A Mischief in the Woodwork

CHAPTER 25

True Colors

Because of our newly threadbare closets, and Ombri's apparent skill with a needle, we soon found ourselves employing an adept, eager little seamstress. I worried, at first, over being able to provide her even the bare essentials to make what we lacked, but “bring me scraps,” she said. “I don't need bolts.” And so we found ourselves being fashioned with the most glorious patchwork attire I had surely ever imagined.

In those early days after Victoria's deliverance, I watched my former mistress closely. There was no telling how a Master would respond to a halfbreed in her house. But she was careful to conform to an un-assuming attitude in our midst. She did not ask questions. She made no commands. I was glad that she could recognize she was out of her element.

More inconvenient than stretching our closets thin, it turned out, was determining bed protocol with so many people. We had a distinct shortage of pallets, now, and they were not big enough to share. Not unless, perhaps, you were lovers. We had no two people who fit that description.

In the end Dashsund offered up his pallet to Victoria and took a place on the floor. I wondered how long that would be bearable – and if he would ever complain if it reached the point where it wasn't – and hoped we did not pick up any more strays in the near future. And, pallets designated or not, we still had to cram in, now. I made sure to manipulate the rearrangement, when it happened, so that I did not land directly beside Tanen. I could not tolerate the thought of sleeping next to him. Too, that meant he could do naught but humble himself and sleep next to one of his titled Baedra, and that was a step I felt I needed to see him take. A step that he owed us.

I was somehow still astonished when he dared show his own distaste for the arrangement. I do not know if anyone else noticed it, but I saw the shift that was his discomfort, the brief stall for time as his scheming prejudice demanded he think of some way to get out of the scenario laid out before him.

“Bring the girl in here,” he ended up saying. “I'll take the other room.”

To me, it sounded just like the driven quest for separation that it was, but it was just his luck that to everyone else it appeared as some noble gesture. Him, taking the room of isolation so that 'the girl' could be warm and safe among the rest of us. Ombri, I insisted in my mind to his choice of words, and felt the boiling need to correct him start to bubble in my gut. But he got his way, unchallenged. I could have stomped from the room in a fury, and left them all to die of their blind stupidity if the reason I was angry did not involve loving the rest of them.

But it did not mean he had to remain unchallenged. This had gone on too long, I realized. I did not have to allow it.

As the transfer was made and Ombri adopted his pallet in the bedroom, I followed Tanen to his new quarters, and swept in the room after him. He dropped his blanket on the cot and looked up.

And I did it; I finally opened my mouth and let it out, something I had wondered myself if I could ever actually do. “The others may not see it – or maybe they don't care – but I do,” I came right out and put it to him. “I see the way you treat them, like they're less than you. Like you can't be contaminated by them. The Baedra.”

“I don't treat them like anything.”

“Because the 'treatment' is an avoidance. Please, Tanen. There's no way to make it smooth. It is precisely what it is, and well on display, and I won't tolerate it. That can't work here.”

Surprisingly, he was not as perturbed by being called out as I had somehow expected. “You're just jealous,” he said evenly, uncaringly. Warmly.

What? “Of what?”

“Of not getting to sleep by me.” It was not the response I was prepared to work with.

So it was me who blinked, caught offhand. I opened my mouth to protest, loudly and disgustedly that he would so vainly presume such a thing. But the most unexpected agenda presented itself in the turn of the tables, and I paused, considered it. For a moment it appalled me, the very thought – but it had the audacity to come with an instant, convicting intrigue pertaining to the possibilities, and I was just as appalled to find I could not deny it.

Disbelieving that this was to be my course, but silencing my better judgment, I took a road I never would have expected had the exchange been premeditated. My stance shifted, allowing him his accusation. I swallowed, as if becoming uncomfortable and sheepish. Let my eyes shift down and away from his. And really, there was no way I could look at him while playing along with such an absurd slant. “Maybe I am,” I let on, a daring confession.

It was his turn to wallow momentarily in the implications. Clearly, he had expected a response of a very different nature as well. But something came into his eyes, and even hoping for it, it found me unprepared for the impact. And again, hoping for it, I could not even say what it was. I could give it no greater name than a 'connection', and I suppose such a thing bore impact, where I was concerned, because we had never shared such before. I had never left the window open for it.

Tanen considered the window now, perhaps very wisely, but it seemed I was a decent actress, and he – a poor resister.

Frightened by my unexpected thirst for what I had invited, I staked a conscious effort of will into standing my ground as the man decided to take his cue, there in dark, crowded boundaries of the room where such an encounter was ripe to take place. He moved to test the waters as perhaps any man worth his greedy salt would, closing the space between us, inclining his head in conjunction with mine, letting a tantalizing breath pass between us before he took the invitation and shuttered that window – with a kiss.

I was ill-prepared for it in many ways. Having not originally come to seek such a thing, never imagining it with him, and having no idea how to do it to name a few. But I was knee-deep in it the instant his lips touched mine, and I had a part to pull off.

I reached for his neck, my fingers grasping the thick arch of muscle there. Who was to say if it was the success of my deliberate seeking or if my senses were simply overly-stimulated, but visions poured into my head. Triumphant, I pulled more from him. I thought nothing of it, except for what it was: a necessary evil. He denied mistreatment of the Serbaens; let his inner thoughts betray him. I could find the extent of the truth myself. I had the power to exploit all of his deepest, darkest, prejudiced secrets. What had he called me? Siren... I could seduce him to his own destruction.

But what I saw was not what I expected. It was nothing that dethroned my accusations, but it changed the game.

I broke contact, and stared at him. He was watchful, as if expecting some inconsistent reaction, and so did not find it odd that that was it. It was just as well; for as he turned back to setting up the cot without further ado or transition, I was allowed to prolong my analysis of him.

There was nothing to see on the outside, though, and I was forced to simply come to terms with what I had seen internally. I would not have guessed he sheltered such a secret. But then I had to wonder – did he even know? It had not been a vision of some secret he kept; merely something attached to him. And when I thought about it – he couldn't know. He surely couldn't.

I had the sense to realize I would give myself away standing there, even if I did not quite have the sense to process the implications of the vision. So I turned, a slightly halting disengagement, and left him to his task, my own mission dissipating into half-forgotten, half-failed sludge in my wake this night. I tracked it out of Tanen's room in my footsteps, bringing it back with me to bed. I would just have to exploit his true colors another time. For the time being, rage had turned to intrigue. And I had lost my own true colors with the stunt.

Now all that was left was the color of secrets. One secret.

A secret of many colors.

*

In the end, it came to pass that what I had seen only fed my lack of sympathy for Tanen's behavior. There was a small time in which I had to think about it, brood over what it meant, but it sorted itself out well enough – as a non-game-changer. It could be a game changer – had the potential to be – but in its current form... No.

In fact it made him less worthy of the way he treated them.

And so my derision grew. Even as he continued to prove he was worth the investment I had made upon first instating him in this house. In the days that followed he took it upon himself to start innovating our garden, dredging a network of trenches and fashioning extra pipes from odds and ends of the city, creating a brilliant, automatic watering system he called irrigation.

It was a blessing, to be sure, not having to haul buckets of water to keep the garden nourished. But while his innovation was impressive as usual, he retained a status that failed to win me over, where the rest of him was concerned.

He came back from the city one day – he seemed to have adopted a hobby as an Albino; what nonsense, I thought, that a role of such gravity be taken for a hobby – and spent a good half of the rest of the day reading in the corner from a book he had charmed out of the rubble. I did not ask what it was, nor did I speak to him at all, even to remind him that the rest of us were breaking our backs over his share of the work, that day. I desired too much that he see it for himself, and also desired not to exchange anything with him, ever again, really, if such could be arranged. I wanted only to pretend that he was not there, the black spot in my perfect household. Life could be good, unhindered by those like him. I would not miss him should he cease to exist.

He seemed to think that his recent innovation – that irrigation system he had installed – had somehow relieved him of further duties for a few days, as if the convenience and efficiency it offered made up for enough labor to sanction a vacation.

Needless to say, when he came to me, I was not in the mood to hear it. Whatever it was that he brought with him.

“I've been reading about something,” he said.

“Oh?” As if I could not see you, over there in the corner blatantly ignoring your duties with your nose in a book.

“After you returned from the city the other day, I could not get your story out of my mind – your account of that place, where you found the girl.”

“Who?”

“Ombri,” he managed the name, and a fierce gloat lit my eyes.

“Yes, Ombri. What of the place?” He had not been in the room when I recounted my tale, and I wondered who had told him. Not that it mattered.

“The concept of such a place does not just depart on the next train of thought leaving the station,” he laughed, as if I were completely overlooking something obvious, something incredible.

“It is mischief, as thoroughly as anything else. Your interest is only a sign of naivety, Mr. Nysim. It is normal for one not well versed in the ways of the world.”

“Or perhaps you are jaded, Avante Siren. Perhaps you have no idea what you have at hand, here, because you too readily accept it simply as 'the ways of the world'.” He produced the book he had been reading, opened it to the pages he had been studying and held it out. On one side there was a picture, an artistic graph depicting something I did not have the immediate wit to grasp. I looked to the paragraphs on the opposite page instead, seeking some clue to what he was trying to show me. “Have you ever been privy to the idea of other dimensions?” he prompted, ready to explain his theory.

My eyes flicked back up to him, and I let the desire to analyze his puzzle evaporate, loathe to encourage him. “Where did you get this?” I asked in turn.

“I tracked down a library. It is not hard, if you know where to look. But I don't suppose a library was ever a privileged haunt of a slave's.”

“The only other dimension I believe in is a spiritual one,” I said in answer to his question. “The realm of the gods, and the extensions of it that reflect their doings.” With that, I made ready to withdraw from his presentation. “And if you found a library, you should tell us where it is – so we can burn it.”

*

He took me there, surprisingly – to this library. Some ridiculous remnant of shame for not being privy to the place lodged inside me as we made the journey. It was like some shard of old, acting up as old scars will, an annoying piece of glass rubbing at its lining as we walked.

“You may find it interesting, you know,” he said. “The theory.”

Of course he wouldn't drop it. “Finding things interesting does not feed hungry mouths. We don't survive on what is 'interesting'.”

“I don't suppose you're interested in recalling why you allowed me to stay?”

I glanced at him, frowning. His recent trick with the garden had been reminder enough. But he voiced a reminder himself,

“I was to offer you an edge over surviving, if I could.”

He proved an inconvenient memory as well. “By exploring secret winter wastelands?” I challenged skeptically. “There's nothing for us there.”

“There could be more. What if there are summery lands? Peaceful fields of springtime bliss beyond a simple door?”

I had to admit – to myself, of course, not to him – that I had not considered such. And if such a thing existed out there, among the rubble...well, I could not well bear to discover it after all this time and grief, could I? If there had been such an alternative all along, I did not think I wanted to know.

“The quirks in the rubble are not consistent,” I explained to him instead of admitting intrigue at the idea. “The door I found was one quirk. There is not going to be some network ripe for discovery. Order doesn't exist out here. It's not the way of it.”

“There could still be some explanation in the theory. What if it's all related? How else do you readily explain everything ceasing to exist as it should, and the phenomena that take place, if not by way of some collision with another dimension?”

“I don't know about dimensions,” I reminded him. “I am a slave, remember? I am not educated in the greater concepts and theories of the world. My education consists of doing what I am told so as not to suffer consequences; of cooking in the kitchen because that's what feeds the mouths that command you; of making beds and weeding gardens because the masters of these things have better things to do – such as toying with the arts and sciences, which are things too beautiful and complex for our humble selves and simple minds. I am educated in lashings, Mr. Nysim. You showed me a chart of meaningless lines in that book of yours, but I could show you one of equal value upon my back.”

He trailed to a halt beside me – impacted by my words, somehow, but I would not look at him to find out how. Perhaps he stared at me. Perhaps he was stunned, or humbled, or appalled, or some combination of the three. I did not really care what he was, so long as he took my point, but after a time in which he did not regain his footing and continue in my wake, I glanced over my shoulder to see if perhaps he was intent on standing there forever.

Behind him, a good twenty paces across the rubble, a wardog slunk in both our wakes.

I stilled, all intelligent thought turning to ash as it drained away with the blood from my head. The hairs on my arms stood on end, clamoring my sudden numb terror. “Tanen...” I managed. It came out half-choked, quietly. But he could either read my lips or my face well enough, and he broke from his humbled standpoint to look over his own shoulder. The same feeling that had overcome me echoed in his stance.

...gods... It was the only thought I could conjure, beyond some vague memory of a wardog we had heard during the day, and then there was nothing but to let instinct take over.

Barren of a suitable weapon, or perhaps only the presence of mind to face such a beast a second time around, Tanen turned and bolted toward me. I saw the wardog pause, lift its head as if listening, and then it bolted after him with a snarl fresh on its lips.

A prick of confusion saw me hesitate, wondering over the beast's body language. The creature tripped as its pace increased, but it recovered, ears swiveling, and kept coming. When it stumbled again, having an evident deal of trouble accounting for the rubble, it became clear to me that something was off. What in the gods' names... But then Tanen tripped, himself, and as his flight broke off, the wardog paused to listen, sliding to a halt in the rubble – and it all came together.

The beast was blind.

And of course – that was why it was out prowling during the day. The light did not bother it.

The conclusion stayed my hand in fleeing. I could not say if the creature had tracked us by scent or sound, but Tanen's flight had set it after him for good. In a complete revamping of instinct, I committed myself to my statue stance, hardly daring to breathe.

Tanen struggled, having the sense to fumble for a makeshift weapon as he fought to get back on his feet. A sharp piece of rubble found its way into his hand as he made the climb to his feet, but I had watched the wardog zone in on his struggle, and slink closer as he found purchase. The beast was close behind him, now – too close. As Tanen dug in for a fresh flight, the wardog did something frightful.

It pounced.

Confident in Tanen's whereabouts, the creature launched from its pedestal of debris and came down on the fleeing calves of its prey. Tanen buckled, and went down beneath the ferocious weight of paws and teeth that sought him.

I would like to say that it was my shock that stayed me at that point, but in truth I don't know what it was. In any case, I did not move from my designated spot of ground. I did nothing to alert the hunting wardog to my presence, nothing to help Tanen. I stood there like a deviant manner of statue in the open city, and watched a wardog feed a scarce few paces in front of me, in broad daylight, where everything in the world ceased to function as it should.

Tanen was not one to go down without a fight, though, and he had faced one of these things before. I may not have had much of an opinion of him, but he possessed a reserve of brutal strength that I might do well to acknowledge in the future – a future that he secured a place in, as it turned out, as that very reserve of fight that he had in him prevailed over the ruthless deliverance of wounds to his body and drove one, then two pieces of debris into his assailant's snarling ribcage, earning his release. The beast faltered, and it was all Tanen needed to shoot through that small window to freedom. He dragged himself from beneath the trapping limbs of the creature, even as it swiped at him, angry with pain. It was not mortally wounded yet, but its blindness and wounds made it a clumsy beast. Still in its path, Tanen was not out of the neck of the woods, but he was not going to die this day.

A knife from his boot found its way into his hand this time around, and he faced the clumsily oncoming beast with every intention of eliminating the threat now. When it took the ambitious leap for a second try at its prey, he slashed it in the belly and sidestepped its fall to the ground. This one he had killed, and it did not slink away into the weedflowers, wounded, whimpering.

I should have felt relief as he stood there, triumphant, a bloody mess but alive. But I didn't. I felt something else – the true shock of events hitting me. What had just played out registered, at last, for what it had been. Tanen Nysim, going down under a wardog on my watch – and my inaction. I had done nothing. Consciously, I had done nothing.

The implications left me stunned.

My inaction by itself was enough to convict me, but it was made worse, remembering: under opposite circumstances, Tanen had saved my life.

Consciously, today, I had not returned the favor.

If I had been one able to bear the truth, I might have revisited my recent broodings regarding true colors, as we stood there in the aftermath. But it was all I could do to recognize that 'what have I done' did not do justice to what had played out here.

The correct sentiment:

What have I not done...

And all that went with it.