Found (16 page)

T
he 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.

W
hen 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.

Catching my breath, I crouched behind the shattered stones that had been the gateway leading into Dusk House and peered in. The area around the pit was deserted. The magisters should’ve been here helping the magic. But they were somewhere else, probably in the cellars below Magisters Hall, cowering and wishing Arhionvar would go away. The air felt thick with the magic, not protecting me as it usually did, not warm, but wound tight with fright. Pip perched at the top of the gate post, drawn by the magic, I guessed.

I got to my feet, crunched across to the edge of the pit, and looked down.

Swirling stars and darkness filled the steep-sided pit. The magic was here. It’d fought off Arhionvar last night, and maybe it was gathering its strength again, but it couldn’t hold out for much longer.

Pip flapped over and landed on the ground nearby. That was enough to get the magic’s attention. It heaved up from the pit, washing over me, picking me up as it’d done before, and picking up Pip, too.

This time I knew how to talk to it. It could hear me because of my locus stone, in Pip, and ever since I’d become a wizard I’d been reading enough grimoires and spell-books to know what to say.

I shouted spellwords. The magic talked back, spellwords that hum-thrummed in my bones, deeper than my ears could hear. I couldn’t understand them all, but I understood enough. The blackness and bright stars whirled around me until I had to close my eyes and listen.

For a moment, behind my closed eyes, I saw the city as the magic saw it. A rolling black plain with a line of glowing slowsilver running through the middle of it where the river was, and patches of warmth and life—that was the city and its people. The magic knew people lived in Wellmet, and it wanted to protect them. It couldn’t tell one person from another; they were just points of warmth in the darkness. Only the wizards stood out like twinkling stars in a black sky, noticeable to the magic because of their locus stones. Before I’d found Nevery, I’d been a patch of cold to the magic because I’d been more alone than anybody else in the city. Maybe the magic had found me after my mother’d been killed and Crowe’d had a word out on me, when I’d been trying to sleep in a freezing doorway in the Twilight. Maybe it’d known I was a wizard, and it had saved me, so I could save it.

The magic was alone, too. All the other magics in the world were far away, at other cities. It was sick and weak, too. It’d been weak even before
Underlord Crowe and Pettivox had built their device to imprison it. A city shouldn’t be like Wellmet, healthy and whole on one side and rotten and empty on the other. It wasn’t balanced. I should’ve seen it a long time ago.

The magic was barely holding out against Arhionvar. It could fight for another night, maybe two, and then Arhionvar would have it.

The magic told me what I had to do.

I didn’t want to do it.

But I would.

M
y cousin, Embre, had called me the Twilight’s wizard. And I was. I would do what the magic needed me to do, but first I had to talk to Nevery. When I saw the city as the magic saw it, I’d seen a cluster of locus stones glowing on the islands that ran through the river.
One of the glowing spots had to be Nevery. He was at Heartsease, busy preparing our defenses. He must’ve escaped from the Dawn Palace before Arhionvar arrived.

As I left the Dusk House pit, I heard a flutter of wings, and a black bird fell out of the sky and landed at my feet. I crouched down and set it on its feet. It ruffled its feathers.

I took a scrap of paper from a quill tied to its leg. Just one word in Nevery’s handwriting.

Heartsease

Yes, Nevery, I knew.

Slinking through alleys, I headed for Fleetside Street and then the Night Bridge.

As I reached the bridge, the heavy, red sun sank behind the dark tenements of the Twilight, making shadows reach out like long, dark arms. The air was icy cold and still. The streets were deserted; people were hiding from the coming of the night.

The bridge was empty, too. All of the Sunrise people had come across during the day, then. The
shuttered houses built right on the bridge leaned over me, cutting off the light.

I heard a sound like the distant whine of factory machines. A dusty breeze sprang up and brushed past me, plucking at my sweater.

The darkness at the other end of the bridge was moving.

From behind me, I heard
pip!
and then Pip darted into the narrow crack between two houses.

The factory noise got louder, and from out of the shadows came a whirling column of wind twice the height of a tall man, clogged with dust; it wobbled from one side of the road to the other, bumping up against the houses, ripping off shutters and gutters and chunks of brick, howling toward me.

I scrambled aside into a doorway, crouched down, and put my arms over my head. The shriek of the whirlwind grew louder.

Peering under my arm, I saw the whirlwind spin closer. Then I felt a surge of Wellmet magic rise up like a wall. As it met the wall, the column of wind
lifted up like a long finger, and then its winds shredded, flying off like bits of dusty rag. Bricks and nails and shards of glass and splinters of wood spun out and rained down into the road.

Dust swirled in the last eddies of wind. I got to my feet and stepped out of the doorway.

Arhionvar was making an attack on the Twilight. I turned to keep going across the bridge, but the road between the leaning houses had turned white. In the greeny-black light, it seemed to move.

I blinked. The road ahead was flowing with white predator-cats, slinking along close to the ground. They paced closer, their eyes glowing.

Right, I couldn’t go this way. I turned and ran.

So many people had rowed across the river from the Sunrise that finding a boat was easy. I wasn’t good at rowing, but I could do it well enough. While I rowed I looked over my shoulder, watching the bank of clouds over the Sunrise lower until
the Dawn Palace on its hill disappeared in a black fog, and the werelights along the streets winked out one by one.

After a while, the boat bumped against the black rocks along the waterline of the Heartsease island. I set the oars in the bottom of the boat and climbed out onto the rocks.

The new Heartsease was almost finished being built, with windows in place and stairs leading up to an arched front doorway. The builders had stopped their work before finishing the roof.

The ground floor windows glowed with pinkish werelight. Nevery. And Benet, I hoped.

Pip was still in the Twilight, near one of the warehouses along the water. My locus magicalicus pulled at me. I stood waiting for Pip under the big tree in the courtyard, jittering a little, looking out over the dark water.

Pip didn’t come. It’d have to come eventually; it couldn’t resist the pull from me to my locus stone for too long.

I turned and went across the cobbled courtyard, trying not to make any noise. The werelight was coming from the ground floor, what would be the storeroom and Benet’s room when Heartsease was finished. I cat-footed up to one of the arched doorways and crouched beside it in the shadows. I peered in.

Since I’d been here last the floor had been finished, blocks of slate scattered with bricks and bent nails. Somebody had gathered boxes to use as chairs, and planks were set across two barrels for a table. Sitting on the boxes were Brumbee and a few of the duchess’s council members, and Argent. The bristle-bearded guard Farn leaned against one of the walls, along with six other Dawn Palace guards. Nevery stood beside the plank table looking down at a piece of paper spread on it; beside him stood Rowan, wearing her sword, pointing at something on the paper; behind Rowan was bat-faced Nimble in his brown magisters robe.

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” Nevery was saying.

Rowan leaned closer to the paper—a map, I guessed—squinting to see better, and traced her finger along a line. “What about this way, Magister Nevery?”

Nevery frowned. “Hmmm.”

Nimble spoke up with his high, whiny voice. “We cannot send the few trained guards we have on a mission that could well be useless. We need them here, protecting us.”

Rowan whirled to face him. “Useless?” She opened her mouth to say more, then closed her eyes for a moment and clenched and unclenched her fists. After taking a deep breath, she said, more calmly, “In the absence of my mother, I am the one who must make these decisions.”

Across the room, the guard Farn nodded. “Until we find Captain Kerrn, we report to you, Lady Rowan,” he said.

Rowan nodded. “Thank you, Farn.” She put her hand on her sword. “I will lead the mission myself, with Sir Argent, and the guards will come with us.
We could use a wizard, too.”

Nimble gave a shiver. “No wizard with any sense would go to the Sunrise at such a time. And if you are acting for the duchess, Lady Rowan, then you are too valuable to risk on this mission.”

Mission? What were they up to?
In the absence of my mother,
Rowan had said. Was the duchess still in the Dawn Palace? I didn’t see Benet. He’d been arrested; was he trapped there, too?

I got to my feet.

At the table, Nevery caught sight of me at the edge of the doorway. His eyes widened, then he gave a slight nod.

Come in, that meant.

I stepped into the room.

Nevery said something in a low voice to Rowan; she turned and saw me.

“Conn!” she said. Her face was pale and soot-smudged; her hair was tied back into a tail with a piece of string. She wore a green wormsilk dress with dirty lace cuffs and a torn ruffle along the hem
and had her swordbelt buckled around her waist.

“Hello, Ro,” I said.

The others in the room turned to stare as I came farther into the room.

“That is the criminal who was to be hanged!” one of the councilors said, getting up from her box-chair, pointing at me.

“He brought that huge dragon here!” said another.

“Guards, arrest him!” Nimble said.

Farn didn’t move; Rowan raised her hand and everyone fell silent. She really was in charge.

“Well, Conn?” Rowan asked.

I glanced down at the plank table. The paper was a map of the Sunrise, all the streets drawn in and the Dawn Palace carefully labeled. All under the cloud of Arhionvar.

Rowan saw where I was looking. “Conn, my mother was trapped in the Dawn Palace after Arhionvar arrived, and she’s—” She gulped and went on more quietly. “She’s been very ill.”

I looked across the table at Nevery. “Is Benet there, too?”

“Yes, boy,” Nevery said.

They weren’t going to like this. But sending guards in didn’t make any sense. “I’ll go to the Dawn Palace,” I said.