“I have the key,” said Brandwin, emerging from her incense-filled workroom one night, bleary-eyed and cooing at a small white moth perched atop her left index finger. “I call it the Adjustment Moth. It’s a very complex and efficient little spell I can cast on anything about this size.”
“And what will they do?” said Amarelle.
“They’ll become iterating work-enhancers,” said Sophara. “It’d take us years to manually adjust all the records we’re after. Enchanted with my spell to guide and empower them, we can send these little darlings out to do almost all of the work for us in one night.”
“How many do we need?” said Shraplin.
Nine nights later, from carefully selected points around the city, they loosed 3,449 of Sophara’s Adjustment Moths, each of which fluttered into the darkness and thence into libraries, archives, shop cupboards, private studies, and bedside cabinets. The 2,625 Adjustment Moths that were not eaten by bats or appropriated as cat toys located a total of 617,451 references to the name “Prosperity Street” and made one crucial change to each physical text. By sunrise they were all dead of exhaustion.
Amarelle and her crew replaced the forty-six street signs and sixteen business placards under cover of darkness, then pried up one of the (restored) ceremonial iron letters sunk into the pavement. PROSPERIT STREET, the survivors said. PROSPERIT, read the signs and placards. “Prosperit Street” read the name of the place in every guidebook, private journal, lease, assize, and tax record in the city, save for a few in magically guarded sanctums of the Parliament of Strife.
Overnight, Prosperity Street had been replaced by its very close cousin, Prosperit Street.
“Amarelle,” said Ivovandas, sipping daintily at a cup of molten gold she’d heated in a desk-side crucible, “I sympathize with your agitation at the failure of so original and far-ranging a scheme, but I really must stress the necessity of abandoning these fruitlessly metaphysical approaches. Don’t steal the street’s name, or its business, or its final ‘Y.’ Steal the street, wholly and physically!”
Amarelle groaned. “Back to the lawn?”
“Back to the lawn, my dear!”
11. After Amarelle, the Deluge
Twenty-seven days later, one of the natural storms of summer blew in from the west, a churning shroud of dark clouds looking for a brawl. As usual, the wizards of Parliament preserved their individual territories and let the rest of Theradane fend for itself. It was therefore theoretically plausible that the elevated aqueduct that crossed Prosperity Street just north of Limping Matron Lane would choose that night to break under the strain.
Prosperity Street was already contending with plugs of debris clogging its sewer grates (these plugs granted unusual thickness and persistence by the spells of Sophara Miris) and with its own valleylike position at the foot of several more elevated neighborhoods. The foaming rush from the broken aqueduct turned a boot-soaking stream into a rather more alarming waist-high river.
Amarelle and her crew lurked in artificial shadows on a high rooftop, dutifully watching to ensure that no one, particularly children and goblins, suffered more than a soaking from the flood. The city hydromancers would eventually show up to set things right, but they were no doubt having a busy night.
“This is still a touch metaphysical, if you ask me,” said Sophara.
“It’s something of a hybrid approach,” said Amarelle. “After all, how can it be a street if it’s been physically turned into a canal?”
12. No
“No,” said Ivovandas. Amarelle was returned to the lawn.
13. Instructive Measures
Half a year gone. Despite vandalism, riot, werejackals, clerical errors, and flood, Prosperity Street was more worthy of its name than ever. Amarelle strolled the pavement, feeling the autumn sun on her face, admiring the pale bronze leaves of Prayer-trees as they tumbled about in little clouds, inscribed with calligraphic benedictions for anyone whose path they crossed.
There was a stir in the crowds around her, a new cacophony of shouting and muttering and horse hooves and creaking wheels. Traffic parted to the north, making way for a rumbling coach, half again as high and wide as anything on the street. It was black as death’s asshole, windowless, trimmed with engraved silver and inlaid nacre. It had no horses and no driver; each of its four wheels was a circular steel cage in which a slavering red-eyed ghoul ran on four limbs, creating a forward impetus.
The singular coach moaned on its suspension as it swerved and lurched to a halt beside Amarelle. The ghouls leered at her, unbreathing, their flesh crisply necrotic like rice paper pressed over old oozing wounds. The black door flew open and a footstep fell into place. A velvet curtain still fluttered in the entrance to the coach, concealing whatever lay inside. A voice called out, cold as chloroform and old shame.
“Don’t you know an invitation when you see one, citizen Parathis?”
Running from wizards in broad daylight without preparation was not a skill Amarelle had ever cultivated, so she stepped boldly into the carriage, ducking her head.
She was startled to find herself in a warm gray space at least forty yards on a side, with a gently curving ceiling lit by floating silver lights. A vast mechanical apparatus was ticking and pulsing and shifting in the middle of the room, something along the lines of an orrery, but in place of moons and planets the thin arms held likenesses of men and women, likenesses carved with exaggerated features and comical flaws. Amarelle recognized one of them as Ivovandas by the gold eyes and butterfly hair.
There were thirteen figures, and they moved in complex interlocking patterns around a model of the city of Theradane.
The carriage door slammed shut behind her. There was no sensation of motion other than the almost-hypnotic sway and swing of the wizard-orrery.
“My peers,” said the cold voice, coming now from behind her. “Like celestial bodies, transiting in their orbits, exerting their influences. Like celestial bodies, not particularly difficult to track or predict in their motions.”
Amarelle turned and gasped. The man was short and lithe, his skin like ebony, his hair scrapped down to a reddish stubble. There was a scar on his chin and another on his jawline, each of them familiar to her fingers and lips. Only the eyes were wrong; they were poisoner’s eyes, dead as glass.
“You have no fucking right to that face,” said Amarelle, fighting not to shout.
“Scavius of Shadow Street, isn’t it? Or more like ‘wasn’t it?’ Came with you to Theradane, but we never got his sanctuary money. Blew it in some dramatic gesture, I recall.”
“He got drunk and lost it all on a dice throw,” she said, wetting her lips and forcing herself to say, “Jarrow.”
“Pleased to meet you, Amarelle Parathis.” The man wore a simple black jacket and breeches. He extended a hand, which she didn’t take. “Lost it all on one throw? That was stupid.”
“I’m not unacquainted with drunken mistakes myself,” said Amarelle.
“And then he went and did something even more stupid,” said Jarrow. “Earned a criminal’s apotheosis. Transfigured into a streetlamp.”
“Please … take some other form.”
“No.” Jarrow scratched his head, shook a finger at her. “That’s a fine starting point for the discussion I really brought you here for, Amarelle. Let’s talk about behavior that might get someone transfigured into a street decoration.”
“I’m retired.”
“Sure, kid. Look, there’s a very old saying in my family: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is another wizard fucking with you.’ You never spent much time near Prosperity Street before, did you? Your apartments are on Hellendal. South of Tanglewing Street. Right?”