A Mischief in the Woodwork

by Harper Alexander

  A keen, amused, yet guarded look pricked her eyes, suggesting I was on to something. "You ought to have shaken her hand, if you were so curious," she advised rather than answering, and I resigned myself to the fact that I wouldn't get a straight answer. But the fact that she didn't deny it, consistent with my suspicions, might have been confirmation enough.

  With that, the Ambassador was turning to leave, our business evidently complete.

  "Ombri..." I said before she could go. "How..." What I wanted to say was 'How is she?', buy of course that wasn't the appropriate question.

  "What I was able to tell you upon acceptance of the deceased girl still stands," the Ambassador told me. It would have to be enough.

  I nodded, slightly.

  She continued to take her leave, her hem dragging a pattern in the dirt as she turned, twisting about her form – but stopped herself this time, casting one more glance over her shoulder. "Your name," she mentioned. "It has come to me. It rang throughout the city today, bridge stones ringing with a cataclysm of finality. You are 'Avante, Bridge-Builder'."

  Something swelled in me at the bequeathing of the name – some piece of my soul that perked up hearing its name spoken for the first time.

  Then our business was truly finished, and the Ambassador for the Angel of Death walked away across the field, the heavy wake of her gown flattening the weed stalks that hadn't already been hampered down by the rain.

  F o r t y - T h r e e –

  Soul Water

  The rain had soaked into the land, but the notion that the Ravine had flooded stayed with me.

  I had to see it for myself.

  It was strange, that the Ravine had become such a constant in my life. No other place in the city had taken to calling me back to it on such numerous occasion. Truthfully, no other place could be counted on as a constant in the city, thanks to the shifts. But as everything else stirred about and re-patterned itself, the Ravine stayed the same. Intact, anyway.

  The dry channel had simply finally been renewed.

  As I traversed the city toward the landmark, something else mulled through my mind as well. What the Ambassador had said, at the doorstep of Manor Dorn, and the significance that it bore. Could bear.

  She had called me Bridge-Builder, and of course – I knew I was. Knew that bridge over the Ravine had been strangely my doing. But what did it mean, entirely? A strange connection kept being made in my mind, as I thought about it. She had come to tell me my two months were up, and the only result-like sentiments she had truly voiced had been about the completion of the bridge, and my name. I had been the one to bow my head and admit I knew I failed.

  But she had never confirmed it.

  And the bridge... It seemed a large part of what she had come to tell me. I had built a bridge. The two things that really stuck in my mind about the exchange rang throughout my head like-so: Your time is up... The bridge is complete.

  A small trickle of wayward, uncertain hope stirred within me. Could those two things really be connected in a way I hadn't considered before – connected in a way that would prove to overturn my assumptions of failure?

  I hardly dared to hope so, after everything we had all been through, and the complicated, mixed emotions that had driven it all.

  Yet there was a trickle.

  When I reached the Ravine, and saw it, I stopped to stare – a certain sense of appeased wonder coming over me. Just in time to offer passage over the floodwaters that filled the channel, the bridge had completed itself. A symbol of significant, perfect timing. It made a sturdy, graceful arch, now – an enduring overpass of clean, new stone. The one perfect thing that could be seen for miles. The one whole, unbroken entity in a sea of brokenness.

  I trailed forward again, treading to the water's edge. Where the Ravine had been, a glistening river now lay. A ribbon of liquid paradise running through the parched, crude city. I knelt by the water, watching the current glide by. I saw a leaf go past, old and soaked and drifting on to a new place of decay.

  I had never seen so much water before. So much clean, glistening, beautiful water. An entire current of pureness, sweeping through our forsaken city. A small smile tugged at my jaded lips, and I reached out to touch it, to caress that liquid surface.

  The water was cool, and fresh – like a drink to my very fingers. Ripples formed around the immersed digits. I could feel that there was a current of debris being whisked along the bottom of the river, tumbling on toward a new resting ground. How much of the stuff would be spirited out of the city via this currant? It would take a long time to make a difference, but this river seemed bent on steadily cleaning up what it could.

  The water had a sweetness to it, and I wondered over it for a time trying to put my finger on precisely where I had tasted its like before. Then it came to me. It was harder to identify, in this form, because it was entirely more refined than where I had felt it before, but when I landed on my conclusion, it was unmistakable.

  It was Ombri.

  Wonder overcame me. I swept my hand back and forth through the water again, stirring it about, cupping hand-fulls and letting them run out of my fingers, back into the river. Her essence was here, permeating the current. It was alive with her.

  It was satisfying, somehow, finding her in it. She lived on, in a way, her soul in the water, sweeping through the city as surely as it did, helping to clear Dar'on of its taint. And, she had always been one to ride the currents, hadn't she?

  A smile played with my lips.

  Keep riding the current of this city, Ombri, I encouraged, rooting for her. The name 'Shifter' took on somewhat of a new meaning, as I thought about it. She had fashioned it for herself because she rode the shifts, but now... She had become somewhat of a shape-shifter hadn't she? A spirit that shifted forms. In another way, that almost seemed fitting with her halfbreed heritage, as well.

  Shifter. It was truly her namesake, in the same way I had been deemed Bridge Builder.

  Which brought me back to the bridge itself. I glanced up from my place on the bank of the river, down its length to where the bridge stood. Perhaps it was time I tested it out, and ran my hand over its balustrade.

  I withdrew from Ombri's lingering presence, letting my hand drip into the river as I rose and walked along its edge to the bridge. I gazed across its span, marveling over the fact that it existed because of me. It was smooth and inviting, promising safe passage and ease of crossing. I remembered the first time I had been charged with crossing this expanse – prodded out onto a ledge that failed to even span half of the gap. It had been an ordeal, then, to cross the thing. Now, all I had to do was walk across.

  How things had changed since then.

  Working up the irrational sense of courage that walking across my own bridge demanded, I treaded out onto the first length of stone. Nothing crumbled beneath me, or dipped down out of the heavens in a flash to fling me across. So I took another step, and rested my hand on the thick stone rail.

  Through the series of essence-visions that ensued, my suspicions (at least in part) were confirmed. The entity that was the bridge was indeed a symbol of another kind of bridge-building – building bridges, making connections, between people. It seemed I had started the painstaking task of linking one side of the city with another, so to speak. Started the process of connecting the victims of discrimination to the proprietors of such a dynamic. It was hard to believe, that I had actually succeeded in doing such a thing – started it, in any case.

  Bits of the essence of my journey – and that of those around me, in accordance with the things I had taken on as my cause – flitted through me as I ran my hand over the length of that balustrade. Flashes and tidbits and flurries of quintessence pertaining to everything I and those near me had been through over the course of these last few, momentous months. It was all mixed in with the paranormal cement of this structure, what made it strong and pitched it upright, a vital ingredient.

  It was only when I reached the middle that something i
n it faltered. It took me a moment to distinguish that it was not something in the soul of the bridge itself, but rather something that had happened here, and left its mark on the overpass.

  I could see the image of someone – someone other than me – being the first to cross the bridge. He had come to its arch as rain came down on the city, and crossed it without a second thought as the Ravine took to quickly filling up, its current rapid in the swell of the storm. Halfway across he had stopped all amid the rain to look length-wise down the river, taking in the stunning evolution from dry chasm to rapids that had transformed it in a day.

  Then he turned to cross the remaining half of the bridge – but slipped, the well-worn tread of his boots failing on the rain-slick slope of the overpass. The railing that was hip-height on me went only to mid-thigh on him, low enough that it did nothing to catch him as he fell against it. If anything, in fact, it tripped his body additionally.

  Halfway across that bridge on his way out of the city, one Tanen of Cathwade went headlong over the side, and fell into the roiling rapids below that had surely drowned a great many other whiteskins that day.

  F o r t y – F o u r –

  The Irony of Fate

  Strangely alarmed, I went back to the waterside to test the current again. I had not felt Tanen's presence in it, the first time. As I knelt at its edge, I was once again invested in what precisely had come of him, because now I was confused. The significance of the bridge and its completion had suggested I had actually succeeded – hope had actually planted itself in me once again – and, running my hand over the balustrade, the visions had all but confirmed that victory. Even up to Tanen crossing that bridge himself.

  Until he fell, halfway across. What could that mean? Surely he couldn't have come so close only to lose his way half a dozen steps short of completing the journey.

  I plunged my hand into the water, drank up everything it had for me. There was the sweet taste that was Ombri's spirit, the taint that was the mischief being carted out of the city, the fresh identity of the cloud this rain had hailed from, the smooth flavor of each drop being polished by the sky. I felt everything in the water that I had felt in the rain, all of the meaning and purpose – but where was that taste I knew all too well; the taste that belonged to Tanen? I knew for a fact (the visions had become as much to me) that he had fallen in, so where was the evidence?

  Thoroughly washed downstream, it seemed.

  I rose and tried a ways farther down. This time, beneath the surface, there was the hint of something that might have been him, at one point, but in such a ghostly form that I would never go as far as to bet my life on it.

  Farther still, and I found it. A trace. And no wonder I hadn't been able to pick up on it near the bridge – it was washed so far downstream at this point, and –

  Not on the surface.

  Suddenly the water felt icy, strangling. I faltered, shocked by what the awareness implied.

  Tanen, what have you done? I was torn between running farther down the bank and approaching at a much more hesitant pace, not sure I wanted to find what lay at the end of this rope. But I couldn't just let it go, so I followed the scent until the bridge was a far-distant thing in my wake, my hand dripping from frequent dunks.

  Traces of Tanen grew stronger and stronger – yet still faint, and alarmingly so. Before today I had let his fate go, but learning of this after experiencing a renewed surge of hope... I couldn't help it, he was back in my interests.

  I followed the Ravine clear to the edge of the city, where it grew shallower, wider. And there, on one side, was a collecting pile of debris, snagging as it aspired to glide past that point, beginning to clog the waterway. And caught in it, half-buried in it, entirely under the water – was Tanen.

  I was not prepared for the pangs of shock and woe that came over me, coming upon such a sight. A sorrow unlike I knew I could feel on his behalf pierced my heart, bruising my chest as I tried to look at him and breathe at the same time.

  Oh, Tanen...

  His image was warped beneath the surface of the water, but I could see that he was still, and blue, and just as gone as Ombri had been.

  Another death, so soon after the first – and so significant – was no easy thing to accept. Nothing could have prepared me for the impact, for the utter, wracking failure that overcame me. I stood on the bank, struggling to cope, thinking I'd recovered from Ombri – or at least found peace in her passing – thinking I'd let Tanen go, accepted whatever would become of him. But now, seeing it...

  Gods, had both of them had to die? Just like that? What had the whole thing been for? What had my insight, and Ombri's brief presence among us, and any apparent progress on Tanen's part been for?

  This was truly the end game of all that?

  I trailed forward, when I could bring myself to, and slogged into the shallow water. Sloshing to Tanen's side, I splashed to my knees, beginning to dig at the rubble that pinned him. Some of it was heavy, and I struggled with it, heaving, using leverage to pry it away.

  A memory of Tanen hoisting the piece of rubble tied to my shackled ankle came back to me. Of him hefting it down the road on my behalf, carrying the burden for me, all the way home.

  An unexpected tear slipped from my eye, adding itself to the watery mess splashing all about me.

  Another piece of rubble, another memory.

  Tanen smiling in the summery afternoon, the field as his backdrop. Hoisting his bow and loosing an arrow. Both of us, searching for lost arrows in the weeds. Him guiding me in the motions of loosing my own arrow.

  Another heave. Another flash of memory broken loose with the rubble.

  Tanen poised in the dark hallway upstairs, arrow ready. Helping to rescue Victoria from that master-bedroom prison.

  A second tear. A piece of rubble. The next reminiscence in the series...

  Glass raining around me on the porch, a wardog pummeling me against the front door. Tanen falling from the sky to aid me, wielding glass like it didn't cut deep on both ends.

  As I worked to free him, they just kept coming:

  Tanen holding an armored corset in his crafty, bargaining hands.

  Tanen coming in from the city, a caged bird offered as one of his prizes.

  Tanen trying to scale the wall of a fortress to get to a nest on the rooftop...

  Explaining the concept of dimensions to me, offering to help me cut vegetables in the kitchen... Propped up on his cot shirtless in the dark when I went to him, kissing me in the privacy of the little room off the kitchen, there...

  Standing for the first time at the doorstep of Manor Dorn, come all the way from Cathwade. A stranger at the door.

  I freed him at last, unable to say, at that point, if the wetness on my face came from tears or the splashing of my efforts. Into my arms I gathered his cold, dead form, hauling him up, stumbling through the clogged shallows of the river as I dragged him to the bank. My fingers confirmed he was gone, but what was I to do? Leave him pinned under the water?

  Beyond dragging him onto the bank, of course, I didn't know what else I could do. I couldn't carry him to any 'greater resting place', and there was no Ravine or Ambassador for the Angel of Death, anymore, to carry anyone to, even if I had the heart and strength to heft him.

  I let him down onto the dirt and plopped down near his shoulders, exhausted from my efforts and this new wave of grief so soon after the last.

  The second thing that was imparted to my touch was one of even greater dismay – for it confirmed that Tanen's crossing of that bridge had been significant, he had been ready to cross it and the metaphoric bridge it stood for, and had merely slipped in the rain due to nothing more than slippery conditions and well-worn boots. It had been no failure of the two month mission undertaken on his behalf that had stricken him from that crossing.

  The irony was terrible.

  Any ill feelings I might ever have held toward Tanen slumped into sorrowful reprieve there on the bank. As I cradled his head, I wanted to
tell him I hadn't meant any of it. I didn't mean it, I didn't mean it, I wanted to pour into him. But I had. I had meant all of it. The real issue here was: How could I?

  And we had done it... We had succeeded in diverting his fate – in changing him. How could he die still? It was so very cruel. Suddenly everything I had thought I had come to terms with met with resistance in my mind. This could not be the gods' idea of justice, of tying up what begun between Tanen and the rest of us. It was a cruel joke at best. It was a cruel joke, and I wanted to tell someone as much. Wanted to shout it to the heavens, demand that this grievance be revoked.

  But all I could do was cradle him as I'd cradled Ombri, and rise at last to begin the painstaking task of dragging him back through the city. Where was I going to take him? I didn't know, but I couldn't just leave him there. I would drag him until I couldn't, any longer, or until the rubble began to shred him, and then I would be forced to give it up. Forced to...

  Forced to what? Leave him there? Collapse at his side and stay there, defeated, until I wasted away as well, at long last?

  There was no end game to my determination, really. It was just that – determination. Raw and mindless and driven.

  An end game on my part was not what fate had in mind that day, however, and so in the end it mattered little.

  As I was dragging Tanen through the outskirts of the city, tired already, the ground beneath the rubble began to tremble.

  F o r t y - F I v e –

  A Crack in the World

  It was subtle, at first – the kind of thing that might have been taken as a regular shift coming on. Then it grew, rumbling, and something about the way it hummed under my feet felt different. I dropped Tanen's shoulders, so very heavy now, to stand straight and feel out the vibrations.