A moment later, a door opened to Hugo’s left and someone began coughing. “What on earth happened in here?” a female voice said, and a moment later a girl about Hugo’s age came wading through the particular. “This is . . . this is either disgusting or fantastic, and I can’t decide which.”
“Common difficulty when studying relics,” Gaz explained. “Edita Skellandotter, apprentice reliquarist, please meet your first customer. He has brought us this fine London fog and needs a vessel for it.” Then he appeared to remember that he hadn’t asked Hugo’s name.
Hugo introduced himself, Gaz lit a lamp, and Edita put on a pair of spectacles very much like Hugo’s fog glasses, which reminded him to pull his own over his eyes. The three of them stared down at the broken glass. Edita looked up at her teacher. “Globe or case, do you think?”
Gaz smiled and shook his head. “That’s for you to decide. With your customer, of course.”
The girl looked at Hugo through lenses that were faceted like a fly’s eye. “Does it need to open? Will you be wanting to take it out again? I could make this into a beautiful snow globe if you wanted.” She blew at the fog swirling between them. “Tiny pigeons instead of snow, maybe, flying over a city and a river, buoyed up by this fabulous murk.” She was describing London. Hugo’s heart leaped. Before he could say yes, however, Edita tilted her head. “Of course, a snow globe won’t open,” she added, coughing.
“Oh.” He wasn’t sure he ought to let it out again, but he didn’t like not having the option. “What was the other thing? A case?”
“Wardian case,” she explained. “A glass box for plants and little living things. Generally meant to stay closed, so the environment inside creates its own equilibrium. But you could open it.” She looked at him closely through her many-planed spectacles. “I think that’s what you want. A sort of . . . cloudarium.”
“He does have to be able to put the fog back, if it’s to be let out,” Gaz cautioned.
Edita nodded. “I quite see that.” She thought for a minute, then waved in the direction from which she’d appeared. “I think I have something.” She vanished into the miasma. Hugo and Gaz followed, the reliquary maker guiding the boy across the workshop and into a back room.
The visibility in there was better, and Hugo looked around in wonder at the collection of glass objects that filled every surface. Since she’d mentioned snow globes, he wasn’t surprised to see a shelf of sealed spheres holding all manner of particles suspended in a variety of liquids, many of which were swirling, even though presumably no one had shaken them. More glass spheres, these ones much smaller and clearly meant to be worn as jewelry, hung on chains from pegs on the wall. But mostly, there were glass boxes of every description. Some were fairly plain three-dimensional geometric shapes made of panes of glass and metal joinery, but most were works of architecture: houses, churches, lighthouses, castles of all shapes and sizes, even a treehouse built into a small but apparently living tree. Many of these had already been planted with flora. A door on the far side of the room stood open, revealing a connecting glass-walled conservatory bursting with greenery.
Edita looked over the baubles hanging from the pegs above the table and selected a small blown-glass sphere on a silver chain. “I think this will do the job. I think you want to be able to carry it.”
She removed the cap that both closed the sphere and allowed it to hang from the chain, then took down a jar from a shelf, selected a single tiny white carved bird from a mass of similar pieces, and popped the bird inside.
“Hold this, please,” she said, handing the glass ball to Hugo, along with a copper funnel she took from one of the worktable’s drawers. “And hold this over the bauble. Now, who’s got the box?”
Gaz had brought it with him. Edita took it and carefully turned the cap widdershins one rotation, then two, then three. Hugo held his breath as she opened it—the instructions, after all, had said to never fully remove the lid. But when she lifted the top away and tipped the lower part of the container over the copper funnel, the last bit of fog slid obediently into the sphere. The tiny carved bird swirled into motion, buffeted by currents in the confined murk.
“Thank you,” Edita said, taking the sphere from Hugo and replacing its cap. As she turned it sunwise, the fog that was rising up around their shoulders now began to rush past them and into the pendant by way of the tiny crack of space between the glass and the lid.
It took her a long time to tighten it. A whole minute, then two. An impossible length of time, considering how very small the pendant’s cap was. But of course, there was a vast amount of fog to bring back, and with every twist, more of it flowed through the vanishingly small crack into its new container.
At long last, after what seemed like hours to Hugo, the room began to clear as the final wisps of the fog trickled into the sphere. And then, finally, Edita raised her face, sooty and exhausted, and held up the reliquary.
“Sunwise to close, widdershins to open,” she said in a cracked voice. They’d all been coughing quite a lot. “But you don’t have to do it that way. Look.” And she showed him how the cap also contained a tiny dropper, like a medicine bottle or something to dispense perfume. “You can measure out exactly how much you want, then just wind it in the same way when you’re ready to, by twisting the cap.”
Hugo watched the tiny bird swirling in the fog. It looked exactly like any of the thousands of pigeons he’d caught glimpses of in particulars back home, like tiny
