Kerrn raised her hand. The guard paused.
Way off in the distance I heard a faint roaring sound. A wind coming.
Kerrn cocked her head, listening.
The roaring got louder. The banners on the corners of the Dawn Palace started flapping, flowing in the wind like slithering snakes. The tops of the trees outside the gate stirred. In the crowd, people looked up, or off to the east where the roaring sound was coming from. A few hats blew off in the growing wind.
“Hang him, Captain!” Nimble shrieked from the row of chairs.
Kerrn pointed at the guardsman. “Do not touch that box.”
“Yes, Captain,” the guard said.
In the crowd, somebody screamed. I heard another scream that came from the front of the Dawn Palace; it sounded like Rowan. A prickle of dread ran up my neck like cold fingers.
From where I was standing, I had the best view. Behind the Dawn Palace, a wall of roiling black clouds, surging, flashing with lightning, boiled up out of the east. The wind rose, whistling through the spires on the Dawn Palace roof.
The whirl of wind and cloud widened along the eastern edge of the city; the air darkened. Nimble, his robe flapping in the wind, stepped up the gallows stairs.
I felt a tug at my hands. I looked over my shoulder.
Kerrn, putting the key into the manacles.
“Hurry,” I said.
She gave a quick nod.
The black clouds rose higher, looming over the city, cresting, about to break, to drown us all. Then it did crest, and a black wave of dread crashed down, washing through the courtyard. People screamed and started to flee. At the base of the gallows, the magisters cowered and clung to their locus stones. They didn’t know any spells that could stop Arhionvar. The dread gripped me so tightly that I couldn’t move.
It was too late. We weren’t ready. The city would be lost.
Then the Wellmet magic fought back. From the direction of the Twilight a burst of sparkling starlight and blackest night fountained up from the Dusk House pit, surging across the river, arcing across the white sky in bolts of silver and midnight to crash against the boiling clouds of Arhionvar. The dread magic flinched back. Thunder rolled out, shaking the ground.
The manacles dropped to the floor. I reached up, trying to get the noose off my neck. Too tight. “I can’t get the—”
Kerrn pushed my hands out of the way and loosened the knot, then jerked the rope over my head. “Go!” she shouted.
I jumped off the box, my legs shaky.
Nimble reached the top of the stairs. “Captain Kerrn!” he panted, pointing at me.
Kerrn drew her sword. “Go!” she said to me again, and she swung the sword around until it was pointing at Nimble’s chest. “You fool!” she shouted at him. “Do you not see he was right? The dread magic has come. You are a wizard! Do your duty!”
I stumbled, then ducked past Nimble and darted down the stairs. People were still running out of the courtyard. The wind howled. Dread pressed down from overhead. I joined the crowds, fleeing as a blanket of blackest night and dread fell over the city.
* * *
Rowan Forestal
I stepped out of my mother’s room for a breath of air. Two guards were there, and Argent, who looked frightened. The guards wouldn’t let him in, he said. He told me Conn had been put on trial for returning from exile and sentenced to death by hanging, and that the sentence was being carried out right then.
They’d acted too fast—I wasn’t ready.
I dashed to my room to get my sword, then ran through the palace to the front doors. When I got there, I saw, over the heads of the crowd, Conn on the gallows, facing away from me. They’d stood him on a box and put a noose around his neck. He was standing very straight and still, and he looked so alone. I screamed at Captain Kerrn to stop—she was too far away to hear—and started pushing my way through the crowd. I had my sword; if a guard had tried to stop me I would have killed him. I feared I would be too late.
Then Arhionvar arrived. I tried to get back into the Dawn Palace to save my mother, but Argent grabbed my arm and pulled me away, and we were caught up in the fleeing crowds. The city’s magisters were fleeing with them.
I must find Magister Nevery, and find out whether my mother is still in the Dawn Palace, and I must be sure Conn got down safely from the gallows.
* * *
CHAPTER 25
The darkness of Arhionvar’s arrival in the city lasted all the rest of the day and into a heavy, black night without stars or moon. The magics battled at the edge of the river, Arhionvar pushing into the Twilight, the Wellmet magic surging up to push it back over the Sunrise, but not strong enough to push it out of the city altogether.
As night fell, Arhionvar attacked with tendrils of blackest dread that snaked up the Twilight streets, and with fiery rocks that smashed down out of the sky and burned whatever they touched. From outside I heard people screaming, and the howling of wind, and deep rolls of thunder.
I crouched against a wall in a cellar in the Twilight, the cold dread of Arhionvar pressing down on me. The other wizards of the city must feel it, too. No wonder the magisters had run away; they hadn’t believed this kind of magic was real. Arhionvar was searching for me. It wanted to use me, as it’d used Jaggus, the sorcerer-king, to finish taking over the city.
During the darkest part of the night, I heard a tk-tk-tk on the stone stairs leading down into the cellar. Pip. As the dragon got closer, I felt better, stronger.
“Lothfalas,” I whispered. My voice sounded hoarse and thin.
At the bottom of the stairs a soft greeny-gold light glowed—my locus magicalicus inside Pip—and then Pip opened its mouth and breathed out green sparks that spun in a tiny whirlwind up to the low ceiling.
I caught my breath. Near the floor, easing away from Pip’s light, hung a snarl of misery eels, twining around each other like ribbons of black smoke. They faded back into a dark corner, not moving. Waiting.
I shivered. If I’d fallen asleep, the misery eels would’ve had me.
Pip eyed the corner full of eels like a cat eyeing a mouse. Its tail twitched. It crouched, then, breathing out another puff of sparks, it leaped into the middle of the nest of eels. They scattered from Pip, flowing up the walls, oozing into cracks and corners. Pip scrabbled after one of them, crawling straight up the wall, trapping the eel in a corner, where it thrashed. Pip crept closer.
The light was getting dim. “Lothfalas,” I said again.
Breathing out light, Pip leaped. A spark caught.
Flaming, the misery eel fell from the corner to the floor, twisting and fizzling like a bit of paper flaring up, then burning down to a blackened strip of ash.
Pip hopped down from the corner and stalked along the wall. Looking for more eels, I guessed.
“Thanks, Pip,” I said.
It ignored me. After a while it flew up the stairs, away.
I closed my eyes and tried not to feel the heavy dread of Arhionvar or the empty echo of my stomach, and waited for morning.
After a long time, the sound of the wind died, the dread lifted, and gray light seeped into the cellar.
The coming of the light meant that it was time to do something. I uncurled myself from my dark corner. My stomach growled.
I climbed out of the cellar, blinking at the light. I was in an alley off of a street called Needles and Pins in the Deeps, the part of the Twilight not far from the mudflats. Pip was somewhere nearby, tied to me by the string of my locus magicalicus.
I went to the end of the alley and peered out from the shadows. Needles and Pins Street led uphill from the Night Bridge, and it was more crowded than usual, people walking in groups of two and three, leading crying children, carrying sacks and packing cases, and throwing frightened looks over their shoulders.
Overhead, the sky was flat white, as it’d been the day before, and the air was cold. I looked toward the east and saw a line in the sky where a black bank of clouds hung over the Sunrise,
ending just at the edge of the river. Arhionvar. Wellmet had fought off the dread magic, but Arhionvar was gathering its strength. It’d go back on the attack as soon as night fell. Then it’d come for me. It needed a wizard, and it wanted me because I had a connection to the Wellmet magic, and it could use me to do even worse things to the city.
I looked toward the north, where the factories lined the river. No clouds of sooty smoke; the factories were closed. Bricks and shards of glass and broken shutters, torn off houses by the wind during the night, were scattered in the street. A pale sun hung behind the clouds, shedding a greenish-gray light. The air was still, no wind, but it tingled like a storm about to break.
Right. I had a locus magicalicus and I knew where the Wellmet magic was, gathering its strength, I hoped. I’d been needing to talk to the magic since the very first time I’d done a pyrotechnic experiment, and now I could. I headed up the hill, toward the Dusk House pit.
I paused in an alley, looking out at Sark Square. Here the crowds were thicker. People were filling the square; they’d fled with everything they could carry on their backs, or stuff into a carriage, or pay a drover with a wagon to carry for them. Sunrise people. Most of them had never been to the Twilight before. The Twilight people stood in doorways or, like me, lurked in alleyways, watching them come. I wasn’t sure what the Twilight people would do. If I’d still been a gutterboy, I might’ve been working the crowds, picking pockets or stealing things off the back of a wagon to sell to a swagshop. But the city was under attack, and the Sunrise people needed help, not thievery.
I caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye, a flash of white slinking into an alleyway. I followed.
There, hovering in the shadows beside a pile of rags and garbage. A cat, sleek and white, with a flat head and raked-back, sharp ears. Seeing me, it crouched, its tail lashing, and snarled.
Predator-cat. I’d seen a cat like that one before. The sorcerer-king had kept one as a pet. It was a watcher for Arhionvar, just like the black birds were for the Wellmet magic.
With a screech, a black bird plunged out of the sky, landing on the cat. It hissed and swiped a needle-clawed paw at the bird, which fluttered, pecking at the cat’s narrow eyes.
I could help; I knew a flame spell from the book Nevery’d given me. Pip—I needed Pip. I glanced wildly around and caught a glimpse of greeny-gold wings, Pip flying up to perch on the edge of a roof.
As I opened my mouth to call Pip, a heavy hand came down on my shoulder and spun me around. The minion Fist.
Drats. I didn’t have time for threats and sacks over my head.
“Little blackbird,” Fist said. His partner, Hand, loomed up behind him.
“Fist, I have to get to the pit where Dusk House used to be,” I said. And get that cat away from the bird.
“You have to get where we’re taking you, is what,” Fist said, grabbing me by the scruff of my neck.
The black bird and the white cat were still fighting when they dragged me away.
CHAPTER 26
The minions brought me to the old guardhouse on Clink Street, down the narrow stone steps to the cellar with the empty cells and the cobwebs in the corners.
When they’d brought me here before, the room had been empty except for minions, but now a padded armchair stood at the other end next to a desk. An oil lantern was set on the desk along with an ink-stand and piles of papers.
Sitting in the chair was Embre.
What was he doing here?
At the bottom of the stairs, Fist gave me a shove toward the other end of the room; then he and Hand went back up the stairs.
I went across the room and stood before Embre. “Hello,” I said.
He looked me up and down, his black eyes sharp. He looked like a bundle of sticks wearing a too-large black suit and waistcoat. He wasn’t smudged with soot as he usually was. “You nearly did the rope jig yesterday,” Embre said.
The hanging, he meant. I nodded.
From the direction of the stairs came the tk-tk-tk of claws on stone. Pip. It crouched at the bottom of the stairs, not coming any closer.
Embre saw Pip and looked at me with his eyebrows raised.
I shrugged.
“I assume this is the arrival of the bad magic you told me about,” Embre said.
“Yes, it is,” I said. “Arhionvar is here. I have to go talk to the Wellmet magic.”
The lanternlight flickered in Embre’s dark eyes and made them gleam. Then he spoke quietly. “For a long time I was trying to decide whether to have you killed,” he said.
I blinked. Have me killed? By who? And why? “What d’you mean?”
Embre shook his head and gave a half smile. “I thought you wanted to be Underlord. It’s what he wanted you for.”
What Crowe had wanted, he meant.
“Isn’t that right?” Embre asked, leaning forward. “Crowe wanted you to be Underlord after him?”
I nodded. But I didn’t want to talk about it.
“I couldn’t figure you out,” Embre went on, sitting back again. “If you were Crowe’s, why’d he have a word out on you? Why were you living on the streets like a gutterboy? And then you met up with that wizard and started telling people you were a wizard yourself.” He shook his head. “I thought you were lying, especially after Crowe was exiled. I thought you’d try to take over as Underlord then. I was ready to have Fist and Hand knock you on the head and drop you in the river. But instead you came asking me and Sparks for pyrotechnic materials to do magic. It didn’t make any sense. Who would want to be a wizard when he could be Underlord?”
I stared at him. He was the one who didn’t make any sense. Who’d want to be Underlord when he could be a wizard?
Then I thought about it. “D’you want to be Underlord, Embre?” I asked.
His smile sharpened. “I am the Underlord, Conn.”
Oh. How could I have been so stupid? Of course he was.
“My true name is Embre-wing,” he said.
An embre-wing was a kind of black bird with a patch of red and gold feathers like embers on its shoulders. I’d seen embre-wings perched on reeds along the river near the mudflats.
“You’re Crowe’s?” I whispered. He had to be, with a black bird name. It meant he and Crowe were family.
Embre’s face sharpened. “No. Not his.” He nodded down at his stick legs. “Crowe did that to me. He broke my legs so I couldn’t walk.”
I stared at him. My mouth felt dry, full of dust. Embre’d had his legs broken by Crowe. Just as my mother, Black Maggie, had. She’d died of it, and then Crowe had taken me into Dusk House to train me, because my name was a black bird name, too. A connwaer was a black bird with a ruffled black crest. But I’d run away, and every time Crowe brought me back and had the minions beat the fluff out of me, I’d run away again until I got better at melting into shadows and he couldn’t catch me anymore.
I hadn’t known anything about Embre. Embre-wing. I swallowed down some of the dust. “Crowe was my mother’s brother,” I said.
Embre nodded. “He was my father.”
“Why’d he break your legs?” I asked.
“By his calculations, I was too weak to become Underlord after him. He broke my legs to get rid of me.” Embre watched me carefully. “To make room for you.”
Embre must hate me, then. I shivered and wrapped my arms around myself.
“D’you see why I thought about having you killed?” Embre asked.
I nodded.
“He would’ve done it,” Embre said.
He was right; Crowe had hurt people to get them out of his way, or to make other people do what he wanted.
“But I’m not like him,” Embre said suddenly.
I hoped he wasn’t. “What’re you going to do?”
Embre gave me a dry smile. “I’m going to do what the Underlord is supposed to do,” he said.
Get minions to beat the fluff out of me, that meant. I hunched into my sweater.
“I’m going
to protect the Twilight, Cousin.” He gave his half smile again.
Oh. Embre was right. That’s what an Underlord did. A good one, anyway. Cousin, he’d called me. A sudden bubble of happiness rose up in my chest.
Embre returned my smile. “I am the Twilight’s Underlord. And you, as the Twilight’s wizard, are going to tell me what the Underlord and his pyrotechnic materials can do to help fight off this Arhionvar magic. Are you ready?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m ready.”
Before Embre and I made plans, the minion Hand brought another chair and a pot of tea, and a plate of boiled potatoes and carrots with butter, and a roast chicken, and a dish of stewed apples for afters, and while Embre drank tea, I sat at the desk and ate all of the food except for half the chicken, which I took on the plate to the corner where Pip was hiding in the shadows. The dragon skittered away from me, so I put the plate on the floor and went back to Embre.
“He doesn’t like you?” Embre asked.
“It’s an it, not a he,” I said.
“Your locus magicalicus, or so I’m told,” Embre said.
I nodded.
He laughed.
But it wasn’t funny.
CHAPTER 27
When I’d finished telling Embre what Nevery and I had been doing to prepare the city for Arhionvar’s attack, I told him that I had to go to the Dusk House pit, and he let me go.
The day was getting later. I left Clink Street and ran up Wyrm Street as fast as I could. No people were around.
Over the pit the sky was flat and white with rags of darker smoke drifting across it. The air smelled smoky; fires were burning in the Twilight from the rain of fiery rocks during the night. Embre had minions working with the Twilight people to put them out.