Authors: Anne Nesbet
“Oh, but you will,” said the regent, glittering more sharply. “The lesson is about why it is important to keep one’s bargains. It is about who is really in charge, in this world. So I’m afraid it does have to be you who pushes this lever.”
And before Linny could move away, he took her hand and forced it right down on that lever—she shouted out, but that did no good, and the magician had shouted, too, and was lunging toward them. She felt a surge of energy pass through the various wires, enough so that her hair stood straight up on the top of her head, and over there on the wrinkled side of the river, the rectangular patch of ground where that little plaster statue was went dark. Its lanterns and fires and glowing things just plain winked out, all at once.
Something bad had happened there. But what? Linny
pushed the regent to one side, dodged the shouting magician (who himself was being tackled by a bunch of Surveyors in gray), jumped off the old stage in the center of that bridge, and began running, as fast as she could, down toward the Bend side of the river.
The crowds let her through. Most of those faces were simply puzzled (everyone asking his neighbor, “What just happened?”). But many were upset and beginning to grow angry.
The feeling that bit into Linny now was grief. A gap had just been torn into Linny’s soul. Something had been lost.
And then, oh, miracle, Elias was there beside her. Elias! She was so relieved to see him, but so horrified by the dark patch of ground where the statue had been that the relief vanished into the air, almost as soon as it appeared.
“Why?” he was saying. “Why? Why? Why?”
“What was that?”
Linny asked him. She didn’t stop running, though.
“Their grid,” he said. He tried to say more, but Linny was dragging him off the bridge now and through the fair. Everyone around seemed to be shouting and surging in one direction or another, but the crowds fell back to let Linny pass, because she was the Girl with the Lourka, and she still wore the crown.
There she was then, facing the ruined patch of the fair, the breath in her painful and making her pant. The little statue was still there; the plaster girl’s eyes looked dully down at Linny. But sparks no longer sprayed forth from its head, and lanterns no longer hovered in the air, not in this part of the fair, and the flowers in their pots had wilted, and much of the color had vanished from everything there. It had been a display of everything wrinkled, and now it was a rectangular patch of ordinary ground, covered with broken things and junk.
How had they done this awful thing? They had put real power into their grid, and they had found a way to mark off a part of Bend, filled with everything wonderful—and then they had
unwrinkled
it.
“The dirty griddlers! The buzzards! The rats! The foul, foul pigs!”
That was Elias, cursing and crying at Linny’s elbow.
“And they made
your hand
push that button thing that did this! We’ll show them. Oh, I’ll show them if I can—”
He turned and shouldered his way through the crowd, heading back to the bridge, where the magician was fighting with a sea of men in gray. Linny looked at all the broken things in this rectangular place, and then she remembered (her brain was moving slowly, it seemed, as if it had lost some essential part of its own wiring) what Elias was carrying under his jacket.
Those awful canisters, full of destruction, that the
madji
had asked Elias deliver to someone. What was it about this miserable city? The Plain side unwrinkling things; the magicians making disorder bombs to undo the very bones of the world . . .
“Elias, wait!” she shouted, and then took off after him.
“Is it war?” said a man’s voice, not far away. “Is it war, Lourka Girl?”
“Stop him for me,” she said, pushing the crowds away with her hands as she followed Elias back to the bridge. “Stop him. Please stop him. He mustn’t help them do anything terrible.”
“War! War!” said voices from the crowds—and the ordinary people in gray, the ones who moments before had been laughing and smiling at the displays on the Bend side of the river, like everyone else, were now taking alarm at what the voices around them were beginning to say. The gray people were trying to get back to the bridge, too, back to their side of the river. But it was slow, moving through those crowds, even though people still gave way before her, before Linny. But some small part of her brain could hear voices crying out, not so far away, and fists thumping and perhaps even vases or bones being crushed.
Bad things were beginning to happen. The crowd was still mostly just murmuring, but soon there would be
nothing anywhere but bad things.
She ran as fast as she could, pushing her way through the people around her, and soon she had her hand on Elias’s back again, and he was swinging around, fists flying, not knowing who it was.
Linny ducked.
“Elias, please don’t,” she said to him. “Come away with me, so we can talk.”
“There isn’t time to talk. I have to get the weapons where they need to go. You know it’s only fair. We can’t let them get away with
that
.”
No, they couldn’t just get away with that, with unwrinkling a part of the world.
They were at the edge of the bridge, pushed up against the stone railing. The crowds were milling and struggling around them, and some large percentage of that crowd was probably watching them.
Linny tried to hang on to Elias, tried to whisper into his ear.
“Please stop. Please think. Those bombs the magician makes—they’re bad, too. Maybe even worse than what just happened, than unwrinkling things. The magician’s bombs destroy whatever’s there, they ruin space—they make places wrong. Elias!
They don’t fix anything.
”
“I think a place without any wrinkle to it is already as good as destroyed,” said Elias. “Can’t you feel that? Why
can’t you feel that? On the Angleside, it feels horrible all the time. And they want to do that to every part of the wrinkled country. That’s what they’re planning. It’s too late to talk about fixing things. Let go of me, Linny!”
He was scrabbling at the railing now, trying to climb up it; he was so eager to get out of her grasp.
And Linny was hanging on to him tooth and nail, with all fingers and both hands.
“Stop it!” she was saying. “Stop it! You idiot! You’ll make things worse. You’ll get hurt!”
She remembered what even those tiny pea-sized disorder bomblets had done to people in the market, when the magician had thrown them. And Elias had huge sticks of that stuff tucked into his vest. She had seen that.
“Let go of me,” said Elias. “You don’t understand anything. You never understood anything. All you cared about was yourself.”
In both fairgrounds, people were shouting at each other. Things were falling apart. And the people around them were shouting, too.
“Let go,” said Elias, and Linny held on as tight as she could.
She could be stubborn. She truly could. Maybe he was right, and that was selfish. But she would not let him go. He was perched on the railing now—he had swung his legs over somehow, and Linny hung on to him as tight as
she could, not letting go. If she hung on long enough, he would rethink his craziness. That was her hope.
It was at that moment that a screech of laughter came dancing along the railing itself: red hair and bright clothing, dancing on the railing as if it were a line painted on the floor, not a thin band of stone high above a river in which it would be all too easy to drown.
“Need help, laddie?” that voice shrieked. “Why won’t you let him loose, Lourka Girl? Haven’t you maybe done enough, pushing their wicked buttons for them?”
It was the magician’s old ma, her brilliant red puffball of a head glowing slightly in the dusk. She was wearing a ragged parody of Linny’s own dress, rough stripes in many colors running down the skirt, all old and worn and fraying.
“Go away,” Linny said, and to Elias she said, “Don’t do
their
work, Elias. The magician just destroys things and makes money on it. That’s as bad as the gray people. What if something happens to you? What do I tell Sayra then?”
He opened his mouth and started to say something. But what that something was, Linny didn’t find out, because the shrieking fireball that was the magician’s old ma kept coming in her wild dance along the railing and flung herself on them, while the magician himself shouted out and wrestled with Surveyors up higher on
the bridge.
Oof!
Pain shot up Linny’s poor arms, and the old woman with the dandelion’s worth of bright red hair was shouting even louder.
“With me!” she shouted, and in one awful leap, she wrenched Elias out of Linny’s hands and right over the edge of that bridge.
No no no no!
Linny scrambled back to her feet, grabbed at the bridge’s railing.
There was a great splashing in the water, down below, and that splashing commotion was being pulled down the river, away from the bridge, as fast as the water could flow.
Linny couldn’t see exactly what was happening. Those were Elias’s arms thrashing around, weren’t they? Was that crazy old woman trying to drown him?
No no no no!
Elias was gone.
“W
hat’s going on down there?” the regent was saying, somewhere behind her back. Even he had been fighting, apparently, or wearing himself out by ordering others to fight; his voice was ragged and harsh. “Why don’t those guards take control?”
Linny was leaning over the railing, her knuckles white. She could see splashes that must actually be people drifting over to the right side of the river—but they were already headed around the bend. The river water Elias was maybe drowning in ran into the gray wall of the waterworks there, not so far away now, not far enough. What happened to the water then? And to the waterlogged bodies it was carrying when it splashed up against the waterworks wall? What would happen to them?
When the river turned the bend, it became impossible for Linny to see what exactly was going on with Elias in the water.
Please don’t drown!
“That was someone you knew who fell in the river?” said the regent, now so close to her she could see the welt on his cheek where someone must have punched him. There were gray Surveyors behind him now, and others, slightly farther away, still trying to subdue the magician.
“You!” said Linny, furious. “You unwrinkled that part of the fair!”
“The only way to make barbarians behave is to show them what kind of force they’re up against. That’s a message they can understand. The rest is all nonsense.”
Linny whirled around, finally angry enough to look away from the river.
“And you used my hand to push that horrible lever! You had no right!”
“That’s enough—” said the regent.
And at that moment, there was a horrible noiseless shock, an explosion that shook through every mind in that place on some peculiar frequency ordinary ears couldn’t hear much of, though it shook Linny’s bones: an awful, enormous
whooooompf
,
coming from behind her back, from far away, down the river, and sucking all the air out of the world for a moment.
A silent thunderclap. And then people started screaming. One thought drowned out everything else in Linny’s
head as she spun back around and grabbed the bridge’s railing with both her hands.
Elias!
Something had gone wrong with the river. Linny’s first impression was that the twilit water there beyond the bend had suddenly tilted off the usual axis, as if the river were a board someone had kicked aslant. Then she noticed the sickening clots of smoke, thick, greasy, and greenish gray, rising up from one end of the waterworks. Oh, no. Oh, no.
Elias!
“What have your insane
madji
done now?” The regent was gasping behind her, but Linny was already pushing her way down the bridge toward the Angleside fair, because it was on that side of the river that the smoke was rising. “Take her! Take her! Hold her, you people there!”
“Don’t you touch me,” said Linny when she felt a hand on her shoulder. “You let me by.”
A pair of rough-dressed
madji
had popped up on the other side of her, with the magician looming behind them. Their shirts were torn, and they glowered at the gray Surveyors behind the regent.
“Stop,” said the
madji
. “The Girl with the Lourka is ours. She’ll come with us.”
One of them took Linny’s sleeve. So now there were two hands on her, claiming her as theirs.
“Let go,” she said. “I don’t want to go with you, either.”
“She’s ours,” said the regent to the
madji
. “Take your filthy wrinkled hands off her.”
They were pulling at her now, the Surveyors on one side and the
madji
on the other. And as the quarrel heated up, both sides got angrier with each other and, for a moment, remembered Linny that much less.
The Surveyors and the
madji
frowned and shouted and pulled, while the regent and the magician followed along on the edges. They were surging down to the Angleside end of the bridge, the little knot of
madji
and Surveyors pulling at Linny and yelling at each other. Linny, fighting to keep her balance, kept grabbing swift looks out over the bridge and the river, trying to take the measure of where she was.
“She comes with us! That crown is ours!”
“You fools! They’re ours! Ours!”
And so on and so forth. Meanwhile, all around them was another knot of people, watching and not knowing quite what to make of what they were seeing. But Linny saw that the frowns on those faces were deepening as the men shouted more loudly at each other and pulled Linny back and forth. The people watching shouted warnings at the men who had Linny in their grip—at all of them, the Surveyors and the
madji
.
“Stop it!” said Linny.
The ones pushing and pulling ignored her, though.