The girl was watching him closely with her odd silver eyes. “Don’t see what you’re looking for?” she inquired in her whistling lisp. The Devil got the uncomfortable feeling that she knew what he had been thinking.
“Just don’t see anything I particularly need,” he said carelessly.
“What do you need, I wonder?” The little scavenger looked at him thoughtfully.
“I don’t need anything,” the Devil said. It was true.
She nodded. “It would have to be something very special, then. Something you want.”
The Devil grinned and allowed that he couldn’t really imagine what that might be. But to himself, he admitted again that he was curious. And again, as soon as he’d had the thought, he wondered if the scavenger knew it somehow.
“Let me think.” She zipped past him and began opening drawers. The first item she held out was a molded black thing, roughly oval and carved to look like a long-necked bird with its head resting on its feet. “It’s an inkstick made from soot collected after a martyr was burned at the stake. You grind a bit against a stone and mix it with water to make writing ink.”
“How on earth could you know where the soot came from?” asked the Devil, skeptical.
“I know because I gathered the soot and made the inkstick myself,” she retorted. “I can show you the mold I formed it in.”
The Devil assured her that he believed her, but all the same, he didn’t feel he simply had to have the inkstick, even if it had been made from a martyr.
“Here’s a knife made from iron extracted from a saint’s blood,” the scavenger said, opening another drawer and removing a blade. “Perhaps that is the sort of thing you’re looking for?”
“How did you happen to find a thing like this picking through garbage?” the Devil asked, looking at the knife. It was very beautiful; the space just above the cutting edge on both sides had been etched with a creeping pattern of lilies of the valley. “And how could you possibly be certain about where the iron came from?”
“I didn’t scavenge the knife,” the girl said with a grim smile. “I scavenged the blood. I extracted the iron myself. That’s how I know what I say is true.”
But the Devil had caught sight of something more interesting than the martyr’s ink or the saint’s iron. When the scavenger had begun hunting for something to tempt him with, she’d looked through a big drawer whose contents had clattered hollowly as she’d shoved it mostly closed again. Mostly, but not totally—the Devil could still see what it held. It was full of white and off-white and gray and pale-brown bits and pieces. Bones. All sorts and all sizes of bones. And one of them was very interesting.
It was a short, thick, squat bone engraved all over with a pattern of neat hatch marks stained with brown ochre ink. Where there weren’t hatch marks, there were curling rows of cursive words in a language the Devil recognized and yet couldn’t quite bring the name of to mind.
“It’s a pastern bone,” the scavenger said, unerringly spotting the item that had captured his attention. “Part of a set for playing knucklebones, I suspect. You need five to play the game, but I only have that one.” She plucked it from among the rest and held it out. “Here.”
The Devil turned the pastern bone over, and even up close, the shapes carved into it taunted him. He knew every language ever invented, and he knew this one, too, but it had been so long since he’d encountered it, he couldn’t remember where he’d seen it or when, let alone how to make sense of the writing. It was as if he had the words of a song stuck in his head, but the name of that song was hovering just out of his memory’s reach.
In the end, that was the thing that made him want the bone. “How much?” he asked as casually as he could.
The scavenger considered. “One tooth,” she said at last. “Your tooth.” She tapped her lip where it hid one of her canines. “This one. The sharp one.”
Whatever the Devil had been expecting her to request, it wasn’t a tooth. “What for?”
She shrugged. “You never know when something like that might come in handy.” She opened another drawer and took out an ugly contraption that looked like an oversize house key with a little claw at one end and a turning crank at the other. “I can pop it right out myself, right this minute. Won’t even hurt. Well, not much. Not for long. Probably not, anyway.”
Not exactly a confident statement, but that hardly mattered. It wasn’t that the Devil was concerned about pain, and it wasn’t as if having one tooth gone would be any kind of inconvenience. Still, in this wagon he’d seen ink made from a martyr and a knife made from a saint, and he couldn’t help but wonder what this young scavenger would do with one of his eyeteeth. But he was sure she wouldn’t tell him to what sort of use it might be put, and he just didn’t like the idea of making a deal he couldn’t clearly see both sides of.
And yet, there was that engraved bone, and the more he thought about it, and the more he tried to remember how to read the language carved upon it, the more he wanted it. Certainly a mystery like that would be worth one tooth.
And yet.
Overhead the clocks whispered on: tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.
Well, the Devil decided to handle this the way he handled every bargain he made. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll play you for it. If you win, I’ll trade you for the tooth and I’ll give you a favor as well, with no strings attached to it. If I win, you give me the bone, and your soul, too.”
The scavenger scratched her head as if she
