In silence, Mo turned the mask this way and that in his hands. For a strange moment he felt an urge to put it on, as if he had done so many times before. Oh yes, Fenoglio’s words were powerful, but words they were, nothing but words – even if they had been written for him. Any actor, surely, could choose the part he played?

“No,” he said, handing the mask back to the Prince. “Snapper is right; the Bluejay is a fantasy, an old man’s invention. Fighting, I assure you, is not my trade.”

The Prince looked at him thoughtfully, but he did not take the mask. “Keep it all the same,” he said. “It’s too dangerous for anyone to wear it now. And as for your trade – none of us here was born a robber.”

Mo said nothing to that. He just looked at his fingers. It had taken him a long time to wash off all the blood on them after the fight in the forest.

He was still standing there holding the mask, alone in the dark gallery that smelled of the long-forgotten dead, when he heard Meggie’s voice behind him.

“Mo?” She looked at his face with concern. “Where have you been? Roxane is setting out soon, and Resa wants to know if we’re going with her. What do you say?”

Yes, what did he say? Where did he want to go? Back to my workshop, he thought. Back to Elinor’s house. Or did he?

What did Meggie want? He had only to look at her to know the answer. Of course. She wanted to stay because of the boy, but he was not the only reason. Resa wanted to stay, too, in spite of the dungeon where they had put her, in spite of all the pain and darkness. What was it about Fenoglio’s world that filled the heart with longing? Didn’t he feel it himself? Like sweet poison that worked on you only too quickly. .

“What do you say, Mo?” Meggie took his hand. How tall she had grown. And how pleadingly she looked at him!

“What do I say?” He listened as though, if he concentrated hard, he could hear the words whispering in the walls of the gallery or in the weave of the blanket under which the Black Prince slept. But all he heard was his own voice. “How would you like it if I said: Show me the fairies, Meggie? And the water-nymphs. And that illuminator in Ombra castle. Let’s find out how fine those brushes really are.”

Dangerous words. But Meggie hugged him harder than she had since she was a little girl.

Chapter 74 – Farid’s Hope

And now he was dead, his soul fled down to the Sunless Country and his body lying cold in the cold mud, somewhere in the city’s wake.

– Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines

When the men on guard raised the alarm for the second time, just before sunset, the Black Prince ordered everyone to climb deep down into the mine, where there was water in the narrow passages and you thought you could hear the earth breathing. But one man did not join them: Fenoglio. When the Prince gave the all clear, and Meggie climbed up again with the others, her feet wet and her heart still full of fear, Fenoglio came toward her and drew her aside.

Luckily, Mo happened to be talking to Resa and didn’t notice.

“Here you are. But I’m not guaranteeing anything,” Fenoglio whispered to her as he gave her back the notebook. “This is very likely another mistake in black and white just like the others, but I’m too tired to worry about it. Feed this damned story, feed it with new words, I’m not going to listen. I’m going to lie down and sleep. That was the last thing I will ever write in my life.”

Feed it.

Farid suggested that Meggie should read Fenoglio’s words in the place where he and Dustfinger had slept. Dustfinger’s backpack was still lying beside his blanket, and the two martens had curled up to the right and left of it. Farid crouched down between them and hugged the backpack to him as if Dustfinger’s heart were beating inside. He looked expectantly at Meggie, but she remained silent. She looked at the words and said nothing. Fenoglio’s writing swam before her eyes as if, for the first time, it did not want her to read it.

“Meggie?” Farid was still looking at her. There was such sadness in his eyes, such despair. For him, she thought. Just for him. And she kneeled down on the blanket where Dustfinger used to sleep.

Even as she read the first few words, she sensed that Fenoglio had done his work well yet again.

She felt it like breath on her face. The letters on the page were alive, the story was alive. It wanted to take those words and grow. That was what it wanted. Had Fenoglio felt the same when he wrote them?

” One day, when Death had taken much prey again, ” began Meggie, and it was almost as if she were reading a familiar book that she had only just laid aside, ” Fenoglio the great poet decided to write no more. He was tired of words and their seductive power. He had had enough of the way they cheated and scorned him and kept silent when they should have spoken. So he called on another, younger man, Orpheus by name – skilled in letters, even if he could not yet handle them with the mastery of Fenoglio himself– and decided to instruct him in his art, as every master does at some time. For a while Orpheus should play with words in his place, seduce and lie with them, create and destroy, banish and restore – while Fenoglio waited for his weariness to pass, for his pleasure in words to reawaken, and then he would send Orpheus back to the world from which he had summoned him, to keep his story alive with new words never used before. ”

Meggie’s voice died away. It echoed underground as if it had a shadow. And just as silence was spreading around them, they heard footsteps.

Footsteps on the damp stone.

Chapter 75 – Alone Again

“Hope” is the thing with feathers.

– Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson

Orpheus disappeared right in front of Elinor’s eyes. She was standing only a few steps from him, holding the bottle of wine he had demanded, when he simply vanished into thin air into less than thin air, into nothing – as if he had never been there at all, as if she had only dreamed him. The bottle slipped from her hand, fell on the wooden floorboards of the library, and broke among the books that Orpheus had left open there.

The dog began to howl so horribly that Darius came racing out of the kitchen. The wardrobe-man didn’t bar his way. He was simply staring at the place where Orpheus had been standing a moment ago. His voice trembling, he had been reading from a sheet of paper lying on one of Elinor’s glass display cases right in front of him and clutching Inkheart to his breast, as if he could force the book to accept him at last in that way. Elinor had stopped as if turned to stone when she realized what he was trying to do for the hundredth, even the thousandth time.

Perhaps they’ll come back out of the book to replace him, she had thought, or at least one of them: Meggie, Resa, Mortimer. Each of the three names tasted so bitter on her tongue, as bitter as all that is lost. But now Orpheus had gone, and none of the three had come back. Only the damned dog refused to stop howling.

“He’s done it,” whispered Elinor. “Darius, he’s done it! He’s over there .. they’re all over there. All except for us!”

For a moment she felt infinitely sorry for herself. Here she was, Elinor Loredan, among all her books, and they wouldn’t let her in, not one of them would let her in. Closed doors enticing her, filling her heart with longing, and then letting her go no farther than the doorway. Accursed, blasted, heartless things! Full of empty promises, full of false lures, always making you hungry, never satisfying you, never!