Goblin Secrets (15 page)

“I am thinking that he is not dead,” said Semele. “I wish that I knew where he was, and that I could tell you
where. I do not know, but I am thinking he is alive.”

“How can you tell?” Rownie asked, not yet allowing himself to be comforted.

Semele thought for a time before answering. “Your adoptive grandmother, she is very good at finding things. She is also very good at knowing when she should not bother looking. If she is still looking, then he is still somewhere to be found.”

She steered them around another curve. Rownie stared at the fog ahead with less anxiety, beginning to trust Semele to know the road.

He thought about Rowan, hiding somewhere in the fog, somewhere even Graba’s many pigeons couldn’t spot.

Rowan used to disappear for days. Sometimes he would put a new troupe together, and try to rehearse, but this rarely went well.
They’re too afraid of masks to put one on
, he complained once, while tossing several hellos over the side of the Fiddleway.
They’re just willing to do a little play-reading, late at night, with the windows down and the shutters drawn, and someone playing a fiddle in the next room to cover the noise. What are they so afraid of?

The Guard
, Rownie said.

But what are the Guard so afraid of?

Rownie wasn’t sure.
Pirates?
he suggested.

Rowan laughed.
No, I mean, why would a little pretending
in front of a crowd . . . Never mind. I just wish the rest of my troupe had more courage.

I’m not scared
, Rownie said.
Can I be in the next show?

Not this one
, Rowan told him.
There’s no role good enough for you in this one. And I’ll need you to be the one friendly face in the audience—if we ever get to stand in front of an audience.

Rownie was disappointed, and Rowan noticed.

Let me hear the speech I gave you
, the older brother said.
You’ve been practicing?

I’ve been practicing
, said Rownie.

He tried to remember that speech now, while he sat on the wagon bench with Semele. The first line came back to him—
I know my way, and I can guess at yours
—but he couldn’t think of the next one.

Another thought itched at the back of his mind, on the shelf of things not yet understood.

“Thomas called the puppet show a personal history,” he said. “Whose history?”

“Only mine,” said Semele. “Our selves are rough and unrehearsed tales we tell the world. Hold on to something, yes, because there is an old tree root in the road ahead. There used to be, at least, and I am thinking it is probably still there.”

The wagon wheels hit the root. Rownie’s teeth clacked together. Thomas and Essa gave squawks of protest from inside.

“So what happened to the girls, later?” Rownie asked, trying to ignore the pain in his teeth. “The ones in the story? The ones who survived?”

“They never did agree on which one was first and which was a reflection of a reflection,” Semele said. “One of them Changed and became Tamlin. The other learned witchwork, and she never, ever forgave the first for her Changing.”

“Oh,” said Rownie. “Oh.” He had several thousand questions now. He asked the one he had asked Patch. “How did you Change? What happened?”

Semele hummed to herself. She seemed to be examining her own words before letting them loose.

“A Change is one big step sideways,” she said, “in exchange for all of the small steps you might otherwise have taken. Yes. In most ways you
stop
changing, after a Change.”

This was not much of a clarification. “But how does it happen?” Rownie persisted. “Is it happening to me?”

“No, Rownie,” Semele told him. “We will not ever work a Change unwilling, on you or anyone. It is not happening to you, and will not happen unless you choose it. And we do need the assistance of someone both masked and unChanged.”

Rownie didn’t know if he was relieved or disappointed. He was not sure that he wanted his eyes to grow huge,
his ears to grow long, and his skin to grow mottled with a thousand green freckles. But he did want to be something else, something other than he had been, and he thought that maybe monsters were safe from each other.

Essa opened the hatch behind them to offer up plates of vegetable pastries. The pastries smelled heavily spiced, and good. Suddenly supper became very much more important to Rownie than anything left on the shelf in the back of his mind. They all ate together, driving through the fog down Riverside Road.

ZOMBAY EMERGED FROM THE FOG.

Rownie stared. He had never left the city before. It had always surrounded him. He had never seen it from the outside. He had never arrived in Zombay, until now.

Lights burned through the fog-filled dark. Constellations of lanterns and candles shone in uncountable windows. Street lamps—rare in Southside but common in Northside—cast warm light across cold paving stones.

The Clock Tower glowed above all. A glass moon ticked across a stained-glass sky on each face, illuminated from behind with lanterns, serving as a lighthouse to any barges sailing beneath the Fiddleway Bridge at night.

Semele drove them into Southside, into the medley of buildings built up over each other. Houses jutted out at strange angles, tethered with iron chains or buttressed with driftwood logs hammered into the brick and plaster
to keep them from toppling over sideways. The misshapen mess loomed over them.

Rownie breathed more easily. He took in a lungful of Southside dust. It was comforting. It was home. Still, he kept careful watch for Graba’s shack, knowing that it might be anywhere at all.

Gearwork hooves smacked the road at regular intervals. A few lonely street lamps lit either side of the lane.

“Are we near to Borrow Street?” Semele asked. “I am thinking that we are, but I would like to be sure.”

“We’re crossing it now,” Rownie said.

Semele jerked the reins to the left, and Horace made a precise left turn. The wagon nearly tipped over. Rownie grabbed the bench to keep from flying off, and almost flew off anyway when the wagon settled back onto all four wheels with a crunching sound. Essa and Thomas made angry noises inside.

“Thank you,” said Semele, unconcerned. “We have not far to go now, yes.”

Rownie examined the familiar streets and avenues around them, trying to guess at their destination. “Where are we headed?” he asked.

“Home,” said Semele. She drove through the entrance gate of the Fiddleway Bridge. “It is no small thing that we are showing you our home and inviting you to stay with
us. It is not something that we very often do.”

They drove as far as the middle of the bridge, and then Semele tugged the reins and pulled the wagon to a short, sharp stop.

“I cannot hear any other feet or wheels, in either direction,” she said, “but please be taking a look around to see if there is someone nearby who might be watching us.”

Rownie looked. He saw only fog and the empty causeway. The windows of the shops and houses on either side of the bridge were all shuttered and dark. It was very late. The Fiddleway slept.

“I don’t see anyone else,” he reported.

“That is a good thing,” Semele said. She steered the mule and the wagon into a small alley on the upstream side. Then she made another turn, and pulled up in front of a featureless stone wall.

“Please open the stable doors, yes,” she told Rownie.

Rownie stared at the wall in front of them. “I don’t see any stable doors,” he said.

“I invite you to see them,” said Semele, and now he did. He couldn’t see how he had missed them the first time.

Rownie climbed down, unlatched the tall pair of doors, and pulled them open. Semele drove the wagon through, and Rownie shut both doors behind them. The orange coal-glow of the mule’s belly cast the only light inside. Rownie
couldn’t see much more than stone walls and old straw.

Essa stumbled out through the back of the wagon. “Home,” she said. “Good. Somewhere there’s a bed that isn’t a hammock, and I’m going to find it.”

“Not so fast, not so fast,” Thomas called from inside. “We must return the masks to their places. The rest of the unloading can wait for tomorrow, but these should be properly cared for before anyone retreats to their own bed and blankets. Please show the boy where his own masks belong.”

Essa stumbled back into the wagon, grumbling, and came out again with an armful of masks. The fox was among them, and also the giant that Rownie had briefly worn on the wagon stage.

“Here,” Essa mumbled. “Take these two, and follow me.”

Rownie took the giant and the fox, carrying one in each hand. Essa held the princess mask, and the hero mask, and a few others besides. She also had the half mask that Patch had worn that morning, which seemed a very long time ago to Rownie—years and centuries ago. Much had happened since.

He followed Essa through a passageway to an iron staircase. The staircase led both up and down. “We’re going up!” Essa called behind her, from somewhere above.

“What’s down?” Rownie asked. They were on the
Fiddleway, and Rownie didn’t think that a bridge could actually have a downstairs.

“Barracks,” said Essa, “all the way down the central pylon. People used to keep watch here for pirates and such, but now they don’t bother. Some bits of the bridge still have skinny little windows for shooting things out of.”

Rownie heard gearwork, turning and clanking against itself. He could almost hear Graba’s legs in the noise. He could almost see her in the dim shadows. He almost felt her talon-toes opening and closing nearby. He was angry at Graba for her curses and birds, for Patch falling down and farther down, and he was afraid of Graba, and he was angry for being afraid and upset with himself for having made Graba upset with him. He pushed all of those feelings into a small and heavy lump of clay inside his chest, and then he tried to ignore the lump.

The staircase led up into a vast, towering space. Gears and springs, weights and pendulums all filled the center of it, turning slowly and interlocking. Crates and a jumbled mess of cloth and carpentry covered the floor. Rownie saw open wardrobes full of costumes, a workbench with all manner of tools, and several bookshelves. This was just as astonishing as anything else—Rownie had never before seen so many books together.

Lanterns burned high overhead, illuminating huge
circles of stained glass built into the four stone walls. Each circle showed a city skyline and a gray moon, half full. The sight was familiar, only now Rownie saw it from the inside out. He stared. His mouth was open. He didn’t notice.

He stood inside the Clock Tower.

“THIS WAY,” ESSA CALLED
over her shoulder. “Try not to get bonked by any moving bits of clock as you go.” Rownie followed her, dazed.

It was then that he noticed the masks.

They covered both the upstream and the downstream walls. Rownie saw heroes and ladies, villains and charmers, nursemaids and gentry. He saw animal masks made of fur, feathers, and scaly lizard skins bristling with teeth. Most had been carved out of wood or shaped in plaster, but he also saw masks made of tin and polished copper, gleaming in the lantern light. He saw thin, translucent masks made of beetles’ wings and carapaces, and wild masks made of bright feathers. He saw long-nosed tricksters and ghoulish false faces. Hundreds and hundreds of masks hung from nails by lengths of string, and every one of them seemed to be watching Rownie as he watched them.