The Hawk And His Boy (13 page)

SPYING ON JUTE

Nio returned to the university ruins in the morning.

Mioja Square already bustled with people. Vendors called back and forth, vying for the attention of customers. Nio was so wrapped up in his thoughts as he walked along that he failed to notice Severan hurrying toward him, hand raised in greeting. At the last moment, though, the old man must have somehow thought better of it, for he ducked behind an apple cart. Nio swept past, head down and brow furrowed. Severan stood and looked after him, but then he made his own way in the opposite direction, away from the university and into the city.

As Nio expected, the university was silent within. He double-checked anyway and stood motionless for several minutes, eyes closed and listening to the silence looming around him. He let his awareness drift through the expanse of the ruins. Countless halls, chambers, courtyards choked with rubble, mold, dust, and silence. Towers crumbled in magnificent disarray or still standing proud over the city. Stairways climbing into the sky. Secrets and shadows and old memories soaked into stone, still stained with blood and tears centuries after the living had been brought down into dust. And the slumber of his fellow searchers, floating across his consciousness like dandelion seeds drifting in the air. No one was awake.

Nio frowned. Only three sleepers. The fourth was not in the university ruins.

He came to himself and opened his eyes. It was as he expected. Though the absence of one so early in the morning was a bit surprising. They all tended to stay up late, arguing over discrepancies in this history or that, or quarreling over inflections in long-dead words that had not been uttered out loud in hundreds of years. With such a habit, they all slept until noon every day.

Scholars. His lip curled. All of them hid behind the title scholar, rather than the dubious distinction of being a wizard. Both studied the same kinds of things. A wizard, however, sought to apply his learning to life. A scholar did not, being content to learn, observe, and record. It was a distinction that had arisen after the Midsummer War and the ill repute that conflict had given wizards. These days in Tormay, hardly a wizard could be found in any of the duchies, unless you counted the tame court wizards of Hearne and Harth, who existed only to ply their parlor tricks at parties to amuse the nobility. In truth, it wasn’t safe to be a wizard.

Ridiculous.

Things would be different. Someday. He would see to that.

The morning sunlight poured in through the thin clerestory windows of the west wing hall. The blue tiles shimmered benignly, as lovely a blue as a summer sky. He picked his way around them, though he deliberately stepped on a blue tile just before the threshold. Safely on the other side, he turned and watched the dog rise up from the floor. A blue vapor, like steam rising from a kettle spout, thickened until it grew opaque and took on solid form. The creature snapped at him once, but then settled on its haunches not two feet away. They regarded each other silently, the man and the beast, and there was interest on both sides.

It has intelligence woven into it
,
thought Nio. It isn’t just a mindless ward created to strike out blindly. Those eyes are assessing me. Thinking. Planning.

He marveled at the craft, wanting to understand and possess the knowledge that had gone into the making. The dog stared back at him. After several minutes, the thing grew transparent, and then it was only a blue mist that drifted down and vanished into the floor.

He stood in silence beneath the ceiling mosaic for a while. It waited in a meaningless jumble of colors. He wondered what the others had sought from it the night before. The three smaller mosaics were still in the same state as when he had last seen them: the hawk, the wolf, and the red eyes of the fire staring down from within darkness. Only the mosaic of the sea was featureless, secure within its border of carved fish, seabirds, and waves.

First, there was the fire mosaic to restore.

“
Brond, byrnan, sweodol, ond lig
,” he said. The stones shifted, the colors sharpening. “
Fyr ond bael!”

And then the image was clear. Not as clear as it might have been, had he possessed more knowledge of fire, but clearer than what the others had seen last night. It stared down at him. It was similar to a man, yet not. The face was formed of shadow. The eyes were coals, banked and smoldering behind the lids.

A sceadu.

His heart quickened and his mouth went dry. A sceadu. A being woven out of the true darkness at the beginning of time. According to lore, only three of them had ever existed. No one had ever seen one since the days of Staer Gemyndes, and even he had written guardedly of them in his books. But there had been a sketch of a sceadu in one of his histories. Nio shivered and tried to doubt his own eyes. There was something oddly familiar about the sceadu’s face. What was it? The wihht. That’s what it was. A hint of similarity between the two.

The wihht, he thought guiltily. But seldom do I exercise such a spell. It is always on behalf of a greater need, when there are no other choices available. I will unmake the wihht once I have no more need for it. Besides, I would never have dealings with such a thing as a sceadu.

What could it mean? The fire wanderer, Aeled, served by a sceadu? But perhaps we had it all wrong. Perhaps these four smaller mosaics signify something different and do not represent the four companions of the wanderers. After all, the three visible are all black in color to some degree. Surely that might represent some sort of tie to the Dark, like the sceadu. Might they all represent enemies of the wanderers? The purpose of the anbeorun is to guard against the Dark, all the histories agree on that, so how could one be served by a creature of the Dark? Also, the earth mosaic should portray a horse, not a wolf. The horse Min the Morn. Were all the old writings wrong?

He pondered on this a while, but he could not come to any conclusion and so turned his attention to the lifeless mosaic of the sea. Sometimes it was better not to think about certain things.

Only one word of the sea. That was all he knew. The memory of its cost was still painful. Even after all these years, he wasn’t sure if he had been cheated. Was there value in the word? Or was it merely a lifeless sound? He had never been able to devise a test. He wet his lips with his tongue and then spoke.

“
Seolhbaeo
.”

The word whispered in the air. It sounded like the ocean surf sighing on the shore. Nio held his breath. What sort of creature would be revealed? He was not sure he had pronounced the word correctly. The old man who sold the word to him had refused to say the thing out loud, but had written it out on parchment, which he then burned after Nio memorized it.
Not a safe word, lad,
he had said.
No telling who might hear. Things listen, they do.

For a moment, Nio was sure he had been cheated. The old man had swindled him. But then the little mosaic came alive. Its stones did not move like the other mosaics. Rather, all of its stones turned blue. A deep, greenish blue the color of the sea. There was nothing else. Just the color. The blue seemed to heave and sway as soon as he looked away, but whenever he stared straight at the little mosaic, it was still.

Elated, he turned his attention to the huge mosaic overhead. He described the box in detail. Black mahogany. Old silver hinges and catch. The lid carved with a hawk’s head, the moon and the sun floating behind. Whorls curving in and out of each other on all four sides.

The mosaic sprang into life. The definition of color and shadow was more precise than what he had seen the previous night. The tiny stones shifted around each other. Colors blurred into other colors. Then the mosaic went still. The picture it presented of the box was indistinct. Not because of a lack of focus, but because the box was obviously in a dark place.

Nio cursed out loud. The mosaic was thrown into confusion by his words. The picture of the box vanished into a jumble of color and nonsensical shapes as the mosaic sought to portray what his cursing looked like. He had to laugh at that, and then he restored the original view of the box. When it was once again visible, he studied the picture.

The box was on a shelf in something like a closet or a cupboard. A faint bit of light shone from somewhere, perhaps a crack in the door. The space was lined with shelves crowded with boxes of all shapes and sizes, stacks of books, bulging velvet bags, and a heap of necklaces crammed into one corner and spilling over the shelf’s edge like a waterfall of gold. Obviously, the hideaway belonged to someone wealthy. The Guild.

Nio cursed again, but was prudent enough to do it under his breath. There was no self-evident way to shift the angle of view the mosaic presented. If he could see the outer door of the hideaway, then he might gain a clue as to where the thing was. Perhaps if he waited? Did the mosaic maintain its views in the changing immediacy of the present? If true, then he might see someone open the hideaway to take or leave an object. His eyes gleamed at the thought. But what if one of the old men came down the stairs and caught him here? He couldn’t risk that.

But what if finding the box was no longer important? What if whatever had been inside was no longer there?

The thought sickened him.

The boy had known where to look in the house. Someone had instructed him how to beat the guardian ward. That indicated magic at work. Ridiculous, to think the boy knew such arts. Someone powerful had set up the theft. That same someone might have known how to open the box. If he could find the boy, then he would unravel him like a thread and find his way, inch by inch, back to whoever had hired him.

The boy.

The frightened face appeared in his mind.

“A boy named Jute. Within the city of Hearne, most likely. Slight for his age. About thirteen years old. Ragged, probably. Dirty, I’m sure. Thin-faced. Straight black hair.” He wracked his memory, trying to recall details.

“Dark brown eyes. Old bruises on his face, I think. Slender hands. The hands of a thief. A thief.
Oeof
.” He held his breath and watched the mosaic.

The stones shifted. Colors rippled. Lines blurred into being and then rearranged themselves into shapes. A stone warehouse, long sweeps of wharves, the blue stretch of sea and sky behind. Figures bending over crates spilling over with silver. Silver. Fish. The docks. And there in the foreground, a boy clambering up from the beach. It could have been any one of the hundreds of street urchins afflicting the city of Hearne. But then, the boy turned toward him, almost as if aware of his gaze, and the dark eyes and face sprang into clarity.

Nio whirled and leapt up the stairs. He stopped, cursed, and ran back down.

“
Undon
,” he said to the little mosaic of the sea. The blue grayed into dull stone. He muttered a word at the mosaic of fire, and the image of the sceadu lost clarity, devolving into the indistinct mass of darkness and two red eyes that had been there before. He snapped a few words at the mosaic overhead until it swirled into a confusion of color and shape.

He ran for the stairs. There was no time to lose.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE PERFECT PLACE TO HIDE

Jute made his way along the foot of the cliffs until he came to the sweep of beach curving along the city walls toward the harbor. He hunkered down behind a boulder and thought for a while. At least he tried to think, but this proved to be difficult, as he was shivering with cold and growing hungrier by the minute.

It was some help, though, to think about the hawk. The whole affair was so strange that it diverted his thoughts from his miserable state. He had a memory of someone saying there were certain animals that could talk—beasts that had been enspelled. Perhaps it had been one of the older boys. Some of the Juggler’s children had come from privileged backgrounds, children who had run away from families wealthy enough to have afforded schooling.

What had the hawk meant?

Things wake that should not have been disturbed. You would do well to avoid their attention.

Did the hawk mean things like the horrible creature in the cellar? Even though he was already shivering, this thought made him shiver even more.
For now, be content with staying alive, youngling.
He might be able to manage that, if he could somehow get warmed up. Some food would help too.

Several fishing boats were drawn up on the beach. Fishermen were stretching out their nets to dry on the sand. Others carried wicker baskets of fish from the night’s catch to the wharves further along the beach. Bigger boats were tied up along the wharves, prows in and crowded for space. Costermongers sold the fresh catch from their stalls. Housewives, cooks from the city’s inns, stewards, even the blue-liveried servants from the regent’s household prodded and poked and sniffed their way through piles of bass, snapper, and flounder, along with buckets of oysters and baskets of eels twisting about themselves like tangled black velvet ropes. Someone had caught a pair of sharks, and the brutes hung by their tails at the side of a stall, seawater and blood trickling from their jaws.

Past the wharves, an immense pier on stone pilings extended out into the harbor almost to the breakwater that sheltered Hearne’s port from the sea. Larger oceangoing vessels were moored along the pier. Slim, double-masted ketches, sturdy schooners from the northern duchies of Tormay, and huge galleons from Harth flying the golden flag of the house of Oran. Even now, a brigantine with square white sails running up was coming about, turning toward the gap in the breakwater and the sea beyond.