But a chimney swift shouldn’t be able to steal a wizard’s locus magicalicus, because the stone would kill him if he touched it. That part about it was strange.
While I waited in an alley, I thought more about what I was. Not a gutterboy. Not the ducal magister. Something else. I was a wizard, and I was somebody all the other wizards in Wellmet except Nevery didn’t like very much, and I knew the magics better than anyone. And I was Rowan’s best friend and Embre’s cousin, and they were the duchess and the Underlord, powerful people in Wellmet. What did all those things add up to, all together?
I thought about it, but I didn’t come up with any answer.
So instead I thought about something more practical, how to spy on the chimney swifts. A long time ago, when Nevery had wanted to spy on the magisters, he’d done the embero spell on me and turned me into a cat because a cat makes a very good spy. I had a cat, Pip, but after the spying I couldn’t turn Pip into a boy who could tell me what he’d seen and heard.
Hmmm. Maybe Pip could be my spy. Maybe I could do a spell so I could see through Pip’s eyes and hear through its ears.
“Tallennar,” I whispered. Pip-cat peered from around the side of the broken-down box it’d been hiding behind. After glaring at me for a moment, it padded over and crouched on the ground next to me.
“All right, Pip?” I said, and gave it a little scratch on the place between its ears. Its slowsilver fur wasn’t soft; it felt prickly and made my fingers tingle.
Pip-cat rubbed its face against my hand—friends again—then climbed up my front and onto my shoulder. Its cat tail prickled where it rested against the back of my neck.
After thinking about it for a while, remembering words in the spell language, I reached up and rested my hand on Pip’s back.
“Magics,” I said in the magical-spell dragon language. “Please make this work without . . . without . . .”
As I spoke, the magics shifted, and I felt it the moment they turned their attention onto tiny me—like looking into the night sky and having the stars look back. Immense, powerful, a little frightening. The air around me stilled and my ears popped. “Magics,” I went on, my voice sounding thin in the echoing silence. “Please make this spell work without hurting Pip.” I took a breath. “Or me,” I added quickly, and then I launched into my made-up eyes-and-ears spell.
The spell tingled in the air, hanging like a sparkling cloud in front of me, then the magics shifted and I heard a roaring thunder inside my head as the spell focused itself into a glowing blue spark bright enough to burn. The spark exploded in front of Pip’s eyes and then in front of mine, and crashed into Pip’s ears and then into mine, clattering around inside my skull as if it was scouring out my brain.
Catching my breath, I blinked the brights out of my eyes and shook my head. Everything looked ordinary—gray sky, muddy ground, brick alley wall at my back, Pip-cat crouched on my shoulder. Then, to finish, I added Pip’s true name to the spell, “Tallennar.”
The world spun and flashed and I closed my eyes quick—and everything changed. With my newly sensitive Pip-ears I heard the rush-rush-rush of the river, and the rustle of a pigeon’s wings on the roof far overhead, and the wind blowing across the top of a chimney, and a man talking to himself two streets over. Carefully I cracked open my eyes, squinting against the brightness. Pip looked down and through its keen eyes I saw the dirty cobblestones, every bump and crack outlined in glowing sparks. Pip turned its head and looked at me, and I saw myself, a gutterboy-wizard with a dirt-smudged face and wide blue eyes, and a cloud of crackling fire around him. So that’s what I looked like to a dragon.
“Connwaer,” I whispered. I watched the gutterboy’s lips move. A flash in front of my eyes and a roaring in my ears, and I saw and heard as my ordinary self again, the ordinary Pip sitting next to me.
I peered around. Nobody had noticed; I was still alone in the dim-dark alley.
Well. The spell had effected with more power than I’d ever felt before. It wouldn’t be temporary, either; I’d have the use of Pip’s eyes and ears anytime I needed them, just by saying Pip’s true name. It was a good spell. A very, very good spell.
I slept for a while in the alley, curled up behind a pile of trash. After midnight, I woke up and went back to the smokehole tavern. Seeing me come in, the potboy nodded, then pointed with his chin toward a dark corner. At a table sat three men and a woman, all wearing black clothes, all smudged with soot. From the doorway I looked them over carefully. None of them were the men who’d beaten the fluff out of me but they were chimney swifts, sure as sure. My plan was to sit at a table near them and use Pip to listen to their conversation, and then to follow them to wherever they lived.
One of the swifts was thin and small enough that he looked like he might squeeze himself into a narrow chimney and then get stuck, but the other two men and the woman were bigger and burlier, more like minions. None of them did go up chimneys themselves, I realized. Whenever you saw a swift in the streets, walking to a job, he always had a soot-smudged kid following him, a boy or girl dressed in black, carrying one of the bristly brushes or a bag. They were the ones who went up the chimneys. The kids were the ones doing the stealing, then, working on the swifts’ orders.
I could go up a chimney, couldn’t I? And I was a very good thief.
I knew what Nevery would say. Don’t be stupid, boy. He’d want me to be safe and careful. But careful wouldn’t get done what I needed to do. Sure as sure, this was a better way than sneaking and spying to find out what I needed from the chimney swifts.
Pip slunk under a nearby bench and I walked up to the swifts’ table. The four of them sat with their heads down, leaning forward, talking in low whispers. Seeing me, they broke off.
“What d’you want?” asked a long-faced man with red-rimmed eyes. He took a drink of ale and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, leaving a clean patch in his sooty face.
“Never mind what he wants,” said the woman, who wore a black woolen dress with a black shawl over her broad shoulders. “Take yerself off, boy.” She pointed at the smokehole door.
The four turned back to their conversation, but I stood there waiting.
They gave me narrow-eyed, sidelong glances, then the woman whispered something to the burly man across from her. He nodded, put his hands on the table, and pushed himself to his feet, then climbed over his bench and reached for me. Before he could grab me and throw me out the door, I ducked under his reaching hands and said, in a loud whisper, “Locus stones.”
The four of them stared at me, looking around to see if anybody else in the tavern had heard.
The burly man held me by the scruff of my neck, standing behind me like a wall. The woman grabbed me by the front of my ragged vest and jerked me closer to the table. “What d’you know about locus stones, gutterboy?” she hissed.
I couldn’t shrug because burly-man had a tight grip on me from behind. “I know you steal ’em,” I whispered. “And I could steal ’em, too.”
The woman’s eyes narrowed. “How’d you manage that?” she asked.
“I have quick hands,” I said.
The fourth man at the table, the skinniest one, leaned forward. “What d’you want, gutterboy?”
“What d’you think?” I asked.
From behind, burly-man gave me a rough shake. “Answer,” he growled.
Right. “I’m a thief,” I said. “I want to be a chimney swift.”
“Huh,” the woman said, and let me go. Burly-man kept his grip on my scruff. “You want to work for us, you mean?”
I nodded.
She looked past me at burly-man. “What d’you think, Drury?” she asked.
He let go of my scruff and grabbed my arm. “We take him to Sootle, is what.”
The others got up from the table and, dragging me with them, went out the door of the smokehole tavern and into the dark streets of the Twilight.
On the way out, I saw the potboy staring, and then shaking his head.
/> But I wasn’t worried. This was a very good plan.
CHAPTER
13
I figured Sootle, the chimney swifts’ leader, would be hiding out in the Twilight somewhere, but the four swifts hustled me through the dark and deserted streets and down to the bank of the river, where they shoved me into a rowboat. Two of them, the woman and the burly man, Drury, got in; the other two stayed behind on the shore. So did Pip. The cat-dragon would find me on the other side of the river. Hopefully Pip would come soon, just in case I needed to do the dazzler spell or the needle-prickler to get away from the swifts.
Drury rowed the boat across the river, past the dark and sleeping magisters’ islands. Heartsease was dark, too, except for one light shining from a window on the second floor. Hello, Nevery, I thought as the boat slipped silently past the island. He was up late, working in the study, reading a book or writing in his grimoire. If he could see me now he’d be furious, most likely, and so would Benet. So would Embre and Rowan and Kerrn, for that matter. They didn’t need to worry. Sure as sure I could look after myself.
On the other side of the river, Drury and the woman, whose name was Floss, led me down the Sunrise streets and ’round the back of a plain-fronted house and took me inside. They put me in a room and told me to wait, which I did for a long time. I listened to the tromping sound of feet in a room upstairs, and then I lay on the hard floor and fell asleep. Finally they came back and brought me down a long hallway and up some stairs and into a dim-dark room.
Three chimney swifts were sitting around a plain table with a lit candle on it. I looked carefully at them, just in case any of them were the men who’d tried to kidnap me from the Heartsease courtyard, but I’d never seen any of them before.
In the room, heavy curtains hung over the windows, and the rest of the room was empty, not even any pictures on the walls or carpets on the floor. A fireplace gaped like an empty mouth, no fire burning there. The swifts ignored us as we came in.
One of them pointed up at the ceiling. “He coming down again, Sootle?” he asked the man sitting at the end of the table.
Sootle was tall and very thin and he had a pointy nose and long, black, stringy hair with a bald patch on the top of his head; and, like the others, he was smudged with soot. “No, we’re done. The men he brought in will take care of the rest of it,” he said. “Take yourselves off. Looks like I’ve got some other business here.”
The other chimney swifts went out of the room, leaving me facing Sootle, with Drury and Floss standing behind me, blocking the door.
“Well?” Sootle asked. He looked me up and down with sharp, black eyes. “You’ve brought me a gutterboy, have you?”
“Says he knows about stolen wizard stones,” Floss said.
Sootle’s sharp eyes narrowed. “What d’you know exactly, gutterboy?”
I shrugged.
The sooty hand flashed out and he cuffed me across the face. “I asked you a question, gutterboy. Answer it.”
Shaking off the blow, I nodded. “I figured out about the stones. And I want to come work for you.”
“Do you, now? We’ll see about that. What’s your name?” Sootle asked.
“Pip,” I said. It was the first name I could think of that wasn’t my own.
“You afraid to go up a chimney, Pip?” asked Sootle.
“No,” I said. I didn’t think I was. “I’m a lockpick, too,” I added quickly.
“Are you, then?” Sootle drummed his long fingers on the tabletop. “What d’you think, Floss? Drury?”
Floss stepped back to look me over. “He’s too tall,” she said.
Sootle nodded. “He’s skinny, though. He might do. I might take him on myself. I could use an intrepid lockpicker charboy like this, especially after last night.” He got to his feet, then went to the hearth, where he squatted down, leaned into the fireplace, and looked up. “Flue’s open.” He stood. “Up you go, young Pip. Tell us about the view from the top.”
Up the chimney, he meant. All right. I went over to the fireplace and ducked inside. The brick walls of the chimney closed around me, burned black and a little wider than my shoulders. I looked up. Spiderwebs and darkness, and at the very top—way, way above—a square of dark gray, the night sky with morning coming soon.
How was I supposed to climb all the way up there?
“Get on with it, Pip,” came Sootle’s hollow voice from outside. “Or I’ll light a fire under you.”
I slid my hands along the walls. Flat bricks, gritty with soot, and then, just over my head, a brick sticking out a little farther than the others. A ledge. For climbing up! I looked and found some other ledges lower down. Kicking off my shoes and my one sock and leaving them at the bottom, I started climbing. My toes clung to the sticking-out bricks and my fingers gripped hard, pulling me up. The chimney closed in around me like a dark square tunnel, growing narrower as I went higher. Soot crumbled from the bricks and sifted down, and rubbed off as my shoulders and knees brushed the walls. I heard a rush-rush-rush of wind blowing over the top of the chimney and felt the air pull at me, just as it pulled the smoke up from the hearth.
I kept climbing, blinking to keep the soot out of my eyes, coughing when I breathed it in. At last, panting with the effort, I got to the top, where I pulled myself up, hooked my arms over the edge of the chimney, and looked around, catching my breath. Off to the east the sky was just turning the pink and gray of morning. The dark slate rooftops of the Sunrise lay all around me, chimneys sticking out of them like snaggled teeth, most of them leaking smudges of smoke. Some of them had birds’ nests built on them.
Wind whistled over the rooftops, ruffling my hair. I could see so far! The Dawn Palace loomed over the Sunrise from its hilltop, glimmering pink in the morning light.
I waved at the palace, at the ducal magister’s stuffy rooms and his closet full of fancy clothes and his cold cabbage soup, and his bag full of money. “Hello, Ro!” I shouted. With Rowan so busy, she was probably already hunched over her desk with Miss Dimity hovering over her like a vulture. I knew Rowan—she’d rather be taking a sword-fighting lesson than getting ready to go to another boring meeting. For a moment I felt sorry for her, stuck in her duchess box.
Below the palace, the city was starting to stir. I turned and looked in the other direction, toward the shadowy dark of the Twilight. In the dusty-dim light the river gleamed like slowsilver, flowing around the wizards’ islands, under the Night Bridge, and away. I took a deep breath and let it out. I felt like I could leap from the chimney and fly over the city like a black bird, free and light.
From the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of something moving, and jerked my head around to look. A cat, lurking.
“Hello, Pip,” I said, grinning. Pip bounded across the rooftiles, crawled up the outside of the chimney, and crouched next to me.
From below I heard a hollow shout. Oh, right. The swifts were down there waiting for me, and Sootle, who thought I might be frightened of climbing up a chimney.
Still grinning, I started down, skiffing from one brick-edge to the next, to the bottom, where I landed in a cloud of soot. I ducked out of the fireplace and stood.
“Well?” Sootle asked. He and Floss and Drury had been waiting, and not very patiently, by the looks of it.
I swiped at the soot on my face. “The sun’s rising,” I said. “And I could see all the way to the Twilight from up there.”
From the chimney came a scrabbling noise, and more soot sifted down. The swifts stared as Pip, covered with soot so it was completely black, dropped down into the fireplace and crawled out into the room. Its eyes gleamed red and it glared around, its tail twitching. Seeing me, it padded over, then climbed up to my shoulder.
“What is that?” Sootle asked, backing away a step when Pip turned its head to look at him.
“It’s a cat,” I said.
They stared.
Krrrr, Pip said.
“It’s purring, see?” I said. Pip opened its mouth in a yawn
, showing a row of needle-sharp teeth. “It likes chimneys,” I said. And so did I.
Floss glanced at Sootle. “He’ll do, then?” she asked.
“He’ll do,” Sootle said. He looked me over again with his sharp black eyes. “And I’ve got just the job for him.”
CHAPTER
14
Before Sootle told me what just-the-job he had for me, he took me down to the house’s cellar to meet the other chimney swift kids, seven of them, one for each swift. They were called charboys and chargirls, and they looked like they’d been charred; they were dressed in black and covered with soot from their hair to their bare feet. They were just waking up, blinking in the light of the lantern that Sootle carried down the cellar steps. The cellar didn’t look too bad. It was damp, but every kid had a woolen blanket.
“You’ll sleep here, Pip,” Sootle said to me. Then we headed back up the stairs, the charkids following, to the kitchen at the back of the house, where he left me. Another chimney swift was stirring a pot of porridge. Eggs were frying in a pan on the stove. As the kids came in, the swift gave each one a bowl of porridge with an egg on top. He gave one to me, too. We sat down on the floor and ate it with our fingers and wiped our faces on our sleeves. Pip came and sat next to me and I gave it some of my egg to eat.
The charboys and girls didn’t say anything, they just watched me and Pip with their pale eyes in their sooty faces, slurping up their egg-and-porridge. They were like the gutterkids and mudlarks. All they thought about was chimneys and what they were going to have for dinner. They didn’t have anybody to look after them, I realized. Not like I did. These kids were so busy looking after themselves that they didn’t have time for anything else.
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