Her polished black shoes left empty prints in the dust on the floor.

"Ah, this one is a favorite of mine," her father was saying over her head. Something about anchors or compasses or weathervanes, no doubt. The old wood squealed under her foot. She paused, and she lifted it -- carefully -- while the floor groaned.

"It's a silver bell from the mast of a seventh-century Liluthian warship," her father went on in a voice that fell damp on the crowded shelves and cluttered tables and half-hinged cupboards. She picked up a little box made of moving wooden gears and springs, and she wiped it on her dress, leaving a smear of dark rotted polish and dust.

"The Liluthians believed that when a silver bell rang during a storm, it protected the ship from being devoured by demons." There was nothing in the box but crumbles of folded paper and an old brass ring. She snapped the box shut and placed it back in its clean square on the shelf.

"Oh, here's a summoning crystal, from the Tilurecs. Second century. These are very rare intact," her father's voice said. After a bit of groping between a rigid stuffed tiger (teeth bared, glass eyes bright) and a chair made of old candlesticks, she found the pull rope for the curtains. Light and dust exploded into the room.

Her father coughed and smacked at the dust with one hand. "A Tilurec shaman would stare into this until he became possessed by an animal spirit." He used his dramatic voice, hoping to inspire a flicker of interest in his perpetually apathetic little girl. He saw her dark head moving occasionally among stacks of books and collections of canopic jars. "I wonder how your uncle Oscar ever got it."

"Black Rummy and cricket fights," she replied in a voice that was flat as a stale biscuit. She tapped on a glass box, which protected a single stone figurine from the inevitable dangers of her late uncle Oscar's curiosity room. "What's this?"

Finally, a spark! Father shuffled closer, grinning, careful of the porcelain masks that lined the wall behind him. "Ah, that is an earth god."

"Of the Old Folk religion, right?"

"Precisely. The Old Folk believed that the gods sleep in these figures, and that they sometimes would wake up and walk among us, if we prayed hard enough. See how he's stepping off his pedestal?"

Agatha stared at the little stone man with bright dark eyes; she felt that there was a story in that polished statue -- of all the reverent hands that had stroked it, all the offerings that had burned at its feet, all the tears and joy and anger that had been given for its judgment. She wanted to touch it, like the Old Folk had so long ago. She pressed her palms on either side of the glass barrier and began to lift --

A box crashed and clattered off a high shelf across the room, and bones and carved ivory skittered and rolled and scattered through the dust on the floor.

Agatha dropped the glass cover back into place, her brows furrowed in anger. "Pinafore!" she snapped at a flash of blue leather wing before it disappeared into an open cupboard.

"I told you not to bring him," her father sighed behind her, while she marched up to the cupboard and threw open the doors with a squeak of old hinges. Pinafore flinched and cowered in a stack of parchment scrolls, and he hid his face in his tail so as not to be seen.

Agatha plucked him out of hiding with two fingers and shook him until his claws detached from the scrolls. "You stay out of trouble," she scolded. Pinafore creaked in dismay.

Out in the foyer, someone with a strong and husky voice was calling and knocking for Mister Thrimble. Father straightened his lapels. "The movers are here with our furniture, though I have no clue where to put it. Agatha, you'll have to help me decide this room. We could sell all this stuff or --"

"We should start a museum," she announced without looking up, scratching with a finger under Pinafore's chin.

Father smiled. "We'll talk about it later." Another call boomed up from the foyer. "Here, I'm coming!" Father shouted back, and he disappeared into the hall.