A Mischief in the Woodwork

CHAPTER 13

Pale Song

The fever dreams had dispersed, but my throat remained a nest of obstruction. And now there was a new factor: contagion.

“My, minda – I think you've given it to me,” Letta lamented, resting against the doorframe the next day and holding the back of her hand to her forehead. “My head is spinning about the room, and I'm seeing strange things.”

“Rest,” I told her. “It is my turn to take care of you.” I moved to usher her into the sick room. “And don't worry, it doesn't seem deadly – just aggravating enough to hold you down. Come.”

I laid her to rest where I had only recently risen from. We had just washed the bedding, so it was fresh for her use. I tried to keep the worry off of my face as she had in the face of my limitations, but I did not know if I succeeded. I did not like seeing her like this – and I was still weak, and needed to sing, and now I had lost her support in the field and her voice from the pack. While I was marginally stronger than I had been the day before, my voice was worse. My throat had constricted – the web thickened.

But Letta was sinking too quickly into her own realm of disorientation to notice the concern tattooed into the lines of my weary face. I was glad of that – that one small thing not to worry about. I gazed at her a moment as she settled in for the spell, and then left her in peace.

The peace of unchecked, lawless fever dreams, that I knew all too well were no kind of peace at all.

*

I was taking the morning tray up to the Masters when I saw them: termites. They were spilling out of a crack in the wall at the base of the stairs, and this time, it was no feverish illusion.

It wasn't that termites were out of place by nature here – certainly not that. It was that I hadn't seen them elsewhere – not in the house, not in the city, never in any of the wreckage. Never near any of the decay. And only as I saw them now did I realize as much.

I paused, bemused, watching them flit out and trickle up and down the wall. In the strangest way, it didn't sit right with me – because in all truth, they were fitting beasties. Yet...they struck a chord, made me wonder. Their eerie absence elsewhere, as it sunk in, only made their appearance here more unorthodox.

Unable to frame them for anything out of character, though, I made an effort of dismissal, and haltingly continued on my way. One had to shake these things from their system, sometimes, because there were just no answers to be had. I could stew myself into a paranoid wreck looking for an explanation, but where would I look? The cracks in the wall? The rubble in the city? Ask the gods to explain the termites in the house?

I shook my head in ridicule, casting the creatures from my suspicions. They would have to be dealt with, that was all. They were a complication, not a sign. The things I'd seen in my fever state had me jumpy. Leery. I was spooked, and no one could blame me. I would never choose to relive what happened to me in that kitchen.

Experimentally, I caressed the bottom of the tray with my finger, the one that had been affected. Texture registered to my touch like never before. I could feel each line of my fingerprint chaffing over the rusty metal as if they were great planes gliding over sandpaper. The particles of rust were pinpricks of intense quality, radiant as bloody stardust, telling a story like braille. I could see the metal in my mind's eye, once shining, bright as a blade – and the weather that warped it, coated it, saturated it, and the spots of disease that cropped up like the plague. I felt the steadfast soul of the metal buckle and crumble in my hands, until it was choked out completely as if from a weed, wrestled into a pulpy excuse for what it once was. Then, withered, the soul of it left the metal altogether – a crippled, contaminated shell to live out its days in misery. As with all metal souls, the spirit of the tray now blazed in the great sword of the gods, which was a metal of all metals, too bright with the sun's reflection to look at, and so sharp that it could cleave the world in two like a melon.

I blinked away the vision, if it could be called a vision. In truth it was more like an unbidden musing, initiated by something else. A trailing result of my sickness?

I disengaged my finger from the metal regardless, rendered just a little bit uncomfortable, and reminded myself to scrub the digit later – just so there was no question as to there being any deviant remnant of mischief tattooed into my fingerprints.

*

Twilight fell like a beast crouching in the grass. I met its horizon-gray eyes out the window, pausing my work in realization. I clutched the garment I was mending closer for a moment, taking comfort in its texture as the gray hour glazed everything outside, silently sapping it of life. It had bled out as if from the subtle slitting of sunshine wrists, which none of us noticed until the body had gone cold. And now night crouched on its precipice, bloody from the catch, ready to pounce lower and walk among us.

It was time, once again.

“Henry,” I called, but it dispersed more like a croak. He appeared presently in the doorway from the other room. A piece of gnawing grass protruded through his lips, and he brushed his hands off as he looked to me for continuation. “The others, please,” I bade barely above a whisper. How was I going to accomplish this?

His eyes went likewise to the land beyond the window, and he turned in cooperation to rally the other slaves. I made my way outside, not keen on waiting for any greater darkness to ward off the beasts I knew were out there. They'd been spotted recently; we couldn't take chances putting off our defenses. We couldn't leave ourselves vulnerable for an instant.

There was a slight commotion as Tanen caught up to me, seemingly to make sure I didn't go out alone. It was thoughtful of him, I hazarded. That bubble of pride in me went mostly unheard in the light of my condition and the fact that I was insecure with the task at hand. I let go of begrudging him the gesture, frankly glad to have someone at my back.

“What do I do?” he asked.

“Can you sing?” I inquired.

“I have a voice,” he confirmed agreeably enough.

“Then stand shy of the field, and learn from the others. I could do with a voice to fill in for Letta. If my beacon isn't great enough, I'll get lost out there.”

He nodded and slowed, even though it seemed he would rather be more helpful. I heard him shift behind me, trying to settle in. Then I was treading into the first stubble of the grasses, swishing through them like the shallows of the ocean, growing deeper and deeper until I was submerged in the patchy tide up to my shoulders.

The first breaths of mist eddied through, cold whispers on my skin. I shivered, caressed by their ghostly intentions, feeling raw and naked as the chill settled around me. I could almost see it in descending layers, heavy as a shroud on the ground but light as a feather in the air. A feeling at once delicate and brutal.

It was scarcely a ghost – but a restless spirit carries great weight.

Breathing the stuff hurt my lungs. They were clenched into a fist, deep and sharp. Taking a breath was like blowing on a raw wound. It branded my chest from the inside out.

This surely did not bode well for my singing.

A meadowlark chirruped in the twilit obscurity, flitting through on retreating wings. The grass rustled slightly with its unseen passing, but then I was left with the pressure to fill the quiet. I measured my breathing, wrestling with the fetal-crimped demon in my chest. My voice was a dormant thing inside me, unsure of being harnessed, if the season was right. It did not feel ripe.

I swallowed, working it up inside me, composing my vocal chords and bracing them against the obstruction in my throat. Then I took a breath, and forced sound to disperse.

That first note rang out, a tribute to my effort. It rang timid but sweet, an effective lance to the chilled air. Instead of being swallowed by the mist, it echoed – a sweeping, warped wave across the land. I heard the faint sound of the meadowlark mimicking it in the distance, a chirping response to the charm in the music.

Then it failed me.

My voice scratched at its cage to be free, but the door had swung shut, and there was no key on this present earth. The sound faltered – filtered determinedly through the cage bars, but weakened alarmingly as I pressed it. It was retreating quickly to its wintry lair, weary, resigning without an ounce of respect for the distress it would cause in its absence. It betrayed me, there in the open, abandoning me to the fate of defenseless silence.

I choked slightly on my efforts, as they razed my damaged throat, crumbled, and clogged my throat like ashes. It was raw from the stress, and I clamped my mouth shut abruptly to halt a rising fit of coughing.

And with the sealing of my lips, I felt it: the weight of the silence.

It was thick as blood around me.

The faintest glimmer had come to the weedflowers, like a blush, but it faded as quickly as it had come, until only a scant few buds cast the weakest light.

My nerves prickled but fizzled out then with a strange knowing, and I became utterly centered there in that field, aware of the deafening quiet in every hair on my body. It rang across the land as surely as my voice had, a velvet hush, roaring in the numbness of my ears, its whispers registering in the goosebumps on my flesh.

As I stood there, twilight sunk visibly into the brush.

The next swallow I took was dry as parchment.

My fingers curled around the strands of grass at their tips, holding its hand – a pitiful gesture.

I waited, my eyes shifting, wondering at the idle seconds. I felt my insides shrivel up in an exodus, vacating the scene. They left me there, a sacrifice for their comfort.

The conviction of my failure was a smell in the air. My vulnerability struck me like the keenest of warnings. In its absolute state, it was all I needed in order to know.

My failure was a sentence.

It was as if a veil fell away from me with the failing of my voice. It was much the same as the feeling one might suffer at center stage if they had been singing for the audience only behind the cover of the curtain – sheltering, perhaps, the secret of a tender age, or inferior class, when the audience expected a woman of stature – and then the curtain fell away, and all was revealed in a terrible moment of truth.

The silence would be deafening.

Then they would crucify me for the scandal.

The only difference now was that I could not see my audience. The brush hid them. I did not know where they were, but I knew they were out there.

And I could be sure they knew of me too.

I stood my ground as the lights went out around me, resigned. My breathing matched the quiet, drawn in on dragging, silent wings, trying to make way for the subtle, telltale sounds that might pinpoint the company that shared that field.

It was folly to stand in the silence, in an open field, as darkness fell. It was folly to stand in any of those things. I knew as much. I told myself that, as if I required telling.

But I stood in my folly. It swirled about my ankles. It breathed down my neck.

The grass hissed, but I could not tell if it was from movement or a breeze. I felt the pupils of my eyes expand, honing in on the field around me. I could not hope to see past the mist, through the grass – but I had to watch. I knew the instant I turned my back to retreat, I was done for. Predators knew this game.

Bless the heart of she who had never played, but knew it too.

There sounded a rustle.

Nothing.

A taunting extent of nothing.

Then the motion of a four-legged demon manifested through the grass.

The wardog filtered through the curtain of weeds before me, head low on its shoulders, the mist dissipating around its warm body. A horrible prickle ran over me, a wave of nerves, like the tide coming in to claim the shore, cold and frothy and chilling. Those eyes convicted me, wicked and mocking. The savage void of a mind that lay beneath that skull was wrapped around me, and I felt it pull as the creature slunk closer.

The rules of the game scattered to all corners of my mind. I would be shredded in an instant.

The moment the voices of the slaves trickled through the mist, I bolted. If I needed one thing right now, it was a bearing.

A gruesome snarl barked into the quiet, ripping it to shreds in my place. I felt the earth heave as the beast lunged after me, and the slaves' voices were lost in the blind panic that followed. Nothing could be heard over the ravaging of grass and vicious snarling of the beast giving chase. I saw nothing but the veil of my fear and my bearing.

When I emerged from the grass, the voices of the slaves cut off in alarm, and they scattered. Had the mist tampered even the ruckus of the wardog?

I realized only after they scattered and I fell silent that I had been screaming at them to get inside. They ran at the house like horses, hard and fast.

I could feel the charging beast nipping at my heels with its great, gaping mouth. I heard the cloth of my skirt rip on its fangs.

Breath rasped into my lungs, going ragged on the barrier edges of my illness.

A strange, glazed relief washed over me as the door to Manor Dorn was wrenched open and the last of the slaves disappeared inside. But relief coupled with raw desperation was a sour, fleeting thing indeed. I was mere lengths behind them, but in the wake of their exodus I was suddenly abandoned to the rabid fate boring down on me, and I knew I would not be so lucky.

I reached the porch, was just short of the door, when the beast lunged. That door was centered in my reach, so close that I could see myself inside.

Instead, I felt the battering-ram weight of the wardog slamming into me full-tilt, and I in turn crashed into the face of my haven, and slammed that fateful door closed with the weight of my own body.

I was stricken senseless for an instant – then instinct arrested me. Great, trap-like jaws were around me, ripping at me, shredding my clothes and cracking my ribs beneath my corset. Soon they would penetrate that too, and I would be a soft bite from being torn open completely.

I thrashed around, bracing myself with my back against the door, shying my face away from the onslaught that tore at my body. I smelled blood, rotten meat, and greasy hackles. The beast's motley fur rippled over frenzied, brutal muscles as he ravaged me.

My arm flung out against the side of the house, banging against the bucket that hung by a chain there. The wardog ground me into the door, and my reach faltered, my elbow grazing against the wall. My arm went limp a moment, senseless from the raw shredding of nerves. But I was reaching again, fumbling for purchase, and my fingers alighted on the lip of the bucket.

I hauled it across my body, ramming it into the side of the wardog's face. The beast faltered, surprised, but the wild look was rooted in its eyes. It was possessed for the feeding.

I dealt another blow, and then another. Again and again I slammed that bucket into that snarling body, beating the creature bent on devouring me. The desperate task blurred into a painstaking eternity, a pathetic sense of perseverance that was my only hope. At center stage was nothing but my desperation, but I knew in the back of my mind that no one would come for me. I was pressed against the door, was being beaten against it – no one could come to my aid if they wanted to.

Even in the midst of my passionate defense, I almost accepted it: that a wardog had finally gotten me, and I wouldn't live past the encounter. I was clinging to life with a fleeting means of adrenaline, and could not hope to dominate the force bearing down on me. I would be corrected in moments.

But then glass rained down around us, the chiming explosion a distant, confusing twist to this fate befalling me, and a silhouette dropped to the ground just down the wall. I had lost myself to the violent rhythm of my bashing, then, and scarcely noticed as this new figure came into the picture and went at the wardog with some new weapon.

The blow of the club-like addition succeeded in drawing the wardog's attention, and the weapon in question was corrected as quickly as I had expected to be. As the creature's attention was diverted, though, I scrambled into the cusp of a more advantageous bearing, dragging the opportunity into my hands.

The next few moments were wet with blood and saliva, and ripe with pain and the drive of life and hunger. The struggle rose in complication as the wardog whipped itself about, dealing with two adversaries at once. We dodged, wrestled, bashed and strangled until at last my accomplice plunged a hand through the smattering of glass splayed across the ground and dredged up a nice blade of it, and drove it hard into the beast's side between its ribs.

There was a sudden change in pitch as the snarling thing yelped, sustained a whimper, and its aggression buckled. The heroic culprit stood with another piece at the ready, but the wardog faltered further, backed up a step on unsteady legs, and then retreated entirely with confusion and hurt dampening its ugly features into a pitiful mask. Damaged, it turned from us and limped quickly into the brush, seeking recovery.

Only then did the heat of the moment drain away, and everything began to hurt. I couldn't help it; my eyes went down to my body, searching for the mortal wounds that it felt like I had, and that I could easily have attained. I was sullied beyond what would ever be socially acceptable, but I did not see anything immediately lethal. I felt as if I had been trampled by horses, but nothing was bleeding out at an overly-alarming pace or keeping me anchored brokenly to the ground.

However, that was surely only thanks to one factor: the ally that had dropped from the broken sky of Manor Dorn, all amidst a pool of glass and free-falling heroism.

All thanks to none other than Tanen, I saw as I looked up, and found him standing over me with bloody hands, and glass in his grasp, and good will written all over the face that I was loathe to love.