Sunday, July 8th, 2012
As Della approaches the door,
she sees a darkness through it that is most certainly not her bathroom. She
follows Samantha, uncertain but excited, then feels the world turn inside-out
around her. She’s been drunk a couple of
times, hung over once, and the sensation as she steps through is remarkably
like the whole process compressed into a single second that seems to last
forever – except without all the partying and peeing and wishing you were
dead. She goes dizzy, loses her sense of
space and time, feels like she’s been hit in the back of the head with a brick
– then she sets her foot down, and she’s through.
“So this is my place,” Samantha says warmly, gesturing at the open living room
as she flips on the light switch.
Bookshelves dot the walls, every one of them filled with volumes of
varying height and thickness, their spines perfectly aligned except for the odd
gap. A dining table, the kitchen
counter, two coffee tables, and a desk are all covered with books and papers,
manila folders piled and arranged here and there. A few filing cabinets stand stoically in a
corner.
“You sure seem to keep busy,”
Della says.
“Yeah,” Sam says, cocking an
eyebrow. “I don’t eat or sleep. Made of wood, you know. So I read and do some, um, ‘filing’ for
Jennie. She’s sure bright, but she can
be a bit flighty at times, so I help her keep things in order.”
“I see,” Della says, taking in
the scene. “So, what do we need?”
“Well,” Della says, “Far as I
can tell, Thomas is pissed about having his shit stolen by some goon. I’d be pissed if my magic treasure was
taken. He just wants to get it back.” She thinks for a moment. “Also, I guess it would be nice to find out
what this revenant is up to. We’re not
sure what she wants with it, and Alice seems to be pretty miffed about her just
walking around unsupervised.”
“Well, what did Thomas use it
for? That’s clue number one to what la mujer muerta – heh, mujerta – is gonna do with it.”
“He didn’t do anything with it. It was just a trophy. We don’t even know what it’s good for. The guy’s just had it for freakin’ ever.”
“Huh,” Sam says, twirling her
hair and tapping a foot. “So: we hit your anchor, track down la mujerta, then maybe – if we see where
it ends up, we might be able to find out what she wants to do with it. We could also try when it was made, ask
whoever made it what it’s for.”
“What, like, tonight?” The bramblekin swiftly nods her head. “You can do
all that?”
“Sure,” Sam says. “It’s just expensive. But Jennie and Alice go way back, so it’s not
that big of a deal. The hardest part is
keeping all the elements straight in my head when I weave the spell.”
“Jeez,” Della says, “Alice made
Thomas promise her an unspecified favor for like a two-minute scrye. This seems like it would use up a lot more
tallow than that.”
“Ha! Storing magic up like that is a nifty trick,
but it’s really a symptom of the mages’ limitations. While they wield tallow like a cudgel, to
force the world to fit their will, we are able to take a more persuasive tack. They’re still fully human, after all; they
only use magic. We bramblekin are magic.” Samantha walks
to a storage closet and begins rummaging around. “We’ll want this,” she says, placing what
looks like a wooden hula hoop for a four-year-old on the ground. “And a few of these,” she adds, pulling down
a box from the shelf above. She counts
out five sheets of yellowed paper, double checks, then replaces the box. “All right, we’re set,” Sam says as she
gathers up the wooden ring and heads for her bedroom. “C’mon, let’s get this show on the road.”
Della follows her into a bedroom
that looks ready for a guest, but not lived-in.
An immaculate bed sits beneath the window, a full-length mirror some
paces from its foot. Little trinkets dot
the various surfaces: a nightstand, a
small vanity, and a corner desk.
Samantha stands before the mirror, closes her eyes, and speaks her incantation:
Mirror, mirror, in my room
Weave for us from Journey’s loom
Guide us through a bramble pass
To the Sandstorm Hourglass
Let the path be trod by night
Hidden from the sunshine bright
First, the anchor Della knows
After that, through several doors
One and two, then skip the rest
End, then start, then back here – yes?
Another brief break in the
bramblekin’s glamour indicates that the spell has taken effect. Samantha nods to Della and steps through the
glassy surface as though it were a doorway.
Della approaches hesitantly, reaches through with one hand, and feels
the glass yield to her touch. The
surface is cool, but offers no resistance to her movement. She leans through with her upper body and
sees a dirt path through a tangled wood on the other side.
The bramblekin takes Della’s
hand and pulls her through. “C’mon, you
don’t want to spend time split between worlds.
It’s bad for the digestion.”
Della follows, bewildered.
“This must be the bramble,” she
says, after taking in her surroundings.
“Bingo,” Samantha says, leading
Della down the path. “We’ll head through
the bramble between destinations. These
will keep us safe,” she says, waving the stack of papers in her free hand, the
wooden hoop looped over her arm. Della
moves at a stuttering jog to keep pace with Sam through the twists and turns of
the bramble. Brush crowds at the edges
of the path, making it impossible to see more than a few yards ahead, but soon
enough they come to a door set in a thicketed frame. “OK,” Samantha says, “Showtime. Just stay close and don’t do anything stupid.”
The admonition strikes an angry
chord with Della, but she has learned her lesson: she resolves to stay close to her guide and
take no action out of turn.
Samantha opens the door and
leads them through to the bloodkin trophy room.
Dead ahead, Della sees the revenant turn in their direction at the
creaking sound. Samantha shouts, “Safe
passage! We got safe passage,” an octave
higher than her normal speaking voice. Memories
fall into place, but Della concentrates on the task at hand as she follows Sam
across the trophy room to the other door.
The revenant smiles and nods as the two of them pass her by without another
word.
Once back in the bramble, Della
says, “I’ve seen that before. I heard
you, when Alice was scrying the theft.
But I didn’t recognize your voice, because you were shouting.”
Samantha looks briefly back at
Della, then turns to the path ahead and says, “Well, yeah. You’ll have that, on a big project like this.” Della thinks back to the oddities – the “seeing
double,” the “meeting again” – but they are approaching another door. “Here we go,” Sam says cheerfully, throwing
the door wide before her as she continues apace.
Della sees an entirely different
room now, floor-to-ceiling windows to her right, one panel distorted to allow a
full-grown adult to pass through. There’s
the revenant again, standing before a large rock on a pedestal with the
Sandstorm Hourglass in her left hand. A
trinket hangs from its leg on a braided black cord. Samantha shouts as they run through to the
opposite door, “Safe passage! Safe
passage again!” Beyond the windows,
Della sees an enormous crater yawning wide in the moonlight. The smells of desert dust and burnt-out
electronics fill her nostrils as they pass through the next door, before the
first has even closed behind them.
In the bramble, Della notices
that one of the papers in Samantha’s hand is crumbling to dust.
“What’s with those papers,” she
asks.
“They’re writs of safe passage,”
Samantha explains. “They’ll prevent
anyone from harming us while we’re between the bramble. We can talk with the people we meet, but so
long as we take no action against them, they’ll do nothing against us if they
know what’s good for ‘em. It’s a strange
sort of magic that runs off of agreement:
if you can get the powers that be to agree on something, they’ll have
Hell to pay if they break their word later.
Anyway, I got like a hundred of these a while back, they’re pretty
useful.”
“How’d you get them,” Della
asks.
“It’s a long story,” Samantha
says as they approach the next door. Unlike the others, this one isn’t a wide
wooden door with a push bar, but a regular-sized steel door with a nickel-silver
knob. She throws the door wide and steps
out onto a walkway alongside a set of train tracks. “Shit,” she exclaims, stopping abruptly and
causing Della to run into her from behind.
“What,” Della asks. She looks around: they stand atop a trestle, rising over the
tree tops, looking down over a moonlit river.
They’ve just come out of a utility closet or a stairwell set in a tower at
the side of the trestle. Samantha turns
around and scrambles for the door, but it has swung shut and locked behind
them.
“Oh, fuck. Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck.” Samantha leans against the door and falls to
a seated position, cradling her head in her hands. “I’m, uh – I’m not so good with heights.” Della looks to her right: the tracks ramp down to ground level. To her left, she sees another tower across
the river, a good hundred yards or so distant.
Nearing the tower, the revenant proceeds along the walkway, carrying the
Sandstorm Hourglass in her left hand as before.
On her right shoulder, she carries an enormous rock glinting in the
moonlight – the one from the pedestal in the last room, Della reasons.
She turns to Samantha, huddled
into a ball against the door and rocking back and forth. “Tell you what,” Della says. “I’ll go make sure we’ve got a doorway on the
other side. You just stay here and try
to keep it together. When I come back,
if that’s where the door is, we can get you there safely. Sound good?”
“Yeah, sure,” Sam says. The creeping desperation in her voice tells
Della that she’ll agree to pretty much anything that doesn’t involve looking
down. Della heads across the trestle,
hurrying to catch up with the revenant.
Her footsteps clatter along the
walkway. Several dozen yards away, the
revenant turns around to look back at her.
Della slows her pace and waves as she approaches, regretting that she
did not bring a writ of safe passage with her.
Whatever. The revenant is laden,
and if she makes a move, Della will easily be able to counter and gain the
advantage. Now that she knows what her
opponent is capable of, she doesn’t expect to be taken by surprise again.
“Evening,” she says with a
smile.
“Hello,” Ferraille replies as
the bloodkin whelp draws closer. She
shifts her weight under the diablo stone as she stands to face the child
squarely. “You seem to get around.”
“Yeah,” Della says, coming to a
stop just out of arm’s reach. “I’m here
and there.”
The whelp still bears the mark
of the writ – Ferraille can do nothing to harm her. That is doubtless the source of her casual
ease; were it not for the writ’s protection, Ferraille would deal with the
nuisance right now and be done with it.
Yet the bloodsucker can do nothing
against her, lest she lose the writ’s protection. Why has she come?
“What brings you here,” Ferraille
asks.
“Well,” Della says, “I couldn’t
stop you from taking the hourglass. So
now I need to get it back.”
“You are persistent,” Ferraille
admits with a diffident tilt of her head.
“But I am afraid I still need it for my own purposes. So: we
stand again at an impasse.”
“And that big rock on your
shoulder?”
Ferraille shoots her eyes
briefly to the diablo stone. “What of
it? It is none of your concern.”
“Well, it was in some kind of
museum before,” Della says. “You’re
going around, stealing prominent objects for purposes unknown. You seem to be somewhat well-connected – if you
were gathering these items for a benign purpose, borrowing or buying might be
easier. So, on the contrary, I think it is my concern.”
Ferraille purses her lips and
inclines her head toward the bloodkin.
Perhaps she is not as foolish as she appears. “Perhaps,” she acknowledges. She waits for it, but the pain does not
come. She is in a precarious position –
she must walk a knife’s edge, careful neither to betray her master nor to provoke
her interrogator. Should it come to
blows, her burdens will put her at an immediate and decisive disadvantage, to
say nothing of the difficulty she will face in retrieving the stone, should it
fall through or off the walkway.
“So what are they for?”
“I cannot say,” Ferraille replies,
narrowing her eyes with a deliberate sigh.
“My master’s eye is always upon me, and I cannot betray his purpose.”
“All right,” the bloodkin
says. “Then what’s your angle in all
this?” Ferraille considers her options
carefully.
“I once overheard a man say, ‘The
assholes have the world by the tail, and they will hit you with it every chance
they get’. I suppose this is why I do
what I do.”
“So, what? You wanna become the biggest asshole?”
“No,” Ferraille says, shaking
her head in dismay. “My solution is much
simpler. I will kill them all.” The whelp locks eyes with her for a moment.
“Well, shit,” she says with a
laugh, “That sounds like something I could get behind!”
“Oh, really,” Ferraille asks
with a wry smile, grateful for the chance to divert the conversation.
“Yeah,” the girl agrees
eagerly. “There’s all kinds of assholes
throwing their weight around. My friend’s
dad, he works in advertising, these executives make stupid changes to good ads
just so they can prove that they’ve got the power to cancel the project. This shit happens all the time, and it pisses me off.
So who are you after?
Politicians? Bankers? Executives?
World leaders?”
Ferraille raises her eyebrows
and says flatly, “All of them.”
“Well, Christ,” the bloodkin
says, eyes wide. “Seems like a tough row
to hoe, with a rock and an hourglass.”
Ferraille shrugs slightly
beneath the weight of the stone. “Sometimes,
the balance can be tipped by the smallest of things.”
“You don’t say.” The bloodkin narrows her eyes and glances
side to side. “So,” she says
conspiratorially, “You need any help?”
Ferraille weighs her
options. This is an unexpected turn, to
be sure, but she has worked alone for so very long. While the bloodkin may not prove terribly
useful, she could be a thorn in Ferraille’s side if rebuffed – perhaps she may
have some instrumental value. Life and death, she remembers. It certainly would be handy for these elements to come to her. And if this whelp is able to help her in any
other way in the meantime, then so much the better.
“I may, indeed,” Ferraille says
after her considerations. “But we cannot
speak of these things now. I shall send
for you: look for the ravens.”
“All
right,” the bloodkin says with a smile. “Until
then.” She turns on her heel and heads
back across the trestle. Ferraille watches
as she retreats into the distance, turning back to her own long road after the
whelp has gone some fifty yards.
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