“I don’t see,” says one of the guild tradesman, “why you can’t simply—”
“Do I come to your shop, master tailor, and tell you I don’t see why you can’t simply make a nicer-looking dress, because all you need do is fasten some fabric together?” Xyphia says, rather loud and rather annoyed after some hours of this, after rather more hours on other days, all the way back to the wretched beginning of the whole project. “Yes! Yes, I could simply tunnel all the holes I’d like beneath the surface of the earth — if I didn’t care at all about what’s above it! Have you heard of earthquakes, sir? Have you ever seen the very earth heave like a wave on the water until all the houses upon it tumble down like so many broken toys? Would you like the entire Eastmarket to fall into a gaping pit filled with sewage, so deep it can never be filled in, so noxious it can never be bridged? Simply! Simply, he says!”
“Master wizard,” another of them sighs.
“How many times,” Xyphia says, slightly louder again, “must I answer that, no, it is not simple?”
“Master wizard—”
“I have taken on an awful lot of trouble which nobody obliged me to,” Xyphia says. “The city will benefit considerably — indeed, it comes up several times in each of these meetings that the city already has — and what does it gain me? Complaints and criticisms and have I thought about — well! I should say I have, given the months I have already spent talking about it, and the months I have spent explaining my reasons, and the months seeking the approval of this chamber for the decisions I have already explained, and furthermore the gentleman, as part of this chamber, already gave me that approval and it’s rather too late to admit he never listened to a word, only raised objections out of a sense he’s entitled to, and he’d now like the months of explanation again but perhaps he’ll feel like listening this time, only to raise more objections, the specifics of which we’ve likely already dealt with while he wasn’t listening—”
“Master wizard—”
“I think I shall take my lunch now!” Xyphia decides frostily.
“Master wizard.”
She stands, jams her hat on her head, pulls her sleeves up her forearms as if preparing for fisticuffs, and picks up her staff with the greatest air of un-triflable-with arcane menace she can project. Given the months of diligent bureaucratic compromise, she suspects it’s not half as much as she’d like.
“There are still several items on today’s agenda,” the chairman says, in a way that’s halfway attempting to appear conciliatory, but mostly sounds as done with her theatrics as she is with, collectively, theirs.
Unfortunately for them all, Xyphia’s attendance at these things has only ever been a pure courtesy on her part. “How unfortunate,” she says truculently, and stalks out.
She spends a week sulking in her tower, brooding over her table-sized scale models of the city and their painstaking recreations of its subchthonian densities and discontinuities. She looses on its tiny spread, a hundred different ways, mad rampages of boring worms, rock-dissolving secretions, workforces of creatures employed to swing a pick. Every time, the city tumbles.
She’s already done it all for the data; this is purely for catharsis.
Robin and Gerda come and knock on the door after long days of venting her frustrations on helpless maquettes.
“Wizard,” Robin says curtly, on the step of the petitioner’s door, cap clutched to her chest. Xyphia doesn’t take her tone personally; it’s the woman’s way, much as her insistence on titling Xyphia Wizard. She’s seemed offended whenever Xyphia has tried to persuade her otherwise.
Xyphia, hatless and with breakfast crumbs on her shirt, heaves a sigh at them. “Ladies,” she says, and waves them in. “Please, please. Sit, I’ll brew tea.”
Robin does not sit. Robin folds her arms. “You’d best not be forsaking our deal,” she says, grimly aggrieved. Xyphia scowls at her.
“Sit down and have some tea,” she says. “I haven’t abandoned anything; I’m simply very tired of dealing with argumentation about it.”
“Well, you’d best not!” Robin says “A wife’s no thing to trifle with!”
“I told you!” Xyphia exclaims, flinging her hands up. “The wizards of old were feckless tyrants, and I’ve no demands on your nuptials at all—”
“I’ll have no trifling, Wizard,” Robin says obstinately.
“I don’t want to deflower your wife!” Xyphia says, frustrated outrage pushing her voice into a humiliating squeak.
For a long, still moment, it seems as though she might finally have said something on the subject that Robin hears. Then, dreadfully and slowly, the big tradeswoman’s face falls into a thunderously redoubled scowl.
“And what’s wrong with her?” she demands, loud and dangerous, cap crushed in newly clenched fists.
Xyphia makes the error of glancing fleetingly at Gerda for help, from whence it’s never once been forthcoming; Gerda has sat, and Xyphia is failing her tea-providing hostess duties. Gerda’s elbow is planted on the table, chin cradled on her palm, and she’s surveying the whole thing with an air of arch civility.
“Robin,” Xyphia says tremulously, “surely you don’t think I’m so selfish that I’d — um — that — you’d be happier, I’m sure, with no such imposition on your union to such—”
“Think you’re too good for her?” Robin roars, face red.
“Never!” Xyphia squeaks.
“Now, Robin,” Gerda says, in a briskly reasonable way. “How do you expect her t’say a word if you keep shouting?”
Robin subsides, hands still clenched, visibly stewing. Xyphia, unnerved, stammers.
“Perhaps you’ve missed t’obvious,” Gerda adds. “There’s two wives t’marriage, aye?”
Xyphia gives her a horrified, incredulous look, then glances at Robin, finding her likewise just looking away from her intended, a frozen look on her face. They hurriedly break eye contact with one another, blushing.
“I—” Xyphia starts, unprecedentedly high-pitched.
“First time came up here, you thought wizard might simply wave a staff and fix t’problem in a flash,” Gerda adds. “She’s put in a dreadful lot of work, hasn’t she? More than even she expected, mayhap. Seems a muchness for just a tumble.”
Xyphia can practically witness the dreadful railway-wheels of Robin’s stubborn mind clack into immovable trajectory on a new, implacable rail, her belligerent determination to have everything square offered the new idea that the books were unbalanced, that she’d mistakenly tried to short the wizard’s payment.
Xyphia gives Gerda a look of profound and frantic betrayal, as Robin squares her jaw and nods decisively, ire derailed into the iron and dutiful idea of them having two wives’ worth of imagined debt to settle in the spring.
“Somebody mentioned tea,” Gerda says, with the air of someone confident they’ve just fixed everyone else’s nonsense with the belated application of common sense.
