The Golden Yarn

by Cornelia Funke

  Chanute and Sylvain were so enthusiastically preparing for their roles in the nocturnal rescue mission that it was almost worrying. Just a few blocks from the Magic Collection was a park with a music pavilion and a stage for concerts for Moskva’s high society—a credible target for one of the anarchist arson attacks that happened all the time all over town. And the pavilion was in the center of the park, so the fire would, hopefully, be controlled before it could spread to any of the surrounding residences.

  Sylvain was so excited by the idea of playing an anarchist that he had Baryatinsky’s stable boys write down every slogan they’d ever seen smeared on a wall in Moskva. Jacob even caught him painting one of those slogans across the wall of their host’s pigsty, after which Sylvain proudly recounted all the buildings in New York City on which he’d left his mark. Sylvain Caleb Fowler was full of surprises.

  He and Chanute had agreed that Chanute should be the arsonist while Sylvain would smear his slogans on the statues in the park as well as on some of the surrounding buildings. Jacob had to listen as Chanute recounted in great detail how a drunk patron once set fire to his wooden prosthesis and how much safer a metal arm was for such tasks. They could only hope they’d all survive the night. While they waited for nightfall, Jacob wished he and Fox had left with the carpet before the Windhound managed to get himself caught.

  It wasn’t the first time Jacob had broken into a magical collection. The invisibility slime of a snail had gotten him into the Chambers of Miracles in Vena. He’d asked Ludmilla whether there were such snails to be had in Moskva, but she’d just given him a pitying smile and whispered, “I’ll bring something better.” The Dwarf had also promised to take care of the Goyl shadow who was still keeping vigil outside Baryatinsky’s palace.

  Fox had gone to bed hours earlier (the powder worked very quickly), but the sky was still summer-night bright when a very apologetic servant brought Jacob a telegram that had arrived earlier that morning.

  It was from Dunbar.

  Mention of silvered animals in lotharainian travel journal STOP More than 130 years old STOP Glass assassins with many faces in tales from Cymru and Helvetia STOP Turn to trees in moonlight STOP Weapons useless STOP Invulnerable STOP Cymru hero finds safety on damp earth STOP Helvetia hero escapes into water STOP No mention of Alderelves but stories of human emissaries from immortals STOP Remember I’m quoting fairy tales and dubious travel journals STOP Best advice stay clear of mirrorlings STOP Don’t want you and vixen silver statues STOP Regards from other side of earth

  “Stay clear.” Jacob wished he could follow Dunbar’s advice.

  Moskva’s many church bells were chiming midnight when Jacob entered Fox’s room to make sure she was still asleep. The apothecary had not promised too much. Outside, Chanute and Sylvain were sneaking through the gate like two boys planning a nighttime prank. Seeing Chanute like that felt good after the old man had asked Jacob to proofread the inscription for his tombstone: Albert Chanute. Treasure Hunter. Still Hunting. This night could earn Chanute a grave in Moskva, but if it came to that, it’d be a death much more to the old hunter’s liking than dying in a bed in Schwanstein.

  The feather on Fox’s nightstand was not the one Jacob had used to trick the Baba Yaga. It was a quill feather from a wild goose. Fox turned her head in her sleep, and Jacob wished he could see who she was dreaming of.

  Really, Jacob?

  He stroked her sleeping face. Why couldn’t he just leave the Windhound where he was? Even Fox would never have asked Jacob to risk his neck for Orlando. But she would also never forgive him if he let the other man die without giving her the chance to save him. And if the Barsoi died, Jacob would spend the rest of his life wondering whether Fox could’ve been happy with Orlando.

  Ludmilla Akhmatova kept her promise. No Goyl shadow in front of Baryatinsky’s gate. Beggars, drunks, flower girls, crowds of nobles and officers on their way to balls or nightly card games, or to one of the city’s countless pleasure houses. Peddlers on every street corner, bear tamers, soothsayers, but the closer Jacob got to the Magic Collection, the quieter the streets became. There’d been some talk of moving the Collection inside the walls of the Kremlin; luckily, that had not yet happened. It would’ve made their nightly venture even more hopeless.

  The palace that housed Varangia’s magic treasures was surrounded by government buildings and schools, all of which were completely dark at this hour. Jacob climbed out of his taxi. Ludmilla Akhmatova was waiting in a side street. She was almost invisible in her black dress. The Dwarf by her side introduced himself, whispering a name that was familiar to Jacob, as was his bearded face. Basil Sokolsky… an artist who performed in Moskva’s biggest circus. Jacob had admired Sokolsky’s daredevil acrobatics when the circus had toured Albion. In the circus tent, Sokolsky called himself the Fly, and it was not hard to guess what task Ludmilla had in mind for him that night.

  “Reckless?” he repeated after she’d introduced Jacob. “You are the treasure hunter for whom that Dwarf trader in Terpevas has offered one kilo of gold.”

  One kilo? Anyone who knew Evenaugh Valiant knew he would never pay out such a reward, but Jacob still felt flattered. His old enemy-turned-friend-turned-enemy was obviously still bitter about how Jacob had tricked him in the Dead City.

  Ludmilla listened to the night.

  The bells of the fire brigade echoed through the empty streets.

  She gave Jacob an appreciative smile. “Your friends are very punctual.”

  “And where is your second helper?” Jacob whispered back. Not that one more would make their venture any more likely to succeed.

  At that moment, the answer came ambling down the street. A man revealed what he was not only by his size but by his gait. A Wolfling. Some very successful treasure and bounty hunters were Wolflings. Jacob had met a number of them. They could call their fur like Fox, but Wolflings were shape-shifters by birth, and unlike Fox, they had to shift every day to keep control over the Wolf. Wolflings who didn’t shift regularly ended up as werewolves, forever howling at the moon. Ludmilla hadn’t mentioned a Wolfling as part of her plan, and Jacob was especially glad Fox wasn’t with them. She’d killed a Wolfling some years ago. They could supposedly scent that.

  The Wolfling didn’t introduce himself. In that respect, his kind were like Fairies and Witches—they liked to keep their names secret. He greeted the Dwarfs with a silent nod, and then his pale yellow eyes rested on Jacob. In some countries, mothers drowned their babies if they were born with wolf eyes. But in Varangia, they were treated with respect. After all, even the Tzars claimed to have descended from wolves and bears.

  “It’s working. The guards wouldn’t notice if an army marched through their gate,” the Wolfling whispered. His voice was so rough it was easy to imagine it turning into a wolf’s growl. “You should see them. They’re craning their necks as though they’re trying to look over the roofs. Now we can only hope our heroic firefighters are not too quick about fighting that fire.”

  Ludmilla Akhmatova reached into her coat pocket and handed each of them something that looked like a dusty ball of wool.

  Sokolsky looked at it with incredulous awe. “A night skin,” he whispered. “Woven from the spiderwebs on a Baba Yaga’s fence.”

  “And as hard to find as a three-headed eagle,” the Wolfling murmured. “How did you get four of them?”

  “I once had an admirer who traded in these,” Ludmilla answered. She began to pluck hers apart. The cloak she unfurled made her invisible. A strange sight, how they disappeared one by one into the night. Only the Fly tucked his night skin into his pocket. He said it would just hinder him, and his small size made him almost invisible anyway.

  “Forgive the question, but did you give one of these to Orlando?” Sokolsky asked.

  “Yes, and it got him past the guards,” Ludmilla replied, “but it couldn’t help him with the door to the secret wing. Gospodin Reckless is here so we won’t run into the same problem.”

  J
acob could only hope he wouldn’t disappoint her trust.

  The plan was to scale the rear of the palace. Hopefully, the noise from the fire brigades would keep the guards from doing their rounds for a while. The rope used to climb up to the second floor would not be invisible. It was not the first time Jacob was grateful that alarm systems were still a far-off idea in this world. The walls surrounding the palace were secured with iron spikes. Sokolsky plucked them from the stone like flowers. The only metal stronger than a Dwarf was silver, and most builders were careless enough to skimp on that expense.

  Chanute and Sylvain had done a thorough job. The guards didn’t even look around when the Fly landed in the courtyard. The night was filled with the noise of carriages and excited voices. Jacob hoped Chanute wasn’t enjoying himself so much that he’d land in prison. One nighttime rescue mission was enough.

  Sokolsky truly lived up to his stage name. Seeing the Fly climb up a wall really was like watching an insect. The barred windows on the second floor were as little an obstacle to his Dwarf hands as the spikes in the walls. The others were hidden so perfectly by their night skins that they had to keep whispering to each other to avoid grabbing the rope at the same time. The Wolfling was just starting to climb when one of the guards recalled his duties. He nearly ran into Jacob, who was waiting at the bottom of the wall, but thanks to the night skin, the guard noticed neither him nor the rope he was hiding with his body. Invisible. Jacob had never liked the feeling, even though he’d experienced it often enough in his line of work.

  Ludmilla’s spies had discovered that since Tennant had so easily reached the door to the secret wing, the Tzar had put greyhounds on guard in the collection. The dogs pricked their ears as Jacob climbed through the window, but the Wolfling just had to shed his night skin and they immediately came to him like lapdogs.

  They were now in the hall with the magic eggs. Jacob appreciated getting a second look at them without Molotov’s dusty voice in his ear. Some were barely bigger than chicken’s eggs; others would’ve made an ostrich proud. The shells were made of gold enamel, and, depending on their size, they contained gardens, forests, or entire exotic islands. The goldsmith who’d created these eggs, Hiskias Augustus Jacobs, had reputedly learned his craft from mine sprites, and his descendants were still the exclusive goldsmiths to the Tzar. Jacob was sorely tempted to steal one of these masterpieces for Fox—she would love having a forest to carry in her pocket—but the eggs were so famous they’d always be recognized as stolen.

  The next room contained the item Jacob needed to disable the knife-wire: a melting ax from Nihon, forged to the same perfection as the swords from that country. Molotov had gone into great detail about how the ax had come to be in the Tzar’s possession, but he’d had no idea of its power.

  Jacob only paid attention to the external safeguards of the glass case. His mind was too preoccupied with the thoughts it was trying not to think. He himself had often advised archivists about the tiny Hemlock-Flies who liked to bore into the wooden parts of magical objects. He felt the first sting as soon as he reached into the case. The effects were loss of balance and even unconsciousness. Well done, Jacob! The hand holding the ax was already swelling. He could only hope his body would resist the poison until they were done.

  The others were already in the room with the magical creatures. The Wolfling was staring at the cage with the Gray Wolf.

  “Once we have the prisoners, we should free him,” Jacob whispered. “We should free them all. They’ll distract the guards and help us get away.”

  Ludmilla didn’t like the idea. Jacob could see her fear of the growling and screeching creatures. But she was smart enough to know the Wolfling would never leave without the Gray Wolf—and Jacob owed it to Fox to free the others.

  The doors where Molotov’s tour had ended still showed signs of the explosives Ludmilla had procured for Orlando. Jacob wondered what Orlando had used to disable the knife-wire. The ax melted it without triggering the alarm, and the rest was easy, as the explosives had damaged the other safeguards. Jacob tucked the ax into his backpack before opening the door. If they got caught, the theft of a magical ax would be the least of their problems.

  There were many in Varangia who were wary of all progress and who demanded a return to the good old times. The Tzar was a moderate among that group. The secret wing of his Magic Collection was a reminder that those old times had not been all good. Its windowless walls hoarded the past like dirt, and the cages didn’t hide their purpose behind gilded decor. The greyhounds tucked their tails between their legs as Ludmilla’s gas lantern revealed the spiked cages. The floor tiles showed traces of illustrious prisoners—claws, horned tails, feet that could melt stone.

  The prisoner in the first cage had the face and breasts of a human woman but the body of a bird whose pale blue feathers had lost their luster decades earlier: Sirin, the bird of pain. Varangian lore had more stories about her than she had feathers. The Tzar’s ancestor had captured her in an attempt to exterminate pain itself, but barely a week later, Sirin’s sister Alkonost, the bird of pleasure, had been found dead in their forest. The egg they’d found in Alkonost’s dead body was stored in the next room. The Tzar had once tried to have it hatched, but whatever was hidden inside the egg either was as dead as Alkonost or was still biding its time inside the blue shell.

  Sirin flapped her wings as the Greyhounds slunk past her cage. The golden quills of her feathers made the cage bars ring out like bells, and the scream she uttered was so shrill even the Wolfling had to cover his ears. The voice of a bird from the mouth of a woman. Ludmilla extinguished her lantern in case the guards came to check out what had made Sirin scream. But nobody came. All they could hear was Sirin’s claws scraping her perch—back and forth, back and forth, more than a century of back and forth.

  Ludmilla turned up the flame of her lantern again. Jacob forgot his swollen hand and his increasing dizziness as the light illuminated the next prisoner. This cage was almost as big as a railway carriage and still too small for the creature huddled inside. There’d always been stories that the last Dragons, before vanishing forever, had interbred with other animals. The creature in front of them had the body of a Dragon, but the heads at the end of two scaly necks looked like the giant bucks found in the mountains of Varangia. Whatever the ancestry of this scaled creature, being caged up had done it as little good as the bird of pain. Yet the sight made Jacob’s heart beat faster. Dragons…He’d never stopped dreaming of seeing one. The creature staring at him through empty eyes had as much to do with his dream as a donkey had with a horse, but it was enough to rekindle that dream.

  The next cages had walls of solid iron and only a peephole to look at the captives. This was how Witches and Wizards were held. The first cell was empty, but through the next peephole, Jacob saw two men sleeping on an iron grate.

  Brunel seemed unharmed, but Orlando had been badly knocked about.

  The lock was tricky, so Ludmilla pushed in the door with her elbow. The strength of the Dwarfs was not limited to their men. Sokolsky helped to wrench the torn metal farther apart. Orlando barely managed to get to his knees, but Brunel crawled so quickly through the opening that it was clear this wasn’t his first time escaping from captivity. When he saw Jacob, Brunel stared at him with such surprise he even forgot to stand up straight. Jacob had not expected Brunel to remember him. The officer who’d introduced them in Goldsmouth must’ve really sung his praises.

  Orlando just gave Jacob a nod as he struggled to his feet. He didn’t look like he had strength for any more than that. The Wolfling had to support him. As they all left the chamber, they opened the other cages only a little and managed to get back to the window before all the captives noticed they were free. They could hear scraping and fluttering as they quickly pulled the night skins back on. Ludmilla had brought two more for Orlando and Brunel.

  Orlando was too weak to climb, so they secured him with a rope. Ludmilla was probably wondering whether he’d given her
name to his torturers. The sky above the park was bright red. Jacob worried that Chanute had blown himself up, together with the music pavilion.

  The Wolfling had just reached the ground when the one of the guards spotted the rope. The soldier managed a couple of steps and fired off one shot before the Wolf buried him beneath his body. Jacob had grabbed the pistol by the time the other guards appeared, but Sirin spared him from shooting anyone. The guards writhed on the ground in pain as Sirin launched herself out the window with an angry screech. The Grey Wolf flew after her as Jacob jumped off the wall and down into the street. The useless guards had lost all sense of who they were or why they were in uniform as they stared like children after the rescuers and the rescued. Circling among the stars above them were the stories of every Varangian’s childhood.

  The trash cart was waiting, as planned, behind the Magic Collection. The night skins were becoming as see-through as the spiderwebs they’d been woven from. They quickly shed the skins before they climbed into the cart. Despite the hideous stench that greeted them, Brunel clambered aboard their clunky escape vehicle as fast as he’d crawled out of his cell. In light of all Brunel’s inventions, Jacob would’ve imagined him to be a braver man, though his cowardice was probably a good motivator for the invention of weapons and armor plates.

  Orlando and Sokolsky were sitting in the trash cart when a huge semi-invisible wolf leaped over the wall as though gravity did not apply to him. He shifted back to his human form more slowly than Fox. The fur on his face only vanished as he strode across the street. He was hobbling, but the blood on his hands was definitely not only his own. One of the guards had taken his attention off the magic in the sky and had trained his gun on the Wolfling. Ludmilla had shot the guard down. She dropped her pistol into her bag like someone who’d killed many times before. That morning, Molotov had briefly chatted with one of the guards about his sick sister. They’d all been about Will’s age. Jacob had also killed many times, but he was glad it still made him queasy.