Twelve-year-old Carmen has a secret: she can talk to her cat Grim. But the powerful Brotherhood has banned pets, and the penalty is death.
Ward is the most wanted boy in the world. The only thing standing between him and the hangman's noose is maste...
One such toy was sitting on her pere's workbench now. What it was exactly, Carmen couldn't say. Her pere sat in an overstuffed armchair nearby, lit his baccus, and watched his daughter examine the toy. Around him unfinished statuary, men and women and children, stood like ghosts. They seemed to watch her too. There was something sad about them.
It was clearly an animal of some sort. It was carved from a single chunk of wood the size of a child's head. Carmen ran a finger down its spine; it was raised in an arch, the skin hanging on it like torpin over a tent-frame. Her pere had done something to the wood to make the skin look and feel leathery. The creature had four thick legs and no feet, great flapping ears on each side of the head, and tiny eyes that seemed somehow wise. Strangest of all was the curling proboscis, like a hose, that protruded from the face, from where it rose up in the air like a hook – if it was a nose it was the most peculiar one Carmen had ever seen. There was a hollow at each corner of the animal's sagging mouth. Two curved, yellowish sticks lay on the workbench beside the toy; she guessed that these were designed to slot into the hollows, so picked one up and pushed its stubby end into the hole beside the creature's mouth. It seemed a horn of some sort, though why the creature would need horns under its nose she couldn't guess.
She turned to her pere, a questioning look on her face. He nodded.
"It's beautiful," she said, for despite its alien appearance it was a nice-looking creature, she thought – a friendly one. My pere made this, she thought, and felt a warm rush of pride. "What is it?" she said.
"To be honest, I don't know."
"Oh. Did you make it up?"
"No. Turn it over. There's a button."
She found the button between the creature's forelegs; when she pressed it the ears began to flap and the nose curled upwards and extended out and retracted again, as if it was reaching to take something from a high shelf. The effect was extremely lifelike.
"You're amazing!"
"Why thank you darling," Joe Carmichael said, looking pleased. "But we'd better finish it off and put it away before your mere sees it." He gave Carmen a conspiratorial wink and rose from the armchair.
He showed her how to dab glue on the ends of each horn, and which horn was the left and which the right. She pushed them into place.
"What are they made from?" she said.
"Something your grandmere had lying around. It looks like bone. She – insisted that I use it." His brow furrowed. "But it seems to suit it, don't you think?" The sudden brightness in his voice sounded forced. "She calls it avory. She says her pere left it for her. It's very old."
"What's wrong with her?" Carmen said. She was often blunt, but the truth was that she couldn't stand her pere's feigned brightness.
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