Jinx's Magic (16 page)

It was after midnight when Jinx reached the blue-violet door to Simon's house. He put out his hand to lift the latch. But the latch didn't move.

KnIP, he reminded himself. He
knew
the door would open.

But it wouldn't.

He tried the door-opening spell he'd learned at the Bonemaster's house. The door did not open.

He worked his knife along the crack of the door by the lock. Nothing.

He tried prying the door open. The knife blade broke.

He kicked the door.

Then he had a feeling, just for a second, of thoughts close by, and he spun around fast and was just in time to catch a glimpse of a dark form running away across the rooftops.

Jinx didn't know what to do. There was no visible lock, and no way to remove the latch or the hinges. And he was pretty sure, from the feel of things, that whoever had locked the door had done it with magic.

He was trapped in Samara.

 

If he couldn't get back to the Urwald to find Simon, then Jinx had to learn KnIP, and fast.

Back at the Temple, he tried desperately to create KnIP spells. He tried knowing things that weren't true. But he . . . knew they weren't true. So the spells didn't work.

He couldn't risk going back to visit Sophie again to ask her for help—not when he was being followed. He couldn't get into the Urwald to look for Simon. He told Wendell what he'd found in the KnIP books, but Wendell just frowned and looked concerned. He wasn't much help with book-related stuff.

Jinx sat in a tree in the yard of the Twisted Branch. People walked past, laughing and talking. They didn't have Jinx's worries. He had to rescue Sophie, find the Eldritch Tome, figure out what had happened to Simon, teach himself KnIP . . .

Somehow Simon had managed to learn KnIP. Who had taught him? Egbert the Onion? If he'd just learned it from those stupid books, then he was a lot smarter than Jinx was.

Jinx leaned his face against the tree trunk and felt the tree's lifeforce pulsing through it. He thought about the Urwald. If only the prison was in the Urwald! He'd get Sophie out easily.

He found himself telling the old tree about the Urwald.

Then in the darkness he became aware of thousands of trees—millions of trees—a vast forest, stretching on forever. The roots drank from the Crocodile River, they dug deep into the rich, moist soil of the hill where the Temple stood—

Really? There was a forest here? How long ago?
Jinx asked.

The tree was confused by the question—time was different for a tree. Time was a circle of seasons, even in Samara. Time was always now.

But this particular now? Perhaps fifty thousand years ago.

Jinx couldn't even imagine that much time . . . time enough for a forest to become a desert. In the tree's memory, he could sense the lifeforce the ancient forest had had . . . and now it was gone from the world.

What if the Urwald's lifeforce were lost from Jinx's world? If Reven cut down all the trees? Then the place would become like Samara—hot, dry, and magicless.

But no—Samara wasn't magicless. It had KnIP.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Wendell stood under the tree, looking up at him.

“Thinking.” Jinx said a silent farewell to the tree, and jumped down.

“About that KnIP stuff?”

“Yeah. Well, actually . . .” Jinx looked around to make sure no one was within earshot. Then he told Wendell what the tree had shown him.

“So wait a minute, you mean you taught a tree how to talk?”

“No, it already knew how,” said Jinx.

“Cool. Is that magic?”

“No,” said Jinx. “It's easy if you kind of listen and stuff.”

“So all you Urwalders can talk to trees?”

“No—”

“Just magicians?”

“Not really,” said Jinx. “I mean I've never met anyone else who could do it. But—”

“So it's a kind of magic that you invented,” said Wendell.

“It's not magic. Other people could do it if they tried.” But Jinx found himself wondering for the first time if Listening actually was a kind of magic.

“Maybe if you asked the tree what Sophie meant, it'd tell you,” Wendell suggested.

“Trees don't think like that.”

“But it was talking about time, right? Same as Sophie was. Well, it's probably something I wouldn't understand. Oh, hey, I got another guiding job.”

He glowed blue happiness.

“That's nice,” said Jinx.

“It was those same merchants I guided before—well, no, it's different merchants, but those first merchants told these guys they should ask for me! Can you believe it?”

“Yes,” said Jinx, amused.

“So they came here looking for me,” said Wendell. “It's only for a few days, starting a week from Thursday.”

“That's great,” said Jinx. “Um, listen, is there a way to find out when Sophie's trial is?”

Wendell frowned. “They don't announce that kind of thing. I mean not in advance. They sort of spring it on people.”

“Oh.”

“Makes it more terrifying, obviously. And then they get through it quick and do the boiling right after, in public. It's very effective.”

“I guess boiling would be,” said Jinx.

“I mean effective at keeping people scared. The whole way they do it. But generally it kind of leaks out, a day or two ahead of time.”

“Leaks . . . oh, you mean gossip?”

“Yeah.”

“Could you sort of listen for the gossip?” Like hooking into the Witchline.

“Oh! Yes! I can do that.”

 

Jinx sat in the library and stared at the stupid book.

 

What is known is a matter of time, and time is a matter of what is not yet known.

 

Gah! That was about as useful as what Sophie had said. What was it? “What isn't true now may be true in the future.” And “Knowing is having confidence in the infinity of possibility.”

And Wendell had said to ask the tree, which wasn't useful, because “the future” didn't mean the same thing to trees. . . .

All right. What if you did think of time the way a tree did? Not from the dead-and-gone past to the unknowable future, but in a circle, ever present? Then you could know something was true in the future . . . no, you could know that something
could
be true in the future. . . .

Jinx stared at the library table in front of him and, holding his breath, knew there was a hole in it.

A small hole, the size of a cup, appeared in the table.

That was it! He could
know
it because it was possible in the future! That was all there was to it.

Only it turned out that wasn't all there was to it. Because when Jinx tried to make a bigger hole, he couldn't. He knew and knew and knew, but the hole got no bigger.

He tried knowing there was another hole next to the first one. That worked. Then a third. And a fourth. Now there was a hole about eight inches wide, and shaped like a four-leafed clover.

“Hello, Zhinx.”

Jinx grabbed a book, meaning to hide the hole, but it was too late. Satya was coming down the aisle between two bookshelves carrying a small blue volume and sipping a cup of tea.

She set the cup down on the hole Jinx had made in the table. The cup sat there, on empty air.

“What are you staring at?” she said.

“Um, nothing.” Jinx had to fight the urge to reach his hand up through the table and grab the cup from underneath.

“We're allowed to have tea in the library.” She handed him the book. “Take a look at this.”

The title was
Internal Force Ratio of Torque Functions
.

“Uh, yeah?” said Jinx.

Satya smiled. “Open it.”

The book was handwritten in tiny, cramped script. Jinx had to put his head close to even make out that it was Qunthk.

Satya turned back to the title page.

There, in ordinary-sized writing, were the words, in Qunthk:

 

The Eldritch Tome

 

“Oh wow,” said Jinx. “Where did you find it?”

Satya's thoughts stepped behind each other. They slid around. She smiled. “Over there, with a bunch of other books with ‘torque' in the title.”

She wasn't lying, exactly. Jinx had an idea that that
was
where she had found the book, but that that wasn't the whole story. Maybe someone had told her to look there. He wondered who.

Anyway. He had the Eldritch Tome. If he deciphered it, it would tell him how to undo the deathbindings, what strange thing the Bonemaster had done with his own life, and maybe even what had become of Simon. It seemed to Jinx that he could never thank Satya enough for finding the book. The trouble with having grown up with Simon was that it didn't provide you with a lot of resources, politeness-wise. What would Reven have said in this situation?

Just that, probably. “I can't thank you enough.”

Satya beamed. But she was still frightened—of something. She picked up her floating cup of tea and left.

Jinx stuck his hand through the table to make sure there was really a hole. Yes, of course there was. He'd
known
there was.

That's it, Jinx thought. For Satya, there was no hole in the table. KnIP spells only work if you know they're there.

And it was just as well, because the librarians would probably take a dim view of people making holes in their tables. When Jinx tried to make the hole go away, he couldn't.

 

The trouble with the Eldritch Tome was that it was unreadable. Not just because of the tiny print and the strange language. It was, as Sophie would say, abstruse. Way more abstruse than any other magic book Jinx had ever read. It went along like this:

 

Let life equal death, and let living leaf equal cold stone. Take leaf to life, and dearth to death, and seal the whole at the nadir of all things.

 

Jinx couldn't figure out what this meant. Maybe if he managed to rescue Sophie, she'd be able to explain it to him. After all, Sophie was pretty abstruse herself.

Jinx practiced KnIP for the next couple of days. He got pretty good at creating spells—tiny spells. He didn't have enough power to do more because he didn't have enough knowledge.

The more KnIP he did, the more clearly he saw his own knowledge—a woven ball that kept adding to itself, sending out threads that connected to other threads and looped around and caught old bits of knowledge and connected them to new bits and created completely different bits out of the connections.

And he saw other people's knowledge. He would've expected Satya to have more than Wendell. But she didn't. They both had quite large amounts.

But the adult scholars had more. Jinx figured it was just because the weaving and the connections had been going on for longer.

Even Professor Night had more knowledge than Jinx did. But Omar, Jinx's teacher from the Hutch, had more than Professor Night. Jinx was rather pleased by this, because he liked Omar.

The preceptors had huge amounts of knowledge. They walked around in great glistening interwoven glowing spheres like dense matrices of golden wire. It wasn't twice as much knowledge as Jinx had, or five times as much. It was a thousand times as much.

How could a person ever know that much?

 

Wendell had gone to do his guiding job. Jinx hoped he wouldn't miss any gossip about Sophie's trial. As for Jinx, he had to find a way to get back to the Urwald.

There was no getting around it—if knowledge was the power that made KnIP work, Jinx just didn't have enough. Sophie couldn't escape from prison through a hole the size of a coffee cup—not unless Jinx turned her into a snake, and he definitely didn't have enough knowledge to do that. Plus she would hate it.

He needed Simon.

It was two o'clock in the morning. Jinx went up the street of close-set doors. He put down the Eldritch Tome and tried the door to Simon's house. It was shut as tight as before. Jinx thought into a possible future in which the door opened, and he knew that the future existed, and therefore he knew the door opened. Quickly, before the certainty could escape from him, he tugged at the door.

It gave a little bit—what was stopping it this time was an ordinary lock, Jinx thought, not a magical one. Okay. Jinx
knew
there was a hole in the door. The hole appeared, and he reached through it and found a bolt. Which was odd. There had never been a bolt there before.

Jinx slid back the bolt, picked up the Eldritch Tome, and stepped into the house. It was pitch dark.

He heard a hasty sound from the room beyond, like a book being shoved onto a shelf. He moved toward the sound. The person in the book room was absolutely silent—but there. Jinx could see a blue-green cloud of fear. They were afraid of him? Good.

“I can tell you're here,” Jinx said. “Whoever you are.”

Surprise, purple and pink, mixed with the blue-green fear. Then someone burst out of the room and shoved past Jinx, knocking him down. The Eldritch Tome went flying. The door to Samara opened and the footsteps ran out through it.

Jinx scrambled to his feet and looked out onto the empty Samaran street. There was no sound and no sign of anybody. Hastily he felt around on the floor for the Eldritch Tome, and was relieved when his hand closed on it.

Rattled, Jinx shut the door and latched it. His heart thudded in his ears. Someone had managed to get into Simon's Samaran house. What had they found, and what did they know?

Jinx went all through the Samaran part of the house, searching for thoughts and feelings. Nothing. He was alone.

Well, there was no way he was hiding the Eldritch Tome under the sofa cushions now. Clutching it tightly, he opened the KnIP-hidden door into Simon's Urwald house.

Cats approached him, mewing and yowling. Jinx could tell from their complaints that Simon hadn't come home.