The ladies of the house were in, and by a welcome stroke of luck so was Shraplin. Brandwin was fussing with the pistons of his replacement left foot, while Sophara sprawled full-length on a velvet hammock wearing smoked glasses and an ice-white beret that exuded analgesic mist in a halo about her head.
“How is it that you’re not covered in vomit and begging for death?” said Sophara. “How is it that you consumed three times your own weight in liquor and I’ve got sole custody of the hangover?”
“I had an unexpected benefactor, Soph. Can you secure this chamber for sensitive conversation?”
“The whole house is reasonably safe,” groaned the magician, rolling off the hammock with minimal grace and dignity. “Now, if you want me to weave a deeper silence, give me a minute to gather my marbles. Wait …”
She pulled her smoked glasses off and peered coldly at Amarelle. Stepping carefully around the mess of specialized tools and mechanical gewgaws littering the carpet, she approached, sniffing the air.
“Something wrong, dearest?” said Brandwin.
“Shhhh,” said Sophara. She rubbed her eyes in the manner of the freshly awake, then reached out, moved Amarelle’s left coat lapel aside, and pulled a gleaming gold thread out of the black wool.
“You,” she said, arching her aquamarine eyebrows at Amarelle, “have been seeing another wizard.”
Sophara clapped her hands and an eerie hush fell upon the room. The faint sounds of the city outside were utterly banished.
“Ivovandas,” said Amarelle. “I ran off and did something stupid last night. In my defense, I would just like to say that I was angry, and you were the one mixing the drinks.”
“You unfailingly omnibothersome bitch,” said Sophara. “Well, this little thread would allow Ivovandas to eavesdrop, if not for my counterspell and certain fundamental confusions worked into the stones of this house. And where there’s obvious chicanery, there’s something lurking behind it. Take the rest of your clothes off.”
“What?”
“Do it now, Amarelle!” Sophara retrieved a silver-engraved casket from a far corner of the room, clicked it open, and made urgent motions while Amarelle shed her coat.
“You see how direct she is?” Brandwin squeezed a tiny bellows to pressurize a tube of glowing green oil within Shraplin’s leg. “We’d never have gotten anywhere if she’d waited for me to make the first move.”
“You keep your eyes on your work,” said Sophara. “I’ll do the looking for both of us and give you details later.”
“I sometimes think that ‘friend’ is just a word I use for all the people I haven’t murdered yet,” said Amarelle, hopping and twirling out of her boots, leggings, belts, vest, blouse, sharp implements, silk ropes, smoke capsules, and smallclothes. When the last stitch was discarded, Sophara slammed the casket shut and muttered spells over the lock.
As a decided afterthought, smiling and taking her time, she eventually fetched Amarelle a black silk dressing robe embroidered with blue-white astronomical charts.
“It seems to be my day to try on everyone else’s clothes,” she muttered.
“I’m sorry about your things,” said Sophara. “I should be able to sweep them for further tricks, but Ivovandas is so far outside my weight class, it might take days.”
“Never let a wizard get their hands on your clothes,” said Brandwin. “At least not until she promises to move in with you. It ought to be safe to talk now.”
“I’m not entirely sure how to say this,” said Amarelle, “but the concise version is that I’m temporarily unretired.”
She told the whole story, pausing only to answer Sophara’s excited questions about the defenses and décor of Ivovandas’s manse.
“That’s a hell of a thing, boss,” said Shraplin when Amarelle finished. The clocks within the house started chiming five and didn’t finish for some time. The city clocks were still sealed beyond Sophara’s silence. “I thought we were up against it when that shark-tears job landed on us. But a street!”
“I wonder how Jarrow figured out it was a locus.” Sophara adjusted the analgesic hat, which had done her much good over the long course of Amarelle’s story. “I wonder how he harnessed it without anyone’s interfering!”
“Keep it relevant, dreamer.” Brandwin massaged her wife’s legs. “The pertinent question is, how are we going to pull it off?”
“I only came for advice,” said Amarelle hastily. “This is all my fault, and nobody else needs to risk their sanctuary because I got drunk and sassed a wizard.”
“Let me enlighten you, boss,” said Shraplin. “If you don’t want me to follow you around being helpful, you must be planning to smash my head right now.”
“Amarelle, you can’t keep us out in the cold now! This mischief is too delicious,” said Sophara. “And it’s clearly not prudent to let you wander off on your own.”
“I’m grateful,” said Amarelle, “but I feel responsible for your safety.”
“The Parliament of Strife craps destruction on its own city at random, boss.” Shraplin spread his hands. “How much more unsafe can we get? Frankly, two and a half quiet years is adequate to my taste.”
“Yes,” said Sophara. “Hang your delicate feelings, Amarelle, you know we won’t let you … oh, wait. You foxy bag of tits and sugar! You didn’t come here just for advice! You put your noble face on so we’d pledge ourselves without the pleasure of seeing you beg!”
“And you fell for it.” Amarelle grinned. “So it’s agreed, we’re all out of retirement and we’re stealing a street. If anyone cares to let me know how the hell that’s supposed to work, the suggestion box is open.”
8. The Cheap Shot
They spent the first two days in measurement and surveillance. Prosperity Street was three hundred and seventeen yards long running north–south, an average of ten yards wide. Nine major avenues and fifteen alleys bisected it. One hundred and six businesses and residences opened onto it, one of which was a wine bar serving distillations of such quality that a third day was lost to hangovers and remonstrations.
They struck on the evening of the fourth day, as warm mist curled lazily from the sewers and streetlamps gleamed like pearls in folds of gray gauze. The clocks began chiming eleven, a process that often lasted until it was nearly time for them to begin striking twelve.
A purple-skinned woman in the coveralls of a municipal functionary calmly tinkered with the signpost at the intersection of Prosperity and Magdamar. She placed the wooden shingle marked PROSPERITY S in a sack and tipped her hat to a drunk, semicurious goblin. Brandwin emptied three intersections of PROSPERITY S signs before the clocks settled down.
At the intersection of Prosperity and Ninefingers, a polite brass-headed drudge painted over every visible PROSPERITY S with an opaque black varnish. Two blocks north, a mechanavipede flying unusually low with a cargo of one dark-haired woman crashed into a signpost, an accident that would be repeated six times. At the legendarily confusing seven-way intersection where the various Goblin Markets joined Prosperity, a sorceress disguised as a cat’s shadow muttered quiet spells of alphabetic nullification, wiping every relevant signpost like a slate.
They had to remove forty-six shingles or signposts and deface the placards of sixteen businesses that happened to be named after the street. Lastly, they arranged to tip a carboy of strong vitriol over a ceremonial spot in the pavement where PROSPERITY STREET was set in iron letters. When those had become PRCLGILV SLGFLL, they gave the mess a quick splash of water and hurried away to dispose of their coveralls, paints, and stolen city property.
The next day, Ivovandas was less than impressed.
“Nothing happened.” Her gold eyes gleamed dangerously and her butterflies were still. “Not one femto-scintilla of deviation or dampening in the potency of Jarrow’s locus. Though there were quite a few confused travelers and tourists. You need to steal the street, Amarelle, not vandalize its ornaments.”