The Magic Thief

by Sarah Prineas

  Slowly, I stood up. The ice creaked. It was thin, barely covering the water. “We’ll have to go around,” I whispered.

  Nevery nodded, and we edged around the thin ice, and then headed for the dark Twilight bank again.

  I looked back over my shoulder. The minion, a dark shape against the dark ice, thought he could catch us by going the short way across—he reached the thin ice and went on. “He’s going to fall in,” I said.

  As I spoke, the ice beneath the minion gave way and, like a stone dropping into a puddle, he plunged into the river, cursing and thrashing. I glanced at Nevery.

  “Keep going,” he said grimly.

  We kept going, expecting the ice to crack under our feet and send us into the freezing water, too.

  As we neared the Twilight bank, I saw that the tenements and warehouses were all dark and still. At the very edge of the river, we climbed the rocky bank and up onto a rutted path that led along the side of a warehouse.

  We paused for a moment, catching our breaths, then I started off again.

  “Wait, boy,” Nevery said.

  “We can’t wait, Nevery,” I said. “It might be too late already.” I started walking, fast, and Nevery strode along beside me. We came around the corner of the warehouse and headed up the nearest steep street, which was edged with tumbledown tenement houses.

  “Too late for what, exactly?” Nevery asked.

  I shook my head. I hadn’t really had time to think it all through. “The Underlord built the device to capture all the magic.”

  “If that is what the device is for,” Nevery said, “it would appear that he plans to hold the city hostage.”

  Right. Magic wasn’t just for running the factories or keeping the werelights lit, it was the lifeblood of the city. With the device, Crowe’s calculations told him, he would control all the magic, and the people would have to pay him for it. He would rule the city, all of it, not just the Twilight. But the Underlord was wrong. “Nevery, the magic can’t stay inside that prison device. It will die.” And soon, if we didn’t let it out.

  “Boy, the magic isn’t alive.”

  I wasn’t going to argue with him about it. But if we didn’t hurry, it would be too late.

  We climbed the streets until we reached Dusk House. We peered in through the barred gate. The building was still, dark, and silent, but the air felt wound tight. Waiting.

  “We ought to wait for the duchess’s guards,” Nevery said softly.

  I shook my head. The guards would have to fight through the minions on the Night Bridge, and that might take too long.

  “I don’t suppose you have a plan,” Nevery said.

  No, I didn’t. “I think we just have to go in, Nevery,” I said.

  “This is why you get into trouble, boy,” Nevery muttered.

  “Come on,” I said.

  Staying in the shadows, I led Nevery through the gate and around to the back of the Underlord’s mansion, to the door I’d gone in when disguised as a cat. It was unguarded.

  We made our way through the dark hallways, stopping now and then to listen, hearing nothing. The minions were all off blocking the bridge, I realized. They hadn’t expected anyone to cross the ice. Sure as sure, though, they hadn’t left the device completely unguarded.

  Finally we came to the room with the entrance to the underground workshop. The bookcase-door was closed, the room dark.

  “The bookcase opens,” I whispered to Nevery. I led him across the room, then reached up to push the panel that opened it. The bookcase swung open and the stairway gaped like a pit before us.

  Without hesitating, I led Nevery down the narrow stairway to the second turning, and peered around. The lights in the cavernous workroom were dimmed; in the center of the shadowy room squatted the prisoning device, swollen and shiny, like a giant leech well fed on blood. Its gears and pistons were still, and the slowsilver was frozen in its crystal tubes. The riveted storage tank in the middle bulged. The magic was caught in there. Down in my bones, I felt a squealing hum, the magic straining at the prison, trying to escape. I also felt a faint tingle in the air; a very little bit of the magic was left, lingering outside the device where the rest of it was trapped.

  Down in the pit, a few minions were lounging around in the shadows, and, by one of the chart-covered tables, Pettivox sat writing something by the light of his locus stone.

  I put my hand into my pocket to check on my own locus magicalicus. A stone could be destroyed by magic, Nevery had told me once, and its wizard with it. I took a deep breath. The magic had chosen me for this, I reminded myself. I couldn’t go off and let it die. I marked out a path from the stairs to the device. I had to try, at least.

  I eased around the corner.

  “What are you doing, boy?” I heard Nevery whisper, but I kept going, creeping down the stairs.

  One of the minions shouted, his voice echoing in the huge workroom. At the sound, Pettivox glanced up from the table. Seeing me, he stood bolt upright, his chair crashing to the floor behind him. “You!” he shouted. I got to the bottom of the stairs and started to run.

  The minions closed in; I kept going, across the stone floor, toward the device. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I got there. If I got there.

  A minion made a grab at me; another one caught at my sleeve, but I eeled away. Pettivox strode across the room, shouting, his words lost in the echoes. I whirled away from another minion, and Pettivox was there, seizing me by the hair, lifting me off my feet. Two minions grabbed me. I twisted and wriggled like a worm on a fishhook, but they had me.

  Pettivox let me go, drew his hand back, and struck me a crashing blow across the face; if the minions hadn’t been holding me I would have fallen. “You,” he snarled again.

  I shook my head. One of my teeth was loose and I had blood in my mouth. Black spots danced before my eyes. From where I stood, the minions gripping my arms tightly, I saw the device looming overhead, the dim light glinting off its gears and wires.

  Pettivox leaned over me, teeth bared. “You’re dead, thief. The Underlord will return shortly, and he will kill you himself.” He drew back his fist to hit me again. I closed my eyes and clenched my teeth.

  But then came a shout. “Pettivox!” Nevery bellowed. My eyes popped open.

  Down the stairs Nevery strode, his gray cloak swirling. At the bottom, he swung his knob-headed cane and slammed it into a table cluttered with leftover copper parts; they clattered to the ground.

  Pettivox jerked up and around.

  The minions holding me stared, but their grips didn’t loosen.

  Striding across the floor, drawing on the magic left outside the device, Nevery began a spell, a river of words that flowed from his mouth and swelled to fill the room, echoing from the walls. Just beneath the ceiling, way overhead, wisps of fog appeared, then gathered into clouds, gray and plump with rain. The giant workroom grew dark.

  Nevery shouted the last word of the spell and the clouds rumble-rolled together. Lightning flashed down. With a shriek, Pettivox leaped out of the way, and the bolt scorched the ground where he’d stood. The minions holding me staggered back. Thunder growled.

  Nevery started another spell; Pettivox was shouting a spell of his own. Their voices echoed from the walls.

  Overhead, the clouds’ bellies swelled, then exploded. Bolts of lightning zinged in all directions, ricocheting from one stone wall to the other, and then crashing into the device. Sparks leaped from its rivets and gears, but the magic stayed locked within.

  A sizzling blue bolt whizzed just over my head. The two minions holding me flinched. That was all I needed.

  With a twist of my shoulders, I pulled myself out of the minions’ hands, kicked one of them in the shins, and sprinted toward the device. The minions shouted and followed, right on my heels.

  Reaching the device, I scrambled up the stone base it rested on, then climbed onto a piston. The metal sparked under my fingers. One of the minions, coming after me, jumped for my foot,
but I reached up to a gear and pulled myself out of his reach. I climbed higher, over tubes, clinging to hoses, until I reached the bulging storage tank.

  Out in the workroom, Nevery and Pettivox were shouting at each other, their voices echoing off the stone walls. Thunder crashed again and the clouds opened, releasing a torrent of freezing rain.

  Blinking water from my eyes, I climbed higher. The rain hit the device and turned to ice; I hung on with numb fingers. A minion climbed up from below me. Another one shouted and threw a bottle; it shattered just over my head, and I shut my eyes as shards of glass rained down.

  Opening my eyes, I pulled my locus magicalicus from my coat pocket. The jewel glowed in the stormy light.

  I didn’t know any spells for this. I rested my forehead against the freezing copper skin of the storage tank and gently tapped my locus stone against the tank. It made a tinny chiming sound.

  Come out, I told the magic. Just come through the stone.

  Inside its prison, the magic strained; I felt it, confined, desperate, dying.

  Another bottle shattered beside my head. The minion climbing up from below grabbed my ankle and pulled. I slipped and almost dropped my locus stone, then gripped an icy cogwheel with my other hand and held on. The minion pulled harder; I kicked him, and then I kicked him again. Screaming, the minion fell away, bouncing off the side of the device before crashing to the floor.

  I pulled myself back up to the storage tank. With shaking hands, I moved my locus magicalicus over the surface of the tank and held it against one of the riveted seams. “Come out,” I whispered. “Here’s a good place.” Again I tapped my locus stone against the seam. The magic strained against the tank. The riveted seam creaked and bulged, but held.

  “Here, magic,” I whispered again. Within the tank, the magic stilled, shifted, and focused itself on my locus magicalicus, on me. It was like looking up at a night sky full of stars and having the stars suddenly look back.

  I closed my eyes. Calm breath, still hands. I thought my way through my locus stone and into the device, and opened the lock. Here. Come out.

  The room held its breath. I heard no shouting, no thunder or wind, no sizzling bolts of lightning. Just a black and velvety silence that filled my head and stilled my breath.

  The riveted seam along the side of the tank bulged, then, like cloth ripping, split. With the crash of thunder and lightning striking at the same time, the magic burst from the device and through my locus stone, roaring through me. It filled my sight, a wave of flashing, crashing light, sparks, blazing white flames, a thousand stars. I clung to my locus magicalicus, and the magic kept coming, pouring out until it filled the workroom, then exploding upward, blowing the top off the device, smashing through Dusk House, fountaining out into the dark night. In my hand, my locus magicalicus disintegrated into a puff of sparkling dust. I was flung away like a leaf in the wind.

  I expected to be dead.

  But instead everything went still. Inside my head, the magic said something, its words a deep, rumbling hum inside my skull and down in the heavier bones of my arms and legs. I floated, wrapped in a warm and welcoming blanket of light.

  And then everything went dark.

  * * *

  Device destroyed now, and we can hope to never see its like again in this world. Destroyed, at cost of boy’s locus magicalicus, possibly his life.

  After boy released the confined magic and Dusk House was razed, found myself at the bottom of gaping pit in darkness, a few small fires burning, debris everywhere, dust sifting down, rubble settling. Not a trace of the device; it had been utterly destroyed.

  Managed to kindle bit of light with lothfalas spell and searched ruins for the boy. Found him wedged in a narrow crack that had opened in one stone wall, as if he’d been set there for safekeeping. Way in blocked by debris. Thought boy was dead. Pale, cold, unmoving. Covered with fine, scintillant dust—the remains of his locus magicalicus. A loss too great to bear.

  Duchess’s guards arrived then, and Benet, who helped me pull the beams and rubble away from boy’s body. Had him out, finally. Placed my hand on his chest, found he was still breathing.

  Wrapped him in my robe and Benet’s coat, took him home to Heartsease, put him to bed.

  Had Trammel in to look at him. Not a mark on the boy, Trammel said. No apparent injury. He is simply cold and exhausted. Needs to sleep. Keep him warm and wait for him to wake up.

  So now we wait.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 36

  I woke up. Even with my eyes closed, I knew where I was; I recognized the musty-dusty smell of my attic room. But I was lying in a bed covered with blankets, and the room was warm.

  My locus magicalicus was gone. I had a hollow, dark, echoing place inside me where it had been. But the magic was safe, at least. I felt it in the air, all around me, even warmer than the blankets.

  I opened my eyes. Yes, my room. I was in a bed, and a fire burned in the hearth. Bright sunlight shone in through the windows and lay across the floor, shining on my dragon painting. In a chair beside the bed sat Nevery, his head tilted back, asleep.

  Carefully, I sat up, my back to the wall beside my bed. That was enough; the room spun around me and I felt like I might fall over.

  My movement woke Nevery. He tipped his head down, blinking, and rubbed the back of his neck. Then he looked over at me. His eyes widened. “Well, boy?” he said. His voice sounded rusty.

  I nodded. The room wavered, and I closed my eyes. I felt Nevery’s hand under my chin. I opened my eyes again. Nevery frowned down at me. “I’m all right,” I said.

  He looked me over, then let me go and sat back down in his chair. “Do you remember what happened?”

  Talking was better than nodding. “Yes,” I said. Actually, no. “What happened to Pettivox? And to Underlord Crowe?”

  “Hmmm. You should have told me from the start that Crowe is your uncle.”

  Yes, I should have. But I didn’t want to talk about it.

  Nevery waited for a moment, then went on. “Pettivox disappeared after the device was destroyed and is presumed dead. Crowe is in the duchess’s prison cells, awaiting her justice.”

  Oh. I wondered if she’d send him to the gallows tree. I doubted it. She preferred to exile people. I felt suddenly very tired.

  “Benet is well,” Nevery went on. “And Keeston.” He said something more, but my eyes closed and I started falling sideways. Nevery stopped talking and caught me, and gently eased me down.

  The ladder up to my room creaked and I heard Benet’s deep voice.

  “No, he’s asleep,” Nevery said.

  And then I was.

  When I woke up again, the room was dark except for a dying fire in the hearth, and Keeston was the one asleep in the chair beside my bed. And I felt a little better.

  I sat up and the room didn’t spin. My lost locus magicalicus was still an empty, aching space inside me. But I didn’t want to think about it. I was thirsty. In the shadows across the room was a small table with Benet’s knitting on it, along with a few teacups and a jug, which might have water in it. I swung my legs out of bed and stood up. A mistake. The room started swirling around, and then I found myself getting a close-up look at the floor.

  Keeston sat up with a jerk, and I heard someone climbing up the ladder. The trapdoor opened and Benet bulled his way in, holding a candle.

  “I’m all right,” I said. “I just fell over.”

  Benet set the candle on the table, then stomped over, picked me up, and put me back into bed, ducking his head to keep it from bumping the sloped ceiling. Then he glared at Keeston. “You were told to watch him.”

  Blinking, Keeston gripped his locus magicalicus. “S-sorry,” he said.

  Benet swung around to glare at me. “You hungry?”

  Yes, I was. Ravenous.

  “Stay in bed,” Benet ordered. He pointed at Keeston. “Watch him.” Then he went down the ladder.

  I sat up and leaned against the wall.


  “You’re supposed to stay in bed,” Keeston said, nervous.

  “I am in bed,” I said.

  “No,” Keeston said. “You should be lying down.”

  I shrugged. “I feel better sitting up.” Which wasn’t exactly true, but I’d need to sit up anyway when Benet brought food. I looked Keeston over; he seemed tired and twitchy. “Are you all right?” I asked.

  He flinched. He was still clutching his locus magicalicus. Right. I knew what he was afraid of. His master’s master was in the duchess’s prison; maybe he thought he would be arrested, too. “Don’t worry,” I said. “Nevery will tell everyone that you helped us. And he knows you didn’t know what Pettivox was up to.”

  Keeston stared at me. “But I did know.”

  “Not everything,” I said. “You didn’t know about that device.”

  He relaxed just a little. “No, I didn’t.” We sat in silence for a few minutes. The candle flame flickered, sending dark shadows wavering over the walls. Then he asked, in a rush, “Do you think Magister Nevery would let me come and be his apprentice?”

  The question dropped into the hole inside me that my locus stone had left and echoed around. I wasn’t a wizard anymore; without a locus magicalicus, I wasn’t even an apprentice. I swallowed down a lump of unhappiness. “I don’t know,” I managed to say. “Nevery didn’t like having me as an apprentice.”

  “Yes he does,” Keeston said. “Will you ask him for me?”

  “You should ask him yourself,” I said. He might even say yes.

  At that moment, Benet climbed into the room, carrying a tray, which he set down on the table after pushing aside the teacups and jug. He’d brought another candle, too, so the room was brighter.

  He gave me a biscuit and a cup of tea and I ate them, but they didn’t fill up the hole inside.

  After a few days, I was well enough to look after myself. Late in the morning, I got out of bed and put on my clothes, and, carrying my boots, made my way downstairs to the kitchen. Benet was there, cutting up apples.