Briar's Book (17 page)

A soft chuckle greeted Crane’s words. He pronounces it like he never said “got lucky” in his life, but he’s trying to sound like one of us, Briar thought, amused. If he ain’t careful, he’ll break a tooth that way.

The dedicate cleared his throat. “Then, unless we stumble on something useful purely by accident, those trays must be emptied and cleaned thoroughly and quickly.” Crane shrugged. “I regret to say that since we proceeded quite well yesterday, there are a great many trays to be cleaned.”

A few workers groaned.

Rosethorn raised a hand for quiet. “I know this looks like a setback,” she said. “The truth is, it’s the best news we’ve had in a while. At last we know
something.
All of us have worked with magic enough to know that it jumps funny sometimes, but we also know ways to detect what magic has shaped and unravel the spell. No long faces or complaints – we’ve finally got a direction we can follow.”

“Enough loitering,” said Crane. “To work, all of you.” To Rosethorn he added, “I will join you in a moment. I need to look around.”

Rosethorn nodded and headed for the inner workroom at her usual brisk stride. A man lifting a tray with blue pox essence turned from his counter just as Rosethorn passed and clipped her with the heavy tray. It tilted and began to slide from his grip. Instinctively Rosethorn grabbed it as yellow fluid ran out from under the glass top to drip on her gloves and arm.

“Stupid bleater!” Briar snarled.

He yanked Rosethorn away, sliding a hand underneath the tray to raise it until it was level. “Chuffle-witted, festering – ”

“Stop that,” Rosethorn ordered, stripping off her gloves. “Take off your gloves.”

“Rosethorn, he – ”

A lordly voice cut him off. “You – out,” Crane ordered. “Immediately.”

The worker said, “I’m sorry. I’m so – ” He put the tray on the counter and fled to the washroom.

“Let the gloves fall – we’ll clean them up,” a friendly voice said in Briar’s ear. It was Osprey, holding two fresh pairs. “Dedicate Rosethorn?”

“No harm done,” claimed Rosethorn as she took the new gloves. Her face was pale. “It was scary, that’s all. Briar, come put that anger to some use.”

Briar followed her to the inner workroom, pulling on his new gloves. Watching Rosethorn go to her counter, he suddenly felt weak with fright. She had said there was no harm done, hadn’t she? It must be true. She wouldn’t let the tiniest drop of pox run between sleeve and glove, where it might touch her skin. Never. Besides, the spot on her forehead was still crimson. She didn’t have the disease.

Or would it change color only when her body lost the fight to keep the pox from taking over?

He couldn’t work like this. Steadying himself against his counter, Briar closed his eyes and practiced meditation breathing. He wanted to stop shaking before he even tried to handle his trays.

Niko and Tris halted where a pair of tunnels intersected. Tris felt the force of the water, thigh deep now, heavy on her barrier. She poured more strength into it, baring the ledge on which they stood and its counterpart across the intersection. With the gold shimmer in the water itself removed, they could see where the footprints continued after a jump from ledge to ledge.

Niko sighed. “I hope it’s not too slippery over there.” He braced himself, then leaped across the canal, landing on the far side where the footprints resumed. Tris had to back up and run a few steps to get the speed to clear the canal.

“We were lucky at Winding Circle, I guess,” Tris said grimly as they picked up the trail again. “All our water comes from wells on the other side of Wehen Ridge. None of this leaks through the stone of the ridge.”

They passed more intersections and entered smaller tunnels, where they had no ledge to walk on. Tris shoved the sluggish liquid mess to either side, fiercely determined to avoid contact with it for as long as she could manage. She had to pity Niko. In here he was forced to walk in a stoop, trying valiantly to keep his head from touching the slime on the roof overhead.

Suddenly the trail ended in a broad, drippy blotch in the center of the tunnel and along a curved wall. Niko and Tris looked up. Immediately above that gold blotch was a barred rectangle of light: a grating. They could hear the rattle of wheels on cobblestones and a distant clock striking the half hour.

They had passed ladders to the street all during their expedition. There was one five yards ahead with a sign next to it that read
LUCKY
STREET
&
SHORT-SHANK
WAY
. Niko climbed up, opened the exit and looked around, then sank down a rung. “Stand back,” he ordered Tris.

Confused, she did as she was told. Niko stripped off his heavy outer garments, dropping them into the sewer: only his mask, gloves, and street clothes remained. He then boosted himself up onto the street. “You do the same,” he ordered, his voice a haunting drift from the light overhead. “Wait until you’re almost out.”

“Oh, joy,” she muttered, panting as she struggled to climb the ladder. She tried not to remember that her three housemates would have clambered up like monkeys.

When Tris emerged, blinking, into the light, Niko stopped her. He’d removed his gloves and tossed them into the sewer. Now he pulled fresh ones from his satchel, giving a pair to Tris. As he placed the cover on the sewer hole, she looked around. They were not in the best part of town. Houses were jammed together, cobbles broken or missing in the street. A view of a towering wall between her and the sun told her they were in East District, near the wall that separated the poorest part of Summersea from the Mire.

Bodies lay on either side of the narrow rising way, many attended by rats. What faces she saw were covered with blue spots. Far down Lucky Street she heard a clanking sound, metal-shod wheels on stone. A wide, deep-bedded dray made its slow way uphill toward her. Workers in gloves, robes, and masks loaded the dead into it.

Those few who walked the hilly streets abroad were veiled or masked and moved with a quick, scuttling gait not unlike that of the rats. If they were puzzled at the emergence of a man and a chubby girl from the sewer, they kept it to themselves. Blue circles were painted on a number of doors to mark where the disease had struck. Fires burned on the corners. Homeless animals, their owners dead, roamed everywhere, digging through garbage in the hope of finding a meal.

A bony hand rested on her shoulder. “You can’t think of that,” Niko said. Of course he’d seen her eyes fill at the sight of the starving creatures. “We have to track down the disease. Time to renew the balm.” He fished out the jar and, taking off a glove, dotted Tris’s eyelids and his own. “Don’t put your spectacles on just yet. Since we now trace not the magic as it became the plague, but the magic alone…”

He drew a glass vial from his satchel and opened it. As Niko touched the bottle’s damp stopper to her eyelids and to the center of her forehead, above the diagnosis oil, Tris’s long nose twitched. New scents – heavy, unpleasant, musty – poured into that sensitive organ. She was about to inquire when Niko said quickly, “You won’t learn what goes into this one for a couple of years – some of the ingredients are poisonous. Don’t even bother to ask. You can put your spectacles on.”

She blinked as vapors from the new liquid made her eyes sting. While Niko anointed his lids – she saw them blaze with her changed vision – she looked around. Scraps of magic glinted in corners and on door and windowsills, the remnants of luck and prosperity charms, love potions, and other small workings. A thin, blue-white cord stretched from a nearby sewer grating up the street.

Niko beckoned her; they followed the blue-white cord to a tall, ramshackle house nearby. The door, a blue circle painted around the knocker, was half off its hinges, which made it easy for Tris and Niko to enter. They stood in a dark and narrow hall, ankle deep in trash, facing a rickety staircase. All the doors on this story were as useless as the front door. Rats and insects fled into the empty rooms, trying to escape the light that now shone bright around Niko.

The blue-white cord led them up three flights of stairs. Tris guessed that this place had rented out rooms. It seemed that now most, if not all, of the building had been abandoned in the wake of the blue pox.

The staircase ended in a garret. The looters had apparently ignored this level. Maybe they don’t like stairs either, thought Tris as she fought to catch her breath. There were only two apartments: the cord vanished through the closed door on one. Niko rapped hard, then tried the knob, only to find it locked. He sighed.

“We should have brought a guard with us,” he told Tris. “Now I have to find one – why are you smirking at me?”

Tris drew a small, rolled-up cloth from her pocket.
Briar?
she called through their magical bond.
I need some advice.

Briar was about to pick up a new tray. Now he stepped away from the stack and turned his attention to his friend.
You came to the right person,
he said with approval, inspecting the locked door through her eyes.
Smart thinking, to bring your picks.
That winter, in exchange for lessons in reading classic Kurchali, he had begun to teach her the art of lock picking.
Which pick do you need to start!

The long, straight one?
she replied, a bit unsure.

Good. Now, get close.

Tris knelt before the lock and let Briar help her through the rough spots as Niko watched, bemused. She only needed two picks before the lock gave and the door opened. A wave of rot-stench surged from the room inside.

“Someone died here,” Niko remarked.

“If you hadn’t told me, I might never have known.” Tris’s sarcasm was nearly lost in the croaking of her voice as she swallowed a mouthful of bile.

You don’t need me for this,
Briar told her.
Good hunting.

Once inside, they had to take a moment to bunk their vision clear: strips, sparkles, and blots of magic shone everywhere. Half of the large room was a mage’s workplace, with a small herb garden in the window, bottles and boxes of ingredients perched on the shelves that lined one wall, a counter littered with jars, mortars, crystals of all shapes, and boxes of candles and ribbons. Another wall held twenty or so books. A meager hearth served for cooking as well as heat, and the pots and pans that hung from hooks around it had seen better days. A wooden trunk also served as a table. There was a footstool and three chairs, all in need of patching.

A tiny bedchamber opened off that room – Niko looked in and closed the door. “Our mage is dead,” he said grimly. “Maybe that’s best. Once her role in this was discovered, I think no power on earth could have kept her safe. People would have wanted vengeance.”

“What if the past-viewing spell doesn’t help us find out what we need to know?” Tris asked, worried.

“Somewhere in here is her journal or workbook. The past-viewing spell ought to show us where it is, and in turn it will tell us what she did.” Niko sighed. “Are you ready to help me?”

Tris nodded. They had done this kind of spell once before, to find out why the Bit Island watchtower had exploded. Remembering how they had worked it, she threw a rope of power to Niko, letting him draw on her strength as well as his own. With her improved magical vision, she saw the power that jumped from his fingertips as a series of lightning-bright threads. The threads wove themselves into a circle around Niko and Tris, then spread to enclose them in a globe of cobwebs that blazed like the sun. Tris shut her eyes, hoping to blot out the too-bright image, only to find the magic was still visible, though not the room. Sighing, she opened her eyes in time to see Niko make two cuts, one to each palm. He let the blood drip. It entered the spell-webs and raced through them, making them vanish. Now they saw the ghostly image of a short, dark-haired woman at the counter. From each of five bottles she dropped liquid onto five pieces of –

“That looks like bacon,” she muttered.

Niko squinted for a better look. “It is bacon.”

The woman made a note in a journal, watching the raw meat intently. One strip turned green and fell apart. One crinkled and turned yellow. A third liquefied. The remaining two turned black as coal, as if they had been cooked for much too long.

From the way she reacted, the dark-haired woman was furious. She flipped to an earlier page in her journal and crossed out what looked like recipes with angry slashes of her pen. She tugged her hair, hit the counter, and burst into tears. At last she stoppered the glass vials and put them in a covered basket. Something then made her pause.

She drew a purse through an opening in her skirt and upended it into her palm. A few copper coins spilled out. She stared at them, lips moving – counting, Tris guessed.

“No,” whispered Niko, “you dolt, stop and think. There are reasons why the law says magical things must be disposed of at Winding Circle.”

The woman counted her money again, then stared at her basket. Opening it, she removed the vials and emptied them into a wooden bowl. She closed the journal, tied a ribbon that glowed with magical symbols around it, and reached into the shelves in front of her, groping. The shelves swung open to reveal a hidden compartment. She set the journal there and closed it. Bowl in hand, the mage walked through Tris, opened a ghost door, and passed through the real one, out of their sight.

“Stupid,” whispered Niko, as passionately angry as Tris had ever seen him. He stalked over to the shelves and reached under one, searching for the catch to the hidden compartment. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!”

“She just got rid of a potion that didn’t work,” protested Tris. When his search proved fruitless, she boosted herself onto the counter and thrust her smaller hand behind the bottles. She was interested to see that they were glued into place, never meant for use in the dead mage’s work. Finding the catch, she tugged, and the shelf door swung open. She dropped to the floor as Niko removed the journal.

“She dumped five magically enhanced fluids that had not been properly neutralized,” Niko rapped back. “With no thought of how they might interact with anything else. The fee charged to handle these things is small. Gods of light and knowledge save me from coin-pinching lackwits!”