ONE

Jonas t’Riseri sat on the river wall, a warm pastry in his hand, idly watching Marek’s early morning water traffic. Downriver to his right, on this side of the river, the ferry was pulling out from the foot of Marekhill, its bow coming round to point towards the Old Market on the other side. Nearly opposite him, a fishing-boat was coming back from the early shift into the small local dock, catch shining silver-blue at the back of its deck; and in the larger section of the docks, little boats darted in and out among the masts of the sea-going Salinas ships.

He grimaced and looked away. He didn’t want to think about Salina right now.

To his left, the shallow curve of the Old Bridge was already busy with folk – servants and shopkeepers – headed from well-off south Marek to the wholesale market north of the river, and returning the other way with loaded trolleys and lighter purses. Carts and carriages took the more direct New Bridge, a few streets further upstream; but for anything that could be carried on foot, especially if you were delivering to the narrow streets of the older parts of the city, or Marekhill itself where carriages and carts were forbidden, human-power was still quicker, and most folk preferred to avoid the dusty, vehicle-crowded routes to, from, and over the New Bridge.

Jonas spotted Tam, one of the messengers he’d met when he first reached Marek, and now a good friend, coming over the rise of the bridge, bare feet skimming across the paving. Messengers were light on their feet; you had to be. Jonas raised a hand as Tam ducked around a porter with a trolley of vegetables and came level with him where the bridge met the river wall.

“Go safe!” Tam called over without stopping; the messengers’ traditional greeting.

Tam, and someone else – Jonas couldn’t quite see their face, but there was something odd, something wrong, about the way they moved. The stranger had to duck under the low doorway that short Tam wasn’t bothered by. Both of them walking towards Jonas…

Jonas blinked, and the flicker was gone, the dim room – had that been evening light from its doorway? – in his mental eye replaced by the bright sunlight of the real morning in front of him. He scowled, the edges of his good mood fading. He’d been having more than one a day, the last couple of days. Definitely more than usual. Not that his flickers were ‘usual’ at all, not for anyone else, and they shouldn’t be for him either. He didn’t want them, and he couldn’t go home with them. That was why he was here in Marek, famous for its magic, finding out how to get rid of them for good. The Salinas did not have – mustn’t have – magic. He had to fix it; but he’d got here and discovered that there wasn’t a sorcerer on every street corner any more. Marek’s sorcerers had almost all been wiped out by a plague a couple of years previously. There were a couple left still, he’d found that out too, but the problem with talking to a sorcerer about his flickers was that it meant, well… talking to a sorcerer, about his flickers. In the season he’d been here, he hadn’t quite brought himself to do it. And then every so often he’d have a longer patch between flickers and think, well, maybe it was just going of its own accord…

He’d get round to it eventually. There was time enough yet. He distracted himself with another big bite of his pastry. The rich crackly leaves of the outside dissolved in his mouth, and he relished the sweet fruit inside. Berries from Exuria, at this time of year, which meant they’d be brought in by Salinas ships… Against his will, he looked rightwards again, following the flow of the water moving steadily below him, out towards the mouth of the estuary and into the Oval Sea. The curve of the river blocked his view any further, but in his mind’s eye he looked around the Marekhill cliffs, past the swamps at the estuary’s mouth, and across the Oval Sea towards Salina, invisibly distant. Though, at this time of year, nearly all of his people would be out at sea rather than at home in the villages.

Behind him an infusion-seller was pushing a clanking barrow and calling their wares. Jonas swallowed the last crumbs of the pastry and counted his coins. Not enough. Time to go looking for the next job. He hopped down off the wall, then hesitated. The Old Market was good for messages this time of day. He had a penny for the ferry over from the far end of Guildstreet, at the foot of the cliff end of Marekhill, and that was quicker than going over the bridge and round the port, but he hated the ferry. It wasn’t a proper ship. And anyway, a penny was a penny. He headed towards the bridge. He’d go the long way. Maybe he’d pick up a job on the way; he wouldn’t get that on the ferry.

The flicker was still nagging at the back of his brain as he threaded his way through the crowds on the bridge. Who was it that Tam was going to introduce to him?

His flickers were aggravating, mostly, rather than useful; though he’d won money on a boat race more than once, and he never played dice with people he liked, or not more than once. He sighed. He really did need to get on and track down one of those sorcerers. His mother had been very clear on the matter. Go to Marek, she’d said, barely able to meet his eye, when she’d realised what he was telling her. They have sorcerers there. Go to Marek and fix it.

He couldn’t just keep letting time slip by, however busy he was earning a living and making friends and exploring this fascinating new city. And however much he hated the idea of talking to a sorcerer.

He was over the bridge now, passing through the wholesale market that stretched in both directions along the river, sandwiched between the riverbank and the squats that rose behind the big market square. Fish and meat and vegetables and grains all in their separate areas, and all of them thronged with people. One of the vegetable sellers beckoned Jonas over; Jonas spread his hands to sign ‘busy’. Wholesalers always wanted to send you out towards the yard where the carts waited, just outside the city bounds, and you could never get anything on the way back again.

To his left, carts were loading up to wheel out onto the main road that led through the marshes towards Teren. To his right, there were three smaller roads and half a dozen alleyways. Jonas swerved towards the alley furthest right; always easier to dodge around folk on foot than carts. And that one cut down towards the northern riverbank. River wasn’t sea, but he still liked to be near the water when he could. And the path went through the docks, where ships were moored in tight ranks, and almost all of them Salinas.

It was too early though today for most anyone to be up, when they were safely in port. The only Salina he saw was a harassed-looking quartermaster overseeing burly dockers removing huge sacks of grain from the ship’s deck. Jonas didn’t recognise her, and she was too busy to notice him. Most times someone would, though; Jonas’ fair hair stood out among the darker Teren dockers, even if it wasn’t as white-blond as most of his compatriots. What stood out even more was a Salina in Mareker tunic and trousers, working on land, and when he wanted a few free drinks, Jonas went down to the drinking dens along the edge of the port, and waited for one of the sailors to ask his story. Sometimes he’d wind up taking someone home for the night, too, one of his age-mates on her first solo tour, or an older woman taken by his cheerful smile. That was fun, too. But he couldn’t explain why he was here; couldn’t talk about his little problem.

Automatically, he looked up at the masts. He slowed, and his eyes widened. Every Salinas ship was flying the New Year flag. And, now he came to look at them, there were a lot more masts than usual. Almost as if they were coming up to… It couldn’t possibly be New Year already, could it? Could he have lost track of the calendar that badly, here where they named their year the other way around? He started counting weeks on his fingers; swore; counted again.

Shitsticks. How could he have left it this long? Half a year, his mother had said; half a year to sort it out, and then he could grab a lift home just after the New Year, when everyone set off for Salina before the bad weather set in and they ceased trading for the season. And here he was, could only be a couple of days from New Year, and he’d got nowhere. How could time have passed that quickly?

Today. He had to find a damn sorcerer, today, and sort this thing out. That was all there was to it.

k k

Reb handed the messenger a penny tip, shut the front door after them, and unwrapped the parcel from the grocer. A bag of floor-sweepings, and another of powdered eggshell. Floor-sweepings from a busy shop were about the best thing going for getting the feel of the city. All those feet, in and out, bringing dirt with them from every corner of the place. Eggshell was just a substrate, but Reb hated powdering it herself. The local grocery was sufficiently busy for her purposes, and the grocer considered bagging his floor-sweepings and powdering his eggshells to be well-worth the honesty-charms she exchanged with him for it.

Not that many people bothered with honesty-charms any more. She’d turned a lot of folk away, just after the plague, wrapped up in her grief and guilt. With no one else to go to any more – it was hardly the sort of work that brat Cato would do, even if respectable shopkeepers were prepared to go to his part of the squats – people had found ways to do without magic.

When she’d started working again, there was still enough business to keep her afloat, and she hadn’t raised her rates, but it seemed like she hadn’t that many repeat customers these days. She remembered, once, being friendly with her customers. Those who still came to her didn’t seem so chatty these days.

That suited her fine.

She took her parcel into the inner workroom, automatically bolting the door behind her. Her jars of ingredients were lined up on shelves above the workbench. As she took down the eggshell and sweepings jars to top them up, she ran her eyes over the shelves, gauging the levels of each ingredient. She’d pay a visit to Christie’s later. Mid-Year was coming up, and going by last year, even now sorcery was less popular that would still mean a boost in trade – beforehand, for protection during the festival time, and afterwards, for fixing any little problems that people might have acquired while they were celebrating. She stared at the shelves. Once, she would have been run off her feet already, and complaining of it with her colleagues. Once, she had had colleagues.

She shook her head, sheering away from the thought. Soot she was fine for and could scrape off her own hearth anyway; a couple of the herb jars were low but culinary from the grocery did just as well as the stuff Christie sold, and with a lower markup. Shame she hadn’t known he’d be sending the eggshell and floor-sweepings, or she could have sent a message for the herbs too. Dried ants she was low on, and hair-clippings; it was worth paying Christie’s markup on hair-clippings for the guarantee that they’d been anonymised already. The anonymisation process didn’t need magic, but it was tedious. The big question, of course, in the long run, was whether Christie was going to carry on stocking any of it. Christie had always been a source of all unusual things, not just magic ingredients – but. Well. Two years on, how long would Christie continue providing something for only two people? If Cato even bought from Christie’s; perhaps it was just her. Who knew what Cato got up to. (She should know. She should still be keeping track. Should.)

And if that did happen, what could she keep doing, with just what she could get from regular shops and suppliers?

How much did she care, any more? Fewer folk were coming to her, after all. There were only two sorcerers left. Maybe magic was just… fading away from Marek. She ought to care. Once, she would have cared. A lot had changed since then.

She found herself glancing upwards, to the small leather case on the top shelf that contained her blood-magic instruments, relic of the days before she came to Marek; then she looked away. Blood-magic was illegal here. She’d promised Zareth when she apprenticed. Then she’d broken that promise, in desperation, during the plague, and it hadn’t made a blind bit of difference.

She sighed, and pushed the heel of her hand into that painful point in her forehead that always seemed to be there these days, trying to concentrate again on what she was doing. She had what she needed for the simple charms that were all she had commissioned for today. (Or any other day. No one wanted anything more complicated, even if she had the heart for it.) And plenty of time to manage them; even if that charm for the grocer had taken far longer than she’d expected the other day. She was getting more and more out of practice. She should get on with it.

Half an hour later, she was swearing without restraint. Two crucibles lay in shattered pieces on the bench, and the shards of the third were scattered across the room. Blood was oozing down her cheek from where a piece had shot straight at her, and she dabbed at it with her sleeve while she swore some more.

This couldn’t possibly just be her making mistakes. Even when she was learning Marek-style magic, when she’d first come to Marek and apprenticed to Zareth, she’d never been clumsy enough to screw up three different charms in succession at all, never mind this badly. Something else was going on. Something was getting in the way of her pulling down the magic.

She bent, slowly, to pick up the pieces of crucible from the floor. If only there was someone else to talk to about this. If only she wasn’t on her own. Her throat tightened in a grief that hadn’t abated in the last two years.

Of course; there was always Cato.

She scowled. She wasn’t at that point yet. First of all, she could try something even more basic. Something that didn’t involve flying crockery if it went wrong. She took down a handful of jars, then looked at them for a moment, chewing at her lip. Carefully, she took a pinch of each and dropped it onto the edge of the table, in a neat row of tiny piles. She re-stoppered the jars and put them in their places behind the protective ledges of the shelves. She cupped her left hand and reached towards the first pile with her right, then stopped, eyeing the remains of the crucibles. Instead, she crouched down on the floor, drew a neat chalk circle on the boards, then reached again towards the piles.

Eggshell, scattered over the circle. Floor-sweepings, towards the six compass directions. The eggshell shifted a little, and she cocked her head to one side. A pinch of rosemary, and another of powdered rowan-bark, drawing a circle within the chalk. She watched, intently. Nothing happened.

She chewed at a fingernail. Once upon a time, in another place, she would have put a drop of blood into the circle, to connect with the flow of magic. But Marek magic wasn’t supposed to need that. She pulled her finger away from her mouth, and looked at it. Her own hair, and her own nail, that wasn’t blood magic, but it was hers, and she was a sorcerer. It would be enough sympathetic magic to boost the spell.

Still watching the circle she reached out, without looking, for the scissors on her table, and snipped off a nail-paring and a couple of inches of hair. She crouched back down again, and gently tossed them into the circle.

Chaos. She jumped back instinctively, even though the circle was containing it. The components of the spell were whirling around one another, without any rhythm that she could see, flying up and down and around within a dome with the chalk circle as its base. Reb watched, hoping that maybe it was just more complicated than she was used to, that if she looked hard enough she’d see something there, that it was simply a more complex pattern than anything she’d worked with of late – but as the minutes ticked by, nothing resolved.

Her throat was dry. Magic was chaos, yes, at its root; but not here. Outside Marek, when you wanted to tap into the flow of magic, to pull it down, to tame it, you used blood, or you made a deal with a nonhuman, and you took the risks of both of those. Here, in Marek, there was the cityangel, bound to the city since its founding, some three hundred years ago, who tamed the chaos. That was why Marek was how it was; that was why Marek was (had been, had been, and her throat tightened again) the city of sorcerers, all these years. The cityangel was always there; and the cityangel wouldn’t allow anything like this. And yet, here this was.

She looked again at the miniature whirlwind, beginning now to settle as the components burnt out. Was it possible that something could have happened – and if it was, how could it be so – to the cityangel?

k k

Reb shook her head, slowly at first, then more forcefully, as the last of the dust within the circle settled to the ground. No. It wasn’t, couldn’t be, possible that anything had happened to the cityangel. That was absurd nonsense. Marek and the cityangel had been bound together since the city was founded; long enough that for most folk it was just a myth. Marek’s reputation for magic might be common knowledge; the link between that and the cityangel was known only to sorcerers, by now. It couldn’t be anything wrong with the cityangel. She would have known. It had to be her, something she was doing wrong.

Maybe it was just a sign that she should, finally, give up. Just stop trying. Maybe Marek just wasn’t supposed to be a city of sorcerers any more. Maybe the plague had a purpose. It might have spared her, but maybe she should have given up anyway, buried it along with everyone she’d known. She laced her fingers together, and tried to pretend that they weren’t shaking.

The knock on the front door startled her. She stood up hurriedly, her right knee creaking slightly, and went back through to the main room.

“Yes?” she called as she bolted the workroom door behind her.

The front door creaked open, and a skinny lad poked his head around it. His pale hair, tied back in multiple braids, screamed Salinas, though his skin was only a shade or two lighter, and his features only a little more pointed, than the average Teren. Reb frowned – the Salinas famously had nothing to do with magic, so why would one of them come to her? Was it some kind of dare? Then he came right round the door, and she saw that he wore a messenger’s red armband. Her eyebrows went up – she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen a messenger who wasn’t Mareker-born, and while Marek had inhabitants from all around the Oval Sea, the Salinas almost never settled anywhere other than their own islands.

“Afternoon,” he said cheerfully.

“Afternoon,” she said.

“You were expecting Asa. They had a message go long, asked me to take over. I’m Jonas.”

That was right. She remembered, now, asking that messenger to come back. For those deliveries that she’d been expecting she’d have ready by then. Dammit.

“What did you want?” he prompted her, after a moment.

Reb scowled. “Well, what I did want was a bunch of deliveries, but unfortunately that won’t be happening. Can I send you to Christie’s, instead? And then I’ll have some notes for when you come back.”

“For certain,” he said politely. “Have you a list?”

“Not written,” Reb started, but he was shaking his head.

“No need. I’ll remember it.”

“Well then. A jar each of dried ants, and of hair-clippings – make sure they’re the anonymised ones, not the ones he sells for processing yourself. And a quarter-jar of amaranth horn.” Christie was expensive, but reliably ethical, which the cheaper providers of amaranth horn weren’t at all. “And tell Christie I’ll be around to see him myself later this afternoon.” She turned to the dresser and dug out one of the coin rolls she kept for messenger errands. “Here. That should see you right.”

“For certain,” Jonas said again, and slid himself back out of the door.

Reb found paper, pen, and ink, and wrote notes for the commissions she’d be late on now – which was infuriating. She was never late. After than she swept up the workroom. Jonas wasn’t back when she was done, which meant that there wasn’t anything she could reasonably use to avoid thinking about what had happened.

Maybe she’d messed up. But – well. She was certain that she had done everything correctly. She’d been doing that spell for twenty years. And the idea that she’d suddenly stopped being a sorcerer was both patently absurd, and contradicted by the effect her hair-clipping and nail-clipping had had on the spell. That had to be her own magic acting as mediator.

The idea that Marek, or the cityangel, or both together, didn’t want her to be a sorcerer any more, and that was affecting her magic – that wasn’t outside the bounds of possibility. Part of her hated the idea with a visceral distress that churned her stomach and left her nauseated. The other part was just weary.

She could just leave it. Hope it fixed itself. Hide her head in the sand. She’d been good at that, the last couple of years. Or she could hie herself to the squats to find that little shit Cato, and hope he was sober and prepared to talk. (He would talk. If she told him what she feared, he would talk. When it came right down to it, they were both still sorcerers.)

Neither idea was particularly appealing, and she was still trying to think of an alternative when a knock on the door made her jump again.

When she opened the door, Jonas was barely out of breath.

“You’re fast,” she said, taking back the parcel and her change. He’d already taken his fee out of it, but she took another coin out and handed it back to him. He nodded his thanks.

“That’s me,” Jonas said. “Fastest runner in Marek.”

She flicked an eyebrow. “Do those who grew up here agree?”

Jonas shrugged. “They have the home ground advantage. But I’m catching up. I like moving fast. Reminds me of sailing.” The Salinas were the only ones who sailed the depths of the Oval Sea. They spent most of their lives at sea, carrying trade goods for every city and nation that gave onto it.

“What’re you doing in Marek, anyway?” she asked.

“Oh, you know. Looking around. New experiences, get to know a place a bit better than you do when you’re just trading. Interesting, being on dry land for a while.”

His eyes were too wide and innocent. What he said might be true, but it wasn’t the whole truth. But then, who didn’t have secrets? It was none of her business, after all; she was just making conversation.

“Hey,” he said suddenly. “You’re a – a sorcerer, no?”

He seemed a little nervous. No wonder, given the Salinas attitude to magic.

“Yes,” Reb agreed.

“Is that something you, like, choose?”

“Well.” Reb considered the question.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” he added hastily, looking as though he thought she might throw a spell at him for the enquiry.

“No, that’s – no, it’s fine. It’s a talent, sorcery. Not everyone has it. I suppose not everyone who has it has to use it.” Not that she could imagine herself having made any other decision, back when she’d discovered it in herself, when she still lived in the Teren village where she’d grown up.

“So you could stop.”

Reb felt suddenly weary. “I could. It would still be there. But I could – do something else.” Could she? “Like you could choose – are choosing, I suppose – not to sail.”

“I’m going back. Soon,” Jonas said, immediately, automatically, but there was an arrested look in his eyes.

“Can you, like, see the future?” he asked, after a moment.

She laughed. “I only wish I could. No, that’s only for fairy-stories, I’m afraid.”

He nodded, looking almost stricken. What on earth did he think sorcerers were? Of course, though any Marek child knew exactly what sorcerers could and couldn’t do, Salinas children were presumably told only to stay away from it.

“There’s seers will tell you your future in the cards or your hand,” Reb offered, “but…”

“But that’s just trickery, I know that,” Jonas said, brushing it aside. “That’s not what…”

He stopped suddenly, and Reb wondered again what he was really after. This didn’t quite seem like just a casual chat.

“There’s stories about the cityangel,” Reb said, calling it suddenly to mind. “That the cityangel can give visions to those who need them, if Marek needs that. Eli Beckett saw visions, so the story goes, or they’d have turned back before they even got here. And Xanthe Leandra – you’ve seen the statue by the south side of the Old Bridge? She was supposed to have been given a vision of the invaders. Though I can’t think you’d please the Leandra these days by suggesting it might happen again.” She laughed, then shrugged. Jonas was watching her intently. “Mark you, I don’t think there’s many would really believe in the cityangel now, even if they recite their charms and the rest.”

She could feel what had happened earlier itching at the back of her throat. It was true enough. It was only sorcerers, really, knew different, and really now that meant her, and Cato. People believed in magic – hard not to, when you could see the results – but they didn’t know the why of it.

“Salina don’t believe in such things, either, do you?”

“Believe in them?” Jonas said, a little scornfully, though there was still something else lurking in his expression. “Spirits? Of course we believe in them. Hard not to, when we see them, often enough, out there.” He gestured towards the wall, in the direction of the estuary and the open sea.

Reb blinked. She hadn’t thought the Salinas would know about spirits. Most Marekers treated them as half a story – spirits didn’t come into Marek, as a rule. The cityangel scaring them off, was the prevailing theory. But of course there’d be spirits out at sea, water-spirits, like the earth-spirits she’d grown up with in Teren, though those weren’t always treated as whole-truth, either, by folk who hadn’t met one.

“We just don’t have anything to do with them. Unreliable.” Jonas grinned suddenly at her. “Like magic generally, saving your presence.”

Well; it was true enough today, Reb thought, feeling her face twitch, before she summoned up a smile for Jonas.

“Never heard tell of cityangels, though, other than here.”

“It’s only Marek has a cityangel,” Reb said automatically, then shook her head. She didn’t want to be in this conversation any more. “But I must get on.”

She handed him the notes and another couple of coins. “Deliver these, if you could?”

He nodded, pocketing the coins and pulling a stick of charcoal out to scrawl his initials across the seals of the notes before she ushered him to the door. He hesitated on the threshold for a moment, and she thought he was about to ask something else; then he was off down the road like a hare. She shrugged, and turned to shut the door behind her.

There couldn’t be any problem with the cityangel. The cityangel just was; that was the deal that Rufus Marek and Eli Beckett had made, three hundred years ago, the deal that bound Marek-the-city and the cityangel together, that created Marek’s magic. The cityangel must be fine. There must be another explanation.

Dammit. There was no way around it. She really was going to have to go to that grotty squat of Cato’s and talk to him. She scowled, and sighed, rubbing at her eyes. Tomorrow, though. Tomorrow would be soon enough, and maybe she’d feel up to it by then.