Museum of Thieves by Lian Tanner

smiling.
    ‘Come along and I’ll show you a place to sleep,’ he said. ‘Come on now, stay close!’
    Goldie was too tired and heartsick to wonder why these people were willing to take the risk of hiding her. She followed the old man through the museum in a daze.
    There was no sign of the glorious history that Sinew had promised the Blessed Guardians. Instead, the rooms seemed to be full of nothing but rubbish. There were torn paintings and cracked chairs. There were clocks with their pendulums missing and their hands stuck in some far distant past. There were broken bottles and rocks and empty jars.
    It was the most uninteresting place that Goldie had ever seen, which was good. She didn’t want to be interested. She wanted to worry about Ma and Pa, and blame herself for what had happened to them. She wanted to feel unhappy and worthless.
    And yet . . .
    The old man stopped outside a water closet and waited while she had a pee and splashed cold water on her face. It was as she was coming out again that the strange thing happened. Suddenly the whole building seemed to . . . shift. As if a huge sleeping beast had woken up, turned around and gone back to sleep again.
    Goldie stopped in her tracks. There was a wooden cabinet full of glass jars in front of her. A moment ago the jars had been empty. But now each one held the fat, scaly coils of a dead snake. She blinked at them in astonishment.
    Behind the glass, one of the snakes raised a narrow eyelid and blinked back.
    ‘Shivers!’ Goldie squeaked with fright.
    Herro Dan patted her arm reassuringly. Then he laid his hand on the nearest wall and began to sing. His voice rumbled up and down in odd sliding notes that made the hair on the back of Goldie’s neck stand up.
    ‘ Ho oh oh-oh ,’ sang the old man. ‘ Mm mm oh oh oh-oh oh .’
    Curious, Goldie laid her own hand on the wall . . .
    The moment she did so, she heard –no, she felt –music. Deep, wild music. It seemed to rage up from the centre of the earth and pour into her like boiling water. She snatched her hand away, feeling as if she had been scalded.
    In their jars, the snakes floated in a sea of yellow liquid. Their eyes were closed and their scales were peeling. They had obviously been dead for a long, long time.
    I must’ve imagined it, thought Goldie. But it looked so real . . .
    The old man stopped singing and took his hand off the wall. His cheerful face was serious. ‘Trouble’s taken a step closer,’ he murmured. ‘Can you feel it, lass?’
    Without waiting for an answer, he led the way through another couple of rooms to a closed door with ‘staff only’ written on it in faded letters. He took a key from his pocket, unlocked the door and ushered Goldie through it.
    Behind the door there was a mattress and a pile of quilts. ‘You’ll be safe here in the back rooms,’ said the old man. ‘This door’s always locked. Guardians won’t catch you here.’
    Goldie wasn’t at all sure that a locked door would be enough to keep Guardian Hope out. But she was too tired to argue. With a sigh she sank down onto the mattress. Then she crawled under the thinnest quilt and fell instantly asleep.

.

    uardian Hope did not know why the Fugleman wanted them to search this ugly little building. ‘Tell them you’re looking for the missing girl,’ he had said when he called them to his office earlier that morning. ‘But keep your eyes open for anything suspicious. Anything out of place, or strange.’
    No offence to His Honour, but the only out-of-place thing that Hope was interested in was the runaway girl, and she was probably holed up somewhere in the Old Quarter of the city, near where she lived. Which meant that one of Hope’s colleagues would have the pleasure of catching her when it should have been Hope herself.
    But when Sinew confessed that the museum didn’t have a Resident Guardian, a worm of curiosity uncoiled inside Hope. She didn’t let her interest show on her face. She was too