Ghoulish Song (9781442427310) Read online

  Contents

  First Verse

  Second Verse

  Third Verse

  Fourth Verse

  Fifth Verse

  Sixth Verse

  Seventh Verse

  Eighth Verse

  Ninth Verse

  Tenth Verse

  Eleventh Verse

  Twelfth Verse

  Thirteenth Verse

  Fourteenth Verse

  Fifteenth Verse

  Sixteenth Verse

  Acknowledgments

  About William Alexander

  For Iris

  First Verse

  THE LAST DAY OF Kaile’s life did not start well.

  She was up before the sun bothered to be, and fumbled a bit with her bedside lantern. The flint sparked, the wick caught, and she blinked herself awake in the sudden, violent light. Then she wound up the base and watched it turn.

  The lantern was a music box, a shadow puppet show, and one of Kaile’s very favorite things. Animals marched around the bedroom walls as it turned in a slow circle. She stared at the shadows while slowly remembering what day it was. She moved more quickly once she remembered, and scrambled out of bed. Ceramic floor tiles felt cold against the bottoms of her feet. Her own shadow climbed the wall behind her to join the marching puppets.

  Kaile opened her window. She smelled coldness and wetness in the air outside. Her arms felt bumpy when she rubbed them, but she put on a simple work dress with short sleeves that wouldn’t get in her way. Downstairs the oven was probably roaring. Downstairs it would be too warm already.

  Kaile, the baker’s daughter, closed the window and braided her hair by her reflection in the window glass. She hummed along with the lantern music, making it a tune to hold her hair together.

  The music box wound down, and the lantern stopped turning. Kaile snuffed the wick and went downstairs.

  A cloud of hot, dry air smacked into her when she opened the kitchen door. She had expected it, and was surprised by it anyway. The air also carried rich kitchen smells. It presented these various scents to Kaile with warmth and welcome. She breathed and sorted them, each from each.

  Mother peered around the far side of the oven, which was a great, big, round, red mountain of clay with many doors and baking trays set into the sides. Mother’s hair stuck up in strange places. It looked like someone had scrubbed the top of her head with the side of a sheep.

  “Take out the first batch of breakfast pies,” she told Kaile, without even saying Good morning. “They’re nearly done.”

  Kaile grabbed a wooden paddle and braced herself for opening oven doors and breathing oven air. She tried not to be annoyed. Mother had probably not slept at all. She never did before Inspection Day.

  Bakery inspections happened every year. The Guard Captain came, bought loaves of bread, and weighed them, one at a time, with his gearworked hands. If the loaves weren’t heavy and substantial enough to pass muster—or if they weren’t tasty enough—then the offending baker got locked in an iron cage by the docks and dunked several times in the River. After that the baker remained in the cage, suspended over the water, so people could laugh and jeer and throw stale breakfast rolls. The dunking went on for three days. It taught bakers not to cheat their neighbors by skimping on the substance of their bread dough.

  Kaile suspected that her mother actually loved Inspection Day. She made the best bread and ale in Southside—everyone knew it, and Mother liked to remind everyone of it. She had never been dunked in the Zombay River for skimping on her dough. Not once. So every year her unbroken record got longer, and the pressure to keep it got stronger. Some neighbors started to whisper that she was getting a bit too proud, a bit too cocky, and that every baker should be dunked at least once to remind them that it could happen to anyone. Wasn’t it just about her turn?

  Mother only ever smiled at the whispered spite. Not me, she would say. Not ever. But she wasn’t smiling now. She made grumbling and muttering noises at everything she touched. Kaile didn’t want to know what Mother was saying to the kitchen as she moved through it.

  Together they covered a countertop with breakfast pies, and filled the open shelves in the oven with pans of bread dough.

  “Where’s Father?” Kaile asked.

  “I sent him out to clean the public room,” Mother said. She wiped her forehead with a rag. It didn’t matter. It only seemed to move the sweat around.

  Kaile had helped her father clean the public room the night before. She didn’t point this out now. Instead she looked around to see what needed doing next. Inspections came only once a year, and the day went faster if she kept busy. Leftovers were also especially good after Inspection Day, so she had that to look forward to.

  She checked the windows to make sure Southside dust wasn’t getting through the cloth screen and mixing with the flour—which always happened anyway, but it was best to limit just how much dust got in the bread—and then she set to kneading dough. She hummed a kneading sort of tune to herself. The tune gave shape to what she did, and held the whole of it together.

  Kaile stopped humming and kneading when a shrill, piercing, horrible noise stabbed through the kitchen air. She covered her ears with both hands.

  Now I have dough in my ears, she noticed. I wonder if I’ll be able to get it all out.

  “Wake up, everybody!” the Snotfish shouted. His name was Cob, but the name did not suit him nearly so well as Snotfish. “Inspection Daaaaaaay, Inspection Daaaaaaaaay . . .” He marched through the kitchen and blew another note into his tin whistle. The sound made it through Kaile’s hands, and through the bread dough, and into her ears. It was even more painful than the first note.

  Snotfish’s whistle was his very favorite thing, and it had been ever since Kaile had given it to him in a moment of foolish generosity. It used to be hers. Now her little brother tried to play marching tunes with it, because the Guard used marching tunes to get used to their gearworked legs. He wanted to join the Guard when he grew old enough—if he ever did, if he managed to live so long before Mother and Father baked him into a pie to be done with him.

  Kaile took her doughy hands from her ears and prepared to say wrathful and scathing things. She wasn’t sure what she was going to say, but she took in a very big breath to make sure she would have enough air to say it with.

  Her father was faster. He tore into the kitchen through the public room door and tried to snatch the whistle away. The Snotfish resisted, and the whistle spun out of his hands and into the oven fire.

  Everyone started shouting at once.

  The Snotfish ran to the oven with a shrill, wordless cry, ready to dive inside and rescue his precious whistle. Father grabbed the boy’s arm to keep him from burning himself. Mother called down curses on the both of them.

  Kaile took the longest kitchen tongs and tried to fish out the whistle. It was far inside. She felt the fine hairs burn on her forearms. A horrible, acrid, metallic smell began to fill the kitchen.

  The shouting subsided. It was silent in the room by the time Kaile pulled out a ruined lump of tin.

  She looked at it sadly. She should have kept it. She shouldn’t have given it to the Snotfish. He never learned to play it properly, and now it would never play again.

  Father brought her a water bucket, and she dropped the tin lump inside. Hot metal hissed and steamed. That was the only noise in the kitchen.

  Mother opened the oven door and sniffed. She reached in with one hand, tore off a piece of still-baking bread, and took a bite.

  “It tastes like tin,” she said. She sounded calm. Kaile was a little bit afraid of how calm her mother sounded. “Tin does not taste good.”

  The Snotfish sniffed. Father’s
eyebrows scrunched together over the top of his nose.

  “Both of you get out,” Mother said. “Please get very far away from this oven.”

  Father and the Snotfish turned and left without further protest.

  “Kaile,” Mother said, her voice still very calm. “Fetch me more water. I need to make dough. Then take everything out of the oven and throw it in a crate for the guzzards, and after that open the public room. The old men are waiting already for their domini table, I’m sure.”

  “Yes, Mother,” Kaile said, and left the kitchen. She was relieved to get away from the hot tin smell, and away from Mother’s cold-burning calm.

  Second Verse

  BROKEN WALL WAS THE name of the bakery, and the alehouse, and the neighborhood all around. Everyone drank ale in Southside. Well water needed to be boiled before drinking, or else it made the drinker’s insides feel like a barrel full of angry fish, so it was very much safer to fill cups with fermented things. Light ale was practically water—only cleaner—and anyone could drink as much as they liked without getting fuzzy-headed over it. The darker, stronger ale was more dangerous. Only fully grown patrons could drink it, and they still needed Mother’s permission before they could have so much as a sip.

  Once she had fetched the water, Kaile took every last loaf out of the oven. Then she went quickly through the very clean public room, around the tall tables, and over the rope-woven rugs to open the front door. The domini men stood on the doorstep, waiting. They were four old sailors who rarely spoke. They had no beards, and they had no teeth except for the single copper set they shared between them whenever they ordered food—which was rarely. Mostly they drank light ale and played domini. Their fingers were like tree roots reaching down from the riverbank. Their skin was hard clay. Their domini tiles were yellowed bone, and they would keep up the game from now until closing time, when Mother would kick them out.

  None of them thanked Kaile when she let them in, and they did not thank her when she poured ale for each at their usual table. They did not seem to notice her. They only noticed domini tiles.

  Kaile wound up the gearwork charms beside each doorway, and hummed along with the jangling music they made. The charms were meant to keep illness, death, and malicious gossip away from the household.

  She opened window shutters, and then lit a few lamps. Polished copper sheets behind the lamps broke their light into pieces and scattered those pieces around the room. She set the fresh breakfast pastries on the countertop—the ones that had escaped smelling like tin smoke—and stood behind them to wait for the breakfast crowd.

  Familiar faces from the neighborhood stopped by for a bite, and Kaile sold them pastries. They stopped in for a quiet sip of a cold drink, and she sold them light ale. They stood at tables, or sat on the rope-woven rugs. They wore knit sweaters and coats stuffed with guzzard down because it was a cold morning.

  Most of the patrons were rock-movers. This was the most common occupation in Broken Wall. They hauled the huge stones of the old city wall with levers and pulleys and gearwork and sweat to wherever those stones might be needed to build something else.

  A small group of coalmakers came in for a drink. Their aprons and fingers were stained, and everyone else in the public room kept their distance from them. Coal came from hearts, removed and set to burning. Kaile sold them ale and tried not to stare at the stains on their fingers and aprons.

  A few barge sailors came in with their hair in long braids. Kaile sold them each something to eat, and something to drink. She conducted the ordinary business of the morning, relieved by the familiar routine of it all, content that the day might turn out to be an ordinary day—notwithstanding the Inspection, and the panic, and the ruined slag of that tin whistle.

  The public door opened again, and then it ceased to be an ordinary day.

  A goblin strode over the threshold. He wore a trim gray beard, walked with a cane, and carried himself like a gentleman, even though he was clearly one of the Changed. He had very large eyes. His ears stuck out sideways from his head. He looked to be shorter than Kaile, though Kaile couldn’t tell how tall the goblin really was underneath the enormity of his big black hat.

  The old goblin looked around, nodded to the domini, men who were openly staring at him, and then recognized Kaile as someone who, for the moment at least, was in charge. He bowed to her with a flourish of his hat.

  “Young lady,” he said. The way he said it made it mean “lady who is young in years,” and not “little girl.” Kaile was impressed. She had only ever heard “young lady” mean “little girl.”

  “Welcome,” she told the goblin, even though she wasn’t sure that he would actually be welcome here, according to Mother or Father. But just at that moment, on that particular morning, it would be okay with her if goblins stole away the Snotfish and forced him into a hundred years of servitude, doing whatever goblins made stolen children do.

  The goblin introduced himself. “I am the First Player of an acting troupe,” he said, “the finest in all of Zombay.” (Kaile couldn’t tell if he meant that the troupe was the finest in the city, or that he was.) “We would be honored to perform for the entertainment and delight of your patrons. All the payment we ask is a hot meal, and whatever donations we earn from the crowd. There will be music, and mummery, and even masks.”

  Kaile imagined what her mother’s reaction to this might be, and then tried not to imagine it. “I’m sorry,” she told the goblin. “This isn’t really the best day for a show. And the last time we had actors performing in here, the Guard tried to arrest them all. They broke furniture, and our oven. We had to spend days carrying clay up from the riverbanks to patch the oven.”

  The goblin made a sympathetic noise. “And what became of those unfortunate performers, do you know?”

  “I don’t,” said Kaile. “One escaped through the kitchen. All the others were escorted out the front.”

  “I see,” the goblin said. “I am merely curious about the fate of our predecessors. But I can assure you that my troupe has license to legally perform, without fear of harassment or arrest.” He paused. “Well, truthfully, without fear of arrest. We are sometimes harassed, but we have very little fear of arrest. Hardly so much as a tremor of fear.”

  He smiled bravely, as if to show his courageous willingness to put on a show for the Broken Wall despite whatever dangers it might bring.

  Kaile smiled back at him, but she also shook her head. Mother would bake her into a pie, and do it badly, and then throw the pie away as guzzard-feed. “We really couldn’t,” she told him. “Not today. Maybe another time.”

  The goblin nodded. “I understand, of course,” he said, and swept off his hat to bow again.

  Astonishing things fell out of the hat.

  The first was a small mask with a pointy nose. The second was a gray flute carved out of bone. The third was a metal box. He quickly snatched up the mask and the flute, but the box he nudged with the tip of his boot, as though by accident. It snapped open. A copper flower, fashioned out of tiny filaments of gearwork, grew up from the box. The petals clicked against each other as it bloomed. Then it wilted. Each petal fell with a small clatter. The bare stem reached around the floor in an embarrassed sort of way, gathered up the petals, and closed the box lid over itself.

  The goblin apologized, picked up the box, and hid it back inside his hat.

  Kaile clapped. She couldn’t help it. The domini men also clapped, all four of them, and Kaile had never seen them react to anything that was not their own tower of tiles.

  “You can set up your stage on the long table at the end of the room,” she said. She was in charge of the public room, at that moment at least, so it was her decision to make. “But not until the afternoon.” The Guard Captain usually came to conduct his Inspection in the morning, and Father always took his shift during the midday crowd. Both should be over and done with by the afternoon. “Make sure it’s me standing here at the counter when you come back, before you get started.�
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  The old goblin winked. He seemed a trustworthy conspirator. “We will.”

  “And promise me you won’t cause a ruckus and break the oven.”

  “The oven will suffer no damage from us,” the goblin said—and more than said. He almost sang the words to make them more than just a promise, to change the shape of the world around them. Then he left.

  Kaile heard domini tiles clack against each other. The day seemed ordinary again. She went back into the kitchen.

  “Is the Captain here?” Mother asked. “The very best bread is in that basket, there by the door. That’s the stuff to give him, if he’s here.”

  “He isn’t,” Kaile told her, “but I’m running out of pastries. And I think it’s Father’s turn at the counter.”

  Mother grunted, handed over a tray of pastries, and disappeared behind the curve of the oven.

  Third Verse

  KAILE TOOK HER MIDDAY break outside, by the road, sitting on a broken piece of wall. She munched a pastry and watched people go by. She knew most of them, and most of them knew her. There was Old Jibb, who lost a leg to a dropped stone and had it replaced with one long, coiled spring. There was Brunip, who always walked with weights strapped to his left arm to balance out the mighty weight of his right arm, which was iron and bulky. Brunip took care of his arm, and scrubbed each individual piece every morning to keep the rust out. It glinted, shiny, when he lifted it to wave. Kaile waved back.

  Rock-moving was dangerous. Many movers had replaced lost parts of themselves with gearworked fingers and toes. Their new bits were always makeshift and strangely shaped, pieced together out of salvage from old clocks or the rail station yard. Only the Guard Captain’s hands looked like the hands he used to have. Only the Guard used gearworked legs that would actually fit into boots.

  Snotfish was several sorts of idiot for wanting to join the Guard, and get his feet replaced when they didn’t need to be.

  The Guard Captain—whose gearwork eyes always ticked in a cold, constant circle—was not here yet. The Inspection hadn’t happened yet. It should have, by now. Goblins were coming to put on a show in the public room, and how had that ever seemed like a good idea?