"Theo, if you took the roof off you could just about wedge your head into the parlor, but you wouldn't have space left to wink. As for my room, well, I've got the biggest in our part of the place, and you couldn't probably spread your fingers on the floor without touching the walls."
"Our?"
"Me roommates. We're all in and out, but there's near a dozen of us altogether. That's just in our bit — the whole comb's got thousands." She looked out at the street. "We're almost there."
The thought of thousands of winged fairies in one place was faintly disturbing — like termite-hatching season. "Okay, I see why that wouldn't work. So what am I going to do? I sure don't have any money myself. Can I sleep in the park, or will the constables or whatever they're called come roust me out?"
"More likely you'd get eaten by werewolves." She didn't look like she was kidding. "Truly, you don't want to be in the park at night if you can help it. This is our stop."
As the bus shuddered to a halt and a few of the other passengers, gnomes and spriggans and various bogles squeezed their astonishingly disparate and in some cases quite awkward shapes out of the seats and into the aisle, a furred hand suddenly appeared beside Theo's head holding something small and vaguely white. He turned to see the goblin who had shared the bus stop with them leaning forward.
"Please forgive my too-sharp ears." The goblin smiled, showing sharp little teeth, and cleared his throat. "I had no intentions to destroy your privacy, but I could not help hearing something of your dilemma. If you should find yourself without a roof in this the very large and not excessively friendly city, come to this place. My friends and I share it. Not much, it is not much, but it is safe." He nodded emphatically. "Safe."
"Time to go," Applecore said, hovering noisily by Theo's ear.
"Thank you." Theo took the paper and stared at it for a moment, then closed his fingers around it. "That's very kind."
"We all wait on the hilltop." The goblin nodded his head again, just once this time — it almost looked like a benediction. "And we all wait for the wind to change."
Still trying to make sense of the last two remarks, Theo followed Applecore down the stairs and onto the sidewalk. "What was that about?"
"Who knows? Some kind of cult — goblins go for all that shower."
Theo stared at the slip of paper. The goblin had written on it in a surprisingly neat hand, "Beneath the old Fayfort Bridge." He showed it to Applecore.
"Not your high-rent cult, then," was all she said.
He was about to crumple it and throw it away when he remembered where and what he was: in a strange city in an unfamiliar land, penniless and homeless. Can't afford to throw anything away, he thought. I might need to leave a note for someone and not have any paper. A suicide note, maybe… He folded it instead and put it into the inner pocket of his shirt.
"Here we are," she said as they turned another corner. "Orchard Flower Comb."
His first impression was not what he had earlier thought it might be, a termite nest, but of a vertical meadow full of fireflies: the air in the small side street was absolutely ablaze with flickering, swooping lights — gray-green, pink, yellow, and pale blue, like a blizzard of radioactive snow. Some of the glowing shapes stood on the banks of tiny balconies that stretched the length of the street, but most of the gleaming spots were actually flying in or out of the hundreds of doors.
"What are all those lights?"
"Sprites," Applecore said. "A few pixies and hinky-punks and hob-lanterns, too, but all the flying ones are sprites. Why, what did you think?"
"But… you don't glow in the dark."
"Can't be bothered. Come along, you." She tugged at his ear, then flew on ahead of him.
Theo took a breath and followed. Bright shapes shot past him with every step, and although many of them were indeed tiny little people as human-looking as Applecore, the phenomenon felt more like walking through tracer-fire: for every self-illuminated winged figure, at least a half dozen that were unlit whizzed past him in the evening darkness, making themselves known only by the wind of their passing, an occasional wing brush through his hair, or in a few cases, a small voice shouting something that he could not make out. In fact, now that the rumble of traffic from the larger streets was behind him, he could hear high-pitched chatter all around — laughing, shouting, gossiping from balcony to balcony as the residents hung clothes or just enjoyed the evening. The firefly-colony metaphor was beginning to fail; with its rush of wings and the background of barely audible voices, the alley that contained Orchard Flower Comb was beginning to seem more like a cavern inhabited by talking bats.
The housing complex extended all the way along a wall that Theo only realized after some moments was the back of another, full-size building. The comb started at about the level of his knees and extended several yards up above his head, something between a high-rise tenement and a dovecote, row after row of box-shaped buildings joined side to side so that it looked almost like someone had mounted an immense set of wooden post office boxes on the wall and cut little birdhouse doors in each one. Most of the dwellings had balconies added onto them, although some of these seemed little more than fruit baskets fastened just below the doorway.
Theo's first impression of something as swarming and impersonal as an insect nest did not last long: the residents had clearly worked hard to put their individual stamp on their homes. Many of the fruit-basket terraces had potted flowers, hanging tinsel or streamers of cloth and other decorations, and most of the tiny houses had windows cut into the front walls as well, with curtains or blinds which colored the light that shone inside so that the pastel flickerings generated by many of the residents were matched by the more static colors of the windows. Some of the dwellings had been modified even farther, perhaps by a single family which had bought anywhere from two to a half dozen of the boxy apartments and then connected them in a number of clever ways, with exterior stairways and sliding poles. A few, to the secret delight of Theo's inner child, were scaffolded by a complex arrangements of chutes and ladders.
Not all the ladders led from one dwelling to another. Long accordions of steps hung down to the ground from most of the buildings, and looked as though they might be meant to be pulled up in an emergency.
"What are those long ladders for?" Theo asked.
"Pixies don't fly," Applecore said. "Now, you, wait here. I'll be back in just a wee while." She rose a yard or so above his head and then flew into a lighted door he could just barely see. A few small shapes poked their heads over adjacent balconies to look at him but didn't appear overwhelmingly interested.
The sprite didn't hurry back out. As he loitered in front of Orchard Flower Comb, Theo found himself wondering for the first time what it was like to be Applecore — how he would feel if he had grown up in a world of giants who were, proportionately, as tall as ancient redwoods. He couldn't quite wrap his head around it.
Somebody from my world who knows something, a college professor or somebody, ought to come here and study this place. No, researchers, a whole bunch of them. Because you could live here for years, I'll bet, and only just start to get a handle on how different it is…
"Ooh, he is a big one," someone said above him. For a moment, the pseudo-Hibernian dialect made him think it was Applecore poking fun at him, but the voice wasn't quite right.
"Well, of course he is," said someone else. "She told us he was a big one."
"I meant he's a big one for a big one," protested the first. "He's got shoulders!"