The Wrinkled Crown

by Anne Nesbet

  Apparently the Surveyors’ Court had been built as a square around a courtyard, and all its windows faced in. But even the first layer of windows, the ones that looked like they had been transported over here from Bend, didn’t budge when Linny wiggled them. And beyond them was the second skin of glass, which looked like it might put up a pretty good fight if you tried to break through it.

  That worried her. It’s always better to be in rooms you can get out of easily, if you need to.

  “What’s that door over there?” she asked. It was a solid old thing, absolutely bristling with locks and latches. “I guess not the way to a privy.”

  “Privy’s down at the other end,” said the matron, pointing. “If you want to use it before we get started. Hurry up! It’s cartography first.”

  Whatever that was.

  Linny followed the pointing finger and found a tiny room, behind a sliding door, with two metal basins in it, set at different heights. It must be quite a recent addition to this ancient building. Porcelain and metal, and with water that came rushing out of spigots at a touch; this was what a privy looked like, apparently, on the Angleside. An outhouse, indoors! Linny splashed the sink water on her face to wake herself up.

  Think! Think!

  What did she still have with her to help? She had once had a cookpot, and Elias, and then eventually a Half-Cat. And she had lost them all.

  “What do I do?” she asked the blank wall above the basin. The wall said nothing, but as Linny dried her hands on her skirt, she felt the comforting lump that meant Sayra’s birthday present was still there, despite everything, in her pocket.

  That half-visible silk butterfly-rose was the only thing in the universe, apart from Linny’s own right hand, to ever have traveled into and out of Away. Just to show it could be done.

  All right. Too bad Sayra wasn’t here to save Linny this time, so that Linny could finally get to work saving her. Surveyors were miles worse than wolves.

  How stupid she had been, to think she could just wander into the Broken City and find whatever it was Sayra needed to come back from Away and be alive again properly.

  You better wait for me, she told the ghost of Sayra’s butterfly-rose. You better hang on. I’ll show them all. Somehow I’ll pass these unpassable tests and make them bring me all the medicines in the world—

  There was a brisk knock on the sliding door.

  “Are you all right, claimant?”

  Linny put on her sweet-as-a-lamb face again and stepped back out into the dormitory room.

  “Sorry I took so long,” she said. “I just got to worrying again—about my friend, you know, and my cat.”

  She was laying it on a little thick, she knew, but the matron patted her on the shoulder.

  “There, now. You’d better let go of such distractions. The cat is gone. Things that go to the lab men to be studied don’t come back alive. No, don’t look like that!”

  Because all of Linny was caught up in one awful thought:

  What?

  “They’re going to hurt my cat?”

  “No, no, they won’t hurt it. This is a civilized place, what are you thinking? They’ll make the beast comfortable, claimant, while they take it apart. It won’t feel a thing.”

  Linny had to try so hard not to scream that her whole face felt like it was twisting into knots.

  “Oh!” she said. “No!”

  “Calm yourself, calm yourself, please!” said the matron. “If you want to pass your tests, you need to focus.”

  The matron slapped two things on the table: a plain brown box and a roll of paper.

  “Cartography!” she said. “You won’t know that word, coming from the backward hills, but it means the science of maps. It wouldn’t be a proper test, without maps.”

  “Because of her being the First Surveyor, not just the Girl with the Lourka,” said Linny. She was watching the matron unlatch that box with a brisk twist of the fingers.

  “Correct,” said the matron, giving Linny a sidewise glance. “Sharpish, are you? Why did you blunder across the bridge, then, in such an inhospitable year, and such a young thing as you are?”

  While she spoke, she was setting metal instruments out on the table, and then she unrolled a sheet of paper—fancy thin stuff, with little squares marked off very faintly all across it.

  “There you are,” said the matron. “The trainer will step you through it. I imagine it will all seem unusual to you, coming from so far off the grid as you do.”

  “I’ve seen a map before,” said Linny.

  The matron shot her another one of those pointed looks.

  “Have you, then?” she said. “Odd girl, indeed. But good for you.”

  Linny remembered too late that she had not only stolen a glimpse of the Surveyors’ map, but actually burned down their camp in the process, and blushed. She lowered her head quickly, to keep the blush private, and started examining the metal tools the matron had just finished setting out.

  “What are those things?”

  There was a hum in her brain when she saw them, like the hum that came over her when she worked on a lourka. A map might not look much like a lourka, but it called to Linny as a lourka did.

  “The cartographer’s kit,” said the matron. “Compasses and rulers and suchlike. Some of what’s necessary, to make a map the old-fashioned way. And they are to be treated with respect, the instruments, claimant. Maps are a serious business. Well, now you’ve only an hour to work, so off I go. Here are a few biscuits to help you focus. The trainer will set the questions for you. Tap the screen when you’re ready for the next.”

  The matron flicked her hand against one of those glossy screen surfaces that had been pretending to be a blank picture in a frame. Apparently that screen was the trainer she kept mentioning. Linny had one of the biscuits and slipped a couple more into a pocket for later.

  “Any questions?” said the matron.

  Well, yes, many questions, but none of them were the kind that the matron was likely to answer.

  “I’ll leave you to it, then,” said the matron. “You still have fifty-seven minutes. Use them well, claimant.”

  And she left, locking the door very carefully behind her, which showed that trying to seem as harmless as a lamb only went so far, on this side of the river.

  Fifty-seven minutes turned out to be not very much time. The trainer showed pictures of the tools on its glassy screen and explained how they might be used. It set little tasks: “Here’s a tiny part of a make-believe city. Use the cartographer’s kit to transfer the picture of it onto the grid-marked paper.”

  It woke up her brain, like drinking a mug of very strong tea. This was what the world looked like! And yes, of course, you could make that picture echo not only in your brain, like it did when you looked out from the top of a tall tree or suddenly got a view of the river and what was beyond the river—no, if you worked carefully, you could put that picture down on paper. No wonder those Surveyors had been so intent on their work, up in the hills!

  Linny kept forgetting to breathe, her mind got so caught up in the three-way dialogue between her brain, her fingers, and the metal tools of the cartographer’s kit. And every now and then a little silver bell would ring out, from wherever it hid behind the glassy expanse of the screen.

  Then suddenly she looked up and realized the matron had come back into the room without her even noticing.

  “Well!” said the matron, examining the screen of the trainer. “That’s quite extraordinary. I’ve never seen that before.”

  “Seen what?” asked Linny.

  “The trainer claims you’ve actually passed that section! Did you do something to this machine?”

  Linny shook her head.

  “Must be a fluke, then,” said the matron. “Never mind. A healthy bedtime snack for you now, and then sleep. Tomorrow’s the rest of the tests, and then the fair.”

  Linny blinked at the instruments in her hand, at the matron setting down a not-very-interesting plat
e of something on her food tray. So it really was like being in her workshop in the woods, way up in the wrinkled hills: maps and lourkas, not so different in flavor, if you were Linny. For a long moment, a very long moment, she had actually forgotten everything else in the world.

  “I advise you to sleep now and not to fret overmuch,” said the matron. “Fretting blurs the brain. Put it out of your mind for the night. After all, in recent times it’s always been a lark for the claimants to come over here and eat their biscuits and parade about the fair for a bow and a laugh.”

  “A lark!” said Linny, trying to fight back the shiver of anger that rose up in her. “If I fail, they want to kill me. That’s what they said.”

  “Not a lark this year, no, of course not. But we must put everything into its historical context, mustn’t we? Long ago it was also very serious, the judging of the claimants. Deeper and darker. I’ve heard the historians speak on the subject, how the girls went into the dark and didn’t come out—”

  That wasn’t turning into the comforting speech the matron had probably had in mind. She stopped in the middle of a sentence, peered closely at Linny, and shook her head.

  “It all seems very hard, I must say. Well, good night and good luck to you. Whatever happens, I suppose we’ve done what we could.”

  And out she went through the doubled door, the old and the new, and the doors both slapped shut behind her.

  For a few desperate minutes Linny just sat there, trying to think her way out of this box with no exits. She did not yet really believe there was no way out. Linny had always been stubborn that way, about not giving up. There are ways forward, and then when those ways are closed, there are other ways around, and when the trail breaks off or fades out, there are still other secret ways, always. That was Linny’s approach. But this place right here had the most walls and closed doors she had ever experienced. Even without wolves or snakes, it was horrible.

  As awful as this room was, however, she figured it had to be better than being cooped up in a tiny cage, like the poor Half-Cat. It was better than fading away to nothingness, up in the hills, like poor Sayra. It might even be better than having to run around dangerous places with the madji, like (as far as she knew) that lummox Elias was having to do. Those three thoughts braided themselves together: she would have to have courage. That was the only way.

  All right, she thought. If she sat here like a good girl, maybe she could pass their stupid tests, whatever they were (and maybe not), and maybe if the tests went well, they would bring her medicines when she ordered them to in her bossiest queen-of-the-world voice (and maybe not)—but the Half-Cat couldn’t wait. She would find Sayra’s medicines somehow and sometime. She would. She had promised. But first there was the Half-Cat to save from the murderous lab men, if it hadn’t yet been taken to pieces.

  She took all the tools in the mapmaking kit, and she took the little carving knife from her lourka bag, and she went over to take a closer look at that other door, not the one she had come in by, and not the door hiding the indoor privy, but the mysterious, much-bolted old door at the other end of the room.

  18

  LOCKS AND LATCHES

  Locks and latches were no match for someone with as many years’ training in pilferage and lourka making as Linny had had. She used the mapmaking kit’s sharp compass to jimmy open the simplest locks and whittled herself a key from a sliver of the door itself to get herself through the last one. It was a comfortable bit of work, almost like being at home and breaking into her father’s workshop for the thousandth time.

  But what she found beyond the door and all its latches was not like any workshop she had ever seen. As her eyes grew more accustomed to the dim evening light, she saw that the room, quite large, was filled with blocky cabinets, each holding a number of long, flat drawers, stacked one on top of the next. She slid open one of those drawers, and large sheets of paper lay there. She thought for a moment, running her fingertip over the old paper: this was the room that had belonged to the First Surveyor. It was hard to see anything properly, but these surely must be drawings or diagrams. Or maps.

  What to do about the light, though? That was another thing Linny knew well enough. You can’t take your winking candle into a space with windows and not expect someone in the village to notice. All the windows across the courtyard . . . they were sort of the Plain version of a village, Linny figured. Here it wasn’t really question of a winking candle, because light came on when you pushed the round switch by the door, but to hit that switch would be like shouting her presence in this room to all lingering Surveyors who might be looking across that courtyard for some reason.

  She scooted over to the outside windows and looked out for a moment at the second skin of more modern glass and all the ripply rectangles across the way. She was beginning to think she might have to carry each of those maps, one at a time, into the other room to look at them, when a string brushed against her cheek and turned out to be attached to thick curtains, rolling down and down. Somehow she had missed them in the dark. So she lowered the blinds, turned on the light, and got to work.

  There was some sort of system to these drawers, but she didn’t understand it. She did find that maps of one area or one type of place seemed to be filed together, so a glance at whatever was on top was enough to disqualify a whole drawer at one go.

  Faster, she said when she started feeling tired.

  There were maps with rivers on them, and maps of farms, and maps of structures she did not understand, but it was not until the twenty-seventh drawer that she finally found drawings of a building with an empty square place in the center. She took that stack over to the floor right under one of the brightest lights and went through it, sheet by sheet, doing her best to stack those sheets in order.

  There were spaces marked LABS on the highest floor. She took very particular note of that. At the bottom of the stack were sheets much older than anything else she had seen, and with a simpler diagram. She looked at those pencil marks, looked up at the walls and windows around her, and her heart gave a little bounce of excitement: she was looking at the plans, the drawing—the map—for the very room she was in! There was the door into the other room, which had been turned into the claimants’ dormitory all those years later. There was the unused fireplace over there, and the closet on that other wall; everything was here in this picture, once you knew how to read it properly. Now she went back a sheet and studied that one, and there it was, yes, the old building embedded in the new.

  She looked at those sheets for what seemed like a very long time, tracing all the important edges of things with a finger so that the memory would sink deeply into her brain. Then she put those maps away, slung her lourka bundle across her back, shut the old door between the map room and the dormitory, and crawled into the fireplace.

  Linny knew that back home in the village, the oldest, largest houses had fireplaces with narrow toeholds in their chimneys, so that the lucky boy sent up to clean out clumps of soot would not be always “slipping down into supper,” as Elias’s mother liked to say. (Elias’s house probably had the second-largest chimney in Lourka, after that of the floury baker.) This old, old house that the First Surveyor had built back in the distant past and that had been swallowed whole by the glass-and-metal Surveyors’ Court later—it was almost like Elias’s house, back in Lourka, wasn’t it? And indeed, when she reached up with her hands into that chimney, she found the toeholds waiting there for her.

  Thank you, she said to the First Surveyor, who had looked so much like Linny herself and who had also, to judge from her various portraits, loved a peculiar, wrinkled cat.

  Still, it took an extra couple of seconds to gather the courage to start that climb up the dark chimney. She had to tease herself into it. So silly to be afraid! It would be just like climbing a tree, probably—only inside out.

  That made her smile, and before the smile could leave her, she flung herself upward and started scrabbling for finger- and toeholds. A piece of
good luck: the top of the chimney had only the flimsiest piece of wood covering it. It was no trouble at all pushing that up and away, so that she could scramble out of the chimney into this strange, strange space that the plans had suggested must be here.

  There was a kind of crawl space—dim and shadowy, but not (thanks to the outer shell of windows) completely dark—between the roof of the swallowed-up old building and the next floor of the new one. The chimney had disgorged her right near the highest part of that roof, where it came very near to the messy underside of the next floor, and she clung to the ridge for a few moments, fending off two fears at once: the fear of being too high and too precarious, on a surface that sloped too steeply for comfort to either side, and also the fear that comes over a person when the ceiling of a cave lurks too close to her head, because up here on the roof ridge, the next floor was very close indeed.

  But that’s good, she reminded herself, and in the workroom of her mind she brought out all the maps she had just studied and looked them over until they blended perfectly with this bizarre place she found herself in. And then she found she could move again, and quite fast. This next part was the trickiest, of course. Linny scooted along the roof ridge, eyeing the ceiling above her, where according to the maps, there should be a weak spot somewhere—there!

  It was an old-fashioned hatch, just a square cut into the ceiling, presumably so that workers could reach this very space Linny was now in (though why would they ever need to?). She inched closer and then pushed up at the square with the palm of her hand, and to her relief, the hatch’s cover shifted easily. No locks here! A moment later she had pulled herself into that next, much darker space, where she sat for a while, letting her heart stop pounding and clearing her mind again so that she could find her way properly. She was in the new building again now. Sitting where she was, she would never have guessed there was an old-fashioned house hidden beneath the floor if she hadn’t just scrambled up through its chimney herself. She felt around that space, and yes, her hand bumped against the bottom step of a small staircase. Good. She slid the cover back over the hatch and started climbing the stairs, counting the levels as she went. The fifth level was the one she wanted. That’s what the drawings had told her.