Jinx's Magic Read online

  “Tell me, Zinx, why are you here?”

  “I want to be a scholar.”

  She pushed her spectacles down to the end of her nose and stared at him over them. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re really here?”

  Jinx was startled. Had someone recognized him?

  “To learn stuff! I want to know—everything, really.”

  At that, her thoughts acquired a silver glow of suspicion. “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” Jinx was getting nervous. “To help the people back where I come from.”

  “And that’s”—she glanced down at a paper in her hand—“Angara?”

  “Go Grapemen,” said Jinx.

  “Hm. Perhaps. But scholars stay here, you know.”

  He tried hard to look innocent. “Well, yeah, but I can still go back and, like, tell people stuff. We’re pretty backward in Angara.”

  “Knowledge is power.” She watched his face carefully.

  “Right,” said Jinx. “Exactly. Like it says on the front of the Temple.”

  “And that doesn’t mean anything to you?”

  “Sure it does,” said Jinx. “It’s a saying.” Also a kind of illegal magic.

  “Tell me, Zinx, have you ever heard of the”—she squinched her mouth around the words as if they tasted unpleasant—“Mistletoe Alliance?”

  “The what? No.”

  “You speak excellent Samaran.”

  “Thank you,” said Jinx. “What’s the Mistletoe Alliance?”

  “A gang of desperate criminals trying to steal the knowledge that is guarded in the Temple.”

  “Oh.” It seemed a bit unfair that she was suspecting him of exactly the wrong thing. “I never even heard of them. Why are they called that? I mean mistletoe doesn’t grow here, does it?”

  “It doesn’t grow anywhere,” she said. “It doesn’t exist.”

  “Oh,” said Jinx, remembering helping Simon gather it in the forest.

  “In mythology, mistletoe is the key to life and death, the magical balance between the two.”

  Jinx wanted to ask her what that meant, but he had a feeling now would be a really bad time to show an interest in magic. “So, um, is that why lectors aren’t allowed into the libraries?”

  “Precisely,” said Ling. “Knowledge must be kept safe. And for all we know, you could be one of their agents. You say you’re not Samaran, but you speak the language like a native.”

  “I started learning it when I was little,” said Jinx.

  “Hm. Well, we will be watching you.”

  Jinx decided it was all right to get a little irritated. “You can watch me all you want, because I have nothing to do with them.”

  “Then you have nothing to fear,” said Ling.

  Jinx decided not to ask what people who were in the Mistletoe Alliance had to fear.

  When they finally got a free minute, Wendell showed Jinx the way to the visitors’ entrance. They had to go around the outside wall of the Temple and in through a separate gate. There was an arched doorway, with a counter blocking the way.

  The woman behind it wore white gatekeeper robes.

  “Name?” she asked.

  “Er, mine?”

  “No, that does not matter. The scholar you wish to speak to.”

  “Sophie.” Jinx had now learned Sophie’s whole name, in the Samaran system. “Sophie Maya Simon.”

  In Samara you started out with your mother’s or father’s first name as a last name, and if you got married you added your husband’s or wife’s first name after that.

  “There’s nobody here by that name.”

  “But you didn’t even look in your book,” said Jinx.

  “I don’t need to look in my book, young man, to know that there is nobody here by that name,” said the woman coldly.

  “Could you look, please?” said Jinx.

  “No, I could not,” said the gatekeeper. “Because I do not need to look, because there is nobody here by that name.”

  “She’s a professor here,” said Jinx. “Maybe she just goes by Sophie Maya.”

  “I think I would know the name of a professor.”

  “Are there any Sophies at all?” said Jinx, desperate.

  “No.”

  “But there has to be one!”

  “Who are you?” The woman looked threatening.

  “You said that didn’t matter,” said Jinx.

  “Anyone who comes in here, wearing a lector’s badge and acting rude, I want to know the name of.”

  “Let’s go,” said Wendell.

  And Jinx had to agree—he didn’t want the gatekeeper to report him to somebody and get him kicked out of the Hutch.

  It was strange, though. There had been no sign of anything but anger floating around the woman’s head—a sort of nebulous white anger that went through life looking for things to fix its attention on. She didn’t seem to be lying. It seemed there really was no Sophie in her book.

  16

  Crocodile Bottom

  “I don’t get it,” said Jinx, when they were outside. “She has to be here.”

  “Who is Sophie, anyway?” Wendell asked.

  “A friend.” Jinx opened his mouth, and then closed it—he couldn’t tell Wendell any of the things that would explain why Sophie was important to him. “She’s—I’ve known her since I was little. She, uh, visited us in Angara.”

  “Oh.” Clearly none of this sounded desperate to Wendell. “Well, she’ll probably turn up. She’s probably right here inside the Temple. That gatekeeper seemed like one of those people who just say no all the time because they can.” He brightened suddenly. “Hey, you want to go into the city?”

  “We’re allowed?” It seemed to Jinx that life in the Hutch largely consisted of not being allowed to do things.

  “Sure. This isn’t really a prison,” said Wendell. “Well, not for most people, anyway, it is for me obviously, but we’re allowed out.”

  What Jinx really wanted was to find Sophie. But he would like to get out. Days in the Hutch were packed with classes and exams. There was hardly time for anything else but eating and sleeping.

  “We’ll just skip the after-dinner lecture,” said Wendell.

  “We’re allowed to do that?”

  “Sure. Well, you probably don’t want to,” said Wendell.

  “I do. I really do.”

  They went around to the Market Square. The gates to the Temple there were closed, and guarded by three stony-faced gatekeepers.

  “That’s weird,” said Jinx, as he and Wendell stood looking up at the words

  KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

  “Did there used to be gatekeepers there?” Last year he’d walked right through the open gates and no one had stopped him.

  “No. There was some kind of fuss a while back and they put more gatekeepers on.”

  Jinx knew about the fuss—he’d caused it.

  “Are the gatekeepers there all night?”

  “Why? Are you thinking of breaking in?” said Wendell.

  Jinx laughed uncomfortably. How was he going to find Sophie, and the book?

  “Let’s go to Crocodile Bottom,” said Wendell. “It’s a real place.”

  “Not like the Temple?” said Jinx.

  “Not at all like the Temple.”

  It was evening, and the square was nearly empty. Jinx and Wendell crossed it and turned down a street to the north. They walked past inns with tables out on the street where people were eating and drinking.

  “This is Temple Close,” said Wendell. “Hardly anyone ever gets attacked here.”

  “That’s good,” said Jinx.

  “You’re really worried about your friend, huh?”

  “Yeah,” said Jinx. “Why would her name not be in that lady’s book? How many professors are there, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. You could ask Omar. Are you sure she didn’t just leave?”

  “I guess she could have. Do professors leave a lot?”

  “I think pretty much never
,” said Wendell. “I mean once you’re in the Temple, you’re in it for life.”

  “Not me,” said Jinx, without thinking.

  “Really?” said Wendell. “Why are you working so hard to get in, then?”

  “There’s just stuff I want to learn,” said Jinx.

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Oh, stuff. Everything.”

  “I see.” There was that orange blob of hurt again, which sometimes got on Jinx’s nerves. “Probably stuff I’m not smart enough to understand.”

  “You are smart,” said Jinx, annoyed. “You just have to talk the way the teachers want, that’s all. All the Fallacies are true, and all the Truths are false, but you have to be able to make an argument the other way around. That’s what they want.”

  “Well, that doesn’t make any sense to me,” said Wendell.

  The streets became narrower and twistier. There were more people around, and though they were dirtier and more ragged than the people in Temple Close, they laughed more. And there were lots of dogs. They sniffed at Jinx’s feet and wagged their tails. Jinx scratched their ears and decided he liked dogs better than cats.

  “If I could do anything I wanted, I’d live in Crocodile Bottom,” said Wendell. “I got a job down here once, guiding some merchants for a few days. They were staying at the Twisted Branch, and they sort of spoke Samaran, but people wouldn’t listen. I took them all the places they needed to go—it was great. And they paid me eighteen silver serpents, and when I got back to the Temple nobody even noticed I’d been gone.”

  “Why don’t you just leave, then?” said Jinx.

  “Grandpa,” said Wendell tersely.

  The air started to feel different. And then Jinx saw why. There was a tree, growing beside a tumbledown house. A real tree, with branches.

  “There are trees down here!”

  “Yeah,” said Wendell. “There’re even more around the Twisted Branch. It’s down here—down Strait Street. I asked Satya to come down here with me one time, but she said she hates to go out in the city at night.”

  Jinx groaned inwardly. Ever since he’d introduced Wendell to Satya, the conversation always came around to her sooner or later.

  “Actually she said she hates to go out in the city at all,” said Wendell. “You think she likes me?”

  “Sure,” said Jinx. “Why wouldn’t she?”

  “Well, why would she?”

  “Because you’re perfectly likeable,” said Jinx.

  “Lots of people don’t like me.”

  This, unfortunately, was true. Most of the lectors scorned Wendell. They knew he’d never make scholar.

  “Anyway, we’re talking about girls,” said Wendell. “Girls is different.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know,” said Jinx. Actually he did—there hadn’t been any signs of pink fluffy thoughts from Satya.

  “Here we are,” said Wendell.

  They came into a courtyard full of trees. There was an inn behind it—much bigger and louder than the inns in Temple Close. But Jinx’s attention was caught by the people in the courtyard.

  “Flipdancers,” said Wendell.

  The flipdancers made Jinx forget about Sophie, the Temple, and everything.

  They leapt into the air, turned backflips and somersaults, sprung up and landed on each other’s shoulders, and then flew off again, turning over and over in the air and landing lightly on their feet. It had to be magic.

  When the flipdancers bounced to a stop, a tiny creature with a tail came through the crowd, shaking a tin box in its paw.

  “What’s that?” said Jinx.

  “A monkey. He wants coins, if you’ve got any. Hey, get away, you.” Wendell swatted at the monkey’s hands as it tried to reach into his pocket.

  Jinx laughed and gave the monkey a silver serpent. It was a lot, but it was Simon’s money, and the flipdancers had been great. He turned to watch the monkey scramble away. The crowd was breaking up, and—

  Now, that was odd. There was a girl hurrying down the street, and Jinx couldn’t be sure in the darkness, but she looked an awful lot like Satya.

  “Did you follow the story?” said Wendell. “See, that backflip that girl did at the end means betrayal, and the kind of swish they do with their right foot means marriage—so, like, she thought she was going to marry this guy, and he ran off—”

  “What?” said Jinx. He was still watching the girl in the street, and she hadn’t tossed her hair like Satya did.

  “Flipdancing always tells a story,” said Wendell. “Only there’s always a double meaning, like in this case it was really about Samara going back on their agreement not to make war against Vesalia.”

  A woman nearby scowled at Wendell and hurried away.

  “How do you know that?” said Jinx.

  “Figured it out,” said Wendell, with a shrug.

  “You figured out what flipdancing means and you can’t figure out the Truths and Fallacies?” said Jinx.

  “Well, sure,” said Wendell. “Flipdancing is real.”

  Jinx looked down the road. The girl was nearly out of sight now, and she still hadn’t shaken her hair. It probably wasn’t Satya. “What’s down there?”

  “Where?” Wendell looked where Jinx pointed. “The river. Crocodiles, pressmen, crooks. It’s kind of cool, actually.”

  “What are pressmen?”

  “They knock you on the head, throw you in a bag, and ship you off to the army. You wake up in the middle of whatever war Samara’s fighting at the moment.”

  “Samara’s in a war?”

  “Sure, all the time.” Wendell looked at him oddly. “You must have had to pass through the checkpoints on the road from Angara. We’d better get back, you know. It’s getting kind of late.”

  Jinx looked down the road toward the river. If that really was Satya he’d seen— “They don’t grab girls, do they?”

  “No,” said Wendell. “But they’d sure grab us if they caught us.”

  Jinx and Wendell started home. Jinx gave up worrying about Satya. “That monkey was cool.”

  “Oh yes,” said Wendell. “He’s just like the ones that pass the hat at the puppet shows back home in Agnopolis.”

  Omar seemed like the most approachable of the teachers. Maybe he would tell Jinx where Sophie was. Jinx stopped him in the hall after class.

  “Yes?” Omar smiled down at him. “By the way, that was an excellent explication of the Third Truth.”

  “Thanks.” The Third Truth was No one has ever been wrong since the world began. “Was I right?”

  “It doesn’t matter whether you’re right,” said Omar reprovingly. “What matters is how well you defend your statements.”

  But Jinx could see quite clearly in Omar’s thoughts that he’d been right: No one is ever wrong from their own point of view. It suddenly occurred to Jinx why Omar’s thoughts were so easy to see.

  “Excuse me,” said Jinx. “Do you ever feel, like, sad or mad or anything like that?”

  It was rather a personal question, but Omar was not perturbed at all. “Sometimes, perhaps, but as little as possible. I strive for complete equilibrium. Do you know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wish to have a purely rational mind.”

  “Oh. Um, so does that mean, like, that you have thoughts instead of feelings?”

  “An interesting way to put it.” Omar smiled. “I shall have to think about that.”

  That’s why I can see your thoughts so clearly, Jinx wanted to say. But the remark would not have made him and Omar better friends, so he kept it to himself.

  “What’s the Mistletoe Alliance?” Jinx asked.

  Omar smiled at him. “An interesting example of citizen rebellion. It raises some fascinating questions. What is knowledge?”

  “Um, I don’t know,” said Jinx. “Stuff people know. But, well—they steal knowledge, right? How can you steal knowledge?”

  “Exactly so!” said Omar.

  This was not very helpful. “Ho
w do they?”

  “In various ways. One is to steal books,” said Omar. “Of course, they often return them.”

  “So they borrow them,” said Jinx.

  “Not quite borrowing,” said Omar, “because they steal the knowledge out of them.”

  “You mean the books are blank when they give them back?” Jinx asked, confused.

  “I mean that they allow many people to read them. After this has been done, the books are often left tied up in bundles on the portico of the Temple, as if to mock those within. Or this was done in the past, rather, before guards were posted. It’s fascinating, really.”

  “It doesn’t sound very wrong to me,” said Jinx. “I mean it doesn’t sound like a crime.”

  “And why doesn’t it seem wrong to you?”

  “Well, because it doesn’t hurt anyone,” said Jinx. “The books come back, and more people have read them, and, well—that’s what books are for, isn’t it?”

  “That’s a theory, certainly,” said Omar, smiling. “And really, young man, it’s a theory you would perhaps do best not to share with anyone else.”

  Especially since Jinx was planning to steal the Eldritch Tome if he could find it. “Um, I was wondering . . . do you know a professor named Sophie?”

  Omar frowned. “Named . . . ? No. No, I’m afraid I’m not acquainted with anyone of that name. Now if you’ll excuse me, this has been a very interesting discussion, but I have some lecture notes to prepare.”

  And because Omar’s mind was so easy to read, Jinx could plainly see a picture of Sophie’s face floating right there in the middle of Omar’s thoughts.

  17

  Simon Takes a Turn for the Worse

  No one would tell Jinx where Sophie was, or even admit she existed. He needed advice. Maybe Simon was back by now. He might have moved the table over to the wall, signaling it was safe for Jinx to return.

  It was difficult to get rid of Wendell, who was always eager to go out into the city. In the city Wendell was almost a different person—at least, he was a much more confident, less nervous and diffident person.

  Jinx followed the winding streets through the part of town called the Eastern Crescent, till he got to the blue-violet door to Simon’s house.