Jarrow banged his head repeatedly against the inside of his prison.
“Eventually we felt it was safe to proceed with our real business. The rest you must surely have guessed by now. The labor was provided by Shraplin, an automaton, whose meeting with Jarrow left him very eager to bear any trouble or tedium in the cause of his revenge. Shraplin utilized tool-arms custom-forged for him by Brandwin Miris to dig up the bricks and stones of the actual street, and to lay in their place the bricks and stones taken from the High Barrens mansions. At night, the detritus he’d scraped up by day was dumped into the ruins of those same mansions. As for why nobody ever heard Shraplin scraping or pounding away beneath our carts, all I can say is that our magician is highly adept at the production of soundproof barriers to fit any space or need.
“All that was left to do,” said Amarelle, stretching and yawning, “was to spend the months necessary to carefully position our carts over every square foot of Prosperity Street. Nobody ever noticed that when we moved on, the patches of street beneath us had changed subtly from the hour or two before. Eventually, we pried up the last brick that was genuinely important, and Jarrow’s locus became just another city lane.”
“Help me!” Jarrow cried, his voice high and faint as a whisper in the wind. “Get me away from her! I can be him for you! I can be Scavius! I can be anyone you want!”
“Enough from you, I think.” Ivovandas slid his prison lovingly into a desk drawer, still smiling. She curled her fingers, and a familiar blue crystal appeared within them.
“You have suffered quite tenaciously for this,” said Ivovandas. “I give it to you now as my half of our bargain, fairly begun and fairly concluded.”
Amarelle took the glowing crystal and crushed it beneath her heel.
“Is that the end of it?” she said. “All restored to harmonious equipoise? I go on my way and leave you to your next few years of conversation with Jarrow?”
“In a manner of speaking,” said Ivovandas. “While I have dutifully disposed of the crystal recording from last year’s intemperate drunken visitation, I have just now secured an even more entertaining one in which you confess at length to crimes carried out in Theradane and implicate several of your friends by name.”
“Yes,” said Amarelle. “I did rather expect something like this. I figured that since I was likely to eat more treachery, I might as well have an appreciative audience first.”
“I am the most appreciative audience! Oh, we could be so good for one another! Consider, Amarelle, the very reasonable bounds of my desires and expectations. I fancy myself fairly adept at identifying the loci in use by my colleagues. With Jarrow removed, there will be a rebalancing of the alliances in our Parliament. There will be new testing and new struggles. I shall be watching very, very carefully, and inevitably I expect to have another target for you and your friends to secure on my behalf.”
“You want to use us to knock off the Parliament of Strife, locus by locus,” said Amarelle. “Until it’s something more like the Parliament of Ivovandas.”
“It might not happen in your lifetime,” said the wizard. “But substantial progress could be at hand! In the meantime, I’ll be quite content to let you remain at liberty in the city, enjoying your sanctuary, doing as you please. So long as you and your friends come when I call. Doubt not that I shall call.”
17. The Work Ahead
Amarelle met them afterward on the Tanglewing Bridge, in the pleasant purple light of fading sunset. The city was quiet, the High Barrens peaceful, no fires falling from the clouds or screeching things sinking claws into one another.
They gathered in an arc in front of Scavius’s statue. Sophara muttered and gestured with her fingers.
“We’re in the bubble,” she said. “Nobody can hear us, or even see us unless I … shut up, Scavius, I know you can hear us. You’re a special case. How did it go down, Amarelle?”
“It went down like we expected,” said Amarelle. “Exactly like we expected.”
“I told you those kinds of sorcerers are all reflexively treacherous bags of nuts,” said Sophara. “What’s her game?”
“She wants us on an unpaid retainer so she can dig up the loci of more of her colleagues and send us after them.”
“Sounds like a good way to kill some time, boss.” Shraplin wound a crank on his chest, resynchronizing some mechanism that had picked up a slight rattle. “I could stand to knock over a few more of those assholes. She’d save us a lot of work if she identified the loci for us.”
“Couldn’t agree more,” said Sophara. “Now hold still.”
She ran her fingers through Amarelle’s hair, and after a few moments of searching carefully plucked out a single curling black strand.
“There’s my little spy,” said Sophara. “I’m glad you brought me that one Ivovandas planted on you, Am. I never would have learned how to make these things so subtle if I hadn’t been able to pry that one apart.”
“Do you think it will tell you enough?” said Brandwin.
“I honestly doubt it.” Sophara slipped the hair into a wallet and smiled. “But it’ll give me a good look at everything Amarelle was allowed to see, and that’s much better than nothing. If we can identify her patterns and her habits, the bitch will eventually start painting clues for us as to the location of her own locus.”
“Splat!” said Brandwin.
“Yeah,” said Sophara. “And that’s definitely my idea of a playground.”
“I should be able to get some messages out of the city,” said Jadetongue. “Some of the people we’ve got howling for our blood hate the Parliament of Strife even more. If we could make arrangements with them before we knock those wizards down, I’d bet we could buy our way back into the world. Theradane sanctuary in reverse, at least in a few places.”
“I like the way you people think,” said Amarelle. “Ivovandas as a stalking horse, and once we’ve got the goods on her we dump her ass in the river. Her and all her friends. Who’s got the wine?”
Jade held out the bottle, something carnelian and bioluminescent and expensive. They passed it around, and even Shraplin dashed a ceremonial swig against his chin. Amarelle turned with the half-empty bottle and faced Scavius’s statue.
“Here it is, you asshole. I guess we’re not as retired as we might have thought. Five thieves going to war against the Parliament of Strife. Insane. The kind of odds you always loved best. Will you try to think better of us? And if you can’t, will you at least keep a few pedestals warm? We might have a future as streetlamps after all. Have one on us.”
She smashed the bottle against his plaque, and they watched the glowing, fizzing wine run down the marble. After a few moments, Sophara and Brandwin walked away arm in arm, north toward Tanglewing Street. Shraplin followed, then Jade.
Amarelle alone remained in the white light of whatever was left of Scavius. What he whispered to her then, she kept to herself.
She ran to catch up with the others.
“Hey,” said Jade. “Glad you’re back! You coming to the Sign of the Fallen Fire with us? We’re going to have a game.”
“Yeah,” said Amarelle, and the air of Theradane tasted better than it had in months. “Hell yeah, we’re going to have a game!”
Bradley Denton
World Fantasy Award and John W. Campbell Memorial Award–winner Bradley Denton was born in 1958, grew up in Kansas, and took an M.A. in creative writing from the University of Kansas. He sold his first story in 1984, and soon became a regular contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. His first novel, Wrack and Roll, was published in 1986, and was followed by Lunatics, Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede, Blackburn, and Laughin’ Boy. He’s perhaps best known for his series of Blackburn stories and novels about an eccentric serial killer, but he won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede, and his two-volume collection A Conflagration Artist and The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians won the World Fantasy Award as the year’s Best Collection. His stories have also been collected in One Day Closer to Death: Eight Stabs at Immortality. He lives in Austin, Texas.