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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 a
t 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.”
Oh, Saturday, whispered Halloween from the wall of the flute where the torchlight cast her. Look at us and remember when all you wanted was for her to come back. It’s your turn to come back. But what can we do against invisible bears sent by Time to punish you?
Saturday leaned forward at the waist and flipped over, winding the long silk behind him as he twirled slowly down to the street. “Why do you have that tattoo? That means you’re married! My loss.” He looked into her eyes, full of interest, without a care in the lines of his face, without the least pain dragging down his brow.
“I’m not married.” September’s throat got so thick she could hardly talk through it. “It was a trick we played on an octopus…”
“Octopi are very dangerous.” Saturday whistled. “I’m impressed all over. How did you know my name?”
September reached out and touched his shoulder. She felt odd. If he didn’t know her now, she’d no right to touch him as though he did.
“I knew you when you were older,” she said softly. “We went to the Moon. We sailed the sea. My name is September.”
“Oh! How wonderful, then. I look forward to becoming the Saturday who sails with you. Forgive me, I meet people out of order all the time—but then, you must know that, from our time on the Moon.”
September clutched her elbows with her hands to keep from coming apart on that wet street in a strange city. “I do know.”
The Marid clapped his hands. “Well, September-of-my-Moony-Future! We seem to have the place to ourselves, so what shall we do for a first date? First for me, I mean. I can teach you how to do a backflip into a double drop on the green silks back that way. Oh! I did see a mad wyvern with a turnip hanging off him and a very odd sort-of-knitted wombat thing? We should avoid them as best we can. When you meet mad folk on the road, some sort of story always starts up, and you’ve no control over how it goes.”
September wiped her eyes quickly. “Where? Where did you see them? Can you show me? It’s important. They’re not mad … you will have known them, too, when you meet me.” Verb tenses were always so difficult with Saturday, but now it was worse than ever.
“Oh … they’re on the other side of the river … it’s a long way round. Wouldn’t you rather walk the tightrope between the Unseelie Unicycle and Big Bacchus? If you don’t fall, you get a lovely pair of black wings.”
September didn’t want to smile. She didn’t feel like smiling. But she knew this Saturday wouldn’t know what she could do, and he’d be dazzled. She could never resist trying to impress him. She turned to the bridge of cards and moved her hands like she was dealing blackjack. It was a trick Sir Sanguine had taught her in the Redrum Cellar. That redcap could do anything with enough aces. The deathly playing cards shuddered and shuffled out, stretching to the other bank.
Saturday clapped his hands and to September’s lonely heart it sounded like love. “Oh, September, I can’t wait to meet you!” he cried.
Saturday took her hand and led her over the bridge of aces, down jackknifing streets, the angles of the alleys so sharp and steep that they tumbled down Mummery as much as they walked through it. And September heard Ell’s gulping pre-flame sounds, and a refrain or two from an ancient fighting song of Wom, and they weren’t phantoms—Saturday heard them, too. They followed the sounds and the cries and the song until they got close enough to hear another voice, a very familiar voice, bouncing off the high towers.
They burst, hand in hand, into a wide plaza ringed in immense marionette puppets without strings. They lay on their sides, sat cross-legged, stood bent over, their joined arms hanging down, rested shoulder to shoulder. They had doors in the soles of their shoes and lanterns lit in their eyes, shutters closed in their chests and old snow in the creases of their wooden hair. Under the gaze of the collapsed puppets, Ell and Blunderbuss fought for their lives.
September could hardly understand what she saw. A-Through-L spat his indigo fire at a girl in black. Blunderbuss fired passionfruits and horseshoes from her mouth, singing all the while. But the girl knocked both flame and fruit aside like bumblebees. She screeched back at them and fired arrow after silver arrow from her iceleaf bow. It was not a duel. It was a brawl, and the Marquess had already got an arrow through Blunderbuss’s ear. The little block letters of the troll’s alphabet danced around their feet. They saw September first and rolled toward her in a clattering wooden wave, beaming up at her with their S and Q and E and W and B’s.
