Hollowpox: The Hunt for Morrigan Crow Read online

  DATE & TIME: Age of Poisoners, Sixth Tuesday, Winter of Six

  08:17–08:34

  She saw the name of the room—Corcoran—and the names of those present, and the date and time, and it all made sense.

  “We traveled to the past?” she said.

  “Strictly speaking, the past came to us,” said Sofia. “A ghostly hour is a little parcel of time that has been plucked from the annals of history, to be witnessed and observed in the present day, in the exact same place. Retrieving and saving a ghostly hour is horrendously difficult—only someone with prodigious skill can do it, but done right the hours will relive themselves indefinitely.”

  “For example,” continued Conall, “this one here, look: First Wednesday, Spring of Two, nine o’clock. Room Tarazed. An intermediate lesson in shadowmaking.”

  “Shadowmaking!” Morrigan shouted in pure delight. “Like the man we just saw. Am I going to learn that?”

  “Shadowmaking falls under Veil, so yes, all in good time.” He pointed to the last column. “Now, this is an annually recurring ghostly hour. You see that little circled A? That means that every year on the first Wednesday of Spring at nine o’clock in the morning, you can watch the events that occurred in that precise location.”

  He pointed out another listing on the same page. “But look—you’ll notice some of them have this little symbol here, can you see that? That little arrow circling in on itself? That means the ghostly hour exists on a perpetual loop. You could sit and observe it for the rest of your life.”

  “Though we don’t suggest it,” added Sofia. “The name is deceiving in another way too, because you’ll notice they’re not always hours. Sometimes they’re only minutes long. Sometimes they go all day, though that’s very rare.

  “Morrigan, ever since we learned there was a Wundersmith among us again, Rook and Conall and I combed through the book, looking for the most useful and interesting lessons. That’s what all these ghostly hours represent—lessons in the Wundrous Arts, from the best teachers in history. You will be taught directly by your predecessors, stretching back through the Ages—hundreds and hundreds of years. There is so much here for you to learn.”

  Morrigan flipped through the ledger, more excited than she could ever remember feeling. There must have been thousands of ghostly hours recorded in these pages. Thousands of opportunities to witness the Wundrous Arts in action, to learn them for herself. This book was a treasure chest and a time machine and a dream come true.

  She was going to become a proper Wundersmith.

  Finally.

  “How is any of this possible?” she asked.

  “It’s possible, Morrigan, through the Wundrous Art of Tempus,” said Sofia. “Tempus is the manipulation of time in various ways—moving through it, recording and preserving it, looping it, shrinking it, stretching it—”

  “Stretching it?” Morrigan looked up in surprise. “Like Professor Onstald? That was my teacher last year, he… was teaching me the history of Wundersmiths, or at least he was supposed to be. But he could do that, he could stretch time! Are you saying that’s a Wundrous Art?” She burst out laughing. “If Onstald had known his knack was a Wundrous Art, he would have—”

  “He did know that,” Conall said gravely.

  Morrigan frowned. “But… he can’t have been a Wundersmith, he hated Wundersmiths.”

  “No, he wasn’t a Wundersmith.” Conall shook his head. “He was one of us.”

  Sofia trotted lightly to the end of the table and stood up on her hind legs, nodding at a small drawing on a piece of paper torn from a sketchbook—a very good rendering of Professor Onstald the tortoisewun’s green leathery face, tufty white hair, and enormous domed shell. Morrigan hadn’t noticed it before. It was stuck up on the wall at a careless angle, dwarfed by the many framed paintings and printed maps that surrounded it. Written across the bottom were the words Sub-Nine Academic Group Founder.

  “His record-keeping was meticulous,” said Sofia.

  Morrigan looked down at the pages in front of her. The hundreds of tight, nearly microscopic rows of text in neat, precise handwriting. “Professor Onstald did this?”

  “He wrote The Book of Ghostly Hours, yes,” said Sofia. “And he created a few of the ghostly hours himself. But most of them already existed here, preserved by other Wundersmiths throughout history. Ghostly hours have always been used by Wundersmiths as a teaching and learning tool. Onstald found the ones that already existed, annotated them, and recorded their details.”

  “This book was Onstald’s life’s work,” said Conall, tapping the pages. “Part of it, anyway. The other part was learning the art of Tempus. That wasn’t his knack, Morrigan, it was his lifelong mission and obsession. His knack was—lord, I don’t even remember, do you, Sofia?”

  “No,” she said thoughtfully. “Something Mundane, I think. I didn’t really know him.”

  “The point is,” said Conall, “anyone can learn the Wundrous Arts.”

  Morrigan’s eyebrows shot upward. “They can?”

  “Well…” Sofia tilted her head from side to side as if she didn’t quite agree. “I wouldn’t say anyone can learn the Wundrous Arts, Conall. Perhaps… anyone can learn a Wundrous Art. At least partially. Take Saint Nicholas, he learned Inferno—”

  Morrigan gasped. “I KNEW IT! I knew that stuff he does had to be Inferno!”

  “Some of it is,” Conall said with a disapproving grunt. “The rest is illusion, crafty mechanics, and the talents of an underpaid elvish workforce.”

  “But although he’s prodigiously talented,” Sofia continued, as if she hadn’t been interrupted, “Saint Nick doesn’t have an exhaustive knowledge of Inferno, by any means. And Professor Onstald dedicated his entire life to learning only Tempus. He was very good, but he didn’t master it. There’s simply too much to learn, one lifetime isn’t enough.”

  Morrigan felt her excitement wilting slightly. “Oh.”

  Sofia wrapped her bushy red tail around her body. “That’s why Professor Onstald founded the Sub-Nine Academic Group—he was trying to preserve the Wundrous Arts in the absence of Wundersmiths, sometime after Squall was exiled. There were nine founding members, and each vowed to dedicate their life to mastering one of the Wundrous Arts in secret, to keep that knowledge alive.

  “Onstald came the closest. Others, like Nicholas and Stelaria—you’ll know her as the Yule Queen, of course—”

  “The Yule Queen studied here too?” Morrigan asked, delighted.

  “Oh yes, she’s quite a good Weaver. They had some degree of success, but most of those original nine failed miserably, became disheartened, and abandoned the project altogether. They passed what they’d learned on to Conall’s generation, though, and his generation passed it on to the next, and then the next… and on we go, trying to keep the torch of knowledge burning.”

  Morrigan peered curiously at the foxwun. “Which Wundrous Art are you learning?”

  “Me?” Sofia chuckled. “Heavens, no! I’m here to witness the arts, not to use them. A few of the other academics have dabbled a little—young Ravi is determined to learn Masquerade—but in recent years the Sub-Nine Academic Group has become much more focused on preserving history than reliving it.”

  “For us ordinary people,” Conall explained, “trying to learn a Wundrous Art is like trying to learn an incredibly complex language, when you don’t know anyone else who speaks it and have never heard it spoken aloud.”

  “I’m not very good at learning languages,” Morrigan admitted.

  Sofia came closer and sat right in front of Morrigan, looking at her intently. “He said that’s what it’s like for ordinary people to learn a Wundrous Art. For a Wundersmith, it’s more like… suddenly remembering you’ve been able to speak another language all along.”

  Sofia allowed this information to sink in. For some time, there was no sound but the crackling of flames in the hearth.

  Morrigan stared at the pages of The Book of Ghostly Hours, frowning. “
I don’t understand. Professor Onstald did all this—and spent his life learning one of the Wundrous Arts—but all he ever taught me was how evil and stupid and dangerous the Wundersmiths were. He said it was a good thing they were all dead. Was he… do you think he was just… jealous?”

  Conall and Sofia shared a look.

  “We know he was like that in his later years,” said Conall. “But that Hemingway Onstald bore no resemblance to the one I used to know. The Hemingway I knew—my friend—was as passionately interested in the lives of the Wundersmiths as I am. But something changed in him. Couldn’t say what, exactly, because the stubborn, angry old fool left the group one day and never spoke a word to any of us ever again.”

  Sofia made a soft, sad noise. “That was long before I came to Sub-Nine. But his life is a great loss for the Wundrous Society. Greater than even the Elders could possibly understand. We think his mastery of Tempus was probably unique in the living world. Not including Ezra Squall, of course.”

  Morrigan thought back to Hallowmas night. The Museum of Stolen Moments. She could still see Onstald’s face, still see the slow blink of his eyes as he mouthed the word RUN.

  “I’m sorry you lost your friend,” she told Conall.

  Sofia put her front paws on Morrigan’s arm, peering up at her. “Nobody blames you for Onstald’s death. You understand that, don’t you? It had nothing to do with you.”

  “It had a bit to do with me,” she said. “He died saving my life, after all.”

  “And that was a very noble thing to do,” said Conall. “But it was his choice. Nobody could have persuaded Hemingway Q. Onstald to do something he didn’t want to. Believe me.”

  With that declaration, Conall picked up his walking stick.

  “Enough of this maudlin chatter,” he said. “Morrigan has Wundersmiths to meet.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  GOLDERS NIGHT

  The next few weeks were unlike anything Morrigan had experienced in her time at the Wundrous Society. It felt like she was standing in a sweetshop, taking her pick of whatever she pleased. The Book of Ghostly Hours was a feast, when for so long she had been in famine.

  Even so, Rook was strict about Morrigan sticking to the timetable she, Sofia, and Conall had created for her, and warned her against dropping into any old ghostly hours she pleased. They’d selected each lesson carefully, the Scholar Mistress said, to build on the last and provide a bridge to the next. So far, they had only focused on two of the Wundrous Arts: Inferno and Weaving.

  “Weaving is a good skill to pick up early—the art of making and remaking the world,” Rook had explained. “Of taking energy and matter from one source, or many different sources, and adjusting or transforming it completely. Most Wundersmiths seemed to consider Weaving the most versatile of the Wundrous Arts, though of course not everyone would agree with that.”

  Morrigan would have spent all day, every day on Sub-Nine if they’d let her. She was having the time of her life. She’d already learned greater control over Inferno (and in one particularly memorable lesson, how to breathe fire in a whole rainbow of colors), and in her Weaving lessons she was working on moving furniture across the room without touching it.

  Weaving didn’t come as naturally to Morrigan as Inferno had. It was hideously difficult to understand and even harder to perform. Moving a chair seemed like it should have been easy, but in fact she wasn’t just moving a chair. She was creating a world in which the chair had moved. Or… she was convincing Wunder to create a world in which the chair had moved.

  Or something like that. She was still fuzzy on the physics of it.

  Either way, when Morrigan had finally made the chair fall on its side, she and Sofia had whooped in delight.

  Conall had taken Morrigan to watch some more advanced lessons too, so she wouldn’t get disheartened while learning the basics. The things the old Wundersmiths could weave were extraordinary. She’d watched one grow a tree from a table leg. Another had turned his own tears into diamonds.

  Morrigan knew full well that she was miles away from diamond tears territory. But with every scrap of skill gained, every fragment of wisdom gleaned from one of her predecessors, her confidence grew and—even more surprisingly—spilled over into the rest of her life at Wunsoc. She still heard the occasional savage whisper in the halls of Proudfoot House, but now they seemed to bounce off her like rubber. She still had to keep up appearances as a whitesleeve, but her bizarre timetable of Arcane classes began to interest her again, rather than annoy her.

  For the first time ever, Wunsoc made sense, and Morrigan made sense in it.

  One Tuesday afternoon following their workshop in Obscure Unnimal Languages, Morrigan and Mahir packed up some sandwiches from the dining hall and took them down to the dragonriding arena on Sub-Five.

  With some extra help from Unit 919’s accomplished linguist, Hawthorne’s Dragontongue was slowly improving (very slowly, according to Mahir), and he’d recently become determined to use it. Previously uninterested in learning a single word, after a year of lessons Hawthorne had become convinced that speaking directly to the dragons he trained with was the only way to achieve his ambition of one day becoming the world’s greatest dragonrider.

  Morrigan and Mahir observed his attempts at small talk from up in the stands, wincing every time Burns With the Fire of a Thousand Wood-Burning Stoves snorted steam from his nose or twitched his enormous tail with irritation. Eventually the dragon turned his back on Hawthorne quite pointedly and closed his eyes, apparently settling down in the middle of the arena for a nap.

  “Awkward,” murmured Mahir.

  “The thing they don’t tell you in Dragontongue class,” said Hawthorne when he’d finally joined them, still glaring at the taciturn Burns With, “is that you can be as fluent as you like, but if the big stupid things don’t want to talk to you, you’ll never get a word out of them as long as you live.”

  Morrigan shrugged, unwrapping her cheese and pickle sandwich and handing half of it to Hawthorne, who gave her half of his cress and roast beef in return. “You’ve only been trying for a few weeks, though, haven’t you? Some of these dragons are hundreds of years old, Hawthorne. You might just need to have patience.”

  “I’ve had patience. I’m sick of having patience, it’s boring,” Hawthorne moaned. “They’re so rude. I mean, I can’t even get so much as a mish kadrach f’al to my hal’clahar fejh alm’ok.”

  Mahir made a choking noise and hastily swallowed a mouthful of chicken sandwich. “Hal’clahar fejh alm’ok? Why are you telling them you’ve got a meat grinder at home? Don’t you think that sounds a bit… threatening?”

  “What?” Hawthorne frowned. “No, that means ‘your fire burns bright as the sun.’”

  “Um, no,” said Mahir, sounding half-amused and half-exasperated. “It really doesn’t. And I don’t know what you think mish kadrach f’al means, but I wouldn’t expect a dragon to tell you ‘your eyes are as hungry as a foot’ anytime soon.”

  Morrigan laughed so hard she snorted chocolate milk out of her nose.

  “So how come they keep letting me ride them?” said Hawthorne, scowling as he threw a paper napkin at her.

  “Maybe because your riding skills are better than your abysmal Draconian. I bet they all talk about you behind your back, though.” Mahir stood up and brushed sandwich crumbs off his uniform, grinning down at them. “I’ve got to go—I promised Francis I’d translate a recipe for his gran. See you on the train.”

  Morrigan was still struggling to contain her giggles after they’d waved Mahir off, and Hawthorne finally gave in and laughed too, shaking his head. “Shut up, milk-dribbler. Where have they stationed you tonight?”

  “Tenterfield,” she said. “Outside the Wunderground station. It’s a gray zone. You?”

  “Solsbury station. What’s a gray zone?”

  “The safest and most boring place to be, apparently.” Morrigan sighed, rolling her eyes. “Far away from all the Scaly Sewer Beast breeding hot spots,
but nowhere near the Golders Night action either. I’m supposed to stop people entering the train station and direct them to the green zones. You know—the imaginary people who definitely won’t be there, because they’ll already be in the green zones.”

  “You’re in for a fun night, then,” he said, smirking.

  “Hate to tell you this, meat-grinder, but Solsbury’s a gray zone too.”

  “Oh, what?” Hawthorne slumped back in his seat, stretching his legs out in front of him. “Why have they split us up, anyway? Shouldn’t we be with our own unit?”

  Morrigan finished the last bite of her sandwich before responding. “Miss Cheery said they’re partnering each of us with someone more experienced, since it’s our first Distraction.”

  “How much experience do you need to stand outside an empty train station for three hours?” Hawthorne slid down even farther until he was practically horizontal and let out a long, low sigh like a deflating tire. “I should have volunteered for the sewer mission with Thaddea. At least that won’t be boring.”

  “Well, cheer up,” said Morrigan, scrunching up the paper bag their lunch came in as she got to her feet. “If you really want to wade through waist-deep sewage, there’s always next year.”

  Morrigan would have chosen waist-deep sewage over being stuck with her designated “more experienced partner” for three hours. Five minutes in, she was wishing she’d volunteered with Thaddea too.

  “Just hurry up and do it.”

  She scowled. “Do what, Heloise?”

  “You know what… Wundersmith.”

  “Shush.” Morrigan whipped around, making sure nobody had overheard. “Are you insane? We’re in public! Nobody outside the Society is supposed to know. Do you realize how much trouble you could—”

  “Oh, please.” Heloise rolled her eyes back in her head. She held one of her throwing stars in one hand while using it to clean the nails on her other. They were painted a vibrant, venomous green to match her badly colored hair. “There’s nobody here. Everyone’s off hunting for treasure.”