The Uncommoners #3

by Jennifer Bell

  “Thanks,” she mumbled. Other soap dishes were moored in the same long canal; it cut across the limestone floor of a vast arrivals hall teeming with people. Iron lampposts shaped like dancers posed around the edge of the chamber, each holding a glowing uncommon lemon squeezer.

  “Land! Finally—” Seb staggered out behind her, his face pale.

  Something hit Ivy on the arm and she looked down to find a tatty paper pamphlet at her feet. She picked it up and read the front cover: Nubrook: Farrow’s Guide for the Traveling Tradesman.

  “Free guide to Nubrook!” called a boy with an American accent as he walked along the jetty. He tossed a few pamphlets at another soap dish. “Discover the secrets of the undermart that built down while commoners were building up.”

  Farrow’s Guide…Ivy had been given one about Lundinor too. The guidebooks were written in a strange back-to-front code that Scratch was able to decipher; others needed uncommon binoculars to read them.

  “Exit’s that way,” the man in the paisley shirt said, pointing to the end of the jetty. He handed Ivy the dolphin-handled soap dish, which—somehow—had returned to its original size.

  She shook the dish dry and stuffed it and the leaflet into her satchel for safekeeping before grabbing Seb’s jacket sleeve to steer him in the right direction. The color soon returned to Seb’s cheeks as they began walking. A horde of aqua-transport travelers jostled past them; Ivy had to swerve to avoid a girl wearing a gold-fringed sari and deerstalker hat, while Seb almost got sandwiched between two bald men dressed in flares and Roman sandals. “Hobsmatch,” Seb murmured, sidestepping a lady in an evening gown and cowhide waistcoat. “Uncommon style must be the same no matter where in the world you are.”

  Ivy thought fondly of her Hobsmatch outfits hidden in her wardrobe at home. The fashion was to wear as many different styles of clothing at once, but, in keeping with Valian’s advice, she and Seb had decided not to bring theirs along. Hobsmatch might be dizzyingly spectacular, but it certainly wasn’t practical.

  Standing at the end of the dock was a woman in a navy-blue uniform. She had a white sash draped over one shoulder and a smart peaked cap. Seb nudged Ivy’s shoulder as they approached her. “She’s got to be a Nubrook underguard,” he said under his breath. “They’re the only uncommoners I’ve ever seen in uniform.”

  The woman looked different from the underguards who policed Lundinor, although she carried the same weapon tucked into her belt: an uncommon toilet brush, capable of electrocuting anyone who didn’t abide by the Great Uncommon Trade laws.

  “Afternoon, folks,” the officer said solemnly, blocking their path. “I must ask you both to shake my hand before proceeding. Security’s been heightened as a result of this morning’s news: we’re monitoring everyone traveling on the waterways.”

  This morning’s news? Wondering what had transpired, Ivy produced her white uncommon dress gloves from her satchel. Unique to each trader, they recorded every deal the wearer made. Ivy’s pair looked remarkably clean considering she had to wear them all the time in undermarts. Seb’s uncommon drummer’s gloves, she noticed, were decidedly grubbier.

  “Sorry, we didn’t catch the headlines,” Seb said, extending his hand. “What’s happened?”

  The officer’s voice hardened. “Thieves broke into the private vault of a quartermaster in Montroquer three days ago. The investigators only released their findings this morning.”

  Ivy knew that Montroquer was a famous undermart in Paris. Like all undermarts, it was presided over by four quartermasters. She hadn’t heard anything about a break-in, but then Valian hadn’t sent any uncommon newspapers for over a week.

  “Evidence revealed that the thieves spent two weeks tunneling under Montroquer to gain access to the vault,” the officer continued. “A crooked sixpence was discovered at the scene: it’s the Fallen Guild who are responsible again.”

  Ivy swallowed. The Fallen Guild was meant to be a less shiver-inducing name for the Dirge.

  The officer stepped aside to let them pass. “They must have wanted something important,” Seb commented as he and Ivy walked away, “if they went to so much effort to steal it. I wonder what it was….”

  Ivy tried to push the Dirge to the back of her mind as they crossed the floor, surveying the crowd. They had to focus on helping Valian find Rosie, not become distracted by other problems.

  “This is going to take ages,” she moaned. “We don’t even know what this ‘man in red’ is. It could be a symbol on a wall or the name of a shop inside Nubrook—”

  “Or someone wearing red Hobsmatch,” Seb added, scouring the floor for anyone who might be him. “Trouble is, there are so many uncommoners here, I can already see three people dressed in red. Why couldn’t Valian have told us to look for a man in a banana costume? Now, that we could spot easily.”

  Ivy wondered whether they were meant to have arrived later, because it would have been quieter then. As New York was five hours behind London, it was currently only two in the afternoon in Nubrook. “We’ll just have to keep searching. Maybe we should look for a man in red doing something out of the ordinary?”

  “Sure,” Seb muttered, ducking to avoid a boy surfing overhead on a flying doormat, “because we’re surrounded by ordinary right now.”

  Everywhere Ivy looked, people were arriving on the back of airborne uncommon objects. Mops, vacuum cleaners and carpets, all carrying several passengers, were shooting out of giant holes in the ceiling, swooping low over the crowd, then settling on landing strips that ran parallel to the aqua-transport canals.

  Finally, after a good ten minutes, Ivy’s attention was drawn to a lone man in all-crimson attire. He was leaning against an old wooden chest of drawers in the shadow of the cavern wall, fiddling with the chain of a pocket watch. “What about him?” she suggested. “He’s not hurrying off anywhere.”

  Crossing the floor to investigate, they noticed the man in red kept checking the time, over and over like he was waiting for something to happen. Suddenly he dropped the watch into his pocket and pulled open the bottom drawer of the chest.

  The ground rumbled….

  With a loud crackle, a fountain of tiny gold lights erupted from the open drawer like the sparks of a Roman candle. Where they landed, regular-sized uncommoners appeared out of thin air, stretching their arms and rolling their shoulders as if they were all about to do a yoga class. Then, after smoothing out their Hobsmatch, they all strolled off into the swelling crowd.

  “Valian!” Seb yelled, jumping and waving at the same time. “Over here!”

  With a blink of surprise, Ivy picked out Valian’s scrawny figure weaving toward them through the throng. His straggly dark hair shone with sweat, but he brightened when he saw them. “What are you two doing here? I wasn’t expecting you for a few hours yet; I was going to wait around.”

  “Is everything all right?” Ivy asked urgently.

  Valian’s mouth drew into a grimace as he wiped his forehead with the back of his fingerless glove. “Yeah, fine. I just hate traveling in those impossibly cramped drawers. I’ve had my face pressed into a stranger’s back for the last twenty minutes.” He threw a scowl over his shoulder as if it might hit the person in question. “Unfortunately, it’s the fastest way to move long-distance at the moment. The International Uncommon Council banned bag travel this morning so as not to worsen Storm Sarah.”

  “That’s why you changed the arrangements…,” Ivy said with a sigh of relief. For some reason, bag travel affected the earth’s geothermal gradient. She knew of at least one occasion when an increase in uncommon bag journeys had caused a snowstorm in London, so perhaps the IUC’s decision was for the best.

  “I had to send the soap dish last minute by ghost-courier,” Valian explained. “I take it you found it all right? Sorry about the vague instructions—there was a phantom in the line behind me at the featherlight mail to
wer and I didn’t like the look of him one bit.”

  “We figured it out,” Ivy told him, gathering that there had probably been a ghost in their bathroom earlier. “How does drawer travel work?”

  “Stationmasters in red operate the chests,” he said. “A different drawer is opened every few minutes. Each one leads to another drawer in another part of the world.” He signaled toward the far end of the hall, where a monumental arch decorated with elaborate Art Deco carvings was cut into the stone wall. “That’s the entrance to Nubrook,” Valian said. “Let’s go.”

  They zigzagged across the arrivals chamber, doing their best to avoid the swinging legs of riders dismounting from vacuum cleaners, then squeezed through the giant vaulted passage along with everyone else. Valian marched ahead, cutting a path through the masses. Ivy understood his urgency: like most undermarts, Nubrook only opened at certain times of the year, and Valian had been waiting for this visit for six months.

  She realized that he wasn’t wearing his trademark red basketball shoes as part of his Hobsmatch, which was very odd. Instead, he had on a pair of brown leather boots, so worn at the heel that she could see his socks poking through. “I know they look awful,” he admitted, catching her gaze. “But they’re uncommon: they allow me to step through most walls, like the dead do. I bought them with the winnings you gave me from the Grivens tournament. You never know when they might be useful, and I wanted to be as prepared as possible for this trip.”

  The heat and noise turned stifling as they reached the other side. “It’s always busy around here,” Valian shouted. “This way.”

  As Ivy stumbled after him, her eyes darted around like she was watching an aerial display. Nubrook’s buildings were covered in dazzling neon signs and flashing lights, all demanding her attention. Mounted on the walls, giant tablecloths played advertisements like the screens in Times Square, while music blared from conch shells on either side. She thought of the uncommon bedsheets used to stream live video in Lundinor; uncommoners called those devices materializers.

  “Whoa,” Seb breathed, looking at the illuminated billboards on the rooftops. “This is insane.”

  Thanksgiving decorations adorned almost every building. Glittering chains of acorns were draped around window frames, and star-shaped wreaths of wheat and cornhusks hung from doors. Valian guided them to an area of pavement dotted with pushcarts selling coffee and hotdogs. The tempting aroma of fried onions filled the air.

  Ivy stared up at the distant concrete ceiling festooned with crystal chandeliers the size of hot-air balloons. She could sense Scratch inside her satchel, giddy with excitement. “I assumed Nubrook would be in a huge cave like Lundinor, but it feels more like we’re inside a massive shopping mall,” she said.

  Valian laughed. “Nubrook’s famous for being entirely man-made. The best thing about it are the basements. Some shops have fifty floors below street level—each one with a different theme.”

  The deepest undermart in the world…Now Ivy understood why.

  “Nubrook has four different quarters, like other undermarts,” Valian continued, “but here they’re one on top of each other. We’re in First Quarter now. Second, Third and Fourth are below us.” He removed three white table tennis balls from his jacket pocket. “Here, take one of these. Throw it at every blank surface you can find—walls, storefronts, doorways, drain covers….We need as many people as possible to see them.”

  Seb arched an eyebrow. “How is playing ping-pong going to help us find Rosie?”

  Valian dropped a ball to the floor. It gave a low ping as it sprang off the pavement and returned to his hand. Where it had fallen, a colorful poster appeared printed on the concrete. In bubble writing at the top were the words MISSING PLEASE HELP and below them was a photo of a little girl dressed in Hobsmatch.

  Rosie.

  “Uncommoners use table tennis balls to copy things,” Valian clarified. “You load them up by repeatedly bouncing them on the image you want copied. Then, when you next throw them against something, they leave behind an exact duplicate stamped on the surface.”

  “It’s faster than using a photocopier,” Seb remarked, “I’ll give you that.”

  Ivy noticed Valian’s baffled expression and shook her head. “Never mind,” she reassured him. (It was easy to forget how little Valian knew about the common world, having lived all his life in undermarts.) She tucked her ping-pong ball in her pocket and took a closer look at the poster. Ivy had only seen a picture of Valian’s sister once before, but the family resemblance was clear: Rosie shared Valian’s sloping cheekbones and fierce brown eyes. Her ice-blond hair was tied in bunches, and a silver necklace hung over the top of her polka-dot blouse.

  “That picture was taken on the morning she disappeared,” Valian said, “when she was six. She’ll look different now…she’ll be twelve—thirteen next month.”

  Ivy committed the details of Rosie’s image to memory. “Her hair color’s really striking. People should remember if they’ve spotted her.”

  “That was my hope at first too,” Valian said, his voice hardening. “The trouble is, no one ever has seen her. I’ve used all kinds of uncommon objects to search, but nothing works. The only thing I’ve learned is that she’s definitely alive.”

  Ivy saw the determined expression on Valian’s face. His parents had died not long before Rosie had gone missing, so he’d shouldered the responsibility of finding her all on his own. She admired him; it must have taken a great deal of courage to take on the task by himself.

  “Something uncommon must be hiding her,” Seb concluded. “It’s the only explanation.”

  “Yeah, but without knowing what object that is, I can’t undo its effects.” Valian shook his head. “It’s got something to do with what happened when I tracked her using the Sack of Stars. You remember—before it got destroyed, it brought me to where Rosie was, only it couldn’t settle on one location, as if she was in several different places at the same time.”

  It was a frustrating puzzle. The Sack of Stars, one of the five Great Uncommon Good, had taken Valian tantalizingly close to his sister, but with no results. Ivy had gone over the facts all summer, trying to find a solution. “At least that invitation Mr. Punch gave you has provided you with another clue,” she said.

  Valian put his hand in his pocket and removed the card with the gold border that Mr. Punch had given him in Lundinor. He reread it carefully.

  “Mr. Punch might be the smartest man in Lundinor, but he’s also the most secretive,” Seb warned. “We still don’t know why he gave you that invitation in the first place—or why he gave Ivy Amos’s journal.”

  Ivy thought about Mr. Punch, one of Lundinor’s quartermasters. She considered him mysterious, it was true, but he’d also demonstrated he was brave and selfless, defending Lundinor from the Dirge’s evil schemes.

  “All I know,” Valian said, tapping his thumb against the card, “is that, according to the Sack of Stars, wherever Forward & Rife’s auction has traveled to, Rosie has been there too. There’s got to be a connection between them.” He lifted his chin as he continued walking. “So this is my plan to find her: investigate the auction house, distribute the posters, ask as many traders as we can if they’ve seen her. If Forward & Rife are here over the next few days, there’s a strong chance she will be too.” He squinted along an adjoining road. “Come on, the auction house is this way.”

  As they set off, the clamor of a thousand fragmented souls—both those trapped inside uncommon objects and those that had formed races of the dead—invaded Ivy’s ears. Although most murmured wordlessly, Ivy limited her senses to Scratch, aware she’d get a headache if she tried to listen to all the others. Bustling through the crowded streets, she scanned the faces of passersby, seeking brown eyes and blond hair. It was silly to think that Rosie might walk by, but Ivy felt they should be searching all the time. She noticed several somber-f
aced dead traders hovering about, each with a cardboard sign hanging around their neck. All the signs displayed a drawing of a different object with the caption HAVE YOU SEEN THIS? followed by a list of identifiable details. Ivy had never spotted one of the dead with such a sign before. She wondered if maybe the practice was unique to Nubrook.

  After a short while, they arrived at their destination. Forward & Rife’s auction house was situated in the lush rooftop garden of a tall marble building. A burly-looking security woman in a tartan kilt and chain-mail tabard stood outside the entrance to the building on the ground floor. “It’s invite only,” she informed them, peering doubtfully at Valian’s scruffy boat shoes.

  “Right—yeah,” Valian muttered, fumbling with his gold-edged invitation before handing it over. Ivy realized he was probably more accustomed to sneaking in to such events.

  The security woman read the card, and then flashed them an admiring glance. “Oh, you’re guests of Mr. Punch? Please, come in.”

  They were ushered through a courtyard and onto an intricately patterned Chinese rug, which ascended to the roof as gently as a napkin floating in the wind. The air turned thick with flowery perfume as they stepped into the garden. Narrow stone pathways ran between the exotic plantings, labeled according to species. Dotted among the ornamental bonsais and potted cacti stood glass cabinets exhibiting the objects due to be auctioned in two days’ time. A catalog was attached to the side of each. Uncommoners in elaborate Hobsmatch milled around, clinking champagne glasses and scrutinizing the articles for sale. Security guards shuffled between them.

  Ivy took a look inside the closest display case. It contained two objects: item number 235—a decorative ceramic music box once owned by Queen Victoria; and item number 236—a solid-gold magnifying glass, which, according to the catalog, could magnify a person’s talents. A hastily scribbled note in the corner of the case explained, however, that it had been withdrawn from sale.