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
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 taken this 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.
“Yes. I … I’m not sure what it was about,” I lied.
“These are troubled times in Virelith, my dear,” he said. “Pardon me, but I do not think you are originally from Quell? Are you a visitor here?”
“Yes, I … I arrived yesterday.”
“I am sorry that you have come at a time of such great upheaval, my dear. They really aren’t the best circumstances for sightseeing.”
“I was … actually coming to find you,” I said. “I am looking for a book.”
The words came out without my planning them. I had intended first to tell him about Mother, ask about the letters they had exchanged, but perhaps my instinct to keep that to myself for now was correct. I described the book as best I could while he listened.
“Ah! I had a feeling you were seeking a particular volume,” said the Book Man.
“You develop a sense for these things, if you’ve been doing this as long as I have.
There’s a certain look to someone searching for a book—a kind of madness in the eyes.
A twitch to the nose.” His mouth quirked in a smile.
“I have this …”
I fished in my pocket and handed him the letter of introduction from the man at the market. He pushed his spectacles higher up his nose.
“The seal is broken,” he observed.
“I asked someone to read it to me.”
“Ah.”
He did not ask me yet why I sought a book so urgently if I were unable to read its contents, for which I was grateful. He read the letter with not a flicker in his expression, then put it to the side.
I leaned forward, my voice low and urgent. “I was told that you can find any book, anywhere.”
“I’m honored.” He bowed slightly in his chair. “That is my reputation.”
“There is one I absolutely have to find. I have little to give you for it,” I added. “But I can work. I can do whatever you want …”
“Whatever I want?”
I hesitated, thinking of what this might imply. He didn’t seem the type, but …
“Well,” I amended, “within reason.”
He seemed to read my mind. “I am not proposing anything … improper,” he said.
“I find myself in a charitable mood and in need of help in the shop—and your rather precipitous arrival on the scene seems like a stroke of good luck. You know the Temple stitches, it says here? You must be a skilled needlewoman.”
“Apparently. That is, I didn’t know they were the Temple stitches. But yes.”
He smiled. “Then work here for a time. For me. I will look for your book, to the best of my ability and … er, I think ‘within reason’ were the exact words you used. You will have food, and a bath, and a place to sleep, if you do not mind bedding down among the books.”
I hesitated, then nodded. “And what about Baldbeak?”
“Bald …? Oh, your raven!” He pushed up his glasses and gazed at Baldbeak, who was busy cleaning between his toes.
“How odd,” he said. “He shouldn’t have been able to get in here at all. The wards are most specific about keeping out all animal life.”
“Yes, they never seem to work on him,” I said. “I don’t know why.”
“They don’t work on the spiders, either,” he sighed.
“Yes, Mo—” I cut myself off before I could tell him that Mother always said the same thing.
Baldbeak hopped from my shoulder, sidled along the chair’s arm and looked at the Book Man sidelong, then made a chirruping sound. He could be very charming when he wanted to be.
“Oh, I think he wants my biscuit,” said the Book Man, who had been just about to take a bite out of one in his hand. “Here you are, my friend.” He broke off a corner and gave it to Baldbeak, who handled it expertly, holding it in one claw while he nibbled its edges. The Book Man chuckled.
“Well, he does seem a very clean bird,” he said. “And very attached to you, clearly. I suppose he can stay.”
He tapped Baldbeak’s imposing beak with one finger. “Excellent. Excellent. Well, let me show you the stove and bathroom, and you can boil water for your bath.”
The way he kept emphasizing the bath made me realize that I was very grubby, and probably not smelling all that sweet, so I followed him obediently down a narrow staircase and through the rows of shelves and precarious stacks on the lower level.
In the close, crowded air of the bookstore, the volumes almost seemed to rustle on their perches, like a flock of watchful birds.
Was it my imagination, or did some of them quiver as I passed by?
The sound of a little bell jingled in the dusty air. To my surprise, the Book Man spun around sharply. “Get behind the stacks,” he said.
“But I …”
“Quickly, now.”
I slipped into a hiding place behind one of the tall shelves, but couldn’t resist pushing two of the books slightly apart so I could see between them. The Book Man opened one of the doors against the wall, revealing a glim-lit tunnel behind it and what I assumed was a customer—a woman.