The Wrinkled Crown

by Anne Nesbet

  The Half-Cat didn’t follow, but that was all right, too. It meowed again, already from distinctly farther away.

  The world was flattening out. She quite liked the feeling, actually. It was restful. The yellow grass sighed a little as the breeze brushed through it, and somewhere ahead was another faint roar of a noise, and her feet walked forward, step after step after step.

  Eventually she noticed that the yellow grass was thinning out. She could see the sandy soil it somehow grew in. And after another very long time, the sound her feet made on the path had softened to the faintest swish swish swish, because the path was made of sand, sand was all around her, and ahead, where the sand seemed to darken a little and grow glassy, was the sea.

  That must be why the cat had stayed behind. Cats, she remembered vaguely, did not care for things like lakes or puddles.

  She looked to her right and her left, and again it was all more or less the same, everything she could see. Wonderfully peaceful, truly. A step later, her feet tripped on something, but even that little jolt didn’t bother her much. Her hand reached down and picked up the thing her toes had stumbled over, and she saw it was a bone, but again her mind registered the fact without alarm.

  The sand was beautifully flat, and the sea came rolling in, and it, too, was flat and lovely. And every now and then the sand was dotted with bones, which would become part of the sand in time.

  She sat down to watch the water come in. It licked its way up the sand, in arcs and curves and parabolas, and then it shrank back into itself. And it did that again and again and again.

  She could sit there forever and not be tired of it . . . the water moving in, the water moving out. The plain sand and the plain air and the Plain Sea.

  Some quite long stretch of time had passed before she remembered that a Plain Sea used to mean something important to her. Maybe not so important that you would have to do something about it, but still, important. Her mind felt cluttered with those thoughts in it. She preferred not to have a cluttered head, so she pushed them away, but that mental effort woke her up a little more, and she looked down at the long, narrow curve of glass in her hand and remembered it was a dropper.

  For collecting drops.

  Her mind thought about drops for a while, about the curve and roundness of them, about the equations you might make up to describe them, all of which in turn reminded her of the push and pull of the lovely sea.

  It was not until somewhat later that she looked down and saw the crystal vial in her other hand.

  She thought about how much nicer the little bottle would be if it were empty, if she just dumped those green grains into the sand. In fact, she had gotten as far as pulling the top out of the vial when something stopped her. It might have been the greenness of the grains, which would have been jarring, maybe, against the pure yellow sand.

  Whatever it was, she stood there quite awhile, with the glass dropper curving forward from one hand, and the almost empty vial in the other.

  She was supposed to put water in the bottle, but she couldn’t remember why. She looked at it and looked at the sea, stared at each of them for a very long time.

  And then, to her own surprise, she found herself standing up and walking forward, to the place where the sea lapped at the sand, and she leaned forward with her long curved dropper and squeezed water into it, and then put three drops of that Plainest water into the crystal vial.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  The little green grains fizzed and bubbled when the Plain water hit them. The fizzing turned them into a teaspoon’s worth of liquid, as green as spring leaves.

  It was as she was pushing the rubber stopper so snugly back into the vial that the watery edge of the Plain Sea washed right up over the toes of her shoes and for a while cleared her thoughts utterly away. She had been too active for this quiet place, poking at the sea with the long curve of glass. She stood watching the water come forward and recede, come forward and recede, lapping at the sand and her toes and the patient, quiet heaps of bones.

  The light around her (on the sand, the sea, and the bones) changed color. She did sort of notice that. But nothing had to be done or could be done about that changing light.

  She stood there and was empty and free and plain.

  If you waited long enough, time would become as flat and plain a thing as the yellow fields or the sand or the sea, going on and on forever without end. And this was that endless moment for her. She had reached the end of the world.

  Everything has an end, even worlds. Ends. Everything has ends.

  That reminded her of something:

  “Yarn’s like life—two ends and a tangled middle.”

  A tremor ran through her. Someone used to laugh and say that, when the yarn got away from her. Who was that? When was that?

  Someone who was also, she seemed to remember, at an end of the world, also fading, because worlds, like tangles—like lives—have two ends, as anyone knows.

  After that long, long moment of ending, she was beginning to see things again—the water at her feet, the vial in her hand, the liquid in it shining leaf green, like something she couldn’t remember, something she really wanted to remember—oh, that was it. Like Sayra’s eyes.

  She took a great gasping breath and stepped back out of reach of the water.

  Then something stung her on the back of the neck. And again.

  Someone was apparently throwing pebbles at her.

  And calling her name.

  “Linny! Linny! Come away from there.”

  Although this wasn’t a place where she could feel angry, she did feel mildly bothered. The plainness and quiet had been so perfect, before the pebbles and the shouting! She turned around to see what was going on and saw an extremely bedraggled, grubby, dirty, unhappy face looking at her from the top of a rolling dune. A familiar face! If she had a little more time, she might even have been able to come up with a name to go with it.

  “Quick,” said that person. “Quick, hurry, come away from here.”

  He had a cat in his arms. Linny was pretty sure she had seen both of them before, the cat and the person.

  “Darn it, Linny!” said the irritating person. “Didn’t you even notice what was lying there all around you? Look!”

  A hand shook something in front of her eyes.

  Sand falling from grubby fingers, and clenched in those fingers, a bone.

  A bone. Was that bad?

  For the first time in a very long while, she felt a twinge of unease.

  “Bones all over! Cursed place!” said—

  Wait! The grubby person had a name!

  “It’s Elias!” said Linny, and in remembering his name, she also remembered her own. She remembered a lot of things, all at once. Her mind snapped back from plainness and became all wrinkled and complicated again. “But you drowned! Or exploded!”

  “Almost drowned and sort of exploded,” said Elias. He seemed almost proud of it. “I remember being in the water and that magician’s awful ma pulling at my jacket. I guess it came off at some point. I don’t know. I don’t remember anything else until I washed up on the river’s bank, way down this way. Then that cat of yours showed up, so I knew you must be nearby. Come on! Don’t stand there! We have to get away—it had you trapped, until I rescued you.”

  “Rescue me! You did not,” said Linny. It was almost like old times, arguing with Elias. “I had just remembered Sayra, all on my own. I got the antidote, see?”

  She waved the little bottle before his nose.

  They were walking away from the sea now, step after step. It was becoming almost normal to be walking again, though she was sorry to leave the quiet curve of the water slipping up the sand and back again.

  How miraculous that Elias was actually here.

  “I thought you were dead,” she said, a little shyly.

  “Nope. But you soon would have been, if I hadn’t been there to pitch pebbles at you. That’s a deadly, horrible place, that
beach. Oh, don’t look at me like that. Did you see all those bones everywhere? Ugh. People go there, and they die.”

  It was definitely, actually Elias, that lummox! She had really thought he was gone. But here he was—and to her surprise, Linny found she had never been so glad to see anybody in her life.

  29

  BACK TO THE EDGE

  They were walking through those long fields, heading away from the Plain Sea, and as tired and as hungry and as wobble headed as they felt, they were both filled with an extraordinary feeling: with hope. It made them want to tell each other everything, the past and the future, which for the first time looked less than totally black (if you kept your eyes studiously away from the dark spots in the picture). Linny talked about the leaf-green antidote, how she hoped it would cure Sayra of the magic that had sickened her, how she would carry it up to Away, where Sayra’s spirit was, more alive than the faded shell of her body back in Lourka, and Elias told his own story over and over again: the dandelion-haired woman grabbing at him, the jacket slipping off, water filling his lungs—

  And that was the point in Elias’s description when they came over the top of a little swell of land in that otherwise flat world—and found the Surveyors right there, waiting for them.

  They had a sand-colored wagon that blended into the grass of the field. There were four of them waiting, with their gray uniforms on and circles of black glass hiding their eyes.

  “Oh, no. Run!” said Elias, his voice hoarse, but it was too late for running, because the Surveyors had already jumped on them, from what felt like all sides. Linny and Elias were already being led to the wagon now by all those rough hands, and the Half-Cat was emitting muffled meows from over to the left, as if it was being stuffed into a sack and didn’t like it.

  “Well, that was easy,” said one of the Surveyors to Elias. “Like tracking a clumsy bear. And now we’ve nabbed you and the girl, as well. Why didn’t you go home, girl? That’s what we thought you’d done—lit back out for the hills.”

  “Two for the price of one!” said another one of those Surveyors. “Hey, don’t you start struggling. Won’t do you any good.”

  The Surveyors were bundling them into their wagon. There was no way to wriggle out of their grasp. (Linny did try, and the hands on her shoulders just became tighter and heavier; over to the right of her, she could hear Elias trying to shrug off one of those hands and failing.)

  It was a large wagon, much bigger than the cart Linny had driven out of the Broken City. Linny and Elias, their hands tied, and the dangerous-looking sack that contained the Half-Cat, were dumped into the back seat. The lourka in its sack was at Linny’s feet. Her mind, meanwhile, was full of skittering panic but couldn’t come up with a coherent thought, much less an actual plan. She was still dazed from her time at the edge of the Plain Sea, and dazed from the happy shock of finding Elias again. And now dazed all over again from the sudden hope suddenly being ripped away.

  And she was hungry. She hadn’t eaten in ages, it seemed like to her. Not since those juicy tomatoes. And tomatoes only go so far.

  The road the wagon took went right by the research hub, where the blank walls gave no clue about what had happened to Aunt Mina after Linny had left.

  The thought of Mina was bad enough, but then a worse thought caught up with Linny: she gave everything she had to me, and it made no difference. And that made Linny shrink down in the wagon, hoping Mina could not, would not, see, so that her heart wouldn’t break all over again.

  Even if in the Plain they did not call it “breaking.”

  Because she was slumping and despairing, Linny missed the very beginning of what happened next.

  They were at the intersection beyond the research hub when one of the gray men said, “Wait, who’s that there?”

  And as he pressed the button that stopped the wagon, a dart suddenly appeared in the side of his neck, and he dropped down to the left, as if he were a stone column kicked by the giant who had built the fairground bridge. And the Surveyor next to him had sprouted a dart of his own and was dangling over the side of the wagon.

  “Down!” said Elias and Linny to each other, at almost exactly the same time, but it is hard to get really far down in the backseat of a wagon when your hands and feet are bound. She shut her eyes tight, though, willing herself invisible. And Elias, too. Let them both be invisible.

  There were thumps and bumps for a minute or so, but no more shouting, and then a breathless, familiar voice said, “Well, hello, little guide of mine! Hello, hello!”

  Elias must have opened his eyes before Linny, because he was already saying, “Who are you?” while Linny spluttered and tried to sit up again.

  It was the Tinkerman, looking over at them from the front seat. He looked a little shaken, but pleased as punch.

  “They were going to waste you! Waste you! So I had to stop them. They’ll thank me in the end.”

  Linny peered over the edge of the wagon and saw the bodies of those Surveyors at the side of the road, where the Tinkerman must have dragged them. She shuddered at the suddenness with which a person could become an unmoving thing. She couldn’t imagine those bodies ever thanking anyone again for anything.

  “Oh, they’ll wake up eventually,” said the Tinkerman, who must have followed her gaze. “It’s strong stuff, but not that strong. We should probably not waste too much time.”

  He had moved a bulky bag of his own into the front seat. Now he was looking at the wagon’s buttons and levers, and he actually rubbed his hands together in glee, as ogres and bandits do in the worst stories.

  The Half-Cat yowled forlornly from inside its sack.

  “Oh, is that my own dear cat, as well?” said the Tinkerman. “Really, this is turning out to be a very good day.”

  “Thank you so much for the rescue, sir,” said Elias, and Linny could tell from the stretched sound of his voice that his headache must be bad again. He would have to be remembering how much he hated being in the Plain. And being kidnapped by Surveyors had not helped. “But who are you, and where are you taking us?”

  “He’s Arthur Vix,” said Linny. “The Tinkerman. Irika Pontis’s sort-of father.”

  “Your gra—!”

  Linny kicked his shins with her trussed-up legs. It was the best she could do, under the circumstances, to keep him quiet.

  Elias’s eyes were as wide as teacups. Linny could see that he was getting entirely the wrong idea about the Tinkerman.

  “But let’s hear what Mr. Vix has to say,” she said to Elias, in her sweet-little-lamb voice. She hoped Elias would take the hint.

  “Ha ha! What I have to say is, research expedition!” said the Tinkerman, starting the wagon machine. “Finally, finally under way. When you babbled about going home and ran off from the fair, well, I thought we might be losing our best chance, with you skedaddling back into the hills, so I came to see my dear Mina, just to check in on how her research was going. She’s been working on that hillsickness remedy for a long time now. Sadly, still no cure, says Mina. But I’m heading into the wrinkled hills, antidote or not.”

  “You!” said Linny.

  “Oh, yes. Who else better, to put my theory to the test? And imagine my surprise when I gathered, from various things her coworkers were saying, that my own recent guest, my impossible visitor, my future guide, was in the neighborhood! Well!”

  He chuckled. The wind was blowing through his silver hair. He seemed very, very pleased with himself indeed.

  “I heard enough to know they had captured someone, and then I set up my ambush. Criminality is so easy, it turns out, if you remember to bring enough darts. Here we are, happy as clams and on our way. Why did I slouch around so long, hoping they would give me official permission to test my theory? Who even gives permission for such things anymore? Who’s in charge? The regent and that awful magician are glaring at each other over the Broken City like it’s their own personal chessboard. They would have kept me waiting until the mountains wore down and the riv
er ran dry!”

  “What theory?” said Elias, that lummox.

  “Don’t encourage him,” said Linny. “He said we’re happy as clams, but we’re not. We’re tied up in ropes.”

  “Complexity, like water, flows downhill,” said Vix modestly as he upped the speed of that wagon. “And can be tapped in to for power. This is the nutshell version I’m giving you now! Wrinkled places are complex, right? Even you can see that. The limit case of complexity is what you call Away. So, run a wire from there to the Plain, and your light bulbs will burn until the end of time. You can use that power to change the world. Like damming a river! Simple!”

  “If the universe doesn’t just go pop,” said Linny. “Which I understand could potentially also happen. You shouldn’t mess with Away. Your plan’s the worst one I ever heard of. Don’t pay attention to him, Elias.”

  Elias had been chewing over the Tinkerman’s explanation, and his teacup eyes were narrowing now, like saucers being turned on their sides.

  “So they’ll use Away to power their grid,” he said. “To make things go, I guess, but also to unwrinkle the world. Like what they did at the fair, only more so.”

  “Yes,” said Linny and the Tinkerman at exactly the same time, only the Tinkerman added a happy exclamation point at the end.

  “And my theory will be proved correct!”

  That shut even Elias up for a while. He had probably never met anyone before who was willing to risk the end of the universe just to prove a stupid theory. He looked at Linny, and Linny looked at him. They were in very grave need of a backup plan.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Vix,” said Linny, trying sweetness again. “But my feet are falling asleep. Would you mind please untying us, now that we’ve been rescued?”

  Almost to her surprise, the Tinkerman pulled the wagon to the side of the road and stopped it. “We’ll need you in good shape when we get to the hills,” he said. “Good shape and rested.”

  “Yes,” said Linny, spreading the sweetness on thick. “But what if my feet have to be cut off because they haven’t had any blood in them so long?”