Found Read Free Page A

bottom of the pit.
    The air went pop and I could hear again. Fog settled into the pit.
    I got to my feet and looked over my shoulder.Fist and Hand stood near the smashed Dusk House gates, watching me. Time to get away.
    Running as fast as I could, going ’round the edge of the pit, I got halfway to the back gate leading away from Dusk House before Hand caught up to me and tripped me. I went down hard, then rolled over.
    “Still not done with you, blackbird,” Fist said, catching his breath. He reached down and jerked me to my feet, then pushed me toward the front gate. His hand gripped my coat collar. “It picked you up,” Fist said. “Never seen it do that before.”
    I shrugged.
    “It’s strange, right?” he asked.
    It was more than strange. Wellmet’s magical being was worried, clear as clear. But why was it in the pit where Dusk House had been?
    “There’s somebody wants to talk to you about it,” Fist said; behind him, Hand nodded.
    Who? I wondered.
    They led me down the hill and along the ruttedroad past the mudflats and along the curve of the river to a shack way outside the city.
    I’d been there before. Sparks, the pyrotechnist, lived there with her nephew, Embre.
    Well. I’d been wanting to talk to Sparks, anyway, and Embre, too. Once Nevery and I figured out what explosive devices we’d use for the traps, we’d need pyrotechnic materials, and we’d have to buy them from Sparks and Embre.
    Their shack was long and had tar paper nailed up all over it, and a scrawny apple tree grew beside the front door. Behind it was a backyard that looked like a mud farm—furrows with a white, limey crust on them, like snow.
    Sparks was there, digging.
    Embre was there, too. He was a boy a lot older than I was, with black hair, dark eyes, and a sharp, pale face covered with soot smudges from working with blackpowder ingredients. He sat at the end of a mud row in a wooden wheelbarrow with a ragged blanket covering his stick legs.
    I squelched through the mud to Embre’s wheelbarrow.
    “Hello,” I said.
    He scowled at me.
    “Hello, Sparks,” I called.
    She bustled back along the row, and when she reached us she leaned on her shovel and grinned. She wore a holey gray dress and had her ashy hair tied up in a kerchief; her face was red from working hard. “Here,” she said, handing her shovel to me. “Have a go at this.” She nodded at her mud garden. “Just turn the dirt.”
    Turn the dirt, right. I went down the row to where Sparks had left off, stuck the shovel in, and lifted. As the dirt came up, so did the sharp-sour smell of old cesspools. I turned the dirt and dug up another shovelful, then another; as I worked my way down the row, Sparks stayed beside me, watching.
    “Steady as you go,” she said.
    “What is this stuff?” I asked. The dirt was wet and smelly and had straw mixed in with it.
    “Niter beds,” Sparks said. She gave me her gap-toothed grin again. “Piss and straw, wood-ash and horse manure. We make our own saltpeter, we do, for the pyrotechnics.” She pointed with her chin at Embre, down at the other end of the row in his wheelbarrow. “Come to talk to Embre, have you?”
    I shrugged. Had I?
    “Better come inside, then, before he takes a chill.”
    Down at the house, while Sparks bustled off to make tea, Embre climbed out of his wheelbarrow, dragged himself across the floor to his high stool at the table, and pulled himself up.
    I stayed by the doorway. “What d’you have to do with the minions?” I asked him.
    “Nothing,” he said. He fixed me with his dark stare. “Why’d you come back here?” he asked. “From what I hear, the minions warned you out of the Twilight once, but you didn’t listen. Are you making a bid to be Underlord?”
    “No,” I said. “They think I am, but I’m not.”
    Embre narrowed his eyes. “They don’t believe you. Your name, Connwaer, is a true name, a blackbird name, just like Crowe’s. You’re his nephew. And he trained you to become