Liesl & Po Read Free Page A

anyone. Hurry right there, and give this to her. Do not let anyone else see it or touch it. You are carrying great magic with you! Huge magic. The biggest I have ever made. The biggest I have ever attempted.”
    Will had stifled a yawn and tried to look serious. Every time the alchemist made a new potion, he said it was his greatest yet, and Will had difficulty being impressed by the words nowadays.
    The alchemist, perhaps sensing this, had muttered, “Useless,” under his breath. Then, frowning, he had given Will a handwritten list of items to collect from Mr. Gray, after the delivery was complete.
    And now it was two o’clock, and Will had neither seen the Lady Premiere nor visited Mr. Gray at his work space.
    Will made a sudden decision. The Lady Premiere lived all the way on the other side of the city, near the alchemist’s shop, while the gray man was no more than a few blocks away from where he was standing. If he delivered the magic first, he would have to cross the whole city, then cross back, then cross back again, and he would not be home in time to sleep more than an hour. Really, he should not have come to see the girl in the window; it was absurd. But he could not feel even a little bit bad about it. In fact he felt better than he had in days.
    No. He would go to Mr. Gray first and then deliver the magic to the Lady on his way back to the shop, and the alchemist would never know the difference. Besides—Will shifted the box again—the potion was no doubt an everyday kind of magic dust, for curing warts or growing hair or keeping memories longer or something like that.
    Will dug into his pocket and pulled out the crumpled list the alchemist had scrawled hastily on a scrap of paper. Nothing too unusual: a dead man’s beard, some fingernail clippings, two chicken heads, the eye of a blind frog.
    Yes, Will decided, casting one last look at the girl in the window before setting off. Groceries first; and after that, the magic.
    Up in her room, Liesl drew a train with wings, floating through the sky.

Chapter Three

    AT THE END OF A TINY, WINDY STREET AND DOWN a steep flight of narrow wooden stairs and past a sign that said
    THE ATELIER OF GRAY.
BODY DISPOSAL, CORPSES,
ANIMAL AND HUMAN PARTS (SINCE 1885) ,
    Mr. Gray was feeling very annoyed.
    For the fourth time in two weeks, Mr. Gray was completely and entirely out of urns.
    The problem was how rapidly people were dying. If they would just stop dying, stop even for a week to give his urn maker and his casket maker time to catch up . . .
    He stroked his chin thoughtfully. Perhaps he could request that the mayor order that there be no deaths for a week? Or impose a death tax? He shook his head. No, no, impossible.
    He knew enough about death to know that it could not be bribed, bought, delayed, or put off. He had lived in the cold basement rooms beneath the funeral home of his great-great-great-grandfather for his whole life. As a child he had played with the loosened gold teeth of the dead men, spinning them across the floor like tops and watching them catch the light. He had been a gravestone maker and a gravedigger, an executioner for the state, a mercy killer, a mummifier.
    These days he mostly stuck to the simple stuff: burning and burying. When someone died, he either put the body in a nice wood coffin lined with sober black silk, or he put the body headfirst in the oven and, when it had burned away to ashes, placed these in a nice decorative urn, which could be kept neatly on display on a mantel or a shelf or a bedside table. Mr. Gray’s great-uncle, for example, was kept within Urn Style #27 (Grecian) just above the stove in the kitchen; his mother was in Urn Style #4 (Lavish) on the windowsill overlooking the street, and his father, in Urn Style #12 (Sober), was sitting next to her. Mr. Gray liked to have his family all around him.
    Of course, he still did a little bit of dealing on the side—odds and ends, bits and pieces, toes and fingernails,