There was a high-pitched sound of shattering glass. Something large and wet and dead hit the floor next to the bar, followed by a shower of skylight fragments and glowing rain. Grask squawked for a house magician to unmake the mess while the exodus quickened around him.
“Ahhh, nice to be off duty.” Sophara sipped unsteadily from a tumbler of something blue and uncomplicated. The bar had cut her off from casting her own spells into drinks.
“You know,” said Amarelle, slowly, “maybe someone really should go up there to the High Barrens and tell that old witchy bitch to put a leash on her pets.”
The room, through her eyes, had grown softer and softer as the noisy night wore on and had now moved into a decidedly impressionist phase. Goldclaw Grask was a bright smear chasing other bright smears across the floor, and even the cards on the table were no longer holding still long enough for Amarelle to track their value.
“Hey,” she said, “Sophara, you’re a citizen in good standing. Why don’t we get you made a member of Parliament so you can make these idiots stop?”
“Oh, brilliant! Well, first I’d need to steal or invent a really good youth-binding,” said the magician, “something better than the three-in-five I’m working now, so I can ripen my practice for a century or two. You might find this timeline inconvenient for your purposes.”
“Then you’d need to find an external power locus to kick up your juice,” said Brandwin.
“Yes,” said Sophara, “and harness it without any other hazard-class sorcerers noticing. Oh, and I’d also need to go completely out of my ever-fucking head! You have to be a dead-eyed dirty-souled maniac to want to spend your extended life trading punches with other maniacs. Once you’ve seized that power, there’s no getting off the merry-go-round. You fight like hell just to hold on or you get shoved off.”
“Splat!” said Brandwin.
“Not my idea of a playground,” said Sophara, finishing her drink and slamming the empty glass down emphatically.
An instant later there was a horrendous shattering crash. A half ton of dark-winged something, its matted fur rain-wet and reeking, plunged through the skylight directly overhead and obliterated their table. A confused blur of motion and noise attended the crash, and Amarelle found herself on the floor with a dull ache between her breasts.
Some dutiful, stubborn fraction of her awareness kicked its way to the surface of the alcoholic ocean in her mind, and there clutched at straws until it had pieced together the true sequence of events. Shraplin, of course—the nimble automaton had shoved her aside before diving across the table to get Sophara and Brandwin clear.
“Hey,” said Amarelle, sitting up, “you’re not drunk at all!”
“That was part of my cheating, boss.” The automaton had been very nearly fast enough, very nearly. Sophara and Brandwin were safe, but his left leg was pinned under the fallen creature and the table.
“Oh, you best of all possible automatons! Your poor foot!” Brandwin crawled over to him and kissed the top of his brass head.
“I’ve got three spares at home,” said Shraplin.
“That tears it,” muttered Amarelle, wobbling and weaving back to her feet. “Nobody drops a gods-damned gargoyle on my friends!”
“I think it’s a byakhee,” said Brandwin, poking at the beast. It had membranous wings and a spear protruding from what might have been its neck. It smelled like old cheese washed in gangrene and graveyard dew.
“I think it’s a vorpilax, love,” said Sophara. She drunkenly assisted her wife in pulling Shraplin out from under the thing. “Consider the bilateral symmetry.”
“I don’t care what it is,” said Amarelle, fumbling into her long black coat. “Nobody drops one on my card game or my crew. I’m going to find out where this Ivovandas lives and give her a piece of my mind.”
“Haste makes corpses, boss,” said Shraplin, shaking coils and widgets from the wreckage of his foot. “I was just having fun with you earlier.”
“Stupid damn commerce-murdering wizards!” Goldclaw Grask arrived at last, with a gaggle of bartenders and waiters in train. “Sophara! Are you hurt? What about the rest of you? Shraplin! That looks expensive. Tell me it’s not expensive!”
“I can soon be restored to prime functionality,” said Shraplin. “But what if I suggested that tonight is an excellent night for you to tear up our bill?”
“I, uh, well, if that wouldn’t get you in trouble,” said the goblin, directing waiters with mops toward the growing puddle of pastel-colored rainwater and gray ichor under the beast.
“If you give it to us freely,” said Sophara, “it’s not theft, and none of us break our terms of sanctuary. And Shraplin is right, Amarelle. You can’t just go berate a member of the Parliament of Strife! Even if you could safely cross the High Barrens in the middle of this mess—”
“Of course I can.” Amarelle stood up nearly straight and, after a few false starts, approximately squared her shoulders. “I’m not some marshmallow-muscled tourist, I’m the Duchess Unseen! I stole the sound of the sunrise and the tears of a shark. I borrowed a book from the library of Hazar and didn’t return it. I crossed the Labyrinth of the Death Spiders in Moraska TWICE—”
“I know,” said Sophara. “I was there.”
“… and then I went back and stole all the Death Spiders!”
“That was ten years and an awful lot of strong drinks ago,” said Sophara. “Come on, darling, I mixed most of the drinks myself. Don’t scare us like this, Amarelle. You’re drunk and retired. Go home.”
“This smelly thing could have killed all of us,” said Amarelle.
“Well, thanks to a little luck and a lot of Shraplin, it didn’t. Come on, Amarelle. Promise us you won’t do anything stupid tonight. Will you promise us?”
5. Removing All Doubt
The High Barrens, east of Tanglewing Street, were empty of inhabitants and full of nasty surprises from the battle in progress. Amarelle kept out of the open, moving from shadowed arch to garden wall to darkened doorway, stumbling frequently. The world had a fragile liquid quality, running at the edges and spinning on previously unrevealed axes. She was not drunk enough to forget that she had to take extra care and still far too drunk to realize that she ought to be fleeing the way she’d come.
The High Barrens had once been a neighborhood of mansions and topiary wonders and public fountains, but the coming of the wizard Ivovandas had sent the former inhabitants packing. The arguments of the Parliament of Strife had blasted holes in the cobblestones, cracked and dried the fountains, and sundered the mansions like unloved toy houses. The purple fire from before was still smoldering in a tall ruined shell of wood and brick. Amarelle sidestepped the street-rivers of melted lead that had once been the building’s roof.
It wasn’t difficult to find the manse of Ivovandas, the only lit and tended structure in the neighborhood, guarded by smooth walls, glowing ideograms, and rustling red-green hedges with the skeletons of many birds and small animals scattered in their undergrowth. A path of interlocked alabaster stones, gleaming with internal light, led forty curving yards to a golden front door.
Convenient. That guaranteed a security gauntlet.
The screams of terrible flying things high above made concentration even more difficult, but Amarelle applied three decades of experience to the path and was not disappointed. Four trapped stones she avoided by intuition, two by dumb drunken luck. The gravity-orientation reversal was a trick she’d seen before; she cartwheeled (sloppily) over the dangerous patch and the magic pushed her headfirst back to the ground rather than helplessly into the sky. She never even felt the silvery call of the tasteful hypnotic toad sculptures on the lawn, as she was too inebriated to meet their eyes and trigger the effect.