by Annie Bellet
The cabinet of golden hands unstitched the map of Theradane, and in its place embroidered a number of paragraphs in neat, even script. Amarelle peered closely at them. They were surprisingly straightforward, describing a trade of one (1) street for one (1) blue crystal to be smashed, but then…
“What the hell’s this?” she said. “A deadline? A year and a day?”
“It’s the traditional span for this sort of arrangement,” said Ivovandas. “And surely you can see the sense in it. I prefer Jarrow de-fanged fairly soon, not five or ten or some nebulous and ever-changing number of years from now. I require you working with determination and focus. And you require some incentive other than simple destruction for failure, so there it all is.”
“A year and a day,” said Amarelle, “and I deliver the street, or surrender my citizenship and worldly wealth to permanent indenture in your service.”
“It would be a comfortable and exciting life,” said Ivovandas. “But you can avoid it if you’re as clever as I hope you are.”
“And what if I were to quietly report this arrangement to the wizard Jarrow and see if he could do better for me?”
“A worthwhile contemplation of treacherous entanglement symmetrical to my own! I salute your spirit, but must remind you that Jarrow possesses no blue crystal, nor do you or he possess the faintest notion of where my external locus resides. You must decide for yourself which of us would make the easier target. If you wish to be ruled by wisdom, you’ll reach into your pockets now.”
Amarelle did, and found that a quill and an ink bottle had somehow appeared therein.
“One street,” she said. “For one crystal. One year and one day.”
“It’s all there in plain black thread,” said Ivovandas. “Will you sign?”
Amarelle stared at the contract and ground her teeth, a habit her mother had always sternly cautioned her against. At last, she uncapped the bottle of ink and wet the quill.
7. Another Unexpected Change of Clothing
The usual tumult of wizardly contention had abated. Even Ivovandas and Jarrow seemed to be taking a rest from their labors when Amarelle walked out of the High Barrens under a peach-colored afternoon haze. All the clocks in the city sounded three, refuting and echoing and interrupting one another, the actual ringing of the hour taking somewhere north of two and a half minutes due to the fact that clocks in Theradane were traditionally mis-synchronized to confuse malicious spirits.
Amarelle’s thoughts were an electric whirl of anxiety and calculation. She hailed a mechanavipede and was soon speeding over the rooftops of the city in a swaying chair tethered beneath the straining wings of a flock of mechanical sparrows. There was simply nowhere else to go for help; she would have to heave herself before her friends like jetsam washed up on a beach.
Sophara and Brandwin lived in a narrow, crooked house on Shankvile Street, a house they’d secured at an excellent price due to the fact that it sometimes had five stories and sometimes six. Where the sixth occasionally wandered off to was unknown, but while it politely declined their questions about its business it also had the courtesy to ask none concerning theirs. Amarelle had the mechanavipede heave her off into a certain third-floor window which served as a friends-only portal for urgent business.
The ladies of the house were in, and by a welcome stroke of luck so was Shraplin. Brandwin was fussing with the pistons of his replacement left foot, while Sophara sprawled full-length on a velvet hammock wearing smoked glasses and an ice-white beret that exuded analgesic mist in a halo about her head.
“How is it that you’re not covered in vomit and begging for death?” said Sophara. “How is it that you consumed three times your own weight in liquor and I’ve got sole custody of the hangover?”
“I had an unexpected benefactor, Soph. Can you secure this chamber for sensitive conversation?”
“The whole house is reasonably safe,” groaned the magician, rolling off the hammock with minimal grace and dignity. “Now, if you want me to weave a deeper silence, give me a minute to gather my marbles. Wait…”
She pulled her smoked glasses off and peered coldly at Amarelle. Stepping carefully around the mess of specialized tools and mechanical gewgaws littering the carpet, she approached, sniffing the air.
“Something wrong, dearest?” said Brandwin.
“Shhhh,” said Sophara. She rubbed her eyes in the manner of the freshly-awake, then reached out, moved Amarelle’s left coat lapel aside, and pulled a gleaming gold thread out of the black wool.
“You,” she said, arching her aquamarine eyebrows at Amarelle, “have been seeing another wizard.”
Sophara clapped her hands and an eerie hush fell upon the room. The faint sounds of the city outside were utterly banished.
“Ivovandas,” said Amarelle. “I ran off and did something stupid last night. In my defense, I would just like to say that I was angry, and you were the one mixing the drinks.”
“You unfailingly omni-bothersome bitch,” said Sophara. “Well, this little thread would allow Ivovandas to eavesdrop, if not for my counterspell and certain fundamental confusions worked into the stones of this house. And where there’s obvious chicanery, there’s something lurking behind it. Take the rest of your clothes off.”
“What?”
“Do it now, Amarelle!” Sophara retrieved a silver-engraved casket from a far corner of the room, clicked it open, and made urgent motions while Amarelle shed her coat.
“You see how direct she is?” Brandwin squeezed a tiny bellows to pressurize a tube of glowing green oil within Shraplin’s leg. “We’d never have gotten anywhere if she’d waited for me to make the first move.”
“You keep your eyes on your work,” said Sophara. “I’ll do the looking for both of us and give you details later.”
“I sometimes think that ‘friend’ is just a word I use for all the people I haven’t murdered yet,” said Amarelle, hopping and twirling out of her boots, leggings, belts, vest, blouse, sharp implements, silk ropes, smoke capsules, and smallclothes. When the last stitch was discarded, Sophara slammed the casket shut and muttered spells over the lock.
As a decided afterthought, smiling and taking her time, she eventually fetched Amarelle a black silk dressing robe embroidered with blue-white astronomical charts.
“It seems to be my day to try on everyone else’s clothes,” she muttered.
“I’m sorry about your things,” said Sophara. “I should be able to sweep them for further tricks, but Ivovandas is so far outside my weight class, it might take days.”
“Never let a wizard get their hands on your clothes,” said Brandwin. “At least not until she promises to move in with you. It ought to be safe to talk now.”
“I’m not entirely sure how to say this,” said Amarelle, “but the concise version is that I’m temporarily unretired.”
She told the whole story, pausing only to answer Sophara’s excited questions about the defenses and décor of Ivovandas’ manse.
“That’s a hell of a thing, boss,” said Shraplin when Amarelle finished. The clocks within the house started chiming five, and didn’t finish for some time. The city clocks were still sealed beyond Sophara’s silence. “I thought we were up against it when that shark tears job landed on us. But a street!”
“I wonder how Jarrow figured out it was a locus.” Sophara adjusted the analgesic hat, which had done her much good over the long course of Amarelle’s story. “I wonder how he harnessed it without anyone interfering!”
“Keep it relevant, dreamer.” Brandwin massaged her wife’s legs. “The pertinent question is, how are we going to pull it off?”
“I only came for advice,” said Amarelle hastily. “This is all my fault, and nobody else needs to risk their sanctuary because I got drunk and sassed a wizard.”
“Let me enlighten you, boss,” said Shraplin. “If you don’t want me to follow you around being helpful, you must be planning to smash my head right now.”
“Amarelle, you can
’t keep us out in the cold now! This mischief is too delicious,” said Sophara. “And it’s clearly not prudent to let you wander off on your own.”
“I’m grateful,” said Amarelle, “but I feel responsible for your safety.”
“The Parliament of Strife craps destruction on its own city at random, boss.” Shraplin spread his hands. “How much more unsafe can we get? Frankly, two and a half quiet years is adequate to my taste.”
“Yes,” said Sophara. “Hang your delicate feelings, Amarelle, you know we won’t let you… oh, wait. You foxy bag of tits and sugar! You didn’t come here just for advice! You put your noble face on so we’d pledge ourselves without the pleasure of seeing you beg!”
“And you fell for it.” Amarelle grinned. “So it’s agreed, we’re all out of retirement and we’re stealing a street. If anyone cares to let me know how the hell that’s supposed to work, the suggestion box is open.”
8. The Cheap Shot
They spent the first two days in measurement and surveillance. Prosperity Street was three hundred and seventeen yards long running north-south, an average of ten yards wide. Nine major avenues and fifteen alleys bisected it. One hundred and six businesses and residences opened onto it, one of which was a wine bar serving distillations of such quality that a third day was lost to hangovers and remonstrations.
They struck on the evening of the fourth day, as warm mist curled lazily from the sewers and streetlamps gleamed like pearls in folds of gray gauze. The clocks began chiming eleven, a process that often lasted until it was nearly time for them to begin striking twelve.
A purple-skinned woman in the coveralls of a municipal functionary calmly tinkered with the sign post at the intersection of Prosperity and Magdamar. She placed the wooden shingle marked PROSPERITY S in a sack and tipped her hat to a drunk, semi-curious goblin. Brandwin emptied three intersections of PROSPERITY S signs before the clocks settled down.
At the intersection of Prosperity and Ninefingers, a polite brass-headed drudge painted over every visible PROSPERITY S with an opaque black varnish. Two blocks north, a mechanavipede flying unusually low with a cargo of one dark-haired woman crashed into a signpost, an accident that would be repeated six times. At the legendarily confusing seven-way intersection where the various Goblin Markets joined Prosperity, a sorceress disguised as a cat’s shadow muttered quiet spells of alphabetic nullification, wiping every relevant signpost like a slate.
They had to remove forty-six shingles or signposts and deface the placards of sixteen businesses that happened to be named after the street. Lastly, they arranged to tip a carboy of strong vitriol over a ceremonial spot in the pavement where PROSPERITY STREET was set in iron letters. When those had become PRCLGILV SLGFLL, they gave the mess a quick splash of water and hurried away to dispose of their coveralls, paints, and stolen city property.
The next day, Ivovandas was less than impressed.
“Nothing happened.” Her gold eyes gleamed dangerously and her butterflies were still. “Not one femto-scintilla of deviation or dampening in the potency of Jarrow’s locus. Though there were quite a few confused travelers and tourists. You need to steal the street, Amarelle, not vandalize its ornaments.”
“I didn’t expect it to be that easy,” said Amarelle. “I just thought we ought to eliminate the simplest approach first. Never lay an Archduke on the table when a two will do.”
“The map is not the territory.” Ivovandas gestured and transported Amarelle to the front lawn of her manse, where the hypnotic toad sculptures nearly cost her even more lost time.
9. Brute Force
Their next approach took eleven days to plan and arrange, including two days lost to a battle between parliament wizards in the western sectors that collapsed the Temple-Bridge of the God of Hidden Names.
The street signs had been restored at the intersection of Prosperity and Languinar, the southernmost limit of Prosperity Street. The sunrise sky was just creeping over the edge of the city in orange and scarlet striations, and the clocks were or were not chiming seven. A caravan of reinforced cargo coaches drawn by armored horses halted on Languinar, preparing to turn north. The signs hanging from the coaches read:
NUSBARQ DESISKO AND SONS
HAZARDOUS ANIMAL TRANSPORT
As the caravan moved into traffic, a woman in a flaming red dress riding a mecharabbit hopped rudely into the path of the lead carriage, triggering an unlikely but picturesque chain of disasters. Carriage after carriage toppled, wheel after wheel flew from its hub, horse team after horse team ran neighing into traffic as their emergency releases snapped. The side of the first toppled carriage exploded outward, and a furry, snarling beast came bounding out of the wreckage.
“RUN,” cried someone, who happened to be the woman in the red dress. “IT’S A SPRING-HEELED WEREJACKAL!”
A heartbeat later her damaged mecharabbit exploded, enveloping her in a cloud of steam and sparks. The red dress was reversible and Amarelle had practiced swapping it around by touch. Three seconds later she ran from the cloud of steam dressed in a black hooded robe. Shraplin, not at all encumbered by seventy-five pounds of fur, leather, and wooden claws, merrily activated the reinforced shock-absorbing leg coils Brandwin had cobbled together for him. He went leaping and howling across the crowd, turning alarm into panic and flight.
Twenty-two unplanned carriage or mechanavipede collisions took place in the next half-minute, locking traffic up for two blocks north of the initial accident. Amarelle didn’t have time to count them as she hurried north in Shraplin’s wake.
Another curiously defective carriage in the Nusbarq Desisko caravan cracked open, exposing its cargo of man-sized hives to the open air and noise. Thousands of Polychromatic Reek-Bees, scintillating in every color of the rainbow and fearful for the safety of their queens, flew forth to spew defensive stink-nectar on everything within buzzing distance. The faintest edge of that scent followed Amarelle north, and she regretted having eaten breakfast. Hundreds of people would be burning their clothes before the day was through.
All along the length of Prosperity Street, aural spells prepared in advance by Sophara began to erupt. Bold, authoritative voices ordered traffic to halt, passers-by to run, shops to close, citizens to pray for deliverance. They screamed about werejackals, basilisks, reek-bees, Cradlerobber Wasps, rabid vorpilax, and the plague. They ordered constables and able-bodied citizens to use barrels and carriages as makeshift riot-barricades at the major intersections, which some of them did.
Amarelle reached the alley after Ninefingers Way and found the package she’d stashed behind a rotten crate the night before. Soon she emerged from the alley in the uniform of a Theradane constable, captain’s bars shining on her collar, steel truncheon gleaming. She issued useless and contradictory orders, fomented panic, pushed shopkeepers into their stores and ordered them to bar their doors. When she met actual constables, she jabbed them with the narcotic prong concealed on the end of her truncheon. Their unconscious bodies, easily mistaken for dead, added a piquant verisimilitude to the raging disquiet.
At the northern end of Prosperity Street, a constabulary riot wagon commanded by a pair of uniformed women experienced another improbable accident when it came into contact with the open fire of a careless street fondue vendor. Brandwin and Sophara threw their helmets aside and ran screaming, infecting dozens of citizens with disoriented panic even before the rockets and canisters inside the wagon began to explode. For nearly half an hour pinkish-white arcs of sneezing powder, soporific smoke, and eye-scalding pepper dust rained on Prosperity Street.
Eventually, two parliament wizards had to grudgingly intervene to help the constables and bucket brigades restore order. The offices of Nusbarq Desisko and Sons were found to be empty and their records missing, presumably carried with them when they fled the city. The spring-heeled werejackal was never located and was assumed taken as a pet by some wizard or another.
“What do you mean, nothing happened?” Amarelle paced furiously in Iv
ovandas’ study the following day, having explained herself to the wizard, who had half-listened while consulting a grimoire that occasionally moaned and laughed to itself. “We closed the full length of Prosperity Street down for more than three hours! We stole the street from everyone on it in a very meaningful sense! The traffic didn’t flow, the riot barriers were up, not a scrap of commerce took place anywhere—”
“Amarelle,” said the wizard, not taking her eyes from her book, “I applaud your adoption of a more dynamic approach to the problem, but I’m afraid it simply didn’t do anything. Not the merest hint of any diminishment to Jarrow’s arcane resources. I do wish it were otherwise. Mind the hypnotic toads, as I’ve strengthened their enchantments substantially.” She snapped her fingers, and Amarelle was back on the lawn.
10. The Typographic Method
Sophara directed the next phase of their operations, resigning her place as mage-mixologist indefinitely.
“It was mostly for easy access to the bar anyway,” she said. “And they’d kiss my heels to have me back anytime.”
A studious, eye-straining month and a half followed. Sophara labored over spell-board, abacus, grimoire, and journal, working in four languages and several forms of thaumaturgical notation that made Amarelle’s eyes burn.
“I keep telling you not to look at them!” said Sophara as she adjusted the analgesic beret on Amarelle’s head. “You haven’t got the proper optical geometry! You and Brandwin! You’re worse than cats.”
Brandwin prowled libraries and civic archives. Amarelle broke into seventeen major private collections. Shraplin applied his tireless mechanical perception to the task of rapidly sifting thousands of pages in thousands of books. A vast pile of notes grew in Brandwin and Sophara’s house, along with an inelegant but thorough master list of scrolls, pamphlets, tomes, and records.
