The Master Magician (The Paper Magician Series Book 3)

by Charlie N. Holmberg

  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.

  Her gaze fell back to the shard in her palm. One thing she knew for certain—the shadowy figure that grazed its surface had headed north, toward town. Not south, east, or west, all of which would eventually lead him to the ocean. To potential escape.

  If her calculations were correct, Saraj had bunkered down in England, not fled it.

  She let a curse roll off her tongue and savored the sharpness of it. Her heart palpitated inside a rib cage made of needles. She fisted the glass shard until its edges threatened to split her skin.

  He’s not coming for you; he’s not coming for you. Something else. Perhaps he went that way because the police were in pursuit from the south . . . or he wanted to avoid the naval base, that’s all. And just because he headed north doesn’t mean he continued north.

  Why couldn’t the logic soothe her? But the answer to that question was apparent enough. She knew neither where Saraj Prendi was nor his intentions. He’d left her—and the rest of Criminal Affairs—in the dark, again.

  Ceony stood, brushing dirt off her knees, and slid the shard into her purse.

  A yellow paper songbird glided overhead.

  Pinching her necklace and uttering the words, Ceony returned to paper magic and beckoned the bird down. It swayed on the breeze and almost missed her hand. Its crinkled body looked weary. Ceony smoothed a bent wing.

  This one had traveled far.

  “What did you find?” she asked it, wishing the spell could talk. Would the paper bird be strong enough to make the trip back? Would Ceony be able to follow if the distance was as great as she feared?

  She pressed her lips together and hummed. Scanning the sky, she saw no sign of her other two birds. Cradling the yellow bird in one hand, Ceony headed toward Gosport and, after a few attempts, found a buggy.

  After the driver pulled over, she stepped up to his window and showed him the paper bird hopping on her palm. “I’m a Folder,” she said, for that morsel of information would make the rest of her request sound less foolish. “I need you to follow this yellow bird best you can, and I’ll compensate you when we reach our destination.”

  The man eyed her and rubbed one eyebrow, then the other. “How . . . far? Will it keep to the roads? I’m not savvy with Folding, miss.”

  “Not too far,” Ceony assured him, though she hadn’t a clue. “As for roads . . . well, he’s yellow. Hopefully that will make him easy to follow, regardless. I have absolute faith in your abilities, as far as traffic laws permit them to extend, of course.”

  The driver inhaled deeply, held the breath in his cheeks a moment, then blew it out like he would cigar smoke. “I hope magicians tip well,” he said under his breath, but loud enough for Ceony to hear. “Er . . . set the thing down on the hood, I guess. Do you need help in?”

  “I can open my own door,” Ceony said, and she did, taking the seat right behind the driver. “Show me what you found!” she called to the bird.

  The songbird beat its rumpled wings and flew a few feet ahead of the buggy. The driver took after it at a slow speed, but picked up his pace once the bird made its first illegal turn. The driver mumbled what could only be foul language not meant for a woman’s ears, while Ceony pretended not to notice. He wound west through Gosport, then north, honking on occasion at stopped carriages or pedestrians who seemed to be considering crossing the street. Ceony only lost sight of the bird once, when it dove behind a bank of grass, but it reappeared a moment later.

  Meanwhile, Ceony quickly Folded a new bird, constructing it differently from the others. There were Folds one could place into a spell that enabled non-Folders to use it, else paper magicians would have a difficult time making any money. She incorporated these Folds now to disguise the fact that the bird had come from a Folder. Mail birds were common; this one would blend in with the rest, no more obscure than a purchased envelope and stamp.

  Muddling her handwriting, Ceony wrote into the bird’s body, Saraj headed north after his escape. Please follow. Do not attempt to contact me; I wish to remain anonymous.

  After animating the creature and whispering to it the address for the Magicians’ Cabinet’s central building, Ceony let the bird fly out the buggy window and out of sight.

  The buggy followed road after road for just over a half hour. The streets had become mostly residential, with a small shop set on approximately every other corner.

  The yellow bird swung back around to Ceony’s glassless window and into her hands. So this was it.

  “Cease,” she told the bird. To the driver she said, “Take this road slowly, if you would. I need to look around.”

  The driver did as asked without so much as a grumble. Ceony pressed her back into the seat, keeping herself out of direct sight. As the buggy crept past the line of houses and buildings, she scanned them, noting the arc of the sun. She needed to return to the dressmaker’s shop soon if she hoped to make it home before Emery.

  What caught Ceony’s attention first wasn’t what she saw, but what she heard and smelled. Beautiful music—almost festive, yet eerie in its own right. It was like nothing she’d ever heard. The melody played on the lips of flutes and the twanging of . . . well, Ceony couldn’t be sure.

  She smelled meat, lamb perhaps, and spices. She picked out marjoram and curry, but the rest of the nuances eluded her.

  Then she spied what the bird must have seen amid a cluster of squat homes: an Indian man.

  Not Saraj: that much was clear. He wore an eggshell-white turban on his head and loose clothing that wasn’t quite a robe. A thick beard hid half his face. He carried several planks of wood on his shoulder and waved ahead to an Indian woman who was about Ceony’s age. The woman glanced in Ceony’s direction, but her eyes didn’t linger.

  The music grew louder, then fainter as Ceony passed more homes. There were Indians of all ages, children playing with stones on porches and old women with long gray braids. She spied into a larger home and saw an enormous table set with shallow metal dishes full of foods Ceony had never seen in any English cookbook. Pe
ople on the walk called to one another in a language she presumed to be Hindi.

  An Indian neighborhood, an enclave—that’s what the bird had found. She knew of a much larger Chinese settlement east of London. She had given her paper spell specific characteristics to find, and it had found them.

  But Saraj wouldn’t be here, would he? Surely he didn’t have family in England . . . at least, not family who would harbor him. The police force would have investigated that route without delay, and besides, the enclave was too close to the location of Saraj’s escape for him to feel safe. At least, were Ceony in his position, she wouldn’t feel safe.

  I’ll find you, Saraj, she thought, chewing her lip nearly hard enough to pierce it. And if you’re still in England, I’ll stop you. For them.

  She made a mental note of the area but didn’t feel confident it carried any sort of useful clue. She certainly wouldn’t go barging into these strangers’ homes searching for an Excisioner!

  She rubbed her thumb over the paper bird’s back.

  “Miss?” the driver asked. They had reached the end of the road.

  “Oh. Turn right, please,” Ceony said, relaxing into her seat. “Thank you, that was all. But if you could be so kind as to take me to a dressmaker’s shop in Waterlooville, I’ll make it worth your while.”

  She’d have to pay him the rest of the money from the Holloway job, likely, but she was used to not having spending money. The cottage had everything she needed, besides.

  The cottage. The clock was ticking.

  “Push the speed limit, if you would,” she added. The driver peeked over his shoulder at her. Ceony offered a small smile.

  She got to the dress shop just before it closed and set up a special order, though she snuck away to the back room while the clerk looked up the item number in a catalog. She transported back to Parliament through the mirror maze, only to find the door to the lavatory unlocked—someone had called in a locksmith, then. She could have transported clear to the lavatory mirror in Emery’s cottage were it not for the bike.