Wicked Problems by Max Gladstone

Author:Max Gladstone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

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As a girl, Kai had been fond of a certain sort of adventure romance, set in a historical Chartegnon that might as well have been a fantasist’s invention for all it had in common with her day-to-day experience as a shipbuilder’s daughter. That was part of the fun. Dukes dueling in graveyards, sopranos swooning over love notes, clasped hands torn asunder by revolution, a kiss on a burning building, these things were vivid and bold and utterly alien. Her sister, Ley, teased her for this obsession—though Kai noticed that Ley could and often did recite the heroes’ speeches from memory as she mocked. She’d been nearly fourteen before she understood that a soprano was not some angelic elfin creature but was, in fact, an athlete capable of putting a high D through a two-inch-thick board at a hundred paces.

She’d long since come to terms with the fact that her books were not accurate guides to the world—though in that respect they were no more deficient than any other aspect of her formal education.

In those books, all opera houses were roughly 90 percent secret passages and booby traps by volume, the better for menacing masked personages to flit around abducting damsels and murdering counts. Every wall was a trick wall, every carpet hid a trapdoor. Kai had adored this image so much she had diligently avoided investigating whether it was true.

Unfortunately, the walls of the Iskari Grand Opera had so far proved impermeable. If the floor meant to open and swallow her into the embrace of some misunderstood monster, it damn well better get on with it. She was tired. Her pursuers were coming up fast. And they had swords.

Less contemplation and more running, rabbit.

“I was under the impression,” she observed to the goddess—and she was not panting, thank you very much, “that your grace compassed sky and sea and slope. The last time we worked together and you wanted me somewhere else you just zapped me there.”

Last time, you were far above the surface of the world, in sight of the moon and within the compass of my power to, ah, zap. You call on me now from the heartland of another potentate, beneath the odd-pupiled gaze of its unfriendly gods. What do you expect from me?

“Miracles?”

Laughter answered. Salvation is my metier, rabbit, but you have to give me something to work with.

“That’s not how you pronounce it. More like met-ee-yay.”

Well, that doesn’t sound right at all.

“Nonetheless.”

This is why I enjoy mortal company. One learns things!

“Have you learned a way out?”

I am working on it.

“Oh Lady of the Silver Ways: work faster.”

Kai kept in shape by climbing the ceremonial steps of Kavekana’ai, but she did that in stretchy shorts and a sports bra, not fifteen pounds of ball gown plus weapons-grade hair. She had, with a sigh, ditched her heels into Tara’s clutch, alongside M. Grimwald’s head and a number of tiny burners and scalpels and phials, including one labeled UNIVERSAL SOLVENT.

Normal people, even normal Craftspersons, did not tend to bring a tool kit to a professional introduction.

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