Abe quickly hid behind the corner, dragging Roods with him. He nodded urgently around the corner and hissed, “him!”
“Him?”
“The man who's after Tym!”
“The teacher?” Roods actually chuckled. “I'll take care of him, you go fetch our lad.”
“Roods, that... man... is not a teacher.”
Roods looked puzzled for a moment and then smiled broadly. “Ah, I follow. The teacher's become the student sort of thing? I'll teach that teacher a few lessons!” He was swinging out toward the Woodsman when Abe grabbed his arm.
“He's a monster, Roods!” He reached inside his jacket and produced the small revolver he carried. He would be left with only knives and his cane if he gave the gun to Roods, and he knew the gun would make no difference to the Woodsman at all, but still he pressed it into the other man's hand. “Take this.”
Roods looked like he wanted to refuse, but he finally took the gun and nodded.
“And be careful!” Abe said, but Roods was already around the corner and, when Abe looked down the block, Tym Wharmley was gone!
2.
“T--” Abe had already started to shout Tym's name when he realized his folly. It might not be a grand idea to yell out the name of the person you are trying to surreptitiously waylay when you are within earshot of a monstrous nightmare creature who is intent on apprehending the very same individual. Besides, as Abe learned once he reached the next corner, Tym was not going to be hard to find.
Tym Wharmley was as broad as he was tall, but the impression was less cubical than spherical. He was round and did his build no favors with his small round glasses and his long hair, every strand of which seemed to be trying to leap off his head but, finding itself stuck in place, was forced to simply stick out straight and form a kind of afro-cum-helmet. Abe was ashamed of himself for having assumed that Roods meant this boy –he couldn't have been older than 16 – was working as a prostitute. Abe immediately felt even more ashamed of himself for assuming that Tym couldn't possibly be working as a prostitute unless the tastes for... that sort of thing... ran very far from what Abe expected.
No, Tym wasn't selling himself, he appeared to be selling newspapers. And doing an exquisite job of it, actually. None of that Ex-Tree! Ex-Tree! Read all about it! Nonsense for Tym (an exclamation that Abe found both grating and mildly amusing, imagining, as he did, that the paperboys were shouting out to let people know what the paper was in a very literal sense... an ex-tree.) No, Tym had a softer approach. As Abe rounded the corner, he saw Tym have the following exchange with an elderly couple out for an evening stroll:
“Excuse me, sir, madame. I hate to assume but as you are out taking what I gather is your nightly constitutional, I am led to believe that you live nearby. If that's the case, might I recommend a copy of tonight's edition, which features in depth coverage of the city council's plans to recobble the sidewalks of Eagleton Avenue? You will be most interested to see the surcharges being proposed for residents, being on a fixed income as you are.” It was difficult to judge what shocked the couple most: Tym's polite demeanor, thorough and accurate assumptions, or the tone of his voice which was at odds with his size and demeanor, a deep soothing baritone that made both man and wife peer around him to see who was actually speaking.
“That does sound interesting, young man,” said the old man.
Tym was holding his hand out for the money already. “You'll find, madame, that there is an advertisement for a going out of business sale in tonight's edition as well. The establishment is called Shropinger's and they sell those very same shoes at quite a reasonable rate.” He nodded toward her shoes, which were nearly worn out.
The old man dropped a handful of coins into his hand and when Tym glanced down to count it said, “keep it,” and took his newspaper.
Abe was impressed. “Well, somebody's observant,” he said in an attempt to break the ice.
Tym took one look at Abe and nodded across the street. “The business you're looking for is two blocks down, sir.” He didn't sound quite so polite when he wasn't trying to make a sale, but his voice was no less impressive.
“What business is that?”
Tym looking him up and down. “Uptown sort, well dressed, youngish, a bit androgynous, carrying a knife – two knives. You're either a deranged madman or looking to procure some company, either way, you'll want the prostitutes two blocks down. You can't miss them, they're dressed very ostentatiously and most likely shouting things like 'ooh, lookit that one' and 'nice rear!'.”
“I'm not looking for prostitutes, I'm looking for you!”
“I hope not to murder... though now that you've given yourself away I doubt you'd catch me. I mean, I'm no Tommy Quickfeet, but you look like you can barely stand.”
Abe would have brandished his cane theatrically again to get Tym to listen but the boy was right, he could barely keep himself upright even with the aid of the cane. “I'm not here to murder you! The man... the...” he wanted to say thing but didn't want to explain it, “...person who wants you dead is around the corner.”
Tym looked underwhelmed. “Is it that wooden fellow?”
“That wooden fellow? You mean the merciless wooden killing machine?”
Tym nodded.
“Yes,” Abe said with eyes wide. “Yes it is that wooden fellow. The wooden fellow who beat me within an inch of my life and flipped a train over with me inside it!”
Tym narrowed his eyes. “Train? Say, were you the fellow in Underton looking for Merry?”
Abe was about one third through nodding that yes, he was the fellow in Underton looking for Merry when Tym rounded on him with surprising speed and punched him in the face.
Chapter Sixteen: Magic in Highmark
1.
Abe felt magnificent.
His mental state deteriorated rapidly once he remembered getting punched in the face by a portly teen while trying to avoid a brutal confrontation with a monster who had maimed him on their previous encounter, but physically he continued to feel just dandy. He was swaying gently and laying on something soft. He was curled up in a fetal position and had been sleeping without dreams. As he awakened he realized the most important change in his physical state: he wasn't sore. Not long before everything went black he remembered the pain in his ankle, which had been getting worse and worse over the course of the day. It was only the most prominent of a whole litany of aches and pains that he had grown used to in the last few weeks, and now they were all absent.
He opened his eyes half expecting to see himself surrounded by angels and clouds and harps and whatnot (or drunk vikings and women in metal bras depending on one's cosmology) but saw, instead, the almost-comical pairing of the very slender and tall and dashing McCallister Roods and the very rotund and silly looking Tym Wharmley.
They were sitting side by side on the bench seat along one side of a carriage. The entire other side was taken up with a prone and, until recently snoring, Abnerssen Crompton. He blinked slowly as he acclimated to a body free of aches and pains. He was still exhausted, he realized, but he was far too curious about what had happened to allow himself to go back to sleep. With some difficulty Abe forced himself upright. He had been sleeping on his cane somehow, and even that hadn't left him aching. “What happened?” he asked.
“I punched you in the face, sir,” said Tym.
“Fell like a sack of potatoes, I hear,” Roods added. Abe didn't think it was a particularly helpful addition. He did raise his hand to his jaw, though, and rub his chin thoughtfully. There was a distinct memory of being punched there, but Abe couldn't feel any pain or tenderness. His face, like the rest of him, felt fantastic.
“Aside from that?” Abe felt the goodness actually leaching over to his mental as well as physical being. He was never one to get angry, but he considered that he ought to at least be a little upset at being punched out by a stranger. He was more upset at himself for being caught off guard so easily. All the nights drawing his knife in front of
the mirror in his bedroom had created a sense within Abe that he was a dangerous man with lightning reflexes. The knives were just a bit of extra weight in his clothes, it turned out, helping him to fall down faster.
“I talked to your friend with the wooden face,” said Roods. “I thought you were exaggerating, to be honest, about the wood.” He shook his head, “nope, definitely wood. Friendly bloke, though.”
“Friendly bloke!?” Abe and Tym said at the same moment.
“He killed half my school!”
“He broke my foot and killed my friends! And he collapsed a tunnel, too! Who knows how many moles that killed...?”
“Lowmen,” said Roods. “But he seemed nice enough.”
Tym nodded toward Abe's foot. “Wasn't broken, by the way, sir.”
“Right,” said Abe. “What happened to me? I feel great when I should be all... I don't know, crying over the pain in my foot and my ribs and, I guess, where I got punched in the face, too, right?”
“It was a damn fine punch,” said Tym. He held his hand up and made a fist, turning it before him as if it were a thing a beauty.
“Oh,” said Roods. “It was incredible! Never seen anything like it, Abe.”
“It wasn't incredible,” said Tym.
“It was magic!”
There was something in the awe in Roods’ voice that seemed peculiar to Abe. The very fact that he had called Abe Abe was strange. “Well, it's because you've only just come from Underton, right?”
Both Roods and Tym blinked at Abe as if he'd just said something insane.
“I mean, I wasn't down long enough to be able to do it, so I figure there's a period after you return that you can still perform magic as well, right? I mean, bit of a delay starting and stopping...”
Roods and Tym regarded one-another for a moment, searching the others face for some clue that Abe was making any sense. “Perhaps you broke him,” said Roods.
Tym turned back to Abe and said, “you think that you could have done magic in Underton if you had stayed longer?”
It was starting to dawn of Abe that he may have been misinformed. “I was told that was the case, yes.”
Roods turned to face Abe as well, adopting a very serious and sympathetic manner which, on his long, narrow, often-smirking face looked a little like parody. “How long are you supposed to be in Underton before this takes effect? Hours? Days?”
“A day or two is the impression I got.”
“And this works for anyone?” Abe nodded an unsure nod. “Y'see,” said Roods, “I've been in Underton for weeks at a stretch... you oughtta know, you filed the reports.”
“Never done magic?”
“Never seen magic, Abe.” Abe didn't seem to get it, and so Roods lifted his tinted shades and looked directly into his eyes. He spoke slowly and deliberately. “Until ten minutes ago, I didn't think it existed.”
“But,” said Abe, “but I told you about the fire... and the healing. The flames right out of Merry's hands!”
“I thought it was the drugs,” Roods said to Abe, then turned to Tym, who had sat back to watch, and said, “I thought it was the drugs,” with a small shrug.
“What drugs!?”
“You were covered in Spirit, Abe! Head to toe. Ebensworth sent me down to confirm the train even wrecked or you'd be a suspect in Merry's murder. Caked in Spirit like that, no one believed a word... why d'you think you got fired, man? Why d'you think I wanted your clothes? Uncut Spirit straight from the mines... the dust in your shoe was worth a small fortune!”
Abe needed a moment to process what he was hearing. “So I was on drugs when I came back...?”
Roods nodded vigorously.
“But it was all true! The train wreck, the Woodsman... You saw him just now!”
Roods nodded again.
“So that proves it, right?”
“Mostly,” said Roods. “Doesn't prove magic.”
Tym leaned forward then. It was dim enough in the carriage that his deep resonant voice wasn't made absurd by the ridiculous face it emanated from when he said, “I think I can enlighten you, gentlemen.”
2.
Tym had been a student at Lady Darbyshire's School for the Profoundly Gifted for about six months. He had already been working for nearly a year at the time, his father having suffered a catastrophic throat injury that ended his career as an opera singer and reduced him to writing poorly-received reviews of other operas, notable primarily for the issue he took with the lead performers total failure to be played by him. The excitement surrounding Mr. Wharmley's turn to critic had been high, but within weeks he was only being carried by Opera Aficionados quarterly, a respectable publication with a circulation in the dozens. So Tym took a job selling newspapers in terrible sections of town. His phenomenal memory and personal approach made him quite a success, while his girth and cheap clothing kept him from being targeted by the various muggers that frequented the areas where he worked.
Of course, desperate spiritualists (as the spirit addict preferred to be called) weren't always kept at bay by his appearance, especially not when he packed up for the night, often after midnight and having sold out of a sizable stack of newspapers. Indeed, those who sat around begging long enough to watch Tym at work couldn't fail to notice that he collected sizable tips from his customers in addition to the price of the newspaper. As Abe had observed, Tym had a keen eye and a light tough, tailoring his pitch to his customers. In fact, Tym was the only paperboy in Highmark with regulars, and he knew them all by name.
When his success won him the attention of a spirithead (as most everyone but spiritualists referred to the addicts; other options being “spiritie” and the even less creative “spirit addict”) Tym had a secret weapon. Tym could do magic.
Nothing fancy, really. A little extra shove, making a man's boot catch on fire, maybe a little light psychokinesis... it kept him safe on the streets late at night, and it was how he wound up at the school.
One night Tym was being approached as he prepared to go home, and when they failed to care upon being informed that he was sold out, he knew what they were about. Exhausted from the night's work he made bunch of pebbles float around their heads until they panicked and ran off, screaming about ghosts or something.
After they ran off, though, a woman emerged from the shadows, a tall, beautiful dark-haired woman with impossibly narrow shoulders and her hair pinned back in a bun so large that her hair, unfurled, must drag on the ground. She was so slender that it was a surprise her thin neck could support the weight of her bun. She told Tym that what he'd done was magic and that it had been poorly done and she offered him a scholarship to her school. Lady Grendalia Darbyshire's School for the Profoundly Gifted.
The scholarship included a stipend, which was treated by both Lady Darbyshire and Tym's parents as a selling price. From discussions with the few other students, Tym learned that the amounts varied wildly depending on one's social standing, as did the description of the school given to the parents. Tym's father was informed that he would be surrounded by the scions of all the elite families of Highmark in a prestigious academy of the arts. He was also paid an obscene sum, very nearly the most of any of the students' families.
The most money went to the aunt of an incredibly poor boy named Winchell who was quite undersized and had several teeth missing. Winchell had been forced to do some remarkably unsavory things as a young boy and had been rescued by his aunt, a morally upright laundress. The school had given her enough money to buy a title, but rumor had it that Winchell's aunt still washed clothes, only now with a different fancy hat for every day of the week.
The “scholarship” wasn't the only thing that wasn't as it seemed. The “school” was also somewhat different than one would expect. For example, there was no formal learning taking place. Almost everything Tym learned had been from fellow students. Like him, they had all figured out how to do certain things on their own, and there was a lot of teaching going on student-to-student. It wasn't as if they h
ad much else to do. There was virtually no instruction aside from some general inspirational speeches by Lady Darbyshire about the importance of solidarity within the magic community. Tym admitted that it seemed a bit overblown and sentimental as he described it now, but at the time he and everyone else had taken her notions of a family of magic quite to heart.
So much so that they had, each and every one, agreed to her request that they not inform their parents when the school relocated. This was no mean feat since the school seemed to relocated nearly once a month. Usually within a matter of weeks after enrolling in the school, the student would be completely lost to his or her family. And yet even when the school was moving for the third or fourth time since a student arrived, no one ever questioned the necessity or wisdom of keeping the parents in the dark.
At least until Underton.
Tym had been with the school for about three months when they moved into the last site in Highmark, the school that Roods had investigated personally. By the time they arrived, Merry and Tym had become close. He claimed they were more than friends despite her being several years older than him and the fact that, when pressed, he acknowledged that they had not so much as held hands, but she had been the one who backed Tym up when he objected to leaving Highmark without telling their parents. He was overruled by Lady Darbyshire, but only in the sense that one could interpret “overruled” to mean forced to comply. And “by Lady Darbyshire” to mean by Lady Darbyshire's terrifying bodyguard, the large and unyielding wooden monster that Abe had taken to calling the Woodsman.
After ordering the other students to start down the stairs, Lady Darbyshire had the Woodsman scoop up Merry and carry her after them. Tym was compelled to follow both by his concern for Merry and by his fear of being left behind. He reluctantly went along, and his idea of turning back was foiled when the Woodsman collapsed the stairwell they'd come down (apparently a hobby of his, collapsing things), sealing them all off in Underton.
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