“Orem Scanthips,” said the guard, and Orem was through the gate and back outside. His visit in Hart’s Hope was over, and he had neither work nor adventures that even the craziest poet could turn into a poem. The man behind him who had been accepted for work was thrust out of the gate, shouting about how he had been cheated, how he had worked for three days and now they didn’t even pay him for that, let alone give him a pass. At least Orem hadn’t been cheated; and meals were cheap enough in the pissers’ haunts that he still had one copper left. He didn’t know that the meals he had eaten should have cost no more than seven stones, and he should have had four coppers three stones left.

  And there was Braisy, the weaselly man, plucking at Orem’s tunic. “How much do you have left?”

  “None of your business,” Orem said.

  Braisy laughed. “Not so nice now, are you! No, they teach you the language of the city fast in there, don’t they? None of your business, is it? Then I take it you’re going home to the farm.”

  Orem shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “Well, I’ll find another customer, then.”

  “Wait,” Orem said.

  Braisy waited. “I’m waiting,” he said.

  “The Hole. I only have one copper left.”

  Braisy nodded. “Then the price is one copper and a big favor.”

  “What’s the favor?”

  Braisy smiled. “I won’t know till I get you in there, will I? But tell me, boy, what did you see in there that made you want to go back?”

  It was a good question, and Orem didn’t know. The parts of the city he had seen were dirty enough, dirtier than Banningside, for sure. But there had been the gleaming marble fronts of the houses on King’s Road, though he had caught only a glimpse. There had been the rich robes of the Exchangers and the Guildsmen. Yet that wasn’t it, for none of that would ever be within his reach. It was something else that he wanted. He wasn’t sure what. Maybe just the crowds. That was probably it—there was something pulsing in there, a current running against the ebb and flow of the masses moving every which way yet curiously all together. Under it was a touch of—

  “Magic,” said Orem. He did not know why the word had come to his lips.

  Braisy raised an eyebrow. “Oh, ho. The Hole it is then, boy. Aye, for the Hole, and I know the favor, I do. I know the favor and so will you,” and they were off, following the winding streets of Beggarstown. In the distance Orem could see the towers of the Hole. But they did not go up the street Orem had seen before. Instead they went into a tavern, a cheap beer tavern that looked filthy and sullen, as did all the customers. Orem headed for the bar, but Braisy pulled him away.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Braisy said. “This way.”

  They ducked through a curtain to a back room, where four or five people waited in the shadows. Braisy was known here; he tossed a single copper to a fat woman in a comer, and she motioned him toward a bench. Braisy sat, and so did Orem. “The copper,” Braisy said. Orem took the last of his coins from the pocket sewn into the hem of his tunic and gave it to the weaselly man.

  Suddenly the middle of the floor sank out of sight. Orem gasped in surprise, then was ashamed as Braisy and several others chuckled at him. All the people in the room lined up and stepped into the trap, where a stairway led down into the darkness. There was no light below—they felt their way and tried to see in the dim light filtering from the room. The walls were stone and there were rats underfoot. One was daring enough to nip Orem’s toe where the sandal provided no protection; Orem cried out and Braisy jabbed him in the stomach with his elbow. Suddenly they came to a wall, wooden, this time, blocking the path. “Oh, shit,” said Braisy. “The low road this time,” and they turned right and went down a steep, uneven ramp. Orem twisted his ankle a little, but it didn’t hurt much.

  “Quiet, now,” Braisy whispered as they reached level ground again. “We’re going under the street. Bight under the guards.” Sure enough, there was a sound of marching overhead, and a few passing horses. After a while, however, the sounds faded away, and the path sloped upward, and they were in a room, half underground and half above, with light coming from a single candle.

  “Braisy,” a woman whispered. “What have you?”

  “A darkling boy,” he answered softly, “who seeks the Hart.”

  The woman giggled. “Then come with me.”

  She led them through a curtained door and up a steep stairway, and then stopped at the top of the stair, though there was no landing. “Strip,” she said, and began following her own advice. Orem was surprised, but seeing that Braisy was also shedding his clothing, he did likewise, trying not to look at the woman, whose old breasts sagged down below her navel. Orem had never seen a human female nude before, and he did not like the sight much now.

  Their clothes bundled under their arms, they went through the door then, into a room lighted by red lamps, so that it seemed all to be afire. One wall of the room was made of huge stones; Orem realized that it was the wall of the city. Soon enough, though, he had no thought of the walls. A hart lay slain on the floor, its eyes staring and its blood smeared on the stone in a pattern that made little sense to Orem, except that he knew it was not the seven circles of God. The woman suddenly seized him by the thigh and pulled him down to kneel by the hart. “Taste the blood,” she whispered fiercely and showed him how, reaching down her finger into the gaping hole in the deer’s throat and then sucking it. Orem did likewise and turned to the woman. She looked at him expectantly—something was supposed to happen. Apparently it didn’t. Her look turned to one of horror.

  “What is the price?” she asked him. “Oh, God, a pilgrim’s trap!” And she backed away.

  Braisy giggled nervously behind him. “You didn’t tell me, boy. Cheater, cheater; God hates all liars.” But Orem did not understand, except that he knew Braisy did not worship God, or the hart’s blood would not be on the wall. What did he fail to do? Why were they suddenly afraid of him?

  Then a man, not nude, but covered only on his thin shoulders with a deerskin, stepped out of the shadows in a back comer of the room. “No,” he said softly, in a voice that seemed adolescent in pitch. “Not a pilgrim, are you? Yet still we see you, when you should have disappeared.” And he touched Orem’s eye, reached out a finger and set it directly on the boy’s eyeball, and Orem did not blink, but just stared at the pinkish black of the man’s finger resting on his eye, vaguely aware that the finger burned. Then, suddenly, he saw the whorls of the fingertip, and in them he thought he saw crowds of people, thousands of people screaming, reaching upward to him out of the whorls as if they were a maze, pleading with him to release them.

  “I can’t,” he whispered.

  “Oh, but you can,” said the adolescent voice, and the finger pulled away from his eye. Now his eye stung bitterly, and he clapped his hand there and rubbed it as the tears flowed to soothe the parched glass of his vision. “Braisy,” the man in the deerskin said, “a pilgrim would only stay visible himself, yes? But here you see the hart’s lady also naked to the eye. No, indeed, no pilgrim, but more valuable, more valuable. This one’s mine. Give Braisy a full purse, lady, a full purse from Galloway Glovehand, but the purse buys silence, complete silence, doesn’t it, Braisy? Doesn’t it, lady?”

  “By my soul,” Braisy answered.

  But Galloway only laughed and said, “That’s foresworn a thousand times over, Braisy. No, by the hart, yes? By the hart.” So they swore by the hart, and Braisy left carrying a bag of coins that jingled because he was trembling. Galloway took Orem by the arm, his slim fingers delicate and dry and irresistible, and led him out of the red-lit room by a different way. “What’s happening to me?” Orem asked as they both dressed.

  “You’ve been employed,” said the wizard.

  “For how long?”

  “For life, I think,” said the wizard. “Yes, for life, Fm sure of it. But don’t despair. You’ll have the freedom of the city, and the best forged passes that money can buy, with spells on them to blind the best guards, even the God’s men. And all you have to do, my boy, is serve me.”

  “But I only wanted to get into the city.”

  “And you are. Or almost.”

  “But I don’t know if I want to work for you.”

  Galloway only smiled kindly at him before his face disappeared in the mass of his green robe, which fell to reveal a brocade pattern which repeated what seemed to be God’s seven circles but was really eight circles, and all broken subtly in odd places. “Why do you think wizards hire at the Hole, boy? I think you’ve come seeking magic; but in Burland all magic is against the law, punishable by death. The hart was slain to blind the eyes of the priests, who watch always from the Great Temple. But you’re already hidden from them, aren’t you, boy? And hidden from me, I think. Yes, and even hidden from Queen Beauty’s Searching Eye. Oh, you’re a good servant, boy. What’s your name?”

  Orem was reluctant to say it aloud. “Scanthips,” he finally said.

  “A lie. But your name would give me no power over you, not at a price I could ever pay. You have a gift that draws you to magic, yes, and also draws magic to you. A Sink, that’s what you are, a Sink, and to think you walked into my own night’s hart. Well, that’s more than fate. I have the strongest magic on Wizard’s Street, and I shouldn’t think you would have come to anyone else, would you? Your clothes are covered with manure from the farm. But I’ll get you new clothes, boy. Don’t think of betraying me. Your pass will burn up if you try it, and the Guard won’t just take your ear, no, boy—they know a magic pass when they see one burning. You won’t betray me, and I’ll take care of you. That’s friendship, isn’t it?” And then they reached a place where the only passage was a trap in a ceiling, and they were in an attic that butted against the gate, and when Galloway Glovehand pushed a needle through an invisible opening in the thick wood of the gate, a part of the gate fell open and they slithered through on their bellies.

  Two hours later, they emerged from a house on Thieves’ Street. Orem was inside the city again, this time to stay, with a wizard holding him by the arm and a terrifying excitement holding his heart in at least as firm and dry a grip.

  “What is a Sink? It is a whirlpool in the sea of magic, and spells disappear into a Sink. You’re a thief, boy, a thief who steals from thieves. Now listen, and learn from me, and you’ll learn the ways to use the gift the Sweet Sisters gave you off in your frozen farm in the north.” And day by day Galloway taught Orem Scanthips how to draw the magic to him, how to find it and suck it in where it would disappear.

  “What you have swallowed can’t be drawn out again,” said Galloway. And Orem began to learn how magic tastes and smells, spending his days in the dark high room where Galloway had hidden him, reaching out to see with his closed eyes the way magic cast a glowing smoke that grew brighter and less penetrable the closer Orem came to its source. “Suck it in,” he heard Galloway’s voice saying, but it was not sucking that Orem did, not at all. It was as though Orem reached out an invisible tongue, just to taste the magic right at its source, to find the cold fire that made all that glowing smoke. And he would taste, and his tongue would bum, and then the cold fire was out and the smoke darkened and disappeared in air.

  Orem wondered what was really going on; could only guess that Galloway was using him against other magicians, to undo their magic at its source. Now and then a wizard would find a way to hide the magic, so that Orem’s probing tongue tasted only glass or stone. But Orem made the hand signs Galloway had taught him, and sang the songs whose words he did not understand, and the walls and windows dissolved and he put out the fire, its taste all the sharper because of the struggle to reach it.

  Orem also found Galloway’s walls but knew enough not to try to break them down. Let Galloway think that his servant Scanthips could not undo his magic; and perhaps Orem could not. But he suspected that Galloway was not as clever as he claimed to be. Sometimes Galloway looked at Orem uneasily, as if the boy’s uncontrolled power—or rather, uncontrolled negation of power—were a sword with no hilts, just a blade that cut wherever it touched.

  “Where did my gift come from? Why am I a Sink?” Orem asked one morning, when Galloway woke him for the day’s work.

  “Why? I don’t know. Sinks are rare enough, and they don’t usually live long, not when wizards know where they are. Fools—they usually kill a Sink. But I’m not afraid of power, boy. Besides, you’re so easy to kill if you ever get out of line.” Galloway patted him affectionately. “Which you’d never do. Let me see the scar.” The wizard studied his cheek, where the guard at Piss Gate had cut him. “Fine. Fine, now. Well, Orem, a day for adventure, I think. How would you like to go outside?”

  Orem laughed and sat up, automatically bending over to avoid banging his head against the sloping roof of the attic. “I thought you meant to keep me here forever!”

  “You wouldn’t have stayed, though, would you?” Galloway asked.

  Orem shook his head. “But then, I wouldn’t have lived through many tries at escaping, would I?”

  “None at all,” said Galloway. “I’ve saved your life, boy. If you lived in this city without what I’ve taught you, you wouldn’t survive your first meeting with a wizard. You would have drawn the power from him, without knowing it—his purchased power—and swallowed it without a price. Now I’ve made your gifts selective. You only draw in what you want to draw, and from all the rest you’re hidden. Remember that—don’t ever draw from a wizard you can see, or his eyes will go where his Searching Eye cannot, and he’ll nail you to the wall and bleed you like a hart. Do you understand?”

  Orem nodded. He knew from the walls he encountered that the other wizards were aware of his power, if not of him. They would be looking for the person who melted their icy flames; Orem had to be sure he seemed to be only Glovehand’s shy servant boy.

  They went down the stairs together. Orem’s legs were weak under him—the attic had not given him room enough to walk, and it had been a month of no more exercise than standing and sitting. He leaned on the banister once, and when he got downstairs his thigh cramped and he lay moaning on the floor until Galloway could massage the cramps out of it.

  Galloway’s house was large, but mostly empty. Only the attic room, and Galloway’s own heavily locked room, where he did his real work, and the main rooms on the ground floor, where customers came, were put to any use.

  And Orem began service.

  His duties were simple: tea for guests and of course to collect the money from them, since the wizard never touched it in front of customers. And when the customers were gone, the sweeping and cleaning, and bearing all the burdens in the market. And alone in his dark attic room, the searches to find and put out cold fires that burned here and there on Wizard’s Street.

  “Why doesn’t the Temple put a stop to all this?” Orem asked one day, when they came back from market, their purchases in a heavy sack that Orem carried.

  “What? Wizard’s Street?” And Galloway smiled. “They’d love to, you can be sure. But there’s the Queen, you see. Queen Beauty. They have their pilgrims and their revenues, and the guards arrest wizards who are fools enough to do magic Between Temples or in the sight of a priest. Put them to death, too. But the Temple stays silent about the Searching Eye that roams the city from the palace. And when the King’s army comes, the priests go deep in the cellars of the temple and hide, while the Queen works her terrors at the city walls.”

  “Then it’s true, that the Queen keeps the King out of the city with witching?”

  “Oh, yes, with witching, if you want to call it that.” But Galloway’s face looked sour. He didn’t want to talk about it, that was clear. “The Queen’s ways are the Queen’s ways, you know.”

  “Is she very powerful?”

  Galloway looked nervous, and plucked at his robe. “Well, you know, if she weren’t, do you think the Temple would tolerate her? But it’s a fearful price she pays.”

  “What is it?”

  Galloway turned away. “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, now. Of course you do.”

  And when Galloway turned back, his face was terrible. “I don’t know, Scanthips; I don’t know and I don’t want to know. Is that enough? I hope it’s enough, boy, because even a Sink can’t pay a price high enough to swallow all the Queen’s power, that’s so. Not and live. Understand that? Hers is a magic you’ll never find, that’s how strong it is, and if you found it, you’d be wise to lose it again, because if she knew about you, boy, I doubt even the Temple’s best prayers could save you or even make your death quick.”

  But Orem was puzzled—if the Queen’s magic were that strong, and her Searching Eye roamed all of Hart’s Hope and the lands around, why had he never seen her bright mist and followed it to the cold fire at its source?

  “There’s another part to the Queen’s balance with the Temple. Just so you understand, Scanthips. And put on the soup, please; there’s no reason to stand still when you’re listening. The Temple leaves us Wizards alone, so long as we only work here and so long as we do no great magics.”

  “Great magics?”

  “We can cure warts and other blemishes. We can do love words and vengeances on enemies, and pranks and little spies. We can even keep the hart’s blood hot on the city wall and go invisible in the daylight when we have the need. But we do not darken skies or move the hearts of masses in the city. We do not question the Sweet Sisters and we do not shiver the earth. The river’s course is beyond our reach and the wind must not be spoken to, and we may not kill the baby in the womb or dry the semen in a man’s loins.”

  Orem was at the pot by the fire, stirring; but his eyes did not leave the wizard’s face, for the gaunt man’s lips were trembling, and his eyes had glazed. Even speaking of such things had a strange effect on him, and Orem was afraid, yet also drawn to him. The cold fires Orem had tasted so far were not the strongest flavors in the world. There were others, and Orem’s tongue slipped in and out between his lips like a snake’s, as if searching the air for a taste of the magic Galloway spoke of.