Magic Steps

by Tamora Pierce

  Sandry looked from Lark to Yazmín. Was help for Pasco in sight? “You know a dance-mage?” she asked.

  “I’ve never even heard of one,” said Yazmín. “I’ve seen shamans work dance spells, just as Lark has, but that isn’t the only way they do their magic.”

  Sandry told herself she should have known she hadn’t gotten that lucky. “Then you can recommend a teacher for his dancing? I’ll pay his fees,” she assured Yazmín. “I can’t teach him myself — I know very few dances, and I’m not any good at them.”

  Yazmín folded her hands in her lap. They were covered with designs in henna, Sandry noticed, and henna had been used to put red tones in the dancer’s hair. She painted her face, too, using kohl to line her eyes and a red coloring on her mouth.

  “Actually, I hoped to teach him myself,” Yazmín explained. “You see, I retired this year. I’ve been a traveling dancer for—”

  “Twenty-three years,” murmured Lark.

  Yazmín wrinkled her nose. “You had to remind me. I would have been content with just ‘a long time.’”

  Sandry giggled, and Yazmín smiled at her. “You aren’t like most nobles I’ve met,” she commented. “Lark said you weren’t.” She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “This summer I opened a school on Festival Street. It’s an old warehouse, not fancy, but it’s a place where dancers and acrobats can stay and train during the winter. And I’ve tried to learn the local dances everywhere I’ve ever been. Your boy could study with me. Between you, me, and Lark, we can craft the kind of spells your boy could do.”

  “I think you’re the answer to my prayers,” replied Sandry with relief. “The longer I know him, the more of a handful he is.”

  “Tell me,” Yazmín ordered.

  Sandry did, starting with what she had seen on the beach of the fishing village only two short mornings ago, and going straight on through the foul-up that had set three people hanging in midair. She had finished describing her conversation with Pasco’s formidable mother at the end of her visit to House Acalon when the door opened and the duke came in.

  “My dear, I heard Dedicate Lark was with you and came to say hello,” Vedris explained as they all got to their feet.

  Lark bowed slightly — temple dedicates were not expected to show great courtesies to nobility. “It’s very good to see your grace,” she told him with a smile. “You’re looking well this morning.”

  The duke smiled back at her. “The loan of my great-niece has much to do with that, I believe.”

  “It’s good to know she’s valued as she ought to be,” replied Lark. “Your grace, may I present my friend Yazmín Hebet?”

  Yazmín curtsied deeply, so graceful that Sandry was envious: while she could curtsy well, she was always afraid her knees might creak. When the dancer rose, she offered a hand. The duke bowed and kissed it, then released her. “I am a very great admirer of yours,” he confessed. “I’ve seen you dance on many occasions.”

  Yazmín smiled at him. “I have seen your grace at quite a few of my local performances,” she remarked. “I’m honored that I was able to entertain you.”

  “Shall I have the pleasure of seeing you perform this winter?” asked the duke. “I have been considering opening this place up and entertaining a bit, if Sandry would like to be my hostess.”

  “Yazmín was just saying that she has retired, Uncle,” Sandry pointed out.

  “Oh, well, I don’t plan to give it all up,” protested Yazmín. “Certainly I’d be delighted to dance for your grace.”

  “Then I must arrange something.” Vedris motioned for the women to sit, and took a chair himself. “Dare I hope you’re here to advise my niece regarding her new student?”

  Sandry explained as Lark and Yazmín added details. The duke had a few suggestions for spells they could try in dances, in part because he had seen much more of Yazmín’s repertoire than had Sandry, and in part because he had dealt with mages all his life. Twice Yazmín made him laugh, something that Sandry observed with interest.

  When the maid who’d directed Sandry to the room came with a tray of refreshments, she took one look at the gathering and disappeared again. She came back with all that would be needed to serve four instead of three. Once she had set out the food and filled their cups, she left the room. She soon returned, plainly unhappy, curtsied to the duke, and said, “My apologies, your grace, but that mage my lady provost keeps has been worriting the footmen—”

  “If you’d just told his grace I was here, I wouldn’t have ‘worrited’ anyone, would I?” inquired Wulfric Snaptrap, coming in on the girl’s heels. “I told you I needed his grace and my lady right away.” His sharp eyes swept the room and returned to Lark. “Though actually I wouldn’t mind getting Dedicate Lark’s opinion, either. It’s news that should go back to the temple in any case.”

  Yazmín got to her feet. “Perhaps I should go,” she said politely. “My lady, you and your boy can stop by my school whenever you like.”

  “I see no reason for you to leave, if we may be assured of your discretion,” said the duke. “Unless you have pressing errands elsewhere?”

  Yazmín resumed her seat. “None, your grace. You have my word that nothing said here will ever be repeated by me.” She touched an index finger to her lips and kissed it in promise of silence. The duke smiled.

  Sandry raised her eyebrows. Was Yazmín flirting? She glanced at Lark, who winked at her. Now, here’s an idea, Sandry thought as Wulfric pulled up a chair and the maid left them. Uncle needs someone who can make him laugh. Maybe a romance would do him good. It’s been years since his wife died. I know he’s lonely.

  You aren’t even sure Yazmín is interested, she told herself.

  “Is anyone eating these?” asked Wulfric, eyeing the pastries. The duke told him to help himself and he did. Soon the maid had returned with another tray and a glass for the provost’s mage. Once she was gone, Wulfric looked at the duke and said, “I experimented with the magic Lady Sandrilene took off your Guardsmen. We’ve a problem and a half. The half is dragonsalt. The mage who cast that dark magic is an addict.”

  “How do you know that?” Sandry asked, fascinated.

  Wulfric smiled. “At Lightsbridge, where harrier-mages train, they teach all manner of spells to detect things. I’ve only performed the dragonsalt cantrip twice before, but I’d a hunch it might work.”

  “Wulfric,” the duke said, quietly amused, “if we may continue with your report? You and my niece may talk of magical practice another time.”

  “My report. Oh, right.” Wulfric buttered a scone. “Well, if our mage is a dragonsalt addict, it could be his supplier is in Summersea. My lady provost has the street Guards looking for a ’salt peddler. My guess is, whoever brought the mage brought the drug. The locals won’t sell it, not with your grace’s penalties.”

  “Dragonsalt is the most vile drug brewed. I won’t have it here,” the duke said firmly. “You claim a problem and a half, Wulfric. If dragonsalt is the half, what is the whole?”

  “We’ve a mage who deals in—” Wulfric hesitated. “‘Unmagic’ is the best term. It’s — nothingness.”

  “The absence of all else — of light, magic, existence,” Lark said, her eyes troubled. “You’re certain, Master Snaptrap?”

  “I’ve been at this for thirty years, Dedicate,” Wulfric informed her tartly. “I’m not likely to mistake something that marked.”

  “My apologies,” replied Lark. “It’s just so rare …”

  “You never mentioned it,” remarked Sandry, puzzled. “None of you mentioned it to us.” She meant herself and her three friends.

  “There was no reason to,” Lark replied. “None of you showed the least aptitude for it, Mila and Green Man be praised. Unmagic is so rare we never thought you’d encounter it.”

  “It’s a blight as much as magic,” Wulfric muttered.

  “What can you do with it?” Sandry asked.

  “Murder people in plain view, it would seem,” re
marked the duke, grim-faced. “Walk past human guards and protective spells with no one to suspect you’re there.”

  “People also use it to collapse distances and walk between places, if they can bear it,” Lark added. “One man who jumped from Lightsbridge to Nidra through unmagic lay in a fever for a year, raving. Later he wrote that his senses all went dead; he was trapped inside his own mind.”

  “Can you find who’s using it, now that you know what it is?” inquired Yazmín. “If no one minds my asking,” she added when they all looked at her.

  “It’s not that simple,” Wulfric replied.

  Lark nodded. “It’s an absence more than anything. It’s hard to track nothing down. I’ll bring it before our mage council, but I don’t believe there’s any way to pick it out, because it isn’t really here.”

  Yazmín shivered. “It sounds like you’d have to be crazy to use it.”

  “That’s the one thing we can be sure of,” replied Wulfric. “The poor bleater that’s using it is going mad. That’s the nature of it, don’t you see. When you have magic, you have life itself. That’s what it’s made of. But this nothingness, it’s the absence of life, isn’t it?”

  “The absence of hope, feeling,” continued Lark. “The more it’s used, the greater its hold on the mage. And if he’s taking dragonsalt to manage it, that just makes it worse. The gods help anyone who gets close. His madness will spread, infecting those around him.”

  “Me, I handle it with gloves and glass instruments,” said Wulfric, his eyes bleak. “I don’t want it getting under my skin.”

  Lark got to her feet with a sigh. “You were right, Master Snaptrap, I need to let the mage council know as soon as possible.”

  She returned to Winding Circle, but the rest of them stayed, and Baron Erdogun joined them. Sandry heard then that those Rokats still in Summersea were being placed under increased guard, one that even killers spelled to be nothing would have to be wary of.

  They were getting clever, Alzena thought as she watched the house on Tapestry Lane. It was the home of Fariji Rokat, one of the Rokat House clerks. In their inspection the previous night, she and Nurhar had sensed watchers. Two large beggars dozed near the corner of Yanjing Street, in a neighborhood where servants quickly sent riffraff on their way. The maids who opened the doors and shutters on the houses facing Rokat’s were very muscular. They didn’t look like civilians at all, but like guards out of uniform. Archers patroled the rooftops along the street. A trip through Cod Alley behind the house showed gardeners and menservants who played dominoes with hands that were blue-knuckled and callused from fighting.

  It was to be expected after the first two murders. Alzena and Nurhar had provided for it. This Rokat’s protectors were no more imaginative than the Rokat guards in Bihan and Janaal had been.

  They had not thought to put more than one disguised guard in front of the stable on Cod Alley that served the Tapestry Lane houses. They had not thought that Nurhar could pass the guard unseen, to leave a small keg of the very flammable jelly called battlefire in the hayloft. They had not thought that the bunch of rough types — draymen, coal carriers, and the like — that came roistering down Tapestry Lane now, after a night of spending Nurhur’s coin in a nearby wineshop, might have an argument not far from Rokat’s house. Hiring the rough folk had been the trickiest part: unless watched, they would drink up their fee before they were needed. Nurhar had stayed with them until half an hour ago, doling out coins one at a time, buying food to make sure a few heads would be clear enough to remember their orders.

  Alzena stepped onto a window ledge on Rokat’s neighbor’s house. Her target’s roof was less than a story below. Scouting the areas around some of the less wealthy Rokats’ homes had been a task she and Nurhar had done before they went near Jamar. This location had been the best; they had saved it for when Duke Vedris decided to give protection to the Rokat scum. Before dawn Alzena had walked across roofs to get here, unseen and unsuspected by the archers, and had entered her current place through the rooftop door. The house’s occupants were up and around, but Alzena ignored them. Her sanctuary was their unused nursery. No one had entered it yet that morning, which saved her the trouble of killing them. From here it was a four-foot leap to her target’s flat roof.

  The roughs were a hundred yards away, lurching closer as they argued.

  Peering through the slit in the spells that hid her, Alzena saw a cloud of smoke rise behind the houses. Nurhar’s fire arrows had set the Cod Alley stable roof ablaze.

  The roughs were fifty yards off. A hamlike fist swung; Alzena heard furious snarls. Two of them waded into each other. Their friends tried to pull them apart, then joined in. Alzena watched. A few house doors opened: those suspicious-looking servants peered out. If they were Provost’s Guards in disguise, they would be uneasy. This was a prosperous street. Peacekeepers here moved troublemakers on in a hurry. It would go against their training to stand by during a brawl.

  Here came the supposed beggars to watch, maybe to interfere. Now all of the roughs were punching, kicking, wrestling. One of the beggars moved in and went flying. A manservant ran out of a house and dove into the fight, as did the second beggar.

  Alzena grinned. Now the other false servants would watch their comrades in the fray — not Rokat’s house, or anything that took place three stories overhead.

  Hot air patted her; a flat boom sounded from the alley. The keg of battlefire in the burning stable had caught and exploded. Bells pealed and horns called, summoning everyone to fight the blaze. The archers on top of Rokat’s house ran to the back of the flat roof.

  Alzena checked her rope to make sure it was properly anchored, then jumped out and across from her window to her target. She landed with a thud that went unheard in the fire alarms’ racket. Off with the rope. Walking cat-footed, Alzena reached the door to the house, and eased herself inside. The archers, watching the fire as it tried to jump from the stable to the neighboring buildings, never looked behind them.

  Two guards in the garret below had gone to stare out of the tiny dormer window at the fire. Alzena was past them and down the stairs, into the house proper, with no one the wiser.

  The family’s protectors had moved them to the nursery, the biggest room on the floor below the garret. A nursemaid was playing with the baby in its crib while the young mother spun and told a story to the little girl. Fariji Rokat paced, his dark face tight.

  Alzena drew her knife and killed the baby first, one cut, while the maid stared. When she screamed, the mother leaped up so quickly that she knocked over the little girl and the spinning wheel. The mother raced over to see what had become of the infant. Alzena killed the girl-child as she began to cry.

  Fariji looked right at them. What did he see? Her knife was spelled with unmagic, like the sword she now drew from the sheath on her back. Rokat wouldn’t see the blade, only his little girl as she fell over, bleeding.

  He gasped and lunged for the child, just as his wife had gone for the baby. Alzena stepped into his rush and cut at his neck, smiling. He had seen his children die. That was good.

  She stuffed his head into her carry-pouch and turned to regard the woman and the maid. They stared at Fariji Rokat’s headless body, screaming. Alzena hesitated. Was the woman pregnant again? She was young; they had seemed much in love.

  No use taking chances, Alzena thought, and ran the woman through. Going to the side window, she climbed out. Below her was a first-story addition to the house. She dropped onto it with a clatter of tiles.

  She felt an arrow’s bite. It took her in the calf, punching through the bulge of muscle to the other side. Alzena cursed and rolled off the tile roof. She landed easily on the pile of hay that lay on the ground, waiting for the servants to cover the garden for the winter. More arrows flew around her — the quick-witted archer was shooting fast, trying to hit what he couldn’t see. She waited until a man ran out the back door, then slipped into the Rokat house. The real servants had been sent away — only war
riors in street clothes were here now, and most of them were running upstairs in answer to the nursemaid’s shrieks.

  In the room near the front door Alzena stopped to deal with her injury. First she broke off the arrowhead, then yanked the shaft from her leg. Both went into her carry-pouch with the head; she dared not leave them for any harrier-mages to use. There was some blood, not a lot, and most was going into her boot. If she tried to bandage it here, people would see the bandage apparently floating in midair outside the nothingness spells.

  She limped out of the house and into the street. The roughs were still fighting. From the sounds that came from Cod Alley, the fire was out of control. She hobbled down Tapestry Lane, shaking her head.

  There ought to be fun in this victory over the hated Rokats. Even the prospect of her family’s pleasure in what she did seemed unimportant now. Before coming to the house she had worried about killing the children, but when her work got to that, she had been cold. What was the point to any of this, if she felt nothing?

  8

  After lunch, Sandry remembered that she needed some copper beads for a trim on one of her uncle’s tunics. Like any noble she could have asked the merchant, whose shop lay on Arrow Road in the eastern part of the city, to send a clerk to her with a selection, but it was too nice a day to stay indoors. The bead merchant, a woman she and Lark dealt with often, was delighted to see her, and had a dozen new types of bead to show her. With a number of packages tucked into her saddlebags, Sandry and her guards turned back toward Duke’s Citadel. They decided to cross town on Yanjing Street rather than tangle in the afternoon crowds on streets like Harbor, Gold, and Spicer. They were a block west of Market Square when Kwaben pointed out a billow of smoke ahead, marking a fire. As they rode closer — the blaze was on one of the little streets that emptied onto Yanjing — they began to hear talk. A bunch of drunks brawling had started it, some people argued. Others said that Provost’s Guards were protecting a merchant from assassins, and the killers had started the fire.