The Rithmatist Page 15

  “It won’t be cold in the parlor,” she said. “Or … well, maybe it will. But everyone knows that ice cream is worth the trouble of being cold. Like all things virtuous, you have to suffer to gain the reward.”

  “Ice cream as a metaphor for religious virtue?” Joel said. “Nice.”

  She grinned as they strolled along the brick-cobbled sidewalk. Light from whirring lanterns played off her deep red hair and dimpled cheeks.

  Yeah, Joel thought, when she’s not acting crazy—or yelling at me—she really is quite pretty.

  “There!” Melody said, pointing to a shop. She dashed across the street; Joel followed more carefully, staying out of the way of vehicles. The parlor was, apparently, a popular one. He’d never been here before—he didn’t go to the commercial district much. What would he buy? The academy provided for his family.

  Joel recognized some of the students inside from Armedius. Richardson Matthews was outside, and gave Joel a little wave—the tall student was a year ahead of Joel, and had always been nice to him. He eyed Melody, then winked at Joel.

  Well, Joel thought. If there weren’t rumors about Melody and me before, there will be now. He wasn’t certain what he thought of that.

  He walked toward Richardson, intending to chat with him. Melody went to read the ice cream flavors.

  Then Joel saw the prices hanging beside the list of flavors. That stopped him flat.

  He cursed himself for a fool. He should have realized, should have stopped to think. He rarely left campus, and he almost never spent money on anything.

  “Melody,” he said, grabbing her arm before she could enter. “I … can’t afford this.”

  “What?” she asked.

  Joel pointed at the prices hanging on the window outside. “Nine cents for a scoop? That’s ridiculous!”

  “Well, it is June,” she said. “Still, it’s not that bad. I doubt you’ll be able to find a scoop for less than seven cents anywhere on the island, and five is the cheapest I’ve seen in winter.”

  Joel blinked. Were things really that expensive?

  “How much do you have?” she asked.

  Joel reached in his pocket and pulled out a single silver penny. It was as wide as his thumb, and thin, stamped with the seal of New Britannia. His mother made him carry it with him, should he need to pay cab fare or buy a ticket on the springrail.

  “One penny,” Melody said flatly.

  Joel nodded.

  “That’s all the allowance you get a week?”

  “A week?” he asked. “Melody, my mother gave me this for my birthday last year.”

  She stared at it for a moment. “Oh, wow. You really are poor.”

  He flushed, stuffing the penny in his pocket. “You just get what you want. I’ll wait out—”

  “Oh, don’t be silly,” she said, grabbing his arm and pulling him into the warm parlor room. She stepped into line behind Richardson and a long-lashed girl that Joel didn’t know. “I’ll pay for both of us.”

  “I can’t let a girl pay for me!”

  “Vain masculine pride,” she said, reaching into her pocketbook. She pulled out a shiny gold half-dollar. “Here,” she said, handing it to him. “Now you can pay for us.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” he protested.

  “You’d better order, because it’s our turn.”

  Joel hesitated, glancing at the soda jerker behind the counter. The man raised an eyebrow at him.

  “Uh…” Joel said. “Hi.”

  “Oh, you’re hopeless,” Melody said, elbowing Joel aside. “I’ll take a triple-scoop chocolate sundae with fudge sauce and chocolate sprinkles.” She eyed Joel. “He’ll have vanilla. Two scoops. Cherries. And a cherry soda for each of us. Got that?”

  The soda jerker nodded.

  “He’ll pay,” Melody said, gesturing to Joel.

  Joel handed over the half-dollar. He got a couple of pennies in change.

  Melody gestured to a table, and Joel followed her. They sat down, and he tried to hand her the change.

  Melody waved indifferently. “Keep it. I absolutely hate carrying small coins. They rattle about.”

  “How much money do you have?” Joel asked, looking down at the coins.

  “I get a dollar a week from my family,” Melody said, pulling out a full golden dollar, about two inches in diameter.

  Joel gaped. He’d never held a full dollar before. It was complete with a glass face on either side to show the gears inside, marking its authenticity.

  Melody turned it over in her fingers, then took out a small key and wound the tiny gears. They began to click softly, spinning around and around inside the glass face.

  A dollar a week, Joel thought with amazement.

  “Here,” she said, rolling it across the table to him. “It’s yours.”

  “I can’t take this!” he protested, stopping the dollar before it rolled off the table.

  “Why not?”

  “It wouldn’t be right. I…” He’d never held so much money before. He tried to give it back, but Melody snapped her pocketbook closed.

  “Nope,” she said. “I’ve got like fifty of those back in my rooms. I never can figure out what to do with it all.”

  “That’s … that’s amazing!”

  She snorted. “Compared to most of the students at this school, that’s nothing. There’s a kid in one of my classes who gets ten dollars a week from his family.”

  “Dusts!” Joel said. “I really am poor.” He hesitated. “I still can’t take this, Melody. I don’t want handouts.”

  “It’s not a handout,” she said. “I’m just tired of carrying it. Why don’t you use it to buy your mother something nice?”

  That made him pause. Reluctantly, he put it in his pocket.

  “Your mother looks like she could use a break,” Melody said. “She works a lot, doesn’t she?”

  Joel nodded. “A lot.”

  “So where does her money go? To pay for your education?”

  Joel shook his head. “The principal gave me free tuition when my father died.”

  “Your mother has to get more compensation than just room and board,” Melody said, nodding to the server as he brought their order. Joel felt daunted by the mound of frozen cream topped with sliced cherries and whipped cream. And his was only two-thirds the size of Melody’s chocolate behemoth.

  She dug right in. “So, where does your mom’s money go?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I never thought about it before, I guess.” He fingered the dollar coin in his pocket again. So much. Did Rithmatists really get that much money from their stipend?

  They had to fight for a decade at Nebrask. They could stay longer if they wanted, but so long as they put in their ten years, they could retire from the battlefront, only to be called up if needed. That happened rarely—only once in the last thirty years, when a large breach in the circle had occurred.

  For those ten years of service, they were given a stipend for the rest of their lives. Joel didn’t know the exact numbers, but if Rithmatists needed more money, they could work for the springrail companies. Those had contracts from the government allowing them to use chalklings—drawn with the Glyph of Rending to let them affect the world, and not just chalk—to wind the enormous springs that powered the rail line.

  Joel knew very little of this—it was one of those things Rithmatists didn’t discuss with others. He wasn’t even certain how chalklings could push. They did, though, and the work paid Rithmatists very, very well.

  “The money seems like a pretty good reason to be a Rithmatist,” he said. “Easy income.”

  “Yeah,” Melody said softly. “Easy.”

  Joel finally took a bite of his ice cream. It was way better than the stuff the cooks at Armedius served. He found it difficult to enjoy, noting how Melody had begun stirring hers about disconsolately, eyes downcast.

  What did I say? he thought. Had their discussion reminded her of her lack of skill? “Melody,” he said, “you r
eally are good at Rithmatics. You’re a genius with chalklings.”

  “Thanks,” she said, but didn’t perk up immediately. That didn’t seem to be what was bothering her.

  Still, she soon began digging into her sundae again. “Chocolate,” she said, “is the greatest invention of all time.”

  “What about springworks?” Joel said.

  She waved indifferently. “Da Vinci was a total hack. Everyone knows that. Completely overrated.”

  Joel smiled, enjoying his sundae. “How did you know what flavor to get for me?”

  “Just felt right,” she said, taking another bite. “Joel … did you mean what you said about chalklings a bit ago? About my skill?”

  “Of course,” Joel said, and took a sip of his soda. “I’ve snuck into a lot of lectures, and I’ve never seen a professor on campus create chalklings anywhere near as detailed as yours.”

  “Then why can’t I get the other lines right?”

  “So you do care?”

  “Of course I do. It wouldn’t be nearly as much of a tragedy if I didn’t.”

  “Maybe you just need more practice.”

  “I’ve practiced a ton.”

  “I don’t know, then. How did you keep your chalklings back behind your defenses? It didn’t seem tough to you at all, but it’s supposed to be very difficult.”

  “Supposed to be?”

  “I don’t know for certain,” Joel said, shoveling a bite into his mouth. He savored the sweet, creamy flavor, and then licked the spoon. “I haven’t studied much about chalkling theory. There isn’t a lot of material about them in the ordinary stacks, and Professor Fitch doesn’t teach chalkling classes—he’s the only one who would let me sneak in and listen on a regular basis.”

  “That’s a shame. What do you want to know about them?”

  “You’ll tell me?” Joel asked with surprise.

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “Because you flipped out when you realized that I was learning about inception ceremonies.”

  “That’s way different,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Are you going to ask or not?”

  “Well,” Joel said, “I know that sometimes, chalklings respond better to instructions than other times. Why?”

  “I don’t know if anyone knows that. They usually do what I want them to, though others have more trouble.”

  “So, you know the instruction glyphs better than others?”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Melody said. “Chalklings … they’re not quite like the other lines, Joel. A Line of Forbiddance only does one thing. You draw it, and it sits there. Chalklings, though … they’re versatile. They have a life of their own. If you don’t build them correctly, they won’t be able to do what they’re supposed to.”

  Joel frowned. “But, what does ‘building them correctly’ even mean? I keep looking through the books, and what I can find says that detail will make a chalkling stronger. But … well, it’s just chalk. How can the chalkling tell if you drew it with a lot of detail or not?”

  “Because it can,” Melody said. “A chalkling knows when it’s a good picture.”

  “Is it the amount of chalk that’s important? A lot of chalk makes a ‘detailed’ drawing instead of a nondetailed one?”

  Melody shook her head. “Some students my first year tried to simply draw circles and color them in as their chalklings. Those ones always died quickly—some just rolled away, not going where they were supposed to.”

  Joel frowned. He’d always seen Rithmatics as … well, something scientific and measurable. A Line of Warding’s strength was proportionate to the degree of its curve. The height of a Line of Forbiddance’s blocking power was proportional to its width. The lines all made direct, measurable sense.

  “There’s got to be some number involved,” he said.

  “I told you,” Melody said. “It has to do with how well they are drawn. If you draw a unicorn that looks like a unicorn, it will last longer than one with bad proportions, or one that has one leg too short, or one that can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a unicorn or a lion.”

  “But how does it know? What determines a ‘good’ drawing or a ‘bad’ drawing? Is it related to what the Rithmatist sees in their head? The better a Rithmatist can draw what he or she envisions, the stronger the chalkling becomes?”

  “Maybe,” she said, shrugging.

  “But,” Joel said, wagging his spoon, “if that were the case, then the best chalkling artists would be the ones with poor imaginations. I’ve seen your chalklings work, and they’re strong—they’re also very detailed. I doubt that the system rewards people who can’t imagine complicated images.”

  “Wow. You really get into this, don’t you?”

  “Lines of Making are the only ones that don’t seem to make sense.”

  “They make perfect sense to me,” she said. “The prettier the drawing is, the stronger it is and the better it’s able to do what you tell it to. What’s confusing about that?”

  “It’s confusing because it’s vague,” Joel said. “I can’t understand something until I know why it happens the way it does. There has to be an objective point of reference that determines what makes a good drawing and what doesn’t—even if that objective point of reference is the subjective opinion of the Rithmatist doing the drawing.”

  She blinked at him, then took another bite of ice cream. “You, Joel, should have been a Rithmatist.”

  “So I’ve been told,” he said with a sigh.

  “I mean seriously,” Melody said, “who talks like that?”

  Joel turned back to his own ice cream. After how much it had cost, he didn’t want it to melt and get wasted. To him, that was secondary to the flavor, good though it was. “Aren’t those members of your cohort?” he asked, pointing at a group of Rithmatic students at a table in the corner.

  Melody glanced over. “Yeah.”

  “What are they doing?” Joel asked.

  “Looking at a newspaper?” Melody said, squinting. “Hey, is that a sketch of Professor Fitch on the front?”

  Joel groaned. Well, that reporter certainly does work quickly.

  “Come on,” he said, downing his soda and shoving the last spoonful of ice cream in his mouth, then standing. “We need to find a copy of that paper.”

  CHAPTER

  “‘Professor Fitch,’” Melody read from the paper, “‘is a little squirrel of a man, huddled before his books like they were the winter’s nuts, piled and packed carelessly in his den. He’s deceptively important, for he is at the center of the search to find the Armedius Killer.’”

  “Killer?” Joel asked.

  Melody held up a finger, still reading.

  Or, at least, that’s what one source speculates. “Yes, we fear for the lives of the kidnapped students,” the unnamed source said. “Every officer knows that if someone goes missing this conspicuously, chances are good that they’ll never be found. At least not alive.”

  Professor Fitch is more optimistic. He not only thinks that the children are still alive, but that they can be recovered—and the secret to their whereabouts might have to do with the discovery of some strange Rithmatic lines at the crime scenes.

  “We don’t know what they are or what they do,” Professor Fitch explained, “but those lines are definitely involved.” He declined to show me these drawings, but he did indicate that they weren’t composed of any of the basic four lines.

  Fitch is a humble man. He speaks with a quiet, unassuming voice. Few would realize that upon him, our hopes must rest. For if there really is a Rithmatist madman on the loose in New Britannia, then it will undoubtedly take a Rithmatist to defeat him.

  She looked up from the paper, their empty ice cream dishes and soda glasses sitting dirty on the table. The parlor was growing less busy as many of the students left for Armedius to make curfew.

  “Well, I guess now you know the whole of it,” Joel said.

  “That’s it?” she said. “That’s all you were talking a
bout with the inspector?”

  “That’s pretty much it.” The article contained some frightening details—such as the exact nature of Lilly’s and Herman’s disappearances, including the fact that blood was found at each scene. “This is bad, Melody. I can’t believe that got printed.”

  “Why?”

  “Up until now, the police and Principal York were still implying that Herman and Lilly might have just run away. Parents of Rithmatists at the academy guessed otherwise, but the people of the city didn’t know.”

  “Well, it’s best for them to know the truth, then,” Melody proclaimed.

  “Even if it causes panic? Even if ordinary people hide in their homes because they’re afraid of a killer who may not exist, and who undoubtedly isn’t going to hurt them?”

  Melody bit her lip.

  Joel sighed, standing. “Let’s get back,” he said, folding up the newspaper. “We have to make curfew, and I want to get this to Inspector Harding, just in case he hasn’t seen it yet.”

  She nodded, joining Joel as he walked out onto the street. It felt darker now, and Joel again wondered at the wisdom of going out when there could be a killer about. Melody seemed to be in a similar mood, and she walked closer to him than she had before. Their steps were quick, their conversation nonexistent, until they finally arrived back at the gates to Armedius.

  The same two officers stood at the entryway. As Joel entered, the campus clock beat fifteen minutes to the hour. “Where is Inspector Harding?” Joel asked.

  “Out, I’m afraid,” one of the men said. “Is there something we can help you with?”

  “Give him this when he gets back in,” Joel said, handing one of them the paper. The officer scanned it, his face growing troubled.

  “Come on,” Joel said to Melody, “I’ll walk you back to your dorm.”

  “Well,” she said, “aren’t you chivalrous all of a sudden?”

  They strolled down the path, Joel lost in thought. At least the article hadn’t been belittling of Fitch. Perhaps the reporter had felt guilty for lying to him.

  They reached the dormitory. “Thank you for the ice cream,” Joel said.

  “No, thank you.”