“Keep your voice down.” The boy cast a nervous glance to either side. “Just mentioning the Tower around here can get you killed.”
He was probably telling the truth about that, Emma thought. She noticed that the passersby were no longer pushing past as if she didn’t exist. Instead they were clearly listening. Some were slowing down to take in every word. And by the looks on their faces, they did not care for what they were hearing.
Swallowing hard, she summoned the loudest voice she could. “DOES THAT MEAN YOU’LL TAKE ME TO THE TOW—”
“Shut up!” the boy shouted. “Okay! You win!”
“Good.” Emma smiled and shoved her hand, with its treasure, deep into a pocket. “And you’ll get this back when we get to the—” She cut off as his eyes widened with alarm. “When we get there. Deal?”
The boy groaned. “Look, I really can’t take you to…that place. Really.”
Emma raised her voice again. “That place? Do you mean—”
“I’ll take you to someone who can help!” the boy interrupted. “Best I can do, I swear. Deal?”
Emma hesitated, and then nodded.
“And your name,” she added. “You can tell me your name.”
“I already did. It’s Savachia,” the boy said grumpily. “Come on.”
He led the way. Emma followed, keeping her hand in her pocket, making sure her treasure was safe. Halfway down the block, she saw Savachia’s back stiffen. Then her gaze moved down the block, and she caught sight of three guards in gray—Tower guards—rounding a corner ahead.
Emma could have waved to them, could have shouted for help, could have run toward them. After all, she wanted to go to the Tower, didn’t she? Pimawa had been taking them there. That was where she’d find Alex, she was sure. Christopher Agglar was there, and Agglar was supposed to keep both her and her brother safe.
But when Savachia darted across the road and down an alleyway with soot-stained walls, fast as a rabbit heading for its burrow, Emma followed him. Partly it was instinct—he ran; she chased.
But even more than that, the looks on the guards’ faces scared her. She’d get to the Tower, all right—but she’d do it her own way. Not with them!
Just as they entered the alley, she heard Savachia spit out a word she didn’t recognize. From the sound of it, it was a curse.
Four more Tower guards were headed straight for them from the other end of the alley.
Savachia skidded to a halt right in front of Emma. She slammed into him. Impatiently, he shoved her back with one hand while, with the other, he tugged at a gate between two buildings.
He yanked it open and forced himself into an opening barely large enough for a kid his size. Emma was on his heels. Those guards were going to have a hard time fitting through there!
She heard them shouting behind her as she followed Savachia along a tunnel so narrow that her shoulders scraped the walls on either side. Then, one after the other, they stumbled out into a square lined with carts and stalls selling everything imaginable: cogs and gears, top hats and sunbonnets, turnips, tomatoes, bread, octopus tentacles on sticks, and stew from a cauldron over a fire. There was even a man sitting in a chair getting a shave, while others waited in line.
Three roads led into the square, and more angry-looking men in gray uniforms were pushing through the crowd along each one.
Emma and Savachia were trapped. The steaming smells wafting from the vendors’ carts, mixed with the oppressive stink of moldy wood and stagnant puddles, made Emma’s head woozy. She surprised herself by grabbing on to Savachia.
“What do we do?” she asked nervously.
The old woman with the patchwork coat whistled from the corner. In one quick movement, every owner of a cart shoved his or her vehicle a few feet forward. Suddenly the guards were blocked, on the outside of a ring of carts, while Savachia and Emma were in the center.
From underneath the cart selling sunbonnets rolled a pyramid-shaped cabinet as tall as Emma. It rattled across the cobblestones to the center of the square. The little girl with braided hair peeked out from behind and nodded to Savachia before rushing back to her cart.
“Problem solved,” said Savachia. He opened a triangular door on the front of the cabinet. “Ladies first.”
Emma hesitated. Her first impulse had been to run away from the guards…but had that been wise? Should she really follow this boy? He’d kidnapped her, after all!
The guards were angrily muscling the carts out of their path. They’d be through at any minute.
“Really?” Savachia snapped impatiently. He grabbed Emma’s arm, and before she could pull away, swung her through the door and into the cabinet. He jumped in after her, latching the door shut.
Outside, booted feet thundered across the cobblestones. Fists banged on the cabinet. “Get out here!” an angry voice ordered. “Open the door now or we’ll hack it apart!”
“Un momento, please,” Savachia called politely. Inside the cabinet, he wrapped his arms around Emma. His breath smelled of garlic and licorice. “Hold on,” he whispered.
Emma was about to demand why when the floor vanished and they fell straight down.
* * *
—
One more trip through the sewers, one more ladder, one more manhole, and then Savachia was leading Emma along a deserted brick street toward a theater designed to look like a pharaoh’s tomb. Two sphinxes, their cracked plaster revealing the metal frame underneath, flanked the entrance.
“Here we are,” said Savachia grandly.
“Where, exactly?” Emma asked. She eyed the shabby theater doubtfully.
“At the Conjurian’s premier palace of entertainment, of course!” Savachia waved a hand dramatically. “Home of the best magic shows in the world—in two worlds, really! Or it used to be, anyway. Before…well.”
“Before magic started to fade away?” Emma asked.
“You got it. Come on. We don’t want to hang around.”
Yells came from the alley on their right. Glancing that way, Emma could see two burly figures holding a scrawny man up against the wall.
“Help me!” shouted the man.
She hesitated. Savachia shook his head and pushed her along the street toward the theater.
“Shouldn’t we…do something?” asked Emma.
“Not our problem,” said Savachia. “We have to go meet the boss.”
Alex
Alex looked down. Big mistake. It was a good thing that the cloud cover prevented him from seeing all the way to the ground.
Ten minutes ago, this had seemed like a very logical plan.
The Tower guards had locked him in a relatively comfortable room with a bed, a wardrobe, and a closet-sized bathroom. Fortunately, the wardrobe was full of extra bedsheets. Seven of those sheets, tied together, made a passable rope.
Honestly, he was a little embarrassed. Bedsheets! Climbing down a rope made of bedsheets was such a cliché. But it was also the most efficient way to reach his goal: the MAGE office, seven stories below.
The only thing he had not calculated was how long those seven stories would feel.
A gust swung him like a pendulum, back and forth, against the face of the Tower. Every instinct screamed at him to stop moving, to clamp his hands and legs around the sheet and wait for rescue.
But if he froze in place, either his hands would give out or the wind would carry him off. He could tell that his arms no longer had the strength to get him back up the rope to the room he had left. His only chance was to keep going down.
Gritting his teeth, his eyes watering from the wind, Alex lowered himself until his toe scraped a ledge. A flock of batlike creatures erupted from under the window pediment, flocking around him, their wings, velvety soft, brushing his face.
Instinctively Alex swung an arm to bat them away.
He fell.
Luckily the ledge was right below him, and it was a good wide one. He thudded down on it, his knees hitting first, then one shoulder. His body wanted to roll with the force of the fall, but he grabbed for any bit of stone he could hold with his fingers, clinging tightly.
Above him, his rope whipped in the wind.
Alex lay still, hugging the stone ledge, his heart thudding until he felt as if it might shake the entire Tower of Dedi. He never wanted to let go again, but he couldn’t just lie here. Reluctantly, he peeled one hand away from the ledge and reached out to the window, only a few inches away. He tugged, trying to slide the window up.
It wouldn’t budge.
Locked? It was locked? Why would anyone want to lock a window hundreds of feet above the ground? He made a fist and thumped on the glass in frustration.
The window swung inward.
Alex made a sound between a groan and a sigh and inched his way forward until he fell, headfirst, into the room.
He lay for a moment with his face in a dusty carpet, relishing the sure knowledge that, whatever happened next, it would not be a sudden plunge to his death. Then, still trembling a little, he got to his feet and closed the window, shutting out the wind.
He looked around to see where he was and flinched backward with a strangled yelp as someone loomed at him out of the dark. “I just—wanted to come in!” he blurted out, madly. “It was cold out there!”
Then he realized that he was talking to a mannequin. It was dressed in a long robe, and a heavy Egyptian headdress draped its bald head.
Past the mannequin, he could see a door with MAGE written backward across a rectangle of glass. As his heart settled down to a normal rhythm, Alex smiled. He’d calculated the correct floor—and better yet, he’d had the good luck to come in through exactly the right window!
There was a desk in this room with a chair behind it. In the walls were several other doors. One, he saw, had the names HENRY AND EVELYNNE MASKELYNE stenciled in gold and black across the polished wood.
His parents’ names.
A sudden stab of feeling impaled Alex’s heart. Was it hope? Fear? Simple surprise? He was honestly not sure.
Alex knew he should try to find Emma, and maybe Pimawa, too. Old Agglar, the traitor, had said that he’d have Emma “shortly.” Did that mean he already had her locked up in another room of this tower?
But that door had his parents’ names on it. His parents, who were supposed to be harmless archaeologists, and who had apparently been something else entirely.
His parents, who’d been searching for the Eye of Dedi. That same Eye that everyone from old Agglar to the freaky Shadow Conjurer seemed to think that Alex and Emma knew about.
Maybe something on the other side of that door would explain things to Alex. Help him understand exactly what was going on here, and what all these people wanted with him and his sister.
He had to try to find out.
Alex opened the door with his parents’ names written on it. He discovered a cramped office with shelves lining three of the walls, floor to ceiling. In the center, two desks sat facing each other, both buried under stacks of books, files, and loose papers.
In the midst of the clutter sat a framed photo of a little girl holding a baby. Emma, Alex realized. His sister, holding him, not long after he’d been born.
Everything was covered with a thick film of dust. Had nobody been in here since the day his parents died?
Died doing what? Not searching for old bits of pottery from the Nile Valley or lost Aztec temples, that was for sure.
Alex grabbed the topmost book on a pile. Houdini’s Lost Dove Act, it was called.
“Probably a good reason it was lost,” Alex muttered. He tossed the book gently aside, raising a cloud of dust, and grabbed the next, a small, slim volume called Practical Magic Methods: How Not to Get Burned at the Stake by Jermay Lucas. He flipped through the pages. Well, if he ever needed to switch two coins without touching them, the way Agglar had wanted him to, he’d found the right book to teach him.
Alex slid Practical Magic Methods inside his pants pocket. It would take him weeks to go through all the stuff on these desks, he realized, and he didn’t have weeks. He probably didn’t have many more minutes.
He took a quick look at the one wall that was not covered with shelves. Instead it had maps, photos, and small things tacked on with nails.
Outside the window, Alex’s sheets whipped back and forth in the high wind, tossing light and shadow across the room. One photo on the wall caught Alex’s attention. In it, a dog sat looking eagerly at the camera, seeming ready to wag its feathery tail. The flickering light made the black eyes seem to wink at Alex.
At the bottom of the photo was scrawled a name: Bartleby.
Alex reached out a finger to touch the picture, its corners turning up with age.
Bartleby? That couldn’t be a coincidence. Alex had named his mechanical dog Bartleby. Nobody had suggested the name to him; it hadn’t come out of a book he’d read or a movie he’d seen. It had just been there, in his head, and it had seemed so…right.
Had it seemed right because, somehow, he’d remembered his parents’ dog? Emma had never told him about this dog. Uncle Mordo had never mentioned it. And yet…could the name have stayed in Alex’s mind, all these years, just waiting?
He pulled the photo off the wall. Had he ever thrown balls for this dog to fetch? Had it watched over him as a baby while he slept?
The photo the paper had been printed on was splitting at one corner. As Alex stared at the image, his fingers pulled at the slit. The backing on the photo peeled away easily, and Alex felt another sheet of paper beneath it.
A handwritten note.
Dear Alex,
Someday you will go looking for answers. If you have found this, I’m sure you have a lot of questions. It also means we failed to keep you safe. I wish we could be there to tell you everything. Take your sister to Plomboria. She’s a dreamer. Brave but too trusting. Keep her safe.
Go now. Trust your instincts. And know that everything we did was because we love you and your sister.
Love,
Mom
After a while, Alex became aware that he had not moved for several minutes. He was standing in a darkened office, holding a letter written years ago by a mother he could not remember.
He was startled to find tears on his cheeks. Impatiently he wiped them away. What was there to cry about? It was not as if he had known either of his parents. It wasn’t even as if this letter was helpful. It told him something he already knew perfectly well—that Emma was a dreamer who needed him to keep her clued in to real life. And it added something completely mysterious. What the heck was Plomboria?
He pulled the book on magic tricks out of his pocket, slipped the letter inside, and replaced the book. That was it. Done. And he was done with this office, too. Time to get out of here and find his sister.
He left his parents’ old office, shutting the door quietly behind him, and turned to the door labeled MAGE, ready to head out into the Tower. Then he saw a blurry figure looming on the other side of the door, getting larger and larger. Footsteps thumped on the floor of the hallway.
Alex froze, but it was too late. “He’s in here!” a voice shouted. The door banged open. Light flooded the room, and Alex took a step back, squinting.
“Master Alex!” Pimawa exclaimed in relief. “You gave us a fright!”
Guards in gray uniforms crowded into the room behind the giant rabbit.
“Climbing out your window? What were you thinking? You might have been kill
ed!” Pimawa exclaimed.
Alex glared at him. “I was thinking I should figure out what is going on around here. I was thinking I need to find Emma. I was thinking I should never have trusted Christopher Agglar—or you!”
Pimawa looked stricken, as if Alex had stabbed him. The guards pushed past the rabbit, and one grabbed hold of Alex’s arm.
“Easy now,” Pimawa protested weakly. “He’s just a boy.”
Another guard shoved Pimawa back. “Watch yourself, Jimjarian. Get downstairs to the duty master for your assignment.”
“That boy is my assignment!” Pimawa objected.
“Not anymore,” the man snapped. “The boy’s on his way to the mentalist.”
Emma
Emma followed Savachia into the gutted theater. Inside, most of the seats had been ripped out, and the space seemed to have been converted into a ramshackle village built out of planks of wood and scraps of metal. Dingy faces peered out from torn sheets that served as curtains. Cots and mattresses lined the stage, and people lay on them, some sleeping, some keeping a wary eye on everything going on around them.
Emma glimpsed a lean figure sitting on the edge of a cot, and she gasped with relief. For the first time since she’d come down the stairs of her uncle’s mansion last night, she felt sure that everything would be all right.
Her uncle might be dead, she might have lost her brother, and a spectral, eyeless figure with a scarred face might be hunting her—but here was someone who’d help, just as Savachia had promised. Derren Fallow, sleeves rolled up, hair rumpled, was examining the bandaged arm of a boy not much younger than Alex.
“Derren!” Emma shouted. She pushed past Savachia and charged up to the stage.
Derren’s head jerked up and she saw his eyes widen. He set the boy’s arm gently down on the cot before he got up and hurried among the beds to the edge of the stage, where Emma was clambering up.
Rise of the Shadow Page 7
