Anna still felt tired and not entirely well, but most of the awfulness had passed.  Tam helped her down the ladder and settled her on the stairs of the Mendiheim, where Ellea joined her.  Varden brought Morly safely down after them, and then looked over at her with confused concern.  “Are you unwell?” he asked.

“I was,” Anna said.  “But that seems to be over now.”  She was grateful.  Plague would have been the worst thing after she had survived an awful fever already.  If she was never sick again it would be too soon.  ‘I’m just glad it wasn’t comets.”
Continue reading “Chapter Sixteen–Things in Their Places”

Kara jogged down the street toward the train station, cursing and furious, trying to convince herself that if idiot children wanted to go fight a demon or some such it was their own lookout, and not really her fault.  She clenched dirty, paling knuckles around the silver spectacle case in her hand and drew up her coat collar against the rain that had begun to pelt down.  She was miserable, tired, and still feeling a bit off.  A ringing filled her ears, and a kind of roaring from somewhere.  Air beat suddenly down on her, but no rain.  Kara didn’t even have time to look up as something pulled her up abruptly into the sky.  With one powerful wingbeat, then another, Kara was over the buildings of the city, held in the powerful arms of Doctor Corin Blackfeather.
Continue reading “Chapter Fifteen–Points on a Star”

Anna stared at the thing that wasn’t Varden.  He said something in the wrong voice altogether, in a language Anna didn’t know.  The others were staring too.

“Varden’s Kesh now?” Jon asked, breathless.  The light from his hand had tempered from blinding to merely brilliant.

“Looks like,” Djaren said, running both hands through his hair, and giving the room, and particularly the floor, a careful look.  Anna felt that if he started off about inscriptions or dead languages right now she might have to smack him.  He said nothing, though, just looked.

“But that was cheating!” Tam said.  “If that was surrendering one’s will, I’ll be a, a . . .  can he even do that?”
Continue reading “Chapter Fourteen–Concerning Words of Power”

Ellea sat on the floor contemplating her options.  It would be easier, she thought, if Morly Chauncellor would stop trying to lift her spirits by saying inane things.

“I’m sure Varden’s on his way to rescue us right now,” Morly said.  “This lot will give him no trouble.  My big brother is—”  He broke off as the door opened.  A person in a long black robe entered, wearing a nearly featureless mask.

Morly scrambled up to stand between the man and Ellea.  He was sweet, really, but Ellea preferred boys with lighter hair and magic shields of the Ancients in one hand.
Continue reading “Chapter Thirteen–The Seal of Kesh”

Varden Chauncellor looked from the sewer grating to Kara, in fury and disbelief.  “You must be joking.  You are the worst thief in existence.  Wasn’t the thing covered in gold and jewels?”

Djaren looked pale, but somehow amused.  He shook his head at Kara in an oddly cheerful bewilderment.

“I had a bad feeling about it,” Kara snarled.

“We’ll have to open it up.  All of you, grab hold and pull that grate up,” Varden instructed.

Together Djaren, Kara, and Jon found that they could.  The grating made an awful scraping sound on the cobblestones as they pulled it aside.  Kara glanced around, but no one was near.  She’d chosen this area for its desolation in the first place.

She leaned down and looked into the smelly blackness of the sewer.  There was the sound of gurgling and rushing water.  “It’s pretty dark and wet down here.  I don’t think that thing’s where I left it.”
Continue reading “Chapter Twelve–A Tour of the Sewers”

Kara sat, feeling less heavy and sick than she had a little while ago, in a remarkably nice hotel.  Djaren was still standing looking at the closed door.  He turned at last, with a little frown, to Kara.  “Hired to steal the seal of Kesh?  Where do you keep finding these clients?”

Jon blinked at her.  “The last one was also an old evil power, that’s true.”

Kara scowled at them both.  “So what, this is all my fault?”

“No,” Djaren said, then, “well, sort of.  Yes.  But at least you found it.  Father has been looking for a while.”

“He can have it,” Kara said.  “It shrieks in your head.”
Continue reading “Chapter Eleven–An Unforseen Betrayal”

Anna looked both ways down a new corridor of the exasperating Derdrein house. Curtains billowed into shapes like people in one direction, and in the other all the dark stained glass windows seemed to have fires burning behind them.

“You would think the engineers of this house could have picked just one scheme, and not made it a bloody showroom,” Varden said.  He had finally stopped complaining about the stolen Narmos antiquities in the ballroom downstairs—or was it upstairs?—and gone back to his former complaints about the house in general.  Anna wasn’t sure if this was a good sign or a bad one.  He looked very strained about the eyes.

Kara squirmed in Tam’s arms.  “Out,” she whispered.  “Lord Tightbritches has a boiled egg for brains.  Put me down.”
Continue reading “Chapter Ten–Calmer Heads Prepare”

Tam quickly became bored and fidgety atop the carriage seat.  He climbed down and tried stroking the horses’ noses, though whether to calm them or himself he wasn’t sure.  Somewhere in the distance, one of those big clocks they kept up atop towers chimed.  Not a nice, even set of strokes so that you could tell what hour it was, but a few notes of some song Tam didn’t recognize.  Well, he didn’t need a clock to tell him it was getting dark.  The sun had long ago gone down behind the tall, unnatural buildings, and soon the stars would be coming out.  If you could even see stars here, with all the glowing streetlamps.  A little boy about as tall as Djaren had come by earlier, with a long stick like some odd blacksmith’s tool, and lit the lamps.

Anna shouldn’t have gone into the house, Tam thought.  The foreigners here weren’t right, and not just in the way all foreigners weren’t right.  Everyone going in had looked sad, except for the ones who looked excited, and those two things shouldn’t go together.  But Anna wasn’t hurt, wasn’t in any horrible danger.  That stuffy fellow must be looking after her well enough.
Continue reading “Chapter Nine–Deeper Into the Thicket”

Kara stood in a new perfumed room with her parcel of stolen goods clutched in one hand.  The purple hooded woman was making her wait this time.  Kara frowned and shifted from foot to foot.  Her palms were sweaty.  The room was bright and open, but something about the air felt vaguely ominous.  She was in a different part of town now, where the houses weren’t stacked one against the other and there was no speck of rubbish left in the streets.  Kara felt like someone might toss her out into a bin or the lockup just on account of her tattered coat.  It wasn’t just the unnerving cleanness, though.  The house didn’t feel clean.  It felt as though things were writhing within the pristine walls and windows.

Kara calmed herself by reviewing her exits: three tall windows with cross-hatched panes of frosted glass, and two doors, one to a hall and then out the servants’ entrance, and one leading further into the house.
Continue reading “Chapter Eight–The Spirits of Derdrien House”

Within the first ten minutes of the carriage ride, it became obvious to Anna that Tam was much more experienced with farm wagons in the open countryside than with a carriage in heavy traffic.  His knuckles were white on the reins and he wore an expression of suppressed panic.  “You’re doing fine,” she ventured, from the carriage window.  “Watch out for that post!”

They made it at last, via Anna’s careful perusal of city maps, and stopping for directions twice, with Anna as translator. Tam’s hands were shaking a little by the time they pulled up in front of the Berdrach collection.

“It’s all right,” Anna soothed.  “The cat got off clear.  Really.  And we didn’t even dent the post.”
Continue reading “Chapter Seven–The Berdrach Collection”