A Mischief in the Woodwork

CHAPTER 17

The Ambassador

Overwhelmed by the visions, and the thought of being surrounded by this disturbing cast, I clenched my hand against further interpretations and my eyes against further imagination. I would be dreaming up visions myself soon, spooked.

I had not realized it, but as my fingers closed I had caught a piece of leaf. It was quaint as a paint chip.

In the end, that's why I opened my eyes.

Not because I was ready to go.

Not because I had regained my composure.

I opened them because there was a whisper still lodged in my grasp, a delicate shard of this puzzle still painting things into my mind.

What it painted this time was something closer than the other snippets. I could feel the heat of it.

The gaze of it.

I saw it, as I opened my eyes.

Even as it stood behind me.

I revolved slowly, until its true form pricked the corner of my eye, and then snapped a full turn.

She was there.

And she was not a vision.

She was in the distance, and I was illiterate to her features. But she was unmistakable.

That was the word that described her.

Unmistakable.

She was hugged by gold, and her frame was one that boasted its tall authority even from a distance. This time, in her hand, she did not clutch her smoking utensil. She clutched a shackle.

It dangled from her grasp, the chain lagging on the ground behind her. When she moved forward, dragging it toward me, she did not seem much hindered by the weight of the rubble.

I did not take well to this woman dragging an anchored shackle in my direction. As she moved forward, I backed away. But each of her steps seemed to double mine. She came forward in flashes.

Oh, gods, what have I fallen into?

I felt her voice in my hand, a tremor in the leaf: “You have fallen off the face of the earth, my dear. You've fallen into the cracks.”

My hand released the leaf with the suddenness of a clamp pried open. Her voice flitted to the ground, where I couldn't hear it. I trampled it as I treaded backward.

I did not turn to flee, though perhaps I would have very much liked to. I was trained in survival, and survival did not always mean running. My hand went to my head, sliding into the niche where my knife was threaded. It was colder than usual, and my fingers were slick with sweat.

There was no use denying that I was out of my element, that I had never encountered a place of this nature, even in all my encounters as an Albino, but there was no time to despair over that nature, nor the desire to analyze it. I just wanted out. I had trespassed, and I just wanted to leave. I had fallen into something that was none of my business.

“It was just a mistake,” I tried, projecting it down the passage while my advancing companion was still a safe distance away. “I just fell in.”

“Most of them do,” came her reply without concern. I had deterred nothing.

My glance took in the chain at her fingertips. “Leave it,” I willed more desperately.

She slunk closer. The dead leaves crawled away from her feet. “This is mine to do with as I shall.”

I bared my blade then, seeking a more deterring stance. “I am not.”

She said nothing, but carried tauntingly onward.

Sweat ran into my eyes. I blinked furiously at it, and when my vision cleared, she was before me.

Right before me.

I lunged away with a hammering heart, but now her strides were long and purposeful. I threw my knife at her.

She caught it by the blade.

She was close enough now that I was stricken by her beauty. I had never seen such beauty. Her skin was rich as the soil of paradise, and her eyes like vast planes of night. Her cheekbones were like weapons, sharp enough to kill, poised above half-mast on her tall, angled face. The mane atop her head was slicked back, smooth, in a way that made her forehead taut as a canvas and seemed to pull on her eyes. It made her severe, and exquisite, and stunning at once.

“Neither are you yours, my dear,” she drawled, her accent crisp as apples and hollow as wind.

The anchor of rubble baubled along behind her, as significant as a neglected kite on a string. It was child's play in her wake.

“The shadows will eat the sun from your skin. The vampires will drain the wretched glow of blood from it. By your standards, you will be beautiful. Fair as any queen. Have you no thanks?”

Horror and bafflement clenched my brow. I could no sooner decipher her estranged riddles than put a tower back together from the rubble. She was a lunatic – but she was one with a distracting sense of power. I could not deny my own eyes. Something bigger was afoot here.

“You will taste your own folly, here, ripe where its sunken into the earth,” the golden woman went on. “When the water comes through, you will taste the bitterness of your own sorry reflection, what the mirror has always seen in you – the spit it would like to throw in your face every time it's forced to look at you. You will taste the terrible sweet tang of all you could have tasted your entire life, when it was attainable. You will taste the sweetness of the things you denied, and then they will turn sour on your tongue. You will taste–” And here, she grabbed for me, an iron fist around my forearm that was a shackle by itself, and her words melted faster than snowflakes on a stove.

Her eyes went to her hold, as if she felt something she had not expected in my bony, strong appendage.

And the coinciding thought that was floating like a wayward survivor on the doused tide of my mind at that moment: I have tasted it...

I did not know where the thought had washed in from, nor where the correlating ache of sadness hailed from, but as her attack of words stopped so did my resulting sentiments, and she and I were both left in a strange stalemate of uncertainty. Both had felt something.

It just seemed mine had been more fleeting, and hers more on the convicting side – for where I had let the feeling go as it saw fit, she was evidently still puzzling over hers.

She had taken it decidedly more personally.

Was she looking at the same thing I had felt?

I didn't care. My thoughts had reverted to my current state of affairs. I did not strain against her hold, for she was a beast in human form when it came to her bony clasp. She could crush me like the leaves at our feet, into a handful of crumblies. Instead, I scowled at her face, defiant against whatever it was about me that intrigued her.

But she was not interested in my defiance. Her face, halfway between fascinated and indifferent as ice, maintained its direction a moment longer before turning thoughtfully to something behind me.

The bridge. As if it were relevant in our exchange. Almost as if it was speaking to her.

I could only be thankful the shackle remained idle at her side. I could not guess what she was thinking.

“You have...” she started in bemusement, but didn't finish. But perhaps that was all that she meant.

A moment later, she released me, and sat upon a slab of rubble I had not noticed before. An epiphany seemed lodged in her mind, playing tricks around her head. It was suddenly like I wasn't there at all. Something about the bridge had overruled my importance.

I have... It echoed in my head, a humble trickle of agreement. But I rubbed my arm where she had clutched me, insecure.

“Tell me,” she prompted suddenly, looking at me. “Am I beautiful?”

It seemed such an unorthodox question given the circumstances, but then again the circumstances themselves were a puzzle to be reckoned with.

I swallowed, for my throat was dusty and sweaty at once. “Most assuredly.”

“They all say that.” She seemed un-impressed.

What did she want, for me to go into raving detail? To flatter her until she declared she'd had enough?

“Devastatingly so?” she pressed. “Enough to kill a man?”

I struggled, uncertain as to what she was searching for, wanting to say the right thing. “If he were so ready to die, perhaps.”

She considered this, still lacking in approval.

“Most of them weep,” she announced.

I did not know what to say to that. “I do not find myself...so devastated,” I hazarded – for honesty had not gotten me killed so far.

It was suddenly her smoking utensil in her hand in place of the shackle, and she drew it to her lips a moment and then exhaled a puff of small minions.

It seemed the termites had been no metaphor of an over-imaginative vision. I watched them disperse with morbid fascination.

The woman watched me with considerable less amusement. Intensity, yes, but there was something entirely more dour on her face.

“Why not, Faller?” she asked coolly.

A truth came to me: “If I wept in the face of beauty, I would cry every day.” I did not know if it was profound, but it surprised me a little, composing such things under the circumstances.

Her face, dry as ice. “Interesting.”

A single termite escaped her stick, squeezing out and flitting off into the air.

The woman stood as abruptly as she had sat, and walked at me. I shuffled back, but only encountered the ravine wall; an unfriendly array of sandpaper fists pummeled against my back. The woman's gaze pressed me hard against them, and I squirmed as she came to tower over me.

In her catlike, nighttime eyes, I could see the deep-patterned torrents of constellations. This woman had stars buried deep within the windows to her soul.

By the gods. Who was this woman? What power did she possess? Meeting her gaze was like looking into space.

She seized my throat in one delicately-bony, crushing clawlike hand. In reaction, my grasp went to hers, as if I could hope to pry it away.

My fingers locked on the veins of her wrist, and a tide of visions I was never supposed to be privy to coursed up my arm and shockwaved my body. I saw the edge of the earth, a place where souls were kicked off or taught to fly. I saw the confidential documents of the heavens, the contracts of the angels. I looked Death in the face, shook Death's hand.

A deal.

I was a great black steed that herded people. My hooves pounded shackles on an anvil. I condemned people. Great seas of people. I drove them like a sheepdog, crowds as big as the ocean. They tripped and scattered and fell like the waves, but I galloped along my designated shores, keeping them in check. I struck the earth open with a hoof. I drove them into the great chasm that resulted, pushing them off the edge.

The sun rose and I turned golden, and as my mane swept across my face I was transformed. A woman now. I smoked a stick of parasites. Termites coursed in my lungs.

I was beautiful on the outside, but inside... Turmoil... Decay under my nails. The result of those humans that had struggled in my grasp.

But in the end, I always seduced them.

I...

I lurched to extract myself from such retrospect, struggling to shed the skin that I had seemingly drawn over myself. My perspective snapped back into my body like a slingshot, a painful ricochet, glancing off the back of my skull and flooding my vision with black spots.

Gold spots.

I shook my head, drunk from it, reeling like a sailor on deck during a storm – drenched and disoriented. It was so forceful that I broke the woman's grasp, staggering against the ravine wall.

She did not seem thrown off by the episode. With knowing eyes, she seized my wrist, and drew up my fingers for inspection. She looked first at the tattoo-burnt pattern on my fingerprints, then at the skin under my nails.

Her skin.

Four long welts were dragged across the underside of her forearm.

Letting me go, she grabbed my face instead, forcing it straight to consider my face. Dizzily, I sought focus on her features. There was no dignity in failing to so much as meet the gaze of the one addressing you.

Then she released me for good, and stepped back as I was recovering.

“We all have something under our nails we wish we could shake,” she said in apparent empathy.

I grimaced in recuperation, my throat feeling scorched from swallowing the visions. “Who are you?” I croaked. My noblest efforts to avoid the pitiful question had failed, and lay in a miserable heap at my feet.

It was not a response that acknowledged or even accepted the significance of her comment, but there was no need. I knew what she meant by it. I had seen it. I had felt it; the decay under her own nails. It was akin to the concept of blood on her hands. Something to haunt her for the things she had done.

“You tell me,” she said in a measuring tone, her eyes intent. They dared me. They probed me. They doubted me, but pressed me. She was still testing me for something.

I had seen so many things in my time – things that didn't jive, things that simply were, that I lived to let go because that was how it worked, because there was just no putting a name to them. It was a rule of thumb, not putting a name to things. As such, naming a character in the midst of it was a ridiculous notion. I did not even know where to begin. There were no generic roles to be filled. Any role in this mess was one that was surely extremely complex or simply chaotic.

“You're not a Serbaen,” I said.

At least I was able to determine what she very much wasn't.

She laughed. Evidently I had stated the obvious, or it was a joke to her for another reason.

I was not dissuaded by her laughter. My mind was running wild with the possibilities – to me, very real possibilities. “A demon?” I tried. “An...angel?” Then it came to me, on silent, sharp wings. “Gods. You're the Angel of Death,” I breathed.

And she laughed again. “Oh no, my dear – no one so noble.”

“Then what? You have a contract with Death. You hail from a place not of this world, and enslave people in this...this trap. To die. How many?” There was something accusing in that question, straying from the point.

“There are a great many,” she answered with a matter-of-fact, devastating honesty, “who wander my chasm.”

“Who else from the heavens is warranted to harvest with such damnation?”

“I do not harvest. I simply reduce. Reduce them to hysterical wanderers, chained just out of reach of the world above them. I simply render them stuck in a rut.”

“Why?”

“So the sun will come up in the morning.”

“Because the sun demands blood?” I demanded, my tone hot with opinions.

“And who are you,” she asked, “to question the greater scheme of things?”

I could hear it in the way she said the first part, that she wanted to know.

Who was I?

She was not merely putting me in my place.

It puzzled and intrigued me, realizing we were at a stalemate. That this being of power was at a loss over me, as I was over her.

The difference between us: I could not begin to guess why.

How to answer? A part of me suggested that now I had leverage, and could use it to my advantage, but suddenly I was also struggling with my own qualms regarding definition, underneath my sly motives.

Indeed, who was I? What was the best truth?

Surely 'Avante of Manor Dorn' would in no way satisfy any kind of curiosity. So what was she expecting me to say?

But it was no use. Evidently, she grew impatient with my dimwitted sense of self, and my prolonged freedom there in her ravine. This was no self-respecting interrogation.

“I am not the Archangel,” she said. “I am his ambassador. And you have fallen into my crack of the world, where I hold those that are due for their reckoning. It doesn't matter who you are. You have come to me in the same way many of them do. I will take you as such.”

“No...” It was the senseless protest that would come out of anyone's lips. “My name is Avante,” I blurted in denial. “My name is Avante...” As if it would prove something. Perhaps it would prove whatever she had been looking for. Maybe it was in my name. Maybe Avante was a special name...

“It works like a spider's web, Avante,” she explained patiently, ruthlessly. “You fall in, you become entwined. It's a properly functioning trap. And the louder your protests, the quicker you bring the beast down on you. Just a word of advice.”

No... My fists clenched. “But I am the spider...”

It was a small murmur, but something fluttered behind its pitiful existence.

“I beg your pardon?”

I didn't know where it had come from either. But I looked up at her, meaning it.

In realization, she humored me – but it was with little patience.

My hand was in hers. She considered my fingers. The constellations in her eyes burned against the patterns of web there.

“There are those in this world who can walk the cracks,” she said, as if admitting it, but not as if she'd been wrong before. She was simply saying it, now. “Those like me. I am not the Angel of Death. I can merely speak for him. An intercessor. A...bridge, if you will.”

That, with a conspiratorial glance toward the bridge that loomed above.

“If you can cross that bridge, I will speak for Death this day, in your interests.”

My eyes went to the bridge. The half of it.

“But you must cross it wearing this.” Her termite stick turned once again to its original shackle form, and I blanched inside. Her sympathy ran short of warming my heart.

Whatever my claim about spiders and identity had meant to her, it had stemmed from desperation. There was no real noble uprising in my heart ready to fly me across a ravine. Especially with a ball and chain wrapped around my ankle.

“I can't cross that,” I protested, as if I could now earn her sympathies the other way, with my all-too-human shortcomings.

“No one can,” she replied matter-of-factly, and my fate was sealed, and thrown out on a ledge.

In place of wings, I was given an anchor.