The gargoyle tried to convey its answer simply by means of nodding and talon-wiggling. When this didn’t work, it hunkered down and reconfigured itself into something less solid, something with empty places within that could resonate, and paper-thin places that could vibrate or collapse and swell like a bellows to pump air. It had done this before, but rarely, for it was elaborate, hard, and detailed work every time. “He is digging up the hero,” Troublewit said at last, his voice gravelly as the scraping of the shovel below, and masked perfectly by it too.
Pantin took his friend’s new voice in stride. “What hero?”
Troublewit shrugged. “I don’t know them all. There are scores of them; I can’t keep track. But this may be one of the great ones. He has been there many, many years. Longer than you. Longer than the house. There is the hero, and he is in a box, and he holds another box in his hands. Or that’s what there was when they put him in the ground. Things change over time. You know.”
“I know,” Pantin agreed. Then he remembered the conversation he’d had with the thief earlier in the day. “He said he was looking for a coffret—a box or casket of some kind. He couldn’t have thought he’d find the hero’s coffin in one of our flats, so it must be the box the hero is holding that the peddler wants.”
Troublewit looked at him. “Shall I go get it? Before the peddler finds it?”
“Can you?”
Troublewit shrugged again. “Of course. I am everywhere in Nagspeake. I can go everywhere iron is, or goes, or can get. I can take the coffret and put it out of the thief’s reach.”
“All right, then.”
The gargoyle looked at the iron rainspout. As the man in the garden toiled with his shovel, the metal spout stretched, drawing itself out into a long, thin iron vine, and slithered silently down the corner of the house to plunge into the earth below, leaving a length of itself twisted like a climbing creeper against the corner where the gargoyle crouched, unmoving.
After a moment, Troublewit spoke up again. “I see no coffin any longer, only the bones of the hero held below where the earth has tumbled them. But there is also the small box.”
But Pantin was watching the digging peddler, who swore now and again as the nettles tore at his sleeves. Perhaps, if this was the same child as in Mr. Amalgam’s tale, the boy was realizing he had met this man before, and wondering if anyone who would go to so much trouble to have the things he sought as to search for them in cursed houses and nettle-choked grave gardens would give up the hunt for this coffret simply because he didn’t find it in the first place he looked.
Troublewit glanced sideways at its friend. “I have taken the box deep underground. Don’t worry. I’ll bring it up the rainspout when the thief is gone.”
“It’s not that I’m worried about,” Pantin whispered. He ducked down behind his windowsill. “I think it’s possible he knows the box is somewhere nearby. If he doesn’t find it there, he may come back here again to look for it. Unless . . .” But the boy shook his head.
“Unless what?” the gargoyle asked. “Unless he can be convinced not to?”
Pantin nodded. “But I don’t know how we could do that.” Could the thief be scared away? Would that be enough? Doubtful. It would be better if they could somehow convince him the box he sought had never been here.
Surely the peddler with the mathematical-sounding name would never believe a boy who wasn’t even sure what the man was after. Yes, Pantin knew, because the thief had told him, that the thief was after a box. But why? What was it about this box?
Abruptly Pantin remembered that his parents were sleeping one room away. They would know what to do. He left Troublewit crouched in the window and darted into their bedroom. There, of course, he found them sleeping peacefully, but he could not wake them. Terrified, he headed for the door of his flat, meaning to wake the mother with the twins. But then he saw the empty bottle that had held the sherbet, and he remembered that, when the peddler had delivered his gift to Pantin’s parents, he had had two bottles more meant for the neighbors. Pantin realized that he might well be the only person awake in the entire house.
It was up to him to get rid of the peddler-thief for good. But how? How could one boy alone manage that?
But then, crossing the flat to return to his room, he remembered that he wasn’t alone. He had Troublewit. And the two of them had someone else, too. They had the original owner of the box the thief was after. They had the hero.
Or his bones, at least.
“I have an idea,” Pantin whispered to the gargoyle. “It involves the hero.”
Troublewit’s iron gargoyle’s mouth stretched into an O of understanding. “Humans are afraid of bones, aren’t they?”
“Sometimes,” Pantin said. “But I don’t think this man will be. The hero will have to do more than just scare him. The hero will have to speak.”
“I can manage that.” The gargoyle nodded. “I think I know how the bones go together, but it won’t be less frightening if they aren’t exactly right, will it?”
“No, it’ll be worse,” Pantin replied in ghastly delight.
“As I thought.” Troublewit’s gargoyle face grinned back. “The thief’s digging will go faster if the hero also digs.”
Pantin shivered and leaned his forearms on the windowsill. He couldn’t quite see how it began, but after another couple of swings with the shovel, the thief paused. He tilted his head. He bent low, his lantern casting strange shadows from among the nettles. Then he straightened abruptly and staggered backwards, tripping over barbed weeds and
