The Paper Magician (The Paper Magician Series, Book 1)

by Charlie N. Holmberg

  Mg. Thane grinned. “There’s hardly one inside, is there?”

  Ceony felt herself root to the floor. Mg. Thane offered a hand to help her up, but she couldn’t lift her arms to take it. Her pulse quickened and her cheeks reddened. “I . . .” She cleared her throat. “Can we test them in the lavatory? The tub? Please?”

  He lowered his hand. “I suppose. You’re not hydrophobic, are you?”

  Ceony’s face grew hotter.

  “Oh,” he said, sobering. “I admit that surprises me. You don’t seem the type.”

  Ceony managed to loosen her shoulders enough for a shrug. “Everyone is afraid of something, right?”

  The paper magician nodded, albeit slowly. “True. Very . . . true. The tub it is, then.”

  He offered his hand a second time. Ceony grasped it and let him pull her up, getting a strange tingle in her fingertips just before he released her.

  She pressed the fingers against her cheek to cool her face. She followed Mg. Thane to the lavatory, where they crowded around the bathtub and cast the spells “Float” and “Endure” on the boats. Before hers had a chance to sink, Ceony excused herself to her room and picked up Astrology for Youth, but for some reason she had a difficult time concentrating.

  Fennel whined an airy whine at Ceony’s feet as she dropped the last fish cakes into the fryer. He wagged his tail, hopeful.

  “You can’t eat it, silly thing,” Ceony chided the paper dog, scooting him back with her foot to open the oven. She pulled from it a shallow ceramic dish filled with asparagus. She had hated asparagus until she worked as a caterer during her last year of secondary school. Apparently anyone of importance ate asparagus, so she had coaxed herself into tolerating it as well.

  The stair door opened and Mg. Thane emerged, looking somewhat less tired than he had that morning. Perhaps he had napped while Ceony cooked dinner. “Mmm,” he said. “I do hope you’re cooking for two.”

  “I’m cooking for two so long as I can burn that papier-mâché ledger without your review of it,” Ceony said. She picked up a fish cake with a fork and waved it back and forth, claiming both the magician’s and the paper dog’s attention. “It’s busywork I’d rather not finish, but if I must, I’ll finish it with a basket full of fish cakes in my lap.”

  Mg. Thane laughed. “I’m sure this sort of bribery is disapproved by the school board. I really should read those letters they send me . . .”

  Ceony let the fish cake hover, and Mg. Thane waved a hand. “Yes yes, let it burn. I’m famished.”

  Grinning at her victory, Ceony put the fish cake back and pulled the last of them from the fryer before taking the dishes to the table she had already set. Mg. Thane pulled out her chair before sitting in his own.

  “We need groceries again,” Ceony said, setting a fish cake on her plate before passing them to Mg. Thane. “And I was wondering what day of the month to expect my stipend.”

  “I shan’t ever partake of my apprentice’s cooking without discussing money, so it seems,” he replied, setting two fish cakes on his own plate. He lifted his fork, again foregoing grace. “I will, however—”

  At least one more word escaped the paper magician’s lips, but a loud explosion in the hallway muffled the sound.

  Ceony dropped the asparagus dish onto the table and whirled around, staring with wide eyes as bits of wood and paper blew in on a breeze from the hallway and drifted into the dining room. The smell of dust and paint mixed with haddock and chives. Mg. Thane leapt to his feet.

  Loud footfalls like sarcastic applause sounded in the hallway. Hard shoes with heels. Ceony stepped forward, but Mg. Thane held out his arm, stopping her. All the mirth had vanished from his face. He looked altered—not cheery nor distracted, but stony. Taller, and his coat seemed to bristle about him like a wild cat’s fur.

  A woman stepped into the dining room. She was stunning—tall with long, waving hair such a dark brown it looked almost black, coffee-colored eyes, and fair skin without the slightest trace of freckles. She wore a black shirt well fitted to her rather ample figure, tight pants with panels over the knees, and two-inch gray heels that fastened with two cords around her ankles.

  There was something familiar about her. It took Ceony only seconds to pinpoint where she’d seen this woman’s face before.

  The fortuity box.

  Mg. Thane paled. “Lira?”

  Ceony’s stomach sank. That was all the response her body could manage before the woman stepped forward, a vial of dark-red liquid clutched in her hand.

  It happened in a blur. Mg. Thane grabbed Ceony’s arm and tried to pull her behind him, but the woman, Lira, dribbled the red liquid into her hand and flung it toward Ceony, shouting, “Blast!”

  An impact like a giant fist slammed into Ceony. It knocked the air from her lungs and sent her flying into the corner of the table, hard enough that the table turned over with the impact, dumping its still-hot contents over the floor with a loud crash as ceramic plates split into hundreds of pieces across the hardwood. Ceony’s backside slammed into the dining room wall, and she slumped to the floor.

  Everything went black for a moment, then morphed into shadows and light. Ceony blinked several times as something else thumped against the wall nearby—she felt the vibrations through the wood. Her vision clear and her back throbbing, she lifted her head to see Mg. Thane pressed against the wall, held up by invisible hands. He struggled to speak, but something unseen held his jaw closed. The artery on the side of his neck had swollen.

  Ceony looked at her hands, spotting blood on them. She panicked for a split second until she realized the blood was cold and not her own. The liquid Lira had thrown at her—blood.

  Her whole body froze.

  Blood.

  Flesh magic.

  Lira was an Excisioner. A practitioner of the forbidden craft.

  Ceony looked back up to see Lira grab Mg. Thane’s collar and rip it down clear to his sternum, exposing his chest. “I’m finally leaving, dearie,” she whispered, “and I’m taking you with me.”

  She plunged her right hand into his chest. Ceony stifled a cry. A golden ring of dust sparkled about Lira’s wrist as Mg. Thane screamed between clenched teeth. Lira pulled her red-stained hand back out, clasping a still-beating heart between her bloodied fingers.

  Sweat beaded on Ceony’s forehead and temples. Her own heart sped in her chest, making her dizzy.

  Put your head down! she thought, skin cold. She tried to feign unconsciousness, but her body trembled and tears drizzled from her eyes. If this woman could so easily defeat Mg. Thane, then she would kill Ceony in an instant. She likely had meant to.

  The heels clicked against the floor. Ceony opened her eyes, peering between toppled chairs. Lira dripped several droplets of Thane’s blood into her palm, smiled, then threw the blood to the floor. She vanished in a swirl of red smoke.

  Ceony cried out the moment the woman faded. Scrambling to her feet, her hips screaming with deep-set bruises, she ran to Mg. Thane. Before she reached him, the spell holding him up wore off and he slumped to the floor.

  CHAPTER 6

  “NO, NO!” CEONY CRIED, tears streaming readily from her cheeks. She put an arm behind Mg. Thane’s neck and laid him down, gaping at the deep, scarlet hole in his chest, still rimmed with glittering gold magic. The hole grew smaller and smaller with each of her own heartbeats.

  Fennel whined beside her, an airy, paper whine. Ceony, shaking, looked to the dog, then back to Mg. Thane, his skin growing paler and paler with each passing second.

  She bolted upright and ran for the study, knocking a kitchen chair out of her way as she went.

  Her mind swirled, her legs felt numb, and her hands perspired as she climbed over rubble in the hallway that had once been the front door and threw herself into the study. She ran for the shelves of paper, frantically sifting through them until she foun
d a thicker piece. Not the thickest, but she had no time to be choosy.

  She ran back into the dining room and slipped on spilled blood. She stumbled onto her knees and winced, but began Folding right there, against the wooden floorboards. She didn’t know the Folds—she couldn’t—but she had to try.

  Visions of Mg. Thane’s handiwork zoomed through her mind. His Folding of the bird, the fish, the fortuity box. The paper trinkets, sculptures, and chains lying around the house. The few lessons on paper magic she had taken notes on at the school. The half-point Fold, the full-point Fold. Folds she didn’t know the names of. Anything. Just line the edges up.

  She Folded the paper in half, then in half again, working it until she had the square that started Mg. Thane’s long-necked bird. From there she made up the rest, her brain summoning images from Anatomy of the Human Body. Her hands stilled. It looked something like a heart. Something like it . . .

  She crawled to Mg. Thane, to the still-closing pit in his chest, and commanded the heart, “Breathe!”

  It pumped weakly in her hands. She pushed it into the bloody cavity and withdrew her hands just before Mg. Thane’s skin closed around it.

  The paper magician didn’t stir.

  “Please,” she cried, his blood on her fingers. She patted his cheeks, slapped them, pressed her ear to his chest. She could hear the paper heart pumping weakly, like the heart of an old man on his deathbed.

  He didn’t stir.

  “You have to live!” she screamed at him, tears falling from her chin onto his chest. If magic couldn’t save him . . . this was all she had!

  Breaths coming in short gasps, Ceony stood, ran up the stairs, and bolted to the library. Grabbing the telegraph, she connected the wires to the one person whose route she knew—Mg. Aviosky.

  Her trembling fingers punched in the code quickly. She swallowed against a dry throat.

  thane hurt stop come immediately stop emergency stop excisioner stole his heart stop

  She backed away from the telegraph as though it were a corpse and pressed her palm to her mouth to suppress a sob.

  Fennel barked at her feet, jumping wildly on his paper legs.

  As soon as Ceony glanced at the dog, Fennel darted into the hallway. Ceony ran after him, following him back down the stairs and into the dining room. She heard Thane’s rasping breath just before she saw him.

  “Thane!” she cried, dropping to her knees beside him.

  He looked dead, his eyes merely slits and his veins showing through his white skin. He tried to lift a finger to point, but dropped it. “Window,” he said, the words straining through his throat. “Second . . . chain. Get . . .”

  Ceony jumped up and ran back into the study, distinctly remembering the chains hanging over the window there. She counted the second one from the left and pulled it down, a tightly knit chain made of Folded rectangles. She also grabbed the second from the right, a looping chain of ovals.

  Rushing back into the dining room, she showed them to Thane. “Which one?” she asked.

  He weakly jerked his chin toward the tight-knit chain made of rectangles. “Around . . . chest,” he whispered.

  Pinching the end of the chain, Ceony leaned over Thane and pushed it under his back, then brought it forward over his chest so that the ends overlapped.

  “Ease,” Thane said weakly, and the chain tightened about him at the command. Thane sucked in a deep breath of air and coughed.

  Ceony lifted his head to help him. When he finished, he opened his eyes and looked at her.

  She gasped. His eyes . . .

  Their light had vanished.

  No brightness, no emotion. Just dead, glass eyes.

  Her tears started anew.

  “I telegrammed Magician Aviosky,” she said, every other word shuddering in her throat. “She’ll be here. Someone will be here to help you.”

  “That was wise,” he said, his weakened voice almost a monotone. “The closest doctor is . . . far.”

  “Oh heaven,” Ceony whispered, pushing locks of hair from Mg. Thane’s forehead. “What has she done to you?”

  “Lira . . . took my heart,” he said matter-of-factly. Like a talking textbook.

  “I know,” Ceony whispered. “Why?”

  “To stop me.”

  “From what?”

  But Mg. Thane didn’t answer. His glassy eyes shifted slowly about their sockets, taking in the room with no expression.

  Ceony kept brushing his forehead, even when she had pushed back all his black locks. “What is the chain?” she asked, wiping her cheek on her shoulder. If she could just keep him talking . . .

  “A vitality chain,” he said quietly, his dull eyes now focused on the ceiling above him. “It will keep this new heart beating, for a time.”

  “A time?”

  “A paper heart will not last long, especially one crafted poorly,” he said. “The chain will make it last a day, two at best.”

  “But you can’t die!” Ceony cried, and Mg. Thane didn’t so much as flinch at the volume, or at the tear that struck him on the bridge of his nose. He didn’t seem aware of her at all. “You have too much to teach me! And you’re too nice to die!”

  He made no response.

  Gently setting his head down, Ceony stood and retreated to the front room, stepping over debris and wiping away tears that refused to stop running from her eyes. She took a pillow from the couch and a blanket from a chest shoved behind it and tried to make Mg. Thane as comfortable as possible, for she dared not try to move him. Fennel sat by his side, still whining and wagging his tail anxiously behind him.

  Two hours after sunset, three people climbed their way over the rubble-filled hallway and into the dining room. Ceony knew all three, if two only from memory. Mg. John Katter, a Smelter, and Mg. Alfred Hughes, the Siper, both sat on the Magicians’ Cabinet—Katter for Agriculture and Hughes for Criminal Affairs. Mg. Aviosky stood among them.

  Ceony, who had cried herself sore and dry, retold the story with every detail she could muster, including her reading on Mg. Thane with the fortuity box. She wondered if, perhaps, she had mistakenly willed Lira’s appearance, and that this was all her fault.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Mg. Aviosky assured her as Magicians Katter and Hughes studied Mg. Thane lying on the floor by the light of four candles. “The only one who can manipulate Emery Thane’s future is Emery Thane himself.”

  Mg. Hughes hovered over Mg. Thane for some time, prodding his neck and chest with rubber gloves. Ceony knew he was a Siper, and she wondered, briefly, if the gloves were enchanted, especially since he tucked the pair into his coat pocket instead of tossing them in the trash. “It’s Excision work all right,” he said in low tones, “and powerful at that. I thought the wards would keep them from coming here, Lira especially.”

  “Wards?” Ceony asked, heart thumping. “What wards? Why would she hurt Magician Thane? Who is she?”

  Mg. Hughes frowned and stroked his short, white beard. Mg. Aviosky put a hand on Ceony’s shoulder and said, “Perhaps you should go to bed, Miss Twill. You’ve had a hard day.”

  “No!” Ceony cried. “You have to let me stay here with him. You have to let me help!”

  Mg. Aviosky frowned, and in the dim lighting it made her look much older, and much taller. “You may no longer be a pupil at Tagis Praff, Miss Twill, but you are still under the board’s jurisdiction. Go upstairs and get some rest. It is not a request. I will discuss matters further with you in the morning.”

  Ceony’s skeleton slumped within her skin. She stepped away from Mg. Hughes so she could see Mg. Thane on the floor. His eyes were closed and his breathing sounded even, albeit faint. Mg. Katter scribbled something in a notepad beside him.

  Clutching her hands over her breast, Ceony stepped past Mg. Thane, watching him, and took to the stairs. Mg. Hughes shut the door behind her, b
ut she knew he didn’t lock it, since he wouldn’t have the key to do so.

  Hesitating for a moment, Ceony tromped up the stairs and to her bedroom door, where she then slipped off her shoes and carefully, very carefully, snuck her way back downstairs, skipping the squeaky ninth step.

  She squatted on the first stair, shying away from the thin light filtering through the door’s keyhole, and listened.

  “. . . getting close,” Mg. Hughes’s voice said quietly. “Emery’s the one who tipped us off for the Lillith capture, if you remember. That was less than two months ago.”

  “But have there been attempts on the other members?” Mg. Aviosky said, sounding very worried. More worried than Ceony had ever heard her sound.

  “Magician Karl Tode was killed yesterday morning in a similar manner,” Mg. Hughes replied. “A hunter, like Emery. But it wasn’t Lira’s handiwork. She’s . . . much cleaner than her accomplices.”

  Mg. Katter said, “But that’s it. Nothing else since they took out Piper last year. Don’t you remember what Gabon Suter said when we arrested him? Reeling around in his chair like a madman . . . ‘We’ll get the rest. Hunt us down like animals, but we’ll turn on you . . .’ ”

  “It could just be a personal vendetta in this case,” Mg. Aviosky said. “Unless my information on their relationship isn’t accurate.”

  “ ‘I’m leaving,’ ” Mg. Hughes said, repeating the words Ceony had related to him, “ ‘and I’m taking you with me.’ That’s all she said. No letters, no ceremony. I know this woman, Patrice. She wouldn’t just do the deed for revenge and not make a show of it, unless she did so outside of Miss Twill’s witness.”

  “Perhaps,” Mg. Katter cut in, “she’s finally gotten smart. In and out, job done.”

  Mg. Hughes said, “No. Not her.” He paused. “She knows Emery is critical to the syndicate, they all do. He’s personally invested in it. That, and she’s always kept a . . . keen . . . interest in him.”