by P. T. Hylton
And then there was the Blue Wall, so named because of the eerie way it glowed in the moonlight. She could see it as she walked. It was less than a block to the south, and it towered over this neighborhood and cast a shadow under which these people spent their lives.
The only thing worse than the Blue Wall was the thought of what was on the other side of it: the elvish ghetto.
She shuddered just looking at the stone structure.
Lily turned her eyes and her thoughts elsewhere.
A few minutes later, she stopped in front of a small shop and looked up at the sign. Vander’s. And below that in smaller, elegant letters, World-Class Thorns. The sign hung askew; it was a wonder the thing hadn’t fallen and caved in someone’s head. It had been tasteful once, she could tell that much, but the letters were peeling now. She took a deep breath and opened the door.
A tiny bell announced her entry into the dim shop, and as she stepped inside a man sprinted out of the backroom. When he saw her, he made a visible effort to change the frantic expression on his face to one more befitting a cordial shopkeeper.
He clasped his hands in front of him and smiled. He was still out of breath, and his voice sounded strained when he spoke. “Good morning, miss. How may I help you today?”
The man looked to be in his mid-forties; too young to be Vander. A son maybe? Or an employee? On the other hand, this seemed like a one-man operation, and a sloppy one at that.
She cast her eyes around the dusty shop. The merchandise was set haphazardly on the shelves. She couldn’t see any order to their placement. This seemed like the type of shop that sold magics likely to backfire on their users
“Is Mr. Vander here?” Lily asked.
The man’s smile looked artificial, as if frozen on his face. “He’s not. He retired years ago.”
Lily clenched her teeth. Another morning wasted and another social assignment she’d failed.
“My name’s Wen,” the man continued. “I promise I can help you just as well as Mr. Vander could. You’re looking for thorns?”
“I’m looking for information,” she said, and from the way the man’s face grew cold she knew it’d been the wrong thing to say. She was coming on too strong. Again. Damn these social assignments.
“We deal in thorns here. Not information. If you’re looking to incapacitate, injure, or otherwise dispatch an enemy, I can help you. Otherwise, I’ll wish you a fine day.”
Lily had to try another approach, and quickly. She looked around the shop. “I’m curious why a shop that sells thorns has such a problem with shoplifters.”
His jaw went slack. “How did you—”
“Please.”
She’d known the instant he’d come running out of that backroom at the sound of the doorbell, like a man defending his home from intruders rather than a shopkeeper greeting customers. “Let me guess, they come in groups, teenagers mostly. They spread out so it’s hard to keep an eye on all of them. Then they start asking questions, distracting you, deflecting your attention back and forth to different corners of the store until one or more of them can slip something into a pocket. But aren’t they afraid of the thorns? Seems like an awfully dangerous shop to steal from.”
Wen sighed. “It adds to the challenge. They look much better in front of their friends after stealing from a thornsman. And what am I supposed to do? If I use a thorn on one of those kids, I’ll hear it from the Abditus Society. I could lose my shop. Besides, I don’t even know which one of them is doing it most of the time. There are so many of them. What can I do? Zap them?”
“Absolutely,” Lily said. “Take a smaller thorn, maybe something that produces fire, and leave it on that shelf in that corner over there. No real customer is going to wander over to the spookiest corner in a thorn shop and start picking stuff up. So, you leave it activated, an aspiring criminal gets a few severe burns, and maybe they leave you alone for a while.”
“And maybe he drops the thorn and burns down my shop.”
Lily shrugged. “Okay, maybe not a fire thorn then. Got anything with spikes?”
Wen smiled. “I like the way you think.”
She kept her face calm, but on the inside she was absolutely beaming. She was engaging in social banter! Which could lead to actual social discussion. Which could lead to information. “I was wondering if you would answer a few questions about Vander.”
His smile shrank just a hair. “Sure. If you answer me one first. Who the hell are you and why the hell are you asking about Vander?”
She paused for only a moment before speaking. “It’s a legal matter. There’s been a dispute about who created a thorn a man on the north side of town has been selling. He’s been doing very well. Some members of the Abditus Society suspect it’s a rip off of one of Vander’s creations. If it’s found Vander has a legal claim to the device, he’ll be looking at a significant financial settlement.”
Wen was standing very still now. “Is that so?”
Lily nodded. “We’d be willing to award you a finder’s fee if you can help us find him.” She pulled four gold pieces out of her pocket and showed them to the man.
His eyes grew wide, and she silently cursed. She’d flashed too much coin.
“That’s got to be a quarter of a throne there,” Wen said. “You must want him bad.”
Lily said nothing, but she slipped her other hand into her cloak and clutched at the handle of her dagger.
He nodded toward the hand in her cloak. “That’s how it is? The coin if I talk and the blade if I don’t.”
“As I said, this is an important matter to the Abditus Society.”
Wen sighed. “I don’t believe your story for a moment. You out to kill him or just to arrest him?”
“Neither,” she said. “I just need to ask him some questions.”
He thought about that for a moment. “Damn shame. I would have told you all about the old man if I’d thought you were going to kill him.”
She kept her face still. Give away nothing, Zane always said, not even a smile.
He nodded toward the backroom. “Come on back then. You bring the gold and I’ll pour the drinks.”
She followed him through the doorway and into the dank living quarters. He led her into the small kitchen. He brushed the crumbs off the two chairs on either side of the small table and gestured for her to sit. He pulled the stopper out of a bottle of dark liquid, and the smell of alcohol drifted to Lily’s nose.
“Want a drink?” he asked.
Lily flashed back to the ship captain who’d asked her the same thing a few days earlier. Men were always offering her drinks and they never expected her to accept them. One of these days, she’d surprise them. But not today.
“No thank you. I never accept a drink from an abditus. No offense.”
He laughed at that. “Good policy, but not something you have to worry about with me. What do you want to know about Vander?”
“Tell me how you came to know him,” she said.
Wen took a long pull off the bottle of liquor before speaking. “How do you think? I was his apprentice.”
There it was. It always came back to that, didn’t it? Sins and stories were passed down from master to apprentice over and over for all of time.
“And you decided to stay on with him after your apprenticeship ended?”
He chuckled. “Not exactly. More like this was the island I stayed on after all the bridges around me had burned.”
Lily wasn’t sure what to say to that.
“Remember,” Wen said, “when you took your Tens? I assume it was the same for you as it was for me. A few weeks after the test, some men came to your home and told your family you’d be leaving to start your formal education. They didn’t say you had to go with them, but it was implied you would. Most parents don’t consider saying no if their child is selected as one of the special ones. The promise of a better life and all that.”
“I remember,” Lily said. It hadn’t gone that way for her, not exactly, b
ut she wasn’t about to share the details.
“Well, when I got to the preparatory school, I overheard some of the teachers talking. They said I’d gotten the highest test score in abditus aptitude of anyone in my year. Fourth highest since Irving Farns himself.”
Lily did an admirable job of not reacting to the name Farns.
“I was scared, like everybody else,” Wen continued. “But having overheard that lit a fire inside of me. I worked hard and graduated top of my class.”
She couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow at that. The valedictorian had ended up here, living in squalor, worrying about shoplifters? Lily had only been third in her class.
“As you might imagine, I was thrilled when George Vander selected me to be his apprentice. I’d been interested in making glides. I love watching objects move through space. But when the most important thornsman of his era calls your name, you don’t say no.”
“Did he have this shop back then?” Lily asked.
“Oh yes. Most thornsmen concentrate on production and let merchants sell their products. Vander handled it all himself, creation to sale. And this place was something special back then. You should have seen it. People came from all over to buy Vander’s thorns. They weren’t even deterred by the proximity to the Blue Wall. This neighborhood was different then. Vander’s shop elevated the whole area.”
“So what happened?”
As soon as she’d asked the question, she realized it probably sounded rude. If so, Wen didn’t seem to notice.
“He put me to work running day-to-day operations here at the shop almost immediately. He’d disappear for days at a time, stopping in only periodically to drop off new inventory and check the books. At first, I thought he was testing me. Like he wanted to see how I handled myself before he trained me to make thorns. But it turned out that wasn’t the case. As he came to trust me more, his visits to the shop became less frequent. I often went weeks without seeing him. This went on for years. He’d show up with supplies of new thorns, check the accounts, and sign off on my progress toward becoming a thornsman. That was ridiculous, of course. He hadn’t taught me a damn thing. But when the master says you’re ready…”
“Yeah,” Lily said. She bit her lip. It was a bad situation, but hardly unheard of. In a system where apprenticeship was the only path to professional legitimacy, some professionals took advantage of the apprentices, using them more as slave labor than trainees. Lily knew she was lucky in that regard; Zane was hard on her at times, but he made sure she was learning.
“After a few years of shopkeeping, during which I learned absolutely nothing about thorn making, Vander called me into this kitchen and offered me a drink, same as I just offered you. He told me he was retiring. And then he really surprised me. He said he was giving me his shop, everything in it, and the rights to continue using his name on the sign.”
“He just gave it to you? No strings?”
“No strings.” Wen smiled bitterly. “I was thrilled. The shop was still popular then, and I was doing a fine job of running it, if I do say so. Owning the shop was my ticket to wealth. It would be easy money, and lots of it. Vander had a solicitor draw up the papers, we both signed, and I never saw him again.”
“So what happened?” Lily asked. “To the shop I mean?”
Wen grinned, revealing a set of teeth that looked too big for his mouth. “What, this doesn’t strike you as a thriving business?”
Lily shrugged. “I haven’t heard the doorbell chime since we’ve been sitting here chatting.”
“You won’t either. Not unless it’s those damn kids.” Wen took another drink. “Things went fine the first year or so. I had plenty of inventory. The money was rolling in as quickly as ever, and I got to keep every copper. Sure, the neighborhood was going a bit further downhill. But I wasn’t worried about that part of it. The neighborhood had never been the draw.”
“What were you worried about?”
He leaned in close and the smell of sweet liquor was powerful on his breath when he spoke. “The merchandise. By the end of that first year, I was beginning to run out of some of our more popular thorns. And I had no idea how to replace them. If your mentor doesn’t teach you anything, you don’t know how to do your job.”
Lily nodded and gave a sympathetic smile.
“I should have gone to the Abditus Society immediately. Asked for help. They probably would have taken the store from me, but they’d have given me a new mentor. It would have been worth it in the long run. I wasn’t thinking long term. I was just a kid. I was prideful.”
“What did you do?”
Wen chuckled. “I tried to figure out the thorns. Pulled them apart to see what made them tick. I had a natural aptitude for it, after all. Top of my class.”
“How’d that go for you?”
He held up his right hand, and she saw it was missing the ring and middle fingers. “Turns out you can’t see everything about how they work by pulling them apart. That’s why we call it magic. I started experimenting based on the limited knowledge I had from preparatory school. And I think I did an admirable job figuring it out, all things considered. I can make knockoffs of some of the most popular thorns around, and they even work like they’re supposed to seventy or eighty percent of the time. Wasn’t quite good enough for the customers, though. Turns out the rich are willing to step into the shadow of the Blue Wall for the best thorns in the world, but not for slightly below average ones.”
“Why’d you stick it out?” Lily asked. She was genuinely curious. “Why not move? Close up shop and do something else?”
Wen shrugged. “Pride, I suppose. That’s part of it, anyway. Another part of me’s hoped George Vander would walk through that door someday and make things right. Maybe give me a whole new batch of thorns. You hear about Irving Farns’s daughter showing up at Volst Hall?”
“I did,” Lily said.
“Yeah, well, I guess I was hoping something like that would happen to me. I spent a lot of time and a lot of money looking for Vander, and now I have a lot less of both. By the time I finally found him, he was a broken down old man who couldn’t help me even if he wanted to.”
Lily leaned forward. “You know where he is?”
“I do,” Wen said, a wicked smile on his face. “And after you hand over those coins, I just might tell you.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“You’re not joking with me, are you?” Lily asked.
Zane sighed. “I’m not. I honestly didn’t know.”
She sat up a bit straighter in her saddle.
Zane rode Pluck and she rode a ghastly thin, pale horse she called Moon. The creature had come with her all the way from the farm she’d grown up on. The frail horse was breathing hard and struggling to keep up with Pluck, who barely seemed to notice they were moving. Zane couldn’t begrudge Lily for hanging onto a thing or two from home; he just wished it’d been a locket instead of an animal.
They were approaching a complex of buildings now, and it was dusk. Zane had planned it so they would arrive just after sundown. They were thirty miles outside of Barnes in the middle of nowhere. The Abditus Society clearly didn’t want to advertise the existence of this place. Zane hadn’t heard of it, and he made a practice of keeping his ears open about such things.
According to Lily, the shopkeeper had called this place the Oasis. Sort of a cross between an old folks home and an abditus club house. Elderly abditus could spend their twilight years here without having to worry about the usual hassles—namely curious folks wanting to learn the secrets of the magical trade.
Most people would be disappointed to learn how few secrets there really were. It was magic and it was unexplainable. But saying that implied there was no study or skill involved, and that certainly wasn’t the case.
The only way to learn about magic was to be selected to do so, to get the right answers on a certain section of your Tens. If you didn’t do well on that one section of that one test, you were out of luck forever. Maybe you didn’t
have the aptitude, or perhaps you were just having a bad day. It didn’t matter; you were out of luck either way.
It worked the same for all skilled professions, of course, from physician to solicitor, but most people weren’t bitter about missing out on their chance to hold a quill or a scalpel. Being denied the secrets of the Abditus Society caused hard feelings in certain types of people.
Some wanted to learn the secrets of magic so badly they weren’t content to merely ask. They started demanding, and demanding violently. Elderly abditus made easy targets for such people.
It all seemed silly to Zane. Sure, magic was fascinating, mostly because of how little was known about it, but it wasn’t worth killing for. Zane had seen the inner workings of the abditus world and he hadn’t much liked it. Or maybe he just hadn’t liked the things it brought out in him.
The wall around the Oasis was high. Out here in the emptiness, it seemed almost as tall as the Blue Wall.
“What are you thinking?” Lily asked.
He looked at the wall and considered. He’d told her they would wait until they saw the place before deciding which approach to take, whether to enter covertly or do it official and by the book. Now that he was looking at the wall, he still wasn’t sure.
After a moment, he said, “Come on. We’ll swing around the back and try to find a place to tie our horses.”
The sun had dipped behind the horizon, and he could no longer see Lily’s face, but he could hear the smile in her voice when she spoke. “We gonna climb?”
“Not sure yet,” he said. He stretched his back muscles, which had tightened at the mere thought of climbing those walls. He’d do it if there wasn’t another way, but Lily was already excellent at climbing. Probably better than he was. She needed to practice new skills, not repeat the ones she’d already mastered. But after twenty minutes of inspecting the wall and not finding a way under or through, he turned back to her.
