by Anne Nesbet
“For it does strike me,” said the man with the glinting ears, and he eyed the fingernails of his mighty right hand with great thoughtfulness as he said it, “that you and yours shouldn’t so much be in the markets of Bend. Should you, now? The wrinkled side of the river is no place for you lot. Time to leave, I’m thinking.”
“There is some confusion, then. Because the boy indisputably belongs to us,” said one of the gray men. “We’ve been looking for him for some days. His welfare concerns us greatly.”
What did that mean, anyway? Linny was taken aback, as well as indignant. Everyone seemed to be arguing over which of them had rights to Linny and Elias. It was highly unpleasant. She certainly did not belong to any of them. Perhaps you could argue she belonged to her parents, but even there, there were limits.
“Is that so?” said the enormous man. “My boy here belongs to you?”
The gray man laughed.
“Check the rules. When we catch a madji boy spying, he’s ours.”
Linny couldn’t help herself, she was so mad.
“Spying! How’s he a spy?”
It just burst out of her. She would have thought better of it, a moment later, but oh well. Done is done.
The gray people all turned to look in Linny’s direction. Their eyes were like icicles: sharp, pointy, and cold.
“Who’s that girl there, dressed up that way?” said the woman in gray. “Little girl, who are you? Here for the fair?”
“What fair?” said Linny, and it was as if those words just hung there suspended in the dusty air.
The crowd rumbled and whispered and shifted about on its many feet. That was when Elias shouldered himself in front of Linny (making it harder for her to see what was happening, to her annoyance), and stepped out beside the enormous man.
“She’s my sister,” he said. “Leave her alone.”
Sister! thought Linny. Well, all right. Under the circumstances.
The crowd sighed. Linny had the oddest sense of being on display, of performing some strange play that the people here had been awaiting for ages and ages. She knew about plays because in Lourka, the village liked to put on spectacles for itself, two times a year, midsummer and midwinter.
“Listen to the boy, you Surveyors,” said the huge man in the calmest of voices. “What this all means is simple enough: you should leave this square. Do you hear me? You’re on our side of the river. You’d best not stay here. No good can come of that.”
“You have no right!” said the gray man, and then he turned to Elias in particular. “Are you sure you know who your sister is, madji boy?”
At that point, some confusing things happened. The enormous man suddenly let go of Linny’s wrist, sent his hand darting into the pocket of his purple trousers to pull out—what were those things? Marbles or round stones? But before Linny had even processed that thought, he sent them flying through the air in the direction of the gray people.
Did those peculiar little spheres explode? Perhaps they did. Certainly they did something bad. There was dust. Voices screaming, in shock, in surprise, in pain.
The huge hand had already clamped itself back on Linny’s shoulder and was yanking her off to the side.
“Come,” said the enormous man. Not that he gave her a choice. He was simply too strong for Linny to resist.
“Hey!” said Elias, right ahead of Linny. The man was steering them both off to the left now, and Elias (being Elias) had tripped. But Elias had also (despite being Elias) managed to grab Linny’s travel bundles, when he scrambled back to his feet after tripping. That was good.
More shouts from the crowd in the square. What had the enormous man just done?
He was dragging them both right toward the wall behind them. Turning her head a moment, Linny saw, with a bitter pang, the glint of coins on the scrap of rug they had spread out. That was their coin money they were leaving! How would they ever get any food now? Beyond the rug, dust was still rising—and someone was holding his arm tight against his belly and howling. Linny could not help it; horror swamped her. Those little tiny rocks or pebbles or whatever they were had done something small but wrong to the world.
Linny tried to wriggle her way free from that enormous hand, but it was hopeless. They were already at the wall, and a door was opening there that had been completely, entirely invisible before.
“In we go,” said the enormous man. “Quick, now.”
They went into darkness and—Linny’s stomach gave the most peculiar twist—came through into light: another street, but without all the crowds of the market square they had just left.
The man looked around and smiled with satisfaction.
“A good mile away. That’ll do fine.”
Behind them, an entirely different wall. Linny glanced up at the sun, and felt the lines and angles falling into place in her mind.
“We aren’t where we were,” she said. “How did you do that?”
“Wasn’t me,” said the man. “Wrinkled rock, that wall’s made of. Brought down from the high country, back when the city was built. Or so they say. Not much of that sort of wrinkled magic left, around here.”
He eyed Linny, perhaps a little too intently. She frowned right back at him.
“Were those wrinkled rocks you threw at the gray people?” she asked, upset enough not to be cautious. Not that she had ever heard of stones doing anything so wrong feeling as what those spheres had just done in the market square.
“That’s enough,” he said. No, snapped. “Quiet. It’s time for us to go home. And for you, girl, to explain what made you put on such a costume, just now, and play such an instrument, when you say you’ve never heard of the fair. Was it the boy who told you to do this?”
“No, no,” said Linny automatically. But she was more confused than confident about anything that was happening. She had never been to such a bewildering place in all her life as this city was proving to be. Even the edge of Away had been simpler than anything here; for one thing, it hadn’t had all of these confusing people in it.
“Stop this!” said Elias, and he made his own feet stand still, so that the enormous man had to stop moving, too, or else just plain drag him along. “We’re not pretending to be anything. But who are you? What are you doing? Where are you taking us?”
“I am taking you someplace safe,” said the man. “They called you madji, so I’m taking you to a place hidden from Surveyors. There are parts of the city that have slipped off the grid, even as close to the Plain as we are, here by the river.”
“Explain what madji means,” said Elias. “We never heard the word before those people in gray grabbed me.”
“The madji fight for the wrinkled country,” said the enormous man. “They fight against gridding. Soon enough, if all goes as I think it may, they will be lobbing disorder bombs into the straight lines of the Plain. They do battle against Surveyors. In Bend the right-thinking people all honor the madji.”
“They’re fighting against the gray people?” said Elias. “I’m on the side of anyone who fights the gray people.”
The man laughed, a wondering laugh that ended in darkness, like a tunnel carved into the side of a hill.
“It is truly an astonishing day for me,” he said, “to find two blank strangers like you in our city, who have never heard of Surveyors or the madji. Now come along. We are far from where we were, but I would like us even farther and more hidden, before any Surveyors can wander along this way.”
Linny could see that that made sense to Elias. His whole face was beginning to relax again, around the edges. Linny was not ready to trust anyone yet, however.
“What’s your name?” she said. “Who are you?”
“I am most often called Rodegar Malkin,” said the man, and he paused to bow to her, which made Linny angry. Only someone being rude and mocking, she suspected, would bow like that to a person who had so very recently turned twelve. “In Bend they all know me, you will find, by one name or another. I am a businessman and a magic
ian. Like the madji, many a person in this city believes he has been waiting for you, little frown-faced girl, to arrive all his life. Or for the one you are pretending to be.”
“What do you mean by that?” said Elias, suspicious. “And what’s a magician?”
That was Linny’s secret question, too. Oh, she knew about magic—it was a word you could use for talking about the wrinkled things of this world. But she didn’t see how wrinkledness could somehow become a person.
The enormous man stopped suddenly, in front of a narrow house that leaned against other narrow houses in that street. It looked a little dirty and run-down, as houses go, but in this endless, sprawling village, it was hard to judge such things. Maybe everything in a city was supposed to be dirty and run-down. There was, however, a cat in the window, Linny noted with approval.
“In through this door, young blank strangers,” said Rodegar Malkin as he turned a large key in the lock, “who come from wrinkled places, but don’t know what a magician is! I will explain what I mean. Or perhaps you will explain everything to me. You should be able to explain something to me, seems like, if you are truly the girl with the lourka.”
10
IN THE HOUSE OF THE MAGICIAN
The house began with a dark hall that smelled slightly of licorice and boots. Linny had a vague impression of many thick coats hanging on pegs and piles of boxes, but her eyes were still adjusting to the dimness and could not be very helpful just yet. And then the enormous man flung open the door at the end of the hall, and Linny and Elias tumbled into the most peculiar room either of them had ever seen.
A hundred oddly shaped glass windows interrupted the room’s far wall—a crazy quilt of windows, as if some enormous window had been accidentally shattered into pieces and each piece, instead of falling to the ground and being swept up, tossed onto a rubbish heap, and forgotten, had instead stubbornly insisted on becoming a window itself, in its own right. Some of the glass had a mild tint to it; some of it was rippled; some gave teasing glimpses of what looked like an actual tree out in the courtyard beyond; and through all of that motley glass, the city sunlight cascaded, dappling everything and making Linny blink.
The cat Linny had seen in the front window slithered through her legs and into a patch of particularly radiant light, right beside an ancient armchair in which someone had heaped yet another pile of ratty old coats. It was a peculiar sort of cat—sandy yellow on the left side of its body, but all smooth silver-gray fur on the other. It had a gold eye on the sandy side of its face, good for staring with, and an inscrutable silver one that seemed to be full of its own private thoughts on the other side. Perhaps it had come down from the hills, thought Linny. It was so unmistakably a wrinkled cat. It was oddness itself, padding its way through the world.
“We are off their grid here,” said Rodegar Malkin when he saw Linny looking at the cat. As if that were an explanation. Then he stamped his huge foot against the floor so hard the many odd-shaped windows rattled in their frames (and Linny and Elias jumped a few inches into the air). “MA! STRANGERS!”
“Speak up when you talk to me,” complained the pile of coats on the chair, and to Linny’s surprise, the pile of coats unfolded itself and became a tiny, withered old person, with pale eyes and a halo of bright red hair sticking straight out from her face.
The red of her hair was not the sort of red that people are sometimes born with. It was infinitely brighter than that.
“And who are these kiddies?” said the wrinkled old person in a plaintive voice. “I can smell them, you know. In from the woods, are they? Hungry, probably? Come here and let me see your faces, you!”
“Ma can’t see so well,” said the magician, and he gave Linny and Elias a shove toward the ratty chair.
“Stop telling lies about me!” said the old woman, her fingers greedily reaching out for Linny’s face. “I can smell them, you know. Lies!”
“Doesn’t hear so good, either,” said the magician.
The ancient old person’s fingers were cool and quick, as they scurried across Linny’s cheeks and took the measure of her eyes and nose. They were cleverer fingers, thought Linny, than the ancient, complaining person they now belonged to.
“Rodegar, this one is hungry. Isn’t this one hungry?”
The old woman gave Linny’s ear a little pull.
“Yes,” said Linny. “We were going to buy pasties.”
And medicines for Sayra—but she didn’t say that aloud. Someone as good at sneaking around as Linny knew better than to tip her hand too soon. Oh, but she was still sad about the coin money left behind in the square.
“What’s that?” said the old woman. “What’s she saying? She’s hungry. I can smell it. And the other one’s hungry, too. Kiddies is always hungry. Feed them, Rodegar. I’m napping.”
And she flopped back into a heap in the armchair and began to snore.
Rodegar Malkin made Elias and Linny sit at a wooden table in that strange-windowed room and brought them bread, which surprised Linny by being not bread-colored inside, but white, and also a slab of yellow cheese. Not as tasty as Lourkan cheese, but still pretty good. There was also an apple each, the green, tangy kind, and a few pieces of some kind of dried meat that needed a lot of chewing but was pleasantly salty if you could stand it.
They were really very hungry. They ate and ate. And while they ate, the magician took their bundles, and went through them, piece by piece.
Linny squawked about that, but the enormous man gave her a look that was very nearly as impressive as his fist, and she shut up again. The price of the food they were eating was apparently letting him examine their stuff.
Not that they had much. Soon there were little heaps of things on the table. The cookpot, blacker than it had been, but still perfectly functional. He put the flint in it, and the tin cups, and their pocket-knives—everything that had brought them safely through the wild places. Then there was a second pile of dirty clothes and the filthy blanket and unspeakably awful socks. And the lourkas, of course, which he set to the side with great care. Only the little bag of things Linny’s mother had sent along missed his scrutinizing eyes, and that was because Linny was still wearing it around her neck, tucked away safely beneath her dress.
When he had examined everything to his satisfaction, he creaked back in his chair and looked at Linny.
“So, you. Who are you, strange girl? How’d you come by this instrument of yours? Who told you to wear such a dress, if you don’t know about the fair?”
“She made the lourka herself,” said Elias, taking Linny by surprise. “And it’s good. She shouldn’t have done such a wicked thing, but you can’t say she hasn’t got the talent for it.”
“And you say what, girl? What’s your name, anyway? I told you mine, and fair’s fair, you’ll agree.”
“I’m Elias, and she’s Linnet,” said Elias.
“Down from the hills, you two, obviously.”
“Yes.”
“Come down just now, for some reason.”
Elias and Linny looked at him. They weren’t sure how to explain themselves and (in Linny’s case, at least) weren’t even sure whether this astonishing person was someone you really should be explaining yourself to.
“Coming down from the hills right in time for the fair! To lead the revolution, maybe, am I right?”
He was staring at them very intently now, as if all the earlier questions had been for practice, and now he was reaching the crux of the matter.
“What’s that mean?” said Linny, squirming a little under the magician’s gaze.
“Taking things over. Changing things. Getting rid of the Surveyors forever. I’m in that noble business myself, you might say. Where would the madji get their weapons, if it weren’t for me?”
(Was that what a magician was? Someone who sold weapons?)
“Getting rid of the Surveyors sounds good to me,” said Elias in an almost inaudible mumble.
“Indeed,” said the magician. He stayed very c
alm, though. Unnervingly calm. He just stared and stared with those thoughtful eyes.
Linny popped right up out of her chair.
“Excuse me, but we’re not taking anything over. That’s ridiculous. That makes no sense. We are only twelve. I’m here to find medicines for someone who needs them. For my friend. There are supposed to be medicines, down in the Plain. And aren’t we near the Plain here?”
“Our friend,” said Elias. “We’re here to help our friend, and I’m not twelve. I am thirteen.”
“So old as that,” said the magician. He cut himself a piece of the yellow cheese and ate it, his eyes never quite leaving Linny’s face. “Sit down, young Linnet. We have only a few minutes here, before I’m off to chat with the madji. To tell them the good news.”
“What good news?” said Linny.
“You claim to be the Girl with the Lourka, yes?” said the magician. “Their hero and their emblem, you know, and et cetera and so forth. And you look astonishingly genuine, which is a pleasant change around here. The actual, real Girl with the Lourka! I’d say that counts as news.”
“I’m not claiming anything,” said Linny.
“You come into Bend with a lourka in your hands and those clothes on your body? That’s a claim, I think. Look! Explain that, girl from the hills.”
And he pointed with his enormous hand over Elias’s and Linny’s heads, to something on the wall behind them.
They turned around in their chairs and stared.
There was an old painting on the wall, with ancient, gold-tasseled velvet curtains framing it.
“Hey!” said Elias. It was his turn to jump to his feet. “How’d you do that?”
Linny couldn’t jump or speak, however. Anything she might say stuck like a bone in her throat.
The painting was of a girl of sixteen or seventeen or so, standing. She had dark hair, the same color as Linny’s own and wavy at the ends, and her eyes looked right at you, wherever you were in the room, the way eyes in paintings sometimes do. Her dress had a red skirt with striped patterns on it, a blue vest, and silver buttons, not to mention the leaves and vines embroidered up and down the sleeves that must have taken somebody’s mother weeks to do. She had a tiny dark mole right there on her cheek, and another under her ear, and in her hand was a lourka. Not just any lourka, but the lourka Linny knew best in the world, because she herself had made it. Even the little linny flower she had worked into the wood was there, with its five pale petals.