TWENTY-THREE

Santine

INSIDE THE TENT, Jin ignored the throbbing in her feet from her dash to safety as she rifled through Uncle Liao’s chest of supplies. If she’d had any doubts before about whether or not her uncle had been practicing some kind of alchemy, they were gone now. Because he’d always mentioned it in ways related to fireworking, Jin had never realized before just how much he really knew about waidan. How much, it turned out, she knew about it, because Mr. Burns had been right. When Liao spoke, Jin paid attention.

In the largest drawer she found lumps wrapped in silk with labels tied to them with string. She selected two just a bit bigger than her fist and set them aside. Then she started ransacking the smaller drawers, which were full of jars upon jars of chemicals and powders.

Some of them she used nearly every time she made fire­works: saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal, which were the makings of black powder; iron filings and copper sulfate, black copper oxide and antimony, coarse-milled sugar and fine. In other drawers she discovered ingredients she had read about using for explosives, but had never tried: shavings of ivory, which were supposed to provide a certain shimmer but were too expensive to use in Fata Morgana’s displays; orpiment, which was poisonous; and malachite.

When she’d found everything else on her list, she slipped from her wrist the jade bracelet that she had taken from the house in San Francisco. Carefully, she ran it against a grater taken from Uncle Liao’s tool chest and collected the shavings in an empty jar. She went to the furnace, gave the coals a good stir with a poker, and added some sticks of pine. Then she crossed the tent and peeked through the flap to check on Sam.

He and Walker sat cross-legged on the ground on opposite sides of an empty crate with a deck of cards between them. Bones and the man she had helped Sam play the prank on loomed behind the two players like seconds in a duel.

Walker tapped the deck with his forefinger. Sam took the cards and began to shuffle.

Jin let the flap fall closed and turned back to the laboratory.

The first shuffle was the thing. Everything depended on whether Sam could pull it off without Walker seeing what he was up to.

“You have to do it on the first shuffle,” Tesserian had said. “Nobody looks for anything untoward on the first shuffle. Just stands to reason, if you’re going to brace before the deal, you shuffle square the first couple times so you put the mark at ease.”

Sam split the deck and bent the halves into a neat bridge. The cards snapped down with a perfect flutter.

Out of the corner of his eye, Sam saw Tesserian smile. Walker saw it, too, and his glance flicked sideways to where the sharper stood. In that instant, Sam palmed away the final card remaining in his right hand so that it popped neatly down the cuff of his shirt.

He and Walker sat cross-legged on the ground on opposite sides of an empty crate with a deck of cards between them. 

Heart pounding, he straightened the deck, split it again, and repeated the process, the whole time half-expecting Walker to call him out for the cheat. But the gambler said nothing, only watched the cards arcing down out of his palms. Sam slid the deck across to him. “Cut.”

Sam shuffled a few more times. Then he dealt the first hand.

 

Inside the tent, Jin was busy going through jars of mud.

More than once she’d thought it was odd that her uncle spent so much time collecting mud and clay from the places they went, but formula after formula in the Port-fire Book had called for crucibles and tubes to be luted, meaning lined or sealed with particular sorts of mud. Of course, those muds had incomprehensible names like the mud of the six-and-one, the mud of the mysterious-and-yellow, the mud of the pearly water, and the mud of the breathing Nile.

Uncle Liao’s jars all had labels, but none of them said anything like the names from the book, so once again Jin had to puzzle them out. She needed two kinds of mud for her recipe: for the six-and-one she settled on a jar of red clay because it was the only one that listed seven ingredients. For the pearly water, she had a flash of genius and picked one that held mud made from sand and crushed oyster shells.

She lined a pair of little golden cuplike crucibles from Liao’s workbench with the oyster-shell mud and set them on a stand in the furnace. Then she emptied the powders she’d collected into a big stone mortar and started grinding them together.

Almost immediately, the compound began to throw off sparks.

She dropped the pestle and backed away. Rogue sparks were a constant danger with fireworks, which was why they were always in a panic about Mr. Burns’s cigar habit. Jin had almost blown herself up the first time she had made black powder.

The sparks stopped, so abruptly that Jin wondered if what she’d seen was a trick of her eyes, maybe some renegade light from the furnace reflecting off the millions of grains in the mortar. She sniffed the air. There was a vague scent, something spicy, but not the smell of combustion. She sifted through the mixture with her fingers. Nothing. No heat, no more sparks. She picked up the stone pestle and started to grind again.

There was a gentle popping, and the sparks returned. Only this time it wasn’t so much sparks as a sudden upwelling of fire.

Jin dropped the pestle again as the lapping flames engulfed her hand, but this time she didn’t back away. The flames were deep blue, and while Jin recognized immediately that she was looking at fire, the motion of it was almost exactly like that of a water fountain pouring up out of the stone mortar.

“I don’t believe it,” she murmured, passing her hand through the blue flame fountain. It was warm, but not hot.

She picked up a feather, one of the big white ones Uncle Liao liked to mix his powders with, and dipped it experimentally into the fire. When she pulled it out, it was perfectly intact and unsinged.

She stared at the feather, then at the bizarre blue fountain. “Unbelievable.”

Trying to ignore the strangeness of it, she returned to grinding the mixture, fire lapping up around her wrists all the while. When the grain felt right under the pestle, she picked up the feather again and stirred it. Slowly, the flames began to diminish. At last, only a thick silver-blue oil remained. Jin poured that into one of the mud-encrusted crucibles, then put the other one on top like a lid, sealed them with the red mud of the six-and-one, and placed it back in the furnace. Then, with one more quick glance outside at Sam, she started packing up her rucksack.

She had just finished tucking the last jar into the bag and had taken the crucibles from the furnace to cool when a thought occurred to her. She went back to Uncle Liao’s workbench and rooted around until she found the red grease pencil and yellow paper he had used to make the talismanic water he’d given Sam to drink. Jin tore a sheet into neat pieces and drew a symbol on each one.

Jin tucked all but one of the yellow squares of paper into her pocket. The last she left on top of the furnace like an offering. “For Sam,” she whispered as it blackened. Then she slipped out of the tent.

 

Outside on the crate, the saints were doing battle.

By the strange logic of Santine, Sam had defeated the black plague (remembering this time to use a Nothelfer rather than a Marshal), a deluge, and a plague of locusts. He’d lost a few of his cards to torture and apostasy. Walker had kept him pretty much on the defensive; about the only offense Sam had managed to accomplish was the difficult move of excommunicating one of the gambler’s highest-ranking cards, the Devil’s Advocate. That had gotten a reaction.

“Son of a—” Walker had flicked the now-useless Advocate away angrily. On his bony fingers, dark freckles began to stand out against the pale skin.

The card Sam had palmed off at the start of the game shifted against his elbow, reminding him that he could end it anytime he wanted. Just in case Walker didn’t intend to uphold his promise, though, he wanted to keep it going long enough for Jin to get a good head start.

Which meant not losing in the meantime. Or making Walker too angry to continue.

“The girl’s leaving,” Bones said tonelessly from a few paces off. “I don’t suppose we care, do we?”

“She’s going to the bridge,” Sam said, countering Walker’s play of two Stylites (who stood balanced on pillars) with a pair of Cephalophores (who carried their own heads). “She has to be there no matter who wins. Let her go.”

Bones turned away, muttering under his breath. Walker jabbed a finger at Sam’s cards. “What the hell kind of play is that?”

Sam shrugged. “Figured they could throw their heads and knock the Stylites down.” Sam had no idea whether this was a legal move, but as far as he could tell it followed Santine’s logic.

“Damn,” Walker snapped. “That is the most obnoxious play I’ve ever witnessed.” He turned to Tesserian. “Where did you find this kid?”

The sharper was bent double, laughing. “Warned you, didn’t I?”

Sam looked up over Walker’s shoulder just in time to see Jin wave as she disappeared around the corner of the hotel.

See you soon, he promised silently.