A Mischief in the Woodwork

CHAPTER 32

Quarry

“Who are you?”

There was never any help for that question, I suppose. It was always the first thing on my lips, needing to be asked. It was necessary, to make any sense out of anything.

“I have been the keeper here,” she said, her voice husky and uncanny. “For you.”

I glanced about, my expression quizzical, as if there might be answers in the architecture that I could find before shaming myself with more ignorant questions.

“We have been waiting for you,” the woman informed me, drawing my eyes back to her.

“We?”

Her gaze glanced up, and she gestured around her. The tatters of her robe hung long and limp from her wrists. She made no other comment, as if the gesture explained.

The fortress, then. As if it possessed some soul.

“And another,” she added, almost as if she could hear my thoughts. “He is waiting for you too.”

Bailin. “He is here?”

She inclined her head, her dreadlocks looking heavier the farther she bent. I feared for a moment she could not bring her head back up, but she dragged her locks back into compliance. They were mere weights over her shoulders now, a burden she had carried for a long time.

I was about to inquire as to where my quarry was hiding, but she keenly pulled me up short;

“You will have to find him yourself,” she denounced, almost teasingly. And of course, how could I expect things to be that easy?

But he was here, somewhere in the architecture that had fashioned itself from my doings. “I built this place?” I inquired like a babe, my eyes traveling the unfathomable reaches of the ceiling.

“With your bare hands,” she confirmed. Whatever in the gods' names that meant, for I most assuredly hadn't.

“And where do you come from? That you would keep this place for me?”

A small smile cracked her lips then, and I could see the fissures of red through the ash caked there. “Alas,” she said. “For I am one you shall not put a name to.”

It was just as well. I could not find it in me to desire touching this one, so as to find out. Better to let her be. “Will you remain?” I wanted to know.

“My duty is done, for the successor has at last arrived.” She raised her hands toward me in some gesture of acknowledgment, or coronation, as a druid might hold his hands to raise a figure from the dead. “It's all yours now.”

Then she was gone, almost without even vanishing. A gentle billow of ash stirred across the floor where she had been.

All mine. Without warning, I was faced with an unfathomable inheritance, abandoned to it as surely as one who's predecessor has dropped dead, leaving no instructions for his heirs. Not a map of the layout, or a soul in the world to consult.

Not a soul, that was, except my quarry, hiding somewhere in my fortress. Hiding somewhere in the sick joke of a trap I had inadvertently built. It felt almost like some sort of test, the irony of placing him here. But really I should find it a convenience; I had built the place, hadn't I? It couldn't be that great of a puzzle.

I started off, realizing there was nothing else to do, no use dithering. If I was to exploit him from the recesses of this place, I had best get the territory figured.

On the opposite side of the chamber was a doorway, and beyond it, deeper shadow. Ash breathed through that door, via some faint draft that I could not feel. I stepped through it, into the deeper parts of the fortress. Its vast and intricate halls opened up around me, issuing a challenge with open arms. Alright then, let's play, I thought. And the game of hide-and-seek commenced.

I used my senses at first, the part of me that was enhanced for this kind of thing, but it required that I hug the edges of the room where I could keep my fingers pressed to those walls. Presently, I developed a superior scheme to finding this man.

His footprints in the ashes that covered the ground.

You are trying to be too clever, Vant, I told myself with a shake of my head, feeling a blush warm my cheeks that hoped this indeed wasn't any kind of test, with some manner of almighty witness judging the keenness of my course. I had overlooked the obvious.

They were there in the soft gray matter littered everywhere, perfect footprints. They would lead me right to him.

With a rush of confidence, I pushed off after this lead, scurrying into the ashen dormancy of the place. Dark arches and doorways beyond balconies watched me hurry by, quiet and lurking at the edges. Though it seemed as if the ash should temper it, my footsteps echoed always in my wake. It was the soft, constant sound of water pattering in a cave.

Bailin's footprints wove a madman's trail throughout the fortress, ducking into rooms and weaving through pillars, drawing me on a merry, teasing chase. They made me dance all over the fortress, until I had thoroughly lost myself down dark twists and turns. Ash was falling now, rather than merely stirring on the floors. Where did the stuff come from? It occurred to me, then, that it was beginning to cover his footprints, and would likewise cover mine, and from whence I came.

I drew up short, turned sharply to take stock of my wake.

My trail was gone.

An uncanny despair spread through me, the panic of losing myself in a place perhaps underestimated. I put a hand on it, reminding myself it was mine.

Somehow, that was not much comfort. Not as I stood there with the incrimination of my covered tracks sinking in. It was all I could do to try to convince myself that a fortress that belonged to me would surely not condemn me, but a recollection of Mr. and Mrs. Dorn being devoured by their own manor rather cast a shadow over my faith in any predestined loyalty that lay therein. Was I finally grossly out of my element?

Suddenly, I could hear him breathing. It came to me on the oh-so-silent currents of ash drifting down around me, the churning abyss of his lungs amplified across the otherworldly drafts. I turned back, looking for him.

“There is no running, Bailin,” I spoke after a moment, wondering if I could draw a response. “You know what's in store for you.”

For a moment, deathly silence. Then; a cough, husky and pained, somewhere above ground level. My eyes darted up, surveying the shadowed balconies. The ash was growing thicker, no doubt settling hard in lungs already plagued by his trials. He could not keep quiet long, with a cough like that.

“I have you,” I finished with a hint of something that might have been resignation, confident I had him cornered.

“You,” chortled his voice accusingly, but I still could not tell where it came from. “You herded me here from the beginning.”

I did not know what he was talking about, only focused on trying to pinpoint his voice.

“The shifts that chased me... The debris that cornered me... Herding me here, all along.”

“I am not responsible for where you stand today, Bailin.” I do not know if I said it for his benefit or mine, but it was no lie that the possibility of his words carrying any wayward truth was something I would rather not consider. Ultimately, I was not responsible for where he stood, the fate that awaited him. That was what mattered.

“You can't deliver me back into those hands,” he protested. “The horror of it – them. Those hands...” He trailed off, but not without interjecting once more, for good measure; “Those terrible black hands.”

Something made a connection inside me, pertaining to this man and his fate and the determinants surrounding him that I was not privy to, but I could not be quite sure. And who was to say if he was referring to the black hand that surely belonged to Death, or if the reference demeaned his character the way that I found myself suspecting?

“And whose blood do you have on your own hands, Bailin?” I asked, making this up as I went, only able to hope I struck some chord with him.

“No blood. I couldn't be stained with that. That's what the gloves were for. For...”

“For what?”

“For... No, you will not trick me into speaking!”

“What do you have to hide?”

“You will condemn me with my own words!”

“You are condemned.” I was treading closer to his hiding spot, almost able to pinpoint him now.

“I've done nothing that wasn't my right!”

“And what were your rights, Bailin? Tell them to me.”

“You – you're a porcelain girl. You understand.”

Porcelain girl. What a beautiful whiteskin might be referred to as.

“They brought black magic! Were they to be welcomed only to breed a taint into the flesh of our grandchildren? We have the skin of the angels! Have you ever seen darkness glow, Polly? Darkness will never be radiant. It has no place among the light of heaven. Angels are radiant. Not clothed with the skin of the night.”

Polly? I wondered. But he was a madman. Let him call me who he saw fit.

“The gods created the night as surely as they created the day,” I said. “Without the two there is no balance.”

“But they are separate! Kept always separate. The night we shut out, condemned to its loneliness, while the day is our true, designated reveling ground.”

No, I thought. “There is twilight. The place where the two collide into the gray. The gray which leads into and comes out of that which is most beautiful – the rising and setting of the sun in all its glory. It is here that you see the vast colors of the heavens, Master Bailin. Its true colors. Always preceded or followed by that gray companion you cannot bear to look at. Are your fair eyes so weak that gray will blind you?”

“Black magic!” he roared, incensed. “Look at what they have done to this land! There was no rubble before they came. No mischief!”

I could not argue with that. It was a fact. But I didn't need to, for I had located his hideout. On the balcony there were pillars that protruded from cubical bases and rose to the ceiling. He was around behind one of these pillars, perched upon the slight ledge that the cube created.

“Come down, Bailin,” I coaxed in conclusion, and his gaze snapped to me. In trying to stay out of sight, he had had his face turned to the dark wall shadows, letting the walls ricochet his words back down to me, but it was no longer any use.

We had made contact.

“What awaits for me, Polly?” he asked – grim, now, instead of impassioned.

Was I expected to deal with this? I hadn't a clue what to say to him, or if the words I found were true or correct, or if they sufficed in whatever the greater game was here. Did greater forces care what I said to him? Did it make a difference? I was suddenly very weary, trying to fill this role. “I imagine you know,” I told him almost gently, for surely he had to know what he had done in his life to deserve his reckoning more than I did. He had committed whatever crimes he was being held for. Surely he had some idea of the consequences, or could use his imagination in a just fashion. A little half-heartedly, disillusioned with my responsibility in the condemning role, I added, “If there is redemption for you, it is surely not here, hiding”, hoping that that offered some wayward scrap of encouragement. Because with what I was charged in doing I didn't have anything else to offer him.

“No. If the gods see everything, you are right,” he admitted, his eyes glazing like windows in the rain. He was suddenly far away in some thought or other. “Hiding is likewise a prison. But that doesn't mean... That doesn't mean I must surrender to their wrath. I can arrange my own freedom.” There was something decisive in his voice, some new determination.

And a moment later, I became alarmingly informed as to the nature of it, as he unfolded abruptly from his roost and leaped atop the balustrade of the balcony, and spread his arms wide as if to fly. And then he was overextending, his torso falling beyond his precariously rooted feet, and he was falling, plummeting.

Eyes wide, I lurched forth, all too aware of what he intended. There was not a lot I could do, but horror drove me forward even as it warned me back. I wanted to cover my face, turn away, scream into a pillar to drown out the results of his fall, but instead I was rushing to intervene. In those moments you just act, one way or another, and there is no changing the course of things once the first step is placed. Now he would splat all around me, all I would have gained was being right in the middle of it, but I couldn't turn away at that point. I was committed to that end game, to coping with whatever the aftermath should be.

My sense of angles all blurred together as he fell through the vertical dimension and I rushed across the horizontal. I could not say who would reach their destination first. There was only the sickening crunch that dragged me down underneath him – my body, not his – and then I was coughing into the ash that covered the floor. I tested my spine, wrenched but intact; my ribs, jarred but not broken. Something crunched back into place as I coughed. My wrist throbbed, and agony pulsed through one knee, but it appeared he had not broken me as I broke his fall.

Reminded of my quarry, I dragged my head over my shoulder to look for him. A sharp, stiff pain pierced through my neck, but I saw him. He had landed a meter or so behind me, and appeared unconscious where he lay. Wincing and nursing my injuries, I pulled myself up onto my hands and knees, then crawled to his form to check for a pulse. My skirts left streaks in the ash behind me.

Bailin was alive, merely knocked senseless. Thank the gods. My ransom was still valid. And it had better be, after breaking a fall like that. If he had died anyway, I did not know that I would have found the strength to get back.

As it was, I realized I would have to muster the strength not only for myself, but for my quarry as well. He was walking nowhere on his own, and I realized he probably would not have been very compliant had he been conscious anyway. Perhaps this was for the best.

'Best' had just never established itself as such a trial before. For being ideal, it very much wasn't.

He was a wisp of a man, though – that was something. Starved to the point of escaping his shackles, running off of nothing but his madman energy.

Thinking I had become a bit mad myself, I attempted to channel that same kind of energy, bracing myself against the pain of my injuries and hoisting his deadweight painstakingly up from its resting place. It was like pulling someone out of tar, I thought, while you nursed a broken back, but in the end I straightened, triumphant, and turned to find my way back out of the fortress. The distorted shapes of two fallen bodies were left imprinted in the ashes, as if to mark the resting place of two beings that had fallen to their deaths in this trap, but I would not be caught dead in my own fortress that day. My footprints were gone, but I was ready to replace them with fingerprints until I found my way back to freedom.

Back to freedom, and the dystopian reality I had never considered mild until then.

Back home, to whatever 'home' was when I had built another place for myself, here.

Back to mischief I could cope with, and beings I could relate to, even if their beliefs were so far from mine sometimes that at times I found myself almost hating them.

Back to everything – 'everything' as my world had always measured it, before that everything expanded into a limitless scape of possibility that left me stranded in the waters of a thousand undiscovered oceans. No one would ever come for me here.

So I blazed my way back through those soul-reminiscent passages and emerged into the foreign air of those treacherous outskirts, heading toward home the only way I could cope with defining it, carrying a madman on my shoulders.