At that moment, Pantin made an accidental discovery. As he waited for his breathing to return to normal, he looked down at the top of the bookcase he was leaning on. The only things on it besides his shaking hand were five books sandwiched between two bookends shaped like the bow and stern of a ship. Because he couldn’t quite bring himself to try to stand on his own yet, Pantin let his eyes roll over the spines. One of the titles leaped out at him: Bournefont’s Cartography: Legends and Keys.
Keys. And then he remembered having seen the word Legend inked inside the symbol box on the map fragment with the monster that had attempted to eat him only a few minutes ago.
Pantin took the book cautiously from its place and began turning pages. It was illustrated with pages upon pages of cartographic symbols and their meanings. In some examples taken from actual maps, the symbol charts were labeled Legend as they had been in the fragment with the mesmerizing monster. In others, they were labeled Key.
Inside this house, there will be an adit-gate, the peddler had said. Let’s say a sort of cabinet that, when opened, shows you something other than the inside of it.
Maybe you couldn’t call a map a cabinet, but Pantin thought these particular ones fit the spirit of the peddler’s request nonetheless. And now that he knew the word key could be applied to cartography, too . . .
Pantin set the book down, returned to the map fragment with the horned and tentacled creature, and examined the legend beneath its curling claws. There, under the icons for train tracks, caves, roads, and rivers, was a symbol that looked a bit like a slice of pie topped by a circle. It was a keyhole, and it was labeled PASSAGE.
He hurried around the room, looking at the legends and keys of any map he thought was too small to carry him away. The keyhole was there almost every time, sometimes shaped differently, sometimes labeled transit or departure or strait, but always recognizably a keyhole. At last he came back to the one on the desk that he’d nearly fallen into. Yes, there was the little keyhole in its legend, labeled aditum.
“Adit-gate.” Pantin laughed, a bizarre, out-of-control sort of giggle. “Aditum.” Then, abruptly, he stopped laughing. He folded up the map and shoved it unceremoniously into his pack.
Immediately he could feel the fury of the room around him. He didn’t wait to see what other uncanny traps it had at its disposal. Pantin sprinted for the arched entryway that, by all appearances, gave into the foyer. He leaped through it headfirst, sprawled onto tile, and came to rest with a thud against the big center table.
The front door was open again, and thin gray light sifted through the trees beyond the drive out front. A tall figure stepped into the opening and lifted a glowing cheroot to its mouth.
“Morning,” said the peddler, exhaling smoke.
Pantin got to his feet and marched across the foyer to the door, not entirely certain where he’d wind up when he crossed the threshold. Apparently the peddler had the same idea, or something like it, because although he very carefully did not step in, he reached one hand through into the house. Pantin took it, gripping the gloved palm as hard as he could, and let the peddler pull him outside.
And then . . . he was outside.
The peddler looked down at the shaking, exhausted child. “How’d you do?” he asked, puffing on the cheroot.
Pantin reached into his pack and passed him the map.
The peddler unfolded the page and stared down at it. “What the hell is this?”
Pantin looked around, his bleary eyes landing on the remnants of the fire the boys had built the night before and the sleeping bodies lumped around it. From the looks of things, only two of them had stayed. “The map key,” Pantin muttered. “That’s what you want.” Then he stumped down the porch stairs and kicked the nearest sleeper in the gut. “Hey!” he snarled as the boy jerked upright. “Where’d the rest of the cowards go?”
Then he fell over in a dead faint. But when the story was told later, as it was again and again over the years by the students of Pantin’s school and beyond, it was reckoned that nobody could fault him for that. After spending a night in Fellwool House, the boy had earned his rest.
INTERLUDE
THE ROOM APPLAUDED politely, all except Captain Frost, who tapped the last few grains of sand down from the top of the glass, turned it over on the sideboard, and hurried out of the parlor. A moment later, a gust of air and a rattling of the windowpanes told them the captain had gone outside by the front door. When the breeze had stilled, Tesserian riffled through one of his decks and handed Maisie two of the knaves: the black knave of keys and the red knave of caskets, to finish a peaked window.
Phineas Amalgam sat back and drained the dregs of his coffee. Then he looked at Petra. “Was that the one you meant?”
“That was it.”
“Ah.” He nodded his thanks to Sorcha as she refilled his cup. “That story isn’t in any of my books yet, you know.”
Petra frowned. “Certainly it is.”
“It isn’t. When I was telling the bit about the suits of armor, I remembered. It’s meant to go into my next collection, but I hadn’t decided which of two versions of the story to include. There’s one where it’s not suits of armor in that hallway, but instead the floor is lava and the house has a much better sense of humor.”
“Well, I must’ve heard it somewhere, mustn’t I?” Petra asked breezily. “I assumed it was from one of your books, but perhaps it wasn’t. Or perhaps I was thinking of a different peddler tale after all. There are so many.”
“Peddlers
