Philip Reeve: Infernal Devices

She went out through the gate at the side of the yard and off down Dog Star Court with the sunlight shining on her hair, and Tom stood watching her until she turned the corner, feeling proud of his tall, beautiful daughter and still amazed, even after all these years, that he and Hester had made this new person.

In the shadows beneath the woodpile, a wireless crab-cam trained its lens on him. In an underwater cave on one of the smaller islets, his image fluttered on a round blue screen.

“She nearly gave us away’ ” said the boy called Fishcake. “He’ll guess!”

Gargle patted his shoulder. “Don’t worry. Natsworthy’s as dim as the others. He doesn’t suspect a thing.”

Wren walked briskly toward the Smew house but did not turn in through the gate. She knew full well that Tildy and her family would all be up in their orchard this morning, picking apples. She had even promised to go and help. How could she have imagined that she would find something so much more important to do?

She cut through the Boreal Arcade, glancing at her reflection in the dusty windows of the old shops, then ran along Rasmussen Prospekt and up the ramp that led to the Winter Palace. The big front doors were always open in summer. Wren ran in and shouted, “Miss Freya?” but the only answers were the echoes of her own voice bouncing back at her from the high ceilings. She went back outside and followed the graveled path around the foot of the palace, and there was Miss Freya in her garden, picking beans and putting them in a basket.

“Wren!” she said happily.

“Hello, Miss Freya!”

“Oh, just Freya, please,” said Miss Freya, stooping to set her basket down. It seemed to be the main purpose of Miss Freya’s life to persuade everybody to call her simply “Freya,” but she had never had much success with it. The older people all remembered that she was the last of the House of Rasmussen and still liked to call her “Margravine” or “Your Radiance” or “Light of the Ice Fields.” The younger ones knew her as their teacher, so to them she was always “Miss Freya.”

“After all,” she said, smiling at Wren as she dabbed the perspiration from her round face with a handkerchief, “you’re not a schoolgirl anymore. We might soon be colleagues. Have you thought any more about coming to help me with the little ones once apple harvest’s over?”

Wren tried to look as if she liked the idea without actually promising she’d do it. She was afraid that if she agreed to come and help run the school, she might end up like Miss Freya, large and kindly and unmarried. Changing the subject as swiftly as she could, she asked, “Can I have a look in the library?”

“Of course!” said Miss Freya, as Wren had known she would. “You don’t need to ask! Was there a particular book…?”

“Just something Daddy mentioned once. The Tin Book.”

Wren blushed as she said it, for she wasn’t used to telling lies, but Miss Freya didn’t notice. “That old thing?” she said. “Oh, it’s hardly a book, Wren. More of a curio. Another of the House of Rasmussen’s many hand-me-downs.”

They went together to the library. It was small wonder, Wren thought, that the Lost Boys needed her help. This huge room was crammed with books from floor to ceiling, arranged according to some private system of Miss Freya’s. Tatty old paperbacks by Chung-Mai Spofforth and Rifka Boogie sat side by side with the wooden caskets containing precious old scrolls and grimoires. The caskets had the names of the books they held written on the backs in small gold letters, but many were too worn or faded to read, and Lost Boys probably weren’t very good readers anyway. How would a poor burglar know where to start?

Miss Freya used a set of steps to reach one of the upper shelves. She was really much too plump to go clambering about on spindly ladders, and Wren felt guilty and afraid that she might fall, but Miss Freya knew exactly what she was looking for, and she was soon down again, flushed from her exertions and holding a casket with the arms of the House of Rasmussen inlaid in narwhal ivory.

“Have a look,” she said, unlocking it with a key that she took from a hook on a nearby wall.

Inside, on a lining of silicone silk, lay the thing that Gargle had described. It was a book about eight inches high by six across, made from twenty sheets of tin bound with a rusty twirl of wire. The sheets were thick and dull and patched with rust, folded over at the edges to stop readers from cutting their fingers on the jagged metal. On the topmost sheet someone had scratched a circle with a crudely drawn eagle inside it; there was lettering around the edge of the circle and more below, but all too worn for Wren to make out any words. The other sheets had aged better, and the long rows of letters, numbers, and symbols that had been laboriously scratched into their surfaces were still faintly legible. What they meant Wren could not say. The faded paper label on the back cover, stamped with the arms of Anchorage and the words Ex Libris Rasmussen, was the only thing that made any sense at all.

“It’s not very impressive, is it?” asked Miss Freya. “It’s supposed to be very old, though. There’s a legend about it, which the historian Wormwold quotes in his Historia Anchoragia. Long ago, in the terrible aftermath of the Sixty Minute War, the people of Anchorage were refugees, sailing a fleet of leaky boats across the northern seas in search of an island where they could rebuild their city. Along the way they encountered a wrecked submarine. The plagues and radiation storms had killed off all her crew except for one man, who was dying. He gave a document to my ancestor Dolly Rasmussen and told her to preserve it at all costs. So she kept it, and it was handed down from mother to daughter through the House of Rasmussen, until the paper crumbled. Then a copy was made, but because paper was scarce in those years, it was written on old food tins hammered flat. Of course, the people who did the copying probably had no more idea what it all meant than you or I. The mere fact that it came from the lost world before the war was enough to make it sacred.”

Wren turned the metal pages, and the wire that bound them scratched and squeaked. She tried to imagine the long-ago scribe who had so painstakingly engraved these symbols, working by the light of a seal-fat lamp in the dark of that centuries-long winter, copying out each wavering column in a desperate attempt to salvage something from the world the war had destroyed. “What was it for?” she wondered. “Why did the submarine man think it was so important?”

“Nobody knows, Wren. Maybe he died before he could say, or maybe it’s just been forgotten. The Tin Book is just another of the many mysteries the Ancients left us. All we know is that the name of an old god crops up several times among all those numbers: Odin. So maybe it was a religious text. Oh, and the picture on the front is the presidential seal of the American Empire.”

Wren looked critically at the eagle. “It looks more like some sort of bird to me.”

Miss Freya laughed. She looked beautiful, standing there in the wash of sunlight from the library windows, as big and golden as the Earth Goddess herself, and Wren loved her, and felt ashamed for planning to rob her. She asked a few more questions about the Tin Book, but she wasn’t really interested in the answers. She gave the thing back as soon as she could and left Miss Freya to her gardening, promising to come back soon and talk about becoming a teacher.

The day was passing quickly, the shadow of the Winter Palace sweeping across the city’s rusty deck plates as the sun climbed the sky. Soon it would be time for Wren to keep her rendezvous with Gargle. She was starting to feel more and more nervous about it. However dashing and brave and handsome he was, however much she liked the idea of helping the Lost Boys, she could not steal from people she had known all her life. Sooner or later the Tin Book was sure to be missed, and when it was, Miss Freya would remember the interest Wren had shown in it and know who was responsible.