"I don't care. I kick you all the time and you don’t complain; you just cry. Which you are doing, and don’t think I haven’t noticed. Figure out who it belongs to if you can. A lot of these people fled here from the burning districts. If you don't find its family, find a staff member to take care of it until we can put it up for adoption. Oh, and if you do find the parents, and if you determine that they abandoned it, we still put it up for adoption. You are not to give it back to them."
“Not going to claim him for your ranks of slaves?” she asked dryly.
“Don’t fuck with me. You know better.”
"Can I take care of it?"
He stared at her before letting out a guffaw. "You? You, take care of a little brat? You live in a cell on a pile of straw! Hahaha - no. You must really be desperate to come up with that sorry attempt at injecting some meaning into your life. Or are you just really bored? If you’re that fucking bored, I can find plenty to fill your time."
The knot in her throat twisted, tears blinking back into her eyes. "That en't my fault! I could take care of him, even for a couple days. If I can’t find his parents, I’ll see if someone in the kitche—"
"A freewoman," interjected Lord Telyra. "Not a slave. Do you want him to have a life like yours? Your parents couldn't take care of you, whoever they were … not that I blame them. You are a handful. But they left you a lovely inheritance." He laughed and took a swig from a container at his waist.
"Are you drinking ...?"
"Water, you little shit! You could've asked if I needed some, don't you think? Do you have any idea what I’ve had to do today? You of all people! Look at me." He gestured at his bloody uniform. "And they haven’t even charged the walls yet! And here you are, living for free under my roof and calling it my fault? Worthless, useless, ungrateful, insulting—"
"Do you need any wat—"
"No. Don't interrupt me. Second time today."
“Why don’t you get someone else to do this?”
He hesitated, glancing over her shoulder to the wall where Kalorn was treating his patients. In his eyes, she could almost see the discarded leg and the unconscious man beside it.
“… Because you know what it’s like to be abandoned,” he said, his tone abruptly softening. “Because you won’t just leave him in a corner somewhere like I found him.” He held her gaze, his eyes intensely gentle.
… Lord Telyra noticed the amputated man. Lord Telyra felt the pain of his loss. Lord Telyra cared about the abandoned child. He … among all these people, as spiteful as he was. His empathy was a warm protective glow, screening out the madness around them.
This. This is what I keep holding onto.
"Are you gonna be okay? Do you want me to get Kalorn? Your arm …"
His eyes glazed, but they cleared and he shook his head. "No. No. I'm fine; it hurts, but I'm fine. Get the medic on the wall to patch me up. After you find something to do with that —" he nodded at the crying baby, raising his voice, "I want you to go to your room, and stay there."
"Are we safe here? I don't remember the last time …"
“Castle's the safest place you could be. You think I’d leave you in danger? Drawbridge coming up after I leave and I’ve tripled the guard. Don't argue with me."
"Yes, Master."
"Another thing, slave. Don't ever call someone else 'Lord' again."
"What?"
"'Lord' Loren," he said and took another drink.
She eyed the bottle warily, wrestling with the increasingly agitated baby. "But ... he is a lord ... There's lots of lords ..."
"Yes, but they're not your lord. Look at me."
She met his icy stare. "No, they're not. My Lord."
They watched each other for a moment; then he turned and galloped out the double-doors and into the misty white afternoon.
VI: The Wall
Blighted leaves grated with the rasp of crawling insects, a vindictive breeze whipping through Rose’s hair. The chill from the soil welled up around her legs, as icy and smothering as floodwater in a moat.
What a stupid errand this had been.
The foliage here was primeval. Bark flaked off of bulging trunks, diseased bandages for hardened, arthritic bodies. The branches were warped, as if unseen currents had torn and twisted them out of shape, deepening the grooves of their malice. With every footstep she was sinking deeper, the grey cloudy light dimming to sickly green shadow.
At the base of a ditch, a gust seized her and threw her tripping and sliding to the bottom, where she came to rest flat on her stomach. Cold mud molested her bare arms and legs with grimy fingers, seeping through her clothing. Lifting her face, her cheeks smarting from the impact with the ground, she tried to wipe it off, but like leeches, it held fast, sheathing her fingers with freezing grit.
The air down here was static and unvaried. It felt artificial, like the forced circulation of dead oxygen through an unseen vent. To the left, the slope of the ground surged steeply, a dense, oppressive sea of blackened emerald and misshapen pillars towering ever higher. The leaves fluttered like seaweed in a submarine cavern, the towering guardians whispering misdirection.
Clambering upright, she tried to press on toward the ascent, but with each step, the wind buffeted harder, until it became a struggle even to lift each foot. Brutal…! She’d known a storm was on its way, but this was a pretty impressive gale, even for Talystasia. Raising her hand, she pushed out against a wall of air. Like a helpless doll, she was flung to the ground in the opposite direction, tumbling head over heels.
Choking and gasping, she lurched upright, her eyes widening.
Several yards away, a colossal slab of russet stone surged out of the ground, joining with identical slabs to either side. Despite their vastness, they appeared painfully overburdened by the cumbersome weight that crushed down on them from above. Overhead, through the twisting branches of the bowed trees, the tessellation of identical slabs stretched interminably into the distance, making a stark, monolithic stab at the sky.
… The Wall. She had never been so close to it before, not from down here at any rate. The battlements of the outer walls were as close as she’d ever wanted to come. And here it was, the massive blocks near enough even to touch.
Edging across the wet ground, she froze in place, one hand sinking into the cold mud, her breath caught in her throat.
Something … was terribly wrong.
The trees were still thrashing wildly all around, but she couldn't hear the creaking of the branches or the rustling of the leaves or the hollow wail of the wind. The awareness pooled coldly in her gut, flooding in over her head, mounting into full-on panic.
… She couldn’t hear a thing.
Hyperventilating, she fought for the sound of her own breath, but there was only the silent pounding under her ribs like a heart attack, a dizzy faintness stealing over her limbs like a toxin.
There was no sound at all. Not even the ringing in her ears.
How can I just suddenly be deaf …? There was nothing wrong with me! I was fine. FINE—
With savage desperation, she shrieked at the top of her lungs.
Nothing.
Why was this happening …?
She looked back up at the Wall, and scrambled away in shock. There was—
She blinked. There was a hole between the gargantuan bricks.
It hadn’t been there before. There was no way she couldn’t have noticed it—
And now that she had … she couldn’t look away.
It wasn’t just a gap or a doorway … It was like nothing she had ever seen—like someone or something had simply torn a gash in the fabric of the world with a massive, angry claw. It clashed violently with the surrounding bricks, obliterating not only light and colour, but seemingly sight and even darkness.
As she stared, she felt the pull of vertigo knotting a rope around her belly. The ground seemed to tilt, dragging her toward the fissure. Her lungs burning with noiseless screams, she dug her fingers into the dirt,
clawing to the earth for all she was worth.
This was ludicrous, mad—something out of a nightmare and not the sane, rational universe—but there was no time to grapple with the impossible. The chasm loomed, a bottomless drop, the threat of it terrifyingly real. She could feel her mind slipping inexorably toward the abyss, the silent wind rushing past. If she didn’t get away, and now ...
Battling the tilting, soundless earthquake, she fought for her feet. Sensation bolted from her body and her legs toppled beneath her, crumpled and useless, her surroundings drifting upward in a slow-motion nightmare toward the ground.
Her whole body was anesthetized, a helpless, heavy dead weight, numb and unresponsive. She was imprisoned, a waking dreamer locked tight in the clutches of numbing paralysis, her eyes clamped wide and unprotected as the passage swallowed her sight.
Acceleration.
Blindness.
~~~
Hyperventilating thoughts.
Supposing I’m comatose.
If so, she was doomed. No one ever went to the Wall. No one would find her lying there.
What if she didn’t even have a body anymore …? Supposing she was dead?
… Arms and legs, hands and feet, flesh and blood. Grass and trees, earth below, sky above. Brocade gowns, afternoon tea with extra cream, the dusty scent of forgotten tomes in the library, the perfume of the garden and cold, fresh, rain-drenched air, rare sunlight dancing on marble walls and over silk sheets, evenings lost in the pages of history and the lives of dead heroes. My father’s arms around me, my brother’s laugher.
Gone.
It was all only minutes ago. Those minutes were now the gap of time without end … an un-crossable, absolute, final divide.
Black.
Maybe this was it. Forever, trapped alone in nothingness. Maybe all roads led here, and for every soul that lived and breathed and laughed and hoped, life was but a lie, a cruel, meaningless joke with only oblivion for a punch line.
Whatever this was, however she’d come to be here—nowhere—there was nothing to measure existence by but hollow, interminable, changeless agony. There was no past or reason, no meaning or worth. It had all been compressed into an endless future, unbearable and inescapable.
From the bottom of her condemned being, a scream roared to the surface, as involuntary as a hurricane. In her disembodied consciousness, she screamed and screamed until it seemed it was all she'd ever been: an endless gulf of agony, stretching across eternity.
~~~
Her knees were twin beacons of crushing pain, her palms and wrists smarting with the jolt of a sudden impact. Beneath her fingers … texture, colour. Rough brown stone, footprints in the dust.
Light. Light! THANK YOU GOD!
Tears cascaded down her face, warm and life-giving as holy water. Hugging herself fiercely, she felt the ground beneath her, rolling off of her throbbing knees. Every inch of her body shook with wave upon wave of release and relief.
There was no way to know how long she had been floating out there in the emptiness, torn from her body and out of the world, fluctuating uncontrollably between unbearable, interminable rumination and rabid, mindless horror.
After the spell, her own voice, muffled by the stale, subterranean air, sounded both hyper-real and somehow imaginary.
“I was in …Hell.”
A cool, soft yellow glow issued from all around.
So where am I now …
Overhead was only hollow blackness, more tenebrous than a midnight sky. The far wall was also cloaked by shadow, but the other three—
Rose’s heart jumped in her chest, a fresh shot of fear prickling along her spine.
On all three sides, the massive uninterrupted bricks of the Wall enclosed her inside a narrow, high chamber. There was no doorway leading back outside, no grey dusk glow promising air and freedom, only the darkness and the dim yellow light.
A frieze ran the perimeter of the room, pulsing faintly.
She squinted. The light from the frieze obviously wasn’t torchlight or fire, but it couldn’t be sunlight.
This was unnatural. Not magical, surely—she didn’t have many experiences with the Elders to serve as a reference point, but she never had the feeling that she was in any sort of danger when one of them was in court. Quite the opposite. This was as far from that as anything could get. But what could it possibly be?
Does anyone even know the Wall is hollow …?
And the fear …
No wonder we are terrified of this place. There is a reason. Not a mindless tradition after all—we simply cannot afford to remember why we are avoiding it. It would drive anybody mad.
It’s probably going to drive me mad.
Others that had been here—what had happened to them?
“Oh God,” she breathed aloud.
What if it happened again …?
What if the next time was forever …?
Crawling forward, she groped on the ground for something sharp, a jagged rock, anything.
This time … this time she’d been lucky. She couldn’t risk going back there—to that nothing. If it started again, she’d have to kill herself.
With a deep breath, she climbed precariously to her feet, struggling to still her pounding heart. It was like she was on a runaway carriage, the horses galloping mindlessly into a dark, malign country.
For God’s sake, she didn’t even remember walking into this place. How could she be inside the Wall?
I was walking along in the woods … and then there was the Wall, and then there was the nothing … and now … this.
Maybe she’d had some kind of a seizure.
But then how did I end up in here?
No, there was no way it’d been a coincidence. That opening in the Wall had just suddenly appeared. What had happened to her had to have been some kind of a passage. The Wall, it seemed, was more than just a mountain of bricks. As chilling as it was, it seemed almost alive—a monster that had opened up its jaws of stone … and eaten her.
It felt like she should be trying to piece it all together, to understand.
But she was still in a survival situation, without food or water or a clear way out.
The far wall, occluded by darkness—would that be where the Wall joined with the summit of the hill? Perhaps this chamber merged into a cavern in the hillside, or perhaps there was a hidden stair. There might be a way to climb back out to the surface. There’d be time enough to try and make sense of all this later. Trapped as she was, she was whole again and back in the world. That was a start … take courage from that.
Starting listlessly forward, she laughed hollowly, and then halted, sighing.
Time. Moments ago, she’d had eternity … and it’d been worthless beyond all imagination.
Who am I kidding.
Assuming she got out of here … how could she do anything ever again? With what she knew now, with what she’d seen—? That black … it would never leave her … whatever it was. Was it just a gate? Or had it always been there? Maybe the hole in Wall had been a mirror and not just a door, reflecting reality as it truly was. Perhaps that nothing was the only truth in the entire universe. And this was just an illusion, a stone’s throw in the black.
Screaming forever in silence.
Do something. Just do something …!
Cautiously, two feet from the Wall, she extended her hand, fingers shaking, and laid her palm flat against the surface.
It felt solid enough beneath her fingertips, coarse with the ridges and troughs of reality. Level with her eyes, the coiled etchings on the wall secreted their trembling light.
Letting out a shaky breath, she turned and made a strangled exclamation, her thoughts again dismantled.
Three feet from where she stood, the luminous frieze split off from the wall, winding lazily through the air. The shimmering string of designs unfolded across the chamber like the severed vertebrae of a coiled serpent, disappearing into the inky blackness concealing the far wall.
&
nbsp; What were these things, and what kind of dark could swallow up things that glowed with their own light …?
Her mind teetered again at the rim of eternity, but she shook her head.
There was something there, even if it couldn’t be seen. The back of the chamber might be lost in shadow, but at least it was there.
And these things, whatever they were … were beautiful.
The light from the floating shapes rippled like sunlight through shallow water, the gentle current they rode stirring her hair and whispering down her neck.
The breeze felt bracing, after the horror of the abyss.
Sensation. Light. She felt almost desperate for both. Unable to resist, she touched one.
It melted painlessly into her skin, a pocket-size sun; her hand lit up like a shivering blossom, muscles and joints illuminated against the translucent, streaming radiance.
Shaken, she blinked, but her hand extinguished like a torch and the mysterious specter drifted on.
Inhaling, she stepped forward. One of the luminous sigils drew up to her and then slowed as if hesitating; then it plunged between her eyes with a burst of light that filled her cranium. Before she could do more than gasp with startlement, the light blinked out.
It was like falling into a warm, rejuvenating, luxurious bath. The breeze was soothing on her clammy skin and fatigued nerves. Putting one foot in front of the other, she followed the serpentine lights along their winding pathway in a warm, sleepy trance, the pale light whispering softly in her head like golden bells. After her encounter with the harrowing sea of emptiness, she wanted nothing more than to rest on this shore of tranquillity, alien as it was.
And then she noticed: it had been dark for just too long. The flashes had stopped.
She snapped open her eyes.
The darkness stared back at her. The lights blew out like a procession of candles. The temperature plunged like a stone.
Rose shivered, every vessel aching to keep pace with her racing heart. Then—
A voice like granite pulverizing her brain.
It's trying to tell you something.
"What?"
Again the madness was keying up, the carriage launching back into its full-on run of reckless, unstoppable haste.
Talystasia: A Faerytale Page 9