Found

Book Three

Illustrations by

Antonio Javier Caparo

T
O
J
OHN,
PRETTY MUCH
THE BEST HUSBAND
IN THE WORLD

A
wizard is a lot like a thief. If a wizard has quick hands, he can make things disappear. He can even make himself disappear.

I lurked in my alley shadows, waiting for the wizard. Winter was just beginning, and the air had a sharp edge of cold. The night was thick with river fog
and factory soot, and it was quiet, nobody about. A good night for minions and misery eels.

I shivered and hunched into my coat. What was taking him so long?

Then I heard it.

Step step tap
.

Step step tap
.

Nevery, wizard and city magister, was coming up the steep street toward me. He paused, peering into the shadows with his keen-gleam eyes. Fog smoked around him.

He couldn’t see me. For melting into shadows I wore dark brown trousers and the black sweater Benet had knitted for me. My black, shaggy hair hung down in my eyes. Over it all I had on my black coat with the shabby velvet collar, the one Nevery’d given me when I’d been in the Dawn Palace jail cells, a place I’d spent too much time in lately. He’d hidden lockpick wires in the collar, and I’d used them to escape. That’d been almost ten days ago.

On Nevery went,
step step
and then
tap
with his cane past my dark alley.

As he passed, I darted feather-foot out of the shadows and—
quick hands
—lifted the purse string out of the pocket of his cloak, then stepped back into the alley. His locus magicalicus was in his pocket, too, but I knew better, now, than to nick it.

He went on, and I padded after him, sticking to the edge of the street where I could duck into a doorway to hide if he looked back. He went ’round a corner onto Half-Chick Lane and stopped. The tumbledown houses on each side of the street were dark shadows leaning against each other, with slices of dark narrow alley between them.

“Well, boy?” he said, his voice loud in the quiet street. “Aren’t you going to pick my pocket?”

I stepped out of the shadows. “Nevery, I already did.”

He whirled around and leaned on his cane, scowling at me.

“You were distracted,” I said. “You have to pay attention.”

“Curse it, Connwaer,” Nevery said. “Now, give the money back.”

“If you want it back, you’ll have to pick it from my coat pocket.” Carefully, so he couldn’t see, I slid his purse string up inside the sleeve of my sweater. Distraction, that was the key.

“Learning to pick locks was easier,” Nevery grumbled. He’d been better at it, too. He was a wizard, but he was good at thinking like a thief. I’d taught him lockpicking back when we’d lived together at Heartsease, his mansion house. He handed me my knapsack, which he’d been carrying. It was full of food, biscuits from Benet, packets of bacon and cheese, apples, and wax candles.

I nodded toward the street where it led down the hill. “I’ll walk with you back to the bridge, all right? And you can try me on the way.”

“And you’ll be distracted, will you, boy?”

I grinned. “I’ll pretend I am, Nevery.”

I slung the knapsack onto my back and we headed down Half-Chick Lane and turned onto Strangle Street. I kept my eyes on the shadows just in case anyone was following us.

“Hrm,” Nevery said after a short while. “Have you, ah, read that treatise about Arhionvar?”

Arhionvar, the dread magic. I didn’t need to read about Arhionvar—I had enough experience with it. At the same moment, I felt his hand grope in my coat pocket. Good try. I stepped sideways and glanced at him, shaking my head.

“Curse it,” he muttered.

We turned another corner, onto Shirttail Street, which led straight down toward the bridge. From here, as we walked, we had a view across the rushing black river to the Sunrise, the nice part of the city, where the rich people lived and the streets were lit up with werelights, and the Dawn Palace glowed pink against the night sky.

“I gave you the Arhionvar treatise back when we were having those troubles with Underlord Crowe, boy. I suppose you didn’t bother to read it,” Nevery said.

I didn’t answer him. He knew I hadn’t.

A chilly wind blew off the river, bringing with
it the smell of mud and dead fish. Nevery paced alongside me, his cane going
tap tap
against the cobblestones.

“Watch out for that pothole,” he said, bumping my arm and then dipping into my empty pocket.

“You’re not very good at this,” I said, pulling away. “What you need is an incentive.”

“Indeed?” Nevery said.

“Yes,” I said. “If you’re a gutterboy and you don’t pick a pocket, you don’t get dinner, but if you try it and get caught, you end up in a guard cell or somebody beats the fluff out of you. So you have to get very good at it.”

“I see,” Nevery said. He cast me a sharp look. “And you are very good, are you, boy?”

“I have quick hands, Nevery,” I said. But I had gone hungry often enough, and I’d gotten caught more than once, even apart from the time Nevery had caught me stealing his locus magicalicus. After I’d picked his pocket, everything had changed. I wasn’t a gutterboy anymore; I was a wizard.

We came down to the bridge across the river; the houses built on it were closed up night-tight. Nevery paused. From behind us I heard the
skff skff
of footsteps sliding along an alleyway, then silence. Drats. We were being followed.

Nevery leaned on his cane. “Don’t forget, boy. We’ll meet at the chophouse in four days.”

I wasn’t likely to forget that. Arhionvar, the dread magic, was coming, and the city was in terrible danger. Arhionvar had been behind the device that the traitor-wizard Pettivox and the former Underlord, Crowe, had built to confine Wellmet’s magic, and Arhionvar had preyed on the desert city of Desh until that city’s magic had nearly been destroyed. Now it was coming to Wellmet. We had to be ready when it got here, or our city and its magic would die, sure as sure.

Nevery had a plan, one based on his long-ago experiments with pyrotechnics, the ones that’d blown the middle out of Heartsease. He knew that setting off an explosion while doing a magical spell
enhanced the effect of the spell. He’d been doing research in the academicos library, looking at old grimoires to find the right spell to enhance, something that would force Arhionvar to leave Wellmet alone. We thought a banishing spell might work, if we set explosive traps all around the city to make it stronger. My part of the plan was to help with the pyrotechnics and to scout the city for good places to set the traps.

“All right, boy?” Nevery asked sharply.

“All right, Nevery,” I said.

“Well then, good night,” he said, turning toward the Night Bridge.

Not a very good night, no. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a quick-look of a darker shadow in an alley, then another scuff of a footstep from the street behind us. Not Dawn Palace guards on this side of the river. Minions, then. They’d warned me off the streets of the Twilight, and if they caught me they’d beat the fluff out of me, or worse.

“I will send a bird tomorrow,” Nevery went on,
“with a copy of the Arhionvar treatise, if I can lay my hands on it.”

I didn’t answer. If I could get into the alleys I might be able to get away from them. “’Night, Nevery,” I whispered, and ran.