The Whatnot. Stefan Bachmann

they stung now as they touched his skin, spitting, icy cold. He tried to take another bite of his apple. It turned to wind and cinders, and blew away.

      Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

       Snow was falling. Not plums. Snow. It gusted into his little hole, and suddenly Pikey’s nose was filled with the stench of old water and deep and mossy wells. A racket kicked up, old Rinshi straining against her chain, barking at something and then stopping, sharp-like. There was a grating, a scrape of metal.

       Pikey saw the blood before he saw the figure, always the blood trickling toward him between the stones. Then the alley was filled with screams.

      Pikey Thomas was running for his life.

      It was a clear day, sharp and cold as a knife, but he couldn’t see a thing. The string that held the patch over his bad eye was slipping. The square of ancient leather slapped his face, disorienting him. He bounced off a drainpipe, did an ungainly whirl, kept running. Behind him, he heard the sound of a bell, coming after him, clanging furiously. Ahead was a gutter. He leaped into it and whistled over the frozen grime, sliding fast as anything. The gutter ended in a rusting grate. Pikey hurled himself over it, struck the cobbles running. His fingers went to the patch, trying desperately to tighten the string, but it wouldn’t stay, and he couldn’t stop. It was only about to get worse.

      The cobble faery tripped him in Bluebottle Street.

      There Pikey was, a knob of black bread clutched inside his jacket, pounding up a street that was as empty and icy as any in London. His pursuer was still two or three corners behind him. Pikey was sure he would get away. And then he felt the tremor in the ground beneath him, the rattle of the cobbles as a tiny faery raced through its secret tunnels. It popped up the stone just as Pikey’s foot was flying toward it.

      Pikey let out a yelp and went careering into the wall of a house. His head knocked against stone. Pain shuddered through him, and he heard a wicked little voice sing, “Clumsy-patty, clumsy-patty, who’s a clumsy pitty-patty?”

      Pikey spun, pushing himself away from the wall.

      The faery was peeking out from under the lifted cobblestone, black-bead eyes glittering. It was a spryte, not three inches from head to toe. Bits of frosty branches grew behind its pointed ears and a dreadful grin was on its face, stretching halfway around. It was a very yellow grin, full of prickly little teeth.

      “Shut up,” Pikey hissed. He ran at it, determined to smash it into a stringy mess. Too slow. The faery pulled down the cobble like a hat and was gone.

      Pikey froze. He glanced back down the street, listening, making sure he still had some seconds to spare. Then he struck his boot heel against the ground three times, getting softer with each strike so that it would sound like he was walking away. The faery shot back up, still grinning. And Pikey leaped, straight onto the cobble. There was a squeak. The cobble smashed back into place. The faery’s hand twitched where it was pinched in.

      “Serves you right, too,” Pikey said, but he had no time to enjoy his little victory. The bell was close now, echoing up between the buildings. An instant later, a huge officer in blue and crimson skidded into the street. A leadface.

      “Thief!” the leadface shouted, his voice oddly flat and dull inside his iron half-helmet. “Thief!” But before he could see Pikey, Pikey was moving again, slipping under an archway and down a steep flight of steps, heart hammering.

      The leadface charged up Bluebottle Street, flailing his bell. Pikey flattened himself against the gritty stone of the stairwell, just far enough down so that he could still see the street. He saw the black boots go by. He allowed himself a careful smile. The officer was running straight for the cobble faery. In five steps he would be flat on his face. Three. Two … And the officer kept right on running, hurtling toward the end of Bluebottle Street and the sooty flow of traffic on Aldersgate.

      Oh. Pikey wiped his nose. Must have stomped that faery harder than I thought.

      He leaned back against the slimy wall, waiting for the sound of the bell to become lost in the noise of the steam coaches and crowds. Then he strode up the steps and into the street, hands in his pockets, looking for all the world as if he had just gotten up and was off to sell matches or shine shoes or squawk the news at unsuspecting pedestrians.

      Of course, he wasn’t. He had just snatched his supper and now he was going to find a quiet spot where he could eat it. Leadfaces were inconvenient; so were cobble sprytes, especially since they had supposedly been banned from the city months ago together with all the other faeries. But they were nothing Pikey Thomas couldn’t handle.

      He picked his way back toward Spitalfields, careful to avoid the places where the leadfaces prowled and where the war agents sat at their painted recruiting booths. They were everywhere these days, and they went after most anyone they saw. “For Queen and Country!” they liked to bellow into their loudening horns. “For England, to eradicate the faery threat! Step right up, all men of hardy constitution!”

      Pikey didn’t know if he had a hardy constitution, but he knew he couldn’t go to war. A year ago he would have. He was only twelve, but he would have signed up in an instant. The army had bread. It had thick coats and colorful banners and great bashing songs that made your feet want to march even if they didn’t know where they were going. And you got a musket, too, for shooting faeries, which sounded good to Pikey. But that was before. Before the snowy night in the chemist’s alley, and the blood between the cobbles, and the feet limping closer, straight toward him no matter how far he pressed himself into the dark. Before everything changed and he didn’t know what he was anymore.

      From an alley, Pikey watched as a group of boys not fourteen hunched over a war agent’s table and signed their Xs on squares of brown card paper. When they had finished, the leadface handed them each a coat and a pair of huge scuffed boots. Then the boys were loaded into a wagon and it creaked away.

      The leadface at the booth began scanning the passersby again, eyes invisible behind the dark holes of his helmet. Pikey hurried on. Those boys would be fighting soon, somewhere in the North. Fighting forests and rivers and whispery magic nonsense. He wondered if their boots would come back to London afterward, when they were gone, and be given to other boys.

      He went up street after street, ducking into alleys when he heard the leadfaces’ shouts, hurrying beneath the drooping, blackened houses. They had been the mansions of the faery silk weavers once. Now they were the houses of pickpockets and bloodletters and the poorest of the poor. Sometimes a woman leaning out of a window, or another boy in the street, would spot Pikey and shout, “Oy, pikey!” in a not-very-nice voice. Pikey always hurried faster then.

      Pikey wasn’t his real name. Or Thomas, either, for that matter. “Pikeys” were what folks called foreigners, and because Pikey had a face as brown as an old penny (whether from dirt or because he actually was a foreigner not even he knew), the name had stuck. As for Thomas, it was the name on the box he had come in, twelve years ago on a doorstep in Putney: Thomas Ltd. Crackers and Biscuits. Premium quality.

      People had thought that funny once, coming from a cracker box. Pikey didn’t think it was funny at all.

      In the pigeon-choked space in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral, a gang of boys accosted him.

      “Give you a ha’penny if you show us your socket,” the oldest and tallest one snarled. He wore a blue coat with brass buttons, much too big for him, and a pair of boots with popped toes. He looked like the leader.

      The other boys crowded around, prodding Pikey, dirty faces pressing in. “Yeh, show us your socket! What happened, eh? Did you see something you weren’t supposed to? Did Jenny Greenteeth pluck it out and string it up for a necklace?”

      If Pikey’d had a socket he would have taken the boys’ offer in an instant. A ha’penny could buy him a proper meal, let him sit in the warmth and stink of an inn and eat potatoes and gravy and gray boiled mutton until he burst. But he didn’t have a socket, and the boys wouldn’t like what they saw.

      “Shove off. Leave