“… but the wisest and cleverest thing would be to turn your bones to molten glass and take no chances. Alas, I need evidence of wrongdoing. Can’t just blast sanctuary tithers. People might stop giving us large piles of treasure for the privilege.”
“My business partners and I are engaged in boring, legitimate commerce,” said Amarelle.
“I know. I’ve been peeking up your skirts, as it were. Very boring. I thought we ought to have a final word, though. A little reminder that you should stay boring, or I can think of one story that won’t have a happy ending.”
The book slammed itself shut. Amarelle exhaled slowly, rubbed her eyes, and went back to work.
On the days wore, on the legitimate business went. The women began to move their vending carts more frequently, investing some of their profits in small mechanical equines to make this work easier.
With three months left in the contract, the carts that moved up and down Prosperity Street began to cross paths with carts from elsewhere in the city in a complicated dance that always ended with an unmarked High Barrens Reclamation Consortium wagon paying a quiet evening visit to one of the mansions they were excavating.
Another two months passed, and there was no spot on Prosperity Street that Amarelle or Sophara or Brandwin had not staked out at least temporarily, no merchant they hadn’t come to know by name, no constable they hadn’t thoroughly pacified with free food, good beer, and occasional gifts of books.
Three days before the contract was due to expire, a loud explosion shook the north end of Prosperity Street, breaking windows and knocking pedestrians to the curb. A mansion in a private court was found burning, already collapsing into itself. A huge black coach lay wrecked in the drive, its ghoul-cage wheels torn open, its roof smashed, its insides revealing nothing but well-upholstered seats and a carpeted floor.
The next day, Amarelle Parathis was politely summoned to the manse of the wizard Ivovandas.
16. Bottled Malady
“Am I satisfied? Satisfaction is a palliative,” said Ivovandas, gold-threaded teeth blazing with reflected light, butterflies fluttering furiously. “Satisfaction is mild wine. Satisfaction is a tiny fraction of what I feel. Delight and fulfillment pounding in my breast like triumphant chords! Seventy years of unprofitable disdain from this face-changing reprobate, and now his misery is mine to contemplate at leisure.”
“I’m so pleased you were able to crush him,” said Amarelle. “Did you manage to get home in time for your tea afterward?”
The golden wizard ignored her and kept staring at the glass cylinder on her desk. It was six inches tall and half as wide, capped with a ground-glass stopper and sealed with wax the color of dried blood. Inside it was wretched Jarrow, shrunken to a suitable proportion and clad in rags. He had reverted (or been forced into) the shape of a cadaverous pale man with a silver-black beard.
“Jarrow.” She sighed. “Jarrow. Oh, the laws of proportion and symmetry are restored to operation between us; my sustained pleasure balanced accurately against your lingering discomfort and demise.”
“So obviously,” said Amarelle, “you consider me to have stolen Prosperity Street in accordance with the contract?”
Jarrow pounded furiously against the glass.
“Oh, obviously, dear Amarelle, you’ve acquitted yourself splendidly! Yet the street is still there, is it not? Still carrying traffic, still hosting commerce. Before I retrieve your blue crystal, are you of a mind to indulge my former colleague and I with an explanation?”
“Delighted,” said Amarelle. “After all our other approaches failed, we decided to try the painstakingly literal. Prosperity Street is roughly 3,170 square yards of brick and stone surface. The question we asked ourselves was: Who really looks at each brick and each stone?”
“Certainly not poor Jarrow,” said Ivovandas, “else he’d not find his bottle about to join my collection.”
“We resolved to physically steal every single square yard of Prosperity Street, every brick and stone,” said Amarelle. “Which yielded three problems. First, how to do so without anyone’s noticing the noise and tumult of our work? Second, how to do so without anyone’s objecting to the stripped and uneven mess made of the street in our wake? Third, how to provide the physical labor to handle the sheer volume and tedium of the task?”
“To answer the second point first, we used the High Barrens Restoration Consortium. They carefully fished through the mansions you two have destroyed in your feud to provide us with all the bricks and stones we could ever need.
“A large hollow space was constructed beneath each of our vending carts, which we first plied up and down assorted city streets, not just Prosperity, for an interminable length of time to allay suspicion that they were directly aimed at Jarrow’s locus.”
Jarrow banged his head repeatedly against the inside of his prison.
“Eventually we felt it was safe to proceed with our real business. The rest you must surely have guessed by now. The labor was provided by Shraplin, an automaton, whose meeting with Jarrow left him very eager to bear any trouble or tedium in the cause of his revenge. Shraplin utilized tool-arms custom-forged for him by Brandwin Miris to dig up the bricks and stones of the actual street, and to lay in their place the bricks and stones taken from the High Barrens mansions. At night, the detritus he’d scraped up by day was dumped into the ruins of those same mansions. As for why nobody ever heard Shraplin scraping or pounding away beneath our carts, all I can say is that our magician is highly adept at the production of soundproof barriers to fit any space or need.
“All that was left to do,” said Amarelle, stretching and yawning, “was to spend the months necessary to carefully position our carts over every square foot of Prosperity Street. Nobody ever noticed that when we moved on, the patches of street beneath us had changed subtly from the hour or two before. Eventually, we pried up the last brick that was genuinely important, and Jarrow’s locus became just another city lane.”
“Help me!” Jarrow cried, his voice high and faint as a whisper in the wind. “Get me away from her! I can be him for you! I can be Scavius! I can be anyone you want!”
“Enough from you, I think.” Ivovandas slid his prison lovingly into a desk drawer, still smiling. She curled her fingers, and a familiar blue crystal appeared within them.
“You have suffered quite tenaciously for this,” said Ivovandas. “I give it to you now as my half of our bargain, fairly begun and fairly concluded.”
Amarelle took the glowing crystal and crushed it beneath her heel.
“Is that the end of it?” she said. “All restored to harmonious equipoise? I go on my way and leave you to your next few years of conversation with Jarrow?”
“In a manner of speaking,” said Ivovandas. “While I have dutifully disposed of the crystal recording from last year’s intemperate drunken visitation, I have just now secured an even more entertaining one in which you confess at length to crimes carried out in Theradane and implicate several of your friends by name.”
“Yes,” said Amarelle. “I did rather expect something like this. I figured that since I was likely to eat more treachery, I might as well have an appreciative audience first.”
“I am the most appreciative audience! Oh, we could be so good for one another! Consider, Amarelle, the very reasonable bounds of my desires and expectations. I fancy myself fairly adept at identifying the loci in use by my colleagues. With Jarrow removed, there will be a rebalancing of the alliances in our Parliament. There will be new testing and new struggles. I shall be watching very, very carefully, and inevitably I expect to have another target for you and your friends to secure on my behalf.”
“You want to use us to knock off the Parliament of Strife, locus by locus,” said Amarelle. “Until it’s something more like the Parliament of Ivovandas.”
“It might not happen in your lifetime,” said the wizard. “But substantial progress could be at hand! In the meantime, I’ll be quite content to let you remain at libe
rty in the city, enjoying your sanctuary, doing as you please. So long as you and your friends come when I call. Doubt not that I shall call.”
17. The Work Ahead
Amarelle met them afterward on the Tanglewing Bridge, in the pleasant purple light of fading sunset. The city was quiet, the High Barrens peaceful, no fires falling from the clouds or screeching things sinking claws into one another.
They gathered in an arc in front of Scavius’s statue. Sophara muttered and gestured with her fingers.
“We’re in the bubble,” she said. “Nobody can hear us, or even see us unless I … shut up, Scavius, I know you can hear us. You’re a special case. How did it go down, Amarelle?”
“It went down like we expected,” said Amarelle. “Exactly like we expected.”
“I told you those kinds of sorcerers are all reflexively treacherous bags of nuts,” said Sophara. “What’s her game?”
She wants us on an unpaid retainer so she can dig up the loci of more of her colleagues and send us after them.”
“Sounds like a good way to kill some time, boss.” Shraplin wound a crank on his chest, resynchronizing some mechanism that had picked up a slight rattle. “I could stand to knock over a few more of those assholes. She’d save us a lot of work if she identified the loci for us.”
“Couldn’t agree more,” said Sophara. “Now hold still.”
She ran her fingers through Amarelle’s hair, and after a few moments of searching carefully plucked out a single curling black strand.
“There’s my little spy,” said Sophara. “I’m glad you brought me that one Ivovandas planted on you, Am. I never would have learned how to make these things so subtle if I hadn’t been able to pry that one apart.”
“Do you think it will tell you enough?” said Brandwin.
“I honestly doubt it.” Sophara slipped the hair into a wallet and smiled. “But it’ll give me a good look at everything Amarelle was allowed to see, and that’s much better than nothing. If we can identify her patterns and her habits, the bitch will eventually start painting clues for us as to the location of her own locus.”
“Splat!” said Brandwin.
“Yeah,” said Sophara. “And that’s definitely my idea of a playground.”
“I should be able to get some messages out of the city,” said Jadetongue. “Some of the people we’ve got howling for our blood hate the Parliament of Strife even more. If we could make arrangements with them before we knock those wizards down, I’d bet we could buy our way back into the world. Theradane sanctuary in reverse, at least in a few places.”
“I like the way you people think,” said Amarelle. “Ivovandas as a stalking horse, and once we’ve got the goods on her we dump her ass in the river. Her and all her friends. Who’s got the wine?”
Jade held out the bottle, something carnelian and bioluminescent and expensive. They passed it around, and even Shraplin dashed a ceremonial swig against his chin. Amarelle turned with the half-empty bottle and faced Scavius’s statue.
“Here it is, you asshole. I guess we’re not as retired as we might have thought. Five thieves going to war against the Parliament of Strife. Insane. The kind of odds you always loved best. Will you try to think better of us? And if you can’t, will you at least keep a few pedestals warm? We might have a future as streetlamps after all. Have one on us.”
She smashed the bottle against his plaque, and they watched the glowing, fizzing wine run down the marble. After a few moments, Sophara and Brandwin walked away arm in arm, north toward Tanglewing Street. Shraplin followed, then Jade.
Amarelle alone remained in the white light of whatever was left of Scavius. What he whispered to her then, she kept to herself.
She ran to catch up with the others.
“Hey,” said Jade. “Glad you’re back! You coming to the Sign of the Fallen Fire with us? We’re going to have a game.”
“Yeah,” said Amarelle, and the air of Theradane tasted better than it had in months. “Hell yeah we’re going to have a game!”
Bradley Denton
World Fantasy Award and John W. Campbell Memorial Award-winner Bradley Denton was born in 1958, grew up in Kansas, and took an M.A. in creative writing from the University of Kansas. He sold his first story in 1984, and soon became a regular contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. His first novel, Wrack and Roll, was published in 1986, and was followed by Lunatics, Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede, Blackburn, and Laughin’ Boy. He’s perhaps best known for his series of “Blackburn” stories and novels about an eccentric serial killer, but he won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede, and his two-volume collection A Conflagration Artist and The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians won the World Fantasy Award as the year’s Best Collection. His stories have also been collected in One Day Closer to Death: Eight Stabs at Immortality. He lives in Austin, Texas.
In the wry, fast-paced comic thriller that follows, we learn that it’s not the instrument—it’s the music.
BAD BRASS
Bradley Denton
1. Lost in the Woods
With only a fragment of moon above, and surrounded by the twisted limbs of live oaks and Texas cedars, I wasn’t worried that the five thieves in the crooked house might spot me. For one thing, I was forty yards away in the woods. For another, it was late on Saturday night—1:30 A.M. Sunday morning, really—and my targets were seventeen-year-olds who were oblivious to anything that wasn’t on their smartphones or in their pants.
As far as I could tell, the most dangerous thing about them was the Hank Williams III country punk that blasted out every time the front door opened. These kids were poor excuses for crime kingpins, which was one reason I liked the idea of taking their ill-gotten gains. I doubted it would be much trouble for me, and maybe it’d be a learning experience for them. Win-win. Besides, if my ex-wife called me to come teach again next week, and if any of these kids happened to be in my class, then ace substitute Matthew Marx would have the pleasure of seeing the hangdog expressions on their pimply faces.
At the moment, though, I thought I needed a better look. Besides the scrap of moon, the available light consisted of off-white beams stabbing from the house windows and a custard-yellow glow from a bulb on the front porch. Not bad. But I had been watching with my folding binoculars for almost forty-five minutes, and I had realized I was too far away to have a good view when the money changed hands. Especially if it happened inside. I needed to be sure I could tell which kid took the cash—and whether that kid kept it, split it with the others, or stashed it.
I also wanted to see how much they collected. There wasn’t much point in tailing a teenager for a lousy hundred bucks … or in burglarizing this dump later if there was nothing inside but empty beer cans and Cheetos bags. I had been in that situation before, and I had been bitten by a previously undetected Chihuahua for my trouble. Then the Chihuahua had only sold for twenty bucks, which hadn’t been enough to cover my pain and suffering. I hoped he had ended up in a stir-fry.
That misadventure had taught me that appearances could be deceiving. The Chihuahua’s house had been a minimansion occupied by successful marijuana importers, yet it had yielded next to bupkis. This rural house with the crooked frame, in contrast, was little more than an oversized Dogpatch shack. It had once been a spiffy guest cabin on the third-largest ranch in Kingman County, but now it was old, ugly, and warped. Yet it might contain a heart of gold.
I had swiped the directions here from a smartphone belonging to a Kingman High football star named Donny. In the hallway before one of my classes, I had heard him brag to a friend about his off-season criminal enterprises. That was the advantage of being an old dude at a high school, and a substitute old dude at that. Unless I stood right in front of them and yelled in their faces, the kids didn’t even see me. And they ignored the school rule against phone use during class. So I could eavesdrop, or walk past their desks and read their texts, as if I
were a ghost.
Once I had the directions, some persistent Googling had revealed that the crooked house plus five acres currently belonged to the bidnissman-father of another high-school kid named Jared. I hadn’t laid eyes on that one at school, but I had figured out which one he was from my vantage point in the woods. Assuming Facebook photos didn’t lie.
It didn’t look as if Jared’s daddy was interested in mowing or other upkeep for this little country retreat. No doubt he’d bought the place as an investment before the latest real-estate bust. So now his seventeen-year-old heir had a clubhouse. And since the next occupied home was a half mile away, the club might as well indulge in some illegal activity.
I was pretty sure no hard drugs were involved, so I doubted that I needed to worry about assault weapons. Sure, this was Texas, so there might be a few shotguns or deer rifles inside. But I wasn’t too scared of anything that needed to be cocked between rounds.
I didn’t have a gun myself. I never do. Guns are a crutch for those who aren’t in good enough shape to run. I did have my Swiss Army knife, but that was just in case I needed a compact burglary tool.
And I didn’t think I would. So far, these kids didn’t seem bright enough to lock their doors.
2. Defective Merchandise
At 1:55 A.M. by my watch, a pair of headlights came toward the crooked house from the county road to the north, bouncing along the dirt-and-gravel driveway just east of my hiding place. I crouched behind a live-oak trunk until a grimy, rust-spotted white van with no side or rear windows passed by. This looked promising.
The van drove past a PT Cruiser, a Honda Civic, and a Ford pickup that were all parked in the grass on the other side of the driveway. It pulled off a wide patch of dirt at the end into the weed-tangled front yard, then backed up until its rear bumper was almost touching the porch steps. The rear doors opened.
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