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paperbacks by Chung-Mai Spofforth and Rifka Boogie sat side by side with the wooden caskets containing precious old scrolls and grimoires. The caskets had the names of the books they held written on the backs in small gold letters, but many were too worn or faded to read, and Lost Boys probably weren't very good readers anyway. How would a poor burglar know where to start?
    Miss Freya used a set of steps to reach one of the upper shelves. She was really much too plump to go clambering about on spindly ladders, and Wren felt guilty and afraid that
    she might fall, but Miss Freya knew exactly what she was looking for, and she was soon down again, flushed from her exertions and holding a casket with the arms of the House of Rasmussen inlaid in narwhal ivory.
    "Have a look," she said, unlocking it with a key that she took from a hook on a nearby wall.
    Inside, on a lining of silicone silk, lay the thing that Gargle had described. It was a book about eight inches high by six across, made from twenty sheets of tin bound with a rusty twirl of wire. The sheets were thick and dull and patched with rust, folded over at the edges to stop readers from cutting their fingers on the jagged metal. On the topmost sheet someone had scratched a circle with a crudely drawn eagle inside it; there was lettering around the edge of the circle and more below, but all too worn for Wren to make out any words. The other sheets had aged better, and the long rows of letters, numbers, and symbols that had been laboriously scratched into their surfaces were still faintly legible. What they meant Wren could not say. The faded paper label on the back cover, stamped with the arms of Anchorage and the words Ex Libris Rasmussen, was the only thing that made any sense at all.
    "It's not very impressive, is it?" asked Miss Freya. "It's supposed to be very old, though. There's a legend about it, which the historian Wormwold quotes in his Historia Anchoragia. Long ago, in the terrible aftermath of the Sixty Minute War, the people of Anchorage were refugees, sailing a fleet of leaky boats across the northern seas in search of an island where they could rebuild their city. Along the way they encountered a wrecked submarine. The plagues and
    radiation storms had killed off all her crew except for one man, who was dying. He gave a document to my ancestor Dolly Rasmussen and told her to preserve it at all costs. So she kept it, and it was handed down from mother to daughter through the House of Rasmussen, until the paper crumbled. Then a copy was made, but because paper was scarce in those years, it was written on old food tins hammered flat. Of course, the people who did the copying probably had no more idea what it all meant than you or I. The mere fact that it came from the lost world before the war was enough to make it sacred."
    Wren turned the metal pages, and the wire that bound them scratched and squeaked. She tried to imagine the long-ago scribe who had so painstakingly engraved these symbols, working by the light of a seal-fat lamp in the dark of that centuries-long winter, copying out each wavering column in a desperate attempt to salvage something from the world the war had destroyed. "What was it for?" she wondered. "Why did the submarine man think it was so important?"
    "Nobody knows, Wren. Maybe he died before he could say, or maybe it's just been forgotten. The Tin Book is just another of the many mysteries the Ancients left us. All we know is that the name of an old god crops up several times among all those numbers: Odin. So maybe it was a religious text. Oh, and the picture on the front is the presidential seal of the American Empire."
    Wren looked critically at the eagle. "It looks more like some sort of bird to me."
    Miss Freya laughed. She looked beautiful, standing there
    in the wash of sunlight from the library windows, as big and golden as the Earth Goddess herself, and Wren loved her, and felt ashamed for planning to rob her. She asked a few more