Peter & Max - Bill Willingham [71]
“Frost Taker will help me get my inheritance back from Peter.”
“Perhaps so, but consider some of the other artifacts and instruments here in my home. Some of them have much greater powers than a mere magic blade, the most powerful of which can still only destroy one soul at a time. There are better things here you could learn to use.”
Max looked again about the cluttered room. Her cottage was bigger inside than out, which had disturbed him at first, until he’d decided that he must not have gotten a good look at the place in the dark and pouring rain. There were many more jars inside than out. Most of these were small ones, full of all sorts of tinctures and powders, the girl had said. Max didn’t know what a tincture was, but knew that things in such tiny jars are usually women’s stuff, so he didn’t concern himself with them. There were also uncounted weapons in the place, stacked and leaned and placed everywhere, without rhyme or reason. He saw many more daggers, hanging from thongs, or sitting on tables, or stuffed into bookshelves to separate one book from another, and to mark a place that she intended to return to again. There were swords too, most of them so much finer than Frost Taker. And there were spears, and slings, and arrows, and other things that he didn’t recognize, but which she assured him were absolutely instruments of mortal intent. She also had more books and scrolls than he’d ever seen, outside of the one time he’d been allowed inside the great stone library in Old Heidelberg City, when the Family Piper had played there one year. There were a hundred or more dolls, and the girl had said they were powerful conjuring devices, not meant for playthings. But Max assumed she was just embarrassed to still have them, after she was no longer quite young enough to keep such things.
A fat yellow tomcat, covered in old scars, and missing one eye and most of its tail, stood up from the chest of drawers it had been sleeping on. It leapt ponderously down to the floor, to chase a mouse. When it suddenly moved, Max’s eyes naturally followed it, and so alighted on the top of the chest and the shelves it supported. On the second shelf up, he saw a long wooden flute, which he hadn’t noticed before, embedded as it was among all of the other clutter.
“I can play that,” he said.
“The flute?” she said, following the direction of his gaze. A sly smile began to grow upon her lips. It was the sort of smile from which devils and hauntings and deadly secrets are born.
“Yes, that’s what I do.” And then after a sullen pause, “Well, that’s what I used to do, back when I was young, before the invaders came.”
“Then that’s what you shall do again,” she said, taking him by the hand and leading him over to the old chest and its shelves. She picked up the flute and handed it to him. It was a few inches longer than Frost and made out of a deep red wood, polished to a remarkable finish. “There’s powerful magic locked away in this thing,” she said. “I’ve been meaning to learn to play a pipe someday, so that I could explore the uses this might be put to.”
“I’ll find its power,” Max said, never taking his eyes off it. “What’s its name?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It came to me long ago, delivered by the trembling hand of a dying prince, who claimed to be the last of a dying race.”
“Fire,” Max said. “Its name is Fire.”
And so it was.
In which Peter returns
at long last to a town
he’d never been to.
IT WAS LESS THAN TWO HUNDRED MILES FROM Frankfurt to Hamelin, as the crow flies. Unfortunately the proverbial crow didn’t design Germany’s autobahn system, which refused to provide Peter with any clear way to drive due north, the direction in which Hamelin was located. The best he could puzzle out, examining his map, was to circle way out and around the Hamelin area, by first going east