A Mischief in the Woodwork

CHAPTER 30

The City

I turned my back on Manor Dorn and walked into the city, leaving the shackle in my wake, a token now dead to me, exhausted of its essence. My fingers hummed with the intake, eager to take up the scent.

It was not inconvenient to stoop as I went, reading the rubble, since it was necessary to use my hands climbing all over it anyway. I would hoist myself up here, gleaning a taste, then steady myself there, absorbing something else. What became the real inconvenience to be reckoned with was separating all of the unrelated nuances from the case I was tracking. This place was positively saturated with meaning, with history, with overlooked detail. It was an overwhelming onslaught – all the more so because I found myself intrigued with every morsel, longing to follow every lead. There were answers here, explanations. But I was on a mission. It would have to wait.

Still, it was impossible not to learn anything with the intake. It was information, and some of it clicked together without the fuss of stewing over it. Some of the pieces simply fit. I remained focused on my goal, but other things were taking form in the back of my mind.

Things that I did not yet dare hope could be the key to a forsaken age.

*

I awoke again sometime in the early morning, unaware of when I had collapsed. The twilit city looked ashen at this hour, inevitably bringing forth the memory of my similar dream. The two scenarios eclipsed, feeling now like the first had been a premonition. It was more than a sense of familiarity I awoke with.

It was the unbidden feeling of nostalgia.

Shaking the disorienting feeling, I rose, brushed the powder from where it had settled on my form. No otherworldly predators had devoured me in the night, then. No wardogs, or Albinos, or similar mischief-spawn or mischief itself had had its way with me.

It wasn't until I got to my feet and worked out the kinks of sleep that I realized I was wrong. I took a look around me as I stretched, seeking the correct avenue to pick up where I had left off, and that's when I noticed that I had no recollection of my surroundings.

Brow creased, I waited for my bearings to return to me, but they didn't. On a hunch, I stooped to feel the ground. The most recent tang of history coursed through my palm; these pieces were fresh tumbled from a shift. The vibrations of the turmoil still lived in the grains.

There had been a shift while I slept.

It appeared that tracking the madman himself was the simplest aspect of the task at hand.

Perfect.

I cast about, frustrated at having to start fresh. Bailin's tracks could be anywhere. Could they even be erased altogether? The bricks that recorded his footsteps buried beneath the layer I now stood on? Experimentally, I got on my knees and dug through the top layer of rubble, until I encountered a crushed deposit of powder. Scooping up a handful, I let it sift through my fingers.

There were many things in this dust, but nothing of Bailin.

I moved on, trying again. After three deposits in which I failed to strike gold, I rocked back on my heels, resting with a sigh. My powder-stained hands draped over my knees. The first pangs of doubt ran through me. Who was I really fooling, out here on this quest? I hadn't lived a day outside of my sheltered walls in all of my time. What must they think at home? Surely they thought me dead. I had never failed to return. And here I was, in one foolhardy piece, making them worry. Blazing a ruthless trail in the opposite direction.

For the first time, I asked the question: when I found Bailin, how did I plan on bringing him back?

I sank into the rubble, nearly defeated; and I had only just begun. I might have seen the uselessness of my quest and given up then, if a wayward glancing about did not fall on a series of strange impressions in the rubble, making me pause that line of thinking. At first, there were no conclusions ready at hand. One impression in the rubble was as good as another. Only another memory caused me to recognize them for what they were; elephant tracks.

It can't be...

I rose to inspect them, coming to crouch by the first of the indentations. They were unmistakable, though, at least in conjunction with how my dream had painted them. And that was really all that mattered, wasn't it? Seeing this manifestation from my dream brought back the rest of it as well, and the most recent one I had had. Aside from tracking through the wreckage, they had pinned my wings to the ground with those same feet. I felt the conviction of it, as I remembered.

I couldn't just go home. Not with signs like this propelling me.

There seemed no greater hunch than to start off by following the elephant tracks. They were surely not Bailin's feet, but I was not one to discriminate when it came to leads.

In the wake of the dream-beasts, I began again.

*

My days blurred together in the city. I lost reality, just a little bit, so focused on my scryings that they became all I knew, as good as the air that I breathed, plunging deeper and deeper into the mischief that had become of our world. I became somewhat of a product of it, I suppose, prolonged as I was in its taint. I was always knee-deep, thoroughly dirty with it. Soon, made-over entirely.

A true Albino now – there would never be any scrubbing all of this from my being.

There were a few things that surprised me, of course, before I became jaded, lost in the fray. I awoke the second morning to a great ship cresting the rise of the vast canyon I occupied. It overcame the peak of debris and churned down into the impression, sailing past, rubble grinding against the hull. I had seen a lot, in my time, but I could scarcely believe my eyes.

There was a herd of horses, too. I was crossing an expanse one day when the wreckage began to vibrate, and then tremble, preceding a great explosion of galloping horses coming over the ridge. I could not begin to fathom how their hooves compensated for the hazardous terrain – surely a horse would break every last one of its legs running through this pothole-riddled, debris-jutting ground – but they teemed around me, physical to the touch. I know, because I was nearly knocked flat by them.

So the horses had not disappeared. They were out here.

I saw Johnny, too. Perhaps more significantly: he saw me. I looked up, found him on a ridge watching me. The all-seeing Johnny. A witness to my journey. It was comforting, in a way, knowing he was out there. Not that he could save my skin from what I had gotten into, if it proved to throw something un-managable my way, but simply that I was not alone. That I would not die alone, if it came to that, and fade into the scenery, never to be heard from again. He was with me. A witness to what became of me.

Johnny was gratifying that way. He had the ability to immortalize people.

I took that as a comfort, and plunged onward.

I found a clock, still ticking, half-buried. Rubbed the dust from its face to check the time. It was useless, of course; a simple act that repainted some semblance of old. Then I moved on, forsaking one last pastime, and entered the darkest stretch of my journey.

*

There was a wind – a desert wind – that began to swirl the powder about my feet. It grew stronger as I went, until it was a steady current, grazing across the terrain and carving away at the corners, the edges, sanding it flat. I stumbled on, my lips cracked, hardly realizing my surroundings had become a respective desert because the effects of such had taken their toll on me. Only the occasional relic from the city protruded up through the sand, remnants scattered across these new plains.

The wind was constant. It buried and uncovered cities like a child at play, the scenery ever-changing. I simply walked onward, the wind whispering secrets through my fingertips, at first, but then only propelling me forward.

At some point, the hallucinations began – mirages, I thought they were called, respectively. There was always the possibility that they were not mirages at all, but reality returning, or maybe that all of it was a mirage – had been, from the beginning – and I had simply reached the heart of it, or was walking between the lines of it, or...

I gave up speculating, hardly letting the possibilities register. I would have thought instead of water, only water, but I could not remember what water tasted like. My thoughts became carved out as thoroughly as the sand-purged hollows of the Dar'on ruins. All that was left were dry cracks, a mind dry as bone.

When I could not go on, I collapsed. I dug my fingers into the sand, one last possessive ebb of strength, determined to squeeze what life out of it I could. A million grains of secret ground into my possession, and I savored them, before they fell through my fingers. I went limp, basking in it. All of the secrets of the world were broken down here, refined into this golden sand, my deathbed. Secrets were meant to be kept, I supposed. It was my last thought as I let my eyelids fall shut, content, if it was all I could do, to take those secrets to the grave.