The Threads of Magic by Alison Croggon (best books for students to read .TXT) 📗

him. It was a corpse smell, a stench like death but much, much worse. Rot and decay are part of the natural way of things, the fertilizer that feeds the roses of next season, but this was death arrested, the decay that promises no roses . . . For an instant her rage faltered, as if the light inside her was being sucked into an enormous, ravenous vacuum.

She didn’t have time to think. With every moment Lamir became more dangerous, and she had never before faced the magic of a Specter. She lunged forward with all the force of her anger and punched Lamir on the nose.

Amina was a big, well-muscled woman, and Lamir, although tall, had a skeletal build and the strength of one who never had to perform any physical task for himself. The last thing he expected was this kind of direct assault. He went down like a sack of turnips and didn’t move.

She bent over the cardinal with a shudder and touched his temple with her forefinger. The feel of his skin was obscene, loathsome, but she forced herself to concentrate. She could feel a pulse. She hadn’t quite destroyed his body.

As she focused her mind, she felt his consciousness flicker. Lamir was coming back. She might have the power to wrestle with him, but she doubted it. Not on her own.

Somebody was already rattling the bolt of the torture chamber. She wavered, wondering whether to take the risk of fighting the cardinal. No, she couldn’t. Her first duty was to escape.

Amina shut her eyes, remembering everything she loved. When she opened them, she was a rat. Her tunic had collapsed around her like a tent.

She just had time to wriggle out and hide under the chair before the cell door slammed open and the two guards came running in, pikes at the ready. They halted when they saw the two prone bodies and the empty chair, their mouths round Os of astonishment. One poked the tunic cautiously, as if it were a dead body that might spring to life at any moment, and the other knelt and checked the cardinal’s pulse.

Amina scuttled behind them, hidden by the flickering shadows of torchlight, and out the open door.

And then she ran for her life.

FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER, ONI FELT SORRY FOR PIP. Her sympathy was mixed. She couldn’t help blaming Pip for getting them all into such trouble. It was his fault that her mother had been taken away by the cardinal’s assassins and his fault that El had vanished into a Rupture. If he hadn’t stolen the Heart, Oni would be asleep in her own apartment that she paid for with her own money. But she had never seen him look as forlorn as he did now.

Missus Orphint made tea and disappeared to clean up Pip’s vomit. Oni noticed muffling candles were placed around the kitchen. In a safe house like Missus Orphint’s, where the walls were already thick with wards and charms, it was a sign of her anxiety.

Pip sat twisting his hands in his lap, his head bowed, his tea untouched. Oni knew that he was trying not to cry in front of her. She wanted to cry herself. El was her dearest friend.

They had liked each other from the start. When they were younger, other kids had called El names, teasing her for her short breath, or calling her “simple” or worse. Oni had always stood up for El, and in turn El stood up for Oni when she was teased for being a raggedy-arse weaver kid. They had fought side by side and laughed together; they had told each other their secrets, their fears and wishes and jokes. And now El was gone. It didn’t seem real.

She couldn’t help worrying about her mother, too. She wasn’t as confident in Amina’s ability to escape the dungeons of the Office for Witchcraft Extermination as Missus Orphint seemed to be, and that made her feel disloyal. Amina was one of the most powerful witches in Clarel — everyone knew that. Well, all the witches knew that, anyway. In the ordinary way of things, she should be fine. But nothing was ordinary anymore.

Since Pip had turned up in the Crosseyes the day before — was it really only a day? — Oni’s world had fallen to pieces. Witches spoke about Specters in secret behind muffling candles, because even to think of them was dangerous, but Oni had always regarded them as frightening stories, not real things that would affect her real life. Then Pip had taken the Heart out of his pocket and put it on the table in her little apartment, and Oni had known at once what it was. Every witch in Clarel knew about Old Missus Pledge and what she had done when she’d tried to destroy the Specters.

At the center of everything, the heart of a dead boy, who had been trapped by a witch between life and death and made into a counterspell. And a grubby little thief called Pip.

“Oni,” said Pip, breaking her thoughts. “What’s a Rupture?”

“I don’t know a lot about this stuff,” she said. “Ma told me some things . . .”

“Does it mean like . . . something breaking open? Like, one place breaking into another place? And that other place, that’s where El is, right?”

Oni glanced over at him. He was staring straight ahead now, frowning. “Kind of,” she said cautiously. These were deep waters. “There’s this place, and the In Between, and then other places as well . . .”

“So why can’t we go there and get her back?”

“I don’t think it’s a place that you can just go to.”

Pip was quiet for a few moments. “What if I make Clovis take me there?”

“How would you do that?”

More silence. “I don’t know. But maybe I could.”

“Why didn’t you say he was talking to you?”

Pip hunched his shoulders, scowling. “It didn’t seem important.”

Oni knew that he felt guilty, so she didn’t