by Paula Guran
Ten dozen booths and suspended balconies filled the Gullet, each carefully spaced and curtained to allow a sense of intimate privacy in the midst of grand spectacle. Lightning, visible through skylights between the ribs, crackled overhead as Amarelle crossed the floor. Her people had a usual place for their usual night, and Shraplin was holding the table.
Shraplin Self-Made, softly whirring concatenation of wires and gears, wore a tattered vermilion cloak embroidered with silver threads. His sculpted brass face had black gemstone eyes and a permanent ghost of a smile. A former foundry drudge, he’d taken advantage of the old Theradane law that a sentient automaton owned its own head and the thoughts therein. Over the course of fifteen years, he’d carefully stolen cogs and screws and bolts and wires and gradually replaced every inch of himself from the neck down until not a speck of his original body remained, and he was able to walk away from the perpetual magical indenture attached to it. Not long after that he’d found klepto-kindred spirits in Amarelle Parathis’ crew.
“Looking wet, boss,” he said. “What’s coming down out there?”
“Weird water,” said Amarelle, taking a place beside him. “Pretty, actually. And don’t call me boss.”
“Certain patterns engrave themselves on my ruminatory discs, boss.” Shraplin poured a touch of viscous black slime from a glass into a port on his neck. “Parliament’s really going at it tonight. When I got here purple fire was falling on the High Barrens.”
“That’s one advantage of living in our prosperous thaumatocracy,” sighed Amarelle. “Always something interesting exploding nearby. Hey, here’s our girls.”
Sophara Miris had one hand under a tray of drinks and the other around Brandwin Miris’ waist. Brandwin had frosted lavender skin that was no magical affectation and thick amber spectacles over golden eyes. Brandwin, armorer, artificer, and physician to automatons, had the death sentence in three principalities for supplying the devices that had so frequently allowed the Duchess Unseen’s crew to evade boring entanglements in local judicial systems. The only object she’d ever personally stolen in her life was the heart of the crew’s magician.
“Shraplin, my toy,” said Brandwin. She touched fingertips with the automaton before sitting down. “Valves valving and pipes piping?”
“Fighting fit and free of rust,” said Shraplin. “And your own metabolic processes and needs?”
“Well attended to,” said Sophara with a smirk. “Shall we get this meeting of the Retired Folks’ Commiseration and Inebriation Society rolling? Here’s something phlegmatic and sanguine for you, Shraplin.”
She handed over another tumbler of black ooze. The artificial man had no use for alcohol, so he kept a private reserve of human temperaments magically distilled into asphaltum lacquer behind the bar.
“A Black Lamps of Her Eyes for me,” said Sophara. “A Tower of the Elephant for the gorgeous artificer. And for you, Your Grace, a Peril on the Sea and a Rise and Fall of Empires.”
Amarelle hefted the latter, a thick glass containing nine horizontal layers of rose-tinted liquors, each layer inhabited by a moving landscape. These varied from fallow hills and fields at the bottom to great cities in the middle layers to a ruin-dotted waste on high, topped by clouds of foam.
“Anyone heard from Jade?” she said.
“Same as always,” said Shraplin. “Regards and don’t wait up.”
“Regards and don’t wait up,” muttered Amarelle. She looked around the table, saw mismatched eyes and shaded eyes and cold black stones fixed on her in expectation. As always. So be it. She raised her glass, and they did likewise.
“Here’s a toast,” she said. “We did it and lived. We put ourselves in prison to stay out of prison. To absent friends, gone where no words nor treasure of ours can restore amends. We did it and lived. To the chains we refused and the ones that snared us anyway. We did it and lived.”
She slammed the drink back, poured layers of foaming history down her throat. She didn’t usually do this sort of thing to herself without dinner to cushion the impact, but hell, it seemed that kind of night. Lightning flashed above the skylights.
“Did you have a few on your way over here, boss?” said Shraplin.
“The Duchess is dead.” Amarelle set her empty glass down firmly. “Long live the Duchess. Now, do I have to go through the sham of pulling my cards out and dealing them, or would you all prefer to just pile your money neatly in the center of the table for me?”
“Oh, honey,” said Brandwin. “We’re not using your deck. It knows more tricks than a show dog.”
“I’ll handicap myself,” said Amarelle. She lifted the Peril on the Sea, admired the aquamarine waves topped with vanilla whitecaps, and in two gulps added it to the ball of fast-spreading warmth in her stomach. “There’s some magic I can appreciate. So, are we playing cards or having a staring contest? Next round’s on me!”
3. Cheating Hands
“Next round’s on me,” said Amarelle an hour and a half later. The table was a mess of cards, bank notes, and empty glasses.
“Next round’s IN you, boss,” said Shraplin. “You’re three ahead of the rest of us.”
“Seems fair. What the hell did I just drink, anyway?”
“A little something I call the Amoral Instrument,” said Sophara. Her eyes were shining. “I’m not allowed to make it for customers. Kind of curious to see what happens to you, in fact.”
“Water off a duck’s back,” said Amarelle, though the room had more soft edges than she remembered and her cards were not entirely cooperating with her plan to hold them steady. “This is a mess. A mess! Shraplin, you’re probably sober-esque. How many cards in a standard deck?”
“Sixty, boss.”
“How many cards presently visible in our hands or on the table?”
“Seventy-eight.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Amarelle. “Who’s not cheating? We should be pushing ninety. Who’s not cheating?”
“I solemnly affirm that I haven’t had an honest hand since we started,” said Brandwin.
“Magician,” said Sophara, tapping her cards against her breast. “Enough said.”
“I’m wearing my cheating hands, boss,” said Shraplin. He wiggled his fingers in blurry silver arcs.
“This is sad.” Amarelle reached behind her left ear, conjured a seventy-ninth card out of her black ringlets, and added it to the pattern on the table. “We really are getting old and decrepit.”
Fresh lightning tore the sky, painting the room in gray-white pulses. Thunder exploded just overhead; the skylights rattled in their frames and even the great bone-rafters seemed to shake. Some of the other drinkers stirred and muttered.
“Fucking wizards,” said Amarelle. “Present company excepted, of course.”
“Why would I except present company?” said Brandwin, tangling the fingers of one hand in Sophara’s hair and gracefully palming an eightieth card onto the table with her other.
“It’s been terrible all week,” said Sophara. “I think it’s Ivovandas, over in the High Barrens. Her and some rival I haven’t identified, spitting fire and rain and flying things all over the damn place. The parasol sellers have been making a killing with those new leather and chainmail models.”
“Someone ought to stroll up there and politely ask them to give it a rest.” Shraplin’s gleaming head rotated slowly until he was peering at Amarelle. “Someone famous, maybe. Someone colorful and respected. Someone with a dangerous reputation.”
“Better to say nothing and be thought a fool,” said Amarelle, “than to interfere in the business of wizards and remove all doubt. Who needs a fresh round? Next one’s still on me. I plan on having all your money when we call it a night, anyway.”
4. The Trouble with Glass Ceilings
The thunder and lightning were continuous for the next hour. Flapping, howling things bounced off the roof at regular intervals. Half the patrons in the Gullet cleared out, pursued by the cajoling of Goldclaw Grask.
/> “The Sign of the Fallen Fire has stood for fifteen centuries!” he cried. “This is the safest place in all of Theradane! You really want to be out in the streets on a night like this? Have you considered our fine rooms in the Arms?”
There was a high-pitched sound of shattering glass. Something large and wet and dead hit the floor next to the bar, followed by a shower of skylight fragments and glowing rain. Grask squawked for a house magician to unmake the mess while the exodus quickened around him.
“Ahhh, nice to be off duty.” Sophara sipped unsteadily from a tumbler of something blue and uncomplicated. The bar had cut her off from casting her own spells into drinks.
“You know,” said Amarelle, slowly, “maybe someone really should go up there to the High Barrens and tell that old witchy bitch to put a leash on her pets.”
The room, through her eyes, had grown softer and softer as the noisy night wore on, and had now moved into a decidedly impressionist phase. Goldclaw Grask was a bright smear chasing other bright smears across the floor, and even the cards on the table were no longer holding still long enough for Amarelle to track their value.
“Hey,” she said, “Sophara, you’re a citizen in good standing. Why don’t we get you made a member of Parliament so you can make these idiots stop?”
“Oh, brilliant! Well, first I’d need to steal or invent a really good youth-binding,” said the magician, “something better than the three-in-five I’m working now, so I can ripen my practice for a century or two. You might find this timeline inconvenient for your purposes.”
“Then you’d need to find an external power locus to kick up your juice,” said Brandwin.
“Yes,” said Sophara, “and harness it without any other hazard-class sorcerers noticing. Oh, and I’d also need to go completely out of my ever-fucking head! You have to be a dead-eyed dirty-souled maniac to want to spend your extended life trading punches with other maniacs. Once you’ve seized that power, there’s no getting off the merry-go-round. You fight like hell just to hold on or you get shoved off.”
“Splat!” said Brandwin.
“Not my idea of a playground,” said Sophara, finishing her drink and slamming the empty glass down emphatically.
An instant later there was a horrendous shattering crash. A half-ton of dark winged something, its matted fur rain-wet and reeking, plunged through the skylight directly overhead and obliterated their table. A confused blur of motion and noise attended the crash, and Amarelle found herself on the floor with a dull ache between her breasts.
Some dutiful, stubborn fraction of her awareness kicked its way to the surface of the alcoholic ocean in her mind, and there clutched at straws until it had pieced together the true sequence of events. Shraplin, of course—the nimble automaton had shoved her aside before diving across the table to get Sophara and Brandwin clear.
“Hey,” said Amarelle, sitting up, “you’re not drunk at all!”
“That was part of my cheating, boss.” The automaton had been very nearly fast enough, very nearly. Sophara and Brandwin were safe, but his left leg was pinned under the fallen creature and the table.
“Oh, you best of all possible automatons! Your poor foot!” Brandwin crawled over to him and kissed the top of his brass head.
“I’ve got three spares at home,” said Shraplin.
“That tears it,” muttered Amarelle, wobbling and weaving back to her feet. “Nobody drops a gods-damned gargoyle on my friends!”
“I think it’s a byakhee,” said Brandwin, poking at the beast. It had membranous wings and a spear protruding from what might have been its neck. It smelled like old cheese washed in gangrene and graveyard dew.
“I think it’s a vorpilax, love,” said Sophara. She drunkenly assisted her wife in pulling Shraplin out from under the thing. “Consider the bilateral symmetry.”
“I don’t care what it is,” said Amarelle, fumbling into her long black coat. “Nobody drops one on my card game or my crew. I’m going to find out where this Ivovandas lives and give her a piece of my mind.”
“Haste makes corpses, boss,” said Shraplin, shaking coils and widgets from the wreckage of his foot. “I was just having fun with you earlier.”
“Stupid damn commerce-murdering wizards!” Goldclaw Grask arrived at last, with a gaggle of bartenders and waiters in train. “Sophara! Are you hurt? What about the rest of you? Shraplin! That looks expensive. Tell me it’s not expensive!”
“I can soon be restored to prime functionality,” said Shraplin. “But what if I suggested that tonight is an excellent night for you to tear up our bill?”
“I, uh, well, if that wouldn’t get you in trouble,” said the goblin, directing waiters with mops toward the growing puddle of pastel-colored rainwater and gray ichor under the beast.
“If you give it to us freely,” said Sophara, “it’s not theft, and none of us break our terms of sanctuary. And Shraplin is right, Amarelle. You can’t just go berate a member of the Parliament of Strife! Even if you could safely cross the High Barrens in the middle of this mess—”
“Of course I can.” Amarelle stood up nearly straight and, after a few false starts, approximately squared her shoulders. “I’m not some marshmallow-muscled tourist, I’m the Duchess Unseen! I stole the sound of the sunrise and the tears of a shark. I borrowed a book from the library of Hazar and didn’t return it. I crossed the Labyrinth of the Death Spiders in Moraska TWICE—”
“I know,” said Sophara. “I was there.”
“ . . . and then I went back and stole all the Death Spiders!”
“That was ten years and an awful lot of strong drinks ago,” said Sophara. “Come on, darling, I mixed most of the drinks myself. Don’t scare us like this, Amarelle. You’re drunk and retired. Go home.”
“This smelly thing could have killed all of us,” said Amarelle.
“Well, thanks to a little luck and a lot of Shraplin, it didn’t. Come on, Amarelle. Promise us you won’t do anything stupid tonight. Will you promise us?”
5. Removing All Doubt
The High Barrens, east of Tanglewing Street, were empty of inhabitants and full of nasty surprises from the battle in progress. Amarelle kept out of the open, moving from shadowed arch to garden wall to darkened doorway, stumbling frequently. The world had a fragile liquid quality, running at the edges and spinning on previously unrevealed axes. She was not drunk enough to forget that she had to take extra care and still far too drunk to realize that she ought to be fleeing the way she’d come.
The High Barrens had once been a neighborhood of mansions and topiary wonders and public fountains, but the coming of the wizard Ivovandas has sent the former inhabitants packing. The arguments of the Parliament of Strife had blasted holes in the cobblestones, cracked and dried the fountains, and sundered the mansions like unloved toy houses. The purple fire from before was still smoldering in a tall ruined shell of wood and brick. Amarelle sidestepped the street-rivers of melted lead that had once been the building’s roof.
It wasn’t difficult to find the manse of Ivovandas, the only lit and tended structure in the neighborhood, guarded by smooth walls, glowing ideograms, and rustling red-green hedges with the skeletons of many birds and small animals scattered in their undergrowth. A path of interlocked alabaster stones, gleaming with internal light, led forty curving yards to a golden front door.
Convenient. That guaranteed a security gauntlet.
The screams of terrible flying things high above made concentration even more difficult, but Amarelle applied three decades of experience to the path and was not disappointed. Four trapped stones she avoided by intuition, two by dumb drunken luck. The gravity-orientation reversal was a trick she’d seen before; she cartwheeled (sloppily) over the dangerous patch and the magic pushed her headfirst back to the ground rather than helplessly into the sky. She never even felt the silvery call of the tasteful hypnotic toad sculptures on the lawn, as she was too inebriated to meet their eyes and trigger the effect.
When she re
ached the front door, the golden surface rippled like a molten pool and a sculpted arm emerged clutching a knocker ring. Amarelle flicked a collapsible baton out of her coat and used it to tap the ring against the door while she stood aside. There was a brief pause after the darts had hissed through empty air, and then a voice boomed:
“WHO COMES UNBIDDEN TO THE DOOR OF THE SUPREME SPELLWRIGHT IVOVANDAS OF THE HONORABLE PARLIAMENT OF THERADANE? SPEAK, WORM!”
“I don’t take shit from doors,” said Amarelle. “I’m flattering your mistress by knocking. Tell her a citizen of Theradane is here to give her a frank and unexpurgated opinion on how terrible her aim is.”
“YOUR ATTITUDE IS UNDERSTANDABLE AND NONETHELESS THOROUGHLY OFFENSIVE. ARCS OF ELECTRODYNAMIC FORCE WILL NOW BE APPLIED TO THE LOBES OF YOUR BRAIN UNTIL THEY ARE SCALDED PULP. TO RECEIVE THIS PRONOUNCEMENT IN THE FORM OF UNIVERSAL PICTOGRAMS, SCREAM ONCE. TO REQUEST MORE RAPID SENSORY OBLIVION, SCREAM TWICE AND WAIT TO SEE WHAT HAPPENS.”
“The name is Amarelle Parathis, also known as the Duchess Unseen. Your mistress’ stupid feuds are turning a fine old town into a shitsack misery farm and ruining my card games. Are you going to open up, or do I find a window?”
“AMARELLE PARATHIS,” said the door. A moment passed. “YOUR NAME IS NOT UNKNOWN. YOU PURCHASED SANCTUARY FROM THE PARLIAMENT OF THERADANE TWO YEARS AND FOUR MONTHS AGO.”
“Attadoor,” said Amarelle.
“THE MISTRESS WILL RECEIVE YOU.”
The sculpted hand holding the knocker withdrew into the liquid surface of the door. A dozen others burst forth, grabbing Amarelle by the throat, arms, legs, and hair. They pulled her off her feet and into the rippling golden surface, which solidified an instant later and retained no trace of her passage.
6. The Cabinet of Golden Hands
Amarelle awoke, thoroughly comfortable but stripped of all her weapons and wearing someone else’s silk nightgown.
She was in a doorless chamber, in a feather bed floating gently on a pool of liquid gold that covered the entire floor, or perhaps was the entire floor. Ruby shafts of illumination fell from etched glass skylights, and when Amarelle threw back her covers they dissolved into wisps of aromatic steam.
