“Crowe’s,” said another minion.
“I’m not Crowe’s,” I said.
“Maybe you are, and maybe you aren’t,” Fist said. He looked down at his rough-knuckled hand. “Maybe you’ll end up at the bottom of the river tonight, blackbird, and maybe you won’t.”
I clenched my teeth to hold in a shiver of fright. What did he want with me, anyway? “Fist, I really am a wizard,” I said.
He nodded. “Twilight needs a wizard,” he said.
I stared at him. I’d heard that once before, when I was buying blackpowder explosives from a pyrotechnist called Embre. Had Fist been talking to Embre? “What d’you want, exactly?” I asked.
“Something’s going on,” Fist said. Along the walls, the minions nodded; a couple of them looked twitchy, as if they were afraid.
“What?” I asked.
“You say you’re a wizard,” Fist said. “You’re going to tell us. Something’s happening. Something with the magic.”
* * *
Asked boy again where staying in Twilight; would not say, curse him. Have sent Benet to look for his bolt-hole, but boy very good at hiding, and Twilight slums difficult to search.
On way home from Twilight stopped at Heartsease to check rebuilding project. Despite cold, workers have set new foundations, walls, steps leading to door. Window glass goes in tomorrow. Boy’s cat there, prowling around the island.
A distraction. Must focus on essentials. Tests show magic of Wellmet remains weak—damaged, we now think, by the Underlord’s prisoning device. Prey, as boy says, for Arhionvar. Must also continue research to find appropriate spells for defense of city.
No reply from duchess. Will make last appeal to magisters, but expect more waffling. They cannot believe that the magic is a living being; they still think it is simply a substance to be used. In this way the magisters are like thieves, stealing the substance of the magic, controlling it with a few spellwords, without considering the consequences of their actions. Because they feel safer ignoring the truth about the magic, they continue to deny that Arhionvar is threat. Fear boy and I must act alone. At dinner tonight at Twilight chophouse discussed Jaspers’s second treatise on pyrotechnics, which boy read in sorcerer-king’s library. Implications for defense of Wellmet.
* * *
CHAPTER 3
The minions didn’t bother checking me for lockpick wires; they just tossed me in one of the basement cells and set two men to watching me all night. I did have wires. I also had Nevery’s purse string. I felt up my sweater-sleeve for it. Nothing; it was gone. Had the dratted minions taken it off me?
I thought back. No, clever-Nevery had. He’d picked his purse string out of my sleeve when he’d bumped my arm and pretended to pick my pocket. He was probably laughing at me right now. Wrapped in my coat, I lay down on the cold stones and went to sleep.
In the morning, Fist and Hand dragged me out of the cell and up to the streets. The sun was barely up. The rain had stopped, and a fog had risen up from the river and hung in the air like a sooty, yellow curtain. I hunched into my coat and shivered. We headed up the hill, then through Sark Square, which was just stirring, a few shops opening up.
I followed them onto Wyrm Street, which snaked up through the steepest part of the Twilight, where the houses had once been the most grand but were now falling to pieces. Only one place this road would take us.
Dusk House. Where the Underlord Crowe and his wizard, Pettivox, had built their device. It’d been a terrible machine built to imprison all of Wellmet’s magic. The device had almost succeeded and now the magic was weaker than it’d been before.
When Nevery and I had destroyed the device, Dusk House had been blasted to pieces. Out in front of its ruins was a shattered stone gateway, the iron gates rusting and hanging off their hinges, and a jagged stone wall like a row of broken teeth. Inside the wall were big chunks of stone, scattered about from when the house had exploded. Snakes of fog slithered around them. Our footsteps sounded loud on the gravelly ground, crunch, crunch.
Fist stopped at the edge of the pit where Dusk House had once stood. “Here,” he said, pointing down.
The pit was steep-sided, hewn out of the rock. Down there was where I’d lost my locus magicalicus. It’d been destroyed, blown into sparkling green dust when I’d released the magic from the device.
I looked down into the pit. It was half filled with sooty fog. “I don’t see anything,” I said.
“Wait for it,” Fist muttered, and backed away from the edge of the pit.
I waited. My stomach growled and I told it to be quiet. Behind me, one of the minions shifted; stones grated under his shoe.
Then everything fell silent. In the pit, the fog rose higher, like a cup filling up with milk, until it overflowed past me, up to my knees, and then it was all around me, damp and smother-white and silent.
I blinked, and the fog was gone. I looked down. Where the fog had been, darkness was filling the pit, shifting and velvety black. The air tingled, stretched like a rope pulled too hard and about to snap. Silence pushed against my ears. Tiny bolts of lightning crackled at the edges of the pit. The blackness welled up, rushing all around me, and my skin prickled as if I was filled with pins. My feet left the ground. I held my breath and looked at the magic all around me, and it was like looking into a night sky full of stars.
The magic knew me. It’d always protected me, even before I’d become a wizard. It’d chosen me because it knew that I would protect it, if I could. What d’you want? I shouted at it.
But I didn’t have a locus magicalicus, so it couldn’t hear me. The magic felt wound tight, frightened—it was worried about Arhionvar, I figured. I’m doing all I can, I wanted to tell it. But it wouldn’t understand.
The velvety, star-filled blackness held me for another long, waiting moment. It turned me, like it was examining me, trying to figure out what I was. In my bones I felt a deep, rumbling hum. Then the giant hand of the magic dropped me and I crashed to the ground. Like water rushing down a drain, the magic swirled away into the bottom of the pit.
The air went pop and I could hear again. Fog settled into the pit.
I got to my feet and looked over my shoulder. Fist and Hand stood near the smashed Dusk House gates, watching me. Time to get away.
Running as fast as I could, going ’round the edge of the pit, I got halfway to the back gate leading away from Dusk House before Hand caught up to me and tripped me. I went down hard, then rolled over.
“Still not done with you, blackbird,” Fist said, catching his breath. He reached down and jerked me to my feet, then pushed me toward the front gate. His hand gripped my coat collar. “It picked you up,” Fist said. “Never seen it do that before.”
I shrugged.
“It’s strange, right?” he asked.
It was more than strange. Wellmet’s magical being was worried, clear as clear. But why was it in the pit where Dusk House had been?
“There’s somebody wants to talk to you about it,” Fist said; behind him, Hand nodded.
Who? I wondered.
They led me down the hill and along the rutted road past the mudflats and along the curve of the river to a shack way outside the city.
I’d been there before. Sparks, the pyrotechnist, lived there with her nephew, Embre.
Well. I’d been wanting to talk to Sparks, anyway, and Embre, too. Once Nevery and I figured out what explosive devices we’d use for the traps, we’d need pyrotechnic materials, and we’d have to buy them from Sparks and Embre.
Their shack was long and had tar paper nailed up all over it, and a scrawny apple tree grew beside the front door. Behind it was a backyard that looked like a mud farm—furrows with a white, limey crust on them, like snow.
Sparks was there, digging.
Embre was there, too. He was a boy a lot older than I was, with black hair, dark eyes, and a sharp, pale face covered with soot smudges from working with blackpowder ingredients. He sat at the end of a mud row in a wooden w
heelbarrow with a ragged blanket covering his stick legs.
I squelched through the mud to Embre’s wheelbarrow.
“Hello,” I said.
He scowled at me.
“Hello, Sparks,” I called.
She bustled back along the row, and when she reached us she leaned on her shovel and grinned. She wore a holey gray dress and had her ashy hair tied up in a kerchief; her face was red from working hard. “Here,” she said, handing her shovel to me. “Have a go at this.” She nodded at her mud garden. “Just turn the dirt.”
Turn the dirt, right. I went down the row to where Sparks had left off, stuck the shovel in, and lifted. As the dirt came up, so did the sharp-sour smell of old cesspools. I turned the dirt and dug up another shovelful, then another; as I worked my way down the row, Sparks stayed beside me, watching.
“Steady as you go,” she said.
“What is this stuff?” I asked. The dirt was wet and smelly and had straw mixed in with it.
“Niter beds,” Sparks said. She gave me her gap-toothed grin again. “Piss and straw, wood-ash and horse manure. We make our own saltpeter, we do, for the pyrotechnics.” She pointed with her chin at Embre, down at the other end of the row in his wheelbarrow. “Come to talk to Embre, have you?”
I shrugged. Had I?
“Better come inside, then, before he takes a chill.”
Down at the house, while Sparks bustled off to make tea, Embre climbed out of his wheelbarrow, dragged himself across the floor to his high stool at the table, and pulled himself up.
I stayed by the doorway. “What d’you have to do with the minions?” I asked him.
“Nothing,” he said. He fixed me with his dark stare. “Why’d you come back here?” he asked. “From what I hear, the minions warned you out of the Twilight once, but you didn’t listen. Are you making a bid to be Underlord?”
“No,” I said. “They think I am, but I’m not.”
Embre narrowed his eyes. “They don’t believe you. Your name, Connwaer, is a true name, a blackbird name, just like Crowe’s. You’re his nephew. And he trained you to become Underlord after him, didn’t he?”
He’d tried to. But I’d run away from Dusk House to live on the streets of the Twilight. “I was never Crowe’s,” I said. “I’m a wizard.”
“If you really are a wizard, maybe you’re making the magic do strange things in the Dusk House pit,” Embre said. “You’re making people afraid so they’ll accept you as Underlord.”
I stared back at him. “Embre, this has nothing to do with Crowe, or any Underlord business. The magic’s doing strange things because it’s afraid. The city’s in danger. Both sides of it, the Sunrise and the Twilight.” The minions had done me a favor, I realized, bringing me to see Embre. Maybe he would help me and Nevery.
“What kind of danger?” Embre asked.
“A bad magic is coming here,” I said.
He frowned. “Bad magic? You’re going to have to do better than that.”
Right. I’d have to start at the beginning. I went to the table and sat down on a stool, across from him. “Remember when I got pyrotechnic materials from you?”
Embre nodded. “You and your friend, that red-haired girl. Sparks sold you blackpowder materials and I gave you a recipe for controlled explosions.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I needed the blackpowder so I could do magic, because I don’t have a locus stone.” Most wizards hadn’t figured out what, exactly, pyrotechnics and magic had to do with each other. Neither had I, but I did know that the magical being of Wellmet liked it when things blew up, and that I could do magical spells if I created a pyrotechnic explosion at the same time. “When I did the controlled explosion, it didn’t work. I blew up Heartsease.” My home, and Nevery’s home. I’d hurt Benet, too, and even though he was all right, and Heartsease was being rebuilt, I still wasn’t sure as sure that Nevery’d forgiven me for it.
“I know about this,” Embre said. “You were exiled. And now you’ve come back because you want to be Underlord.”
“No!” I shook my head, frustrated. “When I was exiled I went to Desh, the desert city. It was being attacked by a magic called Arhionvar, and now that magic is coming here, to Wellmet.”
“What d’you mean, coming?” Embre said.
“It’s like a—” What was the word? “When an animal hunts another animal to eat it, you know?”
Embre gave me a sharp smile. “A predator.”
“Right. Arhionvar is a predator magic, and Wellmet’s magic is its prey. But we can’t get anybody to believe us about how dangerous Arhionvar is. The duchess is ill and won’t do anything, and the wizards can’t understand what the magic really is.”
“What is it, then, really?” Embre asked.
I nodded. It was a good question, one I wished the magisters would think more about. “The magic is a being. It lives here. Every city is built on the place where its magical being lives, and the magic helps the city and protects it.”
“Except for this predator magic, Arhionvar,” Embre said.
“Right,” I said. “Arhionvar tried to kill the Desh magic, and it’s attacked the Wellmet magic before. If it comes here and we don’t defend the city, I think it’ll kill Wellmet’s magical being and the city’ll be destroyed. It will die.”
Embre’s gaze sharpened. “The people will die?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. Some of them might. They won’t be able to stay here if Arhionvar takes over.” I paused. “We’re trying to stop it, me and Nevery. He’s a wizard, and I’m his apprentice. We might be able to use pyrotechnics to set some traps, but we’ll need a lot of blackpowder and slowsilver.” I leaned across the table. “Wellmet’s in big trouble, Embre. Will you help us?”
He looked down and rubbed at a patch of soot on the palm of his hand. “I don’t know.” He frowned. “Maybe. Maybe not. I’ll think about it.”
CHAPTER 4
On the way back to my attic room in the Rat Hole, I thought about skiffing off to pick a pocket or steal something to eat, but every time I started down an alley or tried to turn onto another street, a minion stepped out and glared at me. Right. Straight back to my room, it was, with no stops for anything else. The minions following was their way of saying they knew where to find me, that I was free only because they let me stay free, and I still had my fluff because they’d decided not to beat it out of me yet.
The alleys grew narrower and more rutted; the houses on either side were soot-stained brick, with empty, broken windows or missing roofs, or front doors hanging off their hinges. Nobody lived here in the Rat Hole anymore. It was the oldest part of the city, the area where the artists and potters and glass-blowers and carpet weavers had lived a long time ago, before the factories were built and the workers had moved into tenements to be close to their work.
I turned off the alley into a dark space between two brick buildings only as wide as my shoulders. Then through a backyard full of rotted barrels and rusting metal hoops, and across another alley to my hiding place.
Once it’d been a tall town house in a row of town houses like books lined up on a shelf. I went up the narrow stone steps to the front door, which was missing. The doorway was framed by stone door-posts shaped like dragons, but worn down so they were barely recognizable. But I knew what they were. A dragon was etched faintly into the stone doorstep, too.
I stepped in. Beside the door, under a piece of plaster that’d fallen from the ceiling, I’d stashed a candle and a striker. Rat Hole was full of misery eels, not just in the midnight-dark cellars, but in the rotted houses, too. The light would keep them away if they came after me. The candle had little toothmarks on it; rats had been at it. I struck a spark and lit it.
The building was just one room wide. With a faint circle of light around me, I went through the dark, empty downstairs, creaking over rotted floor-boards to a rickety stairway, and up three more floors. I’d found a ladder and used it to climb up to the attic because the stairs there h
ad rotted all away.
I pulled up the ladder behind me. Safer that way.
My room was narrow, with two windows in the slanted ceiling, both of them patched with brown paper and stuffed with rags around the frames to keep out the wind and rain. Rats lived in the walls. The air was chill and damp and smelled like mold and rot and smoke.
When I’d left, my room had been tidy.
In the flickering candlelight I looked it over. The minions wanted me to know they’d been there. My bed-blankets were kicked into a corner, my pile of books and grimoires had been thrown around the room, and some torn-out pages were stuffed into the fireplace. My shelf of food—biscuits and half a sausage wrapped up in paper—was empty. They’d thrown a jar of jam against a wall; it looked like a jam star splashed across the cracked plaster.
Drats. I took a deep breath and went to the hearth to pull the pages out. One by one, I flattened them on the floor and piled them together. Most of them weren’t burnt, just crumpled and smudged with ash.
Fist had taken my knapsack of food, so I had nothing to eat. My stomach felt hollow with hunger. I dug around in some of the things the minions had thrown against the wall. My teakettle, dented, and in the corner, a cracked teacup. I found half a biscuit, too, dusty and rat-gnawed.
I went down to the pump in the house’s kitchen, climbed back up, and made tea from the scraps of tea leaves I swept up from the floor.
Drinking dusty tea, eating the half biscuit, and wishing for a better breakfast, I thought about what Fist had told me. Something going on with the magic, he’d said. I knew the Wellmet magic was frightened of Arhionvar. Even without a locus magicalicus, I could feel the magic hanging over my head like a storm cloud. The magic’s watchers, its black birds, watched me all the time and flew down to sit on my shoulder and say krrrr, krrrr into my ear.
The magic wanted me to do something. It knew as well as I did that Arhionvar was coming. The knowing made me feel like mingled slowsilver and tourmalifine—about to explode. But what more could I do than I was already doing?
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