“You want to talk to us, blackbird?” the uglier one said.
I nodded. “What’re you called?” I asked.
The minion narrowed his eyes. He waited for a moment, then nodded at his friend, who was holding a burlap sack. “He’s Hand.” He showed me his fist. “I’m Fist.”
Fist, right. Good name. “You know about Dee?” I said.
Fist nodded. “We know.”
“He was killed by the Shadows,” I said.
“Figured,” Fist said; behind him, Hand nodded.
“You know the Shadows only come out at night. Over in the Sunrise they’re making a curfew. No one’s allowed out after dark, for safety.”
“An’ you come to tell us that you think the Twilight needs a curfew?” Fist asked.
I nodded.
“You see anybody around, little bird?” the minion said.
Now that he mentioned it, the streets were empty; everyone from the marketplace had gone home. The minions had set their own curfew. And the sun was just about down; I needed to get back to Heartsease.
“Right, good,” I said quickly. I edged away from Fist.
“Hold up,” he said, moving to block me.
Drats. Now they were going to beat the fluff out of me for coming back to the Twilight after I’d been warned off.
Fist nodded at Hand. “Give it to him.”
Whatever it was, I didn’t want it.
“No harm,” Fist said. “We found this on him.” Hand pulled something out of his sack.
On Dee, he meant. My coat. Brown, with black buttons, patches on the elbows, and frayed edges along the hem. Hand held it out to me, and I took it.
I put it on. Dee had rolled up the sleeves; I rolled them back down again so it fit me, and put my hands into the pockets.
The pockets were full of dust.
Interesting clue to Shadows. Boy found black dust in pockets of coat worn by gutterboy when killed. Have analyzed dust. Very fine, light, almost oily in texture. Not found anywhere in Wellmet. From outside.
Need to find expert on geography to consult, discover where dust comes from. Have called meeting with magisters, will bring dust, see what they think.
CHAPTER 11
While Nevery was at another meeting, I went up to the study to look at some more grimoires to see if I could find the spellword the magic had spoken to me. It might be something about the Shadows, so I needed to figure out what it meant sooner than soon.
I pulled one dusty, thick book off the shelf, and heard a papery crackle. Standing on tiptoes, I peered into the space where the book had been. Something was in there, shoved into the space behind the other books. I reached in and pulled it out. Two bundles of dusty papers, one tied with string, the other tied with a faded red ribbon. The one tied with string was a sketch of a map with things called dragonlairs labeled on it in old, swirly script. I set it aside to look at it later. Then I untied the ribbon-tied bundle and unrolled the papers. A treatise. Nevery had written it; I recognized the tiny, neat handwriting.
An Examination of the Enhancement of Magical Effects Through the Application of Pyrotechnics
Well, that could be interesting.
I didn’t want Nevery coming back to find me reading it, so I went to my workroom. My bags of blackpowder ingredients were next to the door. The floor was still sprinkled with crumbs of glass and shredded papers from my pyrotechnic experiment. The air smelled smoky. I crunched over to the window and opened it, and lifted the table onto its four legs. Then I pulled the chair over, sat down, and started reading.
After a while, the black bird from the courtyard tree flew over and perched on the window frame.
Nevery’s treatise was about using pyrotechnics along with a locus magicalicus to do magic. He’d done experiments with the lothfalas spell and had found that if he set off a tiny explosion while saying the spell and holding his locus magicalicus, the resulting light was brighter. He spent pages and pages calculating how much brighter; I didn’t see much point in that. At the end he’d made notes about what he called odd pyrotechnic effects, like the fact that he’d heard unexplained sounds during the explosions. The magic talking back to him, clear as clear, but he hadn’t realized it.
I set the papers aside and eyed the bags of blackpowder ingredients by the door. With the Shadows’ attack on Dee and the meeting with the magisters, I hadn’t had time yet to test Embre’s recipe.
I fetched my apprentice robe from its hook beside the door and put it on. Then I set the noggin of saltpeter at one end of my worktable, the noggin of sulfur at the other end, and the noggin of charcoal across the room on a bookshelf. I didn’t want the magic knocking them over and making them mingle.
The bird hopped off the window frame onto the tabletop, then hopped up to perch on top of the noggin of sulfur.
“Be careful,” I told it.
It cocked its head and looked at me with its yellow eye. Grawwwwwk, it muttered.
I got out the paper Embre had written for me. His handwriting was neat and straight.
Blckpwder Expl.
Use highest quality materials.
Warning: MUST keep materials apart or will spontaneously combine & combust.
Keep charcoal dry.
Sulfur emulsion:
In saucer cmbn two spnsful dry fine charcoal, one spn sulfur.
Hold saucer over low candle flame to count of twenty, mix with glass rod, add pinch colophony, hold to flame count thirty, mix with rod. Cool. Result: emulsion clear black. If clouded, do over, be sure saucer clean, charcoal dry.
For slow explosion:
Stir emulsion. Add one cupful saltpeter.
Ratio 15:3:2, alter slightly for diff. rate.
Good luck.
I got to work. The charcoal was dry, and every time I measured some out, it stuck to my fingers and to the spoon I was using to measure it. The sulfur smelled awful, and the saltpeter smelled even worse, like a back-alley cesspool in the Twilight. When I put the sulfur and the charcoal together, they didn’t want to mingle properly.
I cleaned off the spoon and started again.
After a while, footsteps came up the stairs to my workroom. Not Benet or Nevery. With a flutter, the black bird left its perch and flapped away, back to the tree, I guessed.
“Hello, Conn,” Rowan said from the doorway.
I didn’t look up. I wasn’t supposed to talk to her.
“I’m not supposed to talk to you,” Rowan said. “But I wanted to see what you were up to.” She paused. “Conn, I’m very sorry about Dee.”
I nodded, and swallowed down a lump of sadness.
Rowan came farther into the room. “What are you working on?”
I pointed at the saucer. The emulsion I’d made was cloudy; I was going to have to start again.
“What is it?”
I handed her Embre’s recipe. While she read it, I set aside the cloudy emulsion and used a rag to clean off a new saucer.
“I see,” Rowan said, setting the paper on the table. “Pyrotechnics again? What, exactly, do you hope to accomplish, aside from blowing your fingers off?”
I shrugged. I wasn’t sure. Even before my pyrotechnic experiment, probably since the Shadows had come to Wellmet, the magic had felt different—it felt frightened, and it made me feel jittery, too. I had to find out what it was afraid of. The Shadows, sure as sure, but if they were creatures of magic, somebody else had made them, and the Wellmet magic was afraid of that, too.
I knew how to find out what it was. If the magic could talk to me during a pyrotechnic explosion, then maybe I could talk to it. I could say magical words, and it would know I was trying to help it, even if it couldn’t understand me.
Rowan was quiet for a few moments. “You’re not going to talk to me, are you?”
I shook my head.
“Mmm. My mother was very angry. I tried to explain that going to the Twilight was my idea, but she blames you for taking me there. She’s starting to think that the magisters are right about
you, and Captain Kerrn is trying to convince her that you should be arrested.” She pointed at the saucer of sulfur emulsion. “You need to be careful, Conn. You should stop doing these experiments.”
I shook my head again.
“Don’t be stupid!” she said.
I opened a book and stared down at the page, not seeing the words. Rowan didn’t know what it was like to lose a locus magicalicus. Or to have the magic talk to her and not be able to answer back. I closed the book and set it aside. My hands were shaking; I bumped the saucer of sulfur emulsion, and it slopped onto the tabletop. Drats. I blotted it up with the sleeve of my robe.
Rowan stood there for a moment, watching. Then she said, “Well, I can see you’re busy, and guards are waiting for me in the courtyard.”
I didn’t answer.
“I’d better go, then.” She paused. “Connwaer, your arm is smoking.”
I looked down. The sulfur emulsion had eaten a hole in my sleeve, and a thin line of gray-black smoke trickled up. Drats! I pulled off my robe and threw it to the floor, then stamped out the smoke. When I looked up, Rowan was gone.
CHAPTER 12
That night after supper, Nevery and I were at work in his study—he was reading a book, and I was trying to keep my eyes open long enough to check one of the old grimoires for the spellword the magic had spoken to me during the explosion. Lady the cat sat on the table, curled up on an open book.
Downstairs, the storeroom door slammed and heavy footsteps came running up the stairs.
Benet burst into the room. “Message from Captain Kerrn,” he said. “The Dawn Palace is under attack!”
I stood up, blinking the sleep out of my eyes.
“Shadows. No one else could get through those defenses,” Nevery growled, getting to his feet. “My robe and cane, Benet, at once.” He frowned across the table at me. “I don’t suppose there’s any point in ordering you to stay home.”
I didn’t see much point in it, no.
We got ready and headed out the storeroom door, Nevery striding across the cobbled courtyard with his cane and locus stone, Benet with his truncheon. Me with…
“Nevery,” I panted, running to catch up with him.
“What,” he said, not sparing me a glance.
“I have to get something from my workroom.”
Nevery stopped. “Make it fast, boy.”
Right. I raced across the courtyard to the other end of Heartsease and up the stairs to my workroom. It was dark; I knocked over a chair, then bumped into the table. I felt over the tabletop until I found what I was looking for—a stoppered vial of sulfur emulsion—and put it in my coat pocket. Then to the bookshelf, where I’d put one of the noggins. I reached in and grabbed a handful of saltpeter and shoved it into my other pocket.
Now I’d be ready to fight Shadows.
We came through the gates of the Dawn Palace. On the wide front steps, a line of guards and a magister—Trammel—fought a darting, swooping crowd of Shadows. Trammel’s locus magicalicus cast a circle of weak light around the guards, who carried swords and pikes.
As we came nearer, the Shadows surged forward like boiling black smoke, and the guards on the steps fell back toward the front doors. A guard had fallen, and one of the other guards dragged her by the collar away from the Shadows.
“Stay with me, boy,” Nevery said. Followed by Benet, he strode toward the fight.
I hung back.
This wasn’t right. I knew how to get into the Dawn Palace, and it wasn’t by attacking the front doors.
It was over the wall and through the glass doors at the back of the palace. A guard ran past me, shouting; I looked in the direction he was going and saw Nevery, striding into a swarm of Shadows, swinging his knob-headed cane, and Benet with his truncheon.
Lothfalas! I heard Nevery shout, and his locus stone flared into light. The Shadows fell back, and then they attacked again.
He was busy.
I headed away from the fight. The sound of the guards’ shouts faded as I came ’round the corner of the palace and into the formal gardens at the back. The windows were all dark; the garden was dark; I saw humps that were bushes, and the faint glimmer of white gravel on the pathways. I stayed on the grass so my feet wouldn’t crinch-crunch on the stone. Over the low wall to the terrace, and up to the glass doors.
All was quiet. I tried the door; it was locked. They hadn’t come this way, then. I let out a breath of relief.
I was turning away, when my feet grated over something. I bent down and found a pile of dust, fine and oily under my fingers.
They had come this way!
I brushed the dust off my hands and reached back into my shirt collar for my lockpick wires, had them out in a moment, and snick-picked the lock. I slid in through the door and skiffed through the ballroom to the dark hallway beyond. No Shadows leaped out at me; all was silent.
Like a shadow myself, I raced through the hallways and up the stairs to the duchess’s chamber. A werelight should have burned in a sconce in the hallway, but it was dark.
On quiet feet I eased up to the duchess’s door. My foot bumped up against something hard; I bent and felt cloth, a body, hardened into stone. Standing, I reached into my pocket and brought out the vial of sulfur emulsion; with my other hand I reached into my other pocket and scrabbled up a handful of saltpeter. With my teeth, I pulled out the stopper on the vial and spat it out. The door was open; I pushed it wider and edged in.
A candle had fallen to the floor, but it still burned; by its wavery light I saw a Shadow looming over the duchess, who lay across her bed, her arm hanging down, limp. A swathe of shadow went up, holding a shard of glittering stone.
“No!” I shouted.
The stone knife plunged down, stabbing the duchess. Then the Shadow whirled away from her and flowed over the bed toward me, ink-black smoke swirling around the glow of its eye.
I wasn’t ready; it moved too fast. Its shadow-hands snaked around my neck; I gasped, and my breath came out as a puff of dust.
I dropped the vial. The glass shattered and the emulsion splashed across the floor. Then I dropped the saltpeter.
The blackpowder elements mingled.
The slow explosion started, with a muffled whumph and a cloud of gray smoke.
Across the room, the candle sputtered out and the room went dark. A heavy, stone feeling spread from my neck into my chest.
“Lothfalas!” I gasped. If the explosion didn’t get the magic’s attention, I was dead.
The magic heard the spell! From the floor, white-bright embers exploded, washing upward, swirling around the Shadow; it flinched away from me and, as the light burned through it, burst apart with a muffled puff into a cloud of black dust. Its glowing purple-black eye hung in the air. I reached out and snatched the eye as it fell.
Then the wave of light flung me back against the wall and I went out.
I clutched the Shadow’s eye, my fingers stiff as stone so I couldn’t put it down. The eye struck spears of heavy numbness up my arm and into my bones. This must’ve been what Dee had felt just before he’d died.
I blinked away the blackness to find myself lying against the wall in the duchess’s room.
Someone had come into the room; the candle was burning again, over by the duchess’s bed.
My face was pressed into the floor; I felt the grittiness of dust under my cheek and smelled the smoke from the explosion. Through the hair hanging down into my eyes, I saw the dust-covered stone floor, a rug scuffed into a corner, shards of blackened glass from the vial of sulfur emulsion.
Feet in black leather shoes crunched over the dust, a cane tapped; I saw the hem of a magister’s robe. Nevery. He crouched down and brushed the hair out of my eyes. I was too frozen into stone to speak.
“What happened here, my lad?” he said quietly. He rested his hand a moment on my stone forehead—I couldn’t feel his fingers. Then he stood and strode to the door. “Guards!” he called in his deep voice. He came back in, cast his
eyes around, then crouched beside me again, fingering the black dust that lay all over me and the floor, picking up the shards of the vial. “Ah, I see.” He swept up all the shards and put them into his coat pocket. Then he went over to the window and opened it.
Coming back over to me, he took off his robe and wrapped me in it, then—“Quietly now, boy”—picked me up and carried me out to the hallway. He paused, looked around, and carried me farther, to the stairs, where he set me on a step, propped up against the wall.
A guard came rushing up the stairs. “Yes, Magister?” he panted.
“A Shadow has attacked the duchess,” Nevery answered. “A guard is dead. Get Trammel up here at once.”
The guard hurried away, and after a minute two more guards raced up the stairs, followed by Trammel, holding a burning locus magicalicus in his hand.
“Stay here, lad,” Nevery said, and swept up the stairs with Trammel to the duchess’s room.
I wasn’t going anywhere.
After a minute, Captain Kerrn went by, taking the stairs two at a time, not noticing me.
I closed my eyes and hunched over, feeling my heavy, stone heart beating slowly inside my chest. My fingers felt frozen around the Shadow’s eye, and heavy numbness flowed from it, up the bones of my arm.
A guard carrying a werelight lantern went by, followed by Rowan, who wore a sword in a scabbard belted around her waist over a white nightgown.
As she passed, Rowan saw me. She came and crouched on the step below mine and peered into my face. “What happened?”
My teeth were clenched by the stone spell. Even though I wasn’t supposed to talk to her, I needed to tell her to go on upstairs, to check on her mother.
Rowan turned to the waiting guard. “Mira, go find some blankets.”
The guard went off. Rowan sat on the step beside me. People passed us, hurrying up and down the stairs.
She took my hand. Not the one with the eye in it. “You’re cold.” She moved closer and put her arm around me; I rested my head against her shoulder. She felt so warm, like a glowing fire on a winter night. I closed my eyes.
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