A Mischief in the Woodwork

CHAPTER 39

The Second Cold I Knew Her By

I returned to the mirror I had brought back from the city, scouring my reflection again, needing to find what others saw, when they looked at me. Needing to meet the eyes of the complicated beast that was the truth inside me. There had to be something there. Some revelation that could point me in the right direction, or reinforce me, or... Anything.

I should not be blind to my own inner workings.

One theory was that it was surely only because I already knew everything there was to know about myself, but recent events had proven that wasn't necessarily absolutely true. And touching the mirror this time, while nothing of my inner workings piped up, I became tickled by another theory, as I thought about it. As I mulled over it and demanded of the gods, Why is this being kept from me?

The theory that perhaps the reason I could not see into myself was because one had to learn about himself – learn about himself, and who he wanted to be. The experience was perhaps a big part of what validated any true essence, any changes or convictions.

I let my fingers fall away, not altogether satisfied, but resigned to the fair wisdom of such.

I did not pull my gaze away as quickly, however. There was still much to be searched, visually, for one who grew and changed and only looked in a mirror every so many years. My gray eyes stared back at me as I sat there, keener than I remembered. Keener in every way – keener with sadness, and hardness, and wisdom, and a determined light that knew not to take joy for granted.

Who are you, Avante? I recalled the Ambassador for the Angel of Death trying to put a name to me, and wondered precisely what she saw when she looked at me. When she looked at me with her life-and-death seeing eyes, and struggled to place me in a world that, to her, consisted of only two kinds of people. The ones to be spared, and the ones to be condemned.

And yet she had bothered to consider the shape of my life, rather than its mere black-or-white implications; surely she did not normally care to mull over the gray areas of a person's life. The gray areas were not the business she was in.

But they seemed very much to be the business I was in. It was gray, gray, gray – sometimes lighter, sometimes darker, sometimes an adamant stuck-in-stubborn-stone gray, sometimes (more lately) a confused haze-gray.

I am Avante, I thought, hoping more would come, that it would follow having just needed to be prompted. Sometimes, you only need to anchor a starting point, and the rest will follow, there all along but in need of being centered.

But nothing else came. Nothing except the watermark-gray imprint of that tentative identity on my abyssal-gray soul;

I am Avante.

I am Avante.

I am Avante...

*

In the end, quite unexpectedly, it was Tanen who came to me. Two days later, after he returned from his afternoon visit to the city, he found me in the garden. I looked up from my work at the blur of someone approaching, faltering when I saw who it was. He did not look precisely fond of the idea of speaking to me, but something came laden on his lips all the same.

"There's something I want to show you," he said, and my mind wondered vainly over what it could be.

"Alright," I said at last, simply enough.

It was a start.

"It's in the city," he elaborated.

It was inevitable that his mention of discovering something in the city brought a certain Ravine and the relating treachery within its domain to mind, but he could be referencing a million different discoveries, so I shooed the thought to the back of my mind.

"Now?" I asked, when he didn't volunteer anything further.

"It could be gone, tomorrow."

That was fair enough. I chucked the dirty carrot I had unearthed into my bucket and wiped my hands on the fabric of my skirt. Rising, I gestured to the road that commenced at the edge of the field. "Lead the way."

Leaving the rest of my task for later, I followed Tanen into the city. He retained his silence the whole way; only when he had picked his way over the rubble to the spot he intended to show me did he speak up again.

"There," he said, gesturing to the base of one of the heaps of debris. "At the base."

I followed his indication, at first finding nothing. All the rubble ran together into one big jumble. Was there one piece that was more notable than the others?

Then I saw it. A great clawed hand protruding from the rubble. Fortunately it had the appearance of being very limp, very dead – for it by no means appeared altogether human. It had a greenish hue to it, and the joints were a little bit larger, the hand itself callused almost to a scaly extent. And, of course, there was the most obvious difference of claw replacing nail – disgusting gray claws about half as long as a given finger. But it was the similarity in shape and apparent function that suggested this was no paw, either. It was very much a hand.

I had never seen something quite like this before, and so I regarded it with due bemusement, and admittedly a little wariness to boot.

"What is it?" Tanen asked, rather bluntly.

I considered a moment before treading forward to do the deed he had obviously invited me along for. It was such a disgruntling thought, contriving to touch that hand, but a second survey confirmed it was surely not attached to any live creature. Surely nothing buried under so much rubble could still be alive to any extent.

I knelt beside the hand, considering the muscle of the open palm, the idle, reaching fingers. Then I stole myself against the eerie squeamishness that I felt and reached slowly to touch it. My fingertips brushed the wrist of the thing first, stiff and cold and chalky, and then I moved them up over the palm to twine my fingers with the creature's, gently clasping its hand.

A look into the creature's soul flashed before my spirit eyes. I received the flash with more grace than many previous bombardments, letting it drain away before returning to myself and extracting my fingers from those other clawed digits. I followed the arm with my human vision until it disappeared into the rubble, and then turned my face to Tanen. He stood at a safe distance, waiting. Watching.

"Well?" he prompted.

"It used to be human," I said, standing.

"How can that be?"

"How can any of this be, Tanen?" I reminded him.

"It's not as if I haven't proposed theories. You could confirm or deny, couldn't you?"

Of course. Dimensions. "You don't want to hear what I have to say, remember?"

"And you only believe in an additional 'spiritual' dimension, anyway, isn't that right? I know you burned the book." The book with the dimension graphs. I'd had no choice. It had been before he and Dashsund had discovered that cache of trees, and we had needed to burn something. "So what is he, some angel?" he challenged, jabbing a finger at the clawed arm.

"The gods work in mysterious ways, Tanen."

"You're going to stick with that? Chalk this all up to some twisted fancy of the gods?"

“Even the forests, pure god-created nature, are posed to burn themselves down, and make way for new growth.” I had learned as much, in my scouring of the essence of all those information-rich library books. It was a perfect metaphor.

“A purge like that is swift and humane, where the purposeful tragedies of mother nature are concerned.”

He was not of a mind to listen to any reason I might propose, and so I stayed silent, gazing at him with more patience than I knew I could muster.

And it was that that sent him over the edge.

"How can you suggest that?" he demanded. "My family was ruined, because of all this. Countless have died. Everything is diseased, and decaying, and ruined. You're alright with believing the gods are in charge of all this? That they even exist in all this? That the gods–" But here he cut off, unable to compose sufficient words. "Come with me," he bade instead, and in his eyes there was a point prove.

I followed him through the city once more, without protesting, wondering what he would lead me to next, what he would choose as his point of reference. I was a little bit surprised when he guided me straight to the base of the hill of debris that hosted the doorway to Ombri's winter. So he had discovered this during his hobby of visiting the city as well.

I trailed to a halt halfway up the slope as he climbed it, and watched as he seized the knob and threw open the door.

"Then this is the realm of the Gods!" he yelled through the wailing cold that spilled out.

As the blasts of cruel wind whipped through that portal and tore against my face, my stance on the matter was not challenged. Rather, I felt the unspeakable power in that wind and the unlivable cold against my face and nodded. "Yes," I breathed.

Tanen's hair whipped in his face, and he stared at me, just so unbelieving. I closed my eyes, and rocked on my unstable pedestal under the force of the gales, seduced by it as surely as he had recently been seduced by the Ambassador for the Angel of Death.

I did not think to further my explanation of the clawed hand and its mysterious host, at that point, for my attention was swept up in the screaming currents of the portal before me. They did not frighten me as they had the first time. The currents screamed with just as much fervor, and bit with just as much cruelty, but the voices on the wind spoke to me, now, and the bite glanced shy of any fateful effect.

If I had not been distracted by revisiting this portal, I might have told him that the clawed hand belonged merely to one of the sick humans. That the mutation was a mere symptom – or the extent of one therein – from being piled high underneath an equally-diseased mound of rubble for so long. The symptoms had been left to fester, to breed, to combine forces and reach new heights.

But, chances were, he wouldn't have been of a mind to listen, again. He was lost, so lost, in the idea that any of what I said could be of a true slant.

Tanen went home first, that evening, giving up on me, and I followed only after carefully shutting the door to Ombri's winter and basking a few more minutes in the perspective that was dawning inside me pertaining to that city. Then I returned home as well, somehow more replete than I had felt in a long time, even considering the fact that the deadline for Tanen was drawing near, and I hadn't a thing to show for it.

Perhaps it was something I'd heard in the voices of the wind, that day, or merely that speaking the part of my stance that Tanen had drawn out had served as a much-needed acknowledgment of the very same idea for myself, centering it in my own mind as surely as it had been intended to offer perspective to Tanen.

I couldn't say for sure where it had hailed from, but there was a sense of peace in it – an irrational sense of peace. Who was to say if it would wear off as quickly as it had settled in, but for the time being I glided through the rest of my duties all amidst its haze, unbothered by the turmoil around me, as if I were truly on to something even more than I had known.

*

The words came two days later:

"Victoria is missing."

It was Enda that spoke, and hers was a wise old voice I would never question. I knew I did not have to ask: Are you sure? Have you checked everywhere? Could you just have missed her?

I rose from my task, caution stirring through me. I did not expect to find any alarming confirmations, but I pressed my palm to the wall of the house briefly nevertheless, just to be sure.

As I suspected: it had not swallowed her like the others.

"Ombri's gone after her," Enda said further, and my eyes went back to her.

"What?"

"Down the road. I would not have taken Miss Victoria for one to care for a venture into the city, but it seems perhaps I've misjudged the girl."

"She won't last an instant in the city," I protested, as if Enda were somehow responsible. "She'll trip over the rubble."

"Why Shifter's been a wise pup and gone after her," Enda confirmed.

I sighed with resignation, wondering what had possessed Victoria, and strode from the room. "I'll bring them back," I said. "The one you call Shifter hasn't been out on the rubble for too long. Things have changed since then."

I left Manor Dorn without further ado and made off down the road to retrieve the two strays myself, a cool breeze lapping at my skirt. A small swirl of dust stirred about my ankles, and then played off through the field. There was no sign of either of my quarry down the road. They must already be in the city.

Hopefully, I thought, Victoria hadn't gone and sprained her ankle. Ombri was much too slight to try to serve as support for the older girl, especially all the way from the city back to our manor.

The shadow of a bird swept across my path, and I glanced at the buzzard that swooped down into the field on the north side of the road. Pesky things. I grimaced at the haggard rustle of feathers and the set of beady eyes that followed me, and moved on toward my destination.

It was not hard to find Ombri and Victoria. I did not even have to use my gifted fingers. I saw them as the city drew near, just within its fallen gates. Ombri stood at the threshold, and Victoria – just a short ways in up a small hillock of rubble. The fair young woman was looking over her shoulder at her dark, faithful little shadow, a haunted look on her face. And it would do that to you – seeing the city for the first time. Having not delved any deeper than the first fringes of the place, it seemed perhaps that was all she had come to do; see it.

I slowed my pace, glad to see them both in one piece. Ombri seemed to be coaxing the other girl back down, now that she had laid eyes on the scene she had come for, and I dismissed the energy that was geared for making an effort where rounding the two of them up was concerned.

But that was when the rubble shifted. With her face to Ombri, Victoria didn't see it. I'm sure the sound of it would have registered, but suddenly Omrbi was crying out, and the sound of her voice served as a bit of an overriding distraction, rather than the warning it was intended as. Instead of cautioning Victoria to the impending danger, it added to a sense of confusion.

A sickening feeling stayed the blood in my veins as I saw the pillar descending toward the oblivious Victoria. I couldn't rightly say, in that moment, if I lurched forward crying my own alarm or stopped dead in my tracks stayed by smothering dread.

It all happened too fast.

I do know that when Ombri scrambled forward, the pillar nearly toppled and Victoria still unmoved from her endangered pedestal, I had the sense to cry out for her to stop. But it was to be one or the other, really, and as fate would have it – or as little angel Ombri would have it – it was not going to be Victoria.

The little halfbreed scurried up the hillock of debris on her fleet, rubble-savvy legs, reaching for her mistress as the pillar reached an impending angle. I was running then, whether or not I was before, but there were no feet in all the world that could have gotten there in time. It was useless, utterly useless, yet how could one ever just stand and watch as such a thing unfolded before them?

Ombri launched herself from a protruding platform of rubble, leaping at Victoria and toppling her from the hillock. The little slave girl landed all across her belly on top of the pile in the older girl's place, and then the pillar struck down on top of her.

That falling trunk collapsed across her back, splitting in two over the top of the pile. I slid to a shocked halt, my sense returning to me only after the two halves of pillar found their resting places and the extent of the shift happening in the vicinity stilled to a whispery crumbling silence.

My breath caught, then raced back into my lungs. “Ombri!” I cried, and lurched forward once again. I pounded over the fallen gate of the city and rushed up the mound of rubble, striving for the platform that hosted Ombri's unmoving body. Denial swamped me as I rose to her height and saw her there, and I collapsed to my knees beside her, my hands reaching and faltering at once. By the gods, I did not want to hurt her worse. If she wasn't... If she wasn't...

I couldn't think the thought, and in the end my hands went to her, anxiously searching for the signs of life that I was certain still had to be there. "Ombri," I coaxed, my voice quivering. Open your beautiful eyes, little angel. "Ombri, love..."

She was unresponsive under my touch, but I refused to accept that the light that she was could simply go out, so abruptly. She had been a great Shifter in the city – one single downed pillar could surely not snuff her. It couldn't.

But it was not even necessary to check for a pulse, not really – one touch was all I needed, and I felt it. I felt it at first contact in my fingertips, and I denied it.

She's not.

"Ombri."

But denial didn't bring her back.

Only after I had managed to flip her, and dragged her so that I was cradling her head in my lap, did I begin to accept it. For I felt it everywhere I touched her, in every stroke as I ran my hands over her tight brown curls, in every dark flash of essence when my fingers brushed her caramel skin.

She was gone.

The ache of sorrow pinned my heart to the back of my chest, and my eyes fell shut in grief as I bent over her, my shaky fingers retreating to hovering over her in a way that barely came in contact. Suddenly it was as if I couldn't bring myself to touch her, in those moments of raw heartache, lest it become too real or I mar her perfect form.

A second glance, of course, would have told a different story where perfection was concerned, throwing into sharp light the brokenness of her body. The patch of blood that was soaking through the coating of powder.

"What happened?" a grave voice intruded on my private moment of anguish, and I peered with agony through the locks of hair that fell in my face where I was bent over Ombri. Tanen stood at the base of the slope, come after us to help same as I'd gone after Ombri and Victoria myself.

"There was a shift," I managed – somehow both brokenly and numbly at once.

A question hovered on his lips – the question – grim and hesitant. I did not have the heart to answer it, though, and so I retreated into my bowed canopy and spoke of another;

"See to Victoria," I said, for she lay a ways away, toppled from the hillock. She could have any number of injuries as well, but surely nothing that compared to breaking a pillar's fall, and I did not have it in me to flit from Ombri's side so inconsequentially.

Tanen responded and found his way around the mound, locating Victoria in the mess and going to her side, and, left to it, I sank back into my grieving. He said something, a moment later, but I wasn't of a mind to note what. The tone was positive, however, suggesting Victoria was going to be fine.

Then Tanen was ascending my pile again, looking down at us where I was folded into a vigil on Ombri's behalf.

"Is she...dead?" he inquired gently, a shard of empathy lodged in his voice. And he was moving closer, crouching at her feet for a closer assessment.

I surprised even myself with the vehement reaction that struck out from my inner self, then, screeching at him, "Don't touch her!". I pulled her farther into my lap, assuming a more protective stance, awkwardly crowding closer over her as if I could shield her from him. "Get away!"

He froze, taken aback, his eyes flashing in quizzical surprise to mine.

Mine had turned furious.

"Vant..." he said uncertainly, but ruefully – evidently assuming my strong reaction was some product of denial, of not wanting the bubble of my little denial-fantasy popped, not wanting another to intrude and shed light on the truth or take her away. But he didn't understand. Not by a long shot.

"Don't,” I insisted hoarsely. Raw pain and blame coursed through me as surely as the blood that ran hot in my veins. "This happened because of people like YOU!"

The accusation dripped with conviction, fierce and pain-filled and tragically enlightening. He stared at me, there on his knees in the rubble, and a look of confusion and caution passed through his gaze.

"What?" he asked quietly, not understanding, and it was then that I couldn't hold it in any longer.