The Master Magician (8 page)

She inched forward, scanning each obstacle, each danger. This mirror she had found had been treated poorly, dirtied, and split, resulting in the dangerous obstacle field ahead of her. Far to her left, the ground shifted down as it might in an earthquake—the manifestation of a crack.

Chewing on her lip, Ceony slid one foot forward, then the other, searching for a clear path. If she found none, she’d go back—her
small investigation wasn’t worth losing her life in this glassy prison. But it was worth a try.

She stepped over a stalagmite, sidestepped until she could move around a web—the manifestation of a scratch—which was seemingly constructed of razor blades. It looped around itself like matted hair pulled from a hairbrush and reached to her midthigh. Ceony ducked under another web and got her skirt caught on a third. A quick tug freed it with minimal damage.

The floor bowed slightly past the wiry clouds, but beyond that she saw the glimmering veil of her destination mirror: a rather large one. She treaded carefully over the ice-slick, concave floor until she reached it, bracing herself for another cold wash.

When she emerged, she found herself in some sort of storage room, thankfully empty. The mirror she had stepped through hung frameless on the wall, about six feet high and four feet across, its surface marred with stains and scratches. Another, narrower mirror leaned against the opposite wall, supported on either side by bolts of unorganized fabrics.

Ceony blinked a few times, adjusting to the dimness of the room—savoring the momentary solitude. Two bare dress mannequins, one in disrepair, greeted her, and beyond them rested an old wooden shelf filled with poorly folded scraps of fabric, everything from satin to cotton to flannel. A box full of bits and cuts of fabric, too small to be of use to anyone, blocked her way to the door. Ceony heaved it aside—moving slowly, so as not to stir up too much noise—and stepped through the doorway into a cramped hall.

A dress shop.

Ceony spied down the hallway to a front area displaying premade gowns and coats, as well as fabric bolts propped on slim shelves against the wall for purchase by the yard. A large, middle-aged woman shuffled about the cash register, but she kept her back
to Ceony. Ceony tiptoed in from the back and made it to the shelf of fabric bolts before the woman turned around.

She gasped. “Oh, heavens! You startled me.” Her hazel eyes glanced to the door and the chime hanging against it. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“Oh, sorry,” Ceony said, forcing a light laugh. “I wanted to see if you had something for . . . a polka dot pattern I saw in a magazine. This is close”—she gestured to a pale-orange fabric with peachy speckles—“but not quite what I’m looking for.”

“Polka dot?” the woman repeated. She tapped her chin. “I do have a booklet you can look at if you’d like to special order something.”

Ceony gripped the straps of her purse in her fingers. “Oh, I may. There’s one more place I’d like to look, but I think I’ll come back.”

“Oh. All right, then. Take care.”

Ceony nodded and headed toward the door, but before its chime could ring she asked, “I just came in from the train—what part of Portsmouth am I in?”

The woman played with a lint brush on the counter beside her. “Portsmouth is eight miles south, dear. Not far. This is Waterlooville. Did you not see the sign?”

“Thank you,” Ceony replied. She stepped outside and counted the pounds in her purse, wondering if she should hire a buggy or make another attempt at mirror travel.

She pinched a few bills between thumb and forefinger. “A buggy would be safer,” she murmured to herself. The journey through the mirror in the dress shop had left her with a bit of a headache, besides.

She called the next buggy that passed and offered some weak instructions concerning Gosport—could she be dropped off somewhere in the middle?—and rode silently in the backseat. She spied signs for Portchester Castle on the way, and the great behemoth of a fortress hulked in the distance beyond her window. She wondered if Emery would be interested in touring something like that. She’d
have to ask, but carefully. She didn’t want him to wonder how she’d come up with the idea.

I just need to know
, she thought, fingering the clasp of her purse.
If he’s left England, that will be that. If not . . . I’ll tell someone
.
Investigate further.

Her palms sweated.

Ceony watched the sea loom closer and closer to the buggy, its body filled with checkered rows of ships, often two or three docks between each ship. Most of the boats stationed there now were small, but a few larger ones sat farther out on the water, too distant to be menacing.

A naval yard—and between two prisons, so the location made sense. But it also made Ceony’s muscles itch. She might not get far, surrounded by military.

She instructed her driver inland, a comfortable distance from both the naval yard and the ocean itself. She tipped him well when they finally stopped, and waited for the automobile to turn around and start for Waterlooville before venturing off.

Studying the road before her—it was barely large enough to fit two buggies—Ceony wondered if this very path had been taken by Saraj and his entourage, or if she had missed the mark entirely. Surely the law would have taken him by way of ferry between Haslar and Portsmouth, unless they feared him traversing open water, bound or not.

A cool, salt-laced breeze caressed Ceony’s ears, pulling her thoughts toward the ocean. She remembered standing on Foulness Island with Lira two years ago. The Excisioner—little more than an apprentice herself—had dropped blood in the water to send a wave crashing into Ceony’s backside, ruining most of Ceony’s paper spells. What could Saraj Prendi do with the sea if he had enough blood at his disposal?

She shook herself, glanced at the sun. This was no time to dawdle.

Leaving the road and journeying closer to town than to the military post, Ceony pinched her paper starlight marked “in 1744” and rebonded herself to paper. Finding a small clearing not too overrun with tall grass and briars, she knelt down and started Folding. Emery had a silly rule about Folding in one’s lap, but she could hardly drag a board all the way down here with her. Folding on her thighs did require more concentration, however.

She formed several paper songbirds, a simple spell she had learned at the beginning of her apprenticeship. She made four: two white, one yellow, one red.

“Breathe,” she said.

The paper creatures came to life in her hands, as if her one word had instilled them with souls. She pinched the bases of their bodies to keep them from flitting away.

“We’re searching for some specific things,” she said to their beaks. “Search the area, a few miles’ worth if you can. Look for broken pieces of carriages, skid marks, perhaps signs of a fight. Wide-spaced footprints. Blood on the street or in the soil. A thin Indian man with a narrow face.”

She paused, considering. “And any mirrors or other glass surfaces that are outdoors, away from the naval base.” If luck was with her and she could find a mirror with a wide view of the area, she might be able to dig into its past and see Saraj for herself. “Fly back to me if you see any of these things.”

The birds flapped their pointed wings, and Ceony released them, letting a second breeze glide them into the air. One of the white spells and the red spell flew toward town together; the other two split up, one gliding toward the coast, the other back up the road on which Ceony had arrived.

Any passersby would think them mail birds. And if Saraj spotted one, hopefully it would spot
him
. A double-edged sword was more useful than no weapon at all.

In the meantime, Ceony walked.

She stayed on the road for a while, keeping note of the passing time. Perhaps Emery would stay late in Dartford and she wouldn’t have to worry about punctuality, but she doubted it. The paper magician wasn’t overly fond of business trips, whatever their purpose.

The thought of Emery sent Ceony’s mind back to the ugly scene in Parliament Square.
Overheard them talking
, she wondered as she walked. What had her parents been discussing, and so loudly that Zina could overhear? Then again, Zina’s knack for snooping rivaled Ceony’s own. She was angry with her sister . . . Of course she was, but her primary concern was for her family’s safety. Did Saraj know what all of them looked like? But even if Saraj hadn’t fled the country, he couldn’t have made it to London already, not on foot. And why would he go somewhere so populated? Unless he had a specific purpose in traveling to the capital . . . but Ceony couldn’t imagine what that would be, outside of finding her.

Too risky, even for him, isn’t it?
she thought.
Surely he’s fled. I shouldn’t even be trying to prove otherwise
.

Both Emery and Mg. Aviosky, people she trusted implicitly, had assured her that her family would be safe, so perhaps she should leave Criminal Affairs’ affairs be.

Still, if she had worried
more
about Delilah, perhaps things would have turned out differently. She had to know for sure.

Soon Ceony ventured off road, scanning the uncultivated lengths between the naval base and the town, searching for the things she’d tasked the birds with finding. She came across a patch of flattened grass about an hour in and, after bonding to glass, took a rubber-lined circle of the material from her purse and commanded it, “Magnify.” The glass, little larger than the front of a picture frame, immediately turned into a looking glass, enlarging the crushed grass at her feet. She found nothing unusual.

“
Criminy, Ceony, it’s like shagging the principal
,” her sister’s voice intruded on her thoughts. “
Isn’t he a divorcé?
”

Zina had said it so
loudly
. And in such crude language!

She swatted the thoughts away. “Focus on Saraj,” she chided herself. “He’s the bigger problem.”

Another half hour later, her feet growing weary, one of the white birds returned, fluttering tired wings. Ceony rebonded to paper and beckoned it down.

“What did you find, little one?” she asked, chills pricking her sun-heated shoulders. The paper songbird bounced in her hands thrice before flying westward, keeping low to the ground. Ceony hurried after it, grabbing her long skirt in her hands as she went.

The bird flew quite a distance, heading away from the road. By the time it landed on a dirt path overgrown with weeds, not far from the town line and an exposed sewer pipe, Ceony’s face had flushed red, and perspiration clung to her hairline and camisole. Ceony knew the spell for a fan that would cool her quickly, but in her excitement, she settled for waving both hands before her face.

She looked about her. Some of the weeds and wild grasses here looked trod upon and torn, as though a brawl had occurred. Something shiny caught her eye—squatting, Ceony picked up a spent bullet, smashed. It must have struck something hard—perhaps the carriage itself? But Ceony saw no wheel tracks. The bullet was etched with a targeting spell, she noticed, meaning that at least one Smelter had been on duty. Unless, of course, the bit of metal was from the naval base. Ceony doubted it.

The white bird, its wings starting to bend backward from the brisk wind, perched on a skinny vine of sunburned morning glory, half rooted from the ground. Ceony dropped to her knees and pushed aside weeds and dirt. The summer sun glinted off a brown piece of glass barely larger than her thumbnail, perhaps from a beer bottle left behind by an off-duty naval officer. She wiped a thin
layer of dust from it and saw her reflection on its smooth side—the inside of the bottle. Not a spotless reflection but adequate for her current needs.

“Good birdie,” Ceony wheezed, wiping the back of her hand over her forehead. “Cease.”

The proud bird toppled onto the ground, immobile.

Ceony held out the brown glass in her palm. She’d never attempted a mirror-based spell on something that wasn’t a mirror . . . but Gaffer spells could work on substances other than Gaffer’s glass, so it was worth a shot.

Ceony’s fingers fiddled with her charm necklace. She broke her bond with paper and became a glass magician once more.

Staring at her tinted reflection, she said, “Reflect, past.”

Her image contorted left, then right, then swirled. Her face vanished from the shard, and instead she saw strands of grass and a peep of sky laced with a single, stretched-out cloud.

Pressing her lips together, Ceony searched her memory of the Gaffer books she had read for pertinent manipulations to this spell. “Backward reflect,” she commanded it.

The reflection of the cloud slowly crawled off the glass.

“Tenth increase,” she said, and the reflection on the brown bottle reversed itself ten times as fast. The light darkened. A star appeared. Sunrise. The grass wavered in the wind.

“Tenth increase, tenth increase,” Ceony instructed, and the shard’s memories rewound faster and faster. This spell, something a Gaffer apprentice would likely learn in his or her first year, already felt far more complicated than nearly all the Folding spells Ceony knew. Perhaps another reason why paper magic had become so unpopular in England.

Day, night, day, night. Rain. The broken piece of bottle sped through its memories beneath Ceony’s scrutiny. It likely wouldn’t reveal anything useful—

“Hold,” Ceony instructed, catching sight of shadows, but they proved to be the silhouettes of two little boys, their indecipherable banter playing on the glass in tandem with their images.

She commanded the glass to continue back through its memories. A larger shadow appeared after another two days. “Hold,” she said, her voice almost a whisper.

The image played at normal speed. The mirror was masked by shadow at first; then something shifted and the sun highlighted tight curls on a head of hair. The head looked back, and in the distance, Ceony heard a whistle, someone yelling. Police officers.

The shadowy man disappeared from the reflection a moment later. The police officers never entered it.

“Saraj,” Ceony whispered, lowering her spyglass as it shifted back to a view of the swaying grass and summer sky. It had to be him. She had seen his darkened silhouette before and could summon the memory as easily as she could recall what she ate for breakfast. And in this location, with those sounds . . . she felt almost positive.