edge of the door until he found the thing that had fallen. He didn't have to see the spiny, jangling spars poking out between his fingers as he picked it up to know what it was: a ring of keys. He must've knocked it loose from the lock below the knob.

There were five of them on a knotted loop of leather; old ones, the kind called skeleton keys. None of the doors in Greenglass House took that sort of key except the attic—not anymore. There was also a small hammered disc on the loop, misshapen and slightly convex, with an uneven hole punched in it for the leather to pass through. His heart gave a little jump. Four designs that looked like Chinese characters had been cut into the surface on one side. Negret brought it up for a closer look. He could identify an assortment of characters because the Pines were slowly learning Mandarin together, but they hadn't gotten far in their studies yet and these were not ones he recognized. He turned the disc over and found a rough spiked shape like a crown. He scratched with his thumbnail at a tiny bit of blue enamel that clung to the image.

Milo knew, of course, that no antique bric-a-brac in Greenglass House was even remotely likely to be connected to his own ancestry, even if it did have Chinese writing on it.
Negret,
on the other hand—
Negret
knew no such thing. Negret, he thought with a little thrill, could perhaps know the exact opposite.

Negret could know, for instance, that these keys had been handed down through his own family for centuries. Negret could even, maybe, remember the very day his father, a world-renowned blackjack himself, had passed the keys to his son.
I always knew you would follow in my footsteps,
his father might have said.
We all knew, the entire family, because you take after me so very much. We even look alike.
Negret gave in and pretended to remember looking in the mirror with his famous blackjack father to see the same nose, same mouth and eyes, same straight black hair as his own.

A strange pleasure crept into his heart. It lasted maybe thirty seconds before the wave of self-reproach he'd known was coming swept in and washed it all away.

He looked down at the keys. They might not open any locks left in the house—although he made a mental note to try them on the attic door—but certainly no self-respecting blackjack would leave behind a perfectly good set of keys. He tucked them into his pocket and ignored the lingering pangs of conscience. Quiet shoes and mystery keys. Not a bad haul.

“What'd you find?”

He turned and nearly jumped out of his new shoes. In addition to the yellow Cloak of Indiscernibility, Sirin had added a fur-lined hat with turned-up earflaps and a pair of old blue-lensed sunglasses with wire rims and a yellowed tag hanging from one earpiece by a bit of red thread.

Sirin pointed to the hat. “Helm of Revelations,” she said, deadpan. “Eyes of True and Aching Clarity,” she added, indicating the glasses.

“Now you're just making stuff up,” Negret protested.

“Obviously, though it's interesting that it was magic glasses that clued you in rather than the invisibility cloak.” She grinned. “It's fun. Look.” She took a pair of brown leather gloves from the pocket of her pants. “For you. Wildthorn's Crackerjack Gauntlets, for Pickers of Locks and Creepers Through Windows Needing Nimble and Foxy Fingers.” She eyed the roof overhead, creaking under the weight of winter. “Also guaranteed to be useful when it's cold.”

Negret took the gloves. “Thank you, Sirin.” He pulled them on. Like the shoes, they fit perfectly, and as his fingertips warmed he realized how cold the attic was.

They moved on, rooting through boxes, riffling through books. Sirin added pieces to her costume, occasionally pressing something on Negret: a whistle that didn't seem to work, a ball of twine, because it was always a good idea to have rope, a dusty spiral pad that was empty except for the beginnings of a grocery list on the first page.

“Hey,” Negret said as his eye fell on a cardboard box labeled
ROLE-PLAYING GAME STUFF—AW
in black marker. “Look at that! Role-playing game—isn't that what we're doing? This must be my dad's stuff. It could be useful, right?”

“We made up our own campaign,” Sirin said, following Negret as he hurried to the box. “And like I said, we're not playing a proper RPG. It's not actually likely to be useful to us.”

Negret opened it and peered inside. It was full of big hardcover books like the ones Meddy had had behind the tree that morning, and booklets and a few smaller boxes with labels that showed groups of adventurers dressed in elaborate costumes. Sirin crouched beside him and took out a booklet. “These are premade campaigns, games you would play at a table with a group and a game master.”

He pulled a loose page of graph paper from the box. “A map from someone's game?”

“Looks like it.” Sirin seemed entirely uninterested.

“Do you think there could be anything in here for the game my dad played? Odd Trails?”

“Maybe. Look, can we get back to
our
game?”

A little more rifling and Negret found it: a book with an illustration of a sinister-looking traveler beside a peddler's cart with the words
The Wayfaring Galleria
emblazoned on its side. Across the top of the picture was the title:
The Odd Trails: Scavengers, Peddlers, and Huntsmen of the Roaming World (Advanced Player's Handbook).
“Cool!”

Sirin sighed. “If you're going to bother with any of this stuff, why don't you at least take the one about blackjacks? That wouldn't be a total waste of time.”

Negret set the book to one side. “How do you know there's one about blackjacks in here?”

“'Cause I can see it. I know all these manuals.” She leaned down and plucked another hardcover from the box. “Here. But don't forget, this is our game. Negret is
your
character. Nobody else gets to say what you can and can't do with him.”

This book had a girl on its cover, walking on a wire over some kind of open-air bazaar.
Blackjacks of the Roads: Highwaymen, Sharpers, and Empirics (Advanced Player's Handbook).
“Awesome.”

“Yes, but it's not a clue, Negret,” Sirin grumbled. “Let's get back to the task at hand.”

He moved on reluctantly, and found a few more useful things: a little round mirror with stains under the glass that he thought might be good for using to look around corners, an old tinderbox with a flint in it, a spade-shaped chunk of metal with a strange sort of jointed handle that he'd thought at first was a lock until he'd spotted the thick bit of charred wick coming from the hole in front. Not a lock, then, Negret decided. Some sort of old-fashioned lantern.