September came to town strapped for battle. She didn’t mean to look as fierce as she did, but she didn’t mean to come to town, either, so it hardly mattered. She carried the Greatvole’s whisker on her hip, her cuttlefish tattoo on her arm, the Rivet Gun and her wrench crossed on her back—and her shadow behind her, cast long and tall on the ancient roads of Mummery.
The city threw out its best sea fog so that September wouldn’t know she’d walked out of the woods around Winesap Station and into Mummery until she was deep in the high street of Foliotown. Only then did the sea fog begin to roll itself up like the awning over a shop in the morning. September looked out into a silent city. She knew it at once, without Ell to tell her, the way she knew how to drive the Bathysphere, the way she knew how to fix the gas stove. The thousand and four towers of Mummery loomed over her out of the mist. Curling jester’s hats full of windows and balconies cast harlequin shadows on the narrow roads. Juggling clubs and staves leaned at every angle, with lights on in their penthouses. Topless ladders rose everywhere, up into the fog and out of sight. Aerialists’ silks flowed from rooftop to rooftop to sword hilt to coin edge, connecting colored balls with tiled roofs and torches with shops in their tall trunks, concert halls within towers made of magicians’ scarves and universities within chalices studded with fake glass gems, trick ropes coiled as high as clock towers filled with dressmakers and bread bakers, cathedrals inside giant double-headed cheaters’ coins, blunted scimitars stuck in the earth of that fool’s city, so vast their hollow blades could hold a hundred banks.
And all of them empty.
September walked the streets of Mummery, her blood beating madly in her brow, her nerves sawing back and forth over her senses. The unlit street lamps stared down unsettlingly at her—each one was a wooden club ending in a very nearly alive-looking carving of a fool’s smiling or frowning or laughing or weeping face and gaudy hat. The mammoth juggling torches cast a fitful orange light through the haze. She thought she could hear voices, footsteps, but when she followed, she found only another alley ending with a locked door in a house of fortune-teller’s cards or barred windows in the back of a gargantuan fiddle.
“I can’t be the only person in a whole city,” she said to yet another dead end.
Rustling sounds shivered through the sweeping silks overhead.
“Never the only,” they whispered. “Never the only one, no one’s alone, never the only one in a world so full.”
Don’t listen to that stage whispering, September’s shadow whispered, trailing over the cobbles and curbs. She could hear Halloween in her bones, but the shadow’s voice made no sound in the empty, echoing city. Mummery is a bad old girl and she only wants to bruise you up a bit before she pounces. We pull this eerie act in Fairyland-Below all the time. I once made a gnome think she’d gone back in time to the Middle Evil era, just for fun. It’s all just for fun. You are a naughty minx, aren’t you, Mummers? Yes, you are! Who’s a menace? Who’s a creaky old slum?
“Did you hear that?” September said sharply. She had heard it—Ell’s flame popping and roaring into life. He always made a little gulping noise right before he spouted off, and she had heard it, down that street there. She darted off after it, running in the quiet, her own breath as loud as Wyvern’s fire in her ears. The fool’s-head street lamps seemed to laugh silently as she sped by.
But down that street there September found nothing but a bridge of shuffling cards, all aces, from a deck so old it had turned the color of a cow’s eyes, without even lovely familiar diamonds and clubs and spades. Instead, the bridge riffled with scythes, nooses, vials—and hearts, for everything changes but hearts. The bridge arched over a river of mulled wine—but it ended halfway across, shuffling into the air, dropping aces onto the burgundy current. The cards drifted downstream like barges to market.
“Ell?” September called out. “Blunderbuss? I’m here! Saturday?”
A bolt of saffron-colored silk twisted and sagged between two wooden flutes with lace curtains in each hole. A familiar blue face popped over the side.
“That’s me! I’m Saturday!” her dear Marid said, and gave her a brilliant smile. “Aren’t you beautiful? What’s your name?”
September felt all the blood in her prickle and turn cold like a million terrible needles. Tears flooded her eyes. It was only one little bear-bite. How could it take Saturday away from her so completely, as though none of it had ever happened, as though her whole life had been a dream that no one wanted to hear about? How could it take their story from them? But it could. It had.
“You can’t forget me. You just can’t,” she whispered. “Everything else, but not me. Not us.”