Steelhands (2011)

by Jaida Jones

  There was no need to distract her with my peculiarities. At least, not for the time being.

  After some argument over the best time to stage our petty crime—my feelings were that this should be done in the dead of night, as was proper; Laure, on the other hand, thought that was foolish and would make it difficult to see what we were doing, besides—we’d finally come to an agreement. We had arranged that I would meet her at Gaeth’s door around noontime, when most of the dormitory staff, and its inhabitants, would be out eating lunch.

  Despite Laure’s very fluid sense of time—and timing, not to mention—she was there before I was, shifting from foot to foot and doing her best not to look suspicious. She was so beautiful that it was impossible to think of anyone finding offense in her presence, but then it was just like Laure not to take that into consideration.

  “Bet you were scrubbing all the banisters on your way here,” she hissed in a gargantuan stage whisper.

  “It was only the doorknob,” I told her, honestly offended. “Now give me one of your hairpins.”

  “One of my hairpins?” Laure asked, staring at me as though I’d just spoken in gibberish. I nodded, holding my hand out to her. “Toverre, you know as well as I do that I don’t wear hairpins.”

  That was right, I realized with a start. They were always getting lost, and she’d find them in the night by rolling over onto one and stabbing herself in the head.

  And yet in all the books I’d read, whenever there was a necessary break-in, the intrepid hero borrowed a hairpin from his heroine. What would we use to pick the lock on his door without one?

  “Do you have anything similar to a hairpin?” I asked. “Oh! I have it. Lend me your brooch.”

  Laure unclasped it with some trepidation, still looking at me as though she thought I had taken leave of my senses. “What’re you gonna do with it?” she asked. “That’s my mother’s old brooch, Toverre. I don’t want you breaking it.”

  “I do not intend to break it,” I told her.

  “I don’t care what you intend to do,” she replied.

  “Your lack of confidence in me at this moment is extremely distracting,” I said, inspecting my tools. The brooch was one of the few pieces of jewelry Laure owned—she had inherited it from her mother after she’d died—but I wasn’t looking at the carving on the front, or inspecting the fine green stone. Instead, I turned it over, looking at the pin on the back. It could have been longer—it could have been a hairpin—yet it would have to do, despite its shortcomings.

  I knelt beside the door, pressing the pin into the lock. Absolutely nothing happened. After a moment’s pause, with Laure’s disapproving eyes burning holes into the back of my head, I began to wriggle the pin around inside, hoping to catch the mechanism and spring the lock.

  No such luck, though I did manage to slip the pin out of the keyhole and stab myself in the finger.

  “Bastion,” I hissed, bringing it up to my lips to suck the blood out. “I should have sterilized it before I began.”

  “Oh, get away from there,” Laure said. “And give me my brooch back.”

  She snatched the item in question away from me, sticking it through the bodice of her dress and doing up the clasp before she shoved me unceremoniously to one side.

  “You might be more polite,” I suggested, around my finger. “Or at least more constructive.”

  “No,” she replied, “what I’ve got to be is more destructive.”

  I hadn’t the time to ask her what she meant, as without warning she stepped back from the door and gave it a single, violent kick.

  The sound reverberated through the halls, and in my surprise I hushed her equally loudly—though to what effect, I had no idea. The damage was already done, and the door swung open with a gentle creak. Everyone was used to ignoring loud noises in this place, and no one poked his head out to inquire after the commotion.

  “The lock’s weak,” Laure explained to me. “Gaeth told me that one time when we were visiting him. You weren’t listening because you were cleaning his windowsill. But I remembered.”

  I recalled the occasion—the windowsill had been covered in at least half a year’s amount of thick, gray grime, and a piece of notepaper had been stuck to it with a melted candy. I had been doing Gaeth a favor by getting rid of it, and myself one, as well, since who would want to take tea while looking at something so disgusting?

  Laure and I had our different areas of expertise, and neither was more or less useful than the other.

  “After you,” I murmured, sufficiently bested.

  Laure patted me on the shoulder. “No worries, eh?” she said. “You can learn how to pick the lock next time. And I’ll even buy a few hairpins.”

  “No need,” I sighed, as she entered the room in front of me. “You’ll only lose them, anyway.”

  It was clear once we were inside that no one had been in Gaeth’s room for quite a few days. The strangest smell assaulted me all at once—I realized too late it was the scent of rotting food—and I quickly brought my handkerchief to my nose in order to block the worst of it out. After a brief search, I found the culprit on the bedside table: a half-eaten sandwich that appeared to have been abandoned midbite.

  There were also boots by the bed, with socks dangling from them, and a vest hung over the back of his single wooden chair. A fire had gone out in the fireplace some time ago, but the ashes hadn’t been cleaned; and a book, held open with an inkwell and with a pen lying beside it, was on his desk.

  All in all, the place gave the impression of someone being called away quite suddenly, in the middle of his work—in the middle of his supper, even. This was not the way someone left a room when they were planning on leaving it; even someone less thoughtful than I would never have done such a thing. For their own benefit if no one else’s.

  “Creepy,” Laure said.

  “Quite so,” I agreed.

  She moved out of the doorway and deeper into the room, hesitating before she lifted a piece of parchment from his desk. “Don’t know whether or not I should read this,” she said. I nodded—what point was there in respecting his privacy when we’d kicked down the door to his room? She glanced over the lines, and her face softened. “He’s not very good at spelling,” she explained.

  “What does it say?” I demanded, since I knew that if I gave her time to think about it, she might decide we were being too intrusive and give up entirely. Laure was very sensible and was able to kick doors down when called upon, but she had an unexpectedly kind heart for someone with such strong legs.

  “It’s a letter home,” Laure said quietly. “What you might expect, really. It says he’s been feeling a bit poorly lately, but his mam’s not to worry because he’s weathered worse winters than what the city has to throw at him.”

  I took the letter from her to see it for myself. He’d spelled city with an “s” and two “t”s—sitty—and I felt a kind of affection stir within me; immediately, I sought to overpower it with a more logical sentiment: irritation at the sight of such ghastly penmanship, not to mention his spelling. If I’d known he’d been having such difficulties, I might have offered to write his letters for him in thanks for the loan of those gloves. Then we would have been even. But there was nothing that I could do to help him now that he’d up and disappeared on us.

  “I don’t like this,” Laure said, looking around the room as though she were mad at it. I could tell when she wanted to hit something—I only had to hope that I wasn’t nearby when she finally decided to release some of her frustration. “Something’s happened to him; it’s obvious. People don’t just drop off the face of the map like this, Toverre.”

  “Now, don’t jump to any conclusions,” I told her, looking over the letter as carefully as I could. Try as I might, I couldn’t divine any hidden patterns or code in the writing—there were too many dreadful misspellings for that. “We’ve barely started looking, and we might yet find some further clue to his whereabouts in all this.”

  Wh
atever had happened to Gaeth, I couldn’t imagine he’d seen it coming. Otherwise, it was more likely that he’d have tried to tell us about it rather than cramming his worries into a badly spelled letter home about his health and the weather.

  “I just feel guilty, that’s all,” Laure admitted, going over to examine the fire. “Like I should’ve paid more attention when he was sick, tried to talk to him more. Should’ve come by with some of that soup you got for me, or something.”

  “You couldn’t have known,” I told her, placing the letter back where she’d found it. “A person’s illness is normally a cause to speak with them less, not more—at least until it goes away.”

  Laure tested the window, but the lock was still firmly in place, and there were no broken pieces anywhere to be found.

  “Well, he must’ve gone out the front door,” she said, looking sheepish when she saw the look on my face. “I was only checking—it’s possible someone could’ve climbed up here and snatched him. The door still would’ve been locked, and no one outside would’ve known a thing. You don’t know what happened. Anyway, it’s not a completely unreasonable assumption.”

  “No, I suppose not,” I agreed, moving the inkwell from Gaeth’s book so that I could flip through it. Gaeth, it seemed, was in the habit of making notes with his pen in the margin—a tactic Laure found useful as well though I personally found it abhorrent. So messy, and it made the pages of the book stick together, smearing the ink all over and ruining the neat pages.

  There was another piece of parchment, folded up into a square and wedged between the pages like a bookmark. I plucked it out carefully, smoothing the creases and holding it up to the light of the window. It appeared to be another letter, though this one shorter, more disjointed than the first. It was evident to me that he’d never intended to send the thing in the first place, so I had even less compunction about reading it than I had for the first. Of course, I would never have wanted someone going through my private documents and diaries this way—but that was why I kept them so well hidden.

  The letter began with the same pleasantries as the first letter had, well-wishes to the family—famly—and assurances that he was doing fine here in the big city.

  After that, it turned rather strange.

  Bin having stranj dreems of late, and heering stranj sounds as well. Sumtimes wen I wake I heer noyses like I am in sum jiant macheen. They sound like hissing and metal, like the inside of a blaksmithy. The room advizers tell me that ther is no such macheen in the dormatry, and that I must be dreeming, but I know when I am awake and when I am assleep.

  There was an addition at the bottom that had been crossed out, and I brought my nose nearly up to the page in order to be able to read it.

  I think I hav been heering a voyse in my head, but it does not sound like mine.

  “Laure,” I said as calmly as I could manage. “Would you please come and read this?”

  She pulled herself out of the chimney where she’d been examining the flue and—rather blackened, ash smudging her pert little nose—came over to take the letter from me. I sat down on Gaeth’s bed, not even mustering the will to be properly horrified at Laure covered in chimney soot. My mind was too occupied with what I’d read.

  It took Laure a longer time to read than it had taken me, and as I waited I looked around the room for any clearer signs of Gaeth’s mind slowly unraveling. The trouble was, everything else seemed to be very much in order—at least, in as much order as someone could expect from someone like Gaeth. There were no curses written on the walls in ink or blood—which was the first marker for insanity that anyone could expect if the stories were to be believed—and there weren’t any diagrams or secret messages or blasphemous calendars, either. I nudged the round rug in the center of the room with my toe, and saw only dust beneath, not demented symbols. The most outrageous thing about that room was the sandwich—and, of course, that madman’s letter.

  And he had seemed so wholesome, I thought. What a tragedy.

  “Well what in bastion’s name is this last bit?” Laure asked, in a tone like she wasn’t at all certain she wanted the answer.

  “He heard a voice,” I told her. “A voice in his head, apparently, sounding like a ‘macheen’—though I’m willing to bet that perhaps it was just someone from the room over. I hope the explanation is this simple: that, in his delirium from the fever, he assumed it was coming from within, as opposed to without.”

  Laure studied the letter again. She looked somewhat green around the edges, and I didn’t blame her. All of this was very disturbing—especially when I considered that we could be living in a building alongside all kinds of madmen and -women. Clearly the ’Versity bureaucracy had no psychological screenings in place, doubtless because they didn’t care to, and no protection for their students, save for locks that were easily kicked in, should the paranoia of one of our fellows turn suddenly violent.

  “I think,” Laure began slowly, so that I could see her mentally girding her loins, “and don’t take this the wrong way, Toverre, because I know you already believe this is crazy, but … But I thought that I heard a voice, too, when the fever was bad. It came to me right as I was drifting out. After I was sick, remember? Didn’t think much of it until now—guess I just shrugged it off—but reading this, it all came back to me. He describes it exactly. Like having someone else crammed right inside your head, whispering things to you, in a voice like—well, exactly like it’s coming from the blacksmithy.”

  I didn’t want to hear that, and I opened my mouth to tell her so.

  “What on earth do you two think you’re doing here?” demanded a voice I didn’t recognize, from just outside the doorway.

  Laure spun around, and I leapt up from the bed as though I’d met the business end of a cattle brand. We’d both been caught, I thought dramatically, and perhaps we’d meet a fate worse than the business end of a cattle brand because of it.

  There was a man standing at the door—older than us, but not by a considerable amount. He was wearing silver-rimmed spectacles and looking at us like a cook who’d discovered rats in her larder.

  Back home, my father always had the cooks club the rats with the flat side of a shovel. I swallowed, wondering how Laure and I could have been so stupid as to sit in Gaeth’s room, just waiting to be caught.

  “I …” Laure said, but she trailed off. There really was no excuse, I thought, and had no words with which to aid her.

  How ironic that, when we needed him least, someone assigned to protect the dormitory finally appeared, like a spirit summoned from the ether.

  “I happen to know this room was let to Gaeth, a young man with blond hair, who I’ll point out is neither of you two,” the man said, glancing between the two of us suspiciously.

  “Oh yeah, Gaeth,” Laure said, finding her voice before I did. “He’s our friend, and we … We haven’t seen him for weeks now. Neither has anyone else. We knew he took ill with the fever, so we were just—”

  “I don’t see how that’s any concern of mine,” the man said, crossing his arms. Then he did a double take toward Laure—as men so often did—and I felt the smallest sliver of hope wedge its way into my chest. Perhaps we might be able to use her assets, hideous as it made me feel to exploit her.

  Behind her back, she thrust the letter into my hand, and I took it, folding it up and sticking it into my pocket.

  We could use it—somehow—if only to send home to Gaeth’s poor parents as evidence of his final, lunatic ramblings. It might bring some comfort to them.

  “I know it was wrong to break in like this,” Laure added, taking a step forward with some hesitance, as though she was nervous. She was a born actress, though she used her skills sparingly, and she’d never even had a single lesson. “We would never have done it except as a very last resort, and then only because we were so worried about our friend.”

  “It’s quite illegal,” the man said with a sniff. If he was one of the room advisors, I’d never seen him. Where ha
d he been hiding himself all this time? I doubted he even lived on the premises. “You should have come to me first with your questions.”

  “I know that now,” Laure said, reaching up to twine a piece of her hair around her fingers. “And I feel just … silly about it, believe me. When there was someone right here all along who could help me. I don’t know why we were so foolish.”

  Ever so slowly—not wishing to draw attention away from my leading lady—I began to inch my way to the door. Gaeth’s disturbing letter was secured within my pocket, my hand covering it as an extra precaution. Though I had no idea yet of what we might use it for, it was the best piece of evidence we’d managed to uncover. I just hoped madness wasn’t catching.

  I didn’t like what Laure had been trying to say before we’d been so rudely interrupted, but we’d try to sort that out later.

  “Now, normally, I’d have to write the pair of you up for safety violations,” the man said, some indecision in his voice. The closer we came, the younger he seemed—and not quite as terrifying as the real authorities might have been. I’d been certain he’d been one of the Provost’s wolves come to arrest us, and now I saw he was merely a shabby little man. “But if—and that’s if—you leave here right now, I might be able to let you go with no more than a warning, and a promise not to do it again next time.”

  “Could you really do all that?” Laure asked, her voice pitched to a frequency I’d never heard before. It was ghastly, and my sides were starting to hurt from holding in my laughter. “How perfectly dear of you. We’d be ever so grateful. All we really wanted to see was if he was all right. I know someone like you would understand. You’d do the same for a friend, I’m sure.”

  The man shifted his weight, looking uncomfortable. He was starting to turn pink—just a natural side effect of being so close to Laure while she turned on the full effects of her charm. Sometimes she didn’t even have to turn it on—it just worked naturally—but this was a special case, and I was in awe of her abilities. The older she got, the better the ruse worked. If only I had been born with such a lucky gift.