Authors: Anne Nesbet
The crowd made a very strange sound. It was somewhere between a grumble and a growl, and Linny found it a little unnerving, to tell the truth. They did not move out of the way to let that group of people in gray easily by. But the gray people came through, all the same, the way that a heavy liquid will pour right through a lighter one and settle at the bottom of the jar, and as they came, the crowd’s hissing noise of disapproval grew and grew, not that you could tell which mouths in particular were making the sound. And through that disapproving crowd, the gray people kept coming closer and closer.
Linny did not like the looks of them.
“Elias—run!” Linny whispered.
“Where to?” he said, trying to keep his shoulder between Linny and those implacable people coming toward them now.
He had a point. There was a wall behind them, and the people in gray before them, and—
“Oh, now who’s
that
?” said Linny, nudging Elias.
T
he most enormous man Linny had ever seen had just appeared out of something like nowhere. He must have been part of the general crowd, but since he was about a foot taller and a couple feet wider and several colors brighter than anyone else in that square, it was hard to imagine how he had managed not to stick out like a sore thumb. He had as many colors on him as you might see on the wildest bird, way up in the most wrinkled folds of the hills: a green belly, brown sleeves, a red sash around his waist, vast purple trousers billowing out from his legs. A black hat of an indescribable shape on his head, with papers pinned to it. Plus there was a beard large enough to serve as a nest for a dozen actual birds.
Linny was too dazzled to be afraid as he strode up close (close enough she could see the wild glint of gold in his ears), but she completely forgot to breathe. Only a foot or two away, though, he swung more gracefully
around than Linny had imagined a man of that size could possibly do and put his hands on his hips—how could a single human being, even such an enormous and bright-colored one, feel so much like a boulder, a blockade, an impenetrable wall? Peeking around the side of the man, Linny could see the gathered crowd, and the people in gray pushing their way closer and closer.
The enormous man cleared his throat and spoke, and his voice was as low and rough as a growl. What he said was peculiar, too. He said, “What do you want now, you cursed grayling Surveyors, with our children?”
Linny was, of course, nervous about the people in gray who had treated Elias so badly back there in the hills, but on the other hand, she wasn’t sure she wanted to be claimed by this intensely bearded man in his green and red and purple, either, whoever he might be.
She looked over at Elias, to try to see what he was thinking, and he gave her a little warning shake of the head.
No sudden moves
, that was what everything in his face was saying.
“For it does strike me,” said the man with the glinting ears, and he eyed the fingernails of his mighty right hand with great thoughtfulness as he said it, “that you and yours shouldn’t so much be in the markets of Bend. Should you, now? The wrinkled side of the river is no place for you lot. Time to leave, I’m thinking.”
“There is some confusion, then. Because the boy indisputably belongs to us,” said one of the gray men. “We’ve been looking for him for some days. His welfare concerns us greatly.”
What did that mean, anyway? Linny was taken aback, as well as indignant. Everyone seemed to be arguing over which of them had rights to Linny and Elias. It was highly unpleasant. She certainly did not belong to any of them. Perhaps you could argue she belonged to her parents, but even there, there were limits.
“Is that so?” said the enormous man. “My boy here belongs to you?”
The gray man laughed.
“Check the rules. When we catch a
madji
boy spying, he’s ours.”
Linny couldn’t help herself, she was so mad.
“Spying! How’s he a spy?”
It just burst out of her. She would have thought better of it, a moment later, but oh well. Done is done.
The gray people all turned to look in Linny’s direction. Their eyes were like icicles: sharp, pointy, and cold.
“Who’s that girl there, dressed up that way?” said the woman in gray. “Little girl, who are you? Here for the fair?”
“What fair?” said Linny, and it was as if those words just hung there suspended in the dusty air.
The crowd rumbled and whispered and shifted about on its many feet. That was when Elias shouldered himself in front of Linny (making it harder for her to see what was happening, to her annoyance), and stepped out beside the enormous man.
“She’s my sister,” he said. “Leave her alone.”
Sister!
thought Linny.
Well, all right. Under the circumstances
.
The crowd sighed. Linny had the oddest sense of being on display, of performing some strange play that the people here had been awaiting for ages and ages. She knew about plays because in Lourka, the village liked to put on spectacles for itself, two times a year, midsummer and midwinter.
“Listen to the boy, you Surveyors,” said the huge man in the calmest of voices. “What this all means is simple enough: you should leave this square. Do you hear me? You’re on our side of the river. You’d best not stay here. No good can come of that.”
“You have no right!” said the gray man, and then he turned to Elias in particular. “Are you sure you know who your sister is,
madji
boy?”
At that point, some confusing things happened. The enormous man suddenly let go of Linny’s wrist, sent his hand darting into the pocket of his purple trousers to pull out—what were those things? Marbles or round stones?
But before Linny had even processed that thought, he sent them flying through the air in the direction of the gray people.
Did those peculiar little spheres explode? Perhaps they did. Certainly they did something bad. There was dust. Voices screaming, in shock, in surprise, in pain.
The huge hand had already clamped itself back on Linny’s shoulder and was yanking her off to the side.
“Come,” said the enormous man. Not that he gave her a choice. He was simply too strong for Linny to resist.
“Hey!” said Elias, right ahead of Linny. The man was steering them both off to the left now, and Elias (being Elias) had tripped. But Elias had also (despite being Elias) managed to grab Linny’s travel bundles, when he scrambled back to his feet after tripping. That was good.
More shouts from the crowd in the square. What
had
the enormous man just done?
He was dragging them both right toward the wall behind them. Turning her head a moment, Linny saw, with a bitter pang, the glint of coins on the scrap of rug they had spread out. That was their coin money they were leaving! How would they ever get any food now? Beyond the rug, dust was still rising—and someone was holding his arm tight against his belly and howling. Linny could not help it; horror swamped her. Those little tiny rocks or pebbles or whatever they were had done something
small but
wrong
to the world.
Linny tried to wriggle her way free from that enormous hand, but it was hopeless. They were already at the wall, and a door was opening there that had been completely, entirely invisible before.
“In we go,” said the enormous man. “Quick, now.”
They went into darkness and—Linny’s stomach gave the most peculiar twist—came through into light: another street, but without all the crowds of the market square they had just left.
The man looked around and smiled with satisfaction.
“A good mile away. That’ll do fine.”
Behind them, an entirely different wall. Linny glanced up at the sun, and felt the lines and angles falling into place in her mind.
“We aren’t where we were,” she said. “How did you do that?”
“Wasn’t me,” said the man. “Wrinkled rock, that wall’s made of. Brought down from the high country, back when the city was built. Or so they say. Not much of that sort of wrinkled magic left, around here.”
He eyed Linny, perhaps a little too intently. She frowned right back at him.
“Were those
wrinkled
rocks you threw at the gray people?” she asked, upset enough not to be cautious. Not that she had ever heard of stones doing anything so
wrong feeling as what those spheres had just done in the market square.
“That’s enough,” he said. No, snapped. “Quiet. It’s time for us to go home. And for you, girl, to explain what made you put on such a costume, just now, and play such an instrument, when you say you’ve never heard of the fair. Was it the boy who told you to do this?”
“No, no,” said Linny automatically. But she was more confused than confident about anything that was happening. She had never been to such a bewildering place in all her life as this city was proving to be. Even the edge of Away had been simpler than anything here; for one thing, it hadn’t had all of these confusing people in it.
“Stop this!” said Elias, and he made his own feet stand still, so that the enormous man had to stop moving, too, or else just plain drag him along. “We’re not pretending to be anything. But who are you? What are you doing? Where are you taking us?”
“I am taking you someplace safe,” said the man. “They called you
madji
, so I’m taking you to a place hidden from Surveyors. There are parts of the city that have slipped off the grid, even as close to the Plain as we are, here by the river.”
“Explain what
madji
means,” said Elias. “We never heard the word before those people in gray grabbed me.”
“The
madji
fight for the wrinkled country,” said
the enormous man. “They fight against gridding. Soon enough, if all goes as I think it may, they will be lobbing disorder bombs into the straight lines of the Plain. They do battle against Surveyors. In Bend the right-thinking people all honor the
madji
.”
“They’re fighting against the gray people?” said Elias. “I’m on the side of anyone who fights the gray people.”
The man laughed, a wondering laugh that ended in darkness, like a tunnel carved into the side of a hill.
“It is truly an astonishing day for me,” he said, “to find two blank strangers like you in our city, who have never heard of Surveyors or the
madji
. Now come along. We are far from where we were, but I would like us even farther and more hidden, before any Surveyors can wander along this way.”
Linny could see that that made sense to Elias. His whole face was beginning to relax again, around the edges. Linny was not ready to trust anyone yet, however.
“What’s your name?” she said. “Who are you?”
“I am most often called Rodegar Malkin,” said the man, and he paused to bow to her, which made Linny angry. Only someone being rude and mocking, she suspected, would bow like that to a person who had so very recently turned twelve. “In Bend they all know me, you will find, by one name or another. I am a businessman and a magician. Like the
madji
, many a person in this
city believes he has been waiting for you, little frown-faced girl, to arrive all his life. Or for the one you are pretending to be.”
“What do you mean by that?” said Elias, suspicious. “And what’s a magician?”
That was Linny’s secret question, too. Oh, she knew about magic—it was a word you could use for talking about the wrinkled things of this world. But she didn’t see how wrinkledness could somehow become a person.
The enormous man stopped suddenly, in front of a narrow house that leaned against other narrow houses in that street. It looked a little dirty and run-down, as houses go, but in this endless, sprawling village, it was hard to judge such things. Maybe everything in a city was supposed to be dirty and run-down. There was, however, a cat in the window, Linny noted with approval.
“In through this door, young blank strangers,” said Rodegar Malkin as he turned a large key in the lock, “who come from wrinkled places, but don’t know what a magician is! I will explain what I mean. Or perhaps you will explain everything to me. You
should
be able to explain something to me, seems like, if you are truly the girl with the lourka.”
T
he house began with a dark hall that smelled slightly of licorice and boots. Linny had a vague impression of many thick coats hanging on pegs and piles of boxes, but her eyes were still adjusting to the dimness and could not be very helpful just yet. And then the enormous man flung open the door at the end of the hall, and Linny and Elias tumbled into the most peculiar room either of them had ever seen.
A hundred oddly shaped glass windows interrupted the room’s far wall—a crazy quilt of windows, as if some enormous window had been accidentally shattered into pieces and each piece, instead of falling to the ground and being swept up, tossed onto a rubbish heap, and forgotten, had instead stubbornly insisted on becoming a window itself, in its own right. Some of the glass had a mild tint to it; some of it was rippled; some gave teasing glimpses of what looked like an actual tree out in the
courtyard beyond; and through all of that motley glass, the city sunlight cascaded, dappling everything and making Linny blink.
The cat Linny had seen in the front window slithered through her legs and into a patch of particularly radiant light, right beside an ancient armchair in which someone had heaped yet another pile of ratty old coats. It was a peculiar sort of cat—sandy yellow on the left side of its body, but all smooth silver-gray fur on the other. It had a gold eye on the sandy side of its face, good for staring with, and an inscrutable silver one that seemed to be full of its own private thoughts on the other side. Perhaps it had come down from the hills, thought Linny. It was so unmistakably a wrinkled cat. It was oddness itself, padding its way through the world.