T A C: Session 09 -- 'A Bit Of A Problem'' Report
General Summary
The thing in mother’s new man isn’t right.
I know it because I’ve seen what a man can do when he has no fear of the chains, the lock-up, the severe questioner or the last breath. Even then, that sort of man must know his limits. Why, just an hour ago, a grey-coated man said as much to me. He said,
“No matter how far you come, no matter how skillful you think you are, there is always something that makes you realise you’re not able to do much about anything at all.” I’m quite sure I agree. The man that said this was given to drink and a personal, drab malaise, born of many slights. I am good at seeing through men but I needn’t have been, to see this about him. He wore a lot of grey in his guildsman’s set. Useful for a professionally skilled worker of the art
and equally so for a man
this close to mourning. I see this in him. I don’t see deaths of his nearest, nor even a one that creates this trouble in him. More that he mourns______ himself? I write this and I don’t understand what I write. I will leave it here nonetheless. I know I don’t mourn for myself. I am already that close to the shroud that there doesn’t seem to be much point in it. How do I know this about myself? Well, that's because of the 'thing'. It brought me to the point of meeting up with the shroud.
The thing in mother’s new man... :
To meet this thing, we must meet the man.
To meet the man, we must be in Valetta.
To arrive in Valetta, we must come from Cloister.
To leave Cloister, my father needs good reason to leave.
My enemy sidles to my back. I feign ignorance. He strikes downward, meaning to split my scapulae, to make them wings apart. I rotate, going low for a moment enough to be beIow the Avian’s Slice. I move aside the dagger with my own, sliding across and to the position beside my enemy so that I am granted the chance at his exposed flank. My dagger reaches out to him, keen to make its point.
There___ and why stop at this___
There again. Sometimes it is necessary to reiterate, eh?
I have turned the killing around, like when the sun takes to the sky just as the moon leaves it. The finished has become the begun, an end has become an start. Let me get to the ‘thing’ in the man by a reversal and start at Cloister.
My brother and I were somewhat acquainted with a famous guildsman named, Scatheius Dash, also known as the ‘Gifted’. How does the greatest of assassins become famous? Isn’t that a bit like having a spyglass to your eye in an unlanterned room without windows? I’ll tell you how an assassin can be famous. By being someone you
think you know. That’s it,
think. In reality, you’ve got it all wrong but you’ll never know it.
A amn would be certain he’d seen Dash take down an assignment… “I watched him gurgle ‘is last, by yer leave, yer Honour. Death from this side of a view. ‘E never even saw the shrike until it was touching ‘is eye. Shrike-stabbed the eye and lanced in ‘is brains, all in the one, yer Honour.”
His dove-coloured coat a small fog atop a roof. Footsteps a fiction published in the tomes of deafness and blindness. His voice was ancient and low. His voice was a croaking worry that nagged. His voice was pitched high like a scream.
His voice was average and intentionally without inflection. His shrike-knives a swarm of happy hornets. Happiest when they were flying_____ Descriptions so clearly legendary. All so wrong. It’s too bad. I like the story. It’s right, even it’s wrong. I’m not the only judge. Most prefer the story to the truth. What is the truth? I don’t know. Scatheius Dash isn’t about to write it down, like I’m doing, is he? He’d be more than the greatest idiot if he did that. Admit to his skills? Proclaim his killings? No guildmaster would do that and he was their master in bringing the special ruin. I could see that and I’m only a child.
When I say that my brother and I were somewhat acquainted with Dash, I mean that we often hid inside him. His statue, I mean. Nobody can hide inside a man excepting the man himself. We found that behind the statue’s plaque, there was an opening. The opening would let in the flies, or a slippery eel, if it were able to breathe air or in our case, a small girl and boy. We made our way inside Dash’s statue whenever we were sure that we wouldn’t be seen. I’d do the making sure, while Liro used his knick to pries off the plaque. I even came up with a way to let Liro know when someone was coming. He couldn’t look at me when he was removing the plaque so I used the windows of the tavern across the street from where the statue stood. This worked well. If a Daggam or an Impleton came into view, I would open the window up widely. The sunshine would flash along the pavings and across Liro’s backside and flash across the plaque. Liro would spin about and pretend to be leaning against the face of the plaque. This worked certain-spiff. It even let me spend half an hour in the tavern. Normally, children weren’t ‘required’ in a tavern but my face and mouth got me by. I was lucky. My face is sweet, my mouth is severe and my throat can give the gutter and take the utter, be that fortified wine or hard spirit. Father liked to call me that. “Hard Spirit.” Father was my favourite. Mother, let’s say I could not have been alive without but I could live without. Liro was my brother. He did whatever I told him to. Loyalty like that is not easy to buy. Just imagine if you could buy it!
I brought halved cobs and sliced cheese and red chicken with me from the tavern. If we heard nothing, we’d be happily full. If we heard something, we’d be happily paid. The guild we gave the goss to was the Quarter-Sun. Their symbol looked like a crescent moon to me. I never said that to them. A yellow ‘sun’
does look like a yellow moon. It didn’t matter to me as long as the guilders liked what we’d overheard. They usually did. The last time, they’d been ecstatic. The three guilders’ eyes glittered like five piles of new-minted helms lit by a lightening flash. Speck was the name of the Quarter-Sun guilder who spoke to us. He was the one with one eye. He covered the gap in his face with a leather strap that went around his head and had a buckle where his eye used to sit. The buckle was gold and had the shape of a crescent moon. I know, it was supposed to be a sun but the buckle wasn’t made special for him. It had come off an astromancer’s tome that no longer needed closures. Speck had laughed his nasty laugh when I asked why the caster didn’t expect to secure his writings any more. There was no chance that any of these three guilders had slain a caster. It must have been that they had accompanied a bosstalker to that job.
I told them and Speck was a little shocked. Not at the cruelty of our goss but more that I could speak it and not be afraid. I probably should have acted that way. It wasn’t good to see Speck’s re-appraisal of me in his eye. Idiot-me. I won’t make that mistake again. Next time I don’t act my age, it will be with reason. The goss concerned the Red Scorpions’ guild. We’d eavesdropped on two of them. They’d spoken in lowered hush about the ‘delivery’ they’d helped with the week before. Sounded much like a normal night’s work for the Scorpions. They’d put a lozenge of their ‘drop’ into the Eighth Segment’s cisterns. There’d be the boss’s cut to pay, it had turned out. The two guilders were scared and planning to leave the city. Leaving Cloister was hardly ever considered an option. A guilder out of the city-state might as well be a double-amputee guilder. They were not only leaving but leaving immediately. Not even returning to their hide for their stashes. They’d only stopped at the statue to make a last breath wish and provisions from the tavern before heading away… This was the way I told Speck. I was only trying to impress them. Make it more exciting. I wasn’t holding back what had happened. Not much. Speck didn’t like my style of telling. He threatened to beat Liro if I didn’t get to the good part. He was a real hard-stalker. Experienced stalkers like him know better than to threaten a person with harm when there is another that they’d be more fearful about. Liro and I had talked this over beforehand so I told Speck I didn’t care what he did to Liro, while Liro laughed at the threat. I thought I might have got a little more money out of them by delaying the top goss. It was a bad idea.
It was Speck’s turn to laugh as his two guilders took hold of Liro and asked him if he’d like to watch as Speck kissed me. Liro said he’d not like to. Speck made slurping noises. He really seemed to be enjoying my discomfort. A beating or slicing I could manage but he was vile. When he seemed about to kiss me, he turned abruptly, walked up to Liro, and kissed him instead. Liro spat when he could breathe again. Speck motioned with his coat, opening it so we could see the vials that were arranged inside it. He said if he wanted to, he could cut us with a vial-wetted knick ‘down there’ and then that one would need an antidote. He could give it to the one not sliced. Not in hand but make the unsliced one drink it. He wouldn’t force that one to swallow. They could hold it in their mouth. They could apply the antidote if they didn’t mind putting their mouth, ‘down there’. I told Speck I wasn’t holding back and asked if he wouldn’t rather hear the top goss. He looked like he wanted to poison one of us so he could watch the afterward. His two guilders weren’t as interested. They wanted the goss. Speck grudgingly closed his coat.
Rapidly, I told them about the bosstalker of the Scorpions getting too entangled with the Red-cord he’d located at the Eighth’s cistern. How he’d had the guilders, including the two who we’d listened to, try to pull him away from the cord. How that hadn’t helped. The bosstalker had had to use an echord to break free. Which wouldn’t have been a problem except the combination of these chantries was made as the Scorpion’s drop began to infuse the drinking water in the cistern. The Scorpion’s dispenser almost fitted, to hear the two guilders remember it. The dispenser was pretty high in the guild. He made the poison drops and lozenges. If he was scared, they all should have been. Turns out that when you combine that particular drop with a Red-cord and an echord, you get a poison that doesn’t kill the poisoned but kills their ancestors. That erases what the ancestors might have done to produce their descendants. It also removed anything else that they’d developed – it was a ‘past poison’. The dispenser had to explain it a couple of times for the Scorpions to get what it meant. The whole of the Eighth, well anyone who was drinking the cistern’s water at least, was about to disappear along with their belongings and maybe their houses… The Scorpions were going to be in it straight up to their hoods from quite a few guilds. Add in the reprisal-tithes that would be offered and the Red Scorpions could really be done.
Speck grinned and said that this
was top goss. Plus, he’d need to tell the Quarter-Sun’s boss straight away. That meant no fun with us. I didn’t antagonise Speck as he and the other two left. Liro let out a low whistle after they’d gone. And that was that… Until the city went totally mad. Cloister rioted. There were plenty of missing guilders and missing buildings. Plenty of guilders lost the lot. Right after that, guilders started to have to default on their tithes. Lost goods meant lost money and that meant no tithes. That created some surly guilders. Most of them. When Speck got nailed for knowing and not telling people straight off but had instead waited so he could score some freely available items from the dearly departed, he blamed us. Not just me and Liro. He blamed father because that made it seem more believable than saying it was two kids that caused him to delay. Father got warned. We ‘vanished’. Out of Cloister, using all his tithe-helms to buy a moderator that would hide us from witnesses. We made it away. Father figured that with so many disappearances, ours might look like just another case of past poisoning. He’d been clever in placing a canteen he’d found with the Red-cordial in it in our kitchen. That’s how we all wound up living at the end of Harvesters’ Road., in Valetta.
The city of Valletta’s children were odd. They went to work with their elders as you’d expect. When working was over they’d either stay indoors or sit around their homes. Liro and I couldn’t find any of them who’d want to get into a store or know what was going on. The only normal kids we met were the ones on the boats that came to port to trade. There were some sharper ones there for sure but they only came and went, for the most part. A boy named, Santiquinne ended up staying when his boat left because he was in the Valeguard’s cells. His captain didn’t even go to see him before leaving. Santiquinne was sour as ripe lemon slices pickled in vinegar about it. What made him a sharp was his climbing. Learned at sea, it seemed he was a beetle when it came to finding cracks in walls to latch on to. He’s tall for his age, being fourteen but standing like a man. I think he likes me, which is useful for sure. A boy who wants to show off is one I can get to do risky stuff.
Father settled into his work on the piers in the north end of Valetta. He quickly gained some attention for his combination of good numbering and decent throwing skill. The numbering came in handy to keep track of the baled cargo bundles that came to the city by sea. These bales could contain furs from Maulght, or the semi-dried fish from the fresh-waters of Ulmavyn, or fine tunic cloth from Kreccidoc. There were all kinds of new things to see. Then there were the smaller boats that didn’t seem to have travelled far at all. They might only have four oars to pull them through the bay to the piers. Where they came from couldn’t be far. These boats didn’t even have a cabin to shelter the few onboard if the weather turned bad. I figure they must be from the other cities toward the mouth of the bay. These rowed boats probably kept close to shore all the way. Father would count up their cargo too. These smaller boats would have far less bulky items but often they had far nicer small things. Father would need to number up the value of the finely wrought handiworks these boats unloaded. The crafters up the bay must be very skilled for sure. The items were amazing if I’m being honest for once.
Father’s other valued ability was his throwing. Throwing things was useful as money exchanged between pier-men working (like Father) and the foreign traders needed to be rapidly exchanged. A pier-man needed to get whatever bale their master wanted, paid for and do this before another pier-man outbid him. A pier-man couldn’t stop another from making a better bid so a rapidly made payment was crucial to preventing a higher bid from being acknowledged. Once a ship’s trader had a helms-bag in his hand he was far from likely to throw it back ashore! Father, had always been decent at throwing. The ships’ trading merchants preferred a man skilled at tossing the stringed bags on to their decks. The fewer bags of money that went astray the better, obviously! There weren’t many men who had the skill as well as the nerve required to make accurate throws of bags filled full of helms. If a helms-bag went into the Sheath, a man would be expected to go after it. Difficult work as the docked ship would make swimming to where the bag went down very dangerous. I saw one man get crushed between a ship and a pier post. He lost a leg and a hand. Another man drowned not three days later when he couldn’t get up to the surface with the heavy bag he’d gone in after. His body got grappled up to the surface later that day, the helms-bag’s strings still wrapped around his wrist. Father wasn’t unnerved by any of this. He’d been a guilder. He’d said, “If I have to choose between the risk of being slashed across the throat by a guilder’s shrike or the risk of going for a swim close to shore, I’m going to need a towel.”
Father had been a flighted guilder of the Starry Interceptors. It was a guild infamous for interfering in any guild bloodletting. They’d make a set-up for a chance and use their obtuse-angled, five-bladed, throwing knives to wreak confusion among the warring guilds. By the time these guilds came to realise that the ‘Stars’ were involved, it was normally all over and too late. Being a group that profited from feuding inclinations of others was dangerous work. The guilds who were taken from were always in violent mode before the Interceptors arrived. These factions were rarely carrying helms or other coinage. Why carry money to a fight where it might be lost if captured?
The guilders did carry their best weaponry though. Fights could always get serious if they didn’t start out that way. If it came to dealing finally with another guild, it was smart to have your best gear kitted. Chantried blades were sometimes part of guilders’ kits. Fighting vials created by lockmartials and wellness draughts made by healer types were likely to be found on them too. A decent haul could be made from just two, opposed guilds. Add in one or two other guilds choosing to get involved and the takings could really add up. A few bloodlettings, successfully intercepted and the ‘Stars’ would be almost over-equipped with chantried items. Items that might be sorted between those worth using and the ones to be ransomed back to the guilds that owned them, or auctioned to guilds that had no claim on them really, or simply sold at markets to whoever fancied such items.
The Starry Interceptors didn’t have even a few ally guilds. Father was trained to use the Interceptors’ throwing blade. He’d not been allowed to keep it when he retired. That was before I was old enough to remember. I’ve only seen them hanging down the backs of other ‘Stars’. They wear them this way to warn anyone coming up behind them as to who they are. The ‘blade’ had a hilt shaped to fit its user’s best palm. Where a regular blade would extend straight out from the hilt, the Interceptor blade move away from the hilt at an angle. When it reached a knife’s length it stopped in a tapering point. Before the blade had reached this length, however, a second length of blade extended out from the first at right angles. This second blade was sharp on just one side. The other edge was serrated. From its tip, the metal forked into two new blades. The two blades moved apart from each other. As they lengthened, they too branched out, forming other sharp blades. Liro used to call them snowflakes. I’d always told him off at that because snowflakes had six sides and six points. The Interceptors’ blades usually could be counted as having five points but could have a tendency to seven or even and very rarely nine but never six or any other even number. All told, the blades were about a man’s forearm across. They could be used to fight with in close combat. The best of the Interceptors seemed to be excellent at trapping an opponent’s weapon amidst the many angled blades of their own. The odd serration added to a chance of spoiling a weapon’s edge or even breaking a weapon completely. Liro’d try to argue the handle of the weapon made a sixth ‘point’, maintaining his ‘snowflake’ idea, but that was simple nonsense. Whatever the number of points it had, the weapon could surely be thought of as star-shaped and gave the guild its name.
Father sometimes ended the day a bit after the Valettan merchant he worked the pier for had closed. On evenings like that, Father would bring the helms-bags home with him. It’s really this, that was the reason we had such a big house. Father couldn’t afford a house as big as ours was on his own but Tevel had insisted that Father needed a house large enough to have more than one decent hiding place for the helms-bags. Tevel isn’t a bad sort. Not really likable but I liked his concoctions well enough. ‘Concoctions’ is what Tevel called the strange, tangy, fizzing drinks he made Liro, Santiquinne and me. I liked the Cyan one best. Tevel had laughed and said that that flavour was called, ‘Gob’s End’. I think that was supposed to be funny, but to me it seemed like a sensible name as drinking it meant you wouldn’t fancy another flavour for at least a day afterward. Tevel seems to be pretty wealthy. I don’t think he sells many fizzy drinks though. Let’s say, he doesn’t sell any while we’re around, nor does he have a shop for selling drinks. Instead, he seems to meet individuals who are odd. They speak as though someone is listening______ other than me, that is. Tevel can’t know I was listening. If he had, I’m sure he would have complained to Father. Now it’s too late for that. That’s because I’m sure Father died five nights ago.
Five nights ago, I was supposed to be in bed with Seamstress Arry. She and I are besties. I always take her downstairs once the rest have gone to sleep and we have a hot drink, heated by the embers in the fire. Some nights the drink is weak shavagh. Some nights the drink is just warm milk. Seamstress Arry only has a sip. Warm drinks keep her awake. If I give her too much, I will wake up in the middle of the night and she will be wide awake just staring out the window. She’ll make up some excuse about how she heard a noise or saw someone at our window. Seamstress Arry is from Cloister so she’s always been edgy about guilders coming to steal her needles and threads. She keeps her threads tucked away in her bloomers. The needles she keeps in her hair. She keeps meaning to make me an embroidered cushion using the brightest of her coloured threads. She never gets around to it though. I don’t mind. What would I do with a cushion? I’d rather she’d been trained as a apothecary, then I might ask her for half a dozen doses for people I take a dislike to. People like Ammonde. He used several names so straight off I didn’t trust him. Hiding your identity is perfectly fine, I guess. I mean I’m not going to say doing it is dumb. But after I told him I knew none of the names he was using were his real one, he got a strange faraway look to him. Not faraway like from Valetta to Cloister either, I mean like from Miranse to the Violet Lune. A really, really strange expression, like none I’d ever come across in all my ten years.
Mister Ammonde made Mother feel better. Father worked so hard he was never around until really late at night. Ammonde took to cutting the firewood and tending the patches where we grew our food. He was strong enough for this kind of work. Father didn’t seem to mind at all. I thought that was very strange. Mother had always made father pretty careful when other men came around. Maybe Father trusted these Valettans more than men of Cloister? I’m not real sure about that though. Father didn’t actually know much about Valettans. Ammonde didn’t even claim to be from the city. He said he was from an island in the Near Sea. I thought that was convenient. I even asked all the sailors I could what islands in the Near Sea had men on them. Every one of them answered the same. That they only knew of some Baymish islands that were home to men but these were proper nations and all had names. Ammonde had said his home island didn’t have a name. Once I’d learned that, I told Liro. We decided we’d better have a talk to Mister Ammonde, or whatever his name was really.
Ammonde tried to be a weasel when I told him that I thought he was up to something. I pushed him hard. Just like in Cloister when I used my phrases and words t oshock a grown-up. Even guilders were pretty shocked by my owrds when I chose to use them. It often worked a treat. Once he saw I was right and knew it, he changed. His voice grew hollow and thin. It was like he was talking down a long tube. His words were sprinkled with some that I didn’t understand. Words that made me feel chilled. That was strange as the day was mild. Near the end of his words, the language he spoke changed. By now his voice was barely audible even though his face was angry and he looked to be shouting into a storm. The hair on his head filled with air. It moved like a wind was whipping it. Liro went for his shrike, hidden in his boot-top. I wasn’t sure that was smart but I wasn’t about to tell Liro not to. Liro threw the blade straight at Ammonde’s face. To me the words he was shout-miming were nonsense. Later Liro would tell me that to his ears, the words were threats too bizarre in their intentions toward us to speak again. I asked Liro how he could possibly know what Ammonde had said, as the language was foreign. Liro replied that Ammonde had spoken,
“Liro, child of the Long-lost Lored, use your mind’s forgotten nature to understand my speech. There is an underlying truth that only my truest of servants can feel… Yes. You hear and understand! You are a true king. Other men will be abject and defer to you. A host will arise and you will sail the stars to an ending at which you will dine at the head of the table of plenty. You will speak and the worlds will crash to the air and swallow themselves rather than raise their armies against your grace. Brave Human! Noble born! Lift your voice with mine and speak only to me. In Time’s narrowing corridors will you see your glory. Bring me what is mine. Are the secret ways of men to be others? Nay, they are thine and thine alone! Let the others find their own way. You are granted my services. Heed me and let the fates of all be occasioned.”
After Liro’d repeated that I was stunned______ twice over. Once for the words’ strangeness. I couldn’t tell what most of it meant. The words sounded important in phrases but I couldn’t put the phrases together sensibly. It was kind of like the fortune tellers’ way of tricking people into paying handsomely for a prediction that could always come true, no matter what happened. This speech was way different than that though… Twice stunned because Liro had repeated the speech not only well and completely, but at times had even had his voice take on the thin, reedy quality of Ammonde’s. That really got me scared but I didn’t say much to Liro. I didn’t want him getting odd with me.
After that, I stayed out of Liro’s way a little. Especially, as he seemed to become close to Ammonde. Not as close as Mother did though. Afternoons, I could hear first Ammonde talking to her about the patches or asking her how much firewood she would need for the day. Then he would ask her how long she’d had her skirts or what she used to make her hair shine so. Mother would answer and Ammonde would start to speak some bad poems to her. Even I thought they were badly written so I knew Mother would think less of them. The thing is the poems only last two or three minutes before Ammonde’s voice would go all thinness again and soon enough Mother’s voice would be answering his in the same faraway manner. Then the talking would stop, but their voices would still be heard making noises that weren’t words, only garbled sounds. Some of these were lovers’ noises. But some of them were
not. Her betrayal of Father was horrible to hear. The other noises Mother made with Mister Ammonde were worse.
Seamstress Arry and I took to going to bed earlier and earlier after that. I didn’t want Ammonde deciding to talk to me the way he had to Liro and Mother. Ammonde came to my bedroom. He asked if I was unwell. I said no, that I was just sleepy. He said, he could help me to sleep deeply so that I would awaken to a new world. I told him to jank himself. He looked perplexed at that and said that I was a sweet child and that I was the best of my family to speak to him so. I’d never had a grown-up react to being told to ‘locate oneself’ like that before. Then Ammonde asked if I had heard about Father. I said I hadn’t. He told me that father had died down at the pier. An accident, Ammonde called it. He said all this with a look of a man trying not to laugh. He left my bedroom in a rush. I could hear his stifled laughter as he went down the narrow stairs. Liro must have been downstairs because he joined in Ammonde’s laughter. I covered Arry’s ears as I knew I couldn’t hope to cover mine and not hear them. I didn’t know what to make of the laughter or the strange turning within the house but I knew Father was gone, Liro was a lost cause and Mother was worse than lost.I decide to run away. I packed my few things and Seamstress Arry’s. Both of our things only filled a helms-bag_____ once you accounted for the fifty hun-helms that were in it beforehand, that is. I stepped down the stairs when Ammonde was with Mother and Liro was sleeping. Down I went… The stairs never stopped. I went down for what seemed like a long time. I stopped because my head was whirling like when somebody spins you around making you dizzy. I looked up to see how far away the top of the stairs were and it was only half a flight. Casting of some kind I had never read about. I thought I could see a figure at the top of the stairs, peering down to me. It had no legs. It had a head that was separated from its body. Around this tentacled head, which nearly had a monster’s face, it wore(?) a large circular ring of some golden metal. It had a collar of this same strange metal as well. I couldn’t see details to well. There was a dark aspect to its form. It [i[did have almost normal hands, that I do remember clear. Large, violet hands that clasped at the fingers and within them held a simmering Dark. Its voice emerged from beneath its head. It had no mouth that I could see but as I was below it on the staircase, I thought I could see a sea-creature’s maw more beaked than lipped opening and closing as it spoke.
“I am a god of the star-paths, sweet child. Let me lay you in a bower of nebulous cloud, where you will become a goddess of children and mother to slaves who will perish at your whim.”
It sounded like it was from wherever Mister Ammonde was from. The thing, sounded more like Ammonde than Ammonde did, to tell the truth.
Its words hung in the space between us. They rang like an echo from below where I stood on the stairs. Over and over, the words seemed to reach back to their speaker and then pass me by, repeating themselves. They’d descend and decrease as they did only to reverberate back upward to pass me again. The stairs did have and end below me then! It was dark down there. I thought that even so, it was better to go down than to face the monstrous thing a few steps above me on the landing. I heard Mother say, “Ammonde, why are you staring down the stairs? Don’t spare me. Tell me of the worlds without Light.”
The thing raised a Violet hand to her but its voice still rang in my mind. I headed down the stairs. I hoped it would listen to Mother and go to her. That would be bad for her but give me a chance to escape into the darkness… It grew dry.
My throat was parched within three steps down. I went onward. The thing up the staircase called down to me in a fading voice, “Brave child. Wonderful child!”
The steps six and seven saw my lips pucker into hard segments. Shrivelled from dryness.
On the eleventh step downward, Seamstress Arry shrivelled too. Her head grew wizened, like a piece of dried fruit hung in the sunshine. There was nothing like sunshine where the stairs went.
At the thirteenth step, my nightshirt cracked apart. It fell from my shoulders like skin lifting off an ovened-bird. My mouth opened and closed repeatedly, trying to bring a wet to my tongue. It didn’t.
On the twenty-first step the dark became, Darkness. It was pitch-dark so I only knew this because Darkness welcomed me. It wasn’t nearly as strange as the thing upstairs, to hear Darkness speak. Why shouldn’t Darkness be able to live? Darkness’s voice was a woman’s. She said,
“I have awaited you. Fear not, for I am patient. You are prone to me. You lie for me. You sense me as always having been in wait for you. The illithyd has seen sense and left you alone. I would be displeased if it had seconded you to its need. The illithyd has enough. You can stay within me. Now go and be with your kind. Return when you have need. I will await. Bliss to you, dark daughter.”
My eyes would have cried if there had been anything like moisture to them. They were dry so that it hurt to blink. My eyelids were coarse and brittle. The Darkness was a thing I was not ready to live inside. Not yet anyway. I turned and saw the front door. It felt like I had been lost in a desert for I didn’t know how long. The house felt damp. Lovely and damp. I resisted the desire to roll on the rug. It smelled like the sea. The Sea! It was just outside and down the road. How I needed to see it. To touch it and then throw myself into it! To be immersed in water and be safe. On the tall stand by the door I saw my coat. I took it off its hook. I paused. I knew I might never come this way again. Odd though it was to feel this way, I noted the hook’s good service these past few years, thanking it for always being there for me. I shuddered at myself. I stepped outside.
I could just make out where the boats were on the water of the bay. The water wasn’t dark even though it was the middle of the night. For most it would be a dark expanse both across its unseen face and within its black depths. I knew It would never look dark again to me.
I spied Liro. He looked dry. He stood about thirty feet from me along the road to the city. I walked up behind him. He didn’t so much as flinch when I brushed his back with a fingertip. He was
dried… Hollowed of all his moisture. Dead. A statue too thinly made to last an hour. Even the slight touch I’d given him had endangered his form. More than this would see him shatter like a poorly made looking-glass tapped by a maul. There was nothing to do for Liro. My tears might return to me or not. I didn’t feel like crying for him now and if not now, then when?
There were others near Liro’s body. There was Ackule. He lived two porches down. He had his nightshirt on and a long-handled spade in his hand. He marched past me saying, “I will save your mother.” I didn’t turn to watch. There wasn’t much point. The thing would have him if he was brave enough to carry through with his plan. I was close to laughing at him. Heroics are quite funny to me. Now that’s a thing that’s truly pointless. If you are a hero and emerge victorious, you get a pat on the back, the reward and become a king. Then what? Do it all again? Over and over, emerging from the perils to return to a more cushioned throne?
What would I do with a cushion? Sooner or later the hero wouldn’t emerge either… Send in the next heroic type!
I was thinking these thoughts as a man began to say words of a similar kind to me. He was ably dressed and that’s what snapped me out of my reveries. He looked a little part guilder. He looked a little part Scatheius Dash. I told him so. There were a few other men about me. They were dressed in comforting amounts of blackest, cloaked fabric. I admired their fashioning. They wore questioners’ masks and hoods. One didn’t but he was obviously just freshly from the thing. I could see the touches of the thing’s puckers on his face and throat. He was almost conscious. He was fortunate, I suppose. I doubted that he wouldn’t have to grow accustomed to the reverberations I had heard on the staircase. Whoever this man was, his sleep would never be easy again.
The guilder-type spoke his words of defeat to me and I saw much to like in him. I gave him my phrases. I cursed as a Near Sea sailor might. I gave him my words. Words like; “poisoning” and “assassination” and “Cloistering-invisibility”. He reacted as I hoped. I struck him with them. He knew I was not a child in need of the coddle and the party More like the cudgel and the parry! I was more grown than many grown-ups. He saw it… As to the others, dressed in their approximations of Darkness, I didn’t really care. They were dour enough to be the grey one’s friends. That much was clear. And that was enough for now. My world was before me. Darkness would wait. Darkness had said as much.
