A Mischief in the Woodwork Read online

  My wrist gave out, but my elbow supported me. As I shifted, I felt glass under my body. It chimed a warning grind, and I felt the warmth of blood in numerous places before I felt the sting of lacerations. I shook the stars from my focus and rolled onto my side, and suddenly suffered the throb and lancing pain of the injuries I had attained. My body screamed in a thousand places.

  Motion brought my focus to what had attacked me. The figure was scurrying about the hoard of books, stuffing them into his big coat pockets. The dirty pale blue of the garment swam in my vision as pain snaked down my neck. I let my head slacken toward the ground, maneuvering my arms underneath me to push my body up. Rubble crunched and chinked beneath me.

  I resisted a groan as my wrist throbbed, and hoisted myself off the ground. With my feet beneath me, I fought my ailments and drew my knife from my boot.

  The other Albino heard the sound, and spun to face me, the stiff tail of his coat furling around him. But I had already launched myself up the mound, and seized the pocket of his coat with a fearsome grip, dragging him down. He buckled, dropping books and skidding onto his backside. I hauled him down the bank, raising my knife, but he brought a slice of debris up from the bank and slammed it against my skull.

  The world spun again, and I flew to the side and onto my back, and then he was upon me pinning me to the sharp slope. My knife was still in my hand, but my hand felt senseless, grazed by nerve-crushing wreckage. He seized my wrist to immobilize my weapon, his other hand going to my throat. I swept my good arm crudely upward, clutching for the blade in my hair. My fingers fumbled against the slight hilt, and then I swept it out, gagging, and sliced at his arm.

  The blade tore into his coat, and he released my throat to pin my other arm, but I crashed my forehead up into his face. As he half-crumpled, stunned, I shoved him off me, scrambling to my feet. He rose as well, still slightly dazed, but came at me again. I swiped both blades at him as he advanced, cutting his cheek, then his hand.

  I saw something in his eyes falter, but he lunged again, not to be deterred that easily. I danced backward, stumbling a bit on the debris, but hurled a knife at him. It was risky, giving up a weapon, and if he ended up with it I would regret it, but I was in no state to grapple with him.

  The knife caught him in the bicep, and his stance flicked back. Pain clenched his face, and he folded slightly in on himself, halting his pursuit. But it was only his arm, and he braced himself and pulled the weapon free.

  Prickles ran through me.

  With the bloody knife in one hand, he swept a large spike of debris off the ground with the other. I did not fancy that coming at me. I crouched shakily, keeping my eyes on him, stirring around on the ground with my fingers and coming up with a sizable shard of glass. Now we were both wickedly armed. My grasp felt decidedly more feeble on my piece of glass than his looked on his brutal spike, though.

  Something fluttered inside me for that moment, but then I felt a familiar sense of feral blood stir in my recesses and leak through me.

  I fixed my grip on the glass, and then I did the unthinkable.

  I lunged at him first.

  We met in a climactic bash of limbs and slashing weapons. I did not feel my ailments. He clubbed me with his spike, and I cut him with my shard, and then I hoisted myself off a slab of an incline and planted my boot square in his chest. He stumbled back, lurched over the obstruction, and collapsed in a jumbled rush. His head bounced off a serrated edge of stone, and he lay still on top of the offal.

  I hunched, panting, and then trailed slowly forward to check him. Stabbing my knife into my hair, I twined my fingers into his hair and pulled his head to the side. A bloody bruise was welling on his forehead, but he was alive.

  Knowing he was sufficiently unconscious, I knelt there for a moment or two, catching my breath. It took a conscious effort of will to release the glass in my other hand, where it was clamped tight and sealed by the cutting sharp edges. Blood ran down my palm.

  Hurt returned to my body, and I grimaced hard to overcome the rising agony. It throbbed and pierced and ached all over. I felt minced and shattered.

  Indignant, I reached into the Albino's big pockets and withdrew the books he had stolen, transferring them to my own pack. I took the bloody knife from his grasp, too, and cleaned it on my skirt before inserting it back into its rightful keep.

  Better luck next time, fella, I thought. I hoped he had learned what he ought to have already known: you didn't cross an Albino, even if you were one yourself. There was a dreadfully fierce code amongst the scavengers. Competition was alive and well without meeting face to face.

  Leaving him, I shouldered my pack and turned to abandon the square. There was a terrible limp to my step, done no service by the disheveled land. It was going to be a nightmare climbing out of the city.

  And the sun was disappearing behind the tops of the piled-up buildings.

  *

  I blazed a steady but inhibited pace, limping through the pre-twilit streets. I had managed to climb free of the square, had slowly conquered the jumbled alley and crossed the sloping avenue, but my progress was hindered. Only sheer determination and survival instinct kept my choppy strides consistent in their slow-going.

  Survival was programmed into me. It was in all of us, but especially saturated in those of us who were thrust out into the open, exploited and counted on. It was why Albinos didn't cross each other. If we saw one of our kind while on a loot, we turned the other way. We avoided the promise of conflict that came with competition.

  Some would think there would be kinship between us, but that couldn't be farther from the truth.

  The impending twilight hounded me as I went, each minute a taunt as my steps dragged closer and closer to the symbol that was both my haven and charge. Safety lay there, but also – I had to sing the fields into bloom before dark set in.

  Breath rasped in and out of my lungs. One rib grated against another like knife on bone as I breathed. I had not had the pleasure of sprawling across the city underbrush quite so artfully before. It was rather lumpy, I decided – and then cringed at the understatement. I had never felt so plowed out of joint in my life. I was certain my body had been perforated in a dozen different places from my spill; and where it wasn't dredged, I was sure it was cracked.

  One apparently did not roll down these hills as the grassy green slopes of times past.

  Dark colors were leaking down across the horizon.

  Letta will fix you right up with her magic herbs and salves, I told myself. There was no need to worry about the speculated extent of the abuse my body had taken. In the back of my mind, I feared the consequences of being torn up in a locale so susceptible to infection, but we the children of Manor Dorn were hardy souls. The lot of us had been through hell and back, one way or another. Some of us twice.

  I felt a subtle chill in the air.

  The question was: should I return to that sunken square the next time to finish what I had started with the rich soil that I discovered there? Was it worth going back for further harvests, or had the novelty been shot through the heart and endangered? The other fellow ought to be more dissuaded from the area than me, I reasoned with myself, but my encounter with the place stayed with me. I couldn't help it; I was wrecked. Dissuasion was raked all over me.

  Tomorrow brings new perspective. You'll see. I would be more than ready to hazard the location again when my next mission came around. After all, the other fellow had proven a point: these were desperate times. If I found good soil, I was going to dig my greedy hands in and bleed it for all it was worth.

  The desperate were entitled to whatever they could get their hands on.

  I limped free of the rubble, finally free of the city. Now there was only the distance, that long empty road ahead of me. I kept my eyes peeled for Manor Dorn's lonely silhouette as the outskirts crawled nearer one hobbling, maddening step at a time.

  I tried telling myself: I could run.

  But I could not.

&nb
sp; My body simply would not increase its efforts without crumpling me into a heap where I stood. Pathetic or not, I was achieving my limit.

  The fields expanded around me, the trails of architectural remnants dwindling into the weeds. What once had been a more rugged road this far out was now a thing of smooth wonder in comparison to the ruined city streets. It aided my handicap, but I kicked up dust.

  I did not like kicking up dust out in the open. A creature could see that, across the distance. A moving cloud that meant live meat.

  Yet there was nothing for it. I could do naught but blaze a trail toward sanctuary.

  A pall of gray was arresting the land, but I saw it: the lonely manor rising in the distance. Soon the mist would mix with the gray to blur it into an even more tentative symbol, but I had it focused in my bearing now.

  Just a ways more.

  My feet burned in my boots. Each step was like I was running on bruised soles, the skin chafed raw, the bones whittled down. Shards of pain shot up my calves and shins, like recurring splinters. A pulled muscle protested in one leg, and the other had been pinched senseless by a sharp jab to the meaty muscle there. I briefly considered resorting to walking on my hands, for how useless my other limbs had been rendered, but the ridicule was lent a faulty premise when I reminded myself my wrist was just as twisted, and the nerves in my other elbow just as tweaked.

  My breath began to sift into the air in frosty little clouds, obscuring my vision in hazy patches. It spread out to be united with the rising mist, and I scuffed hazardously faster for a few moments.

  Presently, I could hear the others singing. It was a distant sound, but unmistakable; I knew that muffled lament. And even fainter beyond that, I noticed as I grew closer, was the sound of a single voice out beyond the other side of the house – a lone, crude chant. An ancient, wise, desperate voice.

  Enda.

  Hastily, I limped through the last stretch of road and plunged straight into the misty weeds, falling to my knees and adding my voice to the ritual. I had to salvage what I could. I imagined the others, fraught with the obligation to take up my task. What a bleak undertaking; for surely they knew they could only grasp at it – that the flowers would flicker in response, in deprivation, neglected by that which the others didn't possess.

  Yet they had to try. The Wardogs were out there.

  Only the slightest falter tickled my throat, raw from my breathy exertions, but I hollowed it out and forced it strong. Potent, keening notes rang through the mist. I closed my eyes and let it course through me, becoming a mere vessel for that greater power that had its seeds planted inside me somewhere. The darkening countryside became ethereal territory, awash with the ringing, sacred symphony of the song in my veins.

  The weedflowers around me flitted with the first shimmers of light. Slowly, they awakened, dawning like pixies in the gloom. My lashes lifted as they assumed their full glow, and I let the breath of the song go out of me. Weariness and relief crashed down on me all at once. But I clambered to my feet with the need to spread out the effect, and, even after I had hastily achieved the task, I stumbled once more in a direction not of the manor – driven by one last piece of necessity this night; in the distance was Enda's voice still, wavering but caught in a vigil. I hastened toward the sound, pushing the weeds aside. They swished and bobbed in my wake, their buds like fireflies.

  At times, I pushed mist aside as much as the weeds, as good as swimming through the abyss. But surely feet had never fumbled or caught so much for any swimmer.

  Enda's voice grew and shrank, teasing me onward, pulling me around.

  Finally, I found her. I broke free of the mist into a pocket of a clearing, and saw her folded on the ground in the middle, desperately stuck chanting. I treaded forward and folded myself at her side, putting my arms around the old, rocking woman. Again, I added my voice, smoothing out the song, bringing her back to a sense of harmonic sanity. I felt her go slack in my arms, her chant turning to a hum. Drawing her slowly up, I turned her about, ears straining for the sound of the voices that I hoped were still posed to hail us. Dusk and mist had lost me completely.

  The first and most prominent thing I heard: silence. Then the second: the gem-cutting sharpness that was a brief string of voiced notes flitting through the gloom. They drifted to us over the field after that, unsteady but tangible. I huddled Enda close as we penetrated the mist, and ushered her back toward the house.

  Our perimeter, swallowed by the abyss, held true as we left it to its nightwatch.

  F o u r –

  The Daylight Echo

  Things creaked, and things stirred. Things shifted, and things brewed. Things festered and cracked and rippled – things that were never meant to ripple.

  Stone was not meant to ripple.

  Yet it was all an enhancement to that which was most haunting: the silence. It was ripe for the very echos of rustling silk. One might catch the sweeping hiss across the miles of raw air, and say it:

  “Someone stirred.”

  That's how it happened, the day following my ordeal in the city.

  Letta paused where she was tending to me in the garden, root salve smeared across her palm. She was rubbing the stuff into my aches and pains, coating my cuts and massaging it into my traumatized muscles.

  “That is a fortunate soul that the wardogs don't hunt during the day,” she observed quietly. It was not as imperative that we retain utter silence out beyond the precarious nature of the city, but we still made sure to speak in soft, even tones. Letta was one who was not as superstitious of the mischief, as well, and probably would have been another to allow the curtains of Manor Dorn open if it wasn't the established way of things to keep them closed.

  I took advantage of the idle moment to shift, for I was stiff in my molded posture. And she was right: a beast would have tracked that sound of life in a matter of minutes. I could imagine its ugly wide snout perking toward the sound, its short neck going abruptly erect at the disturbance, and then its claws digging into the earth as it took off, loping across the countryside toward its unknowing prey.

  Though if they had any sense, I thought, they would know. They would fill with dread the moment they made the slip, knowing it echoed across the ruined land. Knowing they had been targeted in that instant, while they had nowhere to run. Knowing they were as good as sitting like a duck, even amidst their sudden scramble to escape the compromised scene.

  That whisper would have convicted them.

  We, out here, could at least keep a watchful eye as we spoke and seek shelter in our home, should anything emerge nearby.

  “You were lucky too, Monvay,” Letta said. 'Monvay' was the polite title for a lady in Darath. She used it sometimes out of respect for me because of the greater things I took on as a slave – because I was, after all, only a slave, unworthy of the title; just a momentous slave. I was greatly appreciable among the rest of them. “Too much luck falling in a row. It bodes ill for the chances of something going wrong next.”

  “I don't know what you can see from there,” I said, “but this doesn't feel like something gone right. Ow.”

  I knew she smiled. “It's all relative, minda. You were lucky. I don't know what you were thinking, taking on an albino – and an older male, at that.” It was a half tease, because she knew I wouldn't readily take one of them on. Even a scrawny female.

  “I daresay mingling with one's own kind has become rather outdated,” I grunted, my voice pinched, as she upset the pangs of a raw slice on my back. It had mostly dried up and crusted over, but was a horrid, puckered crevice of skin slitted open like a bulging envelope. “Mingling at all has become outdated. And to think, it used to be the polite thing to do. Now, if you do the polite thing, you get whacked.” And by 'whacked', of course, I meant 'killed', in slang terms. Because I had gotten a lot more than whacked in its respective sense. If only, I thought, lamenting the extent of the wear and tear that graced my figure.

  “Oh yes, the golden days when the Masters m
ingled politely with the slaves,” Letta said with a tinge of sarcasm, but it was kind sarcasm. A reminder.

  Something in me softened. Of course, it had not been like that for the rest of them. Imagine, the Masters bothering to spare politeness toward their slaves. That would rather be a mockery of the arrangement. “I'm such an insensitive oaf,” I said.

  “Nonsense. Just a vibrant patchwork of unique perspective.”

  My brow creased into a quizzical expression where she couldn't see. “If you say so,” I granted.

  And then we heard it; the howl in the distance. Not animal. Human.

  It was a shriek of pure terror and anguish – the sound of someone meeting their end. And the snarls that followed, echoing across the broken plains, that named the violent culprit. It was animal. It was too voracious to be anything less than...

  “By the gods,” Letta breathed.

  I had gone rigid underneath her touch, but her touch hovered, forgotten. I felt the downy hairs down my spine prickle in its place.

  “That is the sound of irony if I've ever heard it,” Letta said gravely.

  For it was. It was no less than the sound of the very thing we had ruled out.

  A wardog in the daylight...

  By the gods indeed.

  F I v e –

  The Paper Boy

  The rest of that day, we took to huddling restlessly inside. The silence returned, but it was all the more ripe for disturbing, and now we were loathe to make a sound. Dashsund saw our grave faces, and his lightheartedness faltered, wondering. I picked up a scrap of a book page from the hearth and scribbled on it with charcoal:

  Wardog.

  His eyes did not go wide when he read it, but they flicked up to my face, suddenly reflecting the gravity in my own. I did not need to nod. He was savvy to the implications.

  He turned to spread the word, and soon we were all gathered in the front room, paused in our work, where we sat on the dirty floor beneath the laundry. It was strung about the room; we didn't dry laundry on lines in the yards anymore. It had been decreed in the prime of the spreading mischief that it was too dangerous to pose such a casual task outside. And after that, the powder-laden winds that blew in from the city (and the regular dust-laden ones that blew in from any direction of countryside) had made such a task useless, unless performed indoors. Now, it seemed the danger of posing such a casual task outside had been reintroduced.