by AJ Fitzwater
February 1, 2018 Volume 8 No 4
Through the Eye of the Needle
By AJ Fitzwater
There are only two ways to leave the mistress's menagerie. One is through death, the other is love. Both are tricks.
All of us prisoners buried within the menagerie's pristine fractals are here by virtue of our skills. Fire keeps me alive, and the guests entertained. If the mistress knew my real skill, well. How much less hope is there than none?
Therefore, the voice of no consequence that brings me out of my sundream of the embrace of my beloved ocean must be a trick.
I feel it in my guts; it is the voice which will help me leave this place.
"I spoke, lizard."
She stands close enough to the entrance of my pen that I turn my head, though the detriment to my neck muscles is almost not worth it. As with anyone who intrudes on what weak sunlight I can gather to myself through the atrium glass, she takes a step back upon presentation of the gnarled mass of which was once my left eye. Somehow the mess of scale, flesh, and humour as big as a human head is more disconcerting than the gambit of my full mass.
"I would think," I say, working saliva across my sandy tongue. "My presence here would be obvious. And do not call me lizard. It is an insult to my smaller cousins from whom I am made."
Head back between paws, and that should be the end of it. I need time to work up the energy to examine this newcomer's insides and decide what sort of spy she is. That is my trick; not sunlight, or ocean, or vomited fire. A person's truth lies not in their heart, but in their guts.
The woman does not leave. She tips her head as if examining me from another angle will reveal my true secret.
Hair the colour of my favourite crabs scuttles across her shoulders. My stomach betrays longing for such a feast, and I do nothing to assuage the horror she struggles to contain at such a sound. Let her, let any one of my fellow inmates, think my teeth long for flesh if it keeps them out of my sunlight and their tricks to themselves.
"You are the biggest beast of us all here," the woman says, throwing shade on my front left paw. "Surely a great drakon like you could just fly away."
I am the great eel, fish paying attendance upon my scales. I am flinging myself against the ocean's surge and grasp, pushing up and up until the sun squeezes the pulp and poison from me. I am the eel.
"You have not been here long then." My good eye mocks the ceiling that mocks me back with its clarity; orimos, Drake's corrupted blood, wriggles its silvery maggoty way around the edges. "Do not let those pretty glass panes fool you. They will surely slice you wide open as well as the mistress's fingers can."
The woman clasps her hands in her plain smock. A simple gesture made complicated by the knots of white knuckle and blue veins. She cannot hide her true self from me; no one can. Her guts are all silk threads and thick canvas, barely stitched together with hope. Hope, ha. She would readily lose her hands to leave this place. And yet her hands are her everything.
"I do not see your wings sewn down," she says.
I honour her with a glimpse of my teeth. She does not step back. Fingers tap tap against her smock, as if agitated by the plainness of the fabric rather than my size and the promise of poison from the hollow of my great fangs.
"Just because you do not see a tether or a lock does not mean we are free to move," I say, weaving my head, a sign of dismissal. "You are new. I will forgive you this time for not knowing the rules."
"This is a prison," the woman snaps. "I understand the rules begat by walls all too well."
"Then you will understand you do not ask certain questions," I murmur. I prepare to sleep again.
"Questions like a name?"
The woman steps into my pen, assessing my bulk. Is that a butcher's or a tailor's eye she employs? Is she a spy, or free with her tongue? Either trick will eventually see her dead. Not the smartest of ways to escape the mistress's grasp, but those are certainly popular ways to do it. The garden has many eyes and ears, even when one thinks they are closed; though their magic is neutered the prisoners would hurt you in a moment with fists and spoons if it gained them the false hope of release. Only my sheer bulk has saved me from harm. Those others without teeth or muscle or claws have not fared well.
I am the great eel, diving deep and dark.
The woman hesitates, decides, then bows. Bows! I have begun to think no one knew how to approach one of Drake's line anymore. "My name," she offers, cutting her eyes sideways in case the words settle on someone unintentionally. "Is Riena."
It is a name of one of the newer languages, but it is still old enough that no one here, not mistress or prisoner, artisan nor guest, beast nor magus, will know it is a chosen name that means "Needles."
I am the slippery eel?
"I am Kitahniaa." The woman flinches against the guttural tectonics of the oldest language of them all. I have employed my name in Drakon-het before, and it costs me little.
"That is a...you are a..."
My chuckle is choked with cobwebs and disuse. "Interesting how many misjudge my size and colour. Yes, I am fire-predominate, in dragon speak, if it so interests you. Yes, that is a not-male gender. Have you not figured out that is why the mistress keeps us all here?"
The mistress comes for Riena at a precise enough time. Not too long after we are introduced, but long enough that a lesser beast would be unable to ascertain the calculation in her intent.
This calculation, like her innards, tells me nothing. The mistress carefully shields herself in the steel flame of orimos so it is impossible to look within her. The mistress barely has control of this tongue of Drake's silver fire. But it is enough control that I am perpetually weakened and at the mercy of what little sunlight I can draw upon.
And she likes it that way.
Riena has made herself as comfortable as hay and blanket can suggest in the pen next to mine. Little else passes between us before the hush takes over the inner garden. Those residents that can scuttle from the interior. A mouse emerges from the underbrush, quakes beneath the promise of my bulk, bares its fangs, hisses, and finds a convenient dark hole. Lucky.
The mistress dissolves into being, and captures all the sunlight to her. The scales on my flank rattle above my shiver. The shimmer sits ugly upon her silverness. Hair, skin, eyes, all is afire with orimos; my teeth ache with it.
"You," our mistress says, pointing at Riena. "With me."
Riena is too slow to her feet.
I am a coward, and the eel is hard to kill, and yet...
"What are you staring at, lizard?" The mistress is not so lazy as to spit or slur her words.
"Your greatness, mistress," I mumble, dropping my head as low as possible. At ground level it still comes to her chin.
The mistress steps forward, and my scales creak in protest at the tiny power radiating from the orimos. But oceans forefend, Riena steps between us.
"I am, as always, at your service," Riena murmurs in the reverential tone that has been beaten and starved into us. Her hands twist into her smock.
The mistress looks between us, and a small smile twists her face into unseemly angles. "You too, then."
It takes me longer than necessary to achieve a full standing stance. I have always wondered if the weight of the world is greater here in the mistress's menagerie; it seems a thing she would do. It had been my experience that whirlpools in the ocean could suck even the greatest of bodies to their doom.
Up up, great eel, up.
The mistress turns her back and gestures. One does not disobey, not if they want their flesh to remain intact. I have seen many innards in my time, in ropes slithering across the tiles of the garden.
I prefer seeing them my way, intact in their mysterious glory. Stone, dirt, water, wood; I have seen them all.
One moment, the mistress is walking towards the deserted garden and what little sunlight is allowed is smoothing the tines on my back. The next, we occupy one of the myriad parlours set aside for entertaining guests in the mistress's enclave.
No, enclave is too pithy a description. Least of all is it a home.
The sight of the sheer mass of sprawling buildings outside the teasing windows should hold no fascination. Tucked into a corner of the parlour, keeping as still as possible so as not to disturb the spindly furnishings, thick draperies, and thin skins of artworks scattered around like demons ready to eat my tail, it takes a lot of my small strength not to stare at the outside too long. Riena cannot resist.
The mistress waits, face as still as her terrible hands. Allowing us this view cuts just as deep as her knives.
Outside is no outside at all. Like her temper, the mistress keeps herself restrained within walls upon walls. Here too, orimos-lined glass look out upon blood-copper buildings stitched together by walkways and arches, small courtyards dense with statues dotting the landscape like ugly green lesions as far as the eye can see. At the centre of it all glimmers the atrium garden atop the fractal in which we all reside waiting on the mistress's pleasure.
The mistress has no use for towers or height. Sheer mass is enough to discourage escape. And every time I am given the chance to look, the mass is greater. Perhaps the weight that ties me also attracts stone and glass. Eventually, all creation must assume into arrangements to please the mistress.
The mistress decides when we have seen enough, and tosses a package at Riena's feet as if the contents and Riena's hands are unworthy of her touch. "Get to work. I am having a guest for dinner, and I expect a complete sample by then."
Riena chooses well by picking up the package. I squint my good eye. Her guts have quickened, the stitches tightening in their neat seams.
The mistress strides through one of the many doors too large for her tall frame, but which do nothing for me. The hiss of orimos sizzles away to nothing as she is swallowed by the dark.
"Why did she bring you?" Riena palpates the package, a child guessing at the contents of a gift.
"To keep you honest." I reply as truthfully and obliquely as possible. Riena can do nothing to obscure her true insides to me, but I operate on the assumption that everyone is a spy for the mistress, even the ones who do not intend to be.
The room holds its breath.
Riena pulls on the package string like it is a worm or especially rancid undergarments. "I can leave the room, but you cannot."
Shrugging would disturb the furnishings and old voices. I have never been brought to this place, but I know the voices embedded in the guts of the room. Pitiful cries and pleas for mercy still bleed from the walls. "If you run, I will be punished. Look out there. You may be lost for a time, but she will find you eventually. There is no key to this labyrinth."
My scales itch as I watch dust motes do their spiral tarantella with ease through the weak sunlight.
Her voice when it comes makes my bad eye ache and my belly twist. Considering their lack of use these last few...how long has it been now, eel? I have forgotten...it is not an altogether unpleasant experience. "Why would I care if you are punished?"
"That is a question we all grapple with."
She has found her way into the package. "Wooden needles? Really?"
It is not the reply I expected, but it will do.
"Metal and bone belong to the mistress," I say.
"I have not seen her work with bone." Riena is too busy stroking skeins of silk threads to care which spindly chair deserves her rump. At least she takes one that is not soaked in blood only visible to my good eye and guts.
"Then count yourself lucky."
"I believe in hard work, not luck," Riena murmurs, turning the package contents over and over. "And just how am I supposed to cut threads if there are no scissors?"
My cough is redolent of the last meal of flame stone the mistress forced down my gullet, but at least it contains the whisper of a laugh. I hold out a claw.
Riena's grin does not quite meet her eyes. "Perhaps you will be useful after all, great lizard."
This time, the appellation does not sound like an insult.
And so, she shows me how the eel will once more become one with the great ocean.
Even with needles that are little more than splinters, her fingers meld thread and fabric with what would be called magic to the untrained eye. In a few short hours, a bee like one that would tend the flowering succulents along my shore flourishes out of the fabric. It is the finest of such work I have ever had the pleasure to lay eye upon, but nothing that would pique the mistress's unusual tastes.
Until, upon inspection by our guardian, the bee flicks its silver wings and flies off the fabric.
Stiff joints are forgotten from the many hours hunched into a position even more unnatural than that allowed by my pen. I even neglect to farewell the last rays of the day as the bee hums around the room, falling heavy upon this or that floral arrangement, or crawling towards the startled eyes of one of the subjects in a masterpiece painting. When it chances upon my claw, the tight delicate stitches reveal its unnatural origins, and yet. And yet.
A tight smile grips the mistress's face at the delight that bounds out of the dinner guest shown to the room. The frill-bedecked woman chases the embroidered bee, her promises of useless riches and titles almost incoherent. The dinner guest is so taken with the embroidered bee she almost forgets I am there.
Almost.
Twilight has taken the parlour, and the mistress snaps her fingers indolently. Lamps flare. The guest stumbles to a stop at my claws.
"Oh," she breathes. "I thought you were a statue."
I offer her a good look at my bad eye, and she giggle-shrieks.
How far Drake's line has fallen.
The gifting of the bee to the guest does not sit at all well with Riena, but she can offer no protest as the mistress ushers the human dessert from the room. There is a moment of darkness (I am the eel I am the eel) as the mistress steals back all the light, but the orimos of her armour flashes with the last flick of her hand, and we are back in the night-gloom garden.
"She would not have left us there, would she?" Riena straightens her back with a well-earned click of bones, and twists her hands into her smock.
"Metal and bone, metal and bone," I mutter.
It is too far from the centre of the garden, too many bushes, I cannot see my pen. Metal and bone, water too deep and cold.
A light pressure on my left paw. A fish nibble only, but I use what remains of the day's sun-scribed energy to rumble a warning deep in my gullet.
"This way, lizard," Riena whispers.
To come at me from the left side is a dangerous affair.
But the hay is sand and the still sun-warm tiles is ocean and oh home, oh home.
Shouts prickle across my dark-smothered sight.
"Make a door!"
"...a key..."
"...a knife..."
The sun is singing to me, I know where it is at all times even when it is below my feet, and it is high, high, but still the dark holds me tight, the bottom of the ocean.
Fabric tears. The wet-dry staccato of flesh against flesh. Ah, the prisoners have ventured out of their bolt holes, having discovered one in their midst they think has made good with the mistress. One they can pass on their mislaid hurt to.
"Come on nimble fingers, stitch 'em a grave!"
The shouts pile upon and upon and upon, muffled like blankets, soft and wet as blood.
A curse and spit. "Forget that. Stitch 'er heart in me hands or I be breakin' 'em pretty fingers off one by one!"
No. They have chosen Riena. They know not what they do. Oh great sky, serve me now like you have never served me before.
I
am the great eel. Stone and tile and wall part like water before me. Windows tremble and for a moment, just a moment, orimos stills in the wake of my bellow.
The mob scatters before the lash of my spiked tail, running for their pens in the tunnels that twist about and below the garden we ostensibly share. I manage to vomit a thin sword of flame. The gnarled mass on the left side of my face does the rest.
The green and white and silver of the garden blurs together as I scoop Riena into my claws. Poisonous claws. Claws that can rend a man brain to belly.
Claws that only yesterday clipped silk threads.
Riena is not dead.
I whisper her my plan in Drakon-het in between licks to her swollen and bloody hands.
Does she know the ocean? Does she know the sky? Does she know that place in between where they meet, where Drake says our scales were forged on the anvil of birth and re-birth of the day?
She takes a long time to reply.
And when she does, in that oldest newest language, she wants to know why the treacheries of my mouth are not killing her.
Myth is such a cumbersome beastie. But a few times, like now, it becomes the perfect maelstrom of usefulness. It is not so easy to look into the guts of myth.
The ability to produce flame is a common burden for my kind; it does nothing for our sociability, for which I am grateful. Poison buried in the hollows of my teeth is a recent aberration, and one of the tricks for which the mistress sought me out. What the mistress does not know is that I have learned to control this poison; what is a deathly bite to one, can be a healing touch to another if I so choose.
When Riena can stand—hours or days might have passed, I cannot tell, no one comes to check if she is alive—she delivers the request that will make or break the deal.
She requires a needle of uncommon fortitude and worth.
Her bruised hands are steady as she points. I do not flinch or roar or dribble fire as she approaches and strokes my lips, easing them apart to test each fang for tenacity and sharpness.
"This one," she whispers in that old new language, touching a vicious edge which could open her wounds anew if I let it.