“What do you want me to secure for you?”
Ivovandas opened a tall cabinet set against the right-hand wall. Inside was a blank tapestry surrounded on all sides by disembodied golden hands not unlike the ones that had hauled Amarelle across the threshold. The hands leapt to life, flicking across the tapestry with golden needles and black thread. Lines appeared on the surface, lines that rapidly became clear to Amarelle as the districts of Theradane and their landmarks: the High Barrens, the Sign of the Fallen Fire, the Deadlight Downs, and a hundred others, stitch by stitch.
When the map was complete, one hand stitched in a final thread of summer-fire crimson, glowing somewhere in the northeastern part of the city.
“Prosperity Street,” said Ivovandas. “In Fortune’s Gate, near the Old Parliament.”
“I’ve been there,” said Amarelle. “What do you want?”
“Prosperity Street. In Fortune’s Gate. Near the Old Parliament.”
“I heard you the first time,” said Amarelle. “But what do you … oh, no. You did not. You did not just imply that implication!”
“I want you to steal Prosperity Street,” said Ivovandas. “The whole street. The entire length of it. Every last brick and stone. It must cease to exist. It must be removed from Theradane.”
“That street is three hundred yards long, at the heart of a district so important and money-soaked that even you lunatics don’t blast it in your little wars, and it’s trafficked at every hour of every day!”
“It would therefore be to your advantage to remove it without attracting notice,” said Ivovandas. “But that’s your business, one way or the other, and I won’t presume to give you instruction in your own narrow specialty.”
“It. Is. A. STREET.”
“And you’re Amarelle Parathis. Weren’t you shouting something last night about how you’d stolen the sound of the sunrise?”
“On the right day of the year,” said Amarelle, “on the peak of the proper mountain, and with a great deal of help from some dwarfs and more copper pipe than I can—damn it, it was very complicated!”
“You stole tears from a shark.”
“If you can figure out how to identify a melancholy shark, you’re halfway home in that business.”
“Incidentally, what did you do with the Death Spiders of Moraska once you’d taken them?”
“I mailed them back to the various temples of the spider-priests who’d been annoying me. Let’s just say that confinement left the spiders agitated and hungry, and that the cult now has very firm rules concerning shipping crates with ventilation holes. Also, I mailed the crates postage due.”
“Charming!” cried Ivovandas. “Well, you strike me as just the sort of woman to steal a street.”
“I suppose my only other alternative is a pedestal engraved ‘Now I Serve Theradane Always.’ ”
“That, or some more private and personal doom,” said Ivovandas. “But you have, in the main, apprehended the salient features of your choices.”
“Why a street?” said Amarelle. “Before I proceed, let’s be candid, or something resembling it. Why do you want this street removed, and how will doing so calm down the fighting between you and your … oh. Oh, hell, it’s a locus, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Ivovandas. Her predatory grin revealed teeth engraved with hair-fine lines of gold in arcane patterns. “Prosperity Street is the external power locus of the wizard Jarrow, my most unbeloved colleague. It’s how he finds the wherewithal to prolong this tedious contest of summoned creatures and weather. Without it, I could flatten him in an afternoon and be home in time for tea.”
“Forgive me if this is a touchy subject, but I thought the nature of these loci was about the most-closely-guarded secret you and your … colleagues possess.”
“Jarrow has been indiscreet,” said Ivovandas. “But then, he understands the knowledge alone is useless if it can’t be coupled to a course of action. A street is quite a thing to dispose of, and the question of how to do so absolutely stymied me until you came calling with your devious head so full of drunken outrage. Shall we go to contract?”
The cabinet of golden hands unstitched the map of Theradane, and in its place embroidered a number of paragraphs in neat, even script. Amarelle peered closely at them. They were surprisingly straightforward, describing a trade of one (1) street for one (1) blue crystal to be smashed, but then …
“What the hell’s this?” she said. “A deadline? A year and a day?”
“It’s the traditional span for this sort of arrangement,” said Ivovandas. “And surely you can see the sense in it. I prefer Jarrow defanged fairly soon, not five or ten or some nebulous and ever-changing number of years from now. I require you working with determination and focus. And you require some incentive other than simple destruction for failure, so there it all is.”
“A year and a day,” said Amarelle, “and I deliver the street or surrender my citizenship and worldly wealth to permanent indenture in your service.”
“It would be a comfortable and exciting life,” said Ivovandas. “But you can avoid it if you’re as clever as I hope you are.”
“And what if I were to quietly report this arrangement to the wizard Jarrow and see if he could do better for me?”
“A worthwhile contemplation of treacherous entanglement symmetrical to my own! I salute your spirit, but must remind you that Jarrow possesses no blue crystal, nor do you or he possess the faintest notion of where my external locus resides. You must decide for yourself which of us would make the easier target. If you wish to be ruled by wisdom, you’ll reach into your pockets now.”
Amarelle did, and found that a quill and an ink bottle had somehow appeared therein.
“One street,” she said. “For one crystal. One year and one day.”
“It’s all there in plain black thread,” said Ivovandas. “Will you sign?”
Amarelle stared at the contract and ground her teeth, a habit her mother had always sternly cautioned her against. At last, she uncapped the bottle of ink and wet the quill.
7. Another Unexpected Change of Clothing
The usual tumult of wizardly contention had abated. Even Ivovandas and Jarrow seemed to be taking a rest from their labors when Amarelle walked out of the High Barrens under a peach-colored afternoon haze. All the clocks in the city sounded three, refuting and echoing and interrupting one another, the actual ringing of the hour taking somewhere north of two and a half minutes due to the fact that clocks in Theradane were traditionally mis-synchronized to confuse malicious spirits.
Amarelle’s thoughts were an electric whirl of anxiety and calculation. She hailed a mechanavipede and was soon speeding over the rooftops of the city in a swaying chair tethered beneath the straining wings of a flock of mechanical sparrows. There was simply nowhere else to go for help; she would have to heave herself before her friends like jetsam washed up on a beach.
Sophara and Brandwin lived in a narrow, crooked house on Shankvile Street, a house they’d secured at an excellent price due to the fact that it sometimes had five stories and sometimes six. Where the sixth occasionally wandered off to was unknown, but while it politely declined their questions about its business it also had the courtesy to ask none concerning theirs. Amarelle had the mechanavipede heave her off into a certain third-floor window that served as a friends-only portal for urgent business.