A Mischief in the Woodwork Page 15

  “They're not lullabies,” I protested

  “No? What are they?”

  “For one thing, I do not sing things to sleep. I sing them awake,” I differentiated perhaps a bit self-importantly.

  “Oh. I beg your pardon. Not lullabies. What is it called instead... The thing that roosters do... Cock-a-doodling?”

  I stared at him indignantly.

  “No? Have I gotten my waking-up songs mixed up as badly as my going-to-sleep ones?”

  “I like to think I don't crow, either, Mr. Nysim. Thank you.”

  “Whatever you say, Siren.”

  Siren.

  The look I gave him in response to that, I couldn't even classify. Who had given him the right to come up with names for me? Especially ones so...flattering and disgruntling?

  He had given me a nickname. I resented that.

  I couldn't afford to like it.

  I scuffed after him, keeping my peace. I was not on confident terms with what I might exchange with him should I pursue conversation in our present context.

  “I'll get that nest,” he stated after we walked in silence for a time, wanting to make it known he wouldn't let it rest.

  “You may do as you please,” I replied, not letting myself look at him. I cared about the path in front of me. Not his escapades.

  “Aye,” he confirmed. “And one day, Siren, it might just please you too. Watch out.”

  My face flamed – but in anger or unaccustomed flattery, I could not tell. I opened my mouth, but he did not allow me to rebuke;

  “Don't bother,” he dissuaded. “You don't crow, remember? I'd hate this to be the day that pretty things stopped coming out of your mouth. Stick to what you do. Your calling becomes you.”

  I was just as surprised by the genuine compliment that I found my retort dissipated on my lips anyway. I tasted its ghost, turning it over in my mouth, swallowing the new flavor uncertainly. The next glance I cast in Tanen's direction was a sidelong one, quizzical and slightly wry, and most assuredly stealthy. He did not catch it. It was over, really, before it could catch itself. A flicker of uncertain groundwork. Who was to say what would come of it. But as we made our way toward the home that I was loathe to share, the slave-despiser carried my shackles, the burden casually hefted under one arm, his antics temporarily eclipsed in my interest.

  And an eclipse was a thing of both black and white.

  A clash in perfect harmony.

  T w e n t y –

  Domino Shift

  There was hope for him yet.

  *

  The shackle remained trapped around my ankle for days, before Dashsund and Tanen could pry it off me. I was only glad that they could, at last. For Tanen was right: I had no key; there was no key – and these shackles were not meant to simply be shimmied out of. They were meant to hold people. Fast and eternally. Or at least, until they faced their reckoning, by whatever force ranked above the Ambassador on the celestial food chain.

  It was not a system I cared to sort out. I had seen things I wasn't meant to, when I touched her, and I had no wish to entrench myself deeper in confidential, almighty affairs. I was happy to leave them to their business, happy to return to my humble way of life. Happy to keep surviving, to be fulfilled that way. No misguided ambitions to meddle with what shouldn't be in my capacity to touch.

  Though it would be impossible to get it out of my mind. I couldn't un-see it. The things I had inadvertently witnessed were irrevocably impressed upon me.

  I tried to pretend I was not privy to things I wasn't supposed to be, just because it felt entirely too much like incentive for me be 'taken care of', or whatever the gods did to silence those who had accessed forbidden information. I told myself the gods were, at least, certainly not murderers. But having seen the purpose carried out by the Ambassador for the Angel of Death, I realized that perhaps I should not be so certain.

  But a life lived in paranoia that the gods would hunt me down and murder me down some dark alley was not a sensible life to live. Believing something like that would destroy a person before they ever met their reckoning by a godly hand. That would be misguided, I was sure.

  Letta dressed my shackle-wound, as deft as ever when it came to my injuries. She expected them by now, and as good as met me at the door with salve and bandaging in hand.

  “There will be quite a story written across your body by the time you retire, minda,” she observed as she fixed me up, taking in the latest addition to my battlescars.

  “We don't retire,” I reminded her. It was a simple truth, but threw into uncomfortable light the bleak, inevitable alternative.

  Survivors didn't retire. They kept on surviving, or they died.

  Or they died surviving.

  *

  When Albino duty came around again, I pulled a fast one on the treacherously aspiring Tanen: I went a day early. Not allowing the objections to even form, for lack of anticipation, I simply set out for the city ahead of schedule, unannounced, unobstructed. It felt clever, and I would not allow myself to consider that it was actually desperate.

  I found something interesting in the city that day, in addition to the trinkets that I gathered: dominoes. At first, I saw just one; propped perfectly on its edge on a piece of rubble, glossy-clean, gleaming creamy white in the sun, its inky numbered spots slanting in blood-rich array across its face. I felt drawn in by the indented texture of those spots, so deep and black and perfect were they, each a terrifying small vortex. It stilled me, seeing the talisman there. Poised. Perfect. Unblemished. Not even a speck of dust marring its glossy surface. But wariness turned to intrigue, and my next impulse was to reach out, to take it. To add it to my collection, a quaint treasure discovered in one of many odd scenarios.

  As I reached out, though, I saw the others. My focus shifted to the jumbled landscape beyond, to the extent of the arrangement that had blended with the disarray until addressed. More of them were lined up behind the first – below it, above it, curving away, running all over the levels of rubble. Artistically set up, it seemed, for some profound, almost dual-dimension domino effect.

  My fingers turned to stone in the air – figurative stone, freezing just before I could upset the balance of the single domino before me. Some keen sense of discretion stayed my hand just in time, as awe washed through me. What was this? At this point, I didn't dare ask, but one can never stray too far from the question. It was there inside me, as good as a part of me. Something I couldn't deny, but had learned to repress.

  I swallowed. Swallowed the implications – or rather, the secrets, the great secrets that were implied. I took them in, let them be, freed the nagging questions as if freeing a healed bird to the wind, crippled and stunted but...better. Able to get on with life in a fixed-up, only slightly-compromised state of peace. I backed a step away from the dominoes, a conspiratorial look on my face. I knew when something was well enough left alone.

  But I allowed myself to linger momentarily, to take it in.

  Art. Undoubtedly. Art full of secrets. Underfoot and in code all across the untraveled landscape. It was beautiful, and terrifying.

  The urge to clutch my pack tighter gave way to the perhaps-unhealthier practicality that saw me shoulder it instead, and get on my way. I stepped carefully around the curve of dominoes where it swept in a great, piano-key-like torrent across my level, and cast only one glance over my shoulder as I made my way free of the suspiciously staged scene.

  I returned home to a knowing, grudgingly amused look from Tanen, who was arranged lazily on the front porch. Waiting for me?

  I may have been unhealthily practical about the mayhem that was abroad, but no one was warranted to be downright lazy. I shoved his propped boot off his knee with my own knee as I passed, and his stance buckled as I reached for the door. My knowledge of him substituted the look that he gave me for the stunt. I didn't have to look.

  “Make yourself useful, Tanen,” I suggested in a bit of a drawl. “Or at least teach the others how to lounge
so they can share in the benefits of your trade secrets.” It was mocking him in as many ways as I could manage at once. Gloating about having stolen back my thunder in the city, insulting him as a softie, stressing the superiority of all the others in the house, and criticizing him for not being thoughtful enough to share his secrets of comfort with them.

  “You're cruel, Siren,” he said as the screen door creaked open and slammed shut behind me. He had jumped up to follow me inside, though, so the furthering of his case wouldn't be drowned out. “I could say the same about you, you know. That you just went out for a stroll. Since it technically isn't Scavenging Day. One could accuse you of simply going out for a stroll, and failing to invite anyone for the breather. Just...strolling along, while the rest of us...shuck peas and build walls.” Modo fluttered from one wall of his cage to the other as we walked by, and Tanen paused briefly to offer a finger through the bars.

  “Except I have the evidence,” I said over my shoulder as I entered the kitchen and turned along the counter, dropping my sack in the doorway – or, more relevantly, at his feet. He regarded it, unable to denounce it. But he wasn't to be deterred.

  “I have evidence. You don't work in the fields all day without the hands to show for it. Here,” he said, holding out his hands palm-up for me. “Feel.”

  I paused. Considered him. The order stirred through me oddly. Feel. I didn't want to feel his hands. I didn't want to touch him. He couldn't make me touch him, could he? Another part of me told me I was being silly. They were just his hands. It was about work. It wasn't as if he were compelling me in any other way. Was he?

  I could not read his eyes.

  But another fear: what would I see, if I touched him? I didn't want to do it for that reason, as well. I didn't want to see things in people. Least of all Tanen. But I didn't want to be the one to make something out of his gesture if he didn't mean anything by it, or then the joke would be on me for assuming there was something there. I was about to end my hesitation to save face, when I realized there was no need to touch him. My eyes could suffice just fine; I could see the beginnings of blisters and calluses on his hands.

  So, “Come back when you're bleeding,” I said instead, and turned away to end it. “You know nothing of working in the fields.”

  He chose to withhold further objection, or insistence. Perhaps accepting that I was not so easily won over. I could only hope that that acceptance meant he realized it was folly, rather than simply realizing he would have to try harder. I didn't want him to prove anything to me. I wanted him to change toward the others. Beyond that, I didn't care about him. Had no interest in his affairs. Perhaps that was self-absorbed of me, but survival was rather that way. It was certainly no more friendly than it needed to be.

  But tables had a way of turning, like dominoes.

  In the days that followed, I would become a hypocrite. For there were indeed those who won my affections better than Tanen.

  But it was a good kind of hypocrite to be, for what that's worth. Perhaps such a notion was twisted. But Dar'on was twisted, and everyone in it.

  Including me.

  Including Tanen.

  Including Ombri...

  *

  I did not meet Ombri until the balance tipped. I call it that, because of what happened, but also because it seemed to be a turning point, of sorts. When things began to come together. Or spiral out of control. Or both.

  I opened the door of the manor one morning, and saw them:

  Dominoes.

  They came right to the doorstep of Manor Dorn, all lined up and poised for...for what? A taunt? An invitation? They had found me, followed me. My eyes surveyed the countryside, but there was nothing. The dominoes curved around the house and disappeared into the thinning mist, a line that stretched clear down the road and into the city where it was rooted.

  I regarded the tokens at my feet, allowing the stillness of the land to wash over me. But that's when it happened:

  A shift in the city.

  I heard it, that faint rumble that was like a subtle earthquake. Nothing tumultuous, and it fell still as quickly as it had happened, but I felt the shudder in the bones of my feet. I became riveted to the dominoes at my feet with a new acuteness, a very specific discretion lighting inside me.

  It was as if the front domino and I became trapped in a paradox together, and I was astutely aware of the first breath of it swaying, of it beginning to rock back and forth, unbalanced, a pendulum without a holster. It swayed from front to back in greater arcs until one time it tipped too far, and then my dread for the incident that followed was fulfilled.

  The domino fell, against its predecessor. As the chain reaction began, something in me clicked. Some savvy intuition. If the result reached the city... I didn't know what, but surely something would be set in motion. This was that something set in motion, a fuse burning back toward its source. Burning fuses never ended well. Whatever it was that would ensue, it was impossible not to want to stop a climax before it reached the city. It was instinct. Good things never came of disturbing the city. It was impossible to say whether or not the mischief was bad, but if things could be kept stable, that was certainly the alternative we strove to cling to, with what little influence we had.

  So I dropped my vegetable-harvesting sack, and ran.

  My skirts thrashed about my legs as I took off after the ripple. I did not know how I could stop it, at such a crazed pace, without knocking into any of the dominoes still standing and starting it up again right where it left off, but catching up with the ripple was a necessary first goal. I tore around the house and took off down the road, where the mist was reduced to lacy breaths eddying in the crevices at roadside. The wind of my passing snuffed them entirely, and suddenly I was a second wave headed for the city. I could see it in the distance, shrouded in its cloud of dust-mist, a target set to be...affected.

  The dominoes toppled down the road in a neat, swift line, a flurry of little clicks spilling toward untold culmination. It could not be prudent pounding down the road so, but I was running on adrenaline – uncanny adrenaline – and did not feel, at that moment, that there was anything in the world other than myself and those dominoes. The only other thing threatening to come into play was the city, and I was determined to ascertain that didn't happen.

  I put on a burst of speed, and managed to overtake the ripple. But I didn't stop there. I had to get ahead – truly ahead. Another dozen paces spanned out before I allowed myself to check over my shoulder, to evaluate the ripple now pursuing me. It was at least a noticeable distance behind, now, so I slowed, and dropped carefully next to the line of upright dominoes. My hands were shaking from the adrenaline pumped into them from my run, and I muttered a few breathless, incoherent pleas for them to get their act together. I reached carefully for the top edge of a domino with a single finger, aiming to flick it back in the direction of Manor Dorn, to meet with the ones spilling this way and halt the raging fire, so to speak. But my fingers were too unruly, and I bumped one domino as intended, and another toward the city again, starting two opposite-bearing ripples. I jumped up and started again, overtaking the new current and re-trying. I repeated the same fumbling attempt, unable to master my nerves among the closely-spaced tokens. Again, I dashed the few steps to pass up the spill, and again – dropping closer and closer to ripples I invoked to try to thwart them, turning to frequency in desperation as the city neared.

  And then I was out of breath, and I couldn't do it. I couldn't jump up as I set the next one off. I watched it titter off afresh, its target hopelessly in range.

  I dragged myself up anyway, went after it, even though there was little I could hope to do at that point. But maybe there was something – something to be manipulated in the city so one level could not jump to another. I had seen how carefully-arranged the dominoes were, and how they would have to be, in order for the levels to connect in the first place. It was art indeed to make dominoes climb stairs. If I could just sever the connection, mar the per
fection that was necessary for such a stunt...

  The dominoes spilled through the fallen city gates, and snaked off into the rubble. I burst in shortly after, stopping to get my bearings. There was no telltale motion to follow; the ripple had already disappeared around some corner, and it took a moment to spot the fallen line among the debris. But then I was off after the spotted tracks, striving for ground as I caught the scent.

  It was folly, then, to be sure – immersed in the city with so little hope to thwart the outcome I had pursued, right in the thick of things for whatever that would be. It occurred to me that I had come right into the heart of the impending climax. But I couldn't think of that, or I might find it in me to panic. I had no choice, thanks to my pursuit, but to focus solely on thwarting the progress of that fuse, until 'too late' was beyond a shadow of a doubt. That was, until the city had erupted around me.

  I could no longer hear the clicks of the dominoes over my breathing, so I was not prepared when they stopped – must have stopped.

  Suddenly, the world rocked. I careened to the side, hurled off my feet. The rubble pitched around me, shuddering.

  A shift.

  Numb fear hummed through me, as surely as the shuddering of the earth. I threw my arms out, a sailor desperate for balance on his out-of-control ship. At the same time: awe. I had never been in the city during a shift before. I was terrified, but also dumb-stricken by the sheer magnitude of what was happening around me, what I was finally a witness to. Would the city change around me, before my very eyes? Landmarks in the rubble buckling and sliding and shifting until it was all rearranged?

  How could I survive while that took place around me?

  It began to happen – the actual shifting of the rubble, rather than mere quakes in the earth. I had just found my feet, and went sprawling again, spilling off a great slab as the avalanches began, as a pillar in the vicinity toppled and two others sprouted up, pushed up from underneath the rubble – as the ground seemed to open up, way down under the debris, creating a vortex that rubble spilled into from all sides. I thrashed, resisting the pull, but could climb out only as quickly as I was buried. But then larger debris was emerging, pushing up from underneath like mountains being born. I was caught by one of these, raised up, borne to safety above the mayhem. It became steeper as it rose, however, until I had to cling to it to hold my ground, and then until I spilled off entirely. I tumbled down its length, and was caught at the bottom by another current of rubble, this one more like a river. I managed to find my feet a few times under these circumstances, even tripping all over myself, but never for more than a moment. And then I fell on something, wrenched my back (if it wasn't pierced entirely). Stars and black spots kept me down, my hands reaching in vain for deliverance, fingers trailing off of what they encountered.