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brightened. “I’ve never been there before.”
    “Really, never?” I asked.
    “My mother says it’s too dangerous.”
    It wasn’t that dangerous. You just had to know where it was safe to go, and where anybody smart would stay away from.
    “You’ve heard about the strange attacks in the Sunrise?” Rowan asked.
    Attacks? No. I shook my head.
    “The magisters think they have something to do with magic. People have been found covered with dust, turned to stone in their beds, or outside their own front doors. It’s dreadful. Surely Nevery’s working on a plan to deal with them?” When I didn’t answer, she shrugged. “I suppose you’ve had your nose in a book and didn’t notice.”
    I had been busy, true.
    We stepped from the cobbled street onto the bridge over the river. Overhead, the sky was gray and the air felt thick with the coming rain. Thehouses crowded onto the edges of the bridge made the road dark, like a tunnel. A wagon loaded with coal bumped past us, and Rowan shifted to stay out of its way.
    “My mother has a point about the danger,” Rowan said. “Strange shadows have been seen lurking around the palace walls at night. Maybe they have something to do with the killings, but the magisters don’t seem to know for sure. The guards chase them, but they always get away.” She glanced at me. “Captain Kerrn is worried—she’s even set two of her guards to look after me when I go across to the academicos. Kerrn’s worried that my mother is in danger, too. She thinks the lurkers could be assassins.”
    So that’s what Nevery had been worrying about; he’d said the magisters didn’t want distractions. People turned to stone in their beds sounded something like misery eels, maybe. But I’d never heard of misery eels attacking people out in the street, not even in the worst parts of the Twilight.And shadowy lurkers. What were they, minions maybe? Had Underlord Crowe come out of exile, back to Wellmet? I shivered; I hoped not.
    We came off the bridge and onto Fleetside, the main street leading to Sark Square. A shift was just changing at the factories along the river, so crowds of workers were heading home or in to work at the looms and bottle mills and spinneries.
    We wouldn’t find anybody at the marketplace who could sell us pyrotechnic materials. I’d have to find somebody to ask, who might know somebody else who might know something about some stranger who might have a bit of blackpowder on hand.
    So we turned off the main street onto one of the side lanes in the part of the Twilight called the Deeps. The narrow street was clogged with mud and garbage, the houses crowding together, and a grimy tavern sign creaking in the autumn wind. Not many people were about—there never were—just a couple of dirty kids, an old womanwrapped in a shawl, and a man carrying a broken-down bedframe on his back. Rowan stared at it all. I had to take her hand and guide her around a muddy pothole, or she would have stepped right into it.
    “What’s the matter?” I asked.
    “I didn’t realize it would be this bad,” Rowan said. She was staring at a soot-stained brick house with broken-out windows and a chimney spilling down the side of the roof. A little barefooted girl wearing a raggedy smock stood in the front door, sucking on her finger and watching us with big eyes.
    It wasn’t so bad. The little girl probably had a mother or father who worked at a factory and brought home money for food. When she got big enough, she would work in a factory, too.
    “Come on,” I said. This part of the Twilight was safe enough, but we didn’t need to stand around looking like we wanted our pockets picked. I led Rowan down a narrow alley, turned a corner—
    —and somebody picked my pocket.
    I turned back and— quick hands —grabbed the little ragged kid who was trying to slide past me and Rowan. He wriggled and kicked, but he was smaller than I was and not very strong. I held him by the shoulders and shoved him