Authors: Anne Nesbet
0062104292 (8UP) (12 page)
And then there was the great
bang
of the front door slamming shut—and Linny, whose friends kept being swallowed by dooms of her own making, found herself horribly, awfully alone.
N
o, not entirely alone.
Already a small claw of a hand had clamped itself around Linny’s arm.
“Yes yes yes yes,” the dandelion-headed old woman said as she gave Linny a tug in the direction of a rickety staircase. “Up this way, kiddie. What’s happened to the other one of you? My little Rodegar eat him up already?
Heh heh heh . . .
”
The stairway was narrow and dim. Linny listened to every inch of that space, as much as she measured it with her eyes. The sound of their steps had a hollow undertone to them, for instance.
There’s a basement, then,
thought Linny. She was putting together all the parts of this house in her mind. This was not a place where she ever intended to get lost. Quite the opposite, in fact. She would find her way out of here, as fast as fast.
Sayra was fading, way back in the hills. And now Elias being dragged off to the
madji
, wherever they were! Linny put her hands to her head in frustration, and then recognized the gesture as her mother’s (when the twins were being impossible wild things) and felt a sharp stab of homesickness on top of the worry.
“In here, in here, kiddie,” said the magician’s ma, and she opened the door to a very small and narrow room with a simple cot set up against the wall and a wooden chair at the end of the cot nearest the door. The saving grace of that room was a slightly larger window than you might expect, tucked in under the slanting roof and letting in four dusty panes’ worth of late-afternoon light.
“Young, aren’t you?” said the old woman, out of the blue. She had made a quick job of covering the cot with the quilt and blanket, and now she perched a little shakily on the chair at the far end, her chin tucked on the back’s top rung.
“Not particularly,” said Linny, looking longingly through the panes of that window. There was a walled-in courtyard out back there, with the scrawniest apple tree she’d ever seen. No, she wasn’t young. She had left her child years behind, hadn’t she, when she left the hills? But she did secretly feel not quite as old as she would have wanted to be, to be caught now in the fix she was in.
“Can’t hear you so clear, kiddie,” said the old woman.
“We thought you’d be older, if you see what I’m saying. You’re the one who is supposed to save us and lead us to victory, you know—oh, yes, I know the stories by heart. I would, wouldn’t I? So many fakes, but you smell real to me. Just didn’t know you’d be so puny.”
The window was the kind that didn’t unlatch. Linny came back toward the door and the woman watching from the chair.
“It’s hot,” said Linny, and she pulled the bedroom door right open.
“Hey!” said the old woman. “Go sit on that nice bed there, kiddie! I’ll be minced if I lose you.”
But she didn’t seem to notice the opened door.
Linny listened to the subtle noises any house makes and to the silences that followed them and felt the distances of all of those walls and doors in the way the sound worked here. The old woman gave a little cough that tripped on itself and then kept tripping and rumbling until it was definitely no longer a cough but a snore. She had fallen asleep in her chair. Linny sat very quiet for a while, watching her tiny red puffball of a head loll against the back of the chair.
She was trying to be careful, waiting for a few minutes while the magician’s ma snored herself deeper into her nap. Finally, when the light coming through the window at the end of the room began to dim, Linny stood up
and sneaked past the end of the bed and out into the hall beyond.
She needed to know more about this house and these people. And if the redheaded granny woke up and found her wandering, well, she needed to use the privy, didn’t she? That was ordinary enough.
On the other side of the hall upstairs were two other rooms, very simple and plain, looking over the street in front of the house. Probably the magician and his mother slept in those.
She was figuring all this out very fast as she sped as quietly as a breath of air down the narrow staircase to the ground floor. Her ears were stretched as wide as could be, to pick up any hint of enormous feet stomping back into the house, but she heard nothing.
She opened three doors before she found the staircase that must lead down to the basement. There was a candle in a lantern set into a nook about halfway down, and the flicker of more candlelight from farther below, so it wasn’t completely dark, but it felt to Linny like there was something wrong down here, something wrong at the bottom of the stairs.
Well, but she had to know.
Linny took a deep breath and then darted down the stairs and into what she instantly recognized must be the magician’s workshop. It had sturdy tables like her father’s
room, and storage cabinets along its sides, and shelves with tools and odd objects on them, which was also like any of the workshops she had ever caught glimpses of in her own village. But unlike the instrument-building workshops of Lourka, this basement room, lit by candle lamps, had one whole corner of it left not just undecorated, but actually blackened and barren, as if experiments there had gone terribly awry.
Worse than blackened, to be completely honest: something was deeply, deeply wrong with the world over in that corner. It was a space that Linny’s mind could not make sense of, because the sense of that space had been utterly and violently undone. A part of the pattern of the world was simply missing. Melted away. Gone.
Linny found herself shaking. That annoyed her mightily, so she made a show of walking closer to that blasted corner. “Blasted” was definitely the right word. Fireworks or explosions had scarred the floor and walls and even left some drippy spots of damage in the ceiling above.
That’s when she remembered the strange pebbles the magician had flung into the ranks of the gray Surveyors, and the sickening sense then that some wrong thing was being done to the world. Weapons, he had said. On the shelves were sealed cylinders that Linny thought looked purely wicked
.
When he had thrown those little pebbles,
they had exploded, as if they had a century’s worth of anger and bad feelings squeezed into them. If even a pebble could warp the world, what would these great canisters do? The back of her neck had gone all clammy.
What kind of weapons was Rodegar Malkin selling to the
madji
, she wondered? Was Elias going to be carrying one of these awful cylinders in his hands? Oh, Elias! Appalled, she scampered back up the stairs to the main floor, tested the street door in that dim front hall (and yes, it was locked), and then went outside to make her cover story true by using the privy behind the apple tree.
The walls of that courtyard were too high and too smooth to climb, even for a good climber like Linny. Elias would have to take care of himself for a little bit. And Sayra would have to keep holding on.
When she left the privy, just the last ruddy glimmers of sunset were bouncing about the yard. Time to get back upstairs before old redheaded Ma woke up from her nap and started having fits.
As she sneaked back through the many-windowed room (where the painting was now too buried in shadows to be properly seen) and up the staircase again, something warm and furry snaked up the steps, right through her legs, making her jump. It was the wrinkled cat, mysterious and self-contained, as all cats are, and on its own path.
“You’re in that picture, too,” whispered Linny after the cat. “Wish you could tell me why.”
Cats usually skip explanations, however. By the time Linny was slipping through the bedroom door, the cat was curled up on her bed, the golden tabby side wrapped around the silver one, and its golden eye wide open and staring at Linny. The cat was not the only one staring: the magician’s old ma was sitting bolt upright in her chair, running a hand through her bright red dandelion hair and frowning.
“No giddying about, kiddie!” she said crossly. “You heard my Rodegar bark about that. You’re to stay up here, like a good girl.”
“PRIVY,” said Linny, as loud as she could manage.
Maybe the old woman heard that—hard to tell. In any case, there was a big, distracting ruckus downstairs as the enormous magician came back into the house from wherever he had gone. He bounded right up the steps and peeked his huge head in through the door of Linny’s narrow room.
“Hunh! Not sleeping yet?” he said. “Well, here’s something reasonable to sleep in. We’ll be wanting to keep that dress of yours looking nice and bright, get the most use out of it.”
He tossed a package onto the narrow bed, which made the cat open its other, silver eye, and hiss.
“COME ALONG, MA,” he said. “LET THE GIRL GET SOME SLEEP. BUSY DAY TOMORROW!”
And the ancient woman pattered out the door behind him, pausing to give Linny what was probably meant to look like a wink.
“Not to worry, kiddie,” she said. “I’ll bring you some porridge anyway, to put some meat on your twiggy little bones.”
The magician looked disgruntled.
“Well, porridge. All right. But no tricks from you now!” he said. “I have very good hearing; you need to know that. And the front door is always kept locked, don’t worry about that. I’m a very cautious man. Mess up, and that brother of yours is the one who’ll suffer. He’s all right for now. The
madji
were glad enough to have him. But you’d better stay well in line.”
So then for a while it was just Linny and the cat.
She unwrapped the package and found a plain and sturdy shift to sleep in, and another plain dress, only a little bit too big for her. And stockings without holes. How long did he mean to keep her here, then? Because Linny wasn’t willing to be kept. She had her Aunt Mina to track down, and the medicines to beg, buy, or borrow, and Elias to kidnap back from those
madji
, and—oh so above all!—Sayra to find, wherever she was, and to bring home, safe and whole, from Away. She had a lot to do,
when you made a list of it that way.
But for this moment, when she could do no rescuing of anyone, she couldn’t help but notice that the clothes were new, and the material they were sewn from was softer than the homespun Linny was used to, so this was luxury. Changing out of her birthday dress, she found again the little bag hanging around her neck.
The cat peeked out with its enigmatic silver eye from under a curled paw.
“My private business, Half-Cat,” said Linny, and she shifted around to put her back in between that bag and the cat’s eyes.
She was remembering the image of the girl that had come creeping into view on that card, the last time she and Elias had taken a look. The light was dim in the room already, but she could see the picture had kept blossoming, somehow, in the dark. Why, even the tiniest of cat tails was there, though in a different part of the picture, waving from behind the vase in the background. It was, in fact, a miniature version of that painting downstairs. How that could be, Linny didn’t know. But it was. And indeed, right there on the bottom, letters as fancy as you might see on the front of a store spelled out a few words:
THE GIRL WITH THE LOURKA
.
It was an echo, a picture echo, of that painting, which was in turn an echo of Linny’s own self. So her mother
must have known this picture, long ago when she came up from the Plain. And then, for some reason, she had written on the back, “I will find her.” Find who? The Girl with the Lourka? Linny herself?
It made Linny shiver a little, seeing a picture of herself so much older than she was, and thinking that in some inexplicable way, her mother must have called her into existence. She must have had that picture so firmly in mind, Linny’s mother, that when she gave birth to a daughter, way up in the wrinkled hills, that child—
Linny
—made her mother’s story come true. And then how could someone who looked so much like that girl in the picture
not
end up making herself a lourka and causing all that trouble?
And what exactly had her mother thought would happen, when Linny appeared in Bend wearing the dress her mother had made, the dress from the picture?
No, it was too much of a tangle, and it made her feel all knotted up inside.
She put that picture card back into the bag and looked at the smaller, thicker card there. Something seemed to be blooming on its surface, too, though it wasn’t perfectly clear yet. A face. Perhaps even—a familiar face. Her mother’s face. Yes, it was definitely her mother. And words were beginning to push their way to the surface as well:
IRIKA PONTIS
. Her mother’s own name. Carrying
this card must be like carrying your name along with you.
The Half-Cat startled Linny out of her musings with a sudden hiss. There were dizzy footsteps coming up the steps. Linny had just enough time to put the little bag back around her neck before the magician’s ancient ma skittered in through the door with a bowl of porridge in her hands.
“Eat this,” she said, popping it into Linny’s hands. “Eat this and go to sleep.”
“Tell me, please,” said Linny, as loud as she could without shouting or bringing the magician back up the stairs. “What’s this CAT?”
And she pointed with her spoon at the Half-Cat, just to make her question clearer.
“Ah!” said the old woman. “Special, special! All cats is special, says some, but this one extra so! Wandered in here long ago and stayed. Down from the hills, I guess, kiddie. Like you! To tell us you were on your way! Like the old stories! There’s always a cat in the old stories. There’s always a cat in the picture—”
And she chortled and left.
THE PRICE OF A FANCY BREAKFAST
L
inny was awakened the next morning by bangings and hollerings in the kitchen below. The Half-Cat unfolded itself from the foot of Linny’s cot, stretched, eyed her with each of its strange eyes in turn, and swished through the door and down the stairs.