Marshsong

by Nato Thompson

  But the answer to why it killed Sibel still bothered her tossing and turning condition. It made little sense and while Isabella could perfectly accept that the world worked in unanswerable chaotic ways, she found it hard to believe that that particular crime scene was the result of pure coincidence. No, that creature had come for them and it had come for Isabella as well. It may have fed and bled along the way, hiding in old farmhouses and slaying an impoverished family here and there, but some of its actions were not without premeditation. There were larger hands on the game board and Isabella could feel them.

  But for now she was a mess and the way seemed beyond her control. Last night, the water of the Aliber had soaked into her bones and she had just barely managed to crawl up through the noodle shop and lay on the floor, a sopping pile of sad moss. She had no energy and the tasks against her were too much as is. And she could feel out there, something faint on the back of her throat, that Marty had returned from his trip. He was out there, too, whittling some stick to poke her eyes out while singing on the porch the party was over (and it had just barely begun). The deck was most certainly stacked against her.

  As it turns out, she had escaped the School only to jump into another trap—from kidnap victim to prisoner to wounded. Each environment turned out to be uniquely more constraining than the last. Now here she lay on the couch in the VIP room of her wildly popular secret nightclub. Nothing about Le Chateau De Crawler appealed to her at this moment—catering to the bored elite who ignored the suffering of the city only to wear costumes and play junior high school together. The pounding music so fanatical it drowned out the mystery that was already churning in everyday life. If she weren’t so sick, her face would have turned red in embarrassment at the hubris of it all. She closed her eyes again and told herself that she had to focus.

  Focus came in spurts and not rivers. She had moments of clarity, only to have them consumed by waves of nausea. In the interim, as she lay forlorn on her couch, she played limp host to some of her more concerned guests. Barrister Bruno came by several times bearing flowers—his large arms full of Dutch chocolates, dried apricots, and fresh oranges. He sat by her bedside and told her war stories from his time as a journalist and anarcho-syndicalist sympathizer. He told her how Barrenwood had only escaped total destruction in the war because of their insidious support for both sides. Their duplicitous neutrality was their tragic saving grace. How he had heard of a world’s fair where electricity could be seen shooting around a giant orb and that people were even making machines to fly. The world was changing, he told her, and the sybaritic life they enjoyed here was most probably temporary. He told her about his limp and how it was the result of a bayonet from a child of only seventeen years, who surprised him as they sat waiting for a bridge to explode from dynamite they planted. How the kid and he had become friends after the war and they actually spent time together now in a way most romantic.

  Isabella asked many times about the water. He would shake his head and not know what she was saying, but as he told her about the burgeoning development of the arcades in the Miser’s Quarters, where the elaborate window displays with mechanical trains and tiny twinkling light bulbs (small stars erupting in a shop window) were garnering vast crowds of children, Isabella tugged his arm. “This,” she would say. “This is the beginning of it.”

  Isabella could feel it, too. The city had a bad love affair coming. The markets weren’t only dream makers, but slow dream stealers—a bathtub drain for sorrow that slowly but surely synthesized dreams toward a universal un-ending logic. It was the kind of anti-curiosity that she sensed in parts of the School. The kind Harrison warned about—the anti-enlightenment enlightenment, where all sorrows, heartache, romance and salivated dream could be reduced to a banal schematic to be read, ingested, and crapped out.

  Bruno, in his own way, understood this. He complained about the clocks that were being installed on corners. The city’s timekeepers.

  “Clocks are not our friends,” guffawed Bruno. “They look pretty and all, but they also remind everyone they should get out of the bars.”

  While Bruno regaled her with stories, Caperwill busied himself getting the plans together to move their establishment. Movers were coming in and out the door with boxes, and carriages were pulling up. Le Chateau de Crawler would be moving somewhere in the Mortestrate. Even Isabella was a tiny bit of a real estate speculator.

  Yosune came by once with some homemade soup (but she was a terrible cook. It tasted like moldy water.) Rana was still furious, descending into madness. She was blind with rage and depression and wouldn’t leave her home. Yosune was worried about her, but she didn’t want to bother Isabella with it all in her sick state. Isabella again promised to find the killer even though, in a sense, she believed she knew who it was. Now wasn’t the time to open that can of worms.

  Yosune put a cloth on her brow and told her to rest. She told her how the great Houses were in a panic, that the festival was coming and that they had lost any role in it. How House Revan was furious with the increased power of Castilla and that the great Houses were refusing to contribute any money to the festival. How she had seen her father spending time with people most unsavory and that she suspected that violence was in the air. That blood was soon to be shed.

  Nevertheless, Isabella’s fever raged on and to make matters worse, her stomach pains intensified. In her haze, she missed her life in the cave, her trips in the boat with the record player and film projector, Battle Ball at Cathedral Ogre, Fennel's laughter and his chilling sense of humor. She had always planned to escape, for as long as she could remember, but she had never thought what it would be like to be without her brother. He was the laughter at her side. Without his cajoling malevolence, the world was a colder more rock-like expanse. Humorless.

  As far as she could tell, this world, with its sad myopic emotions, was not all that different than making friends with a mud pit. So many were on the treadmill. Just walking about. Doing what they should do. Feeling the way they should feel. Even the Chateau de Crawler was losing its luster once she had now made her escape. As the boom of the nightclub interfered with her sleep, the antics she orchestrated for people felt like a hollow joke—a mirage to shelter people from the tragedy of their days. Maybe Fennel was right. His malicious sensibility had always struck her as tragically caustic, lacking in robust sympathy, but now she looked upon him in the light of fascination. He was so steadfast in his earnest desire to destroy and remind. If memory was destruction, his was the most acute.

  On her feverish bed, she could hear his mourning song drifting in and out—the sad song of tears that fed his heart. It scared and soothed her as she longed to be back in the boat, drifting along the marshes, feeling the gnats play along the slight breeze and Manzanita with lightening bugs and lily pads crisscrossing on a moonlit sorrow.

  She knew Fennel hadn’t meant to keep her away forever. His betrayal at the School had just been following orders. He was perhaps the most obedient malcontent the universe would ever know. Isabella couldn’t bring herself to believe that he would send her to permanent banishment at the School. He loved her. And she loved him. She missed him so.

  And even that love had fallen apart. Fennel, not at all unlike Barrenwood. This city was limping along like a lemming off the cliff. Even in its sordid chaotic sensibilities, she could sense the forces of the city joining up to sweep away the magic. The water was disappearing. She had even heard Minasha lisp it. But she didn’t need to hear it to know it. She and Fennel had sensed it some time ago. The dreams were getting thinner. The mad were getting carted away. The work-week was growing stronger. The arcades that lined the streets channeled dreams into limp patterns. She felt nostalgic for a city she didn’t really know. Just as she was getting to know this place that she had for so long been a simple servant to, she was finding it hell bent on its own evisceration. The torn up streets of the Mortestrate pushed its way to the front of Isabella’s delirious imagination—the water pouring across the cr
acks as the Gaventas construction crews took apart house and home.

  She woke from her stupor with parched lips. Her head was woozy. Coming into focus, leaning over her, was none other than Heinrich, his bushy eyebrows barely visible through the mist of the hot tea he poured past her lips.

  “Drink this, dear Isabella.”

  “Heinrich,” she muttered. “What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be at work?”

  “I’m afraid I have been dismissed. My last day on the job was some time ago, but I am already set up at a new establishment. I will be fine. Don’t worry about me. I’m just glad to see you alive. You have been gone for some time and your wicked brother has made no reference to you at all. It was almost a cruel joke the way he avoided any mention of you. I had thought the worst, but fortunately Caperwill has tracked me down to come see you.”

  “I will be fine, Heinrich. This is just a passing fad. Don’t blame my brother. He is an idiot.”

  “He is dangerous. I tell you that now, but I know you love him as a sibling should. Now don’t bother your thoughts and just rest.”

  “There is time to rest in the grave, Heinrich. I need you to make one last return to your post to give Fennel this letter. I wrote it for him and I just need him to know I am thinking of him. Will you do that for me?”

  Heinrich frowned. Caperwill came over and handed Heinrich an envelope. She had written the letter a few nights ago, worried sick that Fennel thought she was dead.

  Dearest Brother,

  As you may or may not know, I am no longer at the School. I escaped. It wasn’t easy, but I did and frankly you would have as well. While it is impressively interesting there, they are more than a little too excited to get you to play by their rules. Talk about Dolt and Bore. It is a militarist approach to education that makes me terribly bored. Automatons masquerading as pedagogues. So I ran away and I am now in what you could describe as hiding. I am also very sick. I can’t seem to shake Marty’s power and I am afraid it is tearing me apart. I think I might be dying, but I can’t be sure. Maybe this is what normal people feel like. I at times have a flare for the melodramatic so maybe this is just a passing spell. But I assure you, no matter how awful and bile covered I get, I will never return to the whims and desires of our insipid master. As much as the sickness seems to be overtaking me, it isn’t nearly as bad as my longing to see you again. I miss you. I miss your stupid jokes and I even miss the Raven. I am also sure you have a mustard stain somewhere on your clothes that you can’t see. I need to clean it off. We were meant to be together and I dearly hope you will leave the side of our crooked toothed tyrant to join me out here in this tawdry but ever so real world. I saw that the town fair is this week and that your sculpture is to be unveiled. I’m very much looking forward to seeing it. Of course, please don’t tell Marty I will be there. I think he is out for blood.

  Your sister,

  Izzy

  Heinrich took the envelope and got up from his seat near her bed.

  “Of course, I will deliver the letter.”

  “If he asks where I am . . . ”

  “I will say one of your messengers handed me the letter at my new place of employment.”

  “Thank you, Heinrich. I will see you soon.”

  Heinrich leaned over and kissed her on the forehead, his wiry moustache making her forehead itch.

  “Good evening, Lady Isabella.” And with that, he exited the room.

  Isabella was nervous that Marty could track her down. Fennel had never known about her Chateau de Crawler side project, but the Persembes certainly did and something about recent events had shaken her faith in them. The death of their sister could make anyone do anything and Isabella’s shrouded anonymity may not be at the top of their concerns.

  The Barrenwood Festival was set for the end of the week and Isabella’s head reeled with how she was going to pull herself together enough to attend. She knew she shouldn’t have told Fennel she would be there, but she was desperate to see him again. In her hazy daze, she thought that perhaps what was really ailing her was the lack of her other and the momentary rejoining of the two would set her anew. She wondered if he actually had managed to get his statue built—if he had actually gotten far enough along in his bizarre plans. He often set his sights even further beyond things even he could achieve.

  In essence, Isabella was a mess of anxieties that tossed and turned on a couch in the back of a nightclub. She could lay here and deteriorate or she could make a move.

  In a moment of clarity, an interesting thought occurred to her: “If I stay on this couch much longer, I might actually pass away.”

  Chapter 27

  “I need to leave, Caperwill,” Isabella muttered through slobbery lips.

  “What you need to do, Lady Isabella, is rest and cure yourself of this sickness,” said Caperwill, again patting her forehead.

  This wasn’t that kind of sickness. It wouldn’t work like that. It would only grow and Isabella knew it. As counter-intuitive as it seemed, she had to get on her feet and move before the grip of this mojo took full control of her. She had two options. (There were probably better plans but at this point and she didn’t have the luxury of time to craft some masterful initiative.) She could either escape to the Duke or—and this plan seemed flawed from the get-go—gather some Marty hairs to produce more fish sauce. What she hoped for was that big beast of a man who had locked her and Fennel in a closet would swoop into the room, bash it apart like he had back on the docks, and rescue her from her fate.

  When she had seen him last, his eyes were molten from too much smoke, his senses were dulled and his brain was operating on paranoia more than reality. Had he not been so bogged down in drug-induced revelry, she knew he would have understood immediately whom she and Fennel were. He would have smelled their kinship. But that had not come to pass. Escape had presented itself and somehow, she had been cast back into the fire.

  But the next time around, Isabella would not allow that to happen. She would make it quite clear who and what she was. She would demand some kind of sanctuary. There must be a law or some kind of oath that had been taken for such things. She could see him now, bent low in front of that fire, praying to the old gods with their mercurial magic. The fever of fire burnt so bright in him—a hunger everlasting. She knew she did not have the strength to make it all the way up the Parakeet Path. Marty’s mojo seemed to thicken with every step outside the territory of Barrenwood. The trip would be too much for her. She would end up some forlorn log by the roadside for some traveling salesman to notice months from now. Such a fate did not appeal to her. No, she would have to go to Savina’s and hope for the best.

  If that didn’t work out, the alternative . . . well, it chilled her to the bone . . . she would have to enter straight into the mouth of the monster. There really was no other way because option three was to stay in bed and die.

  Isabella did her best to jump out of the bed and fell slightly on the floor. Caperwell found no humor in it, but Isabella did manage to find her false start amusing. She coughed out a laugh. “Keep the machine here running, Cap. I have to again head out into the night.”

  Caperwell did his best to object, but Isabella was already out, down the back stairs of the noodle house and out along the hubbub of the streets in Barrenwood. The trip down the stairs already exhausted her and she leaned back against the steamy window where the bodies of bar-b-qued duck hung in a row behind her and a mechanical cat had an arm that moved back and forth to the pulse of the distant bass of Le Chateau de Crawler.

  Isabella whistled for Elia. Wherever that wild horse was grazing, it would need to make its way to the Calliope—and soon. Isabella was already tired and all she had done was run down the stairs. She felt like an old woman. She stared at the passing bodies of people making their way past. Her sickness brought a strange sense of empathy. She could see the frailty of all their bones—the nicks and scratches that the world makes on a human so small.

  She looked at the passing faces
and closed her eyes to sense them in truth. She took into her mind a young man scooting by making his way home. He was running late, worried about the wrath of his estranged mother and full to the brim with anxieties. She sensed his cloudy thinking. The pressure of his inescapable fate from the job laid out by his family, his alienated sense that he didn’t really belong in this city, his confusion over the fact that he had paid too much for the rice bag that he was delivering, and his overall sense that none of his life made much sense. It weighed heavy on her. Isabella opened her eyes. So many faces and so much burden. The faces of these people were mostly lost in a wilderness, which they found terrifying.

  “I’m part of the problem,” Isabella muttered out loud.

  A little girl noticed Isabella talking to herself, but the mother pulled her along into the flow of bodies on the move. Isabella felt sympathy for people. They were lost and all she and her brother could do was make fun of them for it. Where did such hostility come from? It pained her to think of herself as such a monster—a terror in the world teaching people a lesson in the courage of death when both of them knew so little about the operatic pain of life. Perhaps she deserved to die.

  A series of screams came rising up through the street and sure enough, Elia came galloping up at full speed. She reared on her hind legs and then landed right in front of Isabella. She knelt down on one knee and Isabella gingerly crawled onto the horse’s back. She whispered their destination into Elia’s ear and they galloped at full speed toward the District of Jed.

  Something magical happens when one is sick and since Isabella was so rarely sick, she noticed its effects most tangibly. The body may lose personality, but it notices small details so much more. Imperfections in a person’s skin become more noticeable and the contrast between light and dark more stark. The city of Barrenwood seemed to speak to her in a way it had never done before. She noticed the state of disrepair of many of the buildings, the way many of the roofs were in such poor condition their interiors must surely be leaking, the numerous potholes in the streets that Elia had to jump over and around like some video game, and the growing array of graffiti whose contents most surely had an increasing narrative of revolution in them: Death to the Houses, Up with the PRM, I Never Forget. The police were out more. Tension was in the air. Isabella could feel it. The city was a growing stew pot of discontent.