Notorious Sorcerer

Book 1: The Burnished City

by Davinia Evans

Genres: Fantasy action & adventure; Dragons & Mythical Creatures; Urban Fantasy

Synopsis

'Notorious Sorcerer is a firework of a fantasy novel: vibrant, explosive, deliciously dangerous and impossibly fun. A must-read debut' Tasha Suri, author of The Jasmine Throne

Welcome to Bezim, where tribes of sword-slinging bravi race through the night, and where rich and idle alchemists make magic out of mixing the four planes of reality.

Siyon Velo, Dockside brat turned petty alchemist, scrapes a living hopping between the planes to harvest ingredients for the city's alchemists. But when Siyon accidentally commits and act of impossible magic, he's catapulted into the limelight - which is a bad place to be when the planes start lurching out of alignment, threatening to send the city into the sea.

It will take a miracle to save Bezim. Good thing Siyon has pulled off the impossible before. Now he has to master it.

A dazzling fantasy debut bursting with wild magic, chaotic sword-fighting street gangs, brazen flirting, malevolent harpies and one defiant alchemist.

Praise for Notorious Sorcerer:

'From the razor-sharp social climbing to the glimmering alchemist's library to the hidden realms beneath it all, I loved getting lost in this dazzling debut' S. A. Chakraborty, author of The City of Brass

'Notorious Sorcerer's unique magic system adds to this delightful fantasy setting, leaving readers eagerly anticipating the next book in the Burnished City series' Booklist

'Notorious Sorcerer feels like a dream you don't want to wake from. . . I devoured it and want more!' Melissa Caruso, author of The Obsidian Tower

'A delightful and fast-paced ride full of flashy swordplay, high society, and thrilling magic. . . Sheer, glorious fun!' Freya Marske, author of A Marvellous Light

'Notorious Sorcerer is a real delight, with compelling characters and wonderful worldbuilding that sucks the reader in and keeps them engaged from beginning to end' Mike Brooks, author of The Black Coast

'A brilliant alchemical recipe! Notorious Sorcerer is a delicious melange of my favourite things, remixing historical magic with class consciousness. I couldn't put it down' Olivia Atwater, author of Half a Soul

'If you like a healthy dollop of rollicking fun with your epic fantasy, this is the book for you' Megan Bannen, author of The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy

Release date: September 13, 2022

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 400

Sample

Siyon couldn’t get the damn square to line up, and the hangover definitely wasn’t helping.

He squinted at the ash lines on the floor. The tiles tessellated in a not-quite-repeating pattern of swirls and spirals that could probably cause headaches all by itself. It was left over from before this place was taken over as the Little Bracken bravi safe house, when it had been a… temple? Church? Whatever. They called it the Chapel now, so probably one of those. Siyon didn’t know much about all that religious stuff. He’d been born and bred here in Bezim, where they preferred the certainty of alchemy instead.

The building was nice; tidy brickwork, tall pitched roof, narrow windows of coloured glass. From the pale hair and impressive beards on the figures, Siyon thought the stories probably drew from the cults and myths of the North, not the remnants of the Lyraec Empire he was more familiar with.

The Chapel was quiet right now, with the morning sun cutting through the dust motes dancing around the lofty beams. The bravi were denizens of the night—the feet that rattled fleet as a passing rain shower over your roof tiles, the midnight laughter that promised mayhem and crossed blades and adventure. Last night they’d been all of that, the stuff of the dreams of children and poets, and now they were sleeping it off. So the tall, vaulted space—which might otherwise be cluttered with the scrape of a sharpening sabre, the clatter and call of training duels, the bicker and bellow of arguments over style—was all at Siyon’s disposal.

He still couldn’t get his delving portal square.

Siyon’s tea had gone cold on a pushed-aside pew. He lifted the tin-banded glass, high and higher, until the light through the stained-glass windows both made him wince and turned the remaining liquid a fiery golden orange. A colour burning with righteousness. An Empyreal sort of colour.

Siyon reached through that connection and snapped his fingers.

And then nearly dropped the suddenly scalding glass.

Allegedly Kolah Negedi—the long-dead father of alchemical practice—had strong views about casual use of the Art. Something about the essence of another plane not being a dog to fetch your slippers. Poetic, but frankly, the great Kolah Negedi didn’t seem all that applicable to the life of Siyon Velo. Let the fancy azatani alchemists, with their mahogany workbenches and expensive bespoke glass beakers, debate his wisdom. All Siyon did was fetch and carry for them. And that’s all he’d ever do, unless he could scrape together enough hard cash to pay for lessons. Today’s work would barely add to his stash, but one day, maybe…

In the meantime, at least he could have hot tea.

Siyon blew gently across the surface of the liquid, took a careful sip, and sighed as the blissful heat smoothed out the jagged edges of his hangover.

“Sorry,” someone said. “I can come back later if you’re enjoying your alone time.”

Not just any someone; that was the tight, pointed accent that went with leafy avenues and elegant townhouses and lace gloves. That was an azatani voice. Siyon cracked one eye open, and looked sidelong toward the doorway.

The young woman wouldn’t have come up to his chin, but she stood straight and tall, barely a trace of a girl’s uncertainty in the way her weight shifted from one foot to the other. She was clad head to toe in bravi leathers—sturdy trousers, tight vest, bracers laced up to her elbows. They creaked with newness, and the sabre at her hip gleamed with oil and polish. The tricorn balanced atop her tied-back ebony curls had an orange cockade pinned on with a Little Bracken badge.

They’d probably run the tiles together, two fish in the great flickering school of the Little Bracken, but Siyon never paid too much attention to the azatani recruits. They joined, they had their youthful adventures, they left to take up their serious adult responsibilities. None of his business.

But here she was, getting in his business. “What are you doing here, za?” he demanded, though he had a bad feeling he knew the answer.

“I was sent by the Diviner Prince to…” Her words petered out, uncertainty conquering the assurance she was born into. “Er. Assist you? Hold something?”

Siyon snorted. “I need an anchor, not a little bird. Go back and tell Daruj—”

“No,” she interrupted, her chin coming up in a belligerent jut. “I can do it. I’m bravi. Same as you.”

Siyon sauntered out into the aisle, where she could in turn get a good look at him. At the fraying of his shirtsleeves and the scuffs on his boots, at the battered hilt of his own sabre, at the lean length of his limbs and the freckles and even the glint of red in his brown hair that said foreign blood. That confirmed he was a mongrel brat.

She could probably trace her family back a few hundred years to the end of the Lyraec Empire. They’d probably helped overthrow the Last Duke and claim the city for the people. People like them, anyway. They’d renamed the city Bezim—in Old Lyraec, that meant ours.

“Yeah,” he drawled, stretching the Dockside twang. “We’re peas in a fucking pod. How old are you, anyway?”

“How old are you?” she demanded right back. There was a flush of colour in her warm brown cheeks, but she wasn’t backing down. Was it even bravery when you hadn’t heard the word no more than a dozen times in your life?

“Twenty-three,” Siyon said. “Or near enough. And I’ve been on my own since I was fourteen, delving the planes since seventeen. That six years of crossing the divide between this plane and the others tells me I’m not trusting you”—he jabbed a finger at her, in her new leathers with her boots that probably got that shine from the hands of a servant—“to hold the only thing tying me back to the Mundane. No offense, princess.”

She hesitated in the doorway, but then her chin came up again. “Fuck you,” she stated primly. “I can do it. And I’m all you’ve got, anyway. Daruj went down to the square; Awl Quarter have called public challenge.” There was a twist to her mouth. It stung, to be sent to do this, rather than being included in the party to bare blades against another bravi tribe, even in a small morning skirmish.

Siyon knew what that felt like. He drained his tea and set the glass down on the pew next to him. “You’re well out of it. It’ll be dead boring. Lots of posturing, barely three blades getting to kiss daylight. No audience in the morning, see? So no pressing need to fight.”

She really did look like a doll playing dress-up, but she hadn’t fled. And if Daruj was off playing Diviner Prince (Siyon never found his friend’s bladename less ridiculous, whatever its proud history), then she probably was the best Siyon was likely to get until later this afternoon. Which would be cutting it fine to make his deliveries.

He sighed. “What’s your name again?”

She grinned, sudden and bright and blindingly pretty. She was going to carve her way through society when she set aside the blade to take up a ball gown. “Zagiri Savani. And I’m eighteen. If it matters.”

Siyon shrugged. “Not to me. Come on.”

His ash square still looked a little skewed at one corner, but he wasn’t redoing it again. “How much did Daruj tell you about what’s involved?”

Zagiri stayed well back from the lines of ash, so at least she was sensible. “You’re going to raid one of the other planes. For alchemical ingredients.”

Basically right, but she’d need more than basics. “I tear a hole between the planes,” Siyon elaborated. “Which is what the square is for. Keeps the breach contained. There’s no risk—not to you, not to the city.” The inquisitors might feel differently, but they weren’t here, and what did they know anyway? “That also cuts me off from the Mundane, so to get back, I need a tether.”

She nodded. “Which I hold.”

“Which you hold.” Siyon watched her for a moment. Clearly a little nervous, but she had a strong grip on herself. That irritating azatani arrogance might be good for something after all.

He unhooked his sabre from his belt and set it down on a pew, picked up a coil of rope instead. It was rough stuff, thick hemp and tarred ends, liberated from docks duty. As mundane—as Mundane—as rope could get, heavy with work and sweat and dirty, fishy business. “One end ties around me,” Siyon said, looping it around his waist, under his shirt and the weight of his cross-slung satchel. “And you hold the other. You hold it no matter what you see, or what you hear, or how much it jerks around. You hold on to this.”

She wrinkled her delicate little nose as she set a hand just above the thick knot tied in the end. She’d probably never put her pampered hands on anything this coarse in her life. “What happens if I don’t?” Not a challenge, more curiosity.

Siyon smiled, tight and brittle. “I get stuck in there. Since I’m delving Empyreal today, that means I’m trapped in unforgiving heat with the angels on my back until either I can find a way out or you”—he prodded at her shoulder—“scarper off and find someone to summon me back. I recommend Auntie Geryss, you can find her through the tea shop near the fountain in the fruit market. If, y’know, you fuck up completely.”

Zagiri swallowed hard, wrapped the rope around her fist, and braced her heels against the tiled floor. At least she was taking this seriously. “All right.”

“Don’t worry.” Siyon grinned, the thrill of what he was about to do starting to tug at him as surely as a tether. It never got old. “I’ll be right here. Well. Right here, and on the other side of reality at the same time.”

She didn’t look reassured.

Siyon stepped into the ashen square and vanished into heat haze.

Between the planes was the void, and the void was perfect; it flashed by in a fraction of a blink, and Siyon was through.

It was like stepping into an open oven, snatched up in the Empyreal plane’s hot, dry fist. Siyon staggered, dizzy and dazzled, as the universe tilted around him. It always took a moment to get his balance, like he’d jumped from a moving cart.

Doing this with a hangover had been an awful idea.

Sand skewed beneath his boots, and whipped up on a keening wind. Or at least, it looked and felt like sand, abrading his skin and gritty between his teeth. Not actually sand, not here. Tiny grains of duty, or conscience, or something equally uncomfortable and insistent. Stung like a bitch, making his eyes water, and Siyon pulled a thin scarf over his face. Easier to see through it than with his eyes scrunched closed against the blast.

Dunes undulated away in all directions, toward shimmering horizons. The not-sand was white—scalding white, pale as purity, clean as righteousness—and the sky was seething fire that sizzled in sheets of orange and yellow and incandescent blue. It was dangerously beautiful; easy to overlook the tiny black specks within the burning gyre.

First rule of delving: The longer you gawk, the less time you have to harvest. Get in, load up, get out.

Siyon lowered his head again, and concentrated on slithering down the side of the dune without falling. This not-sand was so fine, it ran like water. You could drown in it, if you didn’t look lively.

In the gully between dunes, there was a little shelter from the sandstorm. Siyon could crouch without fear of being buried, and shovel aside the fine, flyaway grains at the surface. Deeper down, the sand took on a molten glow, clinging to his fingers like an itch. Siyon scooped up a stinging handful, funnelling it hurriedly into a flask. He shook the excess off with a wince and wiped his hand against the rope around his waist; the roughness of the hemp was great for stripping away the last little bits, or maybe it was the sheer Mundanity that did the trick.

He got one more vial of firesand using the other hand, and tucked them both away safely inside his satchel. Trying to get any more would be asking for burns or—worse—recurring attacks of guilt back in the Mundane.

Standing, he laid a hand on the rope around his waist again. The tether leading back to the Mundane wasn’t visible, but Siyon could feel it, tugging at him when he moved. The pull wasn’t too much right now, so Zagiri didn’t seem to be getting impatient. It was always difficult to tell how much time had passed while he was here. Tears were nudging at the corner of his vision, but Siyon could blink them away. The breath still came easily—though harsh and burning—to his lungs, and he wasn’t experiencing any strange urges toward crusades, justice, or self-improvement.

Perhaps he could try for a little more.

He shouldn’t. Get in, load up, get out, remember? The vials of firesand were what he’d been commissioned to deliver.

So if he could find something extra, it could be bonus cash. If he could find something good, he might be able to get his hands on a book—a real one, a proper alchemic tome. One that might teach him something. Make him more than just an interplanar errand boy.

Hey, a guy could dream.

Siyon flipped his satchel open again, running a finger blind along the dozens of little loops and pockets sewn into the lining. He needed to move fast; he needed something that might lead him to something powerful and lucrative.

Ah. Perfect.

He pulled out a feather—small, plain, grey, notched at one end. Just a pigeon feather. But like called to like, and in this place there were far more interesting—more powerful—things than pigeons on the wing.

Siyon lifted the feather and let the breeze pluck it out of his grip.

It zipped away, moving fast, and Siyon had to scramble after it. Up the dune and down, crosswise along the next, hauling himself up a rocky outcrop that surely hadn’t been here a moment ago. The pigeon feather danced up and over the lip, smudgy against the fire-bright sky, and Siyon dragged himself after it. The rocks scraped against his ribs like pious privation, but he pushed onward. If he lost the feather, it would all be a waste.

Just over the lip of rock, atop the outcrop, the feather snagged on the sharp black edge of a nest. Siyon could’ve whooped in victory, if he’d had the breath for it.

The nest wasn’t built of sticks, but of slabs and shards of obsidian, razor-keen and gleaming. It wasn’t big, barely wider than the length of Siyon’s arm, and there were only two eggs within, nestled among smouldering embers. When Siyon peeled back his scarf to peek over the edge of the nest, the heat nearly took his eyebrows off.

He didn’t want an egg, though. What the hell would he do with a phoenix chick? (Answer: Set fire to his bunk in the Chapel and be left in the ashes for the inqs to pick up at their leisure.) Instead, Siyon edged carefully around the nest, peering into the nooks and serrated crannies, until he spotted the butter-bright gleam of a trapped feather. Extracting it was like sticking his hand into a shark’s mouth, sliding careful fingers between knife-like obsidian and the roaring heat of the nest itself. The feather felt like a wisp of silk between his fingertips, hot as a Flower’s underthings and just as full of promise. Siyon teased it out, wrapping it in a length of actual silk before tucking it away in his satchel.

He was so focused on it that he barely heard the whistle from above. Not like a bravi signal, no human sound at all; more like the sigh of air ripped through a grate. The sound of an angel’s wings scything through excuses.

But he did hear it, and his body was already moving before his mind caught up, hurling him sideways a moment before the broadsword came slamming down right where he’d been crouching.

The force of it buried the edge in the rocks as though they were cheese. Flames licked blue-bright along the length of the blade. Light washed dazzling over Siyon—not from the sword, but the one who wielded it, looming above him resplendent in armour even whiter than the sand. The brutal white of perfect virtue, the unflinching white of implacable justice.

The shattering white of an angel.

Her face was a smudge in the searing light; Siyon just got an impression of a wild halo of fire around diamond eyes and hawk beak.

That beak opened and she screamed, like a raptor diving upon its prey.

“Zagiri!” Siyon shouted. “Pull m—”

The angel backhanded him, slamming the words from his mouth and the sense from his head. Air spun wild around him; he bounced against the rocky outcrop once, twice, before plummeting to the sand.

This wasn’t his physical body, Siyon reminded himself, trying to drag breath back into his lungs. Not real, not him.

Still hurt like a motherfucker.

Sand sucked at him as Siyon heaved up to hands and knees. His satchel pulled him off balance; at least he still had it. Tears crawled down his cheeks, actually cool against the heat around him.

“Pull me out,” he said, but the words were barely a scrape in his throat. No power to them at all.

The world shook as the angel landed in the sand next to Siyon. Her arm wrapped around him, binding as a solemn promise, and she hauled him effortlessly up. His legs dangled, ribs creaking beneath her grip. “Thief,” she snarled in his ear. It wasn’t speaking so much as a stone-chiseled statement of immutable fact. “You must earn what you would steal.”

Siyon had no idea what that meant. But her fingers—or talons, by the sharp sting of them—dug into him as she closed her fist around the rope at his waist. It grew warm against his skin, and something shimmered into being in front of him; a twist of connection, spiralling away into the air like a faint and billowing umbilical.

Siyon gaped. He’d never seen his tether in the planes before. It was sort of beautiful.

The angel lifted her sword.

Siyon thrashed against her grip, but she only clutched him tighter, and his ribs cracked and his lungs spasmed and no sound at all came from his throat.

The sword flashed in its descent, bright with blue-hot flames.

Her grip around him tightened, impossibly, and then yanked. No, wait, it was the rope itself, and Siyon popped fish-slippery from the angel’s hold, whipping into half a moment of dizzying blackness—

—and then there was stone under his feet, and his knees giving way as he crashed into another body and they both went down.

A whistle in Siyon’s ears—no, in reality. “Look out,” he gasped, and shoved hard as he rolled in the other direction.

Something slammed down where he had been with a screech of ironwork and a frustrated hiss, and then there was silence.

Siyon sat up too fast, and paused for the whirling sparks to dance away from his vision. Zagiri was backed against the end of the pew, knees drawn up to her chest and eyes wide. Between their bodies, the ash square was nothing but a smear across the floor.

Except the tilework—and the stones beneath—were sliced through in a deep gash the length of Siyon’s arm.

Zagiri’s dark eyes were wide. “It just—it was—”

“Angelic broadsword,” Siyon croaked. His throat still felt scorched. His cheeks were stiff with dried tears. He reached out to the wound in the floor, but stopped short; the heat was still rising from it, with a smell like midday-baked stone paving. “Thanks,” he said. “You did well.”

She made a noise somewhere between a squeak and a sigh, and lifted her fist. The rope was still wrapped around it, but there was barely an arm’s-length left before it ended, abrupt and fire-blackened.

The end was still smouldering.

Siyon scrambled over and pried it carefully from her trembling grip. He held it gently, moved it slowly, to avoid killing the flame or dislodging ash. There could be good use—good money—in angel ash. How much more in a still-burning fire?

Never mind the phoenix feather, what could this earn him? More books? Equipment? Lessons? Proper ones from a Summer Club alchemist, not just occasional tips from Auntie Geryss.

Zagiri wiped her hands on her trousers. Her fingers were still shaking, but only a little. More backbone to her than many Siyon had seen tangle with the fringes of alchemy. “We’re done now, right?” she asked, evenly enough.

“Change of plans,” Siyon said, eyes still on the smoking rope. “Delivery time. This is too important to wait.”

This was not how Zagiri Savani thought her day would go.

And that was before the flaming broadsword appeared from thin air and buried itself in the damn floor a bare handspan from her knee. She’d stared at the thickness of the blade and the intricate patterns etched in the steel that were somehow still visible through the blue-hot fire, and the only thing she could think was how long it must be, and could she even lift something like that?

“Zagiri,” Siyon said—from the sharpness, not for the first time. “Come on, let’s get going.”

Now he just wanted her to pick up the still-smouldering remainder and carry it around. In a fishbowl, of all things. Amazing, the random rubbish the bravi picked up on party raids.

“I just—” She hesitated. “Are you sure it’s safe?”

Stupid question, of course. He was holding it in his bare hands.

Then again, he was Siyon Velo. Bravi gossip had a lot to say about the petty alchemist of the Little Bracken. Zagiri should have known most of it would be tripe, given the number of wild tales she’d embroidered. But in her experience, alchemists were a bit more serious than an unshaven lout drawing with ash on the floor.

A bit less serious than a screaming angel blade, though.

Siyon gave her a flat look. “You carry a sabre and run around on rooftops, and you’re worried about safe?”

He was right. He was wrong. That was different.

Zagiri wrapped the burlap carefully around the damn fishbowl, keeping it between her skin and the glass. Not what she’d been expecting at all, when Daruj whistled her over. She could’ve been carrying a challenge, or even delivering a prize to his secret lady-love. (Everyone knew he must have one, an opera singer or an inappropriate azata or even the sister of a baron.)

Instead, Zagiri was playing delivery girl for a petty alchemist whose coat, when he shrugged it on, was wearing thin at the elbows.

“Look,” Siyon said, failing to tug his collar straight. “If you’re going to start screaming about angels or anything, do it now, and not when we’re out in public where any inq keen to poison sorcerers can hear you.”

“Piss off,” Zagiri stated, scorn rising quick. “Takes more than a close shave to rattle me.”

Though admittedly, every time her eyes fell on the gouge in the floor, a shudder went down her spine. It was the way it swept, sheer and deep, across two paving stones. It was the fact it was carved into stone, without any apparent effort beyond what Zagiri’s sister might use to apportion a pastry at afternoon tea.

Wanting to get well away from that didn’t mean she was rattled. It was just sensible.

“Are you sure it’s safe?” Siyon mimicked, in a voice far higher than hers.

“I’m just asking,” Zagiri retorted, “whether I’m going to cause another Sundering if I drop this.” Tipping half the city into the ocean again wasn’t the sort of fame Zagiri had in mind.

Siyon hauled the leather strap of his battered satchel over his shoulder and shrugged. “Probably not?” That blithely cheerful face was not made more reassuring by his bloodshot eyes or the ash dusting his reddish stubble. “Here’s an idea: Don’t drop it.”

“Great,” Zagiri muttered, and hugged the bowl tighter against her stomach.

They slipped out the side door, and Siyon checked the square before he beckoned her out of the alleyway. It was late morning and everything was quiet, everyone either sleeping off last night, or busy about today’s business. The sea breeze was just starting to pick up, and the whiff of solder and sawdust from the factories across the river chasm was welcome compared to the memory of stone dust sizzling in angelfire. From the square outside the Chapel, there was a lovely view out over the bay, ships bobbing at moorage, with the messy business of Dockside hidden away by the sharp slope down to the water.

Siyon turned his back on it and started uphill toward the university, leading a zigzag path through the tangle of little streets. Half of them turned into staircases where it got steep, but it was still easy going compared to running roof tiles, and the fishbowl wasn’t heavy, just bulky. What it was, though, was boring.

“Where are we even going?” Zagiri grumbled.

“To someone who’ll hopefully pay me extravagantly for what you’re carrying,” Siyon replied.

Zagiri glanced down at the burlap. “What’s extravagantly?”

Siyon considered that as they climbed another staircase. “Not sure, really. I’ve never struck something this big. Thirty rivna? Forty?”

About what they’d spend on Zagiri’s dress for her presentation, but she wasn’t going to say that. “You should’ve gotten the buyer to come to you. More than one. Had an auction.”

“Like I was a Flower?” Siyon laughed. “Yeah, because your lot would come at my beck and call. Then they’d have to risk lugging the thing across the city.”

Zagiri snorted. “Instead, I get to. Wait, risk? I thought you said this was safe.”

“I did not say that,” Siyon pointed out merrily, but after a glance at her, he sobered. “No, really, don’t lick it or anything. But otherwise, the prime danger is how it’d earn us a whirlwind visit to a horrified magistrate and a fatal cocktail of poison and sanctimonious moralising. Well, me at least.” He lifted an eyebrow at her. “No long-term trouble for the little azata led astray.”

“Get bent.” She spat the words. “I’ve done time in the cells.”

He snorted. “In the holding cells. For disturbing the peace. With half of the rest of the tribe, released by morning, no charges pressed.”

“And trespass.” Zagiri knew she sounded sulky, and couldn’t help it. It wasn’t that she was proud of having been swept up on an evening of bravi tribe business, but… well, everyone at the Palokani garden party had been very impressed.

Siyon was not impressed. Siyon was laughing openly. “Regular little crime baron, aren’t you?”

She might have punched him, if she hadn’t been holding angelfire.

He steered them under the moss-lined gate of the university grounds, winding upward through the tangle of residences. The commons beyond was, as always, littered with idle students, lying on their shed robes, studying, chatting, playing handball. Zagiri shrugged down beneath the wide brim of her plumed hat and hoped none of them knew her. This was hardly the glamour of the bravi life.

But Siyon looked around like a girl on her first visit to the dressmaker’s, if one who knew that her mother had a very tight budget. His gaze lingered on the bronze-domed bulk of the library, and if there was longing in his eyes, there was also a bitter twist to his mouth.

Thirty rivna was extravagant, he’d said. And Zagiri hadn’t paid any attention to university fees—had never seriously considered attending, not when she’d rather be on a rooftop than reading a book—but she was pretty sure thirty rivna might cover tuition for a season. Maybe.

Zagiri hurried after Siyon—and his stupidly long legs—through the law school cloister, down a winding stair that curved around a bastion. “Do they even teach alchemy here anymore?” She tried to make it casual; from the quick stab of Siyon’s attention, she hadn’t managed it. “I’m just saying, it’s kinda illegal.”

“Kinda.” Siyon snorted. “It’s entirely illegal, though the magistrates won’t prosecute if you aren’t a danger to Bezim. Which means you’re fine, as long as you’re respectable.” He sneered the word, cutting a glance at her again.

Yeah, Zagiri knew what that meant. Respectable like her.

“They do teach chemistry,” Siyon continued. “Basically the same, you just only use things from the Mundane plane. Which means no power. Because the material of other planes is alchemical power.” And as the stairs widened out, spilling down toward the Boulevard, he turned to point at the bundle in her arms.

Oh. Material of other planes. Zagiri thought again of the blinding flash of the sword—the scream of it—and swallowed hard. “I’m guessing this is a lot of power.”

“You’re holding part of an angel,” Siyon said, like that wasn’t a terrifying idea. “A higher-order sentient being. Still burning with the righteous fire of her wrath. That’s serious power.”

Zagiri frowned. “Are you sure we should be selling this to just anyone?”

“You sound like an inq.” Siyon smirked sidelong at her umbrage. “But Joddani’s hardly just anyone.”

Oh shit. “Nihath Joddani?” Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he had a cousin who dabbled as well, and she’d never heard of him because, well, Zagiri tried not to talk to him at all, honestly.

Siyon gave her a weird look, and Zagiri realised he might not actually be on a first-name basis with azatani clients who commissioned him like any other errand boy to fetch and carry. That’d be just like bloody Nihath.

Zagiri sighed. “We’re acquainted.” That was putting it mildly, but frankly all she wanted to admit to a fellow bravi. She nodded across the wide, paved expanse of the Boulevard, starting to grow thick with people, at the distant fuzz of green trees and close-ranked tile roofs. The Avenues, where the azatani lived, her among them. “He won’t be at home at this hour, you realise.”

“You know where