Found Read Free

sorcerer-king’s library. Implications for defense of Wellmet.

----

CHAPTER 3
    T he minions didn’t bother checking me for lockpick wires; they just tossed me in one of the basement cells and set two men to watching me all night. I did have wires. I also hadNevery’s purse string. I felt up my sweater-sleeve for it. Nothing; it was gone. Had the dratted minions taken it off me?

    I thought back. No, clever-Nevery had. He’d picked his purse string out of my sleeve when he’d bumped my arm and pretended to pick my pocket. He was probably laughing at me right now. Wrapped in my coat, I lay down on the cold stones and went to sleep.
    In the morning, Fist and Hand dragged me out of the cell and up to the streets. The sun was barely up. The rain had stopped, and a fog had risen up from the river and hung in the air like a sooty, yellow curtain. I hunched into my coat and shivered. We headed up the hill, then through Sark Square, which was just stirring, a few shops opening up.
    I followed them onto Wyrm Street, which snaked up through the steepest part of the Twilight, where the houses had once been the most grand but were now falling to pieces. Only one place this road would take us.
    Dusk House. Where the Underlord Crowe and his wizard, Pettivox, had built their device. It’d been a terrible machine built to imprison all of Wellmet’s magic. The device had almost succeeded and now the magic was weaker than it’d been before.
    When Nevery and I had destroyed the device, Dusk House had been blasted to pieces. Out in front of its ruins was a shattered stone gateway, the iron gates rusting and hanging off their hinges, and a jagged stone wall like a row of broken teeth. Inside the wall were big chunks of stone, scattered about from when the house had exploded. Snakes of fog slithered around them. Our footsteps sounded loud on the gravelly ground, crunch , crunch .
    Fist stopped at the edge of the pit where Dusk House had once stood. “Here,” he said, pointing down.
    The pit was steep-sided, hewn out of the rock. Down there was where I’d lost my locus magicalicus. It’d been destroyed, blown into sparkling green dust when I’d released the magic from the device.
    I looked down into the pit. It was half filled with sooty fog. “I don’t see anything,” I said.
    “Wait for it,” Fist muttered, and backed away from the edge of the pit.
    I waited. My stomach growled and I told it to be quiet. Behind me, one of the minions shifted; stones grated under his shoe.
    Then everything fell silent. In the pit, the fog rose higher, like a cup filling up with milk, until it overflowed past me, up to my knees, and then it was all around me, damp and smother-white and silent.
    I blinked, and the fog was gone. I looked down. Where the fog had been, darkness was filling the pit, shifting and velvety black. The air tingled, stretched like a rope pulled too hard and about to snap. Silence pushed against my ears. Tiny bolts of lightning crackled at the edges of the pit. The blackness welled up, rushing all around me, and my skin prickled as if I was filled with pins. My feet left the ground. I held my breath and looked at the magic all around me, and it was like lookinginto a night sky full of stars.
    The magic knew me. It’d always protected me, even before I’d become a wizard. It’d chosen me because it knew that I would protect it, if I could. What d’you want? I shouted at it.
    But I didn’t have a locus magicalicus, so it couldn’t hear me. The magic felt wound tight, frightened—it was worried about Arhionvar, I figured. I’m doing all I can , I wanted to tell it. But it wouldn’t understand.
    The velvety, star-filled blackness held me for another long, waiting moment. It turned me, like it was examining me, trying to figure out what I was. In my bones I felt a deep, rumbling hum. Then the giant hand of the magic dropped me and I crashed to the ground. Like water rushing down a drain, the magic swirled away into the