by Various
With slight trepidation rolling in her gut, she turned the mask over, laying it carving side down on the table. It was padded inside, with a silk lining—very inviting. She slowly slipped it over her face, letting it settle against her features. Then she tied the black ribbons under her hair and waited for the magic to take hold.
The quill was in her hand before she recognized what she was doing. Words, processes, formulas—an ocean’s worth of information came flooding through. It felt as if it bypassed her brain and splattered straight onto the paper. She saw the words appear, and they turned in on themselves, again and again. Soon she had a collection of giant, worthless inkblots.
With her left hand she grabbed her writing wrist and wrenched it away from the page. She drew several deep breaths, steadying herself. Her heart seemed to be running a desperate race, and her fingers and toes twitched with barely subdued energy. Everything was trying to escape the mask at once. Too much information was being channeled through her. She had to figure out how to control the deluge.
One word at a time. She told herself. Concentrate. Focus on the muscle illness. What needs to be done?
Her writing hand tried to get away, but she reeled it in. Only letting one word seep out at a time, she continued. Her mind began filtering more and more. She caught wisps of ideas, portions of equations. A list of ingredients sprang from amongst the rest, and she patiently wrote it down.
Why had her local healer told her it would take days? All of the information was here, now. It took only moments to fall out of the mask.
But getting a tight grasp on the process was taking longer.
Yes, I remember. She recalled everything the ailment required to be canceled. For the first time she realized that medicine and potion-making were all mathematical, with the illness on one side and the cure on the other. Both sides of the equation had to balance, to cancel each other out. The ending answer always needed to be zero.
To cancel the muscle illness…
She made notes next to each ingredient. It was slow going, writing and making her calculations. The characters came out at an agonizing pace, but if she didn’t hold back, the words would be illegible.
The muscle illness didn’t behave the same in each person, so the makeup of the medicine was always slightly different. She had to recall all the specifics she could about her mother’s sickness. Retrieving the memories was difficult—Master Belladino, with his overwhelming mental faculties, didn’t want to share her consciousness.
Melanie worked through the morning, only stopping when her mother asked for food. She went to the kitchen to order her a meal and some water and bread to last out the day. The boy who wrote down her request deftly ignored the mask.
That was the only time she left the room. Leiwood came to the door once to be sure she was alright. She shooed him away without leaving her chair, assuring him they were fine.
Night had come again by the time she finished. Next she would need to visit the apothecary. But the stars were bright through the window, and all lamps in the hall had been extinguished. The inn had settled down for the evening.
But she needed to start mixing the medicine as soon as possible. Her mother had been sick long enough. Making up her mind, she decided to go to Master Leiwood’s room and ask him to escort her now.
Reaching up, she pulled the ribbons loose, and the mask slid away. Not wanting to waste any time, she gathered her cloak and the annotated list, then scurried out the door.
Halfway to his room she stopped and pulled out the list. The items were familiar, but the notes were gibberish. It was as if someone else had written them, and in code. What did that mean? Had she only imagined that she knew how to cure her mother? No, she’d had the information, but now it slipped out of her like water through a sieve. In the next moment even some of the ingredients became foreign.
She needed the mask. Without it she was helpless.
• • •
When Leiwood answered the door, he looked as though he’d seen a specter. He quickly shook his surprise, but she’d caught it. Melanie hadn’t considered what she looked like with a frog where her face should be. “We must go to the apothecary,” she said, demanding. That wasn’t like her: impatient. But this was her mother’s life on the line. She didn’t need to waste time on courtesies.
He stepped aside and motioned for her to come in. A small fire crackled in the hearth behind him, and the room smelled spicy. “You country people keep strange hours.”
It was a joke, but she didn’t find it funny. “I need these things.” The list appeared, and she held it firmly before his eyes. “Quickly—we must have balance.”
Nodding absently to himself, he took up his night jacket. “You’re lucky the owner’s a friend of mine. He might open for us.”
She brushed past him into the hallway, with her posture tight and tall. She could feel it—a stiffness she didn’t usually carry.
A cheery whistle on his lips, Leiwood locked his door. Then he held out his arm for her to take. She refused, and realized something.
“You’re Victor’s boy.”
The lively flush faded from his cheeks. “I am.”
“How’s he doing?”
Leiwood turned his eyes away, focusing on his brass key-ring instead. “He’s dead. I told you. Been gone four years.”
She started down the stairs. The information seemed simultaneously new and old. Had she heard of Victor’s death before? “He was a bit odd, wasn’t he? A little… off kilter?” Unbalanced.
Work, she remembered. I was studying… something… And Victor—Refocusing, she shook the feeling. No, I never knew Leiwood’s father. She let the conversation fade, and they headed out of the inn and down the street.
• • •
In the poorer quarter where she and her mother had previously stayed, the streets had hummed all night. Melanie had thought the constant ebb and flow of the city was a dance that never ended, but this district was quiet. All of the respectable people had gone home to bed.
They passed a few vendors, a heap of sleeping vagabonds, and one woman dressed similarly to Melanie—but with paint on her face—who asked Leiwood if he wanted to “trade up.”
“You like ’em masked?” she shouted when he didn’t answer.
They turned a corner and Melanie had the sense to look indignant.
“What, they don’t have ‘nightingales’ where you come from?” he asked.
“None who would be so rude to a pair of gentlemen.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
The apothecary was a strangely shaped building, with a hexagonal domed ceiling made entirely of blue glass. It gave the place a peculiar watery glow when Leiwood lit the oil lamps.
The apothecary owner had not liked being awakened. Despite that, he’d given Leiwood the key and told him to return it with payment in the morning. Melanie was grateful they hadn’t had to wait for the man to change out of his dressing gown so that he could accompany them.
Now, in the thick of pots, tubes, and vials of components, Melanie hurriedly read off the ingredients. Directing Leiwood to one end of the shop, she took the other.
“Slow down,” he said, taking her hand. “You act like there’s no time. She’s bad off, but I think she’ll keep until morning.” Leiwood grinned at her, trying to coax a smile back.
“But, balance—” She felt awkward. Things weren’t in their place. The world wouldn’t be right until her mother was cured. “My time’s not my own until she’s better.”
“Real time, or bottled time?”
“Both.” She saw a mineral she needed—a clump of yellow sulfur—and snatched it off the shelf.
“What will you do? When you don’t have to spend the whole day watching over her?” Leiwood abruptly let Melanie’s hand go, as though aware of how intimate the gesture seemed in the dim light.
She sighed and stared at the list for a moment. He was prying, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to be opened. “I don’
t know. She’s been ill since I can remember. My father was much older than her—I had to take care of them both for awhile. To be honest I never really thought there would be a day when she wouldn’t need me.” She looked up. “You’re right. What will I do?”
“At least you’ll have time to think about it. Time to discover how to spend your time.”
They gathered a few more items in silence. A locked glass case held a large specialized syringe with intricate designs covering its barrel—a tool essential to the cure. Melanie worked at the lock for several minutes before giving in to frustration and smashing the case with a weight from the balance scale.
“What was that?” Leiwood called.
“Nothing. I broke a box. I’ll replace it.” She waved away his concern.
“Be careful, please.”
“Sure, sure.”
More silence. She glanced in his direction every now and again and found him watching her. It gave her strange, contradictory feelings in the pit of her stomach.
“I remember having my time bottled,” he said suddenly.
“You can’t,” she laughed. He must think me in a dull mood, telling me a joke. Time was taken only from newborns.
“I do. I had it done late, because my father was trying to cheat the Tax Man. He never declared my birth.”
She stopped her searching, and closed the cabinet she’d been investigating. “What was it like?”
“Painful. But I felt lightheaded after, kind of euphoric. They took extra, as interest.”
“That’s not fair. It’s your father who should have paid.”
“You can’t take time from adults—not without killing them. But it made me realize something—about life. It’s why I’ve worked so hard.
“I didn’t inherit the inn from my parents. I earned it, all myself. Real time is far more valuable than bottled time. It has a better exchange rate. I decided I wanted to spend mine as productively as possible, get the biggest payout I could. That way, when I’m close to dying, I won’t feel the need to cash in. Because I won’t have any regrets. I think only people who waste their lives scrape for those extra minutes.”
“It’s kind of unfair,” Melanie said, thinking about her mother, “that the time can only be tacked on at the end, not in the middle.”
“And who spends those last cashed minutes well? People who die young never think to cash out. Only the old do it. They’re all invalid and incontinent when they get them. Those aren’t extra minutes I want—extra minutes being incapable.” He came over to her with a sack filled with half the list. “And you know what? If people stopped cashing in, I don’t think we’d have to harvest anymore. Babies would get to keep their time, as they should.”
“Sounds ideal,” she said.
He shrugged. “It’s the way things were meant to be.”
• • •
An hour later they returned to the inn with sacks of minerals, chemicals, and dried herbs. As they walked, Leiwood seemed to drag his feet, which she found galling. Her impatience was restored post-haste.
Was he trying to exasperate her? Did he not see how important it was to restore the equilibrium? The asymmetry fed on her nerves, tore at her muscles, weighed heavy in her chest. There was a struggle going on in every fiber of her body, demanding she cure the problem.
An image of a dead cat and a weeping, disheveled girl came to her mind, unbidden. It frightened her, and she vehemently shooed it away.
Back at the inn, Melanie didn’t want to wake her mother, so they went to Leiwood’s room instead. “Mortar, pestle,” she demanded, snapping her fingers at him. Obediently, he drew the tools from one of the bags. While she worked, he set out the rest of the gear: a small burner, some test tubes, a beaker, and the syringe.
Into the crucible went sulfur, calcium, and dried reishi mushrooms. She topped it off with a liquid catalyst that glowed an eerie, subtle green. “It has to rest for a day,” she declared after thoroughly mixing the substances. “This cure demands time.”
Leiwood sat on his bed, giving her a sideways look. He’d been staring at her strangely since they’d gone out to get the ingredients. It worried her. Annoyed her. Disturbed her.
Just like his father, she thought harshly. Brutal man… killed my daughter’s cat.
But that couldn’t be right. She wasn’t a mother.
Confused, she wandered over to the fireplace, and looked deep into the red coals. “They say I’m a great healer.”
Leiwood’s answer came tentatively. “Master Belladino was, yes.”
“I could cure any ailment. Save the dead from dying.”
“Melanie?”
My unfinished work. The thoughts didn’t seem her own. I died before I could finish my work. “But there was one thing I couldn’t figure out how to balance. One illness I couldn’t find a cure for.” Cat. Dead cat.
“You mean August Belladino. There was something he couldn’t cure?”
The cat. Then he… Then he… She…
“Cruelty.” She picked up the iron poker and thrust it into the hearth. “It resides deep, somewhere most medicine can’t reach. And I never could figure it out.” She whirled around. Leiwood’s eyes were wide, and sad. His expression made her angry. “Did you know that a lot of sickness stays in the family? That it passes from parent to child?”
“Melanie…” There was a warning in his voice.
She raised the poker, pointing it at him. There he was; she could see Victor Leiwood hiding under that shocked expression. Sick man. “Do you know what he did to her?” she screeched.
Leiwood was on his feet, arms out, imploring. “What? Who?”
“My daughter!” Melanie ran at him, swinging and thrusting the iron. Claw-like fingers sought to curl around his collar and draw him in. She wanted to impale him, to open him up. “Let me see it!” she shouted. “Where is it? Where does the abuse live? Down in your belly? In your spine? Show me, Victor!”
“Melanie!” he said. “It’s not you. Fight the mask. Fight it! I didn’t do it.” He launched pillows and oil lamps and a table in her path—anything to stop her. “I’m not my father. I’m not.”
Wrath blurring her vision, she plunged the poker forward, barely missed Leiwood, and embedded the point in a plush chair.
This isn’t right, she realized backing away. Leiwood has done nothing but help me. He’s a good man. But an image of his father flashed before her eyes, and the hatred returned with a vengeance. She fought it, trying to keep separate from the feelings. “Leiwood,” she said, distress pervading her voice.
“Melanie? Take off the mask!”
She curled her fingers around the edges and pulled with all her strength. The mask wouldn’t budge. It had fused to her face, holding on like a leech. “It won’t—It—”
In the next instant she was flying after him again. Deep, rumbling accusations spewed from her mouth. She didn’t even sound like herself.
But now there was a duality within her. There was Master Belladino, enraged, hell-bent on tearing Leiwood apart—and Melanie, who wouldn’t hurt a thing. Especially not someone who had been so good to her.
“Help me!” she cried. And in her next breath, “You filth.”
Melanie wrestled with herself, desperate to escape the essence that possessed her body. “The fire!” she yelled, and moved in its direction. But she tripped on her own feet and fell short.
“What are you doing?” He didn’t flee, but he kept away.
“Burn it,” she urged. “Burn!” Inch by wavering inch, she crawled across the floor toward the fireplace. Melanie urged him to hurry, and Belladino damned him the whole way. She felt sick, insane. She wasn’t worried about the flames—about burning skin. She just wanted to be alone again.
Leiwood rushed forward, grasped the mask, and pulled. It didn’t come loose. Melanie grabbed his wrists and growled.
“I can’t get it off,” he said, defeated, searching her eyes—half hidden behind the wood—for another idea.
Melanie
pleaded, “Put it in the fire anyway.”
• • •
Melanie’s words said do it, but her body writhed, desperate to escape. “No,” Leiwood said, “you’ll—There’s got to be something else.” But the memory of his father’s mask—then the hatchet, which Leiwood had swung toward his own face—his own brush with death… Perhaps fire was the only answer.
But then he thought of plunging her face into the coals. It made him sick, and he knew he couldn’t do it.
Leiwood backed away, leaving Melanie to grapple with herself. She clawed at the neck of her blouse, tore at her hair. At one moment she looked like she was strung out on an invisible rack, her spine pulled taut, then it snapped loose again like a band of rubber.
Trying to think fast, he spun toward the heap of apothecary items. With shaking hands, he picked up each substance and read label after label. At a loss, he thumbed the syringe, then the burner. None of the items provided an answer.
He heard a scraping of wood on wood and looked up. Melanie was dragging herself toward the fire once more, face down, mask grating against the floor. She didn’t look as if she could stand much more.
“Wait!” he shouted, bounding over to her. Heart pounding, he grasped one ankle, stopping her progress toward ruin. “Fight it. Give me a little time, I’ll think of a better way.”
“Son of grime,” she raged, reaching forward and grasping the hearth’s hot grate. The rancid scent of charring human skin wafted into Leiwood’s face.
With a hefty yank he hauled her in reverse, simultaneously scanning the room for something to restrain her. The only things that seemed reasonable were the drape cords.
The cords were tied neatly around wrought-iron window hooks. He struggled with the knots—distress made him clumsy. He bumped the nightstand that held a lamp and his pocketbook and they tumbled to the ground.
His purse burst open, and bottles of time went bouncing across the room.
Stunned, he watched one roll to the foot of the table. His gaze went back to the apothecary items. An idea struck him.
Scooping up one of the time vials—a fiver—he leapt over Melanie’s twisted form, then skidded to a halt next to the medicines. In the next instant the syringe was in his hand, poised above the cork that kept the time contained.