0062104292 (8UP) (16 page)
Authors: Anne Nesbet
“What’s that thing?” said Linny. “What are you doing?” Like most people since the dawn of time, she did not like having sharp things pointed at her.
“Measuring the magic in you, as scientifically as I know how,” said the Tinkerman. “I’ll have you know this is wrinkled technology, which is something new. Something quite special. Cat’s whiskers and wires. And you, young lady, are registering very high on my meter here. Unbelievably, impossibly high. You’ve been far up
in the hills, I’m guessing. Especially your right pocket. What’s that in your pocket, impossible girl? And where does it come from?”
“Would you mind putting down that big fork?” said Linny, making an effort to stay polite. Of course she knew perfectly well what was in her pocket. Her hand quickly checked, and it was still there: Sayra’s present.
“But where oh where have you been?” said the Tinkerman, putting the fork thing behind his back even as he leaned forward some. “And why oh why has an impossible creature like you come all the way here?”
“I told you—I had to,” said Linny, feeling increasingly desperate. “For medicines. To save my friend who’s fading. She’s trapped in Away, and now Mina isn’t even here!”
“Oho!” said the Tinkerman. “Around here they like to say Away doesn’t exist.”
“Does so,” said Linny.
“How do you know that, girl?”
“Because I was
there
!” said Linny. “Well, almost. I’m pretty sure my right hand was there.”
“The hand in your pocket,” said the Tinkerman shrewdly.
Linny pulled that hand of hers out of the dress’s pocket and hid it instead behind her back.
“And how did your right hand get into Away?” said
the Tinkerman. “I’m very curious about that—I have a theory about the place, you see.”
“I played a song,” said Linny.
“A song!” said the man. “How delightful! Well! When they hear about these readings, they’ll have to admit how right I’ve been all along. Complexity, like water, flows downhill.
Oh, don’t look so puzzled! Complexity’s just the scientific word for wrinkledness, for magic. Run some nice wires from Away down to the Plain, and it’ll power all our lamps eventually, that’s what I’ve been saying. All we need is for Mina to get that antidote finished. And she must be nearly done by now. Oh, they’ll just have to agree to send us, once they get a good look at you. Come this way!”
It made her feel a little shy. Perhaps it was because of the
things
all around her here. This part of the house, she now saw, was full of
things
, the shelves absolutely crammed with dead animals, filled up with stuffing so they’d look real and staring at Linny through glinty glass eyes. There were even pickled creatures in jars, not to mention other things that weren’t creatures at all, neither pickled nor stuffed, but carved toys or dolls made of twigs or polished rocks.
“Here we are,” said the Tinkerman, stopping short in front of a series of shelves and reaching up for his notebooks. “This, this, I think, and this—”
When a crashing din interrupted, coming from much farther down the hall. A pounding on the walls, a shouting, a banging, a raucous metallic ringing.
“What’s that?” said Linny, jumping around in alarm. Her mind had gone immediately to raging
madji
and enormous and unhappy magicians.
The Tinkerman seemed as surprised as she was.
“More visitors!” he said. “But nobody ever comes to that door, either!”
It was true—the noise was coming from the other end of the house. The Tinkerman was already speeding down that long hall, with Linny behind him, because she didn’t know what else to do, and also because she did not much want to stay, all alone, at the end of the house that held those staring creatures in their jars. The Half-Cat padded along beside her, keeping its own counsel.
“Coming, coming, coming,” muttered the Tinkerman under his breath.
On the left-hand side of the hall, the line of windows gave Linny glimpses, through a light mist of water spraying from the tumbling river, of the larger bridge downstream, of the river widening out below, of the two cities spreading out on either bank: chaotic pointy roofs on the left, rectangular blocks of shiny rectangular buildings on the right. Under other circumstances, not involving her having to race along after this muttering
old man toward absolutely horrible crashing sounds at the far end of the hall, Linny would have liked to stand at one of those windows for a while, just soaking up all that information about the world.
The noises were getting louder and more alarming. There was a whirring, whining sound added to the mix now that made Linny want to cover her ears and hide. The Half-Cat yowled. The Tinkerman broke into an actual run. And suddenly the whole far end of the hall filled with smoke or dust, and a half-dozen men in gray came striding in through the cloud, while the Tinkerman ran forward, waving his fists and shouting in rage.
Without thinking anything over, Linny ducked through the nearest doorway, into a room that was something between a kitchen and a workshop, all incomprehensible machines and white walls. Her eyes assessed it in one second, and she bit her lip. There was no place to hide.
“What have you scoundrels done?” the Tinkerman was wailing, down at the far end of the hall. “I was on my way to open the door! We were coming to the blasted court ourselves.”
“Noncompliance with search order,” said some gray voice while boots came stamping down the hall, one two, one two. “Harboring illegal persons. You think we don’t keep an eye on this house? Transport of aliens. Reckless
disregard of immigration laws. That’s plenty of trouble, Arthur Vix. Smuggling dangerous impostors across the river! Better hand her over now.”
That cat outside wouldn’t budge! And in any case, there really was, no matter how hard she looked, nowhere in this room to hide.
Plan B,
she thought to herself.
Time for a backup plan.
But there was no backup plan that she could see.
Outside in the hall, the Tinkerman was almost babbling, he was so angry. He was sputtering about warrants and property damage, and the gray voice was saying, “Hand her over. Hand her over.”
Sometimes if you cannot hide, the worst thing of all is being found. So it was not a plan, exactly: it was instinct—it was not wanting to be found—that made Linny step right back through that doorway now, to stand as tall as she could next to the hissing Half-Cat and face down that crowd of gray men in the hall.
“There she is!” some of them shouted. But she held her ground and stared unblinking into their grayness, and for a magical moment they fell into the silence that means there’s been a rewriting of the story.
For the length of that moment, at least, they had not found her.
She
had found
them
.
T
hen they arrested her anyway.
The gray uniforms came and surrounded her and pointed down the hall, to where they had made a dusty mess of things by knocking down the Tinkerman’s Angleside door.
“You’d better run away,” whispered Linny to the Half-Cat, but it had parked itself on her toes and was practically throwing off sparks as it glared at the men in gray all around, so in the end she had to pick it right up. It was like trying to lift a very awkward, prickly, hissing sack filled with sand and molasses.
The good thing was, having the angry Half-Cat in her arms helped disguise the awful shakiness that was spreading through all her limbs.
It is hard to stand tall and pretend not to be afraid when your arms insist on trembling.
The other distraction, as the gray men marched her
down the hall and through the dusty hole in the wall that had once been a door, was the angry Tinkerman, who darted around the edges of the gray men, yelping and protesting. They were interfering with his research work! And stealing his inventions! When the regent heard about this, he would—
“It’s the regent’s own orders,” said the gray man who did the talking. “Take it up with him.”
And when the Tinkerman wouldn’t shut up, they arrested him, too.
But by then they had emerged onto the (damaged) porch of the Bridge House, and for a moment Linny’s mind soared far away from all these arguing men and her trembling knees and the sagging weight of the Half-Cat. As she stepped across that threshold, the other half of the Broken City, the Angleside, spread itself out like a strange feast before her. Her first impression was of straight lines and fire. Every corner so sharp you could cut yourself on it, and the sunlight rioting between all those sheets of metal and large glass windows.
It was so very different from anything she had seen before. She loved the undulating, shifting hills, but these angles also satisfied some kind of longing in her that she hadn’t even known she had.
And, anyway, it was such a relief to be out of that narrow hall, even if it had to be a crowd of Surveyors
hustling her out. “You’re such a squirrel in a tree,” Sayra had said once. “Running from burrows. Climbing up, climbing up! Anything for a view!”
Oh, Sayra!
Linny sent some hold-on-I’m-still-coming thoughts fiercely in Sayra’s direction, shifting the Half-Cat in her arms.
The Surveyors hurried her (and the Half-Cat and the still-protesting Tinkerman) into a strange wheeled cart, made mostly of metal, but lacking horses or donkeys or even goats to make it move. Apparently on this side of the river, the lack of horses and goats meant nothing. One of the gray men pushed a red button, and the cart started moving forward, entirely on its own. All the man had to do was shift a lever one way or the other, and the cart’s wheels turned, as obedient as could be.
“I thought they didn’t have wrinkled things over here!” said Linny, forgetting herself.
“Hush, hush,” said the Tinkerman. “There’s nothing wrinkled about it; that’s
electricity
it’s running on. Still scarcer than it should be, electricity, but you know what we’ve got planned about that.”
And when Linny didn’t respond to the significant look he was giving her (because she had no clue what he was talking about), he leaned closer to her and added, “My theory! My plan! To tap into Away. Think! Think! We
could
convert all that dense antientropic complexity into so much power we could all have carts of our own—”
It sounded slightly menacing to Linny. He spoke of Away as if it were an old maple tree you could bore into to catch drip-drops of sweet sap. She turned her head to the side and looked instead at where they were going.
A broad street led away from the Bridge House and the river, past a long line of buildings that were almost too glaring in the sun. Some kind of thin stone had been used to pave walkways on either side of the street, but it wasn’t as though there was a lot of muck in the street itself, to warrant such caution about walkways. It was an eerily clean street, to tell the truth.
They buzzed along in the cart-without-goats, Linny feeling too warm in her dress. The sun glared and glittered around them, all the buildings being so flat and shiny. In Bend, the streets would have been filled with people, but at first Angleside struck her as empty, inhabited only by straight edges and bright surfaces. Then she looked more closely at the wall nearest by, and she gasped: people were looking at them, right through it. She had never heard of a wall like that before. It was very smooth, as well as transparent. A wall made of glass!
After that came a truly grand building, dark and windowless. It seemed to Linny a silent, secret place. It had tall columns of stone in front of it, and no glass walls to speak of.
The man in the cart pushed his button again, and it came to a stop.
“Out,” said the gray man, opening the door.
It wasn’t the building that started Linny’s knees shaking again, though. It was the brass engraving bolted over the front entrance of the building: a brass image of a girl holding tools in her brass hands—a flat triangle with measure marks carved into it, and another pointy angular thing. The girl was just lines etched into a plate of metal, but the extra knobble in the elbows, the little mole on the cheek, the determined, no-nonsense nose looked all too familiar to Linnet.
“What’s
she
doing over here?” Linny whispered to the Tinkerman. “I thought the Girl with the Lourka belonged to the wrinkled side.”
“Haven’t studied much history, then, have you?” said the Tinkerman. “She set things in order everywhere. Over here they remember her as the First Surveyor. By law, the regent’s job is officially temporary, just ruling until the next true Girl shows up, crown in hand. Except until now she never has shown up, has she? And the crown was lost ages ago. By now the whole thing is just a foolish tradition, dragged out and dusted off every ten years for the fair.”
“So you don’t think I’m real?” said Linny.
“Real! Of course you’re real! But that doesn’t mean the legends are real. Legends are legends—useful things
for keeping the wrinkled side in line. You’re a girl, and you happen to have a lourka. Good! But that doesn’t make you
the
girl with
the
lourka. That’s my line, and I’m sticking to it. You’re too important to science to be wasted on politics!”
“Enough out of you,” said a gray man rudely to the Tinkerman, and they marched their arrestees (plus one cat) up the great stone steps toward the entrance of the blank-faced building right here—not so blank, after all, of course, because right there above the engraved shadow of the First Surveyor, there was a pair of grand words engraved into the stone:
SURVEYORS’ COURT
, said those words.
Stand tall and pay attention,
Linny told herself sternly.
The first thing Linny noticed as they entered that building was how astonishingly light it was, despite the complete lack of windows: a different kind of light, chillier than sunshine.
There was a hall leading deeper into the building, and off that hall opened doors and even windows, though the windows looked only into other rooms and not outside. It was more like a street than an interior hall, Linny decided, and she shook her head to help it settle down. She was not used to spaces being so large and grand.
