On top of the Till sprawled a long, coppery crocodile.
As they drew closer, September saw that his scales were not scales at all but pennies, some green with age, some clean and new. His tail wrapped around himself and cascaded over the Till—not a crocodile’s tail but a fan of deep emerald-colored feathers like a beautiful rooster. Deep, emerald-colored bills, folded so expertly they flowed and ruffled like feathers, showing their denominations when a breeze blew by. The crocodile watched the commotion below with glinting silver eyes: clusters of dimes, pale fires behind them, golden glass spectacles before them.
“Well, on you go,” said the Blue Wind testily, pushing September a little closer to the register. “You saw the sign. I’ve brought you to the Way Station safe and sound. You should thank me and buy me supper and tell me how fetching I look in these shoes. Just look at that croc! Scary as a stormfront, isn’t he? You should say: What wonder! What majesty! That nasty old Green Wind just dumped me in the ocean, but you, you have outdone him flat-out!”
“What wonder. What majesty,” September said with a little sneer. She had never tried on a sneer before. It felt rather nice.
“Oh, aren’t you just the rottenest wet blanket who ever spoiled a sport,” snapped the Blue Wind. “You ought to try to make it nice for me. This is my first experience with smuggling humans across the border. If you rain on my fun I shan’t bother again. Why, I didn’t even make you solve a puzzle or stand in line!” The Blue Wind crossed her arms and spat, a coil of icy snow splattering onto the map of the square.
But September was not listening. She had sighted the Model A, surrounded by long-coats who were pressing their ears to the hood and trying the horn and sucking bits of air from the tires. “They’ll spring a flat if they keep that up! I’ll see about the crocodile in a moment—”
“No, you will not!” hollered the crocodile in a barreling, jingling voice. His feathers flicked over the NO SALE tiles. “Present yourself or I’ll have you audited faster than you can blink those big, wide, my-goodness-gracious human eyes!”
The Blue Wind gave her a much firmer shove and September tripped forward toward the brass plates below the Till.
“Now then,” began the copper crocodile. When he spoke, bits of green feather popped out of his mouth like punctuation. “I am the Calcatrix, Agent of the Crown, Excellent Exchequer, and Chief Beast of Imp-erial Ways and Treasures, which is a very new department and thus very fashionable. I get into all the best dancing halls just by flashing my scales. I will be conducting your Inspection this evening. And you are?”
“September.” She clutched her jar of coins a little tighter.
“That’s not very many titles,” frowned the Calcatrix. “I’ll bet you don’t get invited to parties at all.”
September bit the inside of her lip. “That’s true,” she admitted, rather more bashfully than she meant to. “I was a Knight for a while. And then a Bishop.
”
The Calcatrix leaned forward eagerly, his pennies clinking against the Till. “Now, now! We must not dwell on what we were in our salad days when soup days steam now upon the table! I see deep vaults of tragedy in you, young lady! No parties, and no banquets or saturnalias, either, I’d wager! Whereas I have feted the fetid and fabulous alike at every ballroom with two flutes to rub together. Even before I rose to my current position, my family were in low supply and high demand. We are all of us Numismatists of great potency—Finding Magicians, Collectors of Coins and Currency, Sorcerers of the Imaginary. I keep my collection on my person, where it is safe and sound and specially displayed. A Bank is but a college of Fiscal Magic and one never likes to be the rabbit in a beginner’s first disappearing lesson. We ourselves, each of us, wore the Vestments of Investment and Brandished the Bursary! We practically invented the whole field of Fiduciary Glamours. I see you are an enthusiast, if obviously an amateur.” The Calcatrix nodded at September’s jar of coins. “Therefore I feel kindly toward you, though we hardly know each other. I am generous by nature and miserly by nurture. You are lucky that today I am feeling naturally.”
“My savings certainly aren’t imaginary,” said September, curling her arm protectively around her net worth.
“All money is imaginary,” answered the Calcatrix simply. “Money is magic everyone agrees to pretend is not magic. Observe! You treat it like magic, wield it like magic, fear it like magic! Why should a body with more small circles of copper or silver or gold than anyone else have an easy life full of treats every day and sleeping in and other people bowing down? The little circles can’t get up and fight a battle or make a supper so splendid you get full just by looking at it or build a house of a thousand gables. They can do those things because everyone agrees to give them power. If everyone agreed to stop giving power to pretty metals and started giving it to thumbnails or mushroom caps or roof shingles or first kisses or tears or hours or puffin feathers, those little circles would just lay there tarnishing in the rain and not making anyone bow their noses down to the ground or stick them up in the air. Right now, for example, as much as I admire your collection, your coins aren’t coins. They’re junk.”
September opened her mouth to object—the hours she had spent earning them! They were most certainly not junk! She had exactly seventeen dollars and thirty-seven cents in her jar and every one of them was as real as a roan with a bellyache! But the Calcatrix held up one coppery claw and continued patiently.
“Ah, my pecuniary petunia, but they are not real, because no one here would take them. To the denizens of the Blue Market, they have no power. What would they do with them?” He shook his head from side to side to make it clink and sing. “Why, without magic, they’re nothing more than crocodile scales. None of them came here looking to trade their wares for copper with a human head on it. But I can wave my claws over them and make them coins, just by saying a few words, because I am the Exchequer, which is another way of saying Wizard. I can take your junk and make it wealth simply by saying: One of these is worth this or that much. The coins will still be coins, they will not have changed. But suddenly they will have power. And my dear, when you can change something just by saying a word, that is magic. Or I can take them and give you a certain number of Crabs in return, which is the very new and very fashionable currency of Fairyland—but then we are fully in sorcery’s grip, for who are you to say I reckoned it right? When a thing becomes so simply because a person in shiny clothes said it with conviction, that is also magic. If you argue, then it is a wizards’ duel! If a very silly one, because I am the Calcatrix and you are not.”
September thought very carefully. “Maybe that’s so for Fairy money,” she admitted. “But human money is just money. It’s quite serious stuff. And even if it weren’t, it doesn’t matter whether or not money is imaginary, if everyone agrees that it’s got power. If we can’t pay the bank every month we’ll lose our farm, and I daresay they wouldn’t like it if my mother told them to square up for a duel.”
The Calcatrix grinned, showing all his silver teeth. “Just because it’s imaginary doesn’t mean it isn’t real.” He flared his green tailfeathers and settled one great penny-clad paw onto the Till’s hand crank. “Does your human money not make objects appear at your whim? Does it not change a person from one thing to another, perhaps from a frightened child in rags to a haughty industrialist in a suit? Does it not heal you when you are sick? The doctor must be paid, after all. Can it not strike down your enemies at your command? Keep some folk on one side of town and others high on the hill as sure as briars round a castle? Create a coal-fire in the hearth where there was none, whisk you away to a tropical clime when you are so cold you cannot bear to watch another snowflake fall? Oh, do tell me what wonders human money would have to muster to earn the awe with which you treat the littlest Fairyland bauble!” The Calcatrix laughed, the coins of his throat tinkling. “And hie ye not to the Stock Exchange, child! There sneaks so much sorcery, crackling along the ticker tape, that if enough men all together believe a Company has heaps of money, why, suddenly, it will swim in a sea of Conjured Cash! But should those same men turn their faith away, that Dinero Diabolick will vanish as fast as the first abracadabra ever uttered. All that gold, just—presto!—turned to sticks and seeds and pinecones. Now, call the Calcatrix a liar.”
September blinked. It looked like the truth, if you scrunched up your eyes. Hadn’t it happened just that way just before September was born? Hadn’t Aunt Margaret’s husband, that unhappy Uncle of whom they all so rarely spoke, gone from a great man with fur on his coat and squeak in his shoes to a pauper with only a dust farm and a lot of suddenly powerless paper in the space of a night?
The copper crocodile nodded curtly, seeing his case made. “But enough of all these free lessons in my rarefied speciality! How clever of you to get something for nothing—and here’s me hardly noticing. Well! Let us begin.” His feathered tail swept over the till as he bent down to get his stubby hands into the works. “We used to be dreadfully backwards about this, you know, weighing your soul against a feather and all that. But now we have a Methodology. Now we have Tools. It’s such a good lot of fun. Commence! Yes! First Inquiry!” The Calcatrix puffed with the effort of pushing the crank into position. “What is your profession?”
September’s shoulders fell. “I…I haven’t got one yet.”
The copper crocodile blinked his silver eyes. “Excuse me,” he said, “but that’s just ridiculous. How can you have a Way if you haven’t got a profession? And how can we put you down in our books if you haven’t got a Way? Surely you’re employed somehow.”
“I go to school,” September offered. “And I do odd jobs for those that need it.”
The Calcatrix scowled. “All jobs are odd, or they would be games or naps or picnics. Well, let’s ring this up item by item. What sort of thing do you like to do best?”
September did not have to think about that. “Traveling. To Fairyland—and back, but that’s not nearly as good.”
The Blue Wind scoffed. She and her puffin had dozed off, their heads leaning against each other, but the crank’s creaking woke them. “That’s not a thing you do, it’s a place you go to do things in.”
The Calcatrix ignored her. He continued indulgently. “And what sorts of things do you do when you get to Fairyland?”
September spoke very quickly in hopes that she could tell the truth without it counting against her. “Well, the first time I made friends with a Wyverary and a Marid and a Hundred-and-Twelve-Year-Old Lamp and got a magical wrench from a casket in the Worsted Wood and sailed all the way around Fairyland and defeated the Marquess.”