A Mischief in the Woodwork

CHAPTER 22

Privileged

Ombri had been on that ledge a long time. There was no telling how long; she couldn't remember. All she could remember of her past life, at first, was her seemingly endless time in that snow. Her mind was all white inside, its catacombs freeze-branded with distilling polish, scarred. The memories were frozen, locked behind the mental ice that hadn't yet thawed.

Her life had been an eternity of clawing cold. But even a day in that place of deadly chill could quickly come to seem like an eternity, I knew. It could quickly brainwash a person.

We were not impatient for the recovery of her real past, though we did wonder. I could see it in all our eyes; the desire to understand where this girl among us had come from. When she was able, we approved the wandering from her cot to the porch, where she could get some fresh air. 'Fresh' was always debatable, of course. What was there to breathe in but the mischief in the air? But she seemed to appreciate filling her lungs with their regular food instead of icicles and wind, for a change. Armed with a borrowed shawl, she alighted on that porch each afternoon and took to distance-gazing, as if one could hope to find themselves across the miles of cursed land that we sheltered within eyesight.

I joined her on the porch one afternoon, alighting beside her and appointing my gaze likewise. The weed-swept fields around the house were golden. Nothing had ceased looking golden since I returned through the doorway of Ombri's cold, dark prison-world.

“Do you find anything out there?” I inquired, curious what she saw.

Her eyes shifted back and forth over the distance as she searched for an answer. “The stillness...” she began. “I cannot make it speak to me. I don't remember such a stillness. It just...sits there, doesn't it? Always. So stagnant.”

I thought a moment. She said it as if that were an unfavorable quality. As if she could not quite come to terms with it. “On the contrary. Stagnancy, if it came to that, would be a miracle upon this land. What you see now is only the calm before the storm. Ominous,” I differentiated, looking at her. “Not stagnant. Many a thing of mischief comes out of that stillness in any given week. You do not want that stillness to speak to you, or it may contrive to sniff you out and swallow you, in addition, in the same exchange.”

With that, I left her to it, returning to the ongoing list of tasks for the day that, upon prudent completion, would ensure no one found themselves at the receiving end of an impromptu speaking-to, sniffing-out, or swallowing issued by that ominous stillness by day's end.

*

With the pipes fixed, I aspired to take my first respectable bath in a matter of years. It had been a rare luxury even back in the day, as there was little need to afford luxuries to the slaves. The bath was upstairs, in a room most easily accessed by the Masters who normally occupied that floor. There was one in the master bedroom, and one in between bedrooms in the hall. I, of course, went for the latter, stuck behind closed doors and in the midst of the holed-up Masters as the other one was.

The weedflowers were glowing for the night, and, free of my duties, I found my way down the hall by candlelight and set the glowing sticks around the washroom to make it comfortable. I shut the door, turned the old lock, and regarded the old tub in the corner. It was dusty, and brittle looking, somehow. Scuffing through the decayed pieces of floor, I went and knelt by its side to pump the water, and to flush out the dust.

I began to pump, paused... Shook it off and continued. But there was no denying it, in the end, and after ignoring the task at hand only to end up eyeing the pump with wariness as I sought to charm forth water, I left off, slumped over the side of the tub. Weary, now, in place of wary. I could feel it in the pump, same way I felt things in everything these days. That additional sensation, the extra substance. There was something in the water. Or things in the water. Who could say for sure, but I could feel it where others were completely oblivious. I could feel the foreign presence rushing up the pipes, through the bones of the house, toward me in that room, seeking to spill out in the bathtub.

I left off just shy of that climax, as the water gurgled in the spout. What manner of minions churned there, protesting their captivity? I was not one to let them out and find out, not that night. But another idea did come from the close encounter. I withdrew my head from my hands, eyed the grumbling spout, thinking. I did not want to know what was in the water, as I was not always so eager to taste the essence of the other things I seemed privileged in discovering, but there was something at my fingertips that I did want to know.

Ombri.

It seemed almost scandalous, contriving to actually use this strange quirk fastened to my fingertips, but for the first time the uncouth ability and my interests collided. I had used it before, I remembered, with Tanen's boots, but that had been a strange uncontrollable urge. Now I was faced with the untainted, logical idea of it. I could look into this girl's past, discover the lost pieces for her. Or for myself. It was perhaps the better route to let her recall her past of her own accord, but that did not mean I could not begin to understand where she came from.

It was strange, knowing I could charm her secrets from her. I could touch her and see things about her that she could not even remember. I looked at my hands, then closed my fingers and pushed myself up from the side of the tub. She would be sleeping now; each evening got the better of her rather swiftly in these, still her early days of recovery. It had been my routine to check on her every night before I retired anyway, so I made the trip downstairs only with slightly altered intentions. I would have done the deed without any outside influence from the beginning, simply out of a sense of responsibility, but Tanen had swiftly given me reason to become protective of her.

I tried not to think about it, but it was impossible to forget the look on his face when he had seen her. Impossible to forget, impossible to decipher, and impossible to ignore. I could only imagine, though I tried hard not to, what he made of the halfbreed. He had stilled, certainly, and gone somewhere far away in his eyes. Some place of hate that did not exist in Manor Dorn? Some place far away simply to escape the reality of his close proximity to these things? He had left her alone thus far, though. Probably because he could never touch such a thing.

She was at peace on her cot, her covers fallen off of one shoulder, her hair sprung across the pillow. I knelt tentatively beside her, considering. Was this a violation I was about to partake in? Did the ability mean I was privileged, or ought I to treat it like a responsibility, a test, and practice discretion?

I had naught the answers, of course, to anything, and so I settled on going through with the experiment. I reached out, and very gently gripped her shoulder.

*

Discretion was not something dead to me, and so I did nothing with the things that I gleaned from Ombri that night. I told no one what I now knew, and it helped with the notion of violation. Her secrets were safe with me. I had done what I needed to investigate what I had brought into our midst, and now things could continue to develop naturally.

I by no means knew everything about her, but I had seen traces of where she came from and who she had been conditioned to be. I was left intrigued, for some of the glimpses I had certainly never expected and could not explain, but as far as I could glean I had at least not drawn something terrible after me by springing her from the prison-world and bringing her here.

When things began to come back to her and a meeting of sorts formed in the room to hear of it, my mind wandered. It was hard to say if it was because of the matching visions that came to me with her story or if it was because I felt a little guilty for already knowing, perhaps unworthy to hear it. I listened along with the others, but was not fully present.

“When the mischief got bad,” the girl said, “the masters removed themselves as best as they could from the infection. They retreated into hiding to preserve themselves, letting the brunt of survival fall to us.”

“They could never be the ones to face the infection head-on,” someone else said in understanding. “That fell to the slaves.”

“Better to compromise you,” someone else said.

“To me, less supervision meant...freedom,” Ombri said. “A chance to get away. So I ran away to the city. I survived there.”

“You lived in the city?”

She nodded. “I survived many shifts. At first, that's all I did – survive them. Then I got a feel for them. I began to ride them.”

“What do you mean 'ride' them?”

“I was good at it. It became like a...sport. I started to call myself 'Shifter'.”

For whose benefit? I wondered in a moment of lucidity. If she was out there all alone, there was no means to document 'calling' oneself anything. But I didn't know how long she lived out there, I reminded myself. One could grow very lonely out there, and begin to question their own motives for survival if they did not glorify their existence somehow.

But 'Shifter' she had been, and worthy of the title. My visions of such could attest to that. I had seen her, in my mind, riding the destructive evolution of the city like a dancer who could walk on water. Like a sport it had been, surfing the movement, always coming out on top.

“And how did you come to be in the snow?” someone prompted.

“A shift put me there,” Ombri responded. “It caught me sleeping, and I couldn't recover in time. I did try, but... this one was a wild stallion. It was not to be trifled with. I rode it, and fell from its back, and it slammed the door in my face.”

*

For the second time, I dreamed of elephants. They assaulted me, and I was forced to throw my hands up in defense, which brought on the visions as my fingers were pummeled by violent, leathery flesh. Two of the great creatures herded me into the city, causing shifts with their quaking steps. I fell to my knees, my hands hitting the ground, jarring the secrets of Dar'on through me. The elephants reared up and came down, one after the other, to pin my wings to the ground.

The shuffle of glossy feathers fell around me, free at my shoulders. They strained to a rest, a heavy shawl, and I wept ash-dry tears where I had been driven to my knees.

Caught.

Anchored.

Privileged.