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