While Lexy waited for the kettle to boil she slipped back into Miss Wright’s rooms and, after knocking softly on the door, asked to borrow a pager. She should probably let at least one of her friends know that she was all right—not that anyone seemed to have noticed that she’d been out of action. But she needed to warn them about what Jupiter Peacock was planning. Raven answered immediately, and seemed very surprised that Lexy was safe and well and needed someone to translate from Yeti. But there was no response from Maximilian at all.

22

THE WINTER FAIR MARKET was busy today as people did last-minute shopping for their Midwinter’s Eve celebrations. Traditionally, Midwinter was celebrated at midnight with a cake made into the shape of a log and decorated with holly leaves and juniper berries. Midwinter evening meals usually consisted of a hearty chestnut soup with freshly made bread that was eaten at around five o’clock so that people could attend whatever public celebration of Midwinter they’d chosen before they went home for their cake.

Tonight in the Old Town the choice was between Jupiter Peacock’s Midwinter Lecture, a fireworks display put on by the local council or a strange shadow-theater spectacle put on by the Puppet Man. Most people had opted for Jupiter Peacock’s lecture. The fireworks would have been more popular had it not been for the weather. There’d already been a tornado just off the coast, and lots of reports were coming in of electrical snowstorms—a phenomenon last seen during the great climate meltdown of the early twenty-first century.

In the Winter Fair Market, snow was now falling thickly and people were cheerfully huddling around the little stoves. The hot chestnut man was doing a roaring trade with people who had forgotten to roast chestnuts for their soup, or who just fancied eating an enormous amount of chestnuts in one day.

Maximilian searched for Madame Valentin’s stall. But it wasn’t there. It looked as if she’d packed up early or not even come out today. Maximilian remembered that her pet shop was next door to Leonard Levar’s Antiquarian Bookshop. He’d once had a distressing experience with some spiders that Levar had “borrowed” from her shop. He headed there in the snow.

When he arrived he could immediately tell that something was wrong. A man in green corduroy pants was pacing anxiously in the snow outside the door to the pet shop, smoking a pipe and mumbling.

“You cannot come hin,” he said to Maximilian. “We’re closed.”

“But—”

“And all our snakes ’av hescaped also, so you might want to watch where you are treading.”

Snakes? Maximilian used to be afraid of things like that. Not so much anymore. Was this why the man was pacing and mumbling and smoking in the way he was? No. There was something more.