Legacy of the Claw (14 page)

“That was something else,” Phi said.

Bailey could do nothing but stare. The snake had reacted to Tori's instincts as quickly as Tori herself had. He couldn't help but feel jealous.

“C'mon,” Tori said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Let's go before that heap of junk leaves without us.”

The lobby of the opera house was like nothing Bailey had ever seen. Its grandeur made Fairmount's most beautiful buildings look like tinkerer's workshops. The lobby alone had a ceiling three stories tall, and all painted with famous scenes from Aldermere lore. Tucked inside lamplit archways at different points of the room were glass cases that held ancient books and artifacts. Because of the delay on the rigimotive, the group had arrived forty-five minutes late for the performance, and would have to wait outside the auditorium and enter during intermission. No one seemed to mind too much. The students broke off into small groups and gawked at the painted ceiling. Bailey noticed that their numbers seemed to have shrunk—all of the students were accounted for, but he could swear that a teacher or two had taken advantage of the rigimotive stop to do some exploring. Tremelo, he could see, was tapping his fingers nervously on his thigh, seemingly cross that they'd arrived late.

Bailey leaned his head back to get a better look at the murals on the ceiling.

Directly above him was the goddess Nature, painted in deep teals and reds. She had copper hair tinged with gold leaf. In the folds of her colorful robes stood two small children. The little boy and little girl held hands, and Nature was motioning for them to explore the world together. She had a kind face.

“She deserts them,” said Phi, tucking her hair behind her ears as she looked at the mural, and then down at Bailey. She'd walked up and was standing next to him, and Bailey had been too absorbed in the painting to even notice.

“You mean, Nature?” He knew the origin myth as well as anyone. There was even a famous statue of it somewhere west of the mountains, but he'd never seen it. According to the legend, the Twins grow up taking care of each other, and one—the girl—transforms into a fox so that she can catch fish for her brother, and they work together as human and animal.

Phi nodded. “She gives birth to the Twins, but then she isn't mentioned anywhere else in the story, like she just left them on their own. I just always thought that was a funny part of it, you know? The girl Twin feels so empty as a human, like she isn't complete, and Nature's not there to help her. So she has to help herself. She has to change. I think  … ” Phi glanced at Bailey, and then away. “I think if Nature hadn't disappeared from the story, if she'd helped them, the girl could have figured out a way to be whole by herself.”

“But then we wouldn't have the Animas bond,” Bailey said, though it felt like a funny thing to say. He
didn't
have the Animas bond.

Phi's voice became very quiet.

“I'm not sure the bond was really what she was after. I think maybe she wanted something more.”

He stared up at the next painting in the series, of the Twins after the girl's transformation: a boy and a fox, a human and his Animas, holding hand to paw as lightning tinged the painted clouds behind them. He remembered something then—one of the lines from Tremelo's riddle!
Kin rise from ashes, hand over paw.

These must be the children, he thought. The Twins, brother and sister—but rising from the ashes was a strange image. Maybe Phi was right about Nature abandoning them to a terrible fate. Maybe they'd had to face more than just hunger.

He glanced around the lobby of the opera house for Tremelo. Had he guessed the meaning of the line as well, when he was a boy? He looked toward the ornate archway they'd entered through and saw the professor, now standing alone by the door. He watched as Tremelo looked around him—too quickly to notice Bailey's gaze—and exited silently into the street.

Bailey felt like a cold wind had blown through the opera lobby. He couldn't figure his teacher out. Tremelo insisted that he'd left his training days behind him. But surely a man who had fearlessly fought off the wolf in the woods couldn't merely be a normal tinkerer with nothing odd up his coal-dusted sleeves. And that strange riddle  …  Here, perhaps, was Bailey's chance to find out something more that would explain Tremelo's cryptic words.

Bailey looked around cautiously—none of the chaperones were watching him. Could he sneak away and follow Tremelo? After all, if he was caught, he could simply say he was with his professor—and Tremelo would have to back him, since he was sneaking away as well  … 

“Phi, I  …  I forgot to ask Tremelo something. I'll be right back,” he said, feeling guilty for leaving her. She squinted her golden-brown eyes at him and opened her mouth as though to say something.

But before she could, Bailey rushed to the door, and followed Tremelo into the streets of the Gray City.

OUTSIDE THE OPERA HOUSE, groups of wealthy Gray City citizens passed, wearing dresses and suits covered in decorative embroidery. The images of animals were everywhere: not just in the clothing, but in stained glass windows overlooking the square and the stone shapes that menaced from the rooftops. Real animals scuttled across the cobblestones and sat in windowsills, peering at their human kin.

Bailey caught sight of Tremelo on the opposite side of the Opera Square. Quickly, Bailey followed him down a narrow side street. The brightly lit atmosphere of the square dropped away. Here, most of the buildings were shuttered, and Bailey suspected that these businesses were closed because of the riots. Tremelo was leading him closer to the area of the city that was now the most dangerous.

After they'd walked for several blocks, Tremelo disappeared around a corner, and Bailey hurried to catch up. As he turned the same corner, he saw that Tremelo had stopped. Bailey ducked into a darkened doorway. The professor stood in front of a low wooden entrance to a sunken basement storefront. A small plaque was nailed next to the door with a name painted on it: the white tiger. The hairs on Bailey's arms lifted.

Tremelo knocked—six times, in quick but precise succession—and the door swung inward to admit him. Bailey hung back. The basement storefront was nondescript, but Bailey heard loud shouts and even some singing from inside.

The air in the city had turned decidedly colder. Bailey shivered inside his Fairmount blazer. What was he doing? He couldn't just burst in and confront the professor. He decided to wait until Tremelo had gone and then enter the building after him—though he could be waiting on the street for a long time, and he couldn't risk missing the rigimotive back to Fairmount.

Thankfully, he only had to wait about twenty minutes for the door to open and the teacher to reappear. Bailey slunk back into the shadows of the doorway as Tremelo passed him. Once the professor had disappeared at the end of the street, Bailey took off his Fairmount blazer and turned it inside out, so the insignia was hidden against his chest. He spit into both his palms, and mussed up his hay-colored hair. Though he still didn't think he'd pass as a Gray City native, he didn't want to look like a wide-eyed student, fresh off the rigimotive. Unfortunately, the Fairmount blazers were lined with rather loud blue and gold stripes. There was nothing he could do about that.

He approached the door and knocked six times. Almost instantly, it creaked open, and two roughly wrinkled faces peered out at him. One belonged to a very old woman, and the other belonged to the tortoise on her shoulder who was munching very slowly on a withered piece of lettuce. Neither one took their eyes off of Bailey.

“How old are you?” she croaked.

Bailey squared his shoulders and tried to sound tough.

“Old enough,” he said.

The old watchwoman shrugged, as if reluctantly admitting that Bailey
had
knocked six times after all, and let Bailey pass before settling back onto her stool and sighing, presumably with the notion to think up a more secret Secret Knock.

At first, Bailey could hardly see a thing. The room was filled with smoke that curled up and over the low rafters. Hunched figures sat in groups around overturned barrels and wobbly wooden tables. A long, tall bar ran the length of one half of the room, and Bailey could barely make out his own reflection through the grime that covered the tilted mirror on the wall behind it. No lamps were lit in this place—the only light wafted in through the bottle-glass windows on either end, which were small and dirty and blocked by whispering patrons.

Had he crossed half the city just to chase Tremelo to a pub?

He approached the bar, where a heavyset man in a long wool cap was watching him with an amused smirk.

“What's your pleasure?” the man asked. His cheeks were the blotted color of a crushed peach.

“I'm looking for someone,” Bailey said. “I saw him come in, not too long ago—Mr. Loren?”

“Tremelo, you mean? Just missed him,” replied the bartender.

Bailey tried to look disappointed. “Interest you in some rootwort rum? Never too young to get started.” The bartender winked.

Bailey looked around for a menu, or even some bottles to indicate what might be on offer in a place like this, but saw nothing except several pairs of suspicious eyes pointed in his direction. He named the first drink he could think of.

“Do you have sap milk?” It was a long shot, a frothy dessert drink that his dad used to bring back from trips to the larger markets in the Lowlands, and which his mom only allowed him to drink a few sips of at a time. The bartender laughed, and fiddled below the bar. He then brought up a full mug, brimming over with the stuff from a low tap.

Bailey took a sip. It was warm and flat, but not too bad. Bailey reached inside his jacket to find a snailback to pay for the drink, and remembered that he still had Tremelo's pendant in his pocket. The metal clanked against the coins.

The bartender held up his hand.

“On the house,” he said. He poured himself a mug full of a dark amber liquid and settled his meaty arms on the bar in front of Bailey. A rather fat mole stumbled out from a shadow at the end of the bar and settled at the bartender's right elbow.

“What's a little chap like you doing looking for Tremelo in here?”

“He's an old friend,” Bailey said. “Um, of the family's.” Several patrons along the bar had stopped their chatting and were craning their necks to take a closer look at him. They were mostly men, dressed in working clothes that had seen too much wear. A couple of toothless older women smiled at him from one table over their pints of dark, cloudy beer. “I have a couple of questions for him, that's all.”

“Huh, we all do, that's for sure!” rang a voice from the end of the bar.

Several of the older, grungier-looking patrons of the bar laughed—or grumbled; Bailey found it hard to tell which.

“I, for one, would like to know how to fly!” a very inebriated woman in a plaid jacket cried out, lifting her mug of beer above her head, where it sloshed on the older woman next to her. The bartender laughed.

“He doesn't do work on the Animas bond anymore, Delilah.” The bartender shook his head and sighed. “Not since the Loon was—you know.”

“The Loon?” Bailey repeated. “What do you mean?”

“Surely you've heard of his father?” a man at the end of the bar asked. His white whiskers were longer on one side of his chin, as though he'd stopped shaving halfway through the job, and had never gone back to finish. He was accompanied by a satisfied-looking sheepdog, who was sitting in the next chair, nodding off. “The Loon was an Animas Rat. And he knew more about the ways of the bond than any man I ever knew.”

“Any man who ever lived!” shouted the drunk woman, sloshing her beer again.

“When Melore was alive, the Loon was one of his right-hand men,” explained the man with the whiskers. “He and Melore both had powerful bonds, powerful. After Melore died, the Loon was practically an outlaw. He spread this prophecy, see, about a true king returning, even though Melore's kids were both as good as dead. They say the Seers themselves told 'im that it was so. And so he didn't believe in the Jackal's power one bit. He had a whole gang that believed his theories too. The RATS.”

“Cheers to the RATS!” shouted the drunk woman.

“Cheers, indeed,” said the man, raising his glass. He looked wistfully above Bailey's head. “Followed him blind, we—I mean,
they
—did, spreading bits of the prophecy around to the people, so's they didn't give up hope.” Bailey smiled, hearing the man's slip of the tongue. He wasn't sure why, but something about these people and their loyalty to the old king warmed him.

“And your Tremelo, he was raised in the middle of all that,” the bartender interjected. “Some think the Loon really did go loony after Melore was assassinated, and that his prophecies about a true king were bunk. But prophecies and conspiracies or not, one thing I know for sure is that that man had the strongest Animas bonds I have ever seen—except for his son.”

“
How
strong?” Bailey said, curiously.

“Well,” the bartender said, lowering his voice. It was clear that many of the men at this bar were natural storytellers. They all leaned in to hear what the bartender would say. “Delilah over there was joking about flying, but she isn't half wrong—Tremelo grew up learning just about all there was to know of the Animas bond. Its origins. Its tricky nature. How it”—here he made a swooshing, circular movement with his large hands—“flows around everything. Like a  …  a  …  current! A current, that's what he told me once. Get a little rootwort in him, he'd tell you all kinds of things like that. But when the Jackal's men finally came for the Loon, he gave it all up. Didn't want them coming for him too, I expect. Cut off all ties, 'cept for a myrgwood purchase here 'n' there.”

He took a sip out of his mug and continued. “It's a real pity, though. He had a talent. He was taken on at Fairmount when he was twenty years old, and practically a baby himself. He could teach an Animas Sparrow to fly up to the rafters, he could. I seen him make an Animas Cat grow claws instead of nails. Dangerous stuff, powerful stuff. But then old Loony died—ten, eleven years ago—and Tremelo swore it off. Stuck to tinkering. There's some here who think he went mad. 'Course, so many years under the Loon's shadow, I guess anyone might snap. Hard to know these days what side he's on  … ”

Bailey tried to take in everything that was being said. The myrgwood-smoking tinkerer, Tremelo, who was able to make an Animas Sparrow fly, but would only impart a riddle that even
he
didn't quite believe in.

“He told me something once,” Bailey said. “A riddle. Maybe you can tell me what it means.” He concentrated, trying to remember all the words.
“Trees may bear seeds but no fruit, kin rise from ashes, hand over paw. When locusts turn men from treachery, the sun calls to the loon.”
When he'd finished, the bar patrons were staring at him like they'd just seen a dog do a backflip. The bartender was scratching his head, his wool cap balled up in his fist. His hair underneath was a surprising tuft of red.

“Don't sound like much to me, a song I maybe heard once, but I don't know. Though that middle bit—there's something not quite right about it, but it's familiar.”

“What do you mean?” asked Bailey, gripping the underside of the bar.

“The bit about locusts and treachery,” the bartender said. Several grunts of affirmation echoed down the bar. The bartender went on: “The old king himself said something like that, Nature preserve 'is memory. Was part of Melore's last address, at the Progress Fair, uttered even as the Jackal's men were storming the fairgrounds to kill 'im. I was there, that day, hardly more than a schoolkid. He knew the Jackal's men was coming, and he said that treachery turns men into locusts, but we weren't to forget him  …  Brave until the very last, he were.” He brought his rumpled hat to his heart, and many of his listeners mimicked this movement.

An image flitted across Bailey's mind, of the kind-looking man in the top hat and fur-like embroidered coat, holding a pair of scissors: the blurry photograph in Ms. Shonfield's office, his very first day at Fairmount. Bailey nodded.

“They don't teach you much 'bout him in schools these days, oh, no,” the scruffy man at the end of the bar blurted out. “The Jackal nearly wrote 'im out of the history books! Just like he did the Velyn, and the—”

“The Velyn?” Bailey interrupted. “Like in the stories?”

“Oh, yes,” the man said, scratching his white beard. “They were the Loon's favorite subject, you might say! He studied 'em—even spent a few years living among 'em, when Tremelo were growing up. Most people think the Velyn were some sort of lawless troupe, living only in fairy tales—but they were real folk.” The man leaned closer to Bailey. “Tell you something not everyone knows. The Loon's prophecy about a true king? He felt the Velyn would be a big part of that. And the Jackal had them all killed for it, them
and
their kin—only a couple o' years before he went after the Loon too.”

The bartender crossed his arms and nodded in solidarity.

“They were amazing people, the Velyn,” the man continued. “Lived nose to nose with their kin, and knew all sorts of healing arts. Closest bonds you've ever seen—that's why so many of the stories of 'em are about them being werewolves and shape-shifters. Not far from the truth, they could literally see, clear as day, what their kin was seeing, like they was living in their kins' bodies, and their kin was living in them. The Loon spent years studying their methods—even Melore was interested. Probably why they were an important part of his prophecies, and why the Jackal had 'em all wiped out. 'Cause they was smarter than him. Then he goes and tries to cover his dirt by claiming they were all no-goods. It was a terrible thing. Terrible long years, when the Jackal was in power. Can't even think about what the poor blighter went through who told the prophecy to the Jackal in the first place. Tortured it right out of 'im, the Jackal did.”

His sheepdog emitted a low woof of sorrow.

“Go on,” Bailey blurted out. He didn't want any of them to stop talking. He wanted to know everything there was to know about the Loon and the man in the hat, King Melore.

“Then of course there's Melore's daughter. Viviana!” added the bartender. At the mention of Viviana's name, a hush fell on the dingy bar.

“Listen to me, boy, and take what you hear back to Fairmount with you—no talk of such things there on your lofty mountain, I'd wager.”

Bailey gulped. So they had known the whole time? The stripes probably hadn't helped. But he settled himself on his stool, eager to hear the whole story.