0062104292 (8UP) (15 page)

“Means crud for news!” said the person beside her. (Linny blushed to realize she must have spoken right out loud just now. Then she looked and saw . . . yet another girl, with pretty brown curls tumbling down her back, another dark-blue vest over a colorful skirt, another box with strings dangling at her side.) “Changing the rules like that, and on Claimants’ Day! And didn’t I have the
devil’s own time putting this costume together? For nothing, I guess. Angleside killjoys! Well, may they fall right into their Plain Sea and be bored all to death!”

It wasn’t just Linny listening to her speech. A few of the people closest in that crowd hooted their approval; some laughed.

“Fair has to have a Girl, though, don’t it?” said someone a few feet away.

“Well, not me, not this time, it won’t have,” said the angry/pretty girl. Linny could see she was already trying to pull herself out of the tide of that crowd. “Not if they’re going to threaten to
kill
us, the vile griddlers. ‘Immediate sentence of death for all deemed impostors,’ it says right there. Well then, good-bye, I say.”

“Too bad!” and “Luck to you!” said a few voices, and a few others cursed the Surveyors with crunchy, furious words Linny had not heard before.

“And they’re checking papers on the bridge, those gray cowards!” said someone else. “What’re they frightened of, anyway? Girls with toy lourkas?”

There was the sound of someone spitting in disgust, which was not a sound Linny wanted to hear in a crowd as thick as this one. (Where was there for disgusted spit to go?)

“Someday she’ll come, our true Girl, and take charge, and they know it,” said another voice. “Maybe she’s already come, hmm? You know what the rumors are
saying—that a girl showed up in the market square, who looked real as real. Scared, that’s what they are.”

Nervous laughter from here and there. And bobbing above the sea of people, not that far away anymore, Linny caught sight of the magician’s hat.

Well! She had no time to think what to do—she had an instrument that could be nothing other than a lourka hidden under her cloak, and no papers to show any Surveyors. So when the cat hissed from between her feet and then leaped pointedly through the crowd and toward the upstream side of the bridge, Linny blindly followed, making as little commotion as she could, though at least one woman yelled something unpleasant when Linny elbowed past her.

The entrance of the bridge was made grander by a pair of columns, rising pointlessly into the sky. Linny ducked behind the farther column, out of the way of those crowds again, and held her breath. Had the magician or the
madji
(because surely the
madji
must also be right out there somewhere) heard that woman’s yelp? Had they caught a glimpse of a smallish person in a cloak of no recognizable color slipping across the flow of people here? Linny stood very still for a moment and then realized that her cloak of no recognizable color must still be a darkish blot against the white stone, if any of those people chasing her had managed to get to this side of the bridge ahead of her. No, she’d better keep moving. The Half-Cat was already
padding on, covering ground fast but without ever seeming to hurry.

And as she lifted her head for a moment, to see what lay ahead of her on the upstream side of the bridge, she had another of those moments where that hungry place inside her was suddenly fed by information, by the lay of the land, by the view. The river narrowed here and grew louder. The lower parts of the city had been quite flat, but here the water appeared around a kind of high corner and then tumbled down in a series of lively waterfalls. And up there ahead of her, across the narrow liveliness of this upper river, but before the actual bend in its course, was another bridge, a much smaller and stranger bridge, a bridge that was, in fact, a house, built above the water and stretching from one bank to another.

Linny’s heart did a little leap of recognition:
Bridge House, Bend!

And that was when she heard the men’s voices,
madji
voices, from back by the huge stone bridge. They were loud, and they were breathless from running, and they were shouting, “There!
There
she is! Go! Grab that girl!”

Sometimes hiding is the right solution, and sometimes a girl just has to run like the wind and hope she’s faster than the angry people after her. Linny hitched up her skirts and ran.

15

THE BRIDGE HOUSE

L
inny raced up the slope of the embankment as fast as she could manage, considering the fancy dress and the breakable lourka, slapping in its sack against her side. It turns out a person can skitter along a sidewalk pretty quickly when she’s being chased by an enormous magician and a bunch of rebel fighters with an interest in grid-destroying weapons.

The Bridge House was very beautiful and peculiar, stretched as it was across the crashing, tumbling river, from one side to the other. Linny was running as hard as she could, so she caught only glimpses of the house’s windows looking out over the waterfalls, and only glimpses of the crooked roofline of the house, steep and shingled near the Bend side of the river, but ever boxier as it crossed toward the Angleside. Linny sprinted up the sloping riverside as fast as fast, hoping very much that this really was the Bridge House of which her mother
had spoken, and that her Aunt Mina really lived there.

As Linny approached the thick gates that kept the street apart from the Bridge House’s front steps, the thought zipped briefly through her mind that this Auntie Mina had better not be out buying bread for dinner or what have you, because Linny really, really, really needed someone to be willing to open this house’s door and let her in. It was either that or face the angry
madji
. Not to mention the even angrier magician.

She slipped through the garden gates, slammed them closed and latched them shut, and then ran up the stairs to the Bridge House’s front door, as solid as a tree trunk and every inch of it carved with pictures of hills and rivers and trees and more hills—but she couldn’t look at it now. The
madji
were only a few seconds behind her. She gave the door a couple of desperate bangs with her fist.

“You, Linnet!” called the enormous magician from the other side of the fence. He was tall enough that his head showed above the top of the gate, and he started shaking the iron bars with his massive hands. The latch might hold, and then again it might not. “Come back, you fool! That’s the
Tinkerman’s
door. You can’t go in
there
!”

“Why can’t I?” asked Linny, still furious about everything: the queasy-making ride in the coach, the weapons that did something terrible to the structure of the world,
the sliver of a room where the magician had kept her a prisoner. Plus how he had dragged off poor Elias!

Linny turned her back on the magician and the
madji
, all of them, and pounded on the door. The
madji
were shouting, too.

“Just go away, all of you!” said Linny, not even turning around to look at them, her eyes focused on the door that her Aunt Mina, her mother’s sister, must must
must
be living behind.
Oh, hurry!

Sometimes a good stare can work like magic. That very moment the door flung itself open, and a crisp voice said, “Who can possibly be knocking at
this
door? Nobody ever comes here.”

No, this could not be Linny’s Auntie Mina. The voice was not a woman’s voice, for one thing.

“Umm, excuse me, hello!” said Linny, gasping a little for breath. “Is someone named Mina here, please? Can you tell me fast?”

“What’s all the ruckus?” said the man, taking a step forward into the light. He was dressed in a black and gray work shirt and striped apron, and had a black cap pulled down over his head, and a silvery ponytail running down his back. “Why is that giant trying to break through my gate?”

“Not a giant—he’s a magician,” said Linny, feeling more desperate every second. “Please,
is Mina here
?”

“Magicians!” said the man, and he waved a narrow wrench he had in his hand in the general direction of the gates. “Aha! Of course! Hotheads! Know-nothings!
Go away, you lot!
”

The magician roared in response, rattling the gates so hard with one huge fist that Linny thought surely the metal would crack and give way.

Enough!
Before her brain had had time to catch up with her limbs, she had already scooped up the Half-Cat and barged right under the man’s arm and into the dark hall beyond the door. And then compounded her crimes by kicking the big front door shut with her foot. (The shouting outside vanished, just like that. The door must be really very thick.)

The Half-Cat made a shrill, offended spitting noise, scratched itself loose, and sprang to the ground, where it strutted back and forth for a moment, shrugging its fur back into place like a goose settling its feathers after a fight.

Linny wasn’t any better. For a moment all she could do was lean forward, her hand on her knee, and gasp.

But the man with the work apron wasn’t looking at her just at that moment. He had finally noticed the cat. It was the strangest thing: his whole face lit up.

“My best of all inventions!” he said. “It’s my own lost kitty cat brought you here!”

“Excuse me, but why’d the people out there call you the Tinkerman?” asked Linny. What she wanted to ask was, “Excuse me, are you dangerous?” But this seemed like a way to come at the question from a more tactful angle.

“No respect for applied science anymore, is there? On the one side of the river, know-nothings, and on the other side, know-it-alls.”

“Oh,” said Linny. She wasn’t sure whether this meant he was dangerous, or not at all dangerous. She looked around, just as a precaution, looking for other ways out.

They were standing at one end of a long, long corridor, lit by what at first seemed an endless line of windows along the left-hand side. The windows could not be all the same, though: the light was different, farther down the hall. Brighter, perhaps. The windows closest to the door she had just come in by were curtained and shuttered. Hence the shadows here.

Along the right-hand side of the hall were doorways and doors, so many of them that Linny could not count them all. A house that was also a bridge! She had never heard of such a thing. A house between places. Living in this house must be like always being on a journey.

The man had shifted his gaze back from the Half-Cat by now. He stared at the lourka sack in Linny’s hands, and at her face, and then back at the bag again.

“And what’s in that?” he said, pointing.

“My lourka,” said Linny. “I made it.”

“
Did
you?” he said, his eyes all at once waking up and focusing. “A
lourka
? So you’re here for the fair?”

“No,” said Linny. “I never heard of the fair until I got to the city. I’m looking for someone named Mina. Does she live here?”

“Oh, Mina!” said the man. “Mina hasn’t been here for years.”

“But I thought she’d be here,” said Linny. Disappointment, thick as a blanket, settled over her. Now what was she supposed to do?

“Did she go somewhere?” she said.

“Her sister got herself lost in the wrinkled hills,” said the man. “Mina wanted to follow after.”

“She went into the hills?”

“She tried, all right, but the hillsickness stopped her. You can’t just waltz up into those hills, you know.”

Linny certainly knew that. Her mother had been almost sick enough to die when she had first arrived in Lourka. But then she had gotten better.

“But if Mina didn’t go into the hills, where’d she go?”

“She got ambitious, that’s what. Started working on a cure for hillsickness—an antidote for magic. Then she could go looking for her sister, couldn’t she? But the Surveyors heard what she was up to, sure enough, and so they nabbed her.”

Linny was having trouble following the story. Mina
wasn’t here, though; that much was clear.

“The Surveyors took her away? Because they didn’t want a cure for hillsickness?”

The man barked with laughter.

“The other way around! The other way around!” he said. “They want a cure for hillsickness so much they shiver to think of it! Imagine what they could do then—how they could finally map every nook and cranny of those hills and tame all the wild places. So when they heard what she was up to, of course they whisked her right off to a research hub at the plainest edge of the Plain Sea, where I suppose she’s been stirring and mixing ever since. And she’ll be kept there until they get what they want. And who are you, you young person with all these odd questions?”

“My moth—I mean, Mina’s sister, Irika, told me Mina might know about medicines. My friend is sick. That’s why I came down here to the Plain. For medicines.”

“Did you just say
Irika
?” he said. “So have you seen her, then, the child of my wife, my almost-daughter Irika? We lost Mina to the Plain, and Irika to the hills. There’s symmetry for you. Where are you from, that you’ve been chatting with my Irika?”

“From the hills,” said Linny.

“Oho!” said the man. “A girl, down from the hills, with a lourka over her shoulder! That’s a news item, right
there. I’d better run a quick scan.”

“What’s a scan?” said Linny.

The man had already darted over to a chest of drawers against the wall and was rummaging around in them for something.

Linny shrugged off her cloak. She was hot and sweaty after her mad dash up the embankment. Though then she remembered all the ribbons and buttons on the dress she was wearing, and she made her face very tough to compensate. Just because she was wearing ribbons didn’t mean anybody should take her for a fool.

The Tinkerman swung around, brandishing a double-pronged wiry fork that he had dug out of that drawer.

“Found it!” he said, and he darted forward and back, holding the wiry fork thing out toward Linny and watching its wires vibrate and hum, as if they were strings being played by some entirely invisible musician.