A man stood with his back to us, bent over one of the tables as he examined papers spread before him. He was dressed in a magnificently starched, polished, and embroidered green boubou, the voluminous sleeves and folds of the robe marking the old-fashioned style. But if his muscular shoulders; vital posture; short, almost shaved, black hair; and restless hands were any indicator, he was young, not old.
Behind us, the headmaster’s office door snicked open.
We skated over the polished floor and slipped behind the nearest draperies just as the headmaster’s dog trotted back into the chamber. The visitor had not even turned; he was impatiently tapping a hand on the table, the driven pattern of the beat familiar to my ears, because it was one of the drum dances popular on festival days. Bee stood crushed behind me. I tweaked back an edge of the drape.
The assistant hurried to the table, set down a long tube, and uncapped it. He unrolled a schematic busy with lines and curves, then secured the corners and the sides with iron paperweights molded in the shapes of Kemet’s gods and goddesses.
As this precise ritual unfolded, my gaze wandered across the chamber.
On a side table by one of the couches, Bee’s sketchbook lay beneath a slender leather-bound book set thoughtlessly atop it. I could retrieve it as long as neither of the men turned.
Everyone says that the West African Mande lineages and European Celtic tribes were together able to establish the mage Houses, because they possess more conduits to the spirit world than any other peoples known to the natural philosophers, but that does not mean other peoples do not have a few tricks up their sleeves.
We who call ourselves Kena’ani made our fortunes and solidified our sea-trading networks because there were a few things we did particularly well with the aid of the gods—back when our people believed in gods—and with the connivance of the natural world, which must be understood and manipulated so as to harness its power. Some say the Kena’ani are a godless, spiritless, magicless people who will sell our swords and souls for money and will trade anything, even our honor, as long as we make a profit by doing so. They can say what they want. We know how to keep our secrets. We know what information we are willing to share, what we’re willing to sell, and what we will never reveal.
Bee and I learned that lesson young: It’s easier to get away with things you’re not supposed to be doing if no one suspects you can even attempt them. Tell no one. Not ever.
Bee twisted her silver bracelet as she took in a deep breath to fill a false voice she could cast elsewhere as a distraction: an ancient woman’s craft she’d learned from her mother’s mother that I’d never gotten the knack of. As for me, I bent my gaze not inward and not outward but between in and out, into the space where things exist but are not noticed by those who walk past them without seeing that which is not important to them. I drew a veil out of the frail threads of magic inhabiting this space and wrapped myself in it.
A strong word, or a knock—hard to say which—resounded at the far double doors. As both men looked that way, I stepped out from behind the drape and skimmed smoothly across the shining floor toward the table where the books rested. I did not look directly at the two men—the gaze of one person on another can be as hot as fire—but I kept track of their movements in my peripheral vision. The headmaster’s assistant hastened over to the door and opened it while the visitor bent back to his perusal of the papers spread before him on the table. My knee bumped the low side table just as the assistant muttered, “I’ll be burned,” and he turned.
I froze, as still as the table, as silent as the couches, as unexceptional as the floor he stood on and never noticed because it never need be noticed. His gaze flowed right over me without a flicker. He shrugged, closed the door, and returned to the table, again turning his back as he settled in beside the visitor.
“I haven’t much time. I’m late already,” said the visitor in the impatient tones of a man of high status who expects deference. “You said you possess a recently published volume on the subject of aerostatics.”
I dared not risk shifting the top book to get the one beneath. Instead, I swiped up both books and skated straight for the open library door, my back to the men, my skin tingling as with the arrows of discovery pinioning my body. But neither called out. Neither looked. Neither noticed me, someone who was no more important than the other furniture in the room.
At the door, I slipped into the dim alleys of shelving. Bee glided in after me. We skittered to the back aisle and froze there as the headmaster’s dog walked straight down the central aisle and into the headmaster’s office. We saw his figure flash by, but he never looked down the side alleys to see our shapes huddling in the shadows. Bee touched my wrist to claim her sketchbook. I handed it to her. As for the other book, the one I’d been forced to pick up, I felt all I could do was place it on a shelf and hope the headmaster and his dog and servant would think it had been misfiled.