The Threads of Magic by Alison Croggon (best ereader for pdf and epub .txt) 📕

dried horse dung just next to him. The fragrance filled his nostrils. He had never thought that he could be so happy to see good, honest horse droppings.

I’m sorry, Clovis said, in a tiny voice.

What happened?

I took us to another place. Not the other place. This place.

Pip shook his head. You’re babbling, Clovis. I don’t understand . . .

I couldn’t take us far. We’re ’round the corner from where we were. But he can’t see us now.

It wasn’t your father, was it. Pip said it as a statement.

No. Clovis’s voice broke. But even if it had been . . . He went silent again.

Even if it had been . . . what? said Pip.

You were right. My father never cared for me. Not like you do. You left the witches for me, and you put yourself in deadly peril. It was dishonorable to bring you into danger after your sacrifice.

Dishonorable, thought Pip. Right. I suppose so.

Specters are worse than witches, Pip said. Much worse. Much, much, much worse.

Clovis didn’t say anything for a long time. Pip stood up slowly, brushing off his clothes. Every muscle was sore, as if he had been beaten all over, and his head was still aching, but it felt different from before. Then he had felt like his skull might burst, as if something was trying to pry open the bones and force itself inside.

He looked around, trying to work out where he was. Some nameless little alley with shuttered windows and a bad smell. It definitely seemed like Clarel. A mangy dog rummaging for scraps in a midden stared at him and sniffed curiously, but there was nobody else close by.

Are we still friends?

Pip took a deep breath. Yes, Clovis, he said. Yes. We’re still friends.

He stood for a couple more moments, trying to clear his head.

We have to get somewhere safe, he said. A place where that . . . thing . . . can’t find us.

AFTER THE ENCOUNTER WITH THE SPECTER, PIP seemed to have lost what little sense of direction he had left. Once his pulse stopped racing, he stepped out of the lane and ventured cautiously down a side street, which led to a large thoroughfare he didn’t recognize. It was packed with people, all of them heading one way, and he had unwarily stepped into the flow, thinking the crowd would make him harder to find, even for a Specter. But now he couldn’t get out: the street had turned into a river of people that bore him along, and no matter how hard he fought, he couldn’t seem to reach the edge of it.

Many people, Pip saw uneasily, carried weapons: knives, mallets, hammers, even old swords. There was going to be trouble. And the push was getting tighter and tighter as more people joined. He began to be afraid that he might fall and be trampled.

He didn’t even know which way the Undercroft was now. Clovis was no help at all. When Pip asked him where they were, he just repeated that he had moved them a street away from where they had been before, and then he went very quiet and refused to answer.

Pip was beginning to suspect that Clovis’s ideas of distance bore very little relationship to his own. It was probably something to do with having been locked up in a tiny box for fifty years. Or maybe princes didn’t know anything about cities because they spent all their lives inside palaces having their arses wiped by servants.

They were definitely somewhere in the poorer quarters of Clarel. All Pip knew was that he definitely didn’t want to go wherever the people were going.

At last the crowd emptied itself into a large square, and the pressure around him lifted. Pip breathed out with relief and shook his arms, which were aching from being pummeled.

Now Pip could feel the mood of the crowd in his bones: excited and jubilant and defiant. It was contagious, and for a few moments he wanted just to be part of it, to go where everyone else was going. But the crowd was also tense, on the verge of explosion.

Every minute, more people were pouring into the open space, and it was beginning to get tight again. People could suffocate and die in crowds like this. Pip started pushing between the hot, packed bodies, guiding himself by a clock tower that he could just see over the heads of the crowd. People swore and cuffed him, but there was still enough space to squirm away before anyone could start a proper fight. It was slow going, and with every moment that passed, he felt more frustrated.

I don’t like this, said Clovis. We’re in the wrong place.

You could have said before, Pip answered crossly. When I was asking for directions. You plonked me somewhere I don’t know. It’s not my fault.

It’s not mine either, Clovis said petulantly. I was just trying to help.

Pip ignored him and kept pushing. At last he reached the edge of the square and started worming his way along the walls. Once he got out of the crowd, he thought, he could find a way to escape the city. He had no clear idea of what to do after that. Pip was used to surviving moment to moment, so he normally didn’t worry too much about later until later turned up.

A roar started at the other end of the square, voices raised in anger or fear, and there was a violent surge. Pip scanned the walls desperately: there were doors, shuttered shopfronts, a broad flight of steps leading up to some posh building . . . There had to be an alley somewhere . . .

And yes, at last, there was a gap, so narrow he could easily have missed it if he hadn’t been looking so closely. He lunged inside, praying that it wasn’t a dead end, or that if it was a dead end, that the walls might at least be climbable. It