There was food on the table when Jute woke up. After he ate, he investigated the room. There was nothing worth stealing. Wool blankets and old books would not bring much from the barrow sellers who bought from the Juggler’s children. The room adjoined another room with nothing in it except for a window opening out onto a stone casement. He crawled outside and sat in the morning sunlight. The stone was already warming with the sun. He was at a great height, well above the rooftops of the city. Above him, the university spires towered even higher, up into the clear sky. Far below, the hubbub of Mioja Square drifted up to him. People bustled like ants among the brightly colored awnings of the stalls.
The city sprawled around his vantage point. The sea was a brilliant line of blue to the west. To the east, huddled near the university walls, was the ugly mass of the Earmra slum, where the poorest of Hearne’s poor lived and worked. To the north, of course, the rooftops sloped sharply up toward Highneck Rise, at whose highest point rose the gleaming white stone towers of the regent’s castle. He had never been inside, or even close, for the castle was so heavily warded it set his ears buzzing if he got within a hundred yards of the place. According to the Juggler, the castle of Nimman Botrell was filled with the most fabulous treasures imaginable.
The Juggler.
His jaw tightened. A breeze blew by his face, prompting him to look to the sky, but there was nothing there—no hawk riding the winds—only the empty blue.
The view from the window only held him so long. By noon, his boredom outweighed his fear of the university and the terrors Severan had hinted at. He opened the door to the hall and peered out. No one was there. The hall was silent. Even better, he could not hear any ward spells whispering in his mind. What was it Severan had said?
An alarming number of the ward spells here aren’t attuned to noise.
Then what do they listen to if not noise?
He rubbed his nose and thought hard about this for a moment. He hadn’t met a ward yet he couldn’t beat. The trick was to be as silent as the sky. Silent and empty, and the spell would reach right through you and find nothing.
Jute crept down the hall.
He tripped his first ward twenty minutes later.
After some time prowling about the warren of hallways, he came upon a marble door carved with whorls that seemed to creep in and out of each other. He pressed his ear against it and listened. There was only silence. More importantly, there was no ward whispering in his mind. He opened the door and found himself standing on a platform jutting out over a huge, gloomy space of darkness. He edged over to the side to look down. He could see nothing below. But surely something was down there. He had to find out.
Happily enough, a staircase curved down from one side of the platform. The steps were visible some distance down in the darkness, reflecting a hidden light source he could not make out. Jute tiptoed down the stairs in silence. However, after some time, he became aware of a noise. He froze. It was the quietest of noises—similar to a finger tapping on stone. Just a simple, peaceful tapping.
Or so Jute thought.
He took another step down the stairs, listening hard. After a few more steps, he realized the tapping increased in rapidity the further he descended. He retreated back up the stairs a way and paused. Sure enough, the tapping slowed back down.
If Jute had understood the history and nature of the university, he would have promptly ran back up the stairs and hurried to the room where Severan had left him. And there he would have waited until the old man returned. But Jute didn’t. He was a stubborn boy and he was also a curious thief. It was a combination that didn’t always prove healthy.
He tiptoed down the stairs, listening with all his might to the tapping as it increased in tempo with every step he took. He still could not tell where the stairs ended, as no floor was visible below. By this time, the tapping was so fast that surely the next step down he took would result in the tapping becoming a single, unbroken blur of sound. He took one more step and found this to be true.
It was at that moment the stairway began to vanish. The steps below him disappeared, one by one, climbing up toward him. He turned and ran. There was one horrible spot at the end where he felt the step under his foot soften and he looked down to see the thing vanish. He lunged for the platform at the top of the stairs and hauled himself, sobbing for air, up over the edge.
Jute lay on his back, his heart hammering against his ribs. After a while, he noticed with horrified fascination that, far below the platform, the stairway was reappearing. The stairs shimmered into view, one by one, mounting higher and higher. The last stair materialized under his fingertips, and he snatched his hand away as if the cold stone would burn him.
Severan was waiting in his room, perched on the wooden chest.
“Have an apple,” he said, waving at a pile of withered specimens on the table. He took one for himself and bit into it. Jute picked up an apple and promptly dropped it on the floor. His hands were shaking.
“Ah,” said Severan. “You found Bevan’s stairway. I felt it vanish. My colleagues also did. We figured it must have been a large and unlucky rat, though I had my suspicions. No one’s ever reached the bottom of those stairs. Alive, that is.”
“I can’t just stay cooped up in here!” said Jute.
“It’s either stay cooped up or have the wihht find you,” said the old man. “Or have your neck broken in any number of ways. The wards in this place are deadly. Can you get that through your thick skull?”
“The stairs vanished right underneath me!”
“You shouldn’t have been wandering around. I don’t doubt you’re bored, but, trust me, you were lucky. Those stairs killed a lot of people during the Midsummer War. Bevan was an unusually creative wizard. He was the one who figured out how to mask the warning buzz that wards give off. Once he’d discovered that, it wasn’t long before all the best wards in this place were woven for silence. Though—did you hear a tapping noise when you were on the staircase?”
“Of course,” said Jute. He bit into an apple. “What do you expect me to do? Sit in here until I grow old and die?”
“Most people would never have heard any tapping, which is how Bevan designed it. However, if you heard it that means you’d probably be able to recognize many of the wards in these ruins, one way or another. So I suppose it would be safe for you to see a bit of the place. Though,” he warned, as Jute’s face brightened, “you must use your wits, which you obviously didn’t do on the staircase.”
“I’m alive, aren’t I?” said the boy.
“Next time, if you hear noise, no matter how quiet, get away from that place as fast as possible. Furthermore, don’t go below the ground level and do not go outside, whatever you do. Some of the entrance wards are strong enough to reduce a house to rubble. The wards in this place are much more sophisticated than the variety people buy in the marketplace for their homes and whatnot. Any noise, any movement, changes in color or temperature, even a change in odor—treat them as signs of a ward listening to you.”
“What if it’s just a mouse scurrying by?” said Jute.
The old man sighed and reached for another apple.
“A mouse,” he said. “How I wish the world was that simple. You obviously know nothing about the Midsummer War. If you did, even the mice in this place would give you cause for concern.” He settled back on the wooden chest and began to speak.