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“Well? Who’s the woman Impara didn’t want to talk about?”
“An old flame of the professor’s,” Ben admitted.
My face drooped. “Is that all? I thought for sure he was telling us to go see someone positively evil.”
A smile touched his lips. “They had a rather bitter falling out some decades ago, so he may consider her evil incarnate.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “You won’t go visit the devil herself without me, will you? It wouldn’t be fair to have all the fun while I suffered.”
“You expect to be disappointed at your first book club meeting?” he wondered.
I shrugged. “I expect to be bored to tears, so I want something to lift my spirits while my soul slowly dies.”
His teasing eyes smiled down at me as he inclined his head. “Then I swear on the grave of my father that I will do no adventuring until you have been returned to me.”
“Even if I’m just a shell of my old self?” I countered.
“Even were you to be an old wench with a crooked nose,” he swore.
We reached the spot where we’d parked the thunder. The only problem was, there was no thunder parked there.
It had been stolen.
CHAPTERTWENTY-TWO
My heart gavea leap as I looked up and down the block, sure that I was just mistaken about the parking location. Unfortunately, Ben’s concerned expression told me I wasn’t wrong.
“Ben?”
“Yes?”
“Bashful was stolen, wasn’t she?”
“So it would appear,” he mused as he knelt on the ground where she had been parked and proceeded to examine the cobblestones.
I thought back to our previous conversation at this spot. “How did somebody figure out how to get it to work?”
Ben brushed his hands against the stones and shook his head. “Nobody did. It wasn’t driven away but dragged. You can see there are only the two front-wheel tracks that drove down the road. Whoever stole it couldn’t figure out how to work the controls and the machine was too heavy to push very far, so they endeavored to drag it away on some heavy cart with a flatbed.”
“Can we follow it?”
Ben stood and nodded. “For as long as she has wheels.”
My heart skipped a beat. “What does that mean?”
“Thieves generally steal thunders not to resell them whole, but to tear them apart and sell them piece by piece.”
I felt a cold chill but tamped it down and looped my arm through one of his. “Lead the way before Bashful becomes bashed.”
We hurried down the road and on a winding northeasterly path through the maze-like streets. The trail led us to the very northernmost part of the city where the houses were replaced with junkyards of broken stone and ruined thunders. Squalid hovels had been hollowed out of the shattered columns and dirt mounds. Vines and weeds infested the heavy stone foundations, and many of the plants were used as curtains to cover the entrances to the shoddy homes.
Ben and I stood out like clean thumbs on an otherwise dirty hand, and more than one dark face cast suspicious looks at us. Many wore bedraggled clothes patched together like their homes.
I leaned toward Ben and didn’t dare raise my voice for fear of catching more attention. “This doesn’t look like a nice neighborhood.”
“This area is called the Forgotten,” Ben told me, a name which gave me a chill down my spine. “Whenever an old structure is demolished and the bits not needed, they’re sent here. The people in the area have forged their homes and their very lives around recycling the discarded into something they can use.”
I noticed an ornate column some forty feet high. It lay at an angle atop broken bits of its brethren, and four cracked hounds were once perched on its top. “That must have been a big building.”
