Minutes passed. She was about to interrupt again and ask what exactly she was supposed to be waiting on when the glass ball took on a frosty character, as if invisibly treated before her eyes. The haze receded, and a shape began to take form in the glass. It was Rattle upstairs, and the sounds of its flapping wings and clicking legs were coming not from the staircase but from the glass ball containing its moving image. It was still reading, and even the sound of the turning page came through as clear as if it had been happening on the desk itself. The library itself appeared to be spinning, which made Skate feel slightly nauseous, but she realized that the whole room couldn’t be moving while they were under it. It’s more like we’re floating in the room and circling around Rattle while it reads. The adjustment in her understanding of the perspective helped the sick feeling.
“There, you see?” Belamy asked, not breaking eye contact with the glass ball. His voice was measured and less animated than normal; Skate assumed that to be the result of his needing to concentrate. “The tools work perfectly fine, and I’m not out of practice.” He leaned back, and Rattle’s image faded first to the smoky haze, and then to crystal clear nothing once more. “I don’t know why it’s giving me such trouble trying to find the trio who threatened Jack.”
“Well, what would you do if you didn’t want to be found this way?”
“There are a number of ways to thwart such unwelcome viewing. There are charms and spells that could be shielding them, if they know someone with the skill to make such things or cast the magic. Either option would be expensive, but if they’re a particularly successful set of thieves, it may be within their ability to acquire the tools or hire the spellcasters. There are also those who simply cannot be found with such magic, though that is exceedingly rare. Old King Rajian and his line were said to possess such a power; I’m not sure that’s true, since many other royal lines of all stripes make similar claims, but it’s certainly possible that it’s more than just a legend spread by the royal court to discourage attempts by the curious or the bored. And finally,” Belamy said, standing from his chair, “there are those who have been trained to notice and even push away such attempts through the pure exertion of the will. Many wizards go through this training as part of their tutelage, and I have heard tell of monastic and martial orders who exercise the effort for the sake of discipline and security.”
“Someone can just fight it off?” Skate asked, looking into the clear ball.
“Yes, but they’d need to know it was there first, and would almost certainly need some practice at it before they could be said to be able to scuttle these magical reconnaissance tactics.” Belamy walked to the bookshelf and pulled a small, leather-bound tome off the shelf. “I believe you were ready to move on to phonetics lessons, now that you’ve mastered your letters.”
“Yeah, sure.” She was still peering into the clear glass ball. “So which of those is messing you up?”
“I can’t say for sure,” he said, flipping pages and nodding with a look of satisfaction, “but what I’ve just described are the only means I know of to beat it. I think the ‘natural’ option is the least likely. I’ve never heard of any thieves who go through the strenuous process of learning to feel and defeat scrying, either, but I’ve never made it a habit to make such rabble conversation partners—no offense,” he added, looking up from the page and smirking over his large nose. She made a sarcastic laughing gesture, and he smiled all the wider. “No, my guess is that the first option is most likely: they’ve hired a wizard to cast spells of deflection or create trinkets to keep me from finding them.” He closed his book and tucked it under his arm. “You have your chalk and board upstairs?”
“Yeah, in the desk.”
“Good. Let’s get to it, then.”
Skate followed him up the stairs. “Have you ever done it to me?”
“What?” He stopped and turned. “Scrying? Heavens, no.” He turned back around and continued his climb. “It’s a horrendous invasion of privacy.”
“But you’re trying to do it—”
“I have more than enough reason to violate the privacy of someone trying to bully one of my friends for money. They’re lucky it’s me searching for them, and not the Guards. I just want to talk, not arrest or hang them. They should be so lucky to have it be me who finds them.” They turned into Skate’s room. “Let’s begin.”
Chapter 15
In which a non-word is written, a title is read, and art is admired.
The next four days passed uneventfully. Skate got to eat three hot meals each day and spent her time studying the secrets of how to put the letters of the alphabet together to form new sounds. After the first lesson, she was disappointed that words were not yet the focus of the lessons.
“How am I supposed to be able to read if I don’t learn words?”
“Patience,” had been the old man’s only response. It was frustrating, but she trusted him to know how to teach reading, because he knew how to do it. After the second lesson, her frustration boiled to the surface again, and the wizard pointed out that she could start practicing what they’d already discussed. She stuck some of the letters together on her board at random and sounded them out with laborious effort.
“‘Thhhhhhaak.’ I wrote ‘thak.’” She showed him her work, and he nodded with a smile. “That ain’t a word, but it’s what I wrote. Does that count?”
“Of course. You’re practicing what you’ve learned so far. That’s all words are, after all: sounds pressed together that mean something. If you work on the skill of blending the sounds, you’re halfway to reading anything you want. In this language, anyway,” he clarified.
When she wasn’t eating, bathing (a luxury she’d been able to experience only, at most, once a year before now), or studying, she was talking with Petre, trying to tease some more information out of him about Belamy. Anything the imprisoned man could tell her about the lich might give her a clue as to which item might be the storage box of his soul. However, Petre was very reluctant to speak more about Belamy, always steering the conversation to familiar waters or changing the conversation entirely.
On any subject that wasn’t Belamy or himself, Petre was very willing to answer questions and ask them freely, wanting to know about the goings-on around town, about Skate, about Belamy’s friends, or about any other topic of any possible amount of interest. His view of the street outside did not give him much in the way of specific details about the world passing by.
“It’s slightly maddening at times,” he said when learning about rumors of price gouging from some of the merchant families. “I like to know these things from my own efforts, so I sometimes ask Rattle to crack the window so I can hear snippets of conversation, but I can never catch more than half a sentence before the people chatting below have moved on or are else drowned out by a passing carriage or hollering salesman.”
“You could ask to be freed and walk down yourself to ask them what they’re talking about.”
He scoffed. “It’s not much of a penance if I end it for every passing fancy, is it?”