Found (3 page)
Authors: Sarah Prineas
O
n the way back to my attic room in the Rat Hole, I thought about skiffing off to pick a pocket or steal something to eat, but every time I started down an alley or tried to turn onto
another street, a minion stepped out and glared at me. Right. Straight back to my room, it was, with no stops for anything else. The minions following was their way of saying they knew where to find me, that I was free only because they let me stay free, and I still had my fluff because they’d decided not to beat it out of me yet.
The alleys grew narrower and more rutted; the houses on either side were soot-stained brick, with empty, broken windows or missing roofs, or front doors hanging off their hinges. Nobody lived here in the Rat Hole anymore. It was the oldest part of the city, the area where the artists and potters and glass-blowers and carpet weavers had lived a long time ago, before the factories were built and the workers had moved into tenements to be close to their work.
I turned off the alley into a dark space between two brick buildings only as wide as my shoulders. Then through a backyard full of rotted barrels and rusting metal hoops, and across another alley to my hiding place.
Once it’d been a tall town house in a row of town
houses like books lined up on a shelf. I went up the narrow stone steps to the front door, which was missing. The doorway was framed by stone door-posts shaped like dragons, but worn down so they were barely recognizable. But I knew what they were. A dragon was etched faintly into the stone doorstep, too.
I stepped in. Beside the door, under a piece of plaster that’d fallen from the ceiling, I’d stashed a candle and a striker. Rat Hole was full of misery eels, not just in the midnight-dark cellars, but in the rotted houses, too. The light would keep them away if they came after me. The candle had little toothmarks on it; rats had been at it. I struck a spark and lit it.
The building was just one room wide. With a faint circle of light around me, I went through the dark, empty downstairs, creaking over rotted floor-boards to a rickety stairway, and up three more floors. I’d found a ladder and used it to climb up to the attic because the stairs there had rotted all away.
I pulled up the ladder behind me. Safer that way.
My room was narrow, with two windows in the
slanted ceiling, both of them patched with brown paper and stuffed with rags around the frames to keep out the wind and rain. Rats lived in the walls. The air was chill and damp and smelled like mold and rot and smoke.
When I’d left, my room had been tidy.
In the flickering candlelight I looked it over. The minions wanted me to know they’d been there. My bed-blankets were kicked into a corner, my pile of books and grimoires had been thrown around the room, and some torn-out pages were stuffed into the fireplace. My shelf of food—biscuits and half a sausage wrapped up in paper—was empty. They’d thrown a jar of jam against a wall; it looked like a jam star splashed across the cracked plaster.
Drats. I took a deep breath and went to the hearth to pull the pages out. One by one, I flattened them on the floor and piled them together. Most of them weren’t burnt, just crumpled and smudged with ash.
Fist had taken my knapsack of food, so I had nothing to eat. My stomach felt hollow with hunger.
I dug around in some of the things the minions had thrown against the wall. My teakettle, dented, and in the corner, a cracked teacup. I found half a biscuit, too, dusty and rat-gnawed.
I went down to the pump in the house’s kitchen, climbed back up, and made tea from the scraps of tea leaves I swept up from the floor.
Drinking dusty tea, eating the half biscuit, and wishing for a better breakfast, I thought about what Fist had told me. Something going on with the magic, he’d said. I knew the Wellmet magic was frightened of Arhionvar. Even without a locus magicalicus, I could feel the magic hanging over my head like a storm cloud. The magic’s watchers, its black birds, watched me all the time and flew down to sit on my shoulder and say
krrrr
,
krrrr
into my ear.
The magic wanted me to do something. It knew as well as I did that Arhionvar was coming. The knowing made me feel like mingled slowsilver and tourmalifine—about to explode. But what more could I do than I was already doing?
Tap
,
tap
,
tap
at one of the slanted windows in the ceiling. I creaked up out of my blankets, still sore from falling down the stone steps in the minions’ place, went over to the window, and cracked it open.
A black bird hopped in, shaking drops of misty rain from its wings.
“Hello,” I said to it. A quill was strapped to its leg, a message from Nevery. The letter was written on a long, narrow piece of paper rolled up tight and tied with a piece of thread. Not a letter, I saw when I unrolled it, but the treatise on the lost city of Arhionvar.
I’d read it, but first I had a note to write back. While the bird hopped around on the floor, I dug around in the mess the minions had made. They’d taken my paper and pens and ink bottle, and all my notes about pyrotechnics, but I found a rat-nibbled stub of pencil to write with and a blank space on one of the pages the minions had ripped out of a book.
I tried to write neatly, because Nevery hated it when he couldn’t read my handwriting.
Nevery,
I need to talk to you, and to Rowan, if you can get her
.
The magic is doing something strange in the Twilight
.
If you send Benet with the boat we can meet at Heartsease tonight
.
—Connwaer
I folded up the torn-out book page and slid it into the quill.
“Off you go,” I said to the bird, and opened a window so it could fly away. It flapped off into the fog.
After it was gone, I stuffed rags back into the cracks around the window frame and started cleaning up the mess the minions had left. It didn’t take long. Then I sat down against the wall, wrapped in my damp blankets, and read the Arhionvar treatise.
Nevery’d told me about this treatise before, when I’d first become a wizard, but I’d been too distracted by Crowe’s device to read it.
According to the treatise, Arhionvar had once been a city far away in the southern Fierce Mountains. For some reason the city had died. All the people had fled. It wasn’t in the treatise, but I could guess the rest: The city’s magic had left the mountains and had become a predator magic—a magic called Arhionvar after the city where it’d lived. I didn’t
know why it had left its proper place to wander around attacking other cities, as it’d attacked Desh, and as it was about to attack Wellmet. It’d already partly succeeded against Wellmet; the magic was weaker now than it’d been before the device, Nevery said. Prey for the predator.
After a while, the bird came back,
tap tap tapping
at my window. I creaked it open and the bird hopped onto my shoulder. In the quill, a message from Nevery.
Not tonight. Meeting with magisters later. Meet Benet at Tryworks warehouse dock tomorrow night just after dark. Don’t be late.
And don’t tear pages out of books to write on, boy. If you need money for paper, ask for it.
—N
Drats. I wrote him a quick note back saying I would meet Benet where he said, and that I had received the Arhionvar treatise he’d sent, and then I sent the bird off again.
L
ate in the afternoon, as the clouds crowded in over the city for the night’s rain, I heard the clump-clump of heavy feet coming up the stairs. The footsteps stopped under the hole in my floor where the stairs had been.
“Hoy there, blackbird!”
The minion Fist. No point in pretending I wasn’t there. I put down the roll of paper with the Arhionvar treatise written on it, climbed out of my nest of blankets, and went over and lay down on my stomach so I could look through the hole in the floor.
“You’re here, are you?” Fist asked, looking up at me.
Where else would I be? I nodded.
“Got something for you.” He held up a big, square package wrapped in brown paper. “Come down and get it.”
Unless it was food, I didn’t want it. I shook my head.
“No harm,” Fist said. “Just some books.”
“Leave them there,” I said.
Fist shrugged and, very gently, set the package on the floor. Then he turned and clump-clumped back down the stairs.
I waited until I heard him go out of the house,
then got the ladder and skiffed down for the package and lugged it back up to my room. The light had gotten too dim to see much, so I lit a nub of candle, set it on the hearth, and unwrapped the stack of books. A slip of paper was wrapped up with them. I recognized the neat handwriting; it was a note from Embre.
These books were found last winter in a cellar in the Twilight. You might find them interesting.
Embre
The books were old and spotted with mildew, and they had titles like
Pyrotechnics for Industrial Purposes
and
Further Notes on Explosive Ratios
. The book on the bottom of the stack was covered with crumbling black leather, and even though some of the letters had flaked off, I could make out the title, printed in gold:
TH
GRIM RE
OF
A
NAM LE S
ZARD
AND
ANON MOUS
PYRO NIST
My hands shaking a little from excitement, I opened the book. The binding cracked, and more bits of leather flaked off the cover. The pages inside
were yellowed, and the tiny, messy handwriting had faded to gray. Holding the book closer to the candle, I peered at the words. Magic spells and strange ideas about pyrotechnics, it looked like.
I started reading. In the second chapter, at the top of the page, was written
Some Notes on Finding Spells w/Absolute Stoichiometrical Pyrotechnic Effect
.