Edita smiled tiredly and reached for the long-forgotten, cracked glass box the fog had been shipped in. “Give me this,” she said. “Reliquary glass, even broken, should never go to waste.”
And so the deal was made and the city saved from the mysterious Nagspeake particular . . . though my father and grandfather both said that after that, very occasionally, there was a strange, oily yellow fog that came flowing down the Skidwrack when Hugo—or whoever possesses his reliquary these days—lets the particular out to roam for an afternoon.
INTERLUDE
“AT LAST,” CROWED SANGWIN, “a merchant who isn’t a nightmare!”
“Three of them,” Tesserian said. He held out three saints to Maisie: a man calming a stormy, mist-shrouded sea; a young-looking girl holding two eyes on a plate; and a bald man holding a pair of massive keys. The castle now stood as tall as Maisie’s shoulders.
“Do people really carry relics and reliquaries?” Maisie asked. “In the real world?”
“They do,” Sangwin said, getting up from the table in the corner and passing her the marten he’d been carving. “You can go to Feretory Street yourself someday, if you like, and see some.” He turned back to the table, swept up the pile of wood shavings, and, after a quick glance at Sorcha for permission, leaned carefully around Maisie, Tesserian, and the castle and tossed them onto the fire, where they sent up a quick flash of crackling sparkles.
Mr. Haypotten cleared his throat as he began to move around the room again, refilling glasses. “There is also one here in the inn.” There was an uncertain, almost embarrassed tone to his voice. “My old friend Forel is a reliquarist. You know old Forel, don’t you?” he said, turning to Reever Colophon, who happened to be the closest of the two brothers at that moment. “He’s one of—follows the same—” He raised a hand toward the red-haired man’s tattooed face, then arrested the gesture, flushing. He pivoted with his bottle, only to find himself under the scrutiny of Antony Masseter, who was watching this exchange with intense interest from the chair by the sideboard. Now his embarrassment was impossible to miss. Haypotten’s face burned like the filament in a light bulb.
“He’s a High Walker,” Reever finished, smiling a little coolly. “As are my brother and I. Yes, we know Blaise Forel. You might say he recommended your inn to us.”
“Knew,” Negret corrected absently.
“That’s right,” the innkeeper’s wife put in, looking at her husband. “He went missing years ago, didn’t he?”
“A missing reliquary maker?” Masseter said. “I’d quite like to hear more about that.”
“What’s a High Walker?” Maisie interrupted as she balanced the marten on the pitched roof of one of the castle’s gables. She was thinking back to the night before, when she and Madame Grisaille and Sorcha had danced with Reever and Negret. They’ll know your secret, she had said to Madame, but the old lady had waved the worry away. My dear, they already know. They have been in Nagspeake longer than anyone. The city has no secrets from them. Only people confuse them these days.
Then, Reever, to Madame Grisaille: You have always danced with us, so dance with me now.
And she thought back even further, to Madame’s story of the roamer-hero in the garden grave. The iron has taken my coffret. It has taken it down, deep into the earth, below the tunnels under the city, below the land that lies beneath the tunnels.
“Land,” of course, could have simply meant exactly that: more earth, just down farther. But somehow that wasn’t the way Maisie had understood it at the time. She had taken it to mean another place. Another city, perhaps: a city below, a place you could get to, as Jack had climbed the beanstalk to the land of the giants, if only instead of a beanstalk you had wild ironwork, and instead of climbing up, you went down. Down below Nagspeake, down below the tunnels that ran underneath it, down, and down, and down.
“What’s a High Walker?” Reever repeated, his cool smile warmed by Maisie’s open curiosity. “A High Walker is rare, nowadays—though there was a time when we were much more common in this place. You remember what the lady said about roamers? A High Walker is a sort of roamer.”
“You have one of Forel’s relics?” Negret asked the innkeeper. “He gave you one?”
Mr. Haypotten hesitated. “I . . . well, yes, to your first question, and not exactly, to your second.” He had been filling Sangwin’s glass, and he turned the bottle of spirits nervously in his hands. “I have been wondering if I ought to say something to you about it.” He set down the whiskey. “But the truth is, it’s been misplaced, and I couldn’t bring myself to admit it.”
“Misplaced?” Negret repeated in a cold tone that seemed entirely at odds with his usual good nature.
“Part of it, I should say. But—well, let me go and get what’s here, and you’ll see.”
Captain Frost tapped his half-hour glass, turned it, and followed the innkeeper from the room.
“He left it here,” Mrs. Haypotten said as the rattling of windows told them all that Frost had stepped outside by way of the inn’s front door. “Mr. Forel, that was. He left . . . well, he left a number of things with us after his last stay. He often came here to work when he wanted a change of scene, you know. For years we kept a room, special for him, fronting the Skidwrack bend. You never knew when he’d show up.” She looked at Reever. “The room you’re in, Mr. Reever, in fact. That’s the one he used to have when he’d come.”
Reever and his brother exchanged a glance. Negret got up from his chair and began to pace the small bit of unoccupied floor between the hallway doors and the chairs before the fire. The
