Twenty: Into the Rigging

The day after Nail discovered Josef Buddenbrooks sitting in his cell, she planned to begin her own investigation -- to find out who he was and how much of his story was true.

She didn't believe that he was an assassin. That was exactly the kind of stupid lie that boys told all the time, especially when they were trying to show off.

He was just a kid, as frightened and lost as the rest of them. But she had to admit that there was something funny about him. His confidence. The easy way he threw off his handcuffs.

Just as she was lacing up her shoes, Marcus Barkle and Ballko turned up in the brig with a canvas bag.

"Look here, Nail," said Ballko. He pointed at the other kids with his thumb. "You've been living with this new lot. We want you to pick a couple of good ones to help us in the rigging."

"It's time you started learning the ropes," Barkle said.

"You won't need them shoes. We go barefoot up in the rigging. Pick a couple of mates, no runners now, and meet us outside."

Nail made a circuit of the room. The children watched her with wide eyes. "What does it mean?" said a little girl with patchy brown hair. "

"They mean to start training us," Nail told them. "We're to learn our new trade. You, Aramis. You'll go with me. And you, Silda."

Under Dr. Soonoo's care, Aramis has recovered with remarkable speed from his head wound. He had shown in a hundred ways that he was quick-fingered and had a fine sense of balance.

Silda had been a seamstress's girl. She had big, knowing hands and she knew here way around knots and rope.

"Think you can manage the height?" Nail said to Silda, speaking softly so as not to shame her. "We'll be swinging around way up top."

"What choice do I have?" Silda said. She had black, short-cut hair and a fast, thin smile. "I think I'll be okay."

They went out to the base of the docking stand that held the Blue Oriole.

She loomed above them, her hull curving away and blocking the gray light that came in through the warehouse windows.

A hoist went up and down at regular intervals -- a kind of make-shift elevator -- powered by a thudding, coal-fired engine.

"Hold on," said Barkle. "That's the rule today. Hold on tight and don't fall. If you learn that much, then you get a second day to learn something else."

They clambered onto the platform and were swept up past the keel, up past the ventral masts, then swept out toward the crow's platform on the mizzen.

Nail's stomach lurched and lurched again. Her bare feet felt slippery and clumsy on the lift floor. She gripped the rope hard, but her hands were slick with sweat.

She noticed that Aramis didn't look frightened at all. He was looking around with eager curiosity, only holding on with one hand.

Her own heart raced. When Ballko gestured for her to step out onto the rounded spar, she hesitated.

They were high aloft now, three or four stories above the Oriole's deck and the same again above the floor of the warehouse.

She could see the rafters not far above and the great hinges and mechanical works that would slide the roof back when the ship was ready to launch.

For a moment, she felt that she might freeze -- that she might be incapable of walking the shrouds -- but then she heard Josef Buddenbrooks' voice in her head:

"You're not really looking," he said.

She took a deep breath and tried to focus on what she was seeing. In fact, the cross-spar on the mizzen was quite large: as big around as a small tree.

There was a flattened patch on the upper surface, wide enough to stand on quite easily. She stepped onto it and gripped an iron ring set into the mast.

"Move along," Ballko said. "Make room for the others. You can perch on the platform there."

Built around the crow's nest was a largish stage made of oaken beams, which radiated out from the mast, covered with rough-hewn boards.

Nail felt the grain of the wood on her feet, as comforting as anything in her life.

The other two -- Aramis and Silda -- crowded in next to her. Both were panting a little, out of excitement and fear.

"Isn't it fantastic?" Aramis said, under his breath. "Imagine if the whole thing was pitching back and forth!"

Marcus Barkle overheard and said, "You learn to use that -- the pitch and roll of the ship -- when we're underway. A skilled shroudwalker can leap forty feet and more if he times it right."

"Only there's never second chances," Ballko said. Nail could see that he relished trying to scare them. "One wrong move and --" He pounded a fist into the mast.

The next couple of hours were a whirl of excitement, terror, and careful discovery. They met one by one the other shroudwalkers, the veterans -- though Nail was far too nervous to remember their names.

She watched them skip over the ropes, swinging from place to place like monkeys in a jungle.

It was intimidating and overwhelming: I'll never be able to do that, she thought.

To make matter's worse, they spoke in a jargon that amounted almost to a second language, as they pitched lines back and forth, threading the heavy hemp ropes through block-and-tackle.

The new children were given baby-tasks. Someone would direct them to stand in a certain place (miles, it seemed, above the earth below) and hold the end of a canvas sheet.

"Let go when I say let go, not before," Ballko would say. Or, "We'll all haul away when I give the word, so stay sharp."

Silda was the best of the three newcomers. She knew a hundred knots and could do most of them with one hand.

Aramis, too, showed that he had a kind of knack for the work.

Once, one of the older boys tried to trip him up and Aramis let himself fall to the next line of rope, where he spun about and landed on a mast-ring.

"I did a show with a family of fliers," he said to Nail. "They could swing from bar to bar like nothing -- they showed me a few tricks."

Nail felt nearly helpless through most of the long day. At times, a kind of dizzy vertigo took her and she could hardly move or see what was going on about her.

Marcus Barkle dropped down from one of the higher sails, crouching next to her and speaking softly: "You'll be fine, girl. Don't let yourself freeze up. If the others see you choke, you're done for."

She could see that he was right. The older shroud walkers were a hard bunch. They sneered and cat-called, whenever one of the new kids made a mistake.

The trick that the one boy tried to play on Aramis was only the beginning of their hazing. In part it was Ballko's fault: He was a rigid, dull boy who led by bullying.

But the others had caught his spirit. They had spent months or years in their dangerous trade. They had seen their friends die. It had made them callous.

So Nail drove herself. Sweating so that her eyes stung, she struggled to keep up, working knots, clambering from place to place.

Her hands were raw. Her arms quivered with exhaustion. Any number of times, she thought she would slip and fall.

"If I were running things," she thought, "it would be different. We would train the kids without treating them cruelly."

Before she realized it, her first day in the rigging was at an end and they were descending on the hoist elevator.

The ship passed her like a great, living thing -- a thing which she served now. She caught a glimpse of Captain Marsh patrolling the deck, chin on his chest, arms clasped behind his back.

"You did passably well," Marcus Barkle said, to the three of them. "Tomorrow you'll do better."

"They had better," grumbled Ballko, who stalked away.

Aramis glanced at Nail and grinned. "Bet he didn't do half as well on his first day," he whispered.

Nail smiled back but she was too weary to feel much of anything except hunger and a desire for her cot.

An hour later, she was drifting off to sleep, her muscles singing and groaning. It was then, just before she tumbled down into dream, that a pecular thing happened.

In her mind, she suddenly saw the Blue Oriole's masts and lines and sails as a pure geometric pattern. She saw planes and lines and points, each etched with marks to indicate length and angle.

What had seemed like an insoluble muddle through the day -- "Go there, stand here, climb up there!" -- suddenly resolved into a perfectly clear pattern.

To her surprise, she saw that Barkle and Ballko had gotten it wrong. A dozen of the rope-and-tackle systems were placed at angles that were good but imperfect.

If hauled tight, the sails would shed wind; or fail to come properly taut.

What's more, if they did it her way -- the way she could see in her mind -- it would take fewer hands to haul and the job would be done quicker.

The discovery was so marvelous somehow that all the fear and weariness vanished. As she fell asleep, she felt that the wierd, complicated world of the Shroud Walkers had become her own, personal domain.

Next: Cat and Mouse

Nineteen: Inquiry Into the Whereabouts of A Certain Master B.

Two days later, Ballko turned up in Marcus Barkle's cabin. He grinned sheepishly and said, "There's a pair of bluebellies asking to see Captain Marsh. Thought you'd want to know."

"What do they want?"

"You think they'd tell me? They only said it was official business."

Barkle winced. "Admiralty official or local official?"

"Local. I think."

"Okay, Ballko." Barkle pointed upward with his thumb. "How goes it in the rigging?"

"She's knotted like a widow's yarn. We're too short of hands to do it proper."

Barkle nodded. Captain Marsh had used their weeks in drydock to reset the Blue Oriole's mizzen and bowsprint, both of which had taken a beating in the Mother Storm.

That meant completely reworking the lines and sheets, no easy task when you were short handed.

"Let's start training some of the new kids," he decided. "Have to try them sooner or later. We'll put them the lower spars, right? See who's handy and who's got two left feet."

"All of them?"

"None of the runners. Last thing we need now is a rabbit chase. Ask the girl -- Nail. Ask here which ones she thinks will stick. Tell her to pick three or four."

At that very moment, Nail was exploring a part of the great warehouse she had never seen before.

From every corner of the vast barnlike building, the dream clipper loomed like --- well, like a dream. From some angles, she looked like a great bird perched on a nest.

From other angles, she looked like a fish out of water, awkward and exposed. Her masts jutted in all directions, a tangle of unsecured ropes and dangling squares of canvas.

The impression of disorder was made even worse by her sailors, who had put their laundry out on lines to dry.

Down in the shadow of the Oriole, the warehouse included a half-dozen different workshops and buildings: a smithy, a seamstress shop, a joinery.

It was a village unto itself, separate from the larger bustle of Piketon.

But Nail was well aware that it wasn't a happy village. Many of the merchants were clamoring to be paid. The sailors -- having exhausted their meager pay in the town's saloons -- were growing tied of life ashore.

There were arguments and fistfights. The new physician, Dr. Soonoo, spent a part of each day sewing up cuts and making poultices for bruises.

In the brig, the mob of shanghaied kids were homesick and mournful. The new boy, Aramis, helped by doing magic tricks and entertaining them with stories, but even that was growing stale.

Nail herself was bored and restless. "How long until we actually go somewhere?" she asked Ballko.

"Another week at least," the boy said. "That storm beat us up pretty good. And the Captain's still trying to sort out a cargo that'll pay."

To pass the hours, Nail had taken to exploring, and trying to make sense of the vast, complicated business that went into tending a dream-clipper.

"We can go a year and more on our own once we're underway," Ballko told her. "But all the wear and tear adds up. The Oriole was long overdue for a shake-down."

Down a stairway, Nail found a row of stalls made for keeping livestock.

Before they set sail, the Oriole would take a small herd of cattle and goats and sheep aboard, along with chickens, ducks, rabbits and Guinea hens.

Peering through one of the gates, she saw something unexpected: A boy with bright red hair sitting on an overturned bucket.

A manacle had been clapped over his wrist and a chain fixed him to the wall.

He was younger than most of the kids in the brig, but he was sitting bolt upright, his arms crossed over his chest, eyes half-closed.

"Hey, you," Nail said. "Are you asleep?"

The boy blinked once, slowly, then looked at her. He had startling yellow eyes.

"You're the one they call Nail," he said. "The one who likes numbers."

Nail's mouth dropped open. "How do you know my name?" she said. "How do you know I like numbers?"

"I listen," the boy said simply. "I watch. And I make deductions."

She frowned at him. She didn't like the idea of anybody watching her, or knowing things about her that she didn't tell them.

"Who are you?" she said.

"My name is Buddenbrooks," he said. "Josef Buddenbrooks. They kidnapped me almost a week ago. I've been sitting here ever since."

"Why didn't they put you with us -- with the other kids?"

"Because I'm dangerous."

Nail looked at him for a moment, smirked and said, "You don't look very dangerous to me."

"That's because you're not really looking."

"I can see you're just a little boy." She stressed the word little. "You look posh, but your family can't help you now, if that's what you mean."

"I don't want my family to help me," he said.

The boy held up his manacled arm, made a curious gesture with his free hand, and before Nail could properly see what had happened, he was free.

The handcuff dangled useless from its chain. Then the boy did something very strange: He clapped it back on his wrist and locked it again.

"Are you a magician, like Aramis?" Nail said.

The boy shook his head and said, "You're still not looking."

"That's really irritating. If you're not a magician, what are you?"

"I'm an assassin. Or I'm supposed to be."

Nail laughed scornfully. "You? An assassin? How many people have you killed?"

"None. And I don't want to, either. That's why I'm glad they kidnapped me."

"Wait. You're glad you were shanghaied?"

He nodded. "If I'd known what they were doing, I would have gone eagerly. I thought it was a test, put on by my weapons master, or my parents. I hope I didn't hurt anyone too badly."

Nail said nothing. The conversation was simply too puzzling. She turned on her heel and went away, determined to sort things out.

As she left, the boy was silent. She imagined that he must be sitting there again on his bucket, back straight, arms folded.

At that very moment, Captain Marsh was seated behind his desk, a chart of the Thirtyworld Main spread before him and a set of calipers in one hand.

A pair of Piketon's local police -- bluebellies, people called them -- stood across from him in their stiff blue coats, arms folded behind their backs.

"What can I do for you gentleman?" the Captain asked.

"We are making an inquiry," said one of the fellows. He spoke as if reading from a proclamation: "Into the whereabouts of a certain Master Buddenbrooks."

"Never heard of him."

"He is a boy, a child of nine years," said the other man. "Smallish, red hair. He was abducted five days ago."

"So? Since when do cops on Piketon care about missing kids?"

"This kid was a person of quality," the first officer said. "The Buddenbrooks family are -- influential."

"We found this at the scene of the crime," put in the other. He held up a broken belaying pin. "Looks like something a napper crew might use."

"It's not in our interest to take kids from uptown neighborhoods," said the Captain.

"Especially not this particular kid," said the cop. "His parents are muckety-mucks in the Hemlock League. They're licensed killers. Assassins."

"I'm surprised they even bothered reporting him gone," said the other fellow, in a musing tone. "Usually they sort things like this out there own way."

"I'm not sure what this has to do with the Blue Oriole," Captain Marsh said. "I've looked over our fresh recruits. No one fits that description. You're welcome to look for yourself."

"We'll do that," the cop said. "Best to be thorough, isn't that right?"

While Marcus Barkle watched, the bluebellies prowled through the brig, looking at each of the children. Some of the kids watched silently; others begged for help, asking to be taken home.

"Please, sirs," said one boy. "Can you just take a message to my parents? Tell them where I am?"

The cops ignored him. "Our brat ain't here," one bluebelly grumbled. "Let's try the next ship."

Twenty: Into the Rigging

Eighteen: In the Land of the Breathless

The last thing Aramis remembered was a great walloping blow on his head, the kind of corker that leaves you one full heartbeat in which to think, Well, now, that should just about do it.

He didn't have time to think about the queer boy who had chased him, or his brother Simon. He never even spared a thought for his magicking gear.

Not, that is, until he came awake on a great expanse of dusty earth, with a terrible headache and a foul taste in his mouth.

"Dad's magic hat," he said to himself. "I've lost it. I've lost everything, I bet."

He sat up and looked around. The horizon rose up around him on all sides, like the rim of an old clay bowl.

The sky was the color of the polluted river that ran through Piketon. A sun hung sullenly right overhead.

"That's that, Aramis," he said. "You're dead and there's no two ways about it."

His voice went flat into the world, like a coin tossed down a well. As soon as he stopped talking, the silence slammed down, like a glass jar banged over a buzzing insect.

"What's more," he said, "you've died and gone someplace unpleasant."

He stood and looked around again, but this modest change hardly changed the perspective at all. The world was featureless and vast and empty even of wind.

On a whim, Aramis shouted: "Hey! Anybody home?"

Nothing. Not even an echo. He thought maybe his voice would travel all the way round this empty world and hit him in the back of the head.

After a few minutes, his headache subsided and because there was nothing else to do, he started walking.

Aramis had always liked to walk. He could trek forever through the streets of Piketon, magic kit on his back, never minding the ache in his liegs.

But in the city there were faces and smells and intrigues and infinite changes. To his unworldly eye, its streets were full of wonder.

Here there was only dust, so fine and soft that he could hardly hear his footfalls as he trudged along. The sun fell directly on the top of his head, so there wasn't a shadow.

A certain amount of time passed -- Aramis couldn't say how long. The sun seemed never to move. He began to feel lonely and afraid. What if it went on and on? What if he grew old here, walking and walking?

What if there was nothing to eat or drink?

Twice he stopped and sat down. He closed his eyes, but for some reason that made him feel horribly dizzy.

This queer world seemed so flat and featureless that it seemed he might slide right off.

He went on again, dragging his feet through the dust. He found that he had an old nib piece in his pocket. To pass the time, he practiced flipping it over the backs of his fingers, causing it to disappear from one hand and appear in the other.

At last, his eye caught on a feature far away on the plain. He stopped and squinted. It looked like a bit of ink or a scrap of cloth.

He walked a little farther and the shape got bigger, forming first into a shadow, and then into the form of a man stretched out flat on the ground.

Aramis felt a surge of hope and began to jog forward, but something made him falter and stop. The tickle of fear came again. What if the man were dead?

"Hey there!" he called, from a safe distance. "Hello!"

As if stung or prodded with a sharp knife, the man leaped to his feet, looking around. He had a slouch hat that covered most of his face and dusty old dungarees and shapeless boots.

Spying Aramis, he took two quick steps forward, covering a frightening amount of distance. But when Aramis began backing up, the man stopped and took off his hat.

"Hello, son," he said. He had a sleepy, half-distracted voice -- like he might be drunk. "Don't you recognize me? It's me -- your father."

The fellow looked around and wiped his brow with his hat. "I been waiting here for you. I been waiting so long I can't remember how long."

He turned and for the first time Aramis could see his face full-on. He did look something like his father, but a lot of years had passed.

And there was something wrong about this fellow's face. It looked lumpy or swollen, as if the bones under the skin didn't quite fit.

When he talked Aramis could see his teeth on the top and bottom of his mouth, teeth as flat and square as gravestones.

The man's black eyes glinted like a bug's eyes and as he looked around he forgot to blink.

The tickle of fear in Aramis's stomach began to grow.

"How are you, boy?" the man said. "How's Simon? I don't see him with you. You didn't leave him behind, did you? You didn't quit your own brother -- did you?"

The fellow grinned, showing all those teeth at once.

"You're not my dad," Aramis said. "Not even close."

"Why, sure I am. Sure as anything. Here, I'll show you."

The man turned the slouch hat in his hand and made a little flourish. Reaching in, he pulled out a lit candle.

But unlike a normal candle, this one glowed black, with feathers of green on the edge of the light. It was like an infected sore.

He grinned again his stony grin and said, "See? There's no telling what I might pull out of this hat, if I wanted to."

Aramis blinked once, then spun about and began to run. He ran as fast as he could, his feet making hollow drum sounds on the earth.

The first hundred paces or so, he didn't dare look back. He imagined the man grabbing his collar, dragging him down.

When nothing happened, he glanced over his shoulder and found that the fellow was loping behind, hat flopping on his head.

He could catch me any time, Aramis realized. He's pacing me, for some reason, or playing with me.

"You just keep going, boy!" the man yelled, his voice cheerful as death. "Let's see where your little jaunt takes us!"

There was nothing else for it, so Aramis kept running. He ran as fast and hard as he had ever run in his life. He had outstripped thugs before and blue-bellies and truant officers.

But the plain just seemed to go on forever and ever. There was no place to hide, nowhere to take shelter. And the man just jogged along, that big satisfied smile never leaving his lumpy face.

Aramis was just about to give up when he saw something: another glimmering shadow. He bent his path towards it, and redoubled his speed.

His lungs felt raw and his legs were like lead, but he refused to let himself flag.

"What do we have here?" said the man. "Looks like somebody wants to meddle in our little family reunion, isn't that right, son?"

Aramis didn't answer, or look back. The shape up ahead had resolved itself into the figure of a man. He wore a linen suit and had oiled black hair and carried a black valise.

"Hello, Aramis," said the second man. He had a posh accent and sounded completely unbothered by the queer situation. "I would like for you to place yourself behind me as quickly as possible. Stand very carefully in my shadow."

"Who are you?"

"There's no time for that now. You must trust me, or all is lost."

Aramis hesitated only a moment, then dashed past the man. A smudge of inky blackness fell behind him over the sand and Aramis stepped onto it the way you might climb onto the last spar of a sinking ship.

The man who had been chasing Aramis said, "You are intefering with a legitimate Taking. I spied that soul first and it is mine."

"There has been a mistake," said the newcomer. "This boy isn't dead and therefore cannot be taken except by murder."

"I've been waiting for him to die," said the man, with a careless shrug. "Any fool can see he'll be dead soon enough."

"In point of fact, he seems suddenly to have found the road to recovery," said the newcomer. "Sorry to disappoint you, but you will have to find another soul for your collectdion."

The man in the slouch hat gave a snarl. He threw the hat down in the dust and stomped on it. Then he did something horrible.

He took off his face -- the face of Aramis's father -- with exactly the same careless gesture. He threw it down in the dust and stomped on that, too.

Underneath the mask, the man's true face was lifeless and yellow, held together with bits of twine. He looked like a scarecrow battered by a storm.

"What is it?" said Aramis, his voice shaking. "What is that thing?"

"It is one of the Breathless," said the man in the linen suit. "A particularly nasty kind of ghoul. Now if you please, be quiet for a moment."

The Breathless man was rolling up his ragged sleeves and rubbing the soles of his boots on the ground, like a bull preparing to charge.

"If you won't let me have him fair and square," the ghoul said, "then I'll just have to take him." He grinned -- his graveyard teeth were still the same and said, "A little murder never hurt anybody, isn't that right, son?

He started jogging forward, picking up speed every step, like thing that was more wolf than human.

The man in the linen suit seemed unperturbed. He placed his blag bag on the ground and opened it. Aramis was startled to see a tiny head stick out. And then another.

A lean, angular cat leapt from the opening and landed with its back arched, fangs bared at the Breathless. Out came a second cat, then a third.

The Breathless caught himself up, a look of terror on its face. "So that's how it's going to be," the thing said, it's voice shaking with indignation.

"Well, two can play at that game."

It reached into the flop hat and pulled out a scabrous bird with black wings and white eyes. It threw the bird in the direction of the cats and drew out another.

In an instant the battle was joined -- crow against cat, claw and beak against claw and fang. A terrible howling and cawing filled the dusty sky.

The man in the linen suit turned to Aramis and said, "My magic can't kill a Breathless, not here. not in this place. This is Despond, one of the thousand-and-one worlds where the Breathless rule. On this ground, I can only slow it for a time."

"What do we do?" Aramis said.

"It would be best for everyone involved," observed the man, "if you would be so kind as to wake up."

He reached a manicured hand and tapped the boy once gently but firmly on the forehead. Aramis blinked, startled, and when his eyes opened the desolate plain had vanished.

The battle between cats and crows was gone and so was the strange man. In their place was a skinny, sharp-faced girl. She was sitting over him, holding a wet cloth against his cheek.

They were in some kind of hostel or bunkhouse. He could hear other people about -- children, from the sound of it.

Seeing he was awake, the girl said, "It's about time. We thought you might quit on us. Don't ask any questions, not yet. If you keep still, I will tell you three things -- three things and then you have to rest. Is it a deal?"

Aramis -- who was quite completely baffled -- could only nod. He couldn't have struggled if he wanted to. He felt incredibly weak and dizzy.

"First thing, my name is Nail," the girl said. "Secondly, you're one of us now, part of the Blue Oriole crew." She turned and showed the tattoo of a bird's wing on her shoulder.

She looked at it for a second, craning her neck, as if trying to decide what she thought about the symbol.

"Third thing you should know, is that it was Dr. Soonoo who brought you back. He's a strange one. Half cat, I think. He looks at you like you're a curious piece of string, and that's when he notices you at all. But he's no quack. You owe him. And that's three things and a deal's a deal, so you must get some rest."

She stood abruptly and went away and for a long time Aramis lay on the cot. He couldn't help thinking of Simon and the Breathless and the man in the linen suit. A part of him wanted very much to cry and sob.

Then he held out his hand, turned it this way and that, and made a nib appear out of thin air. It was a small gesture, but it was enough to give him a little peace. He closed his eyes and fell into a healthy sleep.

Next: Inquiry Into the Whereabouts of A Certain Master B.

Seventeen: Dr. Soonoo's Black Bag

Nail was furious. With herself, mostly, but also with Marcus Barkle and Captain Marsh, who had sent her on this mission across Piketon.

She sat on a streetcar, rumbling through one of the worker encampments. Pale, dusty faces swept along outside the smeared window.

On a streetcorner, a brass band was playing patriotic tunes from the era of the old Federation, blatting and honking without enthusiasm.

She saw a line of school children, dressed in bright yellow smocks and tricorner hats. Candidates for one of the scribes guilds, she reckoned.

Though she had yet to spend a single day in the rigging of the Blue Oriole, Nail already felt the scorn of the sailor toward worldlubbers.

But it was also true that she had begun to feel the sting of the indentured life. With her family and her distracted, day-dreaming father, Nail had been left to her own devices.

She had sorted for herself and made her own way through life.

Now, she found herself under the thumb of a Captain, whose authority was all but perfect.

Marcus Barkle ordered her about like a servant; and even the boy, Ballko, seemed to think it natural that she should jump when he spoke.

She rattled the pocketfull of coins they had given her and thought about running off. It seemed certain that she could vanish into the alleys and slums of Piketon.

How would Barkle ever find her -- even with this blue tattooo on her shoulder?

She looked at the letter that Captain Marsh had entrusted to her. It was sealed with a blob of blue wax, pressed with a seal from the big ring on the Captain's finger.

"You are to take it to the address I've written on the back," he instructed, hardly botherin gto look at her. "The letter is for Dr. Soonoo, and no one else. If you can't find him, come straight back, is that understood?"

"Yes, sir," she said.

"Off with you, then."

Nail had scampered down one of the gangplanks from the belly-hatch of the Blue Oriole. Barkle was waiting for her at the bottom.

"I can trust you, right?" he said. "I've enough trouble at the moment without any nonsense."

She nodded.

"That letter will bring a doctor who can help the kid in the brig," Barkle said. "Without a doctor, I reckon he'll die in a day or two."

"What's that to me?" Nail said.

Barkle's face darkened. In moments like that, he didn't look like a little boy at all. He looked like some kind of gnome, old and grave.

"He's one of us now, just like you and me. Things are hard on the Oriole, no mistake, but we look after each other. Get it?"

In truth, it was this that made Nail angry: She did care about the sick boy in the brig. She did feel protective of him and of the other children who had been taken by Marcus Barkle.

She thought of them, huddled and frightened, waiting for her to come back. With each passing day, more of them looked to her for help with their problems, for answers to their questions.

The more she tried to push them away, the more they demanded.

"It's not fair," she said to herself. "I just escaped from one family. I never wanted another."

The conductor called out Knife Avenue, which was her stop, and Nail clambered down.

It was a neighborhood made almost entirely of colorless concrete blocks, the road paved with poured macadam.

There was the small of a tannery, sour and thick in the air. On the corner was a saloon, with half a dozen men seated outside on a bench.

Though it was mid-day, they had bottles in their fists and were cross-eyed drunk.

"Hey there, girly!" one of the called. "You must be the Queen of Dream, riding about on a streetcar like that. Got a pocketfull of nibs, have you?"

"Why don't you share with us poor workingmen," said one of his fellows. "Come and buy us a round of drinks?"

Nail ignored their laughter. She had been laughed at plenty when preaching with her father. She knew when men were dangerous and when they were just making noise.

She asked an old man with a vegetable cart for directions and in a few minutes was standing outside a narrow doorway made of plywood and rusty hinges. A tangle of rope served as the knob.

Tacked to the wall beside the door was a scrap of parchment that read, in descending order, "Dentist, Barber, Surgeon, Leech, Priest."

Scrawled at the bottom was a symbol that Nail recognized: an ankh. A cross, with a loop at the top.

She knocked tentatively and said, "Hello? I have a message for Dr. Soonoo! Anyone there?"

A long, low groan came from inside, followed by a cannonade of coughing and wheezing. It sounded like someone was coming apart.

Then she heard a low voice, queerly accented, smooth as fine sand: "There you are, Mr. Keene, all done. Rinse your mouth with this solution and spit in the basin, if you please."

There was more hackery and wheezing and then a dazed looking man, with a great belly and a two-day growth of beard, appeared in the doorway. Dribbles of bright blood showed on the bib of his shirt.

He rested a hand on the wall and said, "Ah, now, the pain's going already. It's a miracle. I believe you have saved my life!"

A second man appeared, dressed in the finest linen suit Nail had ever seen. He wore a cream-colored cravat, with another ankh set in the middle as a tie-pin.

He had olive-colored skin and oiled black hair that was neatly parted down one side.

He looked so out of place in that derelict building that Nail blinked twice to make sure that she wasn't imagining things.

"I have pulled a rotten tooth, nothing more," he said. "But it's true enough that you might have drawn poison into your blood. If next time you feel that something has gone canker in your mouth, Mr. Keene, I urge you to have it removed before it turns green."

"Yes, sir, Dr. Soonoo, no mistake."

The man gave a sort of salute and went wobbling off down the lane. Dr. Soonoo, for that's who it was, turned and looked at Nail.

He was wiping his rather beautiful hands with what appeared to be a silk handkerchief.

"By the look of you," he said, "you can be nothing other than a ship's brat."

Nail bristled and was on the point of telling him to go dunk his head in a bucket of slop when she remembered the letter in her hand and the dying boy in the brig.

"I have a message for you," she said. "From Captain Marsh of the Blue Oriole."

Dr. Soonoo winced visibly. "So," he said. "The fates have sent that devil back to my door, have they? Please follow me inside."

He retreated into the gloomy doorway. She followed and found, to her surprise, that the space inside was spartan but clean and brightly lit with oil lamps.

A curtain led into a back room. "Wait here for a moment, if you will be so kind," said the Doctor.

While he was gone, Nail looked around. She found that the walls were set with curious cubby-holes, half a dozen of them, placed at weird intervals.

From several of these openings, queer-faced cats were staring. They looked at her without blinking, like a jury of felines.

"Ugly brutes," she muttered, and was startled again when one of the animals winked at her.

Next to the surgical table, she saw what appeared to be a small shrine or altar. In the middle was a black statue, six or seven inches high.

It showed a woman, dressed in flowing robes, with the passive face of a cat.

"That is Sekhmet," said Dr. Soonoo, coming back in. "She is my mistress, the patroness of the Healer's Guild."

Nail shrugged and couldn't help pulling a face.

"What, you're a skeptic?" said the Doctor, obviously amused. "I thought children believed in all sorts of things, gods and fairies and the like."

"It's nonsense, if you ask me," she said, "begging your pardon."

Dr. Soonoo laughed and said, "I believe Captain Marsh is recruiting a more clever class of of shroud-walkers than in olden days. Come, give me the old wretch's letter."

He broke the seal and read it quickly through, sighing and shaking his head.

"Do you know what the fool has done?" he said, glancing at the girl. "He has tried to threaten me, lie to me, and flatter me, all in the same paragraph. Unfortunately, our Marsh is a better sailor than diplomat."

Nail couldn't help grinning. She rather liked seeing a point scored on Captain Marsh.

"All things being equal," said the Doctor, "I should send a reply saying that Marsh can walk his own plank and be damned in the bargain. Do you agree?"

This startled her a third time. He seemed to be in earnest, truly asking her opinion. She thought again of the kids in the brig, the sick one in particular.

"Setting Captain Marsh aside," Nail said, as noncomittally as she could, "there are some back on the Oriole who might need you. Who might...die if you don't come."

"Ah," Dr. Soonoo said. "Death is it?" He gestured at the black statue and said, "For my part, I prefer dentistry and philosophical experiments. But my mistress has a particular interest in mortal things."

He produced a large black bag, which opened at the top, and began filling it with blades and clamps and other tools from the surgical table.

The bag seemed to admit an impossible number of objects, including vials of medicine, the statue, and several largish books.

Dr. Soonoo snapped his fingers with a little flourish and one by one thirteen cats emerged from the cubby-holes in the walls.

Several looked like normal house cats or alley cats. But most were tall, lean, black creatures, with pointed faces and ears nearly as large as those of a fox.

The came with a practiced casualness, as if having just decided, independently, upon a course of action. One by one, they leaped into the mouth of the black bag and disappeared.

"Shall I tell you the truth?" observed the Doctor, speaking over his shoulder.

"I would like very much to be a skeptic, too. But last night, while sleeping, I dreamed that I was a cat and a little blue bird came and sat upon my shoulder. And do you know what the bird was carrying in its beak?"

She shook her head, still unable to take her eyes off the magical valise.

Dr. Soonoo turned and looked at her. "The bird was carrying a a small, black nail. What do you suppose we should make of that?"

Next: In the Land of the Breathless

Sixteen: A Replacement for Dr. Trimm

Captain Horatio Marsh was hanging in a great bucket, wearing shirt sleeves with a common sailor's rag tied around his long black hair.

The bucket dangled from a crane fixed to a roof beam at the peak of the Blue Oriole's hangar.

It wasn't common for a ship's captain to inspect his carpenter's fine work, but Marsh believed in looking after details.

Too many times in his career he had discovered that a joining job had been done with salvaged timber or rotting bolts. Or found that his tins of stored beef were shot through with spoilage.

In any event, such "scut" work, as he called, was also a convenient way to escape the creditors and lawyers and merchants and insurance men who crowded around any sizable dream clipper.

Thanks to the fiasco with the parrots, Captain Marsh had been forced to borrow heavily against the value of the Oriole.

The idea of mortgaging his ship made him feel distinctly disloyal and dodgy.

He made up for it by going over her planks one by one, knocking the wood, striking the rivets with a small jeweler's hammer that he kept in his belt.

It was just getting on toward his mid-day supper when someone hailed him from below. It was Marcus Barkle, hat in hand.

There were rules against interrupting the Captain, when he was "fondling his lass," as the crewmen said.

Even from a height, Marsh could see that his Lord of Shrouds had a sheepish look on his face, and a swelling bruise on one cheek.

"Well, now," he said. "What the yellow hell have you got yourself into this time, Mr. Barkle?"

"I've been hunting, sir," said the little man. "I got a good one, but he came at a cost."

"What kind of cost?"

"Well, he's a runner, for one thing. I've had to lock him up special, apart from the others."

Marsh made a noncommittal noise. Half the kids they nabbed were runners. There had to be something more.

"It's Dr. Trimm," Barkle confessed. "Seems he accidentally swallowed half his bottle of aether."

"Dead, is he?" said the Captain.

"No, sir, not quite. But we had to drop him round at the Charity Hospital. They said he'd be two weeks coming out of it."

Orum Braithwaite, the ship's steward, seemed to have an ear for trouble that might affect his well-ordered world of cooks and scullers and maids.

He looked over the deckrail from above and said, "That's no damned good, sir. We have got a full list of First Class passengers, half a hundred booked already. They start coming aboard next week."

Braithwaite was a fat, keene-eyed man, who doubled as chief of one of the cannon crews.

"That passage money's spent twice over, as you well know, sir. The Admiralty'll have our charter if we allow civilians aboard without a surgeon."

"Thank you, Mr. Braithwaite, I am aware of the Admiralty's regulations."

"There's more," said Marcus Barkle. "We have a sick kid in the brig. One of the better recruits."

"Sick how? Ain't the plague, is it?"

"No, sir. He took an honest knock on the noggin a week or so ago--" Again Barkle looked sheepish. "--and ain't been right since."

The Captain swayed for a moment in his bucket, pondering.

Then he said, "It happens I have an old acquaintance in Piketon, a medical man. Not the straightest arrow in the quiver, but no quack either. Wouldn't want to sail with him, but he'll do as a fill-in for Dr. Trimm until he returns."

"Will he take the job, sir?" asked Marcus Barkle. "We haven't any money, have we?"

"Hardly two nibs to rub together, I'm afraid. Which means we will have to pay him in lies and deceit, at least to start."

The little man shrugged. "I suppose that's better pay than some get."

Captain Marsh nodded. "All the experienced shroud-walkers are hard at work making repairs and setting the new rigging. Do you have anyone in that new rabble of kids down there who can be trusted with a message?"

"Yes, sir, a girl. Calls herself Nail. She's one of us."

"Send her to my quarters in a half hour and I'll have a letter for her."

Marcus touched his knuckle to his forehead and turned away. A little too hastily for the Captain's liking.

"Hey, Marcus!" he cried. "Did anything else go wrong with this latest kid-napping of yours? Anything worse than poisoning poor Dr. Trimm?"

Marcus Barkle paused, then turned and said, "No, sir, nothing worth mentioning."

"Very well," said the Captain. Tilting his head, he cried, "Haul me up, will you? And somebody see about my supper!"

Next: Professor Soonoo's Black Bag

Fifteen: Hard as Nail

Nail's resolution to keep herself apart from the other children quickly fell into tatters.

For one thing, she was the oldest of the girls being held in the brig. Her hard pilgrim's life had left her with a bit more independence and confidence.

Even the tough kids from Piketon's streets knew very little of the world. They were baffled and frightened.

As the days passed, the came round to her, sheepishly, wanting to know if she could explain what had become of them.

"We've been shanghaied by a dreamship," she said.

"What? Like turned into slaves or something?" said one boy.

"I heard they mean to sell us for sweetmeats," put in another.

"Not so bad as that," Nail explained, not bothering to hide her exasperation. "It's more like we're indentured. They mean to feed us and give us a few nibs for our work."

In addition to their fright, several of the children had taken sick.

It soon fell to Nail to organize some kind of care for them. And then there was the wounded boy, the one with the funny moons tattooed over his eyes and the great bruise on his forehead.

He still lay unconscious on his cot, though he turned fitfully at night and sometimes cried out. It was always the same cry: A name.

"Simon?" he would say, softly at first. "Simon! Simon!"

Nail delegated a boy called Cross Eye to put a cool rag on the injured lad's head, which seemed to sooth and quiet him.

As the days passed, she emerged as a kind of gang boss. She found that Barkle and Ballko looked to her to sort out little problems and muddles.

"It's not fair," she said to Ballko. "I didn't sign on to be nursemaid to a bunch of sniveling kids."

Ballko shrugged and said, "Play your cards right and you might have my slot in a couple of years. I'm getting bigger."

"Too big," observed Marcus Barkle. "You'll be too fat for the shrouds, soon enough, if you don't leave off the meat pies."

It was true, after a fashion, that there were certain advantages to her role. She was given a bit of privacy. The other children did what she said without question, even the tough-looking ones.

"What if we all tried to run at once?" said a stout, toothless boy that everyone called Gums. "When they bring our slop, we could rush 'em, right?"

"Don't be an idiot," Nail told him. "This is our lot now. Make the best of it, I say. Anyway, what have you to go back to?"

"There's a group of lads in my block," Gums replied proudly. "We look out for each other, we do. All for one and one for all."

"Is that so?" she replied, in her hardest, mocking voice. "And I suppose they've all come round looking for you since you vanished?"

Gums shrugged and looked at his bare, filthy feet.

"They have forgotten you already. Just as you would have forgotten any of them who went wandering off."

The boy said nothing. It was a dreary thing to realize just how meaningless they all were and how little the world had noticed their abductions.

They had lived hardscrabble lives, for the most part, and were thicker-skinned than rich kids, but in the end they were still only children.

The future loomed before them like a great, hungry shadow. At night, in the dark, there was a fair amount of furtive weeping.

Nail took it upon herself to help them in practical ways. She made certain that no one went without food or a blanket.

She forced them to wash their faces and hands in the little basin, lining up one by one until the trickle of water ran black with their grime.

Yet when they came to her for actual comfort, she shied them off with fierce looks and cold words.

"I've been up there on the Dream before," she told them. "And I'll tell you all just this one time how it is: It's sink or swim. It's devil take the hindmost. So you'd best start fending for yourselves."

The youngest ones stared at her blankly. They said amongst themselves that she was rightly named.

"Hard as a Nail," they muttered. "They must have named this whole bloody world after her, the great knuckle of iron."

It became a kind of catch-phrase among them.

Whenever something painful happened -- a bad dream, a fight over a bowl of noodles, a cuffing blow from one of the Oriole's crew -- someone would say, "Got to be hard now, hard as Nail."

They would nod toward the girl sitting apart in the corner, with her cropped hair and her pretty shawl around her shoulders.

Nail had shifted her hammock to hang beneath the large, barred window that looked out into the hangar where the Blue Oriole lay in its berth.

When not distracted by her chores and duties, she studied the ship and watched the men clambering over her. They looked like squirrels in the crown of a tree.

Before, when sailing with her father, Nail had looked at dream ships as abstract things. She perceived their mathematical form, their angles, the lines of force and resistance.

Now, as the crew repaired and refitted the Oriole, she began to see the practical side of the thing, how the lines were strung by groups of fellows working in tandem, how cunningly they positioned the block-and-tackle.

Sometimes she would watch the beginning of some project -- the sheathing of the new mast, for example -- and try to predict just how it would be accomplished.

This was her comfort. The puzzle of the ship was her escape from the small, nagging sorrows of the kidnapped children.

Soon the Blue Oriole would lift her into the sky; and up past the sky into the Dream, where she would sail between worlds.

She would learn how to work her, the way a puppeteer learns how to make a lifeless doll come alive, by pulling its strings just so.

"Maybe I will take Ballko's place," she said to herself. "And maybe sooner than he thinks."

A little girl came up, the one the other kids called Thumbsucker. She was among the youngest, no older than four or five.

"What is it?" Nail said, softening her voice just a little.

Thumbsucker pulled her thumb out of her mouth and said, "It's that boy with the cracked head. The one who had got moons on his face. I think...I think he might be dead."

Next: A Replacement for Dr. Trimm

Fourteen: A Hard-Won Prize

The next day, Marcus Barkle was ready in the avenue with a gang of experienced nappers.

There was Horace Bug, a cannon swab in Sgt. Imple's contingent; another fellow who went by the name of Rigsby who worked in the galley; and Dr. Trimm, the ship's surgeon.

The three had absconded with any number of children during their nautical careers; and, in the case of Bug and Rigsby, they looked upon the activity as a kind of sport.

For the purpose Barkle had hired a small hearse-wagon from a livery near the warehouse where the Oriole was berthed.

She was pulled by two sturdy street ponies, specially chosen for the day.

Bug sat high in the driver's box, disguised in an undertaker's coat, with Rigsby hanging on in back wearing coachman's garb.

Dr. Trimm was inside with his flask of aether.

Barkle himself was positioned at the far end of the street, watching for their mark to come out of the doorway.

They had developed this particular snatch-and-run technique for impressing specially desirable shroudwalkers, usually stolen from circuses or gypsy camps or from the crews of other ships.

In theory, young Master Buddenbrooks would be insensible within moments and secreted aboard the hearse, which would quickly lose itself in the maze of Piketon's lesser wards.

"I still don't understand what we are doing plying our trade in such a fine neighborhood," grumbled Dr. Trimm.

He was a yellow-eyed man, much given to sampling the wares from his own laudunum chest. He went to blow his nose and very nearly stuck his face into the aether rag.

"This shan't end well," he muttered. Which was the same thing he always said before entering upon any complicated medical procedure.

Behind his back, the sailors of the Blue Oriole called him Doctor Pennymouth.

"The only useful thing he ever did," they complained, "was put the penny in his victims' mouths to pay the Ferryman."

The other members of the napper crew were more game. They quite liked the idea of stealing a high-collar, snoot-nosed kid.

"Might give him an extra thump in the gut, just to let him know who's boss," said Horace Bug.

"Just so as we don't kill him outright," Rigsby said. "Such a plum prize won't come half so easy a second time."

At last they saw Marcus Barkle give the prearranged sign.

A smallish boy with striking silver hair had emerged from a doorway and begun idling away in the opposite direction.

All according to plan. Quite unawares, Master Buddenbrooks was walking directly toward Barkle the Hunter and into the arms of their trap.

He was carrying a longish bundle wrapped in some kind of cloth and he seemed to be lost in thought.

As Barkle drew near, he said something to the boy. Asked for directions maybe or begged for a nib or two for his poor supper.

He made his boyish face look as naive and stupid as he could.

Meanwhile, the hearse was drawing up behind, its driver and footman watching avidly, and Doctor Trim's sallow face sweating like an appartion in the window.

The next events proceeded very quickly indeed.

First, Marcus Barkle gave the boy a sudden poke in the solar plexus. Master Buddenbrooks uttered a soft, pained gasp.

Meanwhile, Rigsby vaulted down and threw a bear-hug around his frail shoulders.

The Doctor was already stepping primly from the coach with the poisoned rag, ready to set it over the kid's face.

Then, all of a sudden, Rigsby found himself sprawled on the ground, his right wrist bent at a peculiar angle.

Little Master Buddenbrooks dropped onto the ground in way that looked half-clumsy, but his boot swept out and caught the legs out from under Dr. Trimm.

The man went down with an outraged cry and a smash of glass, the aether pouring out over the bib of his white frock. He began to shriek and snivel.

Marcus Barkle looked down, startled, and saw that the little boy's eyes were upon his own. They were startlingly calm and even eager.

"He's not frightened a bit," Marcus thought. "Now why would that be?"

Then he found himself tumbling ass-over-teakettle into the street, and not even sure how or why.

His left ear clonked meanly on the cobblestone and he felt a rush of hot blood.

Horace Bug had jumped into the fray with his ever-handy belying-pin, which he wielded before Master Buddenbrooks could regroup for another strike.

The child reeled back from the blow, which by all rights should have dropped him like a sack of potatoes.

But the canny kid had twisted in just such a way so that the lion's share of the impact had glanced away harmlessly.

Rigsby went at him again, kicking hard with his boot, but the boy dodged somehow and once again the canoneer went down, moaning in pain, the other wrist broken.

In the confusion, however, Barkle had snatched up Dr. Trimm's rag and just like that he was upon the boy, pressing the poison to his mouth and nose.

The effect was instantaneous. Master Buddenbrooks went limp and Barkle caught him and hoisted him into the open door of the hearse.

"Quick, you," he said to Rigsby. "Climb in before the blue-bellies get wise." And to Bug: "Help me with Trimm, then spark up them ponies."

Another heartbeat or two and they were away. The horses were already skittish after the melee and Horace Bug had the devil's time keeping them in check.

"Play it cool!" yelled Barkle. "Two blocks more, then to an easy trot, innocent as you please."

He threw open the windows of the hearse, to air out the stench of aether, which was making them all light-headed.

The scene in the odd-shaped, funereal coach was less than satisfactory.

Rigsby sat in a corner, moaning and staring at his paws. The boy and Dr. Trimm lay unconscious in a heap.

Barkle chewed his lip and said to himself, "A hard-won prize, that was. Who'd have guessed that a welp like this here would have any fight in him at all? There's a mystery to the business. I've bit off something that might not chew so easy."

An hour or so later, in the warehouse that held the Blue Oriole, he had a glimpse of just how hard to swallow the business might be.

He carried Master Buddenbrooks, still unconscious, into the room where young Ballko kept his tattooing gear, needles and ink.

With Ballko's help, he stripped the child to the waist. They found that he was surprisingly muscled for such a slight boy. Like a gymnast or an acrobat.

His skin was striped and lined with tiny scars and half-healed bruises.

"Almost looks like a little soldier, don't he?" said Ballko. "Do you reckon his folks liked to mash him about a bit? I've heard that some rich folk are queer like that, spoiling their brats in public like and making beasts of 'em behind closed doors."

Barkle shrugged and rolled their prey on his side, so that Ballko could set to drawing the oriole's wing on his arm.

But there on the shoulder-blade was already stamped a mark of ownership: A tiny curved dagger done in red ink.

Ballko let out a long, low whistle. "You know what that is, don't you?" he said.

Barkle nodded and spat on the floor.

"It's the brand of the Hemlock League," he said. "I'm damned if we haven't nabbed up a child of the most dangerous assassins in the Dream."

Next: Hard as Nail

Twelve: Master Buddenbrooks

Marcus Barkle was in a foul mood.

It was the sort of thunderous glowering funk that only caught him up when he was ashore, beset by the complications of landsmen and politics and blue-bellies.

The Blue Oriole had passed a fortnight in her drydock on Nail, caught like a dragonfly in a web.

Mr. Handy, the ship's carpenter, had discovered that the Mother storm had done more damage to their ship than first understood.

The keel had suffered a dangerous wrench, causing a half-dozen of the massive ribs to come unseated.

Worse yet, one of the small pelvic masts -- which jutted at 45 degrees from the Oriole's hull -- had popped free from the massive iron sleeve that held it fast.

"While we were dangerously preoccupied with gyrwights," wrote Captain Marsh in his log, "the vessel very nearly came apart under my boots."

Such disasters were not unheard of in the Dream.

A half dozen times in his career, the Captain had come upon a mess of timbers and wrack, subsiding by degrees into the magical fog below.

They had escaped with their lives and their own ship intact, but the temper of the crew was no less venomous for that.

While the Oriole's smiths and carpenters and joiners went about their trade, Barkle had gone about his own disreputable business.

"How many have you got, Marcus?" asked Captain Marsh, at the morning confab.

"Sounds like he's got a regular herd of brats in that brig," grumbled Falconer. "Ain't there any way to quiet them?"

Barkle ignored the First Mate and said, "We lost a dozen young ones in the storm. I've got nine in the poke so far. I can make do with ten or eleven."

"What's the trick of it?" said Sgt. Imple good-naturedly. "The streets of Piketon are swarming with orphans and starvelings. Give me a belay pin and a half hour and I'll fill the hold with snotty noses."

"Shroud-walking ain't for everyone," Barkle said simply. "They got to be small and quick and agile. Half the kids I picked won't survive out on the lines, not when the first cat's paw comes out of nowhere and gives them a playful push."

The other officers shrugged and went back to their own concerns.

From their vantage point upon the solid deck, the children who manipulated the lines and sails of a dream vessel were little more than monkeys, a necessary inconvenience.

Even those who had begun their own careers out in the far jungle of the rigging preferred not to think upon such matters.

"Anyway there's time for you to be choosy," said the Captain. "We've another two weeks of drudgery at the very least."

In truth, Marcus Barkle was being choosy.

He admitted as much to himself as he prowled through the streets of Piketon, wandering farther and farther from the port district.

In part, he strayed so far because the folk next to the harbor had got word that several ships were impressing children.

Prey was scarce where moms and dads were cautious.

But it was also a fact that Barkle had been shaken to the quick by the battle with the gyrwights.

His own view of things had taken a twist almost as sharp as the one that nearly broke the Oriole's spine.

Watching one kid after another fall away into the void, harassed and tormented by gyrwights: it was a memory that haunted his dreams.

Of course, he had no real choice in the matter. He had to recruit a new batch of kids to fill out his crew.

Yet he wanted to make some gesture, offer some protest against the foul and miserable ways of the world.

After some deliberation, Barkle had decided that he would kidnap a child of consequence.

He knew that Captain Marsh would be furious if he knew, for it was generally understood that the children of wealthy or noble persons were untouchable.

Violating this unwritten rule would mean trouble. If he was caught at it, Barkle might even lose his place.

He found that he didn't care. The poor folk of Piketon had given up plenty of kids; now the fat merchants and guildsmen would pay the blood tithe as well.

So it was that the Lord of Shrouds made his way by streetcar out into the suburbs of the city, where the ugly drabness relented a little and a few trees lined the avenues.

Tenements and shanty-towns gave way to order and ever-greater displays of wealth and power.

Nail was an ugly world, but it was profitable and here there gathered the cream and the polish.

Downtown, the ships huddled behind iron grill windows; here Barkle saw glass and crystal.

Close to the cargo docks, mothers could be seen cooking for their kids on open fires at the margin of the street.

Here there were blue-bellies on every corner making sure no one forgot their place.

Barkle had worn his finest jacket and was carrying what appeared to be a message with a hand-scrawled address, written so as to be illegible.

Twice in the first quarter-hour of prowling he was stopped by a copper and had to pretend to be a messenger.

"Please, sir, I am looking for the mansion of Lord Dudeney. Am I gone the wrong direction?"

"It's none of my care if you've gone to Purgatory," replied the blue-belly, losing interest. "Get on about your own damned business. And don't let me catch you begging for nibs."

It was bare bones until the early afternoon, when various schools and academies opened their doors and released gaggles of children into the avenue.

They were a fine, sleek lot: rosy-cheeked, stout, confident. They went along with entourages of nannies and tutors.

Barkle's mood darkened. Upon close inspection the kids he spied were all too fat or two long-of-limb for shroud-work.

"They feed their brats too well uptown," he muttered. "They would snap my spars like dry twigs."

Dusk was coming on and he had begun to contemplate giving up his scheme when he saw a smallish boy come out of a doorway.

At first, Barkle thought the child must be very young -- five or six -- but no, the lad was only slight.

What's more, the boy began to play an abent-minded game as he went, walking heel-to-toe along the narrow curb.

He practically skipped along, showing perfect balance.

Barkle had begun to move up for a closer look when the door flew open and a hard-faced man stepped out onto the street.

"Don't forget, Master Buddenbrooks!" he called. "You've a make-up lesson tomorrow at a quarter shy four bells. Practice your counter-thrust beforehand -- and don't dare be late!"

The boy pirouetted on the curb, gave a wave, then demonstrated what must have been a counter-thrust.

Without missing a beat, he twirled again and went on his way, his feet never leaving the curb.

Barkle grinned and turned away. He had seen enough to lift his spirits immensely.

"And a whole-hearted welcome to you, Master Buddenbrooks," he said. "I believe it is time you went on a little cruise."

Fourteen: A Hard-Won Prize

Eleven: The Old Wink & Blink

Every morning just before the first smoky dawn broke over Piketon, an army of ice merchants, ragpickers, milk men and tea-wallahs fanned out through the city's slums.

The little boy called Aramis was a light sleeper. From blocks away, he would hear the distant rattle of the peddler carts and the chipping rhythm of the ice man's pick.

He slept in a tiny hovel made of old bits of cast-off corrugated iron and canvas.

There were two cots made from gunnysacks and bundles of ticking nicked from the chair-maker's shop on Cabinetry Lane.

On the other bed lay his older brother Simon, who was ill. He had worked in one of the lark shows on the Bailey Mall as a peanut seller.

But a drunk had punched the boy in the gut and then kicked him when he fell on the hard floor.

After that, Simon's belly never worked right. He could only eat soft food and he forgot things.

When Aramis went out to do his magic show, he had to tie his brother to a post set in one corner of their flop.

Aramis was a conjuror. Their dad had been one, too, and he taught Aramis everything he knew about making nibs vanish or causing feathers to turn into wisps of smoke.

The family's best trick was a floppy hat that could produce a lit candle. It didn't always work right, but when it did the crowd always clapped and gave up a few bits of small-coin.

Their father had taken a bit of his own medicine and vanished two years before. Just -- poof, gone.

Simon said it was the way of a conjuror to take himself off without even a good-bye.

Simon wouldn't have anything to do with magic and anyway he was dead clumsy. Clumsy and strong, at least until he got hurt.

Now it was Aramis's job to keep them both fed and to pay the neighborhood racketman who controlled the tenements and to buy the bottles of Figgy's Nocturnal Solution that helped Simon endure the pain.

When he heard the morning traffic in the lane, Aramis rose in the dark and began to pack his kit. He often traveled for miles through Piketon before setting up his show.

It was better to vary the crowd and to make sure none of the blue-belly cops took his measure.

He carried all of his tricks and props in a black box rigged with a pair of leather straps for his shoulders.

Tucked inside was the motley robe and conical hat that marked him out -- along with the crescent-moon tattoos over his eyes -- as a blood member of the Societe de Legerdemain.

"Are you awake, Simon?" he said.

Simon gave a low moan, stirring in his bedclothes.

"I'm off then, Simon. I won't be back til tonight. I plan to go across to Foundry Gardens, if I can slip a trolley ride."

No response.

"You be good now, Simon. I'll bring you home a good pie and some beer."

Simon began to snore and Aramis crawled out of the hovel into the dim, weary light of a Piketon morning.

Though he had long and dextrous fingers, he wasn't a stoutly-built boy. It took him a moment of dancing to get the box hoisted on his back.

Then he set off through the fast-growing crowds toward the High Street where the trains rumbled along on their iron rails, throwing blue sparks into the sky.

As he walked, Aramis felt two peculiar sensations, neither of which he could explain.

The first was a hum of peculiar optimism and happiness. He felt a little guilty whenever he realized that he quite enjoyed his life.

What had happened to Simon was pretty nasty. And it was no happy thing that their dad had run off, or been way-laid.

But Aramis liked performing as a conjurer. He was good at it and he felt a tiny thrill every time his effects went off smoothly.

If the crowd made that queer noise that meant it was baffled and delighted at the same time, he didn't hardly care if they gave up any of their nibs.

The second sensation had only come to him in the last few days and it was a rather different sort of thing:

Aramis was convinced that someone was watching him; following him, even.

As he grabbed the bar of the streetcar and pulled himself up, he glanced back over the faces in the street.

He saw nothing out of the ordinary: tradesmen, women taking their mounds of dough to the corner bakers, Dula Priests shaking their fern fronds.

There was one face that seemed a bit familiar.

A boy. Maybe ten or eleven. He was leaning against a sign post eating a chicken leg with such a stupid expression on his face that Aramis laughed.

He himself was a clever boy. His father had always said so.

"Simon is strong as an ox, but you were born with the quick eye and the quick finger."

And he was born with something else, something his father called The Old Wink and Blink.

"You've a bit of the Real Stuff in you," he said. "The True Magic. When you were a baby, your eyes kept changing colors. I had it too when I was your age, though it slipped away somehow."

It wasn't much of a power, in fact. When he tried very hard, Aramis found that he could slide himself a bit from one place to another and also through time.

He never used the trick as part of his show -- he felt that it would be cheating and besides he liked to have his secret.

But a half-dozen times he had used the Old W & B to escape a cop or a gang of bullies or the racketman's thugs.

The streetcar took him in a round-about way through the gut of Piketon.

He had to clamber down a quarter mile or so from Foundry Park, when the ticket-taker began to shout at him, but Aramis didn't mind.

He trudged the rest of the way and set up his little table (he called it his "stage") under a shabby looking linden tree. Its leaves were coated with soot and it seemed to be surrounded by scrabbly dandelions.

"At least there's no rain today," said the balloon vendor, a thick-browed Maki-maki who was setting up shop across the garden path. "People don't want balloons in the rain, do they?"

Aramis opened his own kit and soon began to perform, working his little medley of tricks, calling out, "Sorcery and wonders and delights! Sorcery and wonders and delights!"

His small, high voice could be heard across the park, except when the big lorries were rumbling past.

Just after mid-day, when the day had mustered a kind of sullen warmth, he was working his shell-trick, hiding the pea from baffled shop-girls and nannies.

"It's not possible," insisted one girl. "I know the pebble was under that shell. I saw it with my own two eyes."

"Either your eyes are playing tricks," Aramis winked, "or I am."

That won him a laugh -- and a nib or two. He looked around with satisfaction, thinking it might be time to knock off and have his own lunch, when he saw the boy again.

It was the dull-faced kid from the morning, only now he was chewing on a slice of watermelon.

Aramis went about his business, pouring water from an empty glass and causing his own hair to stick straight up and making his tongue turn blue. This last stunt delighted a group of school children.

The entire time, he was watching the boy who was watching him. The kid was very good at his ruse. He seemed a perfect idler.

For a time, Aramis half-convinced himself that it was chance that they had turned up in the same neighborhoods twice in one day.

But then the boy's act slipped for a moment. One of the balloon-seller's balloons popped with a loud bang and the kid's face changed, growing hard and deliberate. His hand strayed toward the curved knife on his belt.

It was a sailor's knife, finely made. In a flash the kid's face resumedits former, cow-like expression.

Aramis felt his heart go knock. He knew that Piketon was a dangerous, ruthless town.

There were any number of reasons that people stalked children. The slave-trade was outlawed by the Admiralty, but no one did much about it. Ships were always looking for shroud-walkers.

When his dad disappeared, no one cared. Aramis might vanish just as quick.

There was a time when the Societe Legerdemain might have looked out for one such as him, but the order had fallen on hard times, at least on this world.

He began to pack his things, acting as natural as he could.

At the last moment, when surrounded by a crowd of Prilm traders carrying their ware-banners, he bolted, hustling through he Park's gates and dodging into the traffic of the road.

Glancing back, he saw that the boy was after him. His face had once again dropped its mask and had a look of irritation and dark resolve.

Aramis spied a streetcar and swung aboard. He thought that would do the trick, but the boy made a nimble leap and caught at the tail-end of the same car.

A crowd of commuters separated them, but they eyed one-another fiercely.

At the next corner, Aramis dropped off and scampered through a vegetable market. He was quick enough except for the big box on his back.

"Hey there, kid! Watch out for the decent folk doing their business! We'll have the blue-bellies after you!"

Aramis ignored them and went up a stair into a tavern and then out the back way into an alley. In his own neighborhood he would have known where to go.

He and Simon had mapped out escape routes, hiding places, and secret rendez-vous. But in this part of Piketon he was forced to run blind.

The boy kept pace. He seemed almost to be maintaining a certain distance, watching, taking his prey's measure. Aramis felt fear rise in his throat.

What did the kid want? What would happen to Simon if he was taken? His brother would have no one.

Aramis ran for another quarter-hour, before turning a corner into a small square, built around a public fountain. Women were lined up drawing water for their soup pots.

The boy was just behind now. Unlike Aramis, who rarely got a decent meal, the other kid wasn't winded at all. He reached a hand and got a grip on the handle of Aramis's box.

"Go easy now," said the kid. "It won't be so hard on you if you don't fight it."

Aramis tugged and twisted but the boy had both hands on him now. He was unnaturally strong, stronger than Simon, almost like a little man.

The women paid them no mind. It looked like two boys tussling over a box.

Aramis scrunched up his face and began to work his magic, his true magic. But the other was boy was too quick.

"Oh, no," he said, in a business-like tone. "We'll have none of your mumbo-jumbo."

He swung a heavy bag filled with lead pellets, clapping Aramis a sharp blow on the temple.

Like a conjuror's trick, the world began to swirl and tip and then a curtain seemed to drop down over everything.

And then, just like his dad before him, Aramis the Amazing simply disappeared.

Next: Master Buddenbrooks

Ten: Aramis the Amazing

In the days that followed, Nail had little time to rethink or regret her decision to join the Blue Oriole's crew of shroud-walkers.

She was taken by Marcus Barkle through Piketon's maze of drab, cobbled streets to a warehouse in the port district. The structure was so vast that it could swallow dream-clippers whole.

The roof was made of canvas and could be rolled back as a vessel descended.

A kind of mounting structure had been erected, so that ships could be docked well above the floor, without collapsing their ventral masts.

Resting in this massive chassis was the Blue Oriole, a thirty-four gun clipper made of oak and brass and iron.

Her first glimpse was less than awe-inspiring. Nail had seen dream ships before and even studied their lines.

This ship looked hard-used and battered. The lines were a mess, hanging in clumps and knots.

Her canvas sails were spread on the ground, where groups of kids were hard at work with long needles and thread.

Up above, crews of carpenters and joiners and iron-smiths were at work, setting off a din of hammers and saws and voices.

A boy with impossibly long arms hopped down from a crate, where he'd been idling with an apple.

"This is Ballko," said Marcus Barkle. "He's Best Mate of the Shrouds. Think of him as the boss and you'll get on okay. He'll get you your stamp and then see you settled."

"My stamp?" Nail said.

"Your tattoo," said Ballko. He grinned and flexed his big bicep. There was a small blue mark there, in the form of a bird's wing.

Nail shook her head and said fiercely, "I don't want to be marked like some cow. I don't want to be owned."

The new boy screwed up his face and looked at Barkle.

"She ain't a stinking runner, is she? I got two of them already to look after and they're driving me crazy. Bawling and blubbering. I won't get a bit of peace until we're off-world."

Barkle shrugged and said, "It's the way it works, girl. We're all marked when we join the Oriole. Or any ship."

"Anyway, it's for your own good," Ballko put in. "Those bastards at the Admiralty is always after kids for their own ships, which ain't half so nice as the Oriole, I can promise you. The Impress Service has a half-dozen gangs hunting in Piketon right now. You're lucky we found you first."

"With the mark, you'll be safe," Marcus said. "It means you're already spoken for. You're one of us."

A fat, grinning man called Mr. King did the tattoo-work, splashing Nail's arm with rum and then working the needles. It stung like a hundred hornets, but she bit her lip and never made a sound.

Afterward, Ballko took her to a kind of bunkhouse. There were bars on the doors and a great, iron padlock on the door.

"I won't make bones about it," the boy said. "For the time being, you're more than half a prisoner. It gets better."

"But I volunteered," Nail said. "I agreed to come."

He grinned and winked. "Think you had a choice, do you? Think Old Barkle would let a spry monkey like you get away?"

She shrugged and said, "Anyway, I don't have anyplace else to go."

"Don't matter. Captain Marsh's orders. Too many idiots try to scram on us, before they see how good they got it. In you go now."

The room was low and dim and smelled of must and damp. She soon discovered that nearly a dozen children were locked in, some of them so terrified that they couldn't move or speak.

Others seemed delighted that they had been fed so well and taken out of their cramped, wretched families.

One cross-eyed boy -- he couldn't have been more than six or seven -- was dangling upside down from a bunk, his scrawny ribs showing.

"What are you doing?" Nail asked.

"I'm practicing," he said. "Pretty soon they'll make us walk out on them ropes. Ain't nothing under you but Dream. If you fall, you just keep on falling forever."

"Where did you hear that?"

"Everybody knows that's what happens if you fall into a dream. But I ain't going to fall. Watch this!"

He flipped himself up with surprising agility and began to walk along the edge of the bed, tongue between his teeth.

"What's your name?" Nail asked.

"I'm Little Blue Dean," he said over his shoulder. "My cat Percy is around here somewhere. They didn't want Percy to come, but Percy goes where he likes."

Nail looked around, but there was no sign of any cat.

The other children ranged in age from five or six to twelve or thirteen. The older ones were small and slight for their ages.

A group of kids had gathered around a cot, where a boy with raven-black hair was lying unconscious.

Crescent moons were tattooed above each of his eyebrows, giving his face a look of startlement. One one temple rose a swollen lump the size of a gelder-piece.

"What happened to him?" Nail said.

"Marcus Barkle clobbered him," someone said. "He's a dwarf, you know. Barkle, I mean. He ain't a kid at all."

"I overhead him talking with Ballko," said another child. "This one made a good chase of it and nearly got away. They said he was a conjuror of some kind. Said his name was Aramis. Aramis the Amazing."

Nail looked at the injured boy. He didn't look very amazing. His nose had been broken and his lip was split.

He first instinct was to take care of him, the way she had tried to care for her brothers and sisters.

But then she felt a clench of anger and bitterness. She had been abandoned. Left behind. She didn't want to look after anyone else, not now, maybe not ever again.

Aramis the Amazing would just have to take care of himself.

Next: The Old Wink and Blink

Nine: Barkle's First Prize

Six days after her family disappeared into Dream, Nell stood on a stone bridge above the Eisen River.

It rushed and roared through the heart of Piketon, turning pistons and wheels, flushing away the city's filth.

Dusk draped itself over the streets. The coal-gas streetlamps looked like winking eyes.

Nell was hungry and frightened. But the thing that had driven her to clamber up onto the bridge's railing was fury.

Her face was clenched like a fist. She kept thinking of all the things that she would say to her father, if she got the chance.

"But I won't get the chance," she said, out loud. "They tricked me. They left me behind like an old suitcase."

They had forced her to accept the role assigned to her at birth: They had subtracted her and divided her until there was nothing left.

She peered up into the fug of factory smoke that cloaked Piketon. Was there really such a thing as Father Tally? Were there angels hidden in the angles of the world?

She shook her head. No. She wouldn't fool herself. She would take her final reckoning without cheating or making-believe.

"I'm Nell," she said angrily. "I never wanted to be, but that's what I am. But you're even less, Father Tally. You're just someone's excuse."

"Who is it you're talking to?"

Nell swung around, only just remembering to hang onto the bridge rail. The black, filthy water swept hungrily below her feet.

A boy, roughly her own age, stood a few paces away. He had a round, rather common face, but his eyes were queer.

They seemed to be taking her measure in a way that was more adult than child-like.

"Aren't you scared?" he said. "Standing at the edge like that? Up so high? You wouldn't stand a chance if you fell."

Nell shook her head contemptuously. "I've been in scarier places than this. I can climb just about anything. Nothing knocks me loose, unless I let go."

The boy nodded thoughtfully. "You look agile enough. And you don't look like you weigh very much."

It was an odd thing to say. As if he were sizing up a prize sheep or a bushel of corn.

"You were talking to someone," he said. "Are you crazy or something? It won't do if you're crazy."

Nell felt her blood race. A moment before she had been thinking of throwing herself into the river, letting herself be swallowed up.

But now her anger had something to focus on. "I'm not crazy," she said, in a threatening voice. "I'll punch your ears if you say that again."

"You could try," said the boy.

He took something out of his pocket. The thing was so rare and special that it took a moment for Nell to realize what it was: a ripe, perfect pear.

"Look what I pinched," he said. "Do you want half?"

Nell swallowed. Her anger was tangled up in caution and hunger.

"Why would you share?" she said. "You never saw me before. People on Nail don't give things away for free."

"No," he admitted. "There's always a price, except when you steal. And no one steals from me."

"What is it then?" Nell said. "Tell me what you want up front and be straight about it, or else leave me alone."

The boy took out a business-like knife. She saw that it was deadly sharp, curved slightly at the tip.

With a practiced turn of his wrist, he cut the pear in half and tossed her the larger piece. She couldn't help but catch it in her free hand.

It was perfect: the skin green and tinged with red, the meat grainy and white. The sweet smell nearly knocked her off the bridge.

Before she could think, she took a bite. The juice covered her chin.

The boy took a bite too. He watched her, his eyes more thoughtful than ever.

"You caught that pair without even thinking," he said. "That's no easy trick."

Nell shrugged and went on chewing.

"My name is Marcus," he said. "And I think you might just do for my crew."

She made a mocking face. "What, your crew of pickpockets and quickfingers? No, thank you. I work honest for my nibs."

He shook his head and said, "It's true I pinch things now and then, when I want them bad enough. But that's not my main job. I'm a wire walker."

"You mean you crew on a dream ship?"

He nodded. Pointing upward with the knife, he said, "You ever been up there before? Up in the Dream?"

"Sure, plenty of times. My family are pilgrims."

"Where are they now, your family? Gone off? I thought so. When I saw you climb up on the bridge rail, I thought you must be alone."

Nell wanted to say something clever and hard, but her throat tightened. She thought she might break down and cry and the thought filled her with shame.

"Here's the deal then," Marcus said. "I'm looking for kids to work the shrouds aboard a ship. She's called the Blue Oriole. A clipper. One of the fastest around. I won't lie to you. It's hard work and tricky and dangerous. But Captain Marsh is a fair man and never cruel when he doesn't have to be. Anyway, working for him is no worse than throwing yourself into a river."

The proposition was such a surprise that for a moment Nell forgot her sorrow. Kids in every port in the Dream knew about shroud-walkers and their way of hunting children.

You had to be careful or you might get shanghaied and carried away from your home and family.

"I thought your sort just kidnapped young ones," she said. "When you need fresh crew don't you just carry them off?"

The boy shrugged and said, "I do it that way when I have to. Some of the kids I take will go aboard kicking and screaming. But when I can, I look for ones like you, ones that don't have nothing better."

Nell nodded. She looked at him for a long time. She could see that there was something truly strange about him.

He wasn't like any boy she had ever seen before. He stood too still. He never fidgeted once.

She turned back to look at the rushing water. In her hand was the bead from her father's abacus. The black stone represented all her life up to that point.

It felt heavy and cold, despite the grip of her hand.

"I heard once," she said, "that shroud walkers always take a new name when they join a crew. A nickname like, a new identity."

"That's right. You leave your lubber name behind."

"I want to choose my own name."

Marcus frowned and thought it over before saying, "It's not tradition, but I guess it's fair enough. What will it be?"

"I guess you can call me Nail. That's where you found me, isn't it? It's not much different from my old name. And nails are hard, right? They're hard to pry loose."

"Nail it is then."

She nodded and said, "I'll do it then. I'll join the Blue Oriole."

The little girl turned held out her hand and let the abacus stone roll through her fingers. It dropped without a sound into the current.

Marcus Barkle watched with satisfaction, taking another bite of his pear.

Next: Aramis the Amazing

Eight: Losing Nell

One of the most unsettling aspects of Dream was that it created and destroyed worlds the way men make and shatter clay pots.

Fortunately, such events were rare. And most worlds that unraveled did so gradually, over many lifetimes. There were tremors and portents.

Geomancers could predict almost to the year when a planet would come apart and be reabsorbed.

There were even certain magicks that could forestall -- at least for a time -- a world's destruction.

Port Primus, homeworld of the Admiralty, had been stitched and bound together by sorcery for nearly a century.

The creation of new worlds, by contrast, was often sudden and cataclysmic.

A dreamship would be sailing a well-charted route through the void, expecting nothing but empty vastness.

But then out of the haze would emerge a new planet, some smoking and primordially volcanic, others already teeming with life that seemed to have existed for aeons.

Nail was just such a world.

It had manifested half a century ago, a forbidding expanse of metallic rock and sulfurous lakes.

The air was scented with rust and the endless smoke of burning coalfields.

A kind of gold rush had begun, with a hundred trading concerns and guilds and conglomerates staking claims across Nail's dismal surface.

Most of these outposts remained primitive and hardscrabble.

Scar-eyed men in heavy coats worked in their holes like primitive animals, bearing ore in baskets upon their backs.

The one proper city on the planet was Piketon, a sprawling and lawless port where great ore barges rose ponderously with each boreal tide.

It was there, in those corrugated-iron slums, that Nell lost her family for good.

She was smart enough to see at once that it was a mistake for them to come to Nail.

The trade-bosses and factory owners needed engineers and accountants, but no one had any time for mystics.

"Numbers are nasty, tiresome things even when they're set to a practical use," was the general sentiment. "The idea of harkening to a sermon about them is pure daft!"

Her father was stubborn. He set up his box on busy streetcorners and begin to chant the theorems of the Blue Crescent.

But his adoration of hypotenuse and ratio only made people laugh or shrug.

There had never been food enough and now the family's meals dwindled from meager to desperate.

Null's brothers and sisters stared sullenly at their lumps of hardtack and their mugs of bluish milk.

She sometimes found them casting angry, resentful glances at her as well.

Her oldest brother, Archimedes, would hiss in Nell's ear: "You're not even supposed to be here. You must have angered Father Tally somehow, or he would have taken you off long ago."

"It's not true," she protested. "I haven't done anything."

"There must be some reason people won't listen to Dad's sermons," said the older boy. "You're an error, that's what you are. You're a fly in the ointment."

Even Nell's mother found it more and more difficult to sneak her scraps of food. The girl was often on her own.

She found herself wandering farther and farther through the lanes and alleys of Piketon.

She did odd jobs in trade for a cup of broth or a heel of bread. Occasionally someone would pay her a nib or two for emptying chamber pots and scrubbing steps.

Rust covered everything on Nail. Someone would always pay her to scrape and sand and peel.

She could climb down into pipes and narrow spaces where grown-ups couldn't go, but the work left her half-dead with exhaustion.

One day, when Nell was unfolding her little roll of blankets, her mother made a queer and surprising speech:

"I don't have much, Nell, that belongs to me alone. But I still have this shawl that was stitched by my own mum."

Nell couldn't believe her eyes. The small cloak was finely made, impossibly delicate. She touched the stitchery with her fingertips.

She could see the geometry in it, the puzzling pattern. "It's very beautiful," she said.

"I've kept it all these years. When your father sold off all the other things -- the plates, the pictures -- I hid this away."

"You were right to keep it," Nell said.

"I knew you'd understand. And now it's yours to keep. The other girls, your sisters, they wouldn't appreciate it properly."

Nell saw that her mother was crying, a thing that she almost never did anymore. Her thin, pale cheeks gleamed like wet soap in the light of the candle.

"I don't want it," Nell said, suddenly afraid. "It's too fine. I've never had anything so pretty."

But her mother wouldn't tolerate any argument. After a moment, she dried her eyes and made her face hard again.

"What's done is done," she said. "Of all the decisions I've made in my life, Nell, giving you this gift may be the one I regret the least."

Nell was a clever girl, and suspicious. This conversation made her wary.

She was careful in the weeks that followed to keep a jealous watch on her family.

She listened to her parents' conversations. She studied her father's face at night when he was chanting the remainders of Pi.

One evening, he looked up from his prayers and his stony gaze fell on Nell and he said, "I see now that you were put here to test me. You were a burden and a trial of my arrogance."

Nell waited, but her father never spoke to her again.

Two days later, she came home from delivering a package to the far side of Piketon.

An Augsburgher merchant had promised her a half-dozen nibs and a piece of rock candy if she returned within an hour's time.

It was a princely sum for such a job and Nell soon realized that she had been tricked.

Her father had paid the Augsburgher out of his last remaining coin.

"Sorry, little girl," said the barrel-chested fellow, peering at her through his monocle. "Seems your dad wanted you kept busy for a while. Tough luck and all that!"

Her mother and father and twelve brothers and sisters were gone.

She raced through the neighborhood and soon tracked down a ticket seller who had booked them passage on a dream ship bound for Titus.

"Aye, they sailed this morning aboard the Yellow Raven," the man said, with a shrug. "Said they weren't sure where they would go after Titus. Your father said he was waiting for a sign."

"I have to go after them," Nell said. "Please! There's been a mistake, I must get aboard."

She showed the man her mother's beautiful shawl. "I'll give you this. This and all the nibs I have. Please!"

The ticket seller laughed and said, "Keep your rags and your nibs, little girl. The next tide isn't for three days. The Yellow Raven will be halfway to Titus by then."

He turned away and Nell went out onto the street. It had begun to rain, so that the smell of rust filled the air.

Water red as blood choked the gutters.

She sat under the awning of a tavern, legs pulled tight against her chest, wrapped in the shawl.

Fear threatened to swallow her whole. Her family had been hard and ungenerous, but now she had no one.

In all the great emptiness of Dream, she was truly and completely alone. With the toe of her tattered boot, she drew a circle in the mud.

It was the figure for zero, for nothing, for emptiness. In the language of her father's faith, this was the symbol that matched her name.

Next: Barkle's First Prize