Today the dragon of the Clock was inert. A clapped-out heap of oxidizing technology. Could it be a disguise? Oswald had so often seemed a half-creature, sinister in its apparent sense of impulse, decided in its attitude toward wrong and right. The dragon’s head had rotated like the headlamp of some pedicycle rolicking down the colege lanes of Shiz. The jaws snapped in four different positions. None of them smiling. When did conscience smile?

“It looks deaded out,” concluded Rain, cheerfuly enough.

“Rain, a little less noise,” suggested the Lion. No sense in salting the dwarf’s wounds.

“Why en’t we hunting in the Grimmerie for words to wake ’m up?”

“Couldn’t hurt,” said Brrr. “I vote yes.”

“Suddenly we’re a democratic synod? That’s what having children does for you? Remind me to neuter myself with a grapefruit spoon.” But with what Ilianora had been through, that remark was thoughtless, and despite his distress the dwarf caught himself. “Oh, al right. But I’m not promising to play by any suggestion a stupid book makes, magic or not.” He got the Grimmerie out of a drawer that opened with a pop, as if it had been eager to deliver the book to Rain. “Reading never did much for me, in my line of work,” he grumphed.

Ilianora spread her shawl on the needled ground, and Mr. Boss dumped the book upon it. “I don’t like to touch the Grimmerie,” said the woman, but Rain knelt down before the tome. She put her hands on the cover as if she’d like to hug the thing, and opened the great lid of it.

“It feels hummy. Like moss with sugarbees in it,” she said.

“And you look like clot without the cream.” The dwarf snorted. “Find what you need to find and close the damn thing up again. It makes me nervous. This book isn’t for the likes of us to examine. We’re just the keepers.”

“Maybe the world is changing,” said the Lion, “and it’s up to us now.”

The dwarf stifled himself as Rain turned the versos. Today each page seemed made of a different sort of paper. Different colors and weights, sieved and pressed with a variety of trash: rag content and straw, string and fuse. To Brrr’s eye the hand-lettered words seemed overly hooked and pronged, a foreign language if not, indeed, a foreign alphabet. Though his spectacles needed updating. Sometimes the marginalia designs appeared engaged and in motion, flat little theater pieces performing for themselves. On other pages a single portrait without caption stared out, its eyes moving as the page lifted, wavered, settled, was covered by the next. “How do we even know what we’re looking for?” asked the Lion.

“When we find it,” said Rain. Simple enough.

Brrr saw it before she did. They had come upon a page that seemed sheathed in ice or glass, across which embossed patterns of frost and snowflake were wheeling, interleaving the way, presumably, the cogs of the Clock did when the Clock was in fettle. The paper glinted with sparkles as of light on snow. Rain said, “Is this caling winter upon water?”