Jinx's Magic Read online

  “You’ve got to stop asking everybody if they’ve seen this Sophie person,” she whispered.

  “I’m not asking everybody. I hardly ask anybody.”

  “Anyway, they don’t know where she is,” said Satya.

  “They do know,” said Jinx. “They’re just not telling.”

  He would have liked to add “and it’s not your flippin’ business.” But he was trying not to turn out like Simon.

  Simon. He looked at the pile of books on the table. Somewhere there had to be an answer to why the tiny Simon in the bottle had gone all funny.

  Satya took a book from the stack. “Theories and Techniques in Deathforce Magic?”

  “I must’ve picked that up by accident,” said Jinx.

  Satya flipped through it, past pictures of a pile of skulls, a stack of bones, and a man being held upside down over a vast cauldron. “What is deathforce magic?”

  “I guess you’d have to read the book to find out,” said Jinx.

  “If you didn’t already know,” said Satya. “You know what you’re not, Zhinx?”

  Jinx shrugged.

  “Devious. You don’t do devious.” She looked all around, then lowered her voice. “They’re watching you. You’ve got to be careful what you read.”

  “I’m just interested in magic as theory,” said Jinx.

  “Well, try and be interested in something else till they get used to you being here.”

  This was too much. “Supposing you mind your own business.”

  He felt bad right away for saying it, but he had to find out why the Simon in the bottle had stopped moving.

  She flickered purple annoyance at him. “They’re watching me too, and they’re going to be suspicious of me because we kind of hang around together sometimes.”

  “Yeah? Well, you know what you can do about that.” Jinx opened a book and glared at the page. He liked Satya, but she had no right to boss him around.

  He waited for her to go away. Instead, she picked up another book.

  “Why do you have books in Qunthk? Can you actually read them?”

  “Not exactly,” said Jinx. “Can you?”

  “No. It’s famously impossible to learn, because the words are all stuck inside each other. What are all these pictures of bottles?”

  “What do you mean, ‘stuck inside each other’?” said Jinx.

  “That’s how you make a sentence in Qunthk. Instead of stringing the words one after another, you split the first word and put the second inside it, and split that and put the third inside, and split that—”

  “Oh wow,” said Jinx, looking at the hopelessly long words on the page. It was like being handed a key. He could feel the words unfolding themselves.

  “Hardly anyone can read Qunthk except a native speaker,” said Satya.

  “Where do native Qunthk speakers live?”

  Satya frowned. “That’s funny . . . no one’s ever said. Anyway, you should put those books back. They look like magic. What are you doing with them?”

  Jinx shrugged. It would have been nice to confide all his problems in somebody. But he couldn’t. Not even a little bit.

  She leaned forward. “Listen, Zhinx, I’m Samaran. I know what they do to magicians here. And to people who even try to be magicians. And it’s not nice.”

  “What?” Jinx couldn’t help asking.

  “They boil them in oil.”

  Oh. Jinx wondered whether that would be better or worse than dancing in red-hot iron shoes.

  “I’m not doing magic,” he said. “Look, I’ve got a lot on my mind right now.”

  “And you think everyone else doesn’t?”

  She flipped her hair, and left.

  The Urwald Studies Department was in a corridor where the pillars were carved to look like trees. Here and there were sculptures of what Jinx guessed were meant to be trolls and werewolves. Professor Night had an office, but he was never there. Jinx went back again and again.

  Finally one day he saw the door open and heard a man muttering to himself in heavily accented Urwish.

  “Excuse me, Professor—”

  Professor Night looked up. “Ah! An Urwish speaker! Come in. What’s your name?”

  Jinx told him.

  “Sit down, sit down. So, interested in the Urwald, are you?”

  “Yes,” said Jinx.

  “I’ve seen you at my lectures, of course. What is it that attracts you to the Urwald?”

  Jinx hadn’t attended any of Professor Night’s lectures, but he didn’t think it would be tactful to say so. “Um, trees, I guess.”

  “Trees?” A little pink puff of disappointment.

  “Er, and monsters of course,” said Jinx. “Werewolves, like different werewolf types of the Central Urwald?”

  “Ah, fascinating,” said the professor. Then he started talking about werewolves, and Jinx didn’t get a chance to say anything for some time.

  When Professor Night ran out of steam, Jinx asked, “Do they talk?”

  “Werewolves? Oh, no, of course not. They’re expressions of our primeval, wild selves.”

  “Oh. Do they talk to each other?”

  “Now, that’s something that’s never been written about. There’s not much still left to be written about werewolves, but I believe you’ve hit on something, young man. Perhaps you should pursue it.”

  “I’m trying to pursue it,” Jinx didn’t say.

  “You certainly speak Urwish very well,” said Professor Night. “Not many young people would devote such attention to an artificial language.”

  “What’s an artificial language?”

  “A language that was invented. Made up. There is no genuine Urwish language because, of course . . .” The professor paused, as if for effect. “There is no Urwald.”

  “What?” said Jinx.

  “There is no Urwald.”

  “Of course there’s an Urwald!” said Jinx. “I—um, I’ve read books about it! Lots of books.”

  “The Urwald is a metaphor,” said Professor Night. “For the unfettered mind, which is full of darkness and monsters and fear and—oh, who knows what?”

  “Trees,” said Jinx.

  “Trees,” said Professor Night. “A very salient point. How could the number of trees that supposedly exists in the Urwald exist anywhere? And in such density? They would block out the sun.”

  “But, um, there used to be—like, a hundred years ago, didn’t there use to be people who would come here from the Urwald to study?”

  “No, no. Now, there was a group of young scholars at that time—nihilists; do you know what nihilists are? These scholars were obsessed with exploring altered consciousness, and learning about magic, and all sorts of frightful things. And they called themselves”—the professor spread his hands dramatically—“the Urwalders! But that was just to impress people with how dangerous they were. They weren’t actually from there, because the place doesn’t exist.”

  “But—” said Jinx.

  “Take the matter of the Listeners, for example.”

  Jinx tried to keep his voice casual. “What about them?”

  “Supposedly, they share a sort of unity with the trees, and there’s some nonsensical legend about their roots going much deeper than those of the trees—but no doubt a clever lad like you will spot that as a metaphor for the collective unconscious.”

  Jinx didn’t say that a clever lad like him couldn’t understand such gibberish. “Do you know, um . . . anything else about Listeners? At all?”

  “Well, it’s a symbol that hasn’t been used much in the literature. There’s some mention of Listeners representing balance, but it’s hard to see how they could be both roots and balance, isn’t it? Balances move. Roots do not. The metaphor simply doesn’t work.”

  “What if it’s real? What would it mean?”

  “If it were real?” Professor Night frowned. “Well, there have been scholars who have posited that the Urwald was real. Urwald Realists, we call them. But on the whole, I thi
nk that theory has been adequately refuted. As you get ahead, young man, you will continually learn that what you learned before is untrue.”

  “What if you get ahead, and find out that what you just said about the Urwald isn’t true?” Jinx asked.

  “There is no call to be rude, young man.”

  “Sorry, I just meant, like—”

  “Do not say ‘like’ so much, please. It lends an uneducated air to your speech. Any worker bee in the marketplace might say ‘like.’”

  “Sorry,” said Jinx again. “But what if you were promoted to preceptor and found out that—”

  “I have no desire to become a preceptor,” said Professor Night. “There are only thirteen preceptors, and no one knows how they are chosen. And since they generally cease to study and to write books, I think becoming a preceptor could hardly be regarded as a promotion. Now then, was there anything else you wanted to ask me about?”

  “Yes.” Jinx felt suddenly very nervous. He brushed his hands on his robe and realized they were sweating. If Professor Night wouldn’t tell him the truth, he didn’t know what he would do. “I’m looking for a friend of mine. I wonder if you know her. Sophie Maya Simon. I mean Professor Sophie.”

  Professor Night looked at the door, as if to make sure no one was listening. He spoke in a low voice. “A friend of yours, you say? Aren’t you rather young to be a friend of Sophie’s?”

  Jinx almost sighed with relief. Professor Night hadn’t denied that Sophie existed. “She’s a family friend. But we haven’t seen her in, like, ages. So you know her, then?”

  “Of course I know her. She was a professor in my department. How could I not know her? It’s odd, now I think of it, Sophie herself developed an interest in Listeners, three or four years ago. But of course she was unable to pursue it, with so little source material.” Professor Night shook his head. “You have your whole life ahead of you, Zhinx. You could go far—even become a professor yourself someday. Don’t ruin your chances by associating yourself with someone like Sophie.”

  “Where is she? Is she alive?”

  “I’ve heard nothing to the contrary. She’s in prison.”

  Jinx felt his heart twist. “Why? What’s she in prison for?”

  “For consorting with a dangerous wizard.”

  “That’s all?”

  “It’s enough, Zhinx. I’m talking about the evil Simon Magus. Have you heard of him?”

  “Only sort of,” said Jinx. “I mean the name’s familiar. But why—”

  “Simon Magus was actually admitted as a scholar at the Temple, if you can believe it. This was some years ago, when there were fewer precautions in place. He used his position at the Temple to steal magical knowledge—possibly for the Mistletoe Alliance—and he murdered a scholar who heroically tried to stop him.”

  “But Sophie didn’t kill anybody, did she?”

  “No, but she married him.”

  “I see,” said Jinx. “So that’s why they put her in jail?”

  “No. They actually allowed her to come back to the Temple after that disgraceful behavior. It certainly isn’t the sort of indulgence that would have been shown to most of us, but Sophie was always a great favorite of the Preceptress Cassandra.”

  “What’s she in jail for, then?” said Jinx, trying to control his impatience. It was hard to sit still with the thought of Sophie locked up in some prison. She must have been there all the time he’d been in Samara, and he hadn’t known!

  “A year or so ago, the wizard Simon returned from wherever the Mistletoe Alliance had hidden him. He charged into the Temple, sending firebolts everywhere, and then fled through the marketplace, killing two coffee sellers. I saw it; I was there.”

  “Was there anyone with him?” said Jinx, who remembered that day perfectly well, only without the firebolts and dead coffee sellers.

  “No. But Professor Sophie disappeared the same day, and wasn’t seen for two weeks afterward. When she returned, of course she was arrested.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, it was presumed that she helped him escape, that she knew where he was, and that she had been hiding him.”

  Jinx remembered the first time he had ever met Sophie. She’d said something like “They don’t like me coming here.” But surely the scholars couldn’t know Sophie was going to the Urwald if they didn’t even believe the Urwald existed.

  “What’s going to happen to her?” said Jinx.

  “I assume she will, in the fullness of time, be tried for her crimes.”

  “And then what?”

  “She will be executed.”

  “In the fullness of how much time, exactly?”

  “That I do not know. The wheels of justice may turn slowly or rapidly, depending.”

  “Do they let people into the prison to visit?”

  “Zhinx,” said Professor Night. “Forget about Sophie. She can’t help you.”

  “I was thinking more about whether I could help her,” said Jinx.

  “She made her own bed—or heap of straw, rather—and must lie in it. As for you, you have a bright future, if you can avoid sullying it with unfortunate connections. You have the opportunity to go far. But only if you learn to control this adolescent hotheadedness and cultivate the right people.”

  “I see,” said Jinx. He had no doubt Professor Night had cultivated Sophie, back when she had been one of the right people.

  Sophie was in prison. And they were going to execute her. Jinx remembered how she’d insisted Simon teach him to read, how she’d convinced Simon that Jinx was smart enough to be a wizard. How she’d always—well, very nearly always—spoken kindly to him.

  He had to see her. He had to find a way into the prison. He had to get her out.

  Wendell would be able to help him.

  19

  Jinx’s Plan

  Going back to the Hutch was easy. The gatekeepers stepped politely aside for Jinx—scholar robes made a difference. Jinx knocked on the door of room 411.

  Wendell stuck his head out. “Oh, it’s you.”

  Then he did a horrible thing. He bowed.

  “Cut it out,” said Jinx. “That’s just weird.”

  He pushed past Wendell into the room and sat down on what had been his bed.

  Wendell sat down on his own bed, and looked at Jinx as if waiting to see what he wanted. There was that orange puff of hurt, and Jinx realized he somehow hadn’t gotten around to visiting Wendell at all. He’d meant to.

  “So, like, how have you been?” said Jinx awkwardly.

  “Pretty well, Questor Jinx,” said Wendell, apparently determined to be annoying. “The classes are fascinating.”

  “No, they’re not, and you hate them.” Jinx hesitated. It felt rotten to ask Wendell for help right away, when he hadn’t even bothered to visit him before.

  An uncomfortable silence reigned.

  Finally Jinx said, “Look, I need your help.”

  Wendell smiled, and the orange puff of hurt vanished. “With what?”

  “Do you know where the prison is?”

  “Sure,” said Wendell. “You pass through Crocodile Bottom, and over the river, and it’s on a hill in the marshes on the other side. Why?”

  “I need to get in there.”

  “Do magic, then,” said Wendell.

  Jinx was startled. Then he realized it was meant to be a joke—do magic, and you’ll go to prison. He tried to laugh.

  “You remember the friend I was looking for? Sophie?”

  “She’s in prison?” Wendell was genuinely worried. “Oh, that’s bad. Well, obviously.”

  “Do you think they’d let me in to visit her?”

  Wendell frowned. “I don’t know. Normally, no. I mean they don’t let worker bees in to visit. Obviously. They wouldn’t let me in. But you’ve got the robe.”

  “So they’d let me in?”

  “No, I mean not automatically. Well, you don’t act right, obviously. You can’t be freaking every time someone bows to you—”
>
  “I didn’t freak,” said Jinx.

  “You kind of have to act like you’re a king or something, you know. Look down your nose at people. Like—”

  “Like the Preceptress?”

  “Exactly.” Wendell looked at Jinx doubtfully. “If you went to the prison and pretended you were on Temple business, and that the preceptors had sent you, and if you acted really important—oh, Grandpa’s arse.” He shook his head. “You couldn’t do it.”

  “I could try,” said Jinx, stung.

  “And then if they caught you, you’d be in prison too,” said Wendell. “And they’d, you know, do something awful to you.”

  “Like they’re going to do to Sophie,” said Jinx.

  They sat for a moment in silence, staring at the floor.

  “What’s she in prison for, anyway?” Wendell asked.

  “It’s kind of complicated,” said Jinx.

  And instantly the orange puff of hurt was back. Gah! Why did Wendell have to be so—breakable?

  Then it occurred to Jinx that he was asking a lot of Wendell. He hadn’t asked him to help get into the prison, but he more or less expected Wendell would, and that meant that Wendell could end up getting arrested too.

  “Look, there’s a couple things I haven’t told you,” said Jinx.

  “Seriously? Only a couple?” said Wendell.

  “I’m, um, okay, I’m not really from Angara.”

  “I know that,” said Wendell. “I may be stupid, but I’m not dumb.”

  “Okay. Right. Well.”

  Jinx told Wendell nearly everything. It was a relief, actually.

  “So wait a minute, you’re really some kind of apprentice wizard?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cool. So why’d you bother coming to the Temple?”

  “To learn stuff. That part was actually true. Well, and to find a book.”

  “What’d you want to learn stuff here for? When you could be home learning magic?”

  “I’m kind of trying to learn magic here,” said Jinx.

  “But it’s illegal here.”

  “I know.”

  “And this place you’re from—you’re really from the Urwald?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So this Sophie isn’t really a friend of yours—”