by Dave Butler
A quarter mile off the highway stood a tall wooden building. A line of men filed out of it and all the way to the road; their faces and clothing were smudged black, and they wore helmets with glowing bulbs on the front. Miners.
“An article of clothing?”
Charlie shook his head.
“A length of the person’s hair? Fingernail clippings? An unwanted organ, removed and kept in a jar?”
“No. No. What?”
Thassia thought. “A longtime possession? Something really important to the person?”
Charlie considered Bob’s flyer and wished he’d accidentally torn off a small piece of it when he’d fallen. “No.”
Thassia sighed. “This may be difficult. I don’t suppose you know a secret, something no one else knows about him?”
“Her.” Ollie was careful about letting people know he was a shape-changer, but when Thassia said the word secret, Charlie immediately thought of Bob.
The wagon was entering town now. Charlie was surprised at how many clockwork and steam-powered devices he saw. Machynlleth, surrounded by sheep pastures and forests at the foot of a desolate mountain, looked like someone had taken Pondicherry’s Clockwork Invention & Repair and stretched it out to fill an entire town. He saw foundries, piston arms, spinning wheels, people standing in oversized mechanical legs that walked them down the street, steam-spewing skeletal horselike creations pulling carts or wearing saddles, and more.
Then Charlie heard jeering. A man wearing mechanical legs picked up his pace and jogged past Thassia’s wagon. Had he seen something interesting ahead?
“Her. Do you know any of her secrets?”
“Yes,” Charlie said. “She has a very big secret, and I think I might be the only one who knows it.”
“Easy, then,” Thassia said. “We’ll just need a dowsing rod. Hawthorn is best for people, and we can find hawthorn here in the valley. You’ll share the secret with me; I’ll use it to find your friend.”
The wagon turned, and the mooring tower came into view, only a hundred feet away. It was even larger from this close distance, but Charlie didn’t look at the tower or at the ships docked at it. He was too interested in what he saw at the tower’s base.
“The sheyala is named Atzick, by the way.”
Charlie was briefly amused that Thassia’s cat shared a name with her husband. Then he focused on what he was seeing.
In front of the tower was a small square with a raised platform of slates. Around that raised platform stood a crowd of people, jeering and booing and whistling and throwing things. They threw fruit, mostly, but also dirt and stones, and Charlie saw more than one strong-stomached little boy picking up a ball of horse manure to fling.
Some of the miners were joining the crowd at the rear, jeering and cursing with harsh words.
The crowd was throwing things at three figures in the center of the platform. The three people stood, but they were bent forward at the waist because their necks and wrists had been locked into a wooden trap.
The stocks. Charlie had read about them and seen drawings, but in real life they were much more horrible.
Because, in real life, the stocks contained Heaven-Bound Bob, Ollie the snake, and the dewin Lloyd Shankin.
Charlie jumped from the wagon and rushed toward the stocks. He threw hard elbows to get through the crowd, and when he found himself in front of his friends, he turned around and held up his hands.
“Stop!” he cried.
For a moment, the mob froze. Then the jeering began again.
“Here now, what’s this?” “You’re a filthy little beggar just like them!” “Oh, look, there are four little turds in the gang of thieves!”
Thieves?
A long, heavy vegetable struck Charlie in the face and fell to the slates. A leek.
“Don’t hurt them!” Charlie yelled.
“Hurt them? We don’t want to hurt them!” A thick-bodied man with no hair and a filthy apron held six eggs clutched against his chest. “We just want to teach them what we think of thieves, boyo!”
“Oh yes, we do!” squealed the woman standing next to him. Her face was greasy; she had a matching apron and armful of eggs. “Then tomorrow we’ll hurt them, but only a little bit, and only around the neck! Now get back to your mouse-eater friends!”
The aproned couple thought this was a hilarious joke. They laughed really hard for a minute, and then they pelted Charlie and his companions with all their eggs.
“Charlie?”
Charlie risked a look back and saw Bob and Ollie both craning their necks to look at him.
“You’d better run, mate!” Ollie grunted.
“I’ve got money!” Charlie shoved his fist into his pocket, groping for his bap’s banknotes. “Are you in trouble? Is there a fine I can pay?”
“Fine? Charlie, get out of ’ere! They think you’re one of us, they’ll ’ang you, too.”
Hang?
“What for?” he asked. A mushy ball hit Charlie in the neck, and the smell told him that he’d just been tagged with horse manure.
“Stealing my own flyer,” Bob said morosely. “Ain’t that just a miscarving of justice?”
“Miscarriage.” A tomato struck Ollie in the head for his trouble.
Bob’s bomber cap lay on the ground. Her brown hair tumbled down around her neck.
“Bob,” Charlie said. “Your cap.”
Ollie snickered. “Yeah, look at my mate Bob. Long hair like a girl. No wonder you never take that thing off.”
Charlie stooped to pick up the cap and stopped when he saw what was inside. Folded like a little packet of papers were Gnat’s wings. They were unmistakable, like the iridescent green wings of an oversized butterfly.
“Gnat?” he asked.
“She ain’t dead, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Ollie said. “Her wings got wet and they fell right off.”
“An’ then we lost ’er, mate,” Bob added. “Or maybe she lost us. When we was arrested trying to recover my property, she got away, an’ we didn’t.”
Stones hit Charlie, and he was glad. Stones that wouldn’t hurt him might put out Ollie’s eye or knock Bob unconscious. The crowd jeered louder.
“I tried to help.” Lloyd Shankin stared glumly at the slates, his whole body drooping as he talked. His black coat and long face made him look like a pasty crow. “But the party trespassed against only assumed I was also a robber.”
“Yeah,” Bob said. “ ’E wants to be a whiny dog.”
“Er…what does that mean? What rhymes with whiny dog?” Charlie asked.
“It ain’t a rhyme,” Ollie grumbled. “It just ain’t English.”
“ ‘Gweinidog,’ ” Lloyd Shankin said. “A parson, it means. I was to be a minister until recently. Until I learned I had talent as a magician.”
“If you had such talent as a magician,” Ollie muttered, “we’d none of us be here, would we, mate?”
Why was Ollie still here? Charlie wondered. Couldn’t he just have transformed into a snake to escape?
“True. If I had a bit more talent on me, we’d have escaped. Instead I’m here with you, charged with Misdemeanor Practice of Magic Without a License from the Royal Magical Society.” Lloyd Shankin sighed.
Charlie looked across the top of the crowd and saw men in long blue coats with double rows of brass buttons coming toward the stocks. Behind them, at a crossroads of two broad streets, stood a tall, narrow gallows.
He forced himself not to think of his friends hanging by the neck. “There are men coming.”
Ollie looked up. “That’s the gaoler and his crew,” he said. “Probably come to take us back to our cell. We were only supposed to be in the stocks for an hour. This ain’t the punishment; it’s just advertisement for the punishment.”
Bob shook her head. “Right, an’ it feels like two days. Serious, mate, you better ’ightail it unless you want to spend the night with us in the rusty an’ maybe get ’anged.”
“The rusty?” C
harlie imagined an enormous iron container with his friends inside.
“Rusty nail, gaol,” Ollie said. “Ain’t you learned to understand Bob yet?”
“Easy, Ollie. ’E’s working on it.”
“I’ll be back.” Charlie put Bob’s cap on her head and pulled on the straps to make it tight. Then he tucked Gnat’s wings into the pocket of his coat and ran. As he cut through the crowd, he took two steps out of his way to grab a ball of horse manure from a big boy’s hand and smash it onto the boy’s own chest.
At the back of the crowd, Charlie pushed through a curtain of miners. They resisted and swore, but they didn’t stop him. Behind them, the wagons were waiting. Charlie slipped through Thassia’s doors and shut them. She had lit a clutch of candles on a shelf on one wall and opened two high shuttered windows to let in light.
“You stank before,” she told him. “Now you’re worse.”
“Thanks.”
“And you see what a good dowser I am?” she continued. “You didn’t even have to tell me your friend’s secret.”
Charlie wanted to laugh, but he couldn’t. “You’re such a good dowser, you’re going to take me to the pixie who lost these wings in no time.”
He pushed the doors open a crack and peeped out. Bob, Ollie, and the dewin were being removed from the stocks and dragged away. They were going to the gaol, Bob had said, but Thassia could help Charlie find them later, if he needed it, by virtue of Bob’s secret.
“Please,” he added.
“No trouble at all,” Thassia said.
* * *
Before Charlie had even half explained to Syzigon what was happening, the dwarf had turned the caravan around and driven up into the hills again, searching for hawthorn. They found a clutch of the trees huddled together on the top of a crumbling stone wall between two sheep pastures.
Because Thassia insisted that the rod would only work if she made it herself, Charlie climbed the wall and then reached down and dragged her up after him. He helped her balance on top of the heap of stones as she chose a forked stick and broke it off with her hands.
Back in the wagon again, he waited while she smoothed the stick and chanted over it, rubbing Gnat’s wings repeatedly down the length of the rod.
Charlie stared at the wings. Was Gnat in pain? Would the wings grow back? Was she doomed to be just an ordinary human now, but only two feet tall? Or would she grow, and become an ordinary person and full-sized? Could she accomplish three mighty feats on foot? And could she possibly be Baroness of Underthames without wings?
“Ready,” Thassia said. They set out.
The sun was sinking below the horizon. Syzigon and the others stayed at the wagons, and Thassia alone came with Charlie, with the promise sworn by earth and sky that at the first sign of trouble they’d come directly back. Thassia led, swinging the rod back and forth and moving in the directions it indicated to her.
Charlie quickly learned that the rod had no interest in keeping them on a decent road. They crossed several sheep pastures and then a vegetable patch. Then they scrambled over a wall and marched across a graveyard behind a church.
It was in the graveyard that Charlie first saw the face.
“Stop,” he whispered. The sun was down now.
“What is it?”
“I thought I saw someone. Over there, behind that big headstone.”
“Someone you know? Or a copper?”
Charlie shook his head. “A boy’s face. He was wearing a thick scarf, and a hat pulled down low.”
They walked around behind the headstone Charlie was talking about. Nothing. For the second time in as many days, Charlie wished he were a tracker.
“Could have been a ghost,” Thassia said.
“Do you mean a ghoul? I know about ghouls.”
“I mean a ghost. The spirit of a dead person…you know.”
“There are ghosts?”
“There are elves, and elf roads, and dwarfs, and gnomes and hulders and fairies, and machines with souls. And, as you point out, ghouls. What’s so unlikely about ghosts?”
Charlie urged Thassia to walk a little faster.
On the far side of the churchyard, the buildings were taller. They were also built closer together, often sharing common walls with their neighbors. Charlie and Thassia were getting close to the center of Machine-Town, which, after all, wasn’t that big.
“The rod dips, telling me we’re going the right direction,” Thassia said. “But it also wants to pull me upward.”
“Upward?”
Thassia pointed at the rooftop of the nearest building. It was three stories tall, with a carpenter’s shop on the ground floor and living rooms above that.
“Right.” Charlie crouched down. “Get on my back and hold on.”
With Thassia holding on to him, Charlie easily climbed up the side of the building. He went from window to window until he reached a balcony on the third floor. From there, a simple jump let him grab the edge of the rooftop and pull himself up.
“Earth and sky,” Thassia said. “You’re an impressive fellow.”
Charlie shrugged. “I’m good at some things.”
Being good at things let him help people. Lloyd Shankin had said he wanted to use his own special talents to help people. Lloyd Shankin, whom Charlie had taken for a madman, but who had tried to rescue Charlie’s friends and had gotten in trouble for it.
Now all his friends needed Charlie’s help.
Thassia took the hawthorn rod in both hands again and marched across the rooftops. Charlie watched her footing so that, in her concentration on the rod and its directions, she didn’t accidentally drop three stories to her death down an alley.
The rod led them up and down over high-gabled rooftops. The roofs here were shingled with slate, the same blue-gray stone that paved the streets of Machine-Town. Charlie was grateful that it was dry—in the rain, the stone would be too slick to climb across.
At the peak of the last and tallest rooftop, he caught Thassia by the shoulder and pointed.
“That’s the street,” he said. “We’ve reached the end of the row. Be careful.”
Thassia swung her divining tool around again several times and experienced its dip in the same place. “The rod wants us to go down a little,” she said. “But not into the street, I don’t think.”
Charlie scanned the face of the building opposite. “That looks like an official building of some kind, doesn’t it?”
Thassia nodded. “Town hall. And look!” She pointed.
Charlie saw barred windows. “The gaol. Is the rod telling us Gnat has been imprisoned with my other friends?”
“I don’t know.” Thassia moved the rod around again experimentally.
And then Charlie saw her.
“Stay here,” he told the dowser. Carefully, keeping his center of gravity low to the rooftop, he scooted down the slate.
Just before the end of the rooftop, windows jutted out, each gabled and itself roofed with slate. There, in the angle between the rooftop and a window, lay Natalie de Minimis.
Charlie crept up to her quietly, his hands trembling. She was bedraggled and wingless, and from the way she lay, Charlie didn’t know whether she was alive. He knelt over her, remembering his fairy friend as a winged terror: skewering rats with a spear, charging trolls twenty times her size, and even, on a rooftop not so different from this one, holding open Grim Grumblesson’s eyelids and forcing him to jump.
Was she dead?
Then her chest moved. She was tiny, so he could barely see it, but she was breathing.
“Gnat.”
She opened her eyes. “Charlie!”
She jumped onto his knee and hugged him fiercely. His hug back to her was very gentle.
“Charlie!” She waved her tricorn hat, pointing over the edge of the rooftop and across the street at the gaol. “They’re going to hang the lads in the morning.”
Charlie grinned. “No, they’re not.”
Charlie borrowed a long rope from
Atzick, who offered it with a joke about taking the rope from the gallows instead. Thassia loaned Charlie a bright red cloak, with glyphs cut from gold cloth and stitched into it.
“Do you want me to actually attract attention?” he asked.
“The cape will make you difficult to notice. Difficult, but not impossible.”
From Syzigon, Charlie borrowed tools: some fine prongs he thought might make good lockpicks, a hacksaw, and a short crowbar. He also borrowed a leather belt with multiple large pockets and loops to hang tools from.
Charlie’s plan was not sophisticated. For all that it was ridiculously full of clockwork and mechanical devices, Machynlleth was a smallish town in the Welsh countryside, surrounded by sheep, forest, and mountains. Charlie was counting on the gaol being not terribly difficult to crack.
Syzigon led the caravan into town again. The dwarf wagons turned right in the center of Machynlleth and continued out the north side to a fork where the smaller, unpaved route turned and began to wind its way uphill. That way lay Cader Idris, Syzigon explained.
As Charlie walked back into town after midnight with Gnat on his shoulder, Thassia began dancing around the caravan with the Dust of Distraction in her fists.
On the way, Gnat told him what had happened since they’d parted company. It was a simple story. The storm had pulled the flyer much farther west and then wrecked it against a hillside. When Gnat and the boys had awoken to armed servants of the landowner forcing them off the hill, the flyer was gone. Suspecting that the landowner had deliberately stolen the flyer, they’d returned the next night, found the aircraft, and then been arrested. Only Gnat had managed to run away. She didn’t know anything about the Welsh dewin; he must have gotten involved later.
“And the terrible thing of it is, some of these men were wearing the same pin as your Frenchman was in London. You remember? The cog-shaped pin. Do you suppose your Iron Cog could be located here?”
So Charlie recounted his adventures. As he talked, he kept turning to look at Gnat; each time, she pushed his head away, until finally he stopped.
