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outside walls, and a front yard full of weeds and a scraggly apple tree.
    “Thanks,” I said. If I’d had any money, I would’ve given him some; he looked hungry.
    “Yah,” he said, and turned away. Then he turned back. “Watch out for the Shadows.”
    Shadows? Is that what he was calling the dark lurkers? Rowan glanced at me with her eyebrows raised. “What d’you mean?” I asked.
    He shrugged. “The bad ones,” he said, then spun and raced away, down the rutted road toward the busier streets of the Twilight.
    Shadows. Bad ones. Crowe’s former henchmen, sure as sure. His minions. The gutterboy was right, then. I’d better watch out for the bad ones.

CHAPTER 5
    “S o the lurkers are in the Twilight, too,” Rowan whispered.
    “It’s probably the old Underlord’s minions, Ro,” I whispered back. We stepped up to Sparks’s house. The front door was a ragged blanket hung across the doorway.I pushed the blanket aside and peered in.

    Inside was dim-dark. A long workbench was pushed up against one wall. The only light came from a candle stuck in a bowl of water, so the shack wouldn’t burn down if it tipped over, I figured. Along the back wall were small barrels piled one on top of the other, and bulging canvas sacks, and scales for weighing things.
    Perched on a stool at the workbench was a boy who looked a bit older than Rowan. He was thin and had black hair and was smudged all over with soot, and his skinny-stick legs hung limply down from the stool; they didn’t work properly, I guessed. His arms were wiry and strong, though, and, using a pestle, he was pounding something in a wide stone dish. Pound, pound, pound . He looked up when Rowan and I came in, scowled, and kept pounding, while staring at us.
    From the shadows beside the door came an old woman wearing an ash-gray woolen dress covered with scorch marks. “What d’you want?” she saidin a cracked and ragged voice.
    “Are you Sparks?” I asked.
    She gave me a gap-toothed grin. “Yerrrs, I’m Sparks.” She glanced at Rowan, who was looking around the room with wide eyes. “Howsabout a cup of blackpowder tea?”
    All right. I nodded.
    “Good for chilly days, blackpowder tea. Be right back, kettle’s on the boil. Go an’ talk to Embre.” She bustled out of the room.
    Leaving Rowan by the doorway, I went over to the boy, who was still pounding. With a name like Embre, he was probably Sparks’s grandson. “Hello,” I said. “I’m Conn.”
    Pound, pound, pound. He paused and looked me up and down. “I know who you are.”
    He did? I shrugged and pointed toward Rowan. “She’s Rowan. What’re you doing?” I nodded toward the stone bowl.
    Pound.
    “What’s it—” Pound. “—look like?” Pound .
    I leaned closer to see. It looked like he was crushing black sand into smaller bits of black sand.
    He stopped pounding. “Colophony and charcoal. It’s part of an explosive. The smaller the grains”—he pointed at the stuff in the stone bowl—“the better it mingles with the saltpeter and the sulfur, and the more powerful the explosion is.”
    Ah, I’d read about this in Prattshaw. “What ratio would you use if you wanted a slow explosion?”
    He sneered. “As if I’d tell you.”
    Trade secret, I guessed. When I made my own blackpowder, I’d have to check the books and then experiment until I got the right amount of each ingredient.
    Sparks bustled back into the room holding a tray with chipped teacups and a teapot on it, which she put down on the table. Her hand, I noticed, was missing two of its fingers. From mixing blackpowder ingredients, I guessed.
    “Here you are, love,” she said, pouring out a cup and passing it to Embre. He took it without looking up and set it on the table.
    “And for you, miss.” Sparks handed a steaming cup to Rowan, and then one to me.
    I wondered if the tea really had blackpowder in it. I took a sip; it tasted like ordinary tea, but with pepper added. “Thanks,” I said, and took