Points of Departure

by Patricia C. Wrede

  He was turning a thin band of silver over in his quick fingers. He spoke, and Jehane jumped. He had a voice like the wrath of Acrilat on the icefield, terrible as an army with banners. That was the voice. The words did not precisely match it.

  “Snake, it’s just what I need,” he said. “It’s perfect.”

  “Yes,” said the taller woman. “It is perfect. And it is staying right here where some discerning customer can discover its perfection and pay for it and take it away and cherish it.”

  “I’ll bring it back tomorrow.”

  “It will be green,” said Snake. “It will be misshapen. It will be covered with cobwebs. That is, if it doesn’t disintegrate altogether and coat your lungs with silver and kill you and make Thyan impossible to live with. No. You can’t have it.”

  “All right, all right. How much?”

  “No, you don’t,” said Thyan.

  Snake looked at her over Silvertop’s head, and shrugged.

  “Too much, Silver,” she said. “If you will tell me precisely what is perfect about it, perhaps we can find you something else?”

  Jehane leaned back and pulled the door open again; the bells rang airily, and this time all three of them looked at her.

  “Hello, Nerissa,” said Thyan.

  “It’s Jehane,” said Jehane, resignedly.

  “I’m sorry. We haven’t seen any of you for some time. Is your family well?”

  Jehane grinned ferociously and said, “Yes, thank you.”

  “Come further in,” said Snake. “What can we help you with?”

  “I’m wet,” said Jehane.

  “I just waxed the floor,” said Thyan. “But don’t drip on the new brocade.”

  Jehane dripped across the shining floor to the counter, Cinnamon dogging her footsteps.

  “Would the little boy like to come help me unpack some bells?” said Thyan.

  “You can feed me,” said Cinnamon. “That keeps me quiet.”

  “I’ll feed him,” said Snake, coming around the counter. “This way, young one.”

  They disappeared through a door in the back of the shop, and Thyan turned back to Jehane.

  “I’m sorry to be a trouble,” said Jehane. “I don’t actually want to buy anything. I was told Master Silvertop might be here?”

  “Yes, he is,” said Thyan, looking at the young man. Silvertop had abandoned the silver bracelet for a pair of earrings; he piled them in one palm and stirred them around with the fingers of his other hand, and red and green sparks leapt out.

  “Silvertop,” said Thyan.

  Silvertop shook the earrings; they jingled pleasingly, and their delicate tremblers became an inextricable tangle.

  “Hey!” said Thyan, shaking his shoulder. Silvertop leaned comfortably into her arm and went on shaking the earrings.

  “Bubblehead!” said Thyan, at the top of her voice.

  “Hmmm?”

  “This is Mistress Benedicti, and she wants to speak to you.”

  Silvertop looked out of the circle of her arm at Jehane, with an expression of vague but cheerful inquiry. He had gray eyes, not the sometimes-gray sometimes-blue of Livia’s, but gray and pure as the rainy sky. Jehane, wet, footsore, bewildered, and tired to death, stared at him and said in her heart the ritual she had not had occasion to use these twenty years. Acrilat, thou art crueler to thy servants than to thy enemies; those who hate thee prosper and those who love thee suffer entanglements of the spirit. He was even more unsuitable than the young man she had gone to talk to Granny about.

  She cleared her throat. “I need to hire a wizard,” she said.

  “What for?” said Silvertop.

  “To make a revolution in Acrivain.”

  “Acrivain!” said Thyan. “That’s hundreds of miles away.”

  “Three thousand,” said Jehane.

  “Is it?” said Silvertop, intrigued. “That would be an interesting problem.”

  “Aren’t you Acrivannish?”

  “I might be,” said Silvertop.

  “You’ve never been there?”

  “I might have been.”

  “You don’t remember? You wouldn’t want to go back?”

  “Wizards,” said Thyan, with an indecipherable expression, “can’t cross water.”

  “Go there?” said Silvertop, disregarding this extraordinary statement. “Anybody could go there. I’d like to see it from here. Why a revolution?”

  “The ruling powers are enemies of my family, and we want to go home.”

  “I’m not sure about a revolution. I might be able to make them abandon their duties; for a little while, anyway. How long does it take to get to Acrivain?”

  “Four months,” said Jehane.

  “No…I could muddle their minds just before your arrival. I think the timing would be difficult, though.”

  “What about an earthquake?” said Jehane, who was suffering a serious disillusionment about the nature and power of wizards.

  “Well, if—”

  “That might kill somebody,” said Thyan.

  “So it might,” said Silvertop, sounding disappointed.

  Jehane said, “So would a revolution.”

  “Yes, I guess it would. We’d better think of something else, hadn’t we? Thyan? What happened to those brass bowls?”

  “I sold them,” said Thyan, in an extremely grim voice.

  Jehane looked down at her quickly. Thyan stared her straight in the face. Snake came back into the room, and Thyan immediately caught her eye.

  “He fell asleep,” Snake said. “What’s this about brass bowls?”

  “Mistress Benedicti wants to hire Silvertop’s services as a wizard,” said Thyan.

  “Good; you two can use the money.”

  “To make a revolution in Acrivain.”

  “Can Silvertop do that?” said Snake. Her eyes had not left Thyan’s; they were carrying on another conversation entirely.

  “He doesn’t think so.”

  “But he wants my brass bowls?”

  Thyan shrugged.

  “I could send illusions,” said Silvertop. “Of earthquakes, or revolution, or whatever you like. Would that cause enough confusion, do you think?”

  “It might,” said Jehane, cautiously. “I don’t know much about the situation in Acrivain.” They had no soldiers; but if Silvertop could send illusions of those, also, then perhaps—

  “Well, that’s easy to find out,” said Silvertop. “I’ve been wanting to try something like that. Then you can decide what you want done. You’d better come home with me.”

  “You can work here,” said Thyan.

  “He can?” said Snake.

  Silvertop seemed pleased but dubious. “I’ll need a lot of stuff from my rooms—”

  “We’ll help you carry it.”

  “Thyan!” said Snake.

  “We’ll use the roof.”

  “In this weather?” said Snake.

  “We’ll rig an awning. His roof leaks anyhow.”

  “Thyan,” said Snake.

  “I won’t let him bring the peacock,” said Thyan. Once again, they were conducting another conversation entirely under this one. There was a pause, and then Snake shrugged again.

  “Don’t you go near that acacia,” she said.

  “Word of honor,” said Thyan.

  “Silvertop,” said Snake.

  “Hmmm?”

  “This doesn’t seem very sound to me. It seems, in fact, politically naive in the extreme.”

  “First we’ll find out what’s going on over there,” said Silvertop. “Then we’ll see what to do about it. That’s cautious, isn’t it?”

  “For you,” said Snake.

  “How much will you want?” said Jehane.

  “I’ll know after I’ve done it,” said Silvertop, picking up the bracelet again.

  “No,” Snake told him.

  “You can give two levars to Snake,” said Thyan. “She’ll need it if we’re going to do this on the roof.”

 
“I hope not,” said Snake. “For two levars I could retile the entire roof and buy another acacia.”

  “Yes, you could,” said Thyan.

  “I’ll bring the money tomorrow,” said Jehane.

  “I hope you’re wrong,” said Snake to Thyan. “All right, children, run along. Take jackets.”

  Jehane got home just before midnight, lugging a somnolent Cinnamon. Livia, of course, had left the little side door open for her; and Livia, of course, interrogated her vigorously, if sleepily, when she came into their room. Granny, Livia said, had come and talked to Mother for a very long while, and Livia had heard Jehane’s name several times, though she had unaccountably failed to understand the gist of the conversation. But Jehane had been outwitting Livia for twenty-two years; and at breakfast the next morning, to which Jehane went sickly braced for an enormous battle with those whom she could not outwit, nobody said a word about it.

  A little consideration and some reluctant listening at doors made Jehane aware that both her parents were far too worried about her two remaining brothers to spare half a thought for any of their daughters. This made her task the more urgent, but also made it far easier to accomplish. She could come and go as she pleased, without dragging poor Cinnamon all over Liavek and making him fat into the bargain. She took a few hours the first morning after she hired Silvertop to follow Livia to an assignation, confront her, and extract, in exchange for her own silence, Livia’s promise not to tell their parents about Jehane’s absences and not to do anything stupid with or about the young man for at least a fiveday. She also apologized to Nerissa, whose diary Granny had returned, no doubt unread. Nerissa, as usual, shut her mouth and went away; but she smiled first.

  Jehane spent the next three days on Snake’s roof. It took Silvertop two of those days just to assemble what he wanted. Jehane began to feel like a pack camel. Snake or Thyan usually came along, and seldom carried very much. Silvertop seemed pleased to have them. In between collecting and arranging his pots of paint and his brass bowls and his mildewed draperies and dead branches and jars of early tadpoles, he asked Jehane hundreds of incomprehensible questions.

  For these two days, also, it rained. Jehane felt a great deal more as if she were playing with Nerissa and Deleon than as if she were accomplishing something; but she could think of nothing else to do, and The Magician and Verdialos, neither of whom appeared either mad or foolish, had sent her to Silvertop. She would see what he could do. And she appreciated having an excuse to see him.

  On the third morning the sun came out weakly. Jehane, still feeling a little strange at being out and about all by herself, bought a jug of kaf from a little stall on the Street of the Dreamers and carried it along to the Tiger’s Eye. Snake had made a sardonic remark about how much of hers they were drinking; and that really meant Thyan, who after all lived there, and Jehane, who didn’t. Silvertop did not drink kaf; he just periodically spilled it and drew diagrams on Snake’s roof with it. Thyan said despairingly that he was making an open-air spot smell exactly like his rooms. If his rooms smelled of equal parts of mildew, kaf, damp soil, and paint, she was right.

  “Good morning,” said Snake from behind the counter. She was always kind and courteous in the morning and became steadily more irate. Jehane could not blame her.

  “Thyan and Silvertop are up there already,” said Snake. “He seems to think that today may be his first attempt.”

  “I hope so,” said Jehane. “It’s urgent; and I’m sure you want us off your roof.”

  Snake bent over and extracted a shah board from under the counter. Then she yelped. “Does he have my soapstone shah pieces up there?”

  “Thyan told him he couldn’t have them,” said Jehane.

  “As well tell a camel not to spit,” said Snake. “Tell him to give them back or I’ll come up there and take them.”

  Silvertop received this threat unmoved. “She can have most of them, but I need the shahs.”

  “Silvertop, she’s very unhappy.”

  “I’ll go talk to her,” said Thyan, grabbed up a double handful of pieces, and departed.

  “You got blue paint on them,” said Jehane.

  “Hold this, please,” said Silvertop.

  “Silver, why is everything you use so wet?”

  “I have to see over three thousand miles of ocean,” said Silvertop, mildly put out. “And just as well, with all this rain.”

  The apparatus looked far worse in the sunlight. Jehane couldn’t believe it was really like that. Every time she looked at it she thought that either her eyes or her mind were failing her. She expressed this dilemma to Silvertop, trying to disregard the filthy tangle of string he had handed her.

  “Some of it isn’t exactly there,” said Silvertop, tying a knot and biting the end off neatly. Jehane feared for his health. “So it’s hard for you to see it.”

  “Bubblehead,” said Thyan, arriving at the top of the ladder. “Snake says today is the last day you spend on her roof, rifling her shop. She says this comes down tonight at moonrise.”

  “That’s plenty of time,” said Silvertop, “if I can have one more mirror. That ebony-backed one in the window would do. I need the comb, too.”

  Thyan came across the roof to them and patted him on the head. His hair was the color Deleon’s had been when he was a baby. Jehane looked away from them, first at the tangle of string, and then with a kind of tearful hilarity at the acacia tree in its huge tub, lavishly smothered in blurry yellow flowers: unaltered, but not especially comforting.

  Thyan said, “I’ll get you the mirror and comb from my room.”

  “That’s silver,” said Silvertop, dribbling blue paint onto his knot and frowning. “I need something that was alive.”

  “It’s ivory,” said Thyan. “Are you going to put blue paint on it?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Will ivory do?”

  “Are there elephants in Acrivain?” said Silvertop to Jehane.

  “No,” said Jehane.

  “All right, then,” said Silvertop.

  He tucked his head into the crook of Thyan’s arm and began rapidly disassembling a shiribi puzzle that Snake had given him yesterday in exchange for the return of six red glass jars. Jehane knew that Thyan would stay there, and that half an hour or half a day from now, he would ask her where the comb and mirror were. Then she would tell him what she thought of him, and he would be alert for about a quarter of an hour. It was a wonder Snake hadn’t murdered them both.

  At the third hour after noon, with a strong spring sun blazing down on their awning and making the concatenation of smells under it peculiar beyond belief, Silvertop professed himself ready to begin.

  They sat down in a row, Thyan, Silvertop, Jehane. Thyan held in her lap an incredible clutter of objects she was supposed to hand to Silvertop when he asked for them. Jehane had a pen and a jar of ink and a pile of pages from Snake’s ledger on which Thyan, or possibly Snake, had made mistakes in arithmetic. Silvertop seemed to think that using the blank sides of those would be better than using new paper. Jehane had no idea what she was supposed to write down, so it hardly mattered.

  Silvertop propped Thyan’s ivory mirror up against a brass chamberpot full of feathers. The comb had long since disappeared. Thyan had refused to give him the brush.

  “Don’t listen to this if you can help it,” said Silvertop. “I don’t want to send you to Acrivain.”

  Thyan muttered something on which Jehane chose to practice not listening.

  Silvertop put his hands on his knees and began to speak. His deep, rough-edged voice rolled out over the insane structure he had made like a concourse of bronze bells. He was speaking Acrivannish, or something like it. It was nursery rhymes, thought Jehane, forgetting not to listen. No, it was tables of multiplication; no, lists of trees and flowers and rocks and birds. Her hand wanted to write them down. She turned one of her pages over and read silently, “Four lengths of red silk, six brass sundials, two packets of jasmine, dried, four pa
ckets of jasmine flowers, preserved, twelve strings of wooden beads.”

  “There!” said Silvertop. “Jehane, what’s this?”

  Jehane looked at him. He was looking at the mirror. A pale blue light washed out of it, like the full moon on a field of snow. It gave his delicate face an unearthly and entirely too appropriate beauty.

  Jehane leaned over his shoulder, and saw in the mirror a long hall paved in white and hung with blue. It had high narrow windows along its length, through which came the blue light. Outside snow fell glittering from a cloudless sky. There was no fire in the hall. People in blue smocks and white trousers stood or sat about. Some of them rolled what might have been dice. There was no sound out of the mirror. Jehane could hear Thyan’s breathing, and the flap of the wind tugging at the awning, and a finch singing far away.

  “It’s the tower of Acrilat,” said Jehane, barely managing a whisper.

  “Who?” said Thyan, considerably louder; Jehane admired her pluck.

  “The god of Acrivain. It’s mad. I don’t think It wants you looking at It, Sil.”

  “What’s It going to think about our messing with Acrivain?” said Thyan. “You didn’t tell us about this.”

  “If you hadn’t looked right in Its front door, It probably wouldn’t have noticed,” said Jehane.

  “I looked right in Its front door,” said Silvertop, without taking his eyes off the mirror, “because It’s looking right into ours. It’s working in Liavek.” He held out his free hand to Thyan. “I need the peach.”

  Jehane never found out what he needed it for. The light from the mirror turned red, and then a hot white. Silvertop yelped and dropped the mirror. Jehane thrust her hand under it to prevent its breaking on the rooftop, and it seared the back of her hand like a splash of hot oil. Silvertop snatched at her wrist, the mirror fell and broke in a shower of glass and ivory, and Silvertop’s entire apparatus cracked and fluttered and flung itself about in the air.

  Nothing hit any of them. Almost everything landed right-side-up, and in considerably better order than in the apparatus itself. The exceptions were the awning and the blue paint. The awning drifted down onto the roof tiles like a sheet being spread over a bed—which in fact it had been, before Silvertop confiscated it—and the blue paint showered down over all of it and half Snake’s roof as well.