“Only musicians are welcome here,” Bombasta pointed out with prickly words. “She failed her audition. She shouldn’t be welcome.”
Luce glared at the singer. “It’s late,” she said. “The girl gets a bed. She’s welcome here tonight, and so is her shadow—wherever the thing wandered off to.”
She led Kaile to a small room with a stuffed mattress, a lamp on the wall, a washbasin, and a chamber pot tucked under the basin.
“Here you go,” said the sailor, her voice uncharacteristically soft. “I’ll bring you a bite to eat in the morning.”
“Thank you,” said Kaile. She felt dazed, disappointed, and tired deep down in the marrow of every bone. She couldn’t hear the bridge, or hold it together. She would not play in Grandfather’s place.
Luce stood still and thoughtful, without leaving. “That song you played. Did Korinth teach it to you?”
“No,” said Kaile. Her voice sounded dull and flat in her own ears. “No one taught it to me. But the flute refuses to play any other song.”
“Oh?” the sailor asked, interested. “And where did this stubborn flute come from?”
“The Kneecap,” said Kaile. “I got it from a goblin, and he got it from a bone carver, but the carver first picked it up from the Kneecap.”
“A drowned bone, then,” Luce observed. “A drowned bone, unquiet in flood time. And it will only play the one song—a very important song. Every Fiddleway musician knows that song. It’s the one we play to hold the bridge against a flood. That’s why it was so important to find you, with floodwaters currently thundering down from the mountains. Not just because every bridge musician and their shadow heard you play, but because you played that song. It binds together the stones of this bridge. And it can shake things apart just as well, just as it shook your shadow from you. That’s why we’re so careful about auditioning.”
“Oh,” said Kaile. She sat down on the edge of the mattress. “I’m sorry I didn’t pass. You spent all that effort finding me, but nothing much came of it.”
The sailor shook her head. “I’m certainly not sorry about spending the effort. Worth it just to get you off the Kneecap. But all of this still needs figuring out. A drowned bone strives to teach you the flood song just before the River pitches its own raging fit. That’s important. That’s not the sort of thing we should ignore. The bone must have belonged to a Fiddleway musician—it wouldn’t know that tune otherwise.”
Kaile held the flute and felt the stops with her fingers.
You might also try to discover whose bone that once was, the goblin had said.
“How can I find out more about its history?” she asked Luce.
“We should go to the Reliquary and pester a Reliquarian for answers,” Luce told her. “They know all there is to know about bones, and they might help you puzzle with this one. I can show you the way to the Reliquary in the morning. I’ll do that, unless I’m very badly needed here.”
“Thanks,” said Kaile, her voice soft and tired. It seemed like the thing to say, but she didn’t feel especially hopeful. She wasn’t welcome on the bridge after all. They only let her sleep here because Luce insisted, and they would only let her sleep here tonight.
“Good night,” said the sailor. She closed the door behind her, but it didn’t latch properly. The door slowly creaked open again after the sailor had gone.
Kaile remained where she was on the edge of the mattress. She didn’t stand up. She didn’t close the door. Shouldn’t ever close the door on a haunting, she thought.
She would not become a bridge musician. She would not inherit Grandfather’s place. She would have no musical conversations with him, playing where he used to play.
She felt as though her very last tie to family and home had been cut. She felt as though she did not touch the world, and was not a part of the world. She felt as empty as her lantern. She felt like she was hiding inside her own bare skeleton. She felt like a dead thing.
Shade crept in through the open door, and came to sit beside her.
You didn’t pass, did you? Shade whispered. I’m sorry. I should have been there. I shouldn’t have left you alone.
“I told you to go away,” Kaile pointed out.
I shouldn’t have listened.
“You can’t help listening,” Kaile reminded her shadow. “You’re always listening.”
I’m sorry, Shade whispered. I’m still sorry.
Kaile took in a breath, just to prove that she could, and then stood up. “Stay near the hallway light.” She extinguished the wall lamp, removed the oil reservoir, and poured it into her own lantern. Then she lit the wick, wound up the lantern base, and set it on the floor. Shadow puppets in animal shapes moved on the walls all around them.
“There,” Kaile said, and closed the door. “That should burn until morning.”
Thank you, said Shade.
Kaile climbed into bed, kicked off her boots, and curled up under blankets. Shade darkened the other side of the mattress.
Kaile wanted to sleep. She tried to sleep. She couldn’t sleep.
“What would happen to you if the lantern went out?” she asked.
I don’t know, Shade whispered. Before, the dark always felt like drowning and sinking and losing the whole shape of myself. I hear that other shadows can swim through it, and visit each other, but I don’t know if that’s true. I never got the knack of swimming. I only sank, and waited for the light to come back so I could have shape again. Now that we aren’t tethered to each other anymore, I might just keep sinking forever. And there are other things that move through the dark, like flickerbloods and brighteaters. There are huge, slow-moving things that swallowed their own names a very long time ago.
A joke and a tease hid in the shadow’s voice.
“What’s a brighteater?” Kaile asked.
They eat reflected light, said Shade. With sharp little teeth. Be careful wearing gemstone rings after nightfall, or you might lose a finger.
“Right,” said Kaile. “I’ll try to remember that the next time I wear jewels. Are you making all of this up?”
Maybe, said Shade.
“Are you trying to cheer me up, or scare me?”
Maybe both, said Shade. Or else maybe these are deep, dark secrets that we shadows almost never let the bodied people know.
Kaile laughed. She couldn’t help it. Then she yawned. “Go to sleep,” she said.
She tried to do the same, but she asked more questions instead of sleeping. “Why do you think the flute will only play that one song? And why did that ghoulish thing on the Kneecap use the same song to hold itself together?”
Shade didn’t answer. She snored a whispering sort of snore.
Kaile rolled over and struggled with her own exhaustion.
You can hold anything together with the proper tune, Luce had said, or you can tear it apart.
Thirteenth Verse
THE NEXT MORNING THE Beglicane household was all bustle and chaos. Kaile crept downstairs to see musicians of every kind jostling for floor space and trying to tune their instruments. Luce Strumgut stood on one banister of the staircase and shouted like a barge captain in the midst of a storm. Master Nibbledy walked stately among the musicians, checked the tuning of their instruments, and gave his own solemn orders—each with a single word.
He only ever spoke one single word at a time.
Kaile found a window and peered outside. The world seemed calm enough. Morning sunlight glowed and glinted, and the surface of the River drifted downstream in what looked like an ordinary way.
“Not sure what the fuss is all about,” she said to Shade, who stood beside her. “I don’t see any flooding. But everybody’s busy, and we’re as much in the way as a Snotfish in a kitchen. Let’s just go.”
Luce said she would take us to the Reliquary, Shade whispered.
Kaile tried to get Luce’s attention, but the lute-playing sailor’s attention had already split into several pieces. None of those pieces noticed Kaile.
Kaile agreed. She did not like taking up space where she was not welcome.
“We’re not supposed to be here,” she said. “Let’s go.”
She picked her way between the drums and foldable harpsichords, dodged a fretful bandore player who kept trying to replace a broken string with fumbling fingers, and finally made it to the front door.
Cymbat the drummer suddenly stood in her way.
He looked directly at Kaile for one moment, and then mumbled unintelligible things at the empty space just above her head. He noticed Shade, and flinched away from her, but only a little.
“Hello,” said Kaile, nervous and uncertain. “Good luck with all this.”
Cymbat handed over a very small bundle made from a napkin tied at the corners. Kaile took it.
What’s that? Shade asked.
“Bread, cheese, and two apples,” said Kaile as she peeked inside. “He gave us breakfast.”
She looked up to thank the drummer, but Cymbat had already disappeared in the bustle and chaos.
* * *
Kaile and Shade ate their breakfast and shadow-breakfast outside. It was early, so there wasn’t very much traffic flowing over the bridge. A farmer’s cart passed by, heading north. A boy in a coat very much too big for him came walking south.
Kaile wiped crumbs from her mouth and the front of her dress. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s find this Reliquary place ourselves.”
We don’t know where it is, Shade pointed out. And we’ve never been to Northside.
“Then we’ll just ask for directions,” said Kaile. She slung her satchel over one shoulder and set out. Shade followed.
They crossed the Fiddleway into Northside. It seemed like a different city entirely, somewhere very far from home rather than just the northern half of their own Zombay. The streets were smooth, the rooftops were slate tile rather than tin sheets and thatch, and none of the walls were falling down. Northsiders wore shorter coats, taller hats, and fewer colors than Kaile was accustomed to.
She felt uncomfortable noticing these differences. It reminded her that she did not know the whole of Zombay as well as she had always thought. She didn’t know her own city. She felt unwelcome. The word “home” seemed like noise to her now, like a very small sound that made no sense.
“Look at all these people,” she said to Shade. “None of them are neighbors. I don’t recognize any of them. I don’t know where they’re going. There’s so much happening at the same time.”
Of course, said Shade. This is a city. There’s always more than one story unfolding at once in a city.
People looked at Kaile oddly when she asked for the Reliquary, but they gave her directions and she followed them. She tried to move with purpose, as though she really did know where she was going, because she had heard that unattended children in Northside got rounded up by the Guard and thrown into orphanages.
Don’t walk so fast, Shade protested. We’re not in the Guard. We don’t have gearworked legs.
“We’re not dustfish, either,” said Kaile. “We can’t swim through dust and leap between the drift dunes. Not that there are any drift dunes here. I wonder how they keep the streets so clean.”
We’re still not molekeys, said Shade, so we can’t scamper over the rooftops and make hiding places with our teeth.
“Not here, anyway,” said Kaile. “All the walls are brick and stone. Painful to bite through. And we’re also not ...”
She forgot about whatever it was that they were not, and stopped to stare at the building in front of them. It looked like a great big jewelry box of pointy stone spires. A pair of bronze doors stood open, gleaming in the sunlight.
“I think this is it,” she said.
Probably, Shade agreed. The doors are made out of bronzed bones all stacked together. That’s a pretty big hint.
The two of them passed through the open doors of stacked bones.
Inside, the Reliquary was a place of thin stone walls, wide windows, and soaring vaults held up by painted columns. Each column had an arch carved into the side, and every open niche held a skull.
Kaile looked down at the glass-smooth floor of polished stone. She saw her own reflection in it, and Shade’s beside her.
“Do reflections mind that we’re stepping on them?” Kaile asked.
No, said Shade, without looking down. From where they stand, they’re stepping on us.
A voice called out to them. “Who is there?” The sound carried, bouncing between the stone columns. “Is someone there?” Footsteps hurried across the floor.
Kaile suddenly wanted to hide. She spoke up instead. “Here! Over here.”
A woman came hurrying toward them. She wore a crisp and formal blue coat, and kept her hair mostly short and oddly styled—or at least Kaile thought it looked odd.
“A guest!” the woman called out. “A visitor! Would you care for a tour? I am Contrivia Runcemore, the Reliquarian on duty today, and I would be very pleased to conduct a tour.” Her Northside accent sounded sharp and precise in Kaile’s ears.
“Um, yes,” Kaile said. “I’d like a tour. But I’d especially like to know about carved flutes. Flutes like this one.”
She held up the flute. Runcemore the Reliquarian looked down, smiled, frowned, and then tried to smile again.
“Of course!” she said, with aggressive enthusiasm. Her voice sped up. “Right this way. But first—first we must admire the atrium as we pass through it.” She held her arms wide to encompass the entryway and all its many columns, and launched herself into a practiced speech. “The space around you is dedicated to the history of Zombay, and to preserving the relics of our most significant personages. The skulls here belonged to every Lord Mayor who has ever governed the city—excluding the current Mayor, of course. He is still using his skull. Along the wall you can see the hand bones of every Captain of the Guard to have served the city—including the current Captain. He was kind enough to donate his old hands after replacing them with gearworks.”
Kaile glanced politely at the bones on display. Pieces of important people sat on velvet cushions within glass cases, gold boxes, and stone arches. Shade walked beside her, and did not look around.
“They seem like actors in pretty little theaters,” Kaile said. She meant it as a compliment, but the Reliquarian scowled.
“They do not resemble theaters,” she said. “What a filthy comparison. The theaters have all closed, and good riddance to them.”
“Sorry,” Kaile said quietly.
With obvious effort, the Reliquarian wrestled away her scowl and resumed the tour. “Down that way we have the Chamber of Grotesques, where we keep all sorts of monstrosities and misshapen bones, oddly changed—and sometimes Changed, even! We have two goblin skeletons, and one set of bones that I believe may have belonged to a troll. Over in that direction we keep the Chamber of Infamous Criminals, and the Chamber of Beasts. I maintain the Chamber of Beasts myself. We will pass through it on the way to the Chamber of Curiosities, where the carved musical instruments are kept.”
The Reliquarian led them into a long chamber, smaller than the atrium but with much larger bones on display. She gestured proudly at the ceiling, where a greatfish skeleton hung suspended by several copper chains. Kaile hadn’t known that any living thing could be so huge—or any dead thing, either. Each of its tusks was bigger than she was.
“I call him Bufkins,” said the Reliquarian. “He is new to the Reliquary. I only just assembled him last year, and employed a gearworker for a few extra touches. Observe. ...” She took a long pole from one corner, reached up through the greatfish ribs with it, and cranked hidden springs. The skeleton began to move. It swished its tail back and forth, and opened its jaws. The great old bones seemed to remember swimming. Then the gearworks wound down, slowed, and stopp
ed.
“I should install a piece of coal in there one day,” the Reliquarian said, wistful. “If we made an automaton out of Bufkins, then I would not need to do the winding up.”
Kaile was horrified, both by the suggestion and the Reliquarian’s casual tone of voice.
“But coal’s made out of hearts,” she protested. Only the nastiest and most brutal people arrested by the Guard were supposed to have their hearts cut out for coalmaking, but no one really believed that the coalmakers limited their craft to nasty, brutal hearts—no one in Southside, at least.
The Reliquarian pretended not to hear her, and the tour continued.
They passed the bones of different animals, most of them with long legs and large teeth, all put together and posed as though they remembered how to move. Kaile kept expecting them to. She imagined that each beast turned its bony head to follow her, that each one kept its empty eye sockets focused on her as she passed by.
“Are all of these skeletons gearworked?” she asked. She tried to make the question casual, unconcerned, and not at all nervous.
“Oh, no,” the Reliquarian said. “Only Bufkins. It would be wonderful, of course, to make all of my charges move. They could bow to the Lord Mayor when he comes, or do little dances to music on important occasions. Others would move much as they did in life, to show us how they were once accustomed to moving.” She stood beside the posed skeleton of a jite, its teeth bared and wings outstretched to look as threatening as possible. The Reliquarian posed herself, mimicking the jite and holding out the tails of her coat like wings.
Kaile wasn’t sure whether or not to laugh, so she didn’t.
The Reliquarian dropped her coat-wings, resumed a dignified posture, and led the way down a long, windowless passage. Here the walls were made out of arm and leg bones, hundreds and thousands of them stacked on top of each other as though a multitude of the dead had built a fort out of themselves.
Kaile hoped that none of these bones had drowned, and that they wouldn’t make unquiet mischief.
At the far end of the bone-built passage stood the Chamber of Curiosities, which displayed bones carved into other things. Kaile saw a model barge, a miniature tree, and a ticking clock.
Ghoulish Song z-2 Page 9
