A Mischief in the Woodwork Page 2

  Wardogs.

  They hunted at night, and we were at their mercy.

  The only thing that kept them away was light – it hurt their eyes. They spent years on end, or even the majority of their lives, hibernating in the nooks and crannies of the world. Spring did not awaken them. War did. The smell of carnage roused them from their nests, and once they got a taste they did not sleep for a very long time. They hid by day, sensitive to the light from their habitual deprivation, but they came out to prowl when dusk hit.

  We had a means of defense in the surrounding land, but it was tricky. The weedflowers could be stimulated into glowing bulbs by way of song. They bloomed when sung to by a comely voice, and glowed like fireflies when awakened thus. But they only lasted a matter of hours. I had to sing them awake right at dusk in order for them to last until dawn. A chilling duty, but normal to me. I had not known this country when it was not plagued by such things.

  I heard the stories, though. I knew that a generation ago, things had been very different. A generation ago, there had not been a population of dark-skinned slaves. They had been our neighbors. Simply the foreign Serbaens.

  Then war had reached their land, and swarms of refugees spilled across the border into our land: Darath.

  Instead of giving them shelter, we had taken them as slaves.

  For some, there was no excuse better than taking advantage of the helpless. For others, they tried to justify their response in that these people had unrightfully invaded, and must face the consequences that any trespasser was dealt.

  The Wardogs were just one of the many things that people now blamed on the darkskins – (or 'baedra', as we called them in their own language, because they 'didn't deserve a place in our own language'. It didn't make sense to me, and rang in irony, that we would not utter of them in our own language, but would deign to speak in theirs.) There was tell of how misfortune and decay followed the darkskins here, how they were the dirty ones who brought it – creatures, rather than folk, whose culture was dark mischief. It was easy to blame them, for how events undoubtedly coincided, and to keep them with a vengeance as slaves. For some it was fear, rather, that needed an excuse to keep the mischief-makers in their place. But for me, the stories and excuses were all unwarranted. For I lived among the mischief-makers every day. They were my friends. And they did not fit the descriptions.

  But it was of no consequence. There was not a judge left in town for these matters. There was only the countryside, the ruins, the people in their nooks and crannies, all in the same boat, and the rituals that had come to be a way of life. Such as the ritual before me now. I had not known things any other way.

  I had been sought for the job because 'no darkskin could have a voice lovely enough to make flowers bloom'. It was an ironic purpose, existing to protect the Masters from the nuances that came with their own choice of slaves, but it was how things had come to be. These were dark times, and strange times, and order had gotten lost in the mischief. Trampled into dusty fragments of old and figments of wild imagination.

  With dusk came mist. There was rarely a night that we didn't have mist. Sometimes there were clear pockets, even clear fields, but billows to an extent always came to eddy about. It was materializing now as I treaded off the porch and faced the vast field. Exposure washed quietly over me as I stepped out of the shadow of the manor, leaving that haven behind me. The first breath of chilly night air wafted into my face and drifted on to the manor walls, raising the hairs on my arms. I shivered. The rags I wore – a crudely-crafted, flimsy, loose tunic over one of Victoria's old corsets, and a fraying silk skirt – were insignificant to the dropping temperature. I pulled the fabric of the loose tunic up over my bare shoulder, where the big neck often fell askew. It offered little in the ways of sealing out the cold. There was nothing for it but to finish my task, and retreat inside.

  The other slaves filed out behind me. They always came to lend me their support, to sing in the background and guide me back through the mist after I had done the rounds.

  I paused before the field, and Letta lifted the back of my tunic to loosen the corset strings. It was not a practical garment, but it was one of the things we were reduced to – wearing hand-me-down undergarments as the best clothing we could attain.

  I stretched my lungs as the strings loosened, assuring I had a proper range. Finished, Letta let the tunic fall, and I stepped forward into the fringes of the dead grasses and brown weeds.

  The sky was painted with the last inky colors of the day, a sullen tapestry sinking quickly into utter darkness. I trailed my fingers over the ugly weed buds as I treaded into their midst, letting the rising mist swallow me from sight.

  I entered that quiet world of softly shifting fears, where nothing but the faint hiss of the mist spoke and nothing but the smearing breaks in the gloom stirred for miles. I eyed those breaks warily, alert for any shift that might be something more than the gloom clearing. The Wardogs could be on the premises any time past twilight. They could be slinking through the field now, and I could stumble right into the path of a hungry beast coming our way.

  I could go to ribbons beneath an onslaught of fangs any instant.

  I calmed my nerves. It was all part of the job. Just get it done, Avante, I told myself. Then I could go back inside.

  I breathed the mist into my lungs, distilling its sting, and then began to let my voice out. It was a haunting lilt, a hymn of ancient words. I sang them from a sacred place in my being, as if speaking in a code that the gods had instilled in me. It filtered out, echoing through the mist. Muffled but rousing.

  As the distance fed off of my lonely voice, I became aware, as always, of how alone I was out there. Singing while exposed had the frightful feel of calling attention to myself. I could imagine the beasts perking their ears toward the sound across the countryside, pinpointing me in the gloom. It was haunting calling them so.

  I fanned out as I sang, flitting slowly from place to place to awaken the buds. They curled slowly open, touched by my voice, and took on the faintest hues of light as I did the rounds. Sometimes, as I drifted through the gloom, I could hear the faithful chant of the other slaves, lined up at the edge of the field to sing me back. Sometimes, I could not. My voice would fall in pitch when I lost them, becoming tentative as I strained to make them out, as I feared I had strayed too far to find my way back. But the buds would dim, and I strengthened my voice again. I could not risk letting the light die. Whether my voice overrode the beacon voices of my fellow slaves or not, I had to sing the flowers to their full potential before they would sustain themselves.

  I circled the manor by a memorized path. I'd counted out the steps by day in the beginning, and stayed true to that pattern, as best I ever could, to complete the task ever since. In wider and wider circles I went, until the buds were sharp lanterns in the night. Then I wound my way back toward the sound of the voices that sustained the lament, my slippers crunching softly on the grasses. As I got close, I caught glimpses of the slaves' formation through the billows, and I released a sigh of relief.

  We were safe for the night once more.

  They trailed off in equal relief when they saw me emerge from the mist, and ushered me inside. I rejoined them, and Letta folded me against her with an arm as we turned to go back inside. Dashsund drew the children similarly to him, holding them against the cold, and we all filed back through the door.

  I let the screen swing shut behind me, and then turned to cast my eyes through its filter and across the field once more. A crop of firefly sentries shone through the gloom all around us, pin-pricks of lancing light to any godforsaken Wardog that contrived to prowl the territory.

  Satisfied, I shut the door with a bang against the night, and threw the latch into the wall.

  T h r e e –

  Fellow Albinos

  Two things the Serbaens had indeed brought to Darath were Wardogs and disease. They had fled their land in a desperate haste, careening through the battlefields and swimming t
he bloody rivers, tracking the carnage across the border. It was inevitable that the Wardogs would follow them here, when the feasts on Serbaen soil ran low or the alpha beasts had claimed all the available battlefields and sent the hungry runts packing.

  A 'hungry runt' of a Wardog was as fearsome a thing as any. They were bigger than mountain wolves – more squatted toward the ground with their proportions, perhaps, but broad as an ox and lithe as a cat. They had large paws 'for swiping off heads', Enda said, and frightful knife-like claws 'that made ribbon stew'. Their heads, dreadfully big, were flat and short like a cat's, but their noses bashed in like a bulldog and their mouths wider than any face even of that size warranted. Great maws that grinned from ear to ear with chiseled yellow fangs zig-zagging across, like the frightening face of a rag doll with its mouth stitched loudly shut. Their tails were short little stubs, their fur coarse wiry and brown.

  I had seen one, once. It was prowling the fields when I went out to sing the flowers awake, and I risked prolonging the darkness that might call more so as to wait for it to pass before I carried out my duty. We had been lucky.

  Disease was the other thing. The Serbaens brought with them the infections they had merited from the uncleanliness of war. A great number of them had died. But, strangely, only a handful of the Masters had suffered the passing-on of their conditions. There was a theory that it was because the Darathians had shunned the new people from their circles from the beginning, and so disease had only lived in the slave quarters.

  Most of the disease had left their ranks by the time I came into the world, but I remembered getting sick when I joined them. There was a period of time that smeared into a feverish haze in my memory, filled with dark faces peering down at me and cold things mopping my forehead, which gave way only to the crazed fever dreams that took me in sleep. They were nonsense, but frightening. Worlds of disturbed nuances unleashed to wreak havoc on my defenseless state of mind. Even today, snippets came back to me that I had forgotten upon waking. Little things in my daily life would spark the memory of them, and I would revisit that strange patch of time from my past.

  I had a scar from that fever. A rash had developed on my back, and one shoulder blade now sported an immortal splotch of color, like a birth mark.

  I dropped my tunic over my head after Letta used her deft root-pulling fingers to lace up my corset for the day, hiding the mark and muffling the memory. I stooped and hiked up my skirt to lace my boots, tucking a knife into the side of one. Letta knotted my light brown tresses partially back, and inserted a blade there as well. The locks fell well past my shoulders, and even if the clever means of self defense embedded in the knotwork weren't necessary, keeping it out of my face was.

  “All set, minda,” she said, putting her hands on my shoulders. I straightened, and met her eyes in the mirror. The smile the middle-aged woman wore was fond, proud, but etched with concern. I could not blame her, but there was no point to it. I would either return or I wouldn't. Many others had met their end this way already.

  “I'll see you at dinner,” I said.

  It was either true, or it wasn't.

  She nodded, and we forsook further exchange. I turned from the room and left Manor Dorn for the wilderness, finding my favorite shadows to walk in as I headed for the city in the distance, embarking on my weekly quest.

  Today, I was an Albino.

  *

  There used to be a designated gate into the city. But the hulking pillar supports on either side had crumbled to various lows, and the gate itself had fallen on its face. It was now a rusted framework of bars trampled in the dust. The walls around the city had disintegrated, and now it could be accessed from any angle.

  I slipped in at the side, navigating through the rubble with the surefooted poise of an expert. The territory had only shifted slightly since I'd last been through. There were no new obstacles to reckon with.

  I breezed past the slanting half-walls and leaning buildings of the fringes, carefully descending the land-slid banks of a sunken square, where I skittered across the spidery cracks in the folded ground and climbed out the other side. I had already picked the square raw. There was nothing left in these parts.

  For that reason, the quest of today differed from the usual. There was a greater element of risk than usual, in that it was time to press deeper into the city. It was time again to penetrate an unexplored sector.

  I hadn't expanded my radius in months. There were endless nooks and crannies to uncover in any given locale. But there came a time when digging deeper in one spot no longer produced results in the necessary quantities. I could go back the University, I mused. It was a goldmine. It was for that reason I was loathe to go there, though. It was undoubtedly popular and frequented by competition.

  I took myself a distance to the west, until I encountered the remains of a navigable alley. One of the buildings had bowed against the other, but it was holding where it was wedged high above. Various piles of rubble littered the passageway, and the ground buckled up in places like sharp hillocks. I climbed over the obstructions, slinking under some collapsed columns that were lodged across my path.

  The alley felt long traveling thus, but it was tedious work anywhere in the city. I conquered it, and found myself at the edge of a vast, sweeping avenue. It tilted up to the left, a gradually sloping street, and fell away at the same rate to the right – but it was hard to say if it had always been that way, or if it was the result of some upheaval.

  Looking both ways up and down the sloping avenue, I surveyed the cracks and edges before breaking out into the open, skittering across the street and alighting in the shadows across the way. A shallow cloud of powder stirred in my wake, but when it settled again, it covered my footprints almost like I had never been there. Only the prints of a ghost remained, the shallowest whisper of passage. So far, so good. I had not upset anything.

  I forsook the avenue the first chance I could. Nothing good could come of staying out in the open. I ducked into another channel, hopping a pillar that lay flat like a fallen tree. My skirt trailed over the surface, leaving a silken streak through the pale dust. I wobbled a bit on the porcelain layers on the other side, but found my footing and plowed on.

  Blazing a trail through the haphazard maze of sections and pieces, I alighted finally on a fresh shore of potential – the crest of a precarious rise, that dipped down by way of jutting, serrated bluffs into another sunken square I had not investigated as of yet. Well, this ought to keep me busy. Carefully, I maneuvered down the broken bank, skidding on plaster and teetering on unsteady slabs. I climbed through the pitched frame of a big window that had fallen and shattered, wedged on its edge to create a crooked diamond skeleton. The glass had long since fallen in the cracks of the bank or turned to dust. Only a scant few icicles of it still hung in the frame.

  Before I reached the bottom, the toe of my boot rustled through a generous corner of parchment curling up through the debris. I paused, stooped, and dusted it off, finding a whole sheaf of scrolls buried there. Ushering away the surrounding junk, I extracted the manuscript and tucked it into the bag slung over my shoulder and across my chest. That would put off the demise of one more of the books in Manor Dorn's diminished library. It wasn't much, but we burned anything that fire would readily eat. If only it would eat plaster, I thought. Or glass, or stone, or rot.

  I reached the floor of the sunken square, and began sifting around through the ruin. I found a doll, which I packed away for Viola, and a diary, which I stowed for the fire. Further on there was a small cooking pot – a bit bashed in and in need of a good cleaning, but still in working order – and some intriguing odds and ends that I discarded after fiddling around with. A slither of cloth seized my attention next, and I produced a scarf when I pulled it free of the rubble. I sincerely hoped it had not been attached to someone's neck a moment ago. I stuffed it in my bag.

  I moved on, scanning the rich puzzle around me. I rustled up the remains of a shredded feather quill, and almost d
iscarded it as useless, but remembered that Letta could make ink from a smattering of things in the garden. Beet juice, insect blood, and ashes, she said. It was a Serbaen trick. The only reason she hadn't shown me was because we had nothing to write with, and certainly nothing to write on, save the walls. Paper was for burning.

  But perhaps the quill would come in handy sometime. And anyway, it didn't take up much space in my bag.

  I nudged aside the bones of some animal, taken by something I saw underneath them. It was a red glass vial, unbroken, with liquid still corked inside it. Astounding, I thought, that it was not broken – but sometimes I found things like that, little miracles preserved in the carnage. Intrigued as always, I added it to my stash, to be introduced to the collection of similar artifacts I had saved at Manor Dorn.

  My bag was beginning to take a toll on my shoulder. I had little but treasures in it so far, and so I narrowed my focus, re-designing it to zone in only on things of good use. To my good fortune, I spotted a tumble of books spilling down the base of the bank ahead of me, and I picked my way over to it. They would not all fit in my bag, but I could come back.

  Stooping, I began to harvest the tomes, clapping closed their splayed covers and straightening them into a certain manner of order to better fit in my possession. Powder discharged as the pages boomed shut, and I fought the sneeze that tried to overcome me.

  I was halfway up the rising spread of books, reaching for another one, when an onslaught of deadweight slammed into my body. I careened headlong down the bank, spilling into the square over the jutting, jarring terrain. It was like being plowed over rocks, sharp and unforgiving, battering me into what might very well be a pulp once I reached a resting place. I spasmed once, my senses shocked by the onrush, and fought the spots of blood and light that plagued my vision as I tried to push myself up off the disheveled ground.