The Whatnot (13 page)

The doors opened in front of her, untouched by faery hands, and what she saw snatched her breath right out of her. The hall was vast. Hundreds upon hundreds of white lamps floated up into its heights, carried by tiny, winged faeries, like dragonflies. The walls were sculpted with sinuous beasts and faery knights, all in gray, and the gently drifting lamplight turned the darkness even deeper and made the beasts and knights look as though they were stirring. The floor below was thick with shadow. Faery ladies and gentlemen wandered here and there, dressed in the colors of rain and winter fields, all with masks on their faces. Spriggans with ten-foot-long limbs leaped and slithered among the guests, doing tricks, pulling grimaces. Jugglers whirled glass globes full of wasps and fish and pin tacks. High above, hanging among the ropes and chains, thin, bony reconstructionists watched, beady-eyed.

Hettie realized she was standing in the doorway, gaping, and swept into the hall. Servants dropped their gaze when they saw her. High faeries nodded to her, or bowed, and she nodded back, very slightly. She felt so proud and cold all of a sudden, as if she were wrapped in spikes and armor. Nothing could touch her like this. No one could hurt her. She started to smile, hid it behind a raised hand. It was rather lovely, really. She began to wonder if she would ever want to take the mask off.

She moved to the center of the floor and glanced about. A great table had been set up along one wall, its benches already filled. Piscaltine sat at the head, wearing the mask of a fish as befitted her station as the Duchess of Yearn-by-the-Woods and Daughter of the Ponds, etcetera, etcetera. Snell was there, too, and Florence La Bellina, and the lady with the hollow back, and a great many other Belusites and Sidhe. The lady with the curtained window-eyes sat to the right of Piscaltine, her mouth open, the red bird extended out of it. The chair to the left of Piscaltine was empty.

Dishes and tureens filled the table, platters of spotted mushrooms, huge tumbles of grapes, berries, and cakes and strange, charred-looking animals. Everything was impeccably arranged, but no one was eating. Heads were together. Faeries were whispering, some were sitting very straight watching the Sidhe and performers on the floor, but the food remained untouched, as though it was all only glass and plaster, as though it wasn't meant for eating. It was a very silent masquerade. Hettie wondered if this was what the balls had been like in the old days, if this was what Piscaltine had been missing.

In the far corner of the hall, three pale faery musicians started a slow dirge. As one, the guests rose from the benches and drifted toward the center of the hall. It was time to dance.

Hettie flowed along with them. She passed Piscaltine's chair. The faery lady looked up, saw her. Hettie held her gaze, still moving. The faery lady nodded ever so slightly. The corner of her mouth twitched. “Go on, my sweetkin,” she whispered. And then Hettie was among the dancers, searching for a faery in green with the mask of a tortoise.

The dance began before she found him. The faeries glided across the stone space. They formed a line, then an archway, a corridor of slender white arms that the couples darted down two at a time. When the last one had gone through, the dancers swirled into a star. The star became a flower that bloomed and wilted in one smooth motion. Up among the ropes, the sprytes and winged faeries hooted and whistled softly.

Hettie walked the length of the hall, slipping along the edges, watching, sharp-eyed. She passed back on the other side.
There.
A sliver of green. He was dancing.

She waited until the fiddle and pipes had died away and the lonely sad drum had stopped banging. Then she moved into the assembly of faeries. The ladies and gentlemen were circling one another, preparing for the next dance. He was standing with his back to her. His coattails were pronged, faultlessly ironed and sewn.

He started to turn. Hettie didn't see it, but behind her at the table, Piscaltine rose a fraction out of her chair. Hettie reached the faery gentleman's side and laid a hand on his sleeve. He faced her. The green tiles of his mask glinted in the lamplight.

Hettie inclined her head.
Simply go to him and take the thing that is hanging around his neck,
Piscaltine had said. But there were many things around his neck. Dozens of them, clinking quietly. Hettie drew her breath in sharply.
Necklaces.
Necklaces just like the one she had under her nightgown, under the illusion of beauty and black velvet. So many eyes, brown and green and robin's-egg blue, looking at her from their metal fixtures. What were they? And where had he gotten them?

“Hello, my lord,” Hettie said, and almost flinched at the sound of her voice. It was deep and dark, like coal and chocolate.

“Hello, my lady,” the gentleman said. “How lovely you look. I do not believe I have had the pleasure of seeing you before.” He was tall and thin, with long, elegant hands. The tortoise mask had slitted eye holes, and through them she saw only black.

“Oh, I hope not,” she said. She tried not to stare at the pendants hanging between the lapels of his coat.
Which one am I supposed to steal? Does Piscaltine know there are so many?

She had to do something. In a second the silence would have gone on too long. The faery gentleman would drift away.

“Do you want to dance?” she asked hurriedly. She didn't know how to dance. But it was either that, or her snatching a necklace and running off with it, and somehow that did not seem wise at all.

The faery regarded her, not speaking. Then he said, “Of course,” and held out a hand. Hettie took it. It was cold as stone. She gripped it tighter. They moved into the center of the floor. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the other faeries slowing, watching them.

The fiddle picked up, playing a sad little tune. Hettie and the gentleman began to dance. They swooped left, then right. They bowed, spun, three steps, four. He was a very good dancer. He swept Hettie along, and she didn't even notice how clumsy her own feet were.

The music became louder. The pipes joined in, growling a deep, rolling countermelody that fought against the sound of the fiddle. Then the drum began to beat, one
-two-three,
one
-two-three.
They sailed across the hall. The music flew up and so did their arms, pointing toward the rafters. None of the other faeries were dancing anymore. Everyone stood, rows of faces, whispering to one another behind raised fans.

Hettie's feet began to hurt, but she did not want to stop. Her head spun with the joy of it. The music became faster and wilder, and suddenly she was filled with a sort of lightness that made her want to fly, made her want to sprout wings and feathers and swoop away in her beautiful, haughty form. No one could match her. Not Florence La Bellina, nor the beautiful girl from Brightest Summer
,
and certainly not Piscaltine.

“What are those things around your neck?” she gasped as they spun yet again across the floor. “Why do you wear them? Will you give me one? Give one to me?” She reached out. Her fingers closed around metal and she pulled, snapping the chain against the faery's neck. Then she whirled away, a laugh of triumph on her lips.

But the faery gentleman was not laughing. The music screeched on a wrong note and stopped. The entire hall went utterly, horribly still.

Hettie half-turned, breathless. She saw Florence La Bellina, moth-winged Snell, all the Sidhe in the room just staring at her, their black eyes filled with a sort of dread she had never seen before in faery faces. Only Piscaltine was smiling, a wicked, wicked smile.

The faery in the tortoise mask stepped toward Hettie. His mouth curved up.

Hettie's heart lurched. “Who are you?” she whispered, and even from her great lady's throat, her voice sounded thin as smoke. “Who are you, really?”

“I am the Sly King,” the gentleman said, and then he began to laugh.

CHAPTER XIII

The Ghosts of Siltpool

P
IKEY and Bartholomew escaped the prison outside a dreary town named Siltpool, just as a gray rain started to fall.

The globe had groaned to a halt for an inspection by officers of Lord Gristlewood's Black-Hat Brigade, and Pikey and Bartholomew had slipped off into the heather and run wind-quick for the brush.

The effects of the blue powder had all but worn off by the time they had made their escape. In fact, they had barely been invisible at all, and not a few guards and decrepit faeries had stared in bewilderment at the dark smudges racing away along the beams. But escape Pikey and Bartholomew did. They found a stony, muddy road and a sign on rusty clockwork spider legs that read,
Siltpool: that way. Population:
X
410 87,
and set off toward the town where they had heard the English army was encamped.

The faery prison rolled past them a short while later. Pikey expected it to be gone for good, but then he and Bartholomew trudged over a hill, and he saw something that snatched the breath right out of his lungs: spread out below him for leagues and leagues were vast barren fields, the ground torn to filthy swaths. In the distance were the sharp rooftops of a town. And congregated about it were twelve iron globes, so huge it looked as if metal moons had dropped out of the sky.

Pikey and Bartholomew stood frozen at the top of the hill. There were so many. Each packed with faeries. Tens of thousands of faeries, locked up in iron, dying.

“Are they—are they just going to leave them there?” Pikey asked at last. “Are they just going to leave them in those cages until the war's over?”

“If the war is ever over,” said Bartholomew, slipping and stumbling down the other side of the hill. “And even then, who's to tell? Parliament might think it better just to keep them there. The English will be furious when the war is done. They'll want the faeries to pay. So why not just keep them locked up, everyone will say. Why not leave them there to rot? I don't know if it matters, to be honest. It's not so different from how the faeries lived before.”

Pikey frowned and plucked at a pussy willow that had grown out into the road. He looked again toward the great globes, now silent, looming against the dark day. He felt a stab of pity for all the creatures inside. He could just as well be in there himself, locked in some dungeon. And all anyone would say was,
Well, you might get out when the war's over. Or not. I don't know if it matters.
And that would be the end of Pikey Thomas.

 

They smelled the town of Siltpool long before they got a good look at it. The smell was something between dung and mildew and mushy gray roots, and it whispered up along the road and into their noses. A short while later, Pikey began to
hear
Siltpool, too. Rain drumming on canvas, harnesses clinking, a general shuffling, rattling sound of busyness. Then he followed Bartholomew over a hill and saw it.

The army's tent city dwarfed the little town. It spilled out of the huddle of low stone houses like intestines from a goat's belly, tents and shacks and wagons spreading across the grass for almost a mile. Toward the center of the town, the tents were large and important looking, flags hanging limp and damp. Farther away, the tents became progressively sloppier and more mud-spattered, and at the very edge of the camp there were only a few broken wagons and some wild-looking peasants washing in a stream.

Everywhere there were soldiers.

“You got some more of that stuff?” Pikey whispered, casting a worried glance up the road. It was empty, but the town was seething with people even in the rain. “Could you make us invisible again? It would be mighty handy right around now. . . .”

Bartholomew put a finger to his lips. “We'll be all right.” They were almost at the first tents now. Voices rang out, dull in the rain. “Pull your hood down low and keep your eyes on the ground,” he said, and threw his own cloak over his pack so that it looked like he might be carrying a bundle of sticks. “The soldiers have other things to worry about than a few children gathering wood.”

They passed into the tent city. Soldiers sat under dripping awnings or huddled over cookstoves. Some played cards. Others just stared into the downpour. A line of horses stood soaked and miserable, tied to a peeled log. A food tent vented greasy smoke. A few soldiers glanced at Pikey and Bartholomew as they went by, but none of them spoke. Their uniforms were sodden and their mustaches drooped. They looked glum, their eyes glazed.
Like cows,
Pikey thought.
Like leadfaces.

Pikey and Bartholomew plodded on. They came to the solid, stone part of town. The houses on either side of the main road were silent, the windows cold. But they
were
lived in. Smoke coughed from some of the chimneys. Donkeys looked sullenly over the tops of fences. Pikey saw sows in the muck. No geese, though, neither in the yards nor in the street.

“So?” Pikey whispered, when he felt it was safe. “What now? Who's Edith Hutcherson and how do we find her?” He was tired and very wet. He wanted to go to sleep.

Bartholomew didn't look at him. His eyes were on the ground, and Pikey noticed he took small shuffling steps, just like a little boy would. “We don't. Edith Hutcherson could be anyone. She might be a hundred years dead. Or the faery might have been lying. We don't know. We'll stay with the original plan.”

“Which
is
? Walk over to the faeries and ask their toffer if he won't just let us through his doorway because we're ever so sad and put-upon? Yeh, it'll work out smashingly.”

“What?” Bartholomew glanced at him, and Pikey saw irritation on the other boy's face. “When you have a better idea you can tell me,” Bartholomew said. “And when you see my sister, tell me that, too. It's been three days.”

That shut Pikey up. It
had
been three days. Three days since he'd seen Hettie, and it was the only thing he was here for. He wondered what would happen if he never saw her again. He wondered if Bartholomew would just leave him somewhere, and Pikey would wake up one morning in this strange part of England all alone and with nowhere to go. The thought made him afraid. He wished a little bit that Hettie was his sister, too, and that he had just as much right to search for her as Bartholomew did. But of course that was stupid. He wasn't Hettie's brother. He wasn't anybody's brother.

They were almost on the other side of Siltpool, when Bartholomew sidled into an alley between two ancient houses. Pikey followed. No windows looked into the alley and it ended in a stick fence, low enough to escape over if need be. The alley was filled with mud and puddles, and there was a crick in it so that its back half could not be seen from the road. When they were almost at its end, Bartholomew pulled Pikey into a crouch and said, “Here. We'll set up camp here.”

“We're going to sleep here?” Pikey wrinkled his nose. “The roofs don't go over more 'n an inch. I saw a better place a ways back, with a roof that went over at least a foot and a—”

“We're not sleeping. We have work to do. You'll be listening. You are going to infiltrate the English camp.”

“What?”

“You're going to—”

“Yeh, but
me
? Why don't you do it?”

“I have other things to do.” Bartholomew reached into one of the many pockets in his cloak and took out a pinch of the blue powder. “Here's the last of it. I only had a thimbleful to begin with and it cost a fortune. It was meant for later, when things are worse. Well, now it's gone, so don't waste it.”

And with that, Bartholomew extended his fingertips toward Pikey and blew. The powder swirled into Pikey's face. Bartholomew whispered a word. Then the muddy alley seemed to flicker and Pikey vanished.

He didn't feel any different.
He
still saw himself, though he felt lighter somehow, hazier. A slight needling was in his shins, but otherwise all was the same.

“Now,” Bartholomew said, and Pikey smiled a little at the way the other boy looked straight past him at the wall behind his back. “Don't be gone more than an hour. That was a smaller dose than the last one and the effects wear off over time. Right now you're air. In twenty minutes you'll be a shadow. In forty you'll look like a breath of ash. In an hour you'll be almost solid again. Before then you've got to learn things. I want details of the English plans. Where the faery armies are located. When the English are marching. When the battles are expected to be fought. I'll not have us stumbling into the middle of a firefight and getting shot.” And with that he gave Pikey a push, which went straight into his face because he couldn't see him at all, and off Pikey went, splashing into the street.

“I have other things to do,”
Pikey thought sourly.
Oh, do you? So you send me off into the middle of the English army all by my lonesome. If I come back and you're sleeping, I'll leave
you
behind.

He went to Siltpool's tavern first. Taverns were where the talking happened, and if he could gather all that information Bartholomew wanted while staying warm and dry, it would be a whole lot better for him. He was already reasonably sure he needn't worry about anyone seeing him. In the Scarborough Faery Prison he had walked right between the stilts of the leadfaces and they hadn't noticed a thing. Still, Pikey went cautiously. He made sure not to kick up the mud as he walked, or tip anything over. He tried to keep his feet from making splashing noises. Luckily for him the rain was coming down hard and the wind was howling, and no one even noticed the little trickle of footsteps twisting along the road.

A group of soldiers was playing cards under the tavern's eaves. The cards were damp and dog-eared, their painted figures sinister in the half dark. The men were silent. They said nothing of interest, only grunting from time to time and frowning at one another over the tops of their hands. The tavern's windows were cold and dark. The place had been locked up. Pikey pulled his cloak closer around him and hurried on.

He had better luck in the tent city. He listened through canvases and at tent entrances. He listened to soldiers and sergeants and the colonels in their soiled sashes and tarnished gold epaulettes. No one saw him. Pikey half-suspected they wouldn't have bothered with him even if they had. They were afraid of other things.

The troops did not want to be here. Their gunpowder was damp and their boots had holes in them. They had lost three days on their way up from Bristol after some faery magic had made the road lead into a bog and wild swamp goblins had dragged an entire division of men into the reeds. And on the way to Doncaster, the troops had come upon a young man in tattered military garb, standing in the middle of an empty road. He was standing very still, simply staring at them mournfully, and something about him made everyone afraid to come close. No one dared walk by him, not even the generals. Then everyone had heard a sound like distant guns, and the young man had dropped with bullet holes in his chest. When they rushed forward to help him he was no longer there.

That story made Pikey shiver. He wondered if it was just a fib to give everyone a bit of a chill, but when he saw the black looks the men were giving one another, and the way they dug themselves deeper into their coats, he didn't think so anymore. They were afraid. Afraid of the faeries, like Pikey had never thought an English soldier could be.

After a while he came to an overturned wagon. Three soldiers sat huddled under it, sodden and miserable, rain spouting off their hats. One of them, grizzled and older than the rest, was missing an eye, an empty socket where it should have been. Pikey heard him speaking and stole behind the wagon to listen.

“Lousy rain,” he grumbled. “Lousy mud, lousy town, lousy war.”

“Aye,” said another, a boy of barely sixteen. “And lousy bread, too. I was told they'd feed us better 'n the Prime Minister if we just signed up. White bread as soft as clouds, they said. Feh. There's more mold than meal in our bread and it's as hard as rocks.”

“It'll be over soon enough,” said the third soldier philosophically. “A few more days and we'll all be going back to where we came from.”

“Oh, you do seem sure o' that,” the older man snapped. “Upon my gone-away eye, we've no idea what's going to happen.”

The third soldier chuckled. “Your gone-away eye . . . That's a pretty way of putting it. How
did
you lose that eye, eh, Glivers? Mistook a cat for your spectacles?”

“No. I pulled it out. With my own hands.”

The two other soldiers turned to look at him. Pikey shivered.

“It went bad somehow,” the man named Glivers said. “I was seeing the strangest things through it, a tower, and a staircase, twisting up, up, up. And I didn't want to get into trouble with the leadfaces over anything. So I thought it best to do away with the offending object.”

It went bad somehow.
He'd had it, too. Glivers'd had a clouded eye. Pikey started to back away. He didn't want to hear any more. Not from this lot, anyway.
Find out when,
Bartholomew had said.

Pikey hurried around the wagon. And barreled straight into a soldier. Pikey bounced off his chest, sprawled into the muck. The soldier let out a grunt of surprise. Pikey looked up, panic-stricken. He was right out in the open, only inches from the worn leather boots of the men under the wagon. In a heartbeat Pikey was up, slopping through the mud.

The boy-soldier jerked to his feet, staring. “Is it a ghost? Was that a ghost just now?”

“Might've been,” Glivers said, barely looking up at all. “There ain't a place left that's not been touched by the blasted faeries. Siltpool's bound to have ghosts if it's any sort of self-respecting.”