Spells in Silence

Chapter 28: Weird Wizards

…Hmm. That was something to keep in mind, actually. If no one else was doing it, maybe she could go door-to-door and offer to do some cleaning for coin? It would be nice not to have to steal everything she needed.

Perhaps after a kilometer or so of walking and thinking, she noticed that the homes were starting to get… not nice-looking, exactly, but less bad. The wizards who could use magic to keep their places in good repair, perhaps? The improvements continued the farther she walked, until she saw that she was at the intersection between Knockturn and another street. Once again she found a pair of iron signs, but these were less elaborate than those at Diagon. Komarsh Alley, she read out to Morgan. That's interesting. What is this place, do you think?

The 'cleaner than Knockturn' trend appeared to continue down this street, so with nothing else pressing for the moment she shrugged to herself and continued her walk into and down the length of Komarsh Alley. Her eyes flicked over the storefronts, and her surprise grew after each building she passed. After Diagon and Knockturn, she was expecting… she did not know exactly what she was expecting, in all honesty. Magics benign? Evil? Both? Neither?

Hazel got none of those, and she found herself occasionally checking the clothing everyone wore to make sure she was still among the wizards and had not somehow stepped through a time rift back to the Middle Ages.

Diagon, even Knockturn, had looked medieval, but that was medieval with a twist of fantasy. The people she saw now? Many of them still wore robes, but a not insubstantial number instead had opted for sturdy leather aprons, thick tunics, and baggy breeches. Her ears caught the friendly and sometimes not-so-friendly calls between the people in the various buildings. Over the examples of human speech were noises that were not human in origin, though: from one building with a wide-open yard the squeal of pigs being butchered, from another the bangs and pings of metal hitting metal and the roars of flame. The buildings might not bear thatched roofs, but everything else looked like it had been pulled out of a history book.

Even so, that did not mean this street was devoid of magic. She wandered a bit closer to the latter building until the smell of smoke tickled her nose and watched as a shirtless man with frankly enormous arms stopped hammering a bar of metal long enough that he could pull a short stick from his back pocket. A muttered word and a wave of the wand, and a long gout of flame poured forth from the tip and funneled itself into the forge so he could stick the bar back in. A couple of houses down, she stopped to watch a young girl giggling as she sat on her grandmother's lap. The grandmother's attention was focused on the loom in front of her while another girl, this one in her mid-teens or so, waved her wand as a conductor might to pull thread from several large spools and bury the ends somewhere in the depths of the machine.

Her footsteps continued carrying her down this street, and while her eyes wandered up the smaller roads that branched off between occasional buildings, she stuck to her plan of exploring just this alley first. She passed several stalls bearing vegetables and fruits and snickered to herself and to Morgan as she listened to the people behind the stalls – the farmers themselves, or just merchants who bought and sold? – insult each others' wares and promote their own.

This is where everything is made, she told her feathered friend all while she wrinkled her nose at the unfortunately familiar scent of tanning leather coming from yet another building. Or if not everything, at least a lot of things. Raw materials, anyway. Then it all goes to Diagon to be turned into the final products. That made sense to her, but it still left her with a question. Now, how do they get their stuff from here to Diagon? Obviously they don't walk through Knockturn, or it wouldn't look the way it does. Maybe they just jump, but that seems like a waste, doesn't it?