The lock was no everyday gadget, and anyone looking could see.
So we sent him the way of the hollow-ware man;
we sent him straight after the hollow-ware man.
He’d only just left, had the hollow-ware man—
there was only one place he could be.
So the man vanished into the hollow-way; what happened next, we never knew.
But he came back that night walking slowly;
he trudged into town, undone wholly;
and when he looked up at us coldly,
his left eye was tin and not blue.
For the hollow-ware man takes strange payments in exchange for his goods so divine.
He’d asked a high price for the right box;
one cold blue eye for the right box;
and then he’d installed that bizarre lock
and a replacement hollow-ware eye.
The stranger he left us that evening, ’fore the blood even dried on his cheek.
Of the box that had cost him so dearly,
that had blinded him halfway (or nearly),
of the lock that it fitted so queerly—
the stranger refused to speak.
INTERLUDE
A MOMENTARY SILENCE FELL. “And so?” Mr. Sangwin asked, his voice uncomfortable and artificially light as he picked up his glass from the windowsill. “Is our peddler here a villain or no?”
Masseter made a thoughtful, humming sound. “What do you think, young lady?” he asked, glancing down at Maisie. “After all, the box was clearly worth an eye to the man who bought it. Whether or not he was pleased to pay that much, he chose to do it. He could have walked back out again when he’d heard the hollow-ware man’s price.”
Jessamy spoke up from the other side of the fireplace. “Maybe he didn’t feel he had that choice.” Her voice was quiet but hard. “Just because a fellow can charge an eye doesn’t necessarily mean he ought to.”
“I don’t think people should charge eyes,” Maisie said decisively, her own eyes locked on Tesserian’s cards as he picked out the king of caskets and the knave of lenses.
Mrs. Haypotten tutted. “Honestly, you lot with your grim tales. Who’s next? Hasn’t anyone got a cheerful story?”
“I’ll tell one.” Everyone turned to the beautiful man with the scar below his eye who lounged at the opposite end of the sofa from Petra, his outstretched arm still just barely not reaching her shoulder. “It’s a love story. And in deference to your wish for more cheerful yarns, Mrs. H., it’s even got a happy ending.”
“Oh, my.” Mrs. Haypotten blushed. “Well. That’s very nice of you, dear.”
“It ends well,” Sullivan said, “but it begins in the dark, and in the cold.”
EIGHT
THE COLDWAY
The Scarred Man’s Tale
HERE IS A WINTER PLACE, if you like: when the river Skidwrack freezes, a whole world comes into being in the city of Nagspeake that wasn’t there before, a sort of neither-here-nor-there-land above the river but below the district called Flotilla.
Flotilla is the island district. Some of it is built on pilings that were sunk, Venice-style, into the muck at the bottom of the river long, long ago. Some is built of boats lashed to the landed bits (such as they are) and to one another. There are bulkheads that ring the whole, but sunken mechanisms move them when the district needs moving about. They say that once, in order to protect a legendary ship and its crew, every single one of the component vessels cast off and scattered into the Skidwrack, causing the entire district to vanish in a matter of hours, leaving nothing but those old oaken posts, left behind like fragments of an incomplete skeleton.
So there is the river, and there is the district of Flotilla upon it. When the river freezes, there comes the Coldway: a warren of tunnels with the frozen river underfoot, where the curved sides of boats of all sorts form the walls and a ceiling arched like a cathedral, where the bows and gunwales of the vessels nestle up against one another to form the roof. In some places it’s high-ceilinged like a cathedral too; in others the tunnels scarcely have height enough for an adult to walk upright in them. Because the makeup of Flotilla changes so often, the Coldway is never the same place twice. And yet, for all that the shape of the route changes and for all that it is temporary, I am reminded of something Mr. Sangwin said about the old ways that traverse the landscape; the Coldway, too, is, at its heart, a route just as great and powerful as any of the other noble old roads that cross the world, and a map of the Coldway shows a realm in which strange things often happen.
And, like any great and old and strange place, there is a great and old and strange tale about it: that the Coldway is no mere path of ice, but the back of one of the mysterious creatures of the Skidwrack River: the blue-and-green serpent known as the caldnicker.
The caldnicker spends much of the year lying at the bottom of the riverbed. Mostly it sleeps, though now and again it stirs in its rest, shifting the inlets of the Skidwrack with it. The caldnicker dreams almost ceaselessly, but sadly the majority of its dreams dissolve in the river before they make it to the surface. All of this changes, though, when the first winter frost begins to settle on the riverbank. Then the creature rouses itself from its dreams and makes its way downriver to Flotilla, where it winds itself among the hulls, twining in and about and throughout the spaces under and between the structures, and then falls asleep again until springtime.
This, of course, is why the floor of the Coldway is made of such dark ice, and why it freezes in unusual patterns that resemble frost-rimed scales. It’s also how the oldsters of Flotilla explain the peculiar lights and sounds that are so often to be found in the tunnels: When the caldnicker sleeps on the surface of the river, the dreams that in the underwater slumbers of warmer seasons merely
