Street Magic (3 page)

The Vipers nodded vigorously.

Once they were gone, the lady considered her next move. Until now she hadn’t known how to give her pet gang confidence: the Gate Lords, who controlled the territory she and Ikrum wanted the Vipers to control, were too many, and too well equipped. Taking apart a smaller, poorer gang might serve her very well. Why had she not considered something like this before?

The city would learn respect for her gang, and learn it well. After all, disrespect to a Viper was disrespect to her, and that she would never permit.

The house where Briar and Rosethorn currently lived was clean and bright, with potted plants everywhere. They set up a welcoming chorus to Briar, reaching for him. As always when he came in, he made the circuit of the first floor, greeting each in the front room, dining room, kitchen, and rear courtyard. If he forgot any one of them, the plants would droop until reassured of his affection.

Once they were calm, Briar sent his power through the house. Rosethorn wasn’t on the second floor, where their workroom and bedrooms were. All he felt there was the magic embedded in the tools, plants, and medicines in the workroom, and the varying blazes that marked his miniature trees. Briar quested past that and found the banked, steady fire that was Rosethorn on the roof.

Like most Chammuri houses, this one had a staircase that led to the roof from the second floor. The other houses Briar had visited in Chammur were the same: it was as if the roofs were as much a part of the house as the kitchen, something he found odd. He climbed up and out into the waning afternoon light with the voiceless song of happy plants vibrating in his skull.

Their roof was almost solid green: tubs and pots filled with the plants Rosethorn thought would help local farms covered every inch of space. All were in different stages of growth regardless of the season, magically encouraged to sprout, flower, and fade over a matter of days while Rosethorn harvested seed for the locals to use.

Rosethorn herself sat on a bench, carefully writing on a slate. She was a broad-shouldered woman in a long-sleeved dark green habit, the emblem of her dedication to the earth and its gods. Her large brown eyes were fixed on her slate. Briar saw she had already been to the Earth temple baths: her chestnut hair, worn mannishly short, was dark against her skull, the strict part white against her wet hair. Her creamy skin bore just a trace of gilt from a summer’s work and travel - she was vain of her ivory complexion, employing hats and various lotions to keep it from going to leather as farmers’ skin did. Though she was now two inches shorter than he was, Briar always thought of her as towering over him. She still did, in learning and power.

“Tell these weeds to calm down, why don’t you?” Briar asked Rosethorn in their native language, Imperial, rubbing his ears. “You think they’d be used to us by now.”

“They can’t help it,” Rosethorn informed him absently in the same language, reviewing her notes. Her speech was a little slurred, one result of her illness four years before. She had died of it, but Briar and his foster-sisters had called her back to life. The precious minutes she had been dead left their mark: a clumsy tongue, and a slight tremor in her hands. “And when we pump them up to rush them through their growing, it makes them talk more.” Nevertheless she sent out her magic like a calming bath, soothing the greenery around them until it quieted.

“How were those western farms?” Briar wanted to know as he sat on the waist-high wall that fenced the roof. “Weren’t you going out there today?” Word that a famed green mage had come to Chammur had spread like wildfire in the days after their arrival, bringing group after group of farmers to see Rosethorn. They needed serious help: their harvests had been shrinking every year. Rosethorn had gone out every day to inspect different fields.

“Desperate,” she told Briar now, her red mouth twisted wryly. “As desperate as the eastern and southern ones. Everyone says I needn’t bother with the northerners - they’ve been growing rocks for three generations.” She rubbed a note out with her sleeve and carefully chalked something else in its place. “How was the Water temple?”

“Finished. Stocked up for a year at least, with plenty extra. All their medicines are at more than full strength. I told you I could do it in a month. Say, Rosethorn - “

“What?”

“Stone mages are common, right?” Briar asked, stroking the fleshy leaves of an aloe vera plant beside him. “You know, ones that magic crystals and jewels and things.”

“Stone magic is common, yes,” she replied. “Most mages deal with spells for stones at some point. Are you asking if there are stone mages like we’re plant mages?”

Briar nodded.

Rosethorn considered. “Yes, there are more whose power comes from stones than there are other kinds of ambient mage.”

Briar scratched his head. He knew that word “ambient.” “Oh, right - mages that work with the magic that’s already in things.”

Rosethorn looked up at him, her large, dark brown eyes sharp, her mouth curled with wry amusement. “Don’t go playing the country bumpkin, my buck. You know very well what ‘ambient’ means.”

How could he explain he’d been thinking like a street rat, after talking to the Vipers and Camelguts? Even now, after four years of regular meals, affection, and education, he sometimes felt as if his head were split in two. Magic and the Living Circle temples didn’t exactly mesh with a life in which meals were stolen and mistakes were paid for with maiming and death.

“And academics?” he asked. There was no sense in talking about gangs to Rosethorn. She had no interest in that life, having never lived it, and she worried when he ventured too close to his old ways. “They do spells with rocks?”

Rosethorn tapped her slate with her chalk. “Like the spells I taught you for use with jade and malachite. Stones are the best objects to hold and store power. Are you wondering about someone who can work magic over a stone, or use what’s in the stone?”

Briar shrugged and wrestled his boots off. Once he’d peeled away both footgear and stockings, he told her about the girl Evvy and what he’d seen.

Rosethorn put her slate aside. “You’d better hope there is an ambient stone mage in Chammur,” she remarked when he was done. “I know one lives in the amir’s palace. Well, they’d have to have at least one, wouldn’t they?”

Briar frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“Over half the city lives in those cliffs.” Rosethorn waved a hand toward the orange stone heights of Oldtown. “Most of their walls are on stone as well as made of it. Their cisterns are dug into stone. If you don’t keep a stone mage around to tell you when a stack of apartments is about to collapse, you’re just asking for trouble.”

Briar sat cross-legged, grimacing as tight muscles stretched. “But howcome I have to hope there’s a stone mage here? It’s no skin off my neb.”

“Why, not howcome, and off my nose,” she corrected absently. “We never explained the rules to you four, did we? About new mages?”

“What rules?” he demanded sharply. This was starting to sound too much like chores for his liking.

Rosethorn sighed. “If there is no mage about whose magic is on the same order as that of a newly found mage - that’s your friend Evvy - “

“I don’t even know her,” objected Briar.

Rosethorn continued, ignoring him. ” - if there’s no mage of her craft available to instruct her, then it is the obligation of the mage who discovers her to teach her the basics. The sooner the better. If her magic hasn’t broken away from her before, just the fact that you saw it means it’s expanding outside whatever unconscious control she’s had until now. Sooner or later it will really break out. If she’s a stone mage, I can think of all kinds of things that can go wrong, right here.”

“I’m a kid,” Briar objected. “Fourteen isn’t old enough to marry, let alone teach!”

Rosethorn shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. You’re a mage and you found her. If there isn’t a local who understands her magic, you have to teach her to meditate, to control her magic, and some of the most basic spells. Academics, too. She’ll need to learn different kinds of rocks and their magical applications, astronomy, reading, writing, mathematics - “

“Not from me she won’t,” said Briar. “I couldn’t even teach our dog to walk on a leash, remember? You need some unexcitable person to be a teacher.”

“Wrong again. You either teach her or hand her over to another stone mage.” Rosethorn reached over and held Briar’s wrist. “Trust me, you do not want to know the penalties for leaving an untaught mage to shift for herself.”

“Who’s gonna work those penalties on me?” Briar demanded crossly. “They’d best bring their supper to do it. They’ll be working a while.”

Rosethorn let him go. “That would be the closest member of Winding Circle’s Initiate Council or the Mage-council of the University at Lightsbridge. They set and enforce the laws for mages from the Endless Ocean in the west to the Heaven Mountains in Yanjing.”

“Then I’ll go. They can come find me,” Briar snapped. “I ain’t their errand boy.”

“The nearest member of both of those councils is me.”

Horrified Briar met Rosethorn’s eyes. The affection she always had for him was there, but it mingled with iron purpose. He didn’t ask if she were exaggerating to make a point. He knew her. She would land on him with both feet if he didn’t listen. And she could. Four people in the world had the ability to make him sorry he had crossed them. She was at the top of that short list - his foster-sisters were the others, and they were inside his mind when the four of them were together. Rosethorn didn’t have to be. He’d known for three years that she was what their world called a great mage, but even before learning that, he’d felt the breadth and depth of her power. He also knew there were times he could tease her, and times he could not. This time, he could not.

Seeing that he understood her very well, Rosethorn picked up her slate again. “You’d better track down the amir’s stone mage,” she said mildly. “Sooner, rather than later. When do we eat?”

Briar sighed and padded downstairs to start supper. Afterward, while Rosethorn cleaned up, he’d go over to the Earth temple. One of their dedicates would know if there were stone mages who lived closer to the Street of Hares than the one in the amir’s palace. He’d also have to find a way to talk to the girl Evvy. She was a wary street rat, just as he’d been. She’d go back to Nahim Zineer’s - she’d never walk away from the few coppers he paid.

She’ll think since I saw her in the afternoon, I’ll come back in the afternoon, he reasoned as he set out food. So she’ll go there in the morning. Which means if I’m to talk to her, I’d best get there before she does. I’ll have to hide, or she’ll run off as soon as she sees me.

And he’d wait to approach until after the stone-merchant paid her, this time. He didn’t want to cost a fellow street rat any more meals.

Evvy rose with the dawn, not because she wanted to, but because Mystery was perched on her collarbone, kneading busily, her thin, needlelike claws hooking into Evvy’s skin. Once Mystery had been petted, the other six cats wanted affection, too. At least they were not hungry this morning. Evvy had been digging in the garbage heap of one of the Ibex Walk inns just as a cookmaid tossed out a bowl full of meat scraps. Heibei the Lucky smiled on Evvy twice, because no one else was scrounging there at the same time. She’d gotten it all, plus some half-rotted vegetables. The meat went to her seven companions. She’d picked the rot from the vegetables and added a three-day-old round of bread for a feast of her own.

Since she was awake, Evvy decided to visit Golden House as soon as it opened. If that crazy boy thought to find her there, he’d probably come in the afternoon. She could work her way through Nahim’s baskets and be gone by then, if Nahim let her. She couldn’t think why he wouldn’t, but no one had ever accused her of magic before.

If Nahim remembered that, he said nothing when Evvy arrived. Instead he produced the polishing cloths and returned to working on his accounts. She sighed inwardly in relief and picked up the first stone to catch her eye, one in a basket of turquoises. She couldn’t have said why this stone called to her and not another, only that it would like polishing. Once she finished it, she placed it in the bowl Nahim gave her for the stones she’d handled, and searched through the turquoise basket for more such pieces.

She was tired by the time the Golden House clock struck twelve. Sadly she put down a basket of peach-colored moonstones. It was time to stop: anything she handled once her bones started to ache would turn gray and lifeless in her hands, its value and beauty gone. She folded her cloths and draped them over the bowl of finished stones, looking sidelong at Nahim.

He was picking through the contents of his belt-purse. He stopped and frowned, then smiled at Evvy. She blinked. Should she run? He’d never smiled that way before, as if his teeth hurt. Still, she’d promised the cats dried fish two days ago, and she hated to disappoint them. Gingerly she held out one hand, ready to bolt if he did anything odd.

He dropped not one copper dav or two, but - three, four, five copper davs into her palm! Evvy closed her fingers on the money, in case he changed his mind.

“You earn it, girl,” Nahim said, his eyes still squinched up, as if something important ached ferociously. “I don’t know what you do, but those stones you polish are the ones I sell first.”

“He means if you become a mage he doesn’t want you thinking he cheated you,” his neighbor called from across the aisle. As long as Evvy had been coming here, almost a year now, the two men had needled each other constantly. “He wants to keep you working for him.”

Evvy shook her head and slid the coins into a small pocket on the inside of her ragged tunic. Usually she just took the money and left, but five whole davs seemed to call for some kind of response. She gave Nahim a smile only a hair less odd than his own, then left before he tried to take his money back. So confused was she that she didn’t see yesterday’s stranger emerge from behind a tapestry drape across the aisle. She did hear a guard shout “Hey,” but thought nothing of it.