“You just shouted—”
“Shh.” He held up a finger to emphasize his point.
Skate stuck her tongue out and walked into the kitchen, where Rattle was busy cooking breakfast. The chaos of the room was punctuated as ever by the clicks of the cook and the banging of pots and pans. Skate noted with some surprise that a lot of these sounds were superfluous; Rattle was banging louder and more often than it strictly needed to. She returned to the main room, where Belamy was sitting unmoved from his intense study of the crystal ball.
Skate joined her teacher by staring into it herself. She saw within it a figure wrapped in cloth that disguised all features in bulk and shadow. The person was seated at a table but doing nothing other than taking an occasional drink from a tankard in front of—him, Skate decided, based on body language alone; most women did not sit with that posture or drink in that fashion. It was Kibo the Magnificent, one of the street performers in the slums. He was in the corner, with others around him. The sphere did not show them fully, but their hands flashed into view and out as their conversation played out. One pair of hands was adorned in several gaudy rings; they were large and mannish hands, though finely cared for. They gesticulated expressively throughout the conversation. The other pair belonged to a pale woman, whose gestures were far more reserved than the man’s.
The owner of the ring-bedecked hand on Kibo’s left was speaking. “…can’t be too worried about it. It works—we’ve made sure of that. We’ll do our bit, get the goods, and be gone within a week. There’s no reason to be worried about these ruffians, Amanda. We’ll be done before they can track us down to demand any money. Forget it, I say.” It was the voice of Carsen Tillby, orator of a story that Skate could not remember. “Nothing to worry about.”
“You weren’t there, Carsen.” Miss Amanda’s bark of a voice was more subdued in this context, but no less unpleasant. “These aren’t nobodies we’re talking about here; these are people with connections. I’m pretty sure they’re running all or most of the crime in this town, like those Claws in Herzeschal. Do we need to go over how that worked out?”
The jeweled hand patted the air in mollification. “I get it. And if we were going to be here much longer, I’d be as concerned as you are. But we’re not, right? Two days, and we’re gone.” The hand took the pint in front of it out of sight for a moment, and Tillby let out a healthy burp as he returned the empty flagon to the table. “Gone like the wind, eh?” He laughed and knocked on the table.
“I don’t like it. They’d have to be keeping eyes everywhere, to be able to have found us out already.”
“They haven’t ‘found us out.’ Thanks, dearest,” he said as another drink landed on the table. The clink of coins and a giggle came from out of sight. “They have no idea what we’re doing; they think we’re a traveling troupe, just like everyone else does.”
“They know we do more than that.” Miss Amanda was growing impatient. “They know people watching the show can’t remember what they saw. They suspect—”
“They suspect much, I’m sure, but they don’t know, do they?” The new flagon disappeared from view. “So they made a threat. They won’t move on it in two days’ time. They don’t think there’s any urgency. Why would they, when they don’t know for sure what we’re doing?”
“Suspicion is enough to make me nervous, and if you had the wisdom that God gave an ant, it would do the same for you.” Her words were scolding, but there was a note of playfulness in her voice, as if Tillby’s words had lessened her fears somewhat.
“I’d take it, to be sure, so long as I could keep the rest of me.” He guffawed at his own wit, and surprisingly, Amanda joined in. Kibo made no sounds, but the robed shoulders shook with silent laughter. The focus of the vision shook their covered head and took another hearty gulp from the tankard.
When the trio recovered from the mirth, Amanda spoke up again. “And I still don’t like that girl who—”
“Oh, not this again,” Tillby said around another belch.
“Yes, this again.” Her irritation was back in full force. “I’m telling you, it didn’t work on her. Not all the way. Tell him, Kibo.”
The magician shifted and set down the almost empty flagon. “It was unexpected, Carsen.” One mystery settled: Kibo the Magnificent was decidedly a man. His voice was a register lower than Tillby’s, though breathy to the point of sounding like a whisper. “No one else has come out of the show so lucid—”
Tillby interrupted with a spluttering raspberry. “‘Lucid’? You said she barely even knew where she was!”
“And that she remembered nothing, yes. But she had questions for us about the show.” Skate realized with a small shock that they were discussing her, that they were talking about her attempt to get answers about the mysteriously disappearing story. “The magic is supposed to prevent that. Any nagging doubts about what was seen and heard should have been immediately smothered by an overwhelming sense of contentment and marvel. That this random child somehow evaded this effect would suggest something went wrong.”
“See?” Amanda chimed in. “It’s not nothing.”
Tillby considered a moment before answering. “You said it only ‘suggests’ something went wrong with the show.” Amanda let out an exasperated groan, but Tillby continued, his ring-adorned hand waving away her objection. “Now hold on, I’m serious. You said ‘suggests.’ What else could it be?”
Kibo leaned forward onto the table, resting on his elbows as he interlocked his fingers in front of him. “Well, it’s all conjecture, really. She could have been in a particular spot that interfered with the magic somehow. Such loci of interference do exist in the world, though they’re rare and difficult to find. It’s also possible she bore some sort of charm or trinket that protected her, but we’d not expect to find such magic among the slums. She was dressed finer than any slummer had any right to be, but that doesn’t mean she can afford magic. There’s also the possibility that she has been trained to resist such magic in the past, though that’s exceedingly unlikely. Training in magic, even in resisting it, costs a heavy fee; those of my craft do not part with their time or secrets trivially. Finally, it’s entirely possible she’s just an incredibly headstrong and intractable youngster, whose pigheadedness kept her from giving in entirely to the spell. Such a will would be one in a thousand; when we spring this on the city proper, we should expect we’ll run into at least a couple such resistors.” He leaned back and polished off the rest of his drink before returning to his original position. “Of all the secondary explanations, this last is most likely; but I think my original concern that something went wrong is likelier still.”
Tillby’s fingers drummed on the table. When he spoke, his voice was lowered to almost a whisper to match the magician’s. “Look, we’ve done this thing here, what, six times now? Nothing went wrong with any other shows. Nobody else at that show went off the rails, right? We need to assume we’re good as far as the show goes and chalk up Little Miss Thinks-Too-Much as a fluke. We must have done it with, what, two hundred people so far? At least that many. And one out of two hundred comes up only…” He trailed off and pulled his hands out of view. Skate was doing the same thing he was at the moment: trying to figure out the number in terms of a percent.