A Mischief in the Woodwork - By Harper Alexander Page 0,30
to point out that he treated the darkskins as much like a disease; I was too upset at him for it to bring it up. I would not stay civil if that came up as a substantial topic between us.
“You've been a lot of places,” I pointed out instead. “Who can say what you've brought with you? You could have tracked anything across the borders.”
“Certainly nothing that could come to your advantage like a good sense of the land or a diverse insight for resources.”
I bit my tongue. Why did he have to talk? Couldn't he just tag along and be on his way?
I reminded myself I was the one to offer to escort him into town. I was beginning to regret it, even though I wanted to see him off.
“We're plenty resourceful,” I said, because I had to say something.
“Is that the reason for the array of shiners slashed all down your unprotected back?”
“What are you, an aristocrat?” I challenged, not liking his crafty way of getting at things. It occurred to me, after saying it, that that may very well be what he had been.
“Maybe,” he said mysteriously.
“Well it won't do you any good out here. We survive on grit, not politics. Fancy words are useless to charm a fortress from collapsing unless you're a wizard. Words just get drowned out, trampled. They're as good as ash on your tongue.”
“There is still something to be said about strategy.”
“If my strategy didn't work, I'd be dead.”
“And if it fails, you will be.”
I thought a moment. “Everyone has their time.” It was something one of the Serbaens might say of the matter.
“That's it? Nature will take its course? Don't you think that's a rather condemning philosophy in this day and age? Nature is ruthless. It's bloodthirsty. Look around you – it's clearly become not only unforgiving, but morbid.”
“It's not as if we lay down at the foot of the towers and tempt fate.”
“So...all those people – it was their 'time'?” A twinge of bitterness lined his voice, like dead, rained-down leaves lining a gutter, clogging it even as the season passes. I could see his shoulders stiffen as if his coat had suddenly become heavier. He carried it as if drenched, weighed down. Yet the thick sides flapped slightly with the force of his gait.
“Maybe,” I said gently as if admitting I could not really claim such, but still leaving it up in the air.
A rock scuffed under my boot. I began to watch the ground.
The rest of our jaunt down the road consisted of the burnt velvet whispers of dust under our feet. It sifted into the cracks of my boots, creaking in the leather.
The city was a hazy cluster in the distance, almost like a mirage behind the constant mask of powder. It grew slowly more defined as we inched closer.
Once we reached the buried gates of the city's respective entrance, picking our way cautiously across past the giant, decayed threshold, we stopped there, eyeing the still piles of rubble. Then Tanen said:
“You have a newsboy?”
“An odd concept, I suppose.”
Our surveillance spread to the farther nooks and crannies, assessing the layout of it all. In the back of my mind reared the image of a loose wardog, escaped from its nocturnal shackles. The image slunk through the sunniest crannies of my mind, a shimmering taunt. It could be here, anywhere.
I heard nothing over the misshapen towers, mounds and hillocks. Nothing echoed in the sunken chasms and ravines.
“Hm. Odd...yes. But a decidedly resourceful way to survive in these times,” Tanen admitted after that moment of thought.
I peeled my eyes off the rubble and turned them on him. “This is where we part ways,” I said.
“Where are you going?” he wondered as he took it all in. To the naked eye, it was nothing but an unmanageable disarray.
“The barber's alley.”
“You have a barber too?”
“Just...the sign, really. It's stayed mostly stationary, even though the shop disappeared.” We shouldn't have been talking.
He accepted this readily enough, but for a moment I was cast back into the past, to the essentially imaginary realm of bustling streets and businesses running as usual. There would have been teeming market squares, preening parlors, manor tea parties and luncheons – men tipping their hats in the streets and women gossiping and strutting about like peacocks in the latest fashions. I could scarcely muster the images. They had faded like old paintings from generations past. That was a lost world.