“The Roaming World,” Foulk breathed. The relief was staggering. It reminded him of when he’d been much, much younger and had discovered that he was not, in fact, crazy, but that the number sequence and accompanying ratio he’d begun seeing everywhere were known phenomena and even had names: the Fibonacci sequence and the golden mean.
“It will come clearer over time,” Morvengarde said. “The more you see, the more you look, the more you will find it. It hides in plain sight, but like many patterns, the overall structure becomes increasingly evident the more data you have.”
“Is it really a whole world? And is it a whole separate world?” Foulk asked, looking down at the puddle. “Is there . . . is that some sort of portal? Or is this Roaming World just a system within this world?”
“Young man, philosophers have given entire lifetimes to that question. Perhaps someday you will be the one to answer it.” Morvengarde reached into an inside pocket of his long coat. “It’s a rare thing to encounter a roamer at the start of his wanderings. Allow me to give you a gift of welcome.” And he took out a small magnifing glass like a jeweler’s loupe. “This, I believe, will help you see.”
Foulk took the glass. “What is it?”
“Look through it.”
Foulk obeyed and peered up at the stranger. Morvengarde was suddenly outlined in vapor and astonishing color against the fields. It was as if he both wore a halo and was also generating glowing smoke that billowed away from his tall figure.
The boy yelped and pulled the glass away. The world returned to normal. He put it back, and once again Morvengarde was a thing of strange light and shadow.
“Is this how you see the world?” Foulk breathed in wonder.
“No, indeed,” the stranger said. “Even among roamers, very few have the ability to see as you do, even when aided by a glass like that one. You have very special vision.”
“What is it about you that the glass is showing me?” Foulk asked, too caught up in all this new information for tact or caution.
“Well, I couldn’t say,” Morvengarde replied, tucking his hands into his pockets. “Describe it.”
Foulk tried, fumbling over words like halo and nimbus and fog, then radiance and visible light and refraction and even foam before Morvengarde, laughing, threw up his hands. “Enough. I think I can tell you what you’re seeing.”
We have heard from Mr. Haypotten about the makers of reliquaries here in Nagspeake, and the spectacular vessels they craft for containing the wondrous. But there is another kind of reliquary.
When do the remains of a miraculous person become miraculous themselves? A saint must—generally speaking—perform some number of miracles in life, but must also—again, generally—be dead before he or she can be given the title. But surely that’s just formality. Some people contain the wondrous within themselves throughout their lives. How would they perform marvels in the first place, if there wasn’t a core of the miraculous, some strange power already within them?
Mr. Morvengarde had a name for this quality. Worden: the quality of having a fate, a destiny, and he was always in search of those who possessed it. He also looked for those touched by a quality he called ferly—the strange and uncanny. Worden and ferly were revealed by a phenomenon Morvengarde called weyward lumination: weird light.
Objects that gave off weyward lumination he called relics, and people with worden or ferly—or best of all, both—he referred to as reliquaries: living, breathing, walking vessels for the miraculous. Foulk would very quickly discover, however, that not everyone is a saint who happens to be a reliquary.
“When you look at me,” Morvengarde finished, “you are seeing both kinds of weyward light. Worden is the halo, and ferly is the mist.”
Foulk stared down at the priceless loupe. “And I can really keep this?”
“Certainly. It’s a gift.” Morvengarde reached into his pocket again and took out a card. “I would be glad to hear from you sometime, Foulk. Write and tell me what the glass shows you. I will explain what I can. And perhaps you may return the favor in your own way.”
“How?”
“I am a merchant by trade, in the Roaming World,” Morvengarde said, presenting the card he’d taken from his vest.
MORVENGARDE
GRANDMASTER IN TOTO
DEACON AND MORVENGARDE,
INCORPORATED
GOODS, SERVICES, AND EXPRESSAGE
TRUSTED SINCE TIME IMMEMORIAL
49 TRYSTERO WHARF, THE LIMEN DOCKS
“Should you come across relics in your wanderings, I will buy them from you. Or, in the case of a reliquary, I—or one of my chapmen—will offer to pay them very well now in exchange for their mortal remains being left to me when they die.”
It began that simply. A boy who could see patterns, desperately looking for the one he couldn’t quite see but that had to be there, and a lens that began to bring it into focus.
It wasn’t precisely all around him, but the traces were more common than he’d expected. He took the loupe everywhere, glanced surreptitiously through it at everything, and began to learn to interpret what it revealed.
Ferly showed up through the lens as a sort of nimbus—a glowing mist around a particular subject that could vary in color, density, and concentration, not unlike all those fogs in the catalog listing Mr. Haypotten described. The uncanny comes in so many flavors, after all. A person marked with ferly could possess any number of varieties of it, and if you wanted to know what you were looking at, you had to look more than once, and carefully. Ferly doesn’t only follow people. It follows objects. It can attach itself to places. It can arise from stories, dances, songs. It spreads sometimes, touching and transforming everything in its path. It is deeply complicated on many levels.
Worden seemed at first to be simpler. Through the loupe, it looked like a halo, just as Morvengarde had said. It was hard-edged, confined; it was usually immediately obvious to what or whom the worden belonged, which was not the case with the more nebulous ferly. And it
