Points of Departure

by Patricia C. Wrede

  I ate the porridge, secured a jug of very strong black tea, and went back up to Verdialos’s room with designs upon the curtains that were never fulfilled. In clearing up the stacks of notebooks I had piled on the floor, I began leafing through them again, in the daze a certain degree of tiredness can cause. And I found that Verdialos kept two journals. The one I had found first was, shall we say, the heart’s gloss upon the mind’s text; this one just told what had happened.

  It was still rather difficult to make out. Why Gorodain had chosen to assassinate those particular six wizards was not clear; Verdialos was more concerned with how he had done it. Perhaps it was just the challenge of the method; that’s a philosophy not alien to the new Green order. Gorodain had killed those wizards, yes; but not with his hands, and not merely through some spell. Through the spell, he had induced somebody else to do it. A toymaker named Quard. And he had meant those six to be the first of many; maybe, though Verdialos seemed to fear more than to know this, the first of all.

  On a page by itself Verdialos had written, much more clearly than he usually did, “Quard to Gorodain, ‘Death serves no man’s wish, nor does it wear one face. Death is particular to all it touches.’” On the next page, he had scribbled, again by itself, “Quard to Jemuel, ‘Justice is another thing entirely.’” I hunted about for the first journal, and found again a passage that had especially puzzled me. “If it serves no man’s wish,” Verdialos had scrawled, “then it will serve mine no more than Gorodain’s. But if it is indeed particular to all it touches, then might it not serve my particular wish while disdaining any scheme for the world’s dissolution? Have all of us in the Green order indeed been condemned by that we seek, or might our modest plans still meet approval? I suppose time will tell. We strive to choose our deaths; that death might choose or spurn us we have not thought of.”

  I went back to the mind’s journal, and read, “I have quarreled with Etriae for the first time in thirteen years. She will not come with me to talk to Quard. I am afraid to go, not for the obvious reason but because he has so very sharp a tongue. I do not know the latitudes of his choice or the climate of his heart—supposing after all this time it is other than icy. I remind myself that he seemed fond of children. What he would not do for me, or even against Gorodain, he may possibly do for Nerissa. Etriae is not afraid, and therefore she will not come. Matters have been so easy these last years; this is no doubt a salutary lesson in the true difficulties from which we study to extricate ourselves gracefully. I am going tomorrow. I trust he will be —”

  And that was the last page of the book. Nothing had been torn out. He must have found some blank pages in some other and continued on. I rummaged for a long time, but found nothing. I supposed it might be at the house in the Street of Flowers. I drank the last of the tea and scratched my sleeping cat between the ears. If Gorodain had made Quard kill six wizards, could he have made him—no, not without his luck; I kept forgetting. Besides, Verdialos had thought of going to see Quard, and had apparently not seen him since they met over Gorodain’s arrest. Nobody had sent Quard anywhere. But the lack of apparent cause was the same in Verdialos and Etriae’s deaths as in the wizards’. I opened the heart’s journal again and looked at the end. Quard. A toyshop near Wizard’s Row. As an address, it was about as useless as could be imagined.

  Restoration Eve

  I went out anyway. It was early evening, a golden one piling up with blue clouds in the east, and a very sharp wind. I went back inside and borrowed Etriae’s sheepskin jacket, and Floradazul spotted me as I opened the front door and insisted on coming too. When I bent and tried to push her back inside she jumped on my shoulder and settled, purring. She was a great deal heavier in her second life than she had been in her first, and had fish on her breath. I took her along anyway. Her basket was at my parents’ house, but I remembered we were getting on for Festival Night, and Liavekans might do anything. A large and protective cat might be just the thing.

  The streets were crammed, the alleys filled to their walls; even the small pathways and side turnings that Deleon and I had discovered long ago held clots of people drinking, or dancing, or dicing, or playing music, or having races with blackbeetles, or all at once. Some of them had built bonfires. From every pillar and balcony blue streamers snapped in the wind and blue lanterns shot shaky bars of light like moonshine over the moving faces and the walls of houses. Nobody paid me any mind. I got to the Street of Scales with no mishap, and walked along it to Healer’s Street. Wizard’s Row was not there, of course; but I trudged up and down all the streets around where it would be, and found not a single toyshop. I wondered if Wizard’s Row had gotten absent-minded and taken some neighboring buildings with it. I watched the long deep light of evening turn Bregas Street into something cozy and minute, and thought.

  I did not know how Wizard’s Row disappeared; I did not know if it took more effort to keep it elsewhere or to make it vanish every time someone undesirable appeared, and then put it back again. If the latter, perhaps I could send Floradazul to find it. I went along to the Lane of Olives and slipped in the side door of the Desert Mouse, bumping my head on its low lintel and wondering if Deleon had ever done so. The players’ room was empty. I was missing the play. I sat down at Deleon’s table, which had laid ready on it a red hat, a tambourine, and a wreath of firethorn. Then I looked at my cat, who was sniffing Calla’s clove water and wrinkling up her whiskers at it. I unfocused my eyes at the wall with its fans and gongs and old cloaks, and thought of the way we had come, and of Wizard’s Row where it ought to be, remembering the smell of damp brick and dry grass and potboil and beer and camel. Floradazul, much as she had done before, shook herself and dashed out the door. I closed it, and leaned back in my brother’s chair, and went with her.

  Wizard’s Row was there, though I deduced this mostly by a strong and peculiar smell I had never encountered before, but that Floradazul associated with snails and strange cats. She had followed Jehane there once, and been fed snails. I had to let her wander at this point, not knowing what the street with the toyshop might smell of. I considered glue, and sawdust, and paint and cloth. Floradazul trotted around a corner and stopped suddenly, looking upward. Over a shut door in a narrow storefront there hung a dancing puppet. It kicked twice in the wind, which was what had caught her eye; and then stilled absolutely, although the wind still ruffled Floradazul’s fur and whirled the dry leaves in the little street. She went on looking at the sign, in case it might jerk again; she twitched her nose, and again there was that most potent and peculiar smell. I wondered if cats could smell magic. I got up in a hurry and followed her.

  She greeted me with a happy chirrup, but refused to come any nearer than she was to the shop in question. I raised my hand to knock, and then shrugged and pushed the door open. Nobody was there, so I went in. It was almost dark outside, but there were lamps lit in here.

  The store was much larger than it had seemed from the outside, and though a little dusty it did not look neglected. It was full of dolls and wooden blocks and houses and cloth animals and shiribi puzzles and painted miniature things and puppets. Behind the counter sat a life-sized puppet, its long arms leaning among a scattering of paint pots, a brush appealingly held in one clever hand. It was finished except for the eyebrows and the hair; with those, indeed, it would be alarmingly lifelike. I thought it would be heavy to maneuver; and what a large theatre one would need for a whole group of them. I moved a step further to see if its pale skin was porcelain or painted wood, and it raised its head and looked at me with eyes as green as olives.

  My lungs wanted to gasp and my throat to shriek, but for a mercy all I did was stand there like a threatened rabbit, quivering just a little. It was not a puppet at all, but a person; and yet what was petrifying was that even looking at me and breathing, he still seemed like something living inside a made body, not like a person who cannot get out whether he will or no.

  “Master Quard?” I said, not very loudly.

  “I’m so
rry, the shop is closed,” he said. He had a nice voice, but it was all in the way his throat was made, not in the force of who used it or how he felt. “Ersin ais Tairit, down by the docks, sells a very nice line of wooden boats and animal puppets.”

  “I don’t want to buy any toys.”

  “That’s fortunate,” he said. After that first appalling moment, he had not looked at me; he was painting the face of a small wooden doll dressed in green, very delicately. “There are far more comfortable places not to buy toys. A good Festival to you.”

  “Sir, my name is Nerissa Benedicti, and I want —”

  He looked up. Other than that, his face did not alter, but his voice did. It was less pleasant but more human. He said, “Verdialos said you were a child.”

  “He thinks of me as one, I expect.”

  “Say rather he knows my weaknesses.”

  “He knows everybody’s, sir. But truly, he doesn’t count things as ordinary people do.”

  Quard smiled, neither pleasantly nor cruelly. “No. No, he does not, not now.”

  “Do you know how they died?”

  “You might say so.” He had bent his gaze on the toy again.

  “Did it hurt them very much?” I said, without in the least wanting to.

  “I didn’t ask them,” said Quard. “Very likely it did. It’s in the nature of things.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “They called death,” said Quard, “and death came.”

  “It isn’t supposed to be that easy.”

  “It isn’t,” said Quard. “Never think so.”

  “It isn’t supposed to be that easy for them,” I said, very angrily.

  “Young lady,” Quard said, not as most people use the words, but as if they meant “Beloved sister”—and why I of all people should make that of all comparisons I truly don’t know. Quard said, in his gentle, unkind voice, “You want to know what it is like. You need simile as others need—what they need. But it is not like anything. There is nothing about it to make grasping it one hair easier.” He ran a finger over the bare skin where he should have had eyebrows. He had the stare of the near-sighted, but I did not believe there was anything wrong with his vision. The dense green of his eyes made it hard to think.

  I swallowed, and said, “Well, how did they die?”

  “Somebody else called death too late, and death did not come,” said Quard, with no expression at all. “Death, having not a conscience, maybe, but a way of counting, came for these two who called a little too soon.”

  “How do you know?”

  He reached under the counter and took out a folded paper. On it was a large blob of green wax imprinted with a seal, a V and E together. It was whole. Scrawled under the seal in Verdialos’s wildest writing were Jemuel’s name and title. “This is from Verdialos,” Quard said. “I think you had better tell Jemuel where you got it.”

  I opened my mouth to ask how he knew I was in trouble with Jemuel, and stopped. “He ought to be dead,” she had said of Gorodain; not as a judgment for what he had done, but as an explanation of why he could not have left Crab Isle. Gorodain had induced Quard to kill the wizards. Gorodain, some of the stories said, had killed someone who had not remained dead. Wizards, Verdialos had said flatly, cannot bring back the dead; that is for the gods alone, and not all of them. Gorodain had tried to contrive the death of the world, and Quard had said to him, Death is particular to all it touches. I did not know precisely what Gorodain had done; but I knew whom I was talking to. I wondered what ways of counting he had, how the laws of his addition worked. He had taken two for one; for a very great one. Would he take three? I put my hand out for the paper, and did not ask him.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “We’ll meet again,” he said. He looked at me and smiled. It was a frightening smile precisely because it was entirely human while his eyes were not. This was the face that death had worn for Etriae and Verdialos. “Not soon,” he said, “as time passes. I am young myself, you know, in time. And my heart is not icy.”

  “Goodbye,” I said.

  Restoration Day

  I had been longer in the shop than seemed reasonable; it was very dark, the sky was sown with stars, and the last hurrah of the fireworks was drowning them momentarily in green and red and yellow and white, when we stepped onto Bregas Street.

  I thought of taking the paper to Jemuel, in case she was still brooding in her office; but she would be furious at having had her time wasted. I looked vaguely around for a messenger, but even if I had found a willing one, they were probably all drunk. Jemuel would have to wait until the new year.

  They were still celebrating at the House of Responsible Life. Calla was there, only mildly reproachful, with everybody except Deleon and Aelim. She found me some sweet Tichenese wine that did not cause sneezing but in time made for great drowsiness, and Floradazul and I went upstairs and slept under Verdialos’s table, with Etriae’s jacket for softness.

  Floradazul bit my nose rather hard at eight in the morning, and I was very stiff, so I got up. There was a vast silence over the entire House, and a disorder that looked like the aftermath of a hurricane. I righted two chairs and carried an armful of pewter goblets out to the kitchen, noticing that although everything had been brought out from the cupboards and nothing whatsoever put away, very little was actually broken. I picked up a broom in the kitchen, brought it out to the entry room, where people had been spilling sugar, and stopped. I leaned the broom against the wall, and creaked outside, and heard only a lark high up in the cold sky. Floradazul was complaining in a mild way about breakfast.

  She complained a great deal more before we got to the Street of Flowers. We met nobody, not a City Guard, not a stray cat. Etriae and Verdialos’s house stood like a column of stone in a field of blooming trees. I rather liked the effect. I pushed open the green bronze gate in the brick wall and stood looking at the front garden. Etriae had planted whitegrass, which keeps its shape all winter and looks like a ghost grass; and firethorn, that holds its leaves and berries through the cold; and juniper, that is exactly the same dusty green all the time. The ordinary grass was still green and the patch of mint was making one last attempt to bloom. Another frost would stop all that. I went up the walk, trailed by a very loud cat.

  One of the six square panes of glass in the window to the right of the door was broken; the bits must be on the floor inside. Somebody had left a stack of coppers on the brick sill. It is entirely possible that Liavekans are the only people in the world who behave better on their holidays than at other times. Or perhaps Verdialos and Etriae just had good neighbors.

  I opened the door and went in. Etriae used lemon oil for cleaning; I could smell that, and drying herbs, and, when I put my head into the kitchen, a lingering aroma of coffee. I went back to the front room, looking for what had broken the window. Floradazul darted under a hammock chair and sent a red wooden ball rolling across the floor. I left her rattling it madly about the room and climbed the stairs, past the snowflake window in improbable purple on the first landing, and the room Verdialos and Etriae had slept in, on up to the little rooms under the roof with their slanting ceilings. The rest of the house had been cold, but up here the sun was coming in the back windows.

  There were two peony trees in terracotta pots in one room, and three in the other. It looked as if somebody had stuck a number of interestingly-shaped sticks into the dirt, like children playing at gardening. But rosebushes are just the same. When you water them they burst out in leaves. I pushed a finger into the soil of the nearest pot. Yes, Etriae had been watering them, and trusting that she would be able to put them outside before they outgrew their pots. I hoped Wind would be a mild month this year.

  I sat on the floor. If I watered those peony trees, I would be lost. I was still very angry with Verdialos and Etriae. They had in fact killed themselves; they had left me quite deliberately, in such a way that I must run about Liavek seeking how. They had made a joke meant to be seen through. And
still I could think of no other reason than that they thought I would be better out of my parents’ house. That was rank folly. They had been happy, I thought; they had work they liked and friends: they could have waited. They ought to have waited until I solved my problems myself; I’d have gotten around to it. I needed them to provide, not a roof over my head, but a shelter for my spirit.

  And that, I thought, had been a responsibility. What business had they abandoning it? They had shunted off on me their house, their work, their abominable peony trees. I stood up. And, of course, myself. Oh, they were so clever; it was as good as a poem. But I was still angry. If I were leaning on them too heavily, surely there was some less final way of disentangling themselves?

  I leaned on the wainscoting and watched the new sun shine on Liavek, striking a remote glint on the Levar’s Palace and gilding Old Town like one of the little houses in Quard’s shop. The tiled roofs of my neighborhood curved along like some strange red sea. They wanted to die, I thought. Despite any of this, truly they did. So when the moment seemed right to them in any case, they changed their plan and they did it. With a great deal of care, planning, and perfect good cheer. Still, why change the plan, and cause a scandal for the House of Responsible Life? I thought of Calla, who had been made not to meddle; of the Serenities, who worried perhaps too much about what Liavek thought of them; of myself, who, confronted with Verdialos and Etriae dead as they had first planned, in some abandon of pleasure, might have thought them no different from Lerre ola Advar. I thought that there were probably others in the House who might have needed some shock or some adjustment. I thought very briefly of Death, whose heart was not icy. But I was still, faintly, angry with them. And I thought, suddenly, if I were to kill myself, who would be angry with me? Deleon, Calla, Jehane, perhaps Aelim, certainly Livia. Not so many in the usual manner of counting, but a multitude in another.