“M-my lord?” Pantin said experimentally.
At that, the hero actually laughed, and the sound was truly bizarre as it resonated through the ironworks that made up its insides. “Don’t be ridiculous, child. No one called me that, even when I had breath, blood, and a proper body.” He looked down at the form Troublewit had built of his remains. “I think I understand why you have done this,” he said to the gargoyle. “Did you also plan to take the coffret?”
Pantin glanced at Troublewit. “We hadn’t thought that far ahead,” the boy admitted. “Mainly we wanted to stop the thief from taking it, though I couldn’t tell you why—other than that he had clearly come to steal it.”
“That is reason enough. Do you know what is in it?” the hero asked, looking from one to the other.
“No,” Troublewit said. It was not of iron. I could not have looked inside without opening it.
“The thief wanted only the box,” the hero said thoughtfully. “That is interesting.”
Pantin nodded, but of course he was thinking, perhaps as you are, that it was the least interesting thing to him at the moment. One of the great heroes of the city, or perhaps his ghost, had taken possession of this strange, partly human body and was now speaking to the boy and the metal gargoyle as if it was all perfectly normal. Pantin couldn’t quite bring himself to care right then about why a thief might want a box.
“I would like to borrow this frame,” the hero said at last, looking at Troublewit. “The parts of it that aren’t mine, that is. Will the iron permit me—that is, would the iron that now holds me together consent to travel with me, for a time?” His voice had a curious note of reverence to it as he spoke to the gargoyle, and for the first time, Pantin thought about the fact that the friend he called Troublewit was more than a mere decoration someone had built into the red stone house. Troublewit was part of something no one in Nagspeake quite understood, something huge. His friend Troublewit was a mere projection, in the way that some kinds of mushrooms are merely a small, visible part of a huge network that stretches, unseen, for miles in the soil.
“Yes,” Troublewit said at last. “The iron will travel with you for as long as you choose.”
Pantin eyed the rags that were the revenant’s only garments. “If you will stay a minute more,” he said, “I can give you one of my father’s old coats.”
The hero nodded, and Pantin hurried back up the ladder and through his sleeping flat to the cupboard where his family hung their cold-weather things. He returned with an old tarpaulin coat and a felt hat.
The hero pulled on the coat, and his strange body adjusted again, lengthening and narrowing to approximately the proportions of Pantin’s father until the garment fit perfectly.
“Thank you,” the hero said, looking at Troublewit and Pantin from under the brim of the hat. “As a token of my thanks, you may keep the coffret and what is inside it.” Even as he spoke, a film of iron, thin as paper, spread over the planes of his skull, layering a face of dark metal over the bone.
“Thank you,” said Troublewit.
“Thank you,” said Pantin.
The hero nodded, and the nettles parted again, this time to give him a path to the overgrown main gate of the grave garden. When he reached it, the vines tangled in the hinges flexed their green fingers to pull the door open ahead of him.
He did not take Trigemine’s lantern, but as he walked toward the trees at the edge of the woods, he bent to pick up a branch from the ground. At the timberline, one of the strange, roaming bonelights that Pantin had often caught glimpses of came drifting through the darkness. The hero held up his branch as if it were an unlit torch, and the bonelight landed atop it like a tame parrot.
Thus illuminated, the hero disappeared into the woods, leaving the two friends to ponder what had happened, and what this strange gift they had been given might turn out to be. Pantin, of course, was young and had many wonders left to see; Troublewit was—or was at least part of—something older than the stones of the house, older than the river itself, and it was a wonder simply to discover that there were surprises left in the world for it to encounter.
Did they find the coffret again?
Of course, for there is no place in Nagspeake where the iron cannot go if it cares to.
What was inside it, that beautiful box made to hold something just the size of a miracle or a memory?
As I told you, I never looked inside. Pantin did—but that’s the beginning of another story for another time, and this is the end of the story I set out to tell.
Or nearly the end. Perhaps . . . yes, now that I think of it, I suppose it is just possible that this sort of thing—raising the dead, wiring them up like museum specimens, and setting them loose in the city—this sort of thing could be precisely why people say old iron behaves badly in a graveyard.
INTERLUDE
THE ASSEMBLED LISTENERS applauded. Tesserian and Maisie added a balcony to their card castle, made of the king of knots, the knave of bottles, the two of spades, and the ace of caskets, though the gambler had to hunt for the ace for a moment before Maisie herself spotted the corner of the card peeking up from behind the band on his hat.
“I am sorry, Mr. Masseter,” Madame said with a nod to the man
