A Mischief in the Woodwork

CHAPTER 4

The Daylight Echo

Things creaked, and things stirred. Things shifted, and things brewed. Things festered and cracked and rippled – things that were never meant to ripple.

Stone was not meant to ripple.

Yet it was all an enhancement to that which was most haunting: the silence. It was ripe for the very echos of rustling silk. One might catch the sweeping hiss across the miles of raw air, and say it:

“Someone stirred.”

That's how it happened, the day following my ordeal in the city.

Letta paused where she was tending to me in the garden, root salve smeared across her palm. She was rubbing the stuff into my aches and pains, coating my cuts and massaging it into my traumatized muscles.

“That is a fortunate soul that the wardogs don't hunt during the day,” she observed quietly. It was not as imperative that we retain utter silence out beyond the precarious nature of the city, but we still made sure to speak in soft, even tones. Letta was one who was not as superstitious of the mischief, as well, and probably would have been another to allow the curtains of Manor Dorn open if it wasn't the established way of things to keep them closed.

I took advantage of the idle moment to shift, for I was stiff in my molded posture. And she was right: a beast would have tracked that sound of life in a matter of minutes. I could imagine its ugly wide snout perking toward the sound, its short neck going abruptly erect at the disturbance, and then its claws digging into the earth as it took off, loping across the countryside toward its unknowing prey.

Though if they had any sense, I thought, they would know. They would fill with dread the moment they made the slip, knowing it echoed across the ruined land. Knowing they had been targeted in that instant, while they had nowhere to run. Knowing they were as good as sitting like a duck, even amidst their sudden scramble to escape the compromised scene.

That whisper would have convicted them.

We, out here, could at least keep a watchful eye as we spoke and seek shelter in our home, should anything emerge nearby.

“You were lucky too, Monvay,” Letta said. 'Monvay' was the polite title for a lady in Darath. She used it sometimes out of respect for me because of the greater things I took on as a slave – because I was, after all, only a slave, unworthy of the title; just a momentous slave. I was greatly appreciable among the rest of them. “Too much luck falling in a row. It bodes ill for the chances of something going wrong next.”

“I don't know what you can see from there,” I said, “but this doesn't feel like something gone right. Ow.”

I knew she smiled. “It's all relative, minda. You were lucky. I don't know what you were thinking, taking on an albino – and an older male, at that.” It was a half tease, because she knew I wouldn't readily take one of them on. Even a scrawny female.

“I daresay mingling with one's own kind has become rather outdated,” I grunted, my voice pinched, as she upset the pangs of a raw slice on my back. It had mostly dried up and crusted over, but was a horrid, puckered crevice of skin slitted open like a bulging envelope. “Mingling at all has become outdated. And to think, it used to be the polite thing to do. Now, if you do the polite thing, you get whacked.” And by 'whacked', of course, I meant 'killed', in slang terms. Because I had gotten a lot more than whacked in its respective sense. If only, I thought, lamenting the extent of the wear and tear that graced my figure.

“Oh yes, the golden days when the Masters mingled politely with the slaves,” Letta said with a tinge of sarcasm, but it was kind sarcasm. A reminder.

Something in me softened. Of course, it had not been like that for the rest of them. Imagine, the Masters bothering to spare politeness toward their slaves. That would rather be a mockery of the arrangement. “I'm such an insensitive oaf,” I said.

“Nonsense. Just a vibrant patchwork of unique perspective.”

My brow creased into a quizzical expression where she couldn't see. “If you say so,” I granted.

And then we heard it; the howl in the distance. Not animal. Human.

It was a shriek of pure terror and anguish – the sound of someone meeting their end. And the snarls that followed, echoing across the broken plains, that named the violent culprit. It was animal. It was too voracious to be anything less than...

“By the gods,” Letta breathed.

I had gone rigid underneath her touch, but her touch hovered, forgotten. I felt the downy hairs down my spine prickle in its place.

“That is the sound of irony if I've ever heard it,” Letta said gravely.

For it was. It was no less than the sound of the very thing we had ruled out.

A wardog in the daylight...

By the gods indeed.