Greetings, Brave and Resourceful Boy! Welcome to the North Forest Kinnock, which was once known as the Gateway of Out-World. Here I have left you a troublesome Tyger. He is VERY hungry! But as you may have guessed, the Key to SHELTER hangs about his Neck. As you may have also guessed, this Key opens the Cage. Use it if you dare! With all regards to your Mother (whose New Husband will visit her SOON), I remain your Faithful Servant!
RF/MB
The man-if he was a man-who left Tim that note was surprised by very little, but he might have been surprised by the smile on the boy’s face as he rose to his feet with the key in his hand and booted away the tin bucket. It rose and flew off on the rising wind, which had now almost reached gale force. Its purpose had been served, and all the magic was out of it.
Tim looked at the tyger. The tyger looked at Tim. It seemed completely unaware of the rising storm. Its tail swished slowly back and forth.
“He thinks I’d rather be blown away or die of the cold than face your claws and teeth. Perhaps he didn’t see this.” Tim drew the four-shot from his belt. “It did for the fish-thing in the swamp, and I’m sure it would do for you, Sai Tyger.”
Tim was once more amazed by how right the gun felt. Its function was so simple, so clear. All it wanted to do was shoot. And when Tim held it, shooting was all he wanted to do.
But.
“Oh, he saw it,” Tim said, and smiled more widely. He could hardly feel the corners of his mouth drawing up, because the skin on his face had begun to grow numb from the cold. “Yar, he saw it very well. Did he think I would get so far as this? Perhaps not. Did he think that if I did, I’d shoot you to live? Why not? He would. But why send a boy? Why, when he’s probably hung a thousand men and cut a hundred throats and turned who knows how many poor widows like my mama out on the land? Can you answer that, Sai Tyger?”
The tyger only stared, head lowered and tail swishing slowly from side to side.
Tim put the four-shot back into his belt with one hand; with the other he slid the ornate silver key into the lock on the cage’s curved door. “Sai Tyger, I offer a bargain. Let me use the key around your neck to open yon shelter and we’ll both live. But if you tear me to shreds, we’ll both die. Does thee kennit? Give me a sign if thee does.”
The tyger gave no sign. It only stared at him.
Tim really hadn’t expected one, and perhaps he didn’t need one. There would be water if God willed it.
“I love you, Mama,” he said, and turned the key. There was a thud as the ancient tumblers turned. Tim grasped the door and pulled it open on hinges that uttered a thin screaming sound. Then he stood back with his hands at his sides.
For a moment the tyger stood where it was, as if suspicious. Then it padded out of the cage. He and Tim regarded each other beneath the deepening purple sky while the wind howled and the marching explosions neared. They regarded each other like gunslingers. The tyger began to walk forward. Tim took one step back, but understood if he took another his nerve would break and he would take to his heels. So he stood where he was.
“Come, thee. Here is Tim, son of Big Jack Ross.”
Instead of tearing out Tim’s throat, the tyger sat down and raised its head to expose its collar and the keys that hung from it.
Tim did not hesitate. Later he might be able to afford the luxury of amazement, but not now. The wind was growing stronger by the second, and if he didn’t act fast, he’d be lifted and blown into the trees, where he would probably be impaled. The tyger was heavier, but it would follow soon enough.
The key that looked like a card and the key that looked like an were welded to the silver collar, but the collar’s clasp was easy enough. Tim squeezed its sides at the indentations and the collar dropped off. He had a moment to register the fact that the tyger was still wearing a collar-this one made of pink hide where the fur had been rubbed away-and then he was hurrying to the Dogan’s metal door.
He lifted the keycard and inserted it. Nothing happened. He turned it around and tried it the other way. Still nothing. The wind gusted, a cold dead hand that slammed him into the door and started his nose bleeding. He pushed back from it, turned the card upside down, and tried again. Still nothing. Tim suddenly remembered something Daria had said-had it only been three days ago? North Forest Kinnock Dogan is off-line. Tim guessed he now knew what that meant. The flasher on the tower of metal girders might still be working, but down here the sparkpower that had run the place was out. He had dared the tyger, and the tyger had responded by not eating him, but the Dogan was locked. They were going to die out here just the same.
It was the end of the joke, and somewhere the man in black was laughing.
He turned and saw the tyger pushing its nose against the metal box with the engraving on top. The beast looked up, then nuzzled the box again.
“All right,” Tim said. “Why not?”
He knelt close enough to the tyger’s lowered head to feel its warm breath puffing against his cold cheek. He tried the
— key. It fit the lock perfectly. For a moment he had a clear memory of using the key the Covenant Man had given him to open Kells’s trunk. Then he turned this one, heard the click, and lifted the lid. Hoping for salvation.
Instead of that, he saw three items that seemed of no earthly use to him: a large white feather, a small brown bottle, and a plain cotton napkin of the sort that were laid out on the long tables behind the Tree meeting hall before each year’s Reaptide dinner.
The wind had passed gale force; a ghostly screaming had begun as it blew through the crisscrossing girders of the metal tower. The feather whirled out of the box, but before it could fly away, the tyger stretched out its neck and snatched it in its teeth. It turned to the boy, holding it out. Tim took it and stuck it in his belt beside his father’s hand-ax, not really thinking about it. He began to creep away from the Dogan on his hands and knees. Flying into the trees and being struck through by a branch would not be a pleasant way to die, but it might be better-quicker-than having the life crushed out of him against the Dogan while that deadly wind crept through his skin and into his vitals, freezing them.
The tyger growled; that sound of slowly ripping silk. Tim started to turn his head and was slammed into the Dogan. He fought to catch another breath, but the wind kept trying to rip it out of his mouth and nose.
Now it was the napkin the tyger was holding out, and as Tim finally whooped air into his lungs (it numbed his throat as it went down), he saw a surprising thing. Sai Tyger had picked the napkin up by the corner, and it had unfolded to four times its former size.
That’s impossible.
Except he was seeing it. Unless his eyes-now gushing water that froze on his cheeks-were deceiving him, the napkin in the tyger’s jaws had grown to the size of a towel. Tim reached out for it. The tyger held on until it saw the thing firmly clutched in Tim’s numb fist, then let go. The gale was howling around them, now hard enough to make even a six-hundred-pound tyger brace against it, but the napkin that was now a towel hung limply from Tim’s hand, as if in a dead calm.
Tim stared at the tyger. It stared back, seemingly at complete ease with itself and the howling world around it. The boy found himself thinking of the tin bucket, which had done as well for seeing as the Covenant Man’s silver basin. In the proper hand, he had said, any object can be magic.
Mayhap even a humble swatch of cotton.
It was still doubled-at least doubled. Tim unfolded it again, and the towel became a tablecloth. He held it up in front of him, and although the rising gale continued to storm past on both sides, the air between his face and the hanging cloth was dead calm.