Greenglass House (11 page)

He located a red striped canvas rucksack to carry what he'd found and climbed to the top of a giant pile of sailcloth under one of the dirty windows to sit and organize his treasures. Sirin flounced over with her invisibility cloak trailing behind her and something cupped in her hand. “This one's for you,” she said, scrambling up to join him. “You are not going to
believe
this find, Negret.”

“What is it?”

“It is,” she said dramatically, “a piece of that same paper.”

Scrap
was more like it;
corner
would've been even more accurate. Negret took the snip from Sirin's palm and held it up between his face and the flickering bulb overhead. The watermark wasn't visible, but a quick comparison to the page he still had in his pocket convinced him that the scholiast was right. The feel of the paper, its weight, the way the fibers ran, all of those things were the same. “Where'd you find it?”

“Over there, behind that big thing.” Sirin pointed to a trio of boxes that were stacked awkwardly against the easternmost wall behind a giant clump of machinery looped with thick old rope.

“I think that's the engine that ran the dumbwaiter back when it worked.” Negret slid down the pile, made his way to the machine, and squeezed awkwardly past it, coating his fingertips with a mixture of dust and congealed grease as he tried to maneuver. “Geez, Sirin, you could've warned me.” He wiped his hands on his knees, hoping he wouldn't have to explain the stains when Mrs. Pine did the laundry.

“It's broken, whatever it was.” Sirin peered over the engine as he opened the topmost box and stood on tiptoe to peek inside. At first he thought, irrationally,
Jewels!
He reached in to lift a piece into the dim light: a not-quite-rectangular shard of glass that shone a dusty sapphire color.

Negret picked carefully through the pieces. There were bits in every conceivable shade of green. He eased the box to one side so he could open the one beneath it. This one was full of golds and sunset colors. The third held russets and sepias that made him think of varying shades of toast.

He picked a piece of glass from each box. “Let us call them the Gems of Ultimate Puissance,” Sirin suggested.

“What the heck does
puissance
mean?”

“Power and might. Gamers have lots of puissant objects.” She pushed her spectacles up onto her forehead and squinted at the pieces he'd chosen.

“I bet they're left over from the really big window on the second floor.” Negret tucked the shards into his bag along with the rest of his finds. “Mom said that one was made here because it was too big to get up the hill already finished.”

“Perfect! These gems probably hold fragments of the power of the house itself,” Sirin declared triumphantly, lifting one fist toward the roof, which chose that moment to drip something into her left eye.

“Wait, Sirin, where was the paper?” Negret asked, scratching his head.

She pointed at a piece of brown wrapping paper peeking out from under the bottom box. “It was stuck to that.”

Carefully, Negret worked the wrapping out far enough to read the faded handwritten words on it. “Lucksmith Paper Merchants, Printer's Quarter, Nagspeake.” He tugged, but it was stuck firmly under the box. “Lucksmith,” he repeated. “Could be a clue.”

They hunted for another ten minutes, during which time Sirin added a belt to the Cloak of Golden Indiscernibility and Negret found a pen he kind of liked. At last they stood under the string dangling from the bulb near the door and surveyed the space they'd just explored. “From now on, Negret, when we want to refer to this place, we'll call it the Emporium,” Sirin announced. Negret gave her a dubious look—or tried to, but between the Helm, the Eyes, and the Cloak, it was a bit hard to keep a dubious look from morphing into a laugh.

Still. “This was fun,” he admitted, slinging the bag over one shoulder. “An excellent morning's work, my dear Sirin.” The bag knocked loose the papers and pencil he still had stuck in his back pocket, and as he picked them up, he remembered the assignment the scholiast had given him downstairs behind the tree. “Hang on. Before we go downstairs, let me draw the map for this floor.”

Negret cleared a space on one of the old chests and started drawing. Sirin leaned over his shoulder and suggested corrections and additions until at last the two of them leaned back from the floor plan, pleased with their work. Negret wrote
THE EMPORIUM
across the top of the page in neat capitals. “There.”

“That's a good-looking map,” Sirin said admiringly.

“Thank you.” His stomach rumbled hollowly and loudly enough that Sirin gave him a sharp look. “I wonder if it's lunchtime yet,” he said, blushing. Then, on the way out the door, he paused. “Sirin? If we
are
making stuff up . . . if it's up to me what to do as Negret—or
with
Negret . . .” He hesitated. “Could I make up a different past for him? A . . . a family and everything, I mean?”

There. It was out.

“
Can
you?” Sirin repeated. “You totally
should.
Giving your character a history really helps you bring him to life.”

He nodded, relieved, and reached into the rucksack to feel for the keys. It was for the game, so maybe it was okay, just this once, to pretend.

 

In fact, it was well
past
lunchtime. “Where on earth have you been?” Mrs. Pine demanded, eyeing the dusty pair as they came trooping into the kitchen.

“The att—I mean, the Emp—I mean, just messing around.” Milo glowered at Meddy, who'd elbowed him twice during his answer but who was now looking innocently up at Mrs. Pine through the grimy blue lenses of the Eyes of True and Aching Clarity. Milo sighed and wondered how his mother was keeping a straight face. “When's lunch?”

“Lunch?” Mrs. Pine lifted an eyebrow. “Well, if you wash up—and I mean
really
wash up,” she added with a dubious look at his hands, “you can make yourself a snack, but the rest of us had lunch hours ago.” She pointed at the kitchen clock, and Milo gaped. It was past four thirty. “We'll have dinner ready around six. Don't spoil your appetite.”

“Evidently there's some sort of a time warp in the Emporium,” he muttered.

 

Milo had read as far as the fourth story in the book, and someone was just about to kill a cat.

She had a good reason, the character called Nell. There were floodwaters rising throughout the city, and people were dying (including all of Nell's family), and somehow the cat was the key to making it stop.

When all that was left of the cat were its bones, she made her way to the river's swollen edge and set the bones on the surface. The frothing water took all but one. The remaining bone spun gently, as if it were caught in the mildest of eddies. Then it slid against the plunging flow, upriver and out of
sight.

Milo took a distracted bite of his ham sandwich and read how, from that same direction, a strange man came walking toward the girl and asked why he had been summoned. Nell asked what could be done to stop the flood, and the strange man's reply began,
“There is a sort of magic called orphan
magic.”

Milo sat up straight. It was hard to ignore that word,
orphan,
especially when you followed it up with
magic.

“It is the magic of that-which-remains, of that-which-is-alone. It is, in many ways, the magic of desperation, but it is never the magic of chance. When one remains, it is the one that was meant to remain. It is the one that is special; it is precious because it is unique; it is powerful because that is how it survived. There is one bone in a cat that may call me, but it must be separated from the others to do its work. It has potential when it is connected to the rest, but when it is sundered away, its potential becomes power.”

Very interesting indeed.

Night comes early in winter, of course, and the sun setting beyond the big hill behind the house was already sending deep shadows out across the white lawn. Milo sat cross-legged in the loveseat by the window, half watching the sunset colors and shadows through the rattling glass as they battled for control of the snowy grounds, half listening to the quiet sounds of people in the living room and the crackle of the fireplace.
The Raconteur's Commonplace Book
lay open on his knee, and he clutched the remnants of the sandwich in one hand.

Now that he was back among the guests, he had returned, mostly, to being just plain Milo. And while Negret was very curious about why Dr. Gowervine had snuck into Clem Candler's room, just plain Milo was still primarily bent out of shape about the fact that someone—maybe Dr. Gowervine or maybe someone else—had snuck into his own room and taken something from it.

He turned to glance at the stout man sitting by the fire. Despite his ongoing gripes at Mrs. Hereward—the two of them just kept on finding things to argue about—he was easy to overlook in a room that also contained blue-haired Georgie and red-haired Clem and, most especially, Meddy.

As if she'd heard him thinking about her, Meddy poked her head out from behind the Christmas tree.
What?
she mouthed. Milo shook his head and let his gaze wander. Mr. Vinge was there too, folded into his usual chair and sporting fresh socks (bright green and yellow argyle). He had a book open in front of him, but his eyes were closed.

We know nothing about any of these guys,
Sirin had said.
We're going to have to find a way to figure out who they all are and why they're here.

Milo took another bite of his sandwich, chewed thoughtfully, and closed the
Commonplace Book
again. From the rucksack at his feet he took the graph paper and started to work on a map of the first floor.

Meddy dropped onto the loveseat next to him and looked at the big rectangles he'd sketched out for the screened porch and the living room that flowed into the dining room that flowed into the kitchen. “Ah. Good. I was going to ask if you'd started a map for down here.” She sat quietly for a moment while he added details: the stairs, the pantry, the fireplace, the foyer.

“If we're calling the attic the Emporium,” Milo whispered, “what's our secret name for this floor?”

She considered. “Well, in lots of game worlds, the place where everyone comes together and gets information is a public house or a saloon or something. Some place where strangers meet for food and drink and conversation.”

In
The Raconteur's Commonplace Book,
the inn where everyone was trapped by the floods was called the Blue Vein Tavern. “Let's call it the Tavern, then.”

“Fine by me.”

Milo added the first floor's new name in his precise capital lettering. He worked on the map for a few more minutes, then set it aside. His fingers bumped against the key ring as he reached into the rucksack again and dug out the big hardcover
Blackjacks of the Roads
guide. Then he took the keys out of the bag, examined them for a moment, and put them in his pocket. What advice would Negret's father offer to his son if he were here?

It is not merely our adversaries we must investigate,
he imagined the old blackjack lecturing.
We must always work to know ourselves better, too.

Fortunately, Milo had a whole giant manual to help him know Negret better. He opened
Blackjacks of the Roads
to the page titled “
Overview”
and settled back to read.

The Road is the greatest trickster of all, winding and forking and vanishing and reappearing across the wide country, making a mockery of maps and carrying even those who know it best into the unfamiliar. It shouldn't come as any surprise that the blackjack is the true child of the Road. Like the Odd Trail itself, the blackjack vanishes and reappears at will. No lock, no wall, no hidden thing is safe from him. No person, either: the blackjack's powers of intuition, persuasion, misdirection, and, often, pure thievery are the stuff of
legend.

There was a lot of the overview that he figured he didn't need to know just now. Milo and Meddy had discussed what skills Negret might want, and Meddy had explained a little about ability scores, but there was plenty he still didn't understand: damages and levels and different kinds of exploits, hits and misses and modifiers. Also, a lot of the exploits—which seemed to be blackjacks' different powers or feats—had to do with fighting, which Milo couldn't see Negret needing in his and Sirin's game world, since all the other players were real people.

But there were a few things that looked useful, even though he didn't understand the specifics of how they worked in the Odd Trails realm.
Zephyr's Passage: your feet carry you as swiftly and invisibly as the wind. Irresistible Blandishment: you can entice even the most reluctant to do as you ask. The Fabulist: you weave lies and the world believes.
And then,
The Moonlighter's Knack: you can steal any object protected by anything that opens with a key or
combination.

Outside, the snowfall began to slow.

Dinner that night was awkward—or at least, it felt awkward to Milo. He was not only surrounded by strangers who weren't supposed to be there while he was on vacation—someone still owed him big-time for that—but more important, one of them was a thief and had been in his room. If that person
hadn't
been Wilbur Gowervine, that meant there were
two
creepers at Greenglass House. And although Milo didn't like thinking of Clem as a thief, after her joke about being a cat burglar, he figured he had to consider the possibility.

It seemed to Milo that he ought to be able to catch the person who'd been in his room behaving differently toward him. That person had to be wondering if Milo had discovered the theft yet. And Dr. Gowervine—well, even if he wasn't the thief, he was still a creeper, and he ought to have the good grace to look at least a little guilty.