Authors: Anne Nesbet
“Not me,” said Linny. “For one thing, I can’t blend in anywhere. But Elias, that’s maybe what
you
should do. To get away from the
madji
. And then I’ll go on to Mina and get the medicines from her—”
“You can’t trust Surveyors,” said Elias.
“Right. But Auntie Mina doesn’t count. She’s my mother’s sister. Mama wouldn’t have sent me to her if she thought—”
“They’re all evil,” said Elias. “You don’t know how
things are. They’re trying to ruin the whole world. I have to do what I can to stop that. I promised. It’s bigger than just what we want. They’ll put the whole world on their grid and undo every last wrinkle. You know how bad it feels, on this side of the river.”
Linny was taken aback. Did it really feel bad, over here? Certainly being locked in a room had felt bad, but then that had been awful on the other side of the river, too. Elias had that suffering look on his face, though—a more intense version of the suffering look he had had ever since they came down out of the hilliest parts of the hills. Unwrinkled places made Elias unhappy. But apparently Linny could travel through wrinkled and unwrinkled places, and feel just fine anywhere.
“
Nothing
feels right over here, on the Plain side of the darn river,” he was saying now. “We can’t let them ruin the whole world. That’s why I went with the
madji
. That’s why I volunteered today. What happens to Lourka, if the Surveyors ruin everything everywhere? Don’t you see? It’s Sayra I’m thinking of, back there. And everybody.”
Linny found herself feeling oddly embarrassed; she missed the trees and birds and so on, but the bitterness in Elias’s words right now was almost an accusation. Did he love the wrinkled country more than she did?
No,
thought Linny first.
Maybe,
thought Linny, a moment later. If hating the
Plain meant you loved the wrinkled places more. He was much better than she was at hating the Plain.
But mapmaking feels a little like making a lourka,
she thought. Your whole mind and body, focused on the details of things: carving this bit just exactly so, making the map’s lines meet up just exactly there. She couldn’t settle the question, so she sidestepped herself away.
“It’s not like you had a choice about going with the
madji
,” she said instead. “What do you mean by ‘volunteered’? And where the heck is that cat taking us, anyway?”
They had been following the Half-Cat for quite a while already. The sky was beginning to gray up in the east; even this long night would eventually end. Now, however, the cat was climbing a street that went up a little hill. Just because it was the Plain side of the river didn’t mean that everything over here was flat. Linny and Elias followed the Half-Cat, and Elias huffed and puffed a little extra loud, to make the point that that he couldn’t answer difficult questions while he was working so hard.
At the top of the hill was an area with grass and little square benches made of stone and larger rectangular shapes made of hedges that had been forced with scissors and clippers to abandon the ordinary wild shapes of growing things. This was the Angleside idea of a park, Linny guessed. But she was not wasting too much attention on
the brick-like hedges, because the hill dropped off, past a geometrical balustrade, and there was one of those views of the broader world (though all in grays and shadows still, it being so early in the new day) that filled the nooks and crannies of Linny’s hungry soul.
They had come quite a long way from the Surveyors’ Court, apparently, for there was yet another bridge across the river, a bridge that Linny had not seen before. The river ran a little narrower again here, and the bridge spanning it was very old and massive and thick—no lightness to it at all—as if a baby giant had built it thousands of years ago, using giant-size blocks. Each foot of the bridge was surrounded by a large space, cluttered with wagons and little tents and displays and fountains.
The Half-Cat purred.
On long days in the woods, back when they were younger, Linny and Sayra used to make little villages together out of twigs and bark and leaves and flowers. From this hill, that’s what the spaces on either side of the bridge looked like, with their wagons and tents and displays—two miniature worlds blossoming along a curve of dark water.
The world on this side of the river had more right angles to it, and the glint of glass here and there responded to beams of bright light from hand-carried lanterns. On the far side of the river, everything was dimmer in the
gray, but specks of candlelight flickered like distant stars, and the paths between the booths were so twisted as to be more or less invisible, while extravagant shapes (trees? balloons?) loomed here and there.
Dark shapes wandered through the cluttered spaces, holding lanterns or candles or lamps, depending on what side of the river they were on, and those dark shapes were people, setting things up and testing things and even calling out to each other.
“It’s the fairgrounds,” said Elias.
No kidding,
thought Linny.
They had already slipped down low behind the balustrade, to keep out of sight.
“There’s the Bend side and the Angleside of the fair,” said Elias. “The
madji
explained it all to me. Once every ten years it happens, and they open up the bridge there, and people come and go freely across it. See that old platform thing halfway across?”
There was a kind of stone house or stage sticking up in the center of the bridge, but you could see the nighttime ghosts of people walking back and forth across the bridge on either side of it.
“That’s where the Girls with Lourkas—not real ones, of course—usually do their funny puppet-maze thing. They told me about that, too. It’s all part of the fair.”
Linny looked at him, but his face was lost in shadow.
“What funny puppet-maze thing?”
“It’s like a joke almost, I think. They have pretend Girls with Lourkas who pretend to do some sort of pretend test. Getting a puppet through a labyrinth? Sounds pretty dumb, right? I guess it all used to be more real long ago. But now they just do silly stuff, and everyone laughs.”
“Not this time,” said Linny with grim satisfaction. They wouldn’t be able to say she had failed their stupid tests! No, she was
gone
. “Nobody for them to laugh at this year. They made it against the law to wear one of those costumes, so the girls will all have stayed in Bend. And I ran away. And I hope the fair is boring for everyone—serves them right. Hey, what’s that?”
Out ahead of them, the river made its second great curve, this time away from the wrinkled hills and toward the Plain. Moreover, just beyond the fairgrounds and to the right, the water ran right into what looked like a great metallic wall, stretching all the way across the river.
“Waterworks,” said Elias, and he said it with great disgust. “That’s where they ruin all our water, before it heads any deeper into the Plain.”
“Really? They ruin water?”
Linny was trying to think how water could be ruined. You could drop something very nasty into a well, of course. You could make it undrinkable that way. And for
an icky moment, she imagined workers dropping garbage into the river, behind that sleek and daunting wall.
“They unwrinkle it,” said Elias. “They take the magic and the flavor out.”
“Oh,” said Linny. “So water in the Plain hasn’t got any flavor?”
She felt sorry for everyone living in the Plain, if so.
“They don’t
like
things to have flavor. They’re hardly like real people at all. That’s just part of their awful plan, though.”
“What awful plan?”
“They mean to put all of the wrinkled country on their horrible grid and unwrinkle us. And we can’t let that happen.
That’s
why I’m—”
The Half-Cat gave a sharp hiss. Some of the lights below them were now turning to cast their beams up the little hill, at the balustrade Linny and Elias were hiding behind.
“Don’t move,” said Elias in a murmur that was quieter than a whisper. He didn’t have to say anything, though, because Linny had already frozen, very small, behind one of the thicker pillars of the balustrade.
The light came spilling through the slats of the balustrade, washing back and forth, and Linny could hear the voices that belonged to those lights: “Did you see that? Something’s up there.”
Her heart pounded.
The Half-Cat had leaped back, away from the light, and now it was scratching away furiously at the part of the little hill closest to them. There was already more light in the air. The hill was a darker, more complicated tangle of grays against the paler gray of the sky. And where the Half-Cat was scrabbling at the hillside, there was now a patch darker even than the rest of that dark hill.
“Nuts,” said Elias. “They’re coming up. They can’t find me. I can’t have them find me.”
“You!”
said Linny. Here she’d almost gotten used to thinking of Elias as a reformed human being and much less of a selfish lummox than he used to be back in the hills.
“If they find me, they’ll just kill us both,” said Elias, and for a second he pulled the flaps of his jacket back, and Linny saw the magician’s disorder bombs, tucked in rows along the inside of his jacket. “I’m on a delivery run.”
“Oh, no,” she said. The wrongness of those canisters! “What are you
doing
?”
“You hide yourself, Linny. I’ve got to go, or the whole thing will be spoiled.”
And he didn’t wait around for Linny to ask more questions or to see her find a safe place to hide, or anything. Suddenly he just sprinted away into the deeper darkness.
There were shouts from the people with the lights, and Linny heard them start to run up the slope.
The horror of everything—of the horrible canisters Elias was carrying around with him, of the gray people coming up the hill now to capture her again—was a hole as dark as midnight, and Linny was teetering at the edge of it. If she fell in, she would never be able to climb out again, or maybe even to move—that’s how she felt. But even on the edge of hopelessness, Linny felt the swift, sharp urge to run away spread through her like fire. To run away and hide! She looked around to see where hiding might best be done.
That was one of her wrinkles, hiding.
The Half-Cat meowed at her. Where was it? She couldn’t quite see where it had gone, but as she scanned the small hill over there, she thought she saw, peeking through the tangle of vines, a suggestion of midnight darkness, a hollow in the side of the small hill, as dark as despair.
That was enough. Linny sprinted across the grass, back away from the balustrade toward what was left of the hill. She stayed very low to the ground, which is an awkward way of running, but the voices called out again. They had seen something—Linny at the balustrade or Elias scooting away. Linny stayed low and ran.
She caught glimpses of things she hadn’t noticed
before, as she hurtled toward the hollow in the little hill: stone carvings crawling up the sides of the hill, all somewhat obscured by vines and plants, but obviously old. It hardly looked like something that belonged in Angleside at all. And then she was flinging herself backward, right into that hollow that the Half-Cat had discovered. She slid her legs in first and reached out afterward to pull the vines loose again, so that they hung down over the entrance to her hiding place, at least as much as could be done.
She lay there very still, willing her breath to slow down and become less noisy, willing the people coming up the hill to go another way. Trying not to think of Elias, not right at this moment, because if the horror came back and swallowed her while she was hiding in this hole, she did not think she would be able to keep from crying, and crying is noisy.
T
hank goodness the hiding place had turned out to be deep enough to hide the whole of her! As the sounds of hurrying feet and dabs of bright un-candlelight came nearer to her, she scrabbled backward a little deeper into that deep—surprisingly deep—hole in the hill.
Then a boot came right up to the entrance of her hole. She could see the heel of it, filtered through those dangling vines. Linny’s heart threatened to drum itself right out of her poor chest.
His boot’s pointed sideways,
she told her frightened heart. Linny knew you had to be very stern with yourself sometimes, when fear starts threatening to take over.
Sideways, so he can’t see me hiding.
“Must have been
madji
,” said a voice, and there was the unpleasant sound of someone spitting in disgust. “They’re everywhere, these days. Like rats.”
Linny kept backing away from the entrance, a stolen,
quiet hand’s length at a time.
“Rats on a rat hill,” said another voice. “Just look at this place! Don’t they clear out rat nests anymore in this part of town?”
And to Linny’s horror, that booted foot came crashing right through the screen of vines. Keeping her stomach low, she snake-scrambled her way backward roughly enough that the rocks scraped against her legs and elbows.
“Hey, look!” said the man. “There’s an actual rathole here. For extra-large rats, to judge from the size of it.”
Linny’s heart thudthudded so loudly she thought it must be audible to all of them.
Back, back, back!
The man was bending down, you could tell from the sound of his voice. Any second now he would take that unnatural, unforgiving light of his and shine it right in through those vines, and Linny’s hiding place would have failed her—
But at that moment something warm and furry came racing forward across Linny’s back, and before she had time to scream out herself (those men had been talking about rats! She was being walked on by
rats
!), all possible noises were drowned out by the mewling yowl of an angry, spitting Half-Cat flinging itself right into the bright light ahead. So it was the younger man with the boot, and fortunately not Linny, who broke the general hush by shouting out in surprise. And then the other
man laughed, not very nicely (and all the while Linny scooted herself back, back, back—it was amazing how far back this hole kept going), so that there was a distracting muddle of sounds from outside: shouts and curses and laughter and those awful noises a cat can make when it’s angry, like a demonic child screeching and hissing in the night.