A Darker Shade of Magic

  “Don’t you want to say good-bye?” he asked, gesturing at the floorboards and somewhere beneath them, Barron.

  Lila hesitated, considering her boots and the world below them. “No,” she said softly, her voice uncertain for the first time since they’d met.

  He didn’t know how Lila’s and Barron’s threads were tangled, but he let the issue lie. He did not blame her. After all, he had no plans to detour to the palace, to see his brother one last time. He told himself that it was too dangerous, or that Rhy would not let him go, but it was as much the truth that Kell could not bring himself to say good-bye.

  Kell’s coat was hanging on the chair, and he crossed to it and turned it inside out from left to right, exchanging the worn black for ruby red.

  Interest flickered like a light behind Lila’s eyes but never truly showed, and he supposed she’d seen the trick herself when she went searching through his pockets in the night.

  “How many coats do you suppose there are inside that one?” she asked casually, as if inquiring about the weather, and not a complex enchantment.

  “I’m not exactly sure,” said Kell, digging in a gold-embroidered pocket and sighing inwardly with relief as his fingers skimmed a spare coin. “Every now and then I think I’ve found them all, and then I stumble on a new one. And sometimes, old ones get lost. A couple of years ago I came across a short coat, an ugly green thing with patched elbows. But I haven’t seen it since.” He drew the Red London lin from the coat and kissed it. Coins made perfect door keys. In theory, anything from a world would do—most of what Kell wore came from Red London—but coins were simple, solid, specific, and guaranteed to work. He couldn’t afford to muddy this up, not when a second life was on his hands (and it was, no matter what she claimed).

  While he’d been searching for the token, Lila had emptied the money from her own pockets—a rather eclectic assortment of shillings, pennies, and farthings—and piled them on the dresser by her bed. Kell reached out and plucked a halfpenny off its stack to replace the Grey token he’d lost, while Lila chewed her lip and stared down at the coins a moment, hands thrust into the inner pockets of her cloak. She was fiddling with something there, and a few moments later she pulled out an elegant silver watch and set it beside the pile of coins.

  “I’m ready,” she said, tearing her eyes from the timepiece.

  I’m not, thought Kell, shrugging on his coat and crossing to the door. Another, smaller wave of dizziness hit, but it passed sooner than the last as he opened the door.

  “Wait,” said Lila. “I thought we’d go the way you came. By the wall.”

  “Walls aren’t always where they ought to be,” answered Kell. In truth, the Stone’s Throw was one of the only places where the walls didn’t change, but that made it no safer. The Setting Sun might have sat on the same foundation in Red London, but it was also the place where Kell did business, and one of the first places someone might come looking for him.

  “Besides, we don’t know what—or who—” he amended, remembering the attackers under their compulsion, “is waiting on the other side. Better get closer to where we’re going before we go there. Understand?”

  Lila looked as though she didn’t, but nodded all the same.

  The two crept down the stairs, past a small landing that branched off down a narrow hall studded with rooms. Lila paused beside the nearest door and listened. A low rumbling snore came through the wood. Barron. She touched the door briefly, then pushed past Kell and down the remaining stairs without looking back. She slid the bolt on the back entrance and hurried into the alley. Kell followed her out, stopping long enough to raise his hand and will the metal lock back into place behind them. He listened to the shhk of metal sliding home, then turned to find Lila waiting, her back purposely to the tavern, as if her present were already her past.

  II

  The rain had ended and left the streets dreary and damp, but despite the wet ground and the October chill, London was beginning to drag itself awake. The sound of rickety carts filled the air, met with the smell of fresh bread and new fires, and merchants and buyers began the slow revival of work, pinning back the doors and shutters of shops and readying their businesses for the day. Kell and Lila made their way through the rousing city, moving briskly in the thin dawn light.

  “You’re sure you have the stone?” pressed Kell.

  “Yes,” said Lila, lips quirking. “And if you’re thinking of stealing it back, I would advise against it, as you’d have to search me, and magic or no, I’m willing to bet my knife could find your heart before your hand could find the rock.” She said it with such casual confidence that Kell suspected she might be right, but he had no desire to find out. Instead, he turned his attention to the streets around them, trying to picture them as if they were a world away. “We’re nearly there.”

  “Where’s there?” she asked.

  “Whitbury Street,” he said.

  He’d crossed through at Whitbury before (it put him near his rooms at the Ruby Fields, which meant that he could drop any newly acquired items before reporting to the palace). But more important, the row of shops on Whitbury did not sit directly on top of the Ruby Fields, but sat a short two blocks shy. He’d learned long ago never to walk into a world exactly where you wanted to be. If trouble were waiting, you’d land right on top of it.

  “There’s an inn in Red London,” he explained, trying not to think about the last time he was there. About the tracing spell and the attack and the corpses of the men in the alley beyond. Corpses he’d made. “I keep a room there,” he went on. “It will have what I need to make a door to White London.” Lila didn’t pick up on his use of I instead of we, or if she did, she didn’t bother to correct him. In fact, she seemed lost in her own thoughts as they wove through the network of back streets. Kell kept his chin up, his senses tuned.

  “I’m not going to run into myself, am I?” asked Lila, breaking the silence.

  Kell glanced her way. “What are you talking about?”

  She kicked a loose stone. “Well, I mean, it’s another world, isn’t it? Another version of London? Is there another version of me?”

  Kell frowned. “I’ve never met anyone like you.”

  He hadn’t meant it as a compliment, but Lila took it that way, flashing him a grin. “What can I say,” she said, “I’m one of a kind.”

  Kell managed an echo of her smile, and she gasped. “What’s that on your face?”

  The smile vanished. “What?”

  “Never mind,” she said, laughing. “It’s gone.” Kell only shook his head—he didn’t grasp the joke—but whatever it was, it seemed to delight Lila, and she chuckled to herself all the way to Whitbury.

  As they turned onto the pleasant little lane, Kell came to a stop on the curb between two shop fronts. One belonged to a dentist and the other a barber (in Red London, it was an herbalist and stonesmith), and if Kell squinted he could still see traces of his blood on the brick wall in front of him, the surface sheltered by a narrow overhang. Lila was staring intently at the wall. “Is this where they are? Your rooms?”

  “No,” he said, “but this is where we go through.”

  Lila’s fists clenched and unclenched at her side. He thought she must be frightened, but when she glanced his way, her eyes were bright, the edge of a smile on her lips.

  Kell swallowed and stepped up to the wall, and Lila joined him. He hesitated.

  “What are we waiting for?”

  “Nothing,” said Kell. “It’s just …” He slipped out of his coat and wrapped it around her shoulders, as if the magic could be so easily deceived. As if it wouldn’t know the difference between human and Antari. He doubted his coat would make a difference—either the stone would let her through or it wouldn’t—but he still relinquished it.

  In response, Lila fetched her kerchief—the one she’d given him when she picked his pocket and reclaimed when he passed out on her floor—and tucked it into his back pocket.

  “What are
you doing?” he asked.

  “Seems right somehow,” she said. “You gave me something of yours. I give you something of mine. Now we’re linked.”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” he said.

  Lila shrugged. “Can’t hurt.”

  Kell supposed she was right. He slid his knife free and drew the blade across his palm, a thin line of blood welling up. He dabbed it with his fingers and made a mark on the wall.

  “Take out the stone,” he said.

  Lila eyed him distrustfully.

  “You’ll need it,” he pressed.

  She sighed and pulled her broad-brim hat from a fold in her coat. It was crumpled, but with a flick of her wrist it unfolded, and she reached into the hat’s bowl like a magician and drew out the black rock. Something in Kell twisted at the sight of it, an ache in his blood, and it took all his strength not to reach for the talisman. He bit back the urge and thought for the first time that perhaps it was better if he didn’t hold it.

  Lila closed her fingers around the stone, and Kell closed his fingers around Lila’s, and as it was he could feel the talisman humming through the flesh and bone of her hand. He tried not to think about the way it sang to him.

  “Are you sure?” he asked one last time.

  “It will work,” said Lila. Her voice sounded less certain now than it had been, less like she believed and more like she wanted to, so Kell nodded. “You said yourself,” she added, “that everyone has a mix of humanity and magic in them. That means I do, too.” She turned her gaze up to his. “What happens now?”

  “I don’t know,” he said truthfully.

  Lila drew closer, so close their ribs were touching and he could feel her heart racing through them. She was so good at hiding it, her fear. It didn’t show in her eyes, or the lines of her face, but her pulse betrayed her. And then Lila’s lips tugged into a grin, and Kell wondered if it was fear she felt after all, or something else entirely.

  “I’m not going to die,” she said. “Not till I’ve seen it.”

  “Seen what?”

  Her smile widened. “Everything.”

  Kell smiled back. And then Lila brought her free hand to his jaw and tugged his mouth toward hers. The kiss was there and then gone, like one of her smiles.

  “What was that for?” he asked, dazed.

  “For luck,” she said, squaring her shoulders to the wall. “Not that I need it.”

  Kell stared at her a moment and then forced himself to turn toward the bloodstained bricks. He tightened his hand over hers, and he brought his fingers to the mark.

  “As Travars,” he said.

  The wall gave way, and the traveler and the thief stepped forward and through.

  III

  Barron woke to a noise.

  It was the second time that morning.

  Noise was a fairly common thing in a tavern; the volume of it ebbed and flowed depending on the hour, at some times thunderous, at others murmuring, but it was always there, in some measure. Even when the pub was closed, the Stone’s Throw was never truly silent. But Barron knew every kind of noise his tavern made, from the creak of the floorboards to the groan of the doors to the wind through the hundreds of cracks in the old walls.

  He knew them all.

  And this one was different.

  Barron had owned the tavern at the seam—for that was how he thought of the aching old building—for a very long time. Long enough to understand the strange that drifted past and in like debris. Long enough for the strange to seem normal. And while he was not a part of that strange, having no interest or affinity for the practicing of that strangeness others called magic, he had come to develop a sense of sorts, where the strange was concerned.

  And he listened to it.

  Just as he listened now to the noise above his head. It wasn’t loud, not at all, but it was out of place and brought with it a feeling, under his skin and in his bones. A feeling of wrongness. Of danger. The hair on his arm prickled, and his heart, always steady, began to beat faster in warning.

  The noise came again, and he recognized the groan of footsteps on the old wooden floor. He sat up in his bed. Lila’s room sat directly over his own. But the footsteps did not belong to Lila.

  When someone spends enough time under your roof (as Lila had beneath his), you come to know the kind of noise they make—not only their voices but the way they move through a space—and Barron knew the sound of Lila’s tread when she wanted to be heard, and the sound of her tread when she didn’t, and this was neither. And besides, he had first woken to the sound of Lila and Kell leaving not long before (he had not stopped her, had long since learned that it was futile to try, and had long since resolved to be instead an anchor, there and ready when she wandered back, which she invariably did).

  But if Lila was not moving about her room, who was?

  Barron got to his feet, the shivery feeling of wrong worsening as he tugged the suspenders from his waist up onto his broad shoulders and pulled on his boots.

  A shotgun hung on the wall by the door, half rusted from disuse (on the occasion trouble brewed downstairs, Barron’s hulking form was usually enough to quash it). Now he took hold of the gun by the barrel and pulled it down from its mount. He drew open the door, cringing as it groaned, and set off up the stairs to Lila’s room.

  Stealth, he knew, was useless. Barron had never been a small man, and the steps creaked loudly under his boots as he climbed. When he reached the short green door at the top of the stairs, he hesitated and pressed his ear to the wood. He heard nothing, and for a brief moment, he doubted himself. Thought he’d slept too lightly after Lila’s departure and simply dreamt the threat out of concern. His grip, which had been knuckles white on the shotgun, began to loosen, and he let out a breath and thought of going back to bed. But then he heard the metallic sound of coins tumbling, and the doubt gutted like a candle. He threw open the door, shotgun raised.

  Lila and Kell were both gone, but the room was not empty: a man stood beside the open window, weighing Lila’s silver pocket watch in the palm of his hand. The lantern on the table burned with an odd pale light that made the man look strangely colorless, from his charcoal hair to his pale skin to his faded grey clothes. When his gaze drifted up casually from the timepiece and settled on Barron—he seemed entirely unfazed by the gun—the tavern owner saw that one of his eyes was green. The other was pitch black.

  Lila had described the man to him and given him a name.

  Holland.

  Barron did not hesitate. He pulled the trigger, and the shotgun blasted through the room with a deafening sound that left his ears ringing. But when the plume of smoke cleared, the colorless intruder stood exactly where he’d been before the blast, unharmed. Barron stared in disbelief. The air in front of Holland glittered faintly, and it took Barron a moment to grasp that it was full of shot pellets. The tiny metal beads hung suspended in front of Holland’s chest. And then they fell, clattering to the floor like hail.

  Before Barron could squeeze off the second shot, Holland’s fingers twitched, and the weapon went flying out of Barron’s hands and across the narrow room, crashing against the wall. He lunged for it, or at least he meant to, but his body refused, remaining firmly rooted to the spot, not out by fear, but something stronger. Magic. He willed his limbs to move, but the impossible force willed them still.

  “Where are they?” asked Holland. His voice was low and cold and hollow.

  A bead of sweat rolled down Barron’s cheek as he fought the magic, but it was no use. “Gone,” he said, his voice a low rumble.

  Holland frowned, disappointed. He drew a curved knife from his belt. “I noticed that.” He crossed the room with even, echoing steps, and brought the blade up slowly to Barron’s throat. It was very cold, and very sharp. “Where have they gone?”

  Up close, Kell smelled of lilies and grass. Holland smelled of ash and blood and metal.

  Barron met the magician’s eyes. They were so like Kell’s. And so different. Looking
into them, he saw anger and hatred and pain, things that never spread, never touched the rest of his face. “Well?” he pressed.

  “No idea,” growled Barron. It was the truth. He could only hope they were far away.

  Holland’s mouth turned down. “Wrong answer.”

  He drew the blade across, and Barron felt a searing heat at his throat, and then nothing.

  IX

  FESTIVAL & FIRE

  I

  Red London welcomed Kell home as if nothing were wrong. It had not rained here, and the sky was streaked with wisps of cloud and crimson light, as if a reflection of the Isle. Carriages rolled in rumbling fashion over street stones on their well-worn paths, and the air was filled with the sweet steam of spice and tea and, farther off, the sounds of building celebration.

  Had it really been only a matter of hours since Kell had fled, wounded and confused, away from this world and into another? The simple, assuring calm, the rightness of this place, set him off-balance and made him doubt, if only for a moment, that anything could be amiss. But he knew the peace was superficial—somewhere in the palace that bridged the river, his presence had surely been missed; somewhere in the city, two men lay dead, and more with empty eyes were likely looking for him and his prize—but here, on what had been Whitbury and was now Ves Anash, the light of the river spilling in from one side and the morning sun from the other, Red London seemed oblivious to the danger it was in, the danger he was dragging through it.

  A small black stone capable of creating anything and razing everything. He shuddered at the thought and tightened his grip on Lila’s hand, only to realize it was not there.

  He spun, hoping to find her standing next to him, hoping they’d been pulled apart only a step or two in the course of their passage. But he was alone. The echo of Antari magic glowed faintly on the wall, marking the way he’d come with Lila.