Excerpt from AN INSTRUCTION IN SHADOW by Benedict Jacka
I shut my front door behind me and walked out into the London evening. Hobbes bounded away across the street, disappearing behind the cars of Foxden Road.
Hunting for Wells is both simple and difficult. Simple, because all you have to do is wander around until you find somewhere with a lot of essentia; difficult, because to detect a Well’s essentia, you have to get close. The finder’s stones that most locators use have to get within twenty feet or so to reliably pick up a Well (more than that for the really powerful ones, but find a really powerful one in London, it’s probably taken already). Which means quartering the city in painstaking detail.
It’s a pretty crude method when you think about it—you’d have thought that with all the centuries drucrafters have had to work on the problem, they’d have come up with a better way. Colin had asked me if there was some way to sense Wells at longer ranges, something like radar or sonar, but I hadn’t been able to think of one. Radar and sonar work by sending out waves that hit something and bounce back, but light and sound pass right through essentia, just like everything else. As far as I know, the only things that can pick up essentia are living creatures. Which means that if you want to find Wells, you have to send out guys to tromp up and down the streets.
Then again, maybe there are sophisticated ways to find Wells, but the corporations don’t use them because hiring guys for subminimum wage is cheaper.
Anyway, I’ve got some things going for me that make sensing a better prospect than usual. For one thing, I can sense, and a drucrafter with good sensing skills can pick up a Well from further away than any finder’s stone. For another, I’ve got my essentia sight. It doesn’t boost my range, but it helps a lot for interpreting. Put those things together, and I can sweep an area ten times as fast as a normal locator.
Of course, sweeping an area doesn’t mean you’ll find anything. Most concentrations of essentia turn out to be just random currents; and even when you do find a Well, it’s often too weak to be useful. On other occasions you’ll find a strong Well, only to discover that someone else has found it first. Finding a Well that’s both full and unclaimed is rare, not to mention really unpredictable. I’ve had days where I’ve worked morning till night with nothing to show for it but aching feet, and then I’ve had the same thing happen the day after that, and then again the day after that. And sometimes it goes on to the point where I start to wonder if my sensing’s stopped working, or if every Well in the city’s dried up. And then all of a sudden I’ll find three Wells in a row. I never know whether another hour spent searching will be wasted, or the most rewarding one of the whole month.
It’s frustrating, but it can get kind of addictive too. I’ve had days when I’ve hated my job, and yet I’ve kept going anyway, trying and trying in the hope of hitting that jackpot, like a gambler feeding money into a fruit machine, or tapping away at a gacha game. The unpredictability keeps you coming back.
Today I was heading up to Forest Gate, an area north of my home surrounded by parks and split by the big Crossrail line running east-west through its centre. I’d combed it pretty thoroughly back in the spring, but it had been long enough since then that I figured there was a decent chance something new might have sprung up. I skirted West Ham Park, then took a small, hard-to notice path heading north.
The sounds of traffic faded away as I left the main road behind. The lane I was on was so tiny it didn’t even have a name, just a little winding passage squeezed in between buildings and yards filled with broken-down vans and rusting machinery. A big rubbish bin was stuffed to overflowing, black bags and decaying cardboard boxes piled around it; apparently even the bin men didn’t come here. A sign loomed up to my left, white on red in the darkness: “CLAPTON FOOTBALL CLUB.”
I walked north along the path, my footsteps echoing in the quiet. The sky above was clear on one side and clouded on the other, the ragged dividing line passing right over my head from horizon to horizon, like a vast grey blanket that had been torn in half. At one point a sound from behind made me stop and turn, wondering if it was Hobbes. He likes going with me on these Well hunts, so long as I don’t go too far, and we were still close enough to his home territory that he might be following. But the passageway behind me was silent and still, and after a moment I went on.
As the passage up ahead opened up into a dead-end road, I saw what I’d been hoping for: trails of pale essentia in the air. To the left was a battered wooden fence with a football ground behind it, and the essentia trails were stronger in that direction. The football ground was fenced in, but the fences had been damaged and only half-heartedly fixed, and I found a gap big enough to squeeze through.
The football ground was dark and quiet. It was surrounded on three sides by houses and back gardens, muffling any sound from the streets nearby. Bedroom and bathroom windows were glowing yellow squares set into the houses around, but the ground itself was close to pitch black. The grass muffled my footsteps as I traced the glowing strands of essentia to the southwest corner, where they met to form a shining beacon of green. A Life Well.
As a usable Well, I decided, it wasn’t going to work. Its strength was a tiny bit too low, just under the cutoff to make a viable sigl. But although it was only a temporary one, it did feel as though it had room to grow. If I came back in a week or a month, there was a good chance that this might turn into a D-class or a D+. Maybe even a C if I was really lucky.
Of course, as of right now, there wasn’t actually anything I could do with a Life Well. With my Linford’s account suspended, I had no way to sell the thing; I couldn’t even check the Registry to see if it was claimed. But just because I couldn’t sell a Well didn’t mean that it was useless. I could make a sigl, or just sit on it in the hope of selling it once this whole thing with Linford’s had blown over. True, I didn’t have any Life sigl designs that I was working on just now, but maybe I could take look at the catalogue with Colin and come up with—
A chill wind swept across the football ground. Behind me, a bird cawed, then fell silent.
I snapped my head around, scanning the grounds. At either end of the football pitch, the goals were white outlines in the gloom. The eastern side, where I’d entered, was dark; there was
no trace of movement.
But now that I stopped to listen, the grounds had gone very quiet. Hadn’t there been more noise before?
Cautiously, I began to retrace my steps back across the grass. I didn’t know what it had been, but my instincts were sounding a warning. As I approached the far side, I slowed, scanning the fence. I couldn’t see anything in the shadows.
I stopped and focused on my essentia sight. Green wisps trailed past me to left and right, drifting lazily on invisible currents. Behind was the green fire of the Well. And up ahead . . .
. . . was something else. Grey-white essentia from the surrounding air was being pulled into a small vortex of green light, clearer and more sharply defined than the trails around me, forming the vague shape of a human body. There was someone there in the shadows, using an enhancement sigl.
I stood quite still.
Excerpted from An Instruction in Shadow by Benedict Jacka Copyright © 2024 by Benedict Jacka. Excerpted by permission of Ace.
Inheritance of Magic #2
The ultra-rich control magic—the same way they control everything else—but Stephen Oakwood may just beat them at their own game in this exhilarating contemporary fantasy from the author of the Alex Verus novels.
Stephen Oakwood has emerged victorious against the schemes of his aristocratic family. Now he finally has the opportunity to do what he’s been wanting to do for a long time: track down his father.
But doing so won’t be easy. Stephen’s not so isolated any more, but the contacts he’s making in the magical world—everyone from the corporation he works for to the mother he’s just beginning to reconnect with—all have agendas of their own. And now a new group is emerging from the shadows, calling themselves the Winged. Their leader, the mysterious Byron, promises that he can show Stephen how to find his father...but he wants something in return.
Following that trail will throw Stephen into greater danger than he’s ever faced before. To survive, he’ll need to use all of his tricks and sigls, and pick up some new ones. Only then will he be able to prevail against his enemies...and find out who’s really pulling the strings.
Fantasy Dark | Horror | Fantasy Urban [Ace, On Sale: October 15, 2024, Trade Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9780593549865 / eISBN: 9780593549872]
Benedict Jacka became a writer almost by accident, when at nineteen he sat in his school library and started a story in the back of an exercise book. Since then he's studied philosophy at Cambridge, lived in China, and worked as everything from civil servant to bouncer to teacher before returning to London to take up law.
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