Through all this, the skirmish went on around us, so loud that the Priest’s cry had barely been noticed. Then the pounding of boots: the Watch, cudgels in hand, surging down one street, and the Temple guards down another. I stood frozen for half a breath, with Baldbeak still on my shoulder, my heart hammering, then I turned and ran to the crematorium where I had been told I would find the Book Man.
Chapter Six
The Cross-stitch
‘A simple stitch that is kind to small and inexperienced hands—taught to young children for their first samplers, it can easily be adapted to form letters and numbers of any type.’
—An Exhaustive Compendium of Stitches
Both Holy and Base, 4th Edition
Inside, the crematorium was little more than a warehouse, long ago stripped down to bare boards and spiderwebs. Only the oven remained, immense and sinister and still smelling of ancient incense. There was nowhere to hide but in its dark maw. I swallowed down my apprehension and clambered in, Baldbeak muttering birdish encouragement in my ear.
It was crushingly dark and close, stinking of soot. I felt fear rise like bile in my throat.
Dark, dark, Baldbeak said over and over, his thoughts fluttering through and around my own and sending them reeling. I couldn’t think straight with his raven-voice rattling around my skull, and so I did my best to push his panic away.
My teeth chattered uncomfortably loudly in my head. I had never been claustrophobic, but this particular dense darkness made me remember all the lifeless bodies that had takenthis final journey before me. I could feel the presence of bones all around me, ground to dust—small and furious as a cloud of stinging wasps, filled with anger at their powerlessness. With every breath I felt like I was drawing them into me. I forced myself to keep moving forward. The chaotic, swirling specks reminded me of the snowstorm I saw when I tried to remember what had happened that day in the Tower.Mother, a tiny, childlike part of me called out silently.Where are you? I need you.
At last I burst from the long tunnel of the oven into a wider space, but I barely had time to feel any sense of relief before someone touched me gently on the shoulder, and I screamed. Baldbeak beat his wings. The dust swirled about me, chokingly thick.
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” a voice was saying. A dry, kind voice. “I do have a proper front door, you know. Although I suppose you might not have spotted it. The back way does prove useful sometimes.”
The combination of the crawl through the cloud of bone dust and the shock of emerging had left me shivering. I could not tell where my skin ended and the rest of the world began. Just when I thought I would dissolve into the swirling white of my lost memories, however, I felt something warm and comforting close about me.
It was the Hair.
It wrapped itself around my body like a cocoon. It held me together—re-formed me into a person from the chaos I had been.
“Here … Sit,” said that kindly voice.
Through the dots that danced before my eyes, I saw a threadbare armchair and sank into it.
“Good, good. Now, are you all right?”
My breath was slowing. Someone pressed a dusty cup of water into my hand, and I drank. My senses began to clear. I became aware of Baldbeak’s claws clamped on my shoulder,and his beak nudging itself against my ear. He was grooming me as best he could, as if I were a frightened chick.
Are you all right?he said.
“I’m all right,” I whispered, and reached up to touch him.
Looking around now, I saw we were in a bookshop—an immense one, lined with shelves and haphazard stacks of volumes. The chair in which I sat was on a sort of balcony running around the lip of a beehive-shaped room, and below, in the wider part, was another shelf-lined room with a few doors set in its sides. The light was alive and sparkling with dust motes. Baldbeak’s feathers shone greenish purple in it, and he stretched out one wing to admire himself. I couldn’t believe all this was hidden below the abandoned building on the surface.
“Ingenious, isn’t it?” said the voice. “You would never know from the outside. The Temple is loath to linger too long at the crematoriums. They built them to take away the power of the dead—but they fear the dead still. Useful for my purposes, of course.”
A man pulled up a chair across from mine. He was the sort of middle-aged that could be anywhere from forty to sixty, with colorless hair falling over a colorless face. Even his clothes were faded. The only points of distinction were two very shrewd, very blue eyes with what seemed like unusually dark, wide pupils, amplified by red-rimmed spectacles. This gave his stare the quality of pinning you in place, as if you were a butterfly tacked to a board. His mouth was deeply bracketed with lines that suggested a ready smile.
“Are you all right?” he said. “Not hurt, I mean. Your hair …”
It was still wrapped about me. No hope that I would be able to conceal its properties from him, then.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m sorry, I …”
“What’s your name?”
“Persinette. Netta.”
“A pleasure,” he said, after a beat. I noticed that his gaze kept straying to my Hair. He didn’t even seem overly interested in the gigantic raven sitting on my shoulder. “Quite a kerfuffle out there,” he said mildly.
