Eleven: The Old Wink & Blink

Every morning just before the first smoky dawn broke over Piketon, an army of ice merchants, ragpickers, milk men and tea-wallahs fanned out through the city's slums.

The little boy called Aramis was a light sleeper. From blocks away, he would hear the distant rattle of the peddler carts and the chipping rhythm of the ice man's pick.

He slept in a tiny hovel made of old bits of cast-off corrugated iron and canvas.

There were two cots made from gunnysacks and bundles of ticking nicked from the chair-maker's shop on Cabinetry Lane.

On the other bed lay his older brother Simon, who was ill. He had worked in one of the lark shows on the Bailey Mall as a peanut seller.

But a drunk had punched the boy in the gut and then kicked him when he fell on the hard floor.

After that, Simon's belly never worked right. He could only eat soft food and he forgot things.

When Aramis went out to do his magic show, he had to tie his brother to a post set in one corner of their flop.

Aramis was a conjuror. Their dad had been one, too, and he taught Aramis everything he knew about making nibs vanish or causing feathers to turn into wisps of smoke.

The family's best trick was a floppy hat that could produce a lit candle. It didn't always work right, but when it did the crowd always clapped and gave up a few bits of small-coin.

Their father had taken a bit of his own medicine and vanished two years before. Just -- poof, gone.

Simon said it was the way of a conjuror to take himself off without even a good-bye.

Simon wouldn't have anything to do with magic and anyway he was dead clumsy. Clumsy and strong, at least until he got hurt.

Now it was Aramis's job to keep them both fed and to pay the neighborhood racketman who controlled the tenements and to buy the bottles of Figgy's Nocturnal Solution that helped Simon endure the pain.

When he heard the morning traffic in the lane, Aramis rose in the dark and began to pack his kit. He often traveled for miles through Piketon before setting up his show.

It was better to vary the crowd and to make sure none of the blue-belly cops took his measure.

He carried all of his tricks and props in a black box rigged with a pair of leather straps for his shoulders.

Tucked inside was the motley robe and conical hat that marked him out -- along with the crescent-moon tattoos over his eyes -- as a blood member of the Societe de Legerdemain.

"Are you awake, Simon?" he said.

Simon gave a low moan, stirring in his bedclothes.

"I'm off then, Simon. I won't be back til tonight. I plan to go across to Foundry Gardens, if I can slip a trolley ride."

No response.

"You be good now, Simon. I'll bring you home a good pie and some beer."

Simon began to snore and Aramis crawled out of the hovel into the dim, weary light of a Piketon morning.

Though he had long and dextrous fingers, he wasn't a stoutly-built boy. It took him a moment of dancing to get the box hoisted on his back.

Then he set off through the fast-growing crowds toward the High Street where the trains rumbled along on their iron rails, throwing blue sparks into the sky.

As he walked, Aramis felt two peculiar sensations, neither of which he could explain.

The first was a hum of peculiar optimism and happiness. He felt a little guilty whenever he realized that he quite enjoyed his life.

What had happened to Simon was pretty nasty. And it was no happy thing that their dad had run off, or been way-laid.

But Aramis liked performing as a conjurer. He was good at it and he felt a tiny thrill every time his effects went off smoothly.

If the crowd made that queer noise that meant it was baffled and delighted at the same time, he didn't hardly care if they gave up any of their nibs.

The second sensation had only come to him in the last few days and it was a rather different sort of thing:

Aramis was convinced that someone was watching him; following him, even.

As he grabbed the bar of the streetcar and pulled himself up, he glanced back over the faces in the street.

He saw nothing out of the ordinary: tradesmen, women taking their mounds of dough to the corner bakers, Dula Priests shaking their fern fronds.

There was one face that seemed a bit familiar.

A boy. Maybe ten or eleven. He was leaning against a sign post eating a chicken leg with such a stupid expression on his face that Aramis laughed.

He himself was a clever boy. His father had always said so.

"Simon is strong as an ox, but you were born with the quick eye and the quick finger."

And he was born with something else, something his father called The Old Wink and Blink.

"You've a bit of the Real Stuff in you," he said. "The True Magic. When you were a baby, your eyes kept changing colors. I had it too when I was your age, though it slipped away somehow."

It wasn't much of a power, in fact. When he tried very hard, Aramis found that he could slide himself a bit from one place to another and also through time.

He never used the trick as part of his show -- he felt that it would be cheating and besides he liked to have his secret.

But a half-dozen times he had used the Old W & B to escape a cop or a gang of bullies or the racketman's thugs.

The streetcar took him in a round-about way through the gut of Piketon.

He had to clamber down a quarter mile or so from Foundry Park, when the ticket-taker began to shout at him, but Aramis didn't mind.

He trudged the rest of the way and set up his little table (he called it his "stage") under a shabby looking linden tree. Its leaves were coated with soot and it seemed to be surrounded by scrabbly dandelions.

"At least there's no rain today," said the balloon vendor, a thick-browed Maki-maki who was setting up shop across the garden path. "People don't want balloons in the rain, do they?"

Aramis opened his own kit and soon began to perform, working his little medley of tricks, calling out, "Sorcery and wonders and delights! Sorcery and wonders and delights!"

His small, high voice could be heard across the park, except when the big lorries were rumbling past.

Just after mid-day, when the day had mustered a kind of sullen warmth, he was working his shell-trick, hiding the pea from baffled shop-girls and nannies.

"It's not possible," insisted one girl. "I know the pebble was under that shell. I saw it with my own two eyes."

"Either your eyes are playing tricks," Aramis winked, "or I am."

That won him a laugh -- and a nib or two. He looked around with satisfaction, thinking it might be time to knock off and have his own lunch, when he saw the boy again.

It was the dull-faced kid from the morning, only now he was chewing on a slice of watermelon.

Aramis went about his business, pouring water from an empty glass and causing his own hair to stick straight up and making his tongue turn blue. This last stunt delighted a group of school children.

The entire time, he was watching the boy who was watching him. The kid was very good at his ruse. He seemed a perfect idler.

For a time, Aramis half-convinced himself that it was chance that they had turned up in the same neighborhoods twice in one day.

But then the boy's act slipped for a moment. One of the balloon-seller's balloons popped with a loud bang and the kid's face changed, growing hard and deliberate. His hand strayed toward the curved knife on his belt.

It was a sailor's knife, finely made. In a flash the kid's face resumedits former, cow-like expression.

Aramis felt his heart go knock. He knew that Piketon was a dangerous, ruthless town.

There were any number of reasons that people stalked children. The slave-trade was outlawed by the Admiralty, but no one did much about it. Ships were always looking for shroud-walkers.

When his dad disappeared, no one cared. Aramis might vanish just as quick.

There was a time when the Societe Legerdemain might have looked out for one such as him, but the order had fallen on hard times, at least on this world.

He began to pack his things, acting as natural as he could.

At the last moment, when surrounded by a crowd of Prilm traders carrying their ware-banners, he bolted, hustling through he Park's gates and dodging into the traffic of the road.

Glancing back, he saw that the boy was after him. His face had once again dropped its mask and had a look of irritation and dark resolve.

Aramis spied a streetcar and swung aboard. He thought that would do the trick, but the boy made a nimble leap and caught at the tail-end of the same car.

A crowd of commuters separated them, but they eyed one-another fiercely.

At the next corner, Aramis dropped off and scampered through a vegetable market. He was quick enough except for the big box on his back.

"Hey there, kid! Watch out for the decent folk doing their business! We'll have the blue-bellies after you!"

Aramis ignored them and went up a stair into a tavern and then out the back way into an alley. In his own neighborhood he would have known where to go.

He and Simon had mapped out escape routes, hiding places, and secret rendez-vous. But in this part of Piketon he was forced to run blind.

The boy kept pace. He seemed almost to be maintaining a certain distance, watching, taking his prey's measure. Aramis felt fear rise in his throat.

What did the kid want? What would happen to Simon if he was taken? His brother would have no one.

Aramis ran for another quarter-hour, before turning a corner into a small square, built around a public fountain. Women were lined up drawing water for their soup pots.

The boy was just behind now. Unlike Aramis, who rarely got a decent meal, the other kid wasn't winded at all. He reached a hand and got a grip on the handle of Aramis's box.

"Go easy now," said the kid. "It won't be so hard on you if you don't fight it."

Aramis tugged and twisted but the boy had both hands on him now. He was unnaturally strong, stronger than Simon, almost like a little man.

The women paid them no mind. It looked like two boys tussling over a box.

Aramis scrunched up his face and began to work his magic, his true magic. But the other was boy was too quick.

"Oh, no," he said, in a business-like tone. "We'll have none of your mumbo-jumbo."

He swung a heavy bag filled with lead pellets, clapping Aramis a sharp blow on the temple.

Like a conjuror's trick, the world began to swirl and tip and then a curtain seemed to drop down over everything.

And then, just like his dad before him, Aramis the Amazing simply disappeared.

Next: Master Buddenbrooks