A Mischief in the Woodwork

by Harper Alexander

  On the opposite side of the chamber was a doorway, and beyond it, deeper shadow. Ash breathed through that door, via some faint draft that I could not feel. I stepped through it, into the deeper parts of the fortress. Its vast and intricate halls opened up around me, issuing a challenge with open arms. Alright then, let's play, I thought. And the game of hide-and-seek commenced.

  I used my senses at first, the part of me that was enhanced for this kind of thing, but it required that I hug the edges of the room where I could keep my fingers pressed to those walls. Presently, I developed a superior scheme to finding this man.

  His footprints in the ashes that covered the ground.

  You are trying to be too clever, Vant, I told myself with a shake of my head, feeling a blush warm my cheeks that hoped this indeed wasn't any kind of test, with some manner of almighty witness judging the keenness of my course. I had overlooked the obvious.

  They were there in the soft gray matter littered everywhere, perfect footprints. They would lead me right to him.

  With a rush of confidence, I pushed off after this lead, scurrying into the ashen dormancy of the place. Dark arches and doorways beyond balconies watched me hurry by, quiet and lurking at the edges. Though it seemed as if the ash should temper it, my footsteps echoed always in my wake. It was the soft, constant sound of water pattering in a cave.

  Bailin's footprints wove a madman's trail throughout the fortress, ducking into rooms and weaving through pillars, drawing me on a merry, teasing chase. They made me dance all over the fortress, until I had thoroughly lost myself down dark twists and turns. Ash was falling now, rather than merely stirring on the floors. Where did the stuff come from? It occurred to me, then, that it was beginning to cover his footprints, and would likewise cover mine, and from whence I came.

  I drew up short, turned sharply to take stock of my wake.

  My trail was gone.

  An uncanny despair spread through me, the panic of losing myself in a place perhaps underestimated. I put a hand on it, reminding myself it was mine.

  Somehow, that was not much comfort. Not as I stood there with the incrimination of my covered tracks sinking in. It was all I could do to try to convince myself that a fortress that belonged to me would surely not condemn me, but a recollection of Mr. and Mrs. Dorn being devoured by their own manor rather cast a shadow over my faith in any predestined loyalty that lay therein. Was I finally grossly out of my element?

  Suddenly, I could hear him breathing. It came to me on the oh-so-silent currents of ash drifting down around me, the churning abyss of his lungs amplified across the otherworldly drafts. I turned back, looking for him.

  “There is no running, Bailin,” I spoke after a moment, wondering if I could draw a response. “You know what's in store for you.”

  For a moment, deathly silence. Then; a cough, husky and pained, somewhere above ground level. My eyes darted up, surveying the shadowed balconies. The ash was growing thicker, no doubt settling hard in lungs already plagued by his trials. He could not keep quiet long, with a cough like that.

  “I have you,” I finished with a hint of something that might have been resignation, confident I had him cornered.

  “You,” chortled his voice accusingly, but I still could not tell where it came from. “You herded me here from the beginning.”

  I did not know what he was talking about, only focused on trying to pinpoint his voice.

  “The shifts that chased me... The debris that cornered me... Herding me here, all along.”

  “I am not responsible for where you stand today, Bailin.” I do not know if I said it for his benefit or mine, but it was no lie that the possibility of his words carrying any wayward truth was something I would rather not consider. Ultimately, I was not responsible for where he stood, the fate that awaited him. That was what mattered.

  “You can't deliver me back into those hands,” he protested. “The horror of it – them. Those hands...” He trailed off, but not without interjecting once more, for good measure; “Those terrible black hands.”

  Something made a connection inside me, pertaining to this man and his fate and the determinants surrounding him that I was not privy to, but I could not be quite sure. And who was to say if he was referring to the black hand that surely belonged to Death, or if the reference demeaned his character the way that I found myself suspecting?

  “And whose blood do you have on your own hands, Bailin?” I asked, making this up as I went, only able to hope I struck some chord with him.

  “No blood. I couldn't be stained with that. That's what the gloves were for. For...”

  “For what?”

  “For... No, you will not trick me into speaking!”

  “What do you have to hide?”

  “You will condemn me with my own words!”

  “You are condemned.” I was treading closer to his hiding spot, almost able to pinpoint him now.

  “I've done nothing that wasn't my right!”

  “And what were your rights, Bailin? Tell them to me.”

  “You – you're a porcelain girl. You understand.”

  Porcelain girl. What a beautiful whiteskin might be referred to as.

  “They brought black magic! Were they to be welcomed only to breed a taint into the flesh of our grandchildren? We have the skin of the angels! Have you ever seen darkness glow, Polly? Darkness will never be radiant. It has no place among the light of heaven. Angels are radiant. Not clothed with the skin of the night.”

  Polly? I wondered. But he was a madman. Let him call me who he saw fit.

  “The gods created the night as surely as they created the day,” I said. “Without the two there is no balance.”

  “But they are separate! Kept always separate. The night we shut out, condemned to its loneliness, while the day is our true, designated reveling ground.”

  No, I thought. “There is twilight. The place where the two collide into the gray. The gray which leads into and comes out of that which is most beautiful – the rising and setting of the sun in all its glory. It is here that you see the vast colors of the heavens, Master Bailin. Its true colors. Always preceded or followed by that gray companion you cannot bear to look at. Are your fair eyes so weak that gray will blind you?”

  “Black magic!” he roared, incensed. “Look at what they have done to this land! There was no rubble before they came. No mischief!”

  I could not argue with that. It was a fact. But I didn't need to, for I had located his hideout. On the balcony there were pillars that protruded from cubical bases and rose to the ceiling. He was around behind one of these pillars, perched upon the slight ledge that the cube created.

  “Come down, Bailin,” I coaxed in conclusion, and his gaze snapped to me. In trying to stay out of sight, he had had his face turned to the dark wall shadows, letting the walls ricochet his words back down to me, but it was no longer any use.

  We had made contact.

  “What awaits for me, Polly?” he asked – grim, now, instead of impassioned.

  Was I expected to deal with this? I hadn't a clue what to say to him, or if the words I found were true or correct, or if they sufficed in whatever the greater game was here. Did greater forces care what I said to him? Did it make a difference? I was suddenly very weary, trying to fill this role. “I imagine you know,” I told him almost gently, for surely he had to know what he had done in his life to deserve his reckoning more than I did. He had committed whatever crimes he was being held for. Surely he had some idea of the consequences, or could use his imagination in a just fashion. A little half-heartedly, disillusioned with my responsibility in the condemning role, I added, “If there is redemption for you, it is surely not here, hiding”, hoping that that offered some wayward scrap of encouragement. Because with what I was charged in doing I didn't have anything else to offer him.

  “No. If the gods see everything, you are right,” he admitted, his eyes glazing like windows in the rain. He was suddenly far away in some thought or
other. “Hiding is likewise a prison. But that doesn't mean... That doesn't mean I must surrender to their wrath. I can arrange my own freedom.” There was something decisive in his voice, some new determination.

  And a moment later, I became alarmingly informed as to the nature of it, as he unfolded abruptly from his roost and leaped atop the balustrade of the balcony, and spread his arms wide as if to fly. And then he was overextending, his torso falling beyond his precariously rooted feet, and he was falling, plummeting.

  Eyes wide, I lurched forth, all too aware of what he intended. There was not a lot I could do, but horror drove me forward even as it warned me back. I wanted to cover my face, turn away, scream into a pillar to drown out the results of his fall, but instead I was rushing to intervene. In those moments you just act, one way or another, and there is no changing the course of things once the first step is placed. Now he would splat all around me, all I would have gained was being right in the middle of it, but I couldn't turn away at that point. I was committed to that end game, to coping with whatever the aftermath should be.

  My sense of angles all blurred together as he fell through the vertical dimension and I rushed across the horizontal. I could not say who would reach their destination first. There was only the sickening crunch that dragged me down underneath him – my body, not his – and then I was coughing into the ash that covered the floor. I tested my spine, wrenched but intact; my ribs, jarred but not broken. Something crunched back into place as I coughed. My wrist throbbed, and agony pulsed through one knee, but it appeared he had not broken me as I broke his fall.

  Reminded of my quarry, I dragged my head over my shoulder to look for him. A sharp, stiff pain pierced through my neck, but I saw him. He had landed a meter or so behind me, and appeared unconscious where he lay. Wincing and nursing my injuries, I pulled myself up onto my hands and knees, then crawled to his form to check for a pulse. My skirts left streaks in the ash behind me.

  Bailin was alive, merely knocked senseless. Thank the gods. My ransom was still valid. And it had better be, after breaking a fall like that. If he had died anyway, I did not know that I would have found the strength to get back.

  As it was, I realized I would have to muster the strength not only for myself, but for my quarry as well. He was walking nowhere on his own, and I realized he probably would not have been very compliant had he been conscious anyway. Perhaps this was for the best.

  'Best' had just never established itself as such a trial before. For being ideal, it very much wasn't.

  He was a wisp of a man, though – that was something. Starved to the point of escaping his shackles, running off of nothing but his madman energy.

  Thinking I had become a bit mad myself, I attempted to channel that same kind of energy, bracing myself against the pain of my injuries and hoisting his deadweight painstakingly up from its resting place. It was like pulling someone out of tar, I thought, while you nursed a broken back, but in the end I straightened, triumphant, and turned to find my way back out of the fortress. The distorted shapes of two fallen bodies were left imprinted in the ashes, as if to mark the resting place of two beings that had fallen to their deaths in this trap, but I would not be caught dead in my own fortress that day. My footprints were gone, but I was ready to replace them with fingerprints until I found my way back to freedom.

  Back to freedom, and the dystopian reality I had never considered mild until then.

  Back home, to whatever 'home' was when I had built another place for myself, here.

  Back to mischief I could cope with, and beings I could relate to, even if their beliefs were so far from mine sometimes that at times I found myself almost hating them.

  Back to everything – 'everything' as my world had always measured it, before that everything expanded into a limitless scape of possibility that left me stranded in the waters of a thousand undiscovered oceans. No one would ever come for me here.

  So I blazed my way back through those soul-reminiscent passages and emerged into the foreign air of those treacherous outskirts, heading toward home the only way I could cope with defining it, carrying a madman on my shoulders.

  T h I r t y - T h r e e –

  Return

  The journey back does not stick in my mind with much clarity. I had used up everything in me, and everything around me looked the same anyway. I do remember that my shoulders ached like nothing I had ever felt, but only until Bailin's weight snuffed the circulation from them entirely, and then they were just numb as the rest of me had become. There is a certain point where an ailed body such as mine surpasses its capacity and enters an otherworldly state of misery, and of course what is otherworldly is not something we can feel, here.

  I collapsed at some point – more than once, I think – and dreamed of the rubble shifting beneath me, of riding waves of it as if my body were a vessel. Much like Ombri did to call herself Shifter, I imagine, except that she never did it lying down, in her sleep. I was a piece of driftwood, a dead swan on the tide.

  When I cracked my crusty lids and blinked the salt from my lashes, I was lying on the shore, and the ocean seemed to have dried up. Where it should have been was only a great chasm.

  The ravine.

  The shifts of rubble had delivered me back.

  I would have felt a wave of relief if I was much into feeling anything those days, but in truth I felt like any other forsaken shell lying on the beach, empty and cracking, the sound of the ocean echoing in its irrelevant recesses.

  Bailin was cast across the rubble beside me, unconscious still.

  Fortune was with me.

  Feeling somewhat revived simply for being on familiar terrain, I forced the sleep from my body, more than ready to get this deed over with. Completion was so close I could taste it. Or was that only the sweet taste of blood in my mouth? It seemed I had bitten my tongue during one of the shifts.

  I swallowed distastefully, but still found the strength to pull myself up one more time. I glanced at Bailin's unmoving form, considering whether or not I should risk rolling him into the ravine. He would probably not come out of another fall, this one unbroken, at least not without being the worse for wear. For that matter, had he even survived the shifts? Just to make sure, I went to check for a pulse again.

  Alive.

  In fact, he muttered something in his sleep.

  Trying to decide how to go about casting him back into his chasm without breaking any bones, I decided on rolling him to the edge and grasping him beneath his arms to lower him as far as I could, bracing myself in the rubble for the exchange. His feet still dangled well above the ground, but, straining, I grunted in his ear, “Bailin”, and he awoke as if only waiting for the cue.

  Awakening suspended against a ravine wall could not be the most serene way to go about it, and, recognizing his place of doom, a shriek escaped him. He thrashed to get free of my hold, but it was the reaction I was hoping for. He did half the work, freeing himself to land upon the bottom of the chasm. Then he was scrambling to his feet again, a crazed look in his eyes, desperate to redeem himself from landing in the spider's web before the beast came out to bind him. But I crouched above him on the ledge to ensure all escape attempts were futile. I would tread on his fingers if I had to. He wasn't coming back out of that ravine again. Not after what I had gone through to see him returned.

  And then the ambassador was there, behind him. Watching him scramble vainly against the ravine wall. Waiting for him to realize he was not alone. He showed no signs of quitting, though, and so finally, she spoke,

  “Bailin. How nice to see you again.”

  He spun wildly, plastering his back against the wall in her presence.

  “Now, now,” she tsked. “Don't be shy. Make yourself at home.”

  They were the opposite of friendly words, of course, and I did not envy him the position he was in before her, the mess he had gotten into in his lifetime. But it would seem such was life, at least for some. And at least – this life.

&n
bsp; “Won't you join us, Avante?” the ambassador inquired in that apathetic drawl of hers, her eyes rising past the ravine wall to where I remained perched.

  “I'm rather fond of the view from up here,” I said.

  “And I'm fond of pegasus meat, but we can't always revel in our own personal paradise, can we?”

  Seeing that she wasn't asking, I rearranged myself and slithered down into the ravine. Bailin startled as I hit the ground. The ambassador gave him a long-suffering look.

  “And where, pray tell, did you find this lost lamb?” she inquired.

  Didn't she know more about this place than I did? Or was her knowledge restricted to her designated domain?

  “I wouldn't presume to say,” I replied.

  “Got a little lost along the way? Discovered him in a place or time you couldn't explain?”

  “He was in a fortress. Beyond the rubble, beyond the desert... Where an entirely new scene of wreckage thrives. It was a fortress that I... It was mine,” I finished, unsure how to explain it. “A woman there told me it was mine.”

  She cocked one of her already-arched brows. “So now you own a fortress in this mess?”

  “The woman there – it's what she told me. I had never seen it before. But she said it was mine, that I built it. Do you know her? She was a keeper, of sorts, just like you. But she was pale and ashen, with robes and dreadlocks...” I wasn't sure why I was disclosing so much to her, except that I thought she might have some answers.

  “I know her,” she confirmed, unperturbed. “A sister ambassador.”

  “For what?”

  “Bold indeed,” she scolded with amusement. “If she did not tell you herself, it is not yours to know.”

  But... “She said I built it,” I repeated more to myself, less convinced I would get anything out of this woman.

  “And it is not the only thing you have built.”

  I looked at her, quizzically, and she nodded once over my shoulder, indicating something behind me. Turning, I beheld the half-bridge in the distance, the one she had made me cross upon our first meeting. Only it wasn't a half-bridge anymore; it was nearly whole. Still not quite touched down on the other side, but a good two thirds of the way there.