Valian led the way as they hurried along a deserted avenue flanked by tall, graffiti-covered buildings. Dingy alleyways with rickety fire escapes ran between them; their windows were either boarded up or broken.
Ivy shoved her gloved hands into her pockets, thinking of what they’d just learned inside the Tidemongers’ base. The air was cold in this part of Nubrook, and the threat from Alexander Brewster and New Dawn only chilled her further. Worrying that they might have been pursued by Tidemongers, she extended the perimeter of her whispering senses as far as she could. The rattling voices of broken souls trapped inside uncommon objects muttered all around, although there were far fewer than there’d been in the First Quarter. There was something else at the very edge of her reach as well, something different, only it was too far away for her to tell what it was.
‘Why is the Bureau of Fair Trade all the way down here?’ Seb asked. ‘Don’t people use it that often?’
Valian shrugged. ‘It’s more for storage than anything. Whenever two uncommoners shake hands, a record of the transaction is transmitted to the Bureau. The only time you ever really have to visit is if you’re trying to settle a dispute.’ He scowled. ‘That’s why I know the Lundinor Bureau so well. I once got short-changed by …’
Ivy zoned out of what Valian was saying as a strange hissing voice soon became clear in her mind. It was one of the dead, moving closer. She listened intently as it chanted over and over, like a sorcerer casting a spell. It was impossible to distinguish the exact words, but whereas the broken soul inside Scratch seemed innocent and full of fun, this soul felt menacing and cruel.
She scanned the vacant shopfronts, her nerves tingling. Scratch, you there? she asked, reaching him with her whispering.
Ivy’s not something right, he warned in her head.
I know. We’re being tailed, and I don’t think it’s a Tidemonger. Do you know what race of the dead it is?
Her satchel shuddered against her hip. Scratch met never before.
Valian was still rambling on, recounting his tale of being short-changed (‘… and the underguard wouldn’t believe that I’d originally handed over seven grade …’), but a movement at one of the windows drew Ivy’s gaze. She saw the figure of a tall man in a black suit and bowler hat silhouetted against a bright light. Ivy couldn’t see much of his face, other than a wide jaw and dark moustache. Was he their pursuer?
Just as she was about to warn Seb and Valian, a dozen underguard officers rounded the corner, the stomp of their heavy boots reverberating around the street.
‘They’ve probably just come from the Bureau,’ Valian said, crossing to the other side of the road.
Seb steered Ivy out of their way. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, studying her expression. ‘You look distracted.’
‘I …’ She eyed the window again, but the suited figure had vanished; it had disappeared from her field of sense too. ‘It’s nothing,’ she reassured him. ‘Don’t worry.’
Having visited a treehouse department store, a windmill workplace and a circus-tent shop in Lundinor, Ivy wasn’t entirely surprised when the Bureau of Fair Trade building came into view. Shaped like an American football stadium, the oval concrete structure also had a mammoth brass funnel inserted in the roof, so it resembled an old-fashioned gramophone.
‘The glove signals are collected through that trumpet before being processed inside,’ Valian explained. ‘The system uses all kinds of uncommon objects working together.’
Having passed through the automatic front doors, they found a small reception area staffed by a plump gentleman sporting a rainbow wig and feather boa. Behind him were two doors, one decorated with garlands of autumn leaves, the other with large paper lanterns painted to look like Thanksgiving turkeys.
‘Welcome to the Bureau of Fair Trade,’ he said cheerily. ‘What name are you looking for?’
‘Kaye,’ Valian replied.
The receptionist signalled to his left. ‘Take the turkey door to hall four. Please don’t forget your headgear – it’s against GUT law to use any of the record rooms without it.’
‘I know,’ Valian grumbled.
Ivy and Seb walked behind him as they ventured along a curved corridor with numbered doors on either side. The air smelled distinctly of peppermint. ‘Headgear?’ Ivy asked.
‘You can’t exactly see glove records,’ Valian told her. ‘You have to listen to them. Uncommoners use certain … devices to help them do that.’
As he opened door number four, a babble of chatter erupted from the space beyond. It sounded so similar to what Ivy sometimes heard with her whispering that for a moment she thought the voices belonged to broken souls. The speakers were mostly calm-toned adults, although Ivy did catch the occasional child.
‘Who’s that talking?’ she asked.
‘Glove owners!’ Valian shouted back. ‘This way.’
The large hall they’d entered was filled with thousands of criss-crossing silvery threads. Each one was strung taut between a tiny hook on the floor and another on the ceiling, giving the impression of a vast spider’s web. Valian guided Ivy and Seb through a gap in the centre. Ivy watched the strands quivering around them; every time one of them vibrated, a new speaker could be heard.
‘They’re too thin to be guitar strings,’ Seb observed. ‘What are they?’
Ivy crinkled her nose; the smell of peppermint was so strong, it gave her a strange idea. ‘It isn’t dental floss, is it?’
Valian smiled. ‘Spot on. Glove signals pass through the floss in here before being logged in the next chamber.’
When they reached the far side, they moved under an arch into a room full of floor-to-ceiling storage chests. The noise from the dental-floss hall faded slightly so that they didn’t have to shout.
‘Everything is stored alphabetically,’ Valian said, reaching into a plastic drum mounted on the wall beside the arch. ‘See if you can find the right drawer.’
While Seb searched for the label KAYE, Ivy watched Valian remove three cardboard egg boxes from the plastic container. A length of elastic was fixed to each one.
‘Got it,’ Seb announced, pointing to a spot between KAYDOP and KAYEB.
Valian pulled the correct tray out and placed it on the floor. Inside was a stack of sheet music, stapled together in batches. ‘Now we put these on,’ he said, handing Ivy and Seb an egg box each.
Ivy flapped hers open experimentally. ‘This is the headgear?’
‘Unfortunately, yes,’ Valian said. ‘You can’t choose which uncommon objects do what.’ He made it sound like the phrase was something he’d been told a hundred times before. ‘If we want to hear who my parents last traded with, we have to use these.’ He sighed and slid the egg box over his messy hair, making himself look like a toddler wearing a home-made space helmet. Ivy stopped herself from giggling by reminding herself why they were there, and positioned her egg box on her head, stretching the elastic under her chin.
‘If this isn’t a photo moment, I don’t know what is,’ Seb said, laughing. ‘It would have been even better seeing those underguards wearing them.’
‘Just put yours on,’ Ivy insisted, glad that Seb’s phone was out of action – common technology didn’t work well in undermarts.
Once they had put on their egg boxes, they all got onto their knees beside the drawer. Valian inspected the first batch of music, put it aside and then spread the other sets over the floor. ‘The top one was mine, so I guess I was the last one to use this drawer. We need to check the rest until we find the ones belonging to my parents. There can’t be that many other Kayes.’
He studied the nearest file for a moment, shook his head and put it back in the drawer. Ivy slid a batch towards her and hesitated. She couldn’t read music and she knew that, despite all his lessons and band practice, Seb couldn’t either. Scanning the top page, she expected to find a meaningless jumble of swirly symbols, straight lines and long-tailed dots, so it wasn’t what she saw that surprised her; it was what she heard.
&nbs
p; ‘… and I swear that this …’ a soft voice said in her ear.
Ivy flinched. The sound was coming from her egg box, she was sure of it. She ran her eyes further along the notation.
‘… is an honest and true …’
Every note seemed to account for a single syllable of speech. Ivy checked which elements around her were uncommon, trying to understand how they worked together. The sheet music, egg boxes and dental floss were the only items containing broken souls; somehow the combination of their three abilities enabled her to read the document.
She started from the beginning.
‘My name is Cherry Kaye and I swear that this is an honest and true account of my uncommon trades.’
Ivy recognized the name: it was Valian’s mum. She regarded him as he sat across from her, scrutinizing another sheet. He would have known that coming to the Bureau meant he would end up listening to his parents’ voices. It couldn’t be often that he heard them talking, or – thanks to the Frozen Telescope – saw them. Today must be making him miss them more than ever. Continuing to read, Ivy listened carefully.
‘Seven years ago, on the twenty-seventh of November, I exchanged objects worth four grade to a sky driver named Lucien Brown for a ride to the shores of Breath Falls. On the twenty-fourth of November I purchased two glasses of Hundred Punch in Lundinor for—’
‘Valian, I found your mum’s records,’ Ivy blurted. ‘Her last trade was on the twenty-seventh of November for transport to Breath Falls. Where’s that?’
He looked up from the page. ‘It’s a famous waterfall in the First Quarter of Nubrook. I’ve got my dad’s records here. He hired a snow-globe photographer to take a picture of him and my mum in front of the Falls on the same day. They must have finished scouting in New York and spent an afternoon sightseeing in Nubrook before coming home – the twenty-seventh of November was the date they were murdered.’
‘So … if your parents were in Nubrook before they died, then it must have been the Sands of Change they found, not the Sword of Wills,’ Seb concluded. ‘Amos wrote that the Sands of Change was hidden in Nubrook. I wonder how your parents came across it.’
‘I have no idea,’ Valian admitted, ‘but whatever object the Sands of Change is, that’s what Rosie has. Did Amos Stirling write anything else about it in his journal? Without knowing what it is, we can’t understand what happened to Rosie.’
Getting the journal out of her satchel, Ivy cringed. ‘There is one thing I found a few weeks back – but you’re not going to like it. Amos discovered some sentences in an ancient text that mention the Sands of Change.’ She found the right page and, after using more of Valian’s raider’s tonic, read aloud:
‘Light to darkness, life to death
Crystal droplet, bathed in breath
Clasped within silver hands
Deep within hide the Sands.’
‘Of course,’ groaned Seb, dragging a hand down his face. ‘It had to be a riddle.’
‘We need to work out what it means,’ Valian said, clearing everything away. ‘Start brainstorming.’
Ivy ran through the rhyme in her head while she gave Valian a hand tidying the sheet music. Her gaze happened to fall on one of the files and she heard a girl talking.
‘… I swear that this is an honest …’ The speaker had a youthful, innocent voice that reminded Ivy of Scratch. Even though the file wasn’t stapled, the paper felt too thick to be a single sheet. Ivy prised away the thumb and forefinger of her glove, licked her fingertip and rubbed it against the corner of the paper: two leaves separated with a satisfying crackle. Carefully, she studied the piece from the beginning.
‘My name is Rosie Kaye and I swear that this …’
‘Valian …’ Ivy tugged on his sleeve. ‘This is your sister’s file.’
He huffed. ‘Yeah, but it’s empty. Rosie had only just received her uncommon gloves a few days before she went missing. She never made any trades.’
‘Are you sure?’ Ivy asked. ‘There are a few notes on the next page.’
Valian sidled closer, frowning. ‘I examined her file after she went missing. There was only the one sheet.’
Ivy tilted the document towards him so he could see too. His eyes sped hungrily over every note:
‘My name is Rosie Kaye and I swear that this is an honest and true account of my uncommon trades.’
As the rest of the paper was blank, Ivy flipped over to the second sheet.
‘Transactions in which no goods were exchanged are as follows: seven years ago, on the fifth of December, I shook hands with Mr Rife of Forward and Rife’s auction house.’
The speech finished there.
‘But—’ Valian jabbed a fist into the floor. ‘Then Mr Rife has seen her! He was lying to us.’
Seb shot to his feet. ‘We should go and confront him. He has to tell us the truth now that we’ve got evidence.’
‘We can’t,’ Valian argued with a shake of his head. ‘Not tonight, at least. The auction house will already be closed and I have no idea where to find Mr Rife if not there. We’ll have to wait till morning.’
There were no three-person road signs available when they got to the boarding zone at the nearest atrium. Seb took a seat on a SCHOOL CROSSING placard; Ivy and Valian shared THE HIGHWAY 17 EXIT behind.
‘I’ll start working on that riddle in Amos’s journal right away,’ Ivy promised. ‘Scratch can help me – he’s good at puzzles.’
Valian picked at the paint on the edge of the sign, his face tight with nerves. ‘We have to hurry, though,’ he said. ‘The longer we take to figure it out, the more chance there is that Alexander will find Rosie before we do …
‘And I can’t let that happen.’
I sit splashing my feet in a clear pool of water. The zing of freshly cut oranges fills the air. Larks dart through the blue sky as my shoulders warm in the morning sun …
Ivy forced herself awake. Bird-shaped silhouettes zigzagged across the plaster ceiling; the invigorating fragrance of citrus filled her nostrils. She pushed herself up in bed, feeling groggy.
Her room was painted mustard yellow, with bold patterned curtains hanging at the windows. All at once the evening before rushed back to her. Valian had already organized hotel accommodation for himself, but she and Seb, having assumed their babysitter would be a commoner, hadn’t planned on staying overnight in Nubrook at all. It had taken them an entire hour to locate an available room. The 1970s-themed Guesthouse Swankypants was the first place they’d found that wasn’t fully booked.
Next to Ivy’s bed stood a silver lava lamp on a stylish teak table. As the wax inside it stiffened, the bird visions overhead disappeared. She read the notice beside the lamp:
Dear Guest,
Please enjoy this uncommon lava lamp. You will wake up energized in the morning, and at night you will feel relaxed and ready for sleep.
With compliments,
Guesthouse Swankypants
Ivy pulled back the covers. She was wearing gingham-check pyjamas embroidered with the logo of Guesthouse Swankypants – a disco-dancing woman with an afro and flared trousers. A shag-pile carpet tickled Ivy’s toes as she padded into a lounge furnished with a moulded plastic table, and chairs in gaudy shades of orange and purple. The remains of the burgers, fries and milkshakes she and Seb had eaten last night were on a room-service trolley in the corner.
Her brother stood gazing out of the window, his expression distant. ‘You sleep all right?’
‘Yeah … surprisingly.’ It crossed Ivy’s mind that the uncommon lava lamp could have suppressed any nightmares she might otherwise have had about the Dirge’s army of the dead.
‘I’ve been trying to work out what the Sands of Change is,’ Seb said. ‘If the name is a clue, it isn’t very helpful.’
Ivy joined him at the window. Beyond the balcony, the street was busy with traders doing early-morning deals on everything from dusters to dancing chairs. On the balconies of the buildings opposite, people set off for work on fl
ying brooms and cleaning mops. The display in the window of a shop named Tierrific Ties caught Ivy’s attention – an array of patterned ties hung round the necks of glittery, grinning mannequins. As she watched their expressions switching from happy to sad, the ties changed colour too.
‘The riddle doesn’t make sense either,’ she admitted. ‘I keep getting stuck on that “bathed in breath” bit. It’s so odd.’
‘I thought about that too.’ Seb gestured to Tierrific Ties. ‘It could mean that the Sands of Change is something you put close to your mouth, like a tie. That would explain the “bathed in breath” line, because you’d always be breathing on it.’
Gazing at the mannequins’ sparkly lips, Ivy wondered which other objects might fit Seb’s theory. ‘What about drinking straws? Or sometimes people blow on their spectacles before cleaning them too. Would that count?’
‘Yeah, or pens and pencils – I always chew mine at school.’
Ivy watched a man sipping a coffee as he strolled along the pavement. ‘There’s also teacups, chopsticks, napkins, cutlery …’ She sagged. ‘I guess it doesn’t exactly narrow down what type of object the Sands of Change could be.’ She jumped as an iridescent peacock feather suddenly appeared at the end of her nose. It floated upwards and swished to and fro, writing letters in the air above her head.
It flipped over and did a loop-the-loop. Ivy jerked her head, dodging aside.
‘Who’s that from?’ Seb asked, shuffling back.
‘I don’t know,’ she answered. ‘I wasn’t expecting anything.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’ Ivy said. ‘The handwriting keeps changing.’
The plume juddered back and forth as if it was being tugged in opposite directions.
‘I’ve never seen a featherlight act like this before,’ Seb admitted.
The feather continued jotting disjointed phrases until, with a soft puff, it disappeared, leaving only three words shimmering in the air:
Half an hour later, the message was still spinning through Ivy’s head when she and Seb arrived outside the Rice Is Nice burrito van where they’d arranged to meet Valian. Papier-mâché models of turkeys in pilgrim hats sat on the roof. Seb traded for two breakfast burritos, and he and Ivy ate them while they waited. Ivy had just swallowed her last mouthful of tortilla when she spotted Valian approaching with a girl. She had golden skin, chin-length, silky black hair and a broad smile. ‘Judy!’ Ivy’s spirits lifted as she greeted their uncommon friend. ‘I didn’t know you’d be here.’
The Frozen Telescope Page 6
