“I didn’t expect it to be that easy,” said Amarelle. “I just thought we ought to eliminate the simplest approach first. Never lay an Archduke on the table when a two will do.”
“The map is not the territory.” Ivovandas gestured and transported Amarelle to the front lawn of her manse, where the hypnotic toad sculptures nearly cost her even more lost time.
9. Brute Force
Their next approach took eleven days to plan and arrange, including two days lost to a battle between Parliament wizards in the western sectors that collapsed the Temple-Bridge of the God of Hidden Names.
The street signs had been restored at the intersection of Prosperity and Languinar, the southernmost limit of Prosperity Street. The sunrise sky was just creeping over the edge of the city in orange-and-scarlet striations, and the clocks were or were not chiming seven. A caravan of reinforced cargo coaches drawn by armored horses halted on Languinar, preparing to turn north. The signs hanging from the coaches read:
Nusbarq Desisko and Sons
Hazardous Animal Transport
As the caravan moved into traffic, a woman in a flaming-red dress riding a mecharabbit hopped rudely into the path of the lead carriage, triggering an unlikely but picturesque chain of disasters. Carriage after carriage toppled, wheel after wheel flew from its hub, horse team after horse team ran neighing into traffic as their emergency releases snapped. The side of the first toppled carriage exploded outward, and a furry, snarling beast came bounding out of the wreckage.
“RUN,” cried someone, who happened to be the woman in the red dress. “IT’S A SPRING-HEELED WEREJACKAL!”
A heartbeat later her damaged mecharabbit exploded, enveloping her in a cloud of steam and sparks. The red dress was reversible and Amarelle had practiced swapping it around by touch. Three seconds later she ran from the cloud of steam dressed in a black-hooded robe. Shraplin, not at all encumbered by seventy-five pounds of fur, leather, and wooden claws, merrily activated the reinforced shock-absorbing leg coils Brandwin had cobbled together for him. He went leaping and howling across the crowd, turning alarm into panic and flight.
Twenty-two unplanned carriage or mechanavipede collisions took place in the next half minute, locking traffic up for two blocks north of the initial accident. Amarelle didn’t have time to count them as she hurried north in Shraplin’s wake.
Another curiously defective carriage in the Nusbarq Desisko caravan cracked open, exposing its cargo of man-sized hives to the open air and noise. Thousands of Polychromatic Reek-Bees, scintillating in every color of the rainbow and fearful for the safety of their queens, flew forth to spew defensive stink-nectar on everything within buzzing distance. The faintest edge of that scent followed Amarelle north, and she regretted having eaten breakfast. Hundreds of people would be burning their clothes before the day was through.
All along the length of Prosperity Street, aural spells prepared in advance by Sophara began to erupt. Bold, authoritative voices ordered traffic to halt, passersby to run, shops to close, citizens to pray for deliverance. They screamed about werejackals, basilisks, reek-bees, Cradlerobber Wasps, rabid vorpilax, and the plague. They ordered constables and able-bodied citizens to use barrels and carriages as makeshift riot barricades at the major intersections, which some of them did.
Amarelle reached the alley after Ninefingers Way and found the package she’d stashed behind a rotten crate the night before. Soon she emerged from the alley in the uniform of a Theradane constable, captain’s bars shining on her collar, steel truncheon gleaming. She issued useless and contradictory orders, fomented panic, pushed shopkeepers into their stores and ordered them to bar their doors. When she met actual constables, she jabbed them with the narcotic prong concealed on the end of her truncheon. Their unconscious bodies, easily mistaken for dead, added a piquant verisimilitude to the raging disquiet.
At the northern end of Prosperity Street, a constabulary riot wagon commanded by a pair of uniformed women experienced another improbable accident when it came into contact with the open fire of a careless street fondue vendor. Brandwin and Sophara threw their helmets aside and ran screaming, infecting dozens of citizens with disoriented panic even before the rockets and canisters inside the wagon began to explode. For nearly half an hour pinkish white arcs of sneezing powder, soporific smoke, and eye-scalding pepper dust rained on Prosperity Street.
Eventually, two Parliament wizards had to grudgingly intervene to help the constables and bucket brigades restore order. The offices of Nusbarq Desisko and Sons were found to be empty and their records missing, presumably carried with them when they fled the city. The spring-heeled werejackal was never located and was assumed taken as a pet by some wizard or another.
“What do you mean, nothing happened?” Amarelle paced furiously in Ivovandas’s study the following day, having explained herself to the wizard, who had half listened while consulting a grimoire that occasionally moaned and laughed to itself. “We closed the full length of Prosperity Street down for more than three hours! We stole the street from everyone on it in a very meaningful sense! The traffic didn’t flow, the riot barriers were up, not a scrap of commerce took place anywhere—”
“Amarelle,” said the wizard, not taking her eyes from her book, “I applaud your adoption of a more dynamic approach to the problem, but I’m afraid it simply didn’t do anything. Not the merest hint of any diminishment to Jarrow’s arcane resources. I do wish it were otherwise. Mind the hypnotic toads, as I’ve strengthened their enchantments substantially.” She snapped her fingers, and Amarelle was back on the lawn.
10. The Typographic Method
Sophara directed the next phase of their operations, resigning her place as mage-mixologist indefinitely.
“It was mostly for easy access to the bar, anyway,” she said. “And they’d kiss my heels to have me back anytime.”
A studious, eye-straining month and a half followed. Sophara labored over spell board, abacus, grimoire, and journal, working in four languages and several forms of thaumaturgical notation that made Amarelle’s eyes burn.
“I keep telling you not to look at them!” said Sophara as she adjusted the analgesic beret on Amarelle’s head. “You haven’t got the proper optical geometry! You and Brandwin! You’re worse than cats.”
Brandwin prowled libraries and civic archives. Amarelle broke into seventeen major private collections. Shraplin applied his tireless mechanical perception to the task of rapidly sifting thousands of pages in thousands of books. A vast pile of notes grew in Brandwin and Sophara’s house, along with an inelegant but thorough master list of scrolls, pamphlets, tomes, and records.
“Any guide to the city,” chanted Amarelle, for the formula had become a sort of mantra. “Any notes of any traveler, any records of tax or residence, any mentions of repairs, any journals or recollections. Have we ever done anything less sane? How can we possibly expect to locate every single written reference to Prosperity Street in every single document in existence?”
“We can’t,” said Sophara. “But if my calculations are anywhere near correct, and if this can work at all, we only need to change a certain critical percentage of those records, especially in the official municipal archives.”
Shraplin and Brandwin cut panels of wood down to precise replicas of the forty-six street signs and the sixteen business placards they had previously tried to steal. They scraped, sanded, varnished, and engraved, making only one small change to each facsimile.