Lord tophet, p.4
Lord Tophet, page 4
part #2 of Shadowbridge Series
Now that she’d touched one wall, she rose. She sensed the slope of the ceiling just before her head brushed it. Close to the wall, everything smelled musty. She slid her palms down the slope to the vertical wall and along it, around a corner and on, until her hands brushed against a door. It rattled slightly and she snatched her hands back, afraid to make noise. Then with care she touched it again, patting as lightly as a butterfly, down until she felt against her wrist a cold bar, the handle. It was small, and she felt all around it, trying to picture what she was feeling, an image in her head of the mechanism. The bar was on a spring, and a pin projected from it that she could pull on to slide it back. Slowly she drew it back; the door swung toward her as on well-oiled hinges.
She glanced outside. Like the room, it proved to be featureless, dark, but some distance away on her left, a hint of illumination—no more than a dull glow—suggested an opening. She stuck her head back into the room and whispered, “Will you come with me?” but the voice of the counselor didn’t answer. “Can you hear?” she asked, to no avail. He had apparently evaporated, and she shook her head as if to rid herself of the notion that it had been anything other than imaginary, her befuddled mind’s creation after the . . . the events.
Out of the room again she moved toward the wan light, her hands out and to the sides. Her fingers brushed against walls on each side as she shuffled cautiously along. It was a narrow hallway. As she went, her balance seemed to tip, the light ahead wanting to tilt. She turned, pressing both palms to one wall, to a rough, solid coolness that anchored her and stabilized the hall. She hung her head and breathed deep lungfuls of air. She realized what must have happened in the Dragon Bowl.
Like Diverus she had no memory of it, but that didn’t shake her belief; rather, it reinforced it. Sounds, smells, where she’d gone or what had come to her—these things lingered in the back of her mind, tantalizingly unreachable. She knew no more of them than of where she was at this moment. Had she been transported? Could she even now be in Edgeworld? Instinct maintained that she wasn’t, although she could hardly express why.
She needed to find Diverus. She thought that if she insisted he try to remember Edgeworld, anything he might recall would help her to recollect her own experience—assuming that they were in the same place.
Pressed to the wall, she shuffled along. The nearer she got to the light, the more details she saw in the corridor: other doors, sconces for lamps, and finally an oval of lighter color where the wall had been patched but not painted.
The light shone through a split curtain. Behind it lay a short ramp that ended in a second, heavier drape below. She crept down the ramp to the drapery. With two fingers, she eased one side of it open, revealing a balcony railing that overlooked a large theater space.
She could see tiers of curved benches beneath a distant wall lined with similar small enclosed balconies. The source of the light remained out of view below the balcony, but it threw shadows that moved, accompanied by soft footfalls and a creak of floorboards.
She pushed her head through the curtain and discovered that hers was one of three balconies projecting from the back wall of a stage, each with elaborately wrought moldings. High above the balconies, a large thatched roof covered the stage area, held up by a framework that must have been attached from above. A higher, larger box-like balcony projected out beneath it.
On the stage below, two figures dressed identically in brown vests and trousers strode the boards. They faced each other and gestured as if in a pantomime of declaiming, of demanding. Transfixed, she watched the curious performance. After a while one of them gestured as if putting on shoes while the other mimed the act of writing on a small tablet. “It’s ‘The Tale of the Two Brothers’!” She thought she said this only to herself, but the twins halted their enactment and turned to look up at her. They didn’t move after that. They seemed to be waiting for a response from her.
“I know your story,” she called down.
One of the two took a few steps toward her, gesturing excitedly for her to come down to the stage.
She raised her hands. “How?” she asked.
He pointed a finger around the rear of the stage, through the balconies, directing her back into the hall and beyond the room from where she’d emerged, then effected jagged movements signifying stairs. She nodded that she understood and then retraced her steps back into the dark corridor, where she felt her way along the wall. As he’d indicated, stairs began but a short distance beyond her room.
From then on she navigated by instinct, approximating the location of the stage and feeling her way in search of an entrance. She touched a heavy curtain and, pushing it aside, entered a dark area to one side of the stage, hidden from the audience, but with part of the stage itself visible.
The two figures had stopped their pantomime and awaited her, still as statues. Leodora walked out onto the stage. Four of the lights along the front of it had been lit. Past them she could see the empty theater space that threw back echoes of her footsteps.
Drawing nearer, she found that statues was not an unreasonable comparison to the two men. They were like clockwork creatures that had wound down. Bodies motionless, they watched her approach. Their eyes were alive, though shallowly set; but their mouths were painted on, their chins defined by vertical lines as though separately inserted and hinged. So, too, their fingers had three distinct joints.
Looking from one to the other, she asked, “Am I still in Edgeworld?”
The two faced each other, their expressions changing to show confusion, their painted mouths pursing. Then together they turned back to her and shook their heads. “I’m in Colemaigne, then?”
This time they nodded without prior consultation.
“So my companions, they’re here, too? In this theater?”
One figure nodded; the other pressed his hands together and placed them against his cheek, closing his eyes.
“Yes, I understand,” she said with relief. It was night. They were asleep. Everything would be fine. Until they awoke, she was in no position to learn what had happened to her, so she might as well explore on her own.
The two inhuman men waited for her to say something.
“I know the story you were performing. I perform it, too. I’m a shadow artist.” One of them pressed his thumbs to his fingertips and moved his hands up and down independently as if raising and lowering something. “That’s right—puppets on rods, that’s how I tell stories.” He placed one hand to his own chest and the other on his twin’s shoulder. Again, she understood his intent as clearly as if he had spoken. “I could—if you want—recite it while you perform. If that’s not presumptuous of me.”
His eyes widened and without warning he clasped and hugged her. When he let go, she said, “Well. I didn’t expect that.” He pretended to be shy then, lowering his head. She laughed at his clowning, and he brightened again. His twin shook his head as if disapproving, but glanced her way to see if she was watching. It was all part of their repartee.
“So,” she said, “I will go sit over there beside the lights and tell the story as if to the audience behind me, and you’ll perform it for them.”
They both nodded their accord and shook hands with each other. She walked to the front of the stage, and they strode off into the wings to await her beginning. She sat cross-legged and for a moment gazed up at the roof, which was like an awning overhead. This is as strange as the parade of monsters, she thought, or the Ondiont snake. The thoughts wanted to drift her into daydream, but she banished them, flexed her spine, and placed her palms on the floor. She inhaled deeply and began.
THE TALE OF THE TWO BROTHERS
There once were two brothers named Baloyd and Suald. They had lived on the span called Kakotara their whole uneventful lives. Both of them had married by arrangement. Their brides had been betrothed to them when they were children. Their father was a respectable weaver, and their mother raised colorful, exotic birds, many of which were purchased for the court of Kakotara. Because of this neither of the brothers worked nor needed to. The two endured not the slightest hardship despite their combined sloth, and often discussed money, but solely as the object of various schemes to avoid employment while they continued to feed from the parental trough.
One night when Baloyd and Suald were wandering the streets of the span in search of a rumored card game, they happened to pass by the entrance to the dragon beam. At the end of the spiraling walkway, the hexagonal bowl hovered in the air on hidden supports. Suald noticed how it glowed in the moonlight and pointed this out to his brother. They stopped and stood there, watching it.
No one else was near. The Dragon Bowl on Kakotara had then been dormant for more years than the two brothers had lived, and no one paid it much attention anymore except during festivals, when unanswered libations were poured upon the tiles.
Suald stopped. He said, “Does the hex seem brighter than it should?” He called it hex because that was the way of that span.
Baloyd, the less thoughtful of the two, had little interest in puzzles. “We should find that game house if we want to gamble,” he urged. He walked ahead, hoping his brother would follow. Instead, Suald stepped onto the beam and began strolling out along its curve. Baloyd knew full well that once his brother had fixed upon an idea there was no use arguing him off it, so he turned around and followed.
Suald had already completed the first loop of the dragon beam’s spiral. He came up directly across from Baloyd, nearly close enough that they could have stretched and touched fingertips. He asked casually, “If you could make the hex light up anytime you wanted, what would you ask for?”
“It’s supposed to be bad manners to make demands of the gods,” his brother replied.
“Gulldroppings. This thing hasn’t ignited in thirty years. How does anybody know what you can do to the gods, or what they care about? Or if they even exist beyond stories? Has anybody you know of ever tried to get what they want off a hex?”
“Probably not.” He said nothing further until he’d caught up with Suald, who waited for him at the entrance to the bowl. “I guess I don’t need money, I don’t need another wife. Wouldn’t want to be king—that’s too much work. Guess I’d like to be quick. Then I could take anything I needed anytime and get away without having to pay if I didn’t want to. You know, dash down to Balrog Harbor and steal a keg right from under the noses of those greedy trolls. Be worth it for all the times they’ve bled me for money. But hey, we’re knights of the elbow, let’s go find that game—”
“It is too bright,” Suald said thoughtfully.
Baloyd finally considered the Dragon Bowl at the center of the spiraling arm. The tiles were luminescent, and not from reflected moonlight. They glowed still brighter as he looked on.
“I think something’s going to happen.”
“You’d better say what you want, then, since it was your idea,” Baloyd goaded.
“Well, I surely don’t want speed. Too specific, see. What I want”—and he raised his voice until he was shouting at the sky—“is a way to have whatever I want later. That way I don’t ask for anything particular now, and I get lots more whenever I want!” He grinned at his brother. “Pretty clever, heh?”
“I think we’re starting to glow, too.”
Suald held his hands up. Sparks danced around his fingertips. His hair stood on end, and sparks whirled around his head. The light came from nowhere and everywhere.
Baloyd began to laugh, his giddiness sharpened by fear. Whatever would happen next, they had chosen to demand, and there was no going back, no reneging. The gods had heard them and would either honor their desires or destroy them. He shouted, “Come on, give me speed!” and his brother responded, “Give me everything I want!”
The light turned thick; the world beyond it vanished. The air pressed them and they moved back to back to withstand the pressure. There was a twistedness to the energy, as if they were about to be wrung from head to foot. The air darkened and squealed mechanically; it stank of rotten eggs, of sulfurous pits. The bowl shook so hard that they both fell. They lay screaming, their bravado forgotten, scared witless now, arms over their heads as certain death mashed them.
Then everything stopped.
Neither brother moved.
The terrible shrieking, as though metal were shredding metal, dwindled like a juggernaut rolling off across the sea. The whoosh of waves against the breakers below reemerged as the predominant—the only—sound.
Baloyd opened his eyes.
The night was dark, but along the horizon a faint strip of dawnlight showed. Hours must have passed, although he had no sense of the lost time. Remnants of sour mist hung in the air, already dissipating in the breeze off the ocean. From a distance footsteps came running, and cries of “It came on!” “I saw it!” and “What’d it leave?” rode the air.
The approach of a crowd galvanized the two young men. They sat up and took stock of their surroundings. They were whole, undamaged. Whatever had happened and whatever had arrived—whether it filled their requirements or not—by right it was theirs. They got up quickly. The people rushing along the dragon beam drew up. Across the gap separating them from the platform at the center, they gaped, crestfallen. As a group they had shared in a hope, a promise, dashed now that others had gotten there ahead of them. The two brothers crossed to the middle of the platform.
Four objects lay on the tiles of the bowl: two unsightly red, bulbous-toed shoes; and a small black metal stylus lying atop a clay tablet.
By instinct the two brothers chose their prizes. Baloyd took the shoes; Suald collected the stylus and tablet. Then they walked onto the beam and followed it back to where the others hovered. If the crowd still held a glimmer of hope that the two might share the treasure, Suald’s arrogance banished it. He forced them back along the path with nothing more than a cold sneer.
On Brink Lane he turned his back on them as if daring anyone to try and take him. Baloyd followed, but with frequent glances over his shoulder to make sure no one pursued them. Brink Lane traced the westward curve of the span, and soon the crowd was out of sight around a bend. Suald kept walking. He turned up a narrow side street leading back into the forest of stucco houses and shops, all still dark with sleep. He pushed open an iron gate and entered a courtyard with a small fountain, bordered on three sides by houses. There he finally stopped. “All right, what have you got?”
Baloyd held the shoes up by their laces. They had high necks and spongy red circles at ankle height. The soles were curiously furrowed.
“Well, they’re something. Why don’t you put them on.”
There was a great deal Baloyd thought of saying: how his brother always created situations and then left him to resolve them; how, since the whole idea of challenging the gods had been Suald’s idea, he should be the one to test the Edgeworld gifts—he should be the one to blow up or ignite or melt. But Baloyd said nothing. A lifetime of habit overruled him.
He sat against the lip of the fountain and put on the shoes. He had to loosen the laces to get his feet in and afterward left them undone. He’d never seen laces before; he had no idea what they were for.
Standing, testing, he discovered that the shoes fit him quite well. He walked around the fountain. Nothing happened. When he’d come full circle, he pointed at his brother’s gifts and said, “What about yours, then?”
Suald held the stylus and tablet away from his body as if, should they come to life, he might fling them away. For a moment he held them above the fountain, and Baloyd almost snatched them away for fear he was going to drop them into the water.
Suald pushed his thumb into the surface of the tablet. His nail left a gouge in it.
“Why don’t you write something instead?” Baloyd suggested.
“I don’t see you running any races.”
“I put the shoes on. I walked around. Nothing happened. They’re just shoes.”
“Try running.”
Baloyd sprinted up and down in place. “They don’t work.”
“What do you think I should write?”
“Write that you’d like some breakfast. I’m hungry.”
“Naturally.” He licked the tip of the stylus and inscribed the words A KING’S BREAKFAST. Nothing happened. He frowned. “I don’t think this thing works, either. Look, why don’t you try naming a destination—somewhere you want to go.”
“I don’t have anyplace in mind.”
“Yes, and no wonder you’re not going anywhere. Pick someplace—go to the end of the span. Go to Nourey Gate or something.” He stared sternly at the tablet, then wrote above the already inscribed words, GIVE ME.
Baloyd replied, “Fine. Nourey Ga—” He never finished the word—at least not within his brother’s hearing.
Suald was reading his own writing when a wind threw him off-balance. He slipped on the cobblestones, caught his foot against something in the dark, and sprawled upon a row of metal dishes. He crushed eggs and pomegranates, figs and relishes, sweet breads and popovers. His elbow flipped a creamer, splattering him with goat’s milk.
Covered in the food he’d requested, he started to laugh. He couldn’t help himself; it was all too ridiculously glorious.
From one of the buildings bordering the courtyard, someone shouted, “Shut up, yer drunken swine!” which only caused Suald to laugh even harder.
