"Is this it, then?" Cutbelly said. His heart sank. "Did you do it?"
"It looks good," said Mr. Feld. There was little emotion in his voice. You would never have known that he had come to the moment he had gone for weeks without food and sleep to reach. The liquid in the flask condensed, turning thicker and shinier until at last it lay glinting in the flask like a pool of mercury. Mr. Feld tipped it from the flask into the palm of his hand. The shining stuff spilled outward in all directions and lay draped over his hand. But it did not drip or run out of his palm. It held together. He grasped it with the other hand and balled it up. Then he kneaded it a few times and smacked it against the workbench. It flattened into a disk. He lifted the silvery pancake and began to stretch it like pizza dough. He tossed it spinning into the air and it stretched and stretched until it hung silky as a parachute, then drifted, billowing, to the floor.
"Bring me a skriker," Mr. Feld said.
"I don't like to touch those things," Cutbelly said. "You know that, Bruce."
"Fine," said Mr. Feld. He went to a small metal door at the back of the lab. It looked like the door of a locker, narrow and slitted at the top. He opened it with a twist of a bone handle and then turned to one side to squeeze himself halfway in. There was a nasty yipping snarl from inside the dark closet. As Cutbelly watched Mr. Feld reach around inside the locker, he noticed something very odd about the back of Mr. Feld's head. It looked—well, it looked flat. As if his head were made of putty, you would have said, and he had been lying on his back too long. Mr. Feld jumped, and flinched. Then he smiled. It was a smile that made Cutbelly shiver.
Mr. Feld held out a large black wire cage, carrying it by a ring at the top. The skriker in the cage thrashed and snarled at Mr. Feld. It snarled at Cutbelly. Skrikers were reputed to feel no emotion but spite and no pain but hunger. But this skriker looked to Cutbelly very much as if it were afraid.
"Bruce," Cutbelly said. "Mr. Feld. Don't. Please."
"I have no choice," Mr. Feld said. It seemed to Cutbelly that his voice still had the nasal tone it took on when he was dictating notes. "If I don't do what he asks, I'll never see Ethan again."
"You may never see him again even if you do," Cutbelly said.
"Be that as it may," Mr. Feld said. The dry dictation voice was still there; it seemed to have become a permanent condition. He put on a pair of thick elk-hide gloves. He raised the restraining device, a pair of long handles with an adjustable noose at one end, which he would use to grab the skriker, and prepared to reach into the cage. Even though the skriker was injured—it had lost its wings in a skirmish with a tribe of wild shaggurts outside Grunterburg a few weeks back—it was still dangerous. "I have no choice."
He unlocked the cage with a weird-iron key and eased open the door, reaching in with the long-handled noose. The skriker cursed at Mr. Feld with the simple grammar and rich vocabulary of the skriker's palindromic tongue, which was called Azmamza.
"Katnantak!" the skriker cursed. "Tav vatve gala gevtav vatkat nantak!"
Then the noose snared the skriker by its neck. Mr. Feld jerked the creature out of the cage and in a single smooth movement tucked the skriker's body under his arm like a bagpipe, and gave its head a sharp twist. The skriker's head came off with a moist pop. From the joint of its neck a single black drop swelled into a shining bead.
"Tawat!" growled the skriker's head. "Vizgon og zivtav vat!"
Mr. Feld set the head down on the table beside him and then covered it with a towel. It continued to chatter for a moment longer, then fell silent. Mr. Feld turned his attention to the bead of black liquid at the tip of the skriker's dead neck. Lowering the body toward the surface of the table, he dabbed at the stretched crepe of picofiber he had just rolled out. The black stuff smeared across in a long streak. Almost immediately it began to steam and smoke. There was an awful smell of sizzling tooth.
"That's just the residue of my hands," Mr. Feld. "The oils and dirt."
Indeed as he said the words the steaming stopped, and the smoke curled to the ceiling and then began to disperse. Mr. Feld watched the black streak of skriker blood, the second most vitriolic stuff in the universe, as it lay on his shining silver stuff, cooling. The picofibrous material refused to react with it. That, as Mr. Feld had explained to the werefox, was what picofibers did: they refused to react. To Mr. Feld's picofiber pancake the skriker blood was as inert and uninteresting as a splatter of spilt coffee. It was not particularly interesting to Cutbelly, either. But Mr. Feld gazed at the streak of ichor as if it were the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Tunelessly he sang to himself:
Na na na na
Na na na na
Hey hey hey
Goodbye
"Biosolvent test," he said after a moment, his voice higher and dryer than ever. "Negative. No indications of molecular interaction on any level." He glanced over at Cutbelly, who sat, not moving, the notebook neglected. "Take that down."
"No," Cutbelly said. "I'm not going to help you anymore, reuben."
Cutbelly liked Mr. Feld. He liked most reubens, as a rule, preferring their company to that of ferishers, among whom he had been born. Ferishers were spirited but shallow and incapable of pity. They were immortal. Only things whose lives were too short, like reubens, were able to feel pity. And he was grateful to Mr. Feld for having intervened to save his life at Betty's Bonepit. But he was increasingly uneasy around Mr. Feld. Something had to be done.
"Take it down!" Mr. Feld said through clenched teeth. "I'm extremely close now! Take it down! Don't you want me to see Ethan again?"
"What are you going to do, pop my head off? Take it down yourself!" Cutbelly said.
Mr. Feld set down the beaker, then snatched up the notebook and began furiously to jot.
"This has nothing to do with you seeing Ethan again," Cutbelly said. "You're doing this, sir, because you like what you're doing. You enjoy the work. Admit it. If Coyote walked in here right now and told you could stop, you'd keep on working, wouldn't you?"
"No," Mr. Feld said. "Of course not."
He looked away, and Cutbelly saw that the back of his head was flatter than ever. In fact, now that he considered it, the entire back of Mr. Feld's body looked flatter than it ought to. His buttocks looked as if they were pressed up against a clear sheet of glass.
The iron portal of the laboratory rolled open, squealing, and Coyote walked in. He was dressed in his snowgear, a tunic and trousers of white fur. His white fur hood was thrown back and his bright coppery hair blazed with droplets.
"So!" he cried. "Hard at work, I see! Excellent! Fine! Splendid! And how goes it? Excellent? Fine? Spendid, even? That's good. Mr. Feld, that is just so good. I am this close to obtaining an adequate supply of the vitriol. A friend of mine is working on the problem right now. I think she's found someone—someone close to your son, intriguingly—who can be persuaded to get me the stuff." He balled his hands into fists and pounded on his own forehead. He yanked on his own hair. "Oh, I'm pleased. I'm very pleased. In fact, I am so pleased that I would like to reward you. As of now, as of this very moment, you are free of my service. I cannot release you from my custody, of course, not, at least, until we have overthrown Outlandishton and captured Murmury Well. But you need no longer work on the delivery system. My smiths can take over from here."
He said this all with perfect sincerity and a kindly tone. Mr. Feld glanced at Cutbelly.
"Uh," he said. "Well."
Cutbelly spat on the floor. "What did I tell you?" he said.
"It's just, I'm so close," Mr. Feld said at last. "I really hate to stop now."
Coyote nodded.
"Knock yourself out," he said. Then he nodded to Cutbelly, and the werefox saw a mean little Coyote smirk on his face. He started back out of the laboratory. "Or should I say, knock yourself flat?"
CHAPTER 18
On Three Reubens Field
ETHAN STOOD IN THE middle of a large, green field, with one perfectly square corner, that opened like a gr
assy fan. Near the perfect corner, inside of a square traced in rich, brown dirt and filled with green grass, stood a tumulus or little round hill of more rich, brown dirt.
"Hey," Ethan said, as he stared across the bright green diamond at Jennifer T. He found himself standing squarely at the back of the circle of dirt where home plate belonged. Jennifer T. was standing on the pitcher's mound.
"Hey," she said, looking around with an expression on her face of perfect wonder. "Did you do this?"
"I…I didn't mean to," Ethan said.
The last thing he remembered was letting go of the burning bat in his hands—burning not like a fire, or even an electric light, but with a cold kind of flame like starlight. It had begun to flicker almost from the moment he followed Thor into the side of the knoll. They had gone no more than a few steps when the light blazed up, blindingly bright, and then it was as if someone had put the worlds in a blender. After that he remembered nothing. And now here they were, standing in the middle of a baseball diamond, in the shade of Dandelion Hill.
When they saw the miraculous ball field that had swirled into existence at their doorstep, the ferishers of Dandelion Hill threw down their tennis rackets and croquet mallets, and left behind the scarred gray patch in the grass where their old field had lain. They dived into the thick, new grass, and swam in it like water, and rolled over onto their backs, and floated on it, and sighed.
"Ethan Feld," Taffy called from the angle of third base. "We need that wood, and quickly."
It was on top of the pitcher's mound that they laid the featherweight husk of Cinquefoil the ferisher. Ethan was shocked by his appearance. He looked less like a living creature than the imitation of one, a bundle of rags, like the doll carried by the ferisher girl Spider-Rose. Ethan wanted to believe that his newly forged bat could somehow reverse the process, but it didn't seem likely. And even if the bat turned out to be up to the challenge, he had no reason to believe that he was.
"Here," he said to Jennifer T., offering her the bat that Grim had made for him. Jennifer T. took it, gripped it in both hands, studied it with her fingertips. She had been eyeing it with interest from the moment she and Ethan had first faced each other across the infield, with the swirling winds and green chaos of a disturbance in the Worlds settling all around them.
"It's got to be you, rube," Grim said to Ethan. "It's your wood. You found it."
"But I've used Jennifer T.'s bat before," Ethan protested. "People share bats all the time. She can use mine if she wants to."
"I don't know," Jennifer T. said, giving it a few practice swings. "There's this little bump on the handle. This knot, or whatever. It sort of hurts my hand."
She passed the bat back to Ethan and he took it. Jennifer T. was right; the knot—he came to think of it as the Knot—on the handle spoilt the feel of the bat in the hands. That was his fault, of course; he hadn't owned the nerve, at the last, to carve it away. He put the shame of his failure out of his mind and turned his attention to the crumpled form of the ferisher lying on the pitcher's mound before him. The Dandelion Hill mob crept closer now, hoping to get a better look at the proceedings. Some of them called out advice and hints to Ethan; others began to lay odds on whether it was going to work at all.
Like all advice, most of the ferisher's suggestions were contradictory—it had been a long time, after all, since anyone around here had seen ash used to draw out the withering sting of iron. Some of them shouted to Ethan to kneel down, and lay the head of the bat right on the wound. Others seemed to feel that he was supposed to remain standing, but wave the bat around over the wound. In the end Ethan settled for some of each. He knelt, and began to draw little circles in the air over Cinquefoil's ruined hand. He closed his eyes, because he couldn't stand the sight of the poor, shrunken chief.
When he opened them again, he saw to his surprise that things were looking much better. The hard little kernel into which Cinquefoil's life had curled itself sprang forth again and sent shoots to uncoil in his face, hands, and feet. His hands opened like buds. His eyelids opened like petals. He was looking right at Ethan.
"Shaved yer splinter, I see," he observed.
A cheer broke out; it was the first time the sound of cheering had been heard at the Hill since the loss of the old ball field to Coyote the Changer's deceit. Then Queen Filaree approached the mound. Her face, alone of everyone's on the field, was severe and unsmiling. Her walk was haughty. She stopped at the edge of the grass and scowled at each of them in turn—Ethan, Jennifer T., Thor, Cinquefoil, Taffy, Grim the Giant, and at the strange little pot-bellied rat-creature—a wererat, Ethan decided, who was standing beside Jennifer T. The wererat stared right back, with his one bright eye. Longest of all, though, the Queen glared at the ferisher girl, Spider-Rose. Spider-Rose admired the line of beech trees beyond right field, as if unaware of all the scowling and glaring that was going on.
"We've been bittered, and ruint, and soured, and mean," said the queen at last. "And worst, we done dishonored the Laws o' Hospitality most disgraceful." She looked at Ethan and Jennifer T. "And ta repay us fer this ill-doing, ya have healt up our long-broken hearts."
"It was kind of an accident," Ethan said, looking down at the bat. "I'm not really sure what I did."
"I ain't sure, neither," Grim the Giant said. "But here's the way I figures it. That lot"—he gestured toward Jennifer T. and Taffy—"and us, now, we was all scamperin' through the hillside at the same instant. I done heard of such things happenin' from time to time, an' the way I heard it, people cross each other in a scamper, why then, you always ends up with somethin' very interestin'. Now, let's just say, with this little reuben carryin' that old hunk of woundwood there—what with all that glowin' it did—I think…I think he done pleached two worlds together. This one and the Middling, I'll warrant. Just for a minute, like."
The wererat crept forward and gingerly ran a dainty forepaw along the shaft of Ethan's bat.
"Woundwood, is it?" He frowned. "Then much as it pains me to have to do so, I fear I must agree with that midgety puddinghead over there. Put a piece of woundwood at the spot where two branches cross, it's like you created a tiny, little temporary gall—you know what a gall is? But it wasn't a real gall. It didn't last. And it only stayed open just long enough for a little bit of the two worlds to involve themselves with each other. Just long enough to make a little tiny patch of a magical place."
"A ball field," said Jennifer T.
"It's got all the magic and size we require," Queen Filaree said. "An' we're deep, deep in yer debt."
"Oh," said Ethan, a little put off by her solemnity, and still trying to take hold of the idea that he had, even if only for a moment, brought two worlds together, and made something so beautiful where there had been only mud and gray ashes. "Well, that's okay."
"It is not," the queen said. "Name a price fer yer gift, and it'll be paid."
"Well—" Ethan began. They had already wasted so much time. "I'm really worried about my dad. He's been taken prisoner by Coyote."
"Plus we're trying to keep Ragged Rock from coming," Thor reminded him.
"Oh, yeah," Ethan said. "Also we're trying to stop the end of the world. And we have a really long way to go. So—well, okay. Could we please have our airship back?"
The queen's cheeks flushed until they were the color of blood oranges. She glanced down at herself, then away. A certain amount of dark laughter bubbled up from the assembled ferishers. A certain amount of money changed hands. Ethan took a closer look at the queen's shiny tunic and at those worn by nearly all of the other members of the mob. Now that they were out in the sunlight he could see that they had been sewn—hundreds of tiny garments, glowing soft and silvery as the moon—from the picofiber envelope of Skidbladnir.
"Oh," he said. "Oh."
"I'll have yer wagon fetched out o' the stables," said the queen. "But I regret ta say that it may not fly so well as it did afore now."
A few moments later, the old Feld Saab appeared from around th
e other side of the hill, pushed by two dozen huffing ferishers wearing thick gloves to keep the touch of metal from their hands. She was dented and dirty and looked, in this enchanted spot, more incongruous than ever. But there was plenty of gas in her tank, and when they tried the ignition, she turned over at once.
"Good thing I couldn't grammer the engine away," Cinquefoil said. "But we got a long ways ta go on a tank o' gas." He looked worried, and he trembled, still pale and drawn, peering in at the gauge labeled BENSIN.
"I'll work a feasting grammer on her for ya, Chief Cinquefoil," the queen said. "What can turn a heel o' bread inta a banquet fit fer a mob. That should stretch things a bit fer ya. And a course we'll outfit ya as we can with foodstuffs and such gear as ya may need."
"Pardon me," said a small, crisp voice at Ethan's feet. "But as long as we find ourselves on the subject of foodstuffs, there was a small matter, I believe, of some Braunschweiger sausage."
It was the wererat. He was staring up at the rear hatch of the car, his tiny black nose aquiver.
"Oh, hey," Jennifer T. said. "Right."
She went to the back of the car and opened the hatch, and rummaged around in the cooler her great-aunts had packed. She reemerged with a stack of sandwiches, wrapped in wax paper, and handed them down to the wererat.