The gutterboy looked up at me; then his glance skittered over to Rowan, who was watching over my shoulder. He had watery blue eyes and teeth that stuck out. “Huh?” he said.
“Or you’re going to get caught with your hand in somebody’s pocket.” And he’d get the fluff beaten out of him if he did. “Look.” I took a step away from him. “You come up from behind. Make your feet feathers so the mark doesn’t hear you. Then quick-hands in, nick the purse string, and out clean.” I turned to Rowan and lifted the purse string from her pocket to show him how.
“Uh-huh,” he said.
He didn’t get it. But he’d get it eventually, or he’d get caught again.
Rowan held out her hand, and I gave her money back. “I’ll let you go,” I said to the gutterboy, “if you’ll help us find somebody.”
“Give me a couple of copper locks, then,” he said.
“Here,” Rowan said. She pulled out her purse string again and gave him a few copper lock coins.
“Now yours,” he said to me.
“I don’t have a couple of coppers,” I said.
“Give me one copper, then,” he said.
“I don’t have any money,” I said.
“You have to give me something, too.”
I didn’t have anything he’d want. Except maybe my coat. Drats. I took it off. “I’ll give you this if you’ll help us.”
He looked at it. “Don’t want it.”
“You don’t want it now,” I said, “but winter will come in not too long, and you’ll really want it then.”
He stared blankly at me.
I sighed. “If you take it to a used clothes shop, the shop lady will give you money for it, all right?”
He nodded.
“I’m looking for somebody who sells explosives,” I said.
“Give me the coat first,” the boy said.
Right. I handed it over. He put it on; the sleeves hung down over his hands.
“I don’t know what explosives is,” he said.
Beside me, Rowan laughed.
“Things that blow up,” I said. His face stayed blank. “Boom!” I shouted.
“Oh.” He nodded and picked his nose, then wiped his finger down the front of my coat. His coat. “Sparks.”
“Yes, sparks,” I said, bending to pick up my lockpick wires; I didn’t want to be without them. “D’you know anybody who makes sparks?”
He nodded again. “Sparks makes sparks.”
Right. Got it. “Where does Sparks live?”
“I could show you,” the boy said.
He led us back toward the river, beyond the docks and warehouses and ratty taverns that clustered in the shadow of the bridge. As we walked, the rain started, just a drizzle, and my hair hung down damp in my eyes. A chilly early-autumn breeze blew off the river. Rowan turned up the collar of her long coat. We walked for a long time, out to the mudflats, past the shacks where the mudlarks lived. I’d never been this far out from the center of the city. The magic was weaker here. Usually I felt it protecting me, like a warm blanket in the wintertime, but here the air felt thin. Most people wouldn’t want to live out here, away from the magic. I guessed the pyrotechnist did because otherwise the magic would set off the materials used to make explosions, because the magic liked explosions.
“Here,” the gutterboy said. He pointed at a long, windowless shack with a tar-paper roof and flapping tar paper tacked to its outside walls, and a front yard full of weeds and a scraggly apple tree.
“Thanks,” I said. If I’d had any money, I would’ve given him some; he looked hungry.
“Yah,” he said, and turned away. Then he turned back. “Watch out for the Shadows.”
Shadows? Is that what he was calling the dark lurkers? Rowan glanced at me with her eyebrows raised. “What d’you mean?” I asked.
He shrugged. “The bad ones,” he said, then spun and raced away, down the rutted road toward the busier streets of the Twilight.
Shadows. Bad ones. Crowe’s former henchmen, sure as sure. His minions. The gutterboy was right, then. I’d better watch out for the bad ones.
CHAPTER 5
“So the lurkers are in the Twilight, too,” Rowan whispered.
“It’s probably the old Underlord’s minions, Ro,” I whispered back. We stepped up to Sparks’s house. The front door was a ragged blanket hung across the doorway. I pushed the blanket aside and peered in.
Inside was dim-dark. A long workbench was pushed up against one wall. The only light came from a candle stuck in a bowl of water, so the shack wouldn’t burn down if it tipped over, I figured. Along the back wall were small barrels piled one on top of the other, and bulging canvas sacks, and scales for weighing things.
Perched on a stool at the workbench was a boy who looked a bit older than Rowan. He was thin and had black hair and was smudged all over with soot, and his skinny-stick legs hung limply down from the stool; they didn’t work properly, I guessed. His arms were wiry and strong, though, and, using a pestle, he was pounding something in a wide stone dish. Pound, pound, pound. He looked up when Rowan and I came in, scowled, and kept pounding, while staring at us.
From the shadows beside the door came an old woman wearing an ash-gray woolen dress covered with scorch marks. “What d’you want?” she said in a cracked and ragged voice.
“Are you Sparks?” I asked.
She gave me a gap-toothed grin. “Yerrrs, I’m Sparks.” She glanced at Rowan, who was looking around the room with wide eyes. “Howsabout a cup of blackpowder tea?”
All right. I nodded.
“Good for chilly days, blackpowder tea. Be right back, kettle’s on the boil. Go an’ talk to Embre.” She bustled out of the room.
Leaving Rowan by the doorway, I went over to the boy, who was still pounding. With a name like Embre, he was probably Sparks’s grandson. “Hello,” I said. “I’m Conn.”
Pound, pound, pound. He paused and looked me up and down. “I know who you are.”
He did? I shrugged and pointed toward Rowan. “She’s Rowan. What’re you doing?” I nodded toward the stone bowl.
Pound.
“What’s it—” Pound. “—look like?” Pound.
I leaned closer to see. It looked like he was crushing black sand into smaller bits of black sand.
He stopped pounding. “Colophony and charcoal. It’s part of an explosive. The smaller the grains”—he pointed at the stuff in the stone bowl—“the better it mingles with the saltpeter and the sulfur, and the more powerful the explosion is.”
Ah, I’d read about this in Prattshaw. “What ratio would you use if you wanted a slow explosion?”
He sneered. “As if I’d tell you.”
Trade secret, I guessed. When I made my own blackpowder, I’d have to check the books and then experiment until I got the right amount of each ingredient.
Sparks bustled back into the room holding a tray with chipped teacups and a teapot on it, which she put down on the table. Her hand, I noticed, was missing two of its fingers. From mixing blackpowder ingredients, I guessed.
“Here you are, love,” she said, pouring out a cup and passing it to Embre. He took it without looking up and set it on the table.
“And for you, miss.” Sparks handed a steaming cup to Rowan, and then one to me.
I wondered if the tea really had blackpowder in it. I took a sip; it tasted like ordinary tea, but with pepper added. “Thanks,” I said, and took another sip. Behind me, Rowan sipped her tea, then coughed.
“Whatcha need?” Sparks asked.
“Something to make small explosions I can control,” I said.
“Explosions, is it?” Sparks cocked her head. “Whatcha need with explosions?”
“I’m a wizard,” I said.
“Are you! From the Twilight and all?” she asked. Embre, I noticed, had put down the pestle and was watching me closely.
I nodded. “But my locus magicalicus was lost.”
“Lost?” Embre interrupted.
“Yes. Destroyed. I need to get the magic to talk to me, and pyrotechnics is the only way to do that.” Now they would tell me I was crazy. But they needed to know, or they might not let me have the ingredients to make blackpowder.
“Huh,” Sparks said. “What d’you think?” she asked Embre.
Embre looked me up and down again. “Twilight needs a wizard,” he said. “If that’s what he really is.”
“Is that so?” Sparks asked, glancing over at him.
He shrugged, then picked up a pencil and started writing on a piece of paper.
“Righty-o, then,” Sparks said. She went to the other end of the dark room and rummaged around for a while, then weighed something on the scale.
Rowan stepped up to whisper in my ear. “Are you the Twilight’s wizard, Conn?”
“I don’t know,” I said. And I didn’t. Unless I figured out how to make the explosions work, I wasn’t anyone’s wizard.
Sparks came back with two canvas sacks. “Half noggin of saltpeter, quarter noggin each of sulfur and charcoal and colophony,” she said, setting the bags carefully on the floor. “And you work out the ratios.”
Embre folded the paper he’d been writing on and tapped its edge against the table. “No, I’ve written down the ratios and instructions.” He held out the paper. “For regular explosions and for slow ones, like you want.”
I blinked. “Thanks,” I said. I took the paper and put it in my pocket.
Sparks grinned widely, picked up her cup from the table, and slurped at her tea.
“What about slowsilver?” I asked. “Can you get me some?”
“Ah!” Sparks said. “Was a big call for slowsilver, much as we could find, ’round about a year ago.”
Because of Pettivox and the giant magic capacitor device he and Crowe had made in his scheme to steal all the city’s magic. I nodded.
“Had to send all the way to Desh for it,” Sparks said.
Desh? I turned to Rowan. I hadn’t gotten around to studying geography yet.
“A city far to the east of here,” Rowan said, answering my question. “It’s across a desert, and it was apparently built on sand and a huge slowsilver mine.”
“Yerrrs,” Sparks said, rubbing her three-fingered hand up through her ashy hair. “But they aren’t trading for slowsilver anymore, the Deshans, least-wise not to Wellmet. There’s none to be had.”
Embre gave a tiny nod, like he was deciding something. “They could look themselves. For slowsilver.”
“They could, yes. I can’t get down in there,” Sparks said to me. “And Embre can’t, o’ course. But you could, and so could your friend here.” She saw that I didn’t understand. “Down in the hole, where the Underlord’s Dusk House used to be. Where the explosion was last winter, eh?”
Of course! Why hadn’t I thought of that? Pettivox and the Underlord had used a huge amount of slowsilver in their prisoning device. And maybe, after Nevery and I had destroyed the device, some of the slowsilver had been left behind.
Rowan took out her purse string and paid for the blackpowder, and Sparks shoved us outside. The rain was still coming down, and the air smelled like dead fish and mud.
“Go off with you, then,” Sparks said. “And be careful of the Shadows.”
“We will,” I said.
CHAPTER 6
We’d been warned twice about the bad ones, the Shadows, but I wasn’t careful enough.
As we were turning off of Strangle Street, a tall, wide man with an ugly, lumpy face stepped across the mouth of the alley.
“Look out,” I said. Rowan’s hand went to her sword hilt.
I spun around to go back the way we’d come, and another, uglier man blocked us. Minions. Drats. Had Crowe returned? Had he sent them after me? I put my back to the wall as they closed in, and set the canvas sacks of blackpowder materials on the ground.
Rowan drew her sword. “Stand off,” she said fiercely.
“Business isn’t with you, girl,” one of the minions said. He pointed his thumb at me. “It’s with him.”
Rowan stepped in front of me and raised her sword. “Then your business is with me.”
The minion spoke to the other minion over his shoulder. “Get her out of the way, Hand.”
The other minion, Hand, stepped forward and, before Rowan could slice at him with her sword, grabbed her by the collar of her coat and flung her against the brick wall of the alley across from me; she bounced off the wall and slumped to the ground.
“Ro!” I started toward her, but the minion grabbed me and pinned me to the wall. I kicked him in the shin and tried squirming away, but he thumped me back against the wall until my head spun.
“Keep still. Want a word with you.”
I caught my breath. Just a word?
“You’re the lockpick,” the minion said.
I nodded, watching Rowan. She sat on the ground, propped against the wall, her eyes closed. She moved, putting her hand to her head. Her sword lay in the mud next to her feet.
“Little friend of ours told us you were around.”
The gutterboy, he meant. I should’ve expected it. When I’d lived in the Twilight, most kids without family to look after them earned their bread and bed working for the minions, carrying messages and spying; I’d never done it because the Underlord’d had a word out on me, and because he’d killed my mother. But the gutterboy I’d met earlier didn’t have that problem, clear as clear.
“Message for you,” the minion said, stepping closer.
I nodded again. Would it be a message delivered with words or with fists?
“Your name’s Connwaer, is it?”
“Yes,” I said.
“A connwaer’s a kind of black bird?”
I could guess where he was headed with these questions. I nodded.
“Group of us, Crowe’s men, want to talk to you. Warn you off. You figure you’re Crowe’s right heir, do you?”
I blinked. Crowe was my mother’s brother. For a while, when I was a little kid, Crowe had tried locking me in his Dusk House and training me up to be like him. But he’d killed my mother and I’d escaped, and then I’d never had any more to do with him than I had to, and he’d been exiled from the city last winter. “No,” I said. I looked past him, at Rowan. “Ro, are you all right?”
She had her head on her knees, but she flapped her hand at me. All right, then.
“Pay attention,” the minion said to me. “What’re you doing in the Twilight?”
I shrugged.
“Right,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “We reckon you’re making a bid to be Underlord. Stirring things up.”
“No, I’m not,” I said.
They waited.
“That all you’ve got to say?” he asked.
That was all. I nodded.
To my surprise, the minion gave a little bow and stepped aside. Looked like I was going to get off without the minions beating the fluff out of me. My shoulders hunched as I stepped past him, toward Rowan, and sure enough, he grabbed me, his hand heavy at the scruff of my neck.
My heart pounded. “Is he coming back?” I asked. Crowe, I meant.
The minion let me go. “Not your business, is it?” He leaned over to whisper into my ear, his breath hot. “But we’ll be watching you, little blackbird.”
Rowan had a bruise on her face and a bump on the back of her head from hitting the wall, but she was all right. She even seemed excited by our run-in with the minions. We headed down the hill toward the Night Bridge, walking fast.
“Those were your Shadows,” I said. I’d slung the sacks of blackpowder ingredients over my shoulder again.
Rowan thought for a moment, then shook her head. “No, I don’t think they were, Conn. The Shadows come out only at night, Captain Kerrn says.” She touched the bruise on her cheek with the tips of her fingers. “What did those men want with you?”
I shrugged. Old business. She didn’t need to worry about it.
After I walked with Rowan back to the Dawn Pal
ace and promised to take her with me the next day, when I went back to Dusk House to look for slowsilver, I went home to Heartsease. I waved to the black bird in the tree, put the bags of blackpowder ingredients in my workroom, then sat at the table in the kitchen, where Benet gave me tea.
“What you been up to?” he asked. He stood at the table, elbow deep in biscuit dough.
“Nothing much,” I said.
Benet snorted.
He kneaded; I drank my tea.
“Currants,” Benet said.
I got up from the table and fetched him a jar of dried currants from the pantry; he added a handful to the dough.
I sat down again and drank more tea. Something about our run-in with the minions wasn’t right. The gutterboy had told us to watch out for the Shadows, and then he’d gone and told the minions where they could find me. Even for someone as stupid as the gutterboy, that didn’t make sense. Maybe Rowan was right and the Shadows weren’t minions after all.
“Benet,” I said, “have you heard of anything strange going on in the Twilight?”
“Like what?”
I shook my head. “I’m not sure. Bad ones or Shadows?”
Benet shaped the dough into biscuits, put them on a pan, and slid the pan into the oven. “Ask Master Nevery.”
Maybe I would. But first I had to talk to that gutterboy again.
CHAPTER 7
The next afternoon Rowan met me on the Night Bridge. The bruise on her cheek had darkened, but her eyes were sparkling. “Good afternoon, Connwaer,” she said, with her usual sideways smile.
I grinned at her.
“What adventures await us today, my lad?” she asked.
The smile fell off my face. We had to go to the Dusk House pit. And we had to find the gutterboy.
If he was anything like I’d been when I was a pickpocket, he had his favorite lurking places.
I led Rowan to where the gutterboy had picked my pocket before, the alleyways around Strangle Street. As we went along, I kept my eyes open for minions. The weather was cloudy and a little cold, and I shivered and wished I’d put on the black sweater Benet had knitted for me.
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