Tortall (24 page)

The liquid rose and produced a headlike knob. A mouth opened and said, “Hello.”

Mad as a rat in a trap, Adria thought again. Trembling, she knelt before the creature. It was a little bigger than her fist. “What are you?” she asked, trying to remember the lists of immortals and gods she’d memorized two years ago. None were little black blobs.

“Lost,” the thing said.

“You’re lost, or your name is lost?” she asked, twining her fingers in her polishing cloth. Her nerves were fizzling, but at the same time she was getting excited, as excited as she’d been when she had glimpsed the mathematics beyond what Instructor Park was teaching her.

“Lost,” replied the creature. “All two.”

“You are lost, and your name is Lost,” Adria said, to confirm it. She liked to have things laid out plain.

“Yes. Name Lost, self lost.”

“And you talk.” Adria leaned in for a better look. Lost extended its head-knob toward her as if it inspected her in turn, though as far as she could tell—its “head” was no bigger than her thumb—Lost had no eyes. It did have several bright yellow threads within its glob of a body, threads that curved around like a whirlpool. On its front, or the part Adria assumed was its front, the creature bore a flake of copper like a brooch.

“Your name?” Lost asked.

Adria blinked as the tiny mouth in Lost’s head moved. “Adria,” she replied. “I’m a girl.”

“I know girl,” Lost replied with a slight note of reproof. “I lost, not stupid, Adria.”

How does it make the sounds without teeth? she wondered. This was one of her questions that her family would find annoying, but Adria could not be content unless things made sense. They had to have a reason to be the way that they were. Even “it’s magic” wasn’t a good enough explanation. She had seen enough guild magic lessons and the work of marketplace mages to know that magic had rules. People with no teeth talked badly. People with teeth managed better. Lost had no teeth that she could see, yet spoke very well.

“Adria?”

She jumped, recognizing the voice of the head clerk, Minter. She scrambled to her feet, clutching the lamp that had served Lost for a home. She didn’t notice the creature looping a long tentacle around the spout so it could pull itself up and into the lamp.

“Yes, sir?” she called in reply. “I’m in the storeroom.”

Minter stuck his head into the room. “We’re going to supper. Stop whatever you’re doing and tend the desks, please.” He didn’t wait for her to agree. He never did.

Adria, keeping very still, listened to the sounds of the clerks as they left the building. Her mind whirled with amazement and thoughts. No one who lived on the river Drell could escape seeing the fabulous creatures that had begun to return to the world nearly twenty years before. Her father did business with a centaur tribe that lived north of the canal; winged horses made regular deliveries from
the markets in the south, and ogres came to trade. Adria had even gotten the chance to pet a unicorn when she was eight.

But no one had ever mentioned black blob-things. Not in the legends, not in the market gossip. She looked for the creature on the floor, but there was no sign of it.

“Right here,” Lost told her.

Adria jumped and dropped the lamp again.

The creature flowed out of its hiding place and turned its head-knob up to her. “Jumpy girl,” it said flatly. “Calm down.”

“I had a bad day,” Adria replied defensively. “Unknown creatures appearing out of lamps don’t help.”

“Not unknown,” it said patiently. “Darking. Tortallans know darkings.”

“This isn’t Tortall,” she replied, going to make sure that the clerks’ office was empty. It was, and the door to the shop where buying and selling took place was locked while the clerks were gone. She turned to find that Lost had followed her. “This is Tusaine. Tortall’s on the other side of the river. I thought you said your name was Lost, not darkings.”

“Darkings my kind,” Lost explained. “I am Lost.”

“You certainly are if you expected to be in Tortall,” Adria murmured. “I don’t know how I can help you get there. Unless I carry you to the ferry and you stow away. But I have chores, and I’m in trouble already. Chores come first.” She had been looking blindly at the door while she thought of what she could do to help her new acquaintance. With a solution in mind, she turned to look at it. Once again Lost was absent from the floor. Panicked, Adria looked around
the worktables until she saw the darking. It had made its way onto the single high table that was Minter’s domain, and was poking its head into the inkwell.

“Don’t do that!” She lunged for Lost and almost knocked the inkwell to the floor. Like a very long, shiny black inchworm, Lost extended its head to the side of the desk, then let its body drop to the next table. Its head followed, and it was a round, solid blob once more.

“Not right, girl so nervous,” Lost told her with disapproval. “Who make you that way?”

“Nobody,” Adria said defensively, clutching Minter’s inkwell to her chest. “I—I have a lot of work, that’s all, and I don’t even know what you eat, or how to get you home.”

“Eat everything,” Lost replied. It thought a moment, then added, “Almost. Don’t want to go back. This more interesting. I help with chores.”

“You don’t have hands.”

Lost produced a pair of arms, and hands to go with them. Then it produced five more arms and hands. “Darkings full of surprises,” it said. Adria would have sworn it sounded smug. “Work now?”

Adria had never laughed so hard doing chores in her life as she did once Lost began to help her. She hadn’t believed the small thing could do much of use, but she also hadn’t understood how far its arms could stretch, or how strong those arms were. She suspected the darking of sipping the water it used to wash the brushes, but the inky liquid seemed to do it no harm. It lifted inkpots out of the way as Adria scrubbed around them, and stacked slates as neatly as if that were its life’s work. The heavy account books used by the senior
clerks were too much for its strength. Adria handled those, shifting them to clean the desks beneath, and then restoring them to their proper places.

She stopped, as she always did, to look at Minter’s book. “This one is my favorite,” she explained to Lost, running her fingers over the page with today’s entries. “Minter has been here since before I was even born. He taught me my first numbers. He even got Father to let me attend the merchants’ school. Look how exact the letters are, and the sums. No blots, no mistakes.”

“Fun,” the darking said in a voice that told Adria he thought Minter’s pages were no such thing. She smiled. Her school friends didn’t think numbers were fun, either. Carefully she ran her dusting cloth over the closed book and raised it back up to Minter’s table. When the volume, the heaviest of the account books, began to slip from Adria’s hold, Lost put up an arm to steady it until the girl had a better grip.

They had just placed it on the desk when they heard keys in the door opening to the shop. Adria gasped. She seized Lost and stuffed it into the pocket of her dress, holding it there.

“Ow,” she heard it say.

The door opened to reveal not the clerks, but Adria’s father. She could tell from the set of his jaw that his teeth were clenched. His brown eyes were harder than the slates.

“There you are,” he said, his voice quiet. He locked the door behind him and hung the keys from his belt. Adria backed up a step, though she knew he despised anyone who showed cowardice. Her father took a folded paper from the
purse that hung beside his keys. Adria recognized it as Instructor Park’s note. “What is this?” her father demanded. “You defy the teacher? You shame our house? You have become so conceited with Master Hillbrand’s praise that you think you do not need to study!”

“No, Father,” Adria said, shaking from top to toe. “I can’t remember the steps, they aren’t important—”

“They aren’t important?” he demanded, leaning toward her. Adria stepped back again. He seized her by the shoulder. “Stand still when I talk to you! You think you know better than an instructor who studied at the university in Carthak, who was brought here at great expense to instruct you children? Who do you think you are?”

The darking was fighting Adria’s hold on it. Adria clutched it tighter, hoping she wasn’t strangling it. She would not let the creature out. She wasn’t even sure why. She couldn’t think of anything when her father towered over her, bellowing at her.

“There are older people, better people, who would have done anything for this chance!” Her father shoved her into the workroom. “They would take it with humility. Now you shame us all with your presumption! My rivals will question my judgment because my daughter forgets her proper place. Over and over I have told you that we can show no weakness in this world, and yet you cannot maintain the proper diffidence, the proper decorum.”

Adria lowered her head, feeling sick and battered. He could go on like this for hours, or what seemed like hours. By the time he was finished, she would promise anything, if only he would stop talking at her. She would believe anything. He
was the wisest man she knew, someone who had learned all of his neighbors’ secrets and weaknesses. Every time she tried to make him proud, she failed.

He had fallen silent. Adria flinched, not sure why he had stopped before she began to beg him to tell her what she could do to make all right with him. Then she heard what he heard: the jingle of keys at the shop door. The clerks were coming back.

He pointed his finger at her. “No supper. No food tomorrow. You will apologize to your teacher, before the class. I will hear of it if you do not. Present yourself to me after supper tomorrow, your work here and your work for school done completely. Then we shall talk about meals.” He walked back into the clerks’ office, pulling the workroom door shut behind him.

A series of squeaks and thumps in her pocket reminded Adria of Lost’s plight. She pulled her hand out, her fingers cramped around the darking. It had bulged through the gaps, but not all of it had escaped completely from her grip. She opened her cramped fingers.

It plopped onto the floor. “Ow!” it cried. “Ow, ow, ow!”

She tried to shush it. When it continued to shout, she scooped it up in her cupped hands, enclosing it completely. She could move faster than Lost, it seemed.

She opened her fingers a crack and held her hands before her mouth. “Promise to be quiet,” she whispered.

“I ow,” the darking replied.

“I’m sorry about the ow,” Adria said quietly. “Promise you’ll be quiet or I’ll lock you in a box, I swear it.”

“Will father come back?”

“He might, yes, and he must see me working, Lost, promise!”

“Promise,” the darking said after a moment.

Adria put it on the floor and grabbed her cloths and polish. She went at the brass work with desperate speed, one ear always on the clerks’ door.

Only after she had finished the work and locked the storeroom after her did Adria begin to talk to Lost again. “I didn’t let you out of my pocket because I was afraid he might take you,” she told her new friend as she walked down the street. “He might not realize you’re a person when he’s in one of his tempers. It’s my fault, I shouldn’t make him angry—”

“Not your fault!” Lost squeaked, its voice the loudest Adria had heard. “You are young, he is old! He must know how to keep temper! I know that and I am only here …” It paused, clearly thinking, then produced several fingers around its head—“
this
many years!”

Adria blinked down at the creature that rode half-in, half-out of her pocket. “It’s too dark for me to count.” She didn’t like this idea, that there was nothing she could do to change her father’s rages. All her life she had believed that if she only did the right things in the proper order, he would be pleased. The possibility set before her by Lost was frightening. It meant Adria could never make Father happy.

“Besides, he too slow to catch me,” Lost said.

“He’s very quick,” Adria said, thinking of the times her father had caught her unaware.

Lost made a very rude and realistic noise. Even though she was worn out, Adria still had enough of her wits to note
that the darking must have spent plenty of time around humans and animals to imitate it. She hadn’t noticed the proper opening for that sound on the darking itself.

“Father slow and stupid,” Lost said. “No match for darkings.”

Adria looked around, alarmed. “There are more of you?” It was hard enough to keep Lost a secret. It would be impossible to hide others of its kind. Knowing the market, and the trade in rare and magical creatures, she feared for the life of her new friend and any like it.

“Not
here
,” Lost told her scornfully.

Adria sighed her relief.

“Not right, young one be so jumpy,” Lost remarked yet again. “Young things should play, have games.”

“Where did you learn that?” Adria wanted to know, thinking to tease a bit of real information from her new companion.

“Places” was the frustrating reply.

Her weary steps had brought her at last to the tradesmen’s gate in the wall around the family’s house. It wasn’t barred yet. One of the stable boys was drowsing just inside. He answered her quiet knock, rubbing his eyes. Once she had passed through, he barred the door and ambled back to his bed in the loft. Adria let herself into the house through the servants’ door. She looked into the kitchen. The cook and the housekeeper were awake yet, gossiping as the cook ground spices and the housekeeper mended linen. The housekeeper shook her head when Adria looked in. She had already received her orders from Adria’s father with regard to supper.

The girl went on up to her room. She dug into the clothes chest for the bread she tucked away each morning after breakfast, in case the day went badly. Lost ate two small bites, then crawled up the wall, snail-like, to stare out her window. It was still there when she fell into a deep, exhausted sleep.

Adria woke at dawn to a view of black with yellow threads twisted in a column just below the surface. She sat bolt upright with a gasp.

Lost’s head popped out of its body, right above the copper flake where it should have had a neck. “Jumpy!” it snapped, as if she had just woken it from a nap. “Young people—”