Lost

  “Very well,” Nevery said at last, and closed the grimoire. “Keep still, boy.” He placed his locus magicalicus against my forehead and started the embero.

  The magic burned out from his locus stone, flashing through me and throwing sparks before my eyes. The room tilted, and I crashed to the floor and everything went dark.

  And then, just as suddenly, it went light again. I hopped to my feet. While I’d been out, Benet had woken up. He sat propped in a chair, hunched over and shivering, and staring at me.

  Nevery was staring, too, and pulling on the end of his beard. “Very odd,” he said.

  “D-d-d-did you change the sp-p-pell, sir?” Benet asked, his teeth chattering.

  “No,” Nevery said. “It should have been exactly the same as before.”

  I tried to give my tail a twitch—it felt funny—and then pounced at Nevery’s foot.

  And I went sprawling, no quirked tail keeping me balanced. No four paws, either.

  Oh, no.

  “You’d better have a look, boy,” Nevery said, and got up from his chair to fetch a mirror. He brought it down to the floor for me to look into.

  Drats.

  A black bird, not a cat. The embero spell wasn’t supposed to work like this. I cocked my head to see better, first one eye, then the other. The embero had turned me into a connwaer, a scruffy one, with black feathers, a ruffled black crest, and bright blue eyes. I lifted a wing and the feathers fanned out.

  Hmmm. Wings might be as good as any cat’s tail.

  Nevery lifted the mirror away. I eyed Benet’s shoulder, high above me. I might be able to fly to it. Hop, hop, jump, and I flapped my arm-wings up and down and went tumbling, beak over tail feathers, across the floor.

  Nevery gave a snort of laughter. I hopped to my feet and shook my feathers back into place. Try again.

  Up I jumped, and this time I scooped at the air with my wings and made it to Benet’s blanket-covered knee, then scooped again and flapped to his shoulder. My balance was off, and I clung tightly, flapping a little and flipping my tail feathers.

  “Mind the c-c-claws,” Benet said. Through my bird feet I could feel him shaking.

  I relaxed my grip and settled, folding my wings.

  “Well, boy,” Nevery said. “You’re going?”

  I dipped my head. Yes.

  “Go and look for this friend of yours, then, and come straight home.” Nevery bent and held out his arm and I hopped onto it, clinging to the black cloth of his coat sleeve. “I’ll take you outside.”

  He carried me down the stairs, through the storeroom door, and, after kindling his locus stone, went out into the night. When he reached the middle of the courtyard, he asked, “Ready?” and before I could open my wings he swung his arm, tossing me into the air.

  My bird bones were so light that I tumbled away from him, then caught the air with my wings and wobble-flapped into the air, higher and higher, until I reached the courtyard tree. Leaves and twigs lashed at me; I ducked and flap-flopped and landed on a wide branch using my tail to catch my balance.

  “You all right, boy?” Nevery shouted up.

  Yes, I called back. It came out as “Awk!”

  Down below, Nevery looked small; he shook his head, turned, and swept-stepped across the courtyard, back into Heartsease, taking the locus light with him. I clung to the branch with my clawed feet and looked around. My connwaer eyes could see far into the sharp-edged shadows. Two branches away perched the other black bird, the one the magic had been using to watch me, I guessed. I saw its yellow eye, glinting in the darkness.

  Grawk, it muttered.

  I wasn’t going to sit around chatting with it.

  I hopped up from branch to branch until I got to the top of the tree, a launching place. Trying not to think about what I was doing, I threw myself from the branch and tumbled down, then caught the air with my wings and flap-flapped until I’d straightened myself out. I aimed my beak toward the dark, steep streets of the Twilight.

  My wings were growing tired by the time I got to the Dusk House pit, a deep, shadowy, darker place in the ground.

  I glided in a rough circle to the edge of the pit, where I skidded to the ground in a swirl of feathers—I wasn’t good at landing yet—and then hopped up to perch on a chunk of stone. Cocking my head, I listened.

  The night was completely still. Behind me, streaks of gray lightened the dark sky; dawn was coming. I shifted, and a pebble rolled away and bounced down into the pit, echoing.

  I leaned forward, opened my wings, and jumped, and felt the rush of wind lifting me. Slowly, I spiraled toward the bottom of the pit, down into the darkness. I splat-landed on a brick.

  Silence. No sign of the Shadows. The stone walls of the pit loomed all around. Way overhead the sky lightened to gray. I hopped to the ground, onto the cracked stone that had been the floor of the Underlord’s workshop, where he and the wizard Pettivox had built the prisoning device. I took a few hopping steps, then stopped to listen again. Nothing.

  The dawn light hadn’t reached this far into the pit; the cracks and corners were still deep in shadow, but my connwaer eyes could see into them, and saw that they were empty.

  But the Shadows had been there.

  At first I thought it was a bundle of rags. Then I recognized my coat.

  My bird heart fluttered. I hop-flapped closer.

  Dee.

  He lay curled up like he was asleep, with my coat over his shoulders as a blanket, but he was too still. His skin was gray. Overhead the sky turned pink. A beam of light from the rising sun crept down one wall of the pit. I hopped onto his bare foot. He didn’t move. I hopped up to his face and with my beak, pecked at his hardened skin. His lips were gray and cold.

  The morning light crept across the floor, and high above, the warm sun peeked over the edge of the pit.

  But Dee stayed cold. He was dead.

  CHAPTER 10

  By the time I got home to Heartsease, my wings ached with tiredness. In the brightening day, Nevery stood in the courtyard, watching the sky. As I spiraled raggedly in, he raised his arm, a landing place. I back-flapped, perched, and lost my balance, tumbling to land splat on the cobblestones.

  “All right, lad.” Nevery crouched down beside me and smoothed my feathers, then brought his huge hand, holding his locus magicalicus, up to my bird-face. His voice murmured the reverse embero. The spell crashed into me, and I went out.

  When I opened my eyes, Nevery was standing beside me and the sun was shining. “Come inside,” he said.

  I followed him in, trudging up the stairs to the kitchen. Benet sat wrapped in his blankets, still shaking.

  “You all right?” I asked.

  “Fine,” he said, and picked up his knitting with stiff hands.

  Nevery handed me a cup of tea; I went over to sit on the floor beside the fireplace.

  “Well, boy?” Nevery said, taking a seat at the table.

  I put my teacup down on the floor. “Dee’s dead.”

  “The Shadows?”

  My voice caught in my throat. I nodded.

  We sat without speaking. Benet’s knitting needles went c-c-clickety-tick. My tea got cold.

  Nevery sighed and got to his feet. “You rest, boy, and I will use my scrying globe to call a meeting. Then we will go to Magisters Hall.”

  I went up the stairs to the fourth floor, then climbed the ladder to my attic room. The sun beamed in through the three small windows that looked out over the courtyard, and west toward the Twilight. My bed was just a bare mattress; I’d left my blankets down in the kitchen. I lay down and tried to sleep. Every time I closed my eyes I saw the swirl of black dust or the purple-black glow of the Shadow’s single eye.

  The day before, on our way back from the Twilight, Rowan and I had talked about Dee.

  She’d started out talking about Embre. “Poor Embre,” she’d called him.

  “What d’you mean?” I’d said.

  Rowan shook her head. “He lives in that broken-down
shack, and he can’t use his legs.”

  “He does all right,” I said. No, Embre did better than all right. He was smart, he had Sparks, and he knew his business.

  “And poor Dee, too,” Rowan had said. “Before this, I didn’t quite understand what it meant to be a gutterboy.”

  Dee did have a hard time of it, I’d thought. But he was working for the minions, and that meant they’d be looking after him, and one day, if he grew big enough, and mean enough, he’d become a minion himself.

  Except that now he wouldn’t.

  “He was wearing that coat,” Rowan had said. “The one you gave him. It made me realize—you were like Dee, weren’t you?”

  “I was nothing like Dee,” I’d told her.

  I lay in my bed with tiredness covering me like a prickly blanket and looked up at the sloped ceiling, the cracked white-gray plaster, the spiderwebs in the corners. The air smelled of the ashes left in the hearth; from outside I heard the faint sounds of Benet in the courtyard chopping wood, and the rushrushrush of the river.

  When I’d lived in the Twilight I had been just like Dee. I’d never thought about anything except where to find something to eat or a warm corner to sleep in, or how to keep the minions from beating the fluff out of me. If the magic hadn’t been protecting me, I would’ve ended up like Dee, too—frozen on a doorstep, maybe, too stupid to have picked a wizard’s pocket and become a wizard myself.

  Now Dee was dead and—I had to face up to it—it was partly his own stupid fault, but it was my fault, too.

  Tap tap tap.

  I opened my eyes. The sun still shone brightly into my room; I hadn’t slept for very long.

  Tap! Tap! I sat up in bed, blinking. TAP! TAP! Nevery, banging with the knob of his cane on the trapdoor that opened into my attic.

  “Are you awake, boy?” he called.

  I went over to the trapdoor and opened it. At the bottom of the ladder Nevery peered up, looking cross.

  “I’m up,” I said.

  “Well, come along,” Nevery said. “The meeting begins soon.”

  “Coming,” I said, and went to the trunk at the end of my bed to get my black sweater, the one Benet had knitted for me, and pulled it on over my head. When I climbed down the ladder Nevery had already gone, so I ran down the stairs after him. As I passed through the kitchen, Benet handed me a biscuit.

  “Thanks!” I said, and raced after Nevery. He was already halfway across the sunlit cobbled courtyard, heading for the tunnel.

  He gave me his keen-gleam glance as he strode along. “Well, boy?”

  Not really well, no. I shoved the biscuit into my pocket. We got to the stairs and went down.

  “Now, this meeting,” Nevery said.

  I nodded.

  “Keep quiet unless you’re spoken to. Don’t ask any questions. Do not bring up your ideas about the magic. Don’t cause any trouble.” Nevery muttered something else into his beard, but I didn’t hear what he said.

  Nevery was right to be worried about the meeting. Captain Kerrn was there, looking fierce, and the duchess, and the magisters, who, when they saw me follow Nevery into the meeting room, argued that I shouldn’t be allowed in.

  Nevery ignored them and started the meeting. When he told me to, I stood at the end of the table and told them about Dee, that the Shadows had turned him to stone.

  They didn’t believe me. Trammel said, “This Dee person was a gutterboy. How can we be sure he didn’t just die of a fever?”

  I told them I knew what stone looked like, and argued with them until they were shouting at me, and then Nevery stepped in. He told them about how the Shadows had attacked me, and then Benet, in the courtyard outside Heartsease, and how the lothfalas spell had defeated them.

  “Then you have actually seen these—these Shadows?” Brumbee asked in a shaking voice. “And they are not ordinary men?”

  “I have seen them, yes,” Nevery said. “I posit that the Shadows used magic to get through the Heartsease gate. I am certain that they themselves are creatures of magic, and not men at all.”

  “Well then,” said Brumbee, “what could they possibly be?”

  “I do not know,” Nevery said, shaking his head. “They seem to be made of smoke and shadow. I have never heard of anything like this.”

  “Might we have an enemy from outside the city?” Trammel asked.

  “We must!” Brumbee said. “No one from within the city could send such terrible creatures against us.”

  “Wellmet is under attack!” the bat-faced magister, Nimble, said. “What will we do?”

  “Oh, dear,” Brumbee said. “We shall have to study the situation further, of course, before we do anything.”

  The duchess stood up from her seat at the other end of the table. She wore a dark green dress with a high collar, and had her red-gray hair braided in a crown on her head. As she looked sternly around at the magisters, they quieted. “If Wellmet is under attack, we must defend ourselves. Magister Nevery, your use of this light spell to deter them seems to corroborate what the unfortunate gutterboy told Connwaer, and what Captain Kerrn has suspected: the Shadows fear light and thus come out only after dark. We must, therefore, institute a curfew.”

  Kerrn nodded. “My guards could enforce a curfew. We would have everyone off the streets of the Sunrise before dark.”

  I took a deep breath. Nevery had warned me not to make trouble. “What about the Twilight?” I asked.

  They all stared. They’d forgotten about me, standing at the end of the table.

  “Shouldn’t you make a curfew in the Twilight, too?” I said. “Dee might not’ve been killed if he’d been told to get off the streets. And people in the Twilight work shifts at the factories at night. They’re in danger, too.”

  The duchess nodded, though when she looked at me she frowned. “This is true.”

  Kerrn said, “We would need to coordinate a curfew with the Underlord, but no Underlord has arisen to take Crowe’s place.”

  “Do what you can with the guards you have,” the duchess said. “Now we must turn our attention to other solutions. I wish to discuss with you diplomatic missions to our neighboring cities, to see if they are having similar problems.”

  From his seat halfway down the table, Nevery caught my eye and nodded toward the door. Time for me to go out.

  Kerrn followed me out into the hallway; two of her guards were there, too, waiting for the duchess. As soon as the meeting hall door closed behind her, Kerrn grabbed me by the front of my sweater, dragged me down the hall, and shoved me up against a wall. Her guards came and stood behind her, arms folded, scowling.

  “The Lady Rowan’s safety is my responsibility,” she growled into my face. Her long blond braid hung over her shoulder like a rope and her ice-chip blue eyes glinted. “You took her unguarded into the Twilight, thief.” With her strange accent, she made Lady Rowan’s safety sound like Lady Rrrrowan’sh shafety.

  “She was safe enough,” I said. And I hadn’t taken her; she’d taken herself.

  “Safe?” Her grip tightened. “You say safe? She left her guards behind. She was with that gutterboy just before he was killed by Shadows. She came home with a bruise on her face. She was not safe enough. The duchess agrees. She gives me a message to give to you. Stay away from the Lady Rowan—do not speak to her or write to her.” She leaned closer and lowered her voice. “And I have another message, thief. From me. Stay away from the Dawn Palace. If my guards catch you, they will lock you in one of my cells and not even your master Nevery will be able to get you out.”

  Down the hall, the meeting room door opened and people came out, talking. Then step step tap, step step tap. Nevery, coming along the hallway, his knob-headed cane tapping on the stone floor.

  “Do you understand?” Kerrn whispered.

  I nodded.

  “Good.” She thumped me once against the wall, then let me go, straightened, and, followed by her guards, strode away toward the meeting hall door to meet the duchess.

&n
bsp; Nevery came up, leaned on his cane, and gave me one of his keen looks. “Well, boy?”

  I shrugged.

  “Talking with Captain Kerrn about the weather, were you?”

  “Nevery, if I ever go missing come look for me in Kerrn’s jail cells,” I said. Just in case.

  “Hmph. Come along.”

  Nevery and I passed down into the damp tunnel under the river, the light from his locus magicalicus flickering on the dripping walls. He spoke an opening spell and we went through a gate, heading for Heartsease. “That was well done, Conn,” he said, “to remind us of our responsibility to the Twilight.”

  Maybe. But reminding wasn’t enough. “Nevery,” I said. “There’s something I have to do.”

  “Very well,” Nevery said. “Be back before dark, boy.”

  I would try.

  On the Twilight side of the bridge I headed straight for the marketplace. In the Sunrise part of the city, where the streets were wide and well-lit and everybody got enough to eat, the guards were making sure the people were safe in their houses. Here in the Twilight, shadows were gathering in corners, and the blank, broken windows of the houses watched me as I walked up the steep streets.

  Sark Square was almost deserted, only a couple of stalls open. I remembered the biscuit in my pocket, the one Benet had given me before the meeting, and I pulled it out and took a bite, leaning against a wall, the bricks still warm from the day’s sunlight. The biscuit had butter and jam on it.

  Across the square, I saw a ragged kid say something to a man, who looked where the kid pointed and saw me. He nodded and headed off down a side street. I ate the last of my biscuit and watched the sun dip behind the houses; the sky turned orange, then darker red.

  I was just straightening up from the wall, ready to head home, when the two minions who had jumped me before came into the square, saw me, and came over. Part of me wanted to run away, but I stilled my twitching feet and stayed put.