Thieves of Weirdwood

by Christian McKay Heidicker

  Breeth sighed. It didn’t look like either boy was going to come up with a way to escape. She would have to take matters into her own splintered hands. She took a long creaking breath—or something like a breath—and made a big decision.

  She creaked back up the wooden railing to the Manor’s main floor, and then groaned toward the west wing. Breeth had spent her time in Weirdwood Manor studying the Wardens and their staff. She wanted to learn to distinguish good people from those who were rotten to the core. She’d trusted too easily when she was alive, and it had gotten her kidnapped.

  Since Breeth had died, Wally was the first person she had seen who seemed to be made of good stuff right to his bone marrow … even if he was a thief. Sure, he was a little shy, but most of the good ones were. If Wally swore he would help track down her killer when she got him out of this place, she believed him. That’s why she was willing to do what she was about to do.

  By the time she reached the west wing, Breeth’s boards were trembling so badly, she accidentally broke a vase. She stretched her senses through the rooms, feeling for the vibration of two particular sets of footsteps—heavy and soft. She felt them in the feasting hall and entered through the high vaulted ceiling, creaking down the cedar walls and thumping into the grand table, heavy with platters of roasted yams and plum stew.

  “It’s your fault and no two ways about it,” Weston grumbled, pointing a spoon at his considerably larger brother. “Your spiral hallway’s meant to stop non-magical types, but those thieves waltzed through like it was a pleasant promenade.”

  “I—I don’t understand how zey did zis!” Ludwig said, tears trembling in his baby blue eyes. “One peek at ze twisted corridor should have sent ze urchins running in ze opposite direction!”

  The twins, Ludwig and Weston, were always arguing about something. You wouldn’t know they were twins by the looks of them. One was small and hairy, the other large and soft. They even had different accents, which was really confusing.

  Weston oversaw the living elements of Weirdwood—like gardening and pests—carpeting the floors with vines and populating the locks with imps. Ludwig, meanwhile, was in charge of the nonliving elements—designing beautiful woodwork and manipulating the corridors. Together they controlled the growth of Weirdwood Manor like a bonsai tree, trimming and wrangling its many rooms and hallways. Breeth loved traveling through their work.

  Ludwig stared at the table. “And vhat about your imp locks? Perhaps if you did not spoil zem vith so much nectar—”

  “Don’t you question how I run my platoon!” Weston said, shaking his spoon and spattering the top of Breeth’s table with soup.

  Breeth softly creaked through each of their benches, searching for a cold weight against her top. She found it and sighed. Of course, it was Weston who held the keys to the Abyssment’s cell. It had to be the twin who was in charge of exterminating pests.

  “’Sides,” Weston said, “my soldiers are on their last legs. We haven’t been granted leave in months, and I haven’t been able to head to the imp forest for fresh recruits.”

  Ludwig scooped up a yam and let it thud to his plate. “Little chance of a vacation after zose urchins broke in.”

  Weston grunted. On that much, at least, the twins could agree.

  Breeth creaked through the floorboards into Pyra’s kitchen, which was mercifully empty. She seeped into the prep table where she found a lone crumb of cheese. By wobbling the table, she was able to knock the crumb to the floor where she creaked next, and then waited. It wasn’t long until a strange creature came hopping out of a hole in the wall.

  Breeth would have called it a mouse, but this creature was slightly bigger. Its back was striped purple and black, and its tail curved like a curlicue. Still, with its big dewy eyes, oversized ears, and needle whiskers, it was just as adorable.

  The mouse thing plucked up the cheese crumb and began to nibble. Breeth’s nerves trembled the floorboards. This was it. She may have been able to creak from dead thing to dead thing, but she still hadn’t figured out how to escape living things—not until they died, at least. Hence her life as a housefly.

  If she were to possess this mouse, she could be stuck for years. And then she would have to experience death yet again. The fly had been easy enough—just a single day before her wings stopped buzzing, her legs curled to her abdomen, and her dusty heart beat its last.

  But this death could be far more unpleasant. People hated rodents. Her life could end in one of Weston’s mousetraps in a stomach-squishing, backbreaking snap. She reminded herself that her parents were waiting for her in the afterlife and the only way to reach them was to free Wally so he could help her catch her killer.

  “All right, little guy,” Breeth whispered to the mouse thing. “I need you not to panic, okay?” If she had a stomach it would have flipped over then. “You either, Breeth.”

  With that, she seeped into the mouse thing’s paws.

  Breeth’s whole being became a confusion of senses. First came the prickly feeling of fur all over her body, the cold of stone against her naked tail and paws, the brush of air against her whiskers. Next was the aromatic taste of cheese, gummy on her bucked teeth.

  But then the mouse thing’s tiny heart started to race. Its body tensed, and its breath grew short. It knew something was terribly wrong.

  “Hi!” Breeth thought into the mouse’s mind. “My name’s Breeth. There’s no need to pan—”

  The mouse thing shrieked. It scampered across the kitchen, frantically trying to escape the voice that had entered its thoughts. Breeth was dragged along, her entire being jounced in frantic hops.

  “You’re okay!” she thought as sweetly as she could. “I’m not going to hurt you!”

  This only made the creature shriek even more wildly as it continued to tear around the kitchen. If the sound drew Weston’s attention, he would come stomping in to end this creature’s life, and Breeth would feel every second of it.

  She tried not to panic as she held on to the mouse thing’s mind like a bucking bronco. How had this worked with the housefly? The answer was it hadn’t. The fly didn’t put up a fight. It just let her take over. Breeth guessed that the simpler a creature’s thoughts, the easier it was to possess.

  As the mouse thing continued to shriek and scamper, Breeth tried to imagine what would relax her if she were a mouse. She thought of cheese. Of calm, rooted burrows. Of slow, cherry pit–sized heartbeats. The mouse thing’s shrieking began to settle as its paws stopped galloping and it came to a standstill, breath still short and quick.

  “There you go,” Breeth whispered inside the mouse thing’s mind. “I’ll take care of you. I’ll keep you safe. I promise.”

  A shudder ran down the creature’s hunched spine. It got low on its haunches until its stomach touched the floorboards. Its long lashes fluttered closed.

  “That’s it,” Breeth cooed in thought. “You’re safe.”

  The mouse thing released control, and Breeth blinked open her oil drop eyes. She stretched her legs and swirled her tail. She flexed her sharp claws against the floorboard she’d possessed just moments before. Then her whiskers twitched upward.

  The kitchen was overwhelming. The ceiling rose as high as the sky. The counters loomed like giant cliffs. But the smells. Breeth pushed up on her hind paws and sniffed the air. There were sweet things on those cliffs. Ripe plums. A bowl of sugar. And bread. A boulder-sized loaf with scrumptious rock crumbs tumbling off it. Her tiny stomach gurgled, but she shook her whiskers. She couldn’t let herself get lost in this mouse thing’s senses.

  She hopped across the vast floor and stuck her whiskered nose under the kitchen door.

  “If we can’t stop a couple of street urchins,” Weston said, “then how are we going to stop the Order of Eldar when they show up to destroy us?”

  “If zey show up,” Ludwig said.

  “When.” Weston pushed away his bowl and dabbed a napkin at his lips.

  They glared at each other and then
simultaneously scooted back in their stools, finished with their meal and their argument.

  Oh no, Breeth thought. The keys had been so easy to reach when Weston was sitting.

  As the twins exited the feasting hall, she scrambled along the baseboard, keeping like a shadow on Weston’s heels as he marched to his workshop.

  “Formation!” he shouted as he entered.

  Several doorknobs hopped from out of the shadows and formed straight lines on the floor.

  Weston saluted them, then crossed his hands behind his back. “I want a full report, you lousy bunch of lowlifes! You embarrassed me in front of Ludwig.” He pointed at a brass doorknob. “You! Marsden! What happened?”

  The doorknob responded in a squeaky voice. To Breeth’s mouse ears it sounded like gibberish.

  “A master lock picker, eh?” Weston said, taking out a pick of his own. “We’ll see about that.”

  As he ran the imps through several drills, Breeth crept to the bottom of his giant chair and gazed up at the keys dangling from his belt, high as an apple on a tree. How was she supposed to reach them? On her hind paws, she was barely three inches tall. She scampered to the other end of the workshop and scaled a rope onto a table of miniature tools. With a swipe of her tail, she knocked a tiny screwdriver to the floor.

  “Hmm?” Weston stood and about-faced as Breeth scurried behind a lamp. “Mortimer? That had better not be you.”

  He searched the area for what Breeth guessed was a deserter imp. When he didn’t find it, he bent to retrieve the screwdriver from the floor.

  Breeth had mere moments to act. She scrambled to the edge of the table and reached out her tiny claw, trying to snag the keys. Her fingernail was a mere whisker’s length away. But for Breeth’s tiny mouse paw, it might as well have been a meter.

  Weston marched back to his imp formation, and Breeth decided to knock down another tool. Hopefully this time Weston would bend a little closer to the desk. But the moment she brought her tail back to swat the tiny hammer, Weston spun on his heels.

  “Aha!” he said. “So you’re the culprit.”

  Breeth leapt from the desk and made a break for the door, but in two giant steps Weston slammed it shut. The space beneath the door was too small, even for a mouse body, so she skittered under the shadow of the desk.

  “Imps dismissed!” Weston shouted, and the doorknobs rolled away, loud as thunder. He opened a drawer and fished out an object. Breeth could see the shadow of the thing as he tossed it up and down in his hand. It looked like a stone, ready to smash her. With a floor-quaking tremble, the desk scooted away from the wall, leaving Breeth out in the open.

  She was trapped. She couldn’t get her paws to scamper left or right, certain one of Weston’s military boots would come crashing down, big as a house, spewing her mouse guts across the floor. She’d promised she’d take care of this mouse. She’d promised Wally she’d get him out of the Manor. She—

  “Hello there, little fella,” Weston whispered, breaking up the bread roll and scattering crumbs in front of her. “A little energy for your journey through the great, tangled Manor.”

  Breeth could only stare at the crumbs with her big black eyes.

  Weston smiled. “Just don’t tell anyone what a softy I am.”

  He marched off to his quarters, leaving the cell’s key on his work desk.

  Breeth blinked. Maybe she needed to work on her character analysis.

  * * *

  “Why don’t you just charm the bars open, Arthur?” Wally said.

  “If they had a beating pulse, I would!”

  The boys were so busy arguing neither of them noticed the mouse that slipped through the bars, dragging a key by its tail. Breeth sat up on her hind paws trying to get the attention of the giant boys towering above her.

  “Besides,” Arthur said, “you’re supposed to be the master lock picker.”

  “I know. But someone got me caught and my picks taken away.”

  “I got you temporarily imprisoned so I could heroically return and—”

  Breeth let out a squeak.

  Arthur saw her and screeched. He hefted a wagon-sized shoe and brought it hurtling down. Breeth tried to run, but her tail was still coiled around the key. Before Arthur could squish her, Wally seized him by the arm and threw him back.

  “Look!” Wally said. “It brought us the key!”

  “And maybe the Pox!” Arthur said, scrambling to the far side of the cell and covering his nose and mouth.

  Heart pounding, Breeth managed to unwind her tail from the key, and Wally picked it up. He stared into her eyes.

  “Breeth?” he whispered.

  Breeth nodded and squeaked. But with her mouse tongue and bucked teeth, it came out as nonsense.

  Blocking Arthur with his back, Wally held out his hand and Breeth hopped onto it. His palm was warm beneath her bare paws. Wally rubbed his finger down her snout and along her back, relieving the pain in her spine from hauling the key across the Manor.

  “What’s it like in there?” Wally asked.

  Breeth could only wriggle her nose.

  “You can’t talk?”

  She shook her head.

  “Hmm. It would be hard to speak English with a mouse tongue, I guess. Can you get out?”

  Breeth hung her head in disappointment. Wally frowned. At first, Breeth thought it was because he was upset she could no longer help them navigate the Manor. But then …

  “Thank you for doing this,” he whispered, scratching between her ears. “We’ll figure out who killed you. In the meantime, I’ll keep you safe. I promise.”

  Breeth’s oil drop eyes filled with tears. Wally had used the same words she had to calm the mouse thing.

  8

  THE PORTAL

  The moment they unlocked the cell door, the rodent scampered up the staircase. Wally ran after it, while Arthur tried to keep up.

  “Um, why are we following a rat?” Arthur asked.

  “It’s a mouse,” Wally said. “Or something like that. And it brought us the key. Maybe it will lead us to an exit.”

  “But rodents like being inside!” Arthur said. “It’s where all the food is!”

  Wally ignored him and continued to follow the mouse—or whatever it was.

  Arthur hadn’t trusted rodents since they’d spread the Pox through Kingsport. He used to bring sacks full of dead rats to the Oakers for a small reward. He still saw rodents as valuable little carriers of disease. And he wouldn’t hesitate to kill this one if it came near him.

  The rodent led them down several stone passageways.

  “How can you be sure that thing’s headed in the right direction?” Arthur asked.

  “It’s proven to be a lot more helpful than you are,” Wally said. “And I’ve had practice figuring this place out since someone left me here.”

  “If I really left you, would I be able to do this?”

  Arthur gathered Wally into a bear hug, but Wally shoved him away and kept moving.

  “Okay,” Arthur said, catching up. “I’ll admit things didn’t go exactly to plan. And that you may have taken the fall for a, um, brief lack of preparation on my behalf. For that I’m, well—what I’m trying to say is…”

  Wally peered over his shoulder. “You’re sorry?”

  Arthur nodded. “I’m sorry you were the victim of uncontrollable circumstances.”

  Wally rolled his eyes and followed the rodent down a dirt tunnel.

  How could Arthur get his friend to recognize that he was a bona fide Gentleman Thief? He remembered Wally’s brother Graham locked in Greyridge. That would tug at his heartstrings.

  “Say, Cooper,” Arthur said. “You’ve never told me about your family.”

  “You never asked.”

  Arthur cleared the embarrassment from his throat. “I know your parents died in the Pox. But do you have any brothers or sisters or anything?”

  “Nope,” Wally said.

  That stung. Arthur figured he and Wally had been th
rough enough together that Wally would at least open up a little.

  “The Rook locked my dad in Greyridge,” Arthur said.

  Wally stopped. He turned and stared at Arthur, as if trying to determine whether or not he was lying.

  Arthur started to feel uncomfortable in his skin. “My old man has his problems,” he said, scratching his hatless head. “But I wouldn’t wish that mental hospital on my worst enemy.”

  Wally stared at him a second. “Good luck with that, Arthur.”

  He continued on, and Arthur felt even worse than before. He’d given Wally the perfect chance to talk about Graham, but Wally had refused it.

  The rodent bounded through a side cavern and into an underground office. It hopped up to an oval window and then wiggled its nose at them. The window looked onto a ghostly field of blue reeds swaying in a soft wind.

  “Whoa,” Arthur said, peering behind the window at the dark space between it and the wall. It wasn’t a window at all. “Um, Cooper? I’m starting to think this is no ordinary manor.”

  “No kidding.”

  Arthur stuck his hand through the window and felt a warm breeze.

  “I don’t think we should go in there,” Wally said.

  “Why not?”

  “From what I’ve learned about this place, that might not even be the real world.”

  The rodent hopped to the side of the window and pointed its whiskers at an ornate lectern. It was made of copper tubing that twined with newfangled electrics, which connected to the window. It also held an open book.

  Arthur closed the book to read the title, and the blue reeds vanished like a snuffed candle. Instead of an exit, a mirror stood before them, reflecting Wally’s and Arthur’s confused expressions. Arthur opened the book again, and the field flickered back into view.

  Arthur removed the old book from the lectern and replaced it with another from a nearby shelf. The moment he opened it, the mirror filled with a new, leafy light. Now it looked onto a purple jungle.

  “It’s a portal,” Arthur said, dumbfounded. “A portal into … books.”

  Wally just stared.